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Ross Simmonds' Guide to Content Repurposing for Higher Engagement
321 Plays2 months ago
The struggle to keep up with content creation is real. How often in our effort to create the next thing do we fail to properly distribute the last thing?
In this episode, the legendary, Ross Simmonds stops by to give away the secrets to effectively share and repurpose your best work:
- The importance of resharing old content and why it still gets engagement today.
- Optimizing content through repurposing and updating existing assets.
- Content strategies, including testing headlines and leveraging paid vs. organic distribution.
If you like this episode, do yourself a HUGE favor and follow Ross on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosssimmonds/
That's Marketing, Baby is produced by Sweet Fish Media. Book a call at sweetfishmedia.com.
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
and We have this philosophy at Foundation that we call the four E's, and if something doesn't fall into one of those categories, we don't create it, we don't try to promote it, we don't distribute it. Educational content, engaging content, entertaining content, or empowering content. And if the content doesn't fall into one of those categories, we don't try to touch it because it's not going to add value to the other person on the other side of the keyboard.
00:00:25
Speaker
Hello and welcome everyone to That's Marketing Baby. We have a legend among us today. ah We're so, so excited to have Ross Simmons on our humble little fun podcast. ah welcome Welcome, Ross. Thanks for having me. I'm thrilled to be here and thanks for the kind words. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. This was like Susan shooting her shot on Twitter. That's why I love when people shoot their shot and you guys did. Here we are. We made it happen. I was like, it was so funny because Jess wasn't around. And I'm like, I don't know, you so I'm just gonna DM. And I sent her a screenshot. She's like, oh my God. It was like dreams coming true. Just sitting there sitting in a glass of wine. I'm like, Ross said that he'll be a guest. So Ross, would love for you to tell us about yourself.
00:01:11
Speaker
how you have become known as one of the leading experts, foremost expert in in content distribution. and And for all of you who maybe aren't um familiar with Ross, that is like his bread and butter. And we're going to learn so much today from him. And I'm i'm like giddy about this. so So go for it, Ross. Tell us about yourself. Yeah, thank you. So I'm the founder of a company called Foundation. We work with B2B SaaS companies on content creation, content distribution, and content optimization. So we work with some of the top brands in the world doing exactly that. And if you're not sure what that is, essentially everything from writing blog posts, creating long form landing pages, eBooks guides, you name it, repurposing those things so they don't just live on their website and then call it a day. We distribute that content through communities, through emails, through
00:01:56
Speaker
LinkedIn updates, through Reddit, through social, all of those different things. And then in addition to that, we do optimization. So we ensure that the old content that you might have wrote two years ago, three years ago was constantly getting updated. So how did I get here? What am I doing in this world today? I started with a fantasy football blog. Funny enough, like a lot of people don't know that. my entire career in digital started with the fantasy football blog that I started in my university days and the traffic was going up but my university marks were going down and my mom sat me down and we had this very tough conversation where she was like
00:02:29
Speaker
Ross, you need to start focusing on your degree. So I changed my blog to start writing about marketing. And I started to write about marketing while I was in university. I think I was in my second year. And I started to get emails from people all over the globe saying, hey, we would like to work with you. And I was like, interesting. This is wild. I'm like, in overdraft and living in my beard space. It's great when you have the internet. right It made no sense. So um the light bulbs went off that this internet thing was going to last and it might like have some legs. So I went all in, um took that opportunity, joined a big agency, left that big agency very quickly. I was there for probably about two years and I've been out on my own doing my own thing ever since. And I fell in love with content distribution because one of those early pieces that I published back in the day
00:03:16
Speaker
I thought it was great. I thought it was a good piece of content. Shared it on my Facebook, got no traction, got no engagement. And the reason why I got no engagement looking back was very clear. The people on my Facebook account were just university students. It was just like me, my friends, and that was it. But the moment I took that same blog post and I shared it in a community called inbound dot.org and growthackers.com, which were two communities for marketers at the time, that piece took off. And yeah, when that happened, I was like, oh, creation doesn't matter as much as distribution. Great ideas don't always win. Sometimes you need to make sure that those ideas get spread. So I went all in on distribution and here we are today. Oh, that's such a good story. I love it. i I love that it was kind of an accidental thing for you. But just like, you know, you found kind of that true talent and that accidental moment. That's so cool. Love it. Amazing.
