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Marketing Powerups is a show for marketers looking to boost their marketing and career to the next level. Ramli John interviews world-class marketers to uncover the secrets, strategies, and frameworks behind their wins. In each episode, guests reveal three things: (1) a marketing power-up, (2) a real-world example of that in action, and (3) a power-up that’s helped them take their career to the next level. Marketing Powerups will help marketers step up their game, level up their careers, and become the best they can be.
You want to sound smart, throw around words like strategy,
marketing strategy, content strategy, email strategy.
The problem is, most people confuse the word strategy with plans.
Most strategy strategies that people present are
really just plans. They're just, oh, here are the things that we're
going to do in marketing over the next quarter half
a year. But that's not a strategy, that's just a series
of activities. A strategy is more of a hypothesis.
It's the difference between executing a playbook,
looking at multiple playbooks and frameworks, and you're doing all the
research and saying, okay, I found a unique
opportunity here that could make a big
positive impact on the results from our marketing
activities or whatever. I totally agree with Devin. She actually shares her
media led strategy for marketing today. She has hypothesis that
if you tap into a community and create a media led approach to attracting them,
your company will do better in the long term. In this marketing Pops
episode, you learned, first, the problem with the traditional SEO approach.
Second, the power of tapping into a community. Third, a B2B company
that's using a media led strategy really well. And number four,
wanting to help accelerate Devin's career. Now, before we get started,
I've created a free power up cheat sheet that you can download and apply
Devin's media-ed strategy. You can find that marketing powerups.com
or in the show notes and description. Are you ready? Let's go.
Marketing powerups.
Ready? Go.
Here's your host, Ramli John.
Well, Devin, I'm so, so excited to have, you know,
we have the Appcues connection. Margaret used to work at Appcues, which is your
thing. You've worked animals has worked with Appuse.
We worked with animals. Thank you for coming on.
We're going to be talking about medialed strategy.
And that word strategy is so loaded because we love to talk about it
like content strategy, marketing strategy, company strategy.
But the problem with it is often very vague and hazy
and you talking about media led strategy. I'm curious.
First of all, to you, what isn't. A strategy that's
such an important thing? Because people think it's something,
but it might not necessarily be that thing. And I heard
you have a lot to say about this. I think when I
was at Animals still, ryan Law and I did a whole
episode on this where we
both read walter was a big fan of good strategy, bad strategy.
So I think if you basically, anytime you worked there,
anyone who worked there had read it, basically.
And what we were discussing is
how most strategies that people present
are really just plans. They're just, oh,
here are the things that we're going to do in marketing
over the next quarter, half a
year. But that's not a strategy,
that's just a series of activities. A strategy
is more of a hypothesis, and it usually
involves experimentation and
to some degree, where you're
not just like it's the difference between executing
a playbook and looking at a
play, multiple playbooks and frameworks. And you're like, doing all the research and
saying, okay, I found a unique
opportunity here that could
make a big positive impact on
the results from our marketing activities or whatever.
This is the hypothesis. And then underneath
that are the activities that you're going to do. So the
reason why I would call media
led strategy, I put strategy at the end of that is that it is
conceptual in nature. I don't have a playbook for
you to say every B two B SaaS company should do
X, Y and Z. It's a belief that
leading with media in
your marketing will return unique
results, like uniquely better results and
is fundamentally better
than the sort of current strategy de
jour because by leading with media,
you have repurposing built
in and there are a great many tools right now,
including AI, that make repurposing
very easy. And so the concept is that
it is more human forward,
which I think is more effective these days anyway.
It leverages the tools that
are currently available. So it's like very present day now.
It's not intended to be this like it's capturing the
reality that we are in right now. And it's
flexible, it can be distributed across multiple
team members, et cetera, et cetera. So that to me is a strategy because
it has a hypothesis and it takes
in sort of the realities and tools of today and
is different from the current
common strategies that are being deployed in B two B SaaS marketing.
And the current common is typically write like
a blog and then create content like that.
When we say content, people think about content, they think about
the blog. And you're talking more of a holistic approach
where like media could be many different kind of
assets or forms. Yes. And the thing
is, we got so asset focused
in B two B marketing strategy where it was like,
I'm going to write blog posts and search
and all that and we're going to use social media for
distribution.
And it was so performance focused.
