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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 4,400+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
1234. Exit. Exit. Exit. We're back. We're live inside exit five. It's been a minute, but we're still live. Matt, good to see you.
Matt Carnevale [00:00:21]:
Yep.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:22]:
I've been canceling all these.
Matt Carnevale [00:00:24]:
It's all good. Good to be back.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:26]:
Yeah, it's good to be back. I'm excited to do this. We had a ripper of a webinar this morning.
Matt Carnevale [00:00:31]:
Yep. Oh, my God.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:32]:
Not webinar live session. It was great. And I'm excited to be with you on exit five. What do we got on the docket?
Matt Carnevale [00:00:38]:
It was funny because a member last week in the community was like, there was some topic that was blowing up. And he had commented on it saying, I'm going to nominate this topic for the next Inside exit five podcast recording. And I'm like, all right, Dave, we got to do. And the people are asking for it. So the topic that the member wanted us to chat about was targeting two Personas. So how do you create content for two or more Personas?
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:04]:
Good question. Comes up all the time. On the surface, this doesn't sound like a complicated thing. It's like, you gotta be able to talk to different audiences. Right? I got two people that I work with. Jazz, an example. I got Matt, I got Dan. I talk to them differently.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:19]:
You're coaching a team. You got two different people. You talk to them different ways. But I think why people ask this. Let's back up and talk about that. I feel like what they're really asking is like, how do I do this with the marketing tools that I have, like the website, the email, the article, right?
Matt Carnevale [00:01:35]:
Yep.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:36]:
It's about the tools. I like to think first about the website. And I think I would speak to the overall message on the website, like focus on the overall, the company story, the positioning on the main website, and then from the website branch off and have like solutions pages or Persona pages. Hold on technical difficulty. Webflow does a really good job with this. And so if you go to webflow.com, comma, they have build with the power of code without writing any. They don't speak to one Persona. They show all of the different case studies and logos, and that's going to speak to you there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:08]:
They show the different features. But then if you go to solutions, they say they have webflow for freelancers, and that's a separate page. Agencies, that's a separate page. Startups, classrooms, enterprise. And so you're going to self select into one of those. That's where I would start. And then the other thing is, I think people don't realize the power of the headline and the power of the copy. I feel like copy often self selects the audience.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:32]:
I think we obsess over who's going to read this. But like, if I write an article and I'm like, 15 tips, every crossfitter should know, if you're not into CrossFit, you're not going to read that article. That content is not for you. Dan Kennedy, I think it was in the ultimate sales letter. He called this planting the flag in the headline, which is basically you plant a flag for your reader to talk about who this content is about. Headline. Now, beyond that, you actually have a lot of tools available to you to segment. So don't send emails to those people.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:58]:
Right. This is why in the onboarding or in the data collection process, get the role and the Persona of that person. And if you're going to send one message to one audience and it's not relevant to them, don't send it to the other.
Matt Carnevale [00:03:09]:
There's always some kind of common theme or common goal that you're solving as a business. So you always want to start there, I think, and then branch out. Like you said. Another cool thing I saw in the comments, just to get a little bit more tactical on that, is in HubSpot, you could actually show content to people dynamically based on what they are. So like you said, you can segment your audience, you can create one email newsletter, but based on what bucket they fit into, they're going to see that. I think that's a really cool play. Also for something that's super tactical.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:41]:
So the content of the email can be dynamic. So I would see a different part of the email than you would if we were different Personas.
Matt Carnevale [00:03:47]:
Yeah, exactly. Like maybe we get an email from a company and you see the stuff that's more relevant to a C suite leader, and I see the stuff that's more relevant to your middle level marketing manager. So I think that's a cool play.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:58]:
Also, we like to over engineer things over engineer problems and issues. And I think that if you're thoughtful about the messaging and the audience, and you have the tools as a marketer today to, like, segment certain audiences, I don't think this needs to be as big of a deal.
Matt Carnevale [00:04:13]:
What do you think of the resource split? Let's say you were putting out a blog article a week, an email newsletter a week, and a podcast episode a week targeted toward one Persona. Now you have another Persona you have to create content for. What are you doing just doubling up? Are you splitting resources like, how do you think about that part?
