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Pioneering a B2B Media Brand To Build Affinity w/Obaid Durrani
63 Plays1 year ago
Today, I had the privilege of interviewing Obaid Durrani, Head of Content at HockeyStack. We delved into the intricacies of content creation, the importance of having a centralized platform, and the transformative power of data. Join me as we explore these compelling insights from Obaid and learn how you can harness the potential of content creation to captivate your audience, drive engagement, and achieve your marketing goals.
Takeaway #1: Harness the Power of Purposeful Content
Obaid emphasizes the importance of treating content creation as a purposeful endeavor. Each series, whether it's "Worst Marketer in the World" or "Can You Dashboard It?", has a specific objective, whether it be educating people about the product or tying SEO success to demand generation initiatives. By aligning your content creation efforts with clear goals, you can create content that pushes your narrative forward and helps your audience understand your product or brand.
Takeaway #2: Leverage the Right Channels for Maximum Reach
Obaid emphasizes the need to share your content on the right channels to reach your target audience. At HockeyStack, LinkedIn and their platform, The Flow, serve as primary channels for content distribution. By strategically repurposing old posts and cataloging new content, HockeyStack maximizes the reach and impact of its creations. Additionally, Obaid discusses the benefits of having a separate streaming platform—a centralized hub where creators can showcase their work, making it easier for users to search, discover, and engage with specific videos.
Takeaway #3: Embrace Data-Driven Content Creation
Data is the lifeblood of successful content creation, and Obaid highlights the significance of leveraging comprehensive data to optimize your marketing strategy. With platforms like Audience Plus, HockeyStack can track various metrics, including podcast mentions, webinar attendees, sales calls, and content viewership. By using insights from this data, HockeyStack can measure the performance of different series, understand the customer journey, and make informed decisions that propel their marketing efforts forward. This data-driven approach brings clarity and measurable results to your content creation process.
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Transcript
Introduction to Audience Grow School
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome back to Audience Grow School where I'm documenting how creators and businesses have grown their audiences so you can do the same. I'm Dan Sanchez and today I'm talking to Obed Durrani who is the head of content at Hockey Stack. Obed, welcome to the show. Thank you my man, appreciate you inviting me on.
00:00:19
Speaker
It's awesome to meet you and looking forward to our chat today. I think it's going to be awesome. Absolutely.
Debate on Media Brands as Streaming Services
00:00:24
Speaker
I mean, we were debating in a post that James Carberry posted about the media brands that you just launched, that Lavender just launched, and we were talking
00:00:37
Speaker
and debating kind of the nuances of launching a media brand and positioning it like a streaming service. And it ended up being coming like a little debate within the LinkedIn posts. So immediately I reached out, I was like, dude, we need to talk about this on a podcast episode and have it out once and for all. Yeah, absolutely. Because obviously I'm a fan of media brands, you're a fan of media brands, but let's get down to the nitty gritty. But before we get down into the debate,
Role and Vision at Hockey Stack
00:01:03
Speaker
Let me hear a little bit of the story and set some context for those who don't know what hockey stack has been up to. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's, uh, important to, uh, go over that and kind of discuss how we got here. Um, so I joined hockey stack as head of content back in March of this year. And, you know, when I was joining them, the, one of the co-founders, Amir that reached out to me was talking to me.
00:01:30
Speaker
We had a pretty similar vision with how we wanted to go about marketing hockey stack the product. And one of those things in that conversation, I was just like, I want to do this, this, and this. And he was like, cool, you got it. And I was like, and I want to do it this way. And I want to do this and that. And he was like, all right, you got it. And then one of those things was like, so when he was just like, OK, OK, you got it. I was like, hmm.
00:01:57
Speaker
Let me see how far I can push this. So I was like, and I want to build a streaming platform. And then he was just like, go to hockeystack.com slash the flow. And I went to it and it was
Developing a Streaming Platform at Hockey Stack
00:02:08
Speaker
already in like it's alpha stage. Like he was already building out like this, like one resource where you could consume all of the content that hockey stack had put together because usually the way that we go about it as marketing teams is things are kind of divided, like,
00:02:26
Speaker
Your learning hub or your academy will be in one place. Your blog will be in one place. Some companies may combine them together in some sort of like a library. But it was never something like what Audience Plus allows for today or what The Flow is doing or what Lavender is doing with the streaming platform. So he was already building that out. And we kind of had the similar vision. So I joined Hockey Stack.
00:02:56
Speaker
the streaming platform thing, it's kind of like the middle of the story. It's what we were doing before that naturally led us here. It was almost like a natural order of progression almost, like the next practical or logical thing to do in our marketing strategy.