Everyone has already talked about how the improvement in measurement
tool like measuring the more tools we had to measure
our marketing was first really great because it made it advocating
for our jobs better. But also it resulted in this very tactical,
these tactical marketing plans that lack
a greater vision,
stance and personality and
that transactional kind of approaches isn't working anymore. I mean, I think
I might have said this in public more than once, but I was
like, websites are dead, you don't need them anymore. Blogs are
just a library that people can reference
when they need to. But that's kind
of true. It's like, what if we put the
idea at the center why
you made this product in the first place? What is the challenge that it
was solving? Who are the people it's helping? If you
put the media led strategy really emphasizes
more the idea,
and then you think about where
is best to share that idea after.
And so I feel like it inherently
puts the customer at the center. Again, it inherently puts
your product at the center. It puts your people at
the center. And there's sort of a limitless number of
experiments that you can run that way.
So that's why I'm
so passionate about it, because also it's more interesting. Everything became
about the journey,
linear journey. I'm like, I need you to know that
journeys don't look like that. They just look journeys are like
a subway map inside. And it's like,
let's stop simplifying and embrace the mess
and chaos. And that's what
I think this strategy does, and I think it'll be more effective.
It's funny compared to subway path because,
you know, I've gotten lost. Like, oh, line one, line I'm
based out of Toronto. We have, like, three lines versus New York,
where there's multiple ways to get from point A
to point B, multiple potential.
And this is a challenge strategy
is like trying to make sense of chaos, and by doing so,
simplifying it so much so that it kind of deduces
it to something that is easy to communicate, but at the same time,
it loses you mentioned it. That humanness to
it all. And I think I get it right.
We automated it down so
that it was presumably more efficient and effective and cost
less. Right? Because the flip side of that is like an unruly,
unmeasurable marketing plan that is
wasteful.
I understand the appeal of automating as much as possible and playbooks
and all. You know, I was thinking about my
friend Michael, who's the founder of Campfire Labs.
He is, like, to me, a really good example of
someone who inherently thinks strategically. So on
the side, he's very interested in climate issues.
And he's launched more than one. He launched a newsletter,
I think it was called Carbon Switch, that immediately took off,
had tons of subscribers, ended up being
a company, offered to buy it.
So we did that. And then he started another newsletter that took off on
YouTube, took off on the newsletter
subscribers. Like, I'm talking tens of thousands. And that
is like, he knew the exact thing
within a small community and the angle
and the way to discuss it. And he did experiments in between
and found and there's
a lot going on there that I don't talk about because it's his to talk
about, but other opportunities have come from this,
and it didn't take a lot of effort. That's the thing.
But it's because he embraced
his depth of knowledge and wasn't afraid to niche
down that, oddly, it blew
up. Same thing with Margaret and I, right? We were like, we only want
to talk to marketing leaders. We're like, we're not talking to anyone else. I'm so
sick of this beginner shit. Like, it's boring.
And man, our podcast took off better than more than
we expected. We thought, oh, it'll be a marketing channel for us, blah, blah.
And then we're like, oh, whoa, wow. We have sponsors offered,
people offer to sponsor us after six episodes, like lots
of other examples like that. And so we're sort
of an example of it just like that works. That is strategy.
Right. And it's different
than a plan. The plan came after the strategy. After the strategy,
right. That makes sense. What I'm hearing here is like,
medialed works so well if you're tapped into the community
because you already kind of know what the problems are
and what challenges they have. Is that what I heard that correctly with
that example with Campfire Labs and with don't say content.
Yeah, and why wouldn't you? You would think that's
already at these companies disposal. Because if you're going through
the motions of building a product,
all that customer research and talking to customers and putting
different early versions of the software out there right.
You know already, you know, and you have access to these
people because they've already given you feedback. You've probably already
run whatever customer tests or
whatever you do, it's already there.
So of course you'd be able to do this without extra.
Those people are already at your disposal. You already built a
community of those people around you. So I think,
again, it's very organic to me. It's very obvious. It's easy.
That makes sense. Easy. You should never I think actually saying
is kind of rude. It's easy to some people.
It's easy when you're I'm not entirely sure.
I forgot who said it. I think Ryan Fishkin recently said, like,
whoever said that second time you start a company gets easier,
they're lying or something. Like know that might be that case here
too. Right. It's like the things that you've done before become
less hard, but then a whole bunch of new problems
you can get to before are like, in your face. Yeah,
but I think the organic thing is really where is
really what I'm trying to say is that it's
not like trying to find a good example instead
of sort of like forcing something to happen.
It's almost like opening the gates and letting the water flow.
That's a great analogy there. I just want to recap and
just share this hypothesis you have about media life strategy.
If people lead with media, right.
You mentioned around getting unique results with it.
And that's really what you're getting at with this media led
strategy where if. You tap into the community, create media.
