Welcome back to second growth. This is Cassidy Carl. How you doing? Oh, doing good Cassidy.
Thanks for having me. Always, always love that you're here every single time. So I appreciate it. I just keep getting the invite.
I'm not sure how I keep earning this invite, but I'm here man. So I'm talking. I'm so hoping you earn it. I got the trust in you.
Nice. Alright man, let's welcome our guest Dan Sanchez. Dan, how you doing? Doing well.
Thanks for having me on. Dan, I mean, I'll introduce you. We go way back to your days at Sweetfish, which I used in the past and was instrumental in kind of getting our first podcast off the ground at a different company. Now you're director of inbound marketing at Element 451 and you'll still have your inside business around audience growth, which we want to get into.
What did I miss? What else are you doing? I mean, that's kind of it. I have my personal brand, which people know me as Dan Chez.
So that's a thing. And then I'm working at Element 451. And then like just before we're on this call, I mean, obviously we're talking about homeschooling kids. So that's kind of my other my other life, offside podcasting and what I'm doing on LinkedIn.
All my time goes there. The personal brand stuff and then element. That's my life. Working family, man.
Working family. I got to go. Welcome to Dan real quickly about like that transition, right? So because you're a new wish in your role and it's a pretty big like shift in industry, you were doing stuff with Sweetfish.
You were like their executive producer. Obviously you were in that world having lots of different companies. And now you're doing demand for marketing for, you know, it looks like a CRM for the education space. But that feels like a dramatic pivot in your career.
Like walk, I guess walk us through that really quickly. Like how you thought about that? He decided on something like that. And like how it's going.
Yep. I was. I was. I have a habit in my career of shifting between agency and in-house.
I've done this a few times now. And I tend to get dissatisfied working for one for too long, right? Because you work in-house, but then what happens is you become the expert, the all-knowing person on marketing, right? And then you're just hungry to learn.
You start filling yourself plateau. So you go work for an agency and dang, you're working with some solid marketers now. You're cooking. And but you start to fatigue in a different way because you're learning all this new stuff and you're applying it across dozens of clients and at Sweetfish, we were working primarily with B2B SaaS, though B2B generally.
And I got to a point with Sweetfish where I'm like, I'm learning all these sweet things about podcasting and audience growth. But you know how it is working for an agency? Refined lives as an agency. Sometimes you can only get clients to move like a few steps up the ladder and you're kind of like, come on, if we can only go to the top rung, this could be so good.
What if? What happens? You start having, I start getting this hunger to go in-house again. You're like, well, if it has to be, it's up to me.
I'm going back, being that solo marketer, not an element. I'm not the solo marketer. I sat down in probably December, January. I started filling that itch again.
And I love Sweetfish. James Carberry has fricking changed my life, man. We're great. He's a great friend to me.
And I've been a huge role and advocate for me from beginning. But I was starting to talk to them about moving on and what that looked like. I had to think like, well, okay, well, if I'm going to move and go in-house again, where's it going to be? So you start to walk down the process and I go, I knew I wanted to work in tech specifically, SaaS, because that's where I've been working on with Sweetfish, like all the clients where I had the most experience.
But I'm like, okay, but what vertical? We had hypothesis at Sweetfish that SaaS is going to move vertical, that that's going to be where the growth is. Right now, it's a little slow, but I'm predicting over the next 10 years that it's going to swing back from horizontal to vertical because tech goes through cycles. Like, we've seen this over and over again.
The pendulum's going to swing back. It always does. And it'll go back horizontal again eventually. Who knows how.
But it's moving vertical. So I picked higher education because I'd spent six years as a director of marketing for higher ed. And before element existed, I was rigging together small business CRMs because that's what we could afford. And I made those things for that college and we tripled enrollment.
So I knew it's nice to be a marketer of something where you can understand and empathize with the audience. Right? So that was a strategic choice. I know it also would be easier to get the job because they would see the role of being a marketing director for higher ed as a plus.
Right? Instead of a negative, if I were to go into thin tech, they'd be like, well, that doesn't count for you. That doesn't count as years of experience for you. So strategically, I knew that would just get me a role faster and actually count for my work.
Yeah, it's really interesting. You mentioned that in your journey, we just had the CMO splash gate on the show. And she'd also gone back to her industry after being away for a while. And so I'm curious, as you're going through the stop process of leaving looking at verticals and you're looking at higher ed, how much of it was I have experience there so I can accelerate the ability to find a job in my growth versus like I have a passion for it as well.
Was it kind of both? Yeah, I love education. I actually struggle with traditional education, even for my own college. I found a weird university that just let me like jump to the final test on almost every class.
I mean, I run my bachelor's degree in like eight months in the Mayan and six months, because that program lets you go as fast as you're capable of or know how. Of course, some, you don't know all the subjects, so they'll slow you down. But I love education. Obviously, like even if you're watching the video, I like this big bookshelf and that's just one, I have another one over here, just full of books because I love freaking learning.
And I find that people who work in higher ed also love learning, you know, just makes sense. So I like working in the industry and a lot of people over there are hungry for change. Don't know what to do though. It's slow and even taking things that are like just best practices over in Techland and bringing it over to higher ed, you just look like a rockstar man.
So easy turf, I understand it and I have a passion for it. So it's kind of a combination of both knowing that it's a good market and I like it. Yeah, so I came from like the non-profit before, refined before HubSpot, I sold like non-profit CRMs and CMSs to like big mega churches and non-profits like Billy Graham crusade, like stuff like that. And I think there's a lot of similarity, right?