Easy Mode Framework for Content Strategy
00:03:17
Speaker
And the reason for that is we
00:03:21
Speaker
Todd and I, Todd Clouser from Lavender, Todd and I created a framework last year called the Easy Mode Framework. And in that framework, it's an eight part framework. So part two, just really quickly, it's this process called the content journey, which helps you establish the purposes behind the content that you're going to be creating. And it goes that you need to create top down content, middle out content and bottom up content. Top down content being
00:03:50
Speaker
the content that you create that's meant to reach the people at your target orgs that are going to drive company wide change. So like leaders, executives, decision makers, what have you. Um, your middle out content is the tactical content meant to reach the people that are actually going to implement that change. Right? Because if we look at the example of like lead gen versus demand gen, if there's a marketing agency out there that talks about
00:04:17
Speaker
companies need to switch from a demand gen model to a lead gen model. Some, you know, SaaS founder out there might be convinced and then he or she would go to his or her team and they would be the ones that would implement the processes in the tech stack that's actually going to help that company transition from a lead gen model to a demand gen model. So even though that that executive person is bought into the narrative or the mindset shift, they're not going to be the ones that are implementing
00:04:47
Speaker
that change that your narrative is suggesting. So you have to create middle out content, which is tactical content meant to reach the people that are actually going to implement that change. And then the last one is bottom up content, which is content meant to reach the end users that are going to drive awareness and admiration from the inside. So it's kind of like, you know,
00:05:12
Speaker
somebody asking within their org, like, hey, have you guys heard of hockey stack? You know, we just had a demo with them. And then like four or five people from inside their company going like, oh yeah, I love that brand. They made this funny commercial or they create these marketing songs or whatever. So that makes the conversation for my AE hockey stacks, AE a lot more easier.
00:05:35
Speaker
because not only does he have a buyer champion, he also has people within that org that are like admirers of our brand. So not only in theory, but we're seeing it. It makes the conversations easier, right? So that was our plan to just create these three lanes of content in a more simplified way. You can think about it like, hey, we need to create content around our product so people know what it is, how it works, what it does.
Creating Series Content with Influencers
00:06:01
Speaker
what benefits you can get from using it. Secondly, we need to create content around our narrative so people know why they even need to implement such a product in the first place. And then the last thing is because we know that not everyone's looking to buy right now, because we know we need to stay top of mind, the third thing that we wanted to create was
00:06:27
Speaker
entertaining content that associates our product with certain outcomes by building that content on creative concepts. So it's just these three lanes essentially that we have parallel running next to each other and we try to keep a good balance of content supplying these three lanes. So as Amir and I set out to do that, months go by, we have tons of videos, we have an academy, we have
00:06:56
Speaker
marketing music. We have four different series of skits on one hand. On the other hand, they were already doing influencer marketing when I joined. We were already paying creators and popular
00:07:15
Speaker
popular leaders in our space to post about Hockey Stack on LinkedIn. So then again, we naturally thought, OK, now that we're following this model where we need to create product-driven, narrative-driven, and entertaining content, and we're creating all these series, because side note, the thing with series is why series?
00:07:40
Speaker
I would create like a one-off skit or like a one-off episode of some sort of concept, and it would do really well. And then from there, because it's doing really well, we do it again, we try it a third time, and then we'll serialize that content, because that allows us to keep... continue to...
00:08:04
Speaker
build on that concept and reiterate it and refine it without abandoning that concept altogether. And then as in the background, we're creating more and more content that's either going to be serialized or not depending on its performance. So on one hand, we're creating all this internal content, product driven, narrative driven, and entertaining content. And then on the other hand,
Collaborating with External Creators
00:08:33
Speaker
I'm sorry, I'm so distracted right now. I have WhatsApp open and my nine-year-old, she's just like blowing my WhatsApp up right now. So I'm just getting these constant notifications from my nine-year-old. I'm like, oh my God, I hope she stops. So we're doing that internal content. And then because we were already working with influencers, we were like, well, instead of paying them to post about us, how about we just pay them per episode
00:09:01
Speaker
to create their own series for our brand. And then to go one step further, just so it wasn't aimless influencer content, like, hey, we're working with a popular creator who's now just posting about hockey stack every day. Because on one hand, that's going to alienate their audience, right? Like that's not why that person tuned into their content to hear them just randomly like plug a brand.
00:09:28
Speaker
Right. Especially if you think of like a creator like Todd, who's like funny and also like smart and helpful. And you know, like sometimes he's coming at you with this helpful content and sometimes he's just like making you laugh. Then all of a sudden he comes out and he's like, Hey, sponsored post go use hockey stack. Right. It'll probably get like 10 likes because that's not what his audience is there for. So we, you, we utilize influencers, but it's like, Hey, we have a model.
00:09:57
Speaker
We know what we're creating content for. We're creating content to accomplish specific purposes and specific objectives. So let's just do more of that, but have these creators and popular influencers do it and put their audience and their face and their following and their expertise behind our messages that we want to deliver.
