Latest / Content, Briefly / Workweek: Ben Bradbury's advice on talent-first content strategy
Transcript
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- 0:53[gentle music] I think a big piece of it as an operator is just having the empathy and being able to listen to the creator's goal.
- 1:01Ultimately, good creators have a very concrete vision of the brands they want to build, and then being able to use my, what I would call medium expertise, paired with their domain expertise to create a roadmap and a vision for their media company which they can really get excited about for the long term.
- 1:17[gentle music] Hey, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Content Briefly. We have a different episode for you today. I spoke with Ben Bradbury, who runs audio and video production for Workweek.
- 1:29Workweek is a talent-first creator network, which basically means that they help creators like Tracy Wallace, who I'm sure many of you know, run newsletters and podcasts. So there's a sort of centralized infrastructure.
- 1:41They have people who specialize in coaching up podcasters and newsletter publishers.
- 1:45They have folks who do all of the publishing and repurposing behind the scenes, and then that allows the folks like Tracy to focus on getting her subject matter expertise out the door every week for people who really care about reading it.
- 1:57So this is B2B content, but it's not to drive free trials for a SaaS company. Now, that said, there's so much to learn from the way that Workweek approaches their content.
- 2:07It's all about empowering the talent to do their very best work, and secondarily, it's about optimizing that stuff for the reader.
- 2:16Content is the product rather than content selling a product, and while not everything will translate perfectly to a B2B SaaS company, there's a lot here to be inspired by.
- 2:24So I'll get out of the way, and hope you enjoy this episode with Ben Bradbury. [gentle music] Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here. Another episode of Content Briefly for you.
- 2:34Really excited for this one, chatting with Ben Bradbury, head of audio, video, and production at Workweek. So gonna have a kind of a different flavor to this episode than some of our others. We'll get into all that.
- 2:43Ben, thank you so much for being here. Do you mind just introducing yourself, telling us a little bit about what you do and a little bit about your background? Jimmy, thanks so much for having me on the show.
- 2:51Been a fan of Superpath for, uh, a couple years, and so really appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, so a bit about me. I've been in the podcast space for five years.
- 2:58Started my own show, Subject Matter, back in November, which was really a way to explore different perspectives.
- 3:04Me and my cohost at the time would share two conflicting points of view and then have the audience kinda make up their answers.
- 3:10That led down a rabbit hole of understanding scripted narrative podcasts, the impact of different cadences of episodes on the feed for momentum, and how that impacts distribution, and really what it takes to build out a kind of podcast infrastructure at scale.
- 3:24And so I productized that into a content marketing agency back in over lockdown, and at the tail end of that was acquired by a media company called Workweek just starting out the gates, and they are, uh, all B2B media company with a focus on creators at the center.
- 3:41What Workweek's trying to do is really upend the traditional media model where talent is pretty egregiously arbitraged, and they do all the work and are not kind of compensated for that.
- 3:51With Workweek, we always want our creators to be the highest-paid people at the company.
- 3:55And so for us, having twenty-plus creators, we see that as twenty-plus distinct media companies, and then the fuel that makes that possible is this layer of operational talent underneath the creators which allows them to build out these media businesses.
- 4:09And so for me, I am managing one part of that flywheel, which is all about audio and video content.
- 4:15And so the kind of four main sides to that, if you think about it like a square, the first side is podcasts, building out the podcast network strategy, coordinating content production there.
- 4:25The next side is virtual events, so very similar skill to podcasts but in a live arena where you can interact with your community.
- 4:33Then YouTube, which is tied into podcasts and virtual events for sure, but also building out original YouTube channels and programming.
- 4:39And then finally, providing production services to Workweek's other business units, as it makes sense to have our own kind of in-house production team for unit economics.
- 4:49And so I'll be helping everyone from education with their courses to live events with their graphics to really help produce that kind of content efficiently. That was such a helpful overview.
- 4:59I have so many follow-up questions.
- 5:00First, very interesting that your business was acquired and that's how you, you became part of Workweek, because one of the things I wanted to ask you is, of the creators on the platform, is Workweek launching different newsletters and podcasts from scratch with some of these creators, or is it more like an acquisition model?
- 5:16Like, content marketers will be quite familiar with Tracy Wallace's newsletter, Contentment. Yes. That's very popular. It gets shared in our Slack group every week when it's published. Mm-hmm.
- 5:24I actually don't know the story. Was it started at Workweek, or was this something Tracy was doing that then kind of joined the network later on? Yeah. Sure.
- 5:31So Tracy's a great example of a operator who has this deep domain expertise.
- 5:36She's built this up from her time at Klaviyo, her time before that, and she really understands the nuts and bolts of content marketing pretty deeply and seeing it as the strategic go-to-market function for new product launches.
- 5:48The bottleneck for her was always the bandwidth. Someone like Tracy has the ability to write a newsletter. She has the ability to stand on stage and magnetize people.
- 5:57She also has the ability to create a course of her content. But the bottleneck is always time and resources.
- 6:04And so that's where Workweek comes in, is we're really able to scale the creator's domain expertise into these other product lines.
- 6:12And so that was the value prop of working with her, is Tracy has had all these kind of strong opinions bubbling in her head, but she doesn't know how to, as a creative, engage in the creative process to turn that into a structured newsletter, and then there's acquiring subscribers, then there's promoting it, that whole shebang.
- 6:27And Workweek has a machine to help with that, ranging from newsletter coaches to distribution, people scaffolding in our email service provider, all these kind of nuts and bolts that you wouldn't really think about until you are in the grind of actually producing one of these newsletters once a week or up to three times a week.
- 6:43And so Tracy was a pretty early-stage creator for us, where we co-created the newsletter with us.We will also work with more mature creators where we can take some of that operational lift off of them and, and really help operationalize some of their business as well.
- 6:59So good example in the direct-to-consumer niche, still in that marketing umbrella w- alongside Tracy, is Nick Sharma.
