Think Like A Media Company (30 Minute Marketing Strategy Discussion)

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On this episode of the Exit 5 podcast, this is a live session that we did a couple weeks ago about why it's important for B2B brands to think like media companies. This was for an event that we did for Goldcast. It was an interview. Myself and Palash, who's the CEO at Goldcast, he, they had me as their guest for their chat on this topic. I think it was one of the best, I'd say hour, maybe 30, 45 minutes of going deep on this topic. This is a topic that comes up a lot. People have a lot of questions about this. How do you define a media company? What does it mean to do that? How do you measure it? Why does it work? Why is this a trend right now? We covered all that stuff and so I wanted to grab that session from them and put it here on the XIT5 podcast because I know that if you listen to this show, you'll get a lot out of this episode. So here is my conversation with Palash about being a media company as a B2B brand.

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining in. I'm Palash. I'm the co founder and CEO of Goldcast and welcome to the event. I'm pretty excited. It's a pretty nice sunny afternoon, at least here in Boston, so please let us know where you are from on the chat. I'm glad that you joined us on a pretty, presumably a pretty busy afternoon. But speaking of excited, we at Goldcast here are super excited. We raised our series A last week and we are all super jazzed to be doing a lot of things that we were waiting for the money to come in and pull the trigger on. So lots of great things, lots of great stuff happening here. But this event is not about fundraising. We are not going to bore you with VC speak. We'll talk about something bigger, right? Something that is top of mind for me and for my team as we build this company. And that is the underlying sort of obvious but also non obvious shift in marketing, right, of B2B companies becoming media companies. And this all kind of starts with actually the man on the right of me. So we were, Kishore and I were at, at Harvard Business School and this is like two and a half years back when we were deep in B2B marketing, event marketing, and we were always keen to hear speakers and DG made a guest appearance at HBS and he gave a 30 minute talk on and we were expecting something very numbers heavy and something cookie cutter ish about what he did at Drift. What we got was something so obvious and so powerful about how you build content, how you create an audience that Kishore, my co founder and I were like, dude, this is mind blowing. And so we wrote a cold email to DG actually at that time. And DG responded one and a half years later and here we are, we are working together and I'm super excited to have DG with me here.

Can I add a funny anecdote as to how that happened? So when I started to think about working for myself and I knew I wanted to do some work one on one with startups in some capacity and I didn't see your email. You know, it just happens, right? And last fall I was doing a bunch of like speaking webinar virtual events type stuff in it and I'm not. This is not hyperbole. Like it was three or four times in a row on Goldcast. I was like gold cast. Gold cast, why does that sound familiar? And then I went to my inbox and I did a search for Gold Cast. And sure enough I had that email from Kishore and I was like, yes, let's, let's work together. It was just like a year and a half later and I just pretended like it didn't happen.

So that's awesome. So cold emails are not dead yet?

No, they're not dead. You just have to get lucky. When I, when I was at Drift, we got a feature. They used to have this thing in the New York Times called the CEO called the corner office. I don't know if they still have it, which is like every Sunday. It was like a column about a, about a CEO and we really wanted to get David Cancel on it. Who's CEO tried all this crazy stuff, all these PR pitches. I, no joke, I was sitting on the couch on a Sunday watching football and I just cold emailed this guy. It was like a three line email and he happened to respond. And so like I think there is some. Sometimes you do just have to send that random email and be like, you know what, let's see what happens. There's not always like a rhyme or reason to it.

Absolutely, absolutely. Love it, love it. So just a little bit of housekeeping. So we have a lot of content, great sessions planned in on how this trend is playing out and some of the thought leaders in this space going to talk about it. So lots to engage here. We have a poll open so please go to the polls tab on the right and please answer that poll. We would love to know your opinion. And then we have Q and A tab that you can go in and ask questions. We'll try to answer them. There is a raise hand button that you would see at the bottom so you can raise hand, come on stage and talk live to us and ask a question. And last but not the least, we have subtitles and captions. So if you want it in what we are speaking in another language, you can just hover on the stage, click on captions and voila, you'll have translations like, like Netflix. So awesome.

