Latest / Content, Briefly / Freshpaint: A content strategy crash course with Mark Rogers

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Freshpaint: A content strategy crash course with Mark Rogers · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [gentle music] It's hard to, like, thread that needle of making a strategy.
• 0:05
  There's, like, some juxtaposition between going too high with it and making your strategy not useful at all, and then bringing it too low where your strategy is actually a content calendar or, or a content roadmap or something where it's not- Yeah...
• 0:15
  a strategy at all. Threading that needle's really tough, honestly.
• 0:18
  It might take a couple revisions or a couple tries to get at it, but if you hit that sweet spot, then your strategy does become a really useful document to understanding exactly where we need to go.
• 0:28
  [gentle music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, I'm chatting with Mark Rogers, the director of content marketing at a company called Freshpaint.
• 0:38
  Freshpaint is a HIPAA compliant CDP, which basically means that the software helps healthcare organizations market to potential patients with a bunch of privacy stuff that helps them make sure they don't reveal any information that should not be revealed.
• 0:54
  So there's plenty of CDPs out there.
• 0:56
  Freshpaint has a totally different take on this, and as a result, they're subject to a lot of legal stuff and government regulation and complexities that another CDP, like a segment, for example, is not subject to.
• 1:07
  So that gives Mark a very unique set of constraints to work within.
• 1:10
  The company's growing like crazy, though, and so Mark is finding ways to use content to fuel that growth in ways beyond just SEO, which is kinda, like, the most obvious way that a content team would operate.
• 1:21
  So it's really interesting to learn about what he's doing, how he's sort of taking inventory of the business and the industry and making plans around that. Also, Mark is posting about all of his learnings on LinkedIn.
• 1:32
  So we'll link to his LinkedIn profile in the show notes, but definitely encourage you to check that out because he's been very transparent about all the things he's doing and how it's going.
• 1:39
  So I will leave you with that, and I will get out of the way. Please enjoy this episode. Also, just a quick reminder to check out the new and improved Superpath Slack group. It's now 20 bucks a month.
• 1:50
  You can also get an annual discount. Your employer should probably cover it for you since it definitely counts as professional development. And I think what you'll find there is gonna be really exciting.
• 1:58
  There's some really interesting high-level strategy discussions, in-depth conversations on things like people management and career development. Honestly, it's awesome. I'm enjoying being in there more than ever.
• 2:08
  I think you will too. If you wanna check it out, just go to superpath.co/community and sign up there. [gentle music] Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here today with another episode of Content Briefly.
• 2:22
  We'll be talking to my friend Mark Rogers today. He's the director of content marketing at Freshpaint, which was...
• 2:27
  I don't know if you found the role through Superpath, Mark, but the job was the most popular job that we've ever had on the job board in terms of the number of people that applied for it and the number of questions that I got about it.
• 2:38
  So congrats. [laughs] Thanks. Would you mind just introducing yourself? Tell us a little about who you are, some of the work you've done over the past couple years, and then tell us about Freshpaint too.
• 2:46
  We'd love to know more about the company and the product. Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for having me on, first of all. My name's Mark, obviously. I'm director of content marketing at Freshpaint.
• 2:54
  I'll get into Freshpaint in a second, but I've been in content marketing for about the past decade. Before this, I worked at Animalz for just over four years there.
• 3:01
  Started as a content manager there, worked my way up, was eventually director of strategy over at Animalz.
• 3:05
  I actually came to Freshpaint because they were a client of Animalz a while ago, and I stayed in touch with the head of marketing at Freshpaint, and when they were looking to fill a content role, he reached out, we started chatting, and then I also saw it posted on Superpath, and I was like, "That's cool."
• 3:19
  And I found out after I got hired at Freshpaint that there was over 1,000 people applied for that role, so- [laughs] That's crazy... crazy, crazy demand. Yeah, just wild. But yeah, Freshpaint's a cool company.
• 3:30
  We call ourselves a healthcare data privacy platform, basically means we help healthcare companies do HIPAA compliant ads and analytics and all the good things that marketers and healthcare companies need to be effective at their jobs.
• 3:42
  My role as director of content marketing there is focused on bringing more people into the funnel, making sure more people are aware of Freshpaint, and then also helping the sales team close deals with content because it's a really long sales cycle.
• 3:55
  We're selling it at enterprise healthcare. It just takes a while to do that. So content's focused on kinda like greasing those sales wheels. Cool. Okay, cool. I have a couple follow-up questions for you about that.
• 4:04
  But first, seriously, congratulations on getting this role- Thanks. [laughs]... because I talked to quite a few people about it, and talked to some really, really talented content marketers.
• 4:12
  So speaks extremely highly of you that you got hired for this role, so seriously, congrats on that. Yeah, thanks.
• 4:17
  I am curious to know, Freshpaint, if I understand right, it's sort of like a customer data platform, a CDP, which I feel like is a term that gets thrown around a lot, and I feel like it's a tool that content marketers don't typically use in their day-to-day work, or maybe they do, but in a very tangential way.
