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95% Content is a show for B2B content teams who want to build trust with the 95% of buyers who are out-of-market today, but will be ready to buy in the future.
You can call it many different things: content marketing, demand creation, brand marketing, dark social, or zero-click content.
No matter what you call it, the goal is the same.
You want to reach future buyers on the social and content platforms they hang out on every single day, and in a way that compels them to want to work with you when they’re ready.
We’re going to cover how B2B companies can win with things like: organic social, short-form video, podcasting, YouTube, newsletters, webinars, and communities.
Because the best way to win today is to already be on your buyers short-list the day they decide they need a solution.
On this show hosted by Erik Jacobson, we’re going to explore how B2B content teams can do exactly that.
Erik Jacobson (00:01.496)
Dave, good to have you back on the show,
Dave G. (00:03.657)
It's good to see you. We finally got to hang out in person and we had a three hour breakfast, which easily could have been a two day breakfast. And that was, it was awesome. And it just re reiterated my belief in like just getting outside of my house and going and hanging out in person. That was something that we wouldn't, can't replicate in, in over zoom. And I hope there's more of that to come. So.
Erik Jacobson (00:09.614)
You
Erik Jacobson (00:26.978)
Likewise, and yeah, the reference you're making there is the exit five team and you all had an event in Boston and I went and joined that. You and I have been hanging, been friends, been working together for, I don't know, like three or four years now. It's like crazy. This is the first time we met up. To your point, we probably could have talked for like two days straight, so we had to cut it short. But yeah, good to catch up here. I think the last time you were on this show was maybe like eight or so months ago.
I know like one of the things that I consider you to be the best in the world at and that I think is becoming increasingly and ever more important at the same time is this concept of like the timeless marketing principles, timeless content principles, timeless marketing principles. And all you open up LinkedIn, pretty much all you see every day now is like,
Buzzword, Buzzword, AI, the new ABM play, brand, yeah, yeah, the YouTuber like shocked face, like brand, brand, what is the definition of brand marketing? Let's argue about this for six hours. And like the real thing is like all of this, if we just take a step back and just remind ourselves, like we are marketing to people at companies, have, we've built a product around a basis of,
Dave G. (01:39.617)
Sure.
Erik Jacobson (01:55.552)
a problem that we can solve in a differentiated way and how do we get the attention, awareness, affinity, trust so that they purchase from us. So you had a great post like two weeks ago and you just listed off in bullet point fashion like 20 timeless marketing principles. So my thought here is today, let's go through these one by one to see what comes up.
Dave G. (02:11.199)
Yeah.
Dave G. (02:15.617)
Okay. All right, wait, can I first give you the why, why I like this stuff? So when I was working at Drift, David, who is the CEO and founder over there, he was the one that put me on this initially. And it was kind of my first real marketing job where I was actually responsible for doing the doing. You know, I could, had the keys to the website and copy and email and everything and HubSpot.
Erik Jacobson (02:20.278)
Yes.
Dave G. (02:39.817)
And I was going down this path of this, was a new startup and I was trying to like, was obsessed with all like the growth hacking, growth marketing of that era, all the SaaS, you know, experiments and all that stuff. And he basically saw in me more of a copywriter storyteller. have this ability to get people's attention, to tell stories, to write hooks and headlines. And he was like, Hey, don't, don't try to become something you're not. Don't become this like, you know, spreadsheet driven marketer. And that's not to say that I don't.
You use spreadsheets don't measure anything. do believe in the funnel, right? But he was like, go, go study like the timeless principles in marketing because we're in this world of B2B, SaaS and everything is the same. Go back and study copywriting, advertising, direct response marketing, know, Claude Hopkins, Eugene Schwartz, David Ogilvie, Bill Birnbach. And it's almost like, you know, politics and whatever you're, you're hearing about in the media today. It's like, I love reading history because when you go back and read history,
you're like, man, this is just the same stuff. Like the political conflict that's happening in the country today could be compared to something that happened in the 1600s somewhere. And that's just because we're all people and yes, we change and evolve, but the roots of how we are and how we operate, go read like Yuval Harari's book, Sapiens, right? Just a study of humans and people. And so,
Erik Jacobson (04:02.478)
Yeah.
Dave G. (04:06.165)
going back and reading these copywriting books, like I'd be reading, I think it was called Scientific Advertising from Claude Hopkins, maybe it was written in like 1927. I remember like highlighting every page and I'm sending it I'm like, this was 2016 and I'm like, everything in this book is like what we're dealing with right now. And recently I took a break from reading marketing books and I got back into something recently and I reread Seth Godin's Purple Cow. And the concept in Purple Cow is like,
If you're driving down the highway, and you know, I'm in Vermont, you see lots of cows, right? Cows are either brown and white or black and white or maybe they're Oreo, Oreo cows. Nobody talks about the cows because you see them all the time, right? But if you're driving down the road and all of a sudden you see a purple cow, you're gonna tell everybody about that damn purple cow. And I'm talking to founders today, I see people in the Exit community, it's more important than ever, like how do you stand out, how do you be different?
Purple Cow was written in the early 2000s. I reread another book of Seth Godin's called Permission Marketing, which was written right before 2000. And I'm like, man, this is all the same stuff. It's all the same stuff. And Matt on my team has been pushing me because I, and I talked to you about this at breakfast. I'm like, sometimes I have this thing where I'm like, I haven't been a CMO in a while. What do I know? And he's like, dude, but you know the timeless stuff. And you said the same thing. I think you said this line, either you or Matt. I don't know who I'll give credit to this line to, but they were like.
Erik Jacobson (05:21.571)
Yes.
Dave G. (05:27.145)
Seth Godin hasn't been a CMO for 30 years. know, nobody sees his posts and is like, what does this guy know? And so I do think the timeless stuff is important. And I also think it's therapeutic in some way where I've been going crazy. I know you have too. It's like the pace of which innovation is happening in AI and business and marketing in particular today is just insane. You open up LinkedIn and every single day it's a headline, breaking news, this.
Erik Jacobson (05:29.742)
You
Erik Jacobson (05:39.106)
Yes.
Dave G. (05:52.511)
this Gemini update, this Perplexity update, this ChatGPT update, you know, it's itches every week, it's new, new, new, new, new, and I think it's important to stay up on that stuff. But I think you have to take a step back and understand some of the principles. And so I love this topic and I'm happy to dive into that with
Erik Jacobson (06:08.748)
Yeah, it's like the discipline of marketing has been around for 4,500 years. They didn't have self-report, they didn't have like digital touchpoint attribution. And there were billion dollar companies created 200 years ago, 300 years ago, 400 years ago. And their concept of marketing is literally based around what we're about to go through and the principles that you've outlined here and that you talk about and preach a lot about.
and so.
Dave G. (06:39.435)
Well, the same thing, I think it's just, there's also like life in here also. It's about communication. And I think the same things that make me a good marketer are the, are the reasons why, like if we have to write a note to my kid's school, my wife is a good, is a good writer, but she wants me to like, take a look at it. She wants me to rewrite it, you know?
