Dave Gerhardt [00:00:15]:
All right, Chelsea, good to see you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. You're the author of one of my most favorite recent LinkedIn posts, which was a Taylor Swift quote with a screenshot of WordPress.
Chelsea Castle [00:00:30]:
Yeah, well, thanks for having me here. Hilarious that you're starting off with that. It was my first viral moment, which, yeah, I was like, this is viral, right? I'm like, okay, this is insane. It was just funny. Like one of those off the cuff things. A good example of like, you can't plan virality. It's just like lightning in a bottle. It was really, really funny.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:51]:
So was it like truly not planned? Did you just literally open up LinkedIn? You had this idea, like, you took a screenshot of WordPress, you went to Google, you found WordPress screenshot and then posted it.
Chelsea Castle [00:01:02]:
So I had this idea for months, honestly, and I hesitated posting it. And I almost thought it would be better if I waited until a little while after Taylor Swift's new album came out. And yeah, I've had, I was just kind of sitting on the idea and one day I was like, I don't know what I'm going to post. It was a Friday. It made me laugh. I was like, okay, I had to find like the right screenshot. So I like, over thought the right word for a screenshot to use, and then it just took off. Like, I was just kind of sat on it for months, not thinking it was funny enough, not knowing if I wanted to post something like that.
Chelsea Castle [00:01:34]:
So it's just one of those things.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:36]:
You can go to Chelsea´s, LinkedIn and find this at some point when this comes out later. But the quote was, you wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me. And then it's a screenshot of an all too familiar WordPress dashboard. The best part is once you reach that, it has, as of this is going to come out a bit later. But I. There's almost 3000 likes, 300 comments on it. Once you reach that level of virality, though, you get the most obnoxious comments from people who think that this was like your actual screenshot. Like, literally, just as I'm looking at, some guy writes, search engine visibility is off.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:09]:
That's a bold move. That was like, all right, you missed the joke, buddy. That was literally, literally not the point. So as somebody who runs content and brand, I'm just curious personally, how do you use LinkedIn and what does your writing and content process look like there?
Chelsea Castle [00:02:27]:
So it's always funny to answer that question because I don't have a huge process or a strategy. Some folks really optimize for growth, optimize with content pillars and the strategy, and really in depth. I guess I have a bit of a process. I like to write from abundance. So I literally have pages and pages and word docs and notion docs and notes on my phone of ideas. I recently organized all of them. I think it was like 519 notes in my phone, just a little embarrassing. And I organized all of it, put it into Chat GPT, and had it helped me organize and like categorize my ideas.
Chelsea Castle [00:03:01]:
So that is probably like the only process oriented thing that I do.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:05]:
I love that. Wait, that's kind of a crazy product.
Chelsea Castle [00:03:07]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:08]:
Did you have to go to, did you have to go to 519 individual notes and copy and paste so you.
Chelsea Castle [00:03:13]:
Can export your notes on your desktop? Yeah, there's, I think it's literally called exporter.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:17]:
Nice.
Chelsea Castle [00:03:18]:
It's like a valid, safe tool, but I had to do it in chunks because Chat GPT, like, limits the amount of characters that you can submit in one prompt. So it took a while from that standpoint. It took a lot of prompt generating, but it helped me categorize all my ideas.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:34]:
So did you ask it to categorize them and then basically you get it back in a table or something that you can export and then sort by topic?
Chelsea Castle [00:03:41]:
Yep. And then I basically just put all of it into a spreadsheet manually and then organized it with filters based on content type. I asked it to, or like analyze which ones were funnier, which ones were stronger. It's not great at those things.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:55]:
Like, he's not the funniest person thing. They. Yes. Who knows? I could be listening right now on any of my devices. So if you're listening, please, I try to be very kind, and I notice that my answers are more kind back. So this is like a bit of like a catch up exercise. And so now you have this database, which is a spreadsheet, and that's what you're going to use, two to write from moving forward.
Chelsea Castle [00:04:18]:
Yeah. Because what I found is I just have so many half written posts, half written ideas, like in notion. So it can be really overwhelming to be like, okay, I know there's a lot of good ideas here, both for my personal LinkedIn and professional work. So how can I organize and make sense of all of that? So that was really interesting.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:36]:
My issue is I have a backlog, but then every now and then I'll have an idea that I like or think is funny or good in the moment, and I want to just like, jump the queue and, and post that one. And so I'll go through and like, move everything around as that happened to you.
Chelsea Castle [00:04:49]:
Yes. Although I don't schedule too much, but yeah, the ones that I tend to, although I've been doing that a lot for repurposing old ones, which I know you've talked a lot about, like, I'll schedule out the old ones.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:00]:
Yeah, that works so well. It's such an underrated thing. Like, so LinkedIn offers this now as a feature. They lack a lot of things, but one of the things is you can go to your posts and you go to analytics and it's going to show you all of your posts by engagement and activity. There's some people that don't like this, but I don't think they're thinking about it the right way. So I have 165,000 followers on LinkedIn. On average, a post is going to reach, maybe a decent post is like 20,000 impressions. So I'm reaching like 10% of the audience that I have on LinkedIn.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:33]:
And so I think you should always take the opportunity to go again, especially if you, if you know things like, I actually guarantee you, if you put something on your calendar and 90 days from now, you posted the exact same WordPress Taylor Swift thing again, it would go, it would, it would work again. And I think you should do it.
Chelsea Castle [00:05:49]:
I think I'm going to try that. Maybe in six months. I'll give it some time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:52]:
Yeah, you could do it six months. It could be, it could be whatever. And, and most people are not going to see it. And I just think it's a great way to resurface stuff. Obviously, if you don't care about engagement and growing your followers and impressions and don't do any of those things. But if that's one of the goals, and for me, using LinkedIn is to have an audience there to then drive traffic to other platforms. So followers and engagement is important. It's actually not a vanity metric at all.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:17]:
So I want more engagement. I want more followers. So I'm going to play that game.