• 4:32
  Yeah. Could you kind of explain how that works? I think I, like, maybe could explain it, but I'm not, I'm not actually sure. Yeah. Yeah. So technically, I guess at our core, we are, we are a CDP.
• 4:41
  Customer data platform is what that stands for. What that means is basically take data from point A and get it to point B. A lot of times that's more difficult than a lot of people realize.
• 4:51
  So, like, if you're trying to get data from an analytics tool into a data warehouse, it's not as easy as just connecting your data warehouse to that analytics tool.
• 4:59
  Sometimes that connection isn't there, or if it is there, sometimes the data's in the wrong formatSo CDPs generally help things get into the correct format and get in the right place.
• 5:08
  For Fresh Paint specifically, since we focus on healthcare, we focus on kind of governing that data as well. So we help anonymize a lot of that data that...
• 5:16
  Because it's healthcare, data needs to be anonymized, otherwise it runs HIPAA compliance risks.
• 5:20
  So we focus on anonymizing a lot of that before sending it to its destination, that way nobody violates HIPAA, everybody's safe, and at the same time, you can still do really cool ads and analytics for, for healthcare which has not traditionally been the case.
• 5:33
  Got it. Okay, that's really interesting. So then a company that uses Fresh Paint could do marketing activities to a group of people who they can't...
• 5:40
  I mean, I guess they have, like, some general idea of the demographics, but they don't know exactly who those individuals are because it's anonymized to protect their privacy. Exactly, yeah.
• 5:48
  We unlock a lot of use cases, but the biggest, uh, probably the easiest use case to think of is, so, like, remarketing through Facebook ads. If you work at an e-commerce company, really easy to do.
• 5:58
  Throw the Facebook pixel on your website, you can run remarketing. For healthcare, that's not possible because to do remarketing, Facebook needs to understand who was this exact visitor, what are the actions they took.
• 6:08
  So Fresh Paint is able to kind of be that intermediary where we can step in and strip out a lot of that personally identifiable information so that Facebook doesn't know anything about the person.
• 6:19
  They just know that this person took an action on a healthcare website, and we wanna reach them again. So Fresh Paint just helps enable that use case for healthcare. Got it. That's really interesting.
• 6:28
  You know, I've been, I've actually been getting a lot of ads on, uh, social and stuff from our local hospital, and the ads are always like, "Do you need a new knee?" [laughs] Or like, "Is that pain actually a hernia?"
• 6:38
  I'm like, "Are you... Did you know that I Googled something?" You know what I mean? Or is this just totally random? 'Cause sometimes I'm like, "Actually, my knee does kind of hurt."
• 6:45
  [laughs] And then I'm like, "But I didn't Google anything-" Well, yeah. [laughs] "... about, like, hernia pain." I don't know. But I wonder if, like, kind of the random feel of that is because they don't have any way...
• 6:52
  You know, they're probably not using a tool like Fresh Paint, therefore they can't target any of it. So they just have to throw a banner ad and hope it works.
• 6:59
  Yeah, that's pretty much how, how healthcare s- healthcare companies operate now, is they kinda take a shotgun approach. They just throw up ads and hope it works.
• 7:06
  And like, obviously your, your ROAS, your return on ad spend, is lower when you take that approach. So using a tool like Fresh Paint allows you to have great return on ad spend.
• 7:14
  It just helps companies do a lot of things. Kinda helps healthcare companies do the type of marketing and, and advertising that you see e-commerce companies doing, like the useful, powerful, good stuff. Right.
• 7:25
  So do you sell to an individual hospital or doctor's office, or is this like you're targeting a group that owns 50 hospitals?
• 7:32
  Or I don't know much about this world, but I imagine there's probably groups that own a lot of healthcare facilities. Yeah.
• 7:37
  So typically we're looking at, like, enterprise health companies, which are, like, 5,000, 6,000, 10- even 10,000 employees. So a lot, a lot of employees. So that's like your big healthcare systems that you've heard of.
• 7:49
  Any big healthcare systems in your city or wherever you're at, that's probably somebody that we're, we're targeting or talking to. Got it. Interesting. And then you mentioned a long sales cycle.
• 7:58
  And actually a few episodes ago, we talked to a woman named Brianna Voleski, runs content at a company called Inscribe, and they sell enterprise fraud detection software to banks.
• 8:06
  And she was saying, like, deals are happening on the golf course. Yeah. Working backwards from that, there's all these different ways that content can support it.
• 8:12
  Is it a similar type of thing, where, like, the sales folks are working with their prospects for six months or twelve months, something like that, like flying out to meet them, going out to dinner, like that type of thing?
• 8:22
  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's definitely that type of thing. It's somewhat an old school long sales cycle. Marketers have to be involved with the sale. A lot of times IT teams do, compliance teams, legal teams.
• 8:33
  So we have obviously, like, the internal champion at the company, but then there's six, eight, ten other people involved in this decision. So it just takes a long time to get that going. Yeah.
• 8:41
  It's a little more complex than, like, uh, Grammarly, which great tool, love the tool, but like they have an easier sales cycle than Fresh Paint. Yeah, that's interesting.