- 7:05Nick is the CEO and founder of Sharma Brands and wanted to do a podcast with one of his best friends, Moiz Ali, the founder of Native Deodorant, that was acquired, crazy story, acquired by Procter & Gamble in two and a half years after founding for about a hundred mil.
- 7:19Hmm. Wow. [laughs] And so Moiz just has this very, yeah, insane like kind of rocket ship trajectory and very unfiltered takes on direct to consumer.
- 7:28And so for us, they already have the means and credibility underneath them. What Workweek is doing is allowing that to bring that to a bigger room.
- 7:36And so that's where I come in, helping them figure out the format of their show, the production on the back end, creating video clips, sponsor integration, and that's the podcast Limited Supply, which has become a household name in the e-commerce and direct-to-consumer space.
- 7:49So to answer your question, it ranges depending on the stage the creator is at, but we're always trying to create partnerships that are as beneficial for the creator, depending on the stage they're in in their journey.
- 7:59That's really interesting. So your pitch to someone like Tracy is essentially you could do this yourself, you could use Substack, or you could use whatever ESP and start building up a newsletter.
- 8:08We're gonna help you supercharge it. We already have an existing infrastructure. I assume there's probably ad sales people to help sell sponsorships.
- 8:15I wonder, too, if there's an element of how many Substack newsletters have started and died off after two or three months. You know, there's like an initial high from doing it. Yep.
- 8:23The interest fades away over time when, you know, it gets hard, like you have to continue doing it, whereas this represents a more formalized approach, which I imagine helps people get over that hump.
- 8:32Kinda like the endurance hump. Yeah. Because I would imagine the longer you stay committed to it, the more you learn about the audience, the better the content can be, the more subscribers you get, et cetera.
- 8:40Yeah, totally. And I think for people listening who work with talent or are talent themselves, it also comes down to the conviction in the kind of company that you're trying to build.
- 8:49Like, we're not just talking about, hey, how many subscribers do we think we can hit in this next month?
- 8:53And of course, unique open rate and churn is important in having an engaged list that you can monetize through other product SKUs.
- 8:59But what's ultimately really important is that we have a media company that they can get excited about.
- 9:03Like on my wall back there is Walt Disney's Disney map from the fifties, which was kind of the first time a media company had been visualized where Disney had this engine, which was animation, which he could then franchise out into a theme park, into music licensing, into merchandise.
- 9:20And similar to us is newsletters are the center of that flywheel, where when we have these engaged audiences that are hard to reach with high purchasing power, we can develop other products off the back of it.
- 9:29And so the question to the creator is then, what do you want to build? Some creators want to come in, and they want to take the biggest stages.
- 9:36And Nicole Caspersen, for example, just got back from the Women's World Banking Conference in Mumbai, India, where they flew her out to speak on fintech because she's become one of the leading voices in the fintech space.
- 9:47Versus Heather Youssef, our chief people officer, she had zero subscribers to her newsletter, hadn't created a single send nearly exactly a year ago.
- 9:55Cue today, she's at over a hundred thousand subscribers, over a fifty percent unique open rate, and is the largest HR newsletter in the country because of her unfiltered takes, which now have a podium and a place to be shared.
- 10:07But those creators, they have, like, very distinct visions. And I've spoken to both of them about where they want to go, and it would be silly to try and bucket them under the same thing.
- 10:15And so I think a big piece of it as an operator is just having the empathy and being able to listen to the creator's goal.
- 10:20Ultimately, good creators have a very concrete vision over the brands they want to build, and then being able to use my, what I would call medium expertise with audio and video, medium as in the format of content that's being created, paired with their domain expertise to create a roadmap and a vision for their media company, which they can really get excited about for the long term.
- 10:41Is it easier to launch a newsletter or a podcast these days? Ooh, what a great question. Well, first of all, it depends on your area of expertise, and it also depends what you're trying to build into your stack.
- 10:53So newsletter to me is more of a capture mechanism, and podcasts are more of a retention mechanism in B2B. This is my area of expertise.
- 11:00Obviously, Workweek is a hundred percent B2B, but for us, great media companies are data companies today.
- 11:06And so the newsletter for us represents a chance for us to understand our audience straight out the gate and understand things like industry, like function, like location, very early on in their journey within the Workweek ecosystem.
- 11:18Podcast data, for those of you who don't know that are listening, is very tricky to understand accurately.
- 11:25And the solutions that we do have in place through hosting platforms like Spotify's Megaphone, audience intelligence layers like Nielsen and Experian, you're still triangulating off of device IP, these demographics and psychographics, which aren't entirely accurate and don't give you that kind of level of qualitative sophistication that you can get with a newsletter.
- 11:44That said, if I have Jimmy Daly in my ear for forty-five minutes on a Monday morning, I feel like I know you. That's what we call a parasocial relationship. It's the same dynamic that's in place in reality TV shows.
- 11:57It's one way. You get invested on the people in screen on your ear without them knowing you, and that's the value of the podcast, is it's really retention at scale, is you feel like this friend on demand.
- 12:07The newsletter doesn't have that emotional feeling, tone, or texture in the voice, but the text does have the advantage of being able to give the reader their own voice to process and the data capture off the back end.
- 12:19So I think it really depends on where your core competency is. I believe that creators will kind of lean one way. Me, for example, I'm much better with voice than text.
- 12:31We have a ton of creators that are much better with text than voice. And then we have a good handful that are just masters at both because they're built like that.
- 12:38And so leaning into what you're personally best as, as a creator, I think is the first place that I would start. That's fantastic. The next thing I wanted to ask you is, does Workweek have a studio arm of the business?
- 12:49Because I imagine as you build so much expertise in the mediums, HR, content marketing, fintech, like there's a ton of SaaS companies that operate in this space.
- 12:58Is there a service arm to help businesses launch newsletters and podcasts in similar spaces? Yeah, absolutely. Branded content is a big piece of what we do. And so there's really kind of two value props with that.
- 13:08One is our operational expertise.