That resonates with them, then they inherently get
attracted to what you're doing. If you're
a consultant, if you're a brand, if you're a product company
am I saying that right? Yeah. The media is
the way to get your unique
stance out into the world in
multiple different ways. Right. You took a stance when
you made a company and you made a product
and you set vision and all of that, right? That comes from a stance
about something. And there's lots of different ways to communicate that
stance through people on your team,
through your leadership, through people in the community that you
surface and each
product or each industry or each developer
communities. For example, there's sort of this built in preference
of where they like to interact and the types of things they like
to interact with. Right? That's going to be true of any product.
And so you sort of have these things already
narrowed down and then it's like, okay, cool, how do I want to what
can I contribute here in these different media
places? That was the worst sentence I've ever
said. But how do
I introduce something that is new
and either entertaining, valuable, fun,
whatever? I think that's it.
It's what I've seen work over and over.
Even I worked with Cisco earlier this year
with their Devrel marketing department. And this
company is like a world. Yeah, right, they're so big,
but they have these really robust communities.
For a company that has a very corporate website, that has more
subdomains and pages than I've ever seen in my life,
they have these robust communities that was
so impressive to me. And there's
multiple of them, multiple different people moderating them,
the events that they, the conferences, et cetera, they're really
engaged. They engage the community and are engaged.
They're an example of surprisingly, I wouldn't necessarily think of a
big company like that as a good example, but they're
a great example of using different
forms of media across different team members
of varying role types in different community
spaces and just regular marketing channels.
It's really impressive to the point where this
world of Cisco is able to become small
in the right ways to keep those right,
which is something that they really that
is important component of their marketing strategy. Before I continue,
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Notes and Description well, let's get back to this episode. I read
it in one of your LinkedIn posts. It's just connecting to me now. How media
led strategy could also be called community led content strategy.
Would you say that it's like you're. Really tapping into the
community to help you decide what to build,
rather than the traditional approach, which is let's do. Keyword research,
whereas let's not start there. It might
help after, but let's start off with people. Let's start off with
our customers. Let's start off with our employees, maybe, and tapping into
that community first to see what would resonate with them first.
Yeah, and it's like seeing the community and I think it can ping pong a
bit or I tend to ping pong there where I
may have a strong stance and so I share that strong stance.
And LinkedIn is a place where sometimes I do that. I actually learned it from
Ashley Foss. She's always testing stuff on LinkedIn
to see what is resonating with people, how they're reacting to it.
Is she to something, tweaking it, sharing it again.
So it's like you have the
idea, then you bring to the community or you research the community and then have
the idea. It kind of ping pongs back
and forth. And I think that once
you get to actually sharing the final thing,
you've got all these people around you who are already fired up about it.
I by accident, I was saying something
over and over in different places and talking to like
when I would comment on something, I guess said it a lot. That to
the point where people were saying to me, they're like, oh yeah, you hate playbooks.
I was like, what? Strong Opinions Weekly Held I was like,
but actually I do hate playbooks frameworks. But it came
back at me. And that is a best case scenario for a brand,
right? Best case scenario. You want people saying you're
believing in your stance so much that they're saying it back to you and to
other people. That's where the ubiquitousness, the sort of longevity
of an entity can exist. Animals is
a great example. I built that brand into something
so big that at least
while I was there, right, there was a lot it could withstand,
and a lot of brand can withstand and
continue. I would say when I left, I was a little bit behind the ball
in terms of modernizing an agency structure,
but it didn't matter, you know what I mean, people?
The brand kind of gives you a little bit of a lifeline to kind of
catch up. What I really love about this approach you're mentioning
is that distribution, and you mentioned it earlier,
repurposing is like inherently embedded into it. The problem
with content, often creators, is that there's
just two phases where they first create and then they
distribute. And 95% of the effort is on the
creation piece. But here it's almost like this feedback
cycle where you're already thinking about distribution at
the same time. And testing, you mentioned testing around what will resonate with
this community, how will we share it, what approach
and what channel in your approach with this is essentially
distribution first, right? Imagine if you
have an idea for a message,
a positioning, or what if you were
able to test that through someone who works at your company, who posts on
LinkedIn, who has a community around them already, or your leader starts
to talk about it. You have different people sharing this as like
a testing ground very fast. Mind you, you get results
immediately or you get feedback immediately, which makes it
super efficient and even going into those communities and asking
them directly too. Now all of a sudden your community feels a part of what
you're building and they're more likely to pay attention when
you do go out with it. And look, I'm not saying that
things like search aren't important. I just think that
in the B, two B SaaS world, what I hear consistently is Google
Search. It's very specific. We're still
for some reason talking about search
in that one context. And I'm like there
is an entire search strategy or search approach
to search that is unique to YouTube, to TikTok.