• 8:48
  I wonder that because my Grammarly subscription just expired recently, but I still have the Chrome- Oh, yeah... plugin in there. And so, like, the Chrome plugin- Yeah... is constantly like, "You spelled this word wrong.
• 8:57
  Pay us $100." Yeah. [laughs] You know what I mean? Yeah, exactly. I actually don't envy their product marketing folks or whoever works on conversion rate optimization 'cause the scale of it is probably very difficult.
• 9:07
  Yeah. Yeah. Different set of issues, I guess. Yeah. So you've been at Fresh Paint for two months-ish as we record this, and I would love to know what have you been working on since then?
• 9:15
  Like, how did you get in the door? I mean, maybe you already had some prior knowledge if they were a client in a previous job.
• 9:21
  What do the first couple weeks on the job look like as you just sort of get your feet wet and start to understand where the most pressing needs are? Yeah.
• 9:28
  I mean, my, my biggest focus in the first couple weeks, which, like I said, I was Director of Strategy at Animals, my previous agency.
• 9:34
  So you would think, like, my first action would be to jump in, figure out strategy, and build from there. I actually kind of flipped it.
• 9:39
  My first action was jump in and just start doing stuff to see what works, what people react to, just how things are going.
• 9:45
  So the first thing I did is start taking an inventory of all the content we have and just trying to find quick wins out of that content.
• 9:51
  So can I tweak this a little bit and re-promote it and get traffic to the website, or can I do something relatively quick just to get something happening, whether that's new email subscribers or, or tweak something the sales team finds useful so it can be a little more useful.
• 10:06
  Quick actions like that that'll just help right off the bat and help me understand what resonates with the audience and where we need to go with content.
• 10:12
  So that was really my first week, was just focused on figuring where all of our content is, figuring out what it is, figure out what our high-performing stuff is, and then trying to see if there's more opportunity to get more out of that.
• 10:23
  And then at the same time, obviously, like, spend a lot of time talking to the sales team, digging in on sales calls, just listening to the kinds of conversations that are happening, trying to get up to speed on the jargon, the technicalities of the sale, just to understand what resonates with the audience.
• 10:37
  Yeah. I would imagine there's probably a subject matter curve. Yeah, for sure.
• 10:42
  Like, healthcare, I, like I said, I don't really know anything about this world, but I imagine it's, like, a whole vast world of acronyms and jargon and probably some legalese too.
• 10:53
  Yeah, and that's exactly it, and a lot of-From listening to sales calls and talking to some of our customers, I know a lot of people hate jargon, but I think that's really important for an audience like this, 'cause if you can use some of that lingo, they understand.
• 11:04
  They're like, "All right, this isn't some outsider that's trying to market to us. This guy gets it. He's using the right words, the right language, the right way." So I think, like, that's really important to learn.
• 11:13
  I try to do my best to understand what are those words they're using. What are those acronyms?
• 11:17
  Do I need to spell out those acronyms every time in a piece of content, or do people get it, and I can just throw a BAA in there and people understand it? Yeah. That's cool.
• 11:25
  So stuff like that I think is really important. For sure.
• 11:28
  I would also like to just highlight for people listening that I think your approach of, like, the early days on the job of just getting in and doing some stuff and finding some quick wins is actually really cool because there's an alternative version of this where you're like, they hire you, you come in, you do an audit.
• 11:41
  Yeah. You do a bunch of keyword research. Yep. You write a strategy document, and then, like, six weeks later, somebody's like, "Hey, didn't we hire a content person? Like, what have they been doing?" [laughs] Yeah.
• 11:50
  Even if it's all, like, foundational work that will lead to good outcomes six or twelve months down the road, like, you kinda need to establish some rapport with the people and probably create some buzz around the new content person and all the exciting things they're gonna be able to do too.
• 12:03
  Yeah, that was a...
• 12:04
  I wouldn't say it was a concern of mine, but it was something I definitely thought about because I was the first content hire at Fresh Paint, so I wanted to make sure that people saw impact really quick of what I'm doing.
• 12:15
  Strategy is so, so important, and I do plan to revisit that, but right now, I think there's enough opportunity to just, like, grab low-hanging fruit, produce content around that, and then help people understand the value of content so that when I step back a little bit and build a full strategy, they're more bought into that.
• 12:30
  Not saying they're not bought in. My CEO's all bought into content. My boss is all bought into content, but at the same time, it's hard to sit there for six weeks and be like, "What is Mark doing here?" Yeah.
• 12:40
  [laughs] "Is he really worth the time if I'm, if I'm spending all of it on strategy?" So. Totally.
• 12:44
  I am curious because you did strategy at a high level at an agency where you get to work with a lot of different clients, how that informs the way you think about strategy for a single client. Yeah.
• 12:54
  I find that one of the biggest challenges that content teams have with strategy, I think, is that it's often not very well documented and is kinda loosey-goosey, which means it changes a lot or it's easy to bend- Yep...
