Transcript
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Welcome back to be tob growth.
I'm Logan lyles with sweet fish media.
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Today I'm joined by Randy Wooden.
He's the chief strategy officer over at seismic.
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We're going to be talking about why
marketers really need to take a publisher's
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mindset. Randy, welcome to the
show. How's it going today? Great.
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Thank you very much for having me, logans. A lot of fun
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to be here, absolutely so.
We're going to be talking about this topic
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of marketers taking on a publisher's mindset. Why is this something that you're so
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passionate about, randy, before we
get into more of the why and the
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and how of this? Yeah,
well, Logan, I've been on this
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dry almost twenty years. I've been
an attack MARQUEC guy focused on the media
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space, the companies like Microsoft and
obviously you over company called rockefuel. I
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was at sales for us for a
while and really, if I think back,
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like the thing that got me excited
about the Internet initially was a book
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by peppers and Rodgers called the one
to one future. It was published in
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like one thousand nine hundred and ninety
five, and I read in ninety seven
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or ninety eight and I was like
that's the future, and the future they
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described was getting the right message to
the right person at the right time.
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And and we have continued to wrestle
with that problem from all lots of different
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angles. I mean, if you
look at some of the reports, there's
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like tenzero vendors that are trying to
solve that problem. And what I would
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say is it two legs of that
stool have been addressed. One is identity
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res Solution. So there's a lot
of technology and a lot of money,
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a lot of VC money, that
has gone after solving the problem of identity
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resolution with systems like DMPS and CDPs, and a lot of your marketing audience
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members will probably have one of those
or considered that. The second dimension,
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or leg of the stool is around
understanding the moment to market to and that's
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really processing all the data that's availables
but put on line, figuring out who
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it is that you're talking to,
where they are in the context of their
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journey, their buy or journey or
their engagement with your brand, and really
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understanding what you should be saying to
them. The third leg of the of
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the stool is around content, and
that's where things gets broken it's because it's
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hard and expensive to create personalized content
for every individual at every moment on their
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journey. It's impossible almost to do
that. And what you find then is
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all that data and insights you have
about the individual and the moment they are
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in their in their journey, you're
just hitting up with the same content.
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You're wants up the people. So
now you're back to the challenge of segments.
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And so I think the thing for
me then, especially in this new
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world that we're living in, where
you don't have conferences, you don't have
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events, you don't have your VIP
dinners that you're doing, everyone's dialing up
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their digital marketing efforts, that the
thing that I'm struck by is how do
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you break through the noise? How
do you break through the noise in terms
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of telling a compelling story that people
are going to read and want to take
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time with? And that is what
it means about a publisher mindset. It's
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you think about your brand as a
publisher, your point of view and building
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content in a compelling way that breaks
through the noise. Yeah, so for
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marketers listening to this, Randy,
that's say I'm very content. I'm very
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content first. Maybe there are VP
of marketing, they've got a content team
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and mansion team, but they think
in a very content first sort of mindset.
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What would you say to them that
maybe you're not quite there in what
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what you would describe as a publisher's
mindset? What is maybe the difference there
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between a content first thinking marketer and
one that really has this publisher's mindset?
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How do you kind of differentiate the
two and think about maybe you have some
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room to grow here in the mindset
that you approach and then the impacts down
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the line to your content strategy?
Yeah, well, you know, the
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thing I would suggest looking to the
starting point is is ask marketers do they
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know what's working? And you look
at all the data and what you end
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up with is a bunch of people
who are producing content and it's like they
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launch it into the abyss and they're
getting no feedback. Like who's using it?
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How are they using it? Is
it influencing the buyers journey? And
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we're not, never really have been, in a linear buyers journey, but
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I think a lot of the way
we think about marketing, in the way
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that we produce contented so you're talking
of these people at this stage and US
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or work it down from initial lead
down to closed opportunity. And I think
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if you if marketers are honest with
themselves, they don't know what content is
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working in which is not. In
fact, I think there's a couple of
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reports out there. The Content Marketing
Institute, which is a great institute.