There's a whole bunch of things that you can do to
surface the stuff you're saying and build
an audience there that aren't exactly the same as Google
Search and are worth. I really by taking it away from,
again, the specific channels, you're like, it's media.
And media to me is kind of like content. You can sort of like morph
it into whatever you think it means, you know what I mean?
This is media, sure, you know what I mean,
everything is a nail in your hammer or whatever. But what
I wish people were saying is, hey,
search,
general search is a thing as a tactic,
it's an efficiency tactic, it's a performance tactic
within your marketing plan and it applies across
several channels. And we have
built that is where a playbook actually really helps because a
lot of times it's stuff you have to do every time you're like. We have
a little mini playbook across all of our media channels
that have search algorithms that can
be optimized for.
And I think that that's where the open it's like there's the openness
of the umbrella to bring in these other
so you're not just because the
conversation is so boring currently about like,
what's going to happen with searching because of AI. And then what's going to happen
with writing because of AI. And I'm like,
stop. Because you're still focusing on something that's rapidly becoming
ancient. What real strategy
in 2023 is completely rethinking
how you build brand affinity
and generate demand
with all the new things that now exist.
That would be a strategic approach. That would be someone going at solving a problem
for their company in a strategic way that's so deep. I feel like that's
like, you probably already posted up on LinkedIn, but such
a Tweetable thing, talking about this brand of fitting
and really generating that demand and this media led approach is about
that attraction piece again. You're like, captain the
community, creating something for that community so that they
are attracted to your product, to what you're doing and what you're working, what you're
talking about. The penis. Jay says this.
Jay a cudzo, says this all the time about, if you just I'm
going to ruin it. So please do not take this word because
he has something very pithy already put together. But he's a friend
of mine, so I hear him talk about this a lot, which is if you
just make something great that people love,
that is the gravitational pull, right? It's like attracting is really
about creating things that people love such that they are attracted to
you. You're not like going out and grabbing them. I always talk
about kind of like the and I'm not knocking on like, demand gen because you
definitely I know you need to do all that stuff. And fair.
Even when you bring people in on community, it's still a little messy. You got
to give someone a path to go down. And I totally get that and think
it's important, but there's this whole
world of people, and we always talk about snatching those people out of
the ecosystem and bringing it into ours. And I'm like,
what if they that feels weird.
It sounds weird, right? I'm not much of a
sheepdog. It's like I'm not really trying to hurt anybody. It's just
like when you do stuff, when you have a unique perspective
and stance and you
are truly authentic. Because I think a lot of people talk about authenticity
and then are still kind of too buttoned up
and polished and synced and not really relating
as much as they could, even on the brand level.
I think particularly B, two B. SaaS brands could take a lot.
They could really do better. Like Help Scout was a great example
of being more vulnerable is
not the right word, but you know what they stood for.
It was one of my favorite, even though it was one of the hardest places
I've ever worked. It was
one of the best brands I ever worked for because, man,
those three founders believed,
and the content showed that. And so
I think that they're a great example of just like, you can be different.
It's okay. It's actually better, right?
Stop following what everyone else is doing. And for the love of God,
say something that I haven't heard
13 times in the last 30 seconds as I scrolled through LinkedIn,
especially if you're talking about AI. I am done hearing
writers weep about how it's going to take their jobs.
And I'm like Strategist. It's like,
this is an opportunity it doesn't have. Like, you can change
your job or come up with a new imagine if you looked at
this and you're like, oh, my gosh, I see this coming. I see the ways
that my work is being commoditized.
I have an idea those are the people that
are going to win right now. This is why I keep saying this is like
the new age of search,
when all of a sudden you could in blogging, right? You could write a blog
post and kind of like, catapult your growth
of your company. That was possible. It's possible
now on all levels, on an individual level, on a brand level.
It's like, take these new changes and instead of trying to worry about
how it's going to impact existing model,
change the model. And if you're the one that does
it, it's likely that you will benefit
more at the most. It's funny
you mentioned, got to go to the I need
someone to towel me off. Give me some.
Getting in there, getting into
the hot takes. It's something that Margaret actually got super
passionate. Margaret, your co host for don't say content. She was talking
about how out of B two B SaaS at some point,
she called the Enterprise Blue, where all enterprise companies,
they look the same and they take on this really generic
blue color just because it's safe
and it's what it's done. And you're like,
that's how you get lost in the sea. Trauma. I have trauma about that
color. I do.
Yeah. When I think of it, I get a little upset. I have
to take a pill or something. I don't know. But, yeah, you're right.
