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In Episode 2 of Grow and Convert Deep Dives, Devesh and Benji discuss why they don't believe a media company content strategy makes sense for most businesses. They argue that this strategy makes sense only for certain types of businesses and that there are things you should prioritize doing prior to adopting a strategy like this. They share examples of "media company" content businesses, explain why the strategy is flawed, and share ideas on what you should do instead.
We share our thoughts and ideas on how to grow a business.
_
Okay, welcome to episode two.
We have a first, before we get into it, we have a really good topic um, we are
upping our podcast and video game.
So we have, uh, we're using, first of all, riverside.fm.
They, uh, we have some level of relationship with them.
They were almost a client, uh, and that
didn't work out, but they have a great product.
So hopefully this improves the video game, as
opposed to using zoom, which we did on episode one,
we have side-by-side so you can actually see us.
And we both are using professional mics.
Um, I was using a professional mic before, but I didn't know how to use it.
So now I actually have it closer to my face.
And Benji now has a professional mic.
So hopefully that's good.
Um, let us know, by the way, in comments,
uh, whether you think the recording and quality is
much better now for today's topic, um, Benji,
I'm going to kick it off with you and we're
going to try, I'm going to try to play devil's
advocate, but you wanted to talk about something
you've been seeing all over, I guess, Twitter, and
just like marketing sphere of people saying this thing
about how marketing teams, how companies
should like build their marketing team.
Like it's a media company, so, uh,
yeah.
Can you elaborate for everyone?
Yeah, I feel like I don't follow too many marketers on Twitter.
So when I do see a topic bubble up, it's usually
something that's trending and this is something
that I've seen, I would say over the last
couple of months, just over and over and over
again, where I just see people tweeting that companies
should approach their content marketing operation, like a media
company.
Uh, and I don't necessarily know what everyone means by that.
So that's something that we want to discuss
on this to just try to define what that actually
means, but
I largely disagree with the whole notion that
companies should approach things like a media company.
And so let's just get into it.
I have some tweets to share, uh, just things
that I've been seeing that kind of led to
this.
And I think it's worth a debate because
I think there's a lot of nuance to this topic.
And that was part of the reason for starting
this podcast in the first place is that often
times there's just people sharing quick
opinions without going into detail on it.
And I think for the people that follow those
people, um, they might be confused or their tweet
might be somewhat misleading.
And so I think it's just better to discuss it at length.
So let's get into,
uh, this,
I mean, while you're pulling it up, I think one thing I can say is like, let me
just put, since my role is going to be to play
devil's advocate, I'll just like roughly define
what I think these people are talking about.
What they mean is,
well, I say that and then I'm having figuring
out what, but like, I think, I think what
they mean is like, as opposed to your marketing
team being about what a lot of people call
performance marketing, which is also by the way
a term I hate because I'm like, shouldn't all marketing
be performance marketing.
Like if you're not, if the marketing's not
getting ROI like, or, or you can't quantify it and
it's not performing, then what are you doing?
Yeah.
But anyway,
I think what they mean is like,
be everywhere and
along that it's like massive brand awareness for your target audience.
So if you're selling to marketing departments, cause
you make a HubSpot type thing, just like HubSpot is
everywhere in the marketing universe.
And they have like, I don't know, I'm just
going to assume a helpless spot does, like for
sure they have this like massive written thing, right.
In terms of written content, but have a podcast
and YouTube and this and that, and like constantly
be producing this content.
I think definitely one aspect of the definition
is produce a ton of content produced in quantity.
Yeah.
A ton like, yeah.
Quantity, different channels.
I think if you're talking about media company, you're
for sure thinking marketing teams need to be doing
video and audio and written.
Um, maybe that's my two definitions, like try
to just be everywhere in that space, have a bunch
of content produced and do like multiple channels, video, audio written.
Yeah.
But I think even if someone was to do just
one channel, I think what people are saying
is produce a bunch of content.
It's top of funnel in nature.
Just get, get the name out there and get the brand out there.
Kind of make your content more brand awareness,
focused, thought leadership focused.
And so, I don't know.
I think we're going to approach this by going off
of those definitions, whether it's one channel producing
a bunch of content, um, going after top of funnel terms or whether it's.
Do blogging, do podcasting YouTubing and every other
channel, but just wanted to share some tweets first.
So I came across this one.
Uh, how did you content marketing old way find popular
keywords, write blogs, create lead magnets, share links
to content on social new way, create a category, right?
Thought leadership content become a media company.
So again, those two terms coming in here, publish zero click content on social.
Not really sure what that means.
I'm guessing.
It just means like threads like this, where
no one really has to click into it to find
a fully length blog post or something like that and create demand.
So that's one of them.
Another one build your start-ups marketing
team, like a media company for your target.
Well, hold on, go back to the previous one or
you get, you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna
give your response afterwards.
Yeah.
I think we can give a response after going through
all these, because they largely just say the
same thing.
Build your startups, marketing team, like
a media company for your target audience.
Again, ton of engagement and a ton of people responding on this one.
Andrew, I've followed Andrew for a long time.
Really respect everything he's built with his company,
but again, create your media company or create your own
media company and publication.
Startups need to stand out more than ever today
and creating large customer audiences gives you a massive
reach year round.
Again, don't necessarily disagree with this
tweet, but I think the devil is in the details
Side note that that phrase startups need to stand
out more than ever today, that these are challenging
times in today's changing environment.
All of those are some of my pet peeve phrases, because it's always true.
It's always, you're always at the precipice
between history and the unknown of the future.
That's called the present moment.
