Community + Content + Event Lead Growth - with Anthony Kennada, Founder and CEO AudiencePlus

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics and form decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Anthony Kennada, the founder and CEO of Audience Plus, and formerly the head of marketing at both Hoppin and Gainsight. Today, we'll be covering four main topic areas with Anthony. First, the evolution of community and content in B2B marketing. Second, the challenges and opportunities of building a community inside of a B2B SaaS company. Third, the power of own media for B2B marketers. And fourth, the measurements of success for a community and media led growth strategy. Anthony, I'm not sure how we're going to cover all this in 30 minutes, but take a brief moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Anthony Kennada** (1:21)
Yes, absolutely. Honored to be here. So as you mentioned, I'm a CMO by trade and I didn't come up through the demand gen or product marketing or any one sort of route. I got dropped into the head of marketing role at Gainsight when we were still pre-revenue. So a lot of what I've learned in marketing has been first principles and really shaped by that experience. Built Gainsight from pre-revenue days to about 100 million of ARR over seven years, helped establish the customer success category through content and community and events and these things that I think historically have been viewed as the arts and crafts side of marketing fundamentally were drivers of our revenue growth and our pipeline contribution at Gainsight. That's become part of my playbook, brought it with me to front, brought it with me to hop in, and most recently stepped into the founder role, seeing a real gap in the technology stack for how companies can leverage these things, leverage thought leadership in general as their most sustainable driver of pipeline and driver of revenue.
Going all in, betting big and thinking that there's an opportunity, certainly from a best practice perspective, and talking about this more, but also from the technology perspective.

**Ray Rike** (2:36)
Super excited. Anthony, of course, I knew of you from what you did with the Pulse community at Gainsight and working closely with Gainsight and Nickmeta today. But then when I met you and found out what you were building at Audience Plus, I'm like, wow, he's actually has a vision and platform that is purpose-built for our business strategy. So I would like for you to share for the audience, because we have a real cross-section of early stage CEOs of B2B SaaS companies, go to market executives, even CFOs. Can you share how you've seen community content evolve in importance and priority for B2B marketers over these last couple of years? Yeah.

**Anthony Kennada** (3:17)
When we talk about content historically in B2B, we have someone that's a former journalist or creative writer working in demand, Jen, who's writing SEO articles. They're writing content for an algorithm. They're not typically producing podcasts like the one that we're on now or video, or any of these other more emerging formats that we as humans are consuming. Not to say SEO is completely going away, but this is becoming the primary way for us to learn and connect and network and be a part of a greater audience. The same thing on the community side. When we talk about community, it's been this like product marketing thing that we do just for our customer community and it's like an online forum. But there's this much bigger kind of capital C community, which is like not just our customers, but the people who fundamentally believe in this movement that we're trying to create with our brands and software. They could be prospects, they could be folks that are influencers or partners or folks on the sidelines who fundamentally believe this same kind of whatever it is that we as a company are espousing. I think that these are in both cases, functions that have lived outside of the core focus of the growth equation. In my experience from Gainsight, they're fundamental to how we build and establish and monetize thought leadership.
The vision that we have for the future of marketing says, we need to be creating content for humans in the formats in which we consume information. We need to be mobilizing a community of people. We use the word audience, but however we want to define that, to actually be contributors to the conversation, to be out there advocating on our behalf. By doing so, we'll be doing two things. One, we'll be fueling pipeline in a very efficient way, relative to paid advertising or some of these more expensive programs that marketers have been guilty of running over the years, but also establishing this halo effect around our brand that is much more defensible in a world where products themselves are becoming more commoditized. I think it's an unbelievable moment for the industry to really be rethinking these two vectors of content and community as a function of driving growth.