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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.
Tall leadership content has become such a buzzword. And Brooklin Nash,
founder of Beam Content, believes it should be a key piece of any
content strategy rather than tall leadership. He calls it expert driven
content because it leverages the wisdom of industry and company
experts to create truly impactful content. In this Marketing Powerups episode,
you learn first, the essence of expert driven content. Second, the role
of cross departmental collaboration and content creation.
Third, the future of AI content creation and fourth, impact of optimistic
ignorance in Brooklin's career. Before I start, I've created a free
powerups cheat sheet. You can download, fill in and apply Brooklin's expert
driven content strategy. You can find that marketing powerups.com
or find the link in the description and show notes. You ready?
Let's go. Marketing powerups ready.
Go. Here's your
host, Ramli. John, when we
were chatting, when you shared what you wanted to talk about, you were saying like,
hey, you know, instead of calling it thought leadership content, we should
talk about it being expert driven content. And I feel
like that kind of clarifies a lot of things about it because when people think
about thought leaders, they think about, I'm not sure,
Mr. Beast or something else. But I'm
curious why that resonates with marketers,
with you more than expert driven content, more than thought leadership
content. I think because thought leadership is
a buzzword at this point that's kind of lost its meaning in
a couple of ways. Number one,
people throw throw stuff out there and call it thought leadership
when it doesn't really have any business being thought leadership. It's not in depth,
it's not adding a new insight or perspective.
It's just kind of regurgitating stuff, right?
Like just because it's on Forbes doesn't mean it's good.
You can pay your way onto the Forbes Council.
It's like a 700 word article that adds nothing to the conversation,
right? That's not to say there isn't Forbes content.
That's great, it's just not exclusively
so anyway. So that's one side of it. Calling it
thought leadership doesn't make it thought leadership. And I think the other side is people
hear thought leadership and
all of a sudden think at the 5000 foot
level. Like it has to be this broad overarching view
of the industry space, this category,
this is what we're changing, this is what's different.
And that's not necessarily the case.
You could share a first hand account
of how you used AI
in your spreadsheets to speed up financial forecasting by
five X. And if it's unique and nobody's written on that,
and given that detailed of a guide, that's thought leadership because you're putting
something new into the world, right? So I think of thought leadership
as taking somebody's actual experience
with something, whether they're a product person or a marketer or CFO,
and packaging it up into content that
people can consume. And I feel like that's why expert
driven is such a much better word. The more I think about it,
which I'm going to start using that term. You should coin it and you get
the domain and start selling courses about.
I'm going to tell our team that because we've literally had conversations this last
month where we're like we like our copy and our positioning,
but we're like, we need a phrase, man, and trying out
expert driven content. So the fact that it landed with you is great.
Yes. Because it kind of challenges what
you just mentioned. And people are tired of being a thought leader
versus expert driven. It's driven by experts.
And I feel like you're talking just about this
kind of really emphasizes what kind
of content we need to be creating more in the future, especially with AI.
I feel like those experiences is something that AI
can't have unless it
starts becoming aware itself. This is
a personal experience from somebody, and AI
can write up those Forbes articles. That is
like fluff. But is that what I'm hearing here?
I feel like this is going to be more prominent going forward
as you see more AI content, this forgiven content.
Absolutely. Yeah. We've been talking about that. In terms of
social PR, SEO content,
those are the areas that I think are going to be impacted the most the
fastest. That's not to knock anybody who works on
SEO, because there are still excellent ways you can do
it. That's not something that chat GPD
can replicate. But let's be honest, that's the small
minority of cases. Most of the time it's pumping out content
for the sake of getting it up there and ranking. And that's something that
generative AI is really close to being able to replicate if
it's already whereas if
you're starting with an interview with your CFO or your
engineer or your head of HR, they have unique insights
that you're not going to be able to crawl on the
Internet. Yeah.
Once again, we're talking about future.
Maybe there's a world where AI interviews
a CFO, which is scary, but on
its own, coming up with the question
and the framework and the strategy and pulling out the best gems
out of people is not in the near.
I don't know. I keep saying near future, but what if quantum computing hits that?
He can interview people, but still at this moment, it is
not something that generative AI can do because pulling
out those insights is so important to make something unique.
Absolutely. Yeah. And I don't want to be the grumpy old man on
his lawn saying that AI will never replace us.
