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Interviews with top marketers sharing tactical tips, strategies, and lessons learned to help you grow your business. Hosted by Dave Gerhardt, founder of Exit Five, former CMO, and author of Founder Brand. Learn more at exitfive.com
All right, look, uh, everywhere you look online right now, everyone's telling you the new way to do marketing because of AI. And I think because of that, there's so much perceived change, and innovation, and speed, and technology, and AI, and agents in marketing right now. I think we've forgotten a little bit about the timeless lessons, uh, in marketing.
Just like life, there's a bunch of timeless principles that kinda always work. Whether I'm reading a book from 1925 about advertising and copywriting that still applies today, or if I'm doing an interview with someone here on our podcast, I'm just reminded all the time about how it's easy to open up LinkedIn and feel like you're behind or feel like you need to chase the newest tool, tactic, or channel.
And so we want to profile some of the more timeless lessons here on our Exit Five podcast, right? Everybody in B2B is chasing what's new: new channels, new tools, new playbooks. But the fundamentals haven't changed. Some marketing lessons never go out of style, and, uh, that's why we handpicked this episode for you in your ears.
We're blessing this as one of the greatest hits of the Exit Five podcast, one of our all-time most played episodes, and here's this one for you. I hope this is a dose of timeless marketing that you need to ground yourself today. You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show. Exit Five.
About Lashay Lewis & This Episode
Hey, it's me, Dave. I hope you're having a good day wherever you're listening from. Every now and then, we have been replaying popular episodes from the past because we've done hundreds of these episodes now, and I look at the data, and I know for a fact that of our total audience, not everyone has listened to them.
So each week, our team meets, we have an editorial meeting, and we are going to pick out one of the most popular episodes from the past to replay. This time, it's an episode with Lashay Lewis. She is the founder of Authority Plug. She's been in content forever, affiliate sites, e-com, B2B SaaS, in-house freelance consulting.
She has made a career around content, and she has a ton of experience on what actually works, specifically with bottom-of-the-funnel content. And so this was a great conversation I had with Lashay about a year ago, talking about why bottom-of-the-funnel content is important and really just how to think about content strategy.
And I think actually you could apply a lot of this to what matters with AI search and what the LLMs want today. Enjoy my conversation with Lashay Lewis.
All right, back by popular
demand, Lashay is here
Hello.
Good to see you.
Good to see you. Thank you so much. We've
already been going for twenty minutes.
We're warmed up.
Yeah.
So you are the founder of Authority Plug, and well, by the time this goes out, will be your, your full-time job. Congratulations- Thank
you ...
on starting your own business.
Thank you.
But you've been an entrepreneur since you were... What did you tell me on your first one? You were, like, doing something crazy with-
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, this is just full circle now.
Yeah, 100%.
I got a bunch of notes and things, but I, I wanna give you the opportunity. I know you have some things that you wanna talk about. Like, did you have a couple bullet points of things that you wanna talk through on this podcast, or do you want us to just go?
I mean, yeah, we can honestly do both because I do have a couple points I wanna hit on. So I've had some people reach out to me and ask me to touch on a few things that I kinda glanced over on the first episode, but I didn't get too tactical. I kinda kept it high level.
All right. I'll play host. Tell me the bullet points of those things, and I'll make sure we get-- we'll work them in and get back to them.
So what were those things?
Sure. So the first thing is feature mapping. The second thing- Okay ... is how to get executive buy-in. And then- Okay ... the third point is how to not hold interviews for every content piece.
Why Lashay Obsesses Over Bottom-of-Funnel Content
Okay. Great. So we'll get back to that stuff. But I wanna kick this off and talk about your obsession with bottom-of-the-funnel content because typically, when we talk about content, content strategy, it skews towards whether it's SEO content, our biases as marketers skews towards high volume, high traffic.
We want more, we want more, we want, "Is this thing gonna pull in all this traffic and change my life?" Or we skew towards, you know, top-of-the-funnel listicle-type things. You know, fifteen-- If you sell sales software, there's the fifteen sales podcasts everybody needs to listen to. But then here you come, and you're like, "Nope, uh, my thing is bottom-of-the-funnel content.
I focus on pain point and product-led content." And so that was a topic that really resonated with people. I think there's a lot of connections between content, sales enablement, product marketing here that work really well, but I, I would love to just kinda kick this off and talk about, in your words, what's up with the obsession with bottom-of-the-funnel content?
Why do we need more of it? Where does this come from?