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We've been to those conferences, is
published something that says the laughs. Then
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half of the BB organizations today craft
their content based on where a customer is
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in their journey, so the content
isn't tied to the personalized experience, to
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where that person in the context.
And then only about a third of the
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marketers believe their content marketing efforts are
effective. So let me give you a
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couple data points, and I can't
give you the names of the company,
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but as this is especially true at
large enterprise companies where you have these immense
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content production teams, I was talking
to one and said, yeah, we
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spend about forty million dollars and producing
content a year and I said okay it.
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You know how much of that is
working? And the guy was talking
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to you said, well, not
sure, but I bet you know maybe
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fifty percent and said okay, so
you're spending twenty million dollars on something and
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you have no idea whether it's working. And so I do think you know
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Logan. The first step is really
for content first companies to do a real
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assessment of do they understand what contents
working and why, and then that informs
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what they would be doing going forward. I describe a lot of cont ten
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first companies is being almost like content
farms and their their mantra is more is
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better, and I think that's just
contributing to and exacerbating the problem we all
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have in terms of the noise that
has been dialed up in this new context.
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Right of staying at home, but
you don't is not good stuff.
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And so you know, high quality
content and that's why I talked about being
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a publisher is I think it's a
different type of skills. It's not the
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classic product like I talked about a
publisher. I'm talking about like when you
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think of who are the people writing
articles at the New York Times, who
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are the people writing articles with the
New Yorker? Who are people writing articles
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at wired? Their editors, their
authors, their writers, they're writing with
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a very specific view of a compelling
story for an audience and I think you
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know anothering you could ask marketers are
what were the skills that we hired for
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in the people that were building our
content? Where they product marketing people?
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Do they come out of technology or
were they? Were they editors? Were
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they authors? And this is where
I think the companies I like the most,
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the ones that I follow, they
have a strong point of view and
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a real editorial sense, all right, they've got a really clear way of
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telling the story and it's like the
brand has a personality. The brand's personality
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is that of a publisher, and
I love that so much, Randy,
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I kid you not, two or
three days ago, here on our team
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and sweet fish, we are building
out an engine to create more content.
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We do tend to lean on more
is typically better, but you need both
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quality and quantity, not just not
just quantity. But one of our stances
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on the quality of your content is
exactly what you just said there. What
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is your point of view? And
so the way that we're going to market
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doubling down on our own content,
outside of having one of the only seven
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day a week be to be marketing
podcast that I know of. On top
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of that is building out the personal
brands of five evangelists internally and one of
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the things we did in that meeting
was, okay, Bill, our COOO,
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what are five to seven things that
you take a hard stance on?
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You find yourself repeating right? I've
heard people kind of roll Gary V and
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say hey, you're repeating the same
five to seven things and he's like well,
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yes, right. It takes it
takes a lot of time for people
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to for content to sink in right
and it's not. I was telling this
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to our CEO. He came up
with five or seven kind of stances he
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takes and he's not one who's used
to putting out a lot of content.
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And we had this conversation of that's
not five to seven pieces of content.
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Each one of those is fifty over
the next six months. And that's where
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a lot of content lacks. It
either lacks the point of view or it
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lacks bringing it down to where the
rubber meets the road. You know,
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we talked about him from an operational
perspective, talking about when you when you
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help your team make decisions at the
at the lowest level, that empowers them.