00:10:21
Speaker
That's where the influencer, the external creators, as we like to call them, we have internal creators and then we have external creators. We don't really refer to it as like influencer or thought leader or anything like that. So with these external creators, that's more of what we're doing. We're utilizing external creators to create these series to accomplish different purposes. And you know,
00:10:48
Speaker
build these multiple faces for our brand. And kind of the reason that that happened is when we started building out the flow, the original goal was to have, so let's say we have like 10 series on our streaming platform. The original goal was to have like eight series from internal creators and then like two series from external creators. But then we realized that
00:11:15
Speaker
the popularity of those external creators may outweigh the platform itself, right? Because if you have just like Tim and Todd, and then a bunch of faces you don't recognize, like let's say me, Amir, right, from our company, then I had a feeling that people would go from referring to our platform as the flow,
00:11:39
Speaker
to referring to it as that thing that Tim Davidson's doing or that thing that Todd Clauser's doing. So to prevent that, we flipped that number around. So now if we have 10 episodes, instead of having eight internal shows, we have eight external shows and two internal shows. So now that we have all these popular faces on the platform, it kind of balances it out. And so people now refer to it as the flow.
00:12:08
Speaker
oh, have you seen the flow of that thing with all those popular creators, as opposed to, have you seen that thing that Todd's doing, that streaming platform? So that's how the influencers came involved, or the external creators. And then the way that we even sort of came to the conclusion that we should create this streaming platform is that
Leveraging Data Analytics for Engagement
00:12:34
Speaker
On one hand, Todd and I, this is something that Todd and I were trying to do last year with Easy Mode, because we had created a lot of content and we saw that it's kind of just, we distributed on social, we're using it to create our following on LinkedIn, but it's kind of just fading away into the void. So it's just like, we should host it on one spot on our website.
00:12:57
Speaker
So from my side, that's where the idea came from. From Amir, it's just something he naturally had the idea for himself. So now when we got to this point, it's like, yo, we have all this content. We have an academy up. Our academy is broken down into marketing 101, 201, and 301. Several episodes under each. We have all these different series going. We have product-driven series. We have narrative-driven series. We have funny series.
00:13:27
Speaker
So it only made sense to collect it all in one place, catalog it into different categories, and present it to you in a way that you could easily just consume all that content in one place. That was the initial idea. Owning your audience and all that, to be very honest, that wasn't
00:13:53
Speaker
That wasn't a thought. That wasn't, I don't want to say it wasn't a thought, but it wasn't like a driving factor, like something like, oh no, the reason we're doing this is because we have to own our audience. The reason we did it. Is it a factor now?
00:14:08
Speaker
Not yet, because we have 1,000 subscribers to the flow, but we haven't sent out a single email yet. We understand the value of it, but we're still in building, creating mode where we just want to put out value, put out a ton of good content.
00:14:27
Speaker
And I think it maybe might have more to do with the fact that, you know, up until a week ago, it was just me and Amir. And, you know, Amir's also focused mostly on like demo calls and whatnot, all that stuff. So, you know, it was just me and it was just a matter of like, how much could I like handle doing alongside like the internal content that I'm creating, the external series that I'm working on, on top of that, like maintaining a newsletter.
00:14:57
Speaker
you know, I'm already maintaining like the company LinkedIn profiles and all of that stuff. So it's just a matter of like, how much can you do as a, as a scrappy team? But it's definitely something that we talk about often like, yo, we got to sign into MailChimp. We have to get the newsletter going and all that stuff. But yeah, at this stage, the whole,
00:15:23
Speaker
owning an audience thing, it's not really one of our driving factors. One thing that I would say is a bigger driving factor is the data that we can get from having all of this content be consumed in a site that we can
00:15:42
Speaker
in a site that we own. If you're familiar with- Before you dive into data, could I just recap? Make sure I understand what you're saying. Totally, yeah. You and Todd, like a year ago, set out to build the Easymoan Freight, where targeting three groups of people, right? Essentially, you have the buyer in the middle, generally.
00:16:03
Speaker
Who has to is the main decision maker who generally is the one who has to implement the thing but you have their influencers Which are the people above them the executives and the people who usually have to be the the users of the thing Yeah, you know usually beneath them right the end users logging into the thing
00:16:18
Speaker
and probably using it. I'm sure more people are using it, but that was kind of like your framework. You're like, dang, we need to implement this framework. You get picked up by hockey stack and Todd gets picked up by lavender and you're both like, dang, here's companies that want to essentially, because that's a lot of content. Those are three different groups. Usually companies struggle just to create great content.
