Here is a transcript generated by Otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with VeraContent’s Shaheen Samavati and entrepreneur Alex Price, on the benefits of WordPress for B2B companies:

Shaheen Samavati 0:13
Hi everyone, I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix and i’m excited to be here with Alex Price, founder of FINITE a global community of nearly 2000 B2B tech marketers. He’s also the founder of 93digital which is the London based digital agency which specializes in the design and development of WordPress websites. So you can go to finite.community to learn more about the FINITE community and also drop links to Alex’s social media and the 93digital channels in the shownotes we publish along with this episode. So thanks so much for joining us, Alex.

Alex Price 0:42
Thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to talking.

Shaheen Samavati 0:44
Yeah, me too. You have a really interesting story so I’m excited to learn more about it. You dropped out of university to start 93digital. Can you tell us how that happened and how you went on to become a top 100 agency in the UK?

Alex Price 0:58
Yeah. It feels like a while ago now, actually. So I guess the background was that i started freelancing. I was doing like all kinds of design development, digital marketing, SEO stuff…literally for like seven pounds an hour, just random odd jobs. I was working on sites like People Per Hour and Elance, which is now Upwork, but those kind of like very, very basic freelance job sites when I was…I think I started freelancing when I was like 16/17—I’m not sure if I was even maybe too young or it was against the rules to be working for those platforms at that age, but yeah I’d always I think I’ve always had this weird desire for independence and I remember having an argument with my mom who said that if I wanted to go and see some friends and have some pocket money I’d have to help clean the windows at home and I was a grumpy teenager and thought like “I don’t need to need to clean windows to have some independence and to make some money. I can do this myself.” And so that’s kind of how it all began and I was always just passionate about technology. I’d kind of been building my own computers and stuff when I was like in my early teens and then that transitioned into more kind of development software side of things. I dropped out of university when I was I think 20/21. I kind of did a first year of uni at King’s College in London which is great and I loved it but I just kind of reached this crossroads where it was like I couldn’t keep doing both. I had like I think like eight hours a week of university contact hours…like it was I was working way, way more than I was studying and it just got to a point where I was it was quite clearly kind of time to double down on everything I was doing on the business and so yeah I kind of spenr the next year basically freelancing, opened a small office—painted it myself with some reduced rent—and it was all just very, very simple and then yeah things just gradually built from there. So we’re now a team of about 25 together and we’ve just been lucky to—I guess I’ve kind of climbed the ladder really slowly up you know from seven pounds an hour to 20 pounds an hour and 500 pound websites to everything in between up to 100,000 pound websites and beyond so it’s been like I’ve kind of stopped to every rung of the ladder on that front but it’s been a great journey and rewarding journey overall.

Shaheen Samavati 3:08
Yeah, I can definitely relate to that story being an agency owner, although you figured it all out a lot sooner than I did but I think I did the same thing later.

Alex Price 3:19
None of have it figured out really, I think. I think I’m still figuring it out right now.

Shaheen Samavati 3:23
Yeah, that’s true. So can you tell us more about the FINITE community and how did that start and how did that grow into what it is now?

Alex Price 3:32
Yeah, sure. So FINITE was kind of born out of us wanting to bring together initially our clients, so we at the agency we’ve got 93digital where we do the UX design and build work and websites for global B2B tech, SaaS clients. We’ve then got 93x which is kind of our digital marketing team and we do PPC and SEO, so we’re kind of working heavily with the B2B technology sector as an agency and as a digital partner. And we had all of these kind of same briefs coming in where the challenges were very similar, the objectives very similar, we had all these clients looking for advice—and you’ll know that often even quite big B2B tech companies and marketing teams can feel quite small and feel quite isolated. They’re often very product and technology-led environments and marketing’s just kind of slightly sidelined and there’s this really like strong desire for people to connect and share and learn and follow best practice. So initially it was like why don’t we just get our clients literally around a table, 10 of them, connect them. We can kind of be at the hub of that and get people talking and connecting and sharing and learning and growing. And then we thought, actually, why don’t we just open up into something more than that. And so we started kind of building finite as its own brand as I guess our vehicle for doing events and building eventually turned into a community. I feel like in the last year or so maybe just because I’ve been more involved in it, the whole kind of community building thing has become… there’s a lot more out there. There’s all these communities on Twitter. There’s communities for building communities. There’s just so much resource around communities. But like when we started, maybe I just wasn’t as aware of it, but it wasn’t as much of a thing overall. But it kind of transitioned from like 40 people in a room in London after work on a Thursday night, having a beer in a WeWork and some slightly cold, soggy pizza, and you know, a few people talking and obviously COVID, then struck, and we transitioned into Slack and online webinars and all things that we were planning on doing at some point, but obviously, with with events coming to a standstill, and all of that kind of just sped up. And really, that was kind of the, I guess it was a blessing in disguise, to some extent, FINITE turned into it, I think we’re close to 2000-odd members who have actually signed up to join. But our events and podcasts and other things go out much wider than that. So yeah, it’s been super rewarding just to be able to connect so many people. We’ve helped people find new jobs, we’ve helped people find mentors, like just like the whole community building spirit of things has just been really, really rewarding. So from an agency perspective, it’s nice to kind of stay at the edge of what’s happening and be really in touch with client pain points and just consume a lot of best practice for myself. But there’s a really nice kind of community aspect to it as well.