So it's like, they always need it to stand out more than ever today.
It's always at peak level of competitiveness.
No one has ever been like the industry is really easy right now.
Just start some business.
Yeah.
So I dunno, you tweeted this last night because
we were truly just trying to get answers for
this episode, but I think this is an important thing to talk about.
Just what do people mean by this?
I don't know if you want to elaborate on this before we start
The last line of my thing.
And I guess since we're going to
possibly put these as podcasts, I guess if someone's
listening to it as podcasts, they'll be like, what
do you mean I'm listening to it as podcast?
I should read it out loud.
So I re or quote tweeted the bill, just start
us marketing team, like a media company for
your target audience.
That's the entire tweet that I quote tweeted.
And mine says, lots of people are saying this, but none with specifics.
What does it mean to build a team like a media company?
What roles in other words, what role should you hire in there?
How big should the team be?
What's the end result also?
What type of media company?
And then I wrote, I guess you could, what
do you call this a snarky line, but like,
I was just kind of leading the witness or
sort of revealing my hand and what I meant
of, I suspect the reason for no specifics is
because no one knows this just sounds nice.
Yeah.
That's my tweet.
Well I think that's largely just Twitter in general.
People are just tweeting things that sound nice.
Can they actually back up a lot of their statements?
I don't know.
Yeah.
The character limit encourages those, these kinda like pithy
comments, these like quick comments, it sounded really profound.
Anyway, you can go to the last tweet.
Yeah.
So
then I came across this because Corey Haines
quote, tweeted it just as a list of different brands
as media companies.
So I think this is a good place to start.
Just look at what companies are, I guess, describing
their content operation as media companies.
And then we can kind of just dissect whether this makes sense or not.
Brands is media company is it's an, a new refrain.
I first heard it in 2011 when I entered content marketing.
And I actually think this whole concept originally came from Gary Vaynerchuk.
I think he wrote a post on every, every company is a media company back in
2011 and a lot of what, he's a lot of what he said in there makes sense in
terms of his forward looking view of content.
But I think the challenge here is that a lot of what is said gets taken out of
context.
And so, yeah, that's kind of what I want
to go into more detail on, but let's see.
So
a bunch of different brands.
So first my friends at Wistia they're docu series.
So this one is talk shows and a video series and podcasts.
So multiple channels here, before the acquisition
MailChimp launched their own MailChimp presents,
paid out good money to creatives to produce.
High caliber series shorts and podcasts.
So again, multiple channels.
Wait, so pause for a second.
I think it's starting to answer a question.
So when these people say like a media company,
I think both of these, and there was another
tweet earlier, they mean like, it was
something like create your own publication.
They mean like, don't just like pop, publish
blog posts on the company's slash blog.
AKA what we do for clients,
do you mean like that's not good enough.
That's like 2005 or something like this that you need a publication.
And what that means is like, like what you're
screen sharing right now, it kind of looks like
a magazine MailChimp presents.
There's these
random photos that like looks really modern.
I don't really know how to interpret it, you
know, but it's like, it's not just like, we're
trying to rank for best email service provider.
It's like, it's like something that you would hope.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Here's, here's a good explanation.
It's something that you're hoping is so interesting
for your target audience in this case, small business owners
for MailChimp, that
they're just going to go to it and just like, read it
for fun the way you would read a magazine, you
know, your favorite magazine or almost newspaper, but
you're not reporting on news.
And so that means like it's polished and there's
graphics and it's regular in terms of cadence and
all this,
Next one.
So profitable did recur Stu uh, recur studios.
Um,
I don't know if it really gives a description on what they did.
Well, I think that's just the name of their like pod video
Series.
Perfect.
Your series,
Uh, more magazine, like approach is from help scout.
So this seems to be talking more, just purely about blogging.
So again, magazine style versus SEO driven, I think is a different,
But they also mean like polished.
Like it's like looks really high quality.
It has like a name.
So the one you're projecting is in called in the works by help scout.
Nope.
HubSpot.
So their podcasts network.
Um, yup.
All right.
I think you've given a good sense of examples.
Yep.
What do you think?
Well I think if we were just to start broadly,
I think media companies have different goals than
SaaS companies.
So if you just think about the goal of a
media company, or even just how they generate
revenue, they're generating revenue for,
through page views versus selling a product.
So I just think even just starting there,
the goal of a media company in terms of growing
page views, getting clicks is very different
than the goal of a business, which is to sell a
and so I think, um, yeah, even, even just
there, the idea of growing a media company just
to get breadth and an audience and brand awareness
serves a very different purpose because they make money
by doing that versus a SaaS company makes money by selling a product.
And if you've ever watched any of our stuff already
anywhere at content traffic, or just pure audience,
doesn't lead to revenue.
So that would be the first point I make.
But then if I look at these companies, something
that stands out to me is none of these
are small businesses.
None of these are bootstrap businesses.
I believe from what I know,
maybe MailChimp was, but they, they sold.
So I think,
I mean, the MailChimp was technically, but like
sure it had massive, massive revenues I believe for a
long time.
So I think just
the point is that I think these companies are
at a very different stage than most businesses.
And so while this advice might be good
for them in terms of them growing beyond,
their existing channels.
So maybe they have tried SEO and exhausted a bunch of keywords there.
Maybe they've done paid marketing and don't have
any more keywords to go after there, or have just
kind of hit the limits that they can do on paid.
And so now these companies are looking for other
ways to grow their brand and expanding into podcasting
or YouTubing or some of these different channels make sense.