You mentioned something in your chat with Tommy Walker.
He asked you for your content principle,
and you just said, don't be boring. You said
very just out there, and you started
going through but it's exactly what you're saying here.
It's like if you say as a brand Enterprise
Blue, you say the same thing as everybody else. AI is going to take a
look. You're just essentially getting
lost in that noise.
This is what I want to know. I want to ask every startup founder,
this is like, what is the benefit
to just copying someone else in any
way? Your website homepage. Because I remember
and I think every marketer who's alive in B two b SaaS is
going to know what I'm talking about. Every founder ever
has come to us multiple times saying, my friend did this thing
in five minutes and they're
worth trillions of dollars now. We should do it right?
Or like, oh, my friend, I heard of this, I know this guy,
and they started a podcast and blah, blah, blah.
That is so ubiquitous. And the
problem is, when you try to do something that
isn't, or try to get something done that isn't in your wheelhouse,
the only thing that feels safe
is what you've already seen, that you know has succeeded.
And so it almost puts blinders on you to
logic around, would this work for our
customers, given that they're completely different
from my friend's company that did this?
Do we have the same resources?
Has it been done before? And I think
that's where you get that sea of sameness.
It's like a version of the Silicon Valley Bank. It's like everyone
starts telling each other, the investors are like, you got to go.
And they perpetuate this thing that was really destructive instead of productive.
And the same with design and brand
and how you describe your product, how you do your pricing page.
It's like, what if you just thought from
scratch and talked to your customers and tested
some stuff to see? Because at some point, whatever exists now
didn't exist before. Somebody did. It new and it worked,
and there's so many other things out there,
but we're not doing it. And I think one of the biggest reasons why we're
not is because marketing in
the B, two B SaaS has stagnated due to the sort
of fraught relationship between founders, CEOs and marketing
leaders. There is always, since the beginning of time,
our time, as long as I've been alive and working in
marketing, let's just say, yeah, it is the
most talked about thing behind the scenes around
just marketers and
founders not speaking the same language. Thus founders
not really understanding what they're doing and constantly meddling and then changing course all
the time. Probably. Definitely high turnover in their marketing
teams and marketers struggling
to show value because time,
resource, et cetera. To finish there's learning
on both sides that needs to happen. But this broken relationship has led to some
pretty boring marketing plans that haven't changed
much in the past ten years, to be perfectly honest.
Just in b two b sasso. You look at B to C and you're like,
man, they're innovating all the time. They are
bringing real world, virtual world in
multiple different ways. And they're like doing this
thing. And it's fun, it's engaging.
They've got free brand ambassadors up
the wazoo because they're doing like a pop up thing here, a virtual experience here,
and why aren't we doing that?
And it's because we haven't gotten anywhere. Because we can't even convince our
founders and CEOs to let us do one very boring,
logical thing and stick. With it long enough to show that it works,
right? And so I think there's and Margaret talks about her and
I have talked about this. This is a thing that we've really latched
onto recently is like, we need to solve that. That's at the
very beginning, at the same time that folks
are sort of experimenting with different strategic
approaches on the outside. I don't think we're going to make a lot of progress
unless we do. It's something you talked about on a LinkedIn post last week about
how you were fired because of lack of performance,
but the reason why is the founder just kept changing
strategy or like, you telling
marketing team to do this new cool thing. And you mentioned
in that post that it takes consistency and time
to really get a marketing program going.
My first nine months at that company, I had a very
simple I had one goal for nine months, or six months,
actually. Wait. Yeah, it wasn't nine months. It was like six months. It might have
even been less than that, now that I think about it.
And I didn't just hit it, I beat
it. I showed up.
I was like, I'm going to do this. And my team was focused on
it. We had support from the other teams, like Design
and Demand gen to sort of help us.
And we did it.
And of course we did because we were able to stay focused long
enough. And I have to really loud my CMO for
that because he was the one getting all the air
cover. So we could because we had a product
founder and CEO who just didn't understand how
marketing worked and was
very skeptical of a lot of things that activities that marketers
engaged in and that once
my CMO left, they brought a lovely,
very brilliant businessman and person who's like,
incredible and who I love. His first
meeting with the Barking team, he's like, Listen, I don't know anything about marketing.
I'm not a marketing expert. We're like,
oh, my God. What?
Right? And to his credit, he was an incredible
person and leader. Like, he did all the things that he was
supposed to do well. But when it came to
the goals for my team,
my content team, they changed so much that
finally my CEO is like, you're not performing. I'm like you're
right. And of
course, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't change course along the way, but you should
know why, right? You should know why. And the why
comes from executing something long enough that you
have the information that helps you make a logical decision.