- 13:10So for example, we just launched a new podcast in the fintech space targeting a diverse Latin American population and kind of elevating the voices of that demographic.We have the operational expertise to deliver that podcast.
- 13:23Our account management team is world-class with client experts. We know how to do the production on the back end, cadence, cover art, you name it, we got it.
- 13:29But then the other piece of this and why I really enjoy producing these projects, Jimmy, is that we actually get to let the creator steer it.
- 13:37So, for example, we have a creator in the healthcare niche called Blake Madden.
- 13:41When I think about people who can synthesize insights on the infrastructure of the hospital industry for hospital executives, Blake is probably top five in the game, and it's because he had a newsletter called The Healthy Muse where he pulled in forty plus sources of healthcare news every single week, aggregated it like a machine, and now has those proprietary data insights that people like Mark Cuban end up engaging and retweeting his stuff on, on socials.
- 14:06And so we had a company that came to Blake and said, "Hey, we want to do a virtual event with you." And Blake came in and said, "Hey, let's actually make this custom."
- 14:13They're in the security space, and so Blake and them together created this narrative which explains why security is important, why HIPAA compliance is changing within regulations in the healthcare industry.
- 14:25These regulations are changing right now. In fact, a bill was passed as of recording this two weeks ago, which is kind of flipping the model on its head, so the content is timely for the people in the audience.
- 14:34But what's most exciting about that is the, the client gets to lean on Blake's domain expertise- Mm-hmm... and Blake gets to lean on the client's narrative and create something that's really organic-feeling.
- 14:43It doesn't feel like an advert at all. And so that's what's cool to me is that the creator gets to drive the discussion, and then when I'm in those conversations, I'm really, again, just listening and synthesizing.
- 14:53"Okay, Blake, it sounds like you want to do this. The client's values are this. How about we package it like this? What about this for the segment? What about this for the title? What about this for the abstract?"
- 15:02And then everything has to be cleared by the creator before we send it to the client 'cause it's ultimately the creator's project, and that, I think, creates, like, a pretty unique value prop in the branded content space.
- 15:12I love that.
- 15:13There's something I've been thinking about recently is that as someone who runs a community, I get hit up by SaaS brands every now and then who say, "You know, we run a community, or we would like to create one.
- 15:21What are some tips that you might have for us?" And I can offer a bunch of tips, but I think the biggest challenge is that the only stakeholder I have is members. Mm-hmm.
- 15:29I don't have to answer to anyone else, and I'm always a little hesitant to offer advice knowing that a SaaS company running a community will sort of operate within a set of constraints that are completely different than mine.
- 15:40I imagine the same is true for newsletters and podcasts, right?
- 15:42Like, when the content is the product, you can focus exclusively on making it great, getting the person's voice out there, optimizing it for the readers, et cetera, whereas within the bounds of a larger B2B SaaS content strategy, it gets a little muddy.
- 15:56Of the content strategies that I see, and I'm fortunate to look at many, so many are still SEO first and then everything else. Like, there's a little touch of thought leadership. There's some sales enablement.
- 16:07Maybe they run a podcast, but it's probably someone internally running it almost like a side project. You know what I mean? It's difficult to optimize it for the listener or the reader- Totally...
- 16:16depending on the type of medium, in a way that Workweek doesn't have those constraints. So you can, I would imagine, do such a better job presenting something to the reader or listener that they really love. Yeah.
- 16:26I would like to think so. I mean, there's a couple angles to that. So one, just to touch on, we build community with our creators, and those look very different, again, depending on the audience.
- 16:35Heba Yusuf with I Hate It Here, our HR brand, her community is called Safe Space because a lot of HR industry professionals want a place to open up about their industry that isn't necessarily super public and is anonymized and safe behind closed doors.
- 16:51That looks very different to Blake's community, Boardroom, for hospital executives who are really there for the networking, and so long as they can meet once a month with other high-powered operators, that is value in and of itself.
- 17:01And so the communities that we design, Olithia, our community manager, is excellent at this, are really designed with those kind of nuances in mind.
- 17:09Going back to your question, though, on constraints, it is really interesting kind of approaching it from the other way around.
- 17:15So for us, we have always seen media as this wedge, which is very quick to monetize but not necessarily as sustainable. Media companies trade for between four to eight X EBITDA on the stock exchange.
- 17:27SaaS companies, Snowflake, when it had the biggest tech IPO ever, to use an extreme example, traded at about 40 X revenue, and that is because of the no marginal cost of reproduction, the lack of linear hiring.
- 17:37And so what we've always wanted to do is build these audiences and then use them to launch SaaS products and services, and our first one was dropped a couple of months ago.
- 17:47It's called Krokit, K-R-O-K-I-T dot com, after Ray Kroc. Ray Kroc was the founder of McDonald's, and he was the original franchise GOAT.
- 17:56And we have a franchise creator called The Wolf of Franchises who we have helped incubate from day one.
- 18:00He's now the most followed franchise creator on Twitter, and we have a podcast, Franchise Empires, which has had people like Greg Flynn on it, the wealthiest multi-unit franchise owner in the world.
- 18:10And so The Wolf has built up this kind of critical mass of people who trust him in the franchise space, and so what we did is helped him take that data, take that intelligence, and build a democratized marketplace around franchises, which is this incredibly opaque industry, kind of a boys' club where you have to know who to call in order to get the information that you want.
- 18:27And actually, we just said, "Hey, we'll put a monthly subscription behind it, and you can have the intelligence like everyone else."
- 18:32And Krokit has been really well received, and that's its own separate SaaS company spun out of the Workweek ecosystem. And so that's what I actually think is the really exciting part is we kind of flipped it on its head.
- 18:43We started with the media, built the data, built the distribution, and then used that proprietary insight to identify opportunities for software. I had no idea there was a SaaS component to this. That is so interesting.
- 18:54And what a beautiful model because by building the audience first, you, I would imagine, gain a really deep understanding of what the product should do and features it must include, and then you have people to sell it to from day one.
