All right. Welcome everybody. For our latest edition of Skacking Growth Live, I'm your co-host Cassidy. Carl, how you doing?
Good. You're the co-host. I feel like you are the host. I'm just like, I just join sometimes, you know, and just add color.
You're the one that people come to see. And by the way, I love the white polo. So Carl and I did not to do this on purpose. I put mine on first this morning.
So Cassidy copied me so everyone knows. Carl has been commenting me on my polo game here recently. And next thing I know, Carl has bought a polo. First polo, I've seen Carl wear in what a year?
Yeah, maybe 18 months. Nice. Anybody else like those? You might as well change?
Whatever. I was bullied into it. Thank you for having us. Don't say bullied.
We'll get in trouble. I know you too. I'm just hoping to survive this this hour. We'll see what happens.
Skacking Growth Octagon in here, man. You just you got to be careful, you know? That's right. You got a USC beard.
So it's not. Oh, I shaved it recently. I don't know if you saw it, but it was like covering like huge connected to like mentioned somehow. So it's trimmed back now.
It looks nice. Thank you. I feel comfortable now that we've hit the two main starting topics of second growth. We've talked about clothes.
We've talked about Carl's beard. So it feels like we're we're in it now. For those falling along at home, there'll be some point in this episode where Carl says something nice about HubSpot. It always goes down that he'll figure out how to weave that into the conversation.
I don't know how he will do that on this topic, but it's all good, man. I'm just figured out. So what we thought we'd do and we'll have our guests introduce us here in a second. Miles and Stephanie is that, you know, we run a pretty hefty organic content strategy within our company.
We obviously advise other companies how to do that. And we often get a lot of questions, not just on at a high level. How do I do this? But into the detail, like, how does it actually get done?
And what do I need to do day in and day out and from equipment, the tools, the processes, and so forth and so on. So what we thought we would do is bring Stephanie Miles on. So get them out from behind the camera to in front of the camera to talk to them about how they do this for refined labs and how do we actually do it for a few other of our customers as well. So Stephanie Miles, welcome.
Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah.
You're always here, but thanks for joining. Why don't we start with some intro? Maybe Stephanie, you start kind of just a little background on yourself and what you do here and kind of work before here. Sure.
So I am the content strategist here at Refine Labs. And mostly what I work on is producing the podcast for revenue vitals and snacking growth. I also work on our social posting, YouTube, some other channels in the future, possibly. And yeah, before this, I was a high school English teacher, but I've been doing content, I started editing audio when I was like 14.
So I've been on the production side of this and podcasting for a number of years. And are you still running a couple podcasts on the side for yourself? I am. Yeah.
I've got a Shakespeare podcast, a D&D podcast, a soccer podcast, pretty much everything besides marketing. I'm in for my own stuff. What I love about Stephanie is when we were interviewing her, I was like, hey, you know, we we kind of we produce like two or three podcasts a week. Is this overwhelming?
And she just kind of laughed. So yeah, I already produced two or three podcasts a week at my spare time. So I'm okay with this. Hang on.
I got to stop here for it. Stephanie, are those podcasts, are those podcasts yours or do you produce them for other people on those topics or the yours? They're mine. Yeah.
Oh my gosh, I had no idea. Yeah. It's fun. Keeps me keeps me going keeps me excited.
Just some while Carl. I got to go listen to those now. That's all all he talks about doing his own podcast. He always claims he doesn't have time.
Well, I talk about a lot of things, you know, I talk about closing deals, right? But that's very well. Yeah, so yeah, I'm a big talker really mostly. Hey, guess what podcast is good for?
I'm perfect for this job. Great chance to talk. Miles introduce yourself, my friend. Yes, thank you for having me.
I'm Miles Campbell, video ops manager here at Refine, been to the company for going over three years now. I was used to being in SAS sales. So I knew this space pretty well for about four to five years. And one thing led to another and all of a sudden, I was filming Chris Walker's consulting calls in 2019.
And that's kind of where it all started. We were actually in Jada, Carl. We would record in the HubSpot Cambridge, Massachusetts office. Because we're a partner back then, we had three or four clients and it was awful.
I didn't know what I was doing and I kind of still don't. But that's kind of where it all started to now. We've got a bunch of podcast and videos and I'm sure you're all very familiar with Chris Walker on LinkedIn. So I'm editing and chopping up what Stephanie's recording in Austin, Texas.
And I'm just outside of Boston, Massachusetts right now. And here we are. So I mean, we got to give Miles some props here. He has literally been editing videos and we all know Chris posts videos every single day.
So Miles has been the guy behind the guy editing these videos every day. And by the way, it's not one video. It's not like Chris says, hey, Miles, wonderful job giving me one video. I'm going to use that one.
It's a new Miles. I need a five 10. I don't know how many videos it is these days and I'll pick one. So we're gonna get five 10 video video edits a day for what three years?
Yeah, yeah, it's been a long time. Thank you, Mary in the chat. Been loving the new book with LinkedIn Vids. Yeah, Chris calls it minimalist.
Look, that really just means less work for me. So I greatly appreciate that. Yeah, again, I feel like I could recite everything I've had in my headphones for the last three years. I've heard every single word he's ever said.
So if anyone needs like a keynote speaker, I pretend to be a marketer, I might be able to pull it off when I was trying to get dirt out of Miles on Chris for a long time. And he's a champ and he doesn't share anything. So I'm just coming, don't worry. I've got a lot of leverage.
A lot of leverage. All right, great. So thanks for the interest, Stephanie Miles. Obviously we want to kind of get your creds out there.
So we, so you know, folks here know that they're gonna learn something today. So why don't we get started? Stephanie, I'll turn it over to you. You have some slides you brought.