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Well, I can think of are
he can think of because this is
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his area of expertise. Forty or
fifty different specific scenarios. unpacking each one
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of those is really where the value
of the the content comes from. So
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what you're saying, they're definitely rings
true. Is there anything there you want
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to you want to touch on,
randy, before we kind of go further
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here? Sure, where I just
say, you guys are doing the best
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practice. What I would describe that
as have a thought leadership agenda and you
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can't have ten. It's like three
or four pillars and there the pillars around
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which you have a you know,
the distinctive point of view means you need
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to operate from a place of expertise. And so when we were at percolate,
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which has been bought by seize Macassales
enablement company, we were really focused
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on the ecosystem and we were really
focused on the marketing operations function, which
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was ten years ago there wasn't a
marketing ops function, and so we were
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really interested and curious about, well, what's led to the growth of this
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function and how do we help those
people become heroes in their organizations? Much
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like what sales force did with sales
force admins or new relict did with DEV
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OPS. It turned you know,
it just radically changed how an entire group
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of people thought about their job and
function. And so what we thought it
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percolate was if we could own the
marketing ops function to have a point of
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view about how to make their life
easier. That was one of the pillars
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of thought, leadership agenda. And
to your point, I think what we
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find and is you want to have
a an agenda for each of the executives
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or people who are going to be
out talking in your PR team can usually
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help you with that. But I
think the other key part is get a
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ghostwriter, get someone that is hip
to hip with you, who can take
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someone like your CEO, who may
not be necessarily one, not have the
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time to write and number two may
not be an experienced writer but has a
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lot of great thoughts on their head, and you go through a process with
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a ghostwriter. All right, all
right, let's articulate the thesis, let's
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articulate the supporting point. So what's
the research that we would need? Because
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a lot of the content you find
that people are reading the processing. I
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was just talking to a serious decisions
analysts which now has been bought by forest
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or. It's all about research based
content, but you don't have a staff
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researchers. So again, if you
have a ghostwriter, and I've got a
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couple I can recommend, if people
want to know, they can really help
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you flesh out these articles in a
template that then you start to get into
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the motion of you produce one of
these things once a week or once every
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other week and you have a platform
and as a publisher you got to hit
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deadlines. And I think that's the
other thing people don't yeah yet is if
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you want to build a community,
people need to they want to know that
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there's going to be new and interesting
information on a regular basis for them as
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pull it versus you pushing it to
them. Yes, thank you so much
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for saying that, Randy. We
talked to so many BB brands that say,
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Hey, we want to do a
podcast. Okay, maybe we could
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do an episode a month, and
my my feedback is why that's not enough.
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You need to be delivering on a
consistent basis, whether that's a podcast,
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which is definitely very serial in nature, so it's probably even more important
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in that channel, and it your
different frequencies will depend on the channel,
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but what you just said, they're
publishers newspapers broadcast journalists. They are used
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to. You know, the news
comes on it at seven in the evening.
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It's being disrupted a little bit with
on demand, but still, you
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know the the in the twenty four
hour news cycle. But from the publisher's
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mindset at least, for you know, decades prior to now, there is
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a set deadline, there is a
set rhythm to that news cycle and to
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get into that rhythm you need to
have a system. You need to not
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only have the experts, but how
do you turn them into thought leaders?
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They have to be known and consistency
is how you get known. And so
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what we've been doing is taking our
five evangelists internally and creating a system so
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that we can get thoughts out of
our head, like literally at times when
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I'm answering questions on sales calls,
because I'm not only the host of this
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show, I'm taking that snippet that's
been recorded by my call recorder, kicking
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that to our team, to a
to a writer, to our social media
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team and it can feed into the
the system. Now to your point,
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just like working with a ghostwriter,
right, there's there's a feedback loop.
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Right. You can't assume that anyone's
just going to write in your tone of
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ways overnight. But the more consistently
you work with like I work with our
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writing team and our social team or
ghostwriter that you're working with, that that
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should get better and better over time
and you're having to review less and that
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consistency gets easier and easier. Exactly. And I think what if you start
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have an editorial calendar? I think
is where you were going with as a
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publisher, you have an editorial calendar. What are the set of topics you're
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going to be driving on? And
I think to your point Logan, the
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other thing you find as you explore
this with a really good ghostwriter, you
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are understanding the topic deepens and so
then it starts to become even more relevant
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and distinctive because you're spending time with
it. And so if you're trying to
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cover thirty different topics, you're never
going to be deep enough. And so
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I would say that you know their
couple models out there. One is their
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companies out there that offer outsource GIG
economy type writers and you post something,
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they write an article, they get
it back to you and you put it
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out in your blog and you know
there may be value there. I don't
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I think everyone can see through that, because to have a point of view
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requires, I think, expertise functional
and Industry and and company specific right and
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so that that's hard work. To
understand what your differentiated value prop is,
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right, who your ICP? Who
you targeting? What's the story that you
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want to tell? Then disaggregating that
down into the essential themes. They that
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you want to build on. If
you're a tech company, you hope that
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the go to market, thought leadership
themes also drive your product cycle. So
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your release has become less about features
and functions. They become more around solutions
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and broader capabilities that you are building. So, for example, it percolate.
