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Every day marketers sift through dozens of headlines, posts, and slacks telling us about the latest and greatest trend we should be following.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and like you have to figure it out by yourself. But you don’t have to do it alone. Content Matters with Nicole MacLean (Compose.ly’s CRO) is your digital partner for filtering the trends and focusing on the content that matters most — creating connection that drive results.
For more, head to our site: https://compose.ly/content-matters
Produced in partnership with Share Your Genius: https://shareyourgenius.com/
Myles Carter [00:00:00]:
I hit LinkedIn and LinkedIn feels like there are 10,000 new posts since the last time I logged on and I didn't log in 24 hours ago. I logged in like an hour and a half ago. And like we're being marketed to nonstop with all of this. I constantly ask myself, like, how do I stand out in this crowded space? And how do I not just add noise?
Nicole MacLean [00:00:23]:
I'm Nicole MacLean and this is Content Matters. Created in partnership with Share Your Genius. This show is your digital partner for filtering the trends and focusing on the content that matters most. Creating connection that drives results. Let's cut through the marketing chaos together.
Myles Carter [00:00:42]:
I'm Myles Carter. I'm the senior director of Content Marketing at Trolley. We are a fintech platform. We help people pay their contractors and their contract workers and a lot of times that's. What does that mean? Like everyone knows what a W2 worker is. That's like your salaried payroll person. Anyone who's working, that's a freelancer, that's a creator, that's a seller from. For a platform. Musical artists don't normally get paid for like a salary. They get paid based on a contracted rate. Trolley is a software that allows you to pay those folks and pay them in a compliant way. So yeah, that's, that's really sort of what Trolley does. We are one of the leading providers in this space. We have had a lot of success in the music space over the last couple years and really we're breaking through in other industries like creator and influencer marketing, places like video gaming and esports and looking, looking to sort of like broaden that footprint of where we are and what we're doing. So yeah, that's a little bit about, about Trolley. I'm the, as I said, I'm the director of content marketing. I've been doing this type of work for about 12 years now in SaaS and in tech and it really has been everywhere. And I know we pro. You might want to dive into a little bit of how I got here, so maybe I'll stop there on that. But like also there's like a side, you know, I, A lot of times when we have these conversations we talk about work, like it's all about work. And yes, work will be a big part of it. But like I also do a lot of other things and I'm, I'm a full time dog walker. I've got my bestie, Buster who needs walks like non stop. He's a cowboy.
Nicole MacLean [00:02:15]:
Will Buster be making a guest appearance?
Myles Carter [00:02:18]:
No, he Lives up to his name. He knows how to open doors. He busts through. So I have barricaded the door because he will make. He loves to be part of the conversations when I talk, he tries to get through that door. I'm partnered to a brilliant medical director, Christine, who works in medical communications. So this house is a lot about content and communications all the time. And as the last couple years I'm a coach so I'm. I really spend a lot of time working with emerging leaders and people who are in transition and. And help people navigate through growth, change big career goals wherever they want to go. But. And I find that incredibly rewarding work to do. Sort of like when you end my nine to five. So yeah, that's a bit about me, a bit about what Trolley is.
Nicole MacLean [00:03:04]:
What is the collection behind you, if I can ask.
Myles Carter [00:03:07]:
Oh, here. These are ball caps. Yeah, I collect sort of wherever I travel. Minor league teams have this fantastic way of having like the most outrageous logos. So if I'm in some small town, you know, Akron, Ohio or something, they're going to have a great ball cap. I started because I was. I used to wear Expos hats. Montreal Expos, rest in peace. They've been gone for about 20 years now. I wore them because you didn't have to know how the team was doing this year. And I realized I really like ball caps. When Covid came in I was like, oh, perfect. I can have a personality because everyone sees between here and here and the collection started to grow and that's where it's at now. It's. That's so cool. 25 or so on the back of the door there. Yeah.
Nicole MacLean [00:03:50]:
Wow. Had a little love. My family's originally from Montreal. That's where Myles is. We both have Irish Scottish roots and the love of Chicago Cubs. So the similarities just keep on coming.
Myles Carter [00:04:03]:
Hey, we can. We'll find those connections. We'll always find those connections.
Nicole MacLean [00:04:08]:
Exactly. Well, thank you for being here. Thank you so much for joining. I know it's going to be a fun conversation.
Myles Carter [00:04:15]:
Hope so.