00:04:07
Speaker
Um, we are very much about the kind of practical, like, what is something I can do right now or like starting. Well, it's a Friday. What can I do Monday? Right. Which we all kind of check, but check it out for the day. But what can I do starting Monday? Right. That will make me better at my job. So. Would love to know what you think is one of the biggest mistakes you see people do when it comes to content distribution and like one little baby step they might be able to take to like get better. So I would say the biggest mistake that I see is people will share a piece of content once. And if it does well, that's great. But that will be the still the only time in which they share that content. And what I would advise you to do, whether you're on LinkedIn, whether you're on X, whether you're on
00:04:51
Speaker
um Facebook, you name it, depending on where your audience is, Instagram, TikTok, you name it. I want you to go back into your analytics and look at your best performing piece of content. Find the hit that you had in 2022, in 2021, and then reshare that exact same post today and see what happens. And you might be surprised to find that an old piece of content that you shared months ago, years ago, that actually resonated and connected with a lot of people at that time still does well today. Why? Because people are still people. And at that moment, you might have had a sample size of 100, but now you have a sample size of 150 and the algorithm at that time only showed your content to maybe 25 of those people. So now you have an entire 125 net new people that you can reach. So my advice is to go find the best content that you've created in the last 12 months that you shared once and didn't continue to share and reshare it again on Monday and see how people respond to it.
00:05:50
Speaker
see and that's It's so funny because Jess knows we work together. and so i you know I was so guilty. I think the other thing that we've we've talked about this before, but kind of tagging onto what you said, Ross, is that we see companies that feel like they have to make so much more content than they actually do. Because to your point, they only share it the one time. so They're like, oh my God, I got to come up with 70 things. And I used to have that problem because i I would see Jess would create so much stuff so fast. And I'm like, how do you do that? And she'd be like, did you not realize it's just the same blog post? I just did it 16 different ways. I sliced into this and that. And I was like, oh. And so then once once you start practicing it, it gets really easy to see how to reformat it. but It is it is like such a mindset shift. And I don't know. It might be a generational thing too, where it's kind of like,
00:06:35
Speaker
I come from the old school where it's like they're there really wasn't repurposing back in the day you know it's like you wrote one article it went in my magazine and that was that and so trying to get around. That mindset has been and i kinda felt like the gears are like. Start to like pick up on it now now it's like second nature but that's definitely something to talk about a lot. Yeah, and that's good. Like it should become, it really, it is one of those things when even you look back into history and you look at um content and storytelling, et cetera, oftentimes everybody chases the original draft. It's a recent phenomenon to see people doing remixes. It's a recent phenomenon to see movie companies like Disney rolling out three different new films that all were based off of cartoons back in the day. So when you start to see all of these live action films start to come out of
00:07:23
Speaker
Mulan out of Lion King out of all of these movies, they're essentially taking old ideas that resonated people with people in the 80s and 90s. Because again, people don't change. Adding a little bit of new additional technology to it and giving it back to them. And what are people doing? They're signing up, they're showing up, they're going to the movies, they're going to the films, and they're enjoying it. And the kids are thinking, oh, look, Childish Gambino is in Lion King. like It's wild. This is the world that we live in today. We're seeing these large companies do it. But for some reason, a lot of marketers and creators get stuck on this hamster wheel of creation that they forget that it is okay to take your old greatest hits, add a little bit of new spice to it, and then bring it back to life.