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One of the big bets we made
was to invest in the ecosystem.
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This is one of the themes.
And you see this, I mean sales
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force did this with Forcecom Marquetto did
it with their market players. I mean
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this wasn't new, but this is
the classic that enterprises do. And so
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what we needed in the marketing space. There was not a platform for content
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operations. Yet developer platform for content
operations. So we were first to market
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with that. But we had to
really think about what what does it mean
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to be part of an ecosystem?
Who's part of that ecosystem? is going
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to be a different type of ecosystem
than what Marquetto did or sales force?
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How do you fit into the metat
ecosystem? And so then started writing about
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that and and through that coming out
with new capabilities and exploring this as a
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topic. I think we started to
build some some interesting thoughts there and I
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think that that's you know, each
company can look at where what are the
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bets they're making strategically as a company
in the category that they're in? How
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are they showing up against the competitors
and how can they differentiate? Because,
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honestly, Logan, I mean a
lot of bb tech in particular, you
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could take the logo of one company
on a website and move it directly over
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the to the other website and it's
all and that's that's that's product marketing trying
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to get, you know, benefits
and values and features, but it's this
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is why I go. It's the
next level of depth is around this publisher's
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insight and point of view. It's
when I come to your brand, what
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am I learning? Like, Oh
Gosh, there's several that have really done
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this very, very well and I'm
totally flaking on it right now, but
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don't come to me as we continue
to talk. Yeah, I mean I'm
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thinking of one, Randy in very
classic example in bb Martec hub spot had
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a very strong standpoint. You know, ten years ago or whatever it was,
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cold calling sucks. Inbound is the
promised land over here. Now there
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are some people who still push back
on you know, cold calling sucks,
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and I'd be one to tell you
we have an outbound strategy as well as
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our thought leadership initiative. But that
stands made it very, very clear that
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when when I think of hub spot, that's what comes to mind. That's
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not necessarily what comes to mind with
other marketing automation platforms that by and large
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do a lot of the same things
that that hub spot does. Think about
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what help spot also did. They
wrote a concerted set of blogs, they
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had a book that came out,
they had they shared all their best practices,
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similar to love. Like what Mark
Bennyoff did its size me behind the
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cloud with that book and talk about
how he came up with that. And
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so I think then everyone started writing
books. But I you know, I
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do think that you may not get
a book published, but like having an
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Ebook is another idea. How do
you aggregate a bunch of this thought leadership
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into a point of view around,
for example, of Percola? We were
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talking a lot about the content bottleneck
and we picked up on that from an
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analyst, Gartner, who talked about
the content bottleneck being the thing that most
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marketers are going to face. They
have this incredible demand for content, but
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the supply in terms of resources and
people to provide valuable content is not being
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invested in at the same rate that
the exponential demand is, and that content
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bottleneck is what Gardner identified as one
of the key trends. We took that.
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We owned it, we came out
with an ebook around it, we
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started going on the conference circuit with
it, we just started hammering, hammering,
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hammering, and as part of that
we started getting really deep into supply
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chain theory and how would you think
about bottlenecks and what does that mean,
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and so it just led to this
really interesting set of insights and conversations.
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But it in that case. But
we did is we hooked into some other
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guys really smart idea content bottleneck,
which other people are going to see in
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the space and we, you know, use that to amplify. But I
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think hub spot has done that incredibly
well and there are other folks that have
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done that too, but I think
it's they really they own this idea.