00:16:38
Speaker
for one of those buyer personas. You're going after three and you're like, we're going to do a lot of content. And the companies you found are like, let's do it. But you're creating all this content from internal people. And then you're hiring other creators, external influencers to create it. And you're just like, damn, we got content going on all over the place. Why don't we all house it in one place, one streaming platform. So if people like what they see, you know, they can go binge it all. They have a place to binge because you know, on social, especially like LinkedIn and Twitter,
00:17:08
Speaker
Dude, if you liked that last one, you ain't gonna find the last post unless it was literally like that's the only thing you talk about, but usually it's not. If you do a series, it's broken up with lots of other things. YouTube's probably more like, well, usually you're pretty consistent on YouTube, but you needed a house to not only bring the series together from one creator, but all the internal creators, all the external creators in one place,
00:17:35
Speaker
where all three of the buyer personas you're targeting, the decision maker, their executive influencers, and the users at the bottom can find everything, right? And in a place where it's nicely packaged, it looks great, it works well, and you can track
Challenges of Building 'the flow' on Webflow
00:17:53
Speaker
some of the data. Is that about right? That's 100% correct, yes.
00:17:58
Speaker
Okay, so tell me about the data. I'm really interested in this. What kind of data are you getting? Because that's the one thing, I know you're using Audience Plus, which is that new software that just came out. It's all shiny and everybody's like, ooh, new software. How's that going for you? I haven't been in it, but I've seen some demo shots, of course, of what it can do. How's that been? So, unfortunately, at the moment, we're not using Audience Plus. We will be using Audience Plus soon.
00:18:26
Speaker
We didn't know what Audience Plus was until Anthony Canada did that event. I think it was Audience Plus Meets World where they had like Topanga and stuff join as well. And that was like the platform reveal when there was like advisors and other people that knew like early beta users that knew what the platform was, but then that's when
00:18:52
Speaker
the public learned about what Audience Plus was and that's when we found out, like Amir and I, that's when we found out what Audience Plus actually is, but by that time
00:19:03
Speaker
We were like 90% done building the flow on Webflow. We used an external agency to build it on Webflow, which is now probably our biggest regret, just building it on Webflow. But we're now in the process to transitioning to Audience Plus. Unfortunately, building it on Webflow, we had an issue to where the URLs weren't working, so we weren't able to
00:19:32
Speaker
There's no URL for any individual series or any individual episode, so you can't track anything. Interesting. But the cool thing is, is now that the URLs are fixed, we can
00:19:45
Speaker
insert hockey stack script on this page and then see inside the customer journey where you can also see like podcast mentions, webinar attendees, sales calls. We can also see like what content they're watching, how long they're watching it, you know, which series that they spend most time on and stuff like that. And then aside from that, the data that we have been seeing just through
00:20:10
Speaker
sales calls and demo calls and people hitting us up on Slack and sending us screenshots from other Slack communities, self-reported attribution, things like that. We're seeing that people are coming to demo calls informed about what our product does because of a specific series that we made.
00:20:31
Speaker
So like, can you dashboard? They're mentioning the flow on inbound. They're mentioning specific series from the flow. They're mentioning we watch the flow, but they're like, oh, I learned so much about your product and how I can have my marketers use it efficiently through can you dashboard it? One of our series. So at the end of the day, it's kind of like this is the content that you were going to create anyways.
00:20:59
Speaker
This is the blog post you were going to create. This is the e-book you were going to create as in these individual series. This is the content you were going to make anyways. Going back to one of my most fundamental beliefs about marketing is that it's all about creating memorable experiences. To do that, your content has to be insightful, interesting, and entertaining.
00:21:25
Speaker
all of this stuff, it just comes back to simple concepts like this. And I think if you really believe in doing marketing this way, and not just that, more importantly, if you're in the right spot,
Creating Memorable Content Experiences
00:21:37
Speaker
right? If you're in the right spot with a leadership team that supports that way of thinking, enables that way of thinking, promotes that way of thinking, and actually allows you to do that, act on those ideas, act on those concepts. I think it eventually comes to a place like this, where it's like, hey,
00:21:56
Speaker
We need to accomplish a business objective and we need to do it through our marketing. Instead of creating a new blog series or creating a new podcast or something, let's think of a creative concept that allows us to
00:22:16
Speaker
tie our product to that specific outcome in a way that whoever's reading this or watching this or listening to it is going to find it enjoyable. And they'll also leave with that takeaway. On a small example of that, we released a feature that you connect Gong to hockey stack and
00:22:41
Speaker
When people mention your podcast on sales calls, Hockey Stack takes notes of that and it can add it to your reporting. Then you can play around with things like in the past six months out of the converted
00:22:55
Speaker
converted close one Which percentage of them listened to our podcast versus which didn't so you can do things like that I just thought and I still think that features like super cool. So when we released it we did the standard, you know Feature launch video with like the cool like rock music type stuff, right? Like yeah standard thing we did that and
00:23:16
Speaker
But I was like, man, it's such a dope feature. Like I want to make more content about this feature without that content being about the feature itself. Right. So like I recorded the skit where I was a marketer pretending to vent to his therapist and I was talking about like how they want to shut down my podcast and how am I supposed to show ROI when it's only been a month and you know, the sales team's bullying me and all this stuff and then
00:23:43
Speaker
The therapist helps me calm down and then he eventually goes like, oh, there's hockey stack. And you can use it to show podcast ROI and all that. And then at the end, I even did one of those medicine commercials where it's like hockey stack.