00:08:08
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's so smart. let's Let's dig into that a little bit more, because I know you mentioned optimization, like going back to your greatest hits and optimizing them, and kind of just talked about how Disney is doing that in their own way. Like, what are some ways that you, your company, or just um companies out there that you have seen that are doing it well, are optimizing? Like, how are they understanding, okay, this did well, but like, how can I get it to continue to do well? I don't want it to start to kind of fall off. Yeah. So let's say, for example, a real example would be this podcast. So we're going to have this conversation. We're talking about content distribution. It's going to be a fire conversation. All the listeners are going to hear it. They're going to start dropping five star reviews. They're going to share with their friends. Y'all are going to skyrocket to the top, right? Manifested right there, but we're all manifested. So we've got good content. That's the starting point. Now let's say we want to optimize this because we've seen that it resonated with the community. What we're going to do now is we're going to look for the key moments that maybe we saw people actually liked a lot, where maybe in the comments they're saying, oh, I enjoyed this piece. So we take that section.
00:09:11
Speaker
And we're going to pull it out. We're going to turn it into a video snippet. We're going to share it on TikTok. We're going to share it on Instagram Reels. We're going to share it on YouTube Shorts. But that's not all we're going to do. We're also going to write a blog post on that topic that summarizes the things that we discussed. And that blog post could collect us after we press publish and we go live and we share it once or twice and it goes to the market. Or we can optimize the title of that blog post to be something along the lines of best practices for content distribution in 2024. And then when 2025 comes by, we're not just going to leave that piece and say it's 2024, we're going to change the date.
00:09:48
Speaker
And then maybe we're going to find a study or a recent piece that came out in that month that talks about the rise of AI influencing content distribution. And we're going to make a reference to that. So it stays relevant in the eyes of Google or ChatTP2, whoever's scanning the content. So those are the things that you want to do to optimize your content. Now, when you think about all of these examples, there's two key things that are happening. One, we're taking an original asset that was valuable, that we thought and the market demonstrated was quality. And then we're doing two simple things. One, we're distributing it. So we're trying to increase our sample size of the people that can be impacted by the story. And two, we're making it better.
00:10:30
Speaker
We're making the content better by giving them exactly what they want to hear in that shorter piece, or we're making it better by adding more context in the form of a blog post. It is very user-centric. We're focused on the consumer, the person who's going to consume this content. We're not focused that much on how many views we got, how many downloads we got. We're just focused on trying to give as much value as possible. And when you start with that at the top of your mind, at the forefront of your execution, you always win. That was so beautiful. yeah ah For the people in the back, the whole like, we're not worried about views. Because when the quality is there, the views come, right? like If you're much you concerned about the quality and the value, the views, the likes, the engagement,
00:11:18
Speaker
come along with that and that's where you get that really beautiful like feedback loop right of like okay what i found was this piece resonated i found the moments within it that resonated most i put them out i was it was reaffirmed that these resonated the most through all of that engagement so i love i love love love that you said that i think the other part of that too and just we've talked about this before but like i handle primarily the paid side of the world and it's always interesting to me when places will write kind of like a half-assed piece of content and then i like well let's put money behind it i'm like all that i'm like
00:11:52
Speaker
All putting money behind anything does is show you how well or not well it did. It's like whatever you saw organically is you're just paying money to make it do more of that. It's not going to save it. It's not going to make it better. um So it's kind of the same problem. It's like, I'll get stuff. And I'm going, don't please don't have me spend money against this. This is such a bad idea. Yeah, so true. I've seen so many like, so my short stint in agency worlds, I had a wide range of clients, a lot of them in CPG, some of them in the government sector. And I would see government spend millions of dollars to create an ad. And then they'd spend another millions of dollars to get that ad in front of people. And it would be so embarrassing to see how many thumbs down these ads would get. But everybody would be happy because they've reached 2.5 million people. in a
00:12:37
Speaker
Yeah, but you got 1.5 down votes. You know what that means? Half of them hate you, so do you really want to be reaching people that hate you? Yeah, Jess and I have talked about that. We're just like, you can kind of see it coming a mile away, and and you'll try and warn them and say, I don't think this is a great thing to spend money on. They're like, no, if we just get it in front of the right people, I'm like, they're that they're actually going to, it's going to be even worse, i was like because they're going to smell that it's crap. They're going to be more upset. They're going to be more upset. Exactly. It's so true. It's wild. like You don't want to distribute bad content. And like at the end of the day, marketers should in general embrace the idea that if they're not creating something that is valuable.