But I don't think that the, this advice of creating
a media company is necessarily relevant to every
business, because I think there's probably things
that you can do that are going to drive revenue for
your SaaS company,
much faster and probably drive better results than
spending a ton of money and resources on either creating
a podcast, doing YouTube channel or even just top of funnel content blogging.
Okay.
Here's my counter
Sure
If I argue on their side, first of all,
you can turn off the screenshare if we're not
actually screen-sharing right.
Okay.
So my counter is going back to the first thing
you said the media company's goal is getting
a bunch of page views.
I think what these people would argue is, yeah, that's fine.
And so that's what I'm saying is your startup
or your SaaS company, or whatever's goal should also
be to get a ton of traffic and page views,
because then you have massive mindshare and it's
okay if an actual media company monetizes
by ads like displayed on the thing or an ads on
the podcast ads on the YouTube video, you're going to monetize by your product.
But it's like, if you can, if you can get
the like eyeballs or whatever, eyeball share that
an actual media company, you know, like HuffPo
or something gets or some online magazine, but you can
do it in, in the case of MailChimp for small business owners, or
when I think the logic of this kind of marketing
is then when they need an email service
provider, you are for sure, the one they're thinking of,
and the media company aspect is if you
do it as a media company, you're going to get
so much eyeballs, earbuds, whatever that there's just this massive reach.
And when any of those people need an email
service provider, they think of MailChimp first.
Yeah.
Fair.
I mean, I don't necessarily, I mean, I don't
disagree with that as a broad statement in terms
of growing your brand is bad or getting more eyeballs is bad.
I just think that there's things that you can
do that will drive revenue faster, and that's more
measurable than just doing this.
And I think
for, for most businesses, they don't have the
budget and or resources to just go start a podcast
and drive ads to it and create all this top of
funnel content that doesn't drive revenue immediately.
Because the reality is that even if you were
to approach things this way, and let's say any
of these companies are a small business,
got like a $200,000 budget to start a podcast and
build up their content team and all that kind of stuff.
The reality is
when things take a turn or marketing spend
needs to get cut, they're going to turn to the
channels that aren't driving direct revenue or
that you can't measure, and the budgets are going to be
cut there.
So again, I think going back to the examples here,
these are all massive companies that have massive
marketing budgets.
And I just don't think it's realistic for a small business.
That's making 2 million a year to invest the
same amount of money in growing media channel or
media company as some of the brands that are listed here.
Yeah.
I think it's worth switching my hat to
your side of the debate here for a second.
Like, I think it's worth emphasizing that like,
okay, you want a ...
You want a media company, like you want a podcast
network, like HubSpot, or you want that publication
that you were projecting of MailChimp.
How much, how much money do you have?
Like, are you a MailChimp?
You know what I mean?
And so like we, we get leads and, and talk to companies all the time,
that don't have that kind of budget.
I mean, just to be totally blunt, although
this is public it's on our website, we charge $10,
000 a month.
So there's companies like, oh, I want to do content, blah, blah, blah.
And they're like, Ooh, yeah, $10, 000 a month.
I don't know.
And then like, they're debating this kind of like top of the funnel stuff.
And you're like, in my opinion, obviously
biased, if you don't know, $10,000 a month to rank
and get your absolute, most buying keywords, then what are you doing?
Wasting time on top of the funnel stuff, because sure.
Your podcast network is great.
And eventually people are going to be like listening to it.
And then when they need MailChimp or equivalent
or whatever your software they'll be like, oh, I need
a software in this obscure B2B space.
Look, it was that company that I've been thinking of that takes forever.
Like that could take a year's the conversion rate is tiny.
In fact, here, let me project
our
now.
Absolutely not arguing for,
for the other side anymore.
I'm like totally biased.
I'm on your side, but I think worth kind of going to our main,
sure.
Need help over there?
Yeah.
I don't know how to share screens.
Okay.
So this blog, post
scaling content expanding from bottom of
the funnel, the top by Daniel, on our team,
it has these graphs, he talks about Geekbot was
client we've had forever and he's been the content
charges for it.
The whole time they make this slack standup bot.
So you can run a stand up just with slack bot, right?
Like how do you feel, what are you doing?
What have you done some yesterday, etc.
daily questions.
He compares bottom of the funnel versus top of the funnel.
And he has all these graphs, the, our bottom
of the funnel pieces for them converted on average,
this isn't even the highest converting ones,
the average 4.78% from traffic to sign up like free
trial signup for this company.
The top of the funnel pieces.
Now mind you,
what we Grow and Convert calls top of the funnel is still sells the product.
It's not this media company stuff that like,
I guarantee you all of this media company advice and
the examples and the Jay Acunzo tweet thread MailChimp,
Wistia, whatever they barely, if at all sell their
product, it's just pure.
Like this is our media.
I think it's get the brand out there.
It's get, get Wistia's name out there, get Mailchimp's name out there.
So it's just a common household name.
And it's part of this line of marketing thinking
of like, don't sell, like if you mentioned your
product, everyone's going to hate you because
that's like really inappropriate or rude.
Ours mentioned it.
And it's still 0.19%. You know?
So we're talking about like in the case of
this, it's like, oh, you're a slack standup bot.
Here are the bottom of like your S your, your software.
We make software for daily.
Stand-ups, let's rank for daily stand-up software,
you know, or like we're an alternative to standuply
let's rank for standuply alternatives.
This is a extremely targeted.
So anyway, this is the core behind our, I
guess, our kind of frustration with this kind of
advice.
Well, I think that's a good segue into
let's go into some of these examples, because
I just started looking at some of the examples shared in that list last night.