Nicole MacLean [00:04:15]:
I do want to dive into your journey but I'm curious when you mentioned Trolley and maybe it's just because top of mind for me and things we're working on. But to be a fintech and then serve very specific niches like musicians, creators, you said you're even moving into like influencers. There's almost. It feels like you kind of have to be an expert in the finance and talking to buyers which is a very, I imagine different Persona and messaging and vibe to then Being in the music industry, the creator industry, how do you balance or I mean, am I maybe digging too deep there and that it's not that different?
Myles Carter [00:04:57]:
No, you're not too far off because one of the projects we're working on as a company right now is building out a number of verticalized marketing messages where we are looking at how do you speak to music businesses and who's the right economic buyer, who is the right technical evaluator at those companies versus let's say like a freelancer marketplace. So we are looking at it and we do have to take a step back and go back to like product marketing 101 and look at each one and go through Personas. And a big part of us running through what we're calling like our playbook project where we're going through multiple verticals in the course of the year to really expand out and nail our story on that is a month to two months of heavy research from a product marketer. Doing interviews, sort of going back to old sales calls and quarterly business reviews and just understanding like how does music, which may, you know, you say I'm paying a contractor and I've got really like, got to make payments. It should feel a lot like you know, a streamer. But those can be quite different. You know, music is an industry that's 100 plus years old in a real way and influencer marketing is like 10 years at most. You may have something that feels a lot more like a finance team versus a product team and those people think different and act different. So we're spending a lot of time thinking about our, not just like who our ICP is, but who those Personas, who those buyers are and really like digging deep to understand it. And it's a year long project to make the first moves. And I think this is going to be a project that we're working on for like two or three years.
Nicole MacLean [00:06:34]:
Yeah, that sounds so long and daunting. And I feel like I can imagine the conversation. The goal planning session is like, well can't we do this in six months or can't this just be a quarterly objective then I think it's right to give it like that weight because it's the research and then it's the implementation, the creation phase and then it's the actual execution and then I'm going to get feedback from the market and probably have to start over.
Myles Carter [00:07:00]:
Well, feedback from the market and starting over, like get out of this game if you don't want to take feedback. Because that is what we're in the feedback game in marketing, which is a brilliant part of it, like a brilliant part of marketing is the fact that it is a two way street. When the market responds, you see the data pretty quickly and you go, okay, that message didn't work. Our landing pages are underperformant, they're overperformant. And you know, I'll never complain about an overperformant landing page. What we're looking at the sort of like how the market reacts. Like that's the name of the game in terms of like timelines. We started this project last year where we really focused on the music vertical and we saw the work that it took to put it together and get this out. What we did is we went back, the team sat for like our marketing team. We have five folks in our marketing team. We sat down and we said what's it going to take to do X number of verticals and everyone game planned hours. We went back and looked at project scopes, we looked at briefs, we looked at any sort of tracking that we did on individual projects and we scoped out what we could do. And really it's not the type of work that you always want to get into, especially an in house team getting into like time tracking and, and time sheets. But when you do the work to do that, you can go and make like really good justifications to your financial, to your CFO, to head of finance, to COOs and let them know this is how much I can get done with these, these resources. Can we get resources to speed this up, slow this down? We reworked what a, what like an MVP level of this looks like and that's where we're working off of it, where we got like good buy in from all of the leaders who we needed to get buy in from. And we're three months into something, we know that it's going to speed up. We're going to have done some repetitions, we'll build that muscle and then we're going to get really good at it. But like it's a long way of getting back to the idea of like we are in like multiple verticals with multiple Personas, with everyone works a little bit different and you just have to kind of get good at listening to what the customers need because there's a lot of assumptions that we can make if we just jump in and say everyone looks the same as everyone else.
Nicole MacLean [00:09:13]:
There's so much good stuff there. It wasn't flippant by any means, but it kind of just was. One of the things is I've had our CEO, if you're a listener, you've probably heard Mike before and I try to bring him on to help give some insight into that C level mindset and try to help give some language or some coaching on how do you get marketing initiatives approved, how do you get the resources you need? And you kind of just gave us a real life use case there of time tracking is so interesting. But I think a lot of times we always focus so heavily on budget. Here's the tangible resources needed for an initiative or a campaign or whatever it may be. And I do think sometimes we forget to talk about the intangible that I do think senior leaders understand that. And saying we could do with this much time. This is what we're able to accomplish. But that's expensive. If we got this resource, it saves this money or we can do it in half the time and thinking about maybe more of those intangible things. And so the fact that you even recognize that time tracking piece, I think is so fascinating. And then again, brought data and spoke, kind of translated your ask to the C level language.