And it doesn't have to be one to one. I ran this
unmeasurable campaign, and it led to those
signals are always there and at least enough to know whether
we should keep going or clearly we should stop.
And a good example of that would be I
sort of used the podcast to conduct an experiment I sort of already knew the
answer to. Interesting. Yeah. So I thought, okay,
well, you know, we have this community around
us already, so let's see if
we can use YouTube or
TikTok to either.
Is it possible to grow
awareness of the podcast and thus impact subscribers
through those two channels? My guess was no, because they're very insular
channels, especially TikTok. But then
my follow up question was, well, is this
a different community for us? Could we build a different community of
marketers that are outside the community that were already well known in?
So it's like kind of a two pronged experiment.
And because of that and we tested intentionally with brand
versus me individually and on TikTok
specifically. And then we focused the brand on YouTube. And it was obvious
very quickly when I posted the same stuff that we were posting on
the brand account on TikTok, a ton of like it was like 200 views to
like 900. Wow. Right.
And YouTube,
we're still experimenting with that because I just feel like I have more to learn
on modern day YouTube and how know, operate on that
platform. But that's what I mean. It's a signal. Now, has that
answered my fundamental question around no, because I've
got a lot more work to do. I have to be consistent on that channel
for a long time to really see how it might benefit.
And the reason I want to use it for the podcast is so I can
see if well, how might this be used for a brand? Because B,
two B SaaS brands in particular, have struggled to figure out how to use TikTok
for brand growth. So if I can use us as an example,
I might discover something that's useful for them to experiment with too.
And thus I can be more useful to my clients when I make recommendations.
It's so cool you were experimenting with TikTok already.
I think that's something that only in the last year I started hearing more
companies like Open Phone and Panda Doc
experiment with TikTok. Yeah, they're doing some
really cool Zapier. To their credit. Zapier was doing stuff,
I think more than a year. I think they were doing stuff back in like
yeah, I guess it was 2022. I don't know if they're still using, but I
love Zapier. Interesting. I know some of the folks there, I just love them as
a brand and they were doing some TikTok stuff.
But yeah, I think, again,
there's a benefit to being a novice. And it's
actually really fun to be a novice in something. Again, to have been in
this industry for so long and to go on. When I first started using it,
I was like, Sweet Jesus,
I still feel that way. Like, I barely know how to use it. But now
I'm having fun. Which means once you start having fun,
you experiment more and you get weird. As evidenced by
my insane LinkedIn post this week where I was like, I.
Don'T care, always goes back to you
saying that don't be boring, and it's you posting up.
I think you were posting up. You walking on a
path. And then you were just like, I think you were dancing. I'm not
entirely sure. I don't quite remember, but I went. For a morning walk with
my mom, and she didn't have any hand weights,
and I thought that a can of beans would be heavy, and it totally isn't.
So I was just, like, making jokes, and then I
was making jokes at her, and she started recording me, and then I
started running by myself, and she drove the car back. So she's,
like, driving alongside me, like, recording me being just
I was just playing. I was having a fun day. And then I was inspired
by being here to write about being
in Vermont and what it feels like to open your
mind in different places, et cetera, et cetera, and exposing making
the things you see all the time feel fresh. And I was
like, mom, send me those videos. I want to make myself look crazy. These are
my beans. Like, what? That's so good. But that's
the side, though. And this is something I did with Help Scout a ton,
which is like, I tried to bring out the individual personalities
of the founders, the other people who worked there and
that stuff. It worked in the sense that that
community, it latched people onto them stronger.
They weren't just like, oh, your content is good, and now I'm going to leave
it's like, they loved Help Scout.
And that is something that lasts, right? It lasts longer
than I wrote a good blog post this week. It ranked in search, and people
read it for long enough that whatever it's like, in our sense
of distributing it on their channels,
that's a kind of relationship that will last forever and thus produce,
I believe, greater dividends over time. In terms of companies
that are doing this, especially in B, two B we talked about,
we mentioned PandaDoc, zapier Hubscott seems to be doing
this or was doing this still doing this
right now? Or like, are there any companies that stand out to you that
is doing media led strategy? Well,
when I joined Animals, we did more media
stuff. I wouldn't say back then.
Things were different five, six years ago.
