Hey everybody welcome to the stack and growth podcast. I am Tori Kenlick the P of demand at refine labs joined by my colleague Matt Wilbenk Matt once I quick hello. Yeah, hello. Hello.
How's it going? And we have a special guest with us today Sam Boulter from zoom info the director of media content Sam Would you care to give a little bit of a background and dive into what you do and company work for? Yeah? First off, thanks for having me on the show really appreciate it So if your listeners aren't familiar I work for zoom info zoom info is a go-to-market platform that sells mostly to sales marketing Recruiting and ops professionals and basically we help people be more productive by giving them access to a large amounts of data and tools to automate outreach and Connecting with different people.
So that's what zoom info does. I work on media So I manage a small team that handles basically all of your content that is offset So social YouTube some content newsletters and then also working on kind of ad hoc data projects where we're using data from zoom info Platform to kind of pitch to news publications and things like that So just saying like oh here's some interesting data and trends and writing some of the content that we hope gets picked up By kind of larger publications as well. So a breath of different offsite content That's awesome Yeah, really excited to kind of dig into some of that and obviously, you know working for a large company and and you know Having a large marketing team It's always great to hear about you know what some of the companies likes zoom info are doing You know where you've got like a really robust team and you know larger marketing operations I think there's always some some good learnings that you know some of us on smaller marketing teams can take away But you know for anyone else listening in as well that is is part of a larger team Yeah, looking for some hopefully beneficial takeaways for them too But why don't we just kind of get started with we'd love to hear about you know Just kind of like what what's working well for you all right now? You know what do you feel like you know whether it be just the type of content or you know specific channel?
We'd love to just kind of hear about you know Any any successes or trends that your team has been experiencing so far in 2022 and yeah, and you know why you think that might be? Yeah I think for zoom in but like I think over kind of social media broadly speaking What are the things we early on decided to do that I decided to do was focus on fewer channels more So I think of it dies one of the things is you're putting the same content out in the same format across every single channel So it's like Twitter linked it post and like YouTube description are all written the same way So or in Facebook and all that so it's like first step was just learn what is working on each individual channel and more catered to that side of it so one of the things that we had done was Cut down the number of post like massively like first was I first they was like let's cut down basically half the number of Post that we're posting and just spend like more than twice as much time working on each one of them What ended up happening as we got you know over the course of about you know six months You're got like three times the amount of engagement doing half the number of post and two times an increase in terms of website referral traffic And it's like I mean it's obviously you guys that anybody else like these things are highly correlated It's like more engagements equals more followers equals more website traffic and so it's like okay engagements are kind of our guiding Metric here and we want to like really use that as a way to focus on like how do we drive specifically that metric Because I think sometimes a lot of times with social people you can pick any sort of metric that you want or there's a whole bunch of different ways That you can look at it But ours need to be highly correlated towards engagements And for us there it's like anybody else video is doing really well stuff like that is doing really well for kind of consistently driving video Engagement short things on LinkedIn longer content on YouTube But for us I'd say probably one of the nicer wins has also just been like continuing to diversify post types So like text only great more text only post they do really good if you have really good text But you can't just do those only you have to do text only a video on me one something else So I think broadly speaking for 2022 is just been like diversifying that mix and making sure that that mix lines up with the channel that it's Actually on like that we're putting it like the like not a 20-minute video necessarily on like did but 20 minute video on you So it's like making sure that the content that we place is going to the place where it sort of should is best served And so where does that like where does that start in your production process? Is this like are you thinking about this in the early stages when you're brainstorming about like let's say content topics? Just you know at the highest level are you at that point thinking about like how it's going to be applied to the different channels that you're Going to roll it out on or is that something that comes a little bit later in the process like okay?
