#71: B2B Content Strategy (with Lashay Lewis)

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive Our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving, registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more.

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All right, Lachey is here. I'm going to give you a minute to introduce yourself but I get a lot of messages from people and they're like here's why I should come on your podcast. And I don't always a lot of them are not that great and typically they come from like a PR agency. And it's like, hello, as a listener of Exit 5, you know, you should please talk to so and so. But I can always tell when somebody actually listens and actually knows the audience. And Lachey sent me a message and was like, I would love to talk about content. And then I started following you on LinkedIn and I thought that you had an interesting point of view about content. We haven't done a content specific episode of this podcast in a while, and it's arguably my favorite topic in marketing. And I was like, all right, let's do it. Let's have Lachey on. So who are you? What's your background? Give people a quick introduction.

Sure. So my name is Lachey Lewis. I'm founder of Authority Plug, which is a content marketing consultancy and education company. So what I do is I help B2B SaaS companies create a profit driven content marketing strategy. So my background, of course, started with like, freelance writing, jumping from one content marketing agency to another, going in house at a few places. And yeah, from there I just kind of branched off and just kind of went the consulting route.

Okay, so how did you get into content in the first place? Like, you became a freelancer. You were in. I actually have some specific questions I want to ask you about your point of view on in house versus agency. But just how did you get into content as a craft, as a thing that you do? My guess, if you're anything like me, I wasn't born and was like, you know what I'm going to do one day? I'm going to be in marketing and I'm going to create a lot of content. So what was your path to content?

Yeah, so it was an interesting one. So this whole digital marketing, Internet marketing thing started when I was like 16. So I'm 29 now, so I've got some skin in the game. But started when I was 16, I started building affiliate sites because it was interesting. I was like, oh, okay, I think I could do that. And as the years went on, I just took a deep interest in like psychology and content marketing and how I'm able to get people to purchase through words. And I found that really interesting. So I just kind of like continued to pursue that. And I got into E Comm at first. So first of all, I used to hate SaaS. Let me just put that out there.

Okay. So when I do these interviews, I take a million notes and things I want to come back to. And I. Before you even clarify, I already said we're coming back. Back to that. We're going to talk about why you hate SaaS or why you hated SaaS. Go ahead.

Yeah, but yeah, I started with E commerce. You know, we're helping a couple E Com companies dial in their content strategy. They wanted to know how to get sales from content marketing. They weren't really sure how to do it. My background in affiliate marketing was very aligned with E commerce because I started off like as an Amazon affiliate, like building websites and so it kind of aligned. And then I started helping a few E Com companies back in the day with their content marketing strategy and then it just kind of slowly moved over and evolved to SaaS. I want to say maybe like five or so years ago and I've been in B2B SaaS ever since.

What would you say someone this comes up a lot like in the Exit 5 community, somebody who maybe has done marketing or writing or content in a different area and they get into B2B SaaS, what's unique or different or what should somebody know? If it's somebody who's listening or what advice would you have for somebody that's coming from a different industry like E Comm and getting into B2B SaaS, is it that different? How would you articulate it?

I think it's pretty different. Mainly because B2B SaaS is very nuanced, whereas E comm is pretty straightforward. It's like if I'm selling a skin cream, it's like, okay, you know, the ingredients to the skin cream, what does it do, what are the benefits? Very straightforward. Not so much. In B2B SaaS there's a lot of nuance. Different products have different features. We have like enterprise level SaaS which is even more complicated. So there's a lot of nuance to B2B SaaS, which is why I didn't like it at first.

And even just like the marketing is not there's more nuance in the marketing. Like when you're doing marketing for E Comm, it's very much like, you know, you talked about the product and the benefits and the positioning of the product. But even just the marketing strategy is pretty much like it's about selling. It's the reason you're working on something is because it's part of a direct sales campaign where like in B2B there's much longer sales cycles, there's much more considered purchase. And so you're often working on things that the goal is not necessarily like direct response sales.

Exactly. It's just like you said, there's more nuance with the Content writing, there's more nuance with the marketing. You have to communicate with more people. And this is something that I've learned just a few years ago is just way more nuanced than, like, direct response. This is just. Yeah, it's just a lot that goes into it, for sure.

And how did you go about tackling that nuance? Like, obviously, you've built a successful career out of writing. Now, how do you translate that?

Do you have a process for?

You know, because obviously there's complex products in B2B SaaS. I mean, I see stuff to this day that I don't understand, and I'm like, this would be hard to do marketing for, but I feel like maybe there's a process. How do you go and translate one of those confusing industries?

Yeah, so I like to break SaaS down by, like, the features. So there's multiple different ways you can do this. But how I like to do it is I like to start with a specific feature and then dig more into that feature. So, like, what ICP does that feature serve and what's the positioning in the market for that specific feature? And what I'll do is I'll just go feature by feature. Now, I know we could probably dig into this a little bit later, but it's like you start with a specific feature. And how I like to start is I like to start bottom of funnel and work my way up across the different features. So it's like if there's a lot of nuance, again, I like to just start and hone in in one place and then tackle that and then I'll move on to the next feature or the next icp. Because I noticed that a lot of content marketers write in a box, kind of like in a vacuum. But it's that content marketing is not a one size fits all type of thing. Especially if you have a SaaS with multiple features. You have to really dig in and understand the ICP of that specific feature.