So dg, that's amazing. So you could hear me in a different. Would it actually subtitle me in different language?

No, sorry. It's like text subtitles. Yes, but in a different language. So you can.

I mean it makes it way more accessible. That's great.

It is, it is. Yeah. We have a lot of.

This is your thing. Go ahead.

International customers. So it's a thing. Awesome. So dg, my first question is just to set context, right. What does it mean for a marketing team to be like a media company? We are all marketing teams, do a lot of things, right. It's a generally super stretch, very tough role. We are seeing it firsthand. But what does. Can we articulate this in a simple manner? What does it mean to be a media company?

Yes. So I think this has been a narrative that's been around in marketing for a while and I think like, you know, HubSpot are some of the OGs of this with actually somebody recently was like on some posts like, isn't this just inbound marketing? And it's like kind of there are pieces of that and like, but like I think the thing has changed. And so like a decade ago when HubSpot was starting out talking about inbound marketing, it was basically like nobody was doing any type of content marketing at all. It was just straight up direct sales, sell our product. Then all of a sudden there became the rise of the Internet gave way to so much information about any product or service that you're going to buy. So it made it hard to compete in that world. And so in that world you created content to bring people in. And so hey, we sell. This is a bad example, but whatever, I'm not good at these on the fly. We sell water bottles. We're going to create content about things around water bottles. And so when you need one, you're going to buy from us.

Right?

And that's kind of what everybody has spent the last decade or so doing, SEO blogging content. But I think now we're just, we're in a different era where when we talk about like, don't build a marketing team, build a media company, I think it's more about like understanding how hard it is to do marketing today and how many things are working against you. People don't want to be marketed to, they don't want to see your ads, they don't want to read your cold emails. And there's 10,000, you know, like, think about your space alone. Polish. Like how many other companies say that they're in this space of, you know, virtual events, webinars live. There's a million of them, right? And so I think the way that you have to think is like, okay, well how can we cut through that noise and how can we meet people on the channels that they're already at? Not even from a marketing perspective, but a straight up education and entertainment perspective. And so I know that like, if I want to sell something, I'll use Goldcast as an example. I want to sell software to event marketers. Right? The best thing you could do as a marketing strategy, at least in my opinion, I think we're here today because you believe that is to become one of the leading resources for that event marketing person. That doesn't mean that you, you only talk about event marketing stuff, but really you focus on getting inside the head of that event marketing person and hey, what, what does this person care about as a person outside of work? What are they reading, what are they listening to, what are they watching? And it's about thinking about how can we be the provider of that. And I think I say media company and I'm not the. I didn't come up with this. I just, it's. Many people have said this before, right? But I say media company because something happens inside of a revenue generating, goal oriented business. A lot of Us are in SaaS that are here today. We make different decisions. So if it was just like me and Palash, we wanted to start a fun Facebook group and a podcast about the Office, our favorite TV show, the things we would do to grow. That would be way different if it was just me and you with no metrics. But if all of a sudden, if we're in a SaaS company, we're like, well, these are two salaried employees they got to spend time on this, they got to spend budget on this. How do we know if this is working? What about all these 15 other things? And so when you do those things, you make a lot of trade offs and end up kind of making like shitty decisions. And so I think it does all come back to like the first principles of like, I want to get this person's attention and get trust and credibility so when I'm ready to sell them something, I can do that. I use this example a lot. I don't, I don't know if I'm ever going to do this, but I'll give this example anyway. I love golf. I've thought, man, I'd love to start a business in golf. Probably a terrible idea. If I was going to do that, the thing that I would do right now would be start a podcast or start a TikTok page or start a community or start a newsletter and build the audience first and then sell to them later. And I think that's what you're seeing more companies do intentionally. And I think this is why we're here today, which is like this is the modern marketing strategy. You're not going to win on features and benefits. You have to be able to attract and keep attention from the people that you want to sell to.

