#57: How to Create Memorable Content (with Obaid Durrani & Todd Clouser)

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Exit Exit.

Let'S kick this off. I was going to ask you both just for the record, to state your Names and tell me what you had for lunch today.

Nice. My name is Abad Durrani and for lunch today I had a grilled chicken pesto sandwich on brown bread. It was amazing.

It's. That's way more. It's way more impressive than me. My name is Todd Clauser and I have. I have not yet ate lunch. So that's running on an empty stomach here.

And that's where the intro, then the intro music comes like that. That's the intro. Bed and Todd are here. What's nice about this Exit 5 podcast is it's mine. I do it for myself and the audience and I just decide sometimes randomly, like, I see something and I see somebody and I'm like, you know what, I should reach out to them. And Obed and I are DM friends. Somehow we have exchanged a bunch of random DMs over the last couple months and I saw something. Somehow I got on your Easy mode. Is it called Easy Mode or Cheat Codes podcast?

Yeah.

Okay. Cheat Codes is the podcast. And I found that, and that really hit with me for some reason. And then I saw that you guys do this together and you have pretty good chemistry and back and forth together. And I was like, maybe they'll come on and we could do a little podcast together. And so that's, that's the background for that. And here I was, like a couple minutes before, was trying to find something specific that I wanted to pull up and prep for you guys. And like, I'm pulling some random episode and you guys are joking about how you do no prep. So you're my kind of people. I'm glad, I'm glad you're here. But the reason that I wanted to have you on is because you guys have an interesting approach to, or approach that I agree with about just what it takes to be successful with content and social media and community building today. And I just wanted to get some of that on the record on this podcast because to be quite frank, I really fuck with it. And I think a lot more people should take that approach. And so just want to start by, first of all, how do you two know each other? Because, like, if you go to LinkedIn, you try to figure out, like, what your association and affiliation with it. You guys, like, do you work together? Do you not work together? So who the heck are each of you? How do you have this podcast together? And why did you start talking about content?

I'm going to take this one a bit, if you don't mind. So the way we met each other Was there was a short stint where we both worked at Refine Labs. And this was very early in like my. My own content creation from like an entertainment journey. And when I started creating some of this content, I would put out like a call for collaborators internally. And the first time I ever did this, it was a video called if sales and marketing were a Married Couple. And Obed was the first one to respond to me and we did this collaboration. I think to this day it's probably like still my best performing post, which is crazy because I had like 2000 followers at the time or something.

You're welcome.

And where, where was it? Like a LinkedIn post, a TikTok video? What was it?

So, yeah, the idea of it was it's a TikTok style, like scene. If you're thinking about like playing multiple characters, everyone's talking to each other. So I played the role of sales and marketing and it was just kind of like making fun of like their, their interactions with each other. And then Obed played customer success, which was like the. In the video, he was like the therapist that sales and marketing went to. But then like, after Obed left Refine Labs, he kind of became the person that like, I just always sent all my video content to prior to putting it out. Like, he was like the first pass. And like, there's several times where it would be like, I feel like this is like 90% of the way there, like, give me your thoughts. And he would just like add something in there and like that would get it over the finish line. So, like, we stayed in touch. We created our own, like, mini little slack of just us so we could continue doing that. Like, I need feedback, let's collaborate, that sort of thing. And like, that's kind of like the beginnings of like what we started with the Easy Mode framework and the Cheat codes podcast. It was just us recording the conversations that we had had, like, that weren't really work related, but just like content creation process. Like, this is what we're doing related.

So. Yeah, totally. And just real quick from my perspective, like you said, I was at Refine Labs. He was already making like funny marketing content, but I was really scared at that time. I wanted to do it really bad. I just didn't know how. So then when he mentioned in the Slack channel, like, hey, does anyone want to hop on this with me? I was like, here's my chance to shine. And so I was like, yeah, I want to do it. So then I did it. And after that, yeah, like he said, we just kept in touch. I remember one time he sent me this really, really funny video called the Origin of Lead Scoring. And he was like, hey, man, I got this video, and, like, I think it's great, but there's something missing. And I watched it, and I'm like, dude, you need to add, like, villain music. And I sent him this playlist that was like an 1800s playlist to feel like the villain who just won the game. And it was like, just the soundtrack of, like, classical music. And I sent that to him, and he's like, why the hell do you just have, like, a villain playlist, like, on the ready?

Well, because he sent this back to me within 10 seconds of me sending this message.

