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Every day marketers sift through dozens of headlines, posts, and slacks telling us about the latest and greatest trend we should be following.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and like you have to figure it out by yourself. But you don’t have to do it alone. Content Matters with Nicole MacLean (Compose.ly’s CRO) is your digital partner for filtering the trends and focusing on the content that matters most — creating connection that drive results.
For more, head to our site: https://compose.ly/content-matters
Produced in partnership with Share Your Genius: https://shareyourgenius.com/
James Furbush [00:00:00]:
Our buyer wants to hear from our buyer. Right. They don't necessarily want to hear from us. And so by having our prospects and buyers and customers and things in our content, it allows potentially other people in the industry to see themselves in our content through us.
Nicole MacLean [00:00:20]:
I'm Nicole MacLean and this is Content Matters, created in partnership with Share Your Genius. Our show consists of three parts. One where we pull in other Compose.ly team members to talk about content that matters to you, like a viral LinkedIn post or the latest trend. The second always includes an in depth interview with a leading marketer, sharing actionable insights and a little inspiration. And finally, you won't want to miss the last segment, aptly called Friends Matter, where we're shouting out some of your friends and mine for their content wins in B2B marketing. Let's cut through the marketing chaos together. Ashley, welcome back to the show.
Ashley Strosnider [00:01:00]:
Thank you. So glad to be here.
Nicole MacLean [00:01:02]:
Yes, I have to say I do think that your Compose.ly chat has been one of our most popular of the entire show.
Ashley Strosnider [00:01:11]:
I'm honored.
Nicole MacLean [00:01:12]:
So we're honored that you would come back to share your knowledge with us.
Ashley Strosnider [00:01:16]:
Thanks everybody.
Nicole MacLean [00:01:17]:
For those of you who missed out on this famous episode segment, Ashley is the chief editor at Composely, so she is the go to on all things content Editing, writing, which is exactly what we're going to talk about today. All things literally on writing and editing. So it's very apropos. Okay, I don't know what it is, but recently we've been getting so many more asks about like we just need you to edit this or can you have a subject matter expert person review this but like don't change anything, but only change this. Or we wrote this stuff with AI, but can someone edit it? And I think when we actually get down to understanding and defining what they want, it never really is actually editing. And so I thought it would be good just to maybe help non career writers or career editors better understand the nuances so that they can have just more collaborative conversations with a writing resource.
Ashley Strosnider [00:02:13]:
Sure. So that makes me think I have similar conversations all the time about what is writing, what is editing, who does what is the editor. Just, you know, I'll go to parties and people are like, oh, about to correct my grammar. And it's not at first you said.
Nicole MacLean [00:02:29]:
I'm going to parties and I'm like, why are you talking about writing when you're at parties?
Ashley Strosnider [00:02:33]:
That's a great question. Because people are like, well what do you do? These are not fun parties, right? These are like dinner Parties.
James Furbush [00:02:38]:
Yeah.
Ashley Strosnider [00:02:39]:
And people hear you're an editor, and they're like, oh, great. You're gonna know everything I'm saying wrong. And it's not that in life. It's not that in content editing either. It's really, as a content editor, I think of the rule more as about just trying to improve the content quality. Yes. If there's a typo, I'm gonna fix it. If there should be a comma here, I'm gonna add it.
Ashley Strosnider [00:03:01]:
If this sentence doesn't match the brand voice, let's tweak it.
Nicole MacLean [00:03:04]:
Maybe if Nicole made up a word in our marketing copy, Ashley's gonna gently tap me on the shoulder.
Ashley Strosnider [00:03:10]:
Mm. Cause it's gonna help in the end.
Nicole MacLean [00:03:13]:
It does.
Ashley Strosnider [00:03:14]:
A lot of it, too, is about reader intent, the flow of the copy. Does it make sense? Are we answering people's questions? And I think that's where writers can get. I don't want to say lost, because they're not lost, but they've got a content brief. They've got a lot of information they need to put in here, and they're doing a bunch of research on the side, trying to figure out the best way to organize it. And so it's not that they're lost, but it's that we've got this draft with a lot of stuff in it, and then the editor comes in with fresh eyes and can say, okay. I think, though, with this keyword, what are people probably searching for? Let's. Let's tweak. Sometimes you get lucky.