Myles Carter [00:10:25]:
And I can't take full credit.
Nicole MacLean [00:10:26]:
You got it across the finish line.
Myles Carter [00:10:27]:
I can't take full credit. It's something that me and my VP of marketing and the whole marketing team did together. Yeah, I work with a really great VP of marketing who is thinking about how to professionalize what we do. One of the things that like I, I put in my notes about something I wanted to just talk about is like, marketing is a balance of business and creativity. I've wanted to be this creative person and this is an art. And we are doing things and I'm, I'm like looking back at classic ads and saying, how can I be like the next lemon ad? How can I be Don Draper? You know, this is, this is what you want to be. And then there's this other piece where it's like you need to understand the business because you're not working in a vacuum. Nobody is giving you. It's not a grant from the company to, to do. Art is a revenue generator. It's a revenue generating exercise that we're doing. And balancing the two of those takes, knowing how the business works and first knowing how the business of marketing works, but knowing how that ties into like the GTM function and the overall financials of the company. If you can get those concepts. And I'm building them up day in, day out. I'm learning and I'm picking and I'm pulling it apart, but I'm noticing anyone on our team who's starting to take interest in that they become better, stronger marketers because they're better aligned with getting those like getting revenues and finding those revenue generating activities and doubling down on them, taking the time to double down on that. I have a really fantastic content specialist on our team. She digs deep now about trying to find ways like, does this piece of content, will it drive people to a revenue outcome? If it won't and we can't find a way to build that link, she's taking the reflex to like, I don't think I'm going to invest the time there. And she challenges us like, is this next project going to be something? And like that's starting at our, our like individual contributors, up to our leaders. And it's made us like, very good. I think that there's like a good organizational intuition that's being developed that says like, I know it's going to work and it's not intuition, but it is. It's like you can make gut calls.
Nicole MacLean [00:12:37]:
No, well, and it's such a great point. And we talked about that topic as a thread that comes up on the show a lot. But in content it is so challenging to drive this social post or this blog post or this ebook or whatever it may be to revenue. And there is a little bit of, I think education and buy in and belief in brand. And so I think it is an interesting. I don't know, I don't know that I've fully given this enough thought to say like, this is a real take. But I do think it's interesting for someone to look at marketing. Like you said, you used to think of the Don Draper and the advertising and the very fluffy creative brilliance was the definition of a good marketer. And then it swung and everyone was like, oh, marketing is just arts and crafts. And then it became, well, no, we're revenue driving. What how much pipeline are we creating for sales? This development of the growth marketer, the demand gen marketer, very sales heavy, metric driven, data driven and not that brand fell off, but it probably didn't carry the same weight anymore. And now I feel like with the rise of AI and it is so cluttered that it is now finding that perfect balance of both. Kind of like what your content specialist is doing is making sure that your creatives are having the lens of revenue, but still leaning into storytelling, still leaning into what is the right messaging to the right person at the right time. And it only keeps getting harder. And I think we don't, we can Go into AI. Every conversation goes to AI Nowadays we don't have to dig into it, but I think AI is just making it clear that you actually have to be good at your job. You actually have to do both. You can't just phone it in and hope that it's going to work. You have to have both that revenue lens and the creative lens. And then if you are able to push those together, I think that's the companies we're going to see really win in the next five, 10 years.
Myles Carter [00:14:34]:
I think that's where you're going to see folks who are making good decisions and making, investing in the right tools and investing in the right skills. And I'll get my AI point out here and it will be off the table. You made a really good point of like you need to be good at what you're doing. You need to have both of the foundations AI is not going to solve. I think in the next two, three, five, ten years it's not going to solve something that is truly a human business. It's a one to many one side of the business. If you get the business and you get the artistic side, in some ways AI can help you level up what you're doing. It can be a way to go from being like, you can be a really good T shaped marketer. If we all know the T shaped marketing model, it can really help you deepen those things that you're, you're not, you don't have a lot of depth in right now really quick or it can fill in where you need it to fill in. But I don't think if you don't have some foundational skill, it's almost dangerous. It's dangerous in the hands of someone who doesn't have the foundational skills because at that point you're just guessing whatever. You're letting AI take the wheel and I think we have to keep our hand on the wheel and I'll leave it at that.
