Latest / Content, Briefly / Ten Speed: Ryan Sargent's system for content at scale

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Ten Speed: Ryan Sargent's system for content at scale · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  I think agencies that aren't looking into diversifying their content are running a risk. [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of "Content Briefly." Today is another follow-up episode.
• 0:16
  We're talking to Ryan Sargent, who we last had on about a year ago. Since then, he's changed jobs and been promoted, so as you might expect, we talk a lot about that.
• 0:25
  Ryan now oversees all content production for an agency called Ten Speed.
• 0:29
  So we talk quite a bit about his content at scale system, which levers and dials he's tweaking to make sure that they're getting the best possible content out of that system.
• 0:39
  We also hear some of Ryan's thoughts on what's happened over the last 12 months and how that's informed Ten Speed's content strategy going forward.
• 0:47
  As you might expect too, there's some diversification, different types of content. I thought it was a very helpful discussion, though.
• 0:52
  I think it's pretty much the things that everybody should be thinking about, whether you're agency or in-house. So good episode. As always, I enjoyed it, and I hope you do too.
• 1:01
  Before we dive in, just a quick plug for the Slack community. As a reminder, 20 bucks a month, you do get a discount for an annual membership as well.
• 1:08
  There's 10 locked channels, a bunch of senior content marketers talking about things that you just can't Google. So if you wanna check it out, superpath.co/community. Hope you enjoy this episode.
• 1:20
  [upbeat music] This week's episode of "Content Briefly" is brought to you by our friends at Userp. Userp is an SEO, digital PR, and link building agency.
• 1:29
  They worked with monday.com for about two years, starting with over 70 articles in their first month together.
• 1:34
  They eventually grew blog traffic by over 1500% in just the first three months, before continuing to produce nearly 1000 articles over the next year.
• 1:43
  It led Zoe Dayon, their content strategist at the time, to call it, "By far the best decision we've ever made."
• 1:48
  Userp has collected all their knowledge and experience from working with monday.com into four webinars that you can access for free.
• 1:55
  You'll learn all the frameworks, strategies, and tactics they use to deliver these results.
• 1:59
  They cover the high-growth framework SaaS unicorns use that everyone else doesn't, the keyword research strategy to prioritize both short-term results and long-term ROI, how to specialize team roles to produce high-quality content that doesn't just convert but rank above competitors too, how to fix common operational mistakes sabotaging your growth, why most link building advice you get is wrong, and how to double down on the best high quantity, high quality strategies instead.
• 2:23
  Use the link in the show notes to check it out, and thanks to Userp for their support. Hey, everybody, Jimmy from Superpath here today with Ryan Sargent back for round two. You were episode number eight.
• 2:35
  A lot has changed since then. That was probably almost exactly a year ago, actually. You're in a new role.
• 2:41
  The world is a very different place in many ways, but from a content marketing perspective specifically, so we have a lot to discuss. But Ryan, if people missed your first episode, would you mind introducing yourself?
• 2:51
  Tell us a little bit about who you are, your background, how you ended up where you are today. Sure. I'll, I'll give the short version since episode eight is out there for people to go catch if they want more detail.
• 3:01
  Ryan Sargent, I'm the VP of Content and Strategy at Ten Speed. Uh, we're an organic growth agency. That's a very different role than I had a year ago, first time I was on the podcast.
• 3:11
  Back then, I was leading an in-house content team for Verblio, which is also then themselves a content marketplace, so there's obviously a lot of overlap there.
• 3:19
  But moving from an in-house role to an agency role, obviously a huge change.
• 3:23
  I'm overseeing multiple teams that produce deliverables at scale for lots of clients, though we do specialize in B2B SaaS, um, so that's most of the work.
• 3:32
  And I originally thought I was gonna be a music professor and ended up in marketing instead, and I'm very grateful.
• 3:38
  I don't miss playing jazz in wine bars, and I still get to build cool shit and send it to people and have them put money in tip jars. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. You still play a lot of music though, right? I do.
• 3:47
  I do still play music. That is a lifelong thing that will always be an important part of who I am, but, uh, I also like health benefits, so... [laughs] Yeah, yeah. I hear that. I hear that.
• 3:56
  You know, just a friendly reminder, Ryan, to update your LinkedIn profile later because you have recently been promoted. [laughs] Yes.
