Introduction
In the bustling world of content, what really fuels your business growth?
Maybe it’s time to rethink your strategy!
In this episode of **Content Universe**, we chat with Mikkel Svold, founder of Montanus, about the three essential pillars of success: **Branding, Marketing, and Sales.**
Mikkel shares insights from his daily exchanges with industry experts and reveals why ignoring one of these pillars can hold your business back.
He emphasizes the game-changing impact of branding on your positioning, premium pricing, and industry leadership—often overshadowed by flashy sales tactics.
Whether you’re looking to boost your market presence or refine your strategy, this episode will challenge your thinking and spark inspiration.
Don’t miss out!
Let’s dive into the content universe together and unlock your business’s full potential!
What You’ll Learn
1. Why branding, marketing, and sales are all crucial for success.
2. How branding sets your company apart from just marketing.
3. The essential role of sales beyond the marketing funnel.
4. How positioning influences pricing and company perception.
5. Effectively integrating branding, marketing, and sales for growth.
Episode Transcript
Alright. Hello and welcome to the Content Universe. Today I had a meeting… I’ve actually had a couple of meetings, so today I first started out by interviewing a client for a podcast, and then afterwards I had an interview with, oh, and a talk with a guy having a network networking company, so he basically does business networks. And then the last talk I had was with one of my friends who does sales, so he does basically cold calling and meeting, booking services. Now these three types of interactions that I had today led me to think about what it actually takes to drive business development. What can you as a content provider, what do you need to remember of different types of content, different types of interactions with potential clients? What does it take for you to help your company develop? What does it take for your company to… or you to help your company sell more? And that is what I want to try and talk a little bit about today. For those of you, of course, who don’t know me, I’m Mikkel Svold and I’m the founder of Montanus, which is a content company where we produce content [of] all kinds – content, podcasts, blog posts – all this for knowledge-driven companies. Like I said, I want to take you through three different types or three things that are needed for content to help you, and also actually not just content but to develop your business. Of course, you need hundreds of different things to develop your business, but these three are sort of interconnected, and in my experience, I do find that people tend to forget some of them.
The three I want to talk about are, first of all, branding. What is it? Marketing. What is that and why is it different from branding? And then, of course, sales because these three obviously are very interconnected. Now, what I mean, and why I think this is an important episode or an important talk to have is what I mean about the different types of content is basically when you have branding, you need branding, but you also need marketing, and you also need sales. I think in many marketing departments, and often I meet departments that are combined departments, so they are both marketing and sales departments, what I meet is often that one of the three gets the whole attention. Or maybe two, but the one that is always, always missing, if one of them is missing, is the branding one. All right, so let me try and go through what value each of the three gives to your organization. Let’s start with the most obvious one, sales. Obviously, you need sales. It shouldn’t be necessary to say this in a business-minded podcast, but it’s just so often that people forget sales, especially if you talk to a marketing department or a marketing and sales department with mainly marketing people in it. Sometimes what happens is that marketing kind of assumes that someone needs to close the deal. At some point, marketing is not enough anymore, and now we’re talking about B2B clients, because actually not. I’m going to take that back. That also goes for business to consumer. Even if you can sell something on your website, marketing is not going to fulfill the sale. You would still need a CRO or someone to help you optimize the sales page. Anyway, coming back to the business-to-business people, I really do think that sometimes we tend to forget that the sale itself is the most important bit of your entire marketing funnel. It’s not enough to have a funnel that has a top, a mid [section], and a bottom [section], you also need that extra layer of salespeople. You need someone you can send out in the field who can have that client meeting or the prospect meeting and then close the deal. It should be obvious, and I hope it is, and I’m not a sales guy so I can’t really teach you anything about that. I outsource a lot of the selling myself, actually, in my own business because that’s just not where I’m really good. So I can’t teach you more about that. I just really wanted to mention it because sometimes sales, like doing the actual selling, is somehow forgotten in some companies.
