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Dave Gerhardt (Founder of Exit Five, former CMO) and guests help you grow your career in B2B marketing. Episodes include conversations with CMOs, marketing leaders, and subject matter experts across all aspects of modern B2B marketing: planning, strategy, operations, ABM, demand gen., product marketing, brand, content, social media, and more. Join 3,500+ members in our private community at exitfive.com.
Ross Simmonds [00:00:00]:
The SerP is essentially I go to Google and I type in what is b two b marketing. If we can have content on that search engine results page. When people type in what is b two b marketing, then we're owning that phrase. That's serp domination. Where's the resource that they go to to figure out what to do? If you miss payroll, you want to be that person and that media engine that has all of those answers because that's going to earn you the subscribe. Like, say, lap.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:35]:
Good to see you, man. It's been a while.
Ross Simmonds [00:00:37]:
In a minute. Likewise.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:38]:
Great to see. I almost don't even want to record this. I wanted to just keep talking with you for an hour, catch up. I was going to ask for your advice because I noticed that you all were just at Disney and we're going there next week.
Ross Simmonds [00:00:53]:
Are you?
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:54]:
Yes, sir.
Ross Simmonds [00:00:55]:
Nice. I got all the tips. I got all the tips.
Dave Gerhardt [00:00:58]:
All right, give me one. Give me one. Give me one dad tip.
Ross Simmonds [00:01:01]:
All right, so if you're doing magic kingdom, you're going to want to get the lightning lane rounds, like fast pass stuff. Just make sure you're not caught up in the chaos of a two hour line because it will waste your entire day. So you got to wake up at 07:00 a.m. And you got to be there ordering that access to the park right away. Set an alarm in your phone, get it, and then book whatever ride stands out to you as, like, the must do ride to be your first one. And then you can't have a bad day. You can't have a bad day after that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:01:36]:
All right. It's crazy. We went last year. Don't you think you could do a whole master class, a podcast on how they've monetized that business?
Ross Simmonds [00:01:47]:
It's the best. It's the best. I'd go there thinking, oh, this is a great experience for the kids, but it's also a great experience as an entrepreneur and as a business person. The marketing is brilliant. The cast members are brilliant. Like, the way that that entire concept is structured where they always are in character, perfection. The prices are also brilliant. You can get a Starbucks coffee at Disney for like, $14, or you can go outside of the Disney world and get one for $3.
Ross Simmonds [00:02:20]:
And it's like, just because you're there, you're okay paying a ridiculous premium on their stuff. Yeah, no, I love it. It's a cool spot. It's a magical place. How long are you guys going to go down?
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:32]:
We're going for a week.
Ross Simmonds [00:02:33]:
Oh, nice.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:35]:
Which we just talked about this offline fun fact. Now that I'm no longer a solopreneur, it means that. It doesn't mean my business is going.
Ross Simmonds [00:02:43]:
To pause possible, right? Exactly. 100%.
Dave Gerhardt [00:02:46]:
We're going to get the vacation paid for while we're there.
Ross Simmonds [00:02:50]:
I love it. The goal for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially as you get into the wonderful world of dad life and mother Life and all that stuff, is like, you don't want to always be working for the business. You want the business to work for you. And for me. I've been able to do like a month and a half to Italy with the fam, brought out my mom. We've been able to do Disney with the kids. We're able to live our best life because we got out of rossimmons.com, which for many years was just myself, freelance, grinding every single night, pushing everything. And now we've just got an amazing team and it's no longer me.
Ross Simmonds [00:03:28]:
So that's awesome, man. Enjoy. You're going to love it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:03:32]:
So many people know you from social media, from your writing, from your tweeting, from your exing. A lot of people. You've been talking a lot about this topic of content distribution. And I thought of you this morning because Dan, who is Coo at exit five, he sends me this screenshot and he says, let me just pull it up because I got it right here. He sent me a screenshot and he said, dave's LinkedIn Post from Sunday drove 200 new newsletter subscribers.
Ross Simmonds [00:04:05]:
That's gold.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:06]:
Okay, gold. So I click on it and I have all my social media stuff scheduled. Like, I write it in batches and then it's just, life is easier if I can do it that way.
Ross Simmonds [00:04:16]:
Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:16]:
And what I posted was this lead magnet that we have. So, like an incentive for somebody to join our email list because it used to just be like, get on the exit five newsletter. That's not a great call to action. So we took this talk that I gave a couple of years ago, which was 16 lessons that I learned going from PR intern to CMO about b two b marketing. We redesigned it, we turned into a lead magnet. And so it says, like, join our newsletter and we will also send you this guide. So it's a better incentive to get people to join the list. Anyway, my point of this is when I initially posted it a couple of months ago, we got 700 new newsletter subscribers on that first day.
Ross Simmonds [00:04:54]:
Right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:04:55]:
So what I've been doing since then is this will make you proud. Just replaying the hits.
Ross Simmonds [00:05:00]:
I'm already. This is it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:04]:
I've done nothing different. So I see this post from Dan. I'm like, what did I post on Sunday? And I go and I look and I copied and pasted the exact same thing that I posted six months ago. And that post drove 200 new newsletter subscribers. Now, that's really significant for us because on a given day, we add maybe ten to 20 new people to our list, right? And I wanted to talk to you about this. I just thought of this. I was just driving from somewhere. I came back in my car.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:29]:
I'm like, man, I got to use this as my first story to tell to Ross because this, to me, is just like a marketing lesson in itself. We already did the hard work to create the thing. We already proved that it worked. I just posted again. And by the way, not a single person has messaged. I think we have this fear of someone messaging me and be like, yo, man, you already posted this. This worked. And so I've been doing that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:05:50]:
Now I'm going to do it every other month. I'm going to post the same thing. And that thing is just going to drive hundreds of people to our list. The other thing, I've been doing more lately, and now that I'm investing and going hard on exit five, I've been taking a lot of this stuff more seriously. So I'm telling you about this as a content person, social media guy. I've also been going, and I've been looking. At least once a month, I look at which social media content is performing the best, and I copy it and I send it right back out into the queue. And lo and behold, the posts that were the top performing posts are the top performing posts again.
