Content Marketing at Help Scout

Alex Kracov: So I'm really excited to dive deep with you today and talk all things content marketing. I'd love to start today's conversation talking about your time at Help Scout where you led the company's content marketing efforts. Can you kind of take us back to what Help Scout was like when you joined?

Devin Bramhall: Yeah, it was - okay. So I joined as director of content. There were around 50 people at the company at the time. The content team was two and a half people. Because Matt Patterson at that time was sort of straddling marketing and customer success. He was pretty well-known in the customer success space from previous jobs, so he ended up just being on the team full time because he makes amazing content. So I had two and a half people, and they had just hired a new CMO. And so, myself and my boss, Sunee, joined at the same time. That was really interesting, because poor Sunee didn't get to choose the person that he was wanting to run content for him. He had to just deal with me. But he was an outstanding leader, and we got on really well. So that luckily worked.

The reason they were looking for a director of content was because they had done really good work with SEO in the beginning. They ranked for some pretty high-volume terms, which I'll get to in a second, and they had recently seen their blog traffic slipping. The blog represented the most of the organic traffic the site got. And so they wanted someone to come in and prioritize that in the beginning. And so my goal that I was set with was to increase website or blog traffic. Specifically, I think it was 125k users. That's how they measured it back then. So what was interesting about the situation they were in is their customer service software. One of their second most popular posts was called the 'psychology of color.' They got, I think it was like 100,000 unique visits a month from that post alone. But it's like, it's useless traffic. Their first most popular was 'customer service skills.' Great keyword, right? But really, top of funnel, not super high intent. And so the lion's share of their traffic was mostly vanity and not as useful. And it was slipping. So my job is like, okay, come in. Increase traffic. But what I was looking to do was increase the right traffic and not just do more psychology of color.

So one of the first things that we did was just to come in and do refreshes. I love to take credit for what I did there on the content side, because I did some really cool stuff. But at the end of the day, if you break it down to the numbers and you look at - because we beat our goal by that September. I think I joined in April or May. It was, by September, we'd hit our goal. If you look at what worked, it was really unsexy. It was like, okay, we refreshed some old posts. We deleted some posts that weren't getting any traffic, doing the redirects and things. They did some technical updates to the website. Then yes, we did also add some net new content that was in sort of keyword families of customer service. We developed more regular cadence of our newsletter, social media, et cetera. But at the end of the day, it was the boring backend stuff that really worked, which is funny. But that was kind of the lay of the land when I first got there.

Alex Kracov: That's usually how it works. All the boring, unsexy stuff, the backlinks, the content architecture, the refreshing, it's usually what moves the needle. It's like kind of what we want to avoid working on. Everyone needs to do the strategy, the strategy, the strategy. But it's the grindy stuff, it's usually what sort of actually moves the needle when it comes to most marketing programs, I think.

Devin Bramhall: Yeah, and I was lucky too because Help Scout really understood the value of brand. So I did have resources to do more brand-related stuff as well. Looking back on the impact that I had while I was there, it really - even though it's not quantifiable, we did a lot with the brand. And it showed through various signals, even though I couldn't directly tie it back to my traffic.

Alex Kracov: What was an example of a brandy thing that Help Scout was good at?

Devin Bramhall: Okay. So they were really good at design. They were really good. Greg Ciotti founded that writing team. They brought in Emily Triplett Lentz. This is back when she was like - this was before she was as well-known as she is now. She was such an outstanding writer. They staffed well in the beginning. They had illustration and design support, and sort of CEO buy-in too. Nick really believed in the brand stuff too. So it's like that kind of permission, foundational permission, was there. Then it was, because of the founder's philosophy around the product as well, we had a really good name amongst the customer service community. Helpfulness was one of our big, you know. And so we participated in - it started as a Slack group. It was called support-driven. We'd led doing this customer service survey. Then basically, what I came in and did was start to tie that all together and say, okay, how can we invest more in this customer support group that's getting us a ton of attention in the events that they do? And how can we leverage this survey better to actually bring in leads instead of just getting us some backlinks, et cetera?

