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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
E5_EoinClancy+Dave - Raw Transcript
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Eoin Clancy: [00:00:00] Nice.
Dave Gerhardt: Alright. Yeah, I'm
Eoin Clancy: excited. You've good questions on the list, so I'm
Dave Gerhardt: excited to dive in. Oh, well, we'll see. You know, we'll see. We'll, we'll, we'll see. So, uh, we're, we're live, we're recording. My guess is Owen Clancy. He is, uh, VP of Growth at Air Ops Owen, good to have you on the pod.
Eoin Clancy: Yeah. Glad to be here, Dave.
Dave Gerhardt: Uh, we were joking because we've done a bunch of stuff together and uh, Dan always messages me, he's like, we should have Owen on the pod and like, for six months. And I'm like, yeah, dude, we have it. It's scheduled, it's happening, and it's happening right now. And I took a screenshot to throw it into Slack, uh, to, to prove it.
Um. So we're gonna get into a bunch of, air Ops is a cool company and a cool space, and we're gonna talk about a bunch of stuff that you're doing in marketing that's working. What's not working? Opinions on marketing. People have been really liking the, like, let's, let's talk about what marketers are actually doing.
Let's get away from the like, oh, so what'd you do before this? And before that, like they wanna talk about Right now I want this to be a podcast that people listen to. Take stuff away from, but before we do that, [00:01:00] uh, briefly tell me about Air Ops. What does the company do? Um, why is it interesting and, uh, what's it been like doing marketing in this AI and SEO slash content space, which is really hot right now?
Eoin Clancy: Oh, it's, it's so fun. I, I come from having marketed or doing growth, uh, in a different space towards software engineers for the last six years. And that, man, that was tough. That like, that drains you. It's an audience that's like hard to get in front of. But, um, so Air Ops is a content engineering platform.
We're in a super hot space at the moment. Everyone is trying to generate content to get their brand seen in AI search and also seen in SEO. So we help, um, leading companies like Carta Chime. And a lot more, um, like basically increase their brand visibility so we can get into, uh, later Dave, like what's the difference between AI, slop and what you guys do?
I know that's like definitely top of mind for everyone, but we're there to help, um, teams basically [00:02:00] increase their brand visibility in organic search.
Oh, Dave, I, I can't hear you.
Dave Gerhardt: Oh, that's all right. I just was playing a game where I go on mute. Um, so you, so you, okay, so you mentioned, you mentioned Air Ops is helping to solve the problem of getting found in AI search, which is something everyone's asking about right now. Um, you also mentioned something about content engineering.
Explain that term to.
Eoin Clancy: Yeah. Um, that is a term that we'd like to say that we've like championed ourselves and like HubSpot had their version of like the, the growth marketer. You've Clay who do like the GTM engineer. For us it was very hard to find who is like the person that like owns or runs Air Ops internally.
So we actually like played around with the, the word choice or like the title for a long time. But a content engineer today, given we have 12 months of lots of learnings and probably, uh, I think in the last [00:03:00] six months we've seen like 80 people hired into content engineering roles at a range of our customers and prospects.
But a content engineer is someone who, um. Really starts to manage your context internally and also builds and maintains your workflows. So when we talk as well about like avoiding ai slap, it all comes down to what you're feeding a model with, or like what you're educating yourself on in terms of the context that feeds into your content.
Hmm. So a content engineer helps gather and make that data available, and they're also building the workflows that help you produce the content.
Dave Gerhardt: Does the content, would the content engineer be responsible for the website content or is it like the blog, like content marketing efforts? Because this has been coming up, it's like now that I need to.
Have my website content formatted in a different way, and there needs to be specific files and this and that. Then I need to make sure my content is [00:04:00] readable for LLMs and humans. Yeah, like this product marketing owns a website or demand gen. Where what, what does this, where does it fit with content engineer?
Eoin Clancy: I think it very much depends on like the size of an organization. So the larger you, you go, your product marketer is probably gonna maintain your product solutions use case pages because they're lower amounts of copy, they're higher density in terms of just like speaking to the user. And we're starting to see more content engineers progress from, um, the more strategic performance focused content.
Up towards that. So I think like card is a good example. So Lucy Hoyle, she's like our champion over there. She started off on managing their blog content and she's moved in and
Dave Gerhardt: is her, is her title like content engineer? She's a content engineer and,
Eoin Clancy: correct,
Dave Gerhardt: yeah.
Eoin Clancy: Yeah. She moved from like a content strategist into, I think now she's like a senior content engineer.
So it's great to see people get promoted in the role as well. But yeah, she's moved from a lot of the performance related [00:05:00] content. So as you said, Dave, like on the blog or larger. Programmatic hubs, and she's now focused on a lot of the strategic content. So she's now starting to craft workflows that go into taught leadership content.
And I think starting to touch some of the product pages. And again, as we think about the higher quality content, whether it is a landing page, which has far fewer words than a longer blog post, you're still generally trying to solve the same problem you're trying to find. What is it that is unique to your business?
Like how does your product. Like situated itself in the market, and then how do you describe that best to a human or an agent that is like visiting this asset that lives on your website?
Dave Gerhardt: I like that distinction because I still feel like, I, I think ai, SEO stuff is cool. There's a lot of changes. The more, and I'm not certainly not an expert at, as Owen, you, as you know, I'm just a thought leader.
I, I just [00:06:00] interview people for a living. But almost everybody that I've talked to, like if I were to like make, it sounds a lot like what, what it was, you know, 10 years ago. Like, hey, let's make sure this content is like searchable and indexable and is useful for Google. It's kind of the same thing now, but it's for LMS and they have a different way of, of doing that.
That might be my layman's terms of explaining that, but is that
Eoin Clancy: totally
Dave Gerhardt: any beef with that?
Eoin Clancy: None whatsoever. Uh, there's one book I come back to every 12 months by Eli Schwartz. It's called Product led, SEO, and I think Eli wrote that in about 2016. So you're talking nice way pre at GPT. You're talking before, even like people also answer elements in Google search, but a lot of the core principles he talks about as to how to invest in a strong, like SEO motion.
They were Who? Who was
Dave Gerhardt: this guy? Who's Eli Schwartz by the way.
