In this episode, host Josh Hoffman and guest Netta Kivilis, founder and CEO of Blue Seedling, discuss various aspects of marketing in the B2B space. Netta shares her insights on the impact of AI on marketing, and talks about contrarian B2B marketing myths and the utility of AI as a thought partner. She stresses the importance of developing people skills in marketing and provides valuable perspectives on marketing practices for B2B startups.
Netta Kivilis is the Founder and CEO of Blue Seedling, a boutique marketing agency specializing in high-growth enterprise B2B startups and scale-ups. With a background in retail marketing, including roles at Custora and Amazon, Netta has successfully built marketing operations, created industry-standard dashboards, organized events, and coached teams, contributing to impressive revenue growth and employee expansion. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters of Marketing Agency:
- Marketers need to experiment with AI tools and applications to gain a competitive advantage in the market.
- AI tools can help marketers in various applications such as content marketing, outbound email prospecting, and visual generative AI.
- Startups need to package AI tools and applications into marketing and sales-specific tools to make them user-friendly and effective.
- AI tools can make brainstorming and Kickstarter easier and more effective for marketers.
- AI can be used as a “thought partner” in B2B startups
- It’s not realistic to expect AI to write an article from start to finish, but it serves as a great tool for brainstorming ideas, titles, and even SEO improvements
- Hiring SDRs for email marketing is a marketing task better handled by B2B marketers
Resources:
Connecting with Netta Kivilis:
Connecting with Josh Hoffman:
Quotables:
- 2:25 – “Marketing technology is not going to make or break your marketing success. However, this is the exception. When I saw ChatGPT and understood the consequences, I got super excited. I think right now we are in the waiting fees where we are waiting for all the startups that are coming along to package ChatGPT into marketing and sales-specific applications and tools that will make it more usable, more user-friendly, more bulletproof for us.”
- 8:41 – “And I think it’s amazing, especially for folks who are remote, maybe walking on their own as freelancers, you suddenly have like a counterpart walking with you and brainstorming with you and helping you ride. So you are never alone, which is delightful.”
- 7:27 – “We kind of say that it’s more of a thought partner, right? Like now, you have a thought partner that is just an expert into whatever you ask it. So it’s, you know, it’s not necessarily going to be great at, I mean it’s great at so many things, but to use it more as if you think of it and brand it as a thought partner, it’s a beautiful tool.”
- 15:15 – “I always find it so interesting again because like I think that coding and a few, and I’ve mentioned this before, but coding and like law is, it’s almost a different way of thinking and, and it gives you this kind of benefit of, of thinking a little bit differently because you know, there’s, when you’re coding obviously you have got to think about things way in the future and how will that will operate or how it’ll break it. So I think it’s just kind of a, a different way of thinking.”
- 9:28 – Josh: “Do you have any examples of how you guys have either used it like very specifically or even used as a thought partner? Is there anything you can kinda share on that site? Cold emails, whatever it is.”.. Netta: “Yeah, so definitely brainstorming for the writing process. I would say the utopian vision of like, I’m going to give you an idea or brief, and you are going to write the entire thing for me end to end. Not realistic at the moment, but for example, here’s a blog post I wrote. Let’s create a title together. That’s an amazing use case.”