So, for me, it was more just about like tying some stuff together and then taking opportunities. We were in the middle of a rebrand when I joined. Rebrands can be dicey. I've been able to execute them to make them an attention-getter. But everyone's heard of the Tropicana and Pepsi woes, right? Especially, for a brand like Help Scout that defined itself so much on its brand identity, I think that runs a risk. I got the founders together taking pictures in the elevator with old and new T-shirts. I got the team who were spread out across the world to pose with the new brands next to monuments. We were at deep dive with the co-founder and lead designer about the thought, every little thought process visually behind the new brand. So we were able to actually use that not only just to get me more traffic, which made me look good as I was marching towards my goal, but also growing our reputation in a big way.

How to Start a Content Program as a CEO

Alex Kracov: One of the themes in your story about Help Scout is it seems like the founders and the exec team were so bought in to the value of content and brand. But a lot of CEOs, a lot of founders are not - they're not really sure what to do with marketing and content. That can be too ambiguous for them. I'm curious, like, what advice you have for founders, CEOs, who want to start investing in content? What should their mentality be?

Devin Bramhall: Well, I will say that just because they were bought in doesn't mean they were cooperative or easy on marketing tactics. The day I started - because they were remote, but they had a Boston office. And I lived in Boston at the time - Nick turned around in his chair and was like, "What do you think about webinars?" That turned into a pretty intense argument about the value of webinars, where he badly wanted to debate whether or not they were useful. So buy-in doesn't necessarily mean your life is any easier.

First, let me empathize with them. It is really hard to stand up a department that you know nothing about. It makes you feel powerless. It makes you feel like you wouldn't even know the right answer if it hit you on the face. I think I've experienced that myself in the past. So that's number one. It's like, how do you set something up to succeed that you don't know the mechanics of, and how even to measure it? And so, my advice, which is going to sound unfair, find a partner who emphasizes testing and iterating. Start with your metric. Start with an objective, a measurable objective. You have to in the early days. Otherwise, you're going to drive yourself crazy trying stuff, and it's all going to fail because you're going to do it wrong in some way. So it's like establish an objective. Find a partner. Set the experiments up with timelines. That way you will start learning as they are executing. And so it's sort of like teaching through progress, I guess. Because it's going to be hard no matter what. The other thing is, you need to be measuring progress along the way. Because you need to stick with some stuff to see it working first. If you're not doing paid media or paid search, it's like it is going to take a little bit of time to show those signals. You need interim milestone, progress milestones, to let you know you're on the right track.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, I found it in my own career at Lattice. I mean, Jack was very bought in to marketing in general. But yeah, he would constantly challenge different things. I think what I did decently was just bring him along for the ride, like make little decks or presentations. Or in one-on-ones, talk through like what does it mean to invest in organic traffic? What does it mean to invest in brand? Here's the pros and cons, and try and be almost like an internal teacher and educator of the dynamics of a certain channel and the pros and cons of it. Then yeah, to some degree, they got to take a leap of faith. But as long as the metrics are generally heading in the right direction and you anchor on something, I think it generally works. But yeah, it can be very hard, especially if your CEO is completely suspect of all marketing, which I think happens at times.

Devin Bramhall: Yeah, it's like the metric is all you've got. If you've no other marketer on your team and you've got to stand this up, either hire that first marketer or work with an agency. It's like you need something to ground you and make you feel confident. That's where the metric is so important. At least, with that metric, you can see, oh, this is working, or this is not and no amount of of bullshitting from anybody. They can give you excuses all day long. But it's like you either move the needle or you didn't. I wouldn't necessarily take that binary mindset with marketing generally. But it's all you got when you're trying to stand it up for the first time. You don't have time. You're working against the clock. You're working against budget and showing progress. You can get the next round. It's like, keep it simple. And don't talk to too many people too. Sorry. Just like, if you talk to too many people, you're going to talk yourself into insanity. Just decide on something. Commit and move forward. You'll learn as well.