00:13:18
Speaker
then they shouldn't promote it. um We have this philosophy at Foundation that we call the four E's, and if something doesn't fall into one of those categories, we don't create it, we don't try to promote it, we don't distribute it. Educational content, engaging content, entertaining content, or empowering content. And if the content doesn't fall into one of those categories, we don't try to touch it because it's not going to add value to the other person on the other side of the keyboard. I want to go back to the paid bit really quickly. When are you like, okay, yes, this paid makes perfect sense for this. we We talk about this a lot. Susan is absolutely an expert here, but would love your take as well.
00:13:52
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm a big fan of paid. Don't get me wrong. I'm the organic guy. Everyone loves hearing Ross talk about organic distribution into Facebook groups, all of these things. But those things take a lot of time, right? And one of the benefits of paid is it's kind of a cheat code. It's a cheat code to access and get distribution. So my belief is you leverage and double down on paid when you have content market fit. And content market fit means that the content that you are distributing to a certain market is driving a result consistently. So for example, there's going to be certain ebooks or guides or resources that your team has created that you're going to put some social organic behind. And you're going to get, let's say, 20 clicks and 19 conversions.
00:14:38
Speaker
Okay, let's double down on that asset because it has a high likelihood that it is going to convert the right people with this message and with this story. So I'm going to send that to pay and I'm going to say, let's amplify this and try to milk it for all it's worth. Yeah, I love that. On the flip side of that, it's like sometimes you're going to have pieces that are complete flop. In those pieces, you probably don't want to opt to have paid behind because you're not going to get the outcomes. So for us, it's all about focusing on like, Let's identify the metric that matters for this asset. And if that metric is being met because of distribution, then let's encourage and think about how we can tap paid to do the same. Hey, I want to take a quick second to tell you about our friends at Sweetfish. Content marketers, just a friendly reminder, your job is not to hook the 3% of your audience who are ready to buy. It's to pique the interest of the 97% of your audience who are not ready to buy yet. With compelling stories,
00:15:34
Speaker
interesting points of view and practical advice that helps them be better at their jobs. And that is where Sweetfish comes in. Sweetfish is a podcasting agency that can help you power a modern top of funnel content flywheel, all to grow that 97% piece of pie into the largest queue of future buyers possible. How do I know all of this? Sweetfish is the official podcasting agency of That's Marketing Baby. So we're big fans over here. Book a call with them at sweetfishmedia dot.com today. So when the 97% are ready to buy, they buy from you. Okay, back to the show.
00:16:10
Speaker
I want to double click on one more thing you just said there, the pieces that don't perform, because obviously there was some research that went into that. You know, your audience, you understand their pain points. Like for the most part, these pieces of content made by good content teams and and good marketing teams are not made in some sort of silo, right? So like, how do you, what do you do with those pieces of content that you're like, ah, didn't perform so well in organic. So we're not going to put paid against it, but maybe we could do something else to to bring it up and try again. So great question. the
00:16:41
Speaker
the biggest mistake that i There's a lot of mistakes that happen in the industry. So I can't even say the biggest mistake because there's a lot of big mistakes. Another mistake that people make is that they assume that the headline, the texts that they use the first time to promote a piece was actually the best text and headline that they could have used to promote that piece. And I believe in testing like eight different headlines to amplify a piece to see if one of those headlines resonate a little bit better. There's been countless times where I've had a piece of content for a partner or a client that we've created that I thought was fire.