But we did do a lot more video type work,
bringing in the customer support team and
then other wow. We did a lot with media when I was
there because it was a customer support
community. It's all about community to them, right? We did this,
like, Humans of Support series. That's cool. That was both
video and written again, repurposing,
and then we repackaged those into Roundups
later in the year. So, yeah, Help Scout when I was there,
we did a lot of that, and it was really cool how much of the
team participated in it. Wistia,
I think, is like the grandpa of media led strategy. So,
like, they're the ones in my mind who should probably
take credit for anything that I say because I've watched
them since I was a little baby in marketing. So I
think they're a really good one. Oh,
Cisco. I already mentioned Ashley Foss at
Atlassian. Everyone knows her already, but she's a great example
of and what's interesting about her know,
Atlassian is this beloved brand. I love Atlassian too,
and I'm not paid to say that. And she loved working there
so much that she developed her own brand and is sort of like
she's a brand advocate while working there, but it's not part
of her job. To the point where the LinkedIn posts that
she shares about Atlassian do
better than the Atlassian brand.
They really and the company, to their credit, supports this, right? Because she's
going out and giving talks. But this was really of her own accord,
which I think is a great example of sort of the micro influencer at company
thing. Sweetfish is a
company that yeah, and they just like they
understand this fundamentally. So even though I
don't hear enough people talking about this approach,
and I think it's worth giving them credit because they're kind of smaller.
And then there's obvious, like, Amanda Natividad is
a person who does that really well. Sarah stockdale,
jay and Melanie with the creator kitchen. They're sort of bringing that
approach even inside the product itself. Sort of a
multimedia experience with people in the community. So I
think it's useful right now in B. Two b SaaS. It's kind of as much
useful to look at individuals as brands because there aren't
as many brand examples, and I think individuals are being more creative
than a brand would necessarily feel safe doing. Off the bat, I think
if these brands can really like, let's throw out this freaking
style guide, can we not? Actually,
because I worked with a company and it was big and you had
to adhere to style guidelines. I'm like, you just took all the
uniqueness and potential for this to actually do anything worthwhile
out of it. Let's rethink what a brand guideline is
so there's more room for truly
creative, fun, human weird
stuff. Because that's really what's going to make a brand stand out more
than anything. So we don't have to rant about
style guides today. Enough,
but so good. Yeah, let's get weird.
Don't be boring and get weird. Don't be boring.
And if people had to stop here, that's the takeaway from
this conversation. But he doesn't have to. I actually want to shift gears and
talk about career power ups. You've been in marketing
now for quite a while. You were like Director of Content at Help
Scout, VP of Marketing. And then you became CEO at Animals.
You're now a marketing advisor, a podcaster. I'm curious what's
helped you accelerate your career and really
level up your trajectory of where you're going.
Yeah, I mean, no surprise, it was community.
And look, I've invested a lot in the marketing community
around me since the beginning, since before,
since my early days in Know,
when Jane Aristia invited me to be on the board of Boston Content
and we did all these events for marketers, I started my own.
Like the list is long of ways that I've invested in
this community and thus the community has
really supported me back and multiply
ten years later when
I resigned as CEO of Animals and without a plan
at all. Like zero.
When I tell you I wrote one LinkedIn post announcing
that I had resigned and I think that
one post delivered one hundred and twenty five
k worth of work over five months without
a lick of biz dev. And I didn't even
mean it. I was like, I made this company
some money here's all the things I did. And then it
led to me, I didn't know what I was going to do.
I was like people kept asking and I was like, I don't know. But then
it sort of came to me in the form of paid work for a while
and I was like, this is great.
And mind you, I have not used the
treasure chest of offers of help that I received.
So many people, people that I didn't even necessarily talk to that much
ever reached out, wanted to know what I was up to,
cared, and then said, how can I help you? I said,
Listen, I will absolutely take
you up. I have an answer to that, just not yet.
Thank you so much, I can't wait to take you
up on that offer. And so
it's like that's the community, it's what made me feel safe
to for the first time in my career not have a
plan and explore and play and
be lazy sometimes and
not worry because I feel
sort of the safety. There's like a net around
me. And on
those times when I do need help, the number of people I've helped is so
large and the people who I have
relationships with, where we love it, it's there and I'm
either directly connected to or one connection away and
tons of people will be happy to make it.
And I am the happiest in my career,
in my life that I ever have been. All because
of what the community has given
me and allowed me in this sort of next phase. I'm guessing that community
you built up has been built through those strong
relationships. I think people often make a mistake. When I was young in
my career, I was like, oh, you just got to network. And that word itself
is such a just leaves a bad taste in my mouth networking
like business cards. But it really is about that connection
and this relationship and helping each other out that really has
make a big difference even in my career.
Yeah, I mean, don't say content is a perfect example.