We've got kind of our killer content here now It's time to you know almost customize it for the different channels that we're we're going to be looking to distribute it on Yes, I think anybody who works at a larger company would probably like feel for me on this like you have a lot of stakeholders I have a lot of Stakeholders and content that needs to go out and it's not always like not only do we have things that are like press releases Product announcements feature updates like we also have a responsibility towards HR career development like hiring making sure that we're like setting traffic to those Also, you know, we are a company like acquires other companies that you're trying to balance between like different stakeholders within each product So I think there's one side of it that's like Social in my team is an intake and then we add a better social version of it So it's like okay great Information is coming from a different part of the company We use ours like this is how we're gonna craft the message This is how we're gonna get it out there So that's like one side of things and then the other side for me more on the production is the way my team like we make what is social first content and one of the things is like broadly speaking for my team I try and have it divided between people who are within the side of distribution and the side of content production and they sit on the same team as opposed to being like a content team that then hands over blog post To then publish we have that motion, but I also have a motion within my team where it's like what do we think will do well on social and Somebody in the team is directly connected to the social person from the start and we produce the content together And we try to produce it on a much shorter time frame So it's like we think a customer story that is mostly animation will look and perform well on social Okay, great We will handle that task borrow assets from the creative team borrow work with customer success But like generally the production from the start is we think this will do well on LinkedIn as a vertical video This is the content of it So for us It's like a lot of some of our content is intake content that then goes out We add a social kind of flair to it and then some of it is we think that we're going to make something that we actually think will be very productive in terms of engagement and we're just going to produce it from the start for social That's really really interesting. Yeah, I think There's a I mean, there's a lot that I think marketers could probably learn from from that process, right? But the things that really kind of stuck out to me there were two things right this concept of social first content, right? I think that that is you know extremely important, right?
I think that we're fine labs, you know, we're often referring to it as like Creating content where the message should be conveyed in feed, you know, we spoke with Amanda and to the dad from from Spark Twero not too long ago She's calling it zero click content but this concept right that like the the content that you produce, you know It need to be thinking about exactly where it's going to be living where it's going to be distributed in the early stages They are otherwise, you know, you're really just kind of trying to almost, you know force a square peg into a round hole and and I think that you know for the most part people can typically tell the difference right in In terms of like the the quality of the content that you're putting out there and certainly, you know When you really try to kind of track it back to what's working and what's not, you know, that's really where You know, there's there's no more assumptions being made right? It's either you're getting the engagements from it or you're not and so before we dive into the you know The other thing that you said that I thought was interesting I would love to hear more about like how are you measuring success with you know, your respective pieces of content on the different channels right talking About engagement being the primary KPI, but you know, how do you look at engagement, you know, and does it differ from channel to channel? Yeah, and I just I mean, I love I mean I just work on zero click content and everything that route and I think it's just so interesting to see people being more focused on it. I think what's funny when I think about it and towards some of the goals is like People used to say like oh, what are the best practices for video?
like what's a good video best practice and like If you look at content on TikTok or even like YouTube shorts or even stuff you see on LinkedIn It's like you wouldn't say best video practice is start in the middle of a word Make it the video so condensed that somebody might have to watch it three times to understand what's happening and cut off at the variant But that is like incredibly successful videos on TikTok are all done like that where there's like parts missing It's hard to understand what's happening sometimes that you're watching it like two to three times like a video best practice would never say Make it so it's kind of confusing what's going on in the first second And then make it so you're once you get to the end of the video you then have to watch the beginning again two more times like but that's what works on TikTok same thing with like YouTube. It's like you would say like oh Don't make a video under two minutes or don't make a video over like two minutes because watch time has a tendency to drop off But like I do too there are a lot of people who upload like 20 30 minute videos for like B2B companies that are like tutorial stuff You know and then people watch a ton of that So I think like a lot of things I've been thinking about more is that the best practices for some sort of media versus the best practices for a channel Are sometimes like pretty different and kind of also shocking when you say them out loud as a content producer like transitions or intros are not really important for TikTok Like immediately move to hooks. Um, but when I look at like how do we kind of separate up the different goals of the channel I think most channels make it abundantly clear if you just look it up like YouTube is really clear It's watch time they say it tell you it if you look at the chart It is the bottom of their funnel is watch time. So it's like that is my major metric of success because the channel is going to reward it It's like if you're driving the thing that the channel wants if it wants more watch time coincidentally we show up in more search results We are our videos are recommended more often.
