Latest / Content, Briefly / Dock: Eric Doty's 2025 content plans

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Dock: Eric Doty's 2025 content plans · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  Hey folks, before we dive into today's podcast, I just wanted to let you know that the new and improved Superpath Pro is up and running, and it's awesome. So I'll just give you a quickie overview of what you get.
• 0:09
  Superpath Pro members get access to a library of courses and content. They get monthly one-on-one calls where we pair you up with a peer and give you a simple agenda.
• 0:19
  It's an opportunity to meet people and kind of brainstorm and talk through content challenges. We're also doing monthly, what we're calling Superpath Socials. So these are group calls. We just did our first one.
• 0:28
  We had forty-five people. There is a sort of large group component, and then there's breakout sessions where you're put into smaller groups for sort of specific discussion on a content trend or problem.
• 0:37
  And then we're also doing private AMAs in the Slack group. So each month we bring in somebody for an AMA, and we run that in the Slack group. So all of that is five hundred bucks a year.
• 0:44
  Our goal is to make it the absolute best deal in content marketing. If you wanna learn more about it, it's all on the homepage, superpath.co, and if you have any questions, feel free to hit us up. Thanks so much.
• 0:54
  Most of our inbound has come from SEO, and I'd say it's been a mix of...
• 0:59
  The very first time we talked, I talked about how we just sort of like we're going with a quantity approach, publish as many blogs as possible, stay in a tight timeline, like do the quantity thing that everybody right now is sort of arguing against.
• 1:09
  Yeah, yeah. And then what that ended up with is, you know, a, a quarter of our blog posts ended up with a good amount of traffic, and then those are driving... Yeah, so that's driving pipeline.
• 1:19
  [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today we've got Eric Dodyon, who you probably know best as the manager of the Superpath community. He does an amazing job.
• 1:33
  We're so thankful for Eric.
• 1:34
  He also has a full-time job at a SaaS company called Doc, and so we use the first part of this episode to talk about what he's been up to in twenty twenty-four and some of his content plans in twenty twenty-five.
• 1:43
  We also talk about the relaunch of Superpath Pro, and we've got a Black Friday/Cyber Monday deal for you. So if you wanna get twenty percent off an annual plan, just use the code BlackFriday2024.
• 1:54
  There'll be a link in the show notes too for you to do that. Just quick update on Superpath Pro. So since we relaunched it, it looks a little different than it used to.
• 2:01
  So our members get access to our library of courses and content. They get matched up with a peer for a monthly one-on-one call, and we're now hosting monthly group calls, which we're calling Superpath Socials.
• 2:14
  And the structure of these is basically we get everybody together on one call, and then we send folks into breakout rooms, probably two breakout rooms per call. We just did the November one last week. It was fantastic.
• 2:24
  You get matched up with folks in groups of four. There's some prompts to get the discussion going, but we hardly needed them. There was just so much to discuss.
• 2:32
  It was awesome to meet people whose names and faces I've seen in Superpath forever but have never actually jumped on a call. Eric is also hosting monthly onboarding calls.
• 2:41
  So if you sign up, you'll get an invite to a monthly onboarding call. He'll walk you through Superpath Pro, answer any of your questions, make sure you've got everything you need to be successful.
• 2:49
  So if you wanna join, superpath.co, use the code BlackFriday2024, get twenty percent off, and hopefully we'll see you there. Thanks everybody. Take care.
• 2:59
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• 4:15
  To learn more about their podcast production service, as well as their other adaptive content marketing services, check out minutia.com in the show notes. Hey everybody, Jimmy from Superpath here today.
• 4:25
  Our esteemed guest, director of community here at Superpath. Is that actually your title? I don't know. I don't think so. Okay. Community- You just got promoted. Head of, head of community. Yeah.
• 4:34
  I gave myself the head of title. Okay. You can be VP if you want. VP. CEO- Eric- Is that up for grabs? No. [laughs] Not yet. Not yet. Eric Dody. Yeah, thanks for coming back. We haven't...
• 4:44
  I mean, well you come on the podcast every now and then, but we have... I wanna just do like a check-in on Doc, you know. Like, we talk a lot about Superpath.
• 4:51
  You run a content program, a SaaS company, which makes you incredibly qualified to run the community, and you have a whole bunch of work that you're working on that people may not really know that much about.
• 5:02
  So thought we'd do a little check-in on that. In true Eric Dody fashion, anytime we talk, you send me these awesome notes ahead of time, which I really appreciate.