Alex Kracov: Totally agree with that. Because I think I've noticed. Again and again, like, Jack would talk to somebody. Then I would have like, oh, what about this thing? What about that thing? What about this thing? It's like, it works if you stick with - channels work if you stick with it, and you nurture the channel. Then there's no silver bullets. There's no quick win. There's nothing anyone's missing, right? It works because you do a podcast episode every week for five years, right? That's why that works or why webinar works. It's like you stick with it, and you learn the channel. But if you're just constantly hopping between different campaigns, different channels, it'll never work. Yeah, so it's really interesting.

Devin Bramhall: And that just sort of happened towards the end of my time. Our CMO left, and we're sort of in between marketing leader. My metrics kept changing. All of a sudden, they're like, "Devin, you're underperforming." I'm like, uggh. But that's what happens when you change your mind too much. It's just like, okay, now we're switching to this. Now we're switching to that. It's like, first, you have to come up with a strategy for each one. Then start doing it. And so they agree, commit, and then consistency.

Joining Animalz

Alex Kracov: Alright. I'd love to switch gears and talk about your time in Animalz. Because you were the CEO of one of the premier content marketing agencies, I'd love to kind of talk about your journey with that agency. So you started there as VP of marketing, and then you eventually became CEO. So we'll kind of go through those transition stages. But that first part when you're with Animalz, what was it like when you joined Animalz? What is the agency? I assume, as VP of marketing, you're responsible for growing the agency. Is that right?

Devin Bramhall: It's actually kind of funny, my title and my role there in the beginning because it was kind of like - so I knew Walter because we worked with Animalz when I was at Help Scout. I got fired from Help Scout for underperforming. I was like, okay, why don't I try freelancing for a little bit? I was looking for work. I talked to my old boss, Sunee. He said, you should hit up Walter. He might have extra work. He does content marketing for SaaS companies. That's your wheelhouse.

So I hit up Walter, and he was coming to have lunch. And so I come into there, like this office on the Lower East Side, to walk up these rickety stairs. It's like a total mess. It was like me and Gabby and Yan and Melanie. I can't remember who else. It was just this, like, we're just sitting around shooting the shit. We go to get ramen. Then we come back, and we're eating it. We're just shooting, like we're just talking about stuff. Finally, I looked at Walter. I was like, okay, so what's up, man? What are we doing here? And so we started talking about our role. Then the role really - this was one of those he hired for person more than role, where we negotiated what the title and what my responsibilities would be. At the time, his biggest challenge was scale. He had a good formula going. They'd worked with some really good companies. But they had tried to scale at one point and ended up with a big backlog. He was awry. He'd done a reset. He was really good. He did a reset. He said, okay, we're going to take a year or a few months. Fulfill everybody's, and then try again.

So he hired me and then Haley Bryant as VP of Client Services. Again, hired us separately without telling either of us at the same time. We started with it a week of each other. It's like, oh, yeah, by the way, Haley is starting next week. I'm like, who's Haley? So what her and I did is like we immediately banded together. We split the company in half. And so I managed half the team. She managed half of the team. I was working on the product from the content side, making sure the operations, the editing, everything around the process could support consistency of quality. Haley was working on from the client services standpoint. Together with Jimmy, who was still there at that point, and Andrew and the team kind of put the wheels on the bus, the rest of the operations bus. Oh, and Julia, too, because she was running HR. So what do all hands look like? How do we build culture? I remember the first all hands we did. There was no culture of chatting during the all hands. It was like crickets. We're like, what?

Alex Kracov: Like, was it all okay? Is anyone listening? Yeah.