• 4:02
  Your LinkedIn says head of content, but your official title is VP of Content and Strategy. So maybe walk us through your first... You've been at Ten Speed for six to eight months roughly, right?
• 4:14
  Um- Almost exactly six months this week- Okay, perfect... as we're recording this. Actually, maybe tell us about Ten Speed.
• 4:18
  Like, give us the overview of Ten Speed, and then could you tell us about your first six months, the role you were hired for, the promotion, and kinda give us a scope of what you're doing now?
• 4:28
  So quick synopsis of Ten Speed. Ten Speed's an organic growth agency.
• 4:32
  We use that term because if you hire an SEO agency, you're not getting the content support, and if you hire a content agency, you're not gonna get the SEO knowhow, and we've got both.
• 4:42
  And so we're building an organic growth engine and then also adding the fuel. We're, we're able to do kind of both sides of that. Ten Speed's been around for just under four years, founded by Nate Turner.
• 4:53
  Nate was the first marketer at Sprout Social. He's a badass is, is the short version. Grew Sprout to over 100 million and did it largely with content. And, uh, he and Kevin King, the other co-founder, met at Sprout.
• 5:05
  They're great. We had kind of an instant rapport, and that's, I think, a big part of why I've felt so at home at Ten Speed.
• 5:12
  And I also think it's important that myself, Nate, Kevin, we all have in-house B2B content marketing backgrounds. Like, what we are doing for Ten Speed clients is stuff that we have done as the in-house team before.
• 5:25
  So we speak the client's language in a lot of ways, and I think that's a big part of the success. Ten Speed's growing. We're moving and grooving.
• 5:32
  There's a lot of it that feels like a startup with some of the ambition and the growth goals, and that really appeals to me as, as a human being and as a marketer, so natural fit.
• 5:43
  I'd like to think that was clear from the first interview. I thought it was clear from the first interview- [laughs]...with Dave Dass Nate.
• 5:48
  They originally hired me to be a head of content because it was time to level up both the production pipeline but also the quality, and that was a big thing was me and Kevin were, were really convinced that in order to help the agency reach the next level, it was gonna be very important that content quality leveled up as well.
• 6:04
  And came in, I got right to work, andIt was everything fell into place.
• 6:11
  We made some strategic changes from ev-everything from the brief template and when what we included to set writers up for success to client communication to adding editing layers.
• 6:22
  It was worth the time to make sure that we were taking another pass at some stuff.
• 6:26
  Throw all that together, put it in the blender, and let it cook for a little bit, and I'm really happy with how things have gone, and obviously that's been reflected in our promotion so. Cool, man. Well, congratulations.
• 6:36
  That's fantastic. You know, I have to admit, I actually thought you were doing more growth work for Ten Speed and less in-house stuff.
• 6:44
  So maybe we can talk about that for a minute, 'cause when you're at Verblio, you head of content, you're not working on accounts, you're working on growth for the business. That's right.
• 6:51
  Do you have agency experience in the past, and how are you finding it so far? No. And that's-- so thank you to Kevin and Nate for taking the risk on that and giving me the first shot at the agency role.
• 7:03
  Verblio is in some ways agency adjacent. Sure. And so it's not like I had no experience with account management or anything like that, but this is my first real full-time agency role. I'm loving it.
• 7:13
  There are some things that I think fit in my wheelhouse nicely, and shout out to Paul Zalewski for recommending that I pursue agency work.
• 7:21
  And I think a big part of that is I feel very comfortable context switching and moving from thing to thing, problem to problem at a fast pace. I think that's a, a key agency skill.
• 7:35
  It's helpful all over the place in content and in marketing, right? Moving from content piece to content piece, moving from strategy to execution, all that kind of stuff.
• 7:42
  But in the agency world, we will go from solving a very specific top of funnel awareness problem for a niche company that's creating a new category, and then literally the next hour of my day will be helping edit bottom of funnel content for an established brand in a larger B2B category.
• 8:01
  So being able to move quickly from use case to use case and, like, reset my brain that way, I think is a big part of why I've been successful. Yeah. That's really cool. You know, if I zoom out on my own career, I see...
• 8:15
  You know, you look at my LinkedIn profile, it's like in-house, agency, in-house, agency. And I think of it as expansion and contraction.
• 8:22
  It's like the expansion part is like I want to have a lot of different accounts to work with.
• 8:28
  I wanna absorb all that knowledge that you can only get on the agency side, then I wanna contract and then go work in-house and do something like really specific for a little while.