Ashley Strosnider [00:03:50]:
You have a really organized brief. Somebody else has already thought through this for you. But a lot of what editors do is really just try to smooth it out and think about, at the end of the day, the reader who's going to read this. We're really trying to help them have the best time reading it and learn as much as they can or be inspired in whatever way they're supposed to be inspired to take the next steps, which makes sense.
Nicole MacLean [00:04:14]:
And a lot of people don't have the luxury of having maybe a writer and an editor on staff. And so I think there has been this conglomeration where you think if you're getting someone who writes, they are an editor, and vice versa. If you have an editor, well, of course they must be a really great writer. If, like, it's just kind of one and the same. At what point does it become, okay, I can't edit this anymore. It needs to just be rewritten.
Ashley Strosnider [00:04:38]:
It's a good question. And I think, to be fair to people who make this assumption. There is a lot of crossover in skill set. Not every writer is going to get all their grammar right. Not every editor is going to be voicey or be able to tell the whole story. But I think that, you know, when it comes down to, oh, can we just edit this, or do we need to rewrite it? A lot of the questions that that raises for me are like, okay, how much knowledge is involved? Is everything I need to know already in this piece? If yes, maybe I can do what I would call line editing. You know, is there a writer I can kick this back to? And here's some comments you might want to expand here. Develop this idea more.
Ashley Strosnider [00:05:19]:
If there's not a writer in the loop, then I need all of the information already in that document to then be able to tweak. If it's something where, hey, we need to reframe this. We're doing a rebrand. This isn't quite how we talk about this anymore. Like, okay, how do you talk about it now? Things like that, or like, hey, this is fairly outdated. We gotta go do some more research and add more recent stats because this thing has really changed. Then, okay, could I do that, like, as a person? Probably, but that's typically in content marketing workflow anyway. That's the kind of stuff writers are doing.
Ashley Strosnider [00:05:53]:
Here's your topic, here's your challenge. Do the research, find out what's out there right now and come up with a good solid draft. So that kind of heavier lift stuff, I would say it's likely better to have a writer in the loop because they're your researchers. They're editors too. But good SEO writers are thinking about search intent, how to frame this, what else is out in the market right now? What are our competitors doing? How should we organize this so we can rank editors? Think about that too. But just the more people you can have in the loop on something that's a heavy lift, the better, I think.
Nicole MacLean [00:06:28]:
I think that's helpful. Any tips you would give to maybe a marketer who is content adjacent, but they wouldn't identify as a writer. How can they have a good conversation to kind of figure out the resources they need, how to get a piece ultimately to be at the level that they're looking for?
Ashley Strosnider [00:06:46]:
Yeah, that's a good question. My first question would be like, okay, what piece are we talking about? And does it exist yet in any form or not?
Nicole MacLean [00:06:56]:
Yes, I think that's a good point. Maybe both is like, hey, we have something that our CEO wrote and there's some good nuggets but it's not ready to go. And then something that maybe let's look at, hey, I did this in AI and I just need someone to like take a look at it.
Ashley Strosnider [00:07:14]:
Yeah, I think those are a couple pretty common scenarios. I think there are follow up questions which we don't have to get into all of them. I'll just list some because it may be helpful for people, you know, like mental checklisting, like, okay, do we have an existing draft? Who wrote it, and how much do we trust them? Because I think the answer, if it's the CEO, we trust the knowledge here. We maybe don't trust the brand voice or the organization or the commas or whatever. If it's AI, okay, we trust that this is clean and readable, but do we think it's right? Like we, we don't know. So I think those are very different content scenarios, you know, and if you're asking me to edit them, then I'm like, okay, well my next question is, what do you want to do with this content? Is the CEO piece? Is it going on LinkedIn? Is it okay for it to be thought leadership? This is the discoverability question comes into play where you're planning to publish it. If you want this to drive organic traffic to your site, then we probably need to weave these nuggets as quotes into a broader SEO play. And then we need to be thinking about topic ideation, the kind of keywords we want to target, and then use those quotes to build authority within a broader piece.