00:24:02
Speaker
helping marketers since 1973. And so I even did like that at the end. And that video had over like 20, 30,000 views on LinkedIn, got over like 130 likes, ton of shares. And the point is, people watch this content, they laughed, they shared it.
00:24:24
Speaker
But that message stuck with them. That hockey stack now has this feature that lets you pick up, that includes podcast mentions in the customer journey. And so had I tried to deliver that message through, let's say, like a news article on the website, hockey stack launches new podcast feature, right?
00:24:50
Speaker
How many people am I really gonna get to go from LinkedIn to our website to read that article? And so that was the big thing that I created this almost like broad reach content that associated our product with a specific outcome versus a lot of times when we try to create that broad reach content, it may just be entertaining for the sake of being entertaining. So that's why the whole,
00:25:20
Speaker
a product association thing is very important when you create that type of content. So now that you've kind of given the background on this, we know what this is built on, what you're getting, how it's selling some success so far. It's funny because my debate has now been fizzled because you're like, well, we're not even trying to build an audience, which means my next question is,
00:25:46
Speaker
Dude, why the heck not? How are you not trying to build an audience with that? Isn't that the whole point? Isn't building an audience and getting people to the site so they can binge it? Wouldn't you want to capture some of that and retain them longer? You know, get them watching more, reading more, spending more time with you? Absolutely. Why not gate some of it?
00:26:05
Speaker
Um, I'm a big fan of gating, by the way, like that's the one thing that audience, I think audience plus can do. I don't think most, I don't think that you do it. I'd be like, uh, you get to watch 30 seconds of this and, but you have to subscribe for free in order to watch everything in here because then we can track it all. And then you can, you can get updates about new series we add. It just kind of makes sense. I mean, Netflix and Disney do it. Absolutely. Just don't put a price tag on it. I'm like, that seems like the best way to go for me. What's stopping you from that? Or is it just like, we haven't gotten there yet.
00:26:36
Speaker
There's a few things, there's a few answers to that. On one hand, the shortest answer is functionality. As I mentioned, we're not using AudiencePlus just yet. We'll be in it, we'll be on it in a week or so, a couple of weeks. But up to right now, we're not using it and we had other
00:27:00
Speaker
things and issues that we needed to fix like the URL issue I mentioned. My goal was to make it to where people can create a free profile on the platform by connecting their LinkedIn profile.
00:27:20
Speaker
You could use Google, just continue with Gmail thing. But I wanted to be able to also add the functionality to where people could connect their LinkedIn profile to create a profile. So on one hand, there's that, just functionality. When we switch to Audience Plus, I think they already have that.
00:27:41
Speaker
functionality, so we may just do that right away. But I think the funner answers are the reason we didn't do it deliberately. I think maybe even if we had that functionality at this point in time, as in like August 24, 2023, I don't think we would do it because I think it's, on one hand, it's like a quality thing. Not that I don't think that content's not good. I think all of it's good.
00:28:09
Speaker
I also understand that our platform is in its infancy, in the sense that up until last week, we didn't have much of a budget. We had a $5,000 per month budget for the flow. And so that's not like, hey, let's rent out a camera crew, rent an Airbnb for a weekend, and let's all meet up.
00:28:33
Speaker
Tell me, is that including soft costs? Like does your salary get billed against it? No, no. Cause then it gets, it adds up real fast. So you have hard costs, $5,000 a week to hire extra freelancers, gear. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, so that's, that's not too bad. So we were, we were, so I wasn't going that approach at all in terms of like gear and this and that everything so far has been us working with the equipment and stuff that we already have.
00:29:03
Speaker
I have this camera, I have my phone, all that stuff. So I'm just creating concepts and we're recording these shows. Our team has been super, super helpful. Our lead customer success manager, Courtney, she's the host of Can You Dashboard It? It's not something that she needs to do or has to do. She just does it for us.
00:29:27
Speaker
She's super awesome. She's really good at it. Our designer, Borgia, she's been really good at, you know, just out of nowhere. She had to jump on like video editing and stuff. She's been really, really good at that. So it's just a matter of like one at like quality at this point. Like I, you know, we, somebody said something, I don't, I don't think it was you, but somebody said something on James Carberry's post about like, um,
00:29:57
Speaker
audience expecting more or something like that. That was me. That was me. I was like, hey, if you're telling people, hey, head over to our streaming platform.
00:30:09
Speaker
By calling it a streaming platform, aren't you kind of comparing yourself to Disney or Netflix?