Dave Gerhardt [00:06:22]:
And every month I write new content. Sometimes you get a new batch from there. I grab those, and now you have this. And I was like, man, I got to tell this to Ross.
Ross Simmonds [00:06:29]:
And see, this is what that is the playbook that every creator should apply, every brand should apply, every marketer should apply. But everybody has the fear of being judged when they share something. Every other month that somebody's going to comment and say something negative, they're fearful that somebody's going to unfollow them. They're fearful that it's going to be a dilution of their personal brand or their creative. But you have demonstrated you have two posts, and combined, that's 900 subscribers. Yes, two posts.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:02]:
I know, actually, I put Dan on this the other day, and I was like, so we use Shield app LinkedIn. Shield is one I got taplio now and I guess you can do it in there, but cool. So he buys Shield app. It was like $144 or something for the year. He hasn't been writing on LinkedIn a lot because he wasn't in this field for a little bit. So he goes in Shield. He finds posts that he wrote two years ago when he was in the trenches doing vp of marketing stuff. And he sends me this post the other day and it blew up hundreds of likes, bunch of comments, way more engagement.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:40]:
And he's like, the funny part is, I wrote this post two and a half years ago, right?
Ross Simmonds [00:07:45]:
And it still resonates today.
Dave Gerhardt [00:07:46]:
And I think a lot of people are afraid to play the game or admit to themselves that this is a game. Right?
Ross Simmonds [00:07:55]:
Well, it's an interesting, I don't think you did this intentionally, but think about Disney. Think about Disney and their hits. There's a reason why Lion King comes back with childish Gambino and Beyonce and is in a hit again. It's because they know that this story resonated with people back in the 90s. They recognize that, oh, Aladdin resonated back in the 90s. Let's give it to people again, but make it modern action, live action. Let's continue to replay the hits, adjust them slightly and see how people respond. How do you think they're going to respond? If the content was good, they're going to like it again.
Ross Simmonds [00:08:33]:
Six months, six years, 20 years later, they're still going to like it, especially if you're able to add a little bit more polish to it. So if you're able to take away, okay, I created this meme back in the day by just like I was walking to the bus stop and I shared this meme and it resonated with people. What if I add a little bit more polish? What if I threw in a logo? What would happen if I shared it differently? You're going to see more engagement, you're going to see better results. And I think a lot of organizations don't realize that they have fallen into the trap of content is king. And because they bought into that idea that content is king, they thought, oh, I just have to create content every single week, every single month, new content, new content, new content, new blog posts, new LinkedIn updates, and they beat their head up against the wall, creating a ton of content without thinking about, oh, right, this idea that I shared back in December 2021 still resonates today. And if I modify it slightly or if I keep it the exact same, people aren't going to care. They're going to, like, they're going to share it, they're going to engage with it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:37]:
I'm glad you mentioned the point about editing it because there's actually a bunch of examples where we all change and I look at something that was popular that I wrote two years ago, and I cringe at it a little bit.
Ross Simmonds [00:09:49]:
Right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:09:50]:
So should I throw it out? No, I didn't throw it out. The topic hit. Right? And so I'm like, let me just rewrite this now and write it as mature Dave or whatever it is.
Ross Simmonds [00:10:04]:
Right. State of your audience and the state of affairs. Right? It's like a great example of this is hustle as a concept. I'm a big believer in hustle. I've been a fan for years. Blah, blah, blah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:15]:
How dare you?
Ross Simmonds [00:10:16]:
A lot of my content back in the day would talk about hustle, okay? The Internet is now anti hustle. Cool. So instead of always saying hustle, I'm going to say, work hard and nobody gets triggered, nobody gets offended. Everybody buys into this idea that you should work hard. And I don't throw at the word hustle because I don't want people to pull out the pitchforks and start yelling. So you have to adjust with the times. You have to be able to be aware of, okay? This needs to be changed slightly to fit my audience and the people that I'm trying to connect with. And if you do that, your content is going to continue to win.
Dave Gerhardt [00:10:50]:
I like that. Take me into your. I like talking to you about social media because you say content, I say social media. I just feel like with b to b, social media is like the most underrated channel. Not underrated in that it's not obvious, but, man, so many people and companies are not good at it. And I think you've done this. I've done this as people and brands with companies, you just see so many people, they have to go spend money on paid in order to do things right. You have a book coming out at some point in the spring.
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:36]:
You've already built up an audience.
Ross Simmonds [00:11:38]:
Right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:11:38]:
And so to sell that book is going to be send email, write tweets about it, post on LinkedIn about it, and especially in B. Two B channels like LinkedIn are so underrated. I think X is underrated. What holds companies back from being better at the social media part? And how can we help them a little bit today on how to tackle that?
Ross Simmonds [00:12:01]:
Yeah. So the book's coming out. Create once, distribute forever. You can go to rosssimmons.com subscribe to my newsletter and I'll be sure to get access. Combine this book, though, with founder brand and I think a lot of people are going to have a ridiculous resource to be able to take these two things and do some ridiculous stuff.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:19]:
Hey, don't sleep on founder brand. I got a deposit this month from authors Republic for $167.
Ross Simmonds [00:12:26]:
There you go. There you go.
Dave Gerhardt [00:12:29]:
It's more if we translate that over to canadian money.
Ross Simmonds [00:12:32]:
Oh, man. It's got a little bit more. It's a mortgage in Canada. That's crazy. But yeah, to your point, I think when it comes to social, there's a lot of things that people underestimate. The biggest thing that people underestimate is like, if you can build a network and a community that actually cares about what you say, your voice, your point of view, then those people aren't just like visitors to your website that are there for a second and then move away. They're people who have committed by just hitting subscribe, by just hitting follow, by just hitting that like, button that they are engaged and interested in hearing the stories that you're going to tell. So that commitment can translate very nicely into actual revenue and actual dollars.