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:31]:
I think you're always kind of looking at just like, broad benchmark. How much should you invest in brand? A good benchmark is like, 70% is focused on short term, 30% is focused on long term. I think that a smart marketer would be able to, well, this would be tied to the business. And so ideally, we're not just creating different levels of Persona content just for the sake of it. We're able to say, like, yeah, we, we want to generate a million dollars in sales this year. Of that, a million dollars, we think that 50% is going to come from Persona one and 50% is going to come from Persona two. Broad strokes. I would just let that dictate the content that we're writing.
Matt Carnevale [00:05:07]:
I think that's good for that one. Why don't we move on to topic number two? I thought it was fitting, because topic number two is, how do you improve your webinar experience? And we just had maybe what I think is one of the best live sessions, not webinars, live sessions exit five has ever had. I feel like I know what you're going to say. We have the audience, but what do you think are some things that companies are doing wrong? What do you think some things they can be doing better? Maybe talk us through how you got our live sessions to where they are and some things you learned along the way.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:37]:
I think ultimately, the issue with the webinar, how to make a better webinar, is like, that's the answer to how to make a better podcast. How do you make a better newsletter? You can't just do this in a vacuum. You have to constantly be getting feedback and understanding. Did my desired audience find this helpful? No, they didn't. Okay, well, then why. Or maybe nobody even showed up. And so then you're kind of just constantly figuring out where to diagnose this funnel. Everything in marketing is a funnel.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:05]:
So you're just going to, like, look at where this thing is stuck. But let's say that you're able to drive people to it, but the content is not very good. Well, then you're going to diagnose like, okay, well, then what can we do to improve the content? Let's go survey the people that went there and figure out what they're trying to learn, what they want to understand. And for us at exit five, we've gotten a bunch of feet like we've now done even before hiring a team. I've been doing this for two years, and I've basically done two webinars a month for two years. Okay, so that is 48 webinars. Each one of them is an hour. I've spent 48 effing hours on webinars now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:39]:
Right? And so I don't have a perfect spreadsheet answer. I don't have a data point. I believe that so much of marketing is this, like, gut feeling. We've done 50 hours of webinars. I think I have a pretty strong feeling about, like, what the audience reacts to. And so for me, it's things like being in the chat, and, like, are you giving your webinar and you're just locked in on the slides, you're not looking, and nothing's happening in the chat. Then, like, no one's active. But for our sessions, very quickly, right away you see the chat is blowing up, and you're like, awesome.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:08]:
This topic is hitting right there. And so I think it's a little bit of, like, being a tastemaker and figuring out, like, what topics. I think oftentimes we're like, we're going to do a webinar, and we haven't first understood, why are we doing this? Does our audience want this content? Could this content be delivered in a different type of format? Could this webinar just be an article? Could this webinar just be a newsletter? Does it have to be a webinar? We like to do webinars because we're a community driven business, and there's value in having conversations and having people in the chat. We're marketers who are selling to marketers, and so there's value in, like, having people in the chat, helping each other, and participating in the conversation. And so that's why we do them. Actually, somebody on this webinar, it was actually Pierce from the. Pierce, the guy from NAC, said, uh, I don't know anybody who watches webinars on demand, and I actually completely disagree with that point, because I think we're caught up again on the word webinar. That same point is like, well, then that means nobody watches YouTube, nobody listens to podcasts, right? If the content is interesting and relevant to me, I'm going to bookmark it, and I'm going to find time to watch it later.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:08]:
I might watch it on my own time, and I might watch it at two x or I might multitask while it's on, but I'm going to watch it. And so I think you got to understand what's the topic that you want. I have done the very first webinar that I did when I was working at drift, we had like ten employees were just starting to sell customers. We were obsessed with this company called leadpages, because leadpages did these amazing webinars that were like live webinars where they told a big problem. They showed all this friction, and then they like, they showed their product as like the solution to that. It was like a really good way of doing like a product demo. That wasn't a product demo. It was like, hey, you probably have this problem, and here's why you have this problem.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:45]:
Well, like, did you know that you could actually increase your revenue by doing this? And by the way, our tool happens to power that. And I literally studied their webinar. I listened to it and I wrote down the script like verbatim. Like I put my headphones on and I spent 60 minutes, like transcribing the webinar and I wrote my own version of that. And I wish I had the picture somewhere, but the very first webinar that I did, I literally wrote out a 20 page script. And so I had my deck and then I had every word that I was going to say and nobody could see me because I wasn't on camera. So it's just like audio only. I literally read line by line.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:19]:
We did that webinar every week at a certain time. We said, we're going to do a live webinar every Thursday at 01:00 we were just starting to grow our email list. We're just starting to get free users onto our product. And so we just had an email flow that sent an invite to anybody who was in our new nurture flow that week to get on the webinar. We may have had maybe ten to 50 people max on those sessions, but it was an amazing, the huge value in doing it was me having to go there every single week and give the presentation and get the feedback. And so even if nobody bought or nothing magical happened on the webinar, it was me having to show up. And I did that webinar for weeks and weeks and weeks. And each week you're going through it and you're like, this morning I showed you, like, I wrote a script for a YouTube video that I did.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:03]:
And it's an amazing process of like, you write the script, but then when you go to record it, you're like, well, that line doesn't actually work. You cut that out, right? And so it's this amazing process of massaging and editing. And maybe after twelve weeks I had the perfect webinar, then we recorded it then we made it on demand and it lived on the website, and then we built like an automated funnel around it. I think there's so much value in that, but you can only do that if you're obsessed with the feedback loop here. And so the real key to making a better webinar is whether you got ten people or a thousand there, listen to feedback. What did we all do in chat after this webinar today? We're already like, Mandy, how do we do something like that every month? We hit gold on that. Now we want to go do more of it. And you just got to always be looking for pockets of that feedback.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:44]:
Your post from earlier this week about, like, the feedback loop, right.
Matt Carnevale [00:10:47]:
A big part of it, a good webinar experience is also who's hosting the webinar, who's talking during the webinar, and if you're a BB marketer in a company, that could be you. But if you don't have someone in the company that is going to play host and is going to get on that webinar and give a really engaging presentation, like, it's also maybe not a great channel. Maybe you're better to just write something interesting, like you said. So I think that's a big reason as to why we have a good experience, is you've done a lot of reps and have a lot of experience playing hosts, and you do a good job at it. So it makes our webinars really good.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:19]:
What, did your girlfriend message you? And she said, did she say that I'm the best webinar host in the world? What'd she say?
Matt Carnevale [00:11:24]:
Yeah, she said she's been to every webinar possible in b two b marketing, and you're the best she's ever seen.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:30]:
Take that. Am I just a pretty bald face with 165 LinkedIn followers? No.
Matt Carnevale [00:11:36]:
Hell no.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:36]:
I'm a good webinar host. Dang it.
Matt Carnevale [00:11:39]:
You are. You are, for sure. I've done webinars at other companies, and I just did it for the sake of doing it, but the presentation sucked. And after I was like, oh, I don't know. But looking back now, it's like I didn't have the right ingredient.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:51]:
Sometimes I have imposter syndrome, and I'm like, man, I don't know all these things. Matt, Matt sending me, like, he built this custom GPT. I don't know how to do that. But then, like, these circles come around, it's like, oh, no, these timeless principles. And I think what we're unpacking and like, the real answer. I wish the how to make a better webinar answer was like, oh, it's just this one little thing. And it's like, no, it's. It's the same thing.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:13]:
That's true for any marketing channel. Why should somebody care? How can the delivery be better or different? What can your way of doing it be like? I would challenge everything. Just because the standard webinar is like 60 minutes, does it have to be like, what if you did a ten minute session and you gave one practical tip and people left that session messaging you being like, damn, I wish you got more. Oh, okay, let's do a longer one. Or let's do it every day. When I was at privy, we started a podcast there called e commerce marketing school. And it was initially, I hosted it to launch it, but we eventually morphed it into the CEO, Ben hosted it, and we changed the format from 1 hour to ten minutes, and we published every single day, and every episode was like a very specific, tactical tip and play. And we got there, it was completely audience driven, and we learned that that's what they wanted.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:05]:
They didn't want these, like, long winded, like, rambling interviews like I do with founders or whoever they wanted to. Like, here's one tip to double the conversion rate of the opt in form on your site, and here's how this company did it. You got to be obsessed with learning. You got to be obsessed with feedback. You're making the food, but you're not delivering the food to the table and being like, how was the meal, Matt? You're missing that. And as a marketer saying, man, we have so much opportunity. Like, you can give feedback. You don't have to wait for statistical significance on any of these channels.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:36]:
You don't need lots of data. You have a direct line to everybody, through email, through social, through us recording this podcast, giving us ideas. I think you got to understand how to take advantage of that. And that is the whole game right there.