Chelsea Castle [00:06:21]:
Yeah. Going back to your initial question here, my why is just kind of like showing up and learning and engaging the community that I've built there is just like, invaluable right now. I'm very much, like, leveraging it for, like, my work brand and how can I connect the two, right? Like, how can I elevate the new company I started at through my personal brand, getting people to know the company more that way. And then like long term game, like, maybe I do my own thing one day and I've built this community, but right now it's just very community focused, which is nice.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:50]:
You don't schedule anything. Do you just decide, like, do you try to write once a day? Do you go, like when you go check your inbox in the morning, you're going to write something. How do you figure out when you're going to post something?
Chelsea Castle [00:06:58]:
I schedule things sometimes. If I have, like, a really good idea and I already posted that day, then I'll schedule it for the next day. Try to space posts out. It's a little different. I'm definitely all over the place. I always try to post in the morning. It's like one of those, like, when's the best time to post? And like the viral post that you mentioned, I think that was posted in the middle of the day. So to an extent, it doesn't always matter.
Chelsea Castle [00:07:19]:
I do think morning is optimal. It hits everyone's feeds, you know, as they're hopping on. But I'm kind of all over the place.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:25]:
Yeah, I think it would only matter if you had already it would only matter if you had already posted that day. Like if you, you didn't post that day, and then you post, then, like, you could post anytime that day. And I think it would work. Like, for me, I have stuff scheduled and sometimes I'll forget and I'll like, double cross myself and I'll look at a post and it has like, no engagement. And I'm like, shit, what happened? And then I look and like, a scheduled post went out and I'm like, damn it, I just screwed my reach for the day.
Chelsea Castle [00:07:48]:
Yeah, I'm kind of all over the place, though. I don't have a huge method to my madness.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:52]:
Okay, that's fair. So right now you are. Oh, actually, the other thing I was going to say is I've been using the link. So I was using a scheduling tool for a while called, actually, it doesn't matter what it's called. And I recently switched to the LinkedIn scheduling tool because it's just like there. And I had this hypothesis that maybe the engagement is better if LinkedIn knows they're using its own tool. But the only thing that I hate about it, and I try to share this every chance I get in the hopes that maybe somebody's listening and can fix it, is that you can't edit. Once a post is scheduled, you can't edit it.
Chelsea Castle [00:08:23]:
I know, I hate that it drives me crazy. I've messed up so many posts.
Dave Gerhardt [00:08:27]:
Oh, so many. So you can't edit it and then, like, it's the worst, because often, like, if you tag somebody in it or if you have a video or an image with it, you have to copy it all, grab the image, grab the video, then do it again. I don't, I don't know how they haven't just. You can't just click into a post and edit, so you can't edit the content. And the other thing that's annoying is you can't just, like, drag and, like, you should just be able to drag and drop, like, the. So if I have two posts scheduled for tomorrow and I want to change up the order, I should just be able to drag them and change them. And I have to. You have to click on each post, change the date, go look at the date, change the time, and then publish it.
Chelsea Castle [00:09:01]:
It's a headache.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:02]:
It's a first world problem. But it's a reality of LinkedIn content, so.
Chelsea Castle [00:09:06]:
But they have games, though. Got games now.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:09]:
There's games I didn't even know. I know what I'm doing this afternoon. All right, so right now, you're head of content and brand at close, and we'll talk about that. Is that Steli's company, by the way?
Chelsea Castle [00:09:23]:
It is, yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:24]:
Okay. Interesting. I used to listen to him and Heaton's podcast a lot back in the day, and I remember it was close IO. Is it not close IO? Anyway, it's still the website, but now it's just closed.
Chelsea Castle [00:09:33]:
It's just close.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:34]:
Nice. Drop the IO.
Chelsea Castle [00:09:35]:
It's cleaner.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:36]:
Yeah, it's just cleaner.
Chelsea Castle [00:09:38]:
It's funny you bring up stelli because this was, like, seven to ten years ago. I think he was definitely one of the first people kind of leaning into founder led marketing before that was even a thing, and he got burnt down on it, kind of stopped doing it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:49]:
Sure.
Chelsea Castle [00:09:49]:
And yet people like yourself and others know Close because of him and his videos from, like, almost a decade ago.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:56]:
Is he still involved in the company?
Chelsea Castle [00:09:57]:
Oh, yeah, he is. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:59]:
Cool. So he's just kind of, like, done the founder led content thing. Burnt out. Now he's just running the business behind the scenes.
Chelsea Castle [00:10:05]:
Running the business. We are. I guess I can tease. We're doing a little bit of a comeback. So Stelli will be coming back.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:11]:
Nice. I love that because you know what you're doing from a content standpoint. You go inside this company and you're like, hey, this is an advantage. We should be using this guy. He's very good.
Chelsea Castle [00:10:21]:
Yeah. And the content will be founder focused this time in terms of building a company, whereas before it was really heavy on sales.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:27]:
Yeah.
Chelsea Castle [00:10:27]:
Stella, come back.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:29]:
How did you get this job? You were at Lavender for a little bit over a year. What led you to go take a new job and go do something new? Go. Go to a new company?
Chelsea Castle [00:10:38]:
Yeah. Where do I start? So I was at Chili Piper and then Lavender. Really love b, two b SaaS. And sales, especially, apparently can't get away from the sales ICP. And I just love sales now, which is funny as a marketer. But I was at Lavender, enjoying the work I was doing. And Erin, who is our marketing leader here at close, she just outbounded me with like, a beautiful cold email, got my attention. And it was a beautiful fit in terms of what they were looking for, trying to build the brand, and it was a good fit.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:06]:
Didn't bother her that your. I think it was. You didn't bother her that your LinkedIn profile was upside down. Is that you? Was that yours?