00:17:14
Speaker
and it go out, we write up a catchy LinkedIn update and it gets met with crickets. like The only people who are liking it are people who are employed by the company and you're like, ooh, this is a flop. And then we rewrite the status update. We share the exact same content, the same ebook, the same guide, but we change the hook. We change the intro. We change the the pain that we're speaking to. And then the clicks go through the roof, the piece gets a bunch of shares, and everyone's left scratching their head. Why? How? And it's simply because the lead in the text was different. So my advice is don't write off a piece of content because you think, oh, nobody wants it.
00:17:54
Speaker
Write off a piece of content when you have actually tested different hooks to get people to lure into it. You have increased your sample size of actual people who've landed on a landing page or maybe have downloaded it and then start to use that to inform whether or not a piece is trash or if it's treasure that you just haven't repurposed and reshared enough. What's the timeframe between like that first flop and like, all right, let's try something else. are you Is this like week by week? Yeah, awesome. Love that. Week. It's a week. Yeah, that's great because I think people are like, you don't get any reach the first time like do it tomorrow. Like that's the other piece. It's like if on day one you have reached 85 people and the algorithm is like you've reached says you've got one like and it's from your CMO like delete it and we share it with new copy the next day, right? Like be quick on adjusting and trying something differently.
00:18:46
Speaker
I feel like that's the number one question that Jess and I get so often, whether it's about the paid side or kind of the organic content side is like, how long do I wait before we call it and say the way we did it didn't work? And it's so it's so hard to answer that sometimes just because to your point, it's like, is it something where it's just a, it's a small market that you reached quickly? Has it not been distributed? Did you post it at a weird time? And sometimes like I put stuff on LinkedIn that like nothing happened and then a week and a half later, all of a sudden I'm getting comments and likes. So it's like, there's you know there's weird quirks like that too. and like My heart breaks for anybody who launched a content campaign the day that half of the OpenAI team quit their jobs.
00:19:22
Speaker
like no one cared about your ebook. Nobody cared about your guide. like Everybody was caught up in the drama and wanted to see what would happen next. So like you have to understand that the internet is this wild place where one announcement can disrupt your entire content initiative if you are only giving yourself 24 hours to like say whether or not this piece resonated. It's ah it's a fool's error to think that you can trust and believe that a post going live once
00:19:52
Speaker
at a certain time amongst all of the other variables that could have been going on on that channel and with the pain points that impact your audience that that is going to dictate whether or not a piece is good or not. What if everybody was at a summit? What if your entire audience was down at a conference? You can't control that. like They're not on LinkedIn at that time, on that day. So you just have to you have to get more points on the board and just take more shots. This is so good. i am like My mind is blown over here. We're only halfway through the questions, Ross. I love it. So good. All right. I have a question for you about strategy. How do you see the relationship between content strategy and content distribution? What's the overlap of that Venn diagram for you? Yeah.
00:20:37
Speaker
So it's a fun diagram because content distribution to me is one piece of a four-pronged opportunity. There's content creation, there's content distribution, there's content research, and there's content optimization. And those make up a perfect content strategy, in my opinion. So on the creation side, you have to do a little bit of internal research to understand like what can we actually create? like what are What do our capacity and our capabilities allow to be created? And what things can we create that are going to drive the overarching goal?
00:21:12
Speaker
Once those things have been cracked and understood, i.e. you know whether or not you can create YouTube videos with success. You know if you can create blog posts with success, landing pages, podcasts, e-books, whatever it might be. You've figured out what type of content you can not only create, but that will resonate with your audience. The next step is thinking All this great content that we're gonna invest in, and we're talking about it as an investment, it's not just for fun. like Investments are supposed to drive ah ROI. So we want these content pieces that we invest in to drive our ROI. How are we gonna get the maximum ah ROI out of it? We're gonna distribute these things. We're gonna distribute these things through earned, owned, and paid. And we're going to think through the different channels in which we are going to be able to maximize our ah ROI through those assets.
