Chloe Addis (01:02.789)
Welcome to B2B Marketers Off the Record. I’m delighted to be joined today by Leanne Dow, the host of Markigy Podcast, which I’m really happy to have been on recently. So super excited to welcome Leanne, also a fractional marketing leader. So would you be so kind as to introduce yourself to our listeners?
Leanne Dow-Weimer (01:24.972)
Yeah, I’d love to. My name is Leanne Dow, sometimes Leanne Dow Weimer, but always Leanne. And I spend a lot of time helping organizations grow through strategic relationships, customer insights, ecosystem and just systems thinking and trust-driven go-to-market strategy. So the way that I do this is through…
Leanne Dow-Weimer (01:50.934)
real conversations, real customer research, and actual relationship building with the customers for long-term lens.
Chloe Addis (01:58.771)
amazing. And that’s exactly why I knew you’d be perfect because you’re constantly having these real world conversations. So I knew there’d be like so much depth of information that you’ve got in your brain, which I can’t wait to unpack. So we kick off with a kind of fun question, which is, tell me you’ve been in B2B marketing for many years without telling me.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (02:22.978)
webinars we used to have lunch and learns and they were actually in person in a conference room where lunch was brought. Somebody spoke with a PowerPoint slide that was had to have a very special dongle to project onto the screen.
Chloe Addis (02:40.391)
Okay.
Chloe Addis (02:43.413)
I love that one. Like, you know, you mean it wasn’t in front of a screen? it didn’t. my God. The days before webinars. So tell me, how did you get into marketing in the first place?
Leanne Dow-Weimer (02:47.56)
It wasn’t a webinar. There was no gift card.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (03:01.501)
Well, the long answer and the short answer is that I realized that that’s what I was doing all along. I had been in many different positions that were kind of sales oriented. You know, always with a big heart and best of intentions, not realizing they were sales and quickly realized that I will do all sorts of marketing to get out of cold calls.
Chloe Addis (03:14.866)
Mm-hmm.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (03:28.609)
And so that’s really when I kind of looked back at the pattern of what I was really good at and what excited me to come up with strategies and kind of in business school, what was the easy A? It was marketing because it just was so natural instead of swimming upstream to try to do something that was a bad fit.
Chloe Addis (03:50.579)
Yeah, I think that’s what the most sort of natural marketers say is like, well, clearly like there’s a lot of logic involved in marketing as well as like, you know, the deeper thinking, the psychology and stuff, which we sort of take for granted. I think that’s what most natural marketers do. But yeah, I can absolutely understand the sales point of view and then being like, you know, like there’s a lot of people that go.
Chloe Addis (04:15.827)
from one side to the other. But that just gives you the broad understanding, I think, what we’re aiming to achieve in the revenue department, if you know what I mean.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (04:25.267)
Yeah, and honestly, it makes me better at sales enablement and partnering with the sales directors because I know what it’s like to get that, not just the no, but like the mean ones. And so my goal is always just to make everything smoother for the person on the receiving end of both sides of the conversation.
Chloe Addis (04:29.757)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (04:32.605)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (04:38.705)
Yeah. Yeah.
Chloe Addis (04:50.129)
Yeah, 100%. It’s all about that stakeholder buy-in at the end of the day, isn’t it? What is one belief about B2B marketing you’ve changed your mind on in the last 12?
Leanne Dow-Weimer (04:55.188)
Yeah.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (05:02.977)
In the last 12 months, I’ve changed my mind on the details of the applications of AI. So before I was heavily like, oh, it’s a baby. You cannot let it do X, Y, and Z. You should not check with it about blah, blah. And now in this amount of time, it has gotten so much more sophisticated that I actually
Leanne Dow-Weimer (05:32.235)
do, I changed my mind on letting it do more than it was.
Chloe Addis (05:39.429)
Okay, that’s really interesting. think, yeah, it’s, there’s definitely this evolution happening, isn’t it? Like the types of applications and what, what people are able to trust with it. That’s interesting. It was actually one of my questions from another guest. So at the end of the podcast, when we get there, I’ll ask you about recommendations for, for people in the future, but to link it back, it’s the question was how.
