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Becky Lawlor on What B2B Buyers *Actually* Care About · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [on-hold music] This episode of Content Briefly is brought to you by our friends at Ahrefs. Do you want to make your business discoverable in search, AI and beyond?
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  Sign up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools with the link in the show notes to improve your website's SEO performance and grow your traffic from search. Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly.
• 0:57
  Today, I'm very excited to welcome back Becky Lawlor. She's the founder of Redpoint Insights. She works with clients to run surveys and publish awesome data.
• 1:05
  That's actually exactly what we're gonna be talking about today. She was on episode seventy-two discussing this kind of in a different context.
• 1:12
  I'll make sure that's linked below because that information is all very much evergreen. Today, we're talking specifically about B2B buying decisions.
• 1:19
  So she interviewed, or excuse me, surveyed two hundred and fifty decision-makers in the B2B space about what types of content and how that content influences their buying decisions. The report is fantastic.
• 1:30
  It will also be linked in the show notes.
• 1:31
  There was a few things in here that confirmed what I already suspected and a couple things that really surprised me, so I won't tease too much because there's nuance in there, and I'll let Becky explain it because she does a much better job than I do.
• 1:42
  So thanks so much to Becky for being on. Also, just thank you for being a longtime member and supporter of Superpath. Speaking of Superpath, a quick plug for Superpath Pro. As you know, we have a thirty-day free trial.
• 1:53
  We have a bunch of cool stuff going on these days. As we record this, we're finishing up our September LinkedIn challenge. We're doing these quarterly, so we'll be doing another one later this year.
• 2:02
  Basically, we post every day in Slack to encourage people to post on LinkedIn. Everyone shares their posts in that channel. It's a way to kind of hold each other accountable to creating just as much as we consume.
• 2:12
  We're also doing some AI show and tells once a month, so we're bringing on members of the community to share their screen and show us some cool things they're doing with AI, ranging from content creation to workflows to vibe coding, and it's all over the place.
• 2:26
  It's really cool. Just tons of inspiration to be gleaned from that.
• 2:29
  And then, as always, we have our monthly one-on-one calls and our monthly group calls, which we always encourage people to participate in because it's just an amazing way to meet other people in the industry and hear what types of challenges they're dealing with, kind of gut check the types of work you're doing and what you're thinking.
• 2:43
  So lots of good stuff there. Learn all about that at superpath.co. Okay, I'll get out of the way now. Enjoy this conversation with Becky Lawlor. All right, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here.
• 2:52
  Really happy to have our friend Becky Lawlor back. She's the founder of Redpoint Insights. Becky, you were on episode seventy-two, I think, which was around this time last year. We're so happy to have you back.
• 3:03
  We have a lot to talk about today. You just published a report that has a ton of interesting data that I would love to run through.
• 3:07
  But first, for people who don't know you, would you mind saying hi and introducing yourself? Yeah. Hi, everyone. Love the Superpath community.
• 3:14
  I think I'm pretty much a founding member, [chuckles] been around for a long time, and I run Redpoint Insights, which is a thought leadership content marketing agency with a specific focus on helping folks do data-driven content, like survey-based or internal data.
• 3:29
  You know, since you were last on the podcast, we ran our salary survey and published the report at the end of 2024. Or sorry, we ran it in 2024, published in early 2025.
• 3:38
  You were massively helpful to us in making that report happen, making it better. So thank you very much.
• 3:44
  Like that, I would cite that as a good example of the type of work that you can help clients do, and it was wonderful to work with someone who really knows what they're doing. So quick plug there.
• 3:52
  So, okay, so you published this report, and I have it up pulled up in front of me. It's called Content That Converts 2025 B2B Buyer Insights.
• 3:58
  You know, there's some specific data points that I think make for, like, very interesting conversation right now. But first, you know, why this report? Why now?
• 4:07
  And then could you speak a little bit to the methodology of it also? Yeah.