Chelsea Castle [00:11:14]:
I did make it right side up, so. But I don't think she cared. That was a fun pattern. Disrupt.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:20]:
That's great. I think that's, that's how you find all the best candidates. You know, we, you can post outbound, but I think you gotta be always recruiting and looking at people, looking for people to kind of build your dream list of, like, who's doing interesting things and who do you want to work with one day? Let's talk about chili. I want to talk about some of your. So you've been in this, like, head of content, director of content, type of role, content and brand at a couple of companies that are very relevant to a lot of people that are listening. So let's rewind back and talk about Chili Piper first, what are some of the things that you did there, content strategy wise, plays that you're the proud of and were impactful on the business with the goal of giving people some ideas of things that they can take into their companies, for sure.
Chelsea Castle [00:12:04]:
I think my favorite and probably one of the most successful that they're still doing today is a content series that we called centers of excellence. I think they've recently rebranded it to be chili experiments. But the whole idea is that we had a written content series that wrote about the work that we were doing internally. So the whole idea was that we were uplifting and highlighting how each function within the Chili Piper company was a center of excellence. So we would write about the experiments happening on the CRO team things that the engineers were doing, the way that the people team were structuring certain aspects of onboarding, some of the really cool things that the SDR teams were doing, different approaches, how we don't discount things like that. So they're still doing it to this day. So it was a way to not only elevate the brand and the company and the work that we were doing, but they were all helpful, relatable stories. So it wasn't super self serving, because they were all relatable things that our audience, our core ICP could learn from.
Chelsea Castle [00:12:58]:
And they're still doing that today. And that's also a play that I think others have replicated. It's one that I want to keep replicating. It's just a really great way to showcase the people behind the company, too, and, like, create valuable content.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:09]:
I think it works because, like, there's so much knowledge stored inside of a company. Just by the nature of what you're doing. You're building, you're at this company. The company is selling to a particular Persona. A lot of people inside of the company are gaining a lot of knowledge and experience about that Persona. The engineers, the product managers, the founders have a vision. The sales leaders are sales team is talking to these people all day. I think that's one of the best ingredients for a content person today.
Dave Gerhardt [00:13:38]:
You have superpower. You can use chat, GPT and perplexity and tool like that. They do amazing research at scale. Pair that with the insights that you're getting from your team and your customers, and walk into a company and have so much stuff to do marketing with. Right?
Chelsea Castle [00:13:54]:
Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, as a former journalist, it's just like you're surrounded by a goldmine of stories. And that, I think, is, like, the most fun aspect of building a brand and building, like, content, like you say all the time with content is marketing, and brand is mobilized into the market via marketing. So, like, content and brand is everything, and you got to start with the story, so you're just surrounded by awesome stories to tell in your company. So that was. Yeah, that was really fun project.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:19]:
What else?
Chelsea Castle [00:14:20]:
What else? Chili Piper still. Yeah, I mean, folks are probably familiar with the mangend chat. Kaylee Edmondson was the host for a while. Now it's Tara Robertson, still going strong. I was a supporter in that we turned a lot into, like, a lot of podcasts into written content that was really beneficial because that's like a really strong feedback loop, right? I think it was Chris Walker who shared recently that for every dollar you spend on marketing, you can increase your revenue ten times. If you're deploying something like a dark social content strategy, which I would say podcasts that have a waterfall distribution effect would be.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:57]:
Can you explain what that means for people that might not be familiar? What is a dark social content strategy? What does that mean?
Chelsea Castle [00:15:03]:
Yeah, that is a term I've only heard Chris use. Dark soul shows the idea of all of these dark channels that we don't have clear attribution for. Right? Like, there's no clear direct line to revenue in terms of saying, oh, these people are talking about you on social. And then they requested a demo, and now they're a customer. It's the idea. The attribution is dark. So what he calls a dark social content strategy is the idea of having some sort of recurring show. Maybe it's a live show, maybe it's webinar, whatever works for you.
Chelsea Castle [00:15:31]:
And having that as a resource. Podcasts, like XFI podcasts would be an example of that. Right? You have these conversations with people. You learn from the audience, qualitatively, quantitatively, what people are liking, what's working, what's not working, what do they want to hear more of what's resonating. So that concept feedback loop is beneficial, but then you have this source of content, almost like the nucleus piece of your content that you can then create other content out of, whether it's an article, a Twitter thread, slice and dice the show into social cuts that you can distribute over the course of a certain amount of time. So it's a really great distribution strategy.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:09]:
Yeah, we're coming up on 200. We'll be doing 200 episodes of this podcast, and we've done basically nothing with the content other than publish the episodes. We haven't had a team until now, but I think we can do so much, and we just hired ahead of content, and I think we can do so much with the existing content we already have. Now, I think there's the easy, basic play, which is like, take all the transcripts, post them with the recordings on our website. That's fine, whatever. But the way that I see it, this type of podcast is me interviewing subject matter experts. You and I are talking about content. Today I talked to somebody about ABM, SEO, dinners, product marketing, fairly specific plays, all the way up to your path to CMO.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:53]:
I think all of that content, we can create so much more content from that by taking the. Like, the words are already there, the plays. Like, we could have newsletter content for two years based on in every interview, I'm getting at least like three to five little nuggets and stories, right? Like last week or two weeks ago, I did a podcast with Natalie Taylor from capsule, and she was telling me how they do dinners. And I ask a lot of questions. I ask about, like, I think some people on podcasts, they're like, oh, that's interesting. You do dinners. Next question. I'm like, no, no, where was the dinner? How did you invite people? What emails did you send? How much did it cost? All that stuff, right? We have like three to five examples of those in 200 episodes.
Dave Gerhardt [00:17:36]:
Imagine if we now use a tool like Chat GPT to summarize that, to find all those learnings, to tease those out. Then our newsletter can become like we're trying to reach b two B marketers. Each week, the newsletter is giving you tactical plays about stuff that happened in b two b marketing. And to get that, all we did was sit here on a Zencastr recording and talk for an hour and get that content. So I think there's a super interesting play there that we haven't really done. Done a lot.