We kind of just start the conversation. And for those in the audience, feel free to drop questions here. Carl and myself will try to keep up. But we really want this to be for you.
So if there's things that you're seeing here that you have questions on, feel free to speak up as we go because we want to make this obviously interactive. All right. So yeah, we really kind of recognize that this is a massive topic. And we've got a minimal amount of time today.
So Miles and I are going to take this from a pretty high level. And Cassidy and Carl have a lot to share in this as well as they've been running stacking growth this year and beyond. So we're going to kind of just take a look at how to get yourself started, some of the questions that you need to ask yourself before you dive in. And then we'll get into some more of the kind of tech specs of the logistics behind it.
So we're going to run through choosing your medium, choosing your platform, building your team, finding your tech, what to do while you're recording, how to handle some of those nerves and stress and organizational tools. And then all of the post production editing and distribution tips, how, when and if to use AI in content creation, and then kind of setting yourself up for success with a content calendar. So let's dive right in. Yeah.
If you've got questions and you want to pop them in the chat, we will if there's something that pops up that is kind of a relevant immediate answer, we'll get to it. Otherwise, we will have some time for questions at the end as well. So yeah, like Biggest Takeaway so far, some over the ear headphones. I know that when you're repurposing for video, a lot of folks will, you know, sacrifice the look.
So they don't necessarily want over the ear headphones for me, since I'm audio first, I'll always be wearing these ear muffs and they really do help with sound. But if you're a visual first person, you get to make those decisions. I'll echo that like, I'll just jump in. It's definitely told me the same thing.
So you need over the ear headphones. I just couldn't do it. So so vain, I was like, and doesn't look right, Carl, they're trying to me, he's like, what are you doing? And I took him off.
And so it's never been the same level of quality since so I apologize. I mean, it's priorities, right? And that's kind of the whole game of this first slide and figuring out where you want to get started is seeing where your priorities lie. So before you do anything, you really want to determine if you are creating content for your company, or if you are creating content for yourself and your personal brand.
And this is probably the most important question to answer before you do anything else, because it's going to dictate a lot of the following questions. Some benefits and drawbacks to both. And then this is a place where casting Carl, I'd love for you to jump in, but really, there's so much authenticity in a personal brand and folks responding to people rather than companies talking to them. So if you're coming to this session and you are here on your own volition, you are interested in content, you want to get yourself moving, that's going to be a personal brand choice.
If you're here because your boss told you to come because they want to start an organic content strategy, it might be more of a company move, but really like sit with yourself and figure out where you want to live for the next X amount of months, weeks, years, because a podcast of video series, it's a long term investment, not just a short term one off. So Cassie, Carl, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this decision. Yeah, I think it's really interesting that how these two things start to come together over time. And Carl and I talked quite about this in that, we really see the rise of people focusing their careers on industries where they're also experts at.
So this obviously makes it a lot easier for you to build your personal brand. For us, for example, around marketing and selling when we're working for a company who is our audience as marketers and sellers. And so I would say if you go back, I'm old, so if you go back 10 or 15 years, we really didn't really consider that as a career choice in terms of what the company did and who they did it for. And what I find now that I've been creating content for myself, I'm looking to do that for companies who also target the people that I want to target individually from my own personal brand.
So that may be something where the crossover between kind of what you want to do in terms of building your own brand aligns with what your company does as well. And it's very hard to say, I'm a marketer and become a subject matter expert on finance because we sell to finance people. And so I think that there's something to consider when you're thinking about is it for you, is it for the company and who should be the person out in front as a subject matter expert. Carl, what's your take as a budding influencer?
I think my take is like, you know, again, this is going to sound like such a platitude, but people learn from people. Companies don't actually know anything. As you think about a company as an entity, like it's not a subject matter expert. And so any of the content that I follow, you think of like awesome brands that do it super well, like Lavender, right?
It's like I follow Jan Allen, right? And Will Aitkin, like I don't like Lavender is in the background as like the logo and stuff, and I know that it's Lavender types of content, but they teach me things, right? Again, I called out Scott, Ministry of Brands who's on this call, amazing job doing production work for Ministry of Brands and his podcast content is repurposed and all over and it's very differentiating the feed. Why would somebody tune into that?
Because it's Ministry of Brands? No, probably not, because like Scott knows what he's talking about, he's interviewing really interesting people and he's talking about relevant topics. So I, this is challenging though, when you don't have people, maybe we'll talk about this later, when you don't have people who want to step up and kind of be that face or that voice, that's where you're in a little bit of a pickle because if you're a marketer kind of standing in as a finance SME that could work better than just a company feed, right? Or a company page on LinkedIn, but it's still not going to be, I don't think as powerful as, hey, we have a fractional CFO that is one of our SMEs that pumps out our content and is well respected in the space.
So, you know, and sometimes you got to crawl, walk around with some of these things and kind of prove out the model. So that's what I think. We have some good questions already. I don't know if we're ready for questions yet.
Yeah, once you grab one while I'll just make one more comment, I think the process, the simple process that Stephanie's outlined here, we often think about this for our own personal brand. What are the things I want to talk about? And my point of view, I guess, be excited, you can use the same methodology for a company. What's a company's point of view?
What's a company get excited and passionate about? And obviously, who are the people you're putting out there to be able talk about those things? But so I think from a simplistic perspective, think of this as like a process for you as an individual or you as a company in terms of figuring out what is the point of view that you want to talk about and what do you really want to educate your audience on for mind with the brand or the individual. So we've got two questions.