Shaheen Samavati 6:14
Absolutely. Yeah, I can definitely relate to this as well as it seems like you have similar goals to what we’re doing with The Content Mix community. I definitely think there’s some overlap. So could you tell us a bit about the the kinds of people in your community? And yeah, who might want to consider joining?

Alex Price 6:33
Yeah, sure. So everyone in the community is effectively client side. So in-house marketer, within a B2B tech software, SaaS business. We’ve got members who are slightly outside of that—maybe more in slightly traditional B2B services, businesses, but I think even those businesses, they’re all kind of becoming tech companies in some form or another, eventually they’re productizing their service offerings or creating platforms or so I think in a few years time, like every B2B business will possibly be some kind of tech company anyway, but so we’re quite flexible on that front. I guess we are obviously, although running an agency myself, we keep the agency stuff really separate from FINITE and we really want it to be seen as a safe space where people can share things quite openly, people can come and say, “I’ve just been made redundant, I need some advice.” And that was something that came up recently. And so for me, it’s really important that it’s not a salesy environment, not a kind of commercial one where every time someone posts “I’ve got this challenge”, there’s like five agencies, consultants, freelancers, whatever is kind of posting saying “We can help.” So that’s the only kind of one, I guess criteria that we look at is making sure that all the applications we look at our client-side marketers only. But other than that it’s everything from like, marketing execs through to CMO, VP of Marketing, even the odd founder that’s just really interested in the marketing side of things. And yeah, everything in between. So I guess we’ve got huge kind of enterprise technology companies, the IBM’s and SAPs, and all those kinds of organizations, and then we’ve got equally five person, you know, seed funded SaaS startup, and everything in between. So there’s a lot of different levels of people and company within the community. And we do all kinds of different webinars and events that I guess some of them appeal more to the more kind of enterprise businesses and others more to the smaller ones. And so there’s a bit of everything for everybody if you’re kind of broadly in the B2B marketing world.

Shaheen Samavati 8:31
And can you tell us like why did you decide to focus on B2B? Why do you think B2B marketers specifically needed their own community?

Alex Price 8:40
Yeah, good question. I mean, I think as I said, like this fact, or something we come across a lot is feedback is that marketers we talk to—B2B marketers—are often feeling quite isolated, feeling that their teams are quite small. Even in companies that are hundreds of people strong, there might be three or four, kind of B2B marketers, working as a team, relying on a few external partners and agencies and stuff. And I think obviously, the challenges that come with B2B marketing landscape are fairly lengthy considered, complex buyer journeys that that takes some time. There’s a lot to be learned, I should say. And we do try and do this from the B2C side of things. I don’t really, although this is a B2B community, I don’t believe in the kind of complete separation that you’re one or the other. I think both can learn lots from each other as disciplines. But I think there’s some unique kind of challenges, as I mentioned, just on the B2B side, and so it’s nice for people to come together and talk about those. I think with any community like having quite a niche focus is a good thing, either in terms of industry vertical or discipline, you know, yours is focused on content marketing specifically, but then maybe across a number of different industry sectors, whereas we’re a bit more sector specific—maybe although B2B tech is still a really broad umbrella, right? There’s everything from like FinTech to HR tech to event tech to… basically pick a word and put it in front of tech and there’s probably a company in there. So yeah, I think it’s just nice to have a niche and a focus and that at least gives you a framework around which to produce all the content and webinars and events that you run.