Devin Bramhall: There were around 18 people at the time. So it was really small, really scary, that first all hands. Then overtime, we were sort of working on building culture, taking over leadership of the company just organically and then working on scaling it. Jimmy is scaling it from the marketing and sales standpoint. I'm making sure we can deliver high-quality product and helping sell and all of that. That was really - I mean, the first two years were a lot of that, just getting scrappy. Along the way, we started getting bigger and bigger clients. Google came on the map. We'd never service to Google before. And so even I had a learning moment there, where we had a really good relationship with them. We were working together. The point of contact reached out to Jimmy. She's like, I love Devin. But we got to get the wheel. And so I was like, okay, cool. We did like a reset. And so I was even learning as I went with really generous patient client partners, and just figuring out and growing in the process. Then, of course, we were about 50 people when the pandemic started. That was a rocket ship growth period for SaaS, which meant it was a rocket ship growth area for us. But because we had laid that foundation by then, we were ready for it.

Becoming CEO of Animalz

Alex Kracov: And at that point, you were the CEO. Right? So you had risen to become the CEO. Is that right? Am I getting the timelines right? I mean, what was that like moving? You have all these peers. You've become the boss of everybody. I'm sure that transition was interesting. Then scaling so fast must have been a crazy experience for you.

Devin Bramhall: Yeah, so the decision around leadership change was made in fall of 2019. So Walter had done the rounds at that summer off site asking all of us what we wanted. I just pointed at him. I was like, I want your job. And he was like, okay.

Alex Kracov: I love it. You got to ask for what you want.

Devin Bramhall: Yeah, exactly. And so Walter spent some time thinking about each of us. Then it was like Devin CEO, Haley COO, Jimmy super path. And so it was really organic. Haley and I talked about it. Because from the very beginning when we joined, we were like, we're going to run this company. We're going to do it. We're going to do it together. We talked about co-leading. She was like, "Devin, I don't want to be the CEO. I don't want it." So it just fell together so perfectly where there wasn't that any kind of angst. The team loved it. Because going from Walter who's the brilliant sort of instigator - founders are terrible leaders often - we came in and everyone's like, "Thank God. Things make sense now."

Alex Kracov: Structure, operations. Yay.

Devin Bramhall: A ban against saying the word stupid. I did come in and I was like, Walter, you're not allowed to say stupid in Slack anymore. You can't say that word. I'm sorry. So yeah, so that part. Basically, what we had done was, once Walter decided on this, it was my job to set up the entire transition, which I'd never done before. So I made a year-long timeline for my own transition throughout 2020. That would be internal messaging and getting ramped up and then making an announcement in September. It was so beautiful, Alex. I was going to launch a new service product. Every month, my first three months after becoming a CEO, it showed a ton of-

Alex Kracov: The master marketing plan. I love it, yeah.

Devin Bramhall: It was so beautiful. I was going to look like a total badass. Everyone's going to be like, yeah. Then the pandemic started to come down on us. I looked at Walter and I said, listen, man. You're not the guy to get us, the team, through this. I said it's got to be me. He agreed. I'm sure he wasn't complaining about it. I don't think leading through the pandemic was anyone's cup of tea except me. He's like, I'm going to tackle this. And so we just made the decision and message it to the team. There went my brilliant marketing plan. But it turns out we didn't need it. Because the initial purge of clients that happened out of fear immediately after that, they're like, wait a second. We fired our marketing teams. Now we need help. Then things start to pick up again in 2021, where now money is free and just assets doing really well. So now we've already built our reputation. We already have big logos on us. We have a process we're known for. The word of mouth drove our growth.

I don't think we ever marketed the company until towards in the 2022 when I could see things were going to go uphill. It was sheer management of inbound volume. That's incidentally. I didn't plan for us to grow that quickly. What I was trying to do those in 2020 through the beginning of 2022 is manage the organic growth that was happening. And so that reflects on how fast we build the team, whether these processes we have actually scaled past a certain point, which I made a ton of mistakes there. I missed a milestone or two. I was like, oh, turns out that was an inflection point in company growth. And I just blew past it.

Then the other part is just managing it out in the world, right? We were having customers on a three-month waitlist to join. By the time we got started with them, they were already impatient. And so now there's a customer dissatisfaction where they're like, we're waiting three months to start. They want to see everything immediately. And so I kind of ended up playing the Fed with our pricing to discourage some of the demand, to place us in a smaller bracket of people so that we didn't get known as an agency that's unavailable. It's crazy, the stuff you have to manage, though. You think it's always going getting enough business. But there's a flip side to that too, which is managing the growth that you're seeing, especially if it's coming on fast.

Devin Bramhall: What did the content machine look like in Animalz? Because it's so interesting to have 130 people working there. You have all these clients. You must have had a really clear process to work with each client. And I'm curious what was that process like. Then also, were you hiring contractors, or was everyone full time? How did you sort of think about the staffing side of this job? Because that's always the problem with agencies. There's this balance of demand from clients and your resourcing and all of that. It can get very, very tricky to balance.

Devin Bramhall: Yeah, interesting thing about the full time. Everybody was full-time at the time. That was one of our biggest selling points to clients back then. Because there was that kind of historic agency legacy of everyone's a contractor, and it sucks. People keep changing on my account. So we were deliberate about doing full-time. That was sort of a differentiator.

So on the structure, we had an editing team. That was a big thing. So it's like you have the content creator. You have the editor, and you have sort of the strategist who manages a book of business with clients and the team of producers, right? It wasn't always like that in the beginning. The producers managed their accounts too. But it's just boring, typical agency growth stuff. Where like as you go along, you're like, okay, some of these roles need to be split out. I've never seen a perfect model ever.

But the important thing that we did from the beginning was have a model that grounded us in all the decisions we made. This came from Walter. I learned this from him. And so it gave us these natural constraints, where it's like we want to maintain X gross margin and Y profit margin. Those are our constraints. And so building a system within that was extremely helpful in keeping us disciplined along the way. It was really hard in the beginning as I was learning. I was like, Walter... Then now I realized that was the foundation for enabling the scale that we got too. Because if you take that business model and then it goes into how you hire and how you forecast hiring. It goes into profitability by client, by team member, all that stuff. So it was really easy for us. Then that bleeds into your pricing. So you're like, okay, we know that to make X gross margin on each client, each client is paying 10k a month, these are the levels of people that can be, and the producer. This is the level of editor, strategist, et cetera. So it just made our decision making almost, it was made for us and allowed us more of that consistency.

Again, this took us some time to put together. So it's not like this happened immediately, right? This is overtime. That's one of the things I've seen with other agencies I've worked with. It's like they don't always have a source of truth around the decisions they make day to day. And so it makes scaling feel impossible. Because it's like, well, how much do we pay this person versus this person? It's like having that model from the get go not only helped run the business but helped scale the business and forecast. Right? We would update the forecast every quarter based on how things were going. We have three different scenarios. And so it's like you can see in the key one things are starting to blow up. We're like, okay, we got to do a big hiring push. If we want to service all this demand, we've got to, you know. So it really helped for me in leading the business and learning how to lead the business.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, agencies are such a tricky business. It is such an interesting just to balance your resource. Because you're essentially selling just people's brains to your customers and their services. So yeah, I don't know. It's interesting.

Devin Bramhall: Well, but to that end, actually, we were always looking to create knowledge share. And so take a business model, and we try to apply that in terms of templates for doing specific reporting templates, edit brief templates. Cassie developed a whole education portal for us and translate that.

Alex Kracov: She really productized it. Yeah, really interesting.

Devin Bramhall: Yeah, like resource center. So it's like people can self-teach as well. Because again, we're a distributed team also. So it's like having this set of resources available for people to utilize to teach themselves, making them more independent. Then using onboarding as kind of a teaching moment as well. Because again, our mission, the mission that I set when I came in, was to make the Internet a more helpful place. A big goal you can never achieve. The way we did that was, one, through helping companies put better content out in the world but, two, putting the best content marketers out in the world. That was a sneaky way for me to get around the fact that tenure at agencies is usually pretty short. So I tried to flip that on its head and be like, "We're probably the best content marketers out in the world. You're welcome, everybody." Turn the negative into a positive. But it worked, right? Even the folks who left, that's the biggest thing that I hear. It's like, "They taught me how to be a better content marketer." They got hired at really great companies as a result.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, the alumni network from Animalz is so strong. It's crazy. I see everybody popping up over at LinkedIn. I was a happy customer of Animalz, too, you know. Yeah, it's really interesting to see out there on LinkedIn and everybody doing their next kind of thing as well.

Devin Bramhall: I'm really proud of it. I really am. That's one of the things I'm proud of the most. I didn't do it by myself. It was a team effort. Haley and I had - it was like Cassie and Ryan Law, they were the sort of -we came in and we quickly saw, like, oh, these people know their shit. And so, really, I credit them with helping us build the company alongside. Ryan on the product service and then marketing. Then Cassie, she built a lot of the templates, the resources, the education. Then she ended up helping us with things around operations and HR and stuff too. She was insatiable. And so they deserve a lot of credit as well for being those young people who are hungry and are just like give me something and helped, among many others, achieve that mission.

Content Marketing Advice for Startups

Alex Kracov: I'd love to switch gears a little bit and talk about content marketing more broadly. Maybe think of a good framing might be like the different phases of content marketing as companies want to invest in it. And so maybe we start the early days, like startups who are just getting going. They have some marketing program. What are the first steps to investing in a content marketing program? Where do you advise people start that journey?

Devin Bramhall: Not right now, to be honest. I grew up in content marketing, but it wasn't the only discipline that I practiced. I really don't see content as necessarily the starting point for early-stage companies right now because it is a big investment. It does take time, and we're fighting with a few more variables right now in the form of like Google is still figuring out how to manage the fact that there's AI content now causing some - I mean, you've seen it with the last two core updates, right? Some people are losing traffic who have good content on their site, right? So it's just like there's a lot of variables, so I don't necessarily recommend you start with content. I think that's a heavy weight for a company financially and from a staffing perspective.

Also, a lot of those companies that came to us had started with paid distribution first and then came to us when they were like, okay, we want to make this sustainable. We want to build the engine behind this and make some of this organically. We don't want to feed the beast all the time. That was a really common reason why companies came to us. And so if I'm an early-stage company, I'm like, what is the next milestone of growth I need to achieve to either make good on a promise to my investors or get me to that next round? It's like start there, and then think about what is the thing that will get me there in the timeline that I have. And it could be that content is part of that, but I feel like the general perception of content is that it's like a blog.

For some reason, organic branded social is still a thing companies are trying to do. And I'm like, where? Twitter, X, whatever, that's dead. You've got LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. You're not selling. I'm sorry. If you're a B2B company, you're probably not selling a lot on there. So it's like I don't know why that's still a consideration, right? There's a lot of legacy still in what's considered content. Whereas like if I were going in, I'd be like, okay, we have to get to X number of customers for the state. Our CEO is super connected, right? Our founder knows a ton of people, already has a huge following. How can we leverage that? Say it's on LinkedIn, assuming. How can we leverage that through content? The stuff, the types of things that he's posting, the calls to action that he's putting into his post, how can we sort of game that to bring leads in? How can we leverage him with things like small dinners? Especially if you're going after big - you're sort of focused on bigger type companies, doing a really small curated dinner, getting everyone together. Even thinking of some hand-to-hand combat stuff. So for me, content would be a supporter in the strategy but isn't necessarily that, like, okay, we're going to go after these keywords and blah, blah, blah. It's like, sure. Eventually, yeah. But I don't necessarily think it's where you start right now.

Alex Kracov: It's a really good lesson. We've been feeling that pain at Dock or that interesting dynamic. Because we've invested in content really early. And it's working now. But it has taken years, right? Like years to compound and grow and get there and get into position where it's actually driving the leads. Yeah, but the founder-led brand stuff works.

Devin Bramhall: It's different than your time with Lattice, right? Because you did that really successfully at Lattice, and you're used to it working faster.