Yeah. I think personally, my obsession with it is that it drives really great results, and I think a part of it is a little bit of a ego thing. I love when either someone in-house or I have a client that comes to me and is like, "I can't believe that we're getting inbound, you know, leads within ninety days and this certain amount of time."
And it's just like I don't know. It really displays you as the professional that you are to be able to come in and just show results like that. And I don't mean results in a form of, oh, email opt-ins and webinar registrations, although those things are important, but nothing gets executive leadership more excited than seeing SQLs come in the door.
And then if you can show the company how you've been able to do that and, like, make that clear attribution, then yeah, you're gonna have a really illustrious career.
Well, y- yeah, I lo- I love that, right? Any... You can do the top of the funnel stuff and drive top of the funnel, but if you can create content that actually converts from a bottom of funnel standpoint.
So one thing that, that sticks in my head that I, I think people would ask about this is, um, the challenge for me is I agree with you. We gotta create bottom of the funnel content. But I think what happens is a lot of times we create the bottom of the funnel content, and maybe it's wrong, and maybe this is why it doesn't work.
But Is it really as simple as, not to dumb down all the amazing stuff that you do, it's as simple as write an article about this bottom of the funnel content, and you're just gonna magically get more people to raise their hand? Like, are you working with companies that already have a lot of traffic and can just kind of plug in this gap in this article?
Like, what... Do you know where I'm trying to get at? The gap between, like, writing this article and actually where does it go, how do people find this? Like, you and I talked about, like, your thing is not distribution, but how do we bring people in from this bottom of the funnel content? Or maybe it's just because it needs to exist in the first place, and wow, because we wrote this, there's clearly a demand, or maybe you're a wizard with customer research.
What is it?
Low Competition Beats High Search Volume
I think it's a mix between low competition and customer research. So I guess I haven't, like, consciously thought about this, but now that you're talking about it, I'm starting to kind of make those connections. I think when it comes to having the bottom of funnel content, I feel like the thing that's gonna help you convert is, number one, how you structure it, and number two, just creating bottom of funnel content in general.
Mainly because all your competitors are focused on how many articles can I produce over the next thirty, sixty, ninety days. Okay, I want a hundred articles over the next three months. And it's like, yeah, that's great if we're talking again about top of funnel email signups, webinar registrations. But it's like when it comes to the bottom of funnel, you don't have to be that aggressive in order to get really good results, and that's another reason I like it.
And again, just to come back around, it's like your competitors are probably focused on top of funnel right now. You focusing on bottom of funnel, and I guess I'll touch on that too. The reason that your competitors are probably focused on top of funnel more than bottom of funnel is because bottom of funnel content can be deceiving, right?
So it's like naturally you would wanna go after a keyword that has fifty thousand searches a month versus one that has fifty searches a month. But it's like when you change your perspective and make that mindset shift, you start to understand it's not about the search volume, it's about the intention.
So if I rank for this keyword that has fifty thousand searches a month, but I'm not getting any SQLs from it- That always comes back to bite the marketer in the ass every single time. It's like, you know, you're showing all these amazing numbers at first, and then three months goes by, six months goes by, and executive leadership is like, "How is this content making us money?"
And a lot of content marketers don't have the answer to that. A lot of head of content, you know, head of marketing, just people that run content teams don't have a solid answer to that question. So I think focusing on bottom-of-funnel helps give you an answer to that question, and I think just digging a little bit deeper, it's just much easier to attribute pipeline to content when you're focusing on bottom-of-funnel.
Mainly because when you're focused on top-of-funnel, it's like the prospect has to go through the entire buying cycle before they even think about trying your product, and it's just like it's all because that's where you mentally caught them. If you mentally catch somebody that's, like, solution aware, and you're going after that person, you don't have to do much convincing.
It's just properly touching on their pain points, making sure the article is product led, especially if you are a PLG, you know, company. And it's really just a matter of those two things. And, and about the content getting found, usually what I'll do is I'll do one of two things. I'll run paid ads to the content, or I will...
and what I usually do is wait for it to rank. So you can do link-building campaigns, but I haven't built a back link in years. I find that if you write really, really good content, Google will kinda pick up and carry the load. Maybe not every article will rank high, and maybe the ones that are having a little bit of difficulty, that's the one you build links to.
But as it relates to getting the article found, I purely, I focus on Google for that, mainly because it compounds over time, and it's just imagine having a piece of sales-enabled content that just sticks in one place that continuously drives traffic over and over and over.
Well, and I think to your point about it, to it, because it's bottom of the funnel, the universe of people who are interested in that particular search or topic, it's gonna be a much more specific search, and I think it's a great forcing function to, like, I think you n- you obviously need both.