Erik Jacobson (06:44.556)
Yes.
Dave G. (06:59.487)
My family wants me to be the one that gives a speech at a wedding or a graduation or something. And I'm like, I see those threads now and I'm like, yeah, that's very similar to the art of marketing and communication. just in my world, it's B2B marketing, but I think it's all the timeless people stuff.
Erik Jacobson (07:15.692)
Yeah, that can be a double edged sword sometimes where it's like, that's one of the reasons why everybody at the company thinks they can critique marketing because they've written a letter before they've written an email before they've maybe given a presentation before. so that can kind of cut both ways. But, but yeah. All right, cool. Let's, let's go through this. We're to go a little bit rapid fire. There's 20 here. we can go, we can stop on some that we want to go deeper on, but the first one.
Dave G. (07:31.604)
Absolutely.
Dave G. (07:40.991)
Yeah. Do you have, do you have a link to this by the way? Can I pull it up too?
Erik Jacobson (07:43.924)
I just screen-shotted it. Here, let me see if can send that to you. yeah, so basically here's your post. This was two weeks ago. Here's a list of timeless marketing principles that will always matter. Number one, know your customer better than anyone else. that's step one in this entire list is know your customer better than anyone else.
Dave G. (07:46.035)
Okay, I can find my post.
Erik Jacobson (08:10.804)
One of the things that comes up for me here is obviously there's many ways you can approach this, but from the lens of content, I think this is one of the least recognized values of doing content. So everybody's talking about usually with content like let's try pipeline, let's drive leads, MQLs, SQLs, all of that. Just by the nature of putting content out into the world with your points of view.
championing the problem you're solving, you're gonna get feedback. And that feedback is from the people that you ultimately want to buy your stuff. And that can help re-inform not only what content you continue to create, but actually the direction of your company. Like the way in which you continue to build the product, how you message the problem that you solve, you know, and all of those sorts of things. So yeah, anything you wanna add on, just knowing your customer better than...
Anyone else?
Dave G. (09:10.913)
Yeah, don't know how you could sell someone to, I don't know how you could sell something to someone if you don't deeply know the customer. I think you can definitely fake it, right? But I think in all things in life, we have a electrician that comes to my house, right? I don't know about that stuff. I want to feel like he does. I want to feel like he knows what I need and I want to be able to trust that person. And so I think there's a level of trust that you build in your marketing.
As much as I believe marketing is a game of attention, it's also a game of trust. And so in order to get people to trust you, you have to get them to feel like you really know what their life is like. I think it's an ultimate sales letter by Dan Kennedy. talks about basically one of the key principles in writing is understanding if your audience has a certain, language or lingo that they use. Right. And so
you need to speak that language and so you need to show that you know this customer deeply through your marketing. And this goes deeper than marketing. It's the product that you build, right? You've built a company in the podcasting space. think I would argue that you know the podcasting for business deeper than anybody else that I know. And I think that shows in how you're making decisions about how you're gonna build your company.
Erik Jacobson (10:28.096)
Yeah, it's like, it's kind of funny. This is like one last point I'll mention on this is you could argue you could be more effective selling something just by being able to describe the problem based on your understanding of the customer better than anybody else, than ever even mentioning anything to do with your product. If somebody's able to hear or see from you,
you articulate the problem that they're having, the product sells itself because they understand if you understand the level of intricacy and details of the problem they're facing and can describe it in that way in a much deeper way than anybody else, that just highlights your expertise and knowledge and and in sort of extrapolating, they're very likely the solution that you have that can help them even without you like having to really pitch the product, the features.
Dave G. (11:25.152)
Yep. Well, it's like one of the reasons that I wrote the book Founder Brand was I think that one of the best marketing ingredients is when the founder basically experienced the pain of the problem and then went and solved it with a company. And I think it's hard to do that if you haven't lived that. And so, I mean, you look at it in consumer examples, right? Like,
Erik Jacobson (11:25.43)
you know, the outcomes, all that kind of stuff.
Dave G. (11:49.78)
My kids are drinking a juice box and on the label of the juice box, it's like some all natural, no sugar juice. And it's like a story from a mom who was, you know, fed up with the sugar. I was fed up with the sugary drinks that my kids had and da da da. And so I decided to create that. That's a story that you're going to resonate with. I just met my neighbor recently in this place that I live and he's a head of sales at this company and the company was started because the person who the company CEO was like head of procurement for like 20 years at Adobe.
and noticed this like big problem and challenge that made procurement really slow, who better to go and build a product for that space than someone who's lived it, right? Why did you start Hatch? You were, you know, deep in the podcasting world and you noticed that a lot of these companies actually needed help creating shows. And so that is an incredibly important part of your company's story and your DNA and that makes for a great ingredient to have in your marketing repertoire.
Erik Jacobson (12:45.87)
And that's actually number two. So number two here in the list is be able to tell a clear, compelling story.
Dave G. (12:53.982)
Yeah, man, nobody likes, know, Apple is the greatest example of this all time. Go to YouTube and go to 2007 Steve Jobs iPhone keynote. And just the way he told stories and made them simple and clear and compelling. think we now more than ever, we have shorter attention spans. We don't want to read everything. You need to be able to tell your story in a clear and compelling way in two or three sentences and two or three bullet points and
think great market, I love, you know, I love Mad Men. I love watching Mad Men and the way that Don Draper in that show is able to basically tell a story and boil down a company's entire product and problem into like a sentence. That is what this is all about. When we were at Drift, we were selling a chat bot product, but we came up with this idea of no forms. We want to replace your lead forms and do it with a chat bot. And basically those two words, no forms became the kind of.
the crux of all the, you know, the main thing in all of our marketing. And I love that. That was basically like two word positioning. We didn't need a positioning framework. We didn't need a positioning document. We didn't need all these like sales enablement things. It was like the whole product strategy and product roadmap and marketing was all about this concept of no forms. And I think the simpler you can make your idea, the more it's gonna be able to spread.
Erik Jacobson (14:16.918)
And not even just externally, like you know you have this, if you could go up to anybody at the company and they're able to recite that story without having to reference anything else, go look up that positioning doc, the messaging doc, anything like that, you know that it's actually a simple, and this is like.
Dave G. (14:34.837)
Yes.
Erik Jacobson (14:42.798)
This is actually really important part of this, I think, and you're really good at this is like, just simple and clear. we don't, this isn't, this doesn't require three or four paragraphs worth of context to like, you could extrapolate it and really like draw it out, but to your point, it's like, yours at Drift, two words, no forms.
Dave G. (15:05.3)
Yeah, simple is almost always better. Even in, you and I have had lots of conversations about business over the years. It's almost always the simpler solution. It doesn't always make it easy. It doesn't mean it's gonna be easy, but simple is almost always the way forward, right? And I think the challenge though with companies is that oftentimes what seems like the simple message is to say something like the all-in-one platform for X, right? And you need to get deeper and more specific about that. But I'm a big believer in that.