Chelsea Castle [00:18:03]:
And I think most companies, especially content teams, you're always like, okay, if I'm not writing directly from keywords, or maybe if you are, you need to supplement. Where do you get your content ideas? Like, when I joined close and we were focusing a little less on keywords, that was the question. It was like, well, oh, my gosh, if we're not writing off of keywords, what do we do? And that's your answer right there, right? Start with one thing, repurpose it, and then you're going to have this constant feedback loop that I think is probably the most valuable aspect of that strategy, of just listening to your audience and hearing what they want.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:32]:
Don't you think? You can also go the other way, too? If you do want to build a real SEO strategy and do keyword and do the keyword approach, you can basically say, here are all the keywords that are important to us. We probably already have that content in these interviews somewhere. And then let's go and write the content that we need for SEO from these. And so if it's like, we want to rank for product b two B product launch strategy. Oh, wow. Two weeks ago we did a webinar on that topic, and I have an hour transcript of that. The content is in there. And then maybe do a little bit of original research on top of that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:08]:
That's what I think is really exciting about these AI tools, is like, this is all stuff that before would just be so overwhelming and you'd have to hire a bunch of people or give it to an intern and they might not know the field that well. The use case for AI for stuff like that with content, is really interesting to me.
Chelsea Castle [00:19:25]:
I love that idea. I think that's so important too, because then if you're taking that approach and you're writing content that isn't optimized for a keyword, but it's focused on expert voices, you're going to stand out in the search, right? And I think the latest Google API leaks, not like that's probably like a whole other can of worms, but one of the learnings from that, for folks who aren't aware, there were a bunch of documents leaked from Google that gave us insight into how their API works. One of the learnings was leveraging people who have a high index in search, right? So if you're already doing conversations, shows, podcast recordings with experts, and then leveraging their content and SEO optimized articles, then using them in your content is going to positively impact your search as well, in addition to supplying content in the serps that are also valuable and not written for algorithms.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:14]:
So I've never really been good at SEO and I've never driven, like at each bud. I've driven a lot of traffic at each company I've been at through what I would consider more like brand content, or I might even call it gut feeling content, which is, I think we know this audience well and I think I know what we can go and create that's interesting to them. And it gets published on social media channels where there's audience. You use that audience to then drive people to your site and you drive a bunch of traffic that way. And I think that is going to become increasingly more important. There's a thread here with like dark social where basically the future of marketing is like, well, it's happening right now, but you're not going to get attribution data. Like, there's no all these social media platforms. Like, it's not, it's like it used to be the open web and now it's like you can use the web but it's closed.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:05]:
In that if you post a link on LinkedIn, like in your Taylor Swift post, if you had a link on that, the reach of that post dramatically goes down with a link in it. But then also, even if you go to click on a link, these social platforms, they don't want you to leave and so they don't want to drive traffic to your sites. So someone's going to click on that and a lot of those link parameters and stuff is going to get stripped out. We do stuff with sponsors at exit five, and sometimes a sponsor will be like, hey, use this UTM link in your LinkedIn post. And I'm like, no way. It's not going to work. It's going to dramatically limit your reach. And so let's figure out how we can write this offer where there's actually no UTM link here.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:45]:
And I actually listened to. So you mentioned that Google leak. Rand Fishkin was on marketing against the grain with Kip and Kieran, which is a great episode. And he says marketers are going to have to go back to measurement more based on time based measurement. So we did this campaign with exit five over these weeks, and we generated this many signups. Okay, that's good enough to know if this worked or not. It's not going to be this particular post. And I think there's a lot of similar thinking there to what makes a podcast work.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:15]:
If we were at a software company, if you had a podcast that close and you had me on the podcast, and then you were trying to measure how many people signed up from that one episode with Dave, like, you're never, that program's never going to last. But if you have a hypothesis like, hey, this is how people get educated and buy, we want to get people to know, like and trust us. We're going to do it through interesting content. We're going to bring on experts. We're going to have strong point of views about this industry. We're not going to measure the show in weeks and months. We're going to do it in years. Then now all of a sudden, we've been doing this show for two or three years.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:46]:
Or if you talk about Chris, like, they did that, I forget what it was called, but he basically did his podcasts for like two or three years. They didn't think about measuring it, but it showed up in how they brought on new clients. I think that's how you have to think about measuring content. It's not like the 2009 HubSpot original SEO approach, where you can basically rank for keywords just by existing, and then everybody's going to directly convert on that piece of content and it's going to be very easy to measure.
Chelsea Castle [00:23:14]:
It gives me the visualization of billboards where, like my first tech company, we were writing a lot of localized, geographically strategized billboards. There's no way of measuring the exact success of whether somebody typed in the tiny URL that you could see on the billboard, if there was a URL at all, it was all based on time. So if you think about social, to your point, it's like, it's all just kind of like public billboards. You kind of have to do your best guess. And I think I kind of want to push back on the link in the post where. Yes, LinkedIn in theory, right. Doesn't want you to leave. It's like a casino.
Chelsea Castle [00:23:49]:
Like, they want you to stay there and live there and like, not leave. But at the same time, I've experimented with it a lot and it doesn't always hurt the reach, depending on the content quality of the post.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:59]:
Ooh.
Chelsea Castle [00:24:00]:
So I would push back and say, experiment with it, especially because for me, as a user, when people put the link in the, in the comments, I can never find it. It is so frustrating.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:11]:
Well, yeah, because they don't give you the ability to pin it. Why can't you pin a comment?
Chelsea Castle [00:24:14]:
Yeah, and the little pin emoji doesn't work either anymore. It's just so frustrating.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:19]:
I agree with you. I changed my mind a lot. See, there you go. Done. Use links. But you're right. So basically you're saying, like, the delivery of that link matters, and so you have to write a really thoughtful post with the link, add value, give people actually a reason to go and click that link. So what's the like? How, what? Let's just talk through the delivery of that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:36]:
How would you do it?