• 4:09
  So I did a similar report last year just wanting to tap into B2B buyers, which, you know, I think marketers need to know what-- I work in the B2B space, not B2C, so I think that my clients and B2B marketers, in general, can be served by understanding better how their B2B buyers respond to content.
• 4:29
  And obviously, the KPIs for marketers to hit are to make some kind of conversion. That doesn't necessarily mean a sale, but that would be the ultimate goal. So I really just wanted to dig in deeper to that.
• 4:41
  And I think, you know, the other part of why now is I think content's, I don't know if under attack is the right word, but it is definitely being disrupted, being kind of questioned or disassembled and reassembled as to how it's gonna work in this new era of AI overviews, LLM search.
• 4:59
  There's just an AI even in the mix of helping to write content.
• 5:03
  So there's a lot going on in the content space, and I think it's important to understand how the buyers kind of view content at this moment in time in that buyer journey. Yeah. You-- Okay, that's a great setup.
• 5:17
  One of the things I'm noticing in the content space right now is, yeah, AI is affecting basically everything, and I think it's fair enough to expose it a bit and, like, give companies the opportunity to, like, run through the content operations that they've probably used for a while.
• 5:32
  Like, gut check it. Is it still right? Is it still working? What do we need to change? In some cases, do we need to, like, totally rip it out and start over? And all very fair questions to ask.
• 5:40
  You know, um, one of the very first pages of this report, you talk about credibility, which I think is very interesting.
• 5:46
  And, you know, the survey shows, and this won't surprise anyone, that data and reports drive credibility. It just sort of got me thinking on how did credibility become so important?
• 5:56
  [chuckles] I guess meaning, like, how much of it did we erode byYou know, the types of marketing that many companies, raising my hand here as a participant in this also, done over the past ten-ish years, which a lot of folks was really heavily reliant on SEO.
• 6:10
  You know, how many games did we play? How many algorithms did we game along the way eroding credibility probably, you know?
• 6:17
  And it's-- I found it very interesting that like, yes, data obviously drives credibility, but that's like now come to the forefront of the B2B journey.
• 6:23
  I think so, and I think the AI play of, you know, folks turning to AI to write content actually also pushes credibility to the front, and not from the sense of, as we'll dive into, we did ask questions around, you know, using AI in content creation and just in general in how they search for content and other things.
• 6:41
  So, and it's not that AI necessarily hampers credibility in the sense of whether or not you use it, but I think it does hamper credibility in the sense of if you're just putting out what I guess a lot of people call it that AI slop.
• 6:55
  [chuckles] Yeah. Um, you know, versus, you know, I think credibility is built some on showing that you're willing to make an investment in the industry, in the problems and challenges that your buyers have.
• 7:09
  And I think when you use any type of original research from data or even interviews with experts and bringing that extra piece in, you're building credibility because you're showing that you're invested at a higher level than just running those SEO, I think what I would s- call the quick and dirty play, content play.
• 7:31
  Yeah. Absolutely. You know, we recently ran a survey on content attribution, put together a report on it, and I used a lot of AI to do that.
• 7:40
  But from my perspective, in a way, sort of to your point of like it-- the data is the good part. Like, the AI is helping me get it out to people faster.
• 7:47
  So I literally just uploaded a CSV to Claude, asked it to kind of make a quick breakdown of the questions, the responses, make the charts, and then we used that as an outline.
• 7:56
  Then we had a writer take it from there, and then I did a voice note brain dump to sort of add some color and context to it. I mean, it made the process so much easier. But really only because we had data to work with.
• 8:07
  Like, without that substance, then the whole thing is nothing really. It's just a shell of content. Yeah. And I think that's what we're seeing.
• 8:15
  Like, I did ask, you know, like the impact of AI-created content on kind of that trust or credibility piece, and the forty-seven percent, so pretty much half said it didn't matter either way to them whether or not content was generated by AI or not.
• 8:29
  But for those-- and then the other was really pretty much split. It was like twenty-six percent actually said it increases trust if they know it's AI generated. Oh.
• 8:37
  Hundred percent sure why that, and then twenty-seven percent it said it decreases trust.