You need top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. But to start there, I think a lot of startups struggle because we just wanna go and create a bunch of content As opposed to thinking about like, let's create content for... Well, we wanna create a bunch of content, but also we kinda have this like, whoa, we're, we're changing the world with this platform, and we can do all these things.
And it's like, well, who are the pe- who-- what's like the slice of people that can buy from you right now? And it seems like what you focus on from a content standpoint is like, who are those people that you can help and you can get to buy from you right now? And when I worked at Drift, as an example, was a company that we were basically like re-segmenting the live chat space.
So there was like live chat at the time, but nobody was really owning it from a sales standpoint. But the category of live chat had a lot of awareness. Everybody that we were selling to knew live chat, but they, in their heads, and this is what we learned from customer research, in their heads, they had this objection that like, oh, well, live chat doesn't work for sales because we heard that VP of sales and sales leaders, they felt like that anytime they've had live chat in the past, they felt like their sales team was wasting time because they were dealing with a lot of support questions, right?
We got that insight and then almost like embraced that from a content marketing standpoint and started creating content that was like Not your traditional live chat. Here's why Drift actually works for sales teams, right? Five reasons, and then we go through and, like, handle all of those objections, and that's an example of where, like, we were able to draft on the existing search volume for live chat, but then basically do the switch and say, "But we know that you have these objections," right, to your point about doing customer research.
"We know that you have these objections, so here's five things that we're already in your head about, and we're gonna lay these out in this article for you."
Yeah, it just makes it so much easier for your content to convert when you're speaking on real customer pain points. Um, not something you made up, not something you searched on Google and you went to your competitor's article to try to scan what they're doing.
Like, real customer research from your org, right? That's really where the power comes in as it relates to creating a high-converting article was definitely that customer research.
Customer Research Questions That Matter
What do you like to look at from a customer research standpoint? Because there can be a lot, and everybody inside the company wants to send you stuff and give you stuff.
So what do you like to go through? If you were ... If I was gonna hire you to help my company, what's the stuff that you would ask for?
Yeah. So a few things that I would ask for is, one, I would... So specifically for the customer research, I have, like, specific questions that I like to ask around that. Fo- so for example, let me pull up one here.
What were some of the largest deals closed in the last year? Are there any products or services that prospects often switch from? Who are the other decision-makers involved in the process? So I don't know. I probably have a list of maybe, like, 50 questions just as it relates to customer research, product research.
So I guess to separate these out and kinda get deeper into them a little bit more. So the questions that I just went through, those are, like, more customer research questions, and I have maybe about 20 of those I usually get companies to answer so we can really get down to who their target audience is.
And then I have another section where... So when I say sections, I'm referring to my content marketing dashboard that I have. So I have another section in here where it says Product Information, so that's where I gather all the product information. And those questions consist of how do customers use the product?
How does the product fit into their current job search? What KPIs does it help them hit? What pain points does it help them solve? So just really digging deep into those pain points. And good thing you brought up as well was, you know, everybody wants to give their two cents. They feel like they wanna, you know, say, "Oh, well, we have this type of customer and this type of customer."
But one of the things that I found works really well, and this ties back into a question that I got on LinkedIn, which was basically how do you get executive buy-in And another question also, which was actually how can you create content without holding multiple interviews? So those were the two things.
Create Content Without Endless SME Interviews
So to address how to create content without holding multiple interviews, the thing that you wanna focus on is Knowledge extraction, right?
Wait, multiple interviews, like, with the customer or with somebody internal?
So with somebody internal, right? So, like, if I'm going around the company and I'm looking for a subject matter expert to kind of, like, give me some insight on a piece so I can have, you know, different opinions and different point of views to throw in it.
And it's like, one of the big pain points that I've seen people struggle with is not being able to get people on calls for these interviews.
Right, or the marketer feels like it's a very intimidating conversation. Like, I'm, I'm bugging you for 30 minutes, and, like, it's a very pressure filled... Yeah, I, I see that question in Exit Five a lot.
Like, or like, "I can't even get time with the subject matter expert," that's definitely a common thing inside of the company.
Yeah, and it's like, the way I've been able to combat that is just extract knowledge from the different teams. So I guess if I were to kind of lay out an example what this would look like, so again, when I say sections, I'm referencing my Notion dashboard that I have for content marketing.
So the customer research section is what sales would fill out. The product information is what customer success would fill out. ICP and buyer persona is, again, sales. Use cases, also sales. Product would fill out the platform overview and features, and then customer success would fill out testimonials and case studies.