- 19:05Exactly. Yeah, the intent is built in, and something we think about a lot is the difference between attention and intention. And so it's easy and mechanical to capture attention.
- 19:16If you give me a budget of 100K and I have the right performance marketer in place, I can build up an email list pretty quickly, or I can drive downloads to a podcast. But the question is, are they gonna keep listening?
- 19:25Are they gonna keep reading? And that's where intention comes in, and that's something that we've learned as a business is you can't shortcut intention.
- 19:32It does just take time for an audience to become familiar with a brand, but you can accelerate it.
- 19:37And that's always been the thesis with Workweek is that the operational mechanics that we have behind our creators can take a process where for someone to become perceived as the industry expert we know they're capable of, that might have taken five years, let's say for example, but with Workweek, maybe it takes two, or maybe it takes 18 months.
- 19:53And that's what we're starting to see with The Wolf is that that investment and then spinning out into Krokit is paying off. [instrumental music] This episode is brought to you by our friends at Minutia.
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- 21:11Visit minutia.com to request a call. That's minutia, M-I-N-U-T-T-I-A.com. [instrumental music] You had mentioned the different types of content that you work on: podcast, events, and YouTube.
- 21:28I'd love to go into a little bit more detail on each of those three things. Yeah. And maybe we just take them in order. Absolutely. Let's do it.
- 21:34So when I think about these products, they kind of exist on a graph or in a hierarchy, if you will. And actually, before we get into a virtual event, we just start with a virtual meetup.
- 21:44This is one of the kind of foundational activities I think that it takes to be a creator these days, is engaging with your community.
- 21:50And increasingly in a remote world, that means hopping on a Zoom, hopping on Hopin, pick your poison, whatever platform you want to choose, and carving out thirty to sixty minutes once or twice a month to engage with those members.
- 22:02I think Superpath does a great job of this, where you can get those real connections and introductions.
- 22:06I met Eric Doty through the community a while back, who I know you've had on the show, and that's like a real person that I can associate and get value from the community with.
- 22:16And so similarly with creators, once we have traction with the list, with their newsletter, we'll then spin that out into a meetup.
- 22:22Then once we have a good engagement with the meetup, then we'll start operationalizing that attention and build out a virtual event.
- 22:28And that's where we'll have creators with more structured programming, whether that's an fireside chat, whether that's an interview, and actually get the audience to have some content which they're, they're sharing.
- 22:37And it's also a great way to improve their reputation by bringing big guests onto the virtual event from their industry 'cause that's one of the other advantages Workweek has with our model is with twenty-plus creators, we are leveraging twenty-plus insanely networked individuals in their niches across marketing, media, franchises, venture capital, and more.
- 22:56That's the virtual events. And then what I think about as a kind of creative graduation is it's important to be compounding the skill overlaps that you've built.
- 23:04So for example, you, Jimmy, you have deep expertise in building these SEO-driven content campaigns with a high volume of word count. Like you know text like the back of your hand.
- 23:15That is a different skill set to voice fundamentally. I've always believed that.
- 23:19The track that it takes to become world-class and take Davos or the Ted stage is different to the track it takes to write a New York Times bestseller as a skill.
- 23:28And so within my department, I'm always trying to compound the skill of voice and the skill of being on video and performing in a virtual event, much like this we're recording in Riverside, is a great way of just, like warming that muscle up.
- 23:40And so the podcast is a natural extension of that. And when they hit the milestones that we set, we say, "Okay, cool. I think you're ready for an audio-video podcast."
- 23:48One of my beliefs is that you should start video with podcasts today, and we can get into that if you want to. But our shows are video first, and so the virtual events are a nice way to train up the creators on that.
- 23:59And then the kind of final tier, which is like the final product in the ecosystem, is original YouTube content.
- 24:04So I say original because every podcast gets its own YouTube channel with videos to repurpose the shows and the long form content on there already. But the original YouTube channel is that kind of next step.
- 24:15So like with The Wolf, the franchise creator I mentioned earlier, we've created a video on the business of Subway. I think it's called The Evil History of Subway.
- 24:22And if you go on The Wolf's YouTube channel, you'll see this fifteen-minute, like feature video where we talk through the twisted history of Subway.
- 24:29Also, for your listeners, Jimmy, Subway has an absolutely bonkers history, which I had no idea about.
- 24:34That company has gone through all kinds of turbulence, so if you fancy blocking out over a lunch break, would definitely recommend it.
- 24:40And so The Wolf can just help us find these wacky stories that we turn into YouTube content. And that for us is kind of the end of that model.
- 24:48And so then making sure that the final piece is each of the products plays to the creator's unique strengths.
- 24:53If a creator comes to us and says, "Hey, I'm super passionate about a podcast," we have this with one of our sales creators. They're like, "Yo, I have a podcast. I want to keep this going.
- 25:01It's a big reason why I signed up." I'm obviously going to prioritize that and not make them go through all these other hoops and just get them going.
- 25:08So it's about having structured frameworks and making sure I know how the products work together, but creator experience is subjective, and being able to listen to those signals is an important piece of the puzzle too.Do you ever charge for content directly, or is everything that Workweek creates free and ad-supported?
- 25:25We will charge for content directly. It's a mix of direct and indirect monetization, so directly monetizing being asking the audience to purchase a piece of content or a ticket to a live event or to a conference.
- 25:35Like we have our big marketing conference coming up on October eighteenth in Austin at the Moody Center, Marketing Land.
- 25:40That's the first time we're putting five hundred marketers in a room and have a ton of structured programming in Austin's hottest venue across four different lands: brand land, eCom land, revenue land, and creator land.
- 25:50It's like if Disneyland did a marketing festival.
- 25:53And we'll absolutely charge for attendance there versus having a newsletter or a podcast that is free to consume, but we will charge for the attention and the brand awareness that will come with that.