• 8:42
  But I think the bottom line is based on all the other data that came out this year, and really I asked a similar question last year, and the same thing is what I saw is it's not that they're not saying like, "So just use AI and that's great, and I won't care."
• 8:54
  What they're saying is essentially, "I don't care, just like you don't care how somebody got two plus two is four, whether they used a calculator or did it in their head."
• 9:00
  They don't really care how you got the words on the page that they're reading, but they do care what the substance is.
• 9:07
  And so if you're not actually delivering true substance, something that is genuinely like either insightful for them or just helpful for them to know.
• 9:17
  I mean, uh, the other thing we see a lot in the data is, you know, peer, they wanna know kind of peer insights. They wanna know what their peers are doing.
• 9:24
  So any way that you're giving them insights into their reality and their work environment and those kinds of things, that's very different than just using AI to just pump out an article on a topic that's, you know, all over the internet already and you're just trying to rank for that same topic.
• 9:41
  So I think the trust is around, we don't care what tool you use, but if you don't deliver, you know, kind of quality content, your credibility will go down. Yeah, yeah.
• 9:51
  Do you have any thoughts on, I'll-- or I guess I'll position it as brand content versus creator content?
• 9:56
  Like, and I'll just-- As an example, like, uh, actually literally just this morning, I was looking at Ramp's website.
• 10:00
  They have a thing on there called the Ramp Economic Lab, and basically they pull data from the product, and they have an, a real economist analyze it and publish findings, and it's fascinating.
• 10:10
  Uh, uh, but they recently moved it to Substack. And so it's the Ramp Economic Index or something like that, but it's all about the economist.
• 10:18
  So it's a human publishing the data, and I sense that they did that because they're sort of doubling down on the credibility thing.
• 10:24
  It's like, yes, they want Ramp to earn credibility by publishing really good data, and now they're gonna double down on that by like, "Here's an economist doing it."
• 10:32
  Are you finding that same kind of sentiment amongst the people you work with, that they want it to be published by individuals more so than companies? Actually, we surprisingly did not find that.
• 10:40
  That was actually the lowest when we asked what builds trust. Authorship or byline was actually the bottom of the options. It was, came in at twenty-two percent. Wow. Whereas- That's so interesting...
• 10:50
  original research was seventy percent in terms of trust building, and expert opinions were sixty-four percent, and peer insights were sixty-two percent.
• 10:58
  So the top three were all around having some kind of original insight, but they didn't necessarily care who was writing the piece, I think.
• 11:07
  I don't think-- I definitely don't think having, like, that kind of, you know, economist byline hurts anything. I think it still helps.
• 11:14
  But in terms of whether or not the byline itself is gonna make or break it, it doesn't seem like it from the data that we collected. Okay. That's fascinating. I was not expecting you to say that.
• 11:25
  You know, I, I feel like there's this marketing trope I've seen floating around out there lately that people follow people, which sounds really good. Maybe we could distill that a bit further to algorithms favor people.
• 11:36
  You know, like, I wonder if some companies are sort of heading that direction, 'cause o-one, they probably see creators and individuals like, you know, basically getting lots of visibility on sites like LinkedIn because it seems like the algorithms favor that, but maybe that's not really the point, right?
• 11:49
  Like, at the moment, that's what the algorithms want, but, like, whether the people are the source of the data or not, maybe that's not, maybe that's not the most important thing.
• 11:56
  Is that- Yeah, I think-- I mean, I understand what you're saying, but I think, like, LinkedIn is, and, and social media is a, you know, it's one channel, and in that channel, I do think people favor ki- It's a very relationship channel.
• 12:09
  So I think- Yeah... when you're talking about LinkedIn, yes, peopleFavor the person putting something out over the brand pu-putting something out on that channel.
• 12:17
  Now, once they've, like, let's say a founder or something puts out, you know, something that drives to the piece of content, or they, you know, the post needs to be written by that person, but then when, you know, the next step or they're-- if they actually link out to a piece of content and somebody clicks on it, I think once they move out of that channel, I don't know that the person is so much as the brand overall credibility on other channels.