So essentially, I'm taking maybe about 15 to 30 days to just go all in on customer research, make sure we really extract the knowledge from our subject matter experts within the company. That way, we don't have to hold an interview every time you wanna create a new piece of content. You just make them give you different use cases, different examples, different ways that the product can be used to be able to attack different angles in your content.
And again, you don't wanna have to go to them every time you create a new piece of content. So the way I get around that is just to extract knowledge from them and place it all into one place and really consolidate that information.
So you do it, but you're just doing it once upfront, right?
Yes.
So you're saying like, "Hey, give me 30 minute," like, "Hey, product," and this is something that this team should be able to just, like, rip off, like, in 30 minutes, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And usually, I see people say, "Oh, we already have our customer research together," and things like that, and I'm like, "Great, this makes this process even quicker." Because the sooner you get that customer research together, the sooner you're gonna be able to start creating bottom of funnel product led customer focused content.
And this really helps with, again, just not having to hold interviews for every single content piece. Like, the content team can spend more time creating and less time having to run around and try to get ahold of this person and that person. I've just heard this pain point so much over the past couple months.
It was a big pain point for me too, hence why this content marketing dashboard exists. I got tired of Having to go on a treasure hunt every time I wanted to create a new piece of content, right? Yeah. And it's like, by the time I gather all the information for me to create the content, I don't even feel like writing it anymore.
So it's really just to help not only, like, head of marketers and head of content professionals and people running content teams, but it's also very useful for freelance marketers. Maybe they have multiple clients, you know, they wanna manage and things like that, and it just, customer research just get messy, and I don't like Google Docs that much for it because I'm just a very visual learner.
Notion is... I mean, I love it and I hate it, and I hate it for the same reason that I love it, is because it does so much. But I think if you understand just exactly what you need when you use the software, you can create something really efficient, and I think that's what I've been able to do as it relates to information consolidation from multiple teams.
So we're talking about every team, like customer success, product, marketing, and this really helps companies find that alignment much quicker.
Okay. So for those of you listening, we're not gonna share this Notion doc because, uh, this is secret sauce for my friend Lashay. You can obviously hit her up and message her and try to hire her or whatever, but, um, I get to look through this 'cause I'm the host of this podcast, and, uh, Lashay and I are friends.
But as I'm looking through this, this is reminding me of, like, um... I, I don't know who said this, but one of the sayings about, uh, copywriting is, like, and I, this could be applied to content marketing or copywriting, it's like, "Great writing is great editing" And to me, what I mean by that when I look at all this stuff, it's like you're not opening a blank page and being like, "Oh, how can I write some, like, super witty blog posts?"
Like, what you're doing, because you're getting all of this research, because you're getting customer information, product information, ICP information, use case examples, platform overview, testimonials, and case studies, you got all this stuff. Now, then that allows the writers who are on your team, not because they love this industry or this segment that they're in, maybe they are, but because they love writing.
And what I think is fun is getting all this information, then figuring out what to write. It's like piecing this puzzle together.
That's literally what it is. It's just once you have all of that information consolidated, then you can breathe a little bit and kinda just play with different things and understand different use cases.
And, and one thing I found that, you know, this dashboard helps with a lot is just learning about the product in record time. It used to take me so much time to learn about a new product and the, the nuances of the product and the different features and so on and so forth. If you bring a freelance writer into this dashboard, I have no doubt that they will be able to learn more about your product than they would have otherwise just by going through the left side of this dashboard, which is all customer research.
And by the way, I do give this away for free, but I have a version 2.0 that I'm coming out with that's even more plug and play-
Oh, you do? ...
than this version. So Dave, I'll give you access to that. If I didn't give anybody else, I know. I didn't wanna knock you off your high horse at first.
No. I'm gonna throw it back to you.
Miss I only do bottom- You would ... of the funnel content has her own lead magnet- ... which is top of the funnel content, which is she's giving this away for free. So I was wrong. Well, great.
No, but I'll give you access to the new version I came up with after working.
No, no. No, I don't want it. I'll have to hire you.
All right. So as I'm digging into your Notion doc, which is awesome, maybe what we can do is send me that link, and we'll, we'll link to it in the notes to this, and then people can pull it up as we're going along here. But, like, here's an example, right? For honestly me right now, I think I'm pretty good at writing, like, um, email copy and social media copy.
If you said to me, "Dave, you're a writer. Hey, I want you to ghostwrite content for our CEO on LinkedIn," and you gave me this all filled out, I could do a damn good job without ever having to talk to that person almost ever if I had what's in here. Because I just wanna read you some of these questions, and again, we'll link to it all, but, like, this is some of the information that you're getting upfront.