Because those are like legacy. I guess I think of maybe you think of these the same way, Dan, but like I think of like, those are like legacy kind of companies are still like 15 years behind like HubSpot and Sweetfish and Clary and Refine Labs. And so it is enticing to go and potentially step back into a legacy industry and be like a rockstar because like, I mean, you can go in and do so much damage fairly easily because there's so much work and just, you know, marketing debt, you know, like I'm trying to find the equivalent of like technical debt for like go to market technical debt, you know, that it's fun to make big, big leaps and bounds. Whereas you go to like a really cool like SaaS company, like let's say I go to, you know, be a sales leader like Chili Piper, you go to Chili Piper, somebody that's like pretty like modern, right?
It's like the transformation and the changes is more instrumental. You're probably not going to go and like install a podcast. It's going to be like this huge groundbreaking thing. It's like already doing a ton of those great things and it's working.
So like the change is more incremental. So I would assume like a little bit less exciting. So that resonates with me just kind of that desire to go back into education for a couple of different reasons. Yeah, I got a lot of questions I can ask here.
One would be though, maybe, and I got a thread. But one is explain more about this thesis that you had with James that the SaaS industry would verticalize. I'd love to hear kind of a little bit of thought process there. And I kind of, I think led also to, you know, you looking at your next gig by industry and by SaaS because you're probably looking at what industry do I want to be in?
My hypothesis is SaaS verticalizes and that's what we're doing with the CRM for education, which is a vertical SaaS application. So maybe thinking through this journey, this hypothesis seemed to have a big impact on your decision making. And where did that come from? I'm still doing it.
I mean, part of it is we're all marketers here. We all understand the game of advancing your careers. A marketer is picking the right horse. It doesn't matter how good of a jockey you are.
If you're picking a bad horse in a bad market, so ultimately that's what I'm picking. I'm trying to pick the right company in the right industry that I know is poised for growth. And I think we were seeing a lot of trends of vertical just becoming better because it's getting easier to build the system. What used to be hard and used to be just like only Salesforce to do that level of complexity.
Well, now people are creating all these crazy tech frameworks to make it easy to duplicate what's in HubSpot can now just be duplicated on its own with less staff and be just as robust. Like an element, the more I go through the product, the more I fall in love with it because it literally has some of the more advanced features that I could do with like marketing cloud or Salesforce. But now I don't have to have these really cumbersome systems that can accommodate for almost everything. But now it can just be set up and ready to go just for my niche.
In fact, there was the biggest lesson I've learned over the last month is like everything I built for the college that I used to work for. It's all gone now. I documented the heck out of that thing. And I had training systems.
I even left behind somebody that knew the system, but eventually they left, they couldn't maintain it. It had to be rigged to fit a college model and it worked, but it didn't work for long. Eventually, it started falling apart. But when you have a vertical system, they not only know how to support you better, right?
They know the customer success is all element is all focused on just colleges, right? They have the same struggles over and over again. The tool can be accommodated just for applicants, right? And that's powerful.
And it's worth leaning towards rather than Salesforce. So that's playing out across multiple industries now, which is why a veterinarian's going to buy CRM specializes in veterinarians, why a dentist is going to buy a CRM that specializes in the appointment settings loop that dentists get into, rather than a generic small business CRM that can do that, but only with a lot more effort and something that the customer success people can't aren't armed with to understand the nuances of the problems. So I think because the text got easier to do and create all these verticals or it started to pop up, it actually, James got the insight from a VC that started talking about it. And as soon as James passed the information to me, I was like, Bob went off and I'm like, that's it.
And just because you've been around tech long enough, you know, the pendulum swings between these two things over and over again, you're like, uh-huh, this is a thing. Yeah. And I think you may get really astute point, not only does the pendulum swing back and forth, but the barrier to entry is dramatically lowering for the technology we're dealing with. Now it's only accelerating.
Like you can imagine this world of AI and stuff that's coming our way. You know, the ability to do these things in a verticalized manner will only increase. That's fascinating. I'm not afraid about that.
Carl, I'm not sure we're going to do that information. That's a good insight. Yeah. I mean, I saw that.
I saw that when I was at HubSpot, right? So I was a salesperson. I was trying to sell you like the general CRM and I always go up against like these little niche. I mean, there's so many little CRMs for like HVAC companies and plumbers and I used to go up against all of those.
And I mean, selfishly, I've always even thought about, you know, being a founder of one of these because like, you may be not going to become like the hundred billion dollar company, but man, in a niche, there is 50 million dollars in CRM revenue that you could capture, you know, or a hundred million in one of these niches. You just have to go in and understand those businesses. And then the thing is like, especially in the CRM space, it's like the CRMs are there, they're 80% the same. I don't know if like the end would agree with this, but like the core is this contact records, account records, like a lot of it's the same, but it's like those hyper specialized verticalized like modules, add-ons features that really make those platforms same.
Hundreds of little details make the difference. Hundreds of little details. It's why I don't do Android phone. I hate all the little details.
The big features are all the same. I can't stand all the little details of Android. So I use an iPhone. Yeah.
So let's overlay kind of this, the journey that you're on here with kind of the other thing that I've noticed your passion for around audience growth. And I really saw this bubbling up again back in the Sweetfish days, not only yourself, but I think you and James really started going down this path of the emphasis in the focus on audience, which I thought was awesome. And you've kind of taken it from there. So like, how did, why did that come to that?