• 12:43
  But again, like everything in marketing, channel, the channel you're on matters for what, you know, people expect from it.
• 12:51
  So if we asked about, like, byline credibility specifically on different channels, maybe we'd see really high, like, on LinkedIn.
• 12:58
  I didn't ask this question like that, but maybe you would see that, like, they don't care on the website
• 13:04
  if it has a byline, but or if it's a, you know, gated report or a report they're pulling from a landing page, they don't care so much, but they do care if it's on a social media platform. Yeah.
• 13:15
  Okay, that's so interesting. I mean, I'm kind of like noodling on this in real time, and I'm just thinking like, I probably would trust data from a brand more so than an individual because I like...
• 13:23
  If the brand is willing to put its name on it, and probably also has more resources to pour into it, I would tend to trust it more rather than an individual.
• 13:30
  But then the individuals probably in most cases are the ones that are gonna have the most luck distributing it. Yeah.
• 13:35
  And kind of on that, like, brand, the other thing we did ask about in there, because I think one of the challenges I just see out in the field is, like, there's a lot of marketers who would love to do this kind of data-driven original research, but it can be expensive, and it can be very expensive- Mm-hmm...
• 13:50
  if, if you're using a kind of branded consultancy, a third-party consultancy that has a big name, whether that's an academic institution or some other kind of consultancy in your industry.
• 14:01
  So one of the things that I wanted to kind of tackle, uh, was does this matter in kind of that creating trust to folks?
• 14:09
  And the answer is actually, again, they actually view, to your point, they view the brands [chuckles]
• 14:15
  as more trustworthy in terms of, you know, they understand that if you use a third party, you're paying it, you know, they're paying them to create the content, and even if they're a well-known academic institution or consultancy that, that they...
• 14:29
  You know, 'cause I asked a follow-up question around this, is, like, if you said you trusted brands more than the third party, why would that be?
• 14:36
  Because I think the perception again here is that a third party would be more neutral, would be more fair, have more credibility, and that's why a lot of brands or marketers feel that they need to lean into that kind of, you know, third party on the report that they published it.
• 14:51
  But the responses were actually, as you said, they feel like the brand actually has a reputation on the line.
• 14:56
  The brand actually knows the industry and the people that are being surveyed, the challenges better than a third party that's coming in just to do that piece of research.
• 15:05
  So, and if you think about it out in the kind of the real world, [chuckles] I would say if you look at like companies that do just own, you know, own their research, they don't say it was done by X, Y, and Z.
• 15:17
  They say, you know, Salesforce. Salesforce produces its, you know, annual mark-- state of marketing, or I know Verizon does it like a more of a, I think it's data breaches.
• 15:27
  I'd have to remember, but it's around kind of some kind of cybersecurity. And, you know, they just, it's just brand owned.
• 15:33
  It's not labeled under somebody else's having done it, whether or not on the back end somebody else is doing it, I don't know.
• 15:38
  But I think that actually has significantly builds c- brands' credibility and awareness when they just own it.
• 15:45
  So my advice to folks would be, like, if you're gonna do the research, one, you can probably do it for a lot less if you-- even if you're using an outsource agency or somebody, if you don't need to have that third party kind of sponsorship or ownership of it.
• 16:01
  And secondly, you actually will get, like a lot of those have a lot of IP restrictions and other things, so this way you own your data, you own the research, and you really get all of the...
• 16:11
  I just think there's actually a higher ROI for you in being able to build brand awareness, credibility, and use it across a bunch of different channels in any way you want when you own it.
• 16:21
  So I would just strongly encourage folks to think about that and think about owning their research when they do do it. Yeah. That's awesome.
• 16:27
  One other just small thing I would add is that LLM visibility is relying heavily on citations, so if you publish the data yourself and then it gets mentioned all over the place, that's gonna be very beneficial to you as people are doing searches for related topics on ChatGPT and Perplexity and tools like that.
• 16:42
  And just, you know, the third party research thing, I think we actually talked about this last time you were on the podcast.