• 5:09
  So I feel like you should just publish this Google Doc that you sent me, 'cause there's so many good things in here. There's so many good talking points. But maybe to jump in, give us like twenty twenty-four Doc content.
• 5:17
  Like what to have, like what, what are you working on? Like I know the product has evolved. You know, curious how your content strategy has evolved to reflect that, et cetera. Yeah.
• 5:26
  So if you listen to the last episode, which I think we recorded early twenty twenty-three, basically gave the summary of we had a podcast, and we had our blog, and we had LinkedIn, and that was...
• 5:37
  And we had case studies. I think that was our entire content strategy at that point, and we had done some product templates. And then we viewed twenty twenty-four for Doc as our coming out tour.
• 5:47
  So, you know, we have all this building quietly content is the way I like to think about. Like SEO, you're kind of building in the shadows, right? Yeah, yeah. And you hope that people find it.
• 5:56
  Whereas twenty twenty-four, we're like, "Okay, we've got this base of SEO. Now we wanna make a splash publicly, make sure people know who we are."
• 6:03
  And there was another sort of development on the product side that caused that to be the case, is that we're actually kinda ready to talk aboutDoc in a more serious way.
• 6:10
  So the original version of Doc was just like client-facing workspaces where people with like complicated sales cycles or onboarding processes could make a workspace.
• 6:21
  You have this nice little shared portal between your, and your customer.
• 6:24
  The thing that we've added that makes us like a little more upmarket and enterprise-friendly is now we also have a content management system backed behind that, where companies can manage like all their sales assets.
• 6:34
  And so that suddenly put us from sort of like this small tool that you could call like a digital sales room, an onboarding portal, and now we're more of like a full-fledged sales enablement platform.
• 6:46
  And so that puts us now in like the rip and replace of like SizeMix and Highspot and like these big tools that big companies use.
• 6:54
  So that sort of, we had to put like our big boy pants on a little bit and become a real company in how we compared ourselves to that market. And so that meant
• 7:03
  for us, like sponsoring communities was a big thing that we started doing. Great. I love that. And so... Yeah. I love when people sponsor communities. [chuckles] Yeah, ex-exactly, yeah.
• 7:10
  If anyone wants to sponsor a community, go to superpath.co. Yeah, so the strategy we took is we're gonna sponsor one community in every single one of our ICPs. Oh, interesting. Cool.
• 7:20
  So we sponsored a RevOps community, we sponsored a sales enablement community, we sponsored a sales community, and we'd actually didn't do a customer success.
• 7:28
  We sort of stayed in the sales and sales enablement space 'cause that's where Doc was really kinda like, because we added that sales enablement platform thing to it, that allowed us to speak to all those groups.
• 7:39
  And the idea was just like for Doc, when we have a... Our sales team would have a sales cycle, and like they'd bring in their, sort of our prospect would bring in like their sales enablement person.
• 7:49
  And if they'd never heard of Doc, that hurts the, our conversion rate. Or if they bring in their sales leader and they've never heard of Doc, or they bring in, there's so many...
• 7:57
  Like, there's this big buying committee that we're selling into, and if each one of those ICPs hasn't heard about us, it's a potential point of friction. So like, you know what?
• 8:04
  We should make sure that at least everybody on our customer team like knows a little bit about Doc, has seen the logo before, has heard of us.
• 8:11
  And so we did these community sponsorships that were normally like a webinar and a newsletter sponsorship. That's really cool.
• 8:19
  I feel like, I can't remember if we talked about this on the podcast or if this is just an offline conversation, where you had sort of mentioned doing content ahead of the product a little bit. Yeah.
• 8:28
  So from an SEO perspective, I mean, among other reasons, that like as the product catches up, the content is already there, maybe even ranking, and then now you can drop in your calls to action. Yeah.
• 8:38
  Our philosophy has kind of been like SEO first so that we can build this moat of like what are the terms we wanna own no matter what the product looks like.
• 8:45
  Or, you know, I know the product roadmap, so even recently, for example, we don't have AI built into the product yet, but we know that we will, let's say, three months from now. It's, it's on the product roadmap.
• 8:56
  So let's own terms like AI, sales enablement AI, or, you know, whatever product category plus AI. Let's just start building.
• 9:04
  We can make a blog post about that now that talks about what's the current state in that industry, and then three months from now, once we add it to our product, we can go back, update it, and, you know, we've already built some equity there that we can capitalize on.
• 9:18
  So there's- Cool. We try to get ahead of it a bit.