Ashley Strosnider [00:08:24]:
And that's probably where you want SEO support and writer support, you know, and on the AI side, like, do we trust it? I don't know. What should we do with it? Sometimes it's solid. I think we talked about AI last time, but so much of the output you get from AI depends on what you've given it and how good the prompt is. So if somebody asks me to edit a piece they drafted with AI, then I'm like, how much do I trust you? How did you prompt this thing? What does it know about your business? And you can get pretty far with good prompts. So having conversations like that too, you know, if you're like, we've got this content creation process, we need it cleaned up or we need it, whatever we need done with it. Sometimes what you need done is fact checking, and that's a whole other career. I'm not a professional fact checker. Sometimes you just need it tweaked for brand voice and that's different.
Nicole MacLean [00:09:14]:
Sure.
Ashley Strosnider [00:09:15]:
Like we can line edit that so it sounds more like the rest of your blog because your custom GBD didn't quite get there because it's still talking like a robot. And that's not how you want to sound.
James Furbush [00:09:27]:
I'm James Furbush, I'm the Vice President of Marketing at a company called AccessOne.
Nicole MacLean [00:09:34]:
What does AccessOne do?
James Furbush [00:09:35]:
Yeah, I'm glad you asked. So AccessOne, we are in the healthcare patient payments space. So within healthcare patients, when they have to pay their bill, we basically make tools and services for hospitals and health systems in order to make it easy and affordable for patients to pay their medical bills. And so we basically, we have two main products. One is what I call the easy button. It's a sort of text to pay. So if you've ever gone to the doctor, you've gotten your bill, chances are pretty good that that bill is arrived in an envelope via the mail. And then you have to figure out, okay, do I have to log into a portal or whatever? It's a very kludgy and antiquated kind of way to pay bills.
James Furbush [00:10:22]:
So our mobile pay product, instead of mailing it, we can text it to you. So we text you the statement and then because it's on a mobile device, it has the payment credit card on file. You can just pay directly from that same pane of glass. So that's one and then the other one is it's like patient financing program. So we offer 0% interest loans to patients for if you go to the hospital and you have a very large bill that you can't afford, which is often the case now because of high deductible health plans. And so if you get a bill and you're like, geez, it's $1,000 or whatever it is, most patients can't pay in full if it's more than $500. So if a health system partners with us, we enable their patients to pay that sort of balance back over time, interest free, in a way that sort of works for them and their families.
Nicole MacLean [00:11:15]:
What a meaningful mission.
James Furbush [00:11:17]:
It's very meaningful and it's become only more meaningful over the last 10 years and change not just for patients, but for hospitals and health systems too. I don't want to necessarily get on my soapbox because I know we're talking about content, but even for hospitals and health systems, our partners, they are losing revenue because it's so hard to collect from patients. Most patients actually don't pay their bills back, frankly. And as a result, hospitals and health systems lose enormous amounts of revenue that they have to write off to bad debt and just basically hope and pray that they will be able to collect. In some ways, the money that they lose out on by not collecting, you know, can be 30, 40, 35% of their total revenue. In some ways, if you think about it like they're losing out on being able to hire doctors and nurses, staffing ICU beds, providing more care. So the more that they can collect on that side, the more care that they can provide. It just creates this cycle.
James Furbush [00:12:18]:
So we feel super passionate that we're helping patients. Absolutely. They need help paying their bills. Healthcare in the US has become so expensive and we're also helping hospitals and health systems. And so I think we're sort of bridging what we call it is we're bridging that affordability gap that has happened in healthcare. And so yeah, it's a super important mission that I think everyone at AccessOne is. When we start talking, I do think that sort of passion comes through.