Erik Jacobson (15:12.866)
Yes.
Dave G. (15:35.924)
I could be the greatest marketer in the world, but it's got to be embedded in the DNA of the company and the founder and you got to have a vision and it can't just be marketing messaging.
Erik Jacobson (15:46.136)
Love it. put in the chat, by the way, the link to the post. Okay, number three.
Dave G. (15:49.386)
thank you. Cool. Apparently, I guess I post a lot on LinkedIn because I was trying to go find it and it was an impossible task. Yeah. Not so good.
Erik Jacobson (15:55.758)
I should have said it before, that was my bad. All right, number three, focus on solving real problems for customers. And I think with this, can have it be the context of like the solution of the product itself, or even just in the content and the marketing vehicle for solving customer problems.
Dave G. (16:17.684)
Yeah, this is, I forget where I read this back in the day, but it's like, people don't want shovels, they want holes, they want the whole dug, right? They don't care how it gets done, if it's a shovel, if it's by hand, they want the outcome, right? Or there's that classic graphic, I saw Sean from MFM posted this recently, and it's that.
graphic where you got regular Mario and then Mario becomes super power Mario. It's like, how can your product be that for the customer? This can't be fluff, this can't be marketing nonsense or jargon. It's like, is the pill that you give someone that when they take it, something is unlocked from that? And again, this goes back to the first thing, right? If you know your customer better than anyone else, if you truly, deeply understand them, you can do a better job on solving that real problem. And I also think,
Erik Jacobson (16:44.771)
Yes.
Erik Jacobson (16:48.61)
Yes.
Dave G. (17:10.448)
We talked about this a lot at Drift and we're even doing this now with Exif5 for example. It's like we're not trying to sell a community, like we don't want you to buy a community, no one's waking up and saying, you know what I need? I need a subscription to a private community. It's like no, the problem that our customers have is they don't have a peer group outside of work. They don't have a sounding board. They don't want to go to LinkedIn and write a lot of these things publicly and so the thing that we're giving them is a private discussion board, a peer group.
a forum to be seen, to be heard, to share recommendations and get ideas from each other. That's a real problem that we're solving.
Erik Jacobson (17:47.82)
Yeah, totally. with this one in relation to content, what I would say is like the solving of the problem sometimes is not always articulated well in what the value of that content is going to be. So what I mean by that is, for example, like a company creating a podcast, but the promise of what the listener is going to receive and how their career or life or education will be different.
after listening to that podcast is not always clear. It's like, we're gonna interview these types of people about these kinds of topics and hope you enjoy versus like listening to this podcast is going to help you do X, Y, Z in your role so that you can ABC. And yeah.
Dave G. (18:34.272)
I'll give you my, the OG content example that I always reference was I was like, I was maybe 23, and I was working at this company and my boss, for like this tiny little part of the product I was working on, my boss asked me to create a marketing plan, and I was like, a what?
Erik Jacobson (18:50.542)
You
Dave G. (18:51.968)
And so I went to HubSpot, HubSpot, is like OG HubSpot when they were like basically the only people writing content for marketers. And they did the best example of this, which is like they were the first brand to create really good content for marketers designed to help us do our jobs better. And so I go to HubSpot, they had this amazing article on their blog, which is basically a step-by-step guide to walk you through how to build a marketing plan. And I pretty much just use that verbatim and I...
created my marketing plan, I shipped it to my boss and she was like, holy shit, this is amazing. And I was like, yeah, right? But perfect example, guess what turned that experience, it wasn't just reading that post, it was like the reading the post, making it mine, shipping it, putting it into play. That cemented me as a HubSpot super fan back in the day because I'm like, this company, I wasn't even a customer, I didn't become a customer theirs until 10 years later.
Erik Jacobson (19:26.798)
You
Dave G. (19:48.796)
It was like cemented it as like, okay, this company just like helped me do my job and it had nothing to do with their software. That is still the best example of marketing. And that is the advice that I give to any founder, any marketing team, basically in any industry today is like, how can you be the number, can you be an incredible resource? Can you be the number one resource for your ideal customer? Can you help them? If you can help them, then you will earn the right to then market to them later.
Erik Jacobson (20:00.364)
Yeah.
Erik Jacobson (20:14.094)
That is such a good example, especially Parlanda number four. Number four is build a memorable brand. What's very interesting about that example is that they did not convert you to a customer for essentially 10 years. Now, I'm assuming now with XF5, you all are spending a good amount of money with HubSpot, but that original interaction you have with their content and the value it provided stuck in your memory for the next 10 years, essentially.
and it ultimately did convert. You were part of this 95 % of the market that wasn't looking for that solution at that time, but they were memorable enough because of the value they provided you and helped you in your career.
Dave G. (20:57.278)
Yep. That's a perfect little segue there. That's a good plug for the 95%, right? But that's how you do it. It's like you work backwards from like, is the person that ultimately we want to sell to one day and what is the thing that we can help them with? Maybe we sell, you know, HR software, right? Well, the content for that...
Erik Jacobson (21:02.392)
Yeah.
Dave G. (21:19.69)
company that sells HR software, not everyone's going to be the market for that. Maybe it's once a year, maybe it's once every four years, you know, or you're a payroll provider, right? But if you can be providing relevant, useful, in-depth, meaty content about my job in HR, you can turn me into a fan. And that's where I think like something like a podcast for HR professionals, not about the company at all.
But all of a sudden, like, nobody else has a show for people that work in HR. I've become a fan of this show. Or there was that example, you know, how Caspian did that, like they do those fiction, you know, they do those narrative podcasts, right? It's a great example of they work with that company. I think it's, I forget what it's called now, but I think it was Jim Pass at the time. They rebranded, I don't know. But anyway, they were working with an HR company and they created a murder in HR, you know, narrative style show.
Erik Jacobson (22:01.186)
Yeah.
Dave G. (22:18.186)
They didn't talk about the product, but it happened to be put on by that company. And guess who's going to listen to that? Who's going to listen to murder in HR, right? Not, not my accountant, probably one of the millions of people in this world who work in HR. Perfect example of how you can use content to market to the 95%.
Erik Jacobson (22:33.666)
What's your take on like, there are more brands, and I think this is really cool to see in B2B, like there are more companies taking an entertainment style approach with just like, if we wanna just call it more just pure top of funnel entertainment style. ClickUp's a good example, like they're creating like skits, like know, LinkedIn skits and stuff like that, actually for the HR, ICP. When it comes to memorable brand, like there's always this like,
there's this tough balance to strike between like, I can get your attention, but am I actually creating a connection between that attention and our product? And where is that line of how important that is? Is pure attention, like what's your take on this from just a memorable standpoint? Is there a line there when it comes to like that entertainment versus educational and
What's your thoughts on that?