• 16:46
  Like I-- When I imagine third party research, I have this idea in my head of like a study that says soda's good for you, and then you find out like Coca-Cola paid for it, or like that type of thing. You know what I mean?
• 16:56
  Like Coca-Cola would never put that on their own marketing materials. [chuckles] But they might try to like... That's an exaggerated example. I don't even know if that's true.
• 17:03
  But I have this like idea in my head of like that's the type of thing. Like someone is paying off some type of analyst who seems super legit to like spread a message that's like maybe not accurate.
• 17:13
  That's probably not totally fair summarization of how third party research companies work, but that's like what sticks in my brain. Yeah.
• 17:19
  I think, you know, on the B2B side, I don't think it is quite that kind of- Yeah... agreeable. Um, [chuckles]
• 17:27
  but I do think that is why in the survey we saw people say like, either I trust them the same and don't care who does it, or I actually trust the brand more because, you know, they said, "Look," you know, "the company is being paid, so they're being paid to please the brand, not please me."
• 17:42
  So- Totally... whereas the brand needs to please me, and they have the reputation on the line to do it.
• 17:47
  You know, we talked about LinkedIn a little bit, and I had a follow-up question for you on that, 'cause there was a very interesting data point in here about LinkedIn.
• 17:54
  You asked where people discover content, and LinkedIn was at the top of the list.
• 17:57
  Forty-six percent of respondents most often discover vendor content on LinkedIn, some of that being organic and some of that being sponsored, I assume. Is that right? Yeah, I didn't break it down that way.
• 18:06
  I just kinda asked for different channels. But I definitely do think that LinkedIn, especially in the B2B world, again, is playing a big role in the, in content distribution.
• 18:15
  Now, that is a little challenging because LinkedIn also punishes you for [chuckles] pushing out your content, so you know.
• 18:23
  I think, though, you have to kind of balance that of just, like, posting in ways that create curiosity and sometimes posting with that outside link to drive them out to your content where they can really, you know, go deeper than just a LinkedIn post.
• 18:34
  I think that is the challenge with LinkedIn.
• 18:37
  But there again, I think that's where if you have content that has, again, that original research or expert insights or peer insights, I think-You're more likely to be able to get people to go off the platform to get it.
• 18:50
  Totally. You know, people who listen to this podcast regularly will know that I whine about LinkedIn a lot, but one of the very good things about LinkedIn, I think, is the ads.
• 18:58
  The ads that I generally see in my feed are, one, extremely well-targeted, but two, pretty good.
• 19:05
  Like, they don't feel like commercials, like they actually feel quite relevant, which makes me think that, like, the way that the LinkedIn ad platform works, which frankly I'm not that familiar with, must be pretty darn good.
• 19:15
  You know?
• 19:15
  I feel like as distribution gets harder, and like it is, to your point, like it's hard to get people to click off of a platform like that, but there's still a pretty gigantic opportunity to reach the exact person at the exact time with the exact content, you know?
• 19:30
  And I feel like paid distribution is probably somewhat under-leveraged for content marketers. Yeah, and I've seen-- I mean, I had clients have good success with that.
• 19:37
  You know, I had one client that got around, I think it was like sixteen hundred.
• 19:42
  You know, they were just publishing, they were promoting it, the landing page from LinkedIn, so trying to drive folks from LinkedIn, and they got around sixteen hundred downloads from organic and paid channels.
• 19:53
  And the campaign achieved a fifteen percent conversion rate from organic social, which is actually about...
• 19:59
  I went out and asked a bunch of marketers, and that turned out to be about five percent higher than industry benchmarks. So it did really well on LinkedIn, but you have to set it up right, and you have to [chuckles]
• 20:10
  promote it right to get a higher conversion than industry norms. So... Yeah. Really interesting.
• 20:15
  There was another one I wanted to follow up with you on about the types of content that play significant roles in buying decisions.
• 20:21
  You know, and I think as content marketers, I certainly am guilty of this, sometimes find myself thinking about this very linear journey through the funnel where like, first we have to create awareness, then consideration.