So it starts with almost research.

Yes, always.

That's what great writing is. It's my favorite lesson about copywriting and just writing in general. It's like, so I think some people get so caught up in trying to be the most creative, wittiest, like, sexiest writing, when really great writing is really just rooted in knowing your icp, as you mentioned, knowing your customer and doing that research.

Absolutely. And what I find is that a lot of content marketers are taught to write how a lot of us were taught to write. So, you know, kind of like the same Way I was taught to write. Like, you type in a keyword, preferably like a high volume keyword, you type it into Google, you pull the first top 10 results and open 10 tabs on the computer, read through those results and attempt to compile your own thought piece from everybody else's opinion and call that a unique point of view. When it's not really a unique point of view, you're just taking what everybody else thinks and mashing it together.

Holy smokes, that's a good take. Okay, now we're going to. Yes. So couldn't agree more. The single biggest ingredient, at least for me, if I think of myself as a content person. You're a content person. Like, I like to think of it like ingredients. Like if I'm going to work with a company or if I'm doing something, like, what kind of ingredients do they have? Maybe they don't have like the sexiest, coolest product, but like they have a great founder with a great story and a hot market. Okay, cool, I can work with that. Or they have a really opinionated founder. Or the product is very unique. It's the first of its kind. And so that to me is the fun part about before you get into like, should it be a blog, should it be a podcast, should it be videos? Because today content is everything. It's always got to come back to, like, does this company have something interesting to say? Like, for me, when I joined Drift five or however six or however many years ago, seven, eight years ago, it was like before I even understood fully the product. In meeting the founders, it was so obvious that like, oh, there's going to be plenty for me to work with from a content standpoint. I think the marketers that have a hard time is like, when you don't have that point of view. And it is just the kind of aggregate of those 10, the top 10 search results, like, talk to me about developing that point of view and what makes a good point of view. How do you create one?

Yeah, so this is actually like one of my favorite things to talk about because I love seeing people's faces when they just get like that aha moment, like that revelation. But the key to coming up with a great point of view, a unique point of view, is your internal team, not a Google search. So the best insights that you're going to get within your company is going to come from sales and customer success. And the reason being is because these two sets of, you know, these two groups of people are talking to your ICP and your users Pretty much all day. So why would you not go to them to understand your ICP better? To be able to create content that positions your product as the ideal solution? It's like the most important customer and product information is not found through Google search. It's found through internal subject matter experts within your organization.

Yeah, Google's like serving up like the most generic, vanilla, obvious insights, right? Yeah, you don't want to sell the generic menu. You want to have that very specific, very appealing menu item.

Yeah. And I believe that's the thing that creates. It's one of the elements of creating a high converting blog, podcast, whatever it may be. It's just understanding your ICP at a very deep level to the point where when they come in and read a blog they're like, yes, that's the issue that I'm dealing with. This person understands me, they get me. I'm going to read more about this. And again like you just cannot find that from typing best sales enablement software or whatever you type in the Google. Like you're not going to find your specific company information. You're going to find it through people that are working with your users every day, that are talking to prospects every day and just getting this information from them is how you're going to be able to craft not even just a contrarian, but just a unique, thoughtful piece.

Yeah, well, it's like you can tell almost in anything in life. You can tell when somebody is kind of in the thing that they're talking about.

Right?

Like oh, and it's like it's not a certain writing tone, it's not a certain writing style. But like I could tell you by the way that like I have kids and so if I wrote a story about having children, you would be like, oh, that he's not faking it. That's real. That's just the way he delivered that one joke is like so head nodding, relatable. Yeah. Oh my gosh, I have kids too. Like I get it. And it's. That is exactly what your marketing has to do. And this is why the point that you're making is like why content is. It's not like there's your marketing strategy and then there's content marketing at least anymore. It used to be like that, right? It used to be like, oh, our strategy is going to be to have a blog, but that doesn't work anymore. You can't just have a blog. And this isn't 16 year old Lachey building affiliate sites and like all you need is some quick links to rank like it was a different Google worked differently 13 years ago. Right. Than it does today.

And Dave, I feel like some content marketers are still operating like it's 2015. Like, so, for example, they're labeling themselves as SEO content writers. When personally, I feel like if you're doing that, you're going to get left behind with the rise of ChatGPT and AI. And it's like, what value do you bring to an organization as an SEO content writer? That's not enough anymore. And then a shift I'm starting to see in the SaaS industry is like SaaS companies are starting to hire journalists instead of SEO writers, because journalists are amazing writers. They're very matter of fact, they're great interviewers. But the issue is journalists aren't content strategists. So they can't necessarily drive a content strategy. But they're excellent at gathering facts and getting the information needed for the piece. But they just don't know exactly, like, what keyword to go after. How do I angle this properly? And that's the gap that I see in a lot of SaaS companies. Like, they have a couple journalists on the team, which is a great first step, but they're missing a strategist, someone to actually drive this strategy. And usually the head of content is too, like, they're too above that level and not in the weeds enough. A lot of head of content professionals don't understand content strategy. They're good at like, kind of like the broadness, like the overall type, maybe like repurposing it into a podcast or a YouTube video, but they don't understand strategy at a deep level.