Nicole MacLean [00:12:45]:
Absolutely. I'm really excited for this episode in particular because last episode we had an expert in SEO and we talked all about the good, the bad, the evolution of SEO and having you and talking about where you sit. Not that SEO can't be helpful and isn't a great tactic, but you are in a very clear niche market. You have a very clear icp, you know who you're going after from a target market. Sometimes those content for SEO isn't necessarily the top priority. So I'm interested to be able to compare and contrast the two different strategies for our listeners that may be live in both camps and especially when you think of the regulatory pieces that I'm sure you have to balance in content too. So just give the maybe roadmap for our listeners of where we're probably going to dive in. But how does content take a role in your marketing strategy?
James Furbush [00:13:43]:
I mean it's basically everything. So content is everything for us. We are very much content-led growth I think on the marketing side. And the reason for that is our deal cycles are not fast.
Nicole MacLean [00:13:59]:
Probably what a year long sales cycle isn't uncommon.
James Furbush [00:14:02]:
A year if that's a fast deal. I think we had a deal recently close in nine months, 13 months. And it was like.
Nicole MacLean [00:14:10]:
That was like lightning.
James Furbush [00:14:12]:
Lightning. An anomaly. I mean our deals are probably closer to 18 months plus. Ish. 15 months. 18 like they're a year plus and sometimes longer too.
Nicole MacLean [00:14:23]:
Right.
James Furbush [00:14:23]:
I think we have an account we've been working. I was just talking to the sales guy, one of my sales guys counterparts and we Were like, did we do that RFP? Was that a year ago, Two years ago? Like, it was so long ago, we couldn't even remember, like, exactly when we had done that RFP. So for us, content is hugely important to marketing for a few reasons. One, we need a reason to continuously engage and nurture accounts once they are that long, right? So people are not coming to our website to do an online product demo and then just signing up for the product a week later. We are buying committees, right? It's like five plus people. And that includes, like, the cfo, our buyer, head of it.
Nicole MacLean [00:15:13]:
Oh, head of it is a rough one, too.
James Furbush [00:15:15]:
There's a lot of scrutiny on our deals because it's health care, right? It's selling to a hospital and health system. Sometimes they can be so gnarly. The buying committee, because it's like an academic medical center that's owned by a college, and that college is actually a state college. And so not only are you selling to the hospital and health system, but you're also selling to, like, the state government. So it's like you've got buying committees to evaluate the buying committees to influence. You know, it's like, insane, as you would think. So that's one. And then two is content is so important as well, because it allows us to sort of build relationships at scale.
James Furbush [00:15:55]:
Our sales teams can't be everywhere. They can't be working every account. They can't be doing all the things that they need to do. You know, we run very lean. And so for us, content and sort of some of the things that we do allows us to build relationships at accounts and sort of do that in a way that feels good, right? Like, we have a podcast. We've gone kind of all in on video and social, things like that. And so sort of that allows us to feature the buyer, right? Like, I do think there's something to be said that product content and all that is super important. I don't want to necessarily, like, brush that aside, but for us, I think our buyer wants to hear from our buyer, right? They don't necessarily want to hear from us.
James Furbush [00:16:39]:
And so by having our prospects and buyers and customers and things in our content, it allows potentially other people in the industry to see themselves in our content through us.
Nicole MacLean [00:16:52]:
Yeah, I love what you said on video social and the featuring the buyer is such a great strategy of content. I almost see you furthering your mission of bridging a gap. You know, your product and services can bridge a gap between patient and healthcare, but even your content's Bridging a gap between buyers at different hospitals so they can learn from each other.
James Furbush [00:17:14]:
I would agree with that. I think one of the things that I noticed. So we do our podcast. Our show is called The RCM Ladder. So we sell to revenue cycle management professionals. It's a very sort of niche job title, but it's become a very important one in healthcare. And essentially you can think about it as like, they are basically like the operation and financial professionals within a health system. So they do everything from scheduling a patient visit to collecting payment and dealing with like insurance.