Our launch, we didn't market it. We're like,
listen, we both know a ton of people and we know that this is an
appeal to them because we've done this forever and we've been in this community forever.
So we sent an
email to our friends, like 102 hundred people or whatever
friends in our community. And then the launch
was a paperless post. We were talking about
how to launch the podcast and we were like I was like, wouldn't it be
funny if we just sent an invitation to our
podcast? Like it's a baby shower or like a wedding.
And it just so happened this wasn't on purpose, but based on when production
was ready, we ended up launching on Valentine's Day. And so Margaret's
like, let's send a Valentine. Oh, that's so good. Which when
I tell you that Neil O'Grady from Demand Curve messaged me
on LinkedIn was like, this is an interesting approach because it's
like full of hearts and everything. We're like sending it to
these people. We're like,
we I think I said this earlier, like the podcast,
which was intended to be just like keep us top of mind channel
as we embark on these journeys. It became we got inbound
sponsorships, we got way more downloads in
the first season. And then I think we grew
by like 30% this
season. I don't actually remember and the numbers on all of them, but it was
something like that. And we were like, whoa, hey.
And people love it. The letters I get. This woman wrote me the
other day this long note about how much
she felt seen and how this exact situation that I talked about
had happened to her and how grateful. And she's
like, I love listening to the show. It's like,
whoa, holy shit. Talk about reward for doing something.
It's so fun because you get to see.
So it's both a monetary community
is I have quite literally made money off of my community
and built something, a creative thing through
that. And you're right, I didn't do it by networking.
I did it by going to networking events and walking up to
Lena Prickett and saying talking to her and then at
the end of it saying, we are going to be friends.
Give me your phone number. I love that. And we're close
and say, same with Gwen Betts. I was like, hi,
we're friends now, so when do you want that's
so good. I just love that. Just like, hey, we're going to be friends.
I think they're just manifesting potential there in terms of that
relationship. It's super cool. Yeah. And they're like, heck yeah. Let's do.
Oh, one final question before we wrap up.
Well, if you can send a message, it could be paperless posts
for all we know. To travel back in time to your younger self maybe
to a Devon who's starting out in marketing or it could be much later.
What would be a piece of advice you'd give your younger self? It could be
about marketing, it could be about life, it could be about career, it could
be about anything, really. Yeah.
My advice is sort of an adaptation of something my mom has always said to
me, and it is my adaptation
is what other people are doing is none of my business.
And that really speaks to
don't be boring.
Being yourself is the best shot you have
of standing out from everybody else and
finding something that you truly love doing.
And I think early on my experience was that I was
terrified because I grew up with an alternative
lifestyle. I was home schooled,
I went to college in Maui. When I was 16,
I ran this company. It was weird and it didn't look like everybody else.
And especially in those early days, it's all about conformity. Like you go from here
to here to here to here. And I was really self conscious about that and
it made me want to stifle myself in a lot of ways.
But every single time I stopped and
stopped stifling myself and pitched, something weird fucking
worked. And people loved it.
And I'm talking people like leaders at the company. One time our
board latched onto something I launched and the first startup I worked for,
they would talk about it in board meetings and it was called
the Spring Pad Show. And it was not cool, but it was perfect
for that community. And so
it's nice to be inspired by people, but I see a lot of inspired people
just spouting the other person's words instead
of trying to adapt that into their own lives. And it makes them and
those are people that aren't. You have to practice before you can preach,
I understand, but it
keeps you away from idolization and uses the
people around you for what they're good for, which is inspiration,
partnership, et cetera.
I don't know what this really looks like, but for
marketers, specifically, like little Mark baby marketing me, this was
very present. Don't try to make your founder
or CEO happy. Oddly, the more
you try to make them happy, the less effective you are and
the more they hate you. So just be fine with it
being a little bit like tension. There are
a little tension being there because you're going to serve I hate to
say this, but you are going to serve them better. And if they don't appreciate
it, you'll have something to show for your work there when you go to somewhere
else where you are appreciated. So it's kind of better for you and through them,
I guess. So just don't worry about
pleasing anyone. Just be a decent,
be a good person, be fair and
don't worry about the rest. Because man, we work in a real ornery business that
is not known for good behavior. Like startups are where
good behavior goes to die. So I'm like, just don't worry
about people liking you. It's not important. Focus on the work and
using the company to build your career. Such a good chat with Devin.
I really love just connecting with her and just making this
more of a conversational approach. You can find out more about Devon by following her
on LinkedIn, Twitter and even TikTok. She has a podcast.
Don't say content. All those links are in the show. Notes and Description thank
you to Devin for being on the show. If you enjoyed this episode,
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