Yeah, that became a thing. That became the thing because of James. And it's really because of James's insight into the market that people just don't want to podcast. They don't want to podcast.
They want an audience. That is the core thing. So I literally came into Sweetfish as the marketing director, but he had the insight to give me the title director of audience growth because that's what clients care about. And at the time, I was like, whatever, you're the boss.
I'll take, I don't care about the title. So I'll run with that title. Over time, I started to recognize the power of it. So James actually like set me up for that.
But I wrestled every marketer knows like, I feel like it's better to be a generalist. It's my conclusion now. And the specialist versus generalist debate, your actual execution skills should be generalist. And I don't mean like kind of know everything like actually be able to execute as many of the verticals you become a more powerful marketer.
You know, if you know the intricacies of PPC SEO, social, if you know how to do those well, it's powerful. But we all know the positioning problem of that if you can't be known for one thing, you have a problem with a personal brand. Because generalist, what is he? Oh, he's a marketer.
Yeah, he does marketing things. What does that mean? What kind of problems does dance? All that's a hard thing to know.
So I was posting on LinkedIn about all kinds of marketing things. And I just found that the people that specialized their personal brands went farther. And honestly, I started to find that I started just because I was helping so many clients with it, gaining an extra skill set around audience growth, which is more, more than just how to grow podcast organically. It was really like, how do you bring a full mix to grow an audience?
How do you use paid? How do you use owned? How do you use earned in order to grow one channel? And it started obviously growing with even more, how do you grow a LinkedIn following?
How do you do a following on YouTube? How do you follow on different places? So it started to build an expertise and then maybe even only in the last year, if I started going hard on it with my personal brand and now launching out a sweetfish, my goal is to continue to publish and be as helpful as possible around how to build an audience. But also do it for element 451.
This is my ultimate thing that my goal element 451 is to find a SaaS brand, build an audience, make it super successful. And that becomes the case study of like, I want to work with more companies that do this thing. Question four, you Dan, where do you feel like, because I feel like every company's like wants like an audience, right? And wants to grow their audience like, you never, I've never met any business professional that doesn't want to do that.
It doesn't have that goal. Like, why, where do they go wrong with it? Where are like some of the big mistakes that you see companies or marketing leaders make that just prevents them from growing their audience to kind of expose potential? The biggest problem most people run into is right at the beginning.
Like they never even have an audience to begin with beyond the paid list that they're getting and the people that don't unsubscribe right away. Like that's that's their audience. That's currently what we have for element 451 is kind of like this email list that got cobbled together from a bunch of different places we keep sending them emails. And then we have a certain percentage of them that for some reason have an unsubscribe.
That's their audience. But that's really starting without an audience. So there's that problem. And then there's another problem where people have an audience, but they've hit what I call the audience growth ceiling.
Like they can't get beyond this plateau for some reason. And there's some basic math that's causing that to happen for them. So, but the first one is definitely they just they haven't even really gotten anything started to begin with. And I actually find that everything you learn as an entrepreneur applies to audience growth at the beginning.
So take your lean startup methodology and just apply that to audience growth. Instead of product, market fit, your real goal should be media market fit. Think you put on your media company hat and pretend like you don't have a product in that you have to make money by getting an audience. What do you need to do?
You need to grow an audience by throwing out you have to have a hypothesis on what kind of content is going to resonate with a certain kind of person. And then you have to test that and test that post. Oh, there's a hit iterate test, test, post. And you know, and grow it slowly and organically because you're trying to find a media market fit before you can go into scaling an audience, which is what a lot of companies they just start doing content marketing.
And then they throw it out there, but they don't iterate. They don't do what creators do on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Right? If you go to any early days of any creator, you see it happening.
You see them testing out different ideas and then you see that have certain hits, right? You can see them thinking through like, how do I capitalize on what's working and they start to change their style, change what's resonating with the audience. So that's the problem most companies run into is they don't treat it like an entrepreneurial endeavor with the hypothesis that they're testing rapidly. And I can, I've now that I'm in this ass company, I'm starting to run into some of the reasons for that.
There's short term, like quarterly pressures to hit numbers. There's approval processes for every single piece of content. There are, there's leaning too heavily on sales and paid media in order to make the goal. So we're scrambling to test creative all the time.
And it looks like everybody else is great, because we're looking at our competitors instead of just going straight to the audience for feedback. So all those things keep people from actually being lean to test lots of different ideas to actually get to media market fit. So that's the biggest problem we have in the early stage. That's awesome.
And I love those reasons because I was going to press you on like, why though? Why? Because I know everybody wants the audience and everybody knows that they should be iterating. But what really prevents a team, smart people, right?
Good marketers from doing that. And I think you nailed some of those reasons are at the end, right? Short term, bold mindset, etc. So how do you maybe haven't done this yet, Dan, you're still early days at Element 451, you're in the process of this.
How do you break off of that hamster? How do you get out of that kind of cycle? What are some of your hypotheses around how a company would do that? How do you plan on doing that?
Well, so far, I'm running into two problems at Element that I'm still working towards overcoming, because if you turn it too fast and the whole team doesn't go with you, and so it takes time to like have change management go through, because the cycle that we're in didn't come out of nowhere. So you have to take everybody with you very slowly. We are spending almost, I'd say all of our left over time or our marginal time promoting webinars. Like every other SaaS company has, I've checked in with other friends, I find that this is a common thing.