I was like, dude, villain playlist. And then he used that, and, oh, man, it made the video so much like it was. I'll send it to you after this call, too. You can check it out. And then, so, you know, that just went on. We were just collaborating, making content together, and then eventually we both wanted to start a podcast. But from just what we've seen, like, historically, like, podcasts were always, like, a lot of work. Like, are we going to have guests? Are we not going to have guests? And what's the name going to be? What's the logo? So what we did is, like, you know, when we worked at Refine Labs together, we always used to have these huddles. We would just jump on huddles and just have these random conversations. And at the end of the conversation, we'd be like, damn, we should have recorded that. That was wild. And then, so we literally just started a podcast that way to where we just get on these zoom calls, and we would be like, so, what are we talking about today? And, like, just through that conversation, we'd end up having, like, an awesome chat. We would save that and then just use that as the episode of the podcast. So that's where the whole us not prepping comes from. So, yeah, I love that.

I also think it, to me, is, like, just a great example of, like, what it takes to actually make good content and to be good at content today is. It's really tough to do if, like, you don't genuinely like that. So, like, the story about, like, Obed just happen to have that soundtrack there. And, like, you had this video, like, clearly this is something that you guys, like, are interested in personally and have fun doing and, like, see it as a way to flex some type of, like, creative muscle. And I do think, like, you know, you look at SaaS, companies say a lot of people that listen to this podcast, the B2B SaaS companies. It's like we want to do content because it's some checklist and some perceived like strategy that we need to have. And so we go and write the blog posts that everybody else has already written where like, I can tell the way that you guys think and I see a lot of myself and how I like to do content and have done things in the past in it where it's like the best stuff comes from riffing on ideas, trying new things, like doing something that you might think is funny and it's based on something that happened in reality. How do you think? Like, can you replicate that? Like, is this easy for you guys? Because you guys are in, you've worked in marketing. You like marketing. You know, people always say to me, yeah, if you make content, you're going to make kind of. But like, you're in marketing. They say the same thing to me. You're in marketing, you're doing marketing. To marketers, this is easy. You just talk about marketing stuff. What do you guys say to that real quick?

I think it's actually easier to market to like non marketers. I think the further you move away from like easy material to go on, I think it becomes more and more necessary and even easier to build marketing that way. A lot of people say like the boring industries, like, oh no, we have a boring industry or no, our buyers want like that technical information and stuff, which is great and all of that has its place. But I don't see that as marketing. Marketing should be about creating memorable experiences, big and small, planting seeds when people are ready to buy for whatever reason, then they come in. Think of it like Geico. It's the most boring industry ever. Imagine if they took the B2B SaaS approach and only put out technical documents on home insurance and like only put out like, here's what you know your mortgage rate would cost you if you blah, blah, blah. And it's like, imagine if they didn't have the gecko. And so one time, like I was talking to, because Todd and I, we get a lot of like backlash and heat when we talk about non boring marketing. And people are like, oh, you don't need for your content to be not boring. You just need to know your audience. And it's like, I do know my audience and I know they're bored out of their minds. So that's why I'm saying this. But you know, in a funny way, imagine like you could call back in time and you're talking to the person that came up with the GEICO gecko and you're like, hey, you know, like I realize that even though like we're marketing to companies, it's still a group of people and we should still appeal to like emotion and their other senses. Like that person would be like, yeah. And then it's like, no, no, but listen, like, even though it's like a company and they're serious and there's 10, 20 people involved in the buying decision, like we should still be like planting seeds based on entertainment and humor and tying it back to our product and making it relevant and making this just enjoyable content when they come across it and it's like, yeah. And it's like, but no, no, no. Like Even though it's B2B and it's like, dude, did you guys take like a hundred years to figure this out? Like we came up with that frog like 130 years ago. Like you guys are sitting here in B2B SaaS with like these, you know, $50 million in fundings like per company. And like you're just now realizing this. So I think it's because I think it's strange how you know, when people like Todd and me and even you, like I've seen you talk about it, like, I think it's so strange how we get so much backlash for like the know, your audience thing, like think of it this way, like knowing your audience is like way, like way up there in terms of one of the first things you have to figure out, right? So it's like market orientation, market research, like segmentation, targeting, positioning, messaging, right? Like all this stuff. And then way down there you get to the content, right? You get to goals, strategy, tactics. And then how are you accomplishing those goals? How are you carrying out that strategy? And then you get to the channels, the actual content you're creating. So it's like non boring content is down here. Like audience is way up here. So it's like knowing your audience is not the alternative to creating content that's enjoyable and memorable and insightful and interesting and entertaining, right? So that's kind of like where I see all of this. Like just the way I see marketing, I see a lot of the stuff that we're creating I would see as more as like sales collateral and sorry, I'm like sweating right now, dude, I just came down with a fever all of a sudden today. I don't know how. And so I see it more like sales collateral. Like you get the GEICO commercial and Then you know, you see these commercials, you see all these things that they're doing. And then when they go in, you got the brochures and the pamphlets and all that stuff and that extra information. In reality, like in B2B SaaS, we're trying to do the opposite. We're trying to use like that informational, like pamphlets and you know, brochures and all of that stuff. The equivalent to that would be like technical blog posts and white papers and stuff. And we're trying to use that stuff as marketing collateral.