Shaheen Samavati 10:17
Absolutely, like, yeah, experience sharing, like, specifically around the challenges that type of marketing entails, right?

Alex Price 10:25
Exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Shaheen Samavati 10:26
I did want to say that we actually got in touch because one of our previous podcast guests, who’s James Stacy from Red Hat, is a member of your community, and he was like, super enthusiastic and really recommend it.

Alex Price 10:38
I saw that, yeah, that was kind of him. So I appreciate that, appreicate the shout out, James. Thank you.

Shaheen Samavati 10:43
Well, and I was curious about, you chose Slack as your platform for the community. And well I guess, what are the advantages of using Slack and what do you think about it? I mean, what went into that decision?

Alex Price 10:58
Yeah, it’s probably the thing that I get asked the most, and the one that I think about the most still, because I’m still certain, you know, I’m very open to different platforms. I guess I just fundamentally believe that you kind of have to go where people already are. So, in most instances, I think a lot of companies are already on Slack, basically, in a nutshell. There’s a lot of great community platforms out there. The ones that we looked at, often are quite kind of discussion-led, they’re almost like online forums. And actually, that’s not really any different to Slack anyway. You can log into Slack in your web browser…so why not just use Slack? Others are a bit more enterprising, and they kind of pulled together content and resources, but I just, I still haven’t yet demoed one where I thought “This could be great enough that…people will be willing to create a whole new account, monitor a whole set of new notifications…” You know, with LinkedIn and Facebook and WhatsApp and Twitter and it’s just, people are just bombarded by notifications, right? And I think asking people to create yet another account on something and monitor yet another channel, I think is a big ask, unless you’ve got something really, really special on the other side of that sign in, that gateway, that account that someone has to create. And I think we’ve got some great content. And I think there’s a lot of obviously a lot of reasons to become a FINITE member. But I just think you have to make these things as kind of as frictionless as possible, and go where they’re where people already are. So I’m hoping that something comes along that completely just “wows” me and I’m like, “That is a genius idea as a platform!” and you know, right price point and has all the features and makes it really easy, but I haven’t yet found that thing. I think you mentioned that you’re mainly on on Facebook, is that right, is it a Facebook group?

Shaheen Samavati 12:42
Yeah. And it’s a question we’ve come with, like, we’ve debated a lot as well. But yeah, we started on Facebook. And that’s still our, like, biggest platform. So…

Alex Price 12:52
Yeah, it’s the same principle, right? Like, most people have a Facebook account, and they’re already there, therefore, go where they already are. Like, I just think the whole kind of “build something and they will come” is not as relevant for this kind of thing. We just have to make people’s life easier.

Shaheen Samavati 13:07
So yeah, absolutely. Also, you mentioned that, obviously, you started out with in person events. Now I know you have like a big digital event coming up soon, right?

Alex Price 13:17
Yes.

Shaheen Samavati 13:18
Well, maybe you can tell us a bit more about what you have in-store at that event. But also, what’s it been like transitioning from live to virtual events?