We're very webinar focused. Webinars have a lot of inefficiencies and doing some things to fix that. The other problem is I think we're spending all of our butt and paid media budget on the bottom of the funnel instead of using it to accelerate our audience growth. So those are the first two things I'm tackling right now is coming up with a different strategy for paid media and trying to streamline webinars, they would not, for sure, well, let me stop webinars.
Right. So most people probably run to that, like we have to do webinars. I'm like, okay, but Kim, instead of crafting every email custom, can we have just lean on zooms built in email reminders? So that's one thing that I've done is just let's just lean into zoom because they send out a lot of these emails and we're spending a lot of time on every single email and then running it through the approval process where it's coming back down the ladder multiple times to get approved.
I'm like, we could be making content this time. And the team wants to work on content. That's the funny thing. And the senior leaders want to work on content.
They don't want this stuff happening. So we're changing that. We're simplifying webinars so that they're done at the same time every single month instead of just always picking a different time. So it's like, nope, for now on, it's going to be the first Wednesday at 1 p.m.
Eastern every single month. We're going to start coming up with the content calendar way ahead of time so that we can kind of systematize it and eliminate all everything we can. One of the biggest books that have impacted my career as a marketer is Tim Ferriss for our work week. Everything he has in there has made me a better marketer.
Even though he's using it to escape the grind, I'm using it to level up in my work. So he goes through, what can you just eliminate, just completely get rid of? Anything you can't eliminate, automate. Anything you can't automate, delegate, which means you have to actually type up with the process of an all these end statements for people to follow to know what to do so that you can hand it off and know that it's getting done well every single time.
So I'm in the process right now of eliminating, automating, and delegating to the team so that the webinars become streamlined instead of becoming 80% of the time, become 10% of the time, freeing up the time to then work on podcasts and the things that actually drive, drive, actually have a little bit more of a flywheel. Webinars don't have one, right? If I do a webinar well, I have to start all over from scratch every time because I'm good at fatigue my email list over and over versus a podcast. If I do it well, again, maybe my subscribers grow and they stick around longer and then it can grow.
My audience can grow. Where does your webinar audience grow? It doesn't. It's a bottom of the funnel tactic.
It works, especially in higher ed, they love in ours for some reasons. I'm like, okay, I'll keep doing it. That's cool. And then I'm also just refining our paid media strategy instead of focusing on everyone at the bottom of the funnel.
I'm just going to narrow it down to just a few decision makers, save a lot of budget and focus that at the top of the funnel with content, with any people to subscribe to our newsletter, getting people to subscribe to our podcast. Because just like Chris Walker says all the time, most people aren't in the buying stage. So you have to nurture the relationship and build affinity with people way ahead of time. That's kind of like the long term game plan.
But right now I've got to throttle back paid media and refocus and streamline webinars. Dan, talk to me and Cassie. I promise I'll let you talk sometime in this podcast. Cassie, you said something in the very beginning of that spiel, which was awesome about change management and people that you need to bring along with you.
And then he said something else interesting. You said, well, the executives want to be doing more content. My team wants to do more content, but there's laggards in there. So like, how are you?
And I want you to talk through your process here because Cassie and I talked to a lot of buyers and stuff that come in down. And the biggest challenge that I find that they face is change management. They want to change. You want to change.
But you got to bring so many people along with you. It's really, really difficult. Talk to me about how you are. Who do you find?
So two questions here. Who do you find is the most difficult to change or maybe the slowest? And then how are you working through that kind of change management, internal transformation process? I feel like that's going to be different every company.
It might be the CEO. It might be the CEO. So far, I've been really lucky. And I was also like during the interview process, I was putting out fillers where I'd be running in obstacles ahead of time.
That's one of the reasons why I chose Element is because I had a ton of alignment with the VP of marketing that I report to. Everything I throw to her, she's like, yes, amen, let's go. Right. The CRO is also a great CRO.
And the CEO had, I could tell already loved podcasting and had a vision for where I wanted to go. So now I'm literally just working through a lot of details and misconceptions and miscommunications. Like with the webinar stuff, all the custom emails we're doing, it took me a couple of weeks just to figure out why we were doing it. Because you know, you talk to the team, the team's like, oh, well, this person said, and I talked to that person, I go, well, that comes from the CEO.
So I finally get a hold of the CEO and the CEO is like, what are you talking about? Right? You're like, he's like, I didn't ask for all that. But I'm like, but you said here, he's like, oh, like, that's not what I meant.
Oh, oh, and why do we make this thing here? Oh, yeah, I made that. But now that you're talking about it, you're right, we can automate it all through Zoom. I don't really care about that.
Oh, because some other people thought that you cared about that. And that's why we did it that way. So it's really just coming in and trying to bring a lot of clarity with and trying to find out very carefully what people are more passionate about than others. And I want to step on people's toes.
So again, change management, lots of conversations. It takes a little bit longer. Like you wish you could change everything in two weeks, but honestly, it's probably to take a few months, maybe not enough to meet all the goals I have for this quarter, which is kind of like where I'm at now like, it's like expectations on goals, change management. We want to be slow and steady in changing things so that we don't like flip the ship upside down while we're trying to turn it, you know, you got we might not make as high of a goals as we were hoping for it, which is the conversations I'm in now.
But I've definitely worked for CEOs in the past that are like unyielding in their opinions and would not even let you hear out, we're not here out your argument without getting angry. Luckily, that's not what I'm running into element. They're pretty cooperative and everybody's everybody's moving with me on things. But it's part of what I was looking for in the interview process.