And I was pretty surprised by what I saw
in terms of Wistia hasn't even gone after the
bottom of the funnel keywords yet they're investing all this money in,
in this top of funnel media related content.
So that just kind of blew my mind, honestly.
And I think that's our main point with
this is, is there's a time and a place for
doing this media style content.
I mean, here we are podcasting, and we're saying,
don't invest in this, or we're not saying don't
invest in it, but I think we're saying there's a place to start first.
And so we've been blogging on bottom of the funnel topics for our own agency.
We already have leads coming in from our own content.
And this was just another channel that we wanted to explore.
Whereas with Wistia,
I found this really interesting.
So if I just searched for Wistia and I look at the ad, their ad talks about,
being a video host.
So hosting your videos with Wistia.
So I was just exploring last night.
And so I just went into here and I did a video hosting just as a bottom of
the funnel keywords keyword.
So here again, I see Wistia serving an ad.
I see Vimeo who's their biggest competitor and surprise, surprise.
Wistia is nowhere to be seen on the first page when you Googled video hosting.
And of course they're mentioned in some of
these posts, but again, Vimeo is number two in this
one here, you see Wistia, but again, like why wouldn't Wistia want to own
what seemingly is one of their number one features
or number one reasons why people would sign up
for their product product with their own blog posts.
That's just kind of eye-opening to me.
So then I went onto their website and I
was just trying to figure out exactly what they
did.
And then I was searching for different bottom
of the funnel keywords that they might want to own.
So let's see, like, so we just
go through some of their core value props here.
So it says recording.
So let's see if we were to search for recording video online,
again, nowhere to be seen, and maybe this
might not be one of their key features, but we
can just keep, keep going here.
So editing video online, which seemingly
is one of the key features of their product.
Again, you see Vimeo here, you don't see,
them, in any of the search results,
we could keep going here.
So collaboration.
So like let's do video collaboration.
I can do platforms since that's a little bit more bottom of the funnel.
Again, you see their competitor here, nowhere to be seen.
So I guess, and then on top of that, if we just look at their site DR Of
90
page rating of 85, so like.
We don't want to be extreme here, right?
Like just like you're conceding.
There's a place for this.
That is the benefit an Ahrefs domain rating of 90, you could argue, okay.
Like, that's the benefit of doing this media
company stuff you've produced so much content.
Your brand is out there.
A bunch of people are linking to you.
The other benefit is what you showed, which is
in other people's list, posts, ranking for the terms
you were just Googling
video, hosting, online, editing, etc.
They
Are getting mentioned places for
sure.
They have that brand awareness.
And this is the effect of it.
And just to
restate what you're saying, I think our argument is, but hang on.
Why, why wouldn't you?
I think there's, there's multiple layers to
our argument, but what I'm hearing you say is why
Wouldn't you do this first
Obvious things.
You have such a strong domain.
You have a DR of 90, you could probably outrank
any of these companies that are sharing these
list posts for all the most valuable keywords that your brand wants to own.
All the keywords that says, I want to use
a product like Wistia, because this is a key
feature, but yet you don't own any of these keywords.
So why are you investing all this money in YouTube
podcasting channels when you just haven't even done
the basics?
That's why it doesn't make any sense to me.
Yeah.
Let me share my screen again and go back to that post
It.
Um,
so I looked at, we looked at the conversion rate up here right now.
If we scroll down, you could say, okay, fine.
Devesh your bottom of the funnel posts the equivalent
of what Benji was showing like video hosting software
for Wistia or whatever convert way higher,
but they don't get the level of traffic.
So top of the funnel, you're going to have lower conversion.
It's going to make up for it on traffic, in our
work that we have documented and published the
data on side note, very few of these marketers doing
these pithy comments online have done
that maybe that comes across as too cocky.
Apologies.
So we find that that's not true specifically here.
I'm showing a graph of the traffic to the
bottom of the funnel, a bucket of posts for
Geekbot versus the top of the funnel.
And bottom of the funnel is about like 35,000 or something.
I don't know.
28,000 top of funnel is 204,000, 20,000, 204,000, almost 10 X.
So yes, top of the funnel gets 10 X the
traffic, but the conversion rate is way more
than 10 X,
right?
It's a, it was a 25 X conversion rate for almost 5% versus 0.2%. And so for
actual raw conversions over the course of,
I don't know, this was like over a year that Daniel
did this analysis, the bottom of the funnel pieces
and his bottom of funnel bucket generated 13, 1,
348 sign-ups versus 400, basically for the top of the funnel.
So back to that Wistia example, what your saying
is like, yeah, your podcasts and all are generating
something.
But if you have this DR and all, even if
you don't like the video hosting online video
editor, the conversion rate from that is so high,
because from a funnel perspective, what we're talking about
is the podcast and the media company and
the publication and the blah, blah, blah.
That is like from the marketing journey
perspective, it's like, step one awareness.
They're aware of your brand, etc.
Right?
And then at some point later when they
need it, they're going to turn to Wistia.
The terms you're talking about is when they need it.
Yeah.
If someone, if someone needed this right
now, what are they going to search for?
It's like, I might not remember Wistia when I'm searching for that.
And then I see Vimeo all over the place
and I might just convert on Vimeo and guess
what?
We are Vimeo customers, because I did that
exact same thing when I was searching for a product
and they were doing.
And if you did re what I'm saying is
even more nuanced than that, even if you did
remember Wistia, even if the top of the funnel
stuff did work, what I'm saying is like, there's
a time lag between you listening to Wistia's podcast
or whatever their media company operation was.
And you needing it at any given time.