Alex Price 13:25
Yeah, so we just launched this week, FINITE Fest, which is a big kind of first, like one-day virtual conference, which is super exciting. So Sasha, who heads up our marketing and community at FINITE with some help from Jodi, our marketing assistant, I don’t know how she’s done it alongside everything else. It’s no mean feat, pulling together a whole one-day global conference with the speakers that we’ve managed to get. So yeah, it’s been awesome. I’m really excited. That’s coming up on the 13th of May. That’s completely free. Anybody can join. So regardless of whether you’re a FINITE member or not. I guess broadly that transition, has been challenging in some respects, but then also opened up tons of opportunity, right? Like I think physical borders around the world have obviously gone up, but digital borders have been stripped down. And we’ve been able to get FINITE out there into so more regions. I think I mentioned before we started that we were kind of at 25% EMEA, 25% APAC—or I think it was 50% EMEA and 25% North America, 25%, APAC broadly, as like a membership split. So, there’s a lot of B2B tech hubs in Scandinavia and Israel and Singapore and Australia, and obviously, the East Coast and the West Coast of the US. So that’s really allowed us to widen our audience, I think. And so it’s been fine. I think, the challenge has just been this whole kind of digital fatigue piece of like, how do you keep webinars short enough and snappy enough and interesting enough to kind of get people there? We saw kind of once we started doing a bit of a slip off gradually of people that would actually attend I think, like broadly like 50/60% of people that would register with that actually come on to the webinar live, you know, lots of other people can watch it on demand, which is great. And we’re producing evergreen content, really. So that’s still valuable. But yeah, I think that the idea of like an hour long webinar panel discussion probably needs a bit of a rethink, you know, we’re trying to keep them like half an hour, maybe 40 minutes, a couple of, you know, one person talking, a 20 minute discussion. I think people just want, like bite size, accessible content all the time, but they also want it to be tangible and useful, and so that’s the, I think that’s the struggle with producing that kind of content. And I think the challenge really will be when it goes back to potentially doing physical and virtual, like that mix of the hybrid event, where we’ve seen platforms like Hop In raising tons of money, and really, I think they’re well-placed to pioneer that space. That will be the challenge because do you do do physical events, and then also try and film them and livestream them and put them online, or did you just do physical events, then virtual events separately? Like, if you do the streaming, then it comes with the overhead of needing all the cameras and like, basically, a full production teams do that, like it becomes a lot more complex. So I think the challenge is probably more still to come. But I think it’s been fun and easy for us to to scale in the last year or so overall.

Shaheen Samavati 16:15
Yeah, and when you started out, you were doing events in London, right? And your community was more focused on the UK. And now you’ve really opened up to the world it sounds like.

Alex Price 16:24
Yeah, definitely, I don’t think that would have happened without COVID happening, really. It may have eventually, but we would never have kind of, it wouldn’t have definitely wouldn’t have, been as quick. And yeah, at this point in time where we are now we will probably still be pretty London-focused and meetup sizes might have grown a bit, but definitely not to the scale that we have now.

Shaheen Samavati 16:41
So digital events will be part of your long term strategy.

Alex Price 16:44
I think so for sure, yeah, just given our a membership split, it would be nice to have some like local meetups, and we were potentially thinking about having almost like chapter leads or something in different regions that might be able to help organize some of these things, just to help us scale it a bit in different places. So that’s something we’re considering and looking at. Obviously, it’d be great to have some some in-person stuff, too. But I think, given the given the global nature, it’s nice to have to keep things digital as much as possible.

Shaheen Samavati 17:14
So you’re talking to B2B marketers all the time. Can you tell us about like some of the most common challenges that they face?

Alex Price 17:21
Yeah, so we actually, we ran a big survey at the end of last year. So we did a survey with our community at the end of last year and published the data basically asking them everything from like, how did your year go? Did you meet your objectives as you planed, though to, you know, more direct impact of of COVID. And yet some stuff about content, stuff about technology, all of those kinds of things. So I think broadly, we were quite happy to see that it was quite a quite an optimistic survey, I think, overall. Like we did this at the end of last year when there was still a fair bit of uncertainty, arguably more so than there is now even though there is still a fair bit of uncertainty, but I think 75% of the marketers that we surveyed said they’d been able to meet their objectives, which I think was meet or outperform and only 25% hadn’t been able to hit their objectives. So yeah, I think even in a good year, without COVID, I would have thought a quarter of companies not meeting their objectives is probably quite normal anyway. So I think on balance, that was a pretty, pretty positive thing to see. I think the things that came up as challenges were like, as I mentioned, digital fatigue, and how do we cut through the noise with with content, but also webinars and other things? How do we balance kind of quality and quantity in content, which is something you probably hear a lot and comes up pretty regularly as as a pain point. We wanted to get a sense of like, which channels have really grown in importance to and so we asked, we gave people a lot of options, and some some free fields, but webinars, no surprise, were kind of the big winner, you know 60%, I think 57%, I think said webinars become the most important channel growing the most important, and since COVID. SEO was actually next. So 39%, which was, I think, maybe slightly surprising, but I think for me being slightly in the SEO world, it wasn’t a huge surprise. We’ve seen a lot of you know, a lot of B2B tech companies with field marketing budgets frozen, no events happening, basically going, “Okay, our website…” And again, according to our survey, marketers said about 70% said the website had become more important since COVID struck and 39% said that SEO has grown in importance the most as the channel. So those were two statistics that I think really demonstrated that big shift to digital and I think marketers have kind of been struggling a bit to pivot to digital first or digital only really in in some respects. So yeah, those are a few of the kind of headline stats, but I can keep talking about the report for hours. I’ll let you ask me some other questions.