So it's like clearly that's important conversion rate on dumb nails It says really clearly YouTube conversion rate on dumb nails great. We show up in more arcada content LinkedIn it's like the same thing. It's just like engagements is going to be your general driver And not linking off to other sites which they often just are going to penalize so it's like great engagements are where we look at For like then we also do look at web referral traffic because we want to track some of the attribution And also we want to track kind of our contribution towards careers pages and things like that for hiring Which is like a big one for us. So I think when we look at it, it's generally engagement Our like overall numbers are always sort of engagement web traffic and Um Total follower count because followers are basically in my mind like the asset we are building It's your long-term asset that doesn't tend to fluctuate by month to month But like it's not like you lose 10% of your followers in any given time Um And so those are the primary ones, but then it sort of varies by channel where it's like youtube We would probably look more towards watch time just because it has a larger effect How do you how do you so a few minutes ago?
You talked about um one of the one of the things that you guys did Um was deciding to do less you focused in more, you know less less content more quality How do you decide what is high quality? I mean, I guess this kind of goes hand-in-hand with some of the metrics and things that you're watching but How do you decide from your from your viewers perspective or the readers perspective? What is the quality level or the quality type that you want to spend your resources on? How do you decide that?
Oh, okay. Well, I mean it's interesting because if we were just going for engagement This is usually the example like if we were going for engagement We would just produce like him Kardashian murder mystery show and now it'd be like the best Like it would no doubt it would kill it would be great. We would get a ton of interest So one there is a balance where you're not just going straight up for engagement You have to be talking about topics that are actually relevant to your buyers Right and so that's why one of the things I do is like follow or count and who our followership is made above It's like a big part of that right? So if where if for some reason we start bringing in a different group of people that is not going to engage with our regular kind of content that would be an issue but I like I digress there like the main thing is that When we're deciding what's good, there's always going to be qualitative stuff in marketing like acting like marketing I believe is not cannot live in a totally data-driven way You're just not going to end up with good quality marketing.
You're just gonna have like incremental things only So one I don't I definitely try to Make sure the things I feel like are relevant to our buyers When I look at a piece of content like one of the ones that I really like to see in terms of emotion to know if something's good is shares I really think shares are a good driver of like somebody else has gone out and said This is a good thing and they posted it and they want other people to do it I think that's a great That's a great one where you know you're producing content that people want to share Whereas like press news and things like that which are often like engagement heavy are really really interesting But it's not it's like yay celebratory not like you can see this Which is I like that you need to see this content The other thing that I think is like one that is more anecdotal is on our own sales team What I love to see is people at Prospects or at existing customers and so it's like here's a new feature You know henry shucks going on he's making a video about how you can use this new air cover feature air covers like great for market Against sales teams and then you just see it just lit up with people being like at this person I think you should check this out at do we have this or my favorite is when customers at whoever is managing their zoom in Vote account to be like have we set this up? It's basically like have we started using the chair doing this thing and you're like okay great I know this content is making like a discernible impact in the sales process. It is directly applicable It's showing up where people are it's really really relevant to our buyer and it's getting engagements great But like to me sometimes you just want positive association and you just want positive things that agree that's between people So looking at engagements is like the my kind of guiding light But obviously there are like times where you're like this could be low engagement, but it got a lot of shares great This could not be a lot of people are saying like oh yeah Like I love this or hi-fi but they're pointing out to prospects or pointing out to customers or customers are like this is really cool Great that works for us as well So those are kind of the main I'd say ways that we try and balance whether the content is like a success or not How much engagement and how much does it align to our buyers and then what do they do with it when they see that information? So with those with those mentions that you're that you're getting right Like obviously, you know, you love to see them your team loves to see them Maybe take a couple snapshots and socialize it around like hey This one really you know this hit the ICP that we were going for Do you see your sales team take any type of action when they see something like let's say there's some type of target account Like you mentioned prospects that are engaging or commenting or you know mentioning one another You know, do you typically see any type of sales motion that follows that so that people can try to you know Almost like kind of almost convert, you know, a person that seems to have some level of preliminary interest in the content.