All right, so let's try to make this tackle. I'm going to try something completely different. Let's go into actually developing a content strategy. We'll make this up on the fly.

Sure.

And let's use exit 5. Let's talk about exit 5. That we'll use a business like that. You say, I call you in. I'm like, hey, I don't have a content strategy for Exit 5. Because where I want to get to is. And I don't know how to articulate this, but I want to do it through our conversation. Is content today is not just write a blog post.

Right.

However, you will also not be successful if you have a blog and a podcast. Hey, yeah, let's make a video. Oh, we have a great idea. Lachey and I have a conversation. We have a great idea and we make a video. Just making that video, though, and posting on YouTube is also not a content strategy, even though that video might have been good. So let's use Exit 5 as an example. It's a community of B2B marketing pros. I want to grow it from 3,500 marketers to 10,000 marketers. Where would you start to develop a content strategy for this business and figuring out what to do and what channels to be on?

Yeah, for sure. So the first thing I would want to know is like, again, coming into a company, like you want to know their goals because some companies have different goals. It's like some companies are more focused on top of funnel, demand generation, high level thought leadership style and then other companies are a little bit more focused on revenue. How can we drive an ROI from our content marketing efforts? So if I'm coming into exit 5 and you're wanting to grow the community, I'm going to start bottom of funnel. And the reason I'm going to start there is because that's where your audience that's actually buying and interested in joining community is going to be hanging out at. Not necessarily top of funnel. Because if I were to target top of funnel, that's probably terms like, what is B2B marketing? And it's like if someone doesn't know what B2B marketing is specifically, they may not be ready to make that leap into a community that dives all into that. It's like you need to be probably pretty invested to make the investment to join the community and to be submerged in, in that group of professional B2B professional that's talking B2B all day long.

So it's like, right, oh, I love this. I made, almost made this mistake too. I. About six months ago, I hired somebody to help me with SEO. I was like, oh, I'm going to grow traffic. I'm going to grow SEO. We did, you know, all the audit, we keyword audit, did a content strategy before we even kicked off the project. I had to back out of it because what they came back with was exactly what you said, which is, okay, here are the relevant topics for. And it's exactly that. B2B marketing. I don't want to rank for B2B marketing community because whoever's going to Google and typing in B2B marketing community is not the right stage of the person. It's, you know, I want people to join Exit 5 because like they talked to Lachey and she's in it and she heard from somebody else and they did this thing and they did this thing and the language is very specific. It feels like an insider's community. And it was like, look, I believe I get that this could grow traffic, and it does look like there's keyword opportunities, but this is too high, Fluffy. It's not specific enough. And maybe there's a time in the strategy where maybe later we get there. But I like how you say twice. You've already said on this podcast is like, I want to develop a content strategy that starts at the bottom of the funnel. Period.

Yeah. And I think that's where a lot of content marketers, head of content professionals, VP of Growth, whoever's running the content marketing team, they get wrapped up in search volume. And this is a ongoing debate that I've had since the beginning of my career, and I will die on this hill, that search volume is not everything. And what I say is, like, search volume does not equal signups. Intention equals signups. So if you're talking to a prospect, a potential prospect, and they're just like, what is B2B marketing? Or what is insert your industry here? They're not going to be ready to sign up for demo. They're way, way, way up the funnel. Like, mentally, they're not there yet. The trick is to insert yourself in the conversation of people that are looking for a solution already. Like, you're not trying to nurture them. And like you said, like, there's a time to tackle top of the funnel. Like, I'm not totally against it, but if you're wanting to drive ROI from content marketing, you need to get very intentional about how you're setting up your content strategy.

All right, so we want to focus on bottom of the funnel. What do we then go and do? Do we just go write an article and post it? Like, what do we do? I don't get it.

Yeah. So if we're focused on bottom of funnel. So what I like to do is first, I like to interview internal teams. So, for example, I like to interview sales and customer success, because sales is going to give you a vision of what life is like before the prospect has your product, and customer success is going to give you a vision of what life is like after the prospect has your product. So from there, I'm able to craft a content strategy that I know our target audience is searching for. Like, this isn't me guessing. Maybe they're searching for it. I've heard from sales development, specifically, this is our icp. And then it's my job as a content marketer to take that information that the SDRs give me and develop a content strategy from that so none of this is guessing. All of this is completely data driven. And of course again, it's like using a tool like Ahrefs or something like that. It's like once I know who I'm talking to, then my wheels start turning. Then I can use a tool like Ahrefs or even Google Auto Suggest and start that brainstorming of topics of like, okay, somebody that's looking for a sales enablement solution, that's looking for a B2B community to join, what would they be searching for? So it's really just all about taking the data that your internal teams has and developing a content strategy from that. Like, you absolutely do not want to guess at this because that's when the misalignment happens. And then the thing is, a lot of SaaS companies are operating and they're not even in alignment.