I understand it's accelerating
quickly. Right. But I think we're
at least a few years away from AI being able to
replicate that connection and digging into
that specific piece of what somebody said and circling
back to a certain thing that goes on at interviews.
Right. That makes sense in
terms of what this looks like. Your team has probably been
creating more and more expert driven content,
is that correct? You would say that. That's been the focus
lately. What does that look like?
You mentioned interviewing internal subject matter experts
and leadership teams, maybe interviewing
customers, but how do
you create expert driven content? Essentially,
yeah. It's the whole reason we started Beam
when we launched last year, we said we're not doing SEO
content. This is exclusively the type of content we're doing.
The one exception is case studies, which is still interview driven,
but a little more established in content
marketing. Right?
Yeah. The way we talk about it with potential clients and
with our current clients is we can start with
interviews, with conversations, or with data,
which is a whole separate piece, but we'll also work with platform data or survey
data for the expert driven content.
I think the more conversations I've had, the more I've realized
that it's kind of a matter of walking
folks through what's possible and what resources they
have available to them. I think content marketing has been in such a silo
for so long that it's like, this is how
we work and this is what we work on and we work on the content
and then get it over to demand gen to distribute
or to sales enablement or whatever. But it needs to be this reciprocal
process where you're involving sales and customer
success and enablement and demand gen and product
and product marketing and the leadership team in
the input process so that your content is all
that much more informed. And then the tail end of that
is if you're creating the type of content that is going
to resonate with the rest of the team and with your audience,
the rest of the is going to be a lot more excited about it and
be more bought in. Right. Versus thinking, oh, content is doing its thing
over here. Demand gen is creating these assets.
Product marketing is focused on this. Sales has its own thing going
on. It just ties everything together. Right. Which kind of got off
your original question, but we'll start with internal,
like internal SMEs, which can be anybody,
honestly, like, if you're selling to engineers, let's start with the engineering
team. It doesn't have to come from the CPO or CTO.
If you're selling into HR, if you're selling HR tech, let's start with
the people team. Often we'll
try to bring in the leadership team to bring that conceptual level. And then
it's not just internal. We'll talk to customers and try to turn those conversations
into not a typical, here's the problem, here's the solution,
here's the outcome case study, but more of like a playbook. Like,
here's what this customer did that was really unique
and really smart. And by the way, our product was
in the background or the foundation of it, but we're not the star.
They were the star. Others are platform
partners. It often makes sense to work together on content.
And then if all else fails or not, even if all else fails,
often it makes sense to bring external folks in, those who already are
going back to thought leadership who already are thought
leaders in their space and bringing them in
so that you kind of have that authority built in from the get go.
Interesting. That makes a lot of sense. I like how you're figuring
out exactly what talking to different people inside first,
and if it's an HR talk to the People team. Do you come in
with concept already, like a topic, or it's
just like it's blank page, I just want to talk to you. I want to
hear your problems. I want to understand exactly
what kind of challenges your target audience when you're talking to those internal
subject matter experts or you already have blog outline
and a brief and things like that, which might
make sense or might not. Yeah, so it's both
and in different stages. So there's kind of three stages. Number one,
when we're kicking off with a brand new project, we'll spend the first month talking
to as many people as we can, essentially internally.
And that's kind of when it's a blank page. We come with questions, but they're
very open ended questions. Exactly what you're saying, like what problems are you
seeing? What do you see people get excited about? What questions
aren't resolved, things like that. And if we're able to talk with the
product team, PMMS, customer success,
demand, gen and leadership, we get a very
full picture of their audience
and kind of their gaps in content, and then we use that to turn around.
Okay, here's the three or four themes we recommend covering over
the course of this year. And here's the specific topics that roll up to those
themes. And then it's just a matter of mix and match. Like,
hey, this topic, we have this internal data person that would be great to
talk to. Oh, this topic. Somebody in our VC
has a connection with somebody. Let's go talk to that person. It's just
kind of this game of mix and match. Once we have the topics,
sometimes it goes the other way, where it's
talking to a person and pulling out what the main theme want.
We have a board management software client and it was essentially
just talking to them about what matters most to them as being part
of a board. And the theme kind of naturally emerged. Like when we talked
to Sam Jacobs, it was so focused on prepping for the
board meeting because every founder gets super stressed out or CRO
gets super stressed out about board meetings. So we just narrow it in there.
But usually it's, here's the topic, here's our specific questions
we want to get into and then pick your brain on,
although you avoid using that phrase and come
to the call with that. And then it just makes it so much more productive.