Nicole MacLean [00:15:41]:
Yeah, I very much agree with that. Okay, so now going back to your skill set, I would love to hear, you know, you've, you've been a lot in content. You clearly have that business experience and the creative experience. So I'd love to hear what has kind of brought you to Trolley and what's giving you like all of this knowledge and insight that you're sharing with us today.
Myles Carter [00:16:01]:
Oh well, so first of all like talking about myself doesn't come naturally. So this is the part where I'm going to be like get red. I will. Great stap on Things, but so I grew up on the east coast of Canada and if people know that it's kind of like culturally it's a little bit like, like Canadian Boston. There's a lot of Irish folks there, there's a lot of Scottish folks there. So there's like a really big storytelling tradition. So I went into sciences, spent a couple years doing ecology work for the Park Service here in Canada. And I realized I like talking about the science more than I liked doing the science. I get it. But I liked having conversations around campfires and things like that. I did meet a girl and we came to Montreal and it's a city, it's a pretty big densely populated city. So there's a lot of like a lot less ecology chasing bears happening here than there is in, you know, the wilderness of British Columbia. So I had to find something to do. I got tech, I got storytelling and kind of jumped into tech marketing and I've been doing that for 12 years. I've done a little bit of everything. Started out really in the, on the SEO side. Moved into a writing role. That gave me an opportunity to do some media relations work and that was at an AV hardware company. Then from there I moved into SaaS and I've been in SaaS for the last seven or eight years I think, if I think about the timeline right in an engineering company. Moved on, took on a marketing leadership role about five years ago. Content team of two at a company called GSoft. We did some stuff with Microsoft products, but we also did some HR tech. And over the course of working there I really went from having like a team of two and that really exploded to a team of 12 and worked with like all different functions. SEO, digital marketers, writers, designers, developers. Really had the full production, ran the full production gamut there. And about three and a half years ago made the move to Trolley. What we're doing there is as I mentioned, we're doing fintech. We're doing payouts for contract for people who are paying contractors. We're also doing like some finance and some accounting stuff. So we think about like end of year taxes. When you pay someone, you're going to have to file taxes for them. So Trolley does that type of work. And we're also like, you want to make sure the people you're paying are good to pay. They're not like on a watch list or some reason that your business is going to really suffer because you made that payment. We do some trust and verification work as well as like ERP sync. So really like when you need to pay someone you work with, Trolley can help you. I've been there leading the content and the marketing production side of things for the last three and a half years. And really that's sort of like where I came. So it's like, there's a lot of writing and a lot of content in my background. Five years ago, getting the leadership side and one of the things that I think I picked up somewhere along the line was like, making a really good business case is really important no matter what, what position you're in. It let me, when I was still pretty junior, pitch, like, doing customer success stories in person in the UK and like, got a couple cool experiences, early career. And since then I've just leaned into that type of, like, if you can make a good case, you can probably do the things you want to do. So, yeah, it's been a little bit of a ride. And then like the other piece that I just want to like, knock on because in the last five years going into leadership, one of the things that I really have learned to love is the coaching aspect of things. So I can't talk about myself without talking about the fact that I coach. And that is something that is like, might be a little off marketing, but I guess I'm marketing myself in this one. But the idea being that, like, I'm really driving people, I like to help people move to the next stage or move through a problem or move through a challenge. And there's no playbook to get through that type of stuff. There's lots to read and lots to take in. But, like, everyone's story is different. And one of the most, like, rewarding things I do outside of my day job is help folks figure that out. Like, how can they get through something? How are they already equipped? What skills, what knowledge do they have that they're just not seeing at the moment giving them a different perspective. And that's super interesting. So, yeah, that's a little bit about me.
Nicole MacLean [00:20:21]:
That is incredible. And I love your backstory of ecology. No offense to journalists, but there's been a lot of marketers who started in journalism or whether that's a major or their first role out of college was writing journalistic style. And that makes a lot of sense. It's a very easy segue into marketing. But love that you were in the sciences and the tech and almost saw the storytelling in the data and then made that jump into marketing because that is such an undervalued, I think, skill set of a marketer is that storytelling of data yeah.