Dave G. (23:35.296)
Well, I would, I would at some point want to work in, I would, I would want people to know that our company put it on in some way. And so it could be presented by and to quote, um, my friend Pranav who runs this company paramark and, uh, they do marketing attribution and measurement. And, uh, they're a measurement company and they're one of our sponsors at exit five and he doesn't really want to measure anything. And I'm well, how are you going to track this? He's like, cause people are not dumb.
Erik Jacobson (23:42.134)
Right. Yep.
Dave G. (24:03.68)
Right? I do, he's like, if I go onto your webinar and I do a good job, I don't need a UTM link for that. If I am captivating and interesting, people are not dumb. What are they going to do after that? Wow, that guy was really interesting. He really helped me out. What's his name? I'm going to go to LinkedIn. I'm going to follow him. I'm going to go check out the website. So I think part of this is we need to give people more credit and we need to be more patient in marketing. Not everything in marketing can be this like direct response. Campaign, right? The other way I would answer that is I would, uh, I love me some Gary V.
Erik Jacobson (24:24.43)
Mm.
Dave G. (24:34.836)
I love that man. And if you don't like Gary Vee, then I don't like you. No, just kidding. Plenty of people don't. That's okay. But I sent this video to our team recently where he was doing one of his like 4Ds calls where he basically people do consulting with him. And this guy's like, I'm posting a LinkedIn, you know, I'm posting LinkedIn videos all the time or I've made, you know, 700 TikToks. And it's just, I listen to your strategy, Gary, and it's not working. Gary's like, maybe the videos are just not good.
Erik Jacobson (24:39.178)
Yeah
Dave G. (25:04.66)
That's hard to say, we don't like to say, but maybe it's not good. And so I think if the content is really good, I think if you try to do this safe, like, it's funny, but it's by us, check us out, right? But then you look at someone like Ross Palmer, look at Corporate Bro, hilarious. Everything he posts is a 10, right? That guy, he's hilarious, he doesn't miss. He has clearly captured the minds of like a salesperson, right? And he makes amazing content for them, right?
Let's just say he worked at a company like Salesforce, right? If he's making good content for that company and he works at Salesforce, by association, people are gonna think of Salesforce when they see them. And so I think it's in the mechanics of it. It's not like, do we have some perfectly timed follow-up email after this? It's like, I think you really have to try to be the purple cow, be remarkable with that content, and then you can earn that connection, right? Or if you're gonna try to do something that is completely brand-driven and not direct response at all,
Erik Jacobson (25:41.869)
Exactly.
Dave G. (26:02.772)
I would be thoughtful about how do we connect the dots? And so maybe we sell marketing software, we're gonna do a CMO, a retreat for CMOs at this resort in Miami. We're not gonna sell us the product at all. If we put on an amazing event and people have an amazing time, of course they're gonna remember us, of course they're gonna think of us. And then, when we do, you still have to do marketing, you still have to reach out later. When we do some outbound.
The whole point is to get people to know, and trust you so then when you go and try to sell someone, they're like, yeah, I know this guy, okay. I'm more likely, the whole point is just to be like, I'm more likely to receive your sales pitch because I now, you made me laugh or I learned something. That's how I think about it.
Erik Jacobson (26:31.192)
Yes. Yes.
Erik Jacobson (26:39.032)
Yes.
Erik Jacobson (26:42.318)
Spot on. Love that. And again, we keep doing this, but yeah, perfect transition to the next one. So number five is creating genuine human connections with customers, partners, et cetera. And so like your example there with that sort of activation was an in-person event, which is like probably no better way to foster that. Not everybody has the opportunity to do that, but yeah, just in general, how are you feeling about that today, that topic?
Dave G. (27:13.404)
I think it's more important than ever, especially in a world where like everybody's a lot of, not everybody, but a lot of people are using AI to like reply to comments on, on social media posts. something we've done at companies I've been at for a decade now is try to reply to every email that we can. Right. Every company is doing some type of automated email and you just assume that no one's going to answer on the other end. Like when we send out our exit five newsletter, Danielle for the two days after the newsletter, she replies to everyone that replied back to her.
Erik Jacobson (27:20.94)
Yes.
Erik Jacobson (27:42.51)
Amazing.
Dave G. (27:43.556)
And usually we try to do something, not always, sometimes it's just like, Hey, thanks for reading. Haha. But sometimes, you know, maybe once every, every 10, we try to go above and beyond and write a real personal note or take a cell, you know, take a picture while I'm replying to the email, or you look at my comments on LinkedIn. Sometimes I just go completely unhinged and I'm like the silly real life version of me in the comments, you know, like.
Erik Jacobson (27:59.992)
So good.
Dave G. (28:08.51)
Somebody wrote on a post the other day, they were like, what would you be doing if you didn't start Exit 5? And I wrote, I don't know, probably be a rapper or be in the NBA. And like that doesn't count for anything, but that's like building, you know, that's a way to be like, hey, I'm a real person. Like that is me. And I think that's a tiny drop of building a human connection with people. And I think we have that today in marketing where everything can be connected. It's either on social media, it's replying to comments, it's replying to DMs, it's replying to messages.
Erik Jacobson (28:15.694)
You
Dave G. (28:37.696)
We talk a lot about the importance of like, you know, building a founder brand or building your presence on LinkedIn. think how you show up in the comments and how you respond is a perfect way to do that. Obviously things like this where you can show your face on video, make a difference, and then any opportunity to meet people in person is the same thing. Mailchimp back in the day, they were like the best company with brand marketing, I think. Obviously now they're owned by Intuit and it's not the same, but every company has a story. Everybody's got a price.
Erik Jacobson (28:38.254)
Mm.
Dave G. (29:07.648)
Like I hope someday someone's like, I remember when you responded to everybody at exit five. I'm like, yeah, well now I'm rich. No, but MailChimp used to do this like a surprise and delight campaign where they would send out like knitted hats to people's cats. So absurd, so quirky, so random, but they created this amazing connection with people because they were like, I got a knitted hat for my cat, for MailChimp. And so there's ways like that.
Erik Jacobson (29:07.758)
You
Erik Jacobson (29:15.37)
You
Dave G. (29:36.576)
Jesse Itzler talks about like writing handwritten notes to people. And you know, was the last time you'd done something like that? Just completely random surprise and delight. We just did this the other day with Exit 5. One of our members wrote in about how they got promoted. And I was like, oh man, we haven't been doing any surprise and delight stuff. And our team got together and got him like a custom Yeti Exit 5 water bottle and a handwritten note and we sent it to him.
Erik Jacobson (29:45.87)
Mm-hmm.
Erik Jacobson (30:01.4)
So good.
Dave G. (30:02.1)
That costs maybe 60 bucks. He went and posted it on LinkedIn. We created that connection. So I learned that lesson at Drift in the early days where David was like, let's just do a bunch of random surprise and delight. Send people stickers, handwritten notes, not always your branded swag, but just like random emails and random notes to people. That stuff goes a long way.