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Alignment. And the reason that they're not in alignment is because the teams are siloed and they're not even communicating with one another.

This has happened to me before where what the marketing team thinks. Like, I've seen it. Hey, show the content calendar to the sales team and the content, what the marketing team is creating. From a content standpoint. The sales team is like secretly talking trash about behind their backs and they're saying like, we don't have any of the content. And then. But if you actually just cut that out and you go right to the sales team, it's always.

And it's.

The great part is, is like it's not often like hundreds of different things. It's like two or three key themes repeated over and over. Like, I just, I wish we had this. I wish we had this. I wish we had this. And so I love, love, love the approach of starting with the sales team because not to poo poo any of the SEO, like SEO is important. You know, SEO does work. But I think when you pair it with what you're saying, which is like, come up with your hypothesis and framework for the topics that matter, that's rooted in the sales, in sales and then you can go mess around in Ahrefs. Like that seems like such a more sustainable content framework. And I love that you frame this as you want to talk to sales because they'll tell you what life is like before using the product. And you want to talk to CS because it's what life is like after the product, separate from sales and cs. That's one of my favorite copywriting and just storytelling tactics like of all time. And so I know that you, you're deep in this because it's like when you can use your copy and your words to show someone, it's in the most simplest form, it's before and after. It's like, here was Dave before he started taking this supplement, and then here's Dave after and he's super jacked. Right. That's just. That is exactly what people want. It's before and after. And so whether you're selling supplements, skincare, or sass, people want to be able to see the life before and after.

No, and I totally resonate with that. And you mentioned storytelling. And there's this big misconception in content marketing that you can only storytell with like top of funnel or thought leadership style content when that's not the case. And you can and absolutely should be storytelling in your bottom of funnel content. So again, when you interview the sales team, that's the information that you need to put in your article to let the prospect know, okay, you're dealing with pain points X, Y and Z. Now I'm talking to CS to get an idea of what the outcome would look like for them. You insert that into the article. You know, you're dealing with these pain points. Here's what the outcome would look like after you use our product. So sales is before, customer success is after. And your product is that bridge to take them from where they are to the promised land.

All right, and let's talk about like tactics. So you meet with the sales team, you know, you start to get some ideas for topics, right? Yeah, you've kind of done your research. Then what do we do? What do we create? How do we know? Well, how do we know what to do? Is it 15 blog posts over the course of three months? Is it one article? Is it a video? Is it a pilot? How do we know what to do?

Yeah. So there's another misconception where companies think that they have to dump a bunch of budget into content marketing. Now, I'm all for content repurposing. I do think you should create a blog post, turn it into a YouTube video, turn it into a podcast. But the misconception is that I need to dump more money into my content marketing strategy for it to work, when that's not necessarily true. If you're dumping more money into something that's not working, you're just going to make it like, not work more. What really needs to happen is companies need to scale back and understand what type of content strategy am I creating. Am I creating a content strategy that's based on intention? Is it based on just search volume. What am I interested in going after? Am I going after clicks, traffic, impressions, or am I going after actual signups? So I think it rolls back to what are the goals of the company. But it's like what I would do to move forward again is just like interviewing the sales team and then putting together a content piece from there. I don't think you have to have a certain amount of content pieces per month. So the funny thing is it's like There are some SaaS companies out there generating like 50 to 100 blog posts a month and not seeing the ROI that they want. And then there are other SaaS companies that are generating four blog posts a month and seeing the ROI again. It all ties back to intention. When you get intentional about what you start to target, you don't have to produce a ton of it. You just have to be, you know, I would say be consistent, but you don't have to do 50 or 100 blog posts a month. It's like, and then we get into scalability, right? It's just like if you're scaling crap, you're going to get more crap. It's just, you know what I mean? So before you dump more money into your content strategy, take a step back, understand your goals, get aligned. And then when you start to see something work, then you start to scale it. You don't scale what's not working.