It's awesome. Yeah, just a side note there. And you said at the end, I think this is fundamental. You figure these things out in the interview process.
You hear a lot of marketers just lament about the situation you just outlined. It's never been more important to figure this out before you start the job. So well done. It's hard to figure out though.
Like, what would you tell, there's so many red flags that you've developed a skill set for because you've been burned by them. It's only until your mid career until you really start to look for some things that you didn't even know at the beginning of your career to ask. Yeah, it's kind of like your kids. You can do your best to kind of pass along your wisdom based on your experience.
They're only going to listen to so much until they figure it out themselves. Right. So I agree. It's very hard to easy to conceptually understand.
It's hard without going through and experiencing it to figure it out in real time. So my question then is, we get a lot of, I mean, I think a lot of individuals or companies would love to build an audience and don't know how. And so I'd love for you to walk through kind of your framework for doing that. Because I do think a lot of people start with, hey, can you help me launch a podcast?
And I think it's very insightful for you to say, listen, we don't really want to podcast. We actually want an audience. And that is, that is true. So how do you think about that, either at an individual level, like Carl would love to build a bigger audience.
Have you seen his? It's not that good. Or for a company, like it could be a company that you're starting from the beginning, like a element, it could be a company like refined labs or somewhere on the journey. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on just what's your framework for tackling this.
When I was meeting with clients for Sweetfish, one of the first things I tried to figure out is who are we talking about? Who is the audience? And trying to get as narrow as possible as who that was because the more narrow you can make it, the better you can make the content, right? If you're trying to satisfy everybody, you're always going to end up going to the middle of vanilla content.
Because if you're trying to satisfy too many people with one blog, the more you're going to just dumb it down to the point where it's not even interesting anymore. And that's sad. So I would always try to get them to be like, okay, what's our target? How narrow can we make it?
I know you serve three industries, but if one industry hit heart, like which one pays you the most, you know, which one has the best margins that you see the most gross potential for, because we're only going to target one. I wasn't always successful on getting them to that point, because sometimes they just have to target all three industries and they're wildly different. You're like, oh gosh. But if I can get them to narrow in on just one, that's another reason why vertical solutions are going to win is because they can build an audience way easier.
Now, how much easier it is to build an audience around higher ed in tech than it is just like multiple industries. It's going to be way easier for us than it is HubSpot. And I only get a small audience that won't compare to HubSpot. Like an email list of 6,000 people, my TAM only has 6,000 schools.
It's not going to be much easier. So you narrow in on the audience. And then of course, like every good marketer knows, you've got to talk to the audience to figure out what is the problem. And that's why I love podcasting.
I usually recommend going after a two channel strategy with podcasting being the one, you could do this with YouTube, you could do this with blogging. I just find podcasting to be simpler and easier to confuse the other two. So podcasting for me to be, of course, LinkedIn. So those are the two channels I go only on.
And I try to get people to ignore all the other channels. Don't do Twitter. Don't even post to it. Instagram, forget about it.
We got to get at least an audience built up on two before we can go to three. And just by creating focus, again, eliminate everything else, automate what you can, and then delegate. You got to go through the steps of freeing up enough time to really hit these two channels hard. You need a short form channel and a long form channel.
Unfortunately, with podcasts, there's not a lot of discoverability built in, which means you have to get it from somewhere else. With most companies, I also talk about like paid media and how to get that going too. But if you're starting from scratch, you have to focus on those two channels, talk to the audience, figure out what their pain points are. If you don't know what those are, then just start interviewing them on your podcast.
I often try to sneak in questions into the back of the interview that are like your rapid fire questions for short answers and make those questions like, what's the biggest struggle your teams running into this quarter? What's the biggest one you've had in last year? What is your boss care most about? Who influences your work the most?
Where do you hear from them? The answers to those questions are freaking gold. If you just ask the same people the same questions over and over again, and interview your ideal buyers, one, you can build relationships with them because they might become customers later, but two, it's fantastic market research, which will tell you what to start producing content on. You can start developing thought leadership around their biggest obstacles, around what they're excited about, around what their boss is asking for.
You can start building relationships with the people who are influencing them. They'll just tell you, oh, it's Chris Walker. When we asked the bunch of media marketers that question, of course, Chris Walker was one of the big ones. We should probably build a bigger relationship with them because the more we can do that, the more we'll be in front of our ideal buyers.
And then where did they hear from them? Because they'll tell you what channels to be on because you're asking them directly over and over again. Where do you hear from the most influential people from? There's some ideas on channels to go hit with paid media as well as your short form content.
And then it becomes about testing, slowly but surely getting used to the platforms and then testing your content with them. I can go into details like how to do it with podcasting versus how to do it with LinkedIn. It's different per platform, but generally it's testing it and doing a volume of content. I think it's the thing that most people miss.
And if you're going to do a volume of content, that means you kind of have to loosen a little bit on what is good or what is perfect. You have to kind of throw perfect out the window and think progress before perfection. So Dan, let's let people go. So let's get tactical.
Cassidy, I don't know if we're ready to get tactical. I'm looking at our time here. But we can probably keep Dan all day. But let's go tactical for a second.
Like, so let's say you've done some of that good market research. You've got some really great hypotheses. You want to do podcast and LinkedIn or you want to do some combination of what you believe is the best short form and long form kind of channels, etc. You just mentioned something that was unspecific and I want to get more specific on it.