Erik Jacobson (30:03.886)
Yep. Exactly.
Erik Jacobson (30:22.574)
I love this so much because on the surface when you're drawing this up on like the marketing whiteboard at the board meeting, like none of this stuff looks scalable and that's why most people don't do it. And that's why everybody's leaning into AI, because it's like, I can copy myself, my video and make a million videos at once or whatever. But the thing with this is it actually is scalable and it's creating the...
the scale of the thing that you actually want the most, which is word of mouth. Like these things, not everyone's gonna play out that way where somebody takes a picture of it and puts it on social, but there will be a percentage that do. And those things you could argue is possibly the single best form of marketing that there is, which is like to create that memory in that actual word of mouth, like content-based word of mouth, there's nothing better.
Dave G. (30:55.552)
Yeah.
Dave G. (31:11.806)
Absolutely.
Dave G. (31:17.0)
And by the way, don't have to, this doesn't have to be like a break the bank budget thing. It could be like, you do this for like five people, right? My financial advisor sends out a thank you card every year, but they do a great job of going out of the way. And they sent my wife and I like these amazing wine glasses with like the state of Vermont, like etched on the bottom. And she was like tapping and she's like, this is a real, this is high quality stuff.
Erik Jacobson (31:21.015)
Right.
Great.
Erik Jacobson (31:46.306)
Yep. Yes.
Dave G. (31:46.94)
Small things like that, that makes me feel like, okay, these people get it, that was a nice touch, I don't need that, I didn't ask for that. I don't want your hoodie, please don't send me any more t-shirts, like if you just go above and beyond and do something like that. And then to your point about the board meeting, by the way, I would, and I think some people don't like this because I'm a better story, I'm good at telling the story and distracting you from the data sometimes, but I would be putting those screenshots in board meeting decks.
Erik Jacobson (31:58.603)
Exactly.
Erik Jacobson (32:12.312)
Hahaha.
Yes.
Dave G. (32:17.022)
because that's how you show this stuff. And so it's like people talk about, how do we show the executive team the value of our podcast? Well, it's not just about the download numbers and audience, but if, for example, someone in your ICP, one of your ideal customers, like posts on LinkedIn about your podcast, you better believe I'm screenshotting that and I'm putting that in the deck because I think there's so much of the marketing that you just need to show that is not a number, and that stuff goes a long way. I would absolutely be like,
marketing those wins to show people the value of these things.
Erik Jacobson (32:51.03)
Last thing I'll mention on this one, do you remember Mike Jones? Mike Jones, yep. What's his phone number? Do you remember?
Dave G. (32:54.912)
Who? 2813308004, is that it? Let's go.
Erik Jacobson (33:03.982)
This is my exact point is like, so we we called his phone number and he answered one time. He was at like the barber shop or something and like that has never left my brain. Like nothing about that was scalable for him. He was probably getting thousands of phone calls a day and he picked up like 10 and
Dave G. (33:12.532)
Wasn't that real? Wasn't that really him?
Dave G. (33:22.868)
That's amazing. Yeah.
Dave G. (33:29.236)
Yeah. mean, this is why, you know, listen to why, why does Gary V still post his own captions and write his own posts, right? And he talks about he'll be in an Uber sitting on an airplane or whatever, and just spend 10 minutes and just reply to everybody, right? I'll give you, I'll give you one more thing on top of this. So even, I think even with automation, you can lean into this. so I have an automate, I have an automation that
Erik Jacobson (33:36.791)
Exactly.
Erik Jacobson (33:45.399)
Exactly.
Erik Jacobson (33:51.95)
Yeah.
Dave G. (33:55.712)
when anybody joins Exit 5, they get a message from me in the community and it's basically, hey, it's Dave. This is an automated message, but like I really did write this and here's a story about why I started Exit 5. Everybody responds to that and they call me automated Dave and they say, hey, automated Dave, thanks for the response. And then I, every morning I have maybe three or four of them. I go through and I reply and I'm like, haha, it's really me now, know, thanks Chris for joining. That's a perfect, that's just a little touch point. That is a.
Erik Jacobson (34:11.448)
Yeah.
Erik Jacobson (34:22.488)
Yes.
Dave G. (34:24.074)
to this point right here, that is a genuine human connection that is somebody knowing that it's really me. And I think addressing that this is automated is a way you can do that.
Erik Jacobson (34:32.556)
Yeah, and you called it out. You weren't hiding all the AI comments in LinkedIn. They're all trying to hide that it is an AI bot comment, and it's such a net negative to the reputation. So I'm gonna skip around a couple, and speaking of reputation.
Dave G. (34:47.146)
Yeah. Yeah. They're welcome to podcasting with me. There's no chance we're going to do 20 of these in an hour.
Erik Jacobson (34:50.72)
No, this is just us in general, we could talk forever. Okay, I'm gonna skip a couple. I'm gonna go to number 11. So build a reputation through consistency. This again, like when we look at the equation of success in marketing, success in content, for some reason it seems like what's not usually included in that equation is just pure time spent.
Dave G. (34:54.624)
You
Erik Jacobson (35:20.802)
being consistent with it. like, let's, yeah. And you are one of the best people to speak about this, because you've probably posted, I don't know, every day on LinkedIn for the last, you know, and posted podcast episodes every week for like the last six, seven, eight years. So, yeah. How do you prioritize it?
Dave G. (35:34.4)
How do have the time for that though? How do you prioritize it? It takes me three minutes a day. Well, so okay, I'll give you, so first of all, there's that saying you are what you consistently do, And so everybody has that one friend who's like, I'm gonna stop drinking and then the next day you see him, I'm just gonna have a drink today or I'm gonna clean up my diet or whatever.
Erik Jacobson (35:48.238)
Mm.
Dave G. (35:57.824)
Anything in life all the great things in life come from consistency over time and you don't need to be great immediately You just need to be you know better than most and the way you do that is just by showing up every single day How many messages that I send you over those six seven years be like man, I'm so sick of this damn podcast I'm gonna shut this thing down And there was a moment two years ago where I was like I'm going all in on exit five as a business This podcast is a channel for us whether I like it or not. I'm burnt out on doing these interviews I got to we just got to keep doing it
Today we've done, I think we're like episode 230. We've put out a podcast every single week, Shout Out to Hatch, for three years now. And the result of that is like, don't have a graph for this, I don't have a number for this, but I feel it in that, I would bet you that 50 % of the people that join Exit 5 are like, I listen to the podcast. What if I stop doing that? You know, the problem is so often though, you quit before you get to see any of these results.
Erik Jacobson (36:50.126)
Mm.
Dave G. (36:56.224)
actually happen and so for any of these channels, for any of these like 95 % marketing to the 95%, I do think time is the greatest thing you have on your side here. Look at Seth Godin's blog, right? Seth's blog, right? He's written a blog post every day for 10, you know, 20 years, 10 years. It doesn't have to be a thousand words every time, but it's that consistency.