Chelsea Castle [00:24:37]:
How would I do it? So one way that I've done it in the past is where the content in the article or, sorry, the content in the post. Right. Is. I mean, you kind of said it like it's valuable. It's, it can stand alone. It's what, you know.
Dave Gerhardt [00:24:49]:
Yeah, I kind of answered the question and then asked you the answer.
Chelsea Castle [00:24:52]:
Yeah. Like, it's kind of what you said. You're just like serving value in the content. Right. Rather than, especially if it's like a webinar, for example. So I was on a rev. Genius webinar this morning. If I want to write about it, I'm focused on writing a topic that relates to the webinar but is not directly selling the webinar.
Chelsea Castle [00:25:10]:
So I'm like, writing a story about how the webinar topic, for example, was about building your brand with AI. So I wrote a post about a topic that's related to that, and then I'm promoting the webinar in a link. So I think the value there and the way to do it is the content is not selling link. It's like selling something that's related to the link and providing value so it can stand on its own.
Dave Gerhardt [00:25:34]:
Yeah, that's great. So instead of being like, Thursday, Dave and I are doing a webinar about how to write great cold emails. Here's the link, sign up. The reach of that post is going to be limited because there's going to be low engagement. Right. First, if you happen to write a really compelling, if you write a really compelling post that builds that want for somebody to actually want to go register for that thing and sign up and then you drop the link, it's going to work, is what you're saying.
Chelsea Castle [00:26:00]:
I think companies need to do that too, because from a company perspective, everyone promoting their webinars, like, looks the same, and I'm not hating on that. Like, I do that too. Like to an extent, like they're all going to kind of look the same. So if your content in the post promoting your company webinar has value on its own, it's more likely to get someone's attention, stop their scroll, feel like, okay, they're already offering me value in the post, so then I'm compelled to see what additional value they'll give me in this webinar.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:26]:
Nice. Just from somebody who runs content at a company. When you think of a content strategy, where do you see this type of content marketing that we're talking about, which is social media, podcasts, webinar, it's not very direct. It's more what I would call brand content. But then there's also the more keyword driven content. Where do you see mashing those two things together, especially now? You know, you mentioned how I talk about content is marketing, right? Content is also like, it's not just written content, it's not just blog posts anymore. It's like the head of, like we just hired a head of content here. I bet your role is similar.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:05]:
She owns website content, webinars, podcasts, video, social media, YouTube, TikTok. It can be all of those channels. How do you develop a content strategy that, like, how do you figure out where to play? How do you figure out when to do SEO, when to not? Where do you social your holistic approach to building a content strategy?
Chelsea Castle [00:27:26]:
Another really big question. I'm kind of figuring it out.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:29]:
Well, that's why I get paid. That's why I get paid the big bucks here.
Chelsea Castle [00:27:32]:
The big bucks? Yeah. On my own podcast, I am figuring it out in real time. Honestly, right now in my new role. So a month, two at close and I've got a team this time. So at Lavender I was the only person doing content. I had a marketing team and then I didn't and it was me for a while. So now I've got a team which also changes the dynamics and there's a lot of prehistorical content and things out there. So sometimes when there are listeners out there, when you kind of enter a new role, you're either starting from scratch or you're kind of elevating something, fixing something.
Chelsea Castle [00:28:02]:
I'm entering into like a 13 year old company. So I've got a lot of material to work with and things to figure out. So for me, I don't know if there's like a right or wrong answer to this. I'm kind of separating things into like a content strategy and a brand strategy. Content strategy has like business goals, objectives, content mission statement, understanding our icp, understanding where we're creating content, not just content pillars, but where are our ideas deriving from in regards to SEO, everything to me is SEO optimized. Secondarily. We don't really, historically at close we were very SEO heavy. Now we're focusing more on value over volume, focusing on content that serves our audience, literally asking them like, what do you want? Which every time I say that, people are like, oh yeah, I should do that.
Chelsea Castle [00:28:46]:
Like, yeah, ask your people what they want. And of course the content strategy has like distribution, lots of other components to it. And the brand strategy. For me, I'm kind of going through brand workshops right now with leadership to decide and really discern and hone in like who is close in 2024 compared to like where we have been. And all of this is kind of informing a brand strategy that has more of these components into it. Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:29:11]:
Nice. So you'll do the brand? Okay, I want to ask about brand strategy too. So you're going to do the brand strategy and then you're going to do the content strategy. I did actually recorded this morning with two people on the Monday.com content team and they talked about how they have, the reason they have such a great content motion is because the business strategy and goals are like, they come first and then the content strategy has to match that. And when those things are out of whack, and I seen this at a bunch of companies, the content team is always busy, right? There's always plenty of stuff to do. They're writing newsletters or doing podcasts, we're writing articles. But none of that stuff matters if you can't hit pause and say, hold on. Well, what fits into the business strategy? And then if you think about all the things that I listed out earlier, don't you feel like you have to be realistic and say, yes, all of those things could work, but we can't realistically be effective.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:01]:
We can't be on all those channels. We need to pick one or two core channels. Do you know what I'm trying to get at?
Chelsea Castle [00:30:07]:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think historically that's why a lot of people maybe like some mistakes that other, you know, in previous lives I've been part of where, you know, like a very common mistake I think is focusing too much on SEO because it's easy, right? Like you've got clear topics to write about, some easy attribution there. It's a little easier to focus on it. You can see some like payback, you can see some results or what we think are results. Still a little bit of a black box, but it's a little easier. Like the inputs and outputs are a lot easier. So yeah, I think it's easier to focus now, you know, okay, we're going to do these core projects. These will kind of be like our always on things.