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We're going to have a point of
view and we're going to publish behind that
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vanguard. Yeah, and going very
deep, continuing to hammer that point of
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view. I think a lot of
folks think, well, we've said this
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before. We you know we've said
this before. And going back to the
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Garry v Analogy, you will definitely
iterate. You'll find branches off of that
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core theme, you will find new
avenues, but it takes time for that
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to sink in with your audience,
to grow that audience to where you it
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can't just be well, we publish
the definitive ebook on it and well,
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that that's it. Let's go demandin
crazy with that one asset for now until
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eternity. That's kind of the opposite
of what you're talking about. Is there
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should always be a fresh take on
what's happening. Right The New York Times
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doesn't say, well, we've written
enough about covid it's what is, what's
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happening this week. What's happening this
hour, what's happening this day, and
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your news cycle, if you will, is not going to be the same
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as a in BB marketing as it
is in broad based news. But,
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having that that mindset, what did
we encounter this week? That is a
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new wrinkle. We've answered a new
question about this, and do you have
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a system to turn that and adomatize
that content into multiple different channels so that
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you can you can push that out? I think we could kind of go
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two ways with the rest of this
conversation, Randy, because I think you
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and I could jam all day on
this. But for the sake of time,
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we could either kind of go back
to what you were talking about before,
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in well, we're doing this,
but we're not sure what's working and
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what's the follow up to that conversation
and your recommendations to that that individual you're
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talking to, or we could go
a little bit deep here into building out
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process to achieve what we're talking about
here. I'll I'll let you kind of
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go either direction based on where you're
where you're feeling right now. Well,
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I would say that first thing is
to do the audit. So maybe just
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spend a little time there and I
think if you're a large enterprise brand of
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brand marketer, their business, business
marketer, there are companies out there that
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can help you, because it's super
hard to do it with an internal team
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because everyone's protecting their their job.
So we've worked with serious decisions. I'm
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a huge fan of them. They're
focused on, you know, be tob
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marketing. They have three thousand people
that show up their conferences and they do
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a content audit and so they'll come
in and help diagnose where all the contents
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being produced, who's producing it.
They'll codify and create a point of view
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and say you're spending x millions of
dollars on it. They'll also do a
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systemic check in terms of your your
strategy, your resources, your technologies and
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your processes. So, going back
to your point, and those are things
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that need to happen, but I
think you want to get a baseline.
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You just want to get an understanding
and dimensionalized what is being produced, where,
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by whom and what. I think
you'll find it many larger companies is
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you got all these people are who
producing contests. Think about it, like
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the cost to deliver content on email
is zero. The cost to deliver blog
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is zero. A tweet, a
facebook, poses we know from our current
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political context, is zero the cost, and so the default is people just
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generate because they're operating from this point
of view that more is better. And
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so I think the how do you
then set up a content council that aligns
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on a thought leadership agenda and then
aligns on the type of channels and how
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they're going to be used and then, to your point, aligns on the
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editorial Colendar. What's going to be
published, when by whom? Part of
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the tension at product companies in particular, as you got, every single product
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manager wants to get their product in
the sales hands and want there's to be
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coverage in the press. And you
know my products is a greasing out there.
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But if it's not part of a
broader initiative, this behind solutions versus
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features like that's a dramatic shift in
how a lot of tech companies go to
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market in reframing. So I think
start with the content audit yourself or out
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person the serious decision for the other
folks who can do it, and then
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the second thing is the content council. A LOT NY thought leadership agenda literally
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habit named. What are the pillars? Translate that into a messaging framework.
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Who are we talking to about what
at what part of the cycle, and
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then figure out how you're going to
staff that on those specific thought leadership pillars.
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Who's being held accountable for what content
being produced what frequency? So in
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percolate, for example, we had
one executive every month had a spotlight and
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they had to get that done and
we would feature that on our on our
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website, and its Seis MC rich
large. We're starting to shift to that
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modality as well. But then you
have the ghostwriter, because you or you
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hire someone, you hire an editor, you go coach someone out of one
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of these great magazines who's just oriented
towards editing, being a great editor,
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a writer and an editor and making
concise, telling pros. And it can
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be long form short form. If
you get that ebook done, you have
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all those little chapters you can sort
of break off and then you can translate
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those into stippets and you just activate
it. You just launch it through your
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your sales enabling platform, size make
would be an example, and and then
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through the other channels. Yeah,
absolutely, I would say kind of the
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way that we've been approaching in a
sweet fish, you know, good batter
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in different and we're learning along the
way and I think we're going to be
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putting on a lot of content about
this as as we go through it.