And so much of marketing is just the repetition and just showing up there. I'm always gonna be there in your feed talking about marketing, talking about what I'm learning, talking about exit five. There's so much noise out there. I'm gonna be there showing up consistently. Consistency is a incredibly underrated aspect of this whole thing.
Erik Jacobson (37:38.154)
It is. And I think if we reframe it a little bit, it might help people realize it's not just something to like, it's not just a checklist item to check off. Like, I did a post every day. It can actually be the differentiator for why your content wins. What's interesting is like, if you look at the podcast, like the successful podcasts in pretty much any category right now, or the successful newsletters, or the successful people on LinkedIn,
the top 20 % across all of those different channels, the top 20 % of people succeeding on them, if you go and look at when their first post was or when their first publish date was, it's usually years and years and years ago and they just didn't stop. So it's like, and that's actually kind of nice to know. It's very simple. Let's just do that. We're gonna have to iterate perfection through iteration. It's not gonna be perfect. We may not get a qualified inbound lead in the first.
30, 60, 90 days. But if we just look at that simple equation of like, in order to get the outlier results, one of the very simple factors we can control is just the amount of time we're willing to do it for.
Dave G. (38:52.192)
Absolutely, I also think that you mentioned if you scroll back through a creator, you also need to open yourself up to the feedback loop and so if you're only say posting once a week, right, or if you're only putting out one podcast episode once a month when you have it, you're not getting enough at bats, you're not getting enough signals and so a part of it is like posting all the time for me is like I'm constantly getting that drip and I feel like.
to point number one, know your customer better than anyone else, at least for what we're doing with marketing, I feel like I know the audience of marketers really well, not just because we have this community, but because I'm constantly writing about this topic and I'm reading the comments, right? And I'm reading what people are saying.
Erik Jacobson (39:35.98)
Yeah, and so the next one, you all at XF5 are really good at this and you are just in general, which is like embracing creative thinking over copying competitors. This is very easy for people to do in content, I feel like for teams. They're like, they've got a newsletter, like we should do one. They've got a podcast, we should do one like this. And there's not really...
there's not really any other formula they're using for what that content should look like, other than sort of like, just kind of mimicking what somebody else is doing. how do you look at that just creative execution, you know, for whether we wanna call it like differentiation or, you know, putting your own POV and, you know, narrative in it and all that kind of stuff.
Dave G. (40:28.284)
I think all of the opportunities to take chances. Look at startup investing as an example of this, right? The investors and VCs who have seen outsized returns on their investments are the ones who invested in Uber when it seemed absolutely crazy that you're gonna call a car on your phone and get into a car with a stranger, right?
And you know, the hard part is like 90%, even 99 % of those things often flop, but it's the one or two things that you hit on that you find that outsize return. And I think it's the same theory applied to marketing. And it's even more important than marketing today, where if you were the first pump, like, so when you could, when you could send emails, I don't know, maybe like late nineties, if you were the first brand and you were doing email marketing.
Erik Jacobson (41:05.582)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dave G. (41:26.41)
there was probably nobody else in your customer's inbox. And so if you had somebody's email, you're probably gonna get a 90 % open rate on that, right? Today, by the time I go check my inbox again after this call, I'm gonna have 300 new emails. It's insanity, there's so much noise. And so the opportunity is to stand out, go back to what we talked about with Purple Cow. So embrace creative thinking over copying competitors.
you're just going to end up in that same stream of, you know, black and white cows and you want to be the purple cow. Now it doesn't mean you have to do something crazy or absurd, but it could mean that like, yeah, maybe all of your competitors write five blog posts a week and they're kind of okay. And they're kind of just kind of listicles be like, you know what, we're not going to play that game. We're going to write one article a quarter, but it's going to be like 3000 words, deep research.
Erik Jacobson (42:13.411)
Love it.
Dave G. (42:14.048)
Graphics, know, we're gonna do a podcast on it. We're gonna make a video of it and that's gonna be our content play Gong was a great example of this when when we were at drift they they kind of just played a different game they had this thing called Gong labs and they would basically Once or twice a month publish a media report and that that report would would out kick, know them writing 30 blog posts in a month
Erik Jacobson (42:35.566)
Love that. And yeah, it's like, I think just from the time, like we zoom again out, so like this is all the timeless stuff. And so if we look at this from like first principles, the person who created the outlier success with either like a content strategy or a marketing strategy, by definition, usually when it's outlier means they weren't following a best practice. The best practice is created after that person.
figured that out and then everybody started replicating it and then over five years it just gets beat to death.
Dave G. (43:09.256)
Yeah. Yeah, it's like my least, my least favorite. And you know, some of this is there's a game with YouTube and content and you can just play it. But my least favorite content on the internet is like about how Mr. Beast did anything.
Erik Jacobson (43:22.606)
Yeah.
Dave G. (43:24.426)
Like I get it, you know, it's like, yeah, maybe like I want to watch a documentary about like the 96 bulls and it's fun to understand that. And I think it's good to learn, but you're not going to make any progress by copying that. You need to find, find a lane, find a gap. One of my favorite things in marketing, and I'm not good at this. I want to do all the things all the time, but I would much rather you be like our only marketing strat, our only marketing channel is going to be TikTok period.
Erik Jacobson (43:53.038)
Right, pick one. Yep. Yep.
Dave G. (43:53.752)
Or pick a channel, right? Newsletter, sub stack, whatever. Because I think what happens in marketing a lot of times is like, yeah, everything does work. YouTube works, TikTok works, email works, events work. But when you try to do all of them, you just end up uploading videos to YouTube and each one of them has 17 views. But if you're like, no, we're gonna go all in on YouTube. We're gonna really make a YouTube first content strategy. And you need to eliminate all, you need to burn the boats. You need to be like, this is the only thing we're gonna do.
Erik Jacobson (44:06.264)
Yes.
Erik Jacobson (44:18.85)
Yep. Yep.
Dave G. (44:20.702)
Like at Drift for us, that was LinkedIn at that time, we didn't really bother with any other social channels. Pick that one thing and make that thing the main thing. And then from there you can add on. So boom, you prove out success with TikTok. Maybe now you might be good at YouTube long form. there's just a part of the creative thinking I think is also being specific and intentional about where are you gonna play.
Erik Jacobson (44:44.834)
I agree. And that leads into, let's do two more, and that leads into the measuring part. And this is honestly probably why a lot of these timeless principles we're talking about, which I think very few would argue against. But the challenge I think for some marketing teams is how they are measured and what they are held to doesn't necessarily allow them.
the opportunity or the time to explore some of this stuff. So if we were to champion these ideas, I think part of our job is to help champion how to look at measurement in a way that company, like the company strategy can be aligned on that so that the marketers can go, so the content team can go do it, the marketing team can go do it. So how do you, so the post here for this line item was measure what matters.