Shaheen Samavati 19:51
Yeah, that sounds like super relevant the report. Maybe we can put a link to it in the show notes as well.

Alex Price 19:56
Yeah.

Shaheen Samavati 19:56
That’d be super useful. On the point of like, balance, quality versus quantity, do you have any tips on that in terms of content production?

Alex Price 20:05
Yeah, I think it’s…I feel like it’s framed slightly wrong in terms of, it’s a little bit black and white in terms of it being just one or the other. And obviously, it’s a sliding scale, and there’s a middle ground. I think the way I always approach it is like, “Well, what does quality mean?” You can’t answer the question or define it unless you define a standard around quality, and which in itself is difficult, right? Like, I’m sure you know, from working with clients, there is always that no matter how hard you try and brief in content with tone of voice and guideline and just like try and nail everything down yet somebody read something and they go, “That doesn’t sound right.” And there’s always that subjective element that people have within content, within design within lots of, I guess, broadly, the creative world. But I think if you can get to a place where you can say, “We’re agreeing as a team—this is what quality looks like.” And you might have to think a bit outside the box as to how you do that. But there’s, I guess, there’s all kinds of things you can say—does this meet our brand tone of voice does it? We need to measure posts, right, against which we can compare content to take that quality box, and I think then you can say, “Okay, if we’re, if we’re meeting these levels, if we’re meeting these criteria we’ve set, then as long as we can keep doing that,” then we can scale quantity as much as we can without falling below these kind of thresholds that we’ve set ourselves. So I think it’s to some extent, it’s almost like a process marketing operations challenge, I think in some some degree. It’s like, how do you build a scalable process that allows you to do enough of something, but also add that desired level of quality?

Shaheen Samavati 21:41
Yeah, I mean, definitely, we all know, like SEO has changed and evolved over the years and apparently—I mean, this, the old strategies of doing lots of poor quality content and stuffing it with keywords doesn’t work. I don’t think that probably ever worked for B2B though, because the industry has always been about building trust and it’s very much a super, super targeted audience. So maybe it hasn’t, that particular trend hasn’t impacted B2B as much as other areas.

Alex Price 22:08
Yeah, it’s, I mean, I think we definitely see in the B2B space that SEO is often pretty content lead. I think we split SEO into kind of a digital PR kind of link building aspects, the technical elements of the website itself, and then content. And in the majority of cases, like our clients are weighted towards content, obviously, building domain authority and backlinks and other things is key. And having a great website, technically, and in terms of user experience is key too. But I think we’re often surprised at how many kinds of content gaps there are from an SEO perspective. And I think that the challenge a little bit is not trying to cater to, we’re not trying to have content serve too many purposes. Like, I think it’s okay to say this content is SEO focused, like this content is serving an SEO pillar—that doesn’t mean coming out with keywords or dropping below those quality thresholds we just talked about, it still has to kind of fit in with the brand and tone of voice and all those things. But there’s a separation I think between like top of funnel acquisition content that brings people into the site, at which point, you can guide them in all kinds of different directions, versus that kind of very thought leadership, consideration stage type content, which is serving a different role and being written from a slightly different perspective. And I think a mistake I think I sometimes see clients try and make is that they want a piece of content just to tick all of those boxes, they want it to be C-suite thought leadership at the same time as meeting, you know, all the kind of keyword gap analysis that we’ve done in the data driven SEO side of things. They wanted to cater to everything. And I think that can just kind of dilute things and make content marketing a bit more challenging overall.

Shaheen Samavati 23:49
I was curious about like your agency 93digital. You’re focused on WordPress as a platform. Why do you decide to focus on that? And is a WordPress robust enough platform for any B2B company who wants to create a really great buyers journey?