Chelsea Castle [00:30:42]:
And then having a documented content strategy, which I think a lot of people still don't have, enables you to have those conversations. Like you were saying, like, well, that's a great idea, but we can't do that right now or it doesn't align with our strategy. And in regards to the brand strategy, I'm actually doing both at the same time, which I probably would not recommend. But we're in this limbo phase right at close of determining like what do we, because we want to kind of pivot our marketing strategy. So we're taking a crawl, walk run approach to everything. So that's why I'm kind of doing brand and content strategy at the same time to separate the different projects under each. And then that enables us to prioritize.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:18]:
Are you going to take any bets on newer channels, like from a b two B standpoint? I think it's easy to just kind of run the same plays, but I kind of think sometimes now, and we're trying to do this with exit five, I'm like, should we, should we say, like screw having a blog? Like what if our content strategy is going to be YouTube and build YouTube first, or TikTok or short, you know, some type of short form video? Because I feel like in order to be successful on those channels, the mistakes that I've made in the past, and I see other b two B companies make is we do something like this podcast and then we throw it up on YouTube and then it has 31 views. And then we're like, well, YouTube doesn't work for us. Versus, like, if you just, if you actually thought like a creator and focus on creating for that platform first, you might actually be able to build an audience there. Are you thinking about anything like that and trying to, like, do something different than they may have done in the past?
Chelsea Castle [00:32:11]:
I think we're still trying to figure out what our different is for Close. And I think that is the really fun part of brand, right, of humans. Humans are imitative species and I think that's why we tend to see a lot of the same things in b two B, where we talk about b two B is boring. Or I see of sameness. Like, we're all imitative humans, like, by nature. So it's easy to imitate what we see. And I mentioned that because with brand, it's like you might be inspired by what somebody else is doing or, oh, Dave did this at drift or HubSpot did this. You can't just go and do that same thing.
Chelsea Castle [00:32:42]:
You have to be like, you can be inspired by something, but then you should pull it back and think, okay, what is the on brand way to do that for us and our audience? And I don't think people do that enough. So for me, like, our core ICP right now are sellers B, two B SaaS, digital marketing agencies and coaches. They're kind of all over the place. But the core platform that is like the red thread is LinkedIn. So hard to do anything different. So now we're kind of like, okay, what can we do different on LinkedIn if that's like LinkedIn, first thing? Historically, YouTube has done really, really well for us. I do think there's a lot of opportunity, actually for our icps on Instagram. We're not at a point to start experimenting with that quite yet.
Chelsea Castle [00:33:18]:
I. But at Lavender, for example, SGrs were our end user. So TikTok, Instagram actually surprisingly did really, really well for us. I don't know about TikTok for us at close, but, like, I think Instagram has a lot of potential for, like, agencies and coaches, like folks like you and, like, love coaches, personal coaches, life coaches, fitness coaches, they all hang out on Instagram. So I think that'll be, like, a big channel for us to experiment with in the future.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:43]:
Yeah, I just, like, I think there's an opportunity to just make some bets and, like, go where the attention is and try to do something different. The challenge is you have to, a lot of those things take time and it's hard to do it because you have to commit and really like create original content. And so it's like trying to do both. And so I think I like the framework of like 70% of the things can support like, the short term business needs and then, like, can we be spending 30% of our time building like the next couple channels? But I think in your industry, LinkedIn will continue to pay the bills.
Chelsea Castle [00:34:15]:
I'm really bullish on seeing how connected tv plays out, though. We started running some ads for that near the end of my time at Lavender, so I didn't get to see how those, like, performed or what sort of like fruit those bore. But I think that's also really interesting to experiment with.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:31]:
Oh, interesting from an advertising standpoint.
Chelsea Castle [00:34:35]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:36]:
How do you even do that?
Chelsea Castle [00:34:37]:
So I think I, LinkedIn actually just added it to the business manager. So essentially, like playing an ad, I think, from the contractor I worked with when we were doing it before, ten to 20 seconds tends to be like a sweet spot. Ten to 30 seconds maybe, and then your ad is played, you know, on streaming platforms. But I think you can do it through LinkedIn. Business manager, I do. Words not demand yet.
Dave Gerhardt [00:34:59]:
Yeah, all right. That's fine. That's fine. Yeah. As a head of content, how do you or slash, would you like to see content measured? And how should maybe founders or other people, vps of marketing who manage marketing or even future content leaders themselves, how should they think about measuring content? Good luck.
Chelsea Castle [00:35:22]:
Such a good question. I honestly think there's not enough focus and this is maybe even like a product idea around like aggregating and measuring qualitative content. That's what means the most to me, especially at Lavender, we created content that would amass, like, I don't even know, like eight to 12,000 views per month. And I'm talking articles, not like videos. Like, I've never had that kind of views on my articles, which is just insane. But that created conversations with people on LinkedIn, on Twitter. Even in my DM's, people would give me ideas and then I would write about their ideas or their requests and then I could go back and say, hey, I made this thing that you wanted. And, yeah, comments on YouTube, on LinkedIn, when you're sharing your content, like when you're actually distributing it, to your point earlier, like, most people just kind of create something, publish it and move on.
Chelsea Castle [00:36:10]:
Finding a way to aggregate the qualitative data, I think is one of the best ways to start measuring. Even if it's like five people compared to, I think five people who are your ICP saying, this is amazing, this is helpful, this is resonating with me. I took this and applied it today and it helped me close the deal. That means so much more than maybe 1000 views on a LinkedIn post.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:33]:
It also comes back to the business strategy piece of this. Right? If you have a high volume, low touch business, then content is going to drive more sign ups than it would in a model where it's very sales heavy. The role of content is going to be different at the, at those companies. Have you had any experience with measuring, like, content influencing revenue?
Chelsea Castle [00:36:58]:
So we did do this at Chili Piper. We went through several rounds of changing up our attribution models. We were inbound versus outbound 50 50. We kind of tried all bound, went back to the split, did a lot of self reported attribution. And I can't remember the exact tools that we used. I can maybe think about it. But we started measuring what we called QHMSe quality, held meetings, so we were able to see through cookie tracking, event tracking, organizing everything. I think in mode is what we used at the time.