Ross Simmonds [00:13:16]:
But a lot of brands make the mistake of thinking, oh, social media is just a place for fun. It's just a place for people to share funny dance videos and share what they've had for lunch and dinner. But in reality, some of the best content might not generate a bunch of likes, it might not generate a lot of shares, but it will actually drive better ROI for your business by simply being educational, by simply providing people with value directly in the feed. You had a great episode with Amanda from Sparktoro talking about no click content. Like if you can deliver value in the feed of a user, it's gold. And then on the flip side of that, I know we're talking a lot about social, but another distribution channel is also search, right? Like everyone thinks that distribution is exclusively on social. SEO is also an organic distribution channel. If you can capitalize on the fact that right now the hundreds of thousands of people are looking for certain keywords that might be relevant to your industry, the problems that you solve, et cetera, and you can start to capture a percentage of that that can pay significant dividends as well.
Ross Simmonds [00:14:21]:
And I think a lot of organizations are afraid to do this work because it doesn't have necessarily that cheat code that paid has. And that cheat code is a credit card. With paid, you just swipe a credit card and you're good. You're going to show up, you're guaranteeing that placement. But with social, there's algorithms that you have to deal with. With SEO, there's algorithms you have to deal with. There's the understanding of your customers that you have to deal with. There's a lot of variability associated with that game, but that hard game can actually pay significant dividends down the road.
Dave Gerhardt [00:14:54]:
Yeah, I love that. I think people we like paid because it's like we need to generate x.
Ross Simmonds [00:15:00]:
Right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:01]:
It's very quantifiable. Let's go take $10,000, $50,000, whatever, and go spend it there. What I love about social and LinkedIn, specifically as a channel for b to b, is I think there's a wrong narrative that followers are a vanity metric.
Ross Simmonds [00:15:23]:
Right? I agree. Yeah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:25]:
I don't think they're a vanity metric at all. I think they are a very important metric. And the reason why is because the more followers you have on a platform means the more people you can reach with your content. So that example that I talked about earlier, I have 160,000 followers on LinkedIn.
Ross Simmonds [00:15:45]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:15:46]:
The only reason I got 200 newsletter subscribers from that was because I have that audience. And so the goal is create content. Over time, more people find you interesting, more people engage on your stuff. When more people engage with your stuff, more people are likely to see your stuff. When more people see your stuff, they're more likely to follow you. So over time, you add followers.
Ross Simmonds [00:16:06]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:06]:
Then when you have something to promote, you can promote it, and people are going to sign up. And so I've been at companies, I've advised companies, I've been around startups who are like, people are smashing their heads against the wall to try to figure out how do we drive more people to our webinar.
Ross Simmonds [00:16:22]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:23]:
When we can do a post with exit five, we have a webinar coming up. We have 900 people registered for it, and we sent one email and two LinkedIn posts about it.
Ross Simmonds [00:16:33]:
That's it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:16:35]:
You're building an opt in, like the followers. Maybe people get caught up in the name, but you're building people that have opted in to see your stuff.
Ross Simmonds [00:16:41]:
Exactly. Yeah. And that's the key. Whether it's followers, whether it's subscribers to an email newsletter, when you own access to your ICP, it's a game changer. But a lot of brands struggle with this, because even when they are willing to try to connect to those people and those people are willing to press that follow button, they don't actually know what to share. Like, a lot of brands also struggle with this idea of, okay, what do we talk about if we don't have something to sell? Am I supposed to talk about five other ways that you can use my product? Am I supposed to talk about the different features? A lot of brands struggle with what I call content market fit, which is understanding what content your market actually wants. And the best way to figure out what content your market wants is actually to send out smaller tidbit ideas, concepts and see what resonates. So on x, I do this all the time.
Ross Simmonds [00:17:32]:
I'll share a tweet and if it generates a lot of reshares, lots of reposts, lots of likes, lots of bookmarks, I'm like, okay, this piece now needs to become a podcast. That podcast needs to become social clips. We need to write a blog post on this piece as well because now I know I have content market fit. And when leads start coming through from that one thread, from that LinkedIn post, customers start coming through it. I know that I've hit something that rings the cash register, so I'm going to go double down on that asset time and time again. So for a lot of brands, they're afraid of not knowing what to share. Here's what you share valuable things. You create content that's going to educate them, that's going to engage them, entertain them or empower them.
Ross Simmonds [00:18:14]:
And if you do that consistently enough, you're going to win at the game of social and you're going to start to get those followers.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:20]:
Do you work mostly with b two B brands?
Ross Simmonds [00:18:23]:
All b, two b. So yeah, we work with the b two B SaaS companies, some of the largest in the world, so to speak. We do everything from social management, content creation on their blog, ebooks, gated assets, all that stuff.
Dave Gerhardt [00:18:37]:
I was asking because I think to build on what you said there, I think that the best marketing strategy, the best content strategy for b to b is to become the expert or the go to resource in your niche. So you sell to HR. Your whole marketing strategy should be to become the go to resource for people that work in HR.
Ross Simmonds [00:19:05]:
Right?
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:06]:
What's your reaction to that?
Ross Simmonds [00:19:07]:
When we work with clients, we always talk about like, there's SERP domination and then there's like mindshare domination. And when we think about SERP domination, it's on the SEO side. Like, you want to be able to show up in multiple places, but in.
Dave Gerhardt [00:19:19]:
The SERP, for people that might not.
Ross Simmonds [00:19:21]:
Know what a SERP mean, search engine results page. So the SERP is essentially, I go to google and I type in what is b two b marketing? If we can have a YouTube video, if we can have a twitter account, if we can have a blog post, if we can have content on that search engine results page. When people type in what is b two b marketing, then we're owning that phrase. That's serp domination. Being able to own a lot of that. When it comes to mind share domination, it's thinking through. When someone has a problem in the wonderful world of HR, where's the resource that they go to to figure out what to do if you miss payroll? What's the resource that you go to when you're trying to figure out whether or not you should send somebody a w two or a w nine or what? The difference is you want to be that person and that media engine that has all of those answers because that's going to earn you the subscribe. And in many ways, and I hate to be the guy who's pumping you up too much, but ex of five has become that for a lot of b two b marketers.
