Hey, everybody. Before we get started, I want to thank my friends at Hatch for
Speaker:producing this episode. You can get unlimited podcast editing and
Speaker:strategy for one flat rate by visiting Hatch
Speaker:FM. All right, let's get into the show.
Speaker:Welcome to Distribution first, the show where we flip content marketing on its head
Speaker:and focus on what happens after you hit publish. Each week, I
Speaker:share playbooks, motivations, stories, and strategies to help you repurpose and
Speaker:distribute your content because you deserve to get the most out of everything you
Speaker:create.
Speaker:Hey, friend, welcome to distribution first on this episode.
Speaker:I'm so excited to have my buddy Travis Tyler on the
Speaker:show, and we had a really fun episode ahead of us here.
Speaker:I can't believe I haven't had you on yet, Travis. I say this to a
Speaker:lot of people, but I feel like the backlog is deep in the distribution
Speaker:friend list here. So welcome to the show, man. Travis, thanks for having me. I
Speaker:am honored. I've been a huge distribution first fan for a long time,
Speaker:going all the way back to when you left metadata and you
Speaker:started this up. I've looked up to you and admired you. I bought your course.
Speaker:I shared it with all of my team members from Cornerstone
Speaker:content all the way down. You know, I just. I love it, man. So let's
Speaker:dive into it. Love it. Awesome for anybody who's not familiar. So you
Speaker:used to work at Pandadoc and really built up the media
Speaker:hub, for lack of a better in my brain anyway, at
Speaker:Pandadoc, and really, really cool to reverse engineer what you all were
Speaker:doing there and really what you were spearheading there with the podcast and going media
Speaker:first. And I think that's an interesting thing that
Speaker:I'm seeing in the market. I actually wrote about it in last week's newsletter in
Speaker:terms of the two worlds in content,
Speaker:particularly in B two B content. But it feels like we've got maybe
Speaker:the traditional side of the house where it's
Speaker:SEO, it's blogging, it's performance
Speaker:metrics, it's more classic content marketing, quote,
Speaker:unquote, for lack of a better term. And then you've got this, I'll call it
Speaker:new age, right? Like, you got this new world where it's media
Speaker:and it's podcast and it's social first and it's
Speaker:brand building and it's, you know, points of view and all
Speaker:these things. And so I think ultimately, if I were
Speaker:advising a company, it's really trying to find that
Speaker:blend, which is ultra difficult because I
Speaker:think a lot of the companies that I talk to don't have the team or
Speaker:the structures or the, even just the strategy
Speaker:in place to be able to do something like that. We actually did that pretty
Speaker:well, I would say, at checksmith when I was there, like merging and
Speaker:blending the. And you were doing at Pandadoc too, like
Speaker:blending the SEO into the media and trying to like
Speaker:bridge the gap there. But I think for me, what I'm interested is kind of
Speaker:like, do you see that same thing, your new role
Speaker:managing social? And then how do you sort of blend those worlds together?
Speaker:Absolutely. I think I let the data
Speaker:really guide a lot of my decision making when it
Speaker:comes to what I'm actually going to create. So
Speaker:first week at my new job, I was like, get me access to Google
Speaker:Analytics. I want to see traffic trends. I
Speaker:want to take a look at from the last, where it's a younger startup that
Speaker:I'm at now, but I still want to see which blog
Speaker:articles are getting the most traffic, which ones are getting the most conversions.
Speaker:That's always just a good starting place for source material. When you're trying
Speaker:to create some of this newer aged media, you have it
Speaker:institutionally already there. You just need to go digging for it
Speaker:and not necessarily repurpose it, but you need to
Speaker:transpose it. And we can get into that. But certainly
Speaker:our content flywheel here at motion and the one I implemented at
Speaker:Pandadoc was let's use that kind
Speaker:of data driven side of the house, that SEO side of the house, that demand
Speaker:gen side of the house to guide what we're
Speaker:going to create in a more fun
Speaker:edutainment brand affinity esque
Speaker:style and format. So give me a real, like, practical
Speaker:example in that. And maybe there's not one on the top of your head, but
Speaker:whether it was Pandadoc or where you're at now, like, how are you thinking about
Speaker:that? Like, you see a really high ranking SEO post and you're like, all
Speaker:right, I'm going to turn this into some edut. Like, what's your thought process on
Speaker:that? That's exactly my thought process. I'm like, all right,
Speaker:like, top 15 blog articles over the last year in terms of
Speaker:traffic and conversions. I'm going to go in there, I'm going to
Speaker:grab the copy, the title, and I'm going to
Speaker:just transpose it into how a youtuber would deliver it on
Speaker:YouTube. And then, yes, using it on the world's second
Speaker:largest search engine and looking with tools like
Speaker:Vidiq to see, like, what kind of title should I
Speaker:have here? It needs to evoke a little bit more emotion than maybe the blog
Speaker:article does, but seeing is there a good amount of
Speaker:monthly search volume for those keywords
Speaker:and can I make it into something that's interesting with
Speaker:like a fun hook, you know, of me dancing in the first 5 seconds, be
Speaker:like, whoa, I thought this was a video on ad hooks. I
Speaker:thought this was a video on how to write a proposal. Yeah, it
Speaker:is. But I'm also going to make this enjoyable because I watch
Speaker:a lot of video content and I've taken a lot of
Speaker:your frameworks from searchers and
Speaker:scrollers and that whole concept of like, and I'm sure
Speaker:most of your listeners are familiar with it, but if they're not, my understanding of
Speaker:it is they're two different audiences entirely. And
Speaker:I've tried to blend the
Speaker:kind of like captivating, scroll stopping
Speaker:energy of scroll
Speaker:content and bringing it and injecting it just a little bit,
Speaker:not too much, not to the point where it gets distracting,
Speaker:but injecting that into my search content
Speaker:and I get great responses, great feedback, and
Speaker:it also shows in the numbers. So in a quick example would be our
Speaker:highest ranking blog article at Pandadoc was how to write
Speaker:a business proposal. That's what Pandadoc does. It's business proposals. That makes
Speaker:sense, right? It's how to content. And I was like,
Speaker:okay, let's turn this into like a seven minute video. And I
Speaker:hired an actor, I rented a studio and got it edited, wrote
Speaker:the script, got it approved by product, and got it approved
Speaker:by the SEO team that had written the original blog article. Yep, everything
Speaker:looks good here. Everything's accurate. Great, let's publish it
Speaker:within six to seven months of it being published and doing all
Speaker:the correct stuff of making sure my Vidiq score is super high with
Speaker:tagging and descriptions and a good thumbnail. We were at like
Speaker:25,000 views, breaking records on our
Speaker:video content on our YouTube and looking deeper into it's like, well,
Speaker:where did these come from? And we had it embedded on
Speaker:that article that was already ranking high on Google, so that really helped.
Speaker:But it was YouTube's algorithm picked it up as this is
Speaker:useful, helpful content, and people are sticking around and watching
Speaker:like long periods of this video, and then boom, it
Speaker:just took off. And that just recently happened with one of my first videos. I've
Speaker:only been at motion for like three or four months and I've been trying to
Speaker:crack the code. And we finally have a video that actually broke a thousand
Speaker:views, which doesn't sound like a lot, but, you know, when you launch a video
Speaker:and you see it gets over 1400 views in the first week or two,
Speaker:you start to get excited, like, okay, wait, we're onto something here.
Speaker:And it was the same concept, this blog article about our top ad
Speaker:hooks in 2024. And we just sourced the material
Speaker:from some of our customers and put it together in an interesting video. And
Speaker:that's what people like. I'm curious, what do you all sell? It's
Speaker:advertising analytics. Bingo. It's visual analytics. So if
Speaker:you run ads on meta Facebook or Instagram,
Speaker:TikTok or YouTube, their ad managers are
Speaker:robust. But when it comes to being able to scale
Speaker:your creative and have a really clear, clean picture of
Speaker:what is actually working, your creatives are looking at all these
Speaker:jargony acronyms. They're like, I don't know. I don't know what
Speaker:this is. Motion is a reporting tool that you can
Speaker:send and look over with your creatives anytime you're trying to figure out what's working
Speaker:and what's not. And the only reason I asked is because the topic of the
Speaker:title, right. Just want to make sure that's the key, is there's alignment
Speaker:there in terms of what you do. I was actually talking to my buddy Andy.
Speaker:Shout out, Andy, if you listen to this. Earlier in the week, he manages the
Speaker:videos at Techsmith. And we were just kind of reminiscing. I was like,
Speaker:dude, we were so ahead of the game. We started
Speaker:doing that video play in 2019, and it was the same sort
Speaker:of stuff where it was like, we had these boring
Speaker:topics like how to record your screen. This is
Speaker:not exciting, but we made an entertaining
Speaker:slash educational video about those types
Speaker:of topics for the products we sold. I haven't looked, but I know at
Speaker:one point, I mean, these are videos that were scratching half a million views on
Speaker:YouTube or, like, organic, you know, and so
Speaker:it's absolutely bananas. And we did that for like 24
Speaker:episodes for different. And then they, we moved them to different products. But
Speaker:that's one of the things that I think is really, really
Speaker:underrated. It's more lyft, it's a lot more left. And I know a lot of
Speaker:teams are sort of, like, hesitant to, like, I think they'd want to, but, you
Speaker:know, they don't have a you, they don't have an Andy even, like, in text,
Speaker:like, to be able to do that. Like, even when I was at metadata, I
Speaker:was the video guy. And, like, I'm not the video guy. You all, like, I
Speaker:don't think you understand, like, I don't know, video that well, but we even at
Speaker:metadata we so very simple, like because I wanted to, I wanted to try to
Speaker:do some of the same things. And so what we did, because we didn't have,
Speaker:you know, sort of video motion for lack of a better term,
Speaker:like we weren't doing consistent, like more one off videos. But we had the video
Speaker:podcast and so what we did was we did
Speaker:an episode where we took one of the top
Speaker:SEO blog posts we had around demandgen
Speaker:interview questions for demand gen marketers and then did a
Speaker:whole episode about that and then broke out each individual question into
Speaker:its own YouTube video and then publish those.
Speaker:And it was within weeks because again, you're talking about such
Speaker:a niche, you know, who's doing demandgen interview
Speaker:question videos on YouTube? Not very many people. It was so niche
Speaker:that it started to rank and started to take off. And now it was like,
Speaker:oh, now when you type it in, it's metadata, at the top it's
Speaker:metadata with two videos in the feed, the full podcast episode
Speaker:and the individual questions. And it's just, I think it
Speaker:doesn't have to be this overly complicated thing where we have to have, you
Speaker:know, sometimes you can weave those things into your existing models too.
Speaker:And one thing we were talking about as we were getting ready for this, Justin,
Speaker:that I want to point out to your audience is like,
Speaker:it's simpler than you think in terms of the topics.
Speaker:We want to overcomplicate things. You had that great quote. What
Speaker:was it again? It was like our brains want to bend to
Speaker:complication or something. What was that? Yeah, it was just this idea I was listening
Speaker:to something they said that psychologically we bend toward complicate. Like, we
Speaker:think complex is better. Like just naturally our natural inclination
Speaker:is like, the web with a million things is like, that's gotta be
Speaker:better than the web with five things. Like, it just, it's gotta be.
Speaker:There's more there. Yeah. It's been completely eye opening and
Speaker:changing for me as I've shifted away from just being a
Speaker:multimedia digital content producer
Speaker:at Pandadoc and I'm now a senior social media
Speaker:manager. And we vastly
Speaker:overestimate, I wanted to say we vastly overestimate how smart people
Speaker:are. And that's going to be like, wow, what a jerk. This guy's like, who
Speaker:does he think he is? I think we vastly overestimate
Speaker:how simple an idea needs to be. And I've
Speaker:seen with social media, when you try to plug in too
Speaker:many concepts into a single post, you're going to lose
Speaker:the vast majority of people, one of the ways we've been able
Speaker:to grow our social media following and see our, our
Speaker:analytics really tick up is simplifying concepts
Speaker:and just doing one post, one concept, nothing more.
Speaker:Don't try to jam pack. Oh, well, this concept has like four different.
Speaker:No, not for a social media post.
Speaker:And yeah, that's been a game changer for us. It's just, again,
Speaker:people are probably listening to this, like, cool, dude, what do you mean by simplifying?
Speaker:I'll give you an example. So going back to
Speaker:the first few videos we made here at motion, I was doing things like how
Speaker:to top strategies for UGC
Speaker:videos in 2024. Those videos did okay.
Speaker:It was too much. I was trying to pack in too much.
Speaker:And once I just was like, what if I try something
Speaker:that feels like a little bit basic? Which was the best Facebook
Speaker:ad hooks for 2024? And I just went to like, two of our
Speaker:best customers went onto their twitters and was like,
Speaker:let me skim. Over the last two years, every ad hoc they've ever talked about,
Speaker:and I'm going to give them credit, but I'm going to be kind of like
Speaker:this journalist in a sense, who's like gathering this
Speaker:in one place for everybody to look at and adding a little bit of commentary.
Speaker:And that video, within, like one week was our best
Speaker:performing video. So I was like, oh, it's just that simple. People just want to
Speaker:learn about like ad hocs. Like, yeah, they want to learn strategies, but like
Speaker:breaking down specific parts of a strategy. Like, I think the
Speaker:next video I do will probably be like, the best Facebook
Speaker:CTA's for 2024 because it's just one part, like call to
Speaker:action part of an ad. So it's simplifying the concept
Speaker:and not trying to plug too much into one video, one post. Yeah, I
Speaker:love that. I think that it's something that is hard
Speaker:to do unless you're intentional about it
Speaker:and have a plan for it, but something I'm pretty intentional about.
Speaker:Within a lot of the frameworks or
Speaker:paths, within conduct repurposing roadmap, it's something I'm intentional
Speaker:about. I try to be intentional about with distribution
Speaker:first is to not. I actually rarely
Speaker:talk about the full framework, ever. It's
Speaker:almost always broken up. If somebody asks, I can lay it out if I'm
Speaker:working with a client or if I'm coaching through with somebody. Here's
Speaker:our end to end roadmap. Here's what we're trying to get to. But it is,
Speaker:it's super complicated. Like people even, like, an idea of, like you
Speaker:mentioned earlier, like the cornerstone, like the three C method for content,
Speaker:where you've got this idea of breaking up content into three different
Speaker:ways. Like, that is overwhelm. It's like, oh, my God, like I say, like
Speaker:every quarter. Like, I got to do like that. And then, like, and it's like,
Speaker:let's break up each piece. Like, what is your cut content
Speaker:engine? What's your social engine? What's your email engine? All right, what's your core
Speaker:engine? Are you doing blogs? You're doing YouTube? Are you doing both? Are you doing
Speaker:a podcast? Like, all right, now let's focus there. All right, now we're going to
Speaker:go to core. Like, do you have any big initiatives? Do you have it? Like,
Speaker:now we're going to break that. And, okay, now that we have these things figured
Speaker:out, how can we make them all work together? Ultimate goal. But
Speaker:again, it's trying to simplify the things to where. Because
Speaker:ultimately, as marketers, what the heck do we want to do? We want to be
Speaker:able to get our message out there. We want to drive demand. We want to
Speaker:be able to sell more product revenue. Da da da da da. But I think
Speaker:in the back of our mind, what we want to do is
Speaker:get in front of our audience as much as possible. And I
Speaker:think we think we need to be doing more than we actually
Speaker:need to be doing. That was the biggest paradigm shift when I took your
Speaker:course and first started talking with you was more
Speaker:does not equal better. It's one of the first myths in the course,
Speaker:one of the first things I talk about. Yep. And it can be
Speaker:hard to have that paradigmship, to break that muscle we've built up.
Speaker:I think it's hard because it can be boring. And here's what I mean by
Speaker:that, because, okay, taking the same example, I've been talking about
Speaker:best ad hocs for 2024. If all I'm talking about is ad hocs, it
Speaker:gets a little boring to create, right? Like, I'm always talking about the same thing,
Speaker:but unfortunately, that's just kind of the name of the game is you kind of
Speaker:have to, you know,
Speaker:overcome that boredom because that's when people will start paying
Speaker:attention to that message. And I learned that from a CRO. Like, by the time
Speaker:you get tired of saying something is the first time, it's
Speaker:probably resonating with your first potential
Speaker:customer. Like, you, Justin, are probably so tired of talking about
Speaker:distribution some days that you're like, no, I love it.
Speaker:But you've been spouting it for years. And it's just like
Speaker:you probably are starting to see, you know, year two, year
Speaker:three coming into year four, I think where
Speaker:you're like, okay, it's finally starting to resonate.
Speaker:You're starting to see people use maybe vernacular that you're like, wait,
Speaker:wait, that's my, so I
Speaker:always try to give you credit when I'm talking about content
Speaker:philosophy and stuff, but yeah. So with cut content,
Speaker:I did ten ad hooks in my YouTube video
Speaker:and the video's like seven minutes long. And then in my cut content
Speaker:version of it, I covered three of the hooks and then
Speaker:removed my commentary on it and just showed what the
Speaker:hooks are. And people loved that. And I'm like, well,
Speaker:shit, now I gotta do like another cut content of like, probably could just
Speaker:do cut content for each hook. So I got ten pieces of cut
Speaker:content from that one video. And
Speaker:it's not sexy. It's not exciting to
Speaker:break new territory and talk about something new.
Speaker:But at the end of the day, a video that I
Speaker:created within this ad hocs video that got 1600 views
Speaker:in the first week and it got us 70 new subscribers to
Speaker:our YouTube channel. I know these aren't huge numbers, but we're just getting
Speaker:started. And when we see something's working, we're like,
Speaker:oh snap. Our first seven minute video that just
Speaker:got us 70 subscribers in the first week. There are a lot of companies who
Speaker:would want 70 new subscribers to their email list. 70 new
Speaker:subscribers to their, you know, it's not again. And I think like,
Speaker:this is another thing for companies too, especially early stage
Speaker:companies where you're just trying to get a foot, like, you need to build
Speaker:marketing for the right people. I know this is something like Alex
Speaker:Hermosis even been really talking about. Like, he went really wide
Speaker:in his content, like, was doing fitness and relationships and
Speaker:business and he literally was like, no more of that. We
Speaker:had our biggest success as from subscribers and views and all that over that
Speaker:time period, but they didn't convert into buyers of
Speaker:products that he selled because people who come for the relationship
Speaker:video want more relationship videos. People who come for the fitness
Speaker:videos want more fitness content. And that goes back to the consistency for you too,
Speaker:of the bored, like, so now hormones. He's like, I'm only doing
Speaker:business content and I'm only doing educational business. I'm going to help these people. Yeah.
Speaker:And so if you think about that from that perspective, like, oh man, I'm
Speaker:only doing business con. Like, I don't get to do the other stuff.
Speaker:But I think as I'm listening to you and I think as a marketer.
Speaker:Cause you agreed, right? Like, I think some of it's inherently like, repeating
Speaker:yourself is really hard. Every single person I talk to on the show,
Speaker:every single person I talk to, whoever I'm coaching, it's like
Speaker:repetition is very, like, we don't like that. And I think it's how we
Speaker:think we're going to be perceived by the market. But
Speaker:I think the thing I'm learning, the more I do it, the more comfortable you
Speaker:get with it. And it's actually what your audience
Speaker:wants. And if somebody does get bored with
Speaker:your hooks message with your, you know, whatever those things are and
Speaker:leaves, they weren't going to buy anyway. I think this
Speaker:is a huge thing and I'm curious, your take on it, it's something I'm
Speaker:starting to shift on, which is why are we doing
Speaker:content marketing in the first place if not
Speaker:to sell something? It's the blending. It's what we talked about
Speaker:at the beginning. It's the blending of like, SEO. And why we love
Speaker:SEO as content marketers is like performance and like, it should drive to
Speaker:conversion and like, we can track it. And why we love the brand building
Speaker:side is because it's fun and it gets people talking and we can build
Speaker:audiences and it's really, really cool. But I think at the end of the day,
Speaker:you have to build the right audience and you have to build the people who
Speaker:want to buy things from you. Because if not, like,
Speaker:if you're a company who has a million people on YouTube
Speaker:and none of them buy, you're out of business.
Speaker:Yeah. Or you're in the wrong business and you need to figure out what the
Speaker:right business is. Yeah. You're at that point, you're having to, like,
Speaker:lean on like, creator mode of like, can we get sponsorships for our show
Speaker:to support what we're doing? You know what I mean? Like, it's a totally, and
Speaker:I'll say this too, as I know this, people who have
Speaker:giant audiences that aren't doing well because they don't know how to monetize,
Speaker:I think we get convoluted in that giant audience equals
Speaker:tons of success when it's the thousand raving fans is
Speaker:really, really true. And I think becoming more and more true, even
Speaker:for a business who wants to grow and wants to be able to see that
Speaker:growth, I think just the way market forces are going,
Speaker:it's becoming more and more necessary to be able to, like, really hone in on
Speaker:who those people are. And you can't do the generic
Speaker:marketing stuff because for you, all right, like, there's going to be people who come
Speaker:into your world and are like, ah, this content is not for, like, this
Speaker:brand. It's not for me. And that's okay. That's
Speaker:okay. You actually want that. You know you want that, and then you want the
Speaker:other half of those people to come in and be like, this is absolutely for
Speaker:me. I'm sick of, like, the other way to do this boring analytics stuff. I
Speaker:want to come in and, like, be entertained and do it in a cool way.
Speaker:It matters. It does matter. I think the only objection I have
Speaker:to what you said, and I've had to take a step back. Feel free to
Speaker:debate this, too, if you're like, let's go. I see some holes in your logic.
Speaker:I sometimes want to ask founders, like, you didn't just start a business
Speaker:to make money. Yes, I did. A little part of you did it
Speaker:to have some fun, right? You want to have a little bit of fun? This
Speaker:is supposed to be fun. You're spending all this fricking time. Don't you want to
Speaker:enjoy it? I enjoy making money. We all do. We all do.
Speaker:But don't you want to have a little bit of Iggy Kai, a little bit
Speaker:of, like, seeing those circles overlap of making
Speaker:money, doing what you're good at, and enjoying it? Wouldn't that be a
Speaker:cool way to conduct business? So that's where I come in with,
Speaker:like, the having fun piece of, like, I don't
Speaker:just make content to sell people. I make
Speaker:content because it's fun for me. But
Speaker:at a certain point, like, I do need to balance those things, right? Like, if
Speaker:I'm just creating wild ass shit and it's
Speaker:fun, but it's not doing anything, then it's like, okay,
Speaker:so I try to strike a balance of diversifying
Speaker:my content that I create on social media, where I am doing
Speaker:memes, I am doing videos of me dancing. I am also
Speaker:doing videos of me showing you really cool, educational things where you're like,
Speaker:oh, I just learned something. That's dope. So for me, that's the
Speaker:end goal of my content, is to balance
Speaker:helping, selling, and having my own fun. Selfishly.
Speaker:Yeah, no, I love that. I love that. I mean, even for me, like, as
Speaker:I'm building my own business, it's become very
Speaker:apparent where if I'm not having fun, what am I doing
Speaker:here? You know? And that's me founding my own thing. But I think
Speaker:for anybody trying to grow that business. I mean, that's
Speaker:when the slog happens. That's when the slog really goes down and
Speaker:you start to hate. Hate what you're ending up doing. But I think it is
Speaker:that balance. And I think what I'll say is fun is different for different people.
Speaker:Fun for you looks different. Like, I am not going to get on camera and
Speaker:dance. That ain't fun. That's actually horrible for me. I
Speaker:would, you know, make me get up and do a lecture before I have to
Speaker:do that. But, like, fun for me, you know, fun for me is honestly,
Speaker:like, teaching and helping and coaching.
Speaker:And, like, if I get off a coaching call with somebody and you see one
Speaker:light bulb go off, it's like. Like, that is fun. That is so fun. That's
Speaker:a good distinction. That is a good distinction. You know, I don't want people to
Speaker:think, oh, gosh, now I got to do, like, dancing video because I think
Speaker:that's, you know, that happens, too, right? Like, oh, you know, we got to do
Speaker:the dancing video. And it's like, no, be true to yourself and your brand, but
Speaker:be true. To yourself living your truth. I think it's finding what's fun for you
Speaker:a good way to figure that out. If you're like, well, I don't know, it's
Speaker:fun. A really good lesson I learned a while ago is like, where do you
Speaker:get into flow state where you completely lose track of time? I remember a
Speaker:Vp of marketing asking me that as I was like a t shaped marketer or
Speaker:I was trying to become a t shaped marketer because I was just such a
Speaker:generalist. It was like, where do you lose track of time? Where do you, like,
Speaker:look up and you're like, oh, shit, it's been like 4 hours. And for me,
Speaker:it was like recording and editing videos that I was
Speaker:just howling, laughing at in my living room. And I was like, okay, if I
Speaker:can blend that with some and making sure that, you know, it's not just
Speaker:all shock value that people are stopping the scroll, but then they're coming
Speaker:back because they're like, I actually got something out of this other than just a
Speaker:laugh. I learned a little bit of something here, and I. I
Speaker:respect what Travis is doing, and it's. I can tell he's enjoying
Speaker:it. And, yeah, that's been a big nuance for me. I know there's more we
Speaker:want to talk about, so we can. We can dive into, like, more. There is.
Speaker:I mean, there is. I know we're tactical stuff for your audience. I don't know.
Speaker:I think this is all tactical and good stuff. I think a lot. It's interesting,
Speaker:a lot of the conversations that I end up having on the show. I don't
Speaker:know if you kind of figured out recently, like, there is more mindset stuff
Speaker:that's coming into play. I just think in order to do this stuff, you have
Speaker:to have a mindset shift in a lot of these things, so. But one of
Speaker:the things I did absolutely want to touch on is your content
Speaker:flow. So anybody listening to the show on the podcast will do
Speaker:our best to describe what this is. But Travis, he's going to share
Speaker:his screen here, and we're going to talk through it. And pro tip, if you
Speaker:come into distribution, first, the membership, you get access to all the video content,
Speaker:too, so you can actually see it happen, you know what I mean? There you
Speaker:go. Little fun plug there. But, yeah, walk us through motions. Content
Speaker:flow, what you have going on. I love the look of
Speaker:this. It's just a basic flowchart. But I think sometimes
Speaker:we talked about simple is better. You know, simple is easy to follow.
Speaker:That's right. So people are like, cool. We got into like 20 minutes podcast
Speaker:to finally get something tactical. Well, here you go.
Speaker:Okay, tactical nerds, this is the content flow, the content
Speaker:flywheel we use here at motion. It all starts with
Speaker:a live stream video. And we have found that live stream
Speaker:events just really do well for our
Speaker:audience in terms of engagement,
Speaker:conversion into actual customers, and
Speaker:the ability for us to churn them out
Speaker:is not a huge lift at the moment. So, yes,
Speaker:it does require a lot of work, but, yeah, so we always go with a
Speaker:live stream with a popular subject matter expert as kind of our
Speaker:cornerstone piece of content that we're doing pretty much on a
Speaker:monthly basis. Sometimes we're doing more than one a month. For
Speaker:example, we're actually doing five over the next
Speaker:five weeks. It's one event, but it's five separate events. But
Speaker:anyway, that's our cornerstone piece of content that then
Speaker:during that live event, and this is the key part, you need to have your
Speaker:marketing team in the actual event, monitoring the chat
Speaker:and seeing where and when people have the most questions.
Speaker:And when they go, they have their aha. Moments that they're verbalizing. Oh,
Speaker:I never thought about it like that. Oh, this is so cool. Can't believe you're
Speaker:giving this away for free. Like, just skim those comments
Speaker:and screenshot that moment, right, and start taking notes. Have your marketing
Speaker:team taking notes. So later today, we're kicking off an event, and you better believe
Speaker:I'm gonna be in those comments just lurking and asking questions
Speaker:and hyping people up and taking a ton of notes. At what point what were
Speaker:we talking about? What was our subject matter expert explaining? What did they have up
Speaker:on screen? And then taking that information and writing into
Speaker:our email newsletter. Our email newsletter is called thumbstop,
Speaker:and it's written by our head of content. He's a freaking genius. He's a really
Speaker:great writer. Shout out to James Mulvey, my boss. He just does a really great
Speaker:job of condensing complicated information.
Speaker:It doesn't read like a blog, it reads like an interview where,
Speaker:like, he almost interviewed the person. He injects his, like, his voice
Speaker:and his point of view into it, and that makes it super
Speaker:relatable. So we go live event into an email
Speaker:newsletter, and then we have a content marketing manager
Speaker:who takes that email newsletter and is like, okay, I'm going to SEO
Speaker:the absolute crap out of this and make sure
Speaker:that we're doing all of the proper things that a content manager needs
Speaker:to do in terms of, like, keyword stuffing and
Speaker:structure and titles and things of that nature. But
Speaker:this is where it also gets really helpful, is both the SEO
Speaker:article and the email newsletter work with our brand designer to get, like,
Speaker:really badass custom visuals.
Speaker:And those are really helpful for cut pieces of content that I
Speaker:use on social. And that helped me because then I go in and
Speaker:read both the newsletter and the blog article, and I sit down, I have my
Speaker:drink, my coffee, like, all right, I'm gonna sit down and read this from start
Speaker:to finish and take notes of what I found to be most interesting and most
Speaker:helpful. They usually are around those badass visuals that we had
Speaker:created, diagrams, charts, whatever it might be. And then
Speaker:I sit down and I write out a script that's usually about five to seven
Speaker:minutes long. And then I film it here at my
Speaker:house. I take that raw footage, I film it in 4K. I've got a
Speaker:really badass studio here, so it looks nice. And I send it over to a
Speaker:video agency. And the video agency works their magic. They do all the editing for
Speaker:us. We get a design review from our designer to make sure everything looks
Speaker:on brand and looks good, and then we promote it. And
Speaker:that's kind of the breakdown of this. So we promote it both via paid
Speaker:and organic. Is kind of like the differentiator here is we
Speaker:take are pieces that do the best from organic,
Speaker:and we put some spend behind them as ads on
Speaker:Facebook, on Instagram, a little bit on LinkedIn as well.
Speaker:LinkedIn tends to have like a higher cost per leads and that we're
Speaker:like, that's like a little bit too expensive. And our audience is
Speaker:predominantly marketing agencies, performance marketing
Speaker:agencies, and then e commerce and direct to
Speaker:consumer brands that are publishing like $30,000
Speaker:worth of paid ads every month. So that's kind of it in a nutshell.
Speaker:Love that. Love that. How do you think about the promotion and the
Speaker:distribution side of that? So I love the flow here. I'm
Speaker:curious now you've got this bucket of stuff that's coming off
Speaker:this. What do you do next with that as a social? Cause you've got the
Speaker:email. That's one sense of distribution. You got SEO, hopefully that's another sense of distribution.
Speaker:But social, like, how do you make sure you're getting the most out of the
Speaker:stuff you're using? I think even speaking transparently, there are
Speaker:times, and I know this is true for people I talk with. Like we
Speaker:create the assets or get the assets created and then never get around to actually
Speaker:promoting them. So I'm curious to hear like your real life story there. That's
Speaker:a great question. And it's an area, that's why I study you, it's why I
Speaker:follow you, it's why I read your newsletter. It's an area that I'm trying to
Speaker:get better at. So frankly, like, bear with me here. I feel like
Speaker:my strength is in the creation part and my distribution is where I'm
Speaker:trying to. I'm trying to work out that muscle at the gym with Justin every
Speaker:week. But the way I try to think about it is
Speaker:going back to the simplifying the concept. When you come to a
Speaker:social post that's scroll content, you need to be able to hook people
Speaker:in so that they hit the seam more on LinkedIn with a
Speaker:strong hook that's just a few words and evokes
Speaker:an emotion and really only pays attention to
Speaker:one piece of information.
Speaker:You can't over inundate it. And that doesn't mean it needs to be like a
Speaker:short text post. But we take those beautifully designed graphics,
Speaker:we take the snippets from my video and we
Speaker:try to do a couple of things. So with the cut
Speaker:content, I am cutting vertical videos square videos for
Speaker:mine, my longer video, I am taking those visual
Speaker:assets and writing a post on it. But then I'm also trying to find
Speaker:like ads in the wild that convey the
Speaker:concept we might be talking about. And those do really, really,
Speaker:really well in terms of engagement. So we'll take a new balance
Speaker:shoe ad that's really popular and we'll try to stop
Speaker:people in their scroll with like, oh, there's a new balance ad and there's
Speaker:some crazy hook. And we'll work with influencers
Speaker:as well to help boost our post by commenting on it because
Speaker:they're relevant to it. So that's kind of the missing piece that people sometimes don't
Speaker:always understand that if you're like, I need to get
Speaker:our LinkedIn post to get more than 19 likes, it's like,
Speaker:well, you might need to take a page out of the Instagram influencer book
Speaker:and partner with folks who have huge followings that are related
Speaker:to you and your audience and tap into their audience and pay
Speaker:them for access to their audience so that you can get more
Speaker:looks and views and engagement metrics on your content
Speaker:to grow your followers. So that's kind of the paid part as well that I
Speaker:didn't mention. But taking cut content, working with influencers,
Speaker:creators who have big followings and getting them to comment on our
Speaker:posts, getting them to engage with us and help us promote it, love that.
Speaker:Yeah. I had a whole episode with Brett McGrath and we talked about
Speaker:using your network as a form of distribution. Now, tapping into
Speaker:the paid side is a whole other way to do that. But I like
Speaker:that especially probably the Roi of dollars
Speaker:spent. It's probably an extremely high roi for the amount
Speaker:of dollars that you're able to spend there. Yeah. And it's different, naturally,
Speaker:seeing it in the feed and seeing somebody you look up to or
Speaker:like comment on that versus seeing the promoted.
Speaker:I mean, you know, like, an ad is still an ad and they let you
Speaker:know that it is. And people might say like, oh, it's sketchy. Like, oh, you're
Speaker:using an engagement pod. It's not an engagement pod, it's just paying an
Speaker:influencer has a shit ton of followers to help us promote our stuff by
Speaker:getting them to just comment on it. So that's a cool strategy that works.
Speaker:And it might not be everybody's cup of tea. I'm like, it still feels kind
Speaker:of icky, but if I was you, Justin, I could say, like, let me
Speaker:find a way to get like, a Seth godin to create a
Speaker:partnership where I pay him $1,000 a month, which
Speaker:is crazy to comment on all of my posts
Speaker:with an image or a quote or a meme or something that relates to my
Speaker:post. And watch your numbers skyrocket, my man. It's
Speaker:a crazy hack. It works really well. I like it. You got to find somebody
Speaker:who's willing to do it, though, and monitor and be like, can I pay you?
Speaker:True, true, true, true. Yeah. Well, I love the flow. I love the way you've
Speaker:broken it down. There's so much more we can go into. Probably we'll have to
Speaker:in a 2.0 episode at some point. But dude, it was so fun to have
Speaker:you on. Don't limit yourself with only at the end. We were practical. I think
Speaker:there was lots of practical good stuff we talked about throughout this episode,
Speaker:and I think people are going to take a lot out of it to be
Speaker:able to kind of merge the worlds as I'm seeing them in content marketing.
Speaker:So thanks for coming on, man. Thanks for having me, Justin.
Speaker:All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode of distribution first,
Speaker:and thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you so,
Speaker:so much and I hope you're able to apply what you learned in this
Speaker:episode one way or another into your content strategy as
Speaker:well. Speaking of strategy, we have a lot of things going on this year that
Speaker:are going to help you build your brand, ten x your content and
Speaker:transform the way you do content marketing. Make sure to subscribe
Speaker:to the show and sign up for my newsletter at Justinsimon Co.
Speaker:So you don't miss a thing. I look forward to serving you in the next
Speaker:episode as well. And until then, take care and I'll see you next time. Next
Speaker:time.