Setting Audience Expectations
00:30:14
Speaker
Yeah. And then you're essentially saying, we have content on a comparable level, which nobody does because they spend millions of dollars on each freaking show. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I think on one hand, that's why I think it was important to add the little four B2B marketers, like streaming platform, four B2B marketers. It provides a little bit of hint of like, yo,
00:30:38
Speaker
we're trying, right? Like we're just getting this thing going. Don't come in here expecting, you know, the new Barbie movie or something. And so on one hand, I think that's cool that our audience kind of lets us slide or like allows that. Like they know that like, okay, I'm going to go to these and I'm going to see like, I'm going to see like 10 ADP webcam video, or I'm going to see like 4k video. I'm not going to see like Hollywood level post production and stuff, right?
00:31:09
Speaker
That is the goal though, right? Like the goal is to work ourselves there. Like as we grow our team, as we grow our budget, as we work with more and more creators, the goal is to eventually do that. Right now we're focused on, we're talking about like everyone that does have sort of like a talking head style series for the flow. We're having them like upgrade their setup. So it looks at least like ours does, you know, as opposed to just like,
00:31:39
Speaker
your Mac, your Mac webcam, you know, you're sitting in a bedroom or something. You, you know, it makes a lot of sense. Like as you've been talking, I've been thinking about the streaming platform and I'm like, okay, well, why have a streaming platform? Couldn't you just dump it on YouTube? And then I thought like, well, like if you're working with external creators,
00:31:58
Speaker
wouldn't they wanna maximize the content by posting it on their own YouTubes? By keeping it all focused on one streaming platform, you can let all the external creators post it to wherever they got audience, and then double dip by taking it into the streaming platform. You know how many times I've gone back to find Todd Clausser's,
00:32:17
Speaker
like remake of the notebook because it was so funny. And there's so many times where I've wanted to show like a new SDR I'm working with them. Like, have you seen Todd Klaus's notebook video of like, he, he like intercut like scenes from the note with, with an SDR marketing conversation is hilarious, but it's buried in the feed. Luckily I think he pins that one to his post and that's where I go to find it now. But is there a URL? Like it's so hard to find these things, but on a streaming platform, Oh dude, you could just search up.
00:32:45
Speaker
Todd Clouser notebook video. Now I know that's not one of the videos you're hosting. You have a bunch of other Todd Clouser videos, but where else are you going to find these social series? Because they're hard. It's almost like you can create playlists, but with the compilation of creators, with the compilation of internal creators, you have some that are more product focused, some that are just fun ones, multiple personas, all within one platform and track it differently.
Benefits of Hosting Content on Platform
00:33:08
Speaker
So it does make sense to have a separate platform for it all, considering you're working with a variety of creators on these things.
00:33:15
Speaker
And that, and then it also goes back to the data. Like if all of this is hosted on YouTube, then sure you have like YouTube analytics, but then it's siloed. And that's one of the biggest issues. It's how data gets siloed, like how Salesforce doesn't talk to HubSpot and they don't talk to each other, right?
00:33:36
Speaker
This data would then just be restricted to YouTube and it's hard to then see how all of these series are performing in the context of pipeline and revenue and closed one and generated leads and stuff. So having this on your own platform, on one hand,
00:33:59
Speaker
One, there's AudiencePlus now. AudiencePlus gives you all of that data. But on the other hand, in terms of me and Amir's perspective, a few months ago when we didn't know what AudiencePlus was, it was like, hey, hockey stack already shows you the customer journey. If Dan visits our website right now, it'll show every single interaction Dan had with our brand, whether he downloaded an e-book, he booked a calendar meeting with a bed, he talked to Nate RAE. It already shows you all that.
00:34:29
Speaker
Once we had this page on our website that has all of this content, it would just include all of that into the customer journey. So now with our reporting, once we could say, hey,
00:34:44
Speaker
how many people that became customers in the last three months listened to a podcast, we could also change it to how many of them watched Can You Dashboard It? How many of them watched Level Up? So we get not just analytics and not just data on how the series is performing, but in the context of how it's performing,
00:35:04
Speaker
for our go-to market strategy, our marketing strategy, qualified pipeline, deals close one, new prospects coming in, inbound demo requests and all of that stuff. That's the big thing. Yeah, that's the main reason that we also host it on our own website.
00:35:30
Speaker
dumping all this stuff on YouTube in specific playlist and all that, that's still a part of the plan. It's still something that I'm going to do moving forward simply because it doesn't happen a lot, but I think there was one instance where somebody was like, hey, can I watch this on YouTube to one of our series? So I was like, okay, we'll throw it up on there eventually.
00:35:54
Speaker
It makes sense. YouTube has discoverability or your own platform. It doesn't have any. Which leads to my next question of how are you pushing people to this property? How do you acquire new audience, new eyeballs to the flow? So far, the way that we've been doing it is through our collective LinkedIn following.
00:36:19
Speaker
And I can't remember the exact number on this because this was a statistic that Amir dropped in Slack like four weeks ago. So it's either 800 or 8,000, but the first month that we launched the flow.