Yeah, that's a great point, dg. And then I think you brought something up which is very relevant. Right? And that's something that we always discuss. Marketing teams are always on fire, right. Like there's so much expectation from VC backed companies especially, right? Which about short term demand gen. There are targets and things have to move fast. Right. And this strategy is like a long term strategy, right. And so how does, say I know a lot of people who are joining us today are owning demand gen pipeline for their company, right? How did they think about it? How did you think about it, that drift? Because I know dc, DC is pretty, pretty strict on targets, right? And growth and things like that. So how did you get buy in from him? How did you both like architect this?

So I got really lucky in that. Number one, I worked for a founder, David, who believed in this approach and that's why we got along so well. And it's what clicked with me. Even in interviewing there, he was like, I believe this is happening in the market and so we want to hire a marketing team to help us build an audience first. So that's like if I'm a marketer in this room, I'm like, fundamentally does the CEO or founder, whoever, do they, do they See, marketing that way. When the company was started in the very early days, one of the earlier things that they did was we launched Seeking Wisdom, which is our podcast, and we were still six months out from really like truly selling our product and building out a sales team.

Okay.

And so I had the luxury of like, there wasn't very strict and hard sales goals in those first couple months. The mission was like, hey, let's build an audience. And what's funny is the way that we built the audience was through not ever really talking about or selling our product. It was about this kind of tangential show, Seeking Wisdom, which is about kind of startup and career and life type of lessons. But those same people happen to be in our audience because we were trading on the brand of David Cancel, who is a well known founder in the Martech space. And so when you start to think about from a strategy standpoint, well, this person's kind of already well known. Okay, interesting. He had a lot, a bunch of followers on Twitter, but he hadn't ever really done anything else. And when he tweeted, his tweets went viral and when he wrote stuff, a lot of eyeballs got on it. And so we were like, man, if we create a podcast and he can say those things on air. And so we took those, we, we made those bets and, and launched that podcast. And the Venn diagram of people who could buy Drift were also listening to that show. But a couple weeks in, a couple months in, we started to get inbound messages, Twitter, DMS, LinkedIn, DMs, emails, somebody coming first, people coming into the website and like when we were ready to sell, like asking for a demo and where did they hear about us was the podcast. And so we didn't have to, I didn't have to spend a lot of my time trying to justify it because we did it. And I say this so often, like we, we started doing it. Now there's, there's a feeling for it that is much harder to quantify that you can feel. And like you, you know this, right? Like how would you quantify all of the stuff like this that you've done from Goldcast? Is there some perfect way to correlate that to Pipeline? There's not. Maybe Chris Walker is talking a lot about self reported attribution, which I think is smart and would be, would be easy to do. But, but outside of that, it's not going to be this, this very spreadsheet driven thing. And so I think going back to like being a marketer, to me, the fun Part is about the creativity. It's about coming up with ideas and taking bets on channels and having a hypothesis like, hey, yeah, we want to reach event people. Nobody in our space is doing, is doing it this way. We want to do it this way. You have to actually go out and have a bias for like, we're going to have an idea, we're going to do our research, we're going to have an idea and we're going to ship it. And so for us it was seeking wisdom and we quickly iterated on that and we saw the connection, the relationship that we created with listeners and so we wanted to continue to build on that and do more brand driven marketing. I think the hard part is when we talk about demand gen, even my brain does it. When you say demand gen in my head, I instantly think SEO, SEM, advertising, sq, funnel optimization, all that stuff. It's like, hold on, just zoom all the way out and be like, the company is gold cast.

Yes.