Dave G. (45:35.733)
Yeah.
Erik Jacobson (45:42.752)
not vanity metrics, and usually not everything is worth measuring.
Dave G. (45:47.136)
So I think the biggest mistake with the measuring, with the measurement stuff is not that it's not trackable. think you can track anything really today in marketing. I think it's about being able to articulate the strategy and then how this channel, so like let's use TikTok in that example. It's not just like we're making videos on TikTok, what the heck, they're not driving sales for us. It's like, wait, no, let's zoom all the way out and be like, hey, my name is Dave. I'm the head of marketing at this company.
I want to talk to you all internally about how we're going to do marketing as a company, right? You need a strategy. It's like, we believe that our buyers are in this demographic. They hang out here, they hang out on TikTok. And so we're going to make the only, and by the way, nobody on TikTok is creating content for, you know, people that want to gain financial independence in their twenties and thirties. And so that's going to be our lane.
We're gonna not measure this by direct sales. We're gonna commit to this. We think this is a long-term strategy. We're gonna do this over the course of years, but we're gonna start to build and create content on TikTok. We're gonna fail a lot. We're gonna make lots of videos. The result over time, hopefully, is gonna be an engaged audience of people in our niche. And those people are people that we can get to know, like, and trust us. So then we can basically nurture them into the more direct response elements of our marketing, right? That's not a perfect...
Erik Jacobson (47:04.366)
No, yeah.
Dave G. (47:05.35)
answered your question, but I think it's usually about having that preamble about how are we doing marketing and why, and how does it fit into the overall company goals? think where a lot of the content stuff gets scrutinized from a measurement standpoint is it's just kind of like, it doesn't really serve the broader purpose, right? And so it's like in the Drift example, we talk about no forms, right? We're gonna make a video show and every Friday,
we're gonna have a round table with three marketers who have ditch forms on their website and we're gonna do that every Friday for an hour and we're gonna do 24 episodes, you know, twice a month for the whole year. How are you gonna measure that? I don't know. Views, comments, over time, we're just gonna go because I guarantee you that if you commit to doing that by like episode 12, you're gonna have some amazing data and feedback and oftentimes through content, it's not necessarily about just the ROI of like the did people buy our product but it's like, oh.
man, we hit on this amazing topic here. And you know, Chris, our friend Chris Walker has talked about this, just like the value in him having a podcast for his business, which is basically like using the podcast or webinar or live show to basically get on the mic and just kind of rant about a topic that was a hot button. And then he sees in the chat, everyone's like, oh man, this is exactly what I'm struggling with. This is exactly, there's no sales ROI on that, but it's like, that was a signal for him to now validate, okay, yep, there's something here.
Erik Jacobson (48:23.342)
Thank
Dave G. (48:31.968)
all right cool, now at my company we're gonna go and create an event around this, we're gonna go and create a product around this. I just think you get in this bad game of like, you can't measure all content as direct response. And look at every brand that's ever been built, if they only looked at their marketing and measured it on the direct response, Coca-Cola would not be Coca-Cola. And even at a smaller level, you can be looking at all these little signals for feedback. And so I think the...
The point about like usually not everything that you can measure is worth measuring. It's like, yeah, I actually, one of the things that I hate or I hated even at a company is this like the download number on our podcast because it's like, that's a hard number to grow. Do we need that to be big? Even if we're selling B2B, like what if we just have 200 people that listen to this a month and we sell six figure deals?
Erik Jacobson (49:12.206)
Mm.
Dave G. (49:23.614)
You know, could our podcast be getting us like two or three new customers over the course of every quarter because people are listening then yeah, then what does it matter that 200 people listen to our podcast or followers? Followers can be a vanity metric if you have them in the wrong niche, but they can be a leading indicator if you have them in the right niche. And so for me on LinkedIn, I kind of only talk about marketing. You're damn right. They're not a vanity metric for us because the more followers I have on LinkedIn, the more people see our content, the more people see our content, the more people can sign up for our stuff. so
Erik Jacobson (49:39.682)
Exactly.
Erik Jacobson (49:45.772)
Exactly.
Dave G. (49:52.808)
You need to just have a strong point of view on your marketing strategy and then where those channels fit as opposed to just being like, yeah, we're gonna start doing stuff on YouTube. That's when the CFO is like, well, what are we spending on this and why? You need to, back to the first couple principles here, I think it's just as important internally that you can stand up in front of the company and have a strong point of view about how people buy your product. And then you tell the company, here's how people buy our product, right? Do you agree with this?
Erik Jacobson (50:01.102)
Yeah.
Erik Jacobson (50:10.83)
Mmm.
Erik Jacobson (50:22.35)
Hmm.
Dave G. (50:22.9)
They get insight from analysts, they learn from their peers, they go to events. Okay, so why are we only doing Google AdWords and direct response marketing? Like no one's gonna disagree with you. Is this not how people buy? Okay, therefore we need to do things that help grow our word of mouth and help spread our message. And so that's why we're doing these things. Here's how we're gonna look at them, here's how we're gonna measure them. Now let's go do it.
Erik Jacobson (50:33.292)
Exactly.
Erik Jacobson (50:39.586)
Yes.
Erik Jacobson (50:47.502)
Yeah, 100 % agree. there's two ways I talk about this as well as just two quick points on it, which is one thing I think we often forget is like, we need to contextualize our content results against the actual TAM that we possibly could sell into and equate that to our audience TAM. So like, if there's only 2000 potential buyers,
that you could target in your market based on what you're selling and who you sell it to, then not putting that in front of the team at the very beginning of your content strategy is a mistake because you can then go look at, just open up YouTube and you see 100,000 views on some video and you feel like you're not succeeding if you have 200. But really what you've done is if you have 200 views or 200 downloads and your audience TAM is 2,000,
you've just captured 10 % of your market paying attention to your content, which is gonna obviously make it far easier to sell to those folks, either because they remember you when they move in market themselves, or you capture them with some direct response other thing on some other channel, but they've already got affinity with you because they've been consuming your content. So like one of the goals is like, how about we just try to get 50 % of our audience, Tam, to have
Dave G. (52:03.411)
Yeah.
Erik Jacobson (52:12.034)
viewed, downloaded, read, watched, listened to any of our content on any of the channels. And you can...
Dave G. (52:18.322)
Yeah. I just had a CMO on our podcast recently and she, she runs marketing at a billion dollar like infrastructure, internet infrastructure company. And she says that, they have data that shows that basically any, any deal that has interacted with some type of marketing content from them, closes fast. The sales cycle is better. They spend more money. And so it's like, how can you look at metrics like that as opposed to like.
You're never gonna be driving in your car, listening to a podcast, hearing about a company and pull over and go fill out the form on their website. That's just not how it works, right? The other thing I would say is about the hugely, hugely underrated and undervalued piece of content strategy is the feedback loop. I can't stress that enough. And so I would be showing in my decks to the company, hey look, we wrote this post about a topic, right? We're an AI company, we sell, you know.