• 8:35
  But anyways, what you just described, kind of like the juggling of the different types of problems you work on in a given day, is exactly why many agencies want to hire people like you who do have the in-house experience because, like, you've experienced some of those things in a really nuanced, in-depth way, which makes it much easier when you kind of zoom out and you have a couple of these things happening that you can...
• 8:55
  You know what to do, right? Versus if you only have agency experience. Yeah. How, how do you really know? I will say, I think having the in-house experience first makes me a better agency employee. That
• 9:09
  everything from essentially providing consultancy, you know, or advice to clients on a call, whether that's in the, like, sales process, the renewal process, the just a monthly update, honestly, [chuckles] about the, about performance.
• 9:22
  I understand that side of the call. Like, I know why they're asking the question, and I can, I can read between the lines, right?
• 9:30
  When, when director of marketing gets on the phone and is like, "Can you just put together a report that shows the keywords we're ranking for?"
• 9:38
  As an agency person who sees all kinds of SEO data day in and day out, part of me wants to say, "Well, it's not that simple. Like, that's not actually the right measure of success. We can do so much better."
• 9:48
  The in-house part of me says, "If a director of marketing is asking that, it means a CMO or a CFO asked for it." Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
• 9:54
  The person on the phone knows that that's not the best marker of SEO success, but we need to provide that person with the tools they need to succeed. Yeah, we'll build a report. Like- Yeah... we, we can do that. Yeah.
• 10:04
  That's so interesting.
• 10:05
  What you just described, 'cause I experienced some of this in my agency days at Animal specifically, where like if a customer asks a question, the question is really like the tip of an iceberg, and the iceberg is the context.
• 10:17
  Like, there's so much happening internally that you don't necessarily get to see. But with experience and getting to know that customer sp-specifically, you kind of like start to under-- or like read between the lines.
• 10:28
  You know what I mean? Which makes for much, much better relationships with customers. And I mean, in today's B2B tech world, that extends to the personal too. Sure.
• 10:38
  I have been the person who's had colleagues get laid off. Now we've had people disappear from our shared Slack. I can put two and two together. On the next call with the client, we're gonna be empathetic.
• 10:48
  We know what that's like. And that in-house experience sifts through and kind of trickles down through all of the stuff that we do. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we're recording this at the end of March 2024.
• 11:00
  I would say it's been a tumultuous last 12 months in content marketing, to say the least. I agree. [chuckles] What has it been like on the agency side? I mean, I guess you've been there for six months.
• 11:13
  You know, if you'd been there for five years, maybe you could speak to like everything that happened, you know, before the quote-unquote content recession, during, and now hopefully in the aftermath of it.
• 11:23
  But let's talk about the last six months, I guess. Like, do you sense that it's been different than it was? Has it been chaotic or stressful?
• 11:31
  Like, are you finding that customers are being a little bit more careful or thoughtful about the content they wanna do?
• 11:37
  Customers are definitely getting more thoughtful, more careful, bigger eye for quality, bigger eye for ROI. There's a, a much bigger push to show business impact.
• 11:47
  And in a content and SEO context, some of that business impact takes time.
• 11:52
  So we've had to adapt some of our strategic presentation and prioritization to make sure that we're delivering an impact as fast as we can, even in a world like SEO where that doesn't happen overnight.
• 12:04
  And I think at the same timeWhile outsourced content production is maybe past its peak, there is still a need, particularly for early stage startups.
• 12:19
  I'm thinking of series A, series B, marketing team of one, marketing team of three type folks. That's most of Ten Speed's clients. They need help.
• 12:27
  They need bandwidth, and that is a fundamental, like, job to be done for clients in the B2B content space on the agency side. And so we need to both demonstrate the business results and take something off their plate.
• 12:41
  Sometimes that looks like strategy. We have clients for whom we provide strategic support and write briefs, and then they go source freelancers, or they write the articles in-house.
• 12:50
  We have clients that we do everything for, top to bottom. We literally... the technical audit and the on-site optimization after we write the thing. Right now we're refreshing an article that we wrote six months ago.
• 13:00
  Like, we essentially are, are their content team top to bottom every step of the way. And the common thread through those use cases is we know content can provide business impact.
• 13:12
  We need to do it faster with fewer internal resources, and there's still room for agencies to provide that support. Got it.