Myles Carter [00:20:56]:
If you're in marketing, SaaS, SaaS, tech marketing. Today there's data in everything there. Some of the, even the hardware type products that are sold today. How much data is being shared, fed that can be manipulated, that can be like brought into giving you a better, like better experience as a customer. It's all super important. I think people want data on everything. They want to make more informed decisions and understanding data and getting it and being able to pick it apart just a little bit is so valuable. It just can help you tell the better story.
Nicole MacLean [00:21:32]:
And quick side note, but I appreciate your honesty and transparency and that you came to Montreal because you met a girl. Our last guest, Paola, talked about how she moved to Houston because she met her now husband and that's part of what unlocked her journey into content marketing and marketing and tech. So it's just, it's very human that sometimes you get to where you are just by the human side of our lives. So I appreciate you sharing that.
Myles Carter [00:21:59]:
Yeah. But you sure this isn't a matchmaking podcast?
Nicole MacLean [00:22:02]:
Surprise, everyone.
Myles Carter [00:22:03]:
Okay.
Nicole MacLean [00:22:04]:
That is actually what the show is. Yep.
Myles Carter [00:22:06]:
To give some love is blind at the end of it, right? That's what happens. Okay. Perfect.
Nicole MacLean [00:22:11]:
Correct. Yep. Surprise.
Myles Carter [00:22:13]:
Yeah.
Nicole MacLean [00:22:17]:
As a sales and marketing leader, I'm always interested to hear about a team's tech stack. At Compose.ly, we use Apollo with HubSpot to fuel our outbound outreach. My team loves it. It consistently provides accurate contact information and is incredibly user friendly. If you're thinking about changing your data provider or just want to hear more about our experience, connect with me on LinkedIn or check out the link in the show notes of this episode. Improve your inbound, increase conversion and keep your marketing database squeaky clean. With Apollo, I think it's also just hearing your story. To me, it's also why this idea of making a business case, I think just comes so naturally to you. Because it is that the business case is painting a story with the data we're helping to explain. If you give us this, I can achieve Y. If you give X, I can achieve Y. And it is addressing the financial and resourcing concerns while also painting a realistic picture of what you can get. And I think it's that mix there. So I'm curious from your seat and if you take the positive or negative part of this question, either what do you think makes a great business case? And or what are maybe some of the key things that people miss when they go to leadership to make that case? Or you can answer both.
Myles Carter [00:23:37]:
Yeah, I think like there's a couple things you have to look at this from. Like any business case has to be looked at from the micro and the macro. And that's, I guess one thing that we can, we can often miss is that there's two lenses. Right. From the 10,000 foot view or the, or the, the 30,000foot view. If we can't relate it back to company objectives, then there is no business case. It is a. You may have a great marketing case. Let's make a project up. You know, I'd like to, I'd like to go to this event that's happening in. Let's pick somewhere nice and warm. It's not a nice and warm Palm Spring, but like Palm Springs. I want to go, I want to go to west next year. I'd like to be in Austin in March. Great. You can say, like, it makes sense. People are marketing. There it is. If you can't bring it back to, okay, we have customers who will be there and the cost will return this much. And we can understand that because we've tested it in a micro version. By being at this smaller version of this and bringing, coming back and making like a macro version, you're, I think I want to say dead in the water. Like there's, it's going nowhere.
Nicole MacLean [00:24:47]:
Yeah.
Myles Carter [00:24:47]:
At the other hand, we can all make that big pitch. But if we can't accomplish and we can't get, we can't put together the pieces that are going to be required to create a great product or even create maybe not a great product, but a great attraction to whatever your marketing message is, you know, your promotion, your. I think sometimes about webinars, like, what's more important? Is it actually holding the webinar? Is it getting people to fill out the form? Sometimes it's like the webinar is a great end product, but if you can't get the people to fill out the form, and that's the micro side of it. So if you're thinking about the business case from like a personal team point of view, is it going to blow the wheels off your team? Is there going to be like a lost opportunity because you spent a lot of time invested in here? Those are the two pieces. If you can find the right balance between those two, you've got a winner. If you are leaning heavily and you can't really justify it on the other side sometimes, like, it's not worth running up the flagpole again. There's also the cost of like bringing. And I don't want to say there's such a thing as bad ideas. But sometimes there are ideas that aren't going to fly.
Nicole MacLean [00:25:51]:
There's some political capital, there's some personal capital you lose.