I think we'll start with Scott's and then we'll come back to VSS when we talk about measurement. So Scott asks, how do you source the most relevant content topics for your market? How do you organize those topics questions to execute on them? Cassie, I think you could probably speak to this because we've got, you know, a couple of customers.
So I've got one in mind that he's going through this now. Do you want to answer this one? How do you source the most relevant content topics for your market? Yeah, and I think Stephanie has some stuff on this as we go through it.
Maybe there's kind of two ways I think about this. One is proactively. So you are trying to convey a point of view or a change in the world that you see. And so you kind of build your content pillars from the standpoint of like your authority and being able to convey and educate folks on that.
In fact, I think about the client we're working this with today. Got a very clear point of view and subject matter expertise. And we're trying to help him structure how you actually bring that out in an organic way in order to educate and build awareness in your market around this kind of change in their industry. The other, which is probably a lot of what Carl and I do.
And that is we react to what we hear from customers and then go answer their questions using the content strategy we put out on stacking growth or individually. So a lot of what I end up talking about, or we talk about on the podcast, including the guests we bring in, is derived by like the things that we hear from our customers or prospects that they're struggling with and that we want to help answer in order for them to do better themselves as they move forward. Now we consider that kind of a reaction to like the market versus proactively going out and saying, here's my point of view, Chris is a very proactive. Hey, this is how we see the world.
Here's how you do it. And then like underneath that, what you see from the rest of the company in terms of stacking growth and our own content is a lot of day in and day out. Here are the struggles we see that marketers and sellers are going through. And you know, we want to make sure we bring an educational content to folks to help them solve those problems.
Yeah, I would also say on that note too, Chris's pro activity too, a lot of it is like you said in your market specifically in the question is being in the it doesn't have to just be your customers right Chris. I found his half of his topics come from comments he's left on other posts where you can saw some engagement or questions and he's like, oh, that's you know, that's just got 50 likes that must be an important topic on the next thing. Let's talk about that for the next podcast episode, whatever it is, let's let's click that. So it's kind of like an engine where like, yeah, he posts a lot, he's always in there talking to people commenting stuff like that.
So don't be afraid to get into weeds with not just your customers, but out there, you know, mostly on LinkedIn. The other thing I'll add to like the proactive bucket of this framework, right? So I think the framework here that we're sort of developing on the fly is like a reactive bucket, like listening to calls, right? Sales calls, listening to customers, interviewing customers, which is maybe a little bit proactive, but you're hearing from them, right?
So it's like an external to internal movement of information. I think one thing Cassidy, you and I do, I'm not going to say great. I'll say, okay, right? Because I'm like, we're like so humble and stuff is that sometimes on the proactive content, he's Chris does this too.
Like you share weird stuff. What I mean by weird is like, because we are the subject matter experts, right? In the field, we have like these ideas that sort of like push the bounds of like conventional thinking, right? So it's sort of like on the spot thoughts or brainstorms.
A lot of people, you'll see this, right? Chris will put out an idea and it's like kind of weird or wild and it gets mixed reviews, right? And he does that stuff intentionally because he's trying to test these new ideas. Like, can I push and innovate in a direction?
And how does the market respond? And you and I do that too. I'm like, our riffs on the stack and growth podcast. We will riff on something.
We took what we maybe totally wrong, right? We don't have any data or research to back up some of this stuff. That's not the point. The point is we're pushing like a something different that is interesting to us.
And I think it can only get that kind of like niche content from being the subject matter expert yourself, because you're sort of, you know, maybe on the, you know, the bleeding edge of whatever the issue or the topic or the industry is. So I really like it look for that type of content, which is very hard to find. And so for anyone on this call, like, if you could start to develop content like that, super easy to differentiate in the market. Because most people are floating obvious insights or truths or things that we kind of already know.
I think the market in any industry is always thirsty for like the non obvious stuff that's new and it's challenging and maybe kind of weird, but it's thought provoking. So, well, let's get out one more thing. Just like the Scott's question, just kind of the lowest level hack and that is, you know, I'd go in the past, I'd go to the sales team and be like, what are the questions you get asked from customers that you don't know how to answer? Because a lot of them as a sales person, you're always getting asked these questions that are, they're sticking points.
And there isn't an answer today, right? And it's like, let's go work on those things because we hear those over and over from prospects and customers. Then we know if we answer them, that's going to be valuable to folks because there's not really an answer out there that's satisfactory. And so again, listen to the market is pretty cliche, but listen for those things that you hear over and over, of which there isn't a good response or an answer today in seating to solve that.
Yeah. And I think that the biggest thing to take away on this is that there is so much content out there, which can feel like a deterrent to adding your own voice to that conversation. But it all it kind of is a safety net. There's so much out there that it creates this exercise for you to figure out where you stand in that and how you want to present the information.
There are a thousand more, that's an underestimation of that was a marketing podcast, right? By figuring out what you offer. And if it is something that you don't give answers, if that's your, if that's your viewpoint and that's your brand is that you're posing questions and talking through them, rather than having answers straightforward, that's a valuable asset to the community in that brainstorming process. So, figuring out what gets you excited and what motivates you in just in the world, not necessarily in your genre is going to be really important to just getting started because looking at that, what do you have to say, like blinking cursor on LinkedIn is one of the most overwhelming things in the world.
I don't know about y'all, but I will sit there and just stare at it for hours. And so, yeah, it's the worst. And so it's easier to just say, I'll do it tomorrow, or I'll do it next week and keep pushing that content off. So when we're looking at that, like a couple of just easy tips to kind of get you into it.
What do you, what do you love? It doesn't have to be your job. A lot of people are fine with their jobs, but not a lot of people like live for their jobs, right? And we see a lot on LinkedIn, we see two sides of this, right?