• 13:19
  Yeah, I agree completely, and I actually feel that I haven't really been on the agency side for a while, but I kinda suspect that agencies are well positioned right now because hiring's tough.
• 13:32
  Like, hiring is just chi- like, most companies are not hiring, or if they are, they're certainly not hiring like they were two years ago. But there's been so much uncertainty around content over the last 12 months.
• 13:41
  I mean, to me, that's the biggest takeaway is, like, the confidence level that teams would bring to it has really changed.
• 13:47
  'Cause it used to be like, "Okay, we're gonna hire a team of 10, and we're gonna pump volume through this thing." And that really has changed over the last year or so.
• 13:54
  As agencies, you know, you have the, this grander view, which really positions you as a strategic partner. You know? So the company can come to you and say, like, "Okay, we need to..."
• 14:04
  Instead of saying, "We need to pump volume through this system," they can say, "What do, what should we do? [laughs] What are you seeing?" You know, "Do you got any ideas for us?"
• 14:12
  And that's a very different conversation than like, "Hey, how much, how many, you know, units can we pump through this thing?" And, and that's where I,
• 14:21
  I am really happy and, and proud to be on, on the Ten Speed team 'cause we aren't pumping stuff through a system or, or copy pasting strategy or...
• 14:28
  Everything is, is custom-built with the client in mind, and that goes as far as saying, "We don't need to build new content. You have an existing content program.
• 14:37
  It needs to be updated and refreshed because here's the result of the decay audit." Mm. Like, you're losing traffic. Yeah. That's a beautiful thing. We just need to fix it.
• 14:44
  Beautiful thing, really, like when an agency can say, "Actually, don't do this."
• 14:48
  And y- yeah, and, and so that, that kind of, that kind of support, I think, is, is really key for agencies right now, and I think agencies are, are in some ways well positioned because of the hiring challenges.
• 15:00
  And I, I wonder if we will ever go back to the same hiring environment that we had in 2021. All that kind of stuff is cyclical, so I, I'm not, I'm not ready to say, "No, we won't." Yeah. But, like- Maybe in a decade...
• 15:11
  that was clearly a special moment in hiring. Sure. For sure. Yes. Our job board revenue clearly reflects the change. [laughs] You know?
• 15:20
  I posted a, a chart of what that looked like on LinkedIn a while ago, and it was like you could see, like, the job board is just, like, growing, growing, growing, and then just, like, pfft, [laughs] just totally falls off a cliff.
• 15:30
  You mentioned ROI. Does content reporting fall under your purview, or is reporting a broader part of account management that content plays a role in?
• 15:42
  So at Ten Speed, the team's kind of split up between the production arm of the, the house, which I oversee, and the account management side of the house. Obviously, we work very closely together.
• 15:51
  The strategists who report to me every month help prepare the, the reports for every client. We send a detailed report. We don't mince words.
• 15:59
  If traffic was down, traffic was down, and it's on us to figure out why and provide the recommendation for moving forward. W- we're not gonna, like, bury the graph.
• 16:09
  That's another piece of, like, I think the in-house experience. Like, w- we're not coming at this from a the service is the, its own reward kind of- [laughs]... kind of, kind of angle. It's like- For sure...
• 16:22
  you've hired us to grow your business. Like, that's the only reason that we're talking to each other. So, so the reporting is, is kind of a shared duty, I guess, is the short answer to your question.
• 16:31
  We use agency analytics. We prepare a custom report every month for every client.
• 16:36
  When necessary, we'll build out custom reports, like a, you know, regex type, type approach and, like, do all of the extra reporting we need to show the results, and that's tailored also to the client goals.
• 16:46
  So some clients need... are asking us, "Hey, improve MQL to SQL conversion rate."
• 16:51
  I know MQL is kind of a bad word these days, but, like, we get a bunch of traffic already, and we need it to convert better versus we have an awareness problem, and our reporting is geared around those goals and customized in that way.
• 17:03
  What's the balance of numbers versus narrative? Uh, 50/50. Cool. So, like, someone sits down, like, obviously you have the data. Probably, you know, it's... the data's not that hard to get. Yeah.
• 17:16
  You know, so there's obviously an important part of it, but then, like, someone, account manager or whoever, sits down and, like, an- analyzes it and explains what's going on. Yeah.
• 17:24
  And in fact, that, you actually just hit on exactly where the transition happens. So the, on the Ten Speed team, the strategist pulls the data.