Alex Price 24:04
Good question. Yeah. So I guess the focus kind of came out of me initially freelancing. I was working across like Joomla, and WordPress and all kinds of platforms. I had a real, a real mix, and eventually just was kind of starting to see WordPress really gaining traction. I think I was working with it when it was powering like 20 something percent of the web, which it’s now like, I think gone to 40% of sites being powered by WordPress. So like huge, huge growth. So there’s that ecosystem and support network of plugins and developers and it gives a lot of flexibility to businesses working with it, which is great. We ended up specializing now, I think, obviously as an agency, you’re in a good position when you’re a specialist and to be able to say this is one thing really, really well. We do WordPress really well for B2B businesses. So we’ve got that kind of depth of WordPress development skill where you just recently became a WordPress VIP partner. So one of just a handful of agencies globally that has the kind of partner status. So you know, security, speed optimization, those things are really key to our clients. At the same time, we can underpin that with really kind of the strategic B2B marketing thinking, the digital strategy, the SEO, and so there’s this really nice coming together of UX and creative B2B marketing, B2B digital marketing knowledge and development capability, which kind of is the perfect mix for a lot of the clients that we work with. So, yeah, I mean, I’m the first to say that WordPress is not the platform for everyone and everything. And I’m also first to say like, there is no perfect CMS out there. Like, I don’t think anyone’s ever used a CMS, that they’re like, “This is absolutely perfect, and there’s no downside!” There will always be a list of pros and cons. But for the majority of B2B businesses, like we can build those kind of very content rich, search optimized, platforms this sit at the heart of B2B buyer journeys. And that’s, yeah, that’s kind of the goal with a lot of our projects is bringing more traffic that’s relevant, helping to convert more leads, support the buyer journey from end to end. And we spend a lot of time building our like content hubs and resource hubs and knowledge centers, or whatever you want to call them. But they’re very content rich environments that have really strong search and filtering and sorting. A lot of our clients, so I’m sure similar to yours, like white papers, and podcasts and video and just like a lot of content being produced. And so I think our challenge from a user experience is like how do we support people in accessing that content and finding their way to in a really frictionless way. So instead of saying, like, here’s this very specific user journey flow that we’re going to map out for this persona in this type of business—which we do through certain parts of the user journeys on the site. With the more content rich sites, I think it’s just about enablement. It’s like how do we how do we get people—how do we let people find what they’re looking for quickly and easily? And in B2B clients have 10 people maybe in the decision making unit, one of them C-suite, one of them’s a developer wanting to find a white sheet or a product spec sheet and learn about an API, the others wanted to know about the business case. So we just need to we just need to support that that really, kind of easy, easy experience overall.

Shaheen Samavati 27:12
Very cool. And yeah, it sounds like even very large enterprise companies are, some of them are using WordPress as a platform. It’s not something that’s just for bloggers that has the reputation.

Alex Price 27:23
Yeah, I think that’s the main challenge that I occasionally run into, but that we’ve delivered it into B2B environments with a kind of, you know, footsie list of businesses that are 50,000 employees, to a couple of 100 head companies, but you know, very serious about security in the FinTech space. So it’s it’s a diverse mix of clients, but all of them, were going through very stringent infosec, security credentials, and auditing and stuff to be able to work with a lot of these clients. So for me, it’s really about best practice. It’s like, if you work with somebody that knows what they’re doing, and really knows their way around WordPress, and has those credentials, it can be delivered securely and safely and at scale in a lot of environments. And my favorite example is that whitehouse.gov is powered by WordPress. So I basically say like, if if WordPress is capable of surviving four years of Donald Trump, then and you’re not being hacked into and not coming down, then I’m pretty sure it will be capable of being delivered securely for your your FinTech business, or whatever it might be.

Shaheen Samavati 28:25
Very good point. So switching gears a little bit, could you share if you have any daily habits that you attribute to your success?