00:21:58
Speaker
no How do you figure all of that out? The most important thing that you have to start this entire engagement with is research. You have to research your audience, you have to research the channels that they're on, you have to research the types of content they want, and you have to research the problems that they have. You can't do this in a silo. You probably have to talk to sales. You probably have to talk to customer success, and you probably have to do a little bit of research into the communities in which they operate, talk to some customers, and figure out the things that they're doing in their spare time. Are they inside of a Slack group? Are they spending time subscribed to certain newsletters? Do this every single year. They show up for a certain event. All of these things are inputs from a content research lens that goes into figuring out what you should create and how you should distribute it.
00:22:42
Speaker
then once that is done and you start to get a cadence of executing the creation and distribution engine, it's now time to start thinking about optimizing these assets. So how do we optimize these pieces quarter after quarter, month over month with success to ensure that we're trying to drive conversion, that we're trying to drive leads, pipeline, revenue, sales, whatever it might be related to our business, and then we rinse and repeat that every single year to have a content strategy that leads to business outcomes. If you do that, you win the game. Congratulations. You're a good content maker. That's essentially the play.
00:23:20
Speaker
Yeah. How few pieces of content have you seen somebody do this with successfully? Like like cornerstone pieces that they can then repurpose and reuse, but like what's What's like the least you've seen that happen with? I'm always interested in this. I've seen a few do like one a quarter and um with one a quarter, you can make a lot of noise. Like if you can invest a lot of great time and energy and resources into creating something that is valuable enough, I believe you can create something once a quarter and win. And the the beauty of our industry
00:23:55
Speaker
which is also a part of the ugliness of our industry. The beauty of our industry is that there's multiple ways to win, right? Like you can win doing one piece a quarter, but you can also win doing 400 pieces a quarter. right you can You can go at it different ways, but they're both really hard to do. So it's very hard to create one really, really, really good piece a quarter that is going to light the industry on fire and get everybody talking. But it's also really, really hard to create 400 pieces that might not get everybody talking, but it does enough to to drive business results. Both of those things are hard. And I've seen brands win with just one. I've seen brands win with 400, 500 blog posts a month. like
00:24:36
Speaker
There's no rules in this game besides figure out what adds a lot of value to your audience, understand your own capacities, capabilities, and that you're good at, and then go and execute it. And the reason why I said that this is a bit of the ugliness of our industry, Because every day you log into LinkedIn, you see someone say that SEO is dead. Email is dead. LinkedIn is dead. Social is dead. All of these things are dead, but they're all actually alive, except for Myspace. But like outside of life, everything else can work, right? Like so many people will preach that, but at the end of the day, you have to play the game that works for you and everybody's going to be different. Every business will be different.
00:25:16
Speaker
And so much of that depends on who your audience is. and are you And are you a huge piece of enterprise software that is going to require three departments to get on board? Or are you something for an everyday user that might edit video ah really quickly that's, you know, 30 bucks a month, right? Like, I mean, there's there's so much that um that decision depends upon. And I think that's the piece, right? like If I'm in that enterprise level, big contract, let's say it's worth 1.5 every client, like you're selling to those. so
00:25:48
Speaker
The one piece of quarter might be exactly what you need because you need to invest the rest into sales, into relationships, and kissing, handshaking babies, and having great dinners. Take hands and shake your baby. That's the strategy. That's it. so like You have to figure out what works in your space. and If you're trying to go after the $20 MRR account, At scale, maybe you do need to create a whole bunch more content. It's ah it's a different game. Totally. Okay. We're to the measurement portion of the of the episode. Everyone's favorite ah topic. ah um ROI on content, ah ROI on distribution, ah ROI on repurposing. All of that is so hard to measure. what How do you... You built a business on this. like How do you report that back to your clients? like This is working and here's proof.
00:26:43
Speaker
Yeah, there's two different key metrics that I love about content marketing that we talk about all the time. One is whether or not we're actually decreasing costs on paid and I love my paid folks. Don't get me wrong. But if you can rank organically for a lot of keywords and you're finding savings in the value of the traffic can be a significant amount of budget that would have traditionally had to be allocated to pay. So we have clients who currently have spent millions of dollars every year trying to rank for their competitors pages.