• 13:07
  if someone says, "Oh, hey, there's a shiny new toy over here. Should we check this out?" And there's no guardrail put in place. And the documentation of it seems to be quite important, but also... Sorry, long question.
• 13:18
  Yeah.
• 13:19
  [laughs] The documentation also requires, like, a certain amount of research and education and learning before you can get to a point where you can put that document out there and feel confident that it's the right one.
• 13:29
  Yeah.
• 13:30
  That was always the challenge at an agency was what you just described is, like, we didn't always have enough time to put in the research, the work to come up with a strategy that I felt like this is dead-on the right one.
• 13:41
  A lot of times, it was, like, using a lot of my gut instincts to try to figure out what's the best path forward for this client or that client.
• 13:47
  And, you know, at the end of the day, I, I did a lot of good work for Customers to Animals.
• 13:51
  I don't feel bad about any of the work I did there, but I wanted the opportunity to go really deep into one company, one strategy, one persona. That's what I get at Fresh Paint.
• 14:02
  We have a few personas, but they're all in the same industry. I have a chance to learn the product better than any product I've, I've learned in the past four or five years at Animals.
• 14:10
  So it's been cool just focusing on one company, trying to build that brand, trying to be successful with that content there, and definitely a little bit of a change for me because it's not so much jumping around from company to company to company.
• 14:21
  It's one company, which is cool. So. For sure. I like the change. Yeah. There's a blog post somewhere on the Superpath blog about this kind of career framework we came up with called expand and contract. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
• 14:31
  And it's just sort of an observation of this trend where for me personally, I went back and forth between agencies and in-house work several times. Yeah. For the exact reason you just described.
• 14:40
  It's like, I want more surface area, I wanna zoom in, and then you're like, "Oh, and actually I want more surface area now." Yeah.
• 14:44
  [laughs] But I found people doing that with, like, small marketing team, big marketing team. Yeah. Freelancing, in-house job or w- people have different flavors of that.
• 14:52
  It's kind of a way to, like, shake up your career now and then. Kind of applying the same skills to a new challenge.
• 14:56
  That's what I think is really cool is over the past four, five years at Animals, I got to go really, really deep on content marketing in general.
• 15:04
  Now I get to go really, really deep on one company and get to apply a lot of the things that I learned at Animals from talking to hundreds of different companies.
• 15:12
  So it is definitely a cool way to, like, expand and contract and continue to progress your career like that. Totally. I do have a question for you about strategy. Yep.
• 15:20
  And maybe you're not this far along yet in the role at Fresh Paint, so you could pull from this or from the agency experience. Do you have any tips for getting buy-in on strategy?
• 15:29
  Because I feel like that's really important, right? That all the people who need to be bought in are bought in, and I feel like maybe it boils down to it's not even just, is it the right strategy?
• 15:37
  It's probably how it's presented. Is it a PowerPoint or is it a Google Doc? Yeah. Does it happen on a live call or is it asynchronous?
• 15:44
  Like, or do you find that there's any things in the creation and presentation of a strategy that make it more or less likely to be bought into? Yeah, a hundred percent.
• 15:52
  We tried so many different approaches at Animals because of that, that challenge of getting people to buy in on strategy and even, like...
• 15:58
  So when you, when you onboarded with Animals, you did a month of strategy, and a lot of times, like, in the sales process, that was a tough sell.
• 16:03
  So a lot of my job at Animals was being in the sales process as well and helping close customers and talking about the value of that strategy and getting that initial buy-in on, like, the front end of, like, why are we doing strategy.
• 16:16
  I always focused on, like, if these are the goals we wanna achieve, we can't get there without a framework helping us build the foundation for the work that we're gonna do, and that's the strategy is the foundation.
• 16:27
  So just helping people understand that, and a lot of times, when you focus on, let's build a foundation to achieve these goals, if you just tie it back to the goals, a lot of times people would buy in.
• 16:35
  And then when it comes to the strategy itself, it's kinda the same thing. I always started strategies, whether I was doing a written doc or a PowerPoint presentation, I always start with the goal.
• 16:44
  Here's where we wanna go. Here's the end goal. Here's what we wanna achieve. And then you kinda tear it down. I'd go backwards every time, like, "What's gonna hold us back from this goal?"
• 16:52
  And we'd talk about all the challenges, everything that's gonna be tough to achieve, so they understand the path forward isn't easy, it's not simple, but that's why we're putting together this strategy to help chart a path forward.
• 17:02
  And then from there, you can kinda rebuild it. So here's how we're gonna overcome this challenge.
• 17:05
  Here's how we're gonna overcome that challenge.And then by the end of the document, people kind of like had this aha moment where we had the goal, all the challenges that tore us down, and then the path forward that's gonna lift us up out of that.
• 17:16
  And that structure, whether it was presented in a Google Doc or, or a presentation, that structure seemed to work best for buy-in.
• 17:23
  In terms of, of presentations themselves, I always had better luck doing a live presentation with PowerPoint slides, just like quick hits, and then explaining the context.