But now Yeah, yeah, we're really like I'm very happy with how aligned zoom in post sales team is amazing And there's really nice alignment in a lot of ways between what we do on social and how we get information over to sales So like sometimes it comes in the form of like we literally have slack channels that are like sending Opportunities they're like hey, this person is hosting an interesting thing Does this seem like an opportunity? Anybody want to pick this up? Um, or like a lot of the times you see towards things like upsell potential opportunities will surface of maybe a customer's like, oh, you know I'm trying to do this thing not realizing that you know, zubid bow is like a has that already right or has a feature that they could be using more effectively So we do a lot to just funnel things directly to sales when we see them on social from like a monitoring perspective Uh, we also do a lot within having Basically using sprout social to send weekly emails of content that's relevant on both from us and also just like it disrew I like oh, here's an interesting article or thread that's going on. You should check this out consider commenting And just basically trying to build out a more engaged sales force on social So I it's definitely something where we work with our like sales team a lot to try and figure out more and more ways to get people Relatively active there that coordination having having your sales team involved like that Not not just, you know, they're posting some things on LinkedIn or whatever ever so often but actually coordinated and being involved in what's going on Man, it helps so much.
That's awesome that it does and I mean, it's like I think people don't spend Thing is like it's been a real learning experience to me because like it is a really stepping process to get better on social Like it's you can't just go all of us out in like overnight have your mentality completely change and go from like never posting anything to like being like Hit it with great song post to get touch engagement It takes time and so like some of it for us is a lot of just like training the sales team providing more resources on it Trying to get people more active trying to work with leadership so they're surfacing up things to their team It's it is really a long process But it's one that it's like if you could build that motion into the company and your company is growing Like it's only going to be helpful Yeah, that internal marketing is so critical, right? And I think it's a good lesson out there for marketers, right? Like if a company the size of zoom info can figure it out, right? Of just like how to keep everyone in the loop as far as the content that's getting put out there Who's engaging on it?
Is there a potential upsell opportunity or even you know a net new logo that you know has shown some level of interest in our content And and a team of your size with you know, the volume of of sales that you're doing If you're able to figure it out, I think the rest of us should be you know able to as well and it's funny You know just mentioning right like the internal slack channels That's that's kind of how we have things set up here too, right? And and and those signals Even if they are few and far between they can just be so powerful In terms of you know kind of getting a salesperson or someone who's you know Just see something with a current customer that maybe you don't support But you know your colleague does and and having a some type of system to be able to kind of bubble those things up and and notify the appropriate people Yeah, that stuff is is really what you know can separate a good content Let's say production from a great one, right? And that's where you can really start to say like hey There is no longer questions being raised about the value of the content that we're producing because you know Not only are we getting the engagements the things that we're looking for But we're also you know now starting to have an impact on you know sales or account retention or upsells or cross-sells And that can be you know such a huge difference maker for so many content marketers out there that often struggle to You know tie a dollar sign or an RY back to what they're doing outside of you know Maybe gating content, which I think you know is is not always the best plate But certainly you know there's plenty folks out there that you know have found ways to utilize that strategy Yeah, I think a lot of people I think sometimes there's a visibility thing between marketing and sales where I don't always see that You know sales doesn't know the volume of content that's getting out there and it's a good way Would you use social or getting people involved in social it's just showing what people are producing But it also to me feeds back like because I now know what content our sales rep sharing Like I have this whole metric where each week there's a list of maybe five to eight pieces of content It's like give this six weeks eight weeks 10 weeks, you know what I mean once you get out at a certain point It's very clear what type of content is going to be good for your sales team and how do you emphasize more of that? And so it's like I think one of the things is it's a very like nice reciprocal thing where you're getting information and can say like oh This week I'm gonna highlight these five pieces of content Okay, this one did a particularly before next week I'll remove and play it replaced with a different thing and see how that does And so like it's been really nice to kind of also monitor and pull that back in in terms of like useful content that people have It's a it's a really great insight They being able to see what are the salespeople sharing?
What are the salespeople saying because the sales team if they don't if they don't think that this piece of Content is gonna have any measure of helping them close a deal or get a new lead or something They're not gonna share it They're not gonna waste their time with it And if you're creating a whole bunch of stuff and your sales team doesn't you want to share it? That should be a little light bulb moment Um if you're if you've got a content strategy where now sales is involved and they're wanting more of it They're asking for it. You're on the right track. You're doing something good Yeah, and I mean I think it changes like it probably adjusts between what stage people are in or like what kind of stage of company people are in or what They're like strategy in terms of it is gonna be but it's definitely a chance like in the same way that I think of SEO is something you optimize and build a channel around YouTube You think about like building towards watch time because it grows steadily like Advocating employees and salespeople is another channel and you just have to think about what works for that group of people and what's gonna be most effective But I mean I've even heard on your show of you guys talking about like how a lot of salespeople are kind of being enabled with like micro marketing tools Right like basically like automation emails like all this thing is salespeople have access to now It's like you want your content if they're sharing it on social it'll get built into their sequences It'll get out there more effectively and you'll know like oh great.