• 20:34
  And I think probably what happens in many cases is, like, people skip all that. They just, they know they need a solution, they skip right to the part where they're trying to figure out which one it is.
• 20:41
  And you had asked a question about, oh yeah, types of content. Survey-based research, benchmark reports, that was number two.
• 20:47
  I was a little surprised to see customer case studies as number one, and that actually held true across the entire funnel, that it was influential even in the earliest stages of B2B buying decisions.
• 20:59
  Curious on your thoughts on that.
• 21:00
  I just thought it was really interesting because in my mind it's like, oh, well, first we need SEO, okay, then we need some consideration content, you know, then we need the sales enablement, but this is not really how it goes in real life.
• 21:07
  Yeah, I don't think that's how it goes, 'cause the other data in there, when I asked about where in the funnel they most use content to make their buying decisions, it was actually...
• 21:17
  I would've thought, like, they would've started maybe top of funnel or bottom of funnel, but it was actually middle of funnel that came out with the highest percent.
• 21:24
  So what that tells me, again, is that, like you said, like a lot of times they're kind of jumping in, they already kind of know roughly sort of what they need, and now they're kind of, you know, they're not to the point where they're making like bottom of the funnel where they're making the vendor decision, but they are already onto kind of step two of like trying to evaluate who's out there.
• 21:42
  And, you know, case studies would obviously, even at middle of the funnel, play a strong role in building credibility and looking to see, you know, again, is this solution solving for a company like mine?
• 21:55
  Am I relating to this case study, and I have those same problems, and they could come in and solve it the same way with that, you know. So I guess I wasn't that surprised to see case studies.
• 22:04
  I think, one, because even at top of funnel case studies, you know, one of the great things about case studies is they are very narrative, so I think that they can work in a similar way to any kind of like educational blog.
• 22:15
  And a lot of times companies do, you know, beyond having kind of the nice PDF case study format, you do see there's an opportunity to just create a blog that's really a case study, but written a little bit more in a blog angle, too, so.
• 22:26
  Yeah, totally. I mean, I find that, you know, you can compare products in many different ways. Like you can make...
• 22:32
  Like nowadays, you can ask Perplexity to make you a chart comparing the features of tool A, B, and C, which is really cool, you know.
• 22:38
  But then you land on the website, and there's something very powerful about seeing people's names and faces and job titles and experiences and relating to those people, you know, and seeing like, "Oh, that person's like me."
• 22:49
  You know? "We have a similar job title. We work in a similar industry. We have the same problem. You know, I wanna be like that person."
• 22:53
  Like, and whether or not people actually like run through that thought process in their head or not, I do think that that's kind of subconsciously what's happening, is that they're probably as much attracted to the customer as the humans as they are the features of the tools, because probably in every industry, you know, there's parity, or at least close to it amongst the top handful of tools.
• 23:10
  Yeah, no, and I think that idea of what you said, attracted to the human, I think that, like, it may be a subconscious thing, but everything that essentially my research is pointing towards really points towards a human insight, right?
• 23:23
  Whether any kind of survey-based report is from a human insight, then you've got, you know, cut case studies or human insights, expert interviews or human insights, peer insights.
• 23:35
  All of the things that were ranking in the top four or five were all really driven by, I wanna know what another human is thinking about this topic. I wanna know their thoughts.
• 23:45
  So I think, again, you know, that's the difference between, you know, you can use AI to write it, but if you're having all those human inputs, it doesn't feel like AI.
• 23:54
  If you're just taking a topic and explaining it, you have no human inputs, and therefore it's not as credibility building. Yeah.
• 24:02
  You-- Actually, very much related to that, if I were advising a company on a B2B content strategy right now, I would recommend thought leadership content be a high priority.
• 24:10
  But in the responses to your question about types of content that drive these decisions, thought leadership was way, way at the bottom.What does that mean?
• 24:18
  Does that mean that, that thought leadership is just not, it's not decision-oriented content, or that there's something else going on with it, either that it's executed poorly or maybe there's too many kind of variations of what thought leadership means to different people, potentially?
• 24:30
  Yeah. I was really surprised to see that as well, because there's a part of me that's like, well, but you also said like [chuckles] original research.
• 24:37
  And I think, you know, I even think of like, you know, expert insights as thought leadership. So I felt like there was a little disconnect in that response.
• 24:45
  But so to me, you know, not being able to-- this is my own hypothesis here.
• 24:50
  I'm not inside the brains of those surveyed, but I do think it's that the term thought leadership maybe carries a little bit like, oh, everybody throws that around, and it's been like overused.
• 25:00
  So when they think of thought leadership, they don't necessarily think...
• 25:03
  They're maybe categorizing it separately from those other kinds of investments, and they're thinking of it like the founder just writes a blog on his, you know, perspective on this or an internal SME, which is still a human input.
• 25:17
  So I think that, and then the other piece of it, though, that the data maybe did show a little bit more is just when it gets to like sharing content with the buying committee and actually making a decision based off content, it was really around data-driven.
• 25:28
  So I think in terms of kind of maybe persuading others, it's more important that they have data versus just something that would be considered, quote, "thought leadership." Yeah. Okay, one more question on this.
• 25:39
  To me, that was like really st- this chart really stood out to me, the different types of content. High on the list was pricing or ROI calculators, and I'm curious your thoughts on basically free tools as marketing.
• 25:50
  You know, this has become much more accessible to content marketers now because of vibe coding. Like you, you act- Right. You could-- Anyone can build an ROI calculator now. How do you think of that as content?
• 25:59
  Do you think of that as content, I guess, is a more clear way to ask that? And then are you finding that the consumers of this stuff want this?
• 26:05
  Like, for example, when I downloaded this report, I put it in Claude and asked for a summary. First thing I did.
• 26:12
  You know, sort of there's like a new way to experience longer form data-driven content, and I feel like vibe coding is potentially a solution to that, although I think we're at the very earliest stages of seeing that.
• 26:21
  Yeah.
• 26:22
  It's a lot to unpack there for me to think about there in terms of I have a cou- different thoughts running in my head, but for the first part, the ROI calculator, I do view it as content because it's typically presented with other content, so I feel like it's part of the content funnel, so to speak, because you would usually have maybe some other content asset driving to the ROI calculator.
• 26:44
  You're not just plopping the ROI calculator, like in an email or something. You usually are setting it up, and then people can click that. Like you've explained how to use it, you've explained what the...
• 26:54
  And the ROI calculator is just, you know, part of that, giving them, like when you think about helping them build a business case for the buying committee, when you're, you know, trying to reach a champion or an influencer, you know, you're trying to give them all the different tools.
• 27:08
  So I guess I feel like it wouldn't really be separate from the content funnel. How else would they get it? So I, I, even though it's maybe not written content, you know, we would also consider videos.
• 27:17
  They're not written content, I think, but they are a type of content that people consume.
• 27:21
  And then to your second question about or just your comment about putting in Claude and getting a summary, I think one of the other things that I've been exploring, I haven't found the right thing yet, but one of the ways I see these research reports evolving to become more interactive, I don't really love, to be honest, the interactive, like when reports myself, I always tend to find them a little overwhelming when they're all HTML and they're all over the place.
• 27:41
  Yeah.
• 27:42
  What I think would be more, and I don't know, maybe that's just me and I just wanna read a PDF, but what I have been exploring, I haven't found the right tool yet, is, but I think it's probably out there, it's close to being out there, is again, kind of where you can put all of the data essentially into the tool and folks can come and interact with the data themselves so they can say like, you know, "I'm in the manufacturing industry, so I just really wanna know how the data came out for those in the manufacturing industry."
• 28:09
  I mean, we often create vertical content out of the data, you know, for like different industries or different company size, but this would give people an interactive way to just question the data themselves and get answers and responses based on what they, you know, uniquely care about.
• 28:25
  I love that. I love that. I feel like AI, for all the, I'll call them frustrations, it's introducing into content marketers world, like it is creating these new opportunities as well.