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But we started with finding those individuals, identifying the points of view and how
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those roll up to the overall message
that we want to get out and who
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we're who we're reaching. We've been
wrestling with a mix of how much should
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be on the nose in BB podcasting
and be to be marketing, which is
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the the realm that we play in, and how much should be maybe you
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know, outside of that. That
comes from our personal experience and so far
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it's been a smaller portion of that
for thinking about that balance of how far
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away do we go from our stance
and our product and the problem that we're
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solving? I actually just interview Joe
Turnoff CMO at Pendo now on this podcast.
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Will Link to that episode in the
show notes if you happened not to
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catch that. He had some really
good thoughts on not straying too far away
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from your product and the problem that
you solved, but not I think it's
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still in line. I think some
people might listen to this episode. Randy
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and listen to Joe and say meant
they're talking about different things, talking about
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going in the direction of thought leadership
and going in the direction of product led
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growth. But I don't think product
led growth is about product marketing in the
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way that that you're explaining. I
think you guys are are covering the same
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thing from a little bit different angle. So interesting that we just had these
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conversations back to back. Randy,
if anybody listening to this, your new
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on their radar. They want to
find out more about what you and the
369
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team at seismecker doing. They want
to follow on with your content or ask
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some follow up questions of you with
the best next steps that they could take
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their sure. Well, they can
find me on Linkedin and I've got some
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articles published for loved. You read
them and tell me what you think,
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because I did use a ghostwriter for
some of them, and that would be
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the example. And as Randy,
last name what Wo Otto, and otherwise
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you don't reach out to me on
email, randy dot wouldn't at Seis mccom
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00:25:22.410 --> 00:25:26.130
my ask is if it's really someone
reaching out from your show that they put
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00:25:26.170 --> 00:25:32.049
in the subject line connected via Logan. Otherwise I'll just delete it. So
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it would be great to meet some
of your audience. I love it.
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Randy, thank you so much for
being a guest on the show today.
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I really appreciate it. Have a
great day and take care of cheers.
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Hey, everybody, slogan with sweetfish
here. If you're a regular listener of
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00:25:51.150 --> 00:25:53.109
BB growth, you know that I'm
one of the cohosts of this show,
383
00:25:53.430 --> 00:25:56.549
but you may not know that I
also head up the sales team here at
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00:25:56.589 --> 00:26:00.509
sweetfish. So for those of you
in sales or sales offs, I wanted
385
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to take a second to share something
that's made us insanely more efficient lately.
386
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Our team has been using lead Iq
for the past few months and what used
387
00:26:08.779 --> 00:26:14.420
to take us four hours gathering contact
data now takes us only one, or
388
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seventy five percent more efficient. We're
able to move faster without bound prospecting and
389
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organizing our campaigns is so much easier
than before. I'd highly suggest you guys
390
00:26:23.650 --> 00:26:29.009
check out lead Iq as well.
You can check them out at lead iqcom.
391
00:26:29.410 --> 00:26:37.279
That's Elle a d iqcom. One
of the things we've learned about podcast
392
00:26:37.319 --> 00:26:41.839
audience growth is that word of mouth
works. It works really, really well
393
00:26:41.880 --> 00:26:45.359
actually. So if you love this
show. Would be awesome if you texted
394
00:26:45.480 --> 00:26:48.670
a friend to tell them about it, and if you send me a text
395
00:26:48.789 --> 00:26:52.230
with a screenshot of the text you
sent to your friend Metta, I know
396
00:26:52.670 --> 00:26:56.109
I'll send you a copy of my
book content based networking, how to instantly
397
00:26:56.190 --> 00:27:00.630
connect with anyone. You want to
know my cell phone numbers. Four hundred
398
00:27:00.630 --> 00:27:03.859
and seven, four nine hundred,
three and three, two eight. Happy
399
00:27:03.980 -->
texting.