Eoin Clancy: Eli Schwartz led SEO at big companies like Toast and like many other [00:07:00] big, like B2C companies where their whole growth motion was SEO. So, hi his, his kind of like Mo is. Like answer users' questions with the content that you produce. So all of the companies he's worked with will say greater than 30% of their, um, acquisitions will come from organic.
But his core principle in the book, again, written a decade ago, I guess at this point, was the search engines. Their whole like motivation is to surface the best content for any given query, and whether that's search like Engine is like Bing or Google or Chat GPT or Perplexity, they're trying to get to ground truth.
They're trying to like answer the, the question they get in with the best piece of content.
Or now it's like a larger answer
So the Like no matter what sort of content you're trying to create, like you always need to draw back to like what a user's focused on and then what are the questions that they have that might be [00:08:00] unanswered. That's largely a like where your opportunity is. So I think given the space is like changing the whole time, it still comes back to you have a human who needs to find an answer and you need to provide that answer.
Dave Gerhardt: Yeah. I love, I love when you can find something like that in the sea of like. Oh my God. I, I saw a tweet from Brian Halligan this morning who's a former CEO and founder of HubSpot, and he's like, and he's, you know, at Sequoia top investor in the space looking at the hottest AI companies. He is like, does anyone, it was something like, does anyone else feel like overwhelmed?
Like they can't keep up. And I'm like, oh, that made me feel better because I have had this insane feeling of like. I am just a MLE who uses chat, GBT, you know, and it's like my feed is like just these insane workflows and all these things, and I'm like, God, I feel so far behind. I, I just love when you hear something like that, a book that came out, you know, 10 years ago where the principles remain nice.[00:09:00]
Eoin Clancy: Yeah, I, I think the, one of the things I do when I try and like select a book is, I think it's the Lindy Effect it's called, but a book becomes more valuable the longer it's been around. So you should always return to like the classics because they're a classic for a given reason. Like, they're not gonna keep coming up in conversations or being mentioned unless they're good.
So basically the longer something is around, the more authoritative and likely long lasting that it is.
Dave Gerhardt: Okay, so you're in this space at AOPs. Uh, you're going after this persona of content engineer, which there are a lot of, we, we do marketers, we do like to make up names and terms, and I, I love when people roll their eyes on this 'cause like, no, no, no, buddy.
That's like actually the job. It's like you, you. You should make these things up. That's, that's part of the marketing job. Like if you're, if you're getting paid to be a marketer or a company like, yeah, we're gonna try to call it content engineer, but it turns out like, this is working, it sticks and it, it, it, it's one [00:10:00] of the things that makes sense to me, like this role makes sense.
I, a couple marketing teams ago, like, we would want to be hiring like. A growth person in marketing or a, we called it, we hired someone who was like a former PM and we called her like marketing engineer. There has always been, or you know, clay has the GTM engineer. What you're talking about is applying.
This specifically to content, and I've long believed that out of all the things in marketing content is arguably the most important thing in marketing. So why not apply an engineer to to that and learn a lot about AI and what it's gonna take to rank for SEOI? I think it's, it's an interesting play, but we don't wanna just talk all about.
Content engineers. We're gonna talk about a bunch of the specific things you all have done at Air Ops that seem to be working. Can you just set the stage, by the way, before we talk about, Hey, here's all these great marketing plays that you run. Can you just, can you gimme some receipts? Credibility? You don't have to, you're a private company, so probably you're not gonna tell me Air Ops revenue on air, but gimme some sense.
Let's tell [00:11:00] people that like. Hey, this, this is working and the company's growing, and then we'll talk about the marketing stuff that you've done.
Eoin Clancy: Yeah, a hundred percent. Uh, so when I joined the company about 18 months ago, I came in as a former customer. I was actually a customer for 12 months. So I joined what was then like a 15 person company, solo marketer.
We were very much like PLG focused, trying to go like bottoms up, like self-serve because. Like, while it was a content automation platform, it was generalized automation as well. You could use Air Ops and still can. Anything
Dave Gerhardt: that, that was your, that was your, the company you were at. For people who might not know that was the company you were at before this wlit?
Eoin Clancy: Uh, I, I was at, what did you say? I was at NICs beforehand.
Dave Gerhardt: Okay. What did you just say?
Eoin Clancy: I, I joined Air Ops when we were more like a PLG, like we were self you said. Okay.
Dave Gerhardt: While, while it was a PLG. Got it. Got it.
Eoin Clancy: Yes, correct. And then, uh, yeah, I was a solo marketer, which means you do everything for about like five or six months.
And then as we started to like [00:12:00] think about, my job was like head of growth, it's to figure out the channels and the tactics that can drive basically pipeline or acquisition for us. So. Basically we started to see a lot more value with dealing with bigger companies. It gave us better product direction. It gave us just better signal.
'cause these people are like knee deep in the problems that we wanted to go and solve. So. Taking the first six months of like finding our feet, setting up some channels. The last 12 months that was 2025, we've basically like 10 XD our revenue and then like 10 Xd our customer count as well. And in that time we've gone from.
SMB focused to really like enterprise. So again, it it's been
Dave Gerhardt: hotel is old this time. Yeah. It's literally every company ever. Dan and I were just talking about this 'cause we're feeling it in our business. It's like, it, it always happens this way.
Eoin Clancy: It's, it's incredible. But, um,
Dave Gerhardt: all the
Eoin Clancy: money. Yeah. Like a, a Along, along the [00:13:00] way though, it is the same set of.
Problems that marketers are facing and people are at different stages of their journey of like understanding and adoption. So like you were like, um, being negative to yourself, Dave, of like, you just used chat GPT, but I think you're still ahead of probably like 50% of marketers. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Even, whoa.
Dave Gerhardt: Hold on, hold on. Hold.
Eoin Clancy: Go for it.
Dave Gerhardt: I use, I use Claude Cowork motherfucker.
Eoin Clancy: Oh, okay. You're,
Dave Gerhardt: you're ahead. The curve.
Eoin Clancy: You're ahead of the curve.
Dave Gerhardt: I am a growth, I'm a vibe engineer myself, so yeah, I said chat GBT, because I didn't wanna make anybody feel inadequate. Yeah. But I'm using Gemini. I'm using chat, GBT, I'm using Claude Cowork like.