Chelsea Castle [00:37:27]:
I think that's changed since then. What we were starting to see is these individuals read a piece of content or attended a webinar. And it didn't really matter how they converted, whether it was through an SDR or through the inbound form or another form of outbound, we could see the influence. And then we were able to actually have like a beautiful pie chart or a beautiful bar graph saying, like, content specifically, however we defined it. In our event, tracking influenced x amount of pipeline. And it was like reader like engagement to quality held meeting, which is also just like an SQL. Like, did they book a meeting? Was it a high quality lead? And did, was the meeting held? Which of course is a little tricky, right? Because, like, we can't control whether the person shows up or not. But that was like what we decided on.
Chelsea Castle [00:38:11]:
And then did it convert to pipeline so we could directly measure, like influence?
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:16]:
What mistakes do you see companies make with a content strategy? Common mistakes that founders make. Think about content, like, just for people to maybe self diagnose, like, or are we, is this a, is this something that we're stuck on at our company? Or maybe you're taking a new job and you're interviewing and you want to talk about the company, like, what does bad look like? And I'm sure you've seen it. It's not to knock any company. We've all done good work and we've all done work that was not great. And you got, that's how you got to learn. So I'm just curious about what, what you've learned is not the right approach.
Chelsea Castle [00:38:44]:
Yeah, I think my top two things are like skyscraper SEO content, right? Like, I'm not saying it's a bad thing to optimize for SEO or even to think about that. First, Zapier, as most of us know, have built their business.
Dave Gerhardt [00:38:55]:
What does that mean? Scott, what is skyscraper SEO content?
Chelsea Castle [00:38:58]:
Oh, skyscraper content. So say you're looking for, I don't know, you golf, you're looking for like the best golf club and you type it into Google and like five articles come up. This is actually a bad example because people probably don't write it like this, golfing, the golfing world. But maybe they do and they're all kind of similar, right? So most of the time when people are writing for SEO, they're like, okay, I'm going to write about this topic, like, what is a cold email? And then you go see what everyone else is writing about. And then you try to replicate it or write something similar, but you write it longer. You touch on every topic and all of your h two s and h three s and h one s and your meta, and you're just pulling in as much info as you can to try to beat out everyone else saying the exact same thing in the serpse, but you're not actually saying anything different, you're just saying the same things differently. So it's like the skyscraper approach where you're just trying to pull everything in and then you've got this like 5000 word article that's optimized for SEO and maybe it ranks and maybe that like boosts your domain ranking with Google. But then what is that traffic actually netting you? And most of the time, almost all of the time, it's not really netting you anything, it's just a bunch of traffic.
Chelsea Castle [00:40:02]:
So that would be like, number one for me.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:04]:
Do you have an opinion today on the gated content?
Chelsea Castle [00:40:07]:
I have lots of ideas on gated content. I think anyone who knows me knows I talk a lot about not being for gated content. There's a reason for this, right? So, like, the best way to build an audience and build a brand is through trust. And gated content traditionally degrades trust because you're asking somebody like, there's a few different avenues, right? If content is valuable enough to gate, then why not just give it away for free to build that relationship with them, help them to make it easy. The guy was trying to get help a couple weeks ago from JetBlue, I think it was JetBlue. And they make you pay to talk to somebody on the phone. And I'm like, I'm so frustrated. I'm just trying to talk to somebody at this company who can help me and you're making me pay $29.
Chelsea Castle [00:40:49]:
So it's a little different monetary value versus email, but I believe in making it easy to give help to somebody. Typically, gated content is like a bait and switch, right? So hey, we've got this great content. Here's what you'll learn. Give us your email and you'll get it for free. You'll get it for free. And then you check out the article or the content and it's actually not that great. Most content that's gated is not that valuable. So it doesn't create a good experience.
Chelsea Castle [00:41:15]:
And then you're degrading your brand and your trust. Cause now they're associating you with that experience. Just like my JetBlue example. I'm always going to remember that they make me pay for help and that doesn't feel very good as a consumer. So it's the same kind of experience in B two B.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:30]:
Actually, this is kind of somewhat related, but I'm going through an exercise for, I need to set up something like Carta for equity. And I got a, I went through, I did a sales call with them and I got a quote from them and it was a little bit high and it's not what I heard. And so I said, hey, is this really the best price? And I said, actually, no, we can offer this. And then another founder told me to go to this other company because they're good and they're newer. And I went to them and I said, hey, here's all the information. Here's what I'm trying to do. I've already talked to Carta. They told me it's going to be this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:04]:
They said, great, Dave, I'm happy to hop on a call. I said, no, no, I don't want to talk on a call. Here's all the information. I just want to know is what you're going to offer me? Is it going to be better than this price? If it is, tell me what the price is. And then yes, I'm happy to get on a call because I know we got to do that whole thing to make this. They won't tell me the price. They want to get on and do the whole dance with me, I'm like, okay, then unfortunately I'm going to go to Carta, so we'll see how this shakes out. But I just don't understand stuff like that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:42:36]:
I get the sales side wants to control the conversation, but there's nothing you're going to get me to do. It's going to make me go up on price because I already know what it can cost and what it should cost for something. This is a very specific thing. It's not like a custom home design where there's lots of nuance and it just is another example of that. Like, those are just such small opportunities to win customers. I don't understand why we do that.
Chelsea Castle [00:42:59]:
And sales and marketing. Right. Like it's so focused on us that we don't focus enough on the other person.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:03]:
Yeah.
Chelsea Castle [00:43:04]:
And yeah, that distraction like we miss.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:06]:
The tough part about gated content is that it can be really good. So, like, for our business, which is a content business, it's actually the best way to grow our email list. And that's a really important thing for us. And so we have lead magnet offers, which is like, hey, get on our email list and I will send you this deck that we have, which is like my 16 lessons going from PR intern to CMO. And whenever we post about that, it drives hundreds and hundreds of new subscribers to our email list. We want to gate that because that could be content that's free on the website. But I want to use it as an incentive to get people on our list. But that also is different because in our business the size of our list is meaningful because it means we can convert more people to buy community memberships.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:50]:
It also means we can charge more money for sponsors. Sponsors will get a better response, the bigger our list is. But if you're like a B, two B SaaS company and you can basically use like a Apollo or clay or Zoom info and get the information of your customers anyway, that's where it kind of breaks down.