Ross Simmonds [00:20:21]:
I see people who literally won't write their boss a question, they'll go in and ask an anonymous question in x of five to get an answer because they don't want to look dumb internally. Well done. Right? Thank you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:35]:
Hey, that's the, I'm not having a great day today. Sometimes you got to take a compliment and you just got to be like, you know what? That feels good.
Ross Simmonds [00:20:44]:
I'll take it. Thank you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:20:47]:
No, thank you for saying that. That means a lot. But also, this is what I've been doing for ten years, right? Some guy on LinkedIn the other day was writing about how I'm given market. Like, I have a big audience and I need to be more. You have a responsibility to show people that marketing is about more than demand gen and performance marketing. I'm like, dude, you're talking to the wrong person. I'm the word guy, the math guy. Are you serious?
Ross Simmonds [00:21:16]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:17]:
You got the wrong guy here. But I love the content piece, and I think the reason why. What's the secret to exit five? Well, this is kind of the playbook that I've done at a couple of companies, and now we're doing it without a SaaS company behind it. We're building this resource for b two B marketers. Now, I love the example you talked about. Your brain goes to search, and that's great. And that's a weakness of mine, for sure. I just want to build on that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:21:47]:
So that is one approach you can take, right. Which is like, let's write the articles. Let's write the how to articles, right? But what I think is cool today is you have multiple channels available to you to try to do this, to try to build that resource. And so you could say, like, we want to try to do that content approach, but right now we don't have the budget to work with a foundation. We don't have the time. You could do something like stand up a TikTok account and make funny and relatable, like, just do life of an HR pro, life of an HR person and make a hundred videos. Now, it's not that easy, right? Not to go Gary Vee on. You just make 100 videos.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:30]:
It doesn't work like that.
Ross Simmonds [00:22:32]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:32]:
But I just want to give people these ideas. It doesn't have to be one thing. It's like, use, okay, how do we become the go to resource now? That TikTok page can either work or not, and you're going to build off of that. But there's multiple avenues here. You could start a newsletter. It could be the founder writing on LinkedIn. It could be a podcast. It could be one article, it could be one webinar.
Dave Gerhardt [00:22:52]:
You need to shrink this down and say, like, our content strategy needs to be built around this person, and the goal is to become known. And like, hey, we happen to sell software to that person. But I always think back. I always use HubSpot as an example. Not to beat a dead horse, but when I was a 23 year old marketer who had no idea what he was doing, I needed to build a marketing plan. I did exactly what you just said with HR. Go to Google, find a HubSpot marketing plan template, customize that, pitch it to my boss. She's like, wow, you came up with this marketing plan.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:23]:
I'm like, you're damn right I did.
Ross Simmonds [00:23:24]:
Yeah, 100%.
Dave Gerhardt [00:23:26]:
And in my mind, affinity, I build brand Affinity with HubSpot through that process.
Ross Simmonds [00:23:31]:
Right, true. Yeah, 100%. I think what you just articulated there is kind of the essence of my mo entirely. It's like, yes, search is a play. LinkedIn is a play, but so is Reddit, so is podcasting, so is a private, slack group. The playbook around adding value is not dictated by you have to be everywhere. It's finding exactly where your audience is spending time going, very intentional into these communities and adding a ton of value. Like, I've been blocked from Reddit probably eight times.
Ross Simmonds [00:24:04]:
I love Reddit. It's my favorite network literally in the world. And I've been blocked because in the early days, I went in, I just submitted links, and I thought, oh, I'm going to make it to the top of Reddit. Didn't happen. Bye, Felicia. You're done. They kicked me off. It sucked because I also used Reddit to win my fantasy football championships, and I couldn't win that year because I got kicked off.
Ross Simmonds [00:24:23]:
But I came back, I learned the game, and I understood now what Redditors want. So now I went into these channels and these communities. I sorted the content by top posts. I analyzed it, and I started to realize these are the types of things that these people want. Okay, Marketer. Now, if you want to do TikTok, how do you figure out what people on TikTok want? You don't just wake up and say, I'm going to apply 2020 one's instagram playbook to TikTok. You're going to go on TikTok. You're going to type in some keywords that are relevant to your industry and relevant to your space.
Ross Simmonds [00:24:54]:
You're going to use hashtags that are relevant to your space. You're going to look at the content on this topic that have generated the most likes that have generated the most comments. Because now you see what on TikTok is working. So you might not have the ability to win at search, but because there's only five competitors on TikTok right now, maybe you start to recreate some of the videos that you've seen on TikTok that are just completely smashing it. There's one account on TikTok called creator Kit, and they're a SaaS company. They're crushing TikTok. What they're doing is essentially educating people using the formats that TikTokers love and talking about influencer marketing, and they're doing amazing at it. Like, so many brands can win at different channels.
Ross Simmonds [00:25:41]:
If you immerse yourself into those channels, study the people who are there, understand the formats that they want, and then give it back to people. Whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's x. Yes, you do have to spend time to learn it. But I guarantee any brand can win on one channel if they're willing to be focused, they understand the best practices, and then they apply that to their industry and they know with confidence that their people are there and then they give it to them. You'll win every time.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:07]:
Yeah. What you said is really important, and I've made this mistake a bunch of times, which is you try to do this across, like, three or four channels at once, and it really takes picking one.
Ross Simmonds [00:26:18]:
Yeah, does.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:19]:
Because each channel is unique in its own. I do feel like, however, once you get momentum on one channel, you can add another one. It's not to say that all the content is going to work there. Like, just because you've had success on Twitter doesn't mean you can just take the same exact content and work on LinkedIn. But there's enough there where you can do that. But I think you do need to have the discipline of being like, we're going to just focus on one channel here, and then you also need to be able to suck for a long time at it. I follow this guy on Instagram. His name is Colin Landforce.
Dave Gerhardt [00:26:58]:
His Instagram is at Landforce. He posted like golf merch and brands and stuff like that. Anyway, it's very random, but he posted this one video of this guy who has now blown up making like, custom handbags.