Chloe Addis (06:07.643)
what sort of applications are you using it for at the moment?
Leanne Dow-Weimer (06:11.681)
Yeah, so would you like me to answer that now? OK. I’m still using it to verify and to brainstorm and lightly to create. My mindset is that if I have an organic human-based conversation and I can use it to use its probability and its decision-making abilities to pull out the highest performing clips or the things that
Chloe Addis (06:13.969)
Yes, please.
Chloe Addis (06:39.687)
Amen.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (06:41.288)
are based off of turning something large and organic into something smaller to distribute it better. I feel like no holds barred, like wildly appropriate to do because I’m not asking it to synthesize the new ideas that people are. Where I also am leaning on it more is for enrichment or for workflows or it’s
Chloe Addis (06:51.644)
Yeah, of course.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (07:10.817)
abilities to do agentic stuff is pretty good. The place where I actually stopped was where I was having it do, I tested out some editing where I was having it pull pauses and it pulled the beginning of my email and the end of my sign off for my podcast. I was like info at and it like all you hear is the markag.com and so I was like, okay.
Chloe Addis (07:13.885)
Mm-hmm.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (07:40.787)
I can’t completely trust it yet, but it’s so close.
Chloe Addis (07:40.893)
We can’t trust it.
Chloe Addis (07:45.427)
Yeah, there’s a lot of things, isn’t it? And as we test and as we learn more, I’m sure that these kinds of things will, there’ll be ways and processes to avoid things like this, but it’s still, yeah, it’s definitely just can’t be like given free rein, trust it, it will do whatever you want it to do. Yeah, especially on that kind of, on the content side is.
Chloe Addis (08:07.781)
is where it needs to be a bit more handheld from my experience anyway. But yeah, think the applications are endless and especially within marketing, we have the ability to always be testing. So that’s probably one of the greatest things within marketing teams at the moment. So in line with that, what shifts are you seeing with how B2B buyers are behaving right now?
Leanne Dow-Weimer (08:34.912)
I don’t think it’s a shift. just think more people are coming onto my side of the understanding is that it really is relationship based. I think before people were getting by with like brute force numbers and they still were under the impression that the business account on LinkedIn was a high priority instead of influential members within the organization’s personal accounts.
Chloe Addis (08:44.85)
Mm-hmm.
Chloe Addis (08:50.471)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (09:02.311)
Yeah.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (09:03.297)
And I think that, you know, that’s one shift that I’ve for sure seen is the rise of the personal brand and the rise of leaning into that with organizations.
Chloe Addis (09:18.245)
Yeah, I saw or I heard a stat the other day that was only 1 % of people on LinkedIn will actually ever post something. And I just thought, my gosh, that’s huge. Like, you know, the potential there is huge, but it’s definitely like to agree with you. It’s definitely something that I’m seeing more and more from different people who are kind of like, you know, always quiet connections coming up and
Leanne Dow-Weimer (09:29.622)
Mm-hmm.
Chloe Addis (09:47.217)
and trying to build that relational thing as I think it’s like side by side with what AI is doing, you know, that content has become more accessible, but also people are then going, okay, well, what’s real? And then those real relationships, of course, where you can see people interact and have these kind of genuine conversations are becoming that much more valuable.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (10:09.375)
Yeah, and thankfully, you know, some of those flash in the pan trends, at least in my algorithms, have flashed and left, or just aren’t so pronounced that it’s obnoxious. So things like comment, blah, blah, blah, to get blah, blah, blah, download, and it’s just like, you got it, like that’s not how social works.
Chloe Addis (10:14.867)
Mm.
Chloe Addis (10:18.931)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (10:25.682)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (10:32.007)
Mm.
Chloe Addis (10:37.819)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (10:38.882)
that always irritated me. it’s good
Leanne Dow-Weimer (10:42.695)
like please do it like within reason.