There's thousands upon thousands of people searching
for this stuff, because they're at the stage where they need
it now.
There's always people.
Today, there's a bunch of people at work that need video hosting software.
So ranking for that captures those people now.
And why wouldn't you do that?
Then that's layer one of your argument.
And I want to go back now to something else you said that's important.
What kind of companies are we talking about?
And layer two of your argument is producing
the media company type stuff of a MailChimp of a
Wistia is not easy and extremely resource intensive for the typical startup.
Maybe you raised the money and you have limited
budget for sure, for the bootstrap companies.
That definitely have limited budget.
And so producing this like fully polished,
beautiful design online magazine, which has this
Just not realistic, right?
Yeah.
You need a massive budget for that.
Meanwhile ranking for, you know, you, you, you look
at what video hosting online, video editor, online video
or something else,
Video collaboration, software, video, hosting platform, there's
all these different variations of their core value props in their
core features that they don't,
I suppose, as required kind of them like imagine
if every company or anyone listening to this was
like, just stop for a second and think, and
write down like 10 of your most obvious, these
people are looking for my product right now,
bottom of the funnel terms to rank for those, or
at least produce the blog posts that will get you on the track of ranking.
You're not going to rank tomorrow.
Right.
Necessarily
what is the resources of that versus like
creating a video series?
Yeah.
I mean, this, this can be done with a very small
team, probably a content marketing manager, strategist
and a writer.
Yeah.
And those will produce leads when you start ringing they'll produce leads.
Um, so it's not an, yeah, I think we should
emphasize like, this isn't an either or, and
like you said, you could say, oh, you guys are being hypocrites.
You're recording this on a podcast.
Yeah.
Also, we've been like, we started this podcast very late.
Like what do we at year six, seven of Grow and Convert?
Um, and even we've started doing SEO for our stuff recently, so
Yeah, we're doing both.
We're still going after bottom of the funnel
keywords, just like we would for any of our clients,
we're doing that simultaneously while, while doing this.
And so, yeah.
I mean, that's a good point.
I don't, I don't want to completely discount this whole idea.
There's definitely a time and a place for it.
And there's definitely people that are really good at this.
I know Dave Gerhardt is one of the people that, that,
really promotes podcasting and growing brands.
And clearly he's one of the best at it.
Like I actually think part of the issue
here is he's so good at what he does that
it's.
I
Everyone thinks they can do that.
Yeah.
Everyone thinks that they can replicate what
he does and be Dave, but Dave is just so good.
Every single company has gone to he's he's
done the same model and it has been successful.
Um, I will say that a lot of those companies
were funded and had a lot more resources
and he was given a lot of resources to make this happen.
Whereas I don't think a lot of the bootstrap companies,
or even just the smaller funded companies have
those kinds of resources.
And I will say that that's a difference.
So I think it's more just about prioritization.
I think there, there are things that you can
do early in your company that will drive direct
results.
And as you exhaust that channel, then they're going
to avenues like this, where you're, you're truly growing
your brand because you've run out of things
that you can do that have trackable ROI makes a
lot of sense.
Yeah.
I think there, one thing we could do that
would be really interesting is I can just profile
different types of companies and we can say, what would we recommend the split?
Or like some mix of marketing?
Like what, what would we recommend?
So I want to go through like the bootstraps.
I want to go from least resources to highest,
like maybe the solopreneur that maybe they're like a
coder founder, they built some software or whatever,
or maybe they're like, I, you know, I dunno like
a copywriting consultant and they want to do content
marketing and grow their client base or something.
And I want to work up to like, what if
you have a little bit more resources, what
if you now have VC funding and be like, what is the split?
What is the order of operations?
But before I get to that, before I lose this thought,
I think there's another factor at play that
none of these tweets is talking about, which is the
sexiness of content marketing.
And I think
marketers in
these companies, it's like, they want to like
make a name inside that company and to be totally
blunt, the kind of content marketing we promote
and teach and do for our clients, like ranking for
these utilitarian, if effective keywords
is not that sexy.
And I think like if your some director of content
marketing, or even like the CMO or whatever,
head of marketing hire #2 like, you want to like make a splash.
And I think everyone on slack at your company
and at the retreats is going to give you
a big pat on the back and say like, great job Benji.
Like, this is awesome.
When you launch your like online magazine for such
and such tech startup or your podcast, there's just,
by the way side note, there's a ton of congratulations
that people get upon launching things, for example,
you and I recently our congratulations for
launching something that we know has not done much.
And there was this joke that we had at the
beginning of Grow and Convert, where we had
a bunch of like content success and people
were following us and we didn't have and
we had no revenue.
We had no business, we had none.
And we were like internally, like, what are we doing?
I was like, Benji, you're wasting my time.
And people would email and tweet us and be
like, guys, congratulations on all your success.
And it became almost this four letter word because,
uh, maybe it's four words, congratulations on all your
success.
It was a five word phrase that I would just say it to you all the time.
And it became this joke among between us.
We'd be like, Hey, first of all, congratulations
on all your success because we had no success.
But I think that part of it is like, they're in the job and they want to make
a splash and you get, you get a lot of congratulations
for your success when you launched the
thing, but no one's measured.
And I think isn't doing anything for the business yet.
Sorry to say it.
You know what I mean?
Or even just
Measuring traffic, when you have a graph that
looks really good and all the numbers are going up
and it's just traffic and you, and that's what you share on social media.
Like, oh, I have a million visitors.
There's been a, there's been a few people that
have reached out to us that have crazy traffic
numbers, like a hundred thousand.