We see people taking things that they do in their everyday life, Lex posted about rock climbing the other day and tied it into learning new vocabulary at work. So something that she loves is climbing and she was able to take it and learn a lesson from it, find a lesson from it, expand on it in some way. And then I feel like you see posts that make fun of that type of post, right, which can be really intimidating if you're just getting started. Maybe those people just love making fun of things.
That's the thing that brings them joy, right? So they're still doing the same thing that you are by taking something that you're interested in and that you're experienced in and that you love and pushing it into a relatable lesson or viewpoint on your actual job genre. So let yourself get excited and pinpoint what it is about, what is it about rock climbing that gets you excited? Is it learning new things?
Take that thread, pull it and apply it to your content. And that's all it is. It's just finding something that you're excited about and letting yourself carry that excitement over into a different topic or different content. You've got to keep in mind who you want to reach, who your audience is.
If you're throwing spaghetti at the wall, you're going to get spaghetti back. You want to say as focused as possible because people will know if they're being, you know, you see a lot of comments like, same, or I feel this or this is calling me out. If you know who that audience is that you are trying to call out, it's going to make your posts a lot more effective. It's going to make your content a lot more effective.
It'll also determine how high level vocab that you use, how much detail that you use, how much data that you use that requires, understanding more than just a basic LinkedIn scroller. And then obviously tone is important. Not everyone can be funny, but if you are, use it, run with it. If you like bringing a humorous element to your content, that's a place that is, I don't want to say risky, but it's definitely harder.
And it doesn't always land and it can be a little demoralizing when you start getting into it if you're not getting the reactions. But if you are kind of consistent to your tone and your brand, it's a really great episode. A couple weeks ago on stacking growth that we got a lot more in depth in this. So I would point you to that.
I'll pull up the episode number in a little bit, but figure out what your tone is, how you want to present yourself and really let that kind of dictate your writing sessions. Awesome. Thanks, Stephanie. We're getting some questions.
People want to get into the detail. So let's, let's talk about how you actually, how you actually bring this to life. Stephanie, before you get going, there's a question about what specific tech we use. So whenever we cover tech, if you could kind of call out some of the specifics of the cameras and the lightings and brand names and stuff, so that people get really, yeah, some good detail on what what the best stuff is because I know you all have vetted all of it.
Yeah, it's coming up for you. Yeah. So in the pipeline, I think sales got to say, right? On the roadmap, whatever you promised on the roadmap.
Yeah. That's it. It's on the roadmap. It's on the roadmap.
So yeah, obviously, you know, you've decided you want to start and then it's where do you start, where do you put this content and your obvious answers and medium in the platform, video, audio, text, obviously video and audio go hand in hand. They're easy to chop up together at the same time, be rip everything, record everything video and audio at the same time in our studio in Austin. But therefore, because we have the audio in the video, we can do both podcast, YouTube, everything in between. So decide what you want there.
But aside, no, but I've realized too, editing, copywriting translates through everything. You need to be able to coherently put your thoughts on it through words, but you're writing and writing about a tricking is writing about what you said. It sounds easy because you said it, but then how can you convert a 30 second clip into a four paragraph post on LinkedIn through value? And first of all, you take a four paragraph post and turn into a mid long video.
And again, I would say one out of three, they're so cohesive, you might as well rip off the band aid and don't speak. I think I'm just going to do a podcast. Well, you're recording on Zoom probably anyways, you might as well just use the video to you have it right there. Use everything available to you.
And so we've tested a lot of platforms over the last three years. People always ask, you know, where do I start? Where do I start? What should I do?
Where should I post? LinkedIn, obviously, B2B is I think it's the number one B2B. I mean, it's not talking about non obvious insights. That's pretty obvious insight.
Especially if you want to talk one on one with your buyers. And I think whenever Chris says so many times, you literally can have a keynote speech to your exact audience every single day. If you want to do, you can pull your thoughts out because you know exactly who you're connecting to, where they work, what their title is. And it's there's no, you know, fake accounts.
There's no like those accounts you see on Twitter that are just like a random word with a bunch of numbers of all the troll accounts. You don't have to worry about that as much. Yes, people can still be jerks on LinkedIn. I've seen that too, especially I mean back in the day, Chris used to really battle with people, but I guess he's gone down a little bit.
Not as exciting for me anymore. And then you have TikTok, B2C, probably you can reach, you know, you just need one post to hit. And it goes what? Million views, 2 million views, like anything.
So if you're on the B2C side, you have to be on there right now. It's just too, it's too good right now for reach and engagement, honestly. But again, that's where we get to trolls. We've already seen that pop up on our stuff.
We've tried the posters. People are rude. So you should have a little bit thicker skin on there. Twitter, or should I say X?
I don't even really want to talk about that right now. What a strange, strange week. It's been on that platform. Definitely good for engagement, especially with more branding opportunities.
There were celebrities, athletes, stuff like that. You can get people who can tweet stuff out or engage with them there, easier to find, not exactly buyers per se, but still, I think a relevant platform. And then of course, Facebook and Instagram, I feel like you're just like the bread and butter of B2B right now, whether it's, I guess B2, obviously. But we don't use that as much anymore.
These are organic strategy, but this is only some noted. And then solo voice or interview style. I know some people like to ramble, I bet Carl could be a pretty good solo podcast or if you wanted to get a little bit smarter. That's a good thing.
That's a good thing. That's much harder than Cassie. No, no, no, no. Cassie is usually T-ball and you have really easy questions.
The back and forth interview style, if you feel like people like to listen to. But if you're a subject matter expert, you should probably be able to talk about important topics in your fields for 20-30 minutes by yourself. And that's good practice. We started doing that, you know, again, three years, we should see the improvement.