Ross Simmonds [00:27:09]:
Cool.
Dave Gerhardt [00:27:09]:
And he scrolled all the way back through the guy's account and he made a video and he's like, look, six months ago, this guy's videos sucked. And you could actually see where he started to make videos. And it just was like, he just was a guy making videos with his phone. Now, if you scroll all the way up, he's got a million followers, he's got all these videos that have gone viral. But I think especially inside a company, it's very hard to be patient and be like, I'm going to do this for six months. And don't you feel like the goal almost has to be output as opposed to some measurement? It's like, hey, we're going to make a video every day for the next 100 days. How would you push someone to actually go and do this inside of a company?
Ross Simmonds [00:27:51]:
Within a few of our clients, we actually have developed these things we call, like, proactive dashboards, where the metric is the proactive things that we own and we can control, which is literally how many posts did we get up? How many posts did we share on LinkedIn? How many blog posts did we publish? How many times were we able to get an influencer to create a video talking about you? You focus on the things within your circle of control you can't control when you have 500 followers, how much virality or engagement you're going to get with your content. You don't even really have much to benchmark. So you focus on your proactiveness and your ability to actually execute the tasks. And then by doing that and getting more reps, you start to figure out the nuances of the stories that resonate and the things that work for them. So that is something that we've encouraged a lot of internal teams to take on their own and start to execute, because when they're able to do that, they're able to start to figure out for themselves, oh, this is how we should be doing it. This is the blueprint of some of the best artists of all time. If you go back and look at Justin Bieber's first video, it was trash, right? Like if you look at some of the top youtubers, like Mr. Beast's first YouTube videos, he wasn't creating Willy Wonka in the chocolate factory with the first video.
Ross Simmonds [00:29:07]:
He set up a camera and he might have said the same word over and over again a million times. And yes, it was cool and interesting, but it wasn't near what it is today. And I think a lot of organizations, especially those that are early, need to create a culture that embraces experimentation and embraces the idea of failing once in a while with these smaller efforts and investments into content. And then what you're able to do with these investments is you're able to find a competitive edge. Because when you're able to create something on a channel that everybody else is saying is risky, like Reddit or TikTok, you're able to get an advantage ahead of them and start to win before them, especially even today. Like you look at x has been around for a long time, but a lot of brands have stepped away from x. You can make your own choices on where you go with that. But here's one thing to note.
Ross Simmonds [00:29:59]:
When fewer competitors are on a channel but your ideal customers are still there, it's probably an opportunity. It's probably an opportunity to tap into and be able to get some value on the back.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:12]:
It's funny you said that. My little pet experiment right now is I've taken the exit five Twitter handle. I'm always going to call it Twitter. I've taken the exit five Twitter handle and I'm just going to run it for 30 days.
Ross Simmonds [00:30:26]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:30:27]:
And because I feel like we have done a good job on LinkedIn, text content works really well for us. I know that b, two b marketers are on X. Maybe they're just not engaging with our content or following it. We happen to have 5000 followers there just because of me tweeting about it over the years. Out of all the places we could be going right now, could we go and go after TikTok? We could, but I just kind of feel like, let's go where we have a little bit of momentum, and we want to find another channel like LinkedIn. So we're going to go hard on exit five Twitter for the next 30 to 60 days and see what happens.
Ross Simmonds [00:31:01]:
And you don't have to do the research to figure out where your audience is on those channels. You can say with confidence by looking at a few other accounts. Oh, okay, my people are still here. They're using this channel, they're engaging versus a TikTok, where it's kind of like an assumption that maybe your people are there. You don't know for sure that they're using it. Definitely not sure if they're using it for business yet. There's a lot more risk associated with that. And I always say, go where your audience is.
Ross Simmonds [00:31:30]:
If your audience is on that channel, double down and invest in it, and then use that. And the other cool thing about it is you can repurpose your greatest hits from LinkedIn over on X. You can try to find those opportunities to remix those content stories and distribute them there. I think that's another great play for a lot of brands and businesses.
Dave Gerhardt [00:31:51]:
Tell me about your strategy, what goes on behind the scenes with X. I see you write some long stuff, you write some short stuff.
Ross Simmonds [00:32:02]:
Yeah, it's a blend.
Dave Gerhardt [00:32:04]:
I want to know, like, geek, geek out, take me actually share some of the secrets, like, are you using tools? If so, what are you using? How often are you writing? I want to know. Yeah.
Ross Simmonds [00:32:13]:
So my strategy on X has always been around the idea that I want to create content that's so valuable that people hit follow and then they click the link in my bio, and then they go, get lost in the Ross world. The Ross world consists of foundation. It consists of courses and books and resources. All of that stuff, my newsletters, podcasts, I want them to just get lost into it. And the way that I focus with my content mix is a blend between threads. I still do them. I still think that. And it's not even that.
Ross Simmonds [00:32:44]:
I think I know they still work because I had a thread the other day that just went bonkers and had like 400,000 impressions. I got two leads off of the back of it. One of them is probably going to pay us next six months. These are the opportunities that still exist on X. And everybody says threads are dead. It's not like you can create a great thread that drives real money. So I throw out threads.
Dave Gerhardt [00:33:08]:
Wait, talk about threads, though. Yeah, you're talking about on X, not on the threads app.
Ross Simmonds [00:33:17]:
The app threads. I throw up, like, random things once in a while. I'll be like, oh, I forgot that app. That experience exists. But a thread is essentially you have one post at the top and then you have a series of posts that go after it. And you want to start your thread with typically an image. The image is going to go into a few different categories. One, it's either a picture of the person or businesses that you're talking about.
Ross Simmonds [00:33:40]:
So if I'm doing a thread breaking down the growth strategies of Zapier, I'm going to take a screenshot of something happening at Zapier or I'm going to show their growth chart because that always captures people attention. If I'm talking about a thread, I did one on Andrew Scholl's comedian. I just got a photo of him. Put that in there. You want to make the first image eye catching and worth clicking. You want to have an interesting hook. Typically, I love to fill that with stats and data. So if I'm breaking down a company's SEO success, I'm going to say this company has 30 million backlinks.