Chloe Addis (10:45.969)
Yeah, I think certainly LinkedIn’s of cottoned on. They’re changing a lot in the algorithm and certain things are working, certain things aren’t. But yeah, if it felt hacky, it’s probably hacky. It’s probably not gonna work for ages. So yeah. What’s a strategic bet you think more marketing leaders will need to make over the next couple of years?
Leanne Dow-Weimer (11:13.121)
Leanne Dow-Weimer (11:14.001)
I think the pendulum is going to be really volatile, swinging back and forth for a while. And I think that the thing that leaders are going to have to do is understand and try to keep up, which you almost have to be unemployed to keep up with AI. But you have to understand the foundation of the LLMs and how they’re shaped.
Chloe Addis (11:20.232)
Mm.
Chloe Addis (11:32.531)
No.
Chloe Addis (11:39.026)
Mm-hmm.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (11:41.353)
in order to leverage them appropriately and then decide is this a tool that’s helping us and how do I enable my team to do it and where do we need to just move fast instead of get it perfect.
Chloe Addis (11:52.552)
Yeah.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (11:55.215)
perfect.
Chloe Addis (11:56.123)
Yeah, there’s so much involved, isn’t there, with LLMs and because the reporting side is still in its infancy in a lot of places and there’s a lot of kind of rhetoric around this, it’s got to be focused on the traditional SEO side of things but then there’s these again kind of hacky things that are going to make you appear or how much focus should people be putting on those things versus…
Chloe Addis (12:24.947)
Like you said, staying abreast of it is almost like half the battle really is knowing that you’re in the know. Because otherwise, I think it’s a feeling as well, isn’t it, of I don’t know what we’re doing here. Like, I don’t know if we’re going to be appearing for now. we’re responding to the current kind of trend.
Chloe Addis (12:52.635)
and then that doesn’t have longevity to it or, you know, we appear for six months and then we don’t appear anymore in the LLMs. think, yeah, it’s just that constant sort of knowledge seeking, isn’t it?
Leanne Dow-Weimer (13:07.345)
It is, it is. And so I think that there’s a lot of noise. But the one thing I would suggest everyone do, whether or not you really understand it completely, is there’s an open course MIT YouTube thing where you can see how the LLMs, it’s basically like how to build an LLM or something or how to build an AI.
Chloe Addis (13:14.195)
and
Chloe Addis (13:25.309)
Okay.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (13:34.047)
But you’re not actually building it. It’s just explaining to you that like, this is what it’s doing and this is how it comes to this decision theory kind of set up. And if you can sink just one to two hours into watching that, it’ll change completely your understanding and way to leverage these things.
Chloe Addis (13:43.26)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (13:48.531)
Mm.
Chloe Addis (13:54.151)
Yeah, I think that’s one of the key things that people just think it’s a knowledge base of loads of answers, but really digging behind it, you’re like, actually it reaches conclusions based on what it finds like commonality, know, like repeated texts and repeated information is what it gives a lot of kind of bias to. So yeah, I think there’s some basic understanding that would really help a lot of people, a lot of marketers.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (14:23.125)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (14:24.349)
So with that, what’s something B2B marketing teams are still doing now out of habit that you think no longer works?
Leanne Dow-Weimer (14:33.838)
I’m picking one, just one, just one. I think that they’re still ignoring the foundations of people, process, and systems. I was on a call yesterday where someone still wanted to do a one-off campaign of an influencer user-generated thing.
Chloe Addis (14:35.276)
No.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (15:01.889)
My advice is that I encouraged them to think of recurring long-term campaigns Because I think there’s so much temptation to save money or to just test it out That we aren’t defining what a true test is and then we aren’t setting up the test for success if you are testing something and you don’t have
Chloe Addis (15:09.266)
Mm-hmm.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (15:26.785)
an onboarding series or you don’t have a landing page properly set up with UTMs and tracking or you don’t have the real meat and bones underneath it, your test will not give you the answers you want or it will give you a false conclusion or you know, or, or, or, or, or, or. So I think that that’s one thing that like just, I get really riled up.
Chloe Addis (15:37.811)
and human.