Go back and listen to podcasts from three years ago on revenue vitals, there used to be a, let me go at what it used to be called, demand you live. And listen to Chris and then now he's been doing it for four times a week for the last three years. You get better by just ripping the bed off and going alone. But shout out our friend Sidney waterfall.
I saw this, she commented on a post, I think a couple of days ago on LinkedIn that it was about medium and platform, but literally none of that matters if you don't have a good strategy or intent. So I don't think what you're posting, but why are you posting it and who are you posting to? People will sniff out the BS that you post that. So obviously about your, your SaaS product, it's, oh, it's so great.
You'll be able to get all this. Like, no, be curious. Like, that's so, I don't think it doesn't have the right intent behind it. So always keep that in mind when you're choosing where to post and why to post it.
We need to stop for any questions. We're good. Keep running. Go for it, Seth.
Let's keep it moving. Yeah. So when you're building your team, some people do it all alone. Some people are lucky enough to have full teams.
You might land somewhere in the middle. We have it broken down. And this is all a lot of this comes from the podcast playbook, the content playbook in the vault, which has a lot more in-depth information than recovering in, 30 minutes here. But we've broken it down into four main roles.
So you've got the architect, the expert, the creative and the distributor. The architect is going to be your strategist. This is the person who is figuring out what topics to cover, what questions you need to answer, what relevant, what's relevant that's going on that you should kind of hit up or queue up in the next couple episodes, the next couple posts. They also tie in with the distributor who looks at KPIs and metrics and kind kind of gives feedback.
So it's all really a cyclical thing. Distributor and the architect kind of go hand in hand very easily the same person on the team. You've got the creative who's going to do all of your editing, all of your post-production. This can be either in-house or external, which we'll get to a couple tools for in a little bit.
And then you've got the expert, who's the host who's doing the talking. And this can be sometimes the hardest piece of the puzzle to fit in. How do you get someone who is excited about being on camera, who is also knowledgeable and also has the time in their schedule to produce content on a consistent level? So again, you might have one person doing all four of these things.
You might have four people distinctly or you might have some kind of combination to double up on them. I just want to jump in and answer Alan's question in the chat real quick. He says about the ideal length for podcasts. I think there is no ideal length and Stephanie, feel free to jump in when you want.
Yeah, I think producing a 15-minute podcast would be great. I don't think anyone has any preference. It's honestly all about the value that's in the podcast and that what do people want to hear you say? I would push back and I'll push back.
But I would also, I think what's more important than the length is the frequency. Are you doing a 15-minute podcast that people are looking forward to every single day? Or if it's 15 minutes, can you get five a week out there? That way people are really engaging and engaging.
But if you do a 15-minute podcast once every two weeks, I think I might slip through the crack. I think there's a relation between frequency and length but not just length in general. And I would say that if you're just getting started, if it's a new show, staying under the hour mark is going to be probably your best bet. Yes, if it's excellent content, people will listen to much more than that.
But if they're trying out your show for the first time, something that's between 15 minutes and an hour is going to hit best to jump right in. I think like test different things as well, right? Like this growth podcast is a good example. We have some short episodes and we just recorded one with MJ Peters.
That was like two hours long that we'll be releasing and she totally broke down how to build a demand engine at a startup from the ground up. And we went super in the weeds. Maybe we'll split into two, but I think it, I don't, Stephanie, if I'm wrong here, you're the expert, but you don't have to start with a length and then your stuck on that length. You do 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and you may have some that are Joe Rogan length and your audience will tell you.
Exactly. And that's why the architect and distributor have to work together if they're not already the same person because you get those metrics and you can see listener retention. So you can see on all of my 15 minute episodes, people listened to 90 to 98% of them. On my two hour episode, my retention was only 15%.
So you can figure out what works for you, trying a lot of different things, but make sure you're trying it not just once because that data could be skewed from whatever other reason. So if you're going to try something, try it for a little bit, change it up, see what works, go back, go back, go back. Hey, so I'm going to jump in and answer Scott's question. If you're all four of the positions on the current team, go back to the team slide real quick.
If you're all four positions currently on the team, what position would you push to hire or delegate first? My first thought is what one of these four, since if you're all four, which one is taking you the most time, where are you losing the most time and where are you going to gain that much value back in your day that you don't have to do, I would say I'm the creative on this team. It's pretty time consuming. So if that's my first thought is probably that you can hire the creative, there's a lot of other companies out there that can do it for you.
Yeah, there'll be some back and forth, which I'll talk about later on, that you definitely lose a little bit of speed sometimes, obviously outsourcing. But if you're looking for someone in house, I would my first thought would be creative because then you can still work with them closely. It'll save you all those hours that you're going through post in the week and get that time back for the other three parts is my first guess. That would be my suggestion as well for sure.
All right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, people see Chris's really crisp, clear HD video on there, and then they record a zoom on their laptop camera and they're like, oh, this is like crap, this is like crap. Well, look at the top left. That was our, that was his webcam with our crappy USB mic that took maybe 200 bucks total to set up with it.
I think he's got a ring light on there. Everything's super cheap. You got to start somewhere. I wouldn't let it be too intimidating.
And Stephanie wrote a great point here is iPhones are insane. Like I'm recording in 4k. The audio is great. It has a not noise canceling, but it can pick up background sound better.
And it doesn't pick up background sound better. I would just be more concerned about your environment. Tall ceilings, like in the Austin studio, most of them going through post and that picture on the right. I do have to catch some reverb because it sounds bouncing off all the walls and we haven't done.