• 17:32
  And then afterward, I would send over a whole written explanation of the strategy as well.
• 17:37
  So if there's any stakeholders that were on the call and wanna review anything, or if they need to sell it internally to other people, they could easily refer to my full document and pull out any notes from there.
• 17:48
  So sometimes it requires both approaches of presentation and a written doc to get all the context across to get the full buy-in of everything. It's a lot, but I think that's the best way to, to go about it.
• 17:58
  Yeah, I like that. I also wonder, like what you just described, it's a plan, right? Yeah. I think sometimes the word strategy gets conflated with maybe a creative vision- Yeah... like a branding concept.
• 18:09
  I feel like really what you need most of the time is you need a plan, and you call it a strategy because the plan is informed by business objectives, your knowledge of this particular persona, what resources you have, and the sort of like those things kind of come together to make a strategy, which then once you turn it into a list of tasks, suddenly feels like, "Oh, okay, now I feel like I know what to do."
• 18:31
  Yeah. "And I feel like I know how to get closer to this thing." Yeah, I think it's that exactly. Like, it's hard to like thread that needle of making a strategy.
• 18:39
  There's like some juxtaposition between going too high with it and making your strategy not useful at all, and then bringing it too low where your strategy is actually a content calendar or, or content roadmap or something where it's not a strategy at all.
• 18:50
  Threading that needle's really tough, honestly.
• 18:52
  It might take a couple revisions or a couple tries to get at it, but if you hit that sweet spot, then your strategy does become a really useful document to understanding exactly where we need to go.
• 19:02
  And then from there, you can build out your content calendar and get moving on content production. Yeah. That almost becomes like the easy part once all that other stuff's in place. Yeah.
• 19:09
  If you do that legwork, like the content calendar a lot of times just kind of appears to you. You're like, "Oh, shoot, these are the pieces I need to write. Let's get rolling." Yeah. Yeah.
• 19:17
  Kind of related to this, you were posting on LinkedIn, I think last week I saw a post you wrote about how in this new role you're not prioritizing SEO. And, you know, you don't throw shade at SEO.
• 19:27
  You're basically just saying like, "It's not our priority right now," and I feel like it would be pretty easy to come in and try to achieve some quick wins by saying, "Here's some keywords we don't rank for.
• 19:35
  Let's get some stuff spun up to rank for this stuff."
• 19:38
  But at the same time, I don't think that Fresh Paint hired a director level role with deep experience in strategy like you have to just do keyword research and- Yeah... outsource some SEO content.
• 19:51
  So I'm curious if you could fill in some gaps there, like had Fresh Paint been doing any meaningful SEO previously?
• 19:57
  As you got into the site, did you find anything interesting that you're like, "Hmm, maybe we'll come back to that later"? And then if not SEO, then what? Yeah. Yeah.
• 20:06
  I mean, so I think SEO has a ton of value for a lot of companies. I'm definitely not one of those people that's like, "SEO is dead. You should all do something else entirely." I think there's a ton of value for it.
• 20:15
  But for Fresh Paint, for the place we're at, the size we're at, the team size I have, I think it doesn't make sense for me to focus on SEO as a priority.
• 20:24
  It's partially because I think if we rank for keywords like customer data platform, which like we were talking about before, that's at the core what Fresh Paint is.
• 20:31
  If I rank for a keyword like that, it's gonna bring in a ton of traffic. A, it's extremely hard to rank for that keyword.
• 20:37
  B, if we do rank for it, we'll bring in a ton of traffic, but most of that traffic, probably all of that traffic, isn't our target audience.
• 20:44
  From talking to people in healthcare, they're just not searching customer data platform. They're searching things like...
• 20:49
  If they're searching at all, they're searching like HIPAA compliant data privacy tools or something like that, which we rank well for keywords like that already, so I'm not too focused on there.
• 20:57
  But the biggest way that like healthcare buys is from talking to their colleagues, learning from each other, going to conferences, learning there.
• 21:05
  So they learn from colleagues and peers in the industry rather than spending time on Google Search. So for me, that was, that was my first trigger that like, all right, shouldn't focus on SEO.
• 21:16
  At the same time, I do think there is some quick wins to be had from an SEO perspective if we wanted them. I was talking about that content inventory I put together in my first week.
• 21:24
  I have a whole list of content refreshes from an SEO perspective that we could prioritize at some point.
• 21:29
  I don't know if we'll get to them this year or next year or even the year after, but if we do wanna tackle them and get to those keywords, we can definitely have some quick wins in the refresh side of things.
• 21:38
  But like I said, I just don't think it's gonna bring in the right audience for us to focus on right now. For sure. You know, also, say you wanna rank for a customer data platform.
• 21:46
  The inevitable first H2 will be what is a CDP? [laughs] I'm sure the person who like doesn't even know what it is is probably not gonna buy it. Yeah, and that's the thing.
• 21:56
  If somebody is just asking that question, they're probably not our target audience.
• 22:00
  So I'm gonna let all the other CDPs in the space do all that 101 level education, which I think is important for the industry, but there's enough of it out there that I don't think another piece on that topic from Fresh Paint is really gonna help anybody solve any new problems or anything like that.
