How to Use an Audience to Drive Results with Dave Gerhardt (DGMG)

I wanted to ask about your book launch because that's probably top of mind for you right now. I've seen you post a lot on DGMG and all that, so how has that gone? How's the book going?

The book is going great. I didn't really know what to expect. I was kind of nervous about it because it's a big deal, like a physical book and I just was ready for everybody to hate it. And I got in my head about it and the responses have just been. Has been amazing. It's been so cool. And it's not even from like big tech CEOs that are reading it, but I'm talking to just people who run their own business and had been thinking about wanting to do more to build their brand and grow their business. And they just started posting and they're like, I got your book and they're sending me pictures and it's just so cool. In a world that's so digital, like my Twitter DMs and Instagram and LinkedIn has just been all like strangers sending me pictures of different pages of the book and everything. That part has been really cool. And the other thing that the reason I said really good is just not even like a. It's not a financial thing because it was actually a terrible money making choice because we did a 99 cent Kindle, basically giving it away version to do a promo for the first week. But it's been such a. So many people that I haven't talked to in years have reached out this week to reconnect for some reason, which is so funny because all the stuff that I talk about in Founder Brand, I've talked about in dgmg, I talk about a lot. If I created an online course called Founder Brand, there's no way that my kindergarten teacher who owns a local bookstore in Worcester, Massachusetts was would be like posting and taking pictures and like sharing it with people. But it's just like something about like I've had like four or five people that I played college baseball with that I haven't talked to in over 10 years. Like we don't keep in touch at all. Have messaged me and they like read it or bought it and something about it being a physical thing that has like created this connection. And that was not a intentional thing. And so I've kind of been like, wow, there's the thing that the thought that I'm lately stuck on is like there's just something to like having something physical. And so I don't even care. People can Say whatever they want about the book after they read it. You can have your own opinion on it. I'm not expecting everybody to love it, but it's just so cool to see this reaction to something physical in a world where if it was an online course, there's no way this would be happening. That's coming from someone who does online courses. And I would sell more of them and do more of them. It's just an observation.

My hypothesis there is that it's something to do with costly signaling, because the effort, like, everybody knows, like putting so much effort into a book, like, not everybody's going to do that. Right? Like, a tweet could go viral, a LinkedIn post could go viral. But, like, I think there's a perception, maybe rightly so, that it's cheap to do so. There's no barrier to entry. Whereas, like, putting together a book, you have to go through, maybe find a publisher, at least self publish. Like, there's so many different, like, logistical things. And I'm sure the book took. I don't even. I don't know how long it took to write, but I'm sure it was a long time.

It took 18 months. It's self published. I own 100% of it and the way that it's set up as self publishing. But I worked with a company to help actually execute on it because me sitting here in my house as a person of one, needed somebody to work with on the book.

Was that one of those scribe media?

Yeah, I worked with Scribe and it was way harder than I thought it was going to be. Like, we, you know, I would get like 50 pages of edits back and like, hey, we need comments on this by like, next week.

Wow.

And I'm like, normally I just kind of like flip through a Google Doc, make a headline comment here, but I'm like, this is going to have my name on it. This is going to have my name on it. This is going to be physics. People are going to hold this. And so, yeah, for, I don't know, at least an hour a day, two hours a day, probably for the last 18 months I've worked on the book.

It's wild. I want to ask why you wrote a book, but I actually want to infer something. And that is, I think a lot of marketers deeply harbor a fantasy of writing a book and think they always have. So is this something you've wanted to do for a long time or what was the impetus?