It's not to say that that stuff doesn't work. They just it has a different place and you have to be aware of. Exactly, yes, I totally agree with that. Which is like, I think a lot of people don't. For whatever reason we, maybe we think we're too good to admit it, but this whole thing is a game for attention and you can choose how you want to play that game, but the game is going to be much easier if people are paying attention to you. Todd, you just joined an interesting company where I feel like this kind of. It's a brand that people are paying attention to. Can you talk a little bit about lavender and why you joined and where you see this fitting? Because I bet that with your background in the similar vein to what Obed is talking about, there's a lot of connections there into being interesting.

Yeah, real quick, before I get into that, I want to touch on this point of marketing to non marketers because for a long time I marketed to welders and like that was my audience. And I think from a content perspective we always think about like reaching the biggest possible audience with any given content and we forget about like the individual at the end of the line. One of the things that we did because YouTube was our primary channel of marketing to them and this was a huge unlock was anytime a question came in that we could action immediately with a long form video, whether or not we had already created a video on that topic or not. We created that video because there was always some little nuance in how we answered it. But not only that you're creating a die hard fan. I hate to say that because it's kind of cliche at this point, but you're kind of, you're creating a die hard fan when specifically when you have a large following and you can you answer that person's question in the form of a video and then you call them out in that video for like providing the idea like that's the person that's going to show up in every single video going to be the first person in the comments. They're going to tell their friends, like if you need questions on xyz, like this is the place to go to. So like I think that's one thing that is important to note as well.

I do think so often though. I was thinking about this with a GEICO comment too. I think the part where like this gets ruined in B2B marketing is I think whether your idea is to make those videos for welders or if you have the gecko idea, we instantly go to like, well, how are we going to measure this and how are we going to. The gecko's great, but I don't, we don't sell geckos. And so how do we make sure that this campaign like drives revenue for this channel or how do we know this one? Making this one video is just going to result in X number of sales. And I think anybody that's actually been in the content game and making interesting content, you know that there is just a certain feeling of when you do it, you get a response and then it becomes, it becomes easy. I'll give you a perfect example. I did like a promoted post with a SaaS company, like a sponsored thing like, hey, drive traffic, you know, write a thing, drive traffic to this, whatever. And they gave me a UTM. They gave me UTM link and I didn't want to use the UTM link in my LinkedIn because I think it looks like, you know, it already is an ad and then like if I'm going to like, it just looks worse. Well, they had 700 signups that day from that post and like they don't need. They emailed me this morning was like, this was amazing. Can we do more? You were right, we don't need the utm because it was obvious that on that day after we did that post, this thing happened and it just was like another reminder of me that like despite the best of our demand gen and how we want to measure, well, we're doing a campaign, we're doing an influencer campaign. Here's the tracking link. Let's make sure we traffic, you will know. And I felt this firsthand when we were at Drift. We had a podcast called Seeking Wisdom that we didn't measure it. How did we know it was driving business? Because like the sales team would tell us all the time, man, I've talked to this person today. They were listening to Seeking Wisdom. We would, someone would show up at event, they listen to this, they reply to our Emails. And I think you have to have that. Creating content has to do with that feeling. And I do think that that's a key ingredient that it seems like you guys have that is also just an underlying layer. Whereas if we go first of, like, how are we going to measure this? Then of course you're going to be screwed from the start at trying to do interesting marketing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, No, I agree. Totally agree.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other thing that is interesting from a content perspective, like, the more and more you create, like, you're going to have different, like, buckets in which those or different point of views in which, like, that different subject matter falls into. And like, in YouTube specifically, we found that, like, there was like, three or four very specific topics that, like, when we spoke about, like, we knew exactly the result that was going to happen. Not because, like, we were measuring it and measuring, like, inbound leads or anything like that, but the response that came in any given video that was around a specific topic. So, like, again, and this kind of back to the question that I put on hold here. This is exactly what spoke to me about joining lavender. Like, if you look at lavender content, it's way more geared towards, like, it reminds you more of, like, B2C content of, like, you know, the stuff you used to see on, like, TV when, like, you would see, like, TV ads and stuff. Like, you see a lavender Joe, like, skit and, like, it's not selling lavender. Like, there's no call to action to download lavender. He's kind of, like, picking on all of the stereotypes that we know are, like, still being done at a huge, like, massive level. But, like, everybody knows that they're wrong. And it's like, we kind of, like, poke fun at ourselves, which is kind of what I do in my personal content with marketing. Like, I make fun of marketers all the time. You know, though I am one so.