In this example, we want more people to know about gold cast. How would we go about doing that? It's, we often get so focused on the measurement on the way in. It's like I get frustrated when people, they ask early on, like, wow, how do we know this is going to scale? It's like, we don't. Let's figure that out. Like, let's shrink this down into a smaller project, find a way we can test this idea and then we'll be able to scale it to scale it later. I mean there's, there's 15 different things in that rant, but that was a lot of how we got there. If you're at a more mature company and you want to do this, I think the way to do it is to shrink it down into a smaller experiment and like show your boss or whoever, like ship something small. Do, do five episodes of the podcast, do one event and build on that.

Yeah, yeah, this is, I think you already answered this question.

How do we convince our leadership that building an audience first is crucial? How do we dedicate resources? Well, I think I would just ask you back this question, like, how do you, how do you buy? Right? Like, when was the last time you're like, huh, you know what? That, oh, they nurtured me properly. Like, I'm ready, I'm ready to buy this now. It just doesn't rarely happen that way. And so I think typically you don't have to adopt this approach, but I think it gives you an advantage. And so if you can do it, if you can build an audience first, you don't just get customers from that, by the way. You get to basically foolproof a lot of your marketing ideas. It's like one of the things people miss about LinkedIn. It's not just about vanity metrics and followers. One of the biggest things that's helped me with marketing over the last five years is like, I feel like I know I'm basically testing content on LinkedIn. And so if you're a company and you're able to like write a LinkedIn post. We saw this with David. He wrote, he wrote a post about how he never hires. And you and I did a whole chat about like what you're on LinkedIn. You were like, you should get an MBA. He did this whole, he did, he had this whole rant about why he doesn't want to hire MBAs. And that post blew up and so we were like, oh, let's do something with this. And so what, what do we do? We turn that into a podcast episode. We then turn that into an event. We turn into a follow on content. And so I think like the other thing that people miss with building an audience, it's still don't go back to the demand gen mindset, go back to like the, let's figure out what's going to resonate with this audience. So if we've already tested this on social, you can bring it in and then, and then maybe the demand gen offer is going to convert better because you've already tested that in some way with your icp.

Yeah, that's a great point. I have a lot of questions, but since we talked about channel, this is what people are resonating with. So pretty interesting to see YouTube. I was expecting LinkedIn to be at the top of this, but that's great. I think we need to do something.

TikTok has definitely got to be higher. I think we're all. Wait, can we just. In the chat, there's a question from Asher. I just want to make sure that we touch on this, which is, did we already define what is a media company? No, I don't, I don't have a great definition. I'm not, I'm not that smart. I don't have a textbook perfect definition for what a media company is. I like to use it as like a think about. I would put it back on you. And so like think of a blog, podcast, newsletter, content creator that you follow and think about their approach to marketing. And that's a little bit how I think about. Another example in the B2B world is like sales hacker, right? Sales hacker basically built a media company focus on educating sales pros. And so what that meant is they just had. They don't, they don't sell a product. They don't sell a physical or digital product or software product. Right. They have con. It's mainly like a content first model. It doesn't mean you have to monetize it. But that's how I think about it. How would you answer that? Plush.

No, that's a great point. I think one thing that stood out to me in our conversations was that the content doesn't have to be about that specific market. Right. Like a lot of companies would post funny content, right? Or content that is funny in and related to their audience. We're not talking about the specific field all the time. And even things like what you are saying, right? These, these things also tie into things like personal brand etc, but they ultimately attract, attract the audience towards your content. So yeah, I think content is the product. That's how I would define it. Right. Content is.

And there's lots of different ways like that people execute this. So one example is like Tom Wentworth, who's a CMO of Recorded Future, right? He went and hired like a npr, former NPR cyber security journalist.

Yeah.

And that person now writes about cyber security stuff. I don't, I don't know cybersecurity that well on behalf of them. But, but they don't lead with, hey, we're a software company. They lead with the, the media first and then building that audience and the association that it gets by being powered by them, I think is super smart. And that, that's one way you could also do it.