No, I've never. I've never. Well, I guess I wanted to do it because I ended up writing, writing the book. A couple reasons. We did a couple of different books at Drift, and I felt a similar thing to what I mentioned about, like, the connection. And I was like, I more thought that, like, the book was like, maybe end of last year or like a year and a half, maybe two years ago at this point. But like, DGMG had kind of become a thing and I had kind of started to build an audience on my own and I really focused on talking about marketing. And it was all those signals that, that was like, it said to me, like, oh, people would read a book on X topic if I, if I wrote it, right? And it was like I had saw. I see. I saw enough, like, signals through social media and other channels that, okay, there's some subset of people who might be interested in the things that I say or my perspective or experience about marketing. And so, like, I think, I think I could sell. I think I could sell a book if I did a book. Whereas, like, probably six, seven years ago, I may have wanted to write a book for like, the creative process of it, but I maybe could have sold like 40 copies and, you know, they all would have been my friends and family. And so I think part of it was like, I had some success with Drift and some success with Privy. And I started, you know, I shared a lot of, you know, B2B marketing thoughts and that's what I like to talk about on social media. And so, like, those had led to building a small audience of my own. And I thought a way to go further with that audience would be to create a book. And then I love talking about marketing and I love teaching and sharing and creating ideas. And I also love, I love the marketing part of it. And so I, as much as I wanted to write the book, I actually wanted to, like, go through the process of it because I love coming up with the title, coming up with the COVID coming up with the layout, the structure, the marketing plan, the offers, the who's, you know, like that, that whole strategy, like sending copies to early people and having them post on social media or, you know, that, that type of stuff. I love that. Then the last part of it was like, I kind of had like one or two philosophies that I felt they weren't like, unique to me. As like, somebody, you know, said the other day, like, this, there's nothing groundbreaking in. Some guy left me a review. There's nothing groundbreaking in this book. And he's not right. He's entirely right. This is all clearly taking off of the things that I've ingested over the years. But what I spit out into the world was, hey, here is a playbook that I think, at least here's how I would articulate. This is kind of what I've done with the companies that I've worked at over the last couple years. I'm going to try to put it into a book and kind of like cement that a little bit. And I think actually the process of writing a book help me clarify that idea the same way writing can be the thing that brings clarity. And so it was like a cool exercise to try to have to package this and actually think about it. And so the way that I came up with Founder Brand was, well, something that we did at Drift was like, very focused on building a media company and using the founder. And we had a podcast and very active on social media and similar but different playbook at Drift. And then in my own life with dgmg, that starts to explode. And the thread between all that were those ingredients, which is Twitter, LinkedIn, podcasting, strong storytelling and strong connection to the feedback loop on social media. I was like, I wonder if there's a way that I could talk about what that is. And I was like, I came up with the name Founder Brand and I was inspired by. I really liked Donald Miller's book Storybrand and I loved the title for that book. And I was like, oh, what? Story Brand is a great concept, but like, kind of what I've been doing is like, Founder Brand, look it up. Does anybody own the domain Founder Brand? Nobody owns Domain Founder Brand. Okay, cool. Maybe I'll call Founder Brand the title. And then the coolest part was like, I had the outline and the. I had written like the six page, like outline just, just like in one sitting. And that's when I knew, like, this was going to be a. This was. This was real to me, was so, like, I didn't have to slog through, like, what's the book going to be about? I sat down and I was like, for a couple hours, I just banged out like the start, you know, the founder. Here's why, here's why I still think social media is so underrated and being used wrong by most B2B companies. Here's how you can do it. Here are the things that I do. Screenshots, examples. Like, I do this every day. And one of the coolest parts was like the most meta piece of it was like, I tested the title with my. The DGMG community people. Like, I have this private Facebook group of a bunch of marketing people. And I first shared the concept of the book, and I said, like, hey, I'm thinking about writing a book. Knowing what you know about me, what would you write about? And it was amazing. I had, like, 100 comments of, like, all these different ideas, and a lot of them started to hit on this concept. And so then I went back, and a couple weeks later, I had, like, a bunch of ideas on the title and the title. You know, you go through the title process, and, like, I shared an idea for the title with. With the community, and people gave me feedback on it, and they tweaked it. And so it was super cool to be able to, like, actually test it along the way with the community. And then, like, the ultimate lesson is, like, that's kind of what I talk about in the book, which is, like, at Drift, we built up this engaged audience of people through a podcast seeking wisdom, which had nothing to do with the product that we were selling, but that created super fans. It created this, like, amazing connection with people that created our initial audience, that helped us get initial traction, which helped us get our existing customers. And so I've seen just, like, the power of building an audience, what you get from that. And, like, you know, you and I recently just work together on some content stuff, but all the ideas that we came up with for content were basically driven through the community. And so the thing that I talk about in the book is how it's not just about publishing on social media to be vain and gain followers. It's about this insane marketing hack, which is. I hate to even use it as a hack, but it's like, if you have an audience, you can literally foolproof this. And so this is a long rant on the book, but ultimately, I felt like, okay, the book can't be that bad, because I've already kind of tested a lot of these concepts with people, and I felt really good that if I do a book, then it might sell. And it's kind of like, a lot of the stuff that I talk about is the stuff that I've been doing.