This is what, I guess we could call this the content trap, which is, and many companies are in this. It's like, because content marketing is a widely accepted strategy and everybody's doing it and everybody's been doing it for a decade, there are many, many companies that are just doing, we have a content team and we're just doing content. I would just rip that whole thing up and go back to your question from the beginning and say, no, no, we haven't even decided that we should be doing content yet. We need to have a strategy level discussion and say, okay, we, Lachey and I have a company. We need to drive more signups. Yep, Hypothesis. We believe that we can drive more signups through content. Great. Now let's go create content. And then it's gonna, then that's gonna tell us like what type of content we should create. And so if we talk about Exit 5, for example, if I say, hey, the goal is to get more signups for Exit 5, it might actually be just one killer article. We don't need a 50 blog post. We need that one killer article. That's like 50 reasons why B2B marketers should join a community like Exit 5. And we're going to distribute that through LinkedIn. Oh, I already have an audience on LinkedIn and so we're going to distribute through LinkedIn. We're going to distribute through email. In that sense of what's the content strategy? We could be wildly successful. And all we did was spend two weeks writing like this meaty, in depth post. I hate when I see companies that are just on the wheel of like, yep, we wrote five blog posts this week and we're starting a podcast. No, let's go all the way back to that questions and you know, why, why are we going to do this? So you want to start a podcast, great. But why? What is the actual, like, goal for your business that that is going to let you achieve? And speaking of a podcast, that would be the worst short term channel that I think you could ever, ever pick. It's taken me, and I've done this a bunch, it's taken me almost two years to grow this podcast to a significant audience. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. One thing I noticed about podcasts is that it's a great trust builder if you have an audience. But what I noticed is that it's not the best audience builder from scratch. So again, like, even guest podcasting on other people's podcasts is a great way to accelerate your audience. But if you're starting from absolute zero, it's going to be an uphill battle trying to start a podcast. It's just, it's just a great trust builder if the audience is already there. If it's not there, I'd probably, you know, recommend like posting on LinkedIn or just, you know, another chat, maybe YouTube. If you're targeting the right keywords, that's a whole nother. That's a whole nother episode. But if you're targeting the right keywords on YouTube and things like that, I wouldn't suggest it for somebody. And I could be wrong. Right. Maybe there are some anomalies out there. Maybe there are some people that start podcasts and it blows up. But I don't look at. And even this comes back to content marketing. Like, I don't look at success. Like in that anomaly mindset. I'm looking at, like, I'm not looking for one post to go viral. I'm looking at like getting on point every day. Like, when you think of profitable content strategy, like, I want you to see my face and hear my name. Like, I don't post content based on like the virality. I post it based on like playing Moneyball, just getting on base every single day.

I love that. And not only you get on base every day, but you're basically also testing your future ideas. And so when you write something, you know, like I'm, I'm, I'm just looking at your LinkedIn profile, for example, but like you have a post recently that was like talking about bottom of the funnel. Like, hey, here's how to create bottom of the funnel content. And the post is very in depth and like that post has more comments than any of your other posts. And so I'm using that as like, I don't need to measure the ROI of that post, but I'm using that as a. Oh, wow, this is interesting. When I write about bottom of the funnel content, people are really interested in that. Therefore I should go and create more bottom of the funnel content. I think this is also a thing that SaaS companies miss with content is the R. It doesn't have to always be direct sales roi. It can be more about like content is a, is a way to test all your other future ideas at scale for sure.

Absolutely.

Okay, question about the blog. What's your point of view on a blog today? So if we develop a content strategy, is blog. Are blogs still relevant?

I definitely think blogs are. I think blogs are still relevant. I just think again, like it comes back to the intention and I just think you can't scale what's not working. I absolutely think blogs are still relevant. I do think that we're in a time period where you should be repurposing content. I don't think you should just put out one blog post and then just kind of let it sit and just hope that people find it. I do think that people should be using like SEO as a distribution channel and just repurposing content. But absolutely. I found, and there's been this debate for years, Dave, like, oh, SEO is dead and blogging this and blah, blah, blah that, you know, podcasts is the wave. But it really comes back down to what type of strategy are you building. Is it a strategy with intention? But I absolutely believe that companies can use their blog to scale to eight, nine figures. It just, again, it comes back to the intentionality of it. If you're being intentional about how you write your blog post, about how you create your content strategy, Blog posts can be your most profitable inbound acquisition channel for sure.

Back to having goals and having a niche and focusing on, you know, does sales telling you that that's where people are reading, reading stuff. My little gremlin is in here messing with me right now.

I got four. Don't worry about it. Four.

Holy smokes. And how could you be this smart about content? You've had four. You have four children.

Oh, go, man. If I could come out with a course on how to do this before kids, I would. I don't know how I do it, but yeah, no, for sure. Like, it's a challenge. For sure. That's another episode, too. How to do content marketing with kids.

Well, maybe that's why you focus on content strategy. Not so much writing day to day, because if you had to do the deep writing every day, that'd be crazy.

Listen, like, let me tell you something. And that's the funny thing. It's like, I'm a great writer, but I don't like to do it, which is why I kind of got into the consulting thing, right? It's like, I can train in house writers or freelance writers how to create some really badass content, but when it comes to me, it just. It's too time consuming. It takes too long. I'm the strategy girl. Like, I love to get in there and be like, okay, boom, here's what you need to write around. You need to do this, this, and that. If you want to hit, you know, these MQLs by this date, here's the, you know, the content you need to be going after. And that's kind of what, like, drew me into strategy. Because you gotta, like, especially when you have kids, like, you have to optimize for time. It's like that fluff stuff goes out the window real quick. So you gotta, like, it would just.