What are some of the largest deals you closed in the last year? Which customers were the easiest to close, shortest sales cycle? What other products that they use come up in sales conversations? Which products do they switch from? Who typically buys this product? Are there other decision-makers? What customers have a low support headache?
What are the most used features of the product? Who are the largest accounts? Who do you view as our best customers? Which company have you been able to sell additional products or service to, right? This is all gold if you have this stuff, and then you g- that's on the customer research side. Then you go to the product side and you say, "How do people use your product?
How does this product fit into their role? How does it help, help their team reach their KPIs? How do they use this product? How do they use it day to day? When did they realize they needed a new solution? What's the primary benefit that you've received? What are the top three benefits that you get? Why did you start looking for a new solution?"
If you give me all of this, we can write some amazing content and copy together. And again, this goes back to great writing is great editing. If you want to level up your content strategy, you need something like what Lashay has here. It's not just about coming up with creative and sexy content ideas, it's about answering these questions, which are rooted in why does this company exist in the first place, who are our customers, and what's a day in their life look like?
Yeah, I love how research focused your, your take on content is.
Yeah, and I think it's necessary, especially when it comes to bottom of funnel. It's like people will realize, they'll know very, very quickly if you don't know what you're talking about. Why? Because it's like, and I hate that my brain is just, like, going a bunch of different places, but I feel like it's im- you know, this is important to say.
It's like the reason that companies can get away with hiring, like, random freelancers to produce top of funnel content is because it's top of funnel. It's like the person that's searching for the top of funnel content probably knows just as much, if not, uh, you know, probably a little bit less than the person writing it, or they probably know the same.
It's just the, the freelance writer did a little bit of research first, then they created the piece. But it's like when you get down to bottom of funnel, it's like this person is very experienced. They know they have a problem. They know what their problem is. Now your job is to show them how your product solves it, and one of the best ways I've found to do that is by feature mapping.
Feature Mapping: Product to Pain Points to ICP
I had a lot of people messaged me from the last episode and, you know, tell me they wanted me to go deeper into this topic. But basically, feature mapping is the process of breaking your SaaS down to a feature level, and then mapping those features back to specific pain points, and then mapping those pain points back to an ideal customer profile.
So one way I could explain this, I'm gonna use a complicated example and simplify it. So let's take a SaaS giant like Salesforce, right? Tons of different products, tons of different ICPs with a whole bunch of different pain points, and it's just like when you're looking at a beast as such, it's like where do I start?
What do I even do? So, and I think this actually is important for positioning as well. Positioning doesn't just apply to go-to-market teams. It doesn't just apply to product teams. It applies to content marketing, too. So to give you a direct example using Salesforce, it's like to a chief data officer, Salesforce is an order management software, as to where a business intelligence director, Salesforce is a sales analytics software.
As of if we were talking to a head of IT, Salesforce is a customer service automation software.
I thought you were gonna say huge pain in the ass. Sorry.
Yeah. But no, it's like based on the different products, you're gonna serve different ICPs, and it's like I notice a lot of content marketers write in a one-size-fits-all fashion, but you can't really get away with that, especially if you're working, you know, at a SaaS company, and you guys have a suite of different products.
And so I guess if someone threw me in the middle of Salesforce today, you know, and said create a content strategy, how would I do it? Let's pretend they don't have any content on the site right now, so I can't cheat. I can't, you know, look at anything. First thing I would do is I would take their product and actually take the SaaS, break it down by product, break it down to a product level, and then from there, break those products down into specific features, and then I would map those features to specific pain points, and then you map those pain points back to an ideal customer profile.
And honestly, from those pain points, that's when you start the keyword research. So a lot of people get it twisted. They start the research first instead of the customer research, but if you work from the product and work your way all the way back to the customer, that's how you're gonna Make sure that you create, like, product-led focused content.
Like, I'm talking about hitting all their pain points, talking about all the features that they use. And of course, the bigger the SaaS is, the more complicated this gets. But using Salesforce as a, you know, as an extreme example, it's probably a lot of people that work at SaaS companies that, you know, maybe not have as many products as Salesforce.
But if I could break that down the way I just did it, I think you can probably do it for your SaaS company as well. Again, and just to repeat that one more time, it's about taking a SaaS, breaking it down by product level. Now, some of you listening may only have, you know, one core product. If that's the case, you take the core product, and then you break it down by feature, and then you start mapping those features to specific pain points.
But if you work at a SaaS company, and you guys have a suite of different products, break it down to a product level, then break those products down into specific features, and then map those features to specific pain points. And then once you have the pain points, you can start doing the, the keyword research for that
That was really, really good.