Ross Simmonds [00:34:11]:
They have 20 million visits every single week. I'm going to break all of that down because that lures people in. And then my focus is the same focus that I have with every single piece of content that I give. I want the core elements within that thread to be ridiculously valuable. So they're like, why is this available for, like, why is Ross giving me all of this for free? And then at the very end, I'm either going to subtly reference another thread that I wrote that they can get lost into or I'm going to tell them to subscribe to my newsletter. Now the reason why I don't go for the hard sell and say, hey, go buy something from me is because we have seen just from our newsletter, so many public traded cloud 100 companies who subscribed to us like two years ago become customers. Like, we've got publicly traded cmos who will subscribe to our newsletter, open every newsletter, they saw it on X and then they send me a note and they're like, hey, we're issuing an RFP. I've been reading your newsletter for two years.
Ross Simmonds [00:35:10]:
We want you to go after this and it's worth eight hundred k. And it's like, ching, ching. Thank you. This is great. I would love to do this. So that's one playbook. There's a few other playbooks on X as well. One is.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:24]:
Hold on. Pause for a second.
Ross Simmonds [00:35:25]:
Yeah. Paused.
Dave Gerhardt [00:35:26]:
So when you go to write that tweet, when you go to write that, just how do I? And you go and write it in a Google Doc. Do you have dedicated time like once a month? I sit down and I batch write. I want to know how does the idea come? Do you open a Google Doc? Do you use a scheduling tool? I want to know that stuff.
Ross Simmonds [00:35:48]:
So when it comes to the idea, there are lots of posts that I've shared in the past where I ask questions like, which company would you like me to break down next? Or I'll even go into communities and I'll see where people have said, oh, this company has a very interesting SEO strategy. So I'll go into a community like exit five. I'm giving you away the secret. And I will go and look at people's comments on a post that somebody might have shared. Foundation had a blog post where we broke down like Canva's growth strategy and it still generates ridiculous traffic. Someone shares it in a community like Exifi. I'll go in, I'll see and read the comments. Someone might say, another great brand that has leveraged a strategy like this is this, this and this.
Dave Gerhardt [00:36:34]:
Cool.
Ross Simmonds [00:36:34]:
I now have three ideas that I'm going to send to myself via slack, and I'm going to set a reminder to myself in slack to write a thread on that topic in a few weeks, in a few months. So then I do that. I tackle it and I write it, or I send it to my team. And my team, which is made up of researchers and writers, will actually go out and do that for us. And they'll write it at first as a blog post. Then it becomes an actual thread. So our team is writers. They're great.
Ross Simmonds [00:37:00]:
They're brilliant minds. I'll give them a simple company's name and they'll go out and they'll research that company's name's growth strategy. I've recorded a bunch of internal looms that talk about how to write a great thread. They watch them. They apply my first principles and methodology to this company. They write it. I get it. Then I can repost it.
Ross Simmonds [00:37:20]:
So we have that methodology. We use buffer to schedule, like good old fashioned one off tweets we use typefully to schedule threads, and then for long form content, which is now available on x if you have a premium account. We don't do that in buffer because it's not allowed for some reason yet.
Dave Gerhardt [00:37:38]:
Only thing that drives me nuts, I use a scheduling tool. I use tweet Hunter, and actually there's flaws with all them. And then I'll use Taplio for LinkedIn. But you can't upload videos and so each one you still need to post natively at some point.
Ross Simmonds [00:37:50]:
Brutal. Why can't anyone just do everything for us? It's brutal. I also hate that I need multiple apps to see data from LinkedIn and from Twitter. Just give it all to me. Like, hey, Shield, if you're listening, go tap into X or acquire someone who can do X and plug it into. But yeah, like, long story, a little bit longer with that. The long form content we do natively on X whenever it's published. And what I've been doing with those pieces is I try to make them like blog post style.
Ross Simmonds [00:38:21]:
So I want the long form content to be written in a way where a C suite exec will send that link to their entire team on Slack. That's the goal. That's the purpose of some of those pieces where I want it to be very educational and worth sharing. The one off tweets where they're short and snippy. I'm always looking for reach, I'm looking for impressions. I want people to see it. It's more of a brand play as well. So I'm reiterating philosophies and ideas and concepts, and here's a simple idea that a lot of people don't tap into.
Ross Simmonds [00:38:56]:
If you have a tweet that resonates right underneath. There's this thing that says see similar posts? If you click see similar posts, Twitter's algorithm, AI, whatever's in the backend, is going to scan their database of content and it's going to show you all of the best tweets and posts that were on that exact same topic. Now, if you cover a topic well, in depth, like I do with content distribution, you're going to see a lot of your own tweets. But what you're going to see is your greatest hits. So you can copy and paste those greatest hits and reschedule them and add them into buffer and share them in the future. But what you can also do is you can get inspiration from other people. So I can go to Dave's ex account, click, see similar posts, and see, oh, Dave had this great post talking about how you should always work for someone who understands marketing. Cool.
Ross Simmonds [00:39:44]:
All right, let me see what other people are saying on this topic. And I might find five people who shared the same idea, but they got like 20 times more retweets. And then I'm like, why did they get more retweets? Oh, they went a little bit more in depth. Oh, they use bulleted points, whatever it might be. So you're trying to understand and pick up on those little nuances and then you rewrite those and you give them back to your audience as well.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:07]:
Love that master class. Justin Welsh has been saying this lately that I like, and I've learned this. If you just kind of show up on one of these channels and just post whatever you're feeling that day, it's not going to work to build growth. Now, that might be what you want out of Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram, right? For a while, I was just kind of using Twitter as like, had a thought playground, right?
Ross Simmonds [00:40:38]:
Just your thought.
Dave Gerhardt [00:40:39]:
Had a witty thing. Sometimes I'd talk about the sandwich that I ate. Sometimes I'd talk about b two b marketing. I guess now that I'm more serious about growing my business and seeing that I can use this channel to grow my business, I'm actually trying to play the game more. And so I have friends or somebody, whoever that follows me, and it's like, man, I hate your tweets. I'm like, great. They're not for you. This is a channel the same way a brand might use adwords or whatever or span on a channel.