Matt Carnevale [00:13:47]:
Absolutely. I have one more point about webinars or live session. It's like any other channel, wherever, it's going to take time. So webinar number 1 may be really bad, but maybe you'll get better by webinar number five, which is exactly what you were saying. And one little thing I used to do, because I started doing webinars at my last company, and I knew that we probably wouldn't get a lot of people to sign up if we just sent an email saying, come to our webinar. So I did this thing where the first 25 people who signed up a free lunch, and we got a ton of signups, not like a crazy amount, but maybe it was like 50 sign ups and we got like 45 people to show up because we gave them a free lunch. It's kind of corny and kind of cheesy, but it got people to come to our webinar. So if you need to dangle a bit of a carrot and use something like a free lunch or free swag or free event tickets to like, accelerate your attendance and try and wow them in that presentation, I think that's okay, too.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:42]:
Yeah, whatever you got to do. If you can juice it up to get more feedback on something, that's the whole game. Webinars. We should do a webinar tear down. Tell us what the topic is, because I think we're good at that. I think we're good at coming up with hooks and descriptions and the delivery of the format. That would be really fun. I see you writing that down.
Matt Carnevale [00:14:58]:
Oh, yeah. And if we just broke down the funnel.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:00]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I think back to the webinar thing, it's not necessarily like, was the deck bad? I think oftentimes, like, the content might actually be good, but we should deliver it in a different way. And I think we could definitely help people. Some of our best webinars, by the way, for these have been no slideshow. Yeah, and that's where we fall in a trap. I think people also default to webinar means I'm going to go heads down and I'm going to present for 40 minutes, and then I'm going to come back up and be like, oh, any questions? Where? I like to. I like to have a guest on, and the guest is going to have slides, but I like to interrupt, ask questions, have a host. So maybe we should do a webinar teardown.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:34]:
That'd be cool.
Matt Carnevale [00:15:34]:
That'd be fun. Hey, if you're a company that has anything to do with webinars, maybe we would do something with you. Who knows? Okay, last topic of the day, someone asked, what are your favorite tools for content ideation? I think they were referring to, like, two actual tools, but I think we could also talk about just strategies. How do we come up with ideas for content? We're spitting out content all the time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:58]:
My number one tool for content ideation is 15 years of experience in this industry.