Chelsea Castle [00:44:06]:
Right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:06]:
Like you don't need like email content. Knowing that Chelsea works at close and having her email address is not necessarily like an indication that she's going to buy from you.
Chelsea Castle [00:44:15]:
Exactly. I think that's the confusion. Right. I think gated content too is going through a bit of a renaissance right now of not all gated content is bad. I think when I speak about it, it's typically like a written piece of content where you have to go through a forum. Like typically like a webinar. Right? Like that's technically gated. You have to give your email to get on your calendar.
Chelsea Castle [00:44:34]:
That feels like a different experience than what we're used to when you're trying to download like a PDF or something. And in your lead magnet example, I would bet money that that is like, a valuable content asset that people can keep and save and reference. Most of the time, the content is not that. And the other component of it is what happens after that. Right. You're probably not like having sdrs cold call them because they downloaded your checklist or downloaded your template.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:00]:
Yeah, no, you're right. We're not. It's super valuable. Like, I hand wrote the deck. We had somebody design it, but I really made it. And, yeah, the only thing that happens after is you're just now on our email list and we're going to nurture you until you die.
Chelsea Castle [00:45:14]:
Yeah, I think there's a good way to do it. I think there's a good way to do it. Certain things are gated. A lot of folks these days are also talking about the difference between gated versus exclusive content. I think if there's a high criteria for value of the content and then it's like, subscribe once, access forever kind of vibe, I think that's a little more appealing. And then you can create, like, that can be like a brand moment. Right. You can make them feel like they're part of this, like, inclusive club.
Chelsea Castle [00:45:39]:
Like, maybe they get special swag. Maybe they get to participate in content. Maybe they get to, like, have give feedback. Like, you can make it. It can be a brand moment then, too, if you're making them feel like they're part of something exclusive.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:50]:
Yeah, I love that. I think the biggest myth is, you know, in LinkedIn, we all write very binary, like, takes do this, don't do that. Right. The myths with gated content, does it work to grow your email list? Absolutely. It's that somewhere along the way it got interpreted as some signal of intent and like, oh, Chelsea got this piece of gated content. Let's give her a call. And that's. That whole thing doesn't work.
Dave Gerhardt [00:46:14]:
I was going to ask you maybe real quick. So you're doing this, like, brand exercise now at close to define what your story is, what the brand is. How are you going about doing that? Do you have a particular framework or method that you're using and just kind of quickly want to hear about that process?
Chelsea Castle [00:46:30]:
Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of sharing this externally, because folks tend to be like, okay, like, if I want to help support my company with building a brand. Like, what do I do? Like, brands don't fit neatly into a spreadsheet, right? Like, it's a little more nebulous. So I actually used to work at an agency. So before I got into tech, I was a journalist, and then I worked at a branding agency. So I'm carrying over a lot of the brand strategy work I learned there. And they're just kind of workshops. Like, you can literally Google brand workshops, probably find a whole bunch of different examples. I've created my own that I iterate on throughout the years, and they're usually, like, two to three part sessions, usually just, like, poor leadership.
Chelsea Castle [00:47:06]:
We don't want too many cooks in the kitchen. For us, it was two of our founders, a vp of product, a designer, and my boss. So that's actually a lot of cooks, but it worked out really well. Your founders own the brand story, and then you're, like, the stewards of the story, is the way I like to think about it. So the workshops go through, like, really fun exercises of, like, if we were a car, who would we be if you were a celebrity? We are a superhero. Who are we fighting? Who are, like, the evils of the world that we're fighting against? A lot of these things are also very similar to, like, strategic narrative work and defining your brand story and then some other exercises around, like, honing in your archetype. And all of these things kind of mesh together into, like, distilling into, like, a brand strategy. I don't really know a good way to tangibly tack through, like, how to create a brand strategy, but it's all about creating, like, if we were a person, people tend to have a hard time with brand, I think, because there's, like, not tangible.
Chelsea Castle [00:47:54]:
So you have to, like, imagine the brand as a person and then think, like, what's the personality? What do they wear? How do they sound? How do they talk? How do they talk on the phone versus on the computer? How all of that, like, then informs, like, how your content shows up. A lot of it is then, like, visual identity. And then I think the other thing is, like, brand associations. So chili Piper was a little easier. We had, like, a pepper. We were very like, let's go against the grain. Do things that are different and bold. Spiciness, you know, like, lots of play on there.
Chelsea Castle [00:48:22]:
Lavender was like, we were a color, so we leaned really hard into our color and gamification of the product and wizardry and sorcery, and that led into our website. Even when I did, like, a website redesign, and it was all magical, and we built, like, a game that was also, like, magical and, like, on brand. So all of those things kind of morph together into giving you, like, some direction in terms of, like, who are we as a. As a person in a brand? And then what does that look like in marketing?
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:50]:
Love it. All right, well, we'll have to go check it out. I'm excited to see your work there. Thanks for hanging out with me for a little bit on the exit five podcast. You'll go find Chelsea on LinkedIn, connect with her, follow her for all of her hot takes and screenshots and Taylor Swift lyrics. And she's a viral sensation. But I think you've done a great job building an interesting career and content. I'm excited what you can do with Close.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:13]:
I'll see you soon. Thank you for coming on the podcast. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna see you at drive. I think I saw your name on the. On the list, so we'll see you there. Give you a fist bump when I see you.
Chelsea Castle [00:49:20]:
See you there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:49:21]:
All right. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Chelsea, see you later.
Chelsea Castle [00:49:25]:
Thanks so much.