Myles Carter [00:25:54]:
There's personal and political capital. You don't want to run every idea up the flagpole because eventually everything is going to be a no. Or. Or it's going to be. Or you're going to have people who are in a different role doing your business casework for you and you've created less of a need for you to be sitting there being the sort of good point filter between good and maybe not tenable or not achievable ideas.
Nicole MacLean [00:26:20]:
There's so much there that I love because, yes, I've also been in the management side too. Not even in my current role because in case anyone on the team's listening, I truly mean this. It's the worst thing as a manager when you have someone who's super excited and is bringing these great ideas but maybe doesn't bring them through that lens or that filter is such a great word for it. And then there's nothing worse to have to be like, no, I mean, this is the best way possible. Like, not right now. Or here's all the things you haven't thought about. And there's that coaching piece which I actually love doing, and try to say, hey, let's pause for a minute. Here's just some business context as to why and let's coach you up. But it also is like the most disheartening thing to have to, like, crush the dream of this great idea. Like, it also sucks from leadership to have to do that.
Myles Carter [00:27:04]:
You know, no one wants to be like, no one wants to be the person who says no all the time. There's a weird dichotomy there when I say that, though. Individual questions. No one wants to be the person who says yes because it's a taking a risk to say yes to a new idea. So that's why a business case helps not just you as the person presenting it, but the person who's going to accept the idea. Make that yes happen on the. That's on the individual decisions. When it's multiple decisions, no one wants to be the person who says no all the time. So if you don't come with a business case and you've done that multiple times, you're like turning someone into Dr. No and no one wants to sit in that role and it becomes like more of a question of like, is this person being thoughtful enough? And that starts to call into question, like, your Business acumen, which, depending on your role, you know, not everyone needs to have like a super high degree of business acumen. But depending on what you want to do in your career, demonstrating business acumen early is, is like one of the number one skills. If you can show that you get business, people will find a place for you. Maybe it's not, maybe you don't fit in marketing, but you fit in other places because, like, you could have a great, great relational skills and business acumen and you'd be great BDR or account executive or somewhere in the sales organization. So, like, if you can nurture that and you can develop that and learn how business works, I think you're golden. More than like any writing skill, any particular, like, marketing operation skill that those can be taught.
Nicole MacLean [00:28:37]:
Yes, there's that coaching in you, but yes, I agree with that. And then that micro versus macro, I think is also a really great piece of advice. And honestly, I, I did that with this podcast. I had always had in the back of my head for multiple reasons, brand awareness, just the relationship building. We're a services company. I think showing some human is really important. Podcasting has always been in the back of my head, but it was to your point. When do you pull that trigger? When can you actually get an audience to listen and you have team capacity to do it? And so we did a couple webinar series where it was every week in May or whenever and kind of picked a theme and did the guests and repurposed that content and kind of built that muscle over time and saw how much engagement are we getting on this. And after one or two of those over about six months, I think that's when there was enough both, like, for me to go to point, go make the recommendation, get the budget and get everyone on board. It's like, we're gonna go create a podcast, guys. I mean, I didn't call it that, but in my head it was a proof of concept. And I think I did use that word of, hey, I want to try some webinar series to see if something that is recurring like this has legs for where we are as a business right now and for our audience. And then that was an excellent data point to then bring into that more macro vision of what we want to do with this.
Myles Carter [00:30:06]:
And here we are.
Nicole MacLean [00:30:07]:
And here we are. I don't know. It worked. But yeah, I get to meet you, so it all, it all pays off. Get to meet some great people.
Myles Carter [00:30:15]:
We'll take that.
Nicole MacLean [00:30:16]:
Exactly. This has been really helpful. I'm very passionate about business cases as well. Because I think early on I did have that mentor. I worked for a startup, had a VP of marketing, which was great, but I was in events. And so our CEO wanted to be very involved. And so every event he wanted to be able to approve or not approve. And so I do think probably one of the most valuable things I learned was having to present an event calendar. And it's that detail of, you don't want to see all the research I did because you're a CEO, but you want to know I did the research and have reasons for what I picked and what I didn't pick and why I'm making this recommendation. And that balance of here's enough detail so you feel confident about it, but not so much detail you're overwhelmed. Like. And I mean, I struggled. I mean, I was 22, trying to figure this out. Like, it was a hard. There are probably some tears, I'm sure at some point, but looking back, it's probably the skill I've used the most is just knowing how to do that. And I agree. And it also gave me business acumen because, yes, it was just events, but my VP helped and so did the CEO saying like, okay, but this also impacts our customers and it does this. And here's why we would do this. Not just, I know it's more expensive and you would say no, but it actually helps us position in the market this way. And it was just such a eye opening experience. Yeah, I, I agree with that.