Be a different career and different business in your mind then, because you just have to find a way to charge more for articles as opposed to strat. I feel like strategy will give you higher ROI from a business. Just personally, like, you know, in your role. And I think it's becoming such a. The reason why I want to do this podcast is I wanted to give. Just have a podcast that people would listen to and be like, do we have a content strategy? Yeah, because we're doing a lot of. We're doing a lot of content, but I'm not sure that we have a strategy and we should be asking these questions.

Yeah, and I think that's a. Another thing I noticed about, like, SaaS companies is like, they'll hire freelancers to kind of like, scale the content strategy. But remember, like I said before, you can't scale what's not working. So the biggest thing is, like, information consolidation so when freelancers come into your company, first of all, you can't expect them to know the nuances of your product. You can't expect them to know the customer. Especially not like, if you're like, okay, I want you to produce five posts a month starting this month. I'm going to hire you at the beginning of May. I want you to produce five blog posts this month or 10 blog posts this month. Like, you can't expect a freelancer to come in and just get it right away. Especially they have other clients they're dealing with. So one of the things that I find is a big pain point for not just freelance writers, because that used to be me, but for head of growth marketers and people. Running a content team is just like getting freelancers up to speed as quickly as possible. And the best way I find to do that is information consolidation, which is where the Notion dashboard that I created was born. It really was just solving my own problem because I would keep all customer information in Google Docs and I don't like Google Docs that much. Like, when I open my Google Docs, it's just like a running document of like everything I just had open, instead of like having the information all together for this specific company.

People love Notion.

I thought, listen, like, I used to hate Notion because it was so much that you could do and it was like overwhelming me. I'm a really bad overthinker. So it was like Notion, you could just do too much. But when you really start to distill down what you need and start to use Notion for exactly what you need it for, it's an amazing, powerful tool.

Well, you described as me to a T and I feel like for me, Notion is like a Ferrari when all I need is a Camry.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. But I think again, it comes back to knowing your goals and knowing exactly what you want from it. And then when you step into it, again coming back to intention. When you step into it with intention, like, okay, I need Notion to do this thing for me. Set it up to do that thing for you. You'll learn and adjust and grow as you go along, but it's so versatile that you can get it to do almost anything you need it to do. I don't have crazy workflows and things like that. I just have the information set up to where a freelancer could come into a SaaS organization and be up to date on the ICP, the product information, use cases, all types of things, maybe within like a week or two.

So you mentioned training writers. This is a reason that I've not done well. One of my weaknesses is hiring freelancers specific to writing because I, I'm bad at articulating why I don't like it, but I'm very particular about the content.

Yeah.

And I think I've found that freelancers can be great for writing top of the funnel, more brand type of content. And so like for example, when I was at Privy, we used this agency called Animals to write kind of once a month in depth, like breakdowns of interesting e commerce companies. And that had nothing to do with Privy, but that was like just interesting content to the market that Privy served. And so like an agency like Animals for example was great for that. But where I struggled was like we want to write this product guide or this more middle to bottom of the funnel content where you do need the kind of deep expertise. And I always find it was hard to am I going to train this free? Like the time it would take for me to train a freelancer up to like know this space. And so very rarely maybe you can find someone with very deep expertise in that industry. But I've struggled with Freelancer for those reasons. You mentioned you're a great writer. You don't have the time, you don't want to write anymore, but you've become good at training writers. This is one of the top marketing questions I get from marketing people or founders. How do we train writers? So whether it's a freelancer, whether it's an in house person, how do you train? What's your process for training writers?

That's worked. Yeah. So again, like my process is all about information consolidation. You need to have your most important customer and product information all together so the freelance writer can come in and become educated on the product. And it's not like again, like we're not doing a Google search. This information is coming from internal teams. So the best way to get a freelance writer up to speed is to just have all the information together for them. Don't put it in a way that'll overwhelm them, but have it like sectioned off. So maybe this section is customer information. Here's our icp. You know what are the largest deals we closed last year? Which customers have the best retention rate and specific things like that. Give them maybe like a week or two to come in and just learn all about the target audience and all about the product pain points. And then from there then you can kind of get them to start crafting a piece. So in the dashboard that I Mentioned, like, I have content frameworks because another issue is that freelance writers, and I don't even just want to say freelance writers, like writers in general, tend to write bottom of funnel content the same way they write top of funnel content. And that's just not going to cut it. Like, your conversion rates are going to suffer. You're probably not going to rank how you need to. Like, it's just these two content pieces are not written the same way. They're written completely different. When I'm working with a company and they want to train their freelance writers, just give the writer information bit by bit and then start to have them craft a piece. But when they're crafting the piece, have that all that information consolidated for them so they can go and pick and choose which information they need for the specific article.

