The Campaign | A B2B Marketing Podcast by 97th Floor

If you’ve maxed out LinkedIn and squeezed all you can from Google, it’s time to expand. But launching a new channel can spike your acquisition costs — and if you’re not careful, it can drain resources, distract your team, and underdeliver.

97th Floor CEO Paxton Gray is joined by Ryan Nelsen, CMO at StackAdapt, to break down a proven approach to evaluating, launching, and scaling new marketing channels without breaking what’s already working.

You’ll learn how top B2B teams de-risk new channel bets, validate faster, and build toward real, repeatable pipeline.

In a downturn, marketing budgets are the first to go. But CMOs know that chaos equals massive opportunity–if you can earn the trust to take risks.

In this episode, we’re joined by Karl Van den Bergh, 2024 Cybersecurity Marketer of the Year and CMO at Illumio, to talk about how marketing leaders can build credibility, keep budgets, and turn uncertainty into a competitive edge.

Karl shares the playbook he used to align marketing with the way sales is measured: building forecasts, hitting targets, and earning trust from even the ever-skeptical CFO. 

We’ll show...

If you’re investing in SEO but not seeing results, your content might be the problem.

97th Floor’s Head of SEO, Michael Witham, built the Content Consolidation Audit to cut waste, boost rankings, and drive real results.

In this episode of The Campaign, Mike joins 97th Floor CEO Paxton Gray to break down the audit process and show how consolidation and optimization can have an immediate impact on organic revenue.

This episode is for you if:
- Your SEO isn’t delivering results
- Recent Google updates have hurt your rankin...

Ready or not, AI is about to radically reshape our work and our lives.

Over the next decade the stuff of sci-fi movies will be just another Tuesday. 

For CEOs and CMOs, understanding these changes and preparing now is critical. 

This isn’t just about adopting new technology—it’s about rethinking the fundamentals of how your business will function in an AI-driven world.

Marketing is more unpredictable than ever—ad costs rise, algorithms change, and audience behaviors shift overnight. But there’s one thing you can control: how effectively you convert the traffic you do get. 

That’s where CRO (conversion rate optimization) becomes your force multiplier—turning uncertainty into opportunity and making every marketing channel more profitable.

https://97thfloor.com/articles/podcasts/how-to-get-more-roi-from-every-marketing-channel-with-cro/ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sollis 

Search is changing fast, and AI is at the center of the disruption. 

With LLMs reshaping SERPs, Google's AI Mode on the horizon, and AI assistants claiming search share, SEOs have more to consider than ever before.

Marie Haynes is an expert SEO and AI Consultant known for her deep expertise in Google’s search algorithms and machine learning systems—including the intricacies of E-E-A-T. Marie is a fearless experimenter who thrives on exploring emerging tech. Now, she’s laser-focused on mastering Google's AI Mode and harnessing the power of LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini to prep...

Every marketer has felt it—that sinking feeling when organic traffic takes a sudden hit. Maybe it’s an algorithm update, increased competition, or just Google being Google. But what if you didn’t have to live in fear of these swings?  

In this episode, we’re joined by **Eli Schwartz**, SEO expert, consultant, and author of *Product-Led SEO*. With over a decade of experience helping companies like WordPress, Shutterstock, Quora, and Zendesk scale their organic visibility, Eli knows what it takes to build SEO strategies that don’t just survive algorithm changes—but thrive despite them.  

We’ll dive...

Webinars have been a staple in B2B marketing for years, but let’s be honest—most of them are forgettable. 

Attendees tune out, engagement drops, and worst of all, they don’t drive real pipeline. So, what separates a webinar that works from one that flops?

In this episode of The Campaign, we’re breaking down the strategies that keep audiences engaged and, more importantly, move them through the funnel. 

Our guest Matt Murdoch shares insights from his book The Webinar Manifesto, diving into:

ABM is supposed to be the most effective way to drive pipeline and revenue—but for many CMOs, it still feels like a never-ending struggle.

Sales and marketing aren’t aligned.
Measurement is murky.
The tools are expensive, and let’s be honest—half the time, you’re not even sure if you’re actually doing ABM or just running a glorified demand gen campaign.

And then there’s the biggest challenge that doesn’t get talked about enough: data governance.

Platforms like 6sense and Demandbase rely on your first-party data, but if that data...

Most technical B2B industries are changing daily—cybersecurity is no exception. AI, global conflicts, new regulations, and nonstop threats are keeping security teams on their toes. 

But here’s the problem: marketers struggle to tap into that expertise, and cybersecurity SMEs are too busy putting out fires to help.

The result? Content that’s too generic, too slow, or just doesn’t hit the mark.

If you’ve ever struggled to get cybersecurity experts involved in content—or to make their knowledge work for your marketing—this one’s for you.

https://97thflo...

Case studies should be your mid-to-low-funnel MVP—building trust, closing deals, and driving serious ROI. 

But for most teams, they’re a nightmare. Slow, messy, and frustrating to produce. 

Even when they do go live, they rarely deliver the impact they should.

Why? Because great customer stories don’t just happen—they require a strong internal infrastructure. Without the right processes, accountability, and buy-in, your customer stories will stay stuck in limbo (or worse, go completely unused).

In this episode, we’re joined by case study maven Joel Klettke to learn how to creat...

We all know B2B marketing is about more than just features and data—it’s about connecting with your buyers on a deeper level. 

The problem? B2B marketers often get stuck in the weeds of rational, logical content and miss the emotional triggers that actually drive purchase decisions.

The key to closing more deals? Storytelling. Feels cliché. We know. 

That’s why we’re digging into the best scholarly research we can find to discover how to craft stories that build trust, resonate deeply, and ultimately close deals.

Paxton is joined b...

Segmenting B2B audiences by industry is a great way to demonstrate empathy and gain trust with your audience through tailored content and personalized solutions.

In practice, it’s more complicated. Industry segmentation can stretch teams thin, risk overpromising, and even feel insincere to our intended audience.

It demands in-depth product knowledge, a deep understanding of each audience, a flexible sales team, and substantial marketing resources to pull it off.

Paxton and Rick Galán from BILL discuss the best way to approach industry segmentation and the audience research that makes it truly eff...

You don’t have to be an expert in SEO to know that the search landscape is more volatile than ever before.

AI has completely disrupted search, to say nothing of major algorithm updates and changes in search behavior. 

What worked for SEO in the past decade just won’t cut it in the decade ahead. 

Marketing leaders need SEOs they can place full confidence in to navigate the new AI world of search.

Join Nick Leroy and Paxton Gray to hear what success wi...

According to LinkedIn, nearly 80% of B2B content is gated. But some research suggests that buyers are strongly averse to gated content. Rather than surrender their inbox to an onslaught of nurture campaigns, buyers are choosing to skip the gated content all together or to give a false name and temporary email in the form. (Hello, Daffy Duck and Bruce Wayne.) 

Gated content “doesn’t work,” but some of the world’s biggest and most successful companies are still using it. What gives?

Gated content still has a place in B2B strategy. Companies that capture c...