That makes sense. I love how you're doing. Discovery phase.
First we're like, okay, we just want to learn as much as possible.
What are the problems, what are the challenges, how is your solution better than
the competitors? What are some that
you might have in this space and then before creating those teams
and then those teams, I'm guessing, do you
base it around the problems that you've heard or solutions or it could be
maybe a mix and match.
How do you figure out the overarching
team that would make sense for client?
Yeah, it's kind of a mix. Often it's tied to pain
points, which is not unique and I know lots of great content
folks do that. We'll often kind of try to
uncover what goals are for the upcoming
year or two. Like if they're moving up market, do they want
to start talking to the CIO instead of the manager
level. So that kind of adjusts what we're talking about and how we're talking about
it. And then we'll also get
into individual team goals like demand gen. What is the
gap, what assets do you need to put out better paid social
campaigns and drive capture that
demand? Right. Or are you more in brand awareness right now and you just want
to make your voice known on this particular topic and
what your stance is. So just digging into that across the teams and then
ideally narrowing those down to no more than four themes that
we can kind of beat that same drum from a lot of different angles.
Once again, I love this whole process because you say, hey,
other teams get this but I'm surprised that they
don't do enough of this. Just like finding and talking internally
and highlighting the expertise that people have within internally
already. And then you're figuring out their goals
like how can content team help out demand gen or sales
enablement or another thing? And you're really trying to figure out
essentially they're the content team's customer
in some sense, right. You're helping them do their job better
essentially with that is what I'm hearing, yeah. And vice versa.
It goes both ways. By talking to them
you can make better content and by creating better content that makes their
job better and easier. I feel like the other
benefit to this approach is that it opens up that
wall. I feel like sometimes, especially with remote teams,
the quantity might have never have ever talked to somebody
from CS or from Sales or from engineering in
this way. Now the door is open and if they hear of
an idea there's already the
relationship built up where know, hey Ramley or
hey Brooklin. Like wouldn't it be cool this idea and like that
kind of I guess getting input more is
actually conducive of creativity and innovation,
would you say? Yeah, definitely. It again
kind of breaks down that silo so that you're not just beating your head
against the wall trying to think of things in a vacuum.
You can kind of constantly get new ideas based off of those conversations.
And often from one conversation we'll get another
conversation or two more conversation. It just kind of snowballs.
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description. Well, let's get back to this episode.
I love that. Have you ever had a situation where
somebody's goal kind of conflicts with another goal? Where Demand Gen
is like, we need more leads, and then the brand is like,
no, we need to focus on building up our awareness and do
more. I'm not sure. I'm curious if
your team has ever been in a situation where you've talked
to different teams and they all say, hey, focus on this,
Brooklin, focus on. This, and they're like different, almost entirely
different things.
Yeah, we try to uncover that in the discovery process. I mean,
before starting the project, the actual sales discovery process,
and make sure there's buy in from leadership to Demand Gen
to whoever our main point of contact is. So ideally, we're not
running into that extreme of a case.
But it does happen where Demand
Gen obviously has not one goal, but they have a
very different goal than brand, which is a very different goal than customer success.
And I think the way we explain it and the
way we try to work through it and hopefully this doesn't sound like bliss or
Cliche or something, but we really do try to create the
kind of content that can be just as helpful
for customer marketing as it is for lead generation.
I like that. Yeah. Like if you're talking about a specific use
case or a new idea for integrating different tools,
that can be really exciting for capturing
demand, especially in retargeting if they are aware and are in the education stage.
Right, but it can also be really helpful for customer marketing because you're
sending out resources and increasing the chance of upsell
and renewal because you're showing them what's possible
with the tool that they're currently using. Right. And then same
for sales, kind of in the middle. If they have more resources to share out
with prospects, the better. I will say though, the first thing I thought
of, it's been a while, but a couple of years ago, going through this process,
we don't work directly with founders as much anymore.
But it was two co founders and we got on
separate calls with them and asked very similar questions
and they gave very different answers.
Are you guys co fathers even? Yeah, you talk to
each mean
hopefully it was like a value add because we just in the recap, we said,
hey, listen, Steve said this and Frank said
this. They sound very different to us. So can we get into like,
what are we actually saying? So it uncovered something for them
that I don't think they were even aware of. Yeah,
that makes that type of sense.