We were looking into soundproofing more, but I definitely know smaller rooms the better, more soft things. You can hang up blankets right behind my desk here. You can put, you know, hang up blankets, styrofoam, everyone do behind it. Really catch that sound.
And that's really, again, ring lights are, you see everyone on TikTok looking into their camera, the ring light, like Chris has in that bit, smaller picture. It comes out really good on an iPhone and a $50 ring light. So do not let tech slow you down. There's a bunch of different options today.
So and I'll just keep going. Yeah, again, let me ask you a question now. When did you start making the shift and when like, how do you know you go from, you know, the log to tech webcam and a mic like this and a ring light for 200 bucks to like that picture you had on the right where you had a whole like you have a dedicated studio. And yeah, a lot of stuff that I don't even know what it is.
Yeah. Yeah. So we have, actually, I'll just go through the setup real quick. I know people were curious.
So we have two cameras on tripods there and the big one in the middle is actually a reflective teleprompter where we have an iPad laying down face up. So Chris can see the look straight into the camera, but he's actually seeing the zoom for our meetings. That helps him be a little bit more natural rather than if anyone's trying to look into a camera and talk, it's really unnerving and weird. But if he's looking into a zoom, like we are now, it's not a zoom, I can just talk to people that helps a lot.
He's got a mic hooked up all the way down to the cords on the bottom on to the receiver that's powering the mic and we actually have a memory card on there too. Recording everything live. And we've got obviously memory cards in both cameras. I forget the name of the company of the lights, but I believe we have four lights, three lights, two in the back, one in the front, the fill light.
Why do you have two cameras? Is that just to capture two angles? Two angles. Yeah.
So it's unnecessary. There's no real technical reason for it. It just looks cooler and pretty. Yes.
I would say, well, the technical reason for it. Yeah, is really just for editing. If you have an um or a stop and a start, it makes it much easier to switch camera angles and hide that rather than doing jump cuts from the same lens. If you're trying to cut out filler words or cut out entire sections of talking.
Great. We're talking like that's like 301 level stuff though. Yeah. Yeah.
And whereas maybe yeah, but at least not for a while. Okay. And we have we have one on the left. You can kind of see it on the monitor of the of the camera.
We actually have it recording vertically. So that way it's natively in TikTok format on the on the left side. So that way it saves us on the post side too because I can still use it in the square link in format, but it's already vertical if we want to read the TikTok and stuff like that. But to Cassie, your question, I think it comes down to bandwidth and your team kind of like Scott's Scott situation.
He's uh, you know, the one man team with four different positions here. He probably doesn't have time to run a studio to and record it. So once you get that post person higher, maybe you can think about, okay, so I have someone running all of post. Maybe they know a little bit about camera work.
Maybe we can just buy a DSLR, try it with the recording. I'm using a DSLR right now that's running right into my computer that I could record natively here right now. So you have one one chord with a little USB thing right from my camera. It's pretty straightforward.
So I would say it comes down to your bandwidth. There's no it's up to your choosing, but I think you need the people behind it running like Stephanie Chris is impressing record. Stephanie's pressing record and all turning on all the lights getting the mic set up pressing record on two of the cameras running the show in the background. She obviously took that picture.
You need somebody there on site too. So come down to your team and I think you're your bandwidth when you're ready to make that jump. And like I said, talking about the DSLR is a lot they are very expensive if you want them to be, but Webcams again, it's like TVs. I'm looking I'm in the market for a TV sync for the basement.
It's unreal how big you can get for so cheap. It's great. We're living the best time ever. You can get cheaper higher quality stuff like I'm sure you can just expense most of it too if you want ask Cassidy.
So there's again, it's just what you're looking for to get started. Obviously I want if you just want to get started, I wouldn't start at the DSLR. There's a lot of different settings that you might not know about. We've got everything kind of set up now where it was probably six months of trial and error.
But now we can kind of just like it's like the studio is good to go. Like you can get in there in and out. I think Stephanie Chris recorded five episodes yesterday. We're trying to minimize downtime with technical errors and stuff like that or it's just good to go.
And audio, I think audio is really actually sometimes I'd rather if you're gonna spend money on a mic or a Web or a DSLR, I'd rather you get the mic instead. It translates better to podcast. It sounds better. Webcams, whatever you can get away with your laptop camera.
If you had to choose between the two, I would upgrade for the for the microphone and over to your headphones. Try to call it. Don't forget that. Yeah, I'm glad you put this down because I think the important point here from my perspective that somebody who's like not at obviously the Chris level where that looks daunting and intimidating and you need experts is like to get started doesn't cost you anything really.
I mean, 50 to 200 bucks. I mean, like the barrier to entry of this is to do it when I would consider it with decent high quality is really low. Very, very low. Yeah.
All right, we're ready to power through. That's the top stuff. Really on one third through. Yeah, we've got like 10 minutes left.
So if anyone has questions that are top of mind, ask them, but we'll just keep going. Yeah, we'll kind of fly through this production tips super straightforward, super easy, obviously easier if you have someone with you helping set things up and get things recorded. Also, just having another person in the room sometimes makes things a little easier because it feels like you have an audience doing outline. Make sure you've got the key points, especially if you're running solo, but even if you're interviewing have your questions prepared, have an introduction prepared, have all of these things in front of you either on a second monitor or print it out just so that even if you know your stuff, you're going to get nervous, even for this, I've got like a paper outline, even though I have it in front of me on the PowerPoint, just for a little bit of extra security.