Matt Carnevale [00:16:03]:
Easy.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:04]:
That is number one. I think it's easy to be like, oh, yeah. Well, he's been in marketing for 15 years, so, like, he's good at coming up with marketing ideas. Yes. That's, like, my strongest suit. But when you're doing. When you've done it enough in one particular topic, I might not know, like, cybersecurity, but I have frameworks or, like, ways to think about that. I could help a company in the cybersecurity space come up with content ideas, right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:28]:
Because there's all different formats. And so beyond having deep experience in a niche. And I'm saying that because I think it's just a topic that I care more and more about lately, in a world where people, everybody wants the, like, chat GBT to write it for them. Everybody wants a shortcut. So much of this is like knowing your audience deeply, and that's a big part of it. I was drawn to this in you, and I see this as, like, I've just always been a super curious person, and I take ideas from everywhere. I mean, go back to how exit five got started. Exit five got started as a Patreon channel, a private Patreon channel.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:59]:
Me talking about marketing. How did I get that idea? I got that idea because I noticed on my credit card bill that, like, my wife was paying dollar 20 a month for a Patreon subscription to some comedian. And I said, oh, who is this? What is this comedian? She's like, oh, I. You know, it's this woman. She has a private podcast. And I was like, private podcast? Yeah, it's like members only content. So she has her main podcast, and that funnels people to, like, this other podcast where she talks, like, off the record more, you know, more candidly. And I was like, oh, that's a great idea.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:26]:
I bet I could do that for marketing. So I'm just always switched on to that. I could be watching golf on tv, and there's a commercial that's, well, the commercials aren't really that interesting, but could be watching YouTube. I'm listening to podcasts. I'm watching YouTube. I'm a constant reader. You see me, Matt, you own, like, our community, and, like, the funnel for the community. The last week, we've been talking a lot about onboarding.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:47]:
What have I done? I've sent you 50 examples of SaaS tools that I signed up for that do onboarding well, and I'm forwarding you their emails. And so I think you just got to be curious and realize that, like, really, marketing is everywhere. It's all around you. It could be the small business that you go get lunch at, and they have a funny sign, like, at the counter. I'm just kind of always switched on to that stuff. And then, you know, marrying that with like, what's the goal of marketing? Great marketing gets people to pay attention. You get a message to land with somebody. You get that message to stick.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:18]:
I'm looking for those examples everywhere. And then I'm always trying to think about, why should somebody spend time with this? What's in it for them? How can you build curiosity, fomo, intrigue, scarcity, all those kind of timeless principles into the content? And then from there it just the delivery mechanism. Take that webinar that we did with NAC today, email teardowns. The webinar was the delivery vehicle, right. We didn't think of the delivery vehicle first, though. We thought of the concept of like, okay, their expertise is email marketing. Oh, we have a community of marketers. Let's have people submit their emails and we'll do tear downs.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:55]:
That could have been a podcast episode, that could have been a YouTube video, that could have been an event. We could have done a meetup. Right? We could have had dinner, we could have had pizzas. And then like, everybody brought their emails live. And so I think the channel is different. The channel is easy. It's thinking about like that main, the hook and the content and the copy. How do you do it?
Matt Carnevale [00:19:13]:
What I've been doing, like, ever since I joined exit five for my own LinkedIn as an example, but I would replicate this anywhere, is using social signals. So we're lucky in the sense where there's ton of b, two b marketers on LinkedIn. So you could literally just spend, I don't know, 1520 minutes, scroll through your feed, scroll through the comments and popular posts, and you could easily pick out five to ten topics that will hit. Right. Because it's there. The proof is there, whether it's in your own content or someone else's content.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:41]:
Yeah, like, I think about that all the time. Like, LinkedIn is a big channel for us. I'm constantly looking at other people's stuff and seeing what gets attention and gets popular.
Matt Carnevale [00:19:51]:
Right, exactly. And to your point of no shortcuts. Also, like, since I've joined exit five, I've commented on maybe, I don't know, 1112 hundred posts in the community. Now. I do it every single day. Yeah. And I mean, I'm just doing the work every day. I'm engaging with other marketers every single day.
Matt Carnevale [00:20:09]:
I'm engaging with the things they're writing about. And I'm learning, I'm saying, okay, these are the topics that people care about the most. Right? So there's no shortcut to that. It just, it sticks in your brain.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:19]:
How would you give this advice to somebody who is maybe listening to this? And they are nothing. They're not in an industry like you and I were messaging earlier about, like, b two b manufacturing or something like that, right? I don't even know what that means, but we'll get there. We'll get there. We want to expand. I'm just going to say this on there, because I think there's something bigger. I think we gravitate towards B two B SaaS, but I do think there is a lot outside of B two B SaaS that we should and can cover and that will, like, grow our tam as a business. But I also think it'll make more interesting content. But.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:48]:
Okay, I hear you, Matt, but how do we do that to, you know, James is listening to this somewhere, and James is not able to, like, pop in the community of people with the same job as him. He's more of an outsider. How do you do it as an outsider, do you think?