That's crazy. It's interesting why
you mentioned that. I actually talked to Brendan Hufford as
well, where he doesn't work with founders
anymore. It's like you mentioned something,
you just mentioned something similar. Now I'm curious. Maybe it's
because they want everything all at once now,
or they don't really know what they want. I'm curious what
the reasoning is for not working directly
with founders versus you have more a fleshed out team.
Each of the teams know what they need, what they want. They have KPIs versus
Founders. They want all the KPIs to move up to the right, which that's
not always possible. Yeah,
absolutely. For us, I think it's because we
don't consider ourselves a full service agency. I mean,
there's a lot we don't do. We focus on the handful of
things that we think we're really good at. And when you're that early
stage, it's not because we don't like working with founders or don't want to work
with founders. It's because if you're that early stage, you kind
of need a little bit of everything to get the ball rolling.
And we don't do SEO, we do social content,
but not social management. We don't do email marketing, we don't do copywriting.
So more and more I'm finding myself referring those earlier
stage companies out to either consultants
who can be that jack of all trades and figure out the right way to
Divide and Conquer or SEO agencies. Because I'm like,
look, we don't work on an SEO. I recognize it is really important,
especially at your price point. Like, if you're self service and you're at
$80 a month, SEO makes a lot more sense than if you're doing
six figure deals with a CIO. So there's like
a specific type of project that we work on, and I just don't want us
to over promise something that is really not our specialty.
That makes sense. That makes sense. In a sense.
Followers can be sometimes fickle where I'm
over generalizing it, but I work with founders where they see
something cool next and be like, let's do that.
They finally like, oh, let's do more AI. Or I'm not entirely sure,
but at least in this case, you have
approach. You have some people that have KPIs. They're working
towards essentially yeah. Avoiding that shiny object syndrome.
We're looking to work with teams. Our ideal is either
head of product marketing or head of content marketing. Whether it's VP
or director, it doesn't really matter. Just somebody who's enabled
and equipped to set the strategy for
at least the quarter, if not the year, and move forward with that rather
than shifting focus every six weeks or
every day, which. I've been a
situation that's absolutely crazy situation.
It happens. Yeah. This brings up this question where
I'm curious what your thoughts are on when a
company or team is ready to start doing expert driven
content. Or maybe it's like a dumb question where you can do it
from the very beginning of your company, where you focus on expert driven
content and that's all you focus on,
especially with people in SEO. Have been talking a lot about
how things will change for SEO.
That question. I'm just curious what your thoughts are and take us out of that.
When is it the right time to start focusing on driven content?
Yeah, this might sound self serving, but I think as
early as possible. Going back to what we were saying at the beginning, thought leadership
is not having this some line
in the sand that you're trying to be grandiose about.
It's just sharing what you see in the market, or what you
see in your product, or what you see users doing, or what you are working
on. That can all be thought leadership. Right?
I think it depends on levels of
priority. Again, we're not an SEO agency, but I do think there
are instances where it does make a lot more sense to start with
SEO because it's
just a lot more direct. And it's not about brand building or building trust
necessarily. It's just about getting visitors and
leads from that organic channel. Right.
But I think ideally, you can do both.
And I think maybe the best example I can
think of is expert driven content internally,
very early is Lavender Will and Will, the two
Wills co founders. There it's
been a few years now.
90% of the time what they're talking about is Cold email. How do
I send better cold emails? And they are so good
at talking about it and have such unique insights because of
their own experience and because of their product. And I think they're just
like known as the
Cold email team now. Even as they
brought on more content folks, it's just helped not
just their brand, but their demand, at least from what I can tell from the
outside. That makes sense when the founders are experts in that space
because they can really position their company
and themselves. It's like, hey, this example,
we are the experts on this. And if you're thinking about this topic,
there is no other place to take a look at it. Essentially,
it's what that example shows.
Exactly. Yeah, I love talking to either
technical founders or somebody who has deep experience in
the target audience they're selling into.
Those aren't necessarily always the same thing,
but it just brings another layer of level of depth.
I know you're talking a little bit about SEO.
I'm curious what your take is on that.
Do you have any takes on AI and content and SEO
and maybe more self serving around why X
might be more important in the future and why people should be thinking
about it. But I'm curious. You've been neck
deep in content for so many years and
you must have a position on, hey, SEO and
AI and then content. Like, what is your take on that?
Yeah, you're going to hear me workshopping this because I'm still trying to
figure out that's cool, the right answer that doesn't sound self
serving or like head in the sand.