James Furbush [00:17:46]:
So it sort of runs the gamut all throughout the the health system. They almost at this point do everything but provide clinical care. You know, there are some trade shows, trade publications and things that are really important in that space. But there also wasn't a lot of like, if you're a revenue cycle professional, how do you go from, I'm doing the front desk check in, but I actually want to be a manager or vice president. It's just very basic, like professional development content. And so we sort of took our podcast and made it a professional development podcast for revenue cycle professionals. So it took a lot of research to figure out where there was a gap in the market in terms of like the content being developed. Because you can go anywhere and it's like, here are the metrics you need to care about and here's how you should do this and measure that and do this system.
James Furbush [00:18:36]:
But there wasn't really a lot of like, what do you need to do if you're at a large hospital and whole system, like, how do you stand out and what are the things you need to do? So the idea was to then be able to go and interview like VPs and directors and then get their advice and talk to them about their careers and really learn their story and figure out like, how they got where they got to and then be able to like share that back, repackage it and share it back up a million different ways with the industry, other people in the industry so well, and that's so.
Nicole MacLean [00:19:08]:
Smart knowing that you have the long game. You're already in the long game with your sales cycles. So going and kind of building those relationships with the future leaders, your future buyers, and building that brand relationship.
James Furbush [00:19:21]:
And that's another point too, which is really great, which is like, we almost could interview managers and open up to different titles because, yeah, like in five or 10 years, maybe some of those people will be in an elevated role and then they've sort of been familiar and experience and had A good positive experience with access 1. Know who we are, know what we do. Not to say that they will buy, but at least part of the challenge I think for a lot of marketers is really like how do you just get into that, that one to three vendor choice set? Right. Because it's like buying habits have changed when people buy. By the time they're talking to sales, they've already got probably the one or two companies in mind. We're not a big space, so we do have a lot of competitors, but like not a ton. And so it's really like how do we kind of position ourselves to be in that sort of early choice?
Nicole MacLean [00:20:14]:
Do you think that's where marketers should be thinking now or do you think it's dependent on the industry in the space? But is it marketer's job just to get the brand in the top three considerations and it's sales's job to win?
James Furbush [00:20:27]:
I mean, that's a loaded question. Again, like I, you know, I think.
Nicole MacLean [00:20:30]:
I don't even know that I agree with that necessarily, but I'm just curious.
James Furbush [00:20:33]:
Yeah, well, but again like it's also different, right? It's like you've got companies that are very product led companies that are everyone's go to market strategy in some way is so unique. Unique to the business and the product and, and things like that. What I will say is for us, we're a sales led company. It's like sales is super important. We're not getting business without sales. And so because of that, I guess.
Nicole MacLean [00:20:57]:
My statement only really applies to sales led. Well, but product led is a good call, is a good call out.
James Furbush [00:21:03]:
Yeah, but I do think it for me marketing's job is not just to get in that top three. Right. Because part of it is then like at the end of the day, like I want to do everything I can to make the job of sales as easy as possible. And part of that is making sure that we're one of the top three companies in consideration that when they do cold outreach, they're positioned for success because they have heard of AccessOne and it's not like going to go to the spam folder or just get deleted that at least like that email will get opened because they've touched AccessOne through a ad or a trade show or podcast or something. Right. That they have a familiarity with our brand but then on down through the buying cycle that it's like they have the resources to succeed, they have the right sales deck, they have the right materials to educate and do all that stuff. So it's a lot. I think getting into that top three is one small piece of it.
James Furbush [00:22:00]:
One small piece of at the end of the day, setting our sales team up to be as successful as they can.
Nicole MacLean [00:22:08]:
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James Furbush [00:23:24]:
Yeah. And I think that that is everything from awareness to account intelligence, competitive intelligence, pricing, packaging. I mean all that stuff. Right. I do think that marketing for a long time. Yeah. Hasn't done a necessarily a great job at telling that full story of like everything that we touch. I often sometimes feel like what's the scene in Lion King where Mufasa looks at everything.
James Furbush [00:23:50]:
Everything the light touches is like your kingdom. And sometimes I feel that's kind of about marketing.