Dave Gerhardt [00:41:08]:
I'm trying to use this as a channel, and I think it's cool to hear you talk about it because it's clear that you are doing the same. Ultimately, what matters to you is not the engagement. It's the fact that an ideal customer who's a CMO of a publicly traded company reaches out and wants to work with your agency for content. Right?
Ross Simmonds [00:41:25]:
When I first got started in this game, I was sharing content and I would have all of my buddies roast me because they were like, why aren't you talking about the party last week? Why aren't you talking about the Kegstans and what are you doing? And I'm like, guys, my socials are no longer for entertainment purposes. I'm using these things to drive business. Now, I know I'm going to get roasted in the group chat for this complete shift, but when you make that shift and you say, okay, I'm going to be a creator. I'm going to make content to drive business results. You do have to start thinking differently about the way that you show up. Don't get me wrong, I still think there's room and value in personal content. And if you don't want to play that game and you don't want to be someone who has a personal platform, personal brand out there in the world, do you? You don't have to go down that path, you can use your channels to do exactly what you want. You can share pictures of the weekend, you can do all of that stuff.
Ross Simmonds [00:42:22]:
You can also blend them. I try to incorporate, the reason why you know about Disney is because I incorporate my real life into my socials and what I have going on on content. But if you don't want to do that, that's okay. But apply these lessons to the businesses that you work with. Apply these lessons to the organizations that you work with. And also think about how you can empower a sales team. This is also, in my opinion, one of the best distribution channels people have in b two B that they don't tap into, but tap into training and teaching your sales team how to build their brand and how to build their own audience. Because when you get that, it changes everything.
Ross Simmonds [00:43:00]:
That is a ridiculous play that not enough b two b brands. Recognize.
Dave Gerhardt [00:43:05]:
Yeah. Say more. Let's double click.
Ross Simmonds [00:43:07]:
Yeah. When I first got started into this wonderful world of marketing, I was working with a company called Intro Hive. They were a spin off from a company called Radiant Six, which was acquired by Salesforce for ridiculous money. When that whole thing went down, one clear thing came to mind for me. The people who were doing social selling, aka, they had platforms and they had an audience on LinkedIn, and they started to talk about their work, they started to talk about social media as a software solution, blah, blah, blah. Why were they were hitting their quota at a ridiculous higher rate than the people who just were behind their emails trying to go through their rolodex? The people who had a brand presence had more direct pipeline for themselves. They also had stronger relationships with their clients. They had prospects that ultimately wanted to work with them long term.
Ross Simmonds [00:43:57]:
And it paid ridiculous dividends for those people. Like some of those people who were sales execs back then, are now heads, vps, like ceos, cmos. They're running the game in many ways. And for a lot of organizations, I think if you can educate your salespeople on how to show up on LinkedIn properly, on how to show up on x properly and create content that actually aligns with your business, you can do numbers, you can do so much more because you're multiplying essentially your impressions across all of them. So instead of just thinking about it as a salesperson, think about the reach that they could have if they added an extra 10,000, 20,000 followers to their account. It just continues to exponentially grow from there.
Dave Gerhardt [00:44:44]:
Well, I also like that because it matches what we talked about earlier which is like, if the brand strategy, if the marketing strategy is to be the go to resource for your ideal customer, you basically create this mini army of people who are megaphones for that. And I think the right way to do it is the salesperson ideally should know the product really to. I was listening to a podcast recently with Tim Ferriss. He had Noah Kagan on talking about his new book. And Tim was talking about how he started off in software sales, or it was some type of device he was selling. And the way that he won was he knew the product almost to the level of an engineer and to the point where the customers he was working with, they said they'd ask him, hey, who is your sales rep? And they'd be like, I don't know. Tim's like a helpful engineer, I think. I love that.
Dave Gerhardt [00:45:37]:
Because if you know the product, if you know the product really well, then you can basically become, and you're the one talking to customers or prospects and having these conversations. That makes for great content to share on social media. And the way to do it right is not just say, like, a lot of people do this and they think they're doing what you're saying, ross, which is, and they just start posting and it just becomes, rah, rah. My company won this award. It's awesome where the way to do it is actually to take the lessons, take the things, the conversation you're having with prospects. Share your lessons. You know them, you know the pain points, you know the challenges, you know what they're reading. Start writing content about those topics and.
Ross Simmonds [00:46:12]:
Do it right after your sales call. So an example of this that I've seen work extremely well is I asked a handful of sales execs at a company once, like, what are some of the most frequently asked questions that you all get when you're on a call? And they just went off. And I was like, okay, let's write these all down. So then I started to ask them those questions again. They went off. I was like, all right, folks, now here's what I want you to do. I want you to record a voice note, and I want you to say everything you just said, answering that faq, and just upload it to Chat GPT. And say, Chat GPT.
Ross Simmonds [00:46:41]:
Write me a quick LinkedIn post describing what I said in a way that will work on LinkedIn. They started to share them and they said, ross, I got more impressions on my account than I ever have. I told them, make sure that you adjust it. Like you don't need it to always have that weird intro that all Chat GPT posts have in the ever evolving, changing world of social selling, blah, blah, blah. You don't need that. Modify it to fit your tone and then share it. And they did that, and they were able to get some results. It's like, answer the problems and answer the questions that you typically get from a prospect or a customer and share that on LinkedIn and see what happens.
Ross Simmonds [00:47:18]:
What's going to happen is simple. You're going to add value to the community. And when you add value to the community, the community will give you back value. And I think so many brands lose sight of that. But if you can empower your entire sales team to think that way, like you said, you'll have an army of people preaching the right song to the social world and giving you a ton of extra value on top of it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:41]:
So I had a whole list of, I asked Chat GPT what questions they would ask Ross Simmons. They weren't better than my questions.
Ross Simmonds [00:47:55]:
I wouldn't think so, no.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:57]:
And we hit on most of them.
Ross Simmonds [00:47:58]:
That's.