Everything should have a beginning, middle and end, whether it's a podcast episode, a LinkedIn post, a video clip, you want to make sure it's structured as a story so that you're engaging the audience, you're teaching them something, and then you're letting them go with a cap on the end. And trust your editors, if you're writing a LinkedIn post, just write, you've got Grammarly, you've got spell check, you've got all of these things that you can use after the fact to tighten it up, by being an editor word by word is only going to keep you from getting started. Same thing with audio or video, trust your editors, if you mess up a word, if you say something wrong, everyone does, just start the sentence over to give your editor a clean break and keep going. Confidence is massive in this, and if you let yourself get hung up on every single error, you're just going to burn yourself out quickly.
Make the time, block 30 minutes a day to post or engage. And then in that time, you're going to kind of going back to how do you figure out what to write about or what to talk about in that 30 minute chunk of time that you're scrolling LinkedIn or I set aside a half hour of data scroll, stick talking YouTube, just to see what's out there and to see what either we can respond to or what we can model for videos, what's working, what's not working, what are people saying and talking about engaging with the content is as important as creating the content so that you kind of know it's not a comparison, but you want to know where you stand and what other people are doing. That's a different version of it. It's easy.
Yeah, I also like the point you made here about the editor, like, you know, I don't have an editor, but Grammarly does. And once in a while I might dump it into JAD GPT, just to restructure it in a better way. I mean, there's obviously tools popping up every day. So I do think having using technology to be your editor to your point is like the barrier to doing that super low and it costs is obviously very minimal.
Honestly, that's the thing that I want everyone to get from this entire session is that you can get started right now. You can leave this and get started. You don't need anything more than you already have as long as you've got something that you're excited to talk about, get into it, get going. All right, Miles, post-production for O.
I have time to Victoria is asked a few times about KPIs. Should we touch on that and measurement frameworks before we move on or? Sure. I'll just keep my thoughts on it and Stephanie, probably a little bit more on the podcast side.
Specifically what KPIs look for, how to measure them, Carl? Yeah, like how your CEO comes to you. He's like, cool, you want to do a podcast? How are we going to measure it?
How are we going to know what works? What does that look like? Maybe you even have a CEO that's not as friendly as that, but it's literally like how many leads are we going to get? So maybe a lot of how do you navigate the reporting, the attribution, and the measurement questions in a channel like, or the strategy like organic or podcast more specifically when attribution is not as clear-cut as Google search, right?
Right. Yeah. I would first think about our self-reported attribution. You might have to buy some time too.
I think an important part too is like we just said, the bare entry is so low that it's probably going to be your cheapest marketing program to start, right? And then when you move on, obviously engagement listens, depends if you're doing video or audio, repeat listeners, stuff like that. But you have to be able to get three to six months of episodes out before someone comes in on your attribution form and says, hey, I was just like, I'd like to talk. So I'm going to go for Chris and refine lines.
Like take me back to the beginning there when all start to see, and maybe it was a little bit more clear cut for refine lines because I was the only marketing that Chris was doing. So every lead is going to come from that source because it's the only source in existence. Yeah. It was pretty immediate, honestly.
But that was peak 2019, time late, 19 early 2020, where I think it was just when LinkedIn was starting to take off as a good content platform rather than a networking platform. So there's also a result, there's a fast, but I wouldn't say that's a good thing to bring to your C-suite. Like, oh, don't worry, it's going to happen really quickly. So I think it's a mounting act of you're going to need to buy some time.
It's not going to be an overnight success given how saturated every platform is these days. But I think given the, again, the cheap cost to start compared to spending 100k on Google ads, let's spend 90k, give me that distant to go find some guests, get some equipment, maybe a outsourced from editing and give me three months and I'll come back and we'll get one inbound, how much might we get in three months? Let's see. And then that's not working after three months, change it up from there.
But I'm not sure what a casting your thoughts are. Well, yeah, in the meantime, you've got a lot of different analytics that you can track in all of your different channels. So I basically, the struggle is that I wish there was one thing that compiled at all. I'm sure there will be with AI, namely not so distant future, but you have your podcast stats.
So you have the number of people who listen to each episode daily. You have retention rates. You've got your estimated audience. So how many different devices listened in the last week?
How big your audience is? How many Spotify followers you have? You have that information for your podcast, for your YouTube videos. Again, you have retention rate on each video.
How many views likes comments? You can see all of the sites will do analytic graphs. So you can have a very clear visual picture of when things are working and when things are working maybe a little bit less well. And then it's really just taking those and tracking them impressions on LinkedIn, all of those different sites.
If this video did really well on LinkedIn, but it did not do well on YouTube, then you're going to reframe your audience. And that's where all of that constant shifting of strategy is going to come into play. Because if this video did really well on YouTube, we're going to keep posting more that are similar. And if that doesn't work, it was maybe just a weird fluke on that one video, then we're going to try something new and come out from a different angle.
So you have constant analytics that you're working with that you have until eventually those leads start coming in. Yeah, I was going to add a few things. I think if you're not the leader or the founder of the CEO and you're doing this for business, you're going to see this in here and on sales calls in the sales process before you see it, maybe on a SRA form. That's something Sydney pointed out in the chat.
What's interesting, if you're the CEO or founder and you're out doing this, you're going to hear about it in DMs. And so we're working with the CEO right now. You know, if you look at who came to the website, I don't know, maybe we're not there yet. If you ask him how many DMs have you gotten from people you could do business with, he's like, I'm getting DMs every day.
And he just started, right? Because that's what people want to do. They see Chris, like we still get a ton of demand through Chris's DMs. They never come inbound.
They don't got a form. They go write the Chris. And those are some of our best customers. So that's the power of getting the CEO and the founder and leadership involved.
They're going to hear from, they're going to hear directly from customers. And as soon as they start getting a few of those, there is no ROI case anymore. They're like, I'm bought in. This thing's rocking and rolling.