Matt Carnevale [00:21:02]:
It's a good question. I think I would try and use the same principle, which is, is there any place, whether it's online or in person, where people in your industry are hanging out or paying attention to within that? Is there any way that you can realize, okay, these are the topics or companies or things that people seem to gravitate to more than others, and then how can I just use those as inspiration? So whether that's an in person event in your city about manufacturing, whether that's a news outlet about manufacturing, I don't know. Is there a place where you can go and find out more about what people in that industry care about?
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:40]:
So use the Internet, blogs, podcasts, find those micro communities, right?
Matt Carnevale [00:21:45]:
Yeah. Even no Internet. Like I said, in person events. Like, can you look up manufacturing events in my city and tell your boss, hey, this is a couple hundred bucks, but I'm going to go there. I'm going to stop booth by booth. I'm going to see which booths people are going to and care about, and I'm going to learn there, and I'm going to bring back 1520 different content ideas that I'm going to apply for our 2025 year. Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:06]:
I love that. I love that. As a young marketer, I got a lot. I mean, actually, as an older marketer, how annoying was I coming back from Golden Hour? I went to, like, event for the first time, and I got so many ideas. I love that. Go there. Go there in person. Come up with your own notes.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:20]:
Yeah. Go spend $500 on a ticket or whatever to go do that. I also think a lot of that information is available online today, right? There's a subreddit for everything. There's a community for everything.
Matt Carnevale [00:22:31]:
Everything.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:31]:
You can be a lurker and learn a lot about that, right?
Matt Carnevale [00:22:34]:
Absolutely.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:35]:
I got into running the last two years and never once posted on Reddit. But reading, like some of the subreddits about running, I learned so much, I feel like I could create proper content for those people now just based on, you see what gets popular, see what has the most upvotes, you see which posts have no engagement. You can really quickly pattern match. And then it's about figuring out, I think something we haven't talked about today, Matt, is matching that to what's your point of view as a company? What's your point of view? It's not enough to just like, you can't just make content. It's like you can make great content when you have a strong point of view on the topic as it relates to that. And so this way of doing things is broken. You're seeing everybody talk about it this way. Actually, we have a different way of doing it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:16]:
Here's our way. You have to have that strong point of view that you can develop at the same time.
Matt Carnevale [00:23:21]:
Yeah, exactly. Whenever I see something on social, I try and take it and just apply it through my own lens. And if I can't do that, then it's like I don't bother because it's like I don't have a good point of view here, so I'm not going to go down this route. Cool. I think we're good. That's all I have for today.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:35]:
That's all you have. Oh, on the ideation thing, let's just, by the way, let's not sleep on AI, though. I'm on both sides of this. Like, I do like to poo poo it at the same time. But, man, I'd be lying if I told you that I don't use chat GBT ten times a day for sure. I know you do, too. Can you actually talk about, can you actually share what you did recently? I think that's an awesome example of somewhat related to these things. But let's talk about how you reverse engineered what's good in our community and how we're going to use that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:04]:
I think it's a really good example of marketing.
Matt Carnevale [00:24:07]:
Yeah, for sure. Right now I'm working on improving the onboarding for the exit five community and I was thinking about how can members get value almost instantaneously? And one of the biggest ways, because we have such a strong membership basis, to just ask a question, ask a burning question. But the issue is that a lot of people don't know what a good question looks like and they shouldn't. I mean, why should they? So the idea was, what if I took the most popular posts from the last three months and I could get this all in our backend and circle, and I plug it into chat GPT? And I say, hey, I'm trying to do this thing in our onboarding. I'm trying to teach people how to write a good post. Here are the ten most popular posts from our community in the last three months. Can you reverse engineer this and, and can you tell me what are the top five elements of these posts that make it good? And then I just took that, and now I'm including that as an instructional piece of content in our onboarding. But one step further, I took those five things and I created a custom GPT and chat GPT using those.