Nicole MacLean [00:23:55]:
I agree. Sometimes I don't think the other kingdoms understand that. But that's our job is to, like you said, make sure that we're not just marketing externally, but we're. It comes up a lot on the show the importance of internal enablement and marketing. The work we're doing and making sure sales does know the right pitch deck and that a resource does exist for this situation is just as important. And you mentioned earlier when we were prepping that one of the biggest challenges of podcasting is finding great guests and organizing all of that. But you know, like a really genius way of again Connecting the podcast back to your audience. Can you share that with our listeners?
James Furbush [00:24:34]:
Yeah. So I had a hard time getting the initial kind of roster of guests for what I would call season one. And I was looking for about 13 episodes just as like, here's a test pilot. And I wasn't getting much traction internally with CS and sales at the time. I didn't have like the biggest, like, just people I knew who I could like, hey, I'm doing this thing. Can you help? What I did have is I knew this woman and we were connected on LinkedIn. She had run a couple webinars, industry webinars. She ran a sort of events content business that would do webinars and things thought leadership for revenue cycle professionals.
James Furbush [00:25:17]:
So like our buyer, core buyer and I attended a few and we were connected and a little bit friendly on LinkedIn. And so I like reached out, I sent her a message and I was like, hey, Kay, this is the dumbest idea I've ever had, but I'm going to shoot my shot. Do you have like 15 minutes? If I can like, just run something by you. And so she was like, all right, I'm intrigued. Let's hop on a zoom. So we hop on a zoom. And I'm like, do you have this great network of webinars that are well attended? I'm like, I'm launching a podcast and I'm looking for guests. And I was like, so I would love to tap into your network so if you would make intros for me to be on, you know, I explained her what the podcast was about and what we were trying to do.
James Furbush [00:25:58]:
And so I was like, if you would make intros to help me book guests, I was like, in exchange for every guest who comes on the show that you made an intro for, I will cut a sort of 30 second spot promoting your organization. So I'll promote your community and it'll be a whole thing. I'll like write the ad, I'll record it so it'll sound kind of native. Like, it'll just be like me reading and be like, hey, this episode brought to you by like our good friends at. And I'm totally blanking on the organization's name. Sorry, Kate. If you're listening to this and it's.
Nicole MacLean [00:26:34]:
Fine, they just have to go listen to the show. Just have to go check out.
James Furbush [00:26:37]:
And I was like, and I'll drop it in right after the intro. We'll create a video version. So we'll drop it right in. In the intro after the YouTube, it'll be one of those things where it can't be skipped. You know, you could fast forward, but you can't really skip through it. She was like, awesome. Love it. She was just like, tell me what you're looking for.
James Furbush [00:26:56]:
And then within a week, she all of a sudden just these like, hi, so. And so I want to introduce you to James, like, my good friend, like, da, da, da. So I booked probably, she said probably 25 introductions. And I think we booked, you know, we got almost all 13 episodes from the first season through that. And there were probably another three to four that we, you know, four or five, I don't know how many that just didn't end up getting scheduled for one reason or another. But yeah, so that works out enormously well, like tapping into someone else's network and basically just giving them, like, free publicity. So I used our platform to give her organization free publicity, and she in turn introduced me to a ton of good guests. So, yeah, that proved to be an interesting strategy.
Nicole MacLean [00:27:47]:
I think sponsorship and commercial, or however you want to say it in a B2B podcast is significantly underused as a strategy. Whether it's to build goodwill with a partner or a community, it can be authentic and it doesn't have to be cheesy. And you call the next 10 minutes, you get blah, blah, blah. You know, you want it to still feel authentic. But I feel like that's one of the things for people who are doing B2B podcasts that don't take advantage of that as a piece.
James Furbush [00:28:16]:
Yeah, I mean, it definitely got me thinking about just tapping into that. Like, there's a lot of great, like, healthcare newsletters that always have, like, ad spaces in them, promotional spaces and things like that where like, oh, I wonder if, like, partnering with them to just put our name out. Yeah, so it did get me thinking about how, like, an underrated strategy is definitely. Like, there are communities and networks probably in any given industry. It's definitely oversaturated. I would say, like, in the martech, like, if you spend any time on LinkedIn, like marketing, sales, tech, it's like every company has a slack community. And, like, so there's a lot. And it's kind of an easy play, certainly when you're in that space.