• 17:30
  We get stuff from GA4, Search Console, Ahrefs, all that good stuff, and then does the analysis, provides an overview, and then works with the account director one-on-one to really sculpt the narrative and, and present it in the most concise way.
• 17:43
  And when I say 50/50, I'm thinking a typical monthly client report has, I don't know, a half dozen plus graphs. Each graph gets sentences of explanation. Nice.
• 17:53
  This isn't a, this isn't a slide deck with three graphs and a header and, and we're done. Yeah. That's cool. That's cool. You know, someone should spin up a service. I would, I would do this for a super pac.
• 18:03
  Explain my own analytics to me, [laughs] you know? Like, give me the numbers I should look at and explain what's going on, because it's pretty time-consuming. Like, we use Fathom.
• 18:12
  It's pretty time-consuming for me to go into Fathom, like, pore through it.Try to make sense of it. I mean, frankly, I don't, I just don't do it, you know?
• 18:19
  Or like once every six months I'm like, "Ah, should I look at, should I look at that? [chuckles] Like, what's going on?" You know? The other thing I'd say about ROI and the tumultuous last year of, of content is
• 18:32
  I'm pleased to see so many marketing teams, so many content marketers getting more creative as a result. More and more we're building middle-of-funnel content, which I think was long overlooked. That warms my heart.
• 18:47
  Everyone's like- Yeah. That's so good. Yeah. And not all of our middle-of-funnel content is complicated either, which is the best part.
• 18:53
  Like, it turns out in some of these niche B2B tech spaces, you just need a really good competitor comparison, and you can get that thing to rank. We're continuing to find SEO is very much not dead.
• 19:07
  Indeed, there are some blue oceans out there.
• 19:09
  They're not everywhere, like it takes a special use case and, and whatever, but we're doing the work to identify those on behalf of clients and then filling them not with the same stuff that would've ranked in 2015, but a carefully well thought out, well-researched piece of middle-of-funnel content that's designed to drive intent and traffic that converts not just numbers.
• 19:29
  Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.
• 19:31
  I really hope, and it's just so great to hear that this is happening, I really hope that the silver lining of the last 12 months is exactly what you just described, that content marketing enters this new era where creativity and differentiation are prioritized over volume, et cetera.
• 19:48
  I mean, you know, maybe it's actually helpful to talk about why the last 12 months have been so bad, and maybe it's completely obvious, but a couple things happened. Economic conditions changed.
• 19:57
  Interest rates go up, which trickle down eventually to venture-backed SaaS companies. And then for us, the content folks specifically, ChatGPT
• 20:06
  enters the arena at this exact like kind of perfect moment where every CMO is thinking about, "How can we save a couple bucks?" You know? Yeah.
• 20:15
  Or maybe even on a grander scale thinking like, "Could we replace employees with this?"
• 20:19
  You know, "We got to at least try because our board is killing us right now because we've never been profitable and we gotta be profitable now." That...
• 20:27
  So then it just like created these conditions where it's like everyone's in a pressure cooker all of a sudden. All that has eased somewhat, but created a lot of stress and chaos, I guess, for a lot.
• 20:37
  Anyway, so may- hopefully, maybe that, like I said, totally obvious, but I feel like it's worth stating. Well, the differentiation piece I think is, is the, the key word in what you said there.
• 20:46
  Like, the creativity has to somehow be connected to like ICP and, and the product, particularly in, in B2B. Like,
• 20:54
  'cause ultimately those things interlock with brand and authority in a way that makes the content successful, whether it's designed to drive organic search traffic or be distributed in some other way, in a newsletter, on social,
• 21:09
  on a podcast, right? So it's the creativity around differentiation and like it's almost like a CX function. Like, the more content marketers think about CX, I think the, the better the quality becomes.
• 21:22
  And we throw around things like narrative and audience research a lot. Like, those are common things for content marketers to talk about, and I think we're finally starting to live them a little more. Right. Right.
• 21:35
  You had mentioned earlier that part of your job is improving content at scale, which I've done... I mean, I ha- I've participated in work like this before. It's very difficult. So, okay, you're in your control center.
• 21:50
  You have some levers and buttons and knobs to improve the quality that runs through this system. What are the levers and knobs and dials you're messing around with right now?
• 22:02
  Are you thinking of when we're working with a client that already has a large, well-established content program, thousands of pages?