- 26:04And we have different packages, different sponsorship agreements, that whole stuff, but that's indirect monetization. Got it. Got it. That makes sense.
- 26:10I am curious what you're seeing in the event space right now, particularly with virtual events. I feel like COVID sort of ruined virtual events for a lot of people. Mm-hmm.
- 26:17It seemed like everyone who ran in-person events just stuck them on Zoom. Yeah. You know?
- 26:22And then on the attendee side, it's like, well, now we're all sort of stuck at home on Zoom all day anyways, like I don't know how much- Yeah... excitement I can drum up for an event.
- 26:30A lot of that is in the past, and so I would imagine there's kind of a new, a new landscape here where virtual events have evolved.
- 26:36When I think of virtual events, I mostly think of webinars, and I feel like the term webinar comes with a lot of connotations, many of them probably somewhat negative if I'm being honest.
- 26:45Like it's a sales pitch for a product in many cases.
- 26:48But because Workweek is focused on content as the product, I'm curious like what kind of events do your creators run, and are there any like learnings that SaaS companies might take away from those events as they're thinking about running their own?
- 26:59So great question. With virtual events, I think they exist on a kind of continuum, and it really depends on the audience that you are catering to.
- 27:08The continuum is a mix of either how informative you want the event to be and how engaging you're expecting the community to be.
- 27:15So to give you two examples from Workweek's ecosystem, within the healthcare community, we know that they are mainly coming to the events to learn.
- 27:23There's a lot of tactical technical knowledge that is shared either for physicians, primary care providers, hospital executives. Different audiences have different value propositions.
- 27:32But the point is, quite consistently we see that they are more preferring this kind of webinar style, where they can sit back, consume the information passively, and learn.
- 27:42That's very different to our HR virtual events, where Heba with I Hate It Here will jump in, she'll get the community amped.
- 27:50She naturally has these hot takes which people resonate with because she's sharing the slightly controversial issues that people are afraid to say, and her community rally behind that.
- 28:00And so the virtual event chat in Zoom is just a joy to see. People are popping off, and you get all these kind of, uh, all this engagement, all this response that comes from her events.
- 28:10And so when we have these hundreds of people in the chat, we are structuring the programming to be different for them. We will use polls to engage them. We will have more time for Q&A.
- 28:19We will have time for the community to engage separately as well. But that's very different programming depending on the informative aspect. So that's the first thing which I would encourage your audience to think about.
- 28:30The second thing is having a clear value proposition and being able to market to that. The way I think about designing virtual events is similar to how I think about designing podcasts, which is using segments.
- 28:41So if you've seen an episode of Saturday Night Live, you will know that they bump between skits, then they will have a musician on, then they'll have an interview, then they'll have a comic who go back to a skit.
- 28:51Those discrete parts of the show are called the segments, and the segments are building blocks of programming.
- 28:57And much in the same way that it plays for linear TV, it also plays for radio, and it plays for podcasts and virtual events as well.
- 29:05And so how I think about it is what are the segments of this show that are gonna hit best?
- 29:10I think Q&A is a no-brainer for many of these virtual events, as that's why people will come in and want to engage and learn off from the creator's domain expertise.
- 29:19But the other piece is if you're taking a topic, what are the three subparts within that topic that the creator can lean on to create a very structured discussion?
- 29:29The things I like to consider with the segments for a B2B audience are setting context, making sure people understand why we are having the event today, what are the regulations or news or technological advances that have got us to this point, then doing a deep dive into the subject matter and really questioning what is the insight that we can share here with either this creator or the guest or the combination of the two that no one can get anywhere else?
- 29:54Those proprietary insights are what I think get people coming back. And then the final piece is a practical playbook.
- 30:00If you are gonna share this with your boss, with your direct reports, how are you gonna get people to enact that change and work through the kind of organizational structure as well?
- 30:10And that will depend on the niche, but I think anchoring on context, deep dive, and behavior change is a good way to kind of structure those. That is such an interesting approach to this because I...
- 30:19maybe too much of my own thought on content is from the perspective of a SaaS company, writing a blog post, publishing a podcast, running a virtual event.
- 30:28And I think that what you just described, my first reaction to it is that sounds intimidating to run an event kind of with that much forethought, right, built so exclusively for the person on the other end.
- 30:41Maybe that's just a personal bias too that I feel intimidated by something like that. Mm.
- 30:45But I imagine that's a very important part of Workweek's infrastructure that allows creators to come in with the subject matter expertise, marry it with your infrastructure to make the magic happen, because I would imagine for folks working without that infrastructure to build it, figure out what the programming is, figure out what the technology is to make it happen, like there's some overhead there even if you have great subject matter expertise that you would love to share.
- 31:07Sure. Yeah.
- 31:08And I mean, to address the intimidation piece of it, a lot of the production can be mechanized and like that's my whole thing with content production is trying to find these efficiencies powered by astute time management that let you get your unit economics better and better.
- 31:25And so we produce like30 of these virtual events in a quarter, and it's a pretty tight ship now that goes between sponsors to account management, to marketing, to creators, to our creator success team who help manage the creators' logistics.
- 31:38And the things that I would say there is, A, it doesn't need to be that complicated. Work Week is a complicated business model, and so naturally, there's a lot of stakeholders involved in that process.
- 31:48But for, like, the Superpath community, Jimmy, maybe you have, like, a content manager who can come up with the ideas. I think you can template out the structure, which creates a consistent value proposition.
- 32:00I think you can template out part of the abstract, part of the title, the format, the branding, and the promotion.
- 32:05I think figuring out where your channels are, whether you're gonna include that in your newsletters, in Slack, on socials, you can standardize how you promote these events as well.
- 32:14And so I think to sum that up, just to address that intimidation, the biggest lift in creating that kind of structure with the event is always gonna be the first one. But once you've got the first one- Yeah...
- 32:24you have a blueprint, you have what I call a process map that you can then implement into your project management tool of choice or software of choice that then becomes repeatable and sustainable. Yeah. That's great.