Dave Gerhardt [00:47:59]:
But let's wrap up and just talk about Chat GPT and AI. I see two sides of this. I see people. You're bullish on it. I've seen your stuff, I'm bullish on it. But there is a whole sphere of people in the content world that are like, content is an art, content is a craft. Chat GBT is not going to. I saw somebody post something like, chat GBT is going to eat, the lazy marketers are going to use it, blah, blah, blah.
Dave Gerhardt [00:48:31]:
I know you see things differently. Just give me your kind of like two minute elevator pitch on how you see the role of content evolving in a world of Chat GPT and AI writing tools.
Ross Simmonds [00:48:42]:
Before humans used calculators, math was a lot harder. Before humans met clippy writing in Google Word docs and Microsoft Word was very difficult before Grammarly, always making sure that you spoke perfect English was very difficult. And today, pre AI pretty much doing everything was pretty difficult. But when you insert these types of technologies into our lives, it doesn't make the work less valuable, it doesn't make the work less meaningful. It doesn't mean the content, the output is going to be less impactful. It means that the people who brought it to life are actually going to just have an easier process that it took them to get there. And for all of the people who say, back in my day, we had to use a typewriter, and back in my day, we had to do all of this, don't trauma dump on everybody else, on the struggles that we had to go through just because in the future you won't have to. Yes, they were beneficial in our day to be able to just start with our own brains, to come up with all of the ideas, et cetera, 100%.
Ross Simmonds [00:49:53]:
But now we have a cheat code, we have a shortcut. So let's embrace it. Let's treat this technology the same way that if you are a superhero marvel, let's pretend you're Iron Man. Tony Stark would have treated the Iron man suit. You put it on and you go full speed ahead trying to win. I don't get the hate behind these tools. I think whether you are. I gave a presentation.
Ross Simmonds [00:50:18]:
There's two thoughts here. One, I don't believe that this technology is going to make the world of difference between a great marketer and a mediocre one. I think a mediocre marketer who uses Chat GPT will be able to create mediocre things ten times faster. But I think a great marketer who uses Chat GPT will be able to create great things ten times faster. So it's an equalizer for everyone. And I think those who leverage it are just going to be able to do more. Now, here's the other thing. I spoke on stage at a conference in Brazil, and I gave this talk about AI.
Ross Simmonds [00:50:51]:
At the end of the talk, I put up a video of myself. I used this tool, eleven labs, to change my voice into Portuguese. I landed in Brazil and I was ignorant and I didn't know that so many people didn't speak English. Huge fail on my end. So I used Chat GPT to translate a bunch of my slides. Used eleven labs to change my voice in a video where at the end of my presentation, I thank them in Portuguese and I press play on this video. It plays. People go wild.
Ross Simmonds [00:51:17]:
They're clapping, they're standing up, they're excited by it. A lady comes up to me afterwards, she was in tears. She says, all of these tools are going to make it easier for me to get so much done during my workday that I'm going to be able to spend more time with my kids. People hate on that. I don't care what those people say. If someone is able to use these tools to spend their time with people that they love in this thing that we go through called life once, and they actually can optimize their time, it's a net positive. Embrace it, lean into it, and go spend more time with your kids.
Dave Gerhardt [00:51:53]:
I love that I've found so many use cases like that. And I think that's where people like, of course, if you ask one of these tools to write you a blog post, and it's not going to be great, it's not going to be better than the human touch, right? But just before this, I was working on something design related, and I'm not a designer, and I can't articulate what I like. I found an image online and I asked Chachi pt to describe the image. And in super incredible, like, it was a guy doing pull ups and it was like, the bar is here. His muscles are like this. It's very specific language, and I got an incredible prompt and guardrails from that. And I think there's just little examples like that or your example of translating a video into a language that you don't speak.
Ross Simmonds [00:52:39]:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt [00:52:40]:
Those are the things that I just think you need to have it open and you need to be thinking about, okay, how am I about to go? Even just doing something silly? I'm trying to push myself to just use these tools more. Even doing something silly. Like, I'm a former CMO and I host a B two B marketing podcast called the Exit five podcast. We share tactical and specific advice for B two B marketers to help them do their jobs better. I'm about to interview Ross Simmons, who's a founder and CEO foundation, a content market, blah, blah. What questions would you ask him?
Ross Simmonds [00:53:08]:
Right, that's it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:53:10]:
I got 20 questions. Right? And I might not use any of them, but it's this copilot to me as I'm going to do work. And I think that's an incredible advantage.
Ross Simmonds [00:53:18]:
And I think there's going to be a ridiculous amount of Roi that comes out of this for a lot of people who embrace it. Like, I am confident that someone out there is going to launch businesses, career opportunities that were never possible because of this technology. There's already on Kickstarter a ton of board games that are being created, built with this type of technology. There's movies that are being funded, built off of the premise being pitched using AI. There's no question that marketers in b to B can use AI and still be creative. I'm confident in it.
Dave Gerhardt [00:53:53]:
Love that. All right, Ross, good chopping it up with you, man. I appreciate you giving us an hour. I'm going to send you a picture from Disney. I promise you.
Ross Simmonds [00:54:02]:
Yes, I love it. I can't wait to see it. Here's one other thing I want you to do in Disney. I want you to try to pull the sword from the stone. And let's see if you can do it. Let's see if you can do it. I want to know if you.
Dave Gerhardt [00:54:12]:
Let's do that. Also, I just sent a note to our team, but let's have you do an AMA, like when your book comes out or something in the community. That would be really fun.
Ross Simmonds [00:54:22]:
Let's make it happen. I'm 100% down. I love what you do for the community, man. Keep doing your thing and congrats. And keep rolling. Enjoy.
Dave Gerhardt [00:54:30]:
Let's reconnect. I always feel re energized when I talk to you, and it's been a while, so we'll keep in touch, right?
Ross Simmonds [00:54:35]:
I like it. Long overdue.
Dave Gerhardt [00:54:37]:
I'll see you later. Cheers.
Ross Simmonds [00:54:38]:
Exit. Exit.