Erik Jacobson (53:01.622)
Yeah.
Dave G. (53:15.282)
An AI SDR tool. just making this up. And we wrote a, we wrote a post about something that we're doing and look at this comment. This, this woman suggested that like, this might be an interesting idea. If someone did X, Y, and Z six weeks later, we actually wrote a report. We delivered on the things she mentioned. And this was the report was the most viral thing we've ever done. I want to show people that whole loop there because I think that shows the value of content. Let's stop looking at every single piece of content and trying to measure it, measure the ROI of that. is.
Erik Jacobson (53:35.118)
Mm.
Dave G. (53:43.252)
The most unbelievable channel in his last book, Trade, I think it's called Day Trading Attention, Gary Vee talks about how like, basically we're living in the greatest time ever as marketers because you can just publish anything for free to social media and get a response and feedback. And then that post that popped off, you can then take that, edit it, turn it into paid, promote that everywhere. Like for Exit 5, we take posts that I write and then we boost them as thought leader ads.
Erik Jacobson (53:43.478)
aggregate.
Erik Jacobson (54:06.51)
Mm.
Erik Jacobson (54:12.941)
Exactly.
Dave G. (54:13.342)
when we know the topic already hits. so, so much of being good at content is showing this. And I just think a lot of times we don't show the strategy of content inside of the company, and then you just end up with like once a quarter the CFO is like, we're spending 250K on writers for this company? What's the ROI of that? And that's the position you don't wanna be in. You need to play offense and preempt all of that.
Erik Jacobson (54:35.214)
100%. Yeah, and there's direct response advertising, but there's also direct response content and direct response content is not looking to convert the viewer, reader, watcher into a customer. It's just looking to convert them into subscribing, following, engaging, leaving a comment, like driving an action that feeds the feedback loop and your
and your overall audience, that is the point of that 95 % content, which is still looking for an action, like a signal. You're trying to get a signal that the content is resonating. Otherwise, you probably do need to iterate. Like if you're not getting a lot of that response and that feedback and like zero growth on any of those content channels, that's a signal.
Dave G. (55:13.109)
Yeah.
Dave G. (55:26.65)
Well, once you have an audience, however big or small it is also, let's just use a podcast in this example. You can talk about your stuff on that channel and use that as way to get them further into your funnel. And so let's say you host a podcast for CFOs, right? I would create some type of content offer on that podcast and be like, Hey, and just make our own, put our own ads on that show. Like if I'm at a company, right. And it's going to be like the pre-roll or the mid-roll or at some point during the show and be like,
Hey, by the way, if you like this, I don't want your ratings and reviews, who cares about those? But if you're interested in, if you wanna get, if you wanna learn more about being a high performing CFO, we actually just wrote the guide to being a high performing CFO in 2025. If you're a listener of this podcast, I know you'll like it, go and check it out right now. It's dada.com slash whatever. Seven people that listen to your show are gonna go check that out. Like you can build those bridges in a creative way.
That was how, for the first time I got sponsors for Exit 5. I was like, man, this audience, this podcast is awesome. I think we have something here. Let's see if I can get sponsors from this. I literally, in my phone, I recorded an ad and I just said, hey, it's Dave. I'm looking to bring on my first sponsor of the Exit 5 podcast. If this is something you're interested, email me, dg at davegearhart.com. Two weeks later, I had five inbound messages from people who listen to my show.
that wanted to sponsor it. Like, why can't you run that same play? There are smart ways to connect the audience with like lead magnets in some type of way to bridge the gap between branded stuff and direct response.
Erik Jacobson (56:59.182)
Exactly. Dude, this was great. I think we got through 10 of the 20. We'll do around two on this the next time. This was so good. Yeah, man, I just think the overall message here is like, let's not get so caught up in all the terminology, all the disagreements about the best way, the best tactic. It's like,
Dave G. (57:05.81)
Alright.
Erik Jacobson (57:26.438)
The reason probably we all got into marketing or in content is because we fell in love with these things. These fundamental things of we've got a good product, we've got a great team, how can we get more people aware of this and interested in buying it? And I think if we study these things and the way that you have with the books and just listening to content like this.
I think it'll make us all better marketers, better content marketers.
Dave G. (57:59.166)
Yeah, just get back to, and I think we mentioned this earlier about like benchmarks and looking at competitors. Just look outside of your industry at the same time, know, like who's, which creators, you're an astute, yeah, you're a big studier of other people, you know, you're always sending me like comedians and you're like, look at like how Andrew Schultz like did this, promoted his Netflix special, right? Like.
That might not connect directly to you selling to CFOs, but I'm sure there's some plays in there that you can run. And I think if you focus more about creating great stuff for the audience that you wanna sell to and don't talk about your product, that is the best place to start. Let's create an awesome show for CFOs. And I think if we just focus on that part, the rest of it, converting them is gonna be, that's gonna be the easy part. It's when you try to do both at the same time, then you get neither.
Erik Jacobson (58:53.132)
Love it, crushed it. We'll end it now so that we don't go for another couple days, but this was fun, man. Everybody, if you're not yet, you should be in the Exit 5 community. It's the largest and best community for B2B marketers out there. This show, we talk a lot about content. There's a ton of content people in there as well. And then, Dave's very active, obviously, on LinkedIn, so follow him there. They actually just put out, by the way, today, a...
Dave G. (58:58.423)
Couple days.
Erik Jacobson (59:21.816)
B2B Marketer Salary Report, which has got a lot of great data around like if you're in the market for a job or exploring a job in the marketing space, like it's a really good report. And actually just, if you just want to study from a content perspective, one of the best content plays I've seen in a while as well. So go sign up for that. Dave, appreciate it, man. Always good talking.
Dave G. (59:41.824)
Yeah, and listen, let me just say for a second, I'm a humongous fan of Hatch. And I have been since the beginning. I think I was one of the first people using it. They do all of our shows at Exit 5. you have a podcast for your, like, I think what's cool about what you can offer to people is I think the marketing team at the company should focus on making the thing great, and then you should find a partner or an expert to.
Erik Jacobson (59:48.61)
Ha ha.
Dave G. (01:00:08.968)
run the show for you and that is what Hatch can do. It's like, are you gonna bring in, if you wanna get great at advertising or SEO, right, your company is gonna own the messaging and the creative and then you're gonna find someone outside to execute that. think there's, Hatch is clearly the best partner to do that. I've been using Hatch for seven years and if Hatch went away, I would be back on one of those god awful marketplaces online trying to find someone in.
some foreign country to edit my podcast. It would just be a disaster. So I'm thankful to have Hatch. Yeah.
Erik Jacobson (01:00:42.222)
you
Appreciate you, Awesome. All right, we'll catch everybody on the next one.
Dave G. (01:00:49.098)
Alright, good job.