• 22:08
  Or are you thinking just in general, the fact that Ten Speed produces hundreds of thousands of words of content a month? The latter. I, I'm imagining like you all are creating net new content for customers. How do you...
• 22:21
  What are the things that you're working on to improve the quality? 'Cause you're really improving the system, which ultimately improves the quality, right? Yeah, I can just give you the exact examples.
• 22:30
  That'd be wonderful. There's, there's some very specific things. We adapted our, and changed our brief template a little bit. Writers weren't necessarily getting as much information as they could.
• 22:40
  I wanna over-inform writers in a brief about things like audience, about things like client product positioning. They shouldn't have to go do a bunch of EEAT research about the client's product.
• 22:51
  We already have that information. Give it to them. They should go apply their own expertise and additional, you know, journalistic research to the rest of the article. That's, that's why we're hiring a good freelancer.
• 23:02
  Yeah. The client-provided information just needs to be in the darn brief. That's a big one. We also moved one of your favorites up front, like what is the purpose of the piece? What is the piece's reason for being?
• 23:13
  Why are we building that? And so the writer now gets a direct line into our strategic vision. This is part of a topic cluster. This top-of-funnel cluster is trying to rank in this way, in this timeframe.
• 23:25
  The client is connected to it in this way. Like, all of that stuff is now in the brief, and that goes a long way as well. So we're making this...
• 23:32
  Th-that's a very tactical thing, right, to change, but I think that made a big difference. I mentioned we also added an editing layer. That includes better fact-checking. It's also just a...
• 23:41
  Now the person doing, our, our editorial lead, the person doing the bulk of the editing, she oversees that, that process.
• 23:48
  She isn't the person doing fact-checking and like narrative alignment or, or product positioning alignment. The person who wrote the brief does that fact-checking layer.
• 23:59
  So the person who wrote the brief now gets to make sure, they're the ones familiar with the topic from their own research through looking at Clearscope, et cetera.
• 24:06
  They're now the ones making sure the article meets that quality standard before we send it to the editor to meet writing quality standards.
• 24:13
  And the making, y- the, it's like checks and balances, separation of powers type stuff there- Yeah. Yeah... that I think is really successful. The third big thing is-We've expanded our onboarding.
• 24:25
  One of the things that it's a dangerous-- we, we gotta thread the needle.
• 24:28
  Agencies will often say, "We're spending the first six weeks, the first eight weeks of our relationship just getting to know you, making sure we have all this dialed in."
• 24:37
  That's a long time to value, and- For sure, yeah... as an, as an in-house SaaS marketer, it's too long. [laughs] Right. Like, I want time to value to be much faster. I want a product-led growth motion for our agency.
• 24:48
  So like we wanna deliver value as fast as we can. There's also, like, some really important work to be done upfront.
• 24:55
  So separate from the logistics kickoff, separate from the strategy presentation, we do a separate meeting with any product marketing resource on the client's team, whether that's a dedicated product marketer, whether that's sales, CS.
• 25:08
  We have the interview that I would have my first week on the job if I were hired as the head of content at this company.
• 25:15
  Jobs to be done, product features coming out in the next three months, who's your favorite customer and why, all of those kinds of questions that I would advise other content marketers to ask of sales, to ask of product marketing, we go ask.
• 25:29
  And asking those things gives us a huge leg up heading into the first round of production. Yeah. That's fantastic. If no one's coined this term, you should coin it for Ten Speed. Writer empowerment.
• 25:40
  [laughs] You know, 'cause- Writer, I like it. Yeah, like I feel like content briefs for a while devolved into almost like a, a just fill-in-the-blank keyword, you know?
• 25:50
  And then it's like now there's AI tools that can write a 15-page content brief in five seconds. It's like none of this is really helping the writer. One thing I see- Yeah...
• 26:00
  so often working with freelance writers, so like we run a marketplace, like we match writers with customers, and one of the things you see if the scope of the project isn't really nailed in the way that you've just described, is there's this long tail of iteration which- Yeah...
• 26:15
  just everybody absolutely hates. You know what I mean? [chuckles] Like the writer's sick of it. The customer's like, "Oh, can you just do this one more thing?"
• 26:22
  You know, like, uh, it's gone so far out of scope partially because the project wasn't well thought out enough to begin with. Yeah.
• 26:30
  And, and I think the, the thing that Ten Speed has always done well is include that subject matter expertise. So once we build the brief, before it goes to the writer, we send it back to the client with questions.