This is not happening. Because look,
I've been in content for like ten years. The first five of that was
pretty much all SEO. So I know SEO
and I get its value and I get that you can get pretty quick
results with it. Like two startups ago,
we went from basically zero traffic to like 15,000.
And because we are a self service tool with a pretty low price
point, it just helped grow the
revenue so quickly. And that was almost all SEO with a little bit of dabbling
in organic social anyway, so I get its value,
I don't know.
So from the client perspective, I think
it will continue to be valuable because even
if search is replaced with a barred response,
google's an ad business, so they're going to figure out how
to show ads. Yeah, how to show ads, which is not the same thing
as SEO, but I don't think it's going
away anytime soon. Completely,
though, I think it's still worth investing in. That said,
I don't think it's as worth investing as people think if
you're at a certain deal size or
selling to a certain audience. Like, CTOs are not googling
how to integrate X with Y.
Like, they're having these much higher level conversations with other
CTOs and CIOs about what's happening with this and that. Right.
So why not figure out how to tap into to?
That's where I'm at.
That totally makes sense. I think that is definitely
investing in it. Into it in the like, maybe it makes sense,
but I'm actually very bullish on more expert joint stuff
that is shared outside of search. You're talking
about? That CIO. But even now,
Eric, our VP of Marketing at Apkis, would share
some articles from some other people or
Kevin Indig or from other places.
And that is hard to measure. That dark.
People call it dark social, but expert. Driven content
walked over here. Server driven content
is like prime for dark social, would you say?
Right. Absolutely. Yeah. It's not
as measurable or is it measurable? But that's the goal.
If a team is sharing your content around in a Slack channel or CTO
is forwarding an email or sharing it on social,
that's showing that it's impactful and that it's sticky.
Yeah, because you're also talking about a lot of stakeholders and a long deal
cycle for these types of products.
So you need it to be sticky. You're not going to get a CEO
or CMO or CTO or a VP
of Data Engineering to land on an article after Googling something
and convert that. You have to build trust
and then retarget and pass to sales so that they can follow up
on what they read and dig into a deeper conversation. Ideally face
to face or at least on a call, just make it really relevant
and sticky and long term.
That makes sense. You really love that. And then the
other thing that's top of mind is how you
measure this is totally different from SEO content.
I imagine SEO content is like organic traffic and then
conversion, especially if you have a product that's low
price. I'm curious how your
team is measuring the success of this. Is it like how the sales team is
using this or CS? Or how it's enabling
sales cycle? Or is it something else that you're looking
at? Yeah. Can I just real
quick share a pet peeve? You added conversions,
but I think often people think about SEO as like traffic.
But I feel like that's such a vanity metric for
SEO because of what you said, conversion. Also, what is
engagement on the page, which now Google provides that they
have engaged sessions, which is awesome. Bounce rate.
I mean, we had a client last year, a couple of years ago that they
brought us on to increase their traffic, which was already at
30 or 40,000 hits a month.
And we were trying to get that up, but then we jumped
in and I dug into their metrics. Their bounce rate was at like 80,
85%. And I'm like, look, you have a ton of content up
here. Your bounce rate is the highest I've ever seen.
Let's dig into. That first, right? Yeah. So anyway, that was not your question,
but no, let's dig into that little. Pet peeve that I that makes
sense. For measuring what we do and
thought leadership, quote unquote or expert driven content.
It sounds like a cop out, but the way we talk through it with our
clients and prospects is, look, it depends on what you do with
it. Going back to what I said about our ideal is at
least a handful of the pieces we're producing each month can be used
by a lot of different teams on a lot of different
channels in a lot of different ways. So this is not like one
metric. We're looking for, like, number of downloads on a
gated asset. We're looking at the lift to
your organic impressions. We're looking at conversion
rate if you have a content offer versus a sales related
offer for paid search and social.
We're looking at feedback from customer success and sales and
how using those assets are going.
There's just a lot of different ways to measure it when you're creating something that
ideally sits at the center of your public voice rather than just being
a tiny little piece of it. Yeah,
that totally makes sense. I think we've been talking about that quite a bit around
making that the central piece of helping the
whole other pieces of the company. You gave
the example with Lavender. I'm curious if there's any other examples that you can give
out, maybe even some of the work that your team has
done in terms of examples that I can share around
content.
Yeah. What's the best one here?