This is useful content Directly in the sales products that's also a lot of views because it's going out to like lots of different people Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry Yeah, I you know, I did not just it's not just that it's getting out there from your sales team or it's you know a wider distribution But generally speaking people want to follow people You know, it's not just you have to have more than just a content feed from the brand profile That's great, but you know my opinion on it usually is like that's a starting point Like this is the the queue of content now everybody should come in and grab from there and start sending it outward People like following people better and salespeople that can build great networks some of them have big followings already They're talking to customers prospects every day so they know what's topical Another company that works are huge like they're like we track one of the things we track is earned media Basically like it gives you kind of a percentage of what you would pay given like the reach you're getting through people sharing the content And yeah, it's like it's funny because it's this interesting balance between who shares how large is the person we get the people who share and then like How frequently are people sharing? So one of the things is you can see on like a week by week basis because basically we track it week by week is like Sub weeks when a couple of like sales people with large following share something It's like you're bringing in potentially like tens of thousands of dollars earned media with just a few sales reps And it's like that is next to everything you're doing on your corporate feed So it's like why would you not do like there's no negative outcome the worst thing that happens is like wow a lot of people are talking about this They got zoom info which is great like none of that is ever gonna be bad in my mind Yeah, and you know you mentioned right that like there is seemingly a little bit of a convergence in terms of like sales and market Right and the best sellers understand marketing the best marketers understand selling right so I think what's what's interesting about all this that you guys are talking about right now is that you know if you can Not just arm your sales team with like the latest and greatest content and have a good system for ensuring that they've got you know Everything that they need and that there is some type of feedback loop there But also that the sales team understands how to distribute it right and that that let's you know for instance on LinkedIn I think is a great example.
Obviously, there's a lot of active sellers on LinkedIn I'm sure you know a majority of your target ICP is on there as well so I'm sure your sellers are extremely active on LinkedIn and If you're utilizing your sales team to help distribute your content the right way It's not just about like having some type of canned You know post that everyone just like goes into a tool and clicks on it and it goes out Right, but like if if you're doing it the right way You're your sellers and the people who are distributing your content also understand You know in some ways how the LinkedIn algorithm works And so if they're posting something there is that like golden hour after a post where LinkedIn is ultimately deciding like what do what What do I want to do with this post in terms of like the reach I want to give it And if it's getting a lot of engagement in that first hour, right That's typically when things are going to take off and so you know for your sellers, right? If they're you know There's some type of like internal slack channel where you're sharing the latest and greatest Or they're talking about something that they're posting and you can get a little bit of additional engagement From your colleagues whether it be in terms of likes or shares or or comments on their posts And you do that in a timely fashion all of a sudden you can see those those impression numbers just skyrocket As compared to just telling your team like all right, you know Here's some new content we produced this week How about it? Let me know how it goes or you know, make sure you include this in your email cadences But if you're giving them the right type of coaching Yeah, like that's you know a potentially way that you could say thousands of dollars At the minimum, um, you know over the course of a year when you've got your sellers helping You really put this out there into the masses and there's large networks and doing it the right way And taking advantage of what we do know about the you know the link in algorithm No, it's great. Yeah, oh sorry go ahead.
No, I was gonna say there there is I can't think of a downside to to really working at getting the sales team involved You're getting direct feedback from the people talking to prospects on is this content gonna work or not I mean they they have a pretty valid opinion before it even is distributed I it's I was like very easy and then but I mean it's not like I try It's like that's the channel. That's what works for that channel like for that channel But there are times where you just like you got a fire meme that's gonna get a bunch of engagement great Do that too? You know what I mean? It probably won't get shared a lot by sales, but it will get a good amount of engagement on our own posts or a text-only post That's like emoji heavy or something like that might not get desired by sales, but good awareness on zoom info brand So to me, it's just like I think uh, yeah, what they get like definitely it's great I wouldn't have people over rotate to like everything everything that social puts out always needs to be relevant to ourselves For sure it's balanced.