• 9:20
  Even if we aren't always ready from a product perspective, we can just drop in the latest update, and then suddenly we're ahead of where we would've been if we waited until launch, then made a blog post, and that would lag three to six months behind, right?
• 9:33
  That's really interesting. If you had asked me two years ago, three years ago, as Doc was kicking off content, like what's our play, that's not what I would've said. You know, I mean, that's one person's opinion.
• 9:42
  And hearing you explain it, I'm like, "I mean, I get it. Like, it makes sense." You know? I mean, I'm curious, like where, how's the SEO going? Y-you know what I mean? Like, are you finding that it's harder than it was?
• 9:54
  You know what I mean? I feel like you hear that a lot now. Like, do, do you plan to continue investing in SEO like you have been? Yeah. So I'd say it's gone well because we have, our sales pipeline is full. It's growing.
• 10:07
  We've hit our revenue targets, and almost all of our inbound comes from SEO. Dang. And then- That's awesome.
• 10:13
  And then, you know, some LinkedIn brand building things and of course, you know, talking about this sort of coming out tour we've done this year.
• 10:18
  But most of our inbound has come from SEO, and I'd say it's been a mix of... The very first time we talked, I talked about how we just sort of like we're going with a quantity approach.
• 10:27
  Publish as many blogs as possible, stay on a tight timeline, like do the quantity thing that everybody right now is sort of arguing against. Yeah, yeah.
• 10:33
  And then what that ended up with is, you know, a, a quarter of our blog posts ended up with a good amount of traffic, and then those are driving... Yeah, so that's driving pipeline.
• 10:43
  And so in terms of like what's worked for us for SEO, I'd say like very close to the product blog posts.
• 10:49
  So how to build a sales proposal, how to build a pricing quote, like best practices around things that are really directly related to our tool, where we can put videos and screenshots and demos of the product right in the blog post and just sort of answer the questions with the product.
• 11:04
  Those have worked really well. Some things that didn't work well that we thought would be really cool is when we did sort of like software posts, right? Where you'd have your classic...
• 11:14
  The typical thing that ranks well in SEO is you have a listicle that had 10 tools. They would just sort of, here's a list of the tools in that category.
• 11:21
  And we thought it would be way cooler if we actually did some, like, analysis or we said, you know, "If you're this type of company, here's five tools," or, "If you're..."
• 11:29
  And we did like a couple more layers of analysis, and all those posts just did terribly. Like the- Dang. That's really interesting. Like what, like what Google...
• 11:35
  And so it sucks because, like, what's common sense, or maybe not common sense, but what's your intuition as a content marketer of what would be better doesn't always make it better for SEO, which is sort of the pain, [chuckles]
• 11:46
  you know, the pain of doing SEO, is sometimes you just have to play the game. And so, you know, we took some of our articles and went back and just made it like a plain listicle, and that worked better.
• 11:55
  So lesson learned. But that's why you gotta be in the trenches- That's cool, yeah... and you can't just do like theoretical, you know, nobody wants this. Everyone wants this.
• 12:02
  Okay, that's true, but if it doesn't rank, then no one will ever find it. So if you're- That's so interesting... building things where like the distribution channel.
• 12:08
  And another thing that was surprising to me, or that's worked really well, is that we have, like anything that's sort of like a template or veryProduct driven.
• 12:17
  So like, uh, if sales proposal template, things like that, those, those articles have performed well.
• 12:23
  Um, and something that's really surprising to me is I never thought we'd be able to get product landing pages to rank well. Like, for example, like a customer onboarding platform.
• 12:32
  I think we own all the number one terms for like customer onboarding tool, and it's our actual product landing page.
• 12:39
  But if you-- I would have never bet in a million years, I would have thought all the top results would be like G2, a blog post of all the best onboarding tools. So that made me take a step back and go, oh crap.
• 12:50
  I need to build like this whole horizontal of product landing pages that we don't have, because I was prioritizing blog posts. So that was... I'm not sure why.
• 12:58
  I think maybe sometimes people just want a tool and they don't want to read a blog- Yeah...of ten options. They just wanna read, you know, they just wanna find Doc and then they're like, "Oh yeah, this is what I wanted.
• 13:06
  I'll start a free trial." That's so interesting. So- I mean, it makes total sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 13:10
  So I think my takeaway from the SEO perspective is that best practices are one thing, and sort of logic and what should work is one thing, but sometimes you just have to try a whole, like for one topic, we'd do a blog post, we'd make a template, we'd make a landing page, and as long as we covered all our bases there, whatever the search intent was, like I'd have a gut feeling on which one of those four things was gonna rank, like for that particular keyword.