• 26:40
  We mostly do that async today, where we're talking about when we need to move that to a, a live interview. There's a lot of opinions about, about that. Like is the live interview required?
• 26:51
  We, we've had a lot of success with async SME communication, and, and I think that the key is that you're doing it. And because the person who wrote the brief has done this research, we're then able to say,
• 27:03
  "Here are the questions we have. Here's the next thing. Here's the thing that AI can't answer." That's great. Or doesn't know to include.
• 27:11
  Layer that on top of product positioning, unique point of view, all that stuff, and we end up with a really good article. That's great.
• 27:16
  Are there any tools you're using that you're finding to be particularly helpful, you know, from the perspective of building a better system?
• 27:23
  You know, not necessarily like reporting or content creation, but like as you think about the, the content system.
• 27:29
  We use Asana right now, and I would go so far as to say we are Asana power users in the sense that, like we have many interlocking automations, many interlocking projects.
• 27:38
  Our operations manager is, has set up a, a really beautiful, elegant system with this and, and like she's got it dialed in.
• 27:45
  In fact, she's on parental leave right now and things are flowing totally normally without her, which is- Amazing... a testament to her work.
• 27:52
  Also, to the dozens of Looms she built so that every time we have a question, we can just go watch a Loom instead of panicking. [laughs] But the, that project management piece is in Asana.
• 28:03
  I, I think there are places where Airtable could also be really successful.
• 28:06
  We keep all of the-- We have an Airtable that's a single source of truth for all of our client requests and preferences, so everything from no Oxford commas, to don't call this project management software, to we capitalize this when it's referring to the product and when, not when it's not.
• 28:22
  Like all that kind of stuff is, is housed in an Airtable as like a, a nice repository. Without that kind of tooling though, and without those systems, n-none of the quality improvements would've been possible. Like
• 28:34
  you can't start talking about quality at any kind of scale until those things are flowing in a really measured way. Absolutely. You know, I bet a lot of people listening to this podcast are agency customers.
• 28:48
  Could you describe how to be a good content agency customer? Oh, boy. [laughs] Okay. Um, without getting fired. Uh- [laughs] So
• 28:59
  I will say, this is my first agency role, so I can only really confidently speak to how to be a good Ten Speed customer. And the place to start there is we want to be, co-pilots is maybe not the right word, but partners.
• 29:15
  And
• 29:16
  the idea that we take that piece of it really seriously, that it is a partnership, and that means that while we are providing additional bandwidth, we need your input, not because we need you to do the work, but because we wanna make sure that there's alignment every step of the way.
• 29:32
  We wanna make sure we can adjust and pivot as flexibly and as quickly as necessary if something goes wrong. So examples, we will build out three months worth of roadmap.
• 29:42
  Here's all the content we wanna build for you in the next three months. Here's why. Here's the results we expect to achieve. All, all that good stuff. If you have comments, give us the feedback.
• 29:50
  Don't feel like you need to rubber stamp it 'cause you've already sent the check. N- also, don't nitpick it to death. [chuckles] Yeah. Say, "This topic cluster doesn't look right.
• 29:59
  There's something not quite right about it. It's using vocabulary that doesn't match our, our ICP," or, "I don't see the volume here," or, "Our point of view actually suggests that this topic cluster isn't important."
• 30:12
  Great. We'll go replace it. That's-- We want that feedback. The same thing happens then when, when we get the SME feedback. We built this brief. Tell us where we got it wrong. Tell us where we got it right.
• 30:22
  We wanna be a partner there. We also keep track of all that, right? When you give us that feedback, we write it down. We put it in, in our internal Slack channels. We talk about it at meetings.
• 30:32
  And it all makes its way then, all those learnings, into the next iteration and into the future work. Yeah. No, that makes sense. In my agency experienceWhen customer relationships went bad, it was almost always because
• 30:45
  the customer, not explicitly, but would sort of say, "We gave you a bunch of money, now impress us." [laughs] You know? Yeah. Like sort of like a mad man type thing.
• 30:54
  And I found, took me a while to appreciate this, that the agency customer relationship is one that needs almost constant calibration. Yes.
• 31:02
  And it's actually quite helpful when you, the agency, can just tell them exactly what's gonna happen and what you need. Yeah. And don't wait, because that's what happens is if they don't know what's going...