Chloe Addis (15:48.071)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (15:53.839)
Yeah, can imagine. think it’s this and there’s so many things in that as well, isn’t there? So like to dig down, it’s starting at the very beginning of why you’re, why do you want to do that? What, you know, where does it fit in in the rest of your marketing? Who is it for? I think, you know, that customer centric point of view that we should all have as marketers, but it’s very, very easily.
Chloe Addis (16:21.379)
forgotten and swayed by influence, isn’t it? Like, you know, we’re just like anyone else, we can be influenced to do the next trending thing. But it actually does that align bringing it back to, like you said, the thoughts and processes of it all to make sure that it marries up with everything else that you’re doing.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (16:42.037)
Yeah, are you just throwing money on a cool campaign or are you testing and validating if you have the right stuff to make it work?
Chloe Addis (16:45.511)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (16:54.181)
Yeah, it’s a lot about what marketing is about, isn’t it? You will be testing a lot of the time, but being able to do it with strategy and to do it with the goal, what’s the goal of that, is what it’s all about really. And I suppose in that situation, you’re doing exactly what you’re meant to be doing with that consultancy point of view for a client that…
Chloe Addis (17:23.333)
needs to be brought back to their strategy.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (17:27.111)
Yeah, and I think that that’s really why people choose me specifically is that I do kind of push back. I lovingly and I’m one thing that I think that I’ve been told that I do exceptionally well is not pushing back by saying no, but pushing back by saying yes. And here’s how we can do it to make it successful.
Chloe Addis (17:30.961)
Mm-hmm.
Chloe Addis (17:41.372)
No.
Chloe Addis (17:49.201)
Yeah, yeah. And then if the response to that is, that’s far too much. Yeah.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (17:57.575)
Sometimes it is and sometimes people
Leanne Dow-Weimer (17:59.367)
don’t realize what they’re asking because they’re really good at this other thing No one can be good at all the things all the time It’s just how it is
Chloe Addis (18:05.092)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (18:11.363)
Absolutely. What is one, is a type of investment that marketing leaders should be protecting at the moment, particularly if budgets are going to be tightened, maybe what would you say they should be focusing on?
Leanne Dow-Weimer (18:28.257)
I think that they should be focusing on organic and using that to make smart moves with their paid. I think that paid is a necessary evil. It’s not and it’s not evil, but it is a necessary growth lever to pull. But I think that because there is a learning curve to how your ads perform on very specifically, you know,
Chloe Addis (18:43.891)
Mm-hmm.
Chloe Addis (18:46.451)
You
Chloe Addis (18:49.48)
Mm-hmm.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (18:57.778)
how it’s set up and all these things that you should already know organically through your audience if this is resonating with them and then put investment behind them. Make sure that that demand exists and that you can be like well or at least have the basic information about who your audience is when you go to get more.
Chloe Addis (19:10.717)
Mm-hmm.
Chloe Addis (19:17.223)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (19:23.123)
Yeah, that’s a really, a really systemic thing that people can put in place. to you, you know, you’re placing a bet on you when you’re putting money on something, you’re saying, look, you know, whatever ad system you’re using, they’ll say, yeah, of course we’ve got the audience for that. But it’s like, actually you’ve pre-tested and you know that you’ve, that that resonates from your brand point of view. And you’ve got that, that whole kind of customer journey.
Chloe Addis (19:53.073)
like synced up before you’ve even started and put the money, put the money on the ad. So that’s a really, really good answer. Thank you. The last one before we move into kind of where we go forward with the podcast is what is one thing you wish you could change about marketing if you could?
Leanne Dow-Weimer (20:13.461)
I wish I could change the reputation. I think that it’s so often seen as like the, you made a pretty poster with glitter. Like the arts and crafts department. And first of all, I love arts and crafts. I have a whole craft bin. But that’s not what I do professionally. And I think that, you know, so often,
Chloe Addis (20:17.821)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (20:25.916)
NNNN
Chloe Addis (20:29.659)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (20:39.165)
me.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (20:43.777)
outside of, you know, B2B when you’re having these, you know, casual conversations, they don’t understand that you know about data, you know about algorithms, you know about psychology and consumer behavior and you dabble in all of these things that it really takes to be successful. And it’s not, well,
Chloe Addis (20:54.002)
Yes.