Alex Price 28:34
Good Question. Yeah. So I kind of I mean, I feel like it’s a bit of a like entrepreneur cliche, the whole kind of mindfulness practice thing. But I do try and do that when I can. I know it’s one of those things that you always think you’re too busy to do. But when you when you when you get the time to do it, you know how much it kind of helps and makes you feel better. I try and exercise regularly. I think pretty basic things. But over the last, what, eight or nine years of kind of growing an agency and business, different sides of the business, I’ve kind of multiple points hit by now and ended up in bed for a couple of weeks, and just kind of completely out. So I’ve definitely learned the hard way where my limits are. And I think I’m quite in touch with myself now in a weird way and I can kind of feel that coming, I can kind of…I know when I might be out to be getting a bit sick or being overworked. So, I’ve learned the hard way to get that balance. But I think that’s what it’s all about, and I’m sure you’re the same way that you you finish work, but you’re kind of always just thinking about work. And it’s the first thing you think about when you wake up and the last thing you think about when you go to bed. So, it can be hard to detach, but kind of exercise and yeah, I’m a keen cyclist, but also it’s a meditation and stuff really helped with that.

Shaheen Samavati 29:42
Yeah, absolutely. I can totally relate to that. And then well, do you have a professional role model or source of inspirations?

Alex Price 29:52
Yeah, I mean, I think so many, particularly in FINITE, I this has been so many CMOS, which in the last year, I’ve really been inspired by that I’ve connected with. I think there’s some really innovative people really changing things out there. I guess, on the agency side, with more with a business hat on, I guess obviously, there’s some people very successful in the agency space. I’ve been following Martin Sorrell, who founded WPP, an agency landscape. And his new venture recently has been going really well. So it’s been impressive to see him go from one one agency model into basically just starting another one very, very quickly and achieving a lot of success. So I think he’s a real kind of pioneer of the agency services space, so I always follow his work closely.

Shaheen Samavati 30:38
Very cool. And then, do you have any recommendations when it comes to resources for marketers, apps, tools, platforms, books?

Alex Price 30:46
Yes, well join FINITE if you’re a B2B marketer, it’s my first plug. But actually, I had a CMO of 6sense, which is a kind of B2B marketing technology platform, called Latané Conant who wrote a book recently called No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls: The next generation of account-based sales and marketing, to give it it’s full title. But it was quite a refreshing look on, you know, this moving beyond this whole, like very gated content, where someone follows up straight away. Just kind of rethinking that whole model of account based sales and marketing, which was nice. She actually refers to herself as Chief Market Officer rather than Chief Marketing Officer, which is an interesting distinction between kind of owning the market and having a voice across the whole market rather than doing marketing. And so it’s small things like that, I think she’s just got some great thinking in that space.

Shaheen Samavati 31:44
Awesome. Sounds like a great recommendation. I’ll have to check it out. So we’re reaching the end of the interview. I just wanted to ask if you have any final takeaways or parting advice for audience?

Alex Price 31:57
Oh, good question. Well, I feel like we covered a lot on this one. But I think for me, the thing that I probably say the most is “Double down on the things that have been been working.” I think it’s…we’re in a weird time coming out of global lock downs, but kind of not coming out of lock downs and still kind of being in them. And still a lot of uncertainty. I think when I look back to last year, maybe like November, I was thinking probably by March, April, things would be a lot clearer. But I do think things still feel a bit bit strange out there and vaccine rollouts and things…it’s all just a lot of uncertainty. So I think it’s doubling down on all that kind of personalization and staying close to customers and all of the things that I think COVID driven some pretty good, good habits. And I think those will continue to pay dividends over the year ahead as well.

Shaheen Samavati 32:47
Absolutely, totally agree, and that’s a great note to end on. So thank you so much, Alex, for sharing your insights with us today. Could you tell us what’s the best way to get in touch with you for those that would like to?

Alex Price 32:59
Probably on LinkedIn is best. So Alex Price, if you type my name I’m sure it’ll pop up. But 93digital, FINITE—there’s loads of ways to somehow find your way to me, but I’d be happy to connect with people.

Shaheen Samavati 33:11
Yeah, definitely and the FINITE website again is finite.community, and we’ll we’ll put the links to your LinkedIn and any other social and other links you want us to share, we’ll put them in the show notes. And so great, well, I really appreciated all of the different advice and insights you shared with us. Thank you again for being on the show!

Alex Price 33:30
Thanks for having me.

Shaheen Samavati 33:32
And thanks to everybody for listening in. For more perspectives on content marketing, check out thecontentmix.com and keep tuning into the podcast for interviews with content experts. See you next time. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai