Latest / Content, Briefly / The Best Brand Primer I've Ever Heard with Kevan Lee and Shannon Deep

Transcript

The Best Brand Primer I've Ever Heard with Kevan Lee and Shannon Deep · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to the 100th episode of Content Briefly. That's right, this is the 100th episode we've published. I do think that there were two reruns in there.
• 0:16
  I'm still counting this as number 100, though. So thank you for all of you who have been listening, whether you started last week or today, or you've been around since the beginning about two years ago.
• 0:26
  We really appreciate it. I do wanna let you know about a couple of cool changes coming to this podcast.
• 0:32
  We will continue to do the Q&A interview style podcast that we've been doing, but we're introducing a new format as well.
• 0:40
  So roughly half of all new episodes are gonna be co-hosted by myself and Eric Doty, who runs the Superpath community.
• 0:48
  And the impetus for this is basically that Eric and I talk about content all the time, and there's topics that we would like to be able to go deep on that we can't always.
• 0:58
  So, like, so, so many of our episodes are guest-driven. It's like, what is this person an expert at? We talk about that. But Eric and I have a lot of thoughts on content.
• 1:06
  We observe so much because we're in the Superpath community all day and talking to our members and our sponsors, et cetera, and we wanna share some of those insights.
• 1:13
  So these episodes will be Eric and I picking a topic, going deep on it. We'll try to make this stuff really timely and really relevant, whereas a lot of the guest episodes are a little bit more evergreen.
• 1:22
  And, so you can look forward to that. We'll have the first episode with Eric and I coming out soon, and you can look forward also to lots more interviews as well. Okay.
• 1:31
  In today's episode, we have Kevin Lee and Shannon Diep from Bonfire. Bonfire is a brand advisory. Kevin and Shannon both have deep experience in B2B SaaS before launching their own agency.
• 1:44
  This was truly the best primer on brand, especially in the B2B space, that I've ever heard. I'm one of those people who feels that brand is... It's, like, adjacent to content.
• 1:53
  Frankly, I don't really have any legitimate hands-on experience with it. It's always felt a little ephemeral to me. It's like, what is it? How do we, you know, capture it?
• 2:02
  Like, some companies seem to have it, some don't.
• 2:05
  W- We talk about all that, and Kevin and Shannon do a just, a wonderful job explaining what brand means in a very concrete way, and also some ways that content teams can, can sort of make some strides towards establishing a stronger brand.
• 2:19
  I'm not gonna tease too much more because they're just so much better at explaining this than I am summarizing it, so I will get out of the way and let them do their thing.
• 2:25
  I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do, too. And of course, just one last thing before we dive in, Superpath Pro has a 30-day free trial these days.
• 2:34
  As you may have saw, we also recently closed down the free portion of the Slack community. This is a pretty significant move for us.
• 2:41
  It took about six years to build up to 24,000 members, and it took about 15 minutes to, uh, essentially boot everyone out, which I did feel bad doing, and I'm sorry for the 24,000 people that got that email.
• 2:53
  The gist of this is basically that Eric and I wanna pour all of our time, energy, and focus into making the Superpath Pro experience as good as it can possibly be.
• 3:02
  And we've been working really hard to do that, and honestly, I think it's working. I think the community is better than it has ever been. There is a, what I would consider a perfect signal-to-noise ratio.
• 3:13
  There is no noise, so it's the perfect ratio. The Slack community is better than ever. The one-on-one calls are great. The group calls, which we launched in the fall, have been a ton of fun.
• 3:22
  We now have weekly co-working sessions twice a week, and we're considering adding a third to accommodate more time zones. There's just a ton of cool stuff going on.
• 3:29
  We would love to have you come and try it out, see if it's for you, right? You get 30 days free, so you don't have to commit until you've really seen what it's all about.
• 3:36
  You can, of course, learn all about that at superpath.co. Okay, out of the way. Enjoy this episode with Kevin and Shannon. This episode of Content Briefly is supported by our friends at Demand Genius.
• 3:46
  Your content impacts revenue. Demand Genius shows you how, so you can focus on creating great content while Demand Genius makes sure your team gets credit for the impact it has.
• 3:56
  Here's a look at everything you get with Demand Genius. First, content attribution. Measure revenue impact and ROI for all your content in a simple dashboard. Second, buyer journey insight.
• 4:08
  See exactly what content performs at each stage and where the gaps are to build a strategic content roadmap that helps close deals faster. Third, content experience.
• 4:18
  Balance conversion and buyer experience for every prospect with reader-led content gates and CTAs that evolve throughout the buyer journey. And lastly, sales and marketing alignment.
• 4:29
  You close more deals faster by distributing content more effectively across both marketing and sales. We all know that vanity metrics don't cut it anymore.
• 4:37
  Let Demand Genius show you exactly how content connects to revenue to maximize and measure your impact.
• 4:43
  Use the links in the show notes to learn more or book a demo, and all Superpath members get 20% off their first year. Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here today with an extra special, kind of different episode.
• 4:54
  We have Kevin Lee and Shannon Diep from Bonfire here. We don't normally get the chance to have three people on, especially with two people from the same business, so this is fun. We have tons to talk about.
• 5:03
  You're the co-founders of Bonfire, which is a... How would you characterize it? Brand advisory service, right? Is that too simple? That's a good question. We ask ourselves that a lot, too. I think that's accurate.
• 5:15
  Wouldn't you say, Shan? Brand advisory consultancy. That sounds better. Yeah. We've gone with brand advisory, brand storytelling consultancy, brand strategy and storytelling consultancy. Mm-hmm.
• 5:26
  Kind of a- anything brand, you can kinda come to us, and we'll figure out a way to get it done for you. Cool. That's awesome. I wanna hear all about it.
• 5:33
  But maybe first, I would love if each of you could introduce yourselves, and just tell us a little bit about how you got here and what led you to start Bonfire. Shannon, would you mind kicking that off? Yeah, sure.
• 5:44
  So I was not a marketer by training, as I feel like a lot of marketers, and especially a lot of content marketers, aren't marketers by training, but they kind of, like, find their way.
• 5:54
  So I had a bit of a circuitous career path as well. I started out in arts and entertainment. I was working in theater in New York. I was a dramaturg and a script consultant.
• 6:03
  And yeah, uh, soUh, storytelling has always been the red thread, so that will be a theme, as you'll notice.
• 6:11
  And I ended up going to Siegel and Gale, a brand agency, and worked for them, started out as an intern as, like, a 27-year-old broke freelancer in the theater in their brand communication department.
• 6:25
  And it was like, "Help us come up with personalities and communication strategies for companies that make them interesting and differentiated." And I was like, "Oh, I know how to do this. I know how to create characters.
• 6:36
  I know how to tell stories that people are interested in." And that kind of kicked me off on my marketing path.
• 6:42
  From there, went in-house at a tech company called Dashlane, and that's where I started, like, working in tech, and eventually crossed paths with Kevin at Oyster. Okay, I was gonna ask you about that. Yes.
• 6:56
  Yeah, so that's where we overlapped, and at the time I was editorial director, still doing a lot of stuff with brand, 'cause brand and editorial are really closely related, of course.
• 7:06
  And yeah, I'll kind of let Kevin, like, pick up [laughs] from there since that's where our paths crossed. Yeah. Perfect. So for me, like, my background was not traditional marketing either.
• 7:16
  I'm a journalism major, [lip smack] so I was like... Like, I made my own press pass in Microsoft Publisher back in the day, printed it out, laminated it, and I got into free sports games- Nice...
• 7:27
  just through my own little hustle. That's cool. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. That's cool. I thought it was cool at the time. Yeah. [laughs] I was pretty proud of myself. You're like, "I'm not a marketer by trade.
• 7:35
  I'm a scammer." Um- It served me well throughout my career. Yeah. Go figure. [laughs] But that was really cool to... Like, that was storytelling also of a sort, right?
• 7:43
  Like, I think that was what drew me into journalism, was telling stories, finding compelling ways to get points across and to do stuff like that.
• 7:50
  And so I thought that was gonna be my path, but the newspaper industry changed a lot, tons of upheaval.
• 7:56
  I didn't really see a future there, and fortunately, I was able to connect the journalism piece of storytelling with the marketing piece of storytelling.
• 8:03
  And so my first foray into more traditional marketing was I created an online community that Vox Media acquired, and so I was able to join the Vox Media team. Whoa, I did not realize that. And I thought...
• 8:15
  You know, it's interesting 'cause I've tracked your career for a long time, and I did not know that. That's very cool.
• 8:20
  Yeah, I mean, it was a sports blog, and it was the dumbest sports blog you'll probably ever come across. But I loved it.
• 8:26
  I loved every second of it, and it was just such a nice little, like, sandbox playground for me to learn how SEO works, to learn how promotion works, to learn how list building and audience development, all these things that I had no formal education in, but I did have this nice little sandbox to get to play in, and grateful for the Vox team to, to kind of encourage that.
• 8:44
  And so that really gave me, like, a taste of what new media and stuff... I was in... I'm, like, based in Boise, Idaho.
• 8:50
  There's not a lot of, like, new media startup stuff here, but that gave me a taste of it remotely, and so I then just pursued other remote opportunities that were adjacent to that, and was very fortunate to catch on at Buffer.
• 9:02
  Uh, Buffer is a social media management app. Thankfully, they had already done some really strong investments into content, and so I came on as marketer number two when the team was about 17.
• 9:13
  And when you're that early stage, you're kind of doing a little bit of everything, as I'm sure everyone knows. But, like, part of it was, yeah, let's build the go-to-market motion around content.
• 9:22
  And so I helped scale that content machine and the go-to-market machine, ended up being head of marketing and VP of marketing at Buffer. Built a team,
• 9:31
  and then left from Buffer to Oyster, which is where Shannon and I crossed paths, and so similar, also joined early there. They also had some really great content foundations that were really appealing to me.
• 9:41
  Buffer was very product-led growth, everything's organic acquisition. Oyster was very sales led, everything is, like, paid d- more, your more typical demand gen machine.
• 9:52
  And so I tried to, like, bring some of my PLG background into that. But it was a wonderful ride there. Joined really early, and was able to build a team of...
• 10:01
  We were 50 at our largest on the marketing side, with a, a really big content editorial team that, that Shannon led, but then a really big brand team that Shannon led, too. And so brand and content were huge at Oyster.
• 10:11
  They were huge at Buffer.
• 10:13
  And after Oyster, like, I think Shannon and I both loved that experience of working together, uh, loved how we thought similarly about the stuff that we thought worked really well with marketing, and also just the way we kind of saw the world and our values in general of what kind of businesses appealed to us, what type of life appealed to us in a lot of ways and, and how work played into that.
• 10:34
  And so that was what a lot of our early conversations were about starting Bonfire. And yes, we are, like, this, this more traditional agency that supports brand strategy, and we even do content for some clients.
• 10:46
  But we like to think that we see the world a little differently when it comes to work, and specifically how we show up as marketers and strategists and storytellers within, like, a B2B and venture-backed context. Okay.
• 10:58
  That's incredibly helpful context. I should tell you also, Kevin, you're the third Buffer alum on this podcast. We've had Ash Reed and Haley Griffis also, which has been awesome. And B- I've always admired Buffer.
• 11:10
  I won't bore everyone going on about Buffer content. You know, like, 10, 12 years ago, for me anyways, it was, like, a huge part of, like, why I wanted to be in content marketing, like, what I saw there. Oh.
• 11:20
  That's amazing to hear. Okay, so Bonfire. You start Bonfire. Give me the rundown. Like, what does a typical engagement with one of your clients look like?
• 11:28
  I'm assuming this is not, like, a productized service, that it's pretty boutique, that people bring bespoke problems, and you come up with bespoke solutions for them, too. Yeah.
• 11:41
  We generally meet our clients at one of two or three kind of inflection points.
• 11:48
  Either they are very early, they're just starting out, and they're doing the very smart thing of investing in their brand very early on as a kind of umbrella over the rest of the strategies that they're going to enact.
• 12:01
  So we get people super, super early. We get people who areAlso early, but who are realizing that they need to pivot for some reason or another.
• 12:12
  Either they're, like, really going deep into product market fit and realizing, "Oh, maybe we fit, like, over here, and that has some attendant, either expectations or things that we need to do a bit differently, so we need to update the brand."
• 12:26
  And then we also have clients who come to us who are in a state of either they've been acquired, they are acquiring, they're merging, there's some other big external reason why the brand really needs to change or to update at that time.
• 12:41
  And so we meet people in all three of those, and all three of those scenarios require different things.
• 12:48
  But I would say generally what we're looking at is what is the story that they are telling in this particular moment? Who are they telling it to?
• 12:56
  And then how do we empower them through brand foundations, which we think of as their purpose, their mission, their values, and then their brand positioning. So those are kind of like our four big things.
• 13:09
  And then how do we take those things and then bring them to life through strategies, usually starting with messaging, and then we can kind of, like, help them through their more, more narrative kinds of strategies.
• 13:20
  So that's brand editorial, communications, content, social, thought leadership, those sorts of things. Does that cover the gamut, Kevin? Is that, like, pretty much what we do? [laughs] It is, yeah.
• 13:31
  Yeah, and I think what's interesting is that we've seen the power of connecting those two things of the foundations and how to bring it to life. Yeah.
• 13:37
  And I think we've also seen and heard from a lot of clients about the distaste they have for just doing the foundations, and then you have Notion documents that are cool and sound good, but they don't actually lead to anything substantial for the business.
• 13:51
  And so we really wanna be conscious of marrying those two together. How difficult is it to get a company and the people within it to agree on those foundations?
• 14:01
  I mean, it just strikes me as, like do brands either have it or not? You know what I mean? Like, when I think of great brands, I often... maybe the first thing that comes to my mind is, like,
• 14:09
  top-down from the very beginning, there was a story.
• 14:13
  And it's easy to kind of rely on that story if it was started really early, but then the larger the company gets, I would imagine the harder it is to kind of wrangle everybody into one place so that you can tell that cohesive story.
• 14:24
  Yeah. I, I think that's, like, really well said. Sometimes companies come into the world with a soul.
• 14:29
  Like, they already know who they are, they already know why they exist, and they have people, usually the founders, who have this, like, really strong animus for, like, why they are d- doing what they're doing.
• 14:41
  And in those cases, it's kind of a matter of, like, just wrangling the energy into something really clear and compelling that everybody knows how to wield, not just the founders.
• 14:53
  But then there are other times when companies kind of spring up for various reasons.
• 14:59
  Either there's, like, a really obvious market opportunity, or they're spinning off from, like, a different company, or somebody, you know, some engineer somewhere creates something really great, and they're like, kinda like, "Now what do I do with this thing?"
• 15:12
  And that doesn't mean that that company, like, can't have a strong brand. It's just a matter of, like, what we usually do is, like, a lot of interviews that kind of resemble therapy. We're like, "Why?"
• 15:23
  That's so interesting, yeah. "Like, what is exciting to you about this? Like, what do you feel when you think about, like, building what you're building? How do you wanna feel about the company in five years' time?
• 15:35
  What's your ideal headline you might read about your company?" And through that, we can get to different motivations that people have. And I think Kevin will back me up on this.
• 15:44
  You don't have to want to save the world or have some, like, big humanitarian purpose. It can be enough that you are authentic to who you are.
• 15:54
  And so, like, that's what we're trying to get at, like, what is your authentic motivation for this company? And then whatever that is, we can build a story on that.
• 16:02
  But if you're trying to be something you're not because it sounds good, then you're doomed from the start. That's, that's so interesting.
• 16:10
  I'm just thinking, like, when I talk with my therapist, it's like me word vomiting. [laughs] And then her kinda, like, repeating back to me what I just said in one sentence that's perfectly clear. And I'm like, "Oh, yes.
• 16:20
  That's it. That's it." [laughs] Yeah. "That's what I'm trying to say." You know? But it- That is our job. Yeah. It, interesting too that you say that the mission doesn't have to be world changing.
• 16:29
  I mean, that's kinda what I was hearing when you were talking about the foundations, like what is our purpose for existing? And it's like,
• 16:37
  for, I don't know, if you're a SAS company that makes, you know, people ops software. I mean, and people ops maybe is closer to- Mm... saving the world than marketing automation or something.
• 16:46
  But that's a really interesting insight to me that identifying the purpose can just be being your authentic self. Like, that sounds, like, very satisfying, actually. Totally.
• 16:56
  And I think, like, I mean, you gave marketing automation, I think, as like a great example of that, where it's like, okay, you're not, like, making clean water in, you know, developing countries.
• 17:06
  But you are doing something for someone. You are making somebody's life appreciably easier or better, hopefully. Hopefully your product is good.
• 17:15
  But, you know, if you can tap into that, and, like, that is, like, a real human emotional sort of idea.
• 17:24
  So it's like you don't have to think of, like, grand scale things, but also there are a lot of human things that are happening everywhere all the time around us if we just pay close attention to them. Yeah.
• 17:36
  That's so interesting. You know, Kevin, a question for you, going back to your Buffer days. Like, Buffer strikes me as a company that came into the world with a brand, right?
• 17:45
  Like, there's a bunch of social media scheduling tools out there. Buffer had strong opinions. It was also the people within the business were very visible.
• 17:56
  You know, the transparency thing, like, took it to a whole new level. Like, did you internally, did people discuss this as, like, th- this is our brand? Like, this is who we are? Because as a customer-It worked that way.
• 18:08
  Like, I wanted to be associated with Buffer. I wanted to schedule my tweets on Buffer because of the brand, even though there were competitors out there who, maybe they were cheaper, I don't know. Yeah.
• 18:19
  Yeah, I think brand marketing was maybe less mature as a discipline 10 years ago, like when those foundations came in place.
• 18:25
  But I think what Buffer did really interesting is they took the values, and maybe not having a super clearly articulated purpose or mission, I think the values really drove so much of what the public perceived Buffer as, and a lot of the decisions that we made internally.
• 18:40
  And so, like I remember early days, one of the things that was really important to Joel, our founder, was this idea of freedom, which is such a powerful brand concept that is so different than, "Let me schedule my tweets," for instance.
• 18:53
  Like, that message is just like s- completely different on the spectrum. And so I think that idea of freedom was like a very compelling why for why Buffer existed. It existed out of a personal pain point for him.
• 19:05
  Like, that's why he built it, was because he didn't wanna feel so beholden to sitting in front of Twitter and, you know, typing out the thing he's wanted to say as soon as he wanted to say it, and schedule it and publish it.
• 19:15
  And so this freedom of like, "Oh, cool, I can set this up for a week in advance, go live my life, and it still happens," I think that was a really core, like foundation for us to build the rest of the brand off of.
• 19:25
  So that's like kind of a more of a consumer personal type need. Right.
• 19:29
  So when we shifted to a B2B business, like well cool, how does that evolve into something that's, you know, still a, a compelling why reason, but maybe makes more sense for a B2B buyer than it does for me or Shannon, who are scheduling our personal tweets or something like that.
• 19:42
  Right. And so yes, I think the foundations were there, but they looked a little different. But they were really critical to have some thought around that, which kinda drove our decisions. Yeah. Okay. The...
• 19:52
  A follow-up question for both of you. You mentioned, Kevin, that the discipline of brand storytelling wasn't as mature 10 years ago. I've just recently been listening to the Acquired podcast.
• 20:04
  Don't know if you've listened to any of those. These like really deep dives on very well-known companies.
• 20:08
  And I just listened to one on Rolex, and I'm listening to one on LVMH right now, which is like a luxury brand, or it's like a collection- Yeah... of luxury brands.
• 20:16
  And in each case, the brand is what sets these companies apart. Like, a watch tells time. They all tell time, you know? And they've over, in this case, like 100 years built this great brand around it.
• 20:29
  So I guess my question for you is, has it changed because we're talking primarily about software businesses, and that, you know, SaaS is a thing now that didn't really exist,
• 20:39
  you know, obviously didn't exist 100 years ago. It hardly existed 25 years ago.
• 20:43
  Like, is that what you mean that there's kind of this set of businesses who like doesn't fully understand how to capture their brand story as well as maybe like a Rolex or a Louis Vuitton or Hermes or some of these companies that have been around forever?
• 20:56
  Yeah, I think there's maybe a spectrum here too. Like, everything started in that consumer space, and you're talking about like consumer goods in particular.
• 21:03
  And then we often see like a lot of the great tactics and strategies there go into B2C software, and then a lot of- Mm... the great B2C strategies eventually get to B2B. And so I think it's...
• 21:13
  Like, if you're a B2B business, the trick is just to adopt the B2C stuff sooner than everyone else, and you kinda set yourself apart- Yeah, that's interesting...
• 21:19
  which I think is something that, that we often advise our clients to do. And so I think it's that, that maturity and that scale. It's like, yeah, cool, this stuff has worked for years for Louis Vuitton, for Rolex.
• 21:31
  It's worked for consumer apps like Duolingo or someone like that. Can it work for B2B? It, it works for Notion. It works for th- like other companies like that.
• 21:39
  Like, how do you apply the things that work here to different environments? There's kind of like a first mover advantage.
• 21:45
  There's all sorts of benefits to doing it that way, and I think we're starting to get there more on the B2B side with brand. I think there's a lot of hurdles to still overcome, especially in B2B venture-backed SaaS.
• 21:56
  But the ones that do that well, I think there's a lot of power there. And even someone like Notion, I think a lot of that, uh, like we know some of the brand marketers at Notion. They're amazing, brilliant people.
• 22:07
  I think some of the reaction to Notion's brand was like people looking at Notion and thinking, "Oh, they have a brand. I want a brand now." [laughs] Like, "Give me what Notion has." It's like, okay, we can...
• 22:18
  We'll start there. But like, I think that then requires a whole, like language and systems, and like how did- Yeah... Notion actually do it? How do they think about it?
• 22:26
  There are people like me and Shannon and the people at Notion who know what that looks like, but I think a lot of the market is still just like, "Ooh, shiny thing that worked well.
• 22:34
  I want one of those too," without knowing what they're actually asking for. Yeah, yeah.
• 22:38
  Um- We got that at Animals all the time, where like a lead would come in, you jump on a call, and they would say, "We want a blog like Intercom's, so could you just- Yeah... could you just do that?"
• 22:47
  We're like, "Well," [laughs] I mean, "No, we can't. I mean, not really. You know, not without like reverse engineering the entire thing."
• 22:55
  I g- Shannon, a question for you, which is a follow-up to Kevin's, is like, okay, you have two companies that come to Bonfire. One is like consumery. It's like Notion, you know what I mean? It's PLG.
• 23:06
  It's kinda consumery. It's like, you know, already got s- a little bit of like, I'll call it brand momentum. And then you have like a giant enterprise company
• 23:14
  that is like 20,000 employees, and like it's kinda old school. Like, which is more fun to work on? [laughs] You know what I mean?
• 23:21
  Like, and is it more or less the same process for helping those two companies understand their own story and then operationalize it? Wow, okay.
• 23:30
  So I might have a bit of a roundabout answer here, but like how are they funded? Like, what is their motive?
• 23:37
  Because I think if you've got this kinda cool Notion-like company that's coming in, but they have a bunch of VC funding, and they're under a ton of pressure to like raise their next round or to get acquired or to IPO or whatever, then generally speaking, our experience has been what they want are the, like effects of brand, but they do not have the timelines and like the scale of time to actually invest in and develop the brand in a particular way, in the way- Oh, that's interesting...
• 24:13
  that will like actually get them...
• 24:14
  Because, uh, we talked about this on our newsletter this week, like-Brand is inherently like a long-term investment, and VC is situated so that you are getting short-term returns for a few people as quickly as you possibly can.
• 24:30
  Like, a-and so there's kind of like working at cross purposes. And so
• 24:35
  I think actually bigger corporations that generally have like bigger budgets, they're willing to work slower, they're willing to like invest in like longer term things.
• 24:46
  They understand big battleships take a long time to turn, and they understand that like, okay, if we roll out this new brand system, we have to like...
• 24:56
  Okay, I worked-- When I was working at Siegel and Gale, I was part of the team that trained a really huge international telecom agency. That, that-- Or sorry, a telecom enterprise.
• 25:08
  That enterprise had 35 different agencies that were creating- Whoa... its materials. And so we have this brand new brand. It's an awesome brand.
• 25:18
  There's new colors, there's new voice guidelines, there's an entirely new brand book. We have to get 35 different agencies up to speed on like what that means.
• 25:29
  Like physical store, brick and mortar store turnover took like two years to complete of like getting all the branding updated. That's crazy. Yeah. And so like there, it's a scale.
• 25:39
  It's like startup marketers like cannot possibly think like on this scale of like what this, uh... A-and, you know, not every big enterprise company is that big, so like I'll caveat that.
• 25:52
  But they're much more willing to take a chance and to invest in something and to ensure that investment pays off versus we are just moving so fast and we need numbers and we need pipeline, and we need to hit these goals.
• 26:06
  So like if something's not working in two weeks, it's out the door and we're trying something new.
• 26:11
  And that's just, you cannot build a really differentiated, cool, sustainable brand by doing things in two weeks and then being like, "Why isn't it working? We're done with it."
• 26:20
  And so that's the tension that we feel a lot of the time. That makes a ton of sense. I mean, it actually reminds me a little bit of content, which has some similar qualities.
• 26:29
  Like if you're trying to move really fast, content's gonna be tough. Yeah. Um, I am curious about your timing here. I mean, uh, you started Bonfire, I think a little bit before AI took over the world.
• 26:41
  Since that has happened, and the way that, I'm thinking from a content perspective mostly, but the way that this is all playing out for content marketers is like, well, organic search is like maybe not as good as it used to be.
• 26:50
  And like, what about these AI overviews? Are people gonna click our stuff anymore? And we used to run this SEO playbook and like it's not really that effective.
• 26:57
  And I think a lot of content teams are, are thinking about, I won't say brand necessarily, but thinking about differentiation more now than they used to because they didn't really have to.
• 27:10
  Like some companies were already doing all this, but some companies weren't, and now they're like, "Ah, shoot, what are we gonna do now?"
• 27:14
  Are you seeing that there is a greater demand for companies that want to establish themselves to, I-I mean, to differentiate, to come up with something cool and unique to help set them apart in a world where like all these commodified channels are kinda drying up?
• 27:33
  I would say so, yeah. I think that's one of the big talking points that we have when prospects come in.
• 27:38
  They might not u- always use the exact word differentiation, but that's often like the idea and concept that lights them up.
• 27:45
  For instance, we did an analysis of like a handful of AI notetaker brands recently, and out of the six that we looked at, three of them claimed on their hero in the, their website to be the number one notetaking tool, like the exact same copy.
• 28:01
  And you're just kinda looking at that thinking, that can't be right. But also [chuckles] like where's the differentiation then?
• 28:06
  I think everyone's starting to realize this, not just in the AI categories, but like in all software categories, there's so much commoditization, both of the product feature set, but also some of the marketing strategies, some of the voice and tone, some of the tactics that we're employing.
• 28:20
  A lot of it because it is driven by efficient AI content creation or efficient team sizes or the roles that we're hiring or that we're laying off, like we're all starting to look and sound alike.
• 28:32
  And so I think the reaction to that is going to be the brand differentiation side, and sometimes that'll show up in our inbox as like, "I need positioning help," or, "I need story help," or, "I need..."
• 28:42
  Things that aren't necessarily the language that we would use, but at the end of the day, it is about how do I sound and look different than everyone else out there. Right. It's funny you say that.
• 28:50
  I was, uh, just literally two days ago, was looking at Superpath's homepage, and it says, "The number one community for content marketers." [chuckles] And like nobody voted that. I mean, I just wrote that.
• 29:01
  [chuckles] But I was starting to think like, this is kinda lame. Y-you know, like I gotta come up with some better messaging, which I've started playing around with.
• 29:10
  But that's been there for three years probably, you know, and it probably hasn't done a whole lot of work for us. [laughs] Yeah, and I think what's interesting is like we often come up to clients who
• 29:21
  they maybe like prioritize the logical appeal before the emotional appeal. Yeah. And so when we're thinking of like- Ooh, interesting...
• 29:28
  product positioning versus brand positioning, your product positioning is the logical appeal, your brand positioning is the emotional appeal.
• 29:34
  So what do you wanna be known as on the brand side versus what do you do and how are you feature and benefit different than everyone else out there?
• 29:42
  And I think a lot of times companies might either ignore the brand piece completely and think that they're building everything on just the product positioning, or they just have them on different priority levels, and brand is kind of the second order thing.
• 29:53
  And so we do them together or we do brand first when we do engagements, and I think it makes a meaningful difference in exactly what you're saying, Jimmy.
• 30:01
  Like I think the copy, the tone, the direction, the strategies all kind of flow from those decisions of how you're positioned both on the brand and the product side.
• 30:09
  Increasingly, you have to be able to attribute the work to a business impact. How does this play out in brand?
• 30:16
  It's a little more lofty, and you don't necessarily expect to be able to tie a dollar amount back to your investment.
• 30:23
  Or do companies say at some point the rubber meets the road, and like we wanna know is this working or not? Yeah. I mean, Kevin is really good at this, so I will turn it over to him to talk about...
• 30:34
  He has like-Home brewed the most magical spreadsheets and stuff for tracking brand ROI and kind of like putting... There are two sides to it. Like, there is a side of brand that you, like, simply cannot quantify.
• 30:50
  Like, you will not be able to measure, like, the number of people starting petitions in their workplace to not use Teams. Like, that's brand working for you, but you can't measure that. It's not possible. Right.
• 31:05
  And so there is that side of it, and that side is valuable because that side is what makes your stuff memorable. It's what... When you start tying emotion to things, it makes it sticky.
• 31:17
  People start associating your brand with their own identity and, like, that is, like, really sticky and, like, it's often unconscious, which also makes it harder to measure.
• 31:29
  And then the thing with storytelling is that it is-- I think the statistic from, like, Harvard Business Review is that stories are 22 times more memorable than facts.
• 31:40
  And so, like, you're not gonna tell an interesting story about your specs. Like, you need something else to say- Right... that isn't specs if you wanna be, like, sticky and memorable.
• 31:51
  So the immeasurable side is really important, but I think, like, you kinda have to have, like, faith in it. And like I said, a lot of these companies aren't operating on timescales where they do see that payoff.
• 32:07
  But on the measurable side, there are things you can do, and I will let Kevin explain the awesome things that you can indeed measure about your brand. [chuckles] Yeah.
• 32:16
  I mean, my hot take would be, like, don't let anyone tell you that brand is too hard to measure, so don't bother measuring it.
• 32:22
  I think that is only going to lead to your brand people getting laid off before everyone else at a company. And so- Yeah... I'm with Shannon on we shouldn't have to measure brand.
• 32:30
  Like, there's plenty of evidence out there that it works and that it's essential.
• 32:35
  But when you're in a VC-backed startup, you have to prove the value of your work, otherwise you won't have a job in environments like these. And, and so yes, I think there's plenty of ways to do it.
• 32:45
  You can look at branded keyword volume. You can look at direct traffic. You can look at share of voice. You can do brand recall surveys.
• 32:52
  You can do so many different things that triangulate, like, the impact the brand has had.
• 32:56
  And so there's absolutely ways to do that, and I think content marketers could probably benefit greatly from knowing some of those levers just in the off chance that you do have to prove the worth of this thing or that thing that you've been working on.
• 33:07
  But yeah, I'm convinced that brand can have a measurable impact and is possible to measure, and also that we shouldn't have to measure it [chuckles] as, as to the degree that we have to.
• 33:18
  Maybe that's b- me being selfish 'cause I, I just don't enjoy having to do that, but- Sure. I can understand... there's definitely ways to do it. Yeah. Yeah, I...
• 33:26
  It reminds me of, like, back in Animalz days, to reference that again, one of the types of customers that we liked working with the most were the ones who, quote-unquote, "believed" in content marketing.
• 33:35
  Like, we thought of it as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• 33:37
  If you believe it, it actually is quite a bit more likely that this is gonna work, and if you question every single thing that we do, it's probably not gonna work 'cause we're just gonna be thinking so short term.
• 33:47
  But an interesting thing about brand that doesn't really apply to content is that there's a, I think, probably more of an evergreen quality to it.
• 33:53
  Like, so one of the main challenges of content is like you, you make these investments and you rely so heavily on the channels to get the stuff out there, like organic and social and email, and like you're always fighting the algorithms and trying to optimize for this, and it kinda creates this barrier between the message you're trying to get out and the people you're trying to get it to, and you have to, like, run it through this optimization filter for whatever channel it is, which is incredibly frustrating.
• 34:18
  And I do think that, as I mentioned before, I think a lot more, a lot more content marketers, a lot more marketing teams are gonna be thinking about, like, how do we take that barrier down?
• 34:26
  Like, how do we rely less on these channels? How do we tell our own story?
• 34:29
  How do we attract people to us instead of kinda doing what we've been doing, which is, like, relying on these platforms which are just incredibly unreliable long term to do that for us? Yeah.
• 34:41
  I think one of the things we were able to do at Buffer, which I was proud of, was to establish a very
• 34:46
  unique and consistent voice and tone to the degree that people would, like, know what to expect wherever they would find us online.
• 34:54
  And so I think what that allows you to do as a content creator is as soon as the blog isn't working anymore, you can take the same voice and tone and apply it to a community. You can apply it to social. Right.
• 35:03
  You can apply it to podcasts, which we did. And it kinda follows you from-- Your brand equity follows you from channel to channel, and the content just continues to, like,
• 35:12
  you know, live new lives and, and breathe new lives into different places. And so, like, as a content creator, I think the voice and tone aspect was really powerful in hindsight, like more powerful than I realized.
• 35:22
  I should admit, when I started at Buffer social media app, like scheduling app, I did not have a Twitter account. I was not on Facebook.
• 35:28
  I didn't know anything about social media, and I was writing expert how-to guides on social media from, like, day one.
• 35:35
  And I think the reason why it was successful was the voice and tone that we adopted of, like, we are in it with you. We are not certain on any of this stuff 'cause it changes so fast, but here we are, like- Mm...
• 35:45
  figuring it out together. That's cool. And that translates really well to a number of different channels that you're making content. I love that. Okay.
• 35:52
  Maybe one last question for you 'cause I wanna be respectful of your time here. What should content marketers be thinking about when it comes to brand right now?
• 35:59
  Like, let's say, just as an example, you're a content marketer at a SaaS company. You've relied heavily on organic.
• 36:04
  It's okay, but maybe, you know, you've seen a little bit of a decline, and you have this opportunity to rethink it a little bit, rethink what content is gonna look like over the next year or two.
• 36:13
  Are there any, like, really tactical things you would recommend those people do? Like, actually voice and tone I think is a really important one, like you mentioned, Kevin.
• 36:21
  Any other things that are top of mind that you would sort of steer content marketers in, in that direction? Hmm. I often think of like-- Like with brand, I think of why us and why now? And I think what is
• 36:32
  interesting about that for content marketers is it comes back to this... idea of understanding what is timely and what is relevant.
• 36:39
  And so as a content marketer, I think it's great to have a core competency, and then to attach, like, s- a second great thing onto that.
• 36:47
  So if you're a great blogger, maybe you are also a great TikToker, maybe you're also a great podcaster, maybe you're also great in Substack or newsletters.
• 36:54
  Like, you have a second skill that you can rely on, which gives you some flexibility when it comes to needing to pivot away from content, for instance.
• 37:01
  And then I think how you make those choices as a content marketer comes back to one of our brand pillars of really understanding your audience.
• 37:09
  And so who are they and where do they hang out, and what are they receptive to these days? For instance, we just... I saw something recently about the rise of content curation.
• 37:18
  And so if that is something that is in the zeitgeist and relevant, maybe the thing that you add is, you know, curated Substack that you share each week, or a curated TikTok thing of what you're reading or learning or understanding.
• 37:29
  And so being... Like, having your finger on the pulse and then making a clear decision of what skill you're adding is something I think would benefit content folks a lot. I love that.
• 37:38
  I'm trying to think, like, as a storyteller, I, a- and as, like, someone who's been a professional writer since I was 19, I always come back to Aristotle at some point. And we've got pathos, ethos, and logos.
• 37:53
  And pathos is an appeal to emotion, ethos is an appal- appeal to, like, ethics and, like, the higher self, what's right and wrong, and then logos is your appeal to, like, reason and what's logical.
• 38:04
  And knowing, like, if you imagined, like, a heat map of your homepage, or, like, a heat map of your white paper, or a heat map of your, you know, downloadable premium asset, your lead magnet, whatever, on the heat map, what...
• 38:20
  How much of it would be logos, how much of it would be ethos, and how much of it would be pathos? And I'm gonna guarantee you in a B2B SaaS context, it's gonna be a whole lot of logos and a little bit of ethos.
• 38:33
  And when, like, people put in the ethos, they think, like, "Oh, wow, this is, like, the really controversial, out there stuff," and, like, there's no pathos in it, like, at all.
• 38:41
  And so I think, like, knowing that there is a balance, and also leading with pathos, because there's, like, a reliable formula for conversion, and I, like, wrote it down so, like, I get it right, is emotional trigger, logical reason, and then you give someone an easy path to act on that logical reason.
• 39:05
  So, like, you get them hooked with the emotion, you keep them there by, like, explaining something that is, like, you know, reasonable, and then what do you do? And make the what do you do easy.
• 39:18
  And, like, that's tried and true. But I think people forget the, like, emotional part of it.
• 39:24
  And that can apply on, like, a micro scale in, like, a tweet, a LinkedIn post, and it can apply on a macro scale in, like, you know, your big annual report using your proprietary data that you're serving to everyone.
• 39:37
  That's awesome. I love that. I'm gonna listen to this podcast. Yeah. I don't always listen to this podcast- [laughs]... but I'm gonna listen to this one.
• 39:43
  I listened to one recently where th- we had Carly Baker on from HubSpot talking about, like, the podcast and YouTube environment right now.
• 39:49
  It was fascinating, and I put it on in the car, and my daughter, she's four, she was like, "Is that you, Dad? How did you get in the car?" She was just, like, fascinated by it. [laughs] It was really funny.
• 39:59
  But this is another one- That's sweet... I'm gonna definitely listen to. [laughs] Where can we send people? We'll send them to the website, right? You have your own community. Please tell us about that.
• 40:06
  There's a newsletter. I mean, there's a bunch of... We'll link to all this in the show notes, but please tell us about it. Yeah. You could start at aroundthebonfire.com. That's gonna be, like, our website.
• 40:16
  You've got our contact form on there. Please say hi if anything we said intrigued you. From there, you can also go to our newsletter. That's newsletter.aroundthebonfire.com.
• 40:27
  We talk about brand marketing, but we also kinda talk about, like, the lives that we want to live and our relationship to work as tech marketers, and, like, how that's affected us.
• 40:39
  We also talk a lot about creativity, 'cause that's something that we care very deeply about, and, like, nourishing your creative self as a marketer, because marketers are inherently creative people, and we like to forget that sometimes, but we are creative and we need to feed ourselves.
• 40:53
  And we also have a digital community that we just launched, like, two and a half weeks ago. Like, really not a long time. So please come join us there.
• 41:01
  You can either find it on our website, or it's at campout.aroundthebonfire.com. And so we'll see you in, in Camp Out, if that appeals to you. Okay, perfect.
• 41:11
  And I'll put links to all those things in the show notes so it's easier for people to find them and go there. Kevin and Shannon, thank you so much. It's awesome.
• 41:17
  You know, recently we've been exploring on this podcast kinda like the world beyond content, like adjacent to content, but like a little bit beyond.
• 41:24
  I think, like, all of us in the content world are having, like, maybe an existential moment of like, okay, we can't just do this one thing anymore. Like, how are we gonna use our skills in different ways?
• 41:34
  And, like, how should we think about this whole differently? So you're really helping us, like, round out that conversation, so thank you very much. Thank you, Jimmy. Oh, that's so nice. Yeah, thanks for having us on.
• 41:43
  Awesome. And I will, if it's okay with you, I've been setting a reminder for one year from every episode to reach back out to guests and see if they wanna come back on.
• 41:50
  So if you're open to that, I'll be in touch about that too. We would love that. Absolutely. Cool. Awesome. Shannon and Kevin, thanks so much. Thank you. Take care. How good was that?
• 41:59
  Thank you so much to Kevin and Shannon for coming on. Really cool to have a different format too with the three people. It's so often one-on-one. It was just kinda nice to have a couple different perspectives.
• 42:07
  Maybe that's something we'll do more of this year. Would encourage people, if you enjoyed this conversation, go to superpath.co/podcast.
• 42:14
  There's a chatbot in the bottom right corner that we train on all of our podcast transcripts.
• 42:19
  You can get quick summaries of all the episodes, and you can also ask it questions about, you know, like in this case you could say, like, you know, "Give me timestamps of when people talk about brand," and it will give you timestamps from a bunch of podcasts over the last year and a half.
• 42:32
  You know, so anyways, there's tons of cool ways to use that chatbot to get quick info, and these podcasts are sometimes long form.
• 42:39
  It's hard to listen to a hundred podcasts, I get it, so go check that out as a quick and easy way to get more info from this podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we'll see you next time. [outro music]