It's a balance, but it is like a helpful one that I'm surprised at how few people take advantage um, and I think sometimes in social like people could be a little bit like overly geeky on the way that their social looks and works and I think the more you can kind of like Emphasize your own employees and sort of expand their voice and like do that and get them more involved in the process Whether it's sharing or producing or like we often reshare if a sales rep or a csm has great content. They've posted It's like oh, we'll reshare repost that type of thing So it's like it gets people involved across the board Which I just think is a much nicer thing than kind of surprised at how little most companies do if that I'm curious about where your ideas for content comes from or like not just the type of topic or the type of content But the subject and how do you come up with ideas that that seems to be a really hard part of being consistent with a content marketing strategy Ideation so like outside of things that are Like outside of things that are kind of things that come in we add our own spin. How do we ideate for social first content? I definitely think that Part of it is a pretty bit ridiculous about just like what does our company do?
You think that sometimes people create a lot of content that they think was this would be interesting But it's like what are the core things we do and what are things that we have that other people don't have or what are perspectives that we have That other people don't have so I think like one thing is like I try to keep things locked that and then think of also trends that I'm seeing that I think would be interesting Um, so for example like one piece of content. We have a podcast pretty big deal We sell to a huge portion towards like sales reps and frontline users You want people to talk about pretty big like a deal that's important in their kind of career and makes them think differently And part of the reason for that one was just like it is an ingrained component of almost all sales teams to have sales huddles Where you talk about deals it is super relevant. It happens to all things every time that are all hands presentations large deals are presented It's culturally aligned to zoom info. It's something that we do eternally we emphasize so it's like makes sense Right that one makes sense for our audience.
It's something that I think feels good and it's like, okay This is going to be relevant content Sometimes we see things that some of our like for example one that I'm excited about some of our sales reps do Is they started posting about a couple sales reps started posting where they take a news event that occurred And they would look at that news event backwards in time To see if there was intense signals or sort of spikes about things to give some indication So like one example is somebody's you know pulls up Bill Gates got to build a litigate it's got divorced You pull up the millenigates found it or the little litigates foundation on zoom info you look at their profile You notice, you know, you skip back a little bit and you notice like oh wow they had like huge intent spikes for like PR press They're trying to like order a press strategy. They have crisis comms and things like that So it's like a fun way to showcase the product where they're showing like intent, right? They've also done similar things towards like data breaches, you know, it's like oh This company said they had a data breach if you look back like two months You could see there was an intent spikes and looking at things like that And it's like wow, this is interesting content like they are interesting This is something that we're internally making that's interesting now It's like can I put more of a marketing spin on it? So then we package that up into a series called like what's the scope and start putting that out there It's being like oh here's some interesting data that you can use from the platform, right?
Unique to zoom info aligns to our target buyer showcases the product in an interesting way So I think like that's one of them that's really creative and then I think for me The one that's probably the most furthest out is sort of like data story Where we do these occasionally where we'll use zoom info platform to kind of pull market data that we think is going to be interesting So like one of the ones that to try and get it picked up within publications Business Insider the economist or something like that So like one of them that's an example was A couple of years ago we did some data polls on the number of diversity equity inclusion Like executives over time, right? So it's like looking at the I executives over time And then also looking at kind of pre and post George Floyd the percentage of the I executives at Fortune 500 companies, right? So it's like it's a super relevant topic. It's really unique data It's like kind of a choke It's like something that we're adding to a broader conversation and it's like I think if we pitch this the news outlets, it'll get picked up So it's like, oh, yeah, great business insider picks it up a couple different articles pick it up a few HR people pick it up citation for zoom info That's great.
Um, and then even recently the economist had picked us up a while ago being like, oh, we're working on an article Can you refresh this data? So there is a chunk that it's like I think this is unique stuff that only zoom info has There are a lot of companies out there that probably have something that's unique to them, you know, some company that might sell Keep it's like technology probably has really good data on how many people are going back to the office Right, some company that has like some interesting niche that they have like can make content that will probably get picked up by somebody who is looking for some insights on that So I'd say that's the other one is that's that's that's the little bit of a trickier one where it's kind of more looking at the news cycle And then saying like on a sort of ad hoc basis Like do we feel that we have something that could contribute to this particular news event or a news story really well Um, another one would be like link did fake profiles on LinkedIn It's like we're able to like quickly kind of run analysis of like, oh, how are you able to contact somebody? Uh, if you just took a random sample like a people in like did not in zoom info Like what does that look like when you try and how it reached to somebody? That's a really great contribution to the conversation around like did fake profiles So those are ones that are like oh and you see these topics come up if you like me spend an enormous time on social for a job It's like you just see them come up and then you go like we kind of get together as a team and go like can we put with a story?
