Hello! Greetings and welcome to the newest edition of Fresh Salmon, your favorite B2B marketing newsletter.

In this episode, I explain how to conduct Customer Research, the power of media-first content marketing, and a few secret resources that Google has been hiding.

Now let's get started. . . .

1) Doing Customer Research?

Understanding your target customers is critical for B2B marketers. It's for this reason that customer research is the cornerstone of any successful B2B business. 

How can you use customer research to your advantage? What does it entail?

The first step is to identify repetitive problems that your customers experience. Conduct interviews, listen to recordings, and participate in live discovery calls. Thus, you will gain valuable insights into the pain points of your customers and identify areas for improvement.

By digging deeper into a customer's background, work history, and core values, you can build an "ideal fit" customer profile. In this way, you will be able to talk with your customers rather than at them, so you will be able to understand what they need and want better.

There is still more to do! Make your customers feel at ease by highlighting their "Aha!" moments. Why did they say, "Wow, that's cool"? What features and benefits resonated with them? You will be able to better understand what your customers truly value if you identify these moments.

Lastly, build your business on the words, feelings, and actions of your customers. Make sure you don't rely on assumptions. Create a strategic narrative and messaging based on customer research.

2) The Power of a Media-First Approach to Content Marketing

Tired of creating text-based content that doesn't engage your audience? Changing to a media-first strategy might be a good idea. 

Creating media content and then creating text content based on that media content creates a flywheel of engagement that keeps your audience engaged.

Let's take the example of a podcast. 

After launching a podcast, post-production should include creating clean video files and audio files for distribution on various platforms such as Apple, Spotify, Google, YouTube, and Amazon Music as an audio and video podcast.

Short snippets for LinkedIn, Instagram Reels, and TikTok can also be created for distribution to these platforms, along with a blog post summary of the podcast episode.

Utilizing a tool like Wistia to host your podcast on your website is crucial since it allows visitors to find your media series whenever they visit. In turn, this helps drive brand affinity and increases time spent on the website - both of which are important factors to optimize for SEO.

Using both text and media content can boost your search engine rankings and keep your audience coming back for more. 

3) Is Google Hiding the Best Search Engines?

It's no secret that Google dominates the search engine market, but is it hiding the best ones from us? There may be lesser-known search engines that are just as powerful, if not more powerful, as Google.

Search engines that specialize in academic resources, scientific documents, and even bioscientific journals exist. Explore these hidden gems and broaden your horizons.

For academic resources, check out RefSeek, which offers over a billion sources, or WorldCat, which offers content from 20,000 libraries worldwide. 

Do you need access to scientific documents? 

Science.gov is a U.S. government search engine for more than 2200 scientific sites.

Bioline is a library of published bioscientific journals, while SpringerLink has over 10 million publications.

There are over 225 million titles available for download on PDF Drive if you're a fan of free PDF books. With over 100 million free articles, BASE-Search is one of the most powerful search engines for academic research texts.

Are you familiar with these hidden gems? Find the right search engine for you by exploring new options.

Interesting Thing That I Read Last Week

You should never hide the feature. I love this. ❤️

Tweet That I Noticed Last Week

Morgan Ingram’s content on social media is 🔥🔥

Don't forget to follow him if you haven't already.

What Do You Think?

This concludes this edition of Fresh Salmon.

I would like to hear what you thought of today's newsletter.

Also, let’s connect on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Cheers,

Vivek

PS. I love you ❤️