Elevating B2B Marketing: Parthi Loganathan on Advanced Strategies for Organic Growth and AI Integration
Exploring Differentiation, SEO Mastery, and Intelligent Content Creation for Effective Customer Acquisition and Engagement
Join us in this edition of the GTM Nights newsletter for an insightful Q&A session with Parthi Loganathan, founder of Letterdrop, and renowned expert in organic demand generation and B2B marketing strategies. Parthi, celebrated for his innovative approaches in leveraging AI, SEO, and content marketing, offers his deep insights into creating differentiated, defensible customer acquisition strategies. His experience in navigating the complexities of modern marketing landscapes, particularly for tech companies, makes this session a must-read for professionals seeking to enhance their marketing techniques and drive substantial growth.
Q&A Session
Q1: Parthi, can you share with us your approach to creating differentiated and defensible organic customer acquisition strategies?
Parthi: You need to be thinking about how you stand out in a very, very, very crowded market for most people. It almost becomes like a product marketing question. It becomes a question, what do you stand for?
A company really needs to have that figured out before they can expand from there, because otherwise what's going to end up happening is you're going to just start sounding exactly like the big dogs. You’re essentially going to be hitting the same channels as them with a lot less money and resources.
I would definitely start with like good foundational product marketing and just figuring out, okay, why is this product different? Once you have that in place, then you can actually start investing in customer acquisition.
Q2: With the ever-evolving SEO landscape, what key strategies do you recommend to B2B companies to stay ahead?
Parthi: Everything's getting a little bit more competitive because AI is letting people generate something which has a loose semblance to “this is good.”
I think from an SEO perspective, the first thing companies need to keep in mind is SEO is largely a demand capture channel. There are already people out there looking for answers. They have intent. They're looking for solutions and they're searching for something.
You're trying to give them the best answer first so that you're the one that Google puts up front.
What I'd recommend is for companies to think a little bit more carefully in terms of what are the kinds of searches or questions that their customers are asking that they can uniquely answer, where there isn't necessarily a ton of competition.
If you have a really good understanding of your customer, you will find these search terms or things that are not going to show up on SEMrush, they're not going show up on Ahrefs, or at least if they show up, they’re going have very low search volume over there.
And there may be more long tail. If they have sufficiently high intent, you have a chance of actually getting a customer from that. I highly recommend every company start off with things like competitor pages.
If somebody's in the market and choosing between competitor A and competitor B, you can rank for that and insert yourself into the conversation, or if somebody's looking for competitor alternatives, try to like rank for that so that you can also once again insert yourself into the conversation.
If you have a specific category, it has a common name. When people are searching for best category tools, you want to try to do that.
Think about the things that your competition is failing at. So if somebody wants to like, how do I do X and Salesforce? Turns out Salesforce doesn't do X, but you do X.
And so those are the places where I'd probably start with in SEO. It's just like bottom of funnel, high intent, not necessarily a lot of volume. Just get people who might be actual buyers onto your website and have them consider you.
Once you have a ton of money and you're scaled up, then you can kind of go after everything.
Q3: How can marketers thoughtfully integrate AI into their strategies without losing the substance of their content or trust with their customers?
Parthi: Right now, generative AI is very good at two things. It's very good at summarizing, and pulling out stuff from that information.
The second thing it’s good at is transforming information, taking something in one format and putting it into another format.
At Letterdrop, we use generative AI to take a podcast or an interview and extract the insights from that and turn that into stuff for your blog post, stuff for our LinkedIn. We use AI to understand a whole bunch of documents or pages, what we’re competing against on Google, understanding the information gaps.
What we don't use AI for is we don't tell AI to run loose and tell me, “ChatGPT, what do you think about X, Y, Z?”
And I think if that is your use case, you should ask yourself, well, people have ChatGPT, it's free. They can go ask, ask it themselves. They don't need that to come from you. And so I think people need to understand the bar for what is worth creating has gone up quite dramatically.
And if you're not going to create above the line, above the fold, don't bother creating it. It's not worth it.
If it's drivel or if it's something that ChatGPT can output, you're not going to see a lot of alpha from you operating in that zone.
Q4: What are your top tips for increasing content distribution through SEO, LinkedIn, and sales teams?
Parthi: There's no point in just creating stuff and letting it rot on a shelf somewhere.
You actually need to get in front of your customers at the right time. SEO, the customers are already telling you what they want. All you have to do is just show up essentially. That's why SEO is such a beautiful channel. Also very competitive because everybody wants to do it. It's a zero-sum game.
On the demand generation side, on social media, LinkedIn, display ads, all that, I think people need to think about, what did I do previously, or what have I done previously that I can reuse?
You said something six months ago, and if it was relevant six months ago, it's possibly relevant right now, you can reuse that.
I think about all the times where people will record a podcast, they'll publish it once, and they'll just kill it; they'll never talk about it again.
You need to be taking that podcast, you need to get it up, you need to be posting on social media, and you need to use those clips and embed those in your blog posts to answer questions better wherever you're relevant.
You need to maybe put some paid behind the social posts featuring those snippets that are going well, so you can boost them on LinkedIn with thought leadership ads or something along those lines, give it like a month or so, and then repost those on your organic channel again.
I think people underestimate how much you can do with one good piece of content, you can really milk it for a very, very long time.
The final thing is I think using people, right? The reality is that people buy from people. And so you want a face behind what you're selling. The founder, the sales team, these are the folks who need to be distributing this content and utilizing it.
Q5: Can you share an example of a successful project where your strategies significantly boosted a client's B2B marketing results?
Parthi: From an SEO perspective, especially with all the noise around AI, what we're really helping companies do is figure out is, how do I include the right information in our content?
How do we think about information gain? How do we just not copy everybody else?
Make sure that we cover those at a baseline, and then figure out what the gaps are in terms of what they're talking about and fill in those gaps.
Because when we fill in those gaps, Google is suddenly like, hey, this page is really great. And answers the question in a very complete manner, way better than anybody else, we should put this up higher.
So a lot of our customers like scribe, Pecan AI, Next DLP, Ramp, et cetera, have seen massive increases in SEO. Like Scribe, for example, they saw a 1,100% increase in traffic as well as paid signups over the course of 12 months.
So that's one of the ways in which we've helped companies really, really think about how do they approach SEO in this new world and how do you do things right as opposed to trying to hack the system.
Conclusion
Parthi Loganathan's expertise in building organic demand generation engines offers invaluable insights for B2B marketers. His focus on combining content strategy with modern SEO techniques and the thoughtful application of AI is particularly relevant in today's dynamic marketing environment. We thank Parthi for sharing his knowledge and invite our readers to connect with him for further discussion on B2B marketing and content strategies.
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