I'm gonna let that breathe for a minute. If I had an air horn, I would press it right now. Because I think, like, what you just showed, like, if you can break down... Look, and Salesforce as a product has a million different features, and I'm thinking about this, I was, like, writing notes as you were saying that.
That's where I have gotten tripped up in the past. If someone was like, "Hey, write copy for Salesforce," I'd be- I would instantly be like, "Well, how? There's 100 different things, a m- a million different ways." But when you broke it down that way, which is, bloop, flip it, start with the customer first.
Mm-hmm.
Because you're, who are we selling to? The use case, as you went from, from the beginning, you need to start there. The use case for sales is different than marketing, is different for HR, is different than IT, and I do think as marketers and content creators, it's very easy to be like, "Oh my goodness, this product has, you know, 700 features and there's all these different possibilities."
Well, that's not entirely true because if you start with the persona, that's gonna give you a clearer map of, like, what matters to this, this audience, right? What matters to IT is gonna be, like, 5% of, or maybe none of the conversation of how you're gonna talk about this to a marketer.
100%. And also think about, like, even if you think about the current economic climate, it's like companies are slashing budgets.
They're just cutting costs wherever they can. So it's really important for you to make sure you at least touch on the top three to five pain points that they're dealing with because it's like, again, at this point in the, with the economic climate, it's like if the prospect doesn't feel like they absolutely need your solution, they're probably not gonna reach out.
And again, this could change depending on how the economy changes, but we're tight right now, so it's like, it's even more important to start hitting on those customer pain points to make sure that you're addressing what they really care about. Because the sooner you do that, the sooner you're gonna start to get those inbound leads, for sure.
Also, this separate but related, I think it's always important from a writing standpoint to address the elephant in the room. And so, like, there's always gonna be each quarter, there's gonna be, like, a now. So in addition to all your research, there's gonna be, like, a what's happening in the world right now that we can tie into our content and our copy to make this relevant.
And so how can you Tie the economic climate stuff that you were talking about into your content strategy, and make that a part of the pain point story that you're trying to tell, as opposed to just operating in a, in a vacuum where you're pretending like that's not happening right now.
No, absolutely.
And you... And actually you saying that just reminded me of something. It's like, that's why I love working with writers with a creative background, maybe writers that were, like, former journalists or worked in B2C, is because they understand little things like you just said. Like, "Oh, maybe let's tie in, you know, something about the economy."
Not totally take it off track, but just, like, angle it and then bring it back into what pain points that they're struggling with, but be able to tie something that's, like, a real world event into the content. It's like... And again, it's no shade to SEO writers. Like, I used to classify myself as one, but it's just, like, the thing about SEO writers is, like, usually I find they wouldn't think of things like that.
They're just very SEO focused, just, "How can we rank this? How can we make this work?" It's just like, that's great, but at the same time it's like it doesn't matter how high of a ranking you have on a bottom of funnel piece. If it doesn't speak to the customer, it's not going to convert. And then at that point, what was the point of you ranking it in the first place?
Totally. Great point. All right, we, we're gonna have to do a round three. Every time you come on, I'm gonna have to reschedule you for th- another time. Can you give us some examples, content you've seen, content you've created, favorite bottom of the funnel content pieces you can remember in your career that you've created?
Real Examples of Great BOFU Content
Yeah. So I created a couple pieces for a company called Big Tin Can Learning. I created some bottom of funnel pieces for them. HubSpot, the company HubSpot has some really, really great content. I didn't write it, but I do use it to show advising clients exactly how they need to structure their content.
ServiceTitan is another company that has really good product-led bottom of funnel focused content. And the thing it's like, it's tricky 'cause I have people ask me for examples of, like, what type of content that I like, but it's so many companies not producing good content. It's, like, hard to pull the examples that I like.
But those are a couple that I think really have this dialed in, and I'm sure there are other companies too that I'm not, just not naming. But those are a few of my favorites. And again, like, if you just go and look through some of their content, you'll be able to see how product-led it is, how it touches on pain points straight from the intro.
They don't, you know, start with, "Oh, you know, this statistic is, you know, 56% of..." There's no point in doing that, especially when it comes to bottom of funnel. Like, get to the point Tell them why your solution is the best. Map specific features to specific pain points. Use those pain points to drive the keyword research.
It's a continuous, like, cycle, and if you continue, like, to refine and try to really master and hone in on that, you're gonna be one of the best content marketers out here. And I know we were kind of talking before the show a little bit, but honestly, you know, we were talking about how my differentiator is bottom of funnel content, and that's because nobody really talks about it.