I like your list. I would also add examples of what good looks like. And I think this is a forcing function for two reasons. Number one, it's show the writer that you're working with, hey, here are three examples that we like. I've done this with new hires. Or say, like, hey, all right, we want to hire a new writer. Here are three of our favorite posts. And that's not to say that you have to clone that, but like, that way, because there's kind of like a harder to articulate part of writing. It's a creative exercise. It's more art than it is science. And so if you send me, here's four books that I've read recently that I liked, I might not know you that well, but I could get a sense for other types of books you might be interested in or sneakers or food or whatever. And it's the same thing with content. So I would have in that brief, like, show me those things. I also like to ask that because it also puts a little bit more onus on the marketer who's trying to work with the freelancer. I think a lot of marketing and writing relationship stuff fail because the marketer doesn't put enough thought into the brief. And it's like, well, you hired this writer, you set them up to fail versus if I give you a good brief, I think I've learned that I got to spend more time in the brief, whether I'm hiring an agency to do my website or write articles. If I spend more time up front with the brief saying, here's what good looks like, here's what, Here's a couple examples of what I like. And even if you've never produced content before, how can you hire a Writer. If you can't go and find five articles in your industry that you think are great, like, and you can show them those, I think you gotta be able to articulate, like, what good looks like. You know what I mean?

No, exactly, I do. I. And even in the dashboard that I put together, it's like, I have examples in there of like, what great content looks like, even down to frameworks. Because I've been doing this for so long that I've kind of come up with these frameworks that convert really well. So what I'll do is like, create the content frameworks to where the writer still has their. They can still be creative, it's still writer creativity, but it's formatted in a way that converts. It gets straight to the point. Like, I was reading an article the other day that was like, best sales enablement software. And then it started like, you know, 52% of marketers don't have a sales enablement solution. I'm like, okay, like, we don't really care about that. And then we move down a little bit further and they're like, what is sales enablement? I'm like, dude, like, if somebody's typing in best sales enablement software, there's no reason in the world why you should have a paragraph in that article that says, what is sales enablement? They already know that your competitors have already educated them on what is sales enablement? Like, you're going to lose. And it's like, that's why people try to write bottom of funnel articles, but they still don't convert as high as they could. Because, like, you're trying to write bottom of funnel articles the same way you're trying to write top of funnel articles. And it's just two totally different beasts. It's just like somebody that's further down the funnel, like you said, you know, reverting to what you said earlier. It's like, people will know if you really know the topic that you're talking about. But then, you know, we run into another issue that I've heard a couple people talk about. It's like they have the subject matter experts in house, but they have trouble getting them on calls for interviews. So that's kind of like where the dashboard came into play, where it's like, let's interview these teams maybe like once a quarter and get all the information down so we don't have to keep bugging them. And then the writers don't have to search and hunt for people to interview for every content piece, you know, so it's just, it's just about having all that information there for the freelance writer and then succinctly walking them through, okay, here's our customer information, here's our product information, here's our use cases, here's a demo video. It's like giving it to them bit by bit is going to set them up for success with working with. You can't expect for a freelance writer to come in and know everything about your company. You know, again, it's like they have other clients and things that they're doing. But if you have all this information together for a freelance writer, like, they will so appreciate that because this is something I did not have as a freelance writer. Like, no company that I wrote for had all of their information consolidated together. They're like, oh, go look at the website, go check out the YouTube channel. I'm like, okay, if you're bringing in a freelance writer and you want to create a profitable content marketing strategy, you know, like you want to focus on bottom of funnel, you need to have this information already put together for, for them that's going to give you the best chance of creating a profitable content marketing strategy.

That would be the dream for sure.

For sure. And it's just like a lot of companies just, you know, they just miss the market with that. And again, it's like, I've done so much writing, I've written hundreds of articles and it's just like nobody got this right. So the whole dashboard thing was just like me solving my own problem. And it just happens that a lot of other people have this problem too. So kind of why people liked it so much, I believe.

All right, you're clearly an early adopter, building affiliate sites at 16. Tell me what your point of view is on ChatGPT, where it fits in content, why it matters or doesn't matter for content. What's your quick take on ChatGPT?

Yeah, I feel like ChatGPT is an aid for content writers and I know there's this big debate like whether ChatGPT is going to take our jobs or AI is going to take our jobs or something like that. I don't think it's intended for that purpose. I think it's to help us brainstorm content ideas rapidly without having a full fledged team to do that. But one thing I will say about ChatGPT and AI is that it still can't totally identify bottom of funnel versus top of funnel. So I've seen a couple ChatGPT prompts where it's like, you know, find, you know, Long tail or bottom of funnel keywords. And the thing that I've noticed is that it still can't all the way correctly identify bottom of funnel versus top of funnel. Another thing I'll say is that it's not a smart idea, especially if you are a B2B SaaS company, to get ChatGPT to write all your content, because ChatGPT does not understand the nuances of your company. They don't understand your customer pain points. Now, maybe in the future somebody will come out with a software. Maybe this is a good idea for anybody listening. Maybe somebody will come out with a software where you can upload customer calls and then the AI will be able to extract the information, you know, the pain points that the audience is dealing with and be able to craft something out of that. I'm not sure, but I think as of right now, it's like writers need to be using ChatGPT as an assistant. Don't have a fear that it's going to replace you. But I do think the industry is shifting as to where, like, writers are going to need to know how to use it. You're going to have a competitive advantage if you know how to use it. So I would say don't be afraid of it. Use it to your advantage. Use it to make your job a little bit easier. Use it to make yourself more productive. Don't be afraid of it.