Do we have an angle here? What format would it work best on? Okay, maybe we could produce a short gift Maybe we could produce an ad abation. We could use just a visual.
Maybe this is just a text only post Um, so like once we sort of see some news conversation that's going on It's like becomes a very good. How can we have a comment or something to add to it? If you are a CEO or of a small company or a marketing marketing leader, maybe of a large company This podcast should be a really clear example of why you need somebody that is focused on this work and thinking about this stuff 100 Of the time. I mean the amount of The number of your brain cells that have been Focused on this strategy and how to do it well and what to change like you can't replace that with somebody who is covering lots of different areas of marketing And the content strategy is just one other piece of it Like it matters this matters so much to the success of long-term growth.
You've got to have somebody focusing on it You know, it's just you're obviously doing a lot of things really well. So I appreciate that Yeah, I think the other the other thing too the other important lesson that i'm hearing um and as you mentioned earlier on in our conversation is about Um, keeping the production and distribution plans very tightly aligned So it's not necessarily that one comes after the other or one is more important the other but you know In your case, right everyone's got to see at the table You know whether it's about a newsworthy event whether it's about some type of like look back in time whether it's about You know trying to find that unique point of view that your company has when you've got the production and the distribution top of mine That's when you know, you're going to be able to create the best content and create it for this specific channel rather than just creating the content And figuring out how you're going to distribute it later And I think that is probably one of the biggest fatal flaws that we see with You know different companies that we talk to or that we work with is that the distribution just becomes an afterthought and it can't be It needs to be you know right there at the forefront along with the ideation because otherwise You know, it's never going to take off and it's just not going to be worth all the time and energy that uh, you know The team puts into it. So um, that's uh, yeah And I mean like it is also um I think just a lot of times optimizing for getting for shipping things is very important and I think like a lot of people are like Yes, we're deeply thinking about the distribution, but sometimes their distribution blade is just too long It's like oh, we have this great research. Well, let's do the ebook first then like out of that two blog post then we'll produce a video It's like is video the best let's just start there like let's immediately start with whatever the best thing is and ship it Like I'm not of the impression like a lot of people feel like their social feed is this like very well understood narrative And not just like oh we posted something, you know that like we should post about this day And then like people will be familiar with what we posted that so that next day we'll do a follow up It's like no people are not going to be familiar They just like walk in randomly they see yourself sometimes It's not a coherent even though you feel as a marketer that it's a coherent feed It's not necessarily a coherent feed to the user So like they don't care that you wrote the ebook first and then the blog post of this It's like they just want to see the information and I think sometimes in marketing It's over optimized to a large distribution plan rather than just like ship the video Like get a video out ship the video great get the blog post out ship the blog post great And then like if it's if we're getting good engagement, then yeah sure an ebook is fantastic But sometimes like I content ideas are all developed in parallel at the same time and then they become intertwined and then like things get delayed stuff happens And it's like way too much when if you just think I think I'm gonna get the most engagement if I have a really good gift Like devote all energy to biking that gift sweet right out of the gate and then if the other stuff seems useful do that Yeah, love it.
I love it. Um, all right. Well, I think we're probably getting to the point now where we're gonna wrap things up here So sam, this was a awesome conversation. Um, yeah I know I had a lot of expectations for both big and small teams and they'd be able to have some action we'll take away So you're right.
I think you definitely helped us deliver on that one for this episode So we appreciate you joining um, and then I guess just one more time, uh, you know before we wrap it up here How can people find you and your company? Yeah, so you should just follow zoom info on everything Especially check out our youtube our podcast pretty big deal. Um, that would be great. You could find me On linkedin my name is a vaulter or twitter svvaulter.
Um, and yeah, just thank you so much for having me on the show Awesome. Well, thanks again sam matt appreciate you as well and until next time everybody out there