Myles Carter [00:31:42]:
There's a point there. And you said it's just events. Events are humongous. And as someone who comes from content, our whole content calendar often ends up getting like, there are these points of gravity in our, in our content calendar and often they're related to an event. So yeah, events have like content related to them. You've got your whole GTM function sort of like falls into line around events. You've got booth building. You're in a company that's like, you're in a tech company that now you've got to get in the business of like, how am I going to physically build a booth? Who am I going to contract out for this? Like, no one else in a tech company is hiring carpenters. Yes, he's hiring like, so true. Union. Figuring out how the union system in.
Nicole MacLean [00:32:28]:
Las Vegas a bill of lading. I had no idea. Yeah, I still don't know if I can tell you what that is. But you know how to get electrical.
Myles Carter [00:32:35]:
And Internet run into a building that should have Internet. There's WI fi everywhere. But I need like dedicated Internet and events are like a thing of their own. And anyone who I want to say that because like events marketers and even like I know that there were some people talking about like event led growth or event led marketing, like that whole concept. There is some grain of truth that there is these. An event in an industry has so much gravity around it. You better be aware of it. You better have a good events person. I worked with a fantastic. I work with someone who is fantastic at events, has done it her entire life. And like this person knows how like the flight routing throughout North America works at any given moment. If you want to get delayed, she can tell you how to get delayed. But if you want to get back as quick as possible, she can tell you how to get back as quick as possible. Like I have to really like appreciate the work that goes in there.
Nicole MacLean [00:33:28]:
Thank you. Honestly, as you say that it's been a minute but I, yeah, I mean I managed events for five years. I was doing 30 to 40 a year in my heyday. This is pre Covid.
Myles Carter [00:33:38]:
Yeah.
Nicole MacLean [00:33:38]:
As you say all those things, I'm like, yeah, that is true. So maybe that's my own imposter syndrome or not wanting to come out. But yeah, as you bring all that back, I mean it is, it does take a lot of. It's a puzzle. It was a lot of pieces that you have to figure out how to put in together.
Myles Carter [00:33:53]:
A lot of pieces and no one else knows how to put them together.
Nicole MacLean [00:33:57]:
Okay. Myles, you've given us tons of great insight on the business case. I am curious because in prep I was asking just what's a common challenge for you right now? And it was. You had a very interesting answer. So I'd love to dig in. And just what is one of your top challenges as you think about content and if you've solved it, great. But how maybe what's your thought process right now around it?
Myles Carter [00:34:20]:
Yeah. So like a challenge that's. And it's like I want to say it's on my mind recently, but it's on my mind recently. It's been on my mind. Five years ago it was on my mind like before I got into content is like there is so much fatigue around how much content is out there and, and truly there is more content out here today than there was in in five years ago. And when I started my career and channels, like channels feel like some days I go, I like I hit LinkedIn and LinkedIn feels like there are 10,000 new posts since the last time I logged on and I didn't log in 24 hours ago, I logged in like an hour and a half ago. And like we're being marketed to non stop with all of this. I constantly ask myself, like, how do I stand out in this crowded space? And how do I not just add noise? That's the second part about it is like, okay, can I stand out or am I just going to create more noise? And there's something in there is like, there needs to be some trust building. And I don't know if I have it solved yet, but it's something that I'm trying to lean into a little bit, is like, if people trust you as a source, you kind of rise out of the noise, you kind of step out of the noise. And I'm like, I'm a fan of brand marketing, but I think it's how you do it has a lot of impact. And I think if you're a brand that associates you, becomes a trusted source, that associates yourself with trusted sources, with subject matter experts, with key opinion leaders, you can do this type of work, then you stand out because people are going to come to see you as someone who is just worth listening to, is worth taking the time, is worth stopping their day, their scroll and getting there. So one of the things we're trying to do is develop our own subject matter experts. We have our VP level folks, our directors, our being asked to speak more often. We're building podcasts, we're interviewing folks just to have like, it might not even be for a marketing material, it might not be for like a public facing marketing collateral, but maybe for like backgrounding. Let's background off our own folks. And it's why we invested in like, we're doing a podcast. We're a couple episodes in at this point. We're investing in some webinars where we're, we're speaking with like industry pros. We want to bring in folks they don't need to be customers. They don't need to be like, they could be a tech that's adjacent to ours, they could be a potential customer, someone who said no to us at some point, but has like a really good take on a topic that we want to hit and set ourselves up so that it's real people having real conversations as opposed to just like straight up sanitized messaging that just disappears behind everything else. And then like when you can do that and when you can build that trust and when you can get those people and when you can create that content, that stands out. You solve like the second problem and it's one of the problems that I think like a lot of marketers have is like, how do I create enough content? Not only can, how do I stand out but like now I need to be in all these different channels and I need to stand out in all these different channels. If you can get that, that, that sort of video, if you can grab video, if you can have that subject matter expert LED stuff, you can then take that and it's like there's your stuff to recycle, there's your stuff to upcycle and chop and bring in and put in a hundred different places and, and like I have to have to lean in. Like conversations with smart people who already have trust behind them is the best way to stand out from the crowd.