I grew the site to a hundred thousand a year, 200,000 a year.
And then you're
Like
A month, sorry, you're right a month.
And then you ask them, well, what is that doing for you?
You don't even need to ask them those people
that reach out to us that have that kind
of traffic are smart enough to be like, guys,
I have all this traffic, our conversions are really bad.
Like wow.
Well often...
The reason they have that traffic is there's one blog post.
That's getting 70,000 views a month.
That has nothing to do with their company.
Yeah.
Um, okay.
So let's go through and give some prescriptive advice.
So let's start at the beginning, the solo person, it could be solo service.
I'm a graphic designer.
I'm a copywriter bla bla bla and, I want more clients and I want to grow.
And I feel like I need to grow my brand.
Look at these other people that do what
I do, but they do a shittier, but look, they
get better, more clients.
I'm jealous.
I'm not saying that in a bad way.
I have been that person sometimes still am,
or it could be the solo, like coder, founder of some product SaaS thing.
I was a very big group of people, um,
the indie hackers.
So either of those, that's, I'm going to consider
this the, the minimum resource available example, your time,
let's assume basically zero budget.
You have a budget for some tools.
And then they're on Twitter being like, damn
like I have this great product or I have this
great service.
I'm an amazing graphic designer or copywriter.
Why?
Like, and then you, they see these tweets being
like, you need to treat your marketing, like a
media company.
They're like, okay, I'm going to create a publication.
Like what, what is your recommendation to them?
Like, no, no, like what does, what does Grow
and Convert or, what do you say they should
do?
What should be there?
Like an example mix.
I mean, are we talking about marketing in general or just content,
No marketing in general let's expand beyond content, including content.
Well, I think this is difficult for any company
because I think this is part of the problem
with Twitter.
And this is the problem I have with a bunch
of marketing people giving advice is that there
is no set formula.
I can't just say, Hey company, this is a mix you should do.
You should do ads.
You should do content only blogging, not video.
Don't be on Twitter, be on Twitter.
I don't think that there is some mix
That, let me just put it this way.
So what you're saying is at the tactical
level, I would tell you, this is the exact
Mix.
I would say generally...
Sure.
I would say generally what a company should do is
figure out.
I mean, they should just figure out what channel
that they have some expertise in-house in.
So if they have someone that can run ads,
if they can write content themselves, if the, I
dunno if they're good at tweeting, whatever it
is, they're good on test that channel themselves, try to
find something that works and then figure out how to scale that one channel.
And it might not be just some ads channel or something like that.
It could just be manual.
It could be reaching out to people in the
very beginning and trying to get feedback on the
product or trying to get people, to use the
product and get that feedback and then cycle that
feedback and continue to improve their product from there.
Cause we're talking about really early stage founders,
but I don't think there is some set formula and
I, I, but I do think that people should lean
on the channels that they have some expertise
in or that they have some competitive advantage
in and test that channel out first, get it to
work, try to scale it.
If it doesn't work, figure out another channel that you can test out.
So maybe you start off with ads, ads aren't working too well because.
Product needs.
I don't know a lot of, uh, education for
people to use it, or it needs descriptions of
how people should use it.
And then you might move to content and
say, oh, I can walk people through how to use
my product.
And maybe I want to own some of these keywords,
but that's just generally how I would think
about it.
If I go into any business, there's no, I I've
run marketing for a couple of startups before.
And the channels that I use to grow, each
of them were different when I first came in
because the products were different and the companies were
in different situations, had different budget sizes and things
like that.
And so I don't think there is a set formula,
but I think start small, start with one
channel, prove that out.
If it doesn't work, test another channel.
And your whole goal is to find one channel that you can scale.
And then you want to just map, like you
want to put everything that you have into that
one channel, and then you want to expand from there.
And I think it's the same point that we're
making here just with the media company thing.
It's not like we're saying this channel can't
work or there's no place for it, but we're saying
there's priorities.
And if you haven't focused on the bottom
of the funnel keywords first for a lot of these
companies, why would you move on to something that
is way harder, more resource intensive and requires a
way bigger budget when you could focus on this first?
Yeah, I don't disagree with anything you said.
I think the one channel thing, I think I even tweeted this a long time ago.
I've seen both from Grow and Convert and my AB testing
agency, growth rock, therefore example, I've worked
with some pretty big e-commerce brands making a lot of money.
And if you just go back in their GA out of curiosity, you realize a lot of them
grow from one channel.
They just double down and in e-commerce for example, it's almost always paid.
It's almost always paid.
It could be paid social, especially these newer,
younger DTC first brands, or like a lot of the
old school ones.
It's like paid search Google shopping.
So, um, yeah,
But I think that's getting harder now.
Like I empathize with people over on this because
I don't think what worked for e-commerce company has,
let's say five years ago in terms of just
going on Facebook or going on Instagram and just
spending a ton of money.
I mean, the costs have gone up there.
It's more competitive.
It's like the targeting has gotten worse.
I think that's more challenging.
And so I guess what I'm challenging people to think through is just
what, what channel do you potentially have
a competitive advantage in that you can win?
And it could be podcasting for some e-commerce company or it could be
No, I'm going to take an even bolder stance.
That's like, it's not going to be what, what e-commerce
company, their first main channel that they grew
on was a podcast.
That's ridiculous.
It's
Paid.
I mean, I don't, I don't know about any, but I'm just saying,
Because it doesn't exist.
So, so, so you, you gave an absolutely correct
strategic response if you're starting out.
Cause my prompts was let's start with the solopreneur.
You actually answered it for, at a strategic level, the
Earliest early stage companies.