Now, I was just about to say one step up the ladder. I don’t know if it’s up or down or a step to the sides. But if we then look at what happens before the sale, and actually also after the sale, but that’s another story. But let’s just say before the sale. Before the sale comes marketing, and marketing, as many of you know, we can often divide up into this three-step funnel where we have the top marketing funnel, we have the middle funnel, and we have the bottom funnel. We have different kinds of content that go into all the different steps, and this is very good. Marketing should be focused on customer problems, on customer needs, and how we can help solve… well, how the customers solve this, and like a parentheses in that sentence, how we, of course, can help you solve that problem. This is also kind of obvious to most people, and then how much we mention our own company and our own services depends a little bit on how far down that funnel we are. But marketing is that which helps drive the lead towards the sale and then sales take over. This is again… it’s not rocket science, and most of you would know this. However, I just really think that it’s important to say the purpose of marketing is to address the customer’s need so they get interested in you. Here comes the fun part or the interesting part. A lot of companies stop here. They say, okay, we have top, middle, and bottom funnel content, that’s all good, and then also, we have the sales department taking over the lead, and that actually drives some sales. My argument here is that you’re still missing out on a crucial element, and that element is called branding. Some companies have a brand manager or they have a brand champion, someone in charge of the brand, but most companies only have a marketing department. They only have marketing, and why do you need branding, you may question? Well, branding is not about identifying customer problems, it is not about identifying the needs and addressing the needs. That’s not branding. Branding is positioning. So branding is much more about the values you have as a company. What do you want, that is branding, where do you want to go, where do you want the industry to go, where do you want the world to go, what is the direction in which you want to drag the industry, the world, humankind, you name it. All of these more abstract things, something that is a higher purpose than just addressing a fairly simple need and, of course, driving the sale.
Why do you want to do this? Why do you actually want to spend your resources, your limited resources that is, why do you want to spend your resources in positioning yourself or driving an agenda in the industry rather than just focusing all of your resources on marketing and sales? I’ll tell you why, because positioning is what will drive your prices, or will hold your prices high in the market or low in the market, but positioning is what allows you to sell at that given rate that you have. That is not your marketing. Your marketing just helps people find your product. It does not position yourself, it does not help you. And now I’m probably especially talking to high-end companies that want to be positioned high in the market because if you’re very low in the market where you’re the cheapest and basically also the worst, well, there’s space for that kind of companies as well, but they could probably go with just sales or just marketing. But if you want to be that top player in the industry, you really do need that branding bit because that is the only thing that allows you to take a premium price and that will manifest yourself as a company, as the leading expert. I’ve already talked in other episodes about what branding is, what thought leadership is, how you can choose an agenda that is above yourself, that is above what you sell. How you can do that, I’ve already talked about that before, but that is what this is about. It is about how you position yourself, how, coming out with your values, coming out with your statements into the industry, maybe some of them are provocative, maybe some of them are fairly mainstream, but if you are really hard on your statements, if you’re really hard on your branding, it will allow you to gain better clients, gain higher-end clients, and also to retain your position in the market as well as your high price. So I think those are definitely three things that you really need to consider when you choose content, when you choose advertisement, when you choose to design your marketing strategy, because I think all of these, in many companies, all of these together are somehow called a marketing strategy. Although they’re not a marketing strategy at all, they’re more like a driving our business to a better place strategy. I don’t know, maybe that has a word, if that has a word, let me know in one of the comments or this, or send it to my email, something like that. Anyway, that is my point for today. You really need these three, branding, marketing, and sales. They each have their purpose, and you need all three if you want to drive a high-end business to development and let those be the last words for me today. If you have any comments, if you have anything to add, and I’m sure because this is something where I’m also struggling a little bit I can feel when I’m trying to sum up what I’ve been talking to these people with today, but if you have something to add and I’m sure you have, please do comment it or send me an email and you can find that email or you can find me on podcast at montanus dot CO and that was podcast at montanus dot CO. All right, that’s it for now! Share this with your friends and your colleagues if you find it relevant and thank you, thank you so much for listening and see you on another planet in the content universe!