• 28:34
  And actually, after we published a salary report earlier this year, within a week or two, somebody emailed me and said, "Hey, I vibe coded a, like a salary calculator based on your data." And it was really interesting.
• 28:45
  Like you basically like select your seniority, your job title, where you live, and it would spit out its best guess at your salary.
• 28:52
  I was like, "Wow, I had never thought of that as a way to present this data," but like what a cool- Yeah. No. What a cool way for an individual to come in here and like...
• 28:59
  Because probably people come in and they're like, "Okay, what should my salary be?" You know? But they could get that so much faster through an experience like that. So- Yeah. Maybe we'll build that in this year.
• 29:06
  That'd be cool. Becky, anything that stood out in this report that I have not asked you about that, that you wanna talk through?
• 29:12
  I think the only thing, other thing that we maybe didn't talk through as much is just, you know, that going back to how folks are finding content and that we are seeing a transition to using LLMs.
• 29:24
  So over half, fifty percent are regularly using AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini to research B2B solutions.
• 29:30
  And what I actually thought, there's a couple things around the C-suite that I think maybe are also important to mention.
• 29:35
  One is that sixty-seven percent of the C-suite are using these tools, so more than your average person.
• 29:40
  So if your buyer that you're really trying to target is the C-suite, they are actually going to these tools more so than other folks. So I think that's important to remember.
• 29:50
  And also, when you're looking at converting the C-suite, the other thing that we saw is that they were even a higher percentage, that original research was significant in moving forward with a buying decision, and that they were one point six times more likely to say original research was the single biggest factor in their buying decision.
• 30:09
  So I think-Again, if you need to hit the C-suite, you really need to be investing in original research. That's awesome. That's awesome.
• 30:17
  You know, also, I think if you publish really good research, you're doing a service to the world.
• 30:20
  Like, I was recently using Perplexity Research, something for an article I was working on for a consulting client that I'm working with right now, and I found a stat that I was, like, mind-blown by.
• 30:29
  I could not believe it. So I go to track it down. It's from this, like, random Medium article published like 10 years ago. There's no link. There's no source from there.
• 30:38
  I go on this wild goose chase trying to find the actual source, and I cannot find it anywhere.
• 30:44
  It's like the only place it exists on the internet is this one random Medium post, which now Perplexity is showing to me as if it's fact, you know?
• 30:50
  And so my point now is, like, you publish good data, like you're really, you're making people's lives easier. [laughs] You know, I wasted like an hour trying to find that, and it doesn't exist. Right.
• 30:57
  And I think, and sourcing your data because, yeah, I have to question. I've, as any writer, has been down that rabbit hole multiple, multiple times of like, you know, and you might even find...
• 31:07
  I found stats that are cited all over the place, and yet there's not one link to a primary source, so you have to wonder who-- Like, did one person make up this data, and now everybody's citing it?
• 31:17
  'Cause it would be a great stat, but is it real? [laughs] Totally. It's like the citation centipede. It just, like, keeps being cited inside, inside it until it feels real. So cool.
• 31:25
  This is such a nice follow-up, Becky, to the episode we did last time, which I'm gonna link in the show notes because we did focus quite a bit on that in original research in a slightly different context, basically like how to do it really well.
• 31:35
  Like, that's very much evergreen information, so I'll make sure that's linked here. We'll obviously link to Redpoint Insights. We will link to this report, to your LinkedIn, and anywhere else we should send people.
• 31:45
  Yeah, I think that's it, and maybe people should just know this is the first in a series of five reports that I'm actually putting out, uh, on B2B buyers.
• 31:53
  So there's, if you go to download this first report, there's a place to sign up for email list if you want to receive those other reports as they come out. Amazing. Cool. Well, go check out show notes, folks.
• 32:03
  Becky, thank you for being on the podcast. Thank you for being such a long time member and supporter of Superpath. We really appreciate you, and we'll see you in Slack. Sounds good. Thanks, Jimmy. [upbeat music]