- 32:35You know, one thing that you mentioned a few minutes ago was how different mediums require different skill sets. Yep. I have learned this the hard way.
- 32:43[laughs] So [laughs] I have a long history of creating written content. A few years ago, we created the first Superpath podcast, and frankly, it was not very good.
- 32:52I anticipated that my writing skills would translate much more easily into podcasting, and they didn't. Mm. And the show lacked a tight concept. The structure wasn't very good.
- 33:03It basically relied on the guest to make it good or not. You know what I mean? And that variability meant that we had some good episodes, some that were not as interesting, and ultimately, I walked away from it.
- 33:13So then this is our second podcast.
- 33:15And I-- because I learned so much on the first one, I tried to address many of those things, but I frankly was surprised at how much more difficult it was to create a podcast as someone with a background in writing. Mm.
- 33:26And so this is sort of a long way to getting around to a question, which is that, what do you find makes for a good podcast? Mm. Is it the charisma of the host? Is it sort of how unfiltered they're willing to be?
- 33:37Are there things you optimize for, like length or, you know, a catchy episode title or artwork? I know there's a lot there.
- 33:44It's kind of a broad question, but I'm sort of curious if there's, like, a couple of takeaways from some of the more successful podcasts that you work on. Totally. Let's definitely get into that.
- 33:51Before we do, I am super curious, just while it's hot, to ask you, what were the main challenges you came up with when you were launching that podcast for the first time?
- 34:00And perhaps, where were the areas where you assumed there would be more of a natural skill jump that there wasn't, that then created friction? Yeah.
- 34:08I think the biggest thing was that all of the episodes when I listened back to them felt like a first draft that needed to be edited into a second draft, which then needed to go to a copy edit before it was published.
- 34:21Like... So, like, if I'm writing a piece, the first draft is like, it's kinda all there, but it's not organized enough. The interesting stuff might be towards the end rather than beginning.
- 34:30You know, there's plenty of stuff that could be cut, and the podcast episode sort of reflected that first draft.
- 34:36It's like you could listen to it and you would find things in there that were interesting, but it took too long. You can't waste people's time for twenty minutes while you get to the interesting part.
- 34:44I had someone helping me edit it, but they were cleaning it up. You know, there was no production. And I really, frankly, had no idea how to do that.
- 34:52I could sort of imagine, like, chopping up an episode and keeping the good stuff and arranging it in a different way, but that felt like a ton of work.
- 34:58I feel like one of the reasons it never got off the ground was that it just wasn't very good. It wasn't a good listen, you know? That and there was just so much variability.
- 35:09Like, I had never created content in a written format that relied on interviewees to kind of carry the load, right? Like, it's their narrative.
- 35:19It's sort of relying so much on them to give the listener something interesting. I'd never done that with written content. I'd always controlled that myself- Mm-hmm...
- 35:28and used interviews or data or whatever other external sources to support an argument that I wanted to own rather than just be like, "I have this great guest. I hope they say something interesting." Mm. Interesting.
- 35:40Yeah, that's useful.
- 35:41Also, it reminds me of the structure being such an important piece of the equation rather than just leaning on the guest to shine, actually saying, "Hey, these are the ways where I'd like you to shine." And- Mm-hmm...
- 35:52for people listening, Jimmy did a phenomenal job of prepping for this. I actually sent your sheet to my team and just said, "This is an excellent example of, like, pre-guest prep."
- 36:01So, uh, yeah, I thought you did a good job of expectation setting and doing that whole thing. Okay, so to come to your question, like, what makes a good podcast?
- 36:08First disclaimer, if I was a creator lawyer, is to say there's no silver bullet for podcast growth.
- 36:14It is completely different, and it depends on the combination or the intersection of your unique strengths and a format that plays to that strength.
- 36:22So the first thing I look for is, what is the strength of the creator that I have? So let's take you, Jimmy. Let's go through this as an example with content briefly.
- 36:29So if I'm now thinking about show format for Jimmy and what makes a great podcast, I need to understand what Jimmy's strengths are.
- 36:35My understanding is that from his time at Animals and his previous experience, he knows how to create text-based, SEO-first content strategies for SaaS companies that convert.
- 36:45And so I would then think, okay, well, within that kind of content marketing, what are some of the elements that could then translate into the show, into the segments?
- 36:54The first thing is the name is Content Briefly, so maybe my opener is to ask the guest, "If you were a content brief, what would your summary say about yourself?"
- 37:04And then we get people actually in the frame of mind of thinking like a content marketer.
- 37:10And then if I want to go deeper, maybe my two next segments, one is focusing on the short term, so the distribution of the content. You get tactical.
- 37:19What are the levers you pull within your content marketing to drive results?
- 37:23And then given the focus on SEO, maybe the next segment is turning to the long term and looking at what are some of the longer term seeds you plant, either in terms of organizational structure, quarterly planning, forecasting that allows your campaign to be a sustainable success.
- 37:37And then maybe the last segment is value props.
- 37:40Just like a SaaS product on their pricing page will have features, you could have a lightning round, which are the different areas of value that you believe you capture in content marketing.
- 37:50Like, what is a contrarian take you have within content marketing as a one-liner? Then we can go deeper into that.
- 37:55And that if your brain was product strategy like a SaaS product, these would be the beliefs that inform it.
- 38:00And so that's obviously just, like, a quick example, but that's an example of where your unique strength would potentially lend itself to a format.
- 38:08And so that's what I'm trying to do with the podcast, is figure out, does my creator have some proprietary expertise that people can't get anywhere else?
- 38:14Is there a data set we have access to that is going to fuel the narrative? Do they have charisma oozing out their ears that I just need to get on the microphone?
- 38:21Do they have a high-powered network that needs to be the center of this focus? Do they have contrarian tastes which they're not afraid to share?
- 38:28It's different for every creator, but that's what I'm trying to do, isCreate formats that mold around those insights. That's so great.