Well, so I think your headline is like, you're the worst marketer in the world or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I lean into that too. Like, I put a post about this the other day and I was like, you know, I get probably not a ton, but I probably get, like, between like, five and 10 people a month that'll DM me specifically to say, like, hey, man, I saw your headline. It's hilarious. And I'll be like, listen, it's meant to be funny. Like, it's meant to grab your attention.

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But it's also true, like I, my background is YouTube, like my full time job for 10 years was YouTube. So, like, when I saw everyone talking about, like, marketing automation and, like, using tech stacks and everything, like, yeah, I felt like a freaking idiot until I realized, like, you know what? Like, my ability to create content that resonates with people and, like, is memorable is way more impactful than being able to, like, report on stuff. I can get somebody else to report on it for me, but, like, showing that I can connect with an audience and create that content, at least to me and the people that I want to work with, like, that's way more impactful.

Yeah, I agree. Going back to what you said real quick about, like, the reason it's a bit difficult to, like, create content this way and do it this way is because so many people are caught up in, like, okay, well, like, essentially, what was the ROI of this? And I think, like, it's going to be difficult to sort of work around that. But I think, like, the answer, a potential solution might be in a mindset shift when it comes to what you're expecting to get out of your content. Like, a lot of people, they want to make content and they want to make it good, right? Like, let's make good content. This has to be good. This has to be amazing. But I would say stop trying to make stuff good, because when you try to make stuff good, what do you want afterwards? You want to see if it was good or not? What do you look for? You look for the proof. The proof isn't usually there because not everything is trackable. And then it's. So you want to pull the plug on these activities and whatnot. So what I'd say is, instead of aiming to be good, aim to be memorable. Because when we're aiming to be memorable, we understand that the person, your audience, they come across dozens and dozens and dozens of content assets in one day, and they're not going to remember all that stuff. What they are going to. So let's say, like, in one week, we come across hundreds and hundreds of content assets. If on day five, I sit there and I'm like, hey, Dave, so can you recall all the content you've seen over the past four days? You'd be like, dude, no way, right? Like, you'd be able to remember maybe three or maybe four of the really memorable ones, and they're memorable because maybe they were super insightful, maybe they gave you a new approach to something, a new perspective to something, or they could have just been relevantly hilarious in the context of what they were going for, but at the end, they were Memorable. So I would say that when it comes to creating content for your, you know, marketing strategy, aim to make your content memorable, a memorable experience. So once someone comes across that content, it's a memorable experience to them. And you can do this in both big and small ways. One of my favorite example of like a small way of doing that is think of the email newsletter signup pages. We go and subscribe to a newsletter and then it's like hey, please check your inbox, confirm and come back here. And then like you know, and so imagine if it was like like imagine if you signed up for our newsletter. We don't have one but imagine if you signed up for our newsletter and it was like holy shit, did the Dave Gerhardt just sign up for our newsletter? I don't believe it. I'm going to need you to confirm your email fam. And then like you go and now when you go to confirm your email, at the very least like maybe you have a smile on your face and then you go and confirm your email. It's not this like horrible daunting task. You confirm your email and then you get a new page and it's like dude, no way I can retire now. Mission accomplished. Haha jk, you know, look out for more insights in your inbox every weekend.

I love that example because like I was gonna and I had a question that I wanted to ask you guys after which is like I think it's easy to default to like these big, the big sexy video like big brand ideas and like what you provided is like micro copy. That's like a day to day thing where like and I remember Slack, I don't know if they do this anymore but like Slack used to have really good like in product copy where like you try to upload a photo and they had some like witty line where like if you didn't upload it the right dimensions they had some like funny one liner or like your email example I'll bet is perfect. I used to have this email at Drift that was after somebody would sign up, they would get an email from me personally and it would be like hey, this is Dave. Well actually it's not really me, it's the automated version of me. I wrote this at one point in time. But I just want to say thank you for signing up. Here's what you're going to expect and if we ever spam you, you can reach out to me personally. Here's my personal email. Please come blow me up. If we, you know, whatever. And then it was like A gif of me waving. And people really connected with that because it was like real, it was personal. And I think that's a great example of what you just kind laid out.

Yeah, I love that. I think that's a perfect example of like that theory or like concept in play. I like that a lot.

So how do you guys apply this mentality to an actual marketing team with weekly monthly goals, quarterly campaigns, like, you know, it's real easy for like if it's the three of us. And I'm like, hey guys, I want to come up with a funny video to like go viral on LinkedIn to help me promote Exit 5. Like, we could do that, we could go make the video. That's great. But I, I want to give people like practical advice because I'm sure people are listening, they're nodding along, they're like, okay, this is cool. These guys have cool content ideas. But like, how do you put this in play? And maybe, Todd, I'll kick this to you. As a former YouTuber who's now running marketing at a SaaS company, where does this actually fall in line?