• 22:15
  Sure. Yeah. Honestly, you make the world a better place by not writing that article.
• 22:18
  [laughs] Interesting though, just to follow up on something else you said, is having a really strong understanding of where the buyers are, how do you reach them, and how do they make decisions?
• 22:27
  Because, so like you just mentioned, they go to conferences, and they talk to their peers.
• 22:30
  That's really interesting if that's something that is really baked into the healthcare industry, whereas like Buffer's almost too good of an example, but like they were like a content first growth plan, right?
• 22:42
  It's just like, let's get tons of blog posts, get tons of people on the site, and I bet a bunch of them will opt into a free trial or a freemium version of this.
• 22:49
  It's like the right way to reach the marketing person who's already on Twitter and reading marketing newsletters and hanging out in marketing communities, et cetera.
• 22:57
  Whether they did that deliberately or not, it worked perfectly for the type of buyer that they wanted to reach. Oh, yeah.
• 23:02
  So like in this case, if what you're really trying to do is add some fuel to word of mouth, 'cause like the word of mouth is probably so powerful in this world- Yes...
• 23:09
  then this like opens up this whole world of things that you might do to enhance a thing that maybe is already happening or you wanna make happen more quickly, or you want one person to give two recommendations instead of one or whatever.
• 23:21
  And it's not even like bottom of funnel content. I feel like it's potentially like a whole new, I don't even know what you'd call it.The word-of-mouth fuel playbook or whatever.
• 23:30
  And I could imagine there's like, a whole strategy to be built just around that one thing. Yeah.
• 23:34
  Without a doubt, and that's pretty much like, where my head space is at right now is like, how do we unlock those conversations that are happening between two colleagues at two different hospital systems or healthcare organizations?
• 23:45
  The thing about healthcare is they're pretty slow to adapt to changes or slow to adapt to new technology, and that's not any fault of their own.
• 23:51
  A lot of times it's because of like, the government regulations that just make them have to be conservative about a lot of the decisions they take.
• 23:57
  So they wanna see proof of something that somebody else has done before they take it on themselves. Hmm. Oh, that's interesting. And at the same time, competition's very different in healthcare as well.
• 24:06
  So if you're at a Buffer, for example, you're probably not gonna go talk to Hootsuite about their marketing strategy.
• 24:12
  But if you're a healthcare system in Colorado, you might talk to somebody in California about what their strategy is. Ah. Because the geography means that they're not direct competitors. Yeah, exactly. Interesting. Yeah.
• 24:23
  But they can learn from each other and help each other. Those conversations happen a lot, and us tapping into them is... It's been powerful so far, and it's something that we wanna continue to do more of.
• 24:33
  That's really interesting. Huh. I haven't really thought about that much because usually SaaS, all SaaS competes against each other, and SaaS companies make SaaS for other SaaS companies.
• 24:40
  So everyone competes, and it's like you, uh, you can't really learn from one customer to the next. So the geography thing, actually, that's very interesting as well. It's cool. Yeah, it makes it really interesting.
• 24:48
  And like I said, in a lot of the healthcare organizations, they place a lot of trust in other people, and that includes the agencies they work with, the law firms that they hire.
• 24:56
  So it's like those agencies, those law firms, those are the partners that we're trying to connect with and build content with, and that's, that's where I think there's a lot of content to be created is how can we do co-marketing with a healthcare-specific marketing agency?
• 25:09
  Oh, interesting. That's the kind of content that I'm really focused on right now. Yeah. Yeah. I like that.
• 25:14
  Have you found or do you anticipate that it will be difficult to find content creators because of the subject matter or if there's complexity around government regulation or understanding HIPAA well enough to speak to it intelligently?
• 25:26
  Yeah. It's, it's not like an insurmountable task, I think, 'cause I look at myself. I didn't come from a healthcare marketing background.
• 25:33
  I just jumped in and learned and figured things out, and I'm definitely not a subject matter expert by any means, but I'm starting to figure things out.
• 25:39
  So I think if you get the right content creator, if you can hire them on, they can learn HIPAA compliance or, or this audience or whatever it needs to.
• 25:46
  So I, I, you know, I've been working with some freelancers, and they're all really good, even if they don't have healthcare backgrounds. It's more like, "Do you have the ability to do the research I need?
• 25:54
  I'll give you a leg up- Yeah... with the subject matter side," and then run with it from there. So it's been, I mean, it's been a challenge, but not a massive challenge to find content creators in the space. Yeah.
• 26:03
  Got it. I've certainly come across a handful of writers in my career where they're just so good at asking the right questions that they're gonna figure it out. Yep.
• 26:11
  And sometimes actually because they don't have deep expertise in whatever industry that is, they might bring a new perspective, or they ask questions that maybe seem so obvious to someone who's worked in it for twenty years that they wouldn't even bother to ask, but actually it deserves to be asked, you know?