Alex Kracov: No, it takes a long time. There's so much competition out there. It's just much more mature markets. So it's so interesting. And the other trend I'm seeing - and this is maybe more for a scaled company. So out of the startup zone. You have some traction as a company - is I feel like content strategy has become so much more multimedia. It's the blog and SEO. But then, there's podcasts like this. There's YouTube, There's webinars. There's social. There's thought leadership. There's so much going on, right? This meme of, okay, build a media company at your SaaS company. I'm curious how you think about that. Is that a good strategy that every company should go after? When should you do it? How do you sort of think about that trend that we're seeing in the content world?

Devin Bramhall: You know my answer to that. You know I'm never. I'm like, if it sounds like a playbook, I'm not in for it. No. So, look, I think the idea of a media company, certain companies becoming a media company makes sense. What I think about the multimedia thing is, we're in channel transition. So, like I said, certain distribution paths like organic social, even search, aren't as effective as they used to be. You've got TikTok, YouTube and YouTube lives and shorts and all of that, like that whole YouTube ecosystem, that does have its own SEO strategy that you can tap into and capitalize on. But the problem is, how do you get them from a video over to your product?

And same with a podcast. It's like, sure. I remember going into Help Scout. One of the first things Nick said to me was like, "We should do a podcast." I was like, Nick, would you like to create an entirely new product that you then have to market and sell and grow an audience for before it's ever going to do anything for the business? Right? It's like you have to be clever in how you leverage these things for business growth, and it's not a direct line. And so what you need to understand is it's looking at your budget and timeline and determining, like, will this help me move the needle to the next place I need to go? Or is this something that I should prioritize? Once we get to this, we intend to hire on the marketing team or whatever. They bring in someone who develop. It doesn't just like make a podcast and put it out there. They're thinking about how to use the podcast to grow the company, use it whatever metric they're a part of, right? I don't necessarily know what that is exactly. Because it's one step removed.

One example of a company I know is they use their podcast to connect with potential companies that would work with them. So it's a biz-dev strategy. They don't actually care how many people listen to it. They make sure it's good. But they don't care about distribution as much because they're like, this is an intro. It's an in for us. That's the way they've leveraged podcasts. Another company might - I don't know if they're a type of product that's a new type of product in the market, and they're really trying to get the market to understand that this is a thing, right? You've got the messaging aspect of it where it's like you're hoping to change minds on a broader scale possibly.

But the reality is, content strategy has never been a playbook. And it's really not a playbook right now. And so what companies need to do is understand the breadth of channels that they have, which includes people at their company, and develop something based on their customers and where they all are and what they're doing and where they're interacting. Maybe they're all in a fucking Discord somewhere. I don't know. Kind of really get custom. Get the playbook out of your mind, and just go look at actual human customers. See where they are in aggregate. See what team members have strong opinions or where they already have influence. Then work with media, social, whatever it is, as the facilitator. Just test. That's what we've been doing with Don't Say Content, right? It's like we made the podcast. It was like, I felt kind of behind the times. I was like, shit. Do I even know how to use YouTube anymore? How do you grow a podcast? I've never done it before, right? And so it was a lot of putting a lot of effort into things that I realized weren't important and I didn't need. Then honestly, to your point earlier, it was about consistency. Where after a year, less than a year, it was around the fall, I was like, we get nothing but positive feedback but I don't see anyone sharing our podcast on LinkedIn. And it was weird. As soon as I said it, it started happening.

Alex Kracov: You manifested it out into the world.

Devin Bramhall: I know. But it's like, you know. So we had to try a lot of stuff and put some energy into dead ends before we really got there. But I think the more people realize that content strategy right now does not look - it doesn't look like what it used to. And thank God. Think for yourself. Think for yourself and your resources, and try new things. I think those are the people that I'm seeing actually have success.

How to Grow a Podcast

Alex Kracov: And you mentioned Don't Say Content, which is an awesome podcast. Everyone should go listen to it. I'm curious. And this is a selfish question considering we're on a podcast right now. What has worked well for you in sort of promoting and growing it? How do you even think about the value of the podcast? Why are you even doing it in the first place?

