B2B Marketing Expert Interview Series: Feeling B2B with Wil Reynolds #MPB2B

Welcome back to our captivating journey through the full range of emotions in B2B marketing featured in our “Feeling B2B” series with MarketingProfs. Our series has been nothing short of enlightening, featuring thought leaders like Joe Pulizzi, Pam Didner, and Ahava Leibtag. Today, we’re excited to introduce our next luminary in the B2B marketing world and see if Wil Reynolds is “feeling B2B!?”

Wil Reynolds is an OG SEO expert, data enthusiast, dedicated runner, and all-around remarkable human being. Wil’s extensive journey in the world of SEO — spanning back to 1999 — just a year after Google’s inception, makes him a true veteran in the field. As vice president of innovation at Seer Interactive, Wil brings a wealth of knowledge and a unique perspective to our video interview series.

Watch the video now and make sure to let us know if YOU are feeling B2B!

As fellow runners, our co-founder and series host Lee Odden joins Wil to delve into the parallels between running and marketing. Wil shares insights from his running experience, emphasizing the addiction to optimization and the importance of embracing the journey, and draws a comparison between setting annual running goals and the perpetual journey of marketing. Both require a long-term perspective, acknowledging that success is neither quick nor easy, but about persevering through all types of weather and terrain to reach the ultimate goal.

Wil also offers an exclusive preview of his presentation, “Houston, We Have a Landing Page Problem—and ChatGPT Might be the Solution,” at the upcoming MarketingProfs B2B Forum event. His session will focus on finding, fixing, and scaling to enhance landing pages, with a unique twist by involving ChatGPT, and he underscores the significance of being customer-centric in optimizing landing pages.

Attendees can look forward to a revealing demonstration of how even highly-paid clicks can be squandered by ineffective landing pages, and Wil is set to provide practical insights on finding and fixing these issues manually and using ChatGPT to scale the process.

Wil’s insights emphasize the importance of nurturing, perseverance, and embracing complexity, and we’re excited to see him in action at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2023, where he’ll undoubtedly share valuable strategies and innovations with fellow marketers.

Stay tuned for even more exclusive conversations in our #FeelingB2B series, and mark your calendars for the upcoming MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2023, where the industry’s trailblazers gather to exchange insights, share experiences, and propel B2B marketing into the future.

Visit mpb2b.marketingprof.com to learn more!

PLUS: Get $100 off individual registration and $300+ for groups of three or more by using our special code, “TOPRANK” when you register here.

How to Connect with Wil:

Wil Reynolds on LinkedIn
Wil Reynolds on X

See Wil Speak at #MPB2B:

October 6 — 8:30 a.m. to 9:15 a.m.
Houston, We Have a Landing Page Problem—and ChatGPT Might be the Solution

If you’ve missed the other “Feeling B2B” video interviews, catch up now:

• B2B Marketing Expert Interview Series: Feeling B2B with Joe Pulizzi #MPB2B
• B2B Marketing Expert Interview Series: Feeling B2B with Pam Didner #MPB2B
• B2B Marketing Expert Interview Series: Feeling B2B with Ahava Leibtag #MPB2B

Here is the full transcript from this conversation between Wil and Lee :

Lee Odden: Welcome to the Feeling B2B show, a limited interview series featuring conversations with some of the top voices in the B2B marketing industry. Brought to you by the fine folks at MarketingProfs B2B Forum. I’m your host, Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing, and today we’re speaking with Will Reynolds, OG SEO, innovator, data nerd, runner, and all around awesome human being. Will is founder of SEER Interactive, where he works as vice president of innovation. Will has been in the SEO game since 1999, just a year after Google was founded. Welcome, Wil!

Wil Reynolds: I really appreciate you having me on the show and being here.

Lee: Awesome. So let’s get started — what do you love most about B2B marketing?

Wil: I love nurturing. There’s something about it. I’ve worked with clients in e-commerce, B2B, and B2C, and you can sell in B2C — if somebody’s having a bad day, and you don’t feel good about yourself, you’re going to buy those shoes, right? What I love about B2B is it makes you have to stretch more as a marketer, to say, “How might I be able to answer your questions?”

This is my approach over time, so that you better understand why I’m a better solution for you than all the other solutions out there, and then the game’s not over. When you get the ranking and the game’s not over, when you get the lead, there’s this whole other process you have to integrate with to make sure that a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL) and becomes actual revenue. To me there’s complexity in that, and I like to run to the complexity, not the simplicity.