I think the best way I can describe this and Obed and I call this the, the content journey. So Obed, you can hop in and say if you want to bring this in a different direction. But I think the problem with most, like let's say entertaining content is that there's no thought process behind it of what it's supposed to achieve. Like I did as an example, last February, I put out my Calendar invite on LinkedIn to just like chat with people who wanted were interested in doing TikTok content but didn't know how to get started or whatever. And I asked three questions on every single one of those calls. The first question was, what's the purpose? Like, why do you want to create TikTok content or entertain content? And the overwhelming majority, and when I say overwhelming, like 99% of these people would say the purpose of it is to create brand awareness or drive inbound demo leads. Like, those were the. Out of everything that I heard, like those two came up almost every single time. And like, it made me realize that like, you know, like, these aren't. This isn't a purpose. This is like a side effect of what you're trying to achieve. So like, in my head, the purpose of this content is first and foremost and like, it should have one of three purposes. Like, and it's really a targeting exercise and then figuring out the type of content that works for that target. So like, first it's like, am I creating content that's going to be geared at a top down strategic narrative level that I'm pitching to CEOs or strategic decision makers?

What's an example of that?

So an example of that would be, take Chris Walker content. He's making what we call type 1 talking head pitching strategic concepts that are trying to like drive that strategic mindset shift in the high level of the organization that they push down.

So like the overall company message is like, we're an agency who believes that the way that B2B marketing is has been done is broken. This is a video that shares like, it's a perspective as it relates to that and we want to get people talking about it as opposed to like, hey, we have a big product launch for Lavender in March and we're launching our new sales email blank. Okay, is that where you're getting with this?

Yeah.

Nice.

But the problem with that, and it's not a problem in itself, but let's say you get that mindset shift adoption in the target company, you come one step down from that strategic CEO C suite level. Now you've got a bunch of people that maybe get the idea, but they have to go out and implement it. So like this is what we call like middle out implementation content. So this is going to be like your how to content. If you're trying to achieve X do Y. And there's millions of examples out there, like just think how to in your head like very tactical where like a lot of this entertaining type of content really comes into play is like now you go one step below that, you've got this massive audience of people who is actually using your product or maybe they're not using your product. Like ClickUp is a great example of this super competitive category that they play in the focus of this content. We call it bottom up. Evangelism is your goal. And like this type of content is to evangelize the end user of your product. So that one, if they already use it, like they're in love with your brand and they're like happy to use it and shout you from the rooftops. Or two, if they don't use it like they want to, like they aspire to use it because you like, they resonate with that content so much. So like I just used ClickUp and as an example but back in the day I was buying, I actually ended up buying Monday. So like I was looking for a project management tool and this was back when I was doing YouTube stuff and I needed it for a very basic Use case. Right. Like, they all did what I needed to do. So, like, I was looking at Monday Asana. I forget the other one or two that I was looking at, but at the end of the day, they were all kind of priced in the same area. They all did what I needed it to do. I went with Monday because back at that time, they had a series on YouTube called Will It Automate, which was freaking, like, an amazing series. And it resonated with me because, like, I was in YouTube, like, it was great content. So I ended up going with that with Monday because, like, they evangelized me with that entertaining content. Had absolutely nothing to do with the product. But, yeah, so, like, that's where that entertainment stuff comes in. And getting back to the original question, I kind of rambled forever there. But, like, you have to figure out the purpose of the content. Are you talking about strategy from, like, a strategic level that's going down? Are you telling people, like, how to implement that strategy, or are you evangelizing the people at the bottom to, like, use your product?

You want to jump on that?