00:36:32
Speaker
It was either 800 or 8,000 companies that visited it, which either way I think is huge. And it was either 200 or 2,000 of those companies that were enterprise companies. So you know, let's just, for the sake of the conversation, let's go with the smaller number. Having 800 companies visit your streaming platform in a month and 200 of them being
00:37:01
Speaker
enterprise companies. I think that's massive. And we did that through posting about it on LinkedIn. And it was just, Amir and I post, Buddha, our CEO post, a few of the external creators that we worked with, they posted about it. And it drove that many people to our streaming platform. There's lots of small companies, big companies that are talking about it.
00:37:32
Speaker
And I'm sorry, I just lost my train of thought. What was your initial question?
00:37:38
Speaker
How are you driving traffic to the website? You had an initial launch when you were talking about it, and everybody in James, the post that brought us here today, was announcing the launch, and they were excited about it, because this is what Sweetfish is all about, helping people build media brands now. Audience Plus is about it, so they were talking about it, because you're a new customer if there is onboarding into the platform. But what's the plan moving forward after the launch news? Is there a consistent like, oh, well, we're going to,
00:38:04
Speaker
the creators are going to mention, like push people back to the flow every once in a while. Like how do they do it? So, so as the, you know, on one hand, as these creators, they create series Todd, for example, there's a new episode of worst marketer in the world. Every Wednesday he posts it links to the flow. On the other hand, if you, if we recall earlier in the conversation, all of this content is being built to accomplish specific purposes. So.
00:38:36
Speaker
The series that I'm making, the everyday content that we post on LinkedIn, it can all be linked back to the flow because that's where it's all coming from.
Aligning Series with Content Objectives
00:38:46
Speaker
Content is being created to push our narrative, to establish it, help people understand it. Content is being created to help people understand our product. It just so happens to be that that content is in the form of video series.
00:39:01
Speaker
So on one hand, I'm posting it on LinkedIn. On the other hand, I'm cataloging it on the flow. So every single thing that I post, I can always say to see the next episode of this or to take a deeper dive into this, link back to the flow in every single one of my posts. I created a, not created, but we already had a hockey stack company profile and I created a company profile, LinkedIn company profile for the flow.
00:39:29
Speaker
So the hockey stack company profile, that's where I kind of post everything. I repurpose posts like old text posts that I wrote. Drew's on our team now and Drew Leahy. So I'm repurposing text posts. He wrote all of our series, the worst marketer in the world level up. I repurpose that. I post product updates, but the flow I want, I'm treating it like almost like
00:39:52
Speaker
like a channel, like a TV channel that you just flip to and then there's just constantly like HBO. Like if you just go to HBO, there's like constantly like movies playing. So with the flow, it was just like, I wanted to just every single day, like post another episode from one of our plenty of series. So we have like 18, like 15 series or 18 series in total right now. And then we also have in development 19 series
00:40:22
Speaker
from 21 external creators. So we have 19 external series and development from 21 external creators. And again, all of this content, it's being created to fulfill one of those three specific purposes. The different goals that it has, that's a different story. Let me give you an example, right? One of the purposes is to create
00:40:49
Speaker
content around our product. So people know what it is, how it works. That's the purpose, right? Overall purpose for our effort to create series and our effort to create content, right? When you move one level down, what's the purpose of an individual series, right? Like what's the goal of this series? So there's an overall three purposes for our content creation efforts in general. And then when you move a layer down, when you start talking about individual series,
00:41:19
Speaker
what is the goal for this individual series? So for example, one individual series that I'm developing right now with a really, really smart, well-known SEO practitioner is a series on SEO. My goal for this series was I want people, I want demand gen folks to care more about SEO by tying
00:41:45
Speaker
SEO success metrics to demand gen initiatives by using hockey stack and so It's product driven content. It accomplishes one of the larger content creation purposes, but it also is accomplishing its own goal that Two different audiences would be interested in SEO community and the demand gen community
Facilitating Content Collaboration
00:42:10
Speaker
So it's an interesting influencer that you have going on. You're essentially doing a lot of collaborations, leveraging the influencers audience. They get to post it to all their people. Meanwhile, you get to fuel your own thing going on with the flow, which is more audience for the creator that maybe that's not tuned into them. So you get the content and then you get to
00:42:34
Speaker
you know, work your product into it in such a way that it feels natural without being forced. It feels like content rather than feeling like, well, marketing and sales content. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it makes a lot of sense. Thanks, man.
00:42:48
Speaker
Probably have one question, I know we have to wrap up here. But how are you structuring the deals with the creators themselves? Are you paying them per series? Or is it different for every single creator? Who has the rights to the content ultimately? Or do you kind of say like, we get to, we have rights to post it here, but you ultimately have the rights to the content, but we were essentially licensing it for it to be here. How's that go? So we're paying them per episode. So we have like a set number.