Devin Bramhall: Yes, so there were two things that we did right in the beginning. One was, we did look at the market and say, what's missing? We didn't just have an idea and say, wouldn't it be neat? We really looked at, like, where are we wishing we had content? And finding this gap for marketing leaders where everyone's talking about tactics on podcasts. But who's talking to the leadership challenges of marketers? That's where we get on the topics of how to get CEOs and marketers get along. Right? It's like those are the types of challenges that folks at that level are having that we didn't feel represented in marketing podcast.

Second thing was, we started with the two co-hosts have strong networks. You know what I mean? It was like, we already had built credibility, and that was part of it. That was a strategic move. It's like you want the water to flow down river. And so the way that our strategy, our execution strategy worked was, going into the launch, we literally emailed a long list of people. We're like, "Hi friends. We're launching this thing. Here, we have a newsletter capture." So we let people sign up to be notified when it came out, which was the foundation of our newsletter list. We did it on Substack because I don't know what the fuck else to do. Who cares? I think it's like I shouldn't be using that platform anymore. But I'm too lazy at the moment.

Alex Kracov: Good, yeah.

Devin Bramhall: Yeah, and then it was really like just posting about it. We were very deliberate about, like, hey, will you support our podcast coming out? Let people know about it. When you say something nice, we're like, can you just put that on the reviews? We got lots of reviews early on. Then obviously, posting. Before, we were posting on Instagram. I was like, we're trying doing a TikTok experiment. It was really like when we post on LinkedIn, people listened to it and our audience continued to grow. And so it was really leaning into those two things, where it's like we're covering stuff that nobody else was covering. We were two people who had good reputations in the space we're operating. And we market it. I mean, you've seen our posts. We're kind of goofy sometimes. We have a weird klutz of us.

Alex Kracov: Great character in the podcast and everything. It shines through. People want to listen to people and not robots on a screen talking about content. No, it works really well.

Devin Bramhall: Yeah, and posting clips, like the B side clips where one of us is saying something stupid, or we're making fun of each other. It's like all of that creates this perception of us as human beings I can connect with, who understand me. Then finding ways to incorporate the community even if we don't have guests. So going out, interviewing a bunch of people and including them in the podcast. Or I'll look at LinkedIn posts sometimes and reference them in a podcast, shouting out our friends. Then eventually, the word of mouth starts to spread, right? It's slow. But I think once that starts to happen to the outside world, you start to look bigger than your britches, right? And so it's like, okay. I think we have like - I forget what it is. 100 something downloads in the first day or week. Okay. You know what? Don't quote me on that because now I always forget what it is. But it's like we're growing. It's not like moonshot growth, but it's like we have been continuing to grow. To us, it looks like slow and steady wins the race. But it is consistent.

Alex Kracov: Totally. Each listener is so valuable on a podcast, YouTube. I mean, it's way more valuable than a blog read or anything like that because you're in someone's ear, talking to them.

Devin Bramhall: It's so cool. We were talking to audience. Plus, the other day, they're like, one of the women on the call, she's like, "Oh, I love your podcast. I listen to every episode." It's like, that helps in other conversations. Where right now, what we're looking at is we got some early inbound sponsorships, which is great. Now we're kind of looking at, like, can we do more partnerships to help grow at a more meaningful pace, like tapping into other people's audiences and doing more of a trade on promotion and that type of thing to sort of get access? Because now we know the podcast is good. We know people like it. And so now it's like, okay, it's just exposure. We're still figuring it out, but that's where we're at right now.

Alex Kracov: Well, thank you so much for the wonderful conversation today, Devin. If people want to go listen to Don't Say Content - I know you're also doing, I think, some consulting these days - where can people reach out and find you?

Devin Bramhall: Dontsaycontent.com has all the connections to wherever you want to listen. Or you can just go to mine or Margaret's LinkedIns, and that's where you can find out about consulting for both of us, actually.

Alex Kracov: Awesome. Thank you so much.