Yes, sir. Okay, so adding on to that, adding on to the purposes behind your content, where you have the top down, middle out, bottom up, there's a few other things that over the past year or two, I've kind of just. It's just the way that I see content now. And so I kind of want to break that down. First, there was this concept or ideology called idea driven content. And where that came from is I've always liked to pare down, like, blanket advice. So a few years ago, the blanket advice was like, just make good content. Just make good content. So I'd be like, what does that mean? And then people would be like, you know, just content. And I'd be like, okay, you know, so then I went and I. I tried to figure this out myself. I forgot about it. You know, imposter syndrome, low confidence, put it to the side. And then I brought it back up when Todd and I were talking. So what it is, is what we've done is we've categorized different types of good content into specific groups to help ourselves and other content creators understand what it even means to make good content. Because on one hand, Dave, you could have this podcast, or you could make a sick LinkedIn text post tomorrow. And, like, it'd be good content. But at the same time, Papelaya could do like an episode of do you even resonate? And, like, that's good content. And at the same time, Will Aitken could make, like, Some funny sales feed, skit or gong could make like a Super bowl commercial. And like, that's good content. So it's like there's such a varying degree of like resources involved here, purposes involved here. So how do we make sense of all this? So the way we did it is we broke it down into three types. There's type 1, type 2, and type 3. Now type 1 is insightful substance. So for your content to be any level of good, especially in a B2B context, it has to be built on insightful substance. From there we move to type 2, insightful substance presented in an interesting format. And then after that it's type 3, insightful substance presented in an interesting format and built on an entertaining concept. And this is not like a progression system. It's not like, oh, you start with type one and you go to type two, then you go to type three. It's individual, like parallel lanes. So a quick example of that. If you look at like, for example, like you mentioned ClickUp, like ClickUp has these commercials where they show you like how cavemen back in the day use their product to do like their alt day to day stuff. And so when I saw that, and then I saw like a Grammarly commercial where they show you an employee using Grammarly for their day to day things, I was like, you know what? Essentially these commercials are like the same thing. They both show you a product, they show you the product in action, they tell you what the product is, they even show you like UI screenshots. And they're both like 30 seconds long. They're the same thing. But in my mind, one is arguably more memorable. And that was because it was built on a creative concept. So then that got me thinking about substance and delivery. And this is something else that we like finalized together. So there's this concept of substance and delivery that when it comes to creating content, you want to break it down into two things. There's your substance. So the actual takeaways you're providing the dope insights, the perspectives, the advice, and then there's your delivery. How are you delivering that substance? What is the best way to get this substance across? And we break that down into two further parts. Delivery is broken down into format and concept. So your format is like the content asset you're creating. Is it a blog post, Is it an infographic, Is it a video? And I feel like we usually just do those two things. We decide what we're going to make and then we make. It's like, oh, I'm going to write A blog post on this or I'm going to make a video on that. So the second part of delivery is concept. Sometimes, not all the time. Sometimes when the moment calls for it, we need to apply a creative concept like the ClickUp commercial. So if we go back to the Type 1, Type 2, Type 3 stuff, and the reason that I explained this substance and delivery concept is I did all three. So with my Type 1 insightful substance, I just wrote up a LinkedIn text post where I explained what this meant, I published it and I went on about my day. Type 2 insightful substance in an interesting format. I turned on my PS5, I turned on my PS5 camera, I started streaming myself playing Resident Evil 8 and I just started talking about substance and delivery. And then I had like, I had like this video. So instead of just like a normal video of me talking about it, it's me live streaming this video game, talking about substance and delivery, published it on LinkedIn, people really liked it. And then type three insightful substance in an interesting format built on an entertaining concept. I got a rap beat and I wrote out like what substance and delivery means, but as like rap lyrics. And then I turned it into a rap song uploaded on Spotify and like did that with it so you could break down your substance in all three ways. And then going back to what Todd said, there's your content journey, right? There's your bottom out, middle out, top down. So just recapping real quick, you have your idea driven content, right? Like what it means to make good content. You have your content journey, the top down, middle out stuff. So the way that I've always put this together is through this thing called a four step thought process, where it's just like, number one, let's grab a marketing objective. Like, what are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to make progress on here? Number two, let's list out all the different content formats that could help us move closer to that goal. Because as you know, there's certain content formats that are better suited for certain goals. Let's go back to like the brand awareness example real quick. If you're trying to get brand awareness, you'll probably have more luck, you know, doing something like a webinar or a free course than, you know, trying to accomplish that through like a blog post. So what I've always done is step one, grab a marketing objective. Step two, write out all the content formats that I could create to move, like, execute that objective. Step three, understand the message that I'm trying to deliver. Like, so what's the main takeaway? What's the thing I'm trying to convey? Like you said, Dave, it could be a product launch, right? Like, this is where that comes in. If that's what I'm trying to get across, that lavender or drift or whoever has launched a new feature and I want everyone to check it out, then that's the message I'm trying to convey. But then step four is, like, how do I turn this brand asset into a memorable experience for whoever's watching, reading, or listening? Like, how do I take, like, the me factor out of it and make this content that is meant for you to enjoy, and at the same time, it's relevant to the product? I tie it back to the objective, all that stuff. But that's hidden. You shouldn't see that. All you should see is content you enjoy.

Hold on one second, ladies and gentlemen.

Hey. Yes.

Thank you. Thank you.

Get this man a towel bed. You could go take a seat on the bench, man. We got you up for the fourth quarter.

Look, guys, it's been an honor. I'll see you later.