- 38:35I feel like one of the things I've been trying to do with this podcast is-- and actually this episode is kind of an interesting departure from that, is have a tighter structure where I ask everyone basically the same questions, knowing that the answers will be a little bit different, which kind of like over time builds up this library of content, so that if someone says, you know, "Oh, I'm a one-person marketing team," there's an episode for that.
- 38:54And we run through the same set of questions for that person as we do for the person who runs a massive enterprise content strategy, just so people can easily kinda compare and contrast as they're thinking about, you know, their day-to-day jobs, career, or whatever.
- 39:06Mm-hmm. One other thing I wanted to touch on was content repurposing. Obviously this comes up with SaaS companies all the time, and it's always kinda like the same conversation.
- 39:14It goes something like, "We spent all this time writing this guide or creating this series of blog posts. We should do something with it." Mm-hmm.
- 39:21And the do something with it part always kinda gets a little muddy and then sorta trails off, because the hard part about text content is that you oftentimes have to rewrite it for the platform where you wanna repurpose it.
- 39:32So say you wanna redistribute it on social. You can't just say, "Here's our latest blog post. Click here to read it."
- 39:38You have to pull something interesting from it, present it in a platform-native way that caters to the algorithm of that particular platform. Same with n-newsletter or wherever else you might share it.
- 39:47And frankly, it's kinda difficult to do that, and many content teams- Sure... are focused on net new.
- 39:53So if the content calendar says one blog post a week, and it's Friday and you're trying to repurpose stuff, you probably are gonna run out of time before you have to start thinking about the next net new piece.
- 40:05Now, I'm curious how you approach that for audio and video, because there's, I would imagine, some slicing and dicing that can happen, where you're not creating new versions of the same content.
- 40:14It's actually repurposing in a purer way, like where you literally are taking pieces of it and sharing it, rather than creating divergent content from a core piece.
- 40:22Anyways, long question, but sorta curious how you all think about the repurposing stuff, and if there's quite a bit of process behind how that happens. Yeah, for sure.
- 40:30So a long-form podcast, let's say with this example, let's call it thirty minutes long. Asking a new listener to jump into a thirty-minute episode the first time that they've met me is a hell of an ask.
- 40:42I do not have thirty minutes for creators that I don't know. I rarely have thirty minutes for creators I do know, right?
- 40:48And that's because we are in such a economy that is oversaturated with asks for our attention, and so we're just pulled in all these different directions.
- 40:56And so you have to have awareness for that when you're starting to build an audience that the content that you create needs to be able to deliver the payoff much sooner.
- 41:05And so with our thirty-minute episode, I think there's probably between six to eight clips within that which will deliver a payoff much sooner, and that's the kind of sound bite.
- 41:16And the reason that we've seen such a proliferation of short clips on socials is because they deliver the payoff sooner, and Gen Z is consuming more video than text.
- 41:28And so audio and video are kind of merging into this similar medium, which is why I am general manager of audio/video. We kinda see them as the same medium.
- 41:37And so within that, making sure that you have these entry points for people to latch onto your brand in the form of these short clips, which are between thirty seconds, maybe twenty seconds on the low end, up to ninety seconds on the high end, but certainly no more than two minutes that just deliver the payoff.
- 41:52And so that's the first piece of the repurposing stack, is taking the long-form content and then chopping it down. But you can get creative with it.
- 41:59If you look at the Lex Fridmans, the Joe Rogans, Chris Williamsons of the world on YouTube, they grew by having these medium-term clips as well, and I think those kind of chapter-style videos are another important piece of the strategy.
- 42:12If I get hooked on content briefly, okay, Jimmy, now give me a SaaS breakdown from a company and how they're doing content marketing strategy. You can't do that in two minutes. You need five. You need ten.
- 42:22And that's a segment. So the segment goes on YouTube.
- 42:25That's the other thing which is pretty straightforward to repurpose as well, and I think you can look at these longer question threads in a podcast as the beginning and the end point of the segment, and maybe you have two or three questions within them as well.
- 42:39The other thing is the podcast can become written content. The big ideas that you share, that could be turned into a tweet thread. It can be turned into a LinkedIn post. It can be turned into a blog.
- 42:48The podcasts themselves can be aggregated into a blog, top ten podcasts to listen to on X topic. You can also repurpose the podcast into other podcasts.
- 42:57We've had a lot of SEO marketers, for example, on Marketing Millennials, and so maybe one day I come in and say, "Hey, let's do a highlights on top SEO insights from past guests." And then the team goes in.
- 43:07They surgically find the three to five insights from three to five episodes. We bundle that up into an episode, and then that's an extra hit on the feed.
- 43:14And so you can repurpose the audio into other audio, but you can also do it into other text.
- 43:19And again, that depends on the creator for us and the way that their teams are set up, because each creator has like its-- a pod of operators underneath them. So some creators will have social managers.
- 43:31Some creators will have newsletter coaches. Some creators have a podcast coach. It depends on the creator to how we set up the operational team on, on the back end for the repurposing.
- 43:41Do you have a sense for how much time is spent at Workweek creating net new content versus repurposing existing content?
- 43:48If I had to guess, and I will definitely follow up with you once I've dug into this a little bit more, I would say it's about seventy-thirty split on new versus repurposing.
- 43:58I think for us, it's skewed a little bit as well, because some of the new content we're producing is creative assets for other business units in Workweek.
- 44:07So we might have, for example, Marketing Land, our conference is coming up. They need some graphic assets, or they need a video trailer to promote it.
- 44:15Our multimedia team will support with that, and then that's gonna skew the hours. But what a great question. I actually want to figure out the answer to that. I'm not sure.
- 44:23You know, it's interesting because Tracy Wallace, I'd have to double-check, but I think she said that her team spends about forty percent of their time repurposing or refreshing old-Old content, which for a SaaS company was a lot.
- 44:34Most are spending probably ten or fifteen percent of content time working on something that's not net new.