You were talking like a volume of content, testing, experimenting. Walk us through like what framework would you use with like your consulting clients or you know with LMF 451. What is a good starting point? I'm starting on LinkedIn.
What does an experiment look like? How long? How much content is appropriate to really get a good pulse? What signals are you looking for?
I guess tactical as you can here now on just like that framework of like maybe the first three to six months of starting to build an audience on a channel. So once you kind of have an idea of what topics you want to talk to or what's most likely going to resonate with your buyers because these are the problems you know they run and these are the things that they're excited about. You start to craft like you have to sit down with your subject matter experts to be able to find the answers to these. Even better if you have someone who's like fairly competent at producing media who's a subject matter expert, which is why hiring an influencer brain of analysis such a good hire because they usually have a little bit of a whole thing to do as well.
But on LinkedIn it's posting in the very beginning I'd probably be posting at least three times a day every day, seven days a week for 90 days. Wow. Like this is going hard. Chris Walker did freaking more.
He was doing 10 posts a day for who knows how long and maybe not every day but like he was throwing out a volume of content. I went from like a thousand followers to like 10,000 five months because I was posting three times a day for five not like two or three times a day for about five months. If you show up to a new city and you don't know anyone but you start showing up to every single party and not just showing up at working the room shaking hands getting no people being interesting and being interested in others, you're probably going to have a lot of friends in three months. It's the same way with LinkedIn.
Not only do you post all the content but you show up and everybody else's comments and you start to build friends really quickly. That's the thing I love most about LinkedIn. It's a very conversational platform versus Twitter which is really about it's about conversation there too but it's about coming up with the hits that go viral. That's the game that Twitter is like crafting virality versus in LinkedIn you're trying to craft conversations with your posts and with the comments when you're in people's comments.
That's the best way you can do it which makes it easier without having an audience somewhere else. You can actually literally just engage with more people and you'll build more of an audience. So even for somebody like me who posts sporadically and sometimes I'll get into a way before I'm pretty consistent and stuff and I've built up a little bit of a following the last two years, that is very ambitious to jump to that much volume. This is me just speaking for myself here.
I don't know how do you come up with that much content and things to say. Sometimes I struggle to just sit down and come up with a post for the day. This is how I did it. There's more ways to do it now with AI because AI is pretty good now.
Nowadays you can feed AI one blog post you wrote it will write 10 tweets for you or 10 LinkedIn posts and they're actually pretty good and they're still in your voice because it's based on your blog post. So at Sweetfish we had an evangelism program and I had a dedicated writer doing nothing but writing content for me and a few other evangelists and that was Emily. Her name was Debrito then now it's Brady. Yeah I remember Emily.
So she's fantastic. She left Sweetfish to become full-time mom which I respect the heck out of so she's not as active on LinkedIn anymore which is she was cranking out great content but before she became an evangelist herself she was writing content for everybody else and she got so good and she would write a one-third of my content about five posts a week that helped. I would focus on writing one really good post a week or one post a day so a lot of my attention to morning would be writing that one post and then the third post would always be a layup for me. It would always be like that thing that I saw somewhere else that I would repost and then add my thoughts to and it literally could be a repost as someone else's post or a screenshot of this thing or this random thing news article that I take a screenshot of them to give some thoughts on but it was like a layup post in late afternoon just for extra and sometimes it'd be a huge hit you never know what's going to work but in the first 90 days it's about learning and growing and figuring out and developing essentially there's a huge shift taking place from creators to creators creatives know how to make content but creators are rapidly trying to experiment to develop a discernment of what's going to work.
Mr. Beast could lose it all and be wildly successful within a year not because of the audience he has but because even if he didn't use his face and had to use someone else's face his level of discernment of what's going to resonate with people is so strong that he would be wildly successful again that's what you're trying to build as someone who's trying to build an audience is that discernment which means you need a volume because you just need more practice. I wasn't going to ask this question or go down this path but like let's dig in a little bit more just selfishly for Carl Knight for a second how did you keep up with that volume yourself even once a day maybe six times a week like did you have like um no I feel like it's in ferris did you get into like like what was your habit here did you have like a sauna board where you have ideas or a notebook or you have to get more practical Dan then time blocking so just time blocking for sure I mean because they luckily I worked at a company that gave me time on paid time to do this and it really I mean and it was good for them because I think through my LinkedIn I could probably attribute about a million dollars of revenue to sweetfish just for my personal LinkedIn over the course of three years so well worth it well worth the investment from sweetfish but I spent about an hour and a half of work every day just working LinkedIn I probably spent another hour and a half in the mornings commenting and writing content and also spent time on blocks in the weekend writing out writing ahead of the week so that I didn't have to do it every single day at least for every single post because again I'm posting three times a day I could have one post in the hopper for every day at least and then another one from Emily that she would write for me based on other things I had said repurpose it and then I'd have to worry about the layup post which was usually pretty easy but it's a lot most of the time is actually just spent in the comments yeah and engaging with influencers engaging with peers and engaging with people that are below you that are maybe becoming uh friends of yours that are trying to follow your path and you trying to help them up because it's kind of becomes the 360 right some people from above you help you and I was engaging with Justin Welsh and Austin Melsak and Chris Walker a lot you know still do sometimes um sometimes they come and show up on my post and give me a boost oh that's one one interesting way if you're accompanying your listening to this you're like well how do I go faster if you have one person on your team with an audience it makes a massive difference for me that was James Carberry in the beginning LinkedIn's weird and that one comment from somebody with the following is a huge huge advantage they don't even