That was great, because. And there's actually a meta lesson, I think, or I don't know if it's a macro, but, like, you're in marketing and you have a point of view, and you wanted to deliver this framework. Like, what you just talked about was, like, the ultimate lesson. Like, the way you package that up is a perfect example of good content on its own, which is, like, you didn't just have a point of view. And I think, like, you guys mentioned Refine Labs and Chris's stuff. Like, the reason that that stuff hit with a lot of people was not just because Chris was, like, a compelling public speaker, but I think things were delivered in such a packaged way. And I learned this lesson at Drift from David Cancel in the early days. He was like, you always gotta give something a. Like, give it a name, give it a framework, give it some packaging. And, like, the message in the story is gonna land much better with people than if you're just, like, hot, take this thing is broken. Here's why. But, like, if you can package it up. And so, like, the way that you laid that out, I think is I want to dive in that for a second. But the more you can go back to, you know, for those listening, the more you can go back to your execs and your founders and think about the company story, not just in the overall story, but, like, how can we package this up? The delivery of it matters, and, like, you know, a Lot of people like to like on marketers and how we like to come up with acronyms and different names for this. But there's so much power in being able to name something, whether it's a framework like inbound marketing, conversational marketing, whatever you want to call it, right. Or if it's just what you did, which is like, hey, here are the three tenants of great content. Like, a lot of people talk about, you need great content, but that means, blah, blah, blah. Here's what it actually means. Boom. You need insightful substance. Boom. You need an interesting format. Boom. You need an entertaining concept. Now you've given people, like, an actual way to do that. So that to me alone was just like a master class in how to think about content. One thing I want to come back to is just like the various formats because I think that framework is fantastic. I think that a lot of companies make the mistake, though, of not being intentional about where do we then want to go and play?

Meaning.

I think it was clear if you use Refine as an example, Refine Labs as an example, or like Gong in the early days, or Drift. It was our podcast. It was like Gong said, we're going to do this on LinkedIn. At Drift, we said, we're going to do this on our podcast.

Right.

I think you do have to be intentional about, like, picking one or two channels because I think what doesn't work is to, like, as great as that framework is, I don't think you can do that in, like, one day you make a YouTube video and one day you make one TikTok video. Like, how do you guys, you know what I'm trying to articulate there? Like, I feel like you need to say, even if you end up being wrong, I would much rather see companies be like, we're going to take that framework and for six months we're going to try to build an audience on YouTube because we believe that X. Like, we. What's your reaction to that?

You want me to take this one? You want to take this one, Obed?

Yes, sir. Go ahead. I'll go after it.

Okay, so I think if we're starting from scratch, let's pretend like we're starting from scratch. We're building out a content engine. Me and Obed were just talking about this earlier today within this framework that Obed partially just laid out there. Like, we talk about high effort, high payoff content and low effort, high payoff content. And I think those also fit into, like, capture demand and create demand. And I think a lot of what the narrative has been lately on LinkedIn and other like marketing channels is create demand. Create demand, create demand, which 100% I agree with, you have to create demand. People kind of forget about the capture demand part though, right? So like kind of coming back to the original question, like, how many channels should you start with? Like, when do you figure out, like when you add on more is in my head, you need to have at minimum one of each. Like you need to be doing capture demand and create demand. So like, if you're just starting out and like I'll use lavender as an example, like we're just building out our marketing team. Like we're creating all this create demand in public. Like the brand awareness stuff. We've got like individual content series that people are, that people are spinning up, but we've also got the blog that we're building out in the back end so that like, if we're successful in these create demand channels right now, the main two for us are TikTok and LinkedIn. But like, as those are effective, we'll bring on more people and increase that. If that works, you're going to get to a point where you're no longer the person that people associate that narrative with, right? Because like word of mouth, dark social, like all these things happen and it gets so far out, so far removed from like my LinkedIn post that like somebody might hear about email assistance and they don't know that like the original narrative came from lavender. They try to find like who's a good email assistant and they may find someone else, like if we're not focusing on captured demand. So like, I think the answer to your question, if you're just getting started, obviously, like if you're in B2B SaaS, the most obvious answer is probably LinkedIn, like there's a huge audience there, but as you move out, like it's about testing and we can talk about like what we look at as those qualitative signals, audience signals. I bet if you want to dive into the little to this a little bit, you can, but I think most people are going to do like all these create demand motions. Like they're going to like spread it out, see what works. I think you need to the capture is less sexy but like you have to do one of each before you hop in.