Take that
Eoin Clancy: influencers. Yeah. So you're your top 10% then. And I think, um, generally it like as people move in, move into that early adopter phase, or now I guess it's like middle, the median person or median like content marketer is starting to like realize that this is something they need to move with.[00:14:00]
That's where we've kind of like found our sweet spot within organizations where they're getting hit by like SEO not being as important, but also just like. The essence of brand being incredibly important as you get into a nano banana, or like comms or pr. Just how you can leverage the tools to move fast or move faster, but keep your quality really high.
That's like the main challenge that a marketer is facing today. Everyone's asking 'em to move faster. Hey, you have all these tools. Why can't we launch faster? Why can't we do more content? But they need to keep the balance of like. Quality very, very high. I think that that's where we're really trying to address their, their situation.
Dave Gerhardt: Yeah. So I have, so one of the topics was gonna be fighting AI slop. Should we, that kind of, oh, this is a natural transition to there. Yeah. So maybe we'll talk, we'll talk about webinars, talk about some other stuff you've done. But maybe let's, let's talk about this. Is this, is this kind of what, what you're getting at, which is like.
We want to use the AI tools to [00:15:00] create our content. However, that, that V one, the, the, the uniqueness, the, the utility, the, the, the cool factor of it has kind of gone away. And it's like you can't just use it to create, you know, silly little memes or just kind of like, Hey, wow. Like, I, I remember three years ago it was like, wow, like Chad g PT wrote me this, you know, email that would've taken me, you know, 20 minutes before.
What's your, what's your kind of like, how do you articulate the, we don't do AI slop, but we use ai. Why? Why do you think that? Why, why do you think those two things get, get mixed together? Why do people say like, oh, you're, you're using, you, you're using AI to create your content. You know, that's evil.
Eoin Clancy: Yeah.
I, I, I think it's, we, we've been on like a journey, I think like as, as a marketing group where when this tool came out, like you said, it just like gave you instant access to like content generation. So be it an email or a memo or a blog post, you could like give it. [00:16:00] Literally like a sentence of like, write me a blog on X and it could come out with as many words as you want, which is like the best thing and also the worst thing.
So Google was like kind of caught flatfooted with some of like chacha BTS releases. So you could put out that on differentiated content and you'd actually get quite good results. So I think between CH GBT coming out, maybe the next six months, people were like, how do I throw like more gas on this fire?
Because you could create. Hundreds of pages and actually get results. But again, the thing I love about Eli Schwartz's book is like, those pages were not serving user intent. Like they were just slop. And I think there's some people today where they're still practice, they're, they're still on that practice and it's not driving results.
And then they're very vocal where they're like, Hey, I'm using ai. Like seemingly like producing output, but it's not driving results. Like it doesn't work. And I think sometimes they get to [00:17:00] dominate the conversation, but it all comes back to like, is what you're producing actually useful? Does anyone want to go read it?
And is it really, I think what we believe in is it pushing the conversation forward?
Dave Gerhardt: I I, the reason I like this topic is because it's like, that's the fun part about marketing to me. I'm not an engineer, so the fun part is not like, how do I produce a hundred pages, a hundred landing pages of the snap of my fingers where my, my bias is more like, how do we tell a story that stands out?
How do we get attention, right? How do we create something worth reading? And then ultimately, if someone. Reads something and it's good and helpful. I don't get to the end of that article and I'm like, oh, this was totally written by ai. I am like, oh, cool. I got the answer that I was looking for. Like, you know, like
Eoin Clancy: totally
Dave Gerhardt: is the post.
I need to go to the post office after, after this. Like, this is a silly consumer example. Like, is the post office open at four o'clock? [00:18:00] Like, I got the answer. Am I like, dammit, AI gave me the answer slop. You know, it's like, it doesn't matter.
Eoin Clancy: I, I think, um, like, sorry, one of the things I've been like stewing on is,
Dave Gerhardt: please
Eoin Clancy: what are the, what are the three biggest indicators of something being AI slap.
Oh,
Dave Gerhardt: okay.
Eoin Clancy: Because if, if you, if, if you know what,
Dave Gerhardt: what you got, gimme what
Eoin Clancy: if, you know what AI SLAP is Yeah. You can avoid it.
Dave Gerhardt: Okay. I
Eoin Clancy: think number one,
Dave Gerhardt: here's a clip's this producer Aaron, let's make the, let's make this a clip here are, here are three ways, three ways to know if the, if the content is AI slop.
Eoin Clancy: Number one, I think not unique. It's not pushing the conversation forward, like in our term. It's not like information gain, like it's not using your internal experts. It's not going into look at Reddit questions or like what questions are coming up on like your gone calls. Like you're not leveraging that really unique information that you have.
You're instead just like. Scraping what's on the top two pages of [00:19:00] Google, repurposing it and churning it back out again. So I think where you're not unique, that's AI slop. Um, number two, and this matters more on like a per brand level, but like if the content doesn't sound like you, I think it's also near the LOP side as well, and.
There's certain brands that always stand out to me that are like edgy, so like Intercom or Clay. Clay's a great example. It's always like a fun brand, like their social persona should actually come through when you're like reading a customer story or a piece of content from them. You want like, they as like a marketing team want it to sound like them, but you also enjoy reading clay's content because.
It has like a certain vibe, so if it doesn't match that, if it doesn't sound like you, I think as well, it's in the lower quality bucket. And then. There's the smaller telltales, and this is like what will come up in a LinkedIn post or like a YouTube video or a college professor is probably like shouting at their students every day.
But like the m dashes, just like the, [00:20:00] there's other words like, uh, utilize instead of use, just these phrases that we actually don't use in everyday vocabulary. I think that as well is just like a, there are like telltale signs there, but it's not that. That is a significant indicator of low quality. Some people do use those words, but it's not in like your daily vocabulary.
And one of the most important things to actually create performant content is like the readability of it. Like, uh, the LLM Celesta like. Digest all of this. A human has to engage with it, like it needs to be like easy to read. So write for a, a fifth grader or like write for your elementary school like audience, and it actually performs better.
Dave Gerhardt: So I was just, before, before this, I, uh, I was at a, I had a doctor's appointment and I was asking something, obviously sharing all my, you know, private information with, with Gemini. 'cause it's like, who cares? Whatever, right? Hey, like, I'm dying. How do you fix it? Um, [00:21:00] but, uh, and, and it exactly the, the headline that one of the tells is like.