00:43:17
Speaker
that we can pay per episode and every creator that we're working with is going to get paid that per episode. That's where that $5,000 a month goes. Yeah, that's where it was going before but thankfully to the success that we're seeing and having
00:43:37
Speaker
that $5,000 a month was increased. So now we can do more. So yeah, we're paying every creator per episode. Initially, it was just me reaching out to people. One week, I messaged like 30 different people. I was like, hey, you want to create your own series for the flow? By the way, Mr. Denchez, do you want to create your own series for the flow? If you do, we could talk about that afterwards. I think it would be cool.
00:44:02
Speaker
That's funny. Yeah. So we'd have to see. Cool. Yeah. And then so in terms of like rights and stuff like it's your content, you know, like you can you can do what you want with it. You know, obviously aside from just like selling it to someone else, but we just hosted on the flow. Right. Like we under like we're not trying to take anything from the creator. Like we're just, you know,
00:44:29
Speaker
We're trying to do our best to collaborate with creators in a way that helps both parties out. You know, us pushing your series, we're essentially pushing your expertise, pushing your thoughts, hopefully getting more people across it. And then at the same time, you know, like you're bringing your, I guess you could say credibility and whatnot and
00:44:55
Speaker
Believing or put you know, helping us spread this message that you also believe in and whatnot. So In terms of rights like these creators own the content they can you know, repost it on their own They can host it on their own website do what they want repurpose it to tick-tock Whatever. It's just that we we also host the content on our own platform. So in the same sense, we're also accepting
00:45:22
Speaker
series from other companies. So if you're familiar with like Winter, Papeliah makes Do You Even Resonate?
Vision for 'the flow' as a B2B Resource
00:45:29
Speaker
I messaged Pap and I was like, hey, would you be cool with us hosting Do You Even Resonate on the Flow? And he was just like, yeah, cool. So then I got all the episodes from Carl from Winter. We uploaded Do You Even Resonate on the Flow? So now along with watching every episode of Do You Even Resonate on Winter's YouTube channel,
00:45:51
Speaker
on winter's website you could also watch it on the flow not that tape needs the flow to get anyone to find out about who he is but now it's also there as well so uh... cognizant they have uh... their series in the loop i talk to them today they're cool with me hosting that on the flow so i'm gonna upload that on the flow uh... another company contrast made a show called the game show that's on the flow so these are the to
00:46:20
Speaker
non hockey stack shows on the flow right now. And the goal is to just add more and more good shows. Create our own and from other companies, from podcasters, from people like you, creators like you as well. The goal is just to make it like the Netflix for B2B marketers, right? It's not necessarily hockey stack driven.
00:46:46
Speaker
It's more so just value for B2B marketers, like the one spot that B2B marketers can go to, to get all of their insights, all of their information, all of their favorite creators to laugh, to learn all that type of stuff. So yeah.
00:47:01
Speaker
It's huge. I mean, if you can, if you can capture that attention, I'm glad you're seeing success already. Like you only launched not long ago, what, two months ago? Almost two months. Yeah. Two months. So the fact that you're already seeing sales pipeline movement and people talking about it and the fact that you can track to see that they've watched some of this stuff is such a good indicator. Hence the budget was increased, but I want the audience, if you're also listening to this, you're like, okay, it's $5,000 a month. Yes. They put a lot of upfront cross developing a website, lots of deals, lots of time.
00:47:30
Speaker
but it's $5,000 a month. For a lot of B2B companies, this is a drop in the bucket. Then one marketer. People look at it and they're like, oh, you got to spend 200K. I'm like, man, it doesn't take that much in order to get this. You probably need to hire one good creator slash marketer like yourself to kind of kick it off. And then just $5,000 a month, you're able to pay per episode for a lot of creators to start contributing good content. You just find people who already
00:47:54
Speaker
You kind of already have a track record for getting attention and you could start owning it. You could start like getting, getting collaborating with them to own some of that attention.
00:48:04
Speaker
which is where the future economy is going around attention. So man, I love where you guys are going. Like three years from now, people will be like hockey stack. They knew what was up. I still feel like it's early. I'm still having to defend audience growth. The people who are like, why would I need to grow an audience? That's crazy. Just send them audience plus or send them the flow or something like that. Be like, look at this. Yeah.
00:48:27
Speaker
It was super dope chatting with you. I had a really good time talking about all this stuff. Maybe we can catch up again in a few months and I can update you on progress, how things are going. We can talk about it again. I'd love to. Where can people officially find the flow and yourself?
Accessing 'the flow' and Connect with Obed
00:48:47
Speaker
Um, hockeystack.com slash the flow. So that would be slash the dash flow hockeystack.com slash the flow. Check that out. Um, that's the mainstreaming platform. You could also follow the flow company page on LinkedIn. You could follow the hockey stack company page on LinkedIn. And to find me on LinkedIn, just look for op-ed the Ronnie. Awesome.
00:49:16
Speaker
those links in the show notes for anybody listening on the players. So thanks again for joining me today. Yeah, for sure, dude. It was awesome chatting with you. I'll talk to you soon.