James Furbush [00:29:03]:
But I would say, even if you're not in that space, like, even in health care, like, there's a lot of communities you can tap into. Probably there's. If you're in a services business, there's probably a lot of communities you can tap into. That definitely an underrated approach for. For sure in marketing because you have.
Nicole MacLean [00:29:19]:
To authentically be a part of that community. As marketers, you and I are probably in a lot of those Martech and marketing and the ones that are great. You know, I think of 6sense, the CMO Coffee Chat is one of theirs. It's special because you have people who just genuinely want to help and share their knowledge or connect. And it isn't just a glorified sales pitch. It is authentic community and you have to actually build that and a sixth sense or whoever is organizing the community, you have to steward that authentic connection. And then if you're going to be a part of it, you have to kind of meet that where it is. And if you just come in and pitch all the time, it's not going to actually get you what you're looking for.
James Furbush [00:30:02]:
It's so hard too because I would say like I have the utmost respect for anyone who is doing that and hasn't, especially on the vendor side and hasn't sort of turned it into a consistent sales pitch because I, I would imagine there's a lot of downward pressure right. Right from the C suite to that sort of community manager where it's like how are we not leveraging this for more pipeline and sales and blah blah, blah and all that and sort of to. To really keep that pristine and gated, I would imagine is an enormous challenge. It's why I would probably never want to launch a community myself. Like I just, I'm getting anxiety just thinking about that. And so it's like much respect to the people who do it and do it well because yeah, I would think that that's just such an enormous challenge.
Nicole MacLean [00:30:49]:
Well and I think you're bringing up some interesting ideas of when you are a small team and you have to be scrappy regardless of size. I mean to point AccessOne has great revenue, great growth compared to, you know, a 1 million seed startup comparison. You don't want to ever spend money erroneously or to point. And so there are some of these tactics that are kind of scrappy and can be really effective. And I've always been such a fan of the partnership, collaboration. Find two people and find mutual win for them like you did in kind of that story that you shared. And I feel like we need to do more of that with each other.
James Furbush [00:31:29]:
Yeah, I would say generally I'm not a fan of spending your way out of problems. I've sort of been in an environment before where that was the case and it is like acquire it.
Nicole MacLean [00:31:41]:
Yeah. At all costs.
James Furbush [00:31:42]:
Which is fine. I mean, if you have the, if you have that, great. But what I will say is, what, what's fun? I think about marketing and content and the challenge or whatever is like, when you have constraints, when it's like, I don't have money, so gonna hit this number, I don't have resources, like, how do I do this? And so it is like, that's where I think a lot of the fun happens, where a lot of the magic happens, where a lot of the fun, where it's like, how do I think through these challenges in a different way or in a way where I can't spend money, but I still have to kind of achieve the same outcome? And I think I tried to listen more when I say, oh, God, that's like the dumbest idea ever. And then like, actually not dismiss it where it is. Like, okay, that's a dumb idea, but I'm going to listen to it and see where it goes. Because I think sometimes if you have those, like, dumb ideas, they are actually probably, probably some of the best ideas.
Nicole MacLean [00:32:40]:
Welcome to another edition of Friends Matter. This week we're celebrating our friends over at MyFitnessPal. If you joined our webinar series last May, then you likely heard from Lauren Joskowitz, the editorial director at MFP, talk about how she and her team used the blog to experiment with new product ideas, specifically creating a macro calculator. Well, fast forward to today and this asset has gone through additional iterations, adding more content and a guided calculator based on competitor options, and it's now generating over 35,000 organic sessions every single month. That is just absolutely insane and really, really cool that we've gotten to follow alongside that journey and see an idea like that drive such success. Huge congrats to you, Lauren and the MFP team. And if you know a marketer that's doing cool things, tell us about them. You can head over to Compose.ly Friends Matter to nominate. That's Compose.ly Friends Matter. Thanks for listening to this episode of Content Matters, created in partnership with Share Your Genius. If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a review and share with a friend. Otherwise, you can find all the resources you need to stay connected with us in the show notes. Till next time.