The way they do like the subheads and kinda like recap things and so it's like the conflict, why what one isn't another and then they explain one section, the hack to stop the frustration. Then the third one was like the last paragraph re it's like recapping it all the reality check, like, it's almost like it's too like robotic and it is one of those weird things.
I also think there's something with humans. Those are great by the way. Love that. Love the love the list of three. I want to, I want to get back to the, um, the, the tone of voice thing in a second. Um. But I, I think there's something, I'm noticing this in my kids now who are young. They know when they, when I show 'em a video, they're like, oh, that's ai.
I'm like, how do you know? Ah, it just feels, just has a way, and I know people love the, like, AI voice recorders. We, we have one, we have, we have a Dave Bot, which is trained on my voice. It doesn't pa it doesn't trick me a hundred percent. Maybe we're gonna, you know, pass this, [00:22:00] someone's, someone's listening in their car right now who's like super deep in AI and there's like, just wait Dave, six months.
You know, the fraud is the spam and the fraud is gonna be through the roof. But there's definitely something there, um, on the, on the field and it's like, I don't know, this is, people love that word. The, the, the term taste. But it's kinda like, I don't know, it's kinda like, how do you know when something is handmade?
Right? Like the difference between like a, a local restaurant, you're, you're in Chicago, amazing. Food. The difference between a pizza in Chicago right from a proper place versus going to say California Pizza Kitchen, more of like a, a chain, a big chain is, is gonna be noticeable. Um, you mentioned tone of voice.
I wanna talk about that because how, how does someone, this is a thing I've been feeling this. How do you define that? A lot of companies, it just kind of happens. There's a writer who's there early and that kind of has their voice. Are you seeing customers or, or even you all like trying to have a tone of voice so that then you can use AI within that framework and it works versus if you let [00:23:00] AI dictate your tone of voice.
Any, any advice there?
Eoin Clancy: Yeah. Thi this is like one of the toughest parts. And like, uh, almost taking a step back to answer the question, people often ask like, is AI gonna replace a marketer? And like, the answer is like, undoubtedly in my head no, because that is like a key question that is, is like so hard to evaluate.
And like we've tried to create like frameworks that can help, um, companies. Basically determine if the end output is similar to their tone of voice input. And it's like a hard problem to solve. Like it's not as if you can do eng an engineering sprint and like go and solve it. But, um, taking like two or three examples of like customers, I think the, the big thing that comes out when we like nail a workflow with them is that from their kind of like content marketer or their, like head of product marketing, they just come to us with, it's the recurring sentence of.
This just sounds like us, and that's like a super hard thing to go and measure. But it, it [00:24:00] really comes from, um, like the hybrid situation. Like if you just try and use like AI outta the box and you mentioned cloud code, Dave. I spent my entire weekend in it, so I was trying to like hack it in all the ways to see like how far I could push it.
Like the hybrid situation is really where you end up with like a higher quality. But there are some important inputs. The inputs are gonna be. Um, like your product context and then you have like brand style guides and then you, you do have like a tone of voice that really, like, you can probably put into a one pager.
And I think that does need to be, uh, a key asset they spend a lot of time on. But the interesting thing, and a lot of, a lot of our customers do, or. When prospects come to us, they've actually done this themselves. They use AI to help generate that. For them, it's like they're gonna have not been using a AI for the last three, four, however many years they're in business, but they've created a lot of content that they're proud of.
It performs really well. It's reflective of maybe they're like leadership's team voice or [00:25:00] maybe their like brand team has like a different quirk to them. So with these tools that are available, you can almost like capture the essence by synthesizing the, the content you have out there into these key documents.
And then that just gives you a much better foundation to go and build on. But, um, it's almost like the human element to answer your question of, it's really hard to figure out what, what is tone of voice, but there are ways that you can, uh, create these assets and. That gives you just a better starting point, but you do need to continue to refine your systems, um, over time because like a product set, your tone of voice is gonna change depending on your state of the company, the state of the market, and wider, wider thing.
So it's an evolving asset, so you wanna make sure that. Humans are very much like kept in that loop.
Dave Gerhardt: Um, I also like, like you've talked about this, but basically how important subject matter expertise is in your content. And it's challenging because there are gonna be people that listen to this [00:26:00] and not everyone at every point in your career or even right now, is gonna be at a company where you're like, man, we have so much unique ip.
Like there are a lot of marketers, like we've gotta just be real, who are just like doing marketing at a company. And the company's kind of like, meh. You know, but I think this is important to still state because this, this shows what it takes to be great. And especially if you're looking for a new company, you know, looking for a new job, looking at a new company.
Can I go do marketing? Where I feel like this is why I wrote the book Founder Brand as an example, but like. That's that. My point was like that's the best ingredient for me as a marketer is like if I find out that the founder of this company has a super interesting backstory and like started this company because they had some deep pain or problem before, which is usually the case, most founders aren't like, you know what I wanna do?
I want to get super rich, and so I'm gonna start a company. It's like, oh no. From tech companies down to like the snacks in my pantry, you know, you open the pantry and it's like, uh, I was tired of feeding my kids, you know, sugary drinks and so I created blank. And it's like everyone has a story. And so the more it [00:27:00] seems like, especially in this era, the more subject matter expertise and IP around the problem that you're solving for your customer, that's also gonna be a key ingredient in how successful you can be with content.
Eoin Clancy: Yes, indeed. Indeed. Um, what, what I'll say is. With all of the tools we've access to, even if maybe your like founding team isn't the most like extroverted or it's like hard to pull those like key stories out. There's like many other places you can go to. Um, like knowing what I know now, how I would've approached content differently at my last company is like.
Interview like engineers every day of the week because they're like, the ones often solving the problems at like 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM and they like realize the, the actual, the life and the day of or day in the life of like our customer. And they're like such nuance there. And again, we always used to do the.
End of quarter, like content analysis at the last company. Um, everything that [00:28:00] like stood out with like traffic numbers or on uh, on time page engagement were the most technical pieces we created. And they were like a struggle to do. It was like super hard to like sit down with an engineer for like an hour, ask them like informed questions, and then afterwards use your best, kinda like, understanding of the problem to write it up.