It’s simple when you may say, “Did this campaign, got this money, done,” — versus, “Did the campaign, got these leads. Oh wait, those are the wrong kind of people.” OK, now I have to think again about the leads. What am I bringing in? So I just love the whole complexity of the journey, because it makes you have to be really on-point as a marketer.

Lee: Awesome. As with our previous Feeling B2B guest Joe Pulizzi — you and I are both runners, and I’m curious Wil, is there something you’ve learned from running that has been applicable to marketing?

Wil: A couple things. One, I realized the connection for me around — dare I say it’s addiction to optimization. The job is never done, and you’re never done running. But also — it sounds cliche, but it’s the journey. It’s like I was saying before, if you’re training for a marathon — or even if you just have an annual goal — you start off your year at zero. And there’s something about the reset on January first every year that reminds you, “Oh, here’s the goal.” Look at how little that bar is today after running my four miles on my massive big goal for the year. You just have to be in that mental space of  realizing that this isn’t going to be quick, and it’s not going to be easy.

I’m not just getting the sale. There are rainy days, snowy ones, days where I’m not feeling well, and I have to get through all of that to be able to climb the hill. For me, it’s no different than in marketing with longer journeys. I’m not just going to be able to produce the content to get the sale today, I’ve got to figure out what’s the client’s next question, and then when are they in this part of the funnel, and then how does my marketing change and how does my messaging change? It’s never just that quick, “Woke up, got it done today, we’re over,” it’s part of that longer journey.

Lee: Awesome. At B2B Forum coming up here real quick, you’re going to be speaking about how to find, fix and scale to make better landing pages and how ChatGPT might be a solution or a resource to help do that. Can you share a preview of your presentation?

Wil: I focus on customers always. More than canonicals, keyword research, and more than keyword difficulty. I think about customers, and I want to show how bad landing pages can be at solving problems for customers. The problem when I show that to people is that it’s overwhelming to see how bad landing pages are — pages that we’re paying for clicks to — at solving problems. I’m going to show you how to find them manually, and then I’m going to show you actually how to scale it using ChatGTP yourself.

Lee: Awesome, and as I mentioned you’re speaking at B2B Forum. What are you looking forward to most about speaking at MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston?

Wil: To the best that I can, I won’t be able to spend too much time in the crowd, which I’ll get into in a second, but I like to learn. What I love about this time, with AI and the amount of disruption that’s happening, and search generative experience, and Bing and Perplexity and Claude-2 and Pi.ai — it’s like the great reset. It’s like no matter how old you are — and you and I have been doing this stuff a long time — all of a sudden it’s a brand new thing that we’ve got to re-envision ourselves through. Like, “Hey, does all this stuff work still, or does it not work? Does it still serve me? How many of my clients’ customers are going there? Are they not going there?” So I just love that kind of reset.

Going to any conference — in person especially — you tend to hear things, you tend to see things, and you get to hear other people brainstorming things over lunches, so that’s cool. But what’s really cool is it’ll be the first time my kids will see me speak. My wife is traveling for work to Nicaragua, and this got booked at the same time and she said, “Well, I’m not in the country, so you’ve got the kids, so you got to figure it out,” and I knew that was true. I do have to figure this out, and I’m going to have my kids in the room and they will have to be there and quiet. My kids don’t really understand what I do when I get on a plane and fly somewhere to do something, so this will be the first time they’ll see it, and they’re eight and six, so they’re super young. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll be like, “Guys, you literally cannot interrupt me for the first 45 minutes.”On a personal note, I’m looking forward to sharing with my two sons what they have seen me leave the house for and do that they’ve never gotten to see themselves with their own eyes.

Lee: That is fantastic, and I can say that I was able to bring my daughter to London with me for a presentation, and she got to see me speak for the first time and it really connected some dots about what dad does when he goes away. It’s really cool that you get to do that, and that your kids will get to see you in action, because I know you’re such a great speaker.

Wil: What was one of the dots that she connected?

Lee: In terms of what is it that I was doing, and the category of topic I was talking about — in this case I was talking about influencers in B2B. She was probably 13 or 14 at the time, and she was familiar with the idea of influencers from the consumer perspective, but not really what does that mean for business. So she gained a little more insight as to the kind of thing, the category of the thing that I was doing, and that for some reason people seem to want to listen to me about it.

I know you’ve got lots more to say, and that there is lots more that people can learn from you, and for everybody tuning in, you can listen and learn from Wil at MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2023, which is happening both in Boston and online. The workshops at the event are October fourth, and the full conference is October fifth and sixth. You can get more information about Wil and about all the other speakers, the sessions, the venue, all the shenanigans at the event — as MarketingProfs likes to call them — at mpb2b.marketingprof.com.

Wil: Thanks for having me.

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