• 26:25
  Yeah, definitely. Have you started honing in yet on the metrics that you really care about? And I guess related to that, like what is the primary call to action on the site? Is it to book a demo? Yeah.
• 26:34
  Book a demo is where we wanna eventually push whatever website visitor. We don't have a free version or anything like that. That's not the focus for Fresh Paint. It's get on a call with the sales team.
• 26:44
  The sales team tailors the demo to the specific needs of that healthcare organization. So it's hard to have a free version. Nice. Okay, so we're recording this in September of twenty twenty-three.
• 26:55
  Can you visualize yourself in September twenty twenty-four? What will be going on? Can you imagine like, what that world looks like yet? Oh, I'm not even sure I can visualize October right now. [laughs] Yeah.
• 27:06
  We've just got so much going on, and there's so much opportunity.
• 27:09
  The biggest challenge is like honing in and figuring out what opportunity do I wanna focus on rather than everything under the sun because that would be a disaster, so. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah.
• 27:17
  What a great problem to have though. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. It's a cool problem. I've never had a problem like this, and I love it. It's a fun challenge to figure out. Yeah, definitely.
• 27:26
  Do you mind if I ask you just a couple quick hit type questions, stuff we ask everybody? Yep. Team structure is one. So you report to Ray, director of marketing.
• 27:34
  What does the rest of marketing look like, and like what are those roles? Yeah. We're a super small marketing team. Ray's the head of marketing. There's me in content marketing.
• 27:41
  We have a guy named Dave who's in demand gen. He's awesome. And then we have a woman named Yvette who's in charge of events, and that's pretty much the entire marketing team right there.
• 27:50
  So Fresh Paint as an organization is only about twenty-two or twenty-three people at this point. Oh, interesting. Oh, that's smaller than I thought. Yeah. We're small. We're lean.
• 27:57
  We're growing really fast, which is fun, but our CEO is all focused on move smart and make things work properly rather than move fast and break things, so. Yeah. Yeah. The company's growing fast.
• 28:07
  We're trying to hire to keep up but not trying to over-hire where we're in a place of too little work for too many people. Yeah.
• 28:12
  When I come across a small marketing team, it sends a signal to my brain about the type of company this is.
• 28:18
  If Fresh Paint has built a great product that people already wanna use, and their primary growth mechanism to date has been word of mouth, and then there's a lean marketing team fueling that, that's just such a different scenario than raising a bunch of money- Yeah...
• 28:31
  not really sure if you have product market fit yet, and throwing a bunch of marketers at it to see if you can connect the dots. Yeah. That's been probably the coolest thing for me.
• 28:39
  We are a VC-backed company, which was one of the things I was a little hesitant about jumping into 'cause I didn't wanna be in a situation where it's like problems with the product are masked by a huge amount of advertising dollars just being thrown at the product to drive people in.
• 28:51
  So we were growing sustainably, which is cool, and super lean, super small marketing team.
• 28:56
  And before I joined, it was just Ray and Dave, the head of marketing and demand gen guy, and they did so much work, just the two of them, that it was just... I'm just like, "Oh, I don't know how you did all this."
• 29:05
  That's awesome. I do wanna follow up too about Yvette, I think her name was, who runs events. Are events virtual events only, or do you have in-person events also? Both.
• 29:11
  So we'll do a lot, a lot of webinars with our partners, with other people in the industry, and then we also do in-person events. Like, the team right now is in Chicago this week for a healthcare conference.
• 29:21
  We're doing a lot of things there, so it's a little bit of both. Very cool. Another quick hitter I wanted to touch on was team communication. Is there a weekly or biweekly marketing meeting?
• 29:30
  Is there a content-specific meeting? And if you're able to share anything about the structure of those meetings, that'd be helpful.
• 29:36
  And, and the reason I ask this because I find that the way that teams communicate, when you sort of unearth some of it, it provides really good inspiration to other content teams, like ways they might improve their own communication.
• 29:45
  Yeah. So we do, uh, we do a weekly marketing standup, and right now that's...
• 29:49
  The way we focus that is what are the issues that content can help solve with demand gen, or what are the issues that content and events can work together on?
• 29:56
  It's all about what's one person struggling with that another person can help solve? And we talk through those, and, you know, we might set up another meeting to help solve a problem.
• 30:03
  Good example, like Dave on the demand gen side, he was building a new account-based marketing program, and he was like, "Oh, I need, I need a whole bunch of ads written.
• 30:11
  I don't have time for that this week 'cause I have X, Y, Z other things." Gave me a perfect opportunity to be like, "Hey, you know, I have a little bit of bandwidth. Let me jump in, solve that problem for you.
• 30:19
  I'll write a ton of ads." That's what I did. It's just good to like, have those conversations about what are you blocked by? How can anybody on the team help?
• 30:27
  If there's a way to help, then let's figure it out, solve the problem, and move on. So that's pretty much how we structure our marketing standups.
• 30:33
  We don't have a content-specific meeting right now because it would just be a meeting with myself, but, uh- [laughs] Yeah, yeah.