We work with an analytics company,
a product, and I feel
like we've done this. They're fully bought in and have
fantastic ideas. Just don't say, like, we did this, but we've
been able to work on things with them that I think get at this concept.
So, for example, one thing we worked on
with is they had their annual event, which usually would just kind of live
there. Like, this is for customers
and bottom funnel prospects, and we're
just leaving it as the live event. But they shared so much
from that. They shared all the scripts and the recordings and
the customers that shared. And we were able to take that
one day event and turn it into so many different assets.
We created guides out of it. We created article.
It just got so much out of one day because they put so much planning
into it. Why does it have to stop there? Nobody needs to know that.
This guide came from a keynote at the
annual event. It's still great content and insights,
right? We also did a series with them called
like, X on X, which we've been able to do with quite a few clients.
It's really fun. We basically, in this case, sat down with five
of their marketers demand gen,
product led growth. Ding ding ding.
Their marketing operations, all these different roles.
And it was basically how I, as a director
of demand gen, use my product for demand gen and
then product growth and then marketing operations because it's analytics. So they were getting
all these insights and turned it into a ghost written piece
that was from their perspective, it was super tactical, like step by step
without being very product heavy. Like it wasn't product marketing.
And then we were able to take all five and then wrap it up into
what they were able to gate as an asset of like five ways to use
X for marketing from the brand perspective. So it
was 545 minutes conversations and we got so
much lift out of that. That is
such a good way to put it.
Is that a case study on the beam side, if possible, or anywhere?
I can link that in the description. All right, okay.
It's not it should be they're up for renewal in a
couple of months, so that might be coming down the line,
hopefully. That's awesome, though. That's good to hear. This is something that other
people can apply, this expert driven content.
Why just do the you can repurpose a bunch of
events or things like that that can really highlight experts internally and externally
within your content as quotes even maybe
for social or other things like that, essentially. That's what I've heard here so
far. Yeah, that's kind of the piece,
I guess, that we didn't really get into. But that example makes me think of
is there's so much more cross pollination when you do this because you
can take one interview and A use it
so many different ways and B use it for more ideation
and creative space of, oh, maybe we should dig into this deeper.
I love that. Well, thank you for sharing this
all about expert driven content. I want to shift gears and talk about
career power ups. You mentioned. We've been already talking about how long you've been content
marketing for over a decade. I'm curious,
what's something that's helped you kind of accelerate your career
or your business and take it to the next level? And it could
be a soft skill, networking, or being nice
to people, or being kind, or just reaching out to folks, or it could be
a hard marketing skill that's helped you accelerate your career.
This might sound negative or positive, depending on how you
see it, but I think especially early
on, what helped me the most was saying,
yeah, I can do that, when I had never in my
life done that thing before. Because I feel the
confidence that I can learn how to do it very quickly and
then just learning how to do it. I mean, that's how I went from writing
to SEO strategy and then doing
case studies based off of extensive briefs to running customer interviews.
That's how I learned a lot at my in house jobs over a couple of
years. It's just like saying yes for the sake of learning.
And then I think you can build those skills. So I think
that's a big one. And then
I will say there isn't a little self promo
here, but there's an article on our side, an interview with Kyle Lacey on marketing
careers. And I don't know that I've been able to adapt it, so don't take
it as my advice, but Kyle shared, like, if you can if
if you can learn effective storytelling,
you can do a lot as a marketer. And sometimes that's writing,
sometimes that's branding, sometimes it's internal presentation. It's just like
the storytelling element because we were talking
about writing and how important that is for pretty much any marketer, no matter what
your role is. And he's like, yeah, writing, but also
the story and telling a compelling story with
your writing, with your words, with your conversations. And I really love
that. That is awesome.
This is the one says Kylie C wants marketers to call her
outside of the lines. Is that the one? That's the one. Yeah. I will
link it in the description in show notes, but super cool
around like yes. Saying yes. I feel like also saying yes
kind of reaffirms that you can I believe it's. Yoda,
who said don't say try. I'm butchering.
I'm sorry to all my Star Wars people. Don't say
you try, just do it. That's definitely not how he said it.
Don't say you'll try, just do it. Right? Yeah,
exactly. And you saying yes kind of reaffirms
in the back of your mind that, yes, you can do it, versus, like,
maybe. Kind of like when you
say maybe, there's that seed of doubt that
makes people stop and like, hey, maybe I can't do it. So I
love that you said yes, especially early on.