Awesome. So dg, the other question that I had was given the cost of content, production is coming down, right? It's very easy for anyone to get content out. How should brands think about standing out? Right. They say there's always this risk of everyone trying to do the same thing. Right. How do brands stand out in this cacophony?

I mean, I would say don't do the same thing. This is the fun part of marketing to me, which is like, you can't just blindly. Like I wouldn't if I was a B2B SaaS company listening right now, like, I wouldn't just be like, I'm gonna start a podcast. Okay. I would say, well, well, why? Let's, let's go run the five whys on that, right? So maybe you want to start a podcast because you know what, you've had a personal podcast for the last five years and you're like really good at growing podcasts, you know that in and out. And so you think that you might have better luck creating that than oh, we're gonna start a YouTube channel. But we don't have the budget to hire somebody to do video right now and we're not going to figure out video and house. So should you start a YouTube channel? Probably not. So like, I like to think just like very, very basic, like first principles type stuff. Kind of do one of those analysis like what skills do you have internally, right? What do you have from a budget and time standpoint? Because maybe you do have budget, maybe so you can go spend 15, 20 grand and have a content agency like work with you on developing this. Right? But also you have to look at the market and look at Today's episode.

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The landscape now, there's always going to be an appetite for something different and something better. And so that could be one approach. But I also think the opportunity is to maybe, maybe have a smaller niche. Maybe you niche all the way down and you only focus on one particular thing and, and who cares if the thing that you're building ever reaches more than 100 or 200 people? What if that's the perfect fit? What if that's your icp? You don't need to have a podcast that has a million downloads a month or 2,000 people on, on a live event. So I would start there. I would also think a lot about, I think that we're shifting in this new era now actually we're in it, which is 10 years ago. This was like the HubSpot era. You could basically like, because you had a blog, the content didn't have to be that good. And you could rank and you could basically take that content and kind of just plaster it everywhere. And because you were early on all those channels you would build on, that doesn't work anymore. You have to be able to create audience, a channel specific content. And so you can't just take this recording and upload it on YouTube. And that's your YouTube strategy? No, you need to have an actual YouTube strategy. So what content works on YouTube? What content works on TikToks, what content works in a, in a newsletter, what makes it successful, LinkedIn page successful. Starting with those things and then working from there and be like, okay, now these are the things that we've gone, we've audited ourselves internally, we've looked externally at the competition, what the market opportunity is. And I say that part because you do want to try to operate from a Position of power where if like nobody in your industry has started a podcast, maybe that might be an easier way to.

Yes.

To get started. And then the last piece of that is like, which one or two channels? I think the more you can focus on one, maybe I'm not even gonna say two, maybe one channel as like the core way to start doing this for you all. It's been these live events because this is your product obviously, and you're really doing a good job lately on LinkedIn, right? Gong was very focused on just LinkedIn in the early days and they kind of use, they leverage that all into one big thing. And what never works, and I've, I've made this mistake over and over again, would never work, is taking one thing and just kind of peanut buttering across channels. That's why every B2B SaaS company has 71 views on a YouTube video and followers on the Twitter account. I'd much rather see you like kill all those channels and be like, we're not gonna. I don't care if we have a Twitter, I don't care if we have an Instagram, I don't care if we have YouTube. We're focusing on LinkedIn and that's our strategy. I think that makes such a difference in this phase also.

Absolutely. I think dg, what you said is like the channel specific strategy. That's something media companies do amazingly well, right? If you look at buzzfeed, right? The kind of articles that they do and then their TikTok channel and their Facebook, it's all different, kind of the same.

You also can build like now, okay, now you've cracked one channel, you've figured out LinkedIn, you've getting some feedback at scale. I would much, I would feel much better about being like, oh, we figured out this LinkedIn thing, now let's go try to do this on another channel. Channel number two. So often what happens is we try to do all the channels and this is where the discipline of being able to be like, nope, we're not doing any of those channels. We are focusing on this, here's why. And we're here, we're going to give it six months minimum to commit to this as we build.