Matt Carnevale [00:25:11]:
So essentially what people can do now is they can go to that custom GPT and they can just hit a button that says, help me write a post in exit five, that GPT is going to ask them, prompting questions to pull information out of them, and it's going to write a good post for them. So in short, I use previous posts to help people write better posts in the community with a couple of clicks of a button or a little bit of text.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:34]:
So I love this example because this is like old me would just go to chat GPT and like write a question and get a lame answer and be like, I don't get it. But now I think doing more things like this, basically asking chat GPT to tell you the right way to ask the question, then you'll get a better answer. And so I was like, giving design feedback recently, and I am not good at articulating design. And so I found a bunch of websites that were, I thought, similar, but I didn't know how to, like, explain them. And so I asked chat GPT to explain the styles of all these websites and like, what elements they had in common and how you'd articulate that to a designer. And then I got the answer back and then I could give better feedback about that. So I like doing it like that. I also like asking it to analyze trends and patterns and then telling you how to explain that so you can explain it back and get more and so on.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:21]:
The content ideas thing, if you just go to chat GPT and you're like, hey, give me some good ideas for webinars for B two B marketers, that's not great, right? But if we said, hey, we've been doing webinars for two years to an audience of B two B marketers, here are the ten most popular. Here are the ten least popular. Our audience is this. They like things like this. They tend to gravitate more towards like this. We want to do things like this. We want to do things like that. Spend more time in like the upfront, the brief, the prompt, then you're going to get really good stuff out of that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:50]:
I think that's a perfect way to do content ideation. Another thing that I've been doing lately is basically using chat GPT to like, beef up my writing. And so I, you're sick of hearing this now, but I had this analogy where I talked about how getting sales to use your content is like, made me think of making my daughter's lunch. Once I got her to like, she came home from school, she didn't need her lunch. I asked her why she need her lunch. She told me she doesn't like all the stuff. I said, okay, let's make your lunch together. We make your lunch together and that lunch gets eaten.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:19]:
Voila. Right? Same thing is true with sales. And I basically, that analogy hit. I got a bunch of comments in the chat and I said, oh, there's like a bit here. And this is another thing, like to bring us full circle, the feedback loop. It's almost like an improv comedian. Like, you're kind of just always testing like little bits. And it could be something.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:36]:
You say, Matt, on this podcast, and we get three emails about it. Oh, interesting. This is a pocket. We should go do more with that, right? So that's a separate thing. But I get feedback on that. And then I'm like, yeah, I want to write something about this. And so I start to write it. I'm like, yeah, but this is kind of lame.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:48]:
It's just my story. So I go to chat GPT and I say, hey, I came up with this analogy about, here's the question. The question was about how to get sales to use more content. Here's the analogy I came up for. This analogy really worked with people. Now can you help me do some research? Are there any ideas, research methodologies, frameworks, whatever that back this up. Chat JBT is like, beep boop, beep boop. Comes back and says, actually, yes, here's some boom gartner.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:12]:
Study that says 74% of sales content is more usable if it's created with marketing. Fantastic. Got that. Another one says this is actually called the IkeA effect, which is like, humans have been proven to be more engaged with something that they created together. I'm like, awesome, take that. Now I can write something, and it's much more full. Like, I've, I filled it out by doing some research, and I think it can be an incredible writing support tool. I don't think if you just go to chat GBT and like, hey, write me a 500 word blog post about B two B marketing, you're obviously not going to get good results.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:45]:
But if you use it like this, like Matt and I are talking about today, you can really have a great partner on the content creation side and content ideation. And maybe it can help you make webinars that don't stink.
Matt Carnevale [00:28:56]:
That's a good one.
Dave Gerhardt [00:28:57]:
Cool. All right, well, everybody, hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit five podcast. No big deal. The number 59. 59th most popular marketing podcast in the world. No big deal. Just tell everybody you listen. I hate getting those emails from charitable.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:13]:
Anyway, do me a favor. I want you to send us an email because I want to know if you're listening to this. Send us an email. Matt and I, we read every single one. Hi, exit five.com. dot. I'm on that email. Matt's on that email.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:24]:
So send it to us. Send us hi at exit five. Tell us, should we keep doing more of these inside exit fives? And what do you want to hear about? And maybe, what did you learn from this episode? Or maybe it's like a fist bump emoji or something, right?
Matt Carnevale [00:29:34]:
Yep.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:35]:
Hi, exit five.com. send us an email ASAP.
Matt Carnevale [00:29:37]:
Awesome.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:38]:
Goodbye, exit. Exit.