have to share your post just come and comment um because every time James came and commented on my early post I'd almost I was getting 50-60 comments from the beginning because James was showing up on my comments every day because he also liked what I had to say so it wasn't just you know bad post they were good post um it's almost like a trampoline right if you ever jumped on a kid on a trampoline if you had the big kid come and jump next to you right before you hit the mat it would like launch you right and you'd go up lincoln's the same way if you have some with a bigger following come and hit your post and I've had a number of people that have showed up on my post like Chris very rarely but Chris would sometimes show up and then that would help um but Justin Welsh um Austin Bellsak a few times he's got like million followers and that was always a big big one but then Dale Dupree and even a bunch of people with like 30 to 40,000 in that range like Nick Bennett would show up and if a bunch of those people show up and comment you're gonna have a hit you're gonna have a viral post because like four or five people with 50k followers showed up on your post and added their two cents so yeah we always joke about the let's go say car we always joke about the Chris Walker impact hey like Chris commented on somebody at one of our teams post and you can see a take-off and yeah like the running joke yeah how do we get a chance if Chris is commenting on a few of your posts then you're doing better than me so I still can't I still can't get this guy to go and comment on my post so uh you're a kind of have to bait him in you know what I'm saying like you have to make it all about like the last time I talked about the audience growth ceiling which is another gosh we could talk about that too and I was like I think Chris is wrong on why less people are engaging with him and so the post was kind of like responding to something he said at the beginning of the post and then I laid it in my hypothesis and actually what do people start doing they start tagging him over and over again so if you can create the talk conversation about him and people start tagging him a hundred times he's probably gonna show I've done it a few times now to summarize what you just said we just need to piss off Chris and then he will show up in your comment section so I think I always try to write it in a way that I never try to piss people off I try really try to be careful with that but I try to be bouncing being like hey I don't think I think there's a different explanation here so if you go and read the post where I get Chris to show up it's never like in a combative way where I'm just looking to throw it's always kind of like have you considered you know this I feel like LinkedIn's really good at that compared to other social platforms where people are just generally nicer and willing to change opinions and actually have conversations and I love that yeah I agree with that I do for the remaining time want to hit on audience plateau audience you know ceiling ceiling ceiling I'd like to hear your thoughts on how to it is definitely a thing I'd love to hear your thoughts on like how you identify it and break through it start with I discovered it because I was playing around with some growth models we had found out how to unlock audience growth through programmatic ads of all things I could by targeting down a programmatic ads and making it really narrow and doing some other cool things with retargeting pixels to get trying to who are the kinds of people respond to these kinds of ads that are called action subscribe to podcast I found we could guarantee audience growth for about five bucks paid a subscriber on Apple podcast so for five grand I could generate a thousand you know new new followers to an Apple podcast show so I'm like okay with that kind of predictability what are we running into and I just started running through the excel sheet like okay well we can grow like this but you know that you would think it'd be a linear curve but then you have to account for churn there's always going to be churn because you've experienced it yourself with your own favorite creators how many people have you subscribed to listen for a long time and then you unsubscribe because you felt like you know you learned it all you've graduated from their content right there's always going to be churn so let's imagine just for funsies we have we gain a hundred new people every single month and we have a churn rate of 10 percent we're losing 10 percent every month whereas our ceiling a thousand people because at a thousand people no matter how many hundred new hundred subscribers I get I'm always going to lose a hundred every month right so you have an audience growth ceiling of a thousand people if you're gaining a hundred and every month that churn rate is always going to work against you so now if we if we kind of intuitively understand that's what's going on with your audience growth ceiling that's cool now we can actually start to make modifications based on that and that's when I get into like what I call the audience growth pillars the first one's acquisition what can we do to gain more to increase our hundred that we're getting every single month what are all the different ways we can leverage paid owned and earned in order to increase acquisition because that will increase our audience growth ceiling more importantly what can we do to retain them longer you can just walk through like never lose a customer again by Joey Gohman and just take these principles for customers and apply them to audience so ask like how can we activate them and onboard new audience better how can we acclimate them and help help them build habits around listening and engaging with us how can we help them accomplish a small but meaningful win early now that they're part of our audience and I'd like to even ask the question how do we graduate them knowing that some people will learn everything we have to learn and we need to be repetitive and what we say because there always be new people for the message like Chris Walker's message is still as good as it was three years ago even though some people are tired of hearing it there's still people fighting most people I'd argue are still fighting over capturing demand instead of generating it so there's still new audience to be had there at the main same time there's some people that are have learned everything they can for Chris to some degree and need to graduate like what can we be doing to graduate people out and make them feel good about hey you've made it to a certain level go and do the next thing maybe even make recommendations on the next thing random idea I've had that I'm still working on so what's one of those examples though because honestly like I don't I don't when you say these things I'm like oh sound awesome but I don't even know how you would do something like that so like how do you onboard how do you graduate how do you help them have a small win in something like a podcast channel because like you don't have like a ton of control right necessarily so are you talking about like having like an email subscription as well they're like in a company what are some of those really like you know actionable strategies to do those things better with a podcast my first recommendation would be having a start here thing and it depends on what your industry and I was working with a big a big brand that has a large audience around like um health for for mothers it just happens to be local and natural and I was talking to them because they have a massive audience you're talking like hundreds of thousands audience