I'm thinking about like pre product market fit even into maybe your seed round.
Yeah.
Even your seed round your series A...
I still think what I said is true all the way up until that level.
And it's true for bootstrap companies, whatever.
So you gave that, but let me make a more kind of, um, I don't know, like a
brash kind of response, which is
honestly what Benji said is true about one channel,
but in my personal opinion, try the normal channels.
First, the stuff that other people in your
space have gotten to work the bread and butter like
paid and SEO.
I'm sorry.
Maybe that makes me a cranky old man.
I would also say outbound sales can work.
Like outbound sales can work, stuff like that.
You got to give it a go at some point and SEO yes.
Takes time.
And we said, oh, something like you published.
It's going to take time to rank.
Especially if you have like no backlinks and
no domain, whatever, but it's just not that hard to
publish 12, 20 posts that each one targets
one super bottom of the funnel keyword do that.
Let that clock start ticking for it to rank, then move on.
And then for paid the advantage of paid even we don't do paid.
So now we're not doing saying anything.
Self-serving the advantage of paid though is
actually I should asterisk, we do do a little bit
of paid, but like that's not our main thing.
That's not our main thing.
But the thing is
yes, you have to pay for each of the visitors.
But the flip side is you can really micro test it.
Yeah.
Like you can get immediate feedback
Media company and you don't have $200 to try on some ad channel
on paid search or paid social.
You don't have $500. You don't have $200 a month.
Like growth rock.
My AB testing agency, like largely me.
It's like a consultant.
I've just done it forever and I don't want to stop doing it.
I love it.
Whatever.
I don't have like a ton of budget, but
I tried and it's not even a nice strength.
You said something very correct.
I think in good, like focus on something
you're strong at, etc for the solopreneur.
I'm not even a big paid ads kind of guy,
but we saw paid Twitter, working at Grow
and Convert.
I was like, ah, I'll give it a shot.
And this particular formula of like a key strategic
piece that's promoted via Twitter worked ridiculously well so
much so that I was like, well, I'm on, it's only me.
I can't take that many leads.
And I turned it off because of the generated some leads.
And so it's like.
Does none of that is like sexy.
I didn't have to like, you know, like hire
a studio and like make a YouTube series and
the podcast and interview all these guests.
Like the amount of effort that these media style
marketing projects take is very, very high because it's
nonstop.
It's content production.
Every week, every month you need a podcast guest, you need to edit it.
You need more content.
You need the next issue of your online magazine.
Versus if you get some paid ROAS to work, you're good for a little bit.
You don't need to keep producing that.
You just run that ad.
Yes.
You need to change it, etc.
But like it's different.
Yeah.
Actually I have an example of this.
So the first company that I ever joined out of college,
a hundred million dollar business really successful,
uh, been around for 50 plus years.
Right before that I had got there.
They had hired a full media team.
I think they spent something between 250,000 million
dollars a year on investing in this media full
production, uh, like journalists from different news
publications to really try to grow this new media site and
a year into it...
None of that budget on your tiny out of
college salary while they were paying you $3.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I made next to nothing compared to the
budgets that they spent on that, but regardless,
uh, they scrapped the whole operation right before
I got there, because exactly that thing, they said, this
is great.
We're growing traffic, but we can't prove the ROI of any of this.
And then
when I got in, I think I was able to grow the traffic more than that site had
in one year
by myself than, than a whole team of people, but not that's besides the point.
But I think it's just to say, you can be scrappy and not do things with a full
media team and editors and videographers.
And even this, like this is really low budget.
We just bought a microphone, like took a trial
of different software and are uploading and we don't
need fully designed like these videographers and
these expensive editors to produce this kind of snuff.
It's just come in with an interesting concept, something
that people aren't doing, uh, and this, this is
the same for your content too.
And the same, how we even started our agency,
it was just, where's there a gap in the
market and how can we fill it?
I even this podcast is just, it's all about,
let's go in depth on marketing topics because no
one else seems to be even having these conversations.
And there's things that all these other marketers are thinking constantly.
And there's no outlet for people to share their
thoughts or to have thoughtful discussions about this on
Twitter.
It's just a bunch of people saying, oh, I have this idea.
And then someone else being like, oh,
you're wrong and there's no nuance anymore.
And so let's, let's just credit.
Try to create something unique here.
Yeah.
That's a, that's actually a really interesting and good point.
I hadn't thought of that before is
lurking under this treat your marketing as
a media company idea is this thing that you and I
have talked about for years, that I did not
make that connection until you just said it, which
is this idea that you just kind of like
the, you, you make the outside of your marketing
effort look a certain way and that's going to
work when you're like, okay.
But like whatever channel, video, audio, or written
that you pick for your media publication for your company,
quote unquote, do you have anything useful to say
like, you know what I mean?
Like that's like lurking on it.
It's just like, oh, you know, this super
polished thing and look at it, it looks gorgeous.
It looks like a magazine.
What are you saying?
And underlying that is this idea that like,
you just kinda, you know, you like higher, or even,
even at the big stages where you do have budget for it.
You just like hired these people.
Right.
You hire them.
They worked at this online magazine, so they must work for this.
And you're like, why are people following that?
Because you're right.
We like,
I want to go, I almost want to go back to this because I think this is
it's these two things that I think everyone
is, is going for with what they're trying to say
in, I want a media company.
I think everyone at the end of the day
wants to be authoritative in their industry.
And I think you covered this in the blog
post on, or I don't even remember, did I
write it?