Chloe Addis (20:57.277)
Mm-hmm.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (21:10.729)
We decided to use a blue logo because Twitter uses a blue logo. Like, that’s cool. That’s not going to get you there. And I think that when you get past that type of reputation, you see it as a necessary layer to any business growth in order to drive revenue so that there is credibility for the salespeople, so that there is a
Chloe Addis (21:15.283)
and
Chloe Addis (21:28.275)
Mm-hmm.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (21:36.601)
journey for the buyer so that the brand is manifested through every single touch and it’s consistent and pleasing and delightful. I think that it just it needs to be brought in early and often to some of these high-level conversations.
Chloe Addis (21:42.727)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (21:53.203)
It is that it brings functions together as well, doesn’t it? It’s like, you know, it’s the stickiness, if you like, of translating what the company is internally as well as externally. you’ve got, like we were saying, all of the stakeholders to keep happy. So there’s just, there’s so much value in it that is, it does need to be constantly communicated because like you said, then if it’s not,
Chloe Addis (22:22.843)
we see the overall reputation being, the colouring in department. it’s like, you know, there’s so much there. It’s revenue, finance, know, key business decisions, you know, the market research, all of that stuff that is, yeah, cross functional and very highly valuable. So what…
Chloe Addis (22:47.859)
Do you think we should, the next questions is that we’re about kind of the next episodes of the podcast. So who do you think we should invite on to speak next? And I feel like this is going to be a really hard question for you because you’ve interviewed so many people on your podcast. It’s going to be like, who’s your favorite baby?
Leanne Dow-Weimer (23:06.305)
I love all my children. Thankfully, all of them are people that I look up to so, so much. you know, it’s really like pick your poison. Like who, what topic do you want to know more about? And I get so excited about introducing people. I think where I’m going to go with this is someone from my inner circle, Teresa Potratz.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (23:32.257)
I love her as a podcast guest because she does have the really great answers. She has the pattern recognition, the grit, the how do we do this and how do we think about this differently mentality that really helps her drive growth. So I have great opinion of her clearly, but all of my podcast, I don’t publish episodes that I don’t believe in strongly.
Chloe Addis (24:01.667)
Okay, okay. So, okay, first thing is that I’m going to dig out one of the episodes with and then reach out to her. So that’s a perfect recommendation. Thank you very much. And what is a question that you think that we should ask our next guest? It doesn’t necessarily have to be that this is going to Theresa.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (24:05.697)
Yeah
Leanne Dow-Weimer (24:20.927)
Well, you should ask them how they’re using AI for personalization.
Chloe Addis (24:27.601)
Okay, okay, I’m guessing that’s going to be a huge one to delve into.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (24:35.237)
I think that that’s a really great question to show how they view their customers and it’s a really great tell. So it’s kind of one of those like filter questions too.
Chloe Addis (24:42.6)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (24:45.223)
Yeah.
Chloe Addis (24:49.387)
Yeah,
Chloe Addis (24:49.938)
it would be. there’s this kind of, there’s so much going on with like mass personalization. And I think a lot of marketers will feel a lot of ways about that question, the answer to that question. So that’s a really good one. Thank you very much. So thank you very much for coming on my podcast. I think it’s been a great session. Can you tell people how they can find you?
Leanne Dow-Weimer (25:00.193)
you
Leanne Dow-Weimer (25:15.337)
Yeah, obviously LinkedIn is my jam. So you can always find me on LinkedIn as Leanne Dow Weimer, or you can just email me info@markigy.com, but always tell me where you heard about me so that Chloe and B2B marketers off the record get that sweet attribution.
Chloe Addis (25:41.619)
Perfect, yep, absolutely.
Chloe Addis (25:45.204)
Well, thank you so much for joining me and I’ll speak to you again soon.
Leanne Dow-Weimer (25:49.717)
Thank you so much for having me, this was wonderful.