Nobody's really focusing on it, and it's like the people that do focus on it, they don't publicly talk about it. I'm sorry if there's anybody out there that publicly talks about it that I don't know. If there is, feel free to reach out and connect with me. But from what I see, there is nobody that gets specific and deep on bottom of funnel content.
So I wanted to fill that gap in the market. So I guess that's just me, like, you know, the whole self-fulfilling prophecy of just, like, you know, doing customer research and then figuring out what the gap is and then being able to fill that gap.
But also just I think it's so much more efficient, and I've made a lot of mistakes in doing a lot of stuff at the top of the funnel before from a brand and buzz standpoint.
But I think what's great about your approach is, um, the output doesn't need to be like you're on this, like, SEO hamster wheel where your content team of two in-house writers and two freelancers and a very slim budget, it doesn't have to be like, "Well, congrats. You're gonna have to create 50 articles this month."
Whereas, like, I think if you take this approach, you can create one or two in-depth killer pieces of content that is gonna bring you so much more value than writing 50 articles.
No, 100%, and that's one of the reason number 2,500 and whatever that I love bottom of funnel content is because you can do so much more with it with less budget.
So it's like if you are at a SaaS company right now and budgets are a little bit tight and you have, don't have that much wiggle room, it's like producing that bottom of funnel content and then being able to take that to executive leadership in 90 days and say, "Look." And again, for anybody that I'm about to touch on attribution really, really quickly, but for you to go to executive leadership and say, "Look how my content drove in this many demos this month," and it's only been three months since you started.
So I think bottom of funnel content is perfect for companies that maybe have a tighter budget, and when I say tighter, I mean, like, they don't have eight to $10,000 a month to pay a content marketing agency. It's just great for companies that are tight on budget that really wanna be resourceful and really think about taking a sniper approach to content marketing rather than a shotgun approach.
Repurposing BOFU Content Across Platforms
How do you think, like, all of the channels available to you impact this conversation about bottom of the funnel content because I was thinking of like, man, this is, yes, this is so important because to me, content is marketing, right? Like, the way that we buy things is we do research, we go to Google, we go to YouTube We see TikTok videos, and this is how I got on this thought, was like, this is how we buy, though.
And so, like, there's a whole world now where this is changing. It's evolving right in front of our eyes beyond Google. It's not just what shows up in Google, but like if all of a sudden I see a video o- on YouTube Shorts, or I get an email, or I see a LinkedIn post, like you as a content strategist, like where do you see this world evolving?
Like, you're giving companies these content briefs. Do you see this evolving beyond like, right now you're saying, "Yeah, go write an article about this," but do you see a world where this is evolving, where that article is also a YouTube video, is also a podcast episode, is also a TikTok video? Like, how do, how do you see that playing out?
You know what I'm trying to get at?
No, for sure. I definitely feel like with the rise of like content repurposing and things like that, I think it's even more important to start distributing your bottom of funnel content. So I guess specifically, even when it comes to having a social media strategy, I still look at it through the lens of top, mid, and bottom of funnel.
So and then I think LinkedIn recently came out with like Boost Post or something like that. I think that's gonna be a game changer for individuals, especially when it comes to, you know, running content strategies for companies and being product evangelists and so on and so forth. But I think it's very important to repurpose that bottom of funnel content, mainly because it's like, especially if it's converting just sitting on your blog, what else do you think it could do?
If you were to turn that into a YouTube video and kind of just start the YouTube video off the same way you would start the article off, and I'm just giving, you know, everyone an example. I start my articles off, one of my frameworks, "Customers usually turn to an XYZ software when they're dealing with these pain points."
Imagine starting a Shorts video or a YouTube video in the same type of fashion. It's literally just taking a bottom of funnel piece and repurposing it across different platforms. And, and I know YouTube is a little bit more trickier when it comes to top, mid, and bottom of funnel. But I think taking what works and then distributing what already works is gonna put you ahead of your competitors for sure.
Because a lot of people are just distributing things. And not to say you have to get really super strategic with like repurposing and things like that. I know it's just great to sometimes be able to pump the top of funnel content out. But again, if we're talking about bottom of funnel and being very tactical here, I think it's important to understand which content pieces are converting for you, and then come up with a plan on how to repurpose that piece into multiple different media types.
So if it works good on a blog, film a YouTube video and then embed the YouTube video into the blog. What happens is people that come to the blog are gonna watch the video. Those are your YouTube views going up. People that go to YouTube Can see the blog in the description, they can click on the... So it's really just like creating an entire ecosystem of just your product, your brand, and again, I think it's just very important to be repurposing bottom of funnel content.