I'm going to keep posting them and do more and more. And that can happen pretty quick in terms of their buy in when they sort of seeing the reaction to their content and see people writing and saying, hey, can we talk about this? I think opportunities to cast you to add to that start opening up, right? You start getting invited onto other podcasts.
You start getting invited to events. Like all these other opportunities start coming your way. And that's like what's so awesome about this organic engine is like how scalable it is. Like you still have a small team, right?
Like Chris, Stephanie and Miles and like, you know, the people that we kind of outsourced some other creative to, et cetera. And it's just like that engine is pretty small and can scale. I mean, I don't want to say infinitely and be dramatic, but you know, it can scale into a lot of other opportunities, which I think is not, it doesn't exist necessarily with like a heavy page strategy. Right.
Yeah, I think for where we are with time, I feel like we've given a decent amount for you to go out and get started. Maybe we come back in two months and we talk about that kind of metrics KPI. How do you figure out what's working, shifting strategy? Maybe we kind of like come back to some of that information in a little bit.
That's not good to me. And there's some good information on that deck. I don't know if people like want to see some of that. I'm sure that's something that we can share out.
Maybe. Yeah, why don't we take another five? Well, if you're okay, I'm only take five or 10 minutes. People want to stick around.
They can stick around. If not, we can cover some of the highlights in the back of that deck for the podcast, at least. Yeah, I'll quickly touch on editing tools. We use the Adobe Suite here Adobe Creative Suite.
I think it's, I mean, I'm just super used to it right now. And I think it's so versatile as audition for podcast premiere for video after effects. If you really want to get into the weeds and do some animation, illustrator, Photoshop, they all work well together. If you've learned that, that's one thing that I highly suggest and there's obviously, you can teach yourself everything is on YouTube, how to do this, how to do that.
I've searched so many different things that I've now added into my tool belt that are, you know, again, pretty much self-taught. Again, self-editing is huge because I work so closely with Chris that our turnaround time is very quick. I know what he likes. There's minimal back and forth now back in the day.
He used to be a huge pain in the buck. He changed his title. He changed his start the clip here. So I've now learned how his brain works, thankfully, so I'm like, I think he's like this, he's like that.
Let's just keep it moving. Ending services are great. Like Scott's suggested to Scott. You might want to outsource that, save yourself some time, take one of those pillars off.
They can be that creative for you, but it's a little bit slower. There will be some back and forth. I remember a couple of years ago, we were doing some video work for clients where the back and forth just slowed everything down. It would take two weeks of small, tiny, minor edits that I thought didn't really matter back and forth back and forth.
Then they don't even have to post me because they're like, oh, we'll go on to the next thing. We'll go on to the next thing. So just be aware that there could be some pickups here and there of stuff like that. But again, I highly recommend.
And we do use Hatch, right? So I can do that. Yeah, so we do outsource a lot of audio because again, we have only so many hours in the day. We're running two full-time podcasts.
The Hatch is a great company. They have quick turnaround, great to work with. They've great, I don't know what to call it, not a framework, but a kind of a chart that you can upload your own things. They see it as a little workflow.
They show them anything. Here it is. Here's the file line. It's done.
You can put notes in. And then Sweetfish also does some video editing. They're a great company to work with and be host on Spotify. I didn't know.
I didn't realize they changed from Anchor, but they have great stats on there. You post everything to your copy for the podcast. And it looks like there's a bunch of, there's a great, much different options on the table below. And repurposing.
This is our bread and butter, Chris calls them content pillars. That's basically your long-form talk, your podcast episode, 30 minutes to an hour of your recording. Side note here, I really wanted to touch on which I thought was important. Making content to for the clips never works.
You need to have something, stuff you talked about before. You need to be passionate about something and have a topic that you're ready to go deep on. And then the clips and everything will come naturally after that. If you try to shortcut your way into like, I want to say this for a clip and it sounds scripted and unnatural, well, then everyone's going to see that at the end.
So for the repurposing portion, that will happen naturally. You record your 30 to, you know, hour-long thing. You can read a post on that clip every time. Here's a good practice.
Clip every time you're talking. If you're a tiger, I mean, if you clip every single thing from start to finish, drag those into out and then chop those down and work from there. Don't, don't, the biggest time was there. It's going through, like which one was working?
That's not that good. I don't know. I don't know. Pull everything.
Then you can compare contrast. Short form videos up on YouTube shorts, which was seen some momentum there. TikTok's been huge, but again, more for personal brands and company on there. And LinkedIn, of course, the long form goes up on YouTube.
This might go up on YouTube. Stephanie, I have refined lams. Yep. This long form recording going there.
And then of course the audio up on podcasts, or if you don't like how your face looks, you can do an audio gram. If anyone really wants to know how to do that, I can show them after effects. DM me. It's a little bit intricate to start.
You can do cool audio waves with like your headshot or something. Use that on LinkedIn. We used to do those back in the day. So that was kind of like a quick.
I know. Sure. I think there's like, there's an insight in there. I've not actually ever heard you say, which I don't really know.
And that is, well, just the idea that you don't record for a short, like the fact that you should be recording in length and then cut it down to the short, I think is not obvious. So I appreciate that. I always thought about like, hey, how do I record something for a minute? And you're like, that's a bad idea.
Record something for 15 minutes and cut it into minutes. Exactly. I go back to the client work we used to do when he wanted to get the client had started talking points about him, I'm sure record this or never record this. And it was just not good content.
You could tell when I was in the game, it was like, just like, it just didn't come out. Well, sorry. I suggested, you know, go talk for 20 minutes and then come back and I can get two minutes at that. That should be a problem.