- 44:40One of the many reasons that Tracy is so fantastic, and I'm sure Workweek is very glad to have her on the platform. Totally. I'm curious about the creators and how much knowledge sharing happens between them.
- 44:50Tracy runs content at Klaviyo, so this is not her full-time job. I would imagine that's probably the case for many of the creators.
- 44:56Are there weekly meetings or monthly, or is there some other way that experience and learnings are shared amongst those creators? Yeah, absolutely.
- 45:04So we have a regular event series called Creator All Hands, where we have experts come on and speak about their domain expertise.
- 45:11So we've had people from Jack Raines, the Twitter troll who blew up using humor in his tweet threads and finance, to David Spinks, who wrote The Business of Belonging, a book on community, talking about how to build belonging in the communities.
- 45:25We've had deep subject matter experts who understand some weird niche in media, essentially. It's kind of the mandate.
- 45:31Trung Phan has come on to talk about Twitter threads before, and they're really informative, and that's fueled by our creator success team.
- 45:39So every creator at Workweek gets their own creator manager, and you can think of them like a kinda player coach.
- 45:45The creator success team is there to make their life easier and saying, "Hey, here's the deliverables you have coming up for the week. Here's how your audience growth is pacing. Here's how your podcast is doing.
- 45:53Here's how your revenue is doing. Here's what we are working on for the quarter." And they get these kind of health updates every single week. But they're also there to help with our education.
- 46:02So when a creator comes to us and says, "Hey, I want to learn how to do threads better," or, "I want to learn how to do podcasts better."
- 46:07Like, I led a Creator All Hands back at the end of May with a good friend of mine, Michael Greenberg, on media production and how he thinks about audio, video, podcast production.
- 46:17He's one of the most knowledgeable people I know in the space, and so he was able to just drop some gems for the creators as well in a kind of interactive Q&A.
- 46:24But creator education is really important to us, and it's important that it's a two-way street as well. Because, yes, we do learn from the creators, but I wanna push them to get better.
- 46:32I want to come to them and say, "Hey, like, here's what I'm seeing in the industry. Here's something I think we can test. Here's a format I think will work."
- 46:39And so it's this combination of listening to them, but also providing strategic insights that I think is the bedrock for a healthy creator-operator partnership.
- 46:47Listening to you describe what it's like to create content at Workweek is making me a little jealous.
- 46:53To have a creator coach sort of helping you along rather than have a manager saying, like, "Why didn't you generate more MQLs last month?" [laughs] would be such a different dynamic.
- 47:02And I feel like there's some things to be learned here, because B2B content is so much more than SEO, and I think that's where so many of us get hung up, and oftentimes at the behest of management who wants to see numbers and trials and demos and things like that.
- 47:17But there's just so much inspiration to be drawn here from empowering the creators to do their very best work, to focus as tightly as they can on creating a wonderful experience for the reader or listener.
- 47:26And so I feel like that's probably my main takeaway for the SaaS content marketers that are listening. Yeah.
- 47:31And I-- to double-click on that, I think focusing on content quality, if you do build a talent-first content strategy where you're actually building up personalities within your organization to actually take the time to check in on those qualitative milestones for that talent.
- 47:47So if you take Daniel Murray, Daniel joined us last year with The Marketing Millennials, targeting a broad sway of the marketers, and it's very easy for me to spew numbers.
- 47:56"Oh, we have seven hundred K followers on LinkedIn. We're doing millions of impressions a month. His podcast is regularly top twenty in the US for marketing."
- 48:03These stats sound great, but when I tell you that Daniel was going to Harvard to teach about marketing, followed by HubSpot Inbound to host a live podcast there, those are names that if you're in marketing, you can't dispute, and you know.
- 48:15And that to me is a signal that his perception in the industry is rising.
- 48:20And so being able to have lunch with Nicole last week and hear about her travels to India, her travels to Amsterdam, where she was flown out by Money20/20 Europe to speak in the Women's World Banking conference, that is really changing her life.
- 48:32And her career is forever changed from working with us.
- 48:35And so you can flesh out all the metrics that you want and create these pretty reports, but realize that the personality you're building, if done right, is going to have huge reputational influence, part of which you can't measure in such a structured way and does require you to be more qualitative.
- 48:51And you wanna make sure to feature those insights in your reports and in your campaigns as well, 'cause ultimately that's what moves the needle, and it's gonna increase your revenue per user over the long run.
- 49:00That's a great point. Will you tell us a little bit about your podcast and where people can listen to it and what they could expect from it? Yeah, I appreciate that, Jimmy. The show is called Subject Matter.
- 49:09It's a podcast for creators and operators who are working in the media space, specifically for people who wanna scale creators' time, money, and ideas.
- 49:18So I have people who are working behind the scenes like me on the show who really understand their domains. If you're gonna listen to one episode, listen to Tom Webster.
- 49:27Tom was the director of research at Edison Research for fifteen-plus years, recently joined the indie creator brand Sounds Profitable to lead their reporting and market analysis there.
- 49:37Incredibly dialed and just a lovely gent. And yeah, had a great conversation with him. So Subject Matter, you can get it on Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen. Great.
- 49:45We'll make sure that we link to that for folks who wanna check it out, and I imagine many will. Ben, thank you so much. It's just so great to get a different perspective on B2B content.
- 49:53There's so many different ways to go about this.
- 49:55If I could flag one thing for the in-house SaaS content marketer listening to this is look for some ways to empower your creators to do their very best work, and also audio and video.
- 50:04We're all so focused on text and SEO.
- 50:06All of that is, by the way, changing or about to change with generative AI and whatever Google ends up doing with SGE, so it's probably a good time to start diversifying into audio and video anyways.
- 50:17But we'll make sure that we link, Ben, to Workweek, to your podcast, to your LinkedIn and Twitter, if that's cool, so that folks can follow you, learn more from your expertise. And thanks again. Can't thank you enough.
- 50:26Really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today. I appreciate you, Jimmy. This has been fun. [outro music]