Now that can turn into like. Hey, Dave, like, use your phone when you're out on a walk. Record this voice note, send it to me. I'll like use AI to enrich it. Come back to you with a draft. We can like, like improve the whole process that whole. End-to-end, like work stream is much easier now, but you can often find people inside of the building who can give you that key context.
And even if still that's not available, like ask your customers or better still listen into the conversations they had with your sales team. And again, like that is. The richest golden context you could be using for developing your content or just like [00:29:00] honing in. What if you're trying to find product market fit, honing in on how you should position yourselves to these people.
Dave Gerhardt: I also think that it being easy should not be the like benchmark for like, Hey, we, I think the good content actually does take time. It's almost. That is what makes it good. It's because you had to interview subject matter experts and really dig to find a point of view or, um, I've used this example a bunch, but like Emily Kramer from MKT one, you do, you know who she, you've seen her Substack, so she's like, I talked to her a couple weeks ago and she's like, yeah, I write like twice a month, once a month, and it's because I'm doing a ton of research and a ton of data.
I'm like, perfect. Like, I don't know if that wor like. For her. That works. That's amazing. But I like it because it's like she's gonna go super deep and win on like depth and data and sources verse like, I'm gonna just publish a million times in a month and, and hope something good happens. And so I think [00:30:00] we we're always under pressure by like management and others to like find the easy button for marketing and it's like, just create more content when it's actually like, I dunno.
I, I al I love that concept of. More so people were talking about this like five years ago by like PI pillar content, 10 x content, right? Instead of blog posts every day, what if once a month we publish like some, some piece of original research that was actually, you know, worth sharing.
Eoin Clancy: Yeah, the um, the example I'll give you from like in-house here was one that, um, Josh, who's our webinar lead and our content lead, he created back in probably this time last year, February, 2025, around the 10 x content engineer.
And kind of like we were going through there, he interviewed a ton of subject matter experts internally, talked to a ton of our customers, so that gave them like a lot of key context. But Josh did like toil over this piece for like a week, and it wasn't as if we tried to like, make it keyword [00:31:00] optimized and like absolutely pristinely, like structured.
So that was gonna work incredibly well in an agent. But, um, it was. Well written. It was written to like a problem that existed and does exist in the market. And it is like by far and away the outstanding piece of content from whatever angle we wanna measure it. And like again, content engineering was not a high uh, search.
Like it didn't have high keyword volume. It wasn't something that anything existed on YouTube about, but it very much kickstarted our own initiative of like making this like a craft to go and invest in. Nice. So a, a lot of the, the best content, as you said, comes from someone putting in the work and like wrecking their brain.
But I think now you can start to use at least like tools to help you get there.
Dave Gerhardt: And I, I think in the past a lot of people would say. Like, how do I, well, how do I find a great writer? And I don't want to take anything away from the, from the craft of writing and being a great writer, but from a marketing [00:32:00] standpoint and a business business growth standpoint, maybe what's cool about the role of content engineers, I actually think we have more tools than ever.
If you're, if you're not an amazing, if you don't have amazing copy or amazing prose, that doesn't mean you can't. Create amazing content. Look, look at social media, right? Imagine saying like the only people that could go viral on TikTok are professional videographers. And it's like, no, we, you could be what?
What if your, what if your angle on being a great content marketer is like, you're really great at coming up with hooks and you're great at doing the research, and then you can use the tools to like help you create the content. I think it doesn't have to be, I've always. Struggle with like, all right, well who's gonna write this like 2000 word article?
Well, we have more of the tools at our disposal to, to be able to do that. Alright, we're gonna shift over to, to webinars. So, uh. TLDR on this one is, uh, air Ops loves webinars. Webinars are crushing for you all. You did 14 webinars in Q4 in 2025, and you've applied your kind of analytical growth mindset to your webinar [00:33:00] funnel.
I thought webinars were dead. I know they're not 'cause I love them. Um, but wait a second. It's, it's, it's 2026. I got a VP of growth at like a hot, you know, AI company telling me that his growth hack is webinars. Please enlighten me. What is your webinar playbook, sir?
Eoin Clancy: Oh man, I don't, I, I won't reveal all of it, but like, webinars are back.
That, that was like the story for 2026, at least for us. Um, and. I, I think like, to, to explain why they're so good. It's kind of worth's taking a step back to why we started them. So like initially when I came in, again, it was like very different company, very different space. But what I wanted to do was we had these amazing builders.
We had like now today, we'll call them content engineers. We had amazing builders on the platform just doing wild and crazy stuff and like having amazing results with it. And I was like, the best way for us to get more users or get our names out there is like. [00:34:00] Tell, help, tell the story of these amazing people, and a lot of them were not content focused.
We had like Sean Linnehan, who runs like an executive coaching firm, we had Mateo, who now is a content engineer, but back then he was doing kind of like product marketing work. I just started with like, let's unlock these stories. And that just gives us ideas and gives the market ideas.
Dave Gerhardt: Okay, so hold on, hold on.
Let, let, let's, let's just like geek out on the, on the tactics a little bit here. So the number one thing was like really finding good stories to tell on a webinar. Yes. Okay.
Eoin Clancy: Correct. And like what we, we also have the, the benefit of being in a super, um, like influx market. So search changes a ton. So what we really care about is connecting the leading practitioners.
To the leading like experts. So we, we will start off when we plan out a quarter with like a skeleton and we're like, we need to [00:35:00] speak to the content engineer. We wanna try and speak to the CMO and we'll have like two or three tracks and we will like generally say we. These are like two or three hot subjects.
So like right now it might be query fan out or cloud code and we're gonna say like, we need to hit on these like two or three things across two or three different tracks. And then it was not easy 12 months ago, but now we have the luxury of we will try and match who is the best person in the market for this problem and how, how do we like find our way?
To meet them. So there's kinda like trying to identify what's hot, um, what people wanna learn about and who can help us, kind of like who, who's the industry expert that can like, tell that story. But we also need to be very flexible with that plan. So I, one of the, the highest performing, uh, webinars we ran and actually is in Q4, was with Mark Williams Cook Huge SEO agency guy out at the uk.
I forget what we had Mark committed to originally. But, uh, two weeks [00:36:00] out he was like, guys, like we need to like throw, throw our original agenda out the window. And after going super deep in Google AI mode, which was relatively new, and he was like, I have a ton of research, like, let's cover that. And we're like, fantastic.