but they're you know they're they're trying to increase their audience growth ceiling I'm like hey instead of trying to acquire more why don't you just onboard your people coming in every day and onboard them better and for them it's like we needed a start here like if and you could plug this into every episode like hey you need to the channel if you're brand new thanks for joining um you should go to this URL right now to get started on this thing it's the easiest thing you can do to improve this thing that we're talking about right and having a start here thing that's some kind of and I would capture a lead and get them onto an email list um preferably a newsletter of some kind but there's going to be a welcome sequence that helps them walk through your basics like Chris this is my biggest beef with Chris is that he needs this desperately he needs a place that walks people through the basics of his core message he's not doing this and I'm like uh so much money left on the table because how many people need to go through back through the basics of lead gen versus demand gen he repeats it a lot but if you get just caught in the wrong episode or listen to episodes in a row you're probably not gonna say it so he needs an activation guide to get people on the fast track and experience a quick win earlier right so it's really just a simple onboarding sequence going through your main message even a little indoctrination where you properly define the villain that you're fighting right um and why why this works really well so simple email onboarding sequence is the easiest way um that was an all how do you acclimate to people and build habits though that I think that's really where you can get really excited um Gary Vee's really good at this with building habits right because he's pushed really hard to be like the first comment so he rewards people for being the for he did for a while anyway he's like first comment on instagram because he knew that was driving results on instagram he's like first comment this is what I'm giving away first comment this is what I'm giving away again he's trying to build habits just in well shakin master at getting people to his post hard first I'm there showing up at 714 in the morning I know he's dropping a post I'm literally refreshing my feet waiting for it there's at least a dozen other people we're doing the exact same thing to be the first comment on just in well she's post he's trained to me to habitually show up and it's 714 to be the first substantial comment on his post because it's part of his course so he's built a habit of his audience to do that's why he continues to grow so those are some examples let me jump into the last two pillars really quick before we go one is elevation and I didn't write the book on this but how do you get your your audience base to be deeper level not just casual audience but deep committed fans pat flan wrote an awesome book on super fans pretty much has the step-by-step guide on this how do you get them how do you get casual audience to become super fans fascinating book and then last pillars monetization like how do you actually take this massive audience you're building actually make money out of it so what were the three three pillar fan we're going to summarize them sorry four pillars our acquisition retention elevation and monetization all things that you need to do in order to lift your audience pursuing is kind of like I had a diagram in front of you it's kind of like four pillars ceiling right because that's what we're trying to lift is this audience we're sealing you need them all to work together in order to build an actual audience so that's kind of my philosophy I'm still very early and even talking about these things on LinkedIn probably take a crack at writing a book on it this the summer to publish for free and let probably make a dedicated podcast for people to just go and listen to just to try to get more content out there on it and start documenting the process of how I'm doing it for element 451 so that's the goal that's the dream I might have some of that I guess isn't there but I'm pretty I'm feeling pretty good about it I'm gonna sneak one more in another but it's time monetization do you look at it as in direct versus indirect or kind of what's your philosophy on kind of monetizing the audience in terms of like directly monetizing it indirectly monetizing it you have a a framework in your head of how you think through that you have it's really days there's so many ways to do it but the first thing you have to do is take the monetization hat off for a little bit and focus just on building an audience right because that's the first thing that kills most most companies they're focused on content marketing and they need to take the marketing out and just focus on the content if you try to monetize it too early you're going to kill it so but provided you got something going there's so many ways to monetize it the first is like if you're building a separate media brand is so what sweetfish is getting into you can I like to separate the corporate brand for the media brand because that's a whole nother podcast but having a separate media channels than your corporate channels you can start essentially making your your corporate brand a sponsor of the media brand you could do advertorials you know we did a whole podcast series on media growth with vidyard on how they're doing this and they've laid a fantastic way of how they're doing they're using multiple things like they're putting some not some vidyard ads in their content but they're also creating like tutorials that are very video personal video centric right so they're trying to get sales reps to understand the ideals of personal video and of course they'll have little hooks little call the actions that go back to the vidyard brand saying oh come read this blog post on the sales thing on our vidyard brand that's more tightly close to like video right being personal right so they have all these little hooks that they're laying for vidyard in their what is the sales feed media brand um so and I think you can do that heavy you can probably be light and kind of go back and forth and find like a good middle ground I think people will figure it out they're not dumb they'll figure out where it's where it's coming from but there's lots of ways to lay hooks and especially once you get people in the newsletter where you can really start to you know stick a bunch of hooks going back to your corporate brand within your newsletter but just imagine if like what's the current media brand that has your audience's attention how would you monetize it if you had bought it think about how hotspots how about doing it with the hustle there's a case study right there of how they're monetizing that's good stuff man I look forward to you the book you should definitely write it I think I'd love to see you post more about this on LinkedIn too so selfishly yeah so I can learn from you um anything else Carl man that's awesome I I don't know if I've smashed the bell button Dan on your LinkedIn profile honestly I'm barrisingly enough I need to just like go do that because I don't feel like I see a lot of your content and I definitely that's a mistake so um this was smash it yeah maybe I'll help you out Carl yeah maybe I'll be the first commenter I'll dance post now Dan I see everybody can find you on where can everybody find you LinkedIn what else yep linkedin.com slash in slash digital marketing Dan and danches.com thanks for your time and it's been awesome Dan audience I appreciate it. Alright everybody we're out Carl have a good day and have a good day see you guys later