Nicole MacLean [00:37:47]:
Well, I think it's just really important to pick, especially if you're a small scrappy team. I have a feeling over the next couple months we're going to see smaller and scrappier teams just kind of come back and picking your pillar. It could be a webinar, it could be a really in depth 50 page research paper, it could be a podcast. I mean there, there are different things based on your skill set, your audience. Pick the pillar that makes the most sense for you, but then put all of the resources into making that really great. And then like you said, that's what you repurpose and get as much juice out of it as you possibly can. And if the initial is good, well produced, thoughtful. Because we are, we are so far beyond the. Okay, I can just have a social post and put it on hootsuite and it's the same thing on Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Facebook. Okay, great, I did social. Like if you actually want that to be a thing, you have to tweak each one to be authentic. And we talked about this and decided like, not every channel is probably the right for us. We don't have unlimited resources. We're gonna pick three. But we're going to show up the way we're supposed to on each of those channels by repurposing things. And I think that's just a really important piece of it.
Myles Carter [00:39:03]:
Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I think we've done a similar exercise where we say like, we are doing really well. We understand, we think our ICP is in this place. Let's be there as much as we can. Because if we're trying to be in six places at once, we're not showing up for anyone in the right way. It's almost like I, I think of it as like and sometimes I like our brand to be like, you know, a helpful person. I also think of like that helpful person in your life who is like they're trying to solve problems for like 50 people at the same time and all they're doing is like getting in 50 people's way. But if they can, if they can solve one person's problem really well, like they just shine and that is. Or if they can give one person some dedicated time. And I think about that as a brand too. Like if you can be in one place really well to that audience, do it. As soon as you can do that well, there's going to be some like knock on effect where you might find a second channel that looks like this but needs a couple little modifications and that's the place where you start to expand without it costing you extra. And I almost thought about the business case when you were saying that like you have to make a business case as to why you're being in a certain place and it might be a business case to yourself. About why I'm investing time here.
Nicole MacLean [00:40:15]:
Yes.
Myles Carter [00:40:16]:
Or to your, like from your content team to your content leader or your content leader to your marketing lead. Like a business case always doesn't, doesn't always have to be like a appeal to the CEO to make a million dollar investment in a great campaign. It can be a time investment but I want to make sure everyone knows why I am investing that time here.
Nicole MacLean [00:40:35]:
Yes.
Myles Carter [00:40:35]:
And where the value is going to come from.
Nicole MacLean [00:40:37]:
Well, and it kind of brings us back to a full circle moment to knowing your ICP and your messaging and making sure that you are showing up in the right ways. But this was incredible conversation. So Myles, thank you so much for joining us.
Myles Carter [00:40:50]:
Thank you very much. I really, really appreciated like jumping on and having the conversation today and like always happy to talk marketing and content. But like I think maybe we even got a little bit bigger than that which is like just being a person in business. And not everyone goes to business school or does a commerce degree and comes ready to be trained. But I think a lot of people can get the right. It doesn't take a lot of investment to figure out like some really good reflexes. And if you have those, like I said, you can be pretty golden moving forward.
Nicole MacLean [00:41:24]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Content Matters created in partnership with Share Your Genius. If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a review and share with a friend. Otherwise you can find all the resources you need to stay connected with us in the show notes till next time.