Sorry. I know this is like rapid fireish, but I
think it helps you narrow in on what you really love doing and
what's, like, that's not for me. Yeah, this is
a little skewed because I was a freelancer, so this is maybe more
freelancer advice, but I had a write up where I said, like,
freelancing is saying yes,
no, yes, no.
And slowly moving from saying yes to everything to
saying no to most things and saying yes only to the things that
you really enjoy and give you that creative
spark. That's true.
We haven't really talked about how good you are. We're like posting up tweets on
LinkedIn and Twitter. Do you spend like a few hours a day, like,
creating those content?
Do you spend like an hour at the beginning of the week just to put
this all together?
It just hits you, your shower or walking with your family,
like, this is a great tweet. Put it in my bank.
100% more on that end. Which I don't know if is a good thing or
a bad thing, but yeah, people have asked me about content strategy or
social strategy. I have zero. I just post
shit. Post what I want, when I want.
And here we are. And it's like sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn't.
My favorite is when I think something's really funny and I'm cracking myself
up and that just falls flat and then there's something you
hit, it just takes off.
Or there's a really in depth write up.
It is one of the few times I sit down and spend 30
40 minutes writing out a post and it's just like there's
some engagement. Yeah, but then it's the stupidest thing that I think of in
the shower, like you said, and it just goes viral.
Like, what is this? It feels like a video game sometimes. That's so
funny. It is, definitely. You think you
figure out the algorithm and then it's like no you have really
is that's super cool though. But I'm going to tell you people to follow you
on LinkedIn, on Twitter, but we're not wrapped up yet. Just one final
question around an advice you would give your younger self,
a younger Brooklin who might be starting
out in content marketing, just trying
to get their feet wet. What would be your advice to that younger
version of you? Yeah,
you let me know this question was coming and I still this
is like the highest pressure question. For some reason.
I don't know how many freelancers listen to your show, but I think I have
different answers for whether if you're a freelancer or if you're a
full time marketer. I think for freelancers I would say or
not, I would say. I would have told my younger self,
get a lot more specific about what you do. It took me way too
long. I was just like this generous, like I can write this,
I'll do this for so long. And I think narrowing
in on this is what I do, why I do it, and who I work
with really helped me a, enjoy the work a lot more and
B, if we're being honest, get paid better for of it.
And that combination just makes this whole thing a lot more
sustainable.
Yeah. And then the other piece is just talking to more people,
which is another way of saying networking, but not like
networking. Like, I'm going to go to this happy
hour and I'm going to get business cards or whatever the digital equivalent is
now. Follow up. It's just like taking
time to talk with people. Something I'm so grateful for now
is there are other agency owners that I keep up with
and we'll connect every few months. There's like other freelancers that
we'll do that with. It's just like really enjoyable
to get on a call with pretty much no agenda. They're not trying to sell
you something, you're not trying to sell them something, you're not trying to get something
from them. You're just like, hey, what are you running into.
What are you thinking about? I ran into this weird thing that
and like, past colleagues keeping up with past colleagues, like somebody worked
with at my previous startup. We keep up
and it's just, like, so enjoyable. It makes this whole thing it's better.
That'S so I would even I do
that. I meet up with Andrew Kaplan once a
month just to catch up on the agenda. Just like, hey, how's your
podcast podcast going? I feel like
that just opens up a bunch.
If you could, that would be cool. But I'm curious,
who do you keep up with that this has helped you along
this journey? Maybe you can even shout them out,
I guess, if they're okay with it. If not, I can cut this part.
Yeah, I don't know if I want to name drop, if that's all right.
Like some of their agency owners or
maybe like, who you would think.
I guess maybe that's helped you in this journey that
you're like here. I just want people.
That'S a good question. I can
definitely thank my former boss, Colin Campbell,
at Outreach. I was only in house for a couple of years,
but I went in house after being freelance for so long
because I figured there was so much for me to learn, and sure enough,
there was. And I learned a ton about other
stuff, but Colin really showed me what a good manager
and direct report relationship looks like and modeled that.
Yeah. So as we're growing our team, we have folks reporting to me
for the first time, and it's weird, and I'm just figuring it out
as they yeah, he just showed me what
empathetic leadership looks like. I had such a fun chat with
Brooklin. If you want to learn more about Brooklin's work, you can go to Beamcontentent
Co. Or follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter. Find all of those
links in the description and show notes. Thanks to Brooklin for being on the
show. If you enjoyed this episode, you'd love the Marketing Powerups
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