There's so many directions I want to go here. But you mentioned a couple of times, media company building a media company, building an audience. And that's something that I hear a lot nowadays. When I was at HubSpot, that was a huge focus, obviously, since the beginning. And then they bought the Hustle. Stripe is doing a publishing arm. I think Coinbase is doing something like this as well. Everybody's going straight to the Audience as opposed to going through public relations and publications. But I don't feel like anybody's really, truly defined what a media company means in the context of, like, a B2B brand. I think you are a media company in many ways right now, and I think, like, Drift was a very good example of that. So, like, what do you. How do you define, like, a media company outside of. I know you mentioned the channels that could be useful for this, like Twitter and LinkedIn, and you mentioned storytelling, but how do you go from going through the motions in those places to actually building something that people care about and want to follow?

Well, okay, I think that. I don't know. I've never had to give a sexy definition to a media company, but I think I would say that it's probably something like an entity that puts out content about a particular topic and attracts. With the goal of attracting and building an audience of people who might be interested in that topic. And so that could be. You are the hustle. And you talk about entrepreneurship and these kind of, like, unique business ideas, and you're going to build an audience of entrepreneurs or solopreneurs or entrepreneur, whatever they are. Right. And I talk about this a lot because I think that most. And I mostly talk about B2B companies is that that's your world on this, right? Like, mostly.

Yeah, I would say for the most part.

Yeah. Okay. For the most part. I think the advice applies either way. But most B2B companies struggle with, like, things like content marketing and social media, because I just think they use them wrong. They use them as, like, promotional channels for their business, which is already kind of, like, by nature going to be more boring because it's usually B2B. And I don't think B2B is boring. I just think, like, it's not the. It's harder to build a. It's harder to build a social media presence for a B2B company than it is for, like a Wendy's, a Golf meme account or something. Right? Yeah, or Wendy's. Right. It's just that you're just appealing to different things. And so what I see happen over and over is, like, these companies, they just kind of like they're on all these channels, but, like, the way they use Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube or whatever it is is they just kind of post like, all stuff related to their company. When I think the real way to, like, actually build an audience and build a following is to be like the number one resource or a top resource for your dream customer. And Work backwards from there. So, like, if you are. If I want to build an audience of event marketing people, and I'm an event marketing software company, the way that I will be effective at building an audience on social media will be through trying to become a number one, trying to make that event marketing person laugh, smile, share something, learn something, get something new, to be the number one resource for that. And so if you and me just had our own side hustle, we're like, we're going to build a newsletter for event marketing people and it's just going to be awesome. Like, we could probably. We would have a better chance of growing that, just you and me, if it was our side hustle than we would if we were like implanted on the marketing team of a B2B SaaS company. Because they're, they're going to be like, demand gen team is like asking them, hey, can you promote this on social media? And can you promote our webinar on social media and can promote this event on social media? And we got to promote this award on social media. But we just like keep doing all those things and then you don't actually ever build an audience and a following. And it's not that I don't think that I'm not interested in the vanity of building an audience and following, but I think the following really does matter because ultimately the goal is to drive some type of result for the business. And so did HubSpot drive more buyers in the very early days because of their presence and the content they put out on Twitter and LinkedIn? 100% it mattered that they were one of the only B2B accounts with a million Twitter followers back in the day because they had reach. And so they could actually, when they needed to promote something, they could actually drive people there. And so maybe like, you know, 8 out of 10 times they're talking about inbound marketing or marketing, and then when they have to promote something, it actually works. And so I just, I like to use the media company mindset because I think it's a different mindset. Like, how can you be the media company? How can you be the blog, the newsletter, the resource for your niche? Not like we're a B2B SaaS company that has social media channels.