Great. Because we had been receiving on sales calls, we had been getting questions in from previous webinars of like Google AI mode being a key thing people wanted to dig into. So. There's definitely, from a tactical standpoint, many little growth things that we do, but we try and create a skeleton match ourselves and our audience with the best people who know nice their, their topics, and then go
Dave Gerhardt: deep, begin be a time timeless principle number 47, right?
Begin with the end in mind, which is like. I think a lot of times we see, you know, I'll see people in our community or marketers, it almost seems like that that's just an existing channel that marketing does. And so it's like we, we gotta do webinars. We're gonna do three webinars a month because we need, you know, each one of them to produce five M qls [00:37:00] and we need to find a way to turn it into sales, ROI.
And so we need to make it like very product focused. And so it's like, join us for the Salesforce blah blah, blah webinar. And it's like, well, who's gonna go to that? Where? What you did is like, this is what I love about marketing, right? It's like, here's a trend in the, like, it is so obvious to me in our marketing sphere that like everyone is talking about Claude code in the last 30 days.
That's the, that's the like, um, work one. If I had to do a personal life one, it would be like saunas. Everyone's talking about the benefits of sauna right now, right? So it's like I could do, I bet if I did a webinar on saunas. And if I did a webinar on the health benefits for men and women in their late thirties of sauna like I would crush.
Yeah. Just because you're, you're out there. Part of being good at content is just like having a feel for the market. And so it's like instead of doing, instead of instantly being like, well, how are we gonna make this an Air Ops? Product webinar where we show them product. It's like, no, no, [00:38:00] no. These are people who care about these types of things.
The thing they care about right now that actually has nothing to do with Air Ops is Claude Code. Let's do a killer webinar on Claude Code. During that webinar, we get them to know, like, and trust us, and then we can, you know, run the, the place from there. Right.
Eoin Clancy: Yeah. A a hundred percent. And someone asked me the last day, they were like, so like, how much do you care about m qls?
How much do you care about like, getting the sales pitch in there? And I'm like, honestly, that's the last thing that is on our minds when we're creating this content.
Dave Gerhardt: Okay. Wait, well let's let, let's get to that though, because I, I do wanna, I do want to answer that because I sometimes people gimme a hard time when I say stuff like this because it's like, yeah, yeah.
Rah, rah, rah. Great topic. But ultimately like. The end of the day, the way someone get, you know, measure the oftentimes, like the person who's responsible for managing the webinar, webinar program, right? Her job is to book some nu, there needs to be some measurable out outcome, and I know you care about this so.
Let's get to that, but I want to like talk to the, the webinar stack. So first, like what do you run the what, what [00:39:00] tool? People love tools. What, what tools do you use to, you know, do you use a webinar platform? Yes. Any tech stack stuff you can share.
Eoin Clancy: Yeah. Um, we're gonna change it in the next while, but right now we use Luma for managing the event and, uh, communications with people who register.
Um, then we use like HubSpot for all our, what are you gonna change
Dave Gerhardt: to?
Eoin Clancy: We we're currently looking at a few different tools. If, if anyone, uh, who's selling, uh, is interested in giving us a discount, I'd be more than happy. But we'd love to bring everything into like one platform. There's just nuances as we get to like a bigger scale of trying to segment our audience that like Lua doesn't do a great job on.
So that's some, some tool we need to find by the end of like this quarter.
Dave Gerhardt: Okay.
Eoin Clancy: Um,
Dave Gerhardt: HubSpot, you mentioned HubSpot for what?
Eoin Clancy: For emails.
Dave Gerhardt: Okay,
Eoin Clancy: so
Dave Gerhardt: the webinar thing, the webinar platform has to connect to HubSpot, so you can send emails,
Eoin Clancy: correct? Um, that I have a story on it as well in a minute. [00:40:00] Uh, but Zoom, we just have like scaled from internal meetings to like Zoom webinars, and then we do pretty sophisticated, um, like personalized follow ups with.
Clay Trigger and Smart lead in the backgrounds and then like Zapier. So we've many small little signals we monitor and they come into like clay or air Ops to kind of get condensed, personalized, and then we send out emails via a mixture of HubSpot and Smart Lead. So there's a. A core set of tools, but also like many other small ones in there.
Dave Gerhardt: Can you, can you share anything about the follow up strategy? Because I think this is where, okay, well we're gonna just have sales follow up with everyone attended didn't attend. Like, there's different strategies for like who attended, who didn't, who didn't attend, what's the offer? You know, if I get an email after the webinar that I went to, but it's like, Hey, book a, hey, air Ops is the shit, book a meeting with us tomorrow.
I'm not gonna do that. I'm curious if. [00:41:00] Know, what are some of the signals? What, what, what might be a good outreach? You know that Claude Code webinar as an example, how do you book a Air Ops demo from that?
Eoin Clancy: The booking, the demo is not the thing that we care about, which is like, okay,
Dave Gerhardt: so what is the, sorry, what is the metric that you care about?
Then whatever that, whatever that is
Eoin Clancy: we care about, like engagement with the content that we put in front of someone. So. Again, answering your, your previous question for doing follow up, the context that we care about is, is this your first event to come to that? That requires something very different to a person who's a customer that's coming to their 15th event.
So it's like, where in your journey, uh, or where. Where along your journey in terms of attending our webinars are you, uh, we also look back at what context do we know about this person from questions they've asked or pages that they've been on. And then we also, we do a lot of pre-work before a webinar to get [00:42:00] personalized questions from our audience.
So those three sets of like. How many webinars have they attended? Um, what do we know about them from like what is available? Like have they done a signup but nothing else? Have they viewed different pages and then the most recent context gathered from them? All of that comes in together. Within like an Air Ops workflow and from there we basically have three or four assets that we can share with someone after the fact.
One might just be a recap if people didn't show up and we can't really like push them too much further down the funnel or their education journey. Without just giving them like a recap of like what event they missed out on. If someone is like very far down and they're attending their 10th webinar, that's gonna be more of like, can we enable them like deeper in the product?
Can we give them like a demo of our latest feature? Um, again, like all async so that they can enable themselves. And if someone is far more top of funnel. [00:43:00] They have come to an event to educate themselves, so they probably want to do more work there. So we do a ton of, um, we spend a ton of time internally on our own research, so we're very much like research driven in our follow-up to say, Hey, like this is a trend we've noticed on your website.