Or if you wrote it, but the thought leadership
content, what the key point is like, yes, of
course everyone wants, thought leadership content.
And if we had to define that, it's just something
that makes you stand out in your industry.
You have unique opinions, unique things
to say unique examples, that kind of stuff.
But I think the problem with people becoming
a media company or why they're not able to achieve
this is because people don't have these unique opinions.
They're just kind of saying what everyone else is saying.
They haven't done the work.
They haven't tested things on their own.
They haven't come to different conclusions than everyone else.
And everyone else is just kind of spewing the same best practices.
And so just naturally your content doesn't stand
out, regardless of what channel it is, whether it's a
podcast, whether it's written content, whether it's video,
the core problem starts with not having something interesting to
say,
Yeah, there's a good chance.
Your podcast is going to be the same as every
other podcast in your industry, which is you
interview the same people that are being interviewed on the other podcasts.
And you ask the same surface level questions and every who is it?
Someone tweeted this, or I saw this somewhere where it was like.
It was like, if someone was like, it was
like a fake conversation, I'm starting a podcast.
You're like, yeah, everyone else is.
And they were like, no, no, like what makes us different?
And they were like, yeah, but I'm going to
ask like the really good questions that go in
depth.
We're going to go in depth.
You're like really, no one has thought about a podcast that goes in depth.
You're the first one.
It's like, everyone is trying to create a podcast that goes in depth.
But like, you need to think carefully.
That's the podcast equivalent of everyone producing
the same, like beginner's guide to insert industry here in the
written content everyone's producing that same fluff stuff.
And I think that's, that's actually really interesting
that the whole media company advice, it's like advice for
the outside stuff, you know, it's advice for the clothing you wear.
And you're like, yeah.
But like is, I don't know, like, is your,
is the health of your body good inside?
Like, do you have something substantive to say that's really interesting.
Uh, I don't know if I have any thing else to say on this topic.
I hope the discussion was valuable for everyone.
Again, I don't know if
We
Necessarily came to it.
Why do you want to summarize, like, here's what
I'm, here's what I'm hearing like the layers, or
it could maybe be kind of like on that meta or strategy level,
what I'm hearing from you and from myself as
we're thinking through this is that I think people
can walk away with is like,
number one, if you don't already have
a channel, that's like, you feel like you're really exhausting it,
then
that's your first goal is like finding
Double, double down on that channel.
If you have something that's working, actually,
this is a good point because I see this often people
find a channel that works.
And instead of just doubling down on that channel,
they immediately like move to something else.
And you're like, what?
Why are you moving away from the channel?
That's working just double down on this
channel first exhaust it and then move on.
Yeah.
I think that is this idea that that's like, that's what growth means.
Like, okay, this is working, you know, and
we need to grow, but, and then the second layer,
and I want to tie back to this kind of
second half of the conversation to some of
the graphs I was showing from our geek bot
example earlier, if I zoom out of that example,
I guess one way to think about what we're saying is
like, you may or may not want to do some of
these channels or whatever, like video podcasts
or a publication, but at least do yourself
the favor and respect of your own time and your
company's time, your employee's time of measuring the business impact.
You may measure the conversions and still conclude.
You want to do whatever, whatever, but at least measure.
And I think most people don't want to do that.
And you and I have talked about how it's
honestly not in a lot of marketers interest to
measure the conversions that come from their work,
because it's probably not converting very well and they don't
want their bosses to see that right, where you're
hiding it from yourself, but like do yourself the
service of doing that of like measuring, just like keep an eye on it.
And that's our way of kind of being polite to be perfectly blunt.
And instead of just being like, most of this,
shit's not going to get you any convert or
very few conversions, like, why wouldn't you
do the bottom of the funnel our polite way to say
it is like, just measure it.
And then you decide, and if you see a
graph, like I showed with a, with like barely
any conversion rate and whatever, like I would
hope that the logically it would get you to conclude,
you know, that, um, maybe you should go in a different direction.
Yeah.
And then I guess the last takeaway is tying
back to the theme of this podcast is like,
don't assume that marketing advice in a tweet,
even if a ton of people have retweeted, it replied
to it liked it
is good.
And
I was, I was
Waiting, I was, couldn't find a better way
to saying that, but, and then also like, if it
doesn't make sense to you, there's probably a reason
there's all these like pithy statements that are just
like, you know, like put around like do
basic logic helps you out, a media company.
Like what is that?
What does that mean?
And then actually, that's another takeaway that I heard
from our conversation today is separate the channel and
the activity from this concept of like media company, you can do a podcast.
You could do, you could do a video series.
Like if you sell technical software or something,
that's like, screen-sharing is important.
Like Excel based stuff, analytic stuff, or whatever.
Like you could do a video series, but just turning
on screen recording and publishing a YouTube
Going after keywords going after the same pain point
keywords on YouTube that you would and written content,
essentially, that's kind of what we're doing with
this podcast is can we rank for things on YouTube?
Oh, that's a great idea.
Do you know what people don't do enough of
the, especially the SaaS group is you take the
thing of like best video hosting, video
hosting software, video, hosting reviews,
Just do video
Demo recording, like, just show your software,
show how it works, find that version of that keyword for
you, best whatever.
Or just like the thing, this software, that
software, and be like, I made this, I'm really proud
of it.
Like, here's how it works.
Here's why I think it's better than everything else.
And like put it on YouTube and Google, some
basics of YouTube SEO make the title, right?
Like the description that was something would rank
and publish it like that doesn't require the resources of
a media company.
You don't need to hire someone from the New York times to do that.
Yeah.
All right, cool.
That's a good way to end.