00:27:13
Speaker
and especially keywords that are competitor versus them. So they're trying to rank for these pages. They never do. G2, Capturates, Gradius, all those guys outrank them. So we work with them and we're like, oh hey, let's just create this content and make it better than everything that's showing up in the SERP today. Let's create these pieces once. Let's distribute them through backlinks and generate a bunch of traffic to them through social, et cetera. But let's see if we can rank. And what happens there is two metrics. One, We're now able to measure how much value they're getting organically to these keywords. So we take the CPC, multiply by how much traffic they're getting, and we could say like, this is how much value we're driving. In addition to that, we actually track the conversion of those pages and see how it's influencing pipeline. Sorry, I didn't want to cough in everybody's ear. All good. Everyone's sick right now. It's okay. We were talking about that earlier.
00:28:06
Speaker
The whole family is down for the count right now. It's rough. It's rough. youve got I've got this three little ones and it's like... ah up and think Those germs, man. They're ultra germs. I tell you. Five years. Five years. of this I know. i call i'm like I call them the cutest Petri dishes that ever walked the earth. It's so true. It is so true. so On the flip side of that, we're measuring things like pipeline. We're actually going in to their CRM and we're seeing like, okay, how much of the actual deals in the pipeline have been influenced by these landing pages, um and how many of those have actually converted. And then we're able to say directly, oh, we influence your revenue by X, Y, and Z because these pages that we created. And then you can also model, OK, if it costs you this and amount to create these landing pages because you don't get it for free, like we're an agency, we sell our services, we build out the pages, this is what it costs you.
00:28:58
Speaker
Based off of our math, you were able to pay back the cost to have us build these landing pages in two and a half months. So for the rest of eternity, these pages will exist and they're going to generate high quality traffic because look at their conversion rate and you only paid us once. So that some cost is now gone. Congratulations. And here you go. That's kind of the play. I love that. We had Emerita Matheron, who's CMO at at ClickUp. ah for the summer. And her like big one of her big things she always talks about is payback period. And I think that's such a smart way to measure like programs against each other, right? Because it's so hard to do that. Typically, it's like there's no you're comparing apples to I don't know, um light bulbs, right? Like, they're they're so different. Each each campaign has, you know, all these different variables. And so I love just the idea of being like, hey, this one over here paid us back in the shortest amount of time we're going to like
00:29:55
Speaker
pour everything into that. Exactly. A hundred percent. And that is one of the big advantages of things like paid. Like when you are looking at payback period, it can be very quick and it's directly related oftentimes to a bit of the strategy. Like you have to make sure that your team on the paid side is going after the right keywords, but it's also connected to the budget. So if you have budget, you might be able to see an increase in your payback period. Yeah, love that. What are you bullish on this year? Like, is there is there a format of content, a repurposing playbook, something that you're like, yeah, I'm going to do this over and over in 2024. Yeah, so I'm I'm very bullish on Reddit. I think I think it's a channel that gives the marketers hives. It breaks marketers out. Every market hears it and they get nervous. They're scared. They're like, oh, don't touch Reddit. It's not. more oh And I didn't get it.
00:30:49
Speaker
That's true on the paid side too. like Don't spend money there. You just get 5,000 people saying they hate you. 100%. And I get it. like I've been blocked from Reddit probably six times in the last two years. It's a wild place. they will They will tell you where to go and how to get there really, really quickly. But if you can understand the communities, and you can do the research to understand the types of content that they want, and you can give it to them, the ah ROI that I've seen is significant. And most recently, Google announced that they were entering a partnership with Reddit. Most recently, we've been doing an analysis across all the search pages, and Reddit is skyrocketing in terms of its visibility in the search engine results page. um And they're going to IPO.