This correlates with this piece of research we have done. We think this is how we should interpret it, and like, action on it yourself. So it's very value driven. We're never gonna do. Go to Dave and say like, Hey Dave, you were on this now, now you're educated. Come talk to us.
Dave Gerhardt: And how do you, how do you do that?
Eoin Clancy: That, that, that's, that's where the magic lives. Okay. That, that is the workflows that we have. We must have done 40 webinars at least last year. And in each one, our aim is to like continue to get the, the open rate up, the click through, rate up, and the conversion rate. Measuring some of that stuff is very difficult because for each [00:44:00] person they're kind of being left with a different call to action, but it's really like tight refinements on many different parts of the system that compound over time.
Dave Gerhardt: And are you able to like look out in the future and then you know, that webinars influence those deals? You know, like 90 days from now you see a close one deal. Everyone's excited. You're like, oh, yep, they went to two webinars, and then you like kind of reverse look at it versus like, all right, we did this webinar.
Where are the deals? Where are the deals?
Eoin Clancy: Yeah. Yeah. We do not look at like trailing 14 days. It is like a 30 day or like 90 day lag, 30 day on maybe like demo booked 90 days more so on like closed one, or like qualified business. So. There is like a nice pop when we do a webinar, people who are just like, oh, like I see these guys are experts.
They're talking about something. I need to like go deeper on, I wanna actually talk to a [00:45:00] human. We will see like a pop in demos booked, but very much it has like a long tail effect and like that's what we're trying to go for. Like we'd much rather win. The long term game then like optimize the crap out of the short term game because you're just gonna burn relationships.
So I have definitely evolved over time from the like, let's get everything, let's like make sure that we squeeze every email out of everyone. As often as we can to just be, how do we create the best content, give it away for free. And then when someone has their problem or needs a solution in the future, we're the first name top of mind.
And I think you asked me the question on like, what webinar software are we gonna go with? Um, I don't know. Like, no, no one is, no one's like always in my face saying like, we're the, we're the best for this reason, or more so like offering me value of. How I can better engage with my community or like audience.
No [00:46:00] one's doing that to me from like the webinar site. So I actually don't have a top of mind name right now.
Dave Gerhardt: All right. Uh, don't worry. Depending on when this podcast comes out, you'll get fired.
Eoin Clancy: I'm sure I'll get a lot of call outbound. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt: Um, no, that's good. I, um, and then how do you, how have you earned the right to do this?
Right? I think someone's listening. They get it. Um. My friend pr Prav from Paramark would say like, don't treat people like morons. Right. If you do something good and then over time they're gonna come back and, you know, tell you that they heard about you or whatever. We've been doing this podcast for three years.
I don't try to drive exit five members from this, but like literally every single week people say, oh, I heard about you on the podcast. It's just 'cause we, we've been doing it. Do you have a tight relationship with, with the management team? Like, do you have to. To get permission. Is it, do they believe in your marketing strategy?
Because if anyway, if, if anybody else was like, Hey, here's the deal, we're gonna do all these [00:47:00] webinars, uh, we're not gonna gate any of them. The follow-up's kind of gonna all be different, but like, uh, this is gonna lead to deals somehow. Just trust me. Right? Like, on the outside it's like, no, that doesn't, that doesn't work.
Maybe that works for you, but how, how did you make that work?
Eoin Clancy: It's a good question. It it's, it's kind of going back, it, it is the question age old of like attribution. Like no one has solved it. No one ever will solve it. So like, it is a matter of storytelling and I, I think it comes back to, I don't wanna say like I'm a great storyteller, but I can find the data that can help back up my point of view that I've high conviction in.
So early on it was like, damn, like, Owen, you're investing a crap ton of time in this like webinar thing. It hasn't really taken off yet. Like maybe we should put our focus elsewhere. But, um, basically I talked to like some of my advisors, my mentors, and they were like, no, you like need to like get into a rhythm here before you completely, um, rule it out.
So it was [00:48:00] great advice I got at that point because we had done like. Three or five. I hadn't seen results, but it was starting to show up in sales conversations, which was my qualitative, um, like data point. And then we did like number six and seven and we started to like refine our call to action.
Started to refine like what we did in follow up. Tried to like sell less on the call and then just like the hamster wheel started to move. And when it starts to move, you're more easily finding proof points. You're better equipped to like tell a story internally and then you get to this point of, uh, perpetual motion, which is like, Hey, this is the thing that we do and, uh, like our co-founders or the rest of our team.
Even as new people join, they're like, oh, like digital pure. Like I know this amazing person. So where originally it was really tough to get it off the ground. Now we're in a, like a privileged position of we have to turn down guests [00:49:00] right now, which is tough. Um, so we're always looking to scale, but I think it comes back to, if you're trying to repeat this motion elsewhere, it comes back to having high conviction, finding some data points.
Back up your point of view where along the journey you are, and then like storytelling it, like internally and keeping your market informed as well.
Dave Gerhardt: It's like, uh, I, I don't know if you, I don't know if you play golf, but there's a common, uh, analogy to a lot of things, which is like, you have to find the right balance of like.
Not gripping, not trying too hard, but you need to try a little bit. And it's almost like the same is true with like, with marketing. It's like, yeah, if we try to do these webinars and we're like, oh, we're doing this webinar and we need five, you know, me, m qls from it, then it's like too much pressure. But if you, if you're too laissez-faire with it, like you don't get the right thing.
And so,
Eoin Clancy: yeah.
Dave Gerhardt: I like what you said. We, we often use, internally we say like momentum creates clarity. And so it's like you've done, you did a couple. I love the, the feedback loop from sales. That's obviously the ultimate one. If bunch of people start saying like, yeah, we've been gonna, their webinar, it's like, oh [00:50:00] shoot, okay, let's go do more of those.
Um, somehow, somehow we chewed up a lot of this this time, but I'm gonna keep you for a couple more minutes. Uh, webinars good, good enough. You left enough there to, to be desired. I I do have two quick, two quick follow-ups. One you mentioned like. Are there some type of signals like you, you know, someone that goes to the webinar, are you ingesting like data from, you know, web, your, your websites, CRM, uh, other sources and then kind of scoring them in some way?