• 31:10
  if the customer doesn't know what's going on, they feel like, "Where's our money going? We haven't heard anything on this project. You know, I want this, I want that." All they really need is just expectations, you know?
• 31:20
  And then if you deliver on those expectations, good chance everyone's gonna be happy. It's about the expectation setting. I agree.
• 31:25
  And even in the world of like B2B SAS and enterprise level sales, agency relationships require constant care and feeding, and that's something that Ten Speed takes very seriously, does very well, both in terms of meeting cadence and in terms of just general communication.
• 31:40
  And I think you mentioned like they say, "Just impress us." The other thing I've noticed is alignment about done versus perfect is often a- Yeah, that's a great point... a point of, a point of friction.
• 31:52
  So finding alignment on that can also be something that's good to do early in the process. Yeah, that's cool. I like that. What's next?
• 32:00
  Like what are, what are things that are kind of percolating in your mind that you hope to spend the next six months working on? This is actually the thing I'm most excited about.
• 32:08
  I was, I was hoping we would get to talk about this stuff. So over the next six months, Ten Speed's plan is to build out more and more services, specifically around more different types of content.
• 32:19
  We're gonna start building more different stuff for clients, which is so exciting. The blog post has had a great run, and I expect we will continue producing hundreds of thousands of words a month for clients.
• 32:31
  I can't wait to build research reports, to build more email newsletters, to build all that kind of stuff so that we can have a more fully distributed content plan, a strategy that truly has more tools at its disposal.
• 32:47
  And yeah, if you... I mean, if you're listening to this, we're... that stuff is probably already in motion and redoing our website to accommodate it all and- Nice... all that. So it feels... It's great.
• 32:57
  I got to put my product marketer hat on a little bit with it.
• 33:00
  It's like, 'cause as the person like responsible for the deliverables in a lot of ways, I got to be the product marketer and like build a go-to-market plan and do all that kind of stuff from my past.
• 33:08
  That was a lot of fun. So- Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun. And my gut reaction is that sounds like exactly the right thing to do also. Yes. I, I think agencies that aren't looking into diversifying their content are
• 33:21
  running a risk. Yeah. They're not, not sunk by any means. Like, like I said, SEO is very much not dead, but I'm really happy that we're, we're taking that step and taking it now. Yeah. Yeah.
• 33:29
  Well, you're getting back to first principles. You know, it would be easy to say like, "We are an agency that creates SEO content."
• 33:36
  It's harder to say, you know, "We're an agency that helps our customers grow their businesses," and then work- Yeah... backwards from that to figure out like, "Well, what, what do we need to do?" Yeah.
• 33:44
  And it's funny you, you used the term, right, SEO content, and somewhere along the line that also became a little bit of a bad word.
• 33:50
  And in my mind, all it means is content that's designed to drive organic search traffic and conversions. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's content that we're building for that channel.
• 33:58
  And to that end, we're starting to build more and more of what I've been calling authority content, content that's designed to drive traffic and conversions from other channels based on your authority, whether that looks like, quote, "thought leadership" or social posts or a podcast.
• 34:14
  It's fundamentally authority content, not SEO content. Absolutely. SEO content is increasingly a tool in the toolbox, not- Exactly... the whole workshop. [laughs] Yeah. So that's great. Well, we'll have to...
• 34:26
  So this is your second, your second appearance. We'll... I'm gonna set a reminder for us to do this hopefully like March 2025- Perfect... so we can check in and like I... 'cause I really am curious. We're... I...
• 34:36
  People may notice, like we're bringing on more past guests lately because I always end these episodes saying something like, "Oh, well, like we wanna know how it goes," and now we're actually finding that out.
• 34:46
  So I hope we can have you on again so we can learn more about like how the, how this has all evolved, how it's gone, what you've learned, all that good stuff. I would love that. Let's, let's book it. Cool.
• 34:56
  Ryan, where can we send people to learn more about Ten Speed and about you also? Best places to find me are on LinkedIn.
• 35:03
  You'll know it's me because there's a fun black and white illustration, guy in glasses, and Ryan Sargent. And then, or on Superpack. Send me a DM, tag me in a, in a channel. And then, uh, Ten Speed is at tenspeed.io.
• 35:16
  All, all the usual internet stuff. Cool. We'll link to all that stuff in show notes so people can go check it out. Um, Ryan, thanks as always for your time, and we'll look forward to doing it again soon.
• 35:27
  Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it. [outro music]