00:31:35
Speaker
This is not investment in advice. I have to clarify that. Again, letters from anybody. don't want theres This is not investment advice, but I have a feeling that because of them going to IPO, they're going to try to do even more to drive business and and success. so Well, and you know what's so funny about it too is that it's like, the reason they're doing well is because they're filling the need that Google used to fill. Do you know what I mean? So it's like, no one believes anything that comes up on Google anymore. And so, and I mean, I do it too, where I'm just like, I mean, we're, we're getting ready to get a bird, right? So I'm like, when I Google, I'm like, I don't go to Google and look up bird supply stuff. I literally put Reddit at the end of every single one that I do.
00:32:22
Speaker
And because I go to an actual community with real people answering the questions and telling me what cage I should get and whatever, you know, so it's like youve you kind of just been conditioned to ignore what comes up in the results. I mean, it's it's sad, but it's you kind of look at it and you wonder how Google is going to combat that, which it makes sense that they're partnering with a place like Reddit. But I think I'm waiting for all the tin foil people to come out and be like, well, now that Google has their hand in their pocket, like, is that going to change what Reddit does? Is it going to change how they process that information? So it'll be interesting to watch. It's definitely gonna be interesting to watch. i have um I wrote a book on Reddit probably eight years ago. I don't know how relevant and still will be, but folks can just do a quick search for Ross Simmons in Reddit. and You'll find a bunch of material I've created on the topic, um but I'm very much like a believer that Reddit is going to take off in the coming coming months.
00:33:10
Speaker
you could go back to that piece of kti that book and you could optimize it and look at that look at your one hit book it might click up three i've got lot of this exactly it's listed as one of my tops then click up for the the
00:33:27
Speaker
Amazing. You My mind is blown. My mind is packed full of all these ideas. Susan, did you have any other questions we didn't get to today? No, could go back to I don't think so. I think we covered all of it. I'm super appreciative that you dropped by that piece of content, that book, to say hi. and you could optimize it. Thanks for sliding into DMs to make it happen. I really appreciate it. I know. I had a blast. We get very persnickety about our guests. So we've we've had Amrita, we had Mike King on a couple months ago. So we we kind of selectively go through, because we try and make a balance of like, we don't want to just be interviewing people all the time. But we're like, there is someone that is going to deliver way more value than Justin. I feel like we could. We'll have them on. so
00:34:03
Speaker
That's awesome. I love it. Well, thanks for having me on. Folks, if there's anything I can ever do to repay the ferry of her and help out in any way. Absolutely. Yeah. Same with us. If you ever need us, just give us a holler. Where can people find you, Ross? Yeah. So they can find me on all of your favorite social networks. You can just do a quick search for Ross Simmons. I'm on Instagram. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Facebook. i'm like all the channels. If you do add me to LinkedIn, I get a ton of requests. So just say that you heard me on That's Marketing Baby. And you can also find me at RossSimmons.com. I have a new book coming out called Create Once, Distribute Forever. It's going to be available on Amazon. go yeah jes will be je is gonna be getting a copy of that yeah um Be sure to keep your eye out, subscribe to the newsletter and you'll be able to get early access. And yeah, for the both of you, thank you for having me on. I had a ah lot of fun and maybe we can do this again in a few months' time. Yeah. see what Circle back on what's happening with Reddit at that point. I like it. That'd be fun. A full episode on Reddit. I'd be damned. Oh, yes. All right. Don't tell me with a good time, Ross. That sounds amazing.
00:35:04
Speaker
All right. Thank you so much. We will see you next time, everybody. That's Marketing Baby. That's Marketing Baby. Bye. Bye. Thanks for listening to That's Marketing Baby. If you dig what we're putting down, be sure to subscribe and share with your marketing besties. Cause you know, hot marketers don't gate keep. And if you're like, this is not enough. I need more. We got you. Ransom Raves is the official newsletter of That's Marketing Baby. Every week, Susan and I share one thing we love and loathe in the world of marketing. Get on the list at thatsmarketingbaby dot.com. Okay, bye.