I feel like you mentioned something like, something like that.
Eoin Clancy: Yeah. Um,
Dave Gerhardt: and what are you doing that with?
Eoin Clancy: We have a bunch of signal tracking tools, so like, or B2B for like person level enrichment. Um, we use like hockey stack to get a better feel of when we have performance ads. Is someone at a company getting a ton of ads or no ads?
And again, it is so interesting in that. Uh, perspective. We do a, a customer deep dive every week. Uh, how many people come in and say that they found us through personal research? And if you're listening, I'm doing like air quotes. [00:51:00] The people who come in with personal research have received a crap ton of ads.
So we, we use like hockey stack or B2B Triggery and like what HubSpot, HubSpot tracks outta the box to figure out what has their journey been over time, how long do they know about us? And then kind of like their most recent activity as well.
Dave Gerhardt: Okay, cool. 'cause that, that seems like such a useful thing. It's not just about that webinar in a vacuum.
It's like they, maybe they also did this and, and they did that. Um, and then how do you get butts in seats, right? Somebody's like, yeah, well, whatever you, air ops, like, you, you, you raise money, you made an announcement, you got a lot of hot buzz. You got a list. Like how are, how are you getting butts in seats to these things?
Any, any secret.
Eoin Clancy: There's a few secrets I'll keep in my back pocket, so I wanna make sure. Okay,
Dave Gerhardt: no, I respect that as you should.
Eoin Clancy: But, but I, I do think it, uh, 80 20 rule applies. I'll keep the 20%, the 80% is just, and again, this is, you need to develop towards it of like the storytelling, but. Give away the [00:52:00] value.
Like I have learned that so much in the last 18 months, like don't gate. And that will feel so hard to let go of in certain organizations 'cause you're targeted against like an MQL goal or like a sales qualified goal, but give away the value and. What, how I look at it and how we look at it is we win when our like audience wins.
And our audience, even in the last 30 days, I've never seen as much public love on LinkedIn about our webinars where they're like screen recording in the background because they don't wanna wait six hours for us to send out the email. And they're sharing out snippets on LinkedIn. They're doing their own UGC of it on amazingly TikTok, but also YouTube.
So. The whole thing is like basically give as much value as possible, like find their pain points and democratize access to thought leaders or the like best insights and then your users will do the distribution for you. [00:53:00]
Dave Gerhardt: Pick a hot topic also helps. Um,
Eoin Clancy: true.
Dave Gerhardt: Okay. Couple, uh, two quick hitters. Gimme, gimme two things.
Two other channels or two things that are working besides, uh, webinars. Well, we, you're doing content. You got a content engineer that that whole thing is working. You're using your own product to do that. Uh, webinar program. Um, one or two other channels that are like promising and a, and a part of the, the mix moving forward for, for, for air ops.
Eoin Clancy: Yeah, may, maybe just like one bit of sage advice for the audience as well. I'm, I'm a young guy, so take my use of sage with a pinch of salt. Um, I think, I think the channels marketing team should focus on, should be ones that establish trust and then agent visibility. They're, they're very different, but I think they all come back to like authenticity.
So. From our side, like webinars, our own content, they actually fall a lot into both buckets, but also agent visibility Trust is really where we're trying to hone in on. So we do a [00:54:00] ton of enablement and we, we probably spend more time enabling people who are, uh, not customers than actually customers. But the whole goal is to educate people on how to use these tools.
Like we've mentioned Cloud code a ton of times we're running an upcoming webinar on that. Um, it's not something that like we've productized, but we're like, if we can move the market further, like again, they'll know about us around these hot topics. So enablement is huge. It's establishing a real strong base of UGC and referral and like word of mouth for us.
And then events, we actually webinars we keep coming back to, which is funny, but we ran them for like 10 months before we actually did any in-person first party event. And it was amazing. We had these people who met up in New York at like a hackathon, and they were like Lucy and Vivian and Paul. Mary and they'd all been engaging on our webinar chats before and they met in person and they, they just created little pods in lots [00:55:00] of different cities all over the US and actually abroad too.
And they're kind of like almost grounds up creating their own events. And we're trying to meet a tops down with larger ones too. So events, community, they're all kind of together, but bundling up to trust, I think, as a core bucket of channels.
Dave Gerhardt: Anything that you're not invent? Did, did anything get the, get the ax in the 2026 budget? Come on, gimme something. I know something. Yeah. You fired a PR agency or something like that? I don't know.
Eoin Clancy: No. Uh, like we've been privileged of, um. I don't think anything got cut. What I, I, I, I don't feel I'm hesitating because it feels like nothing has been cut on us because we're very quick to experiment and experiments to us are like, how do we short circuit our learning time?
How do we like de-scope to like the [00:56:00] smallest possible MVP, um. But make sure that it drives a learning or a signal out the fire site. So we've had multiple bets that just like haven't paid off on existing channels, but we'll always start to invest or overinvest in the ones that work. So there's nothing that, when I go to like a leadership meeting, I'm like, guys, like you've denied me four times on this.
Uh, I can't say that honestly there is anything that falls into that bucket, but we definitely get support, investment, um, resources to move fast. The ones that are. Working for us.
Dave Gerhardt: Okay. Alright. Fair. Whatever that was a you the whole pod A plus. That was a, I'll give you a D, but it's okay. Enjoy your time, enjoy your, enjoy your weekends, uh, with Claude code because my friend, that time is gonna go away quickly, so you better get sharp.
You get head sharp now. Uh, okay. Owen and Clancy, this was an awesome, awesome episode. Smart guy. Uh, you came off great. You did, you did a great job. We got some, we got some specif [00:57:00] specific stuff in there. Uh, if you sell webinar software, go find Owen on LinkedIn, please no, send them, send 'em an InMail. Uh, you'll, you'll find them on, on LinkedIn.
You can follow Air Ops, see what they're doing, um, putting out a lot of useful stuff. And, um, you know, winning by, by being helpful, which, which is awesome. Great to have you on the pod. Lots of people have said really nice things about you and, uh, I, I agree. Did a nice job on the pod and I'll continue to follow you and, um, we'll listen, we'll, we'll check you out on the next episode.
Thanks everybody for listening. I'm Dave Gerhart, um, and I'm outta here Owen. See you, man. Thank you.