I know there was one interesting thing that I ran into so Eric from Hatch. I was speaking with him about podcasts and how it's going to become important in B2B, right? And he's a big believer in this thesis and he said, you know what works Best in B2B? Podcast, or any podcast for that matter. People come in to listen not because they are interested in content. They obviously are, but that's not the number one reason because they feel that they are friends with the host. And so that was like a big revelation for me. That's like a very channel specific thing that I didn't know, I didn't appreciate. But I think being channel specific is a big one.

There's lots of ways to do that also. Like I've seen like Redpoint VC, TikTok channel, like they hired someone to do that and run it. And so you don't have to do it internally. Right. You can use your budget, time, resources, creatively to be like, I don't have to be the face of this. If not me, how can I be the guide for other people?

Yeah, absolutely. I also think that this kind of changes the kind of skill sets you will look. You would look at marketers in different channels. But I'll come to that question before this question from Devin. How do you think about adopting marketing trends versus choosing to carve your own path? Do you assess the longevity of strategy and acknowledge short term opportunities?

I think you're constantly balancing both. I think adopting market trends, I don't think it's a binary thing where you have to look. Usually if you're saying it in this context, the way I'm interpreting is it's like doing what everyone else is doing versus carving your own path. So I would, I would learn it's important to know what marketing trends are important. So like for example, why is short form video content like the way to consume information right now? But can your take on that be the way that you carve your own path? I think you have to use them as inputs. But then there's also, you know, you also have the opportunity to just do something completely opposite. Like everything has gone digital, but we're doing a print newspaper that we're going to mail out to our top 100 accounts, you know, every quarter. I think we tend to live in a very safe like marketing box when typically you can take bigger swings and you can do things better in the early days is how I would put it.

Yeah, absolutely. So we are almost out of time. We have one more question, but I would love to hear our opinion. So early stage marketing is hard in general. Right? But early stage marketing is super hard and in every way. And so I would. And you have done this twice successfully. Given this context of the change in how marketers should approach marketing and what's working, what's not working, what would be your like One advice to marketers, what is there something that they can do today that would help them a lot in balancing all these like short term and long term goals while being able to build a media company?

Yeah, I would say before I even went and built a media company, I think this is one strategy that you could take. I think the one takeaway and the places that I've seen marketing be successful is when the company and marketing can articulate what their marketing strategy is. And it seems so obvious and so simple but there's so many companies, we're just, we're just doing a bunch of things and I so like oh, I, I was on this webinar today and they said build a media company. And so we're starting a podcast like don't, don't go do that. I think this is one way that you can go. It's a philosophy. And so you, so like you need to have a strong opinion about how are we going to do marketing at this company. And so if you are drift five years, you know, five, six years ago, and you're looking at the market and it's a really competitive market, your bet is that we're going to do, we're going to try to build a brand and we're going to do it this way because no one in our space has done it this way. And so therefore the types of marketing that we need to do is X, Y and Z. Because that becomes, then you need guidelines and guardrails for how you're going to do marketing. Then you can think about what does demand gen look like? What is this media company piece look like? I think when you try to operate, that's when everything competes. Ideally, if you do this right, it's additive to demand gen because you're building brand awareness and you're building brand affinity and you're building an audience. There's not a demand gen leader in the world that wouldn't say that that's going to be not helpful for doing the demand gen thing. But a lot of people that I, and I made this mistake myself where just, just doing stuff, you got to be able to articulate what, what is your marketing strategy first.

Yeah, that's a great point. DT and that's not, it's obviously not, not easy. I think one thing I learned from you and talking to Kip at HubSpot and all great CMOs we host is that marketers, like the top marketers, think like founders, they'll figure out the niche first, the market first, and then go in with the strategy. So I wish we had more time for the session. We have around 250 people live right now. That's awesome. That's fantastic. And thanks, Viji. Thanks a lot.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the Exit 5 podcast.

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