Obed though, this is where it does pay to the whole like, know your audience piece though, right? Like if you're going to pick which channels are we going to be on, that's got to come from who are we selling to where do these people hang out? And I also think another analysis that you have to do is also like, where can we, based on this point in time, compete? And so maybe nobody in your industry, in your niche is on YouTube, but like, you look around and like, you don't have any budget, you have one other people person on the team, you have no YouTube experience. Maybe let's not do YouTube versus, like, if the team is, you know, Todd's there and Obed's there, and it's like, well, actually, you know, we kind of have some creative chops here and like, Todd spent a decade on YouTube and so we might have an unfair advantage. Like, I think there's a little intangible piece of that in figuring out, like, where you're going to play. Like, at Drift, it was playing into the fact that the CEO already had, you know, 60,000 followers on Twitter and was like a pretty prolific writer on Medium and already had an audience. So I was like, oh, there seems to already be something here. Let's go and build that. Versus if it's two unknown founders, I might not have like, recommended the same approach.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. That's kind of like the way I was going to approach it. Like, when it comes to, like, what channels do we go on, where do we start? I think it depends. Like, if you're just getting started out, you have no existing audience, nothing like that. Then like you said, where do your customers hang out? Where is your audience actually spend their time? Then I would say to start with there, I think eventually, over time, gradually over time, what you want to do is dominate more and more of these channels, create a dominating presence on more and more of these channels. Just like you need to eventually, over time, unlock new verticals, you need to expand your total addressable market. I think you also need to start establishing presence, a dominating presence on all of these channels. It's just a matter of prioritizing the order in which you roll those channels out or you attempt to build a presence on those channels. And then again, that goes back to one of two things. If there's no existing audience, you're just getting started out. Find out where your customers are. And then on the other hand, like, if you've been doing it, I would say start with there. And like you said, based on your resources. So your customers and your resources, that's what's going to guide you and help you determine, like, what is the order of these channels and like, how do we want to attack them based on priority and stuff.

And Real quick too. I think also the lift that is required on specific channels. Like one thing that I learned a long Time ago in YouTube, because a YouTube video is not easy to produce if you're going to do it right. Like it's, it's typically not repurposed. Like you have a YouTube first strategy, pause, never say.

Which is my biggest beef with every B2B SaaS company in starting YouTube is what we do is we just, we made a lot of videos and we just put them on YouTube and we're like, well, why is YouTube not working?

Yeah.

Whereas, like, same as TikTok, the same as YouTube, the same way, like, I've seen a lot of people do this. I'm trying to do this now with my podcast. Like, if I just take clips from the podcast and put them on TikTok, that account is not gonna grow. You have to make dedicated native content for the platform.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's kind of, that's a little bit where I was going with this. Like, what I learned when I was doing YouTube content, like, we couldn't spend a ton of time figuring out what was gonna work. Like, we had sponsors, we had like, goals to meet, like all that. So what we would do is we would start with our short form channels. So like early on it was Facebook and Instagram, and then later on it became TikTok and we would start putting out content on these lower lift channels to figure out the stuff that people were responding to. So we might put out five short form posts a week, figure out what has like the most engagement, what people are like asking the most questions about all that kind of stuff, and then that turns into a long form video. Whereas most people's perception of like, how you should create and repurpose content is kind of what I call like the Gary Vee method, which is like create one long form piece of content and then chop it up a thousand different ways and just like call it like recycle. To me, that's like recycling rather than like repurposing. When we talk about repurposing, we're talking about repurposing the idea, not the specific piece of content. So, like, if I'm creating something for TikTok from this podcast, I'm not gonna, like you just said, I'm not just gonna cut something out of this podcast. I'm gonna figure out the message I was trying to get across in that clip and I'm gonna rewrite it so it works for TikTok, you know, so.

Yeah, I love that. That to me is like the secret ingredient of like, using content and using social media. It's like trying to find these little signals in pockets. And it's not necessarily a metric, but it's like, oh man, that's that concept. It's like when I use that line, life is too short to work for. CEO doesn't get marketing. Like, people started to tweet that and reshare it and whatever. And so when I wanted to come up with a video concept to promote the job board that I had, it was like, oh, I already know. Like, here's a one liner that I think is funny and like, already lands with people. Then when, when I hired Danielle from Epic Media, who made the video, we came up with that idea in like five minutes because it's like, hey, this concept's kind of already been proven. Let's go and like make a funny video. And she, she did her magic and made it happen. But I love that. I think that's the underrated benefit of content is like, it gives you your finger on the pulse. We gotta wrap up. I wish I could talk to you guys forever. Obed and Todd, I'm gonna link to you guys in this episode. I would recommend you go and connect with each of them on LinkedIn so you can get their content in your feeds. You also need to go and check out Cheat codes. This is their podcast, Cheat codes. Play the marketing game on Easy Mode. They got a bunch of different stuff on there from this content framework that they talked about to what does it mean to build a media company to how to approach influencer marketing. I've been following them secretly and I wanted to get them on the show. So I appreciate you guys doing this and hopefully we'll stay in touch and I'll. Maybe we'll do this again in the future.

Okay, thanks a lot.

Appreciate you having us.

Appreciate you having us on.

We'll see you guys. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the exact Exit 5 podcast.

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