Yeah, I love that mindset of just finding tools that can help you. And, and I've seen some cool use cases of, like, writing an article, like almost having Chat GPT help you generate ideas, but also playing a little bit of an editor and helping with a bunch of your research. I think there's a lot of cool use cases that will, that will arm up. And I'm just reading through one of your posts on LinkedIn. I said, you said, let me clear the air. I'm not going to flood your timeline with Chat GPT expert advice. I'm not. No. I don't think chatgpt is going to replace writers. No, I'm not here to talk about how 90% of you are using it wrong, but I do think he can help us hear what. Here's why I thought that was great.

Yeah.

Okay.

We could talk for six hours on content. I know that I'd say that on every podcast episode, but it's true. Maybe we'll do another episode in the future. One thing I wrote down in my notes as I feverishly scribbled notes, this.

Episode, this is what I do.

This is. It's Great. I want to hear just from a personal career standpoint, there's a lot of people that work in content out there that will listen to this agency versus in house.

So I don't want to shade agencies because there are some really good agencies out there. But I would just say any SaaS that's thinking about working with an agency, I would say be very careful, understand what KPIs, what metrics, what goals you're looking to achieve. Because again, not to shade any agencies, but a lot of agencies out there will deliver your reports to you once a month and it'll say, oh, your Traffic increased by 25% this month. Yeah, that's great. But how is that tying back to revenue? How am I getting demo signups? So I would say, like, if you're thinking about working with an agency, like, one way to filter out if the agency is a good one or not possibly is just to like, see what KPIs they report on. Do they report on traffic increases, impression increases, or do they report on how many demo signups they drove in for you this month? So I would say, like, just really get down to the specificity of it all with agencies, like, don't fall for like, oh, you know, we grew your traffic or your impressions grew. Because it's like the C suite is eventually going to want to know, like, how is content marketing attributing to revenue? And a lot of content marketers, both in house and agencies, do not have the answer to that question. And I think I want to say, like, as it relates to in house content marketers, I feel like this may be a better way to go because I know there's been a lot of tech layoffs and things like that, but you don't need a big content team in order to execute an effective strategy. You could create a killer content marketing strategy with two people versus a SaaS company that has 10, 20 different people on the content team. And you'd probably kick ass a lot better than they would.

Definitely.

If you start off with intention and not just like, okay, we have to mass produce. So again, I think it all comes back to like really knowing your KPIs and just really holding these companies accountable. It's like, okay, our traffic increased 20% this month, but what are the MQLs? Like, how many of those? And I don't want to like, I know closing depends on like sales in that process, but it's like our job as content marketers is to bring the sales team more of the right type of prospect. It's all information. It's like a big information ecosystem. It's like, I learned from sales what type of people use our product. I go and create content around that to bring in more people that use our type of product. And that's why it's so important for internal teams to be communicating. Because at the end of the day, it's like the revenue goals is not tied to a specific segment. Like, we're all trying to hit the same revenue goals, so why not work together to do that?

Amen. All right, well, thank you for doing this. I gotta stop myself because I'm looking at the clock and I have 15 other questions that I wanted to ask you. We could riff on content forever, but I love the final point that you wrapped with, which, if I could translate that back, how I internalize that, is your content will be so much better if you have a content strategy first.

Yes.

Give me a content strategy. Dave Lachey. And an intern is gonna outperform a stable of 30 writers with no direction and no clear tie to impact and all the budget in the world. Like you've said multiple times on this episode today, you can't scale crap, or it's just crap scaled or some version of that. But. But that's how I would interpret that, right?

No, absolutely. Every day of the week. And I tell people all the time, it's not a lack of budget thing, it's a lack of strategy. So once you try coming up with a strategy and then as that strategy starts to work, then you scale your budget. But if you're trying to scale what's already not working, don't think that throwing more money at something that's not working is all of a sudden going to make it work. You've got to find what works first, then from that point, you double down and scale.

Yeah, I love that. All right, Lachey, thank you so much. It's great to meet you. Thank you for this conversation. I want the call to action on all these episodes lately is to go and connect with our amazing guests. And so here's what I want you to. I want Lachey to send me a note in two weeks and be like, man, a bunch of people actually do listen to your podcast and I got so many messages on LinkedIn. So I want you to go to LinkedIn, find Lachey, Lachey J. Lewis. I will link to your profile in the notes and everything, but that's the call to actions. Go to Lachey, connect, send a message, and then we will see you on the next episode of the Exit 5 podcast. Lachey, great to meet you. We'll stay in touch and I'll see you on LinkedIn and around Exit 5.

All right, sounds good. Thank you so much for having me.

See ya. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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