Just take what's working and then figure out how to tailor it to the specific platform that you're trying to go on. So it's like obviously if you're writing a LinkedIn post, you're not gonna be able to write it exactly the same way you're writing a blog post. You have to do a little bit of restructuring.
But even with a LinkedIn content strategy, I still look at it the same way. I look at it like certain posts are top of funnel, just kind of fluffy, maybe a little bit of motivational. Middle of funnel, where it's like I'm talking, you know, I'm getting tactical with you. This is how you do this, that, and third.
And then bottom of funnel, reach out to me for a strategy call to get your team on a profitable path with content marketing. It's like I look at content through that top, mid, and bottom of funnel filter. That's how I'm able to simplify a lot of the things that I'm able to simplify.
This is where I think social media can be awesome, and it's very underrated from a content marketing standpoint, and just the, a way to test ideas.
Like, I would love to take your framework and start creating some of that content, but before we wrote, like, a three thousand word, two thousand word article on it, like, I think that, like, almost your template for a brief could be formatted into, like, a two hundred to five hundred word LinkedIn post, and you could get a quick, like, directional sense on, on the reaction to that.
Or even I do this, like, more subconsciously now, but, like, I might just, like, have a tweet off the cuff or a Zeet. I don't even know what it is anymore. A tweet off the cuff or, like, a LinkedIn post off the cuff And I'm like, whoa, okay. So like I wrote something the other day about creating like 30, 60, 90-day plans for new VPs and put more time and effort into that LinkedIn post than normal, and that LinkedIn post blew up.
That to me is a great indicator of like people in my audience are interested in that topic. Like for example, if we wanted to do a webinar on that topic, I would feel pretty damn good about it being popular, or if we wanted to do a podcast episode on that topic, it, I'd feel pretty damn good about it being popular.
And so I think there's a lot that people can also just use social media when we talk about what's the value of brands being on LinkedIn, or founders or whoever being on LinkedIn. Like think about your business. How much have you learned about what people want more from out of you just by you writing on LinkedIn as an ex- as an example?
No, 100%. Also, I practice what I preach, so everybody that, you know, reaches out and that's looking for content marketing advising, I have a running list of pain points, and then I'm mapping my own solution to those pain points. That's why, you know, if I put out a bottom of funnel post on LinkedIn, usually does pretty well with generating strategy calls and things like that because I know how to touch on the customer pain points.
And you know, some of those pain points are usually like, "Oh, you know, we're producing a lot of content, but we're not seeing any growth in SQLs," or, "I wanna be able to focus on bottom of funnel content, but I just don't have the time." And a lot of head of marketers don't have the time to focus on that like they want to, and it's like, you know, "I've worked with this content marketing agency, but they weren't very thorough in how they..."
You know, so it's just like I keep a running list of those pain points, and then for every single pain point that I hear from a prospect, I tie my service or f- I guess I wouldn't call it a feature, but like a specific section of my service and tie it back to that pain point, and really this dashboard solves a lot of those pain points.
It solves Content marketing and sales alignment, customer research, executive buy-in. It's a ton of different use cases that I've heard from a, a lot of different people that you can use to kind of help with this. The whole dashboard thing, I think one of the use cases somebody gave me was like, "Oh, this is great for BDRs and SDRs when they come in and quickly learn about a product."
And I'm just like, "Wow, I didn't even think about having that many use cases for this thing." I was just looking at it through a lens of let's create a bottom of funnel content strategy. And the way I look at it is I completely break it all from everything else we're doing. That's why it sits in its own dashboard, 'cause I don't want us mixing the top of funnel and the bottom of funnel stuff.
It's just written totally differently. Let's hone in and create some systems and processes for scaling bottom of funnel product led content.
Wrap Up & Exit Five Community
Love that. You could like repackage this as like a onboarding kit for new hires, like there's lots of value. Okay, Lashay, you gotta go. I gotta go. Thank you for doing this.
Thank you.
I'll see you for something else later this week. This episode will be out after that. Do me a favor, go to LinkedIn, look up Lashay Lewis. I'll put your information in this post. We'll link to all the stuff that we mentioned here. I'll email you after so we can get the right links to that. And the highest measure of success for a podcast for me is when the guest emails me after and says, "Oh my goodness, I got so many messages from people after listening."
So go to LinkedIn, connect with Lashay, send her a message, reach out, ask a question, start following her stuff on LinkedIn, and we'll be here with another episode of the Exit Five podcast. All right? See you later
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