• 30:38
  I imagine all that will probably evolve quite a bit over the next couple of months as you really start scaling upContent production and, and all that Yeah.
• 30:45
  I'll be hopefully growing the team within the next six, eight months. So I hope to figure out a lot of those problems, and hopefully have a lot of those problems, like, what do I do on this meeting?
• 30:53
  So I'll keep you posted on how I sort those out. [laughs] Yeah, yeah. In the meantime, enjoy the extra time in your day. Yeah. [laughs] One of the things I did wanna ask you about was generative AI.
• 31:02
  I'd say we asked this to about half the people on this podcast, and I'm always slightly hesitant to bring it up 'cause I think there's some fatigue out there- Yeah...
• 31:10
  on generative AI, and it's like, do we really need to talk about creating content briefs with AI anymore? Like I, I think everybody gets it.
• 31:17
  But I'm gonna throw it out there anyways, more because of the healthcare aspect of this.
• 31:21
  And the thing I'm curious about is, if you've played around with it at all yet, can it help, or is the subject matter such that it's too risky to hand off the generation of content to ChatGPT or whatever other tool because it's too deep to get, like, surface level information back?
• 31:36
  Yeah, I mean, I actually use generative AI pretty much every day in my job. I find it really helpful for specific things.
• 31:43
  I tried it early on for, like, can it write a whole paragraph on this topic or something like that, and it didn't really produce great results there.
• 31:50
  But what I find it really helpful for is helping me work through writer's block or helping me come up with forty-seven title options for an article I wrote. Just kinda like sparring back and forth on different things.
• 32:00
  So as a writer, one of the areas I always struggle with is intros, so I find it really helpful to, like, I'll paste my intro into ChatGPT. My prompt is usually like, "This sucks. How can I make it better?"
• 32:09
  And, like- [laughs]... it'll come up with some interesting suggestions.
• 32:12
  A lot of times they're not good, but at least it helps me think about the intro or whatever I'm struggling with in a different way, and then I can take it from there and craft it in a different direction.
• 32:20
  So it just helps push me past that point of, like, beating my head against the wall. I don't know where to go with this intro. I think Ryan Law, when he was at Animalz, he coined the term of, like, sparring with AI.
• 32:30
  That's kinda how I approach it. It's useful to, like, throw things at a wall, see what bounces back, and, and develop your thinking from there. Yeah. That makes sense.
• 32:37
  It's definitely very difficult and intimidating to look at a blank Google Doc and then get it all the way to an article or a newsletter or a social post or whatever that's ready to be put into the CMS and published.
• 32:48
  So- Yes... I'm definitely a fan of, like, if you can find some efficiencies in there, great. If you can find some ways to, like, spur your own creative thinking, great. Yeah.
• 32:56
  I know all of this could be completely different three months from now. It is. But at the moment, those are, like, great use cases and maybe a ceiling. I don't know. Maybe not a ceiling for everyone.
• 33:04
  But at least right now, if you wanna create really good stuff that people actually wanna read, use AI as the sparring partner. Yeah. Still do some of that heavy lifting yourself. Yeah.
• 33:13
  I think you have to, especially if you're trying to do, like, subject matter expert heavy content, then you have to do the heavy lifting yourself.
• 33:20
  AI might be able to write a good, like, what is a customer data platform post, might be able to handle that well. Yeah.
• 33:25
  If that's, like, your focus for your content strategy, or your high level one-on-one style content, then maybe it'll work well.
• 33:31
  But I think for anybody else, it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to spend a lot of time there. Yeah, totally.
• 33:37
  Mark, I really appreciate you spending time talking about this, and maybe September twenty twenty-four we re-record another episode because I'd just be so curious, how did it play out? Yeah. What'd you end up doing?
• 33:46
  How did it go? What did you learn? Who did you hire? All those types of things, 'cause obviously, like, some of that is still TBD for the future.
• 33:52
  But honestly, I think it's really cool what you've been up to for the last couple of months, and I think there's a lot to learn, really actually quite a bit to learn from that experience so far that maybe could help some other folks think about, you know, just ways to shake up some of the things they're doing.
• 34:05
  You know, just maybe think about some new ways to look at old problems, things like that. So thank you, really appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate you having me on.
• 34:12
  I'm looking forward to figuring out some of this stuff myself.
• 34:14
  I'll throw in a, a plug for me on LinkedIn, as I'm posting a lot of the stuff that's going on behind the scenes at Fresh Paint from a content marketing perspective.
• 34:22
  So if you wanna follow along there of, like, my successes, I'm hoping to post failures too, 'cause I wanna be honest with people about how it's going.
• 34:29
  So be posting a little bit of both, so follow me there and you can hopefully learn, and then maybe by September twenty twenty-four we'll record that next podcast. Cool. I love it.
• 34:37
  And we'll make sure we link to your LinkedIn in the show notes so the people can get to it quickly. Awesome. Cool. Awesome, Mark. Thanks so much. Really appreciate it and look forward to doing this again. Yeah.
• 34:44
  Thanks a lot, Jimmy. Appreciate you having me on. [outro music]