• 13:35
  But sometimes it's gonna be the page, sometimes it's gonna be the blog, and I couldn't really predict with great regularity what that would be.
• 13:41
  So a lesson is just to, you know, diversify what you're putting out there from an SEO perspective, and hopefully it works. That's cool. That's really interesting.
• 13:50
  I remember like way back when, when I worked at QuickBooks, we had a whole SEO team, which is really helpful to have like a bunch of really smart people who can help you.
• 13:57
  But one of the things they, they would do is they would do their keyword research and then they would make a recommendation for how to satisfy the query.
• 14:04
  And I was so used to working at small companies that I, you know, in my mind, it's just you create content. That's the only tool you have, you know? And they would say, "Oh, no, this one needs a product page.
• 14:15
  No, this one we should build a wizard calculator or thingy. This one probably needs a video." And I was like, "Whoa, that's crazy- Yeah, exactly...actually." That, I mean, it's a huge company.
• 14:23
  They can afford to do this kind of things, but then it kinda helped my perspective out a little bit too. Like content isn't always the answer, or at least blog posts aren't always the answer. Yeah.
• 14:31
  Or another lesson too is that there were, for our product category, like for example, digital sales room, like, okay, we wanna own digital sales room. That's one term that people would describe our product.
• 14:42
  So let's ma- build this like amazing guide, three thousand words, all this content.
• 14:45
  But what people actually wanted is they either wanted the list of the best digital sales room tools or they wanted like example digital sales room. Like they want to see one, right? Yeah, yeah.
• 14:56
  And they wanna know what it is. So there's like the what is...
• 14:59
  Like what we should have done is what is the digital sales room, short post, show an example, maybe even have our product demo there, and then have a list of the best tools.
• 15:05
  But instead we wrote like this huge best practices guide for all, like how to use digital sales rooms and that's a great asset to have from like a customer enablement perspective.
• 15:14
  But it wasn't the right thing to do for SEO. Mm. So now that I'm a few years in, I'm like re- sort of repurposing, you know, let's take this, let's make that a webinar. Let's make this a shorter blog post.
• 15:24
  Let's make this like a top tools post. And then so yeah, once you see the sort of the data trickle in, you can make smarter decisions about what people actually want. That's cool. That's really cool.
• 15:33
  And how about you personally? Like one of the things we talked about a lot on your first time on the podcast was this kinda one person content team thing.
• 15:40
  If Doc one day IPOs and has like seven hundred and fifty employees, like are you efficient enough that you could still be a one person content team, you know? Yeah. Or like has your role expanded? Like how, how...
• 15:51
  I guess either your role has to expand over time or you are really, really careful about what you say yes to. Yeah. So I'll answer that in two parts.
• 16:00
  So first of all, the goal always with Doc has been start a channel, spin it up, get it efficient. So blog post, good, that's running.
• 16:09
  Once that's, I've like compressed my time down into how much time that takes me, now we can add a podcast. Great, that's running. Now I feel pretty good about it. That condenses down in time.
• 16:18
  And so over time, you like add a thing, compress it down, and I can add and add channels. Eventually, I guess there's a cap on how much I can do as an individual person.
• 16:26
  Like things can only be optimized so far, and like I think this year was a discovery of that for me.
• 16:32
  So for example, like we added, we started sponsoring these webinars and communities, and so each one of those we had to like spin up a webinar. We had to do all this follow-up. Like I'm, I'm the full marketing team.
• 16:42
  I'm not just the content team. So I also have to like help our CEO build the deck. I have to do the- Right, right, right...lead follow-up, all those things.
• 16:48
  And a lot of those had like one-off efforts that were just time consuming, and so it really, it like hurt the rest of the things that I already had optimized, like blogs and podcasts.
• 16:57
  And so basically we spread ourselves thin with a lot of different... We launched an influencer program that went okay. We started doing in-house product webinars, which like went okay.
• 17:07
  And so we did all these things that like they were executed decently well, and they performed decently well.
• 17:12
  But ultimately, I think like adding too many channels, it didn't hurt, like our content marketing has been successful and our, our marketing program is successful.
• 17:20
  But I think it could've been more successful if we just like, if I stayed narrower, because I'm a one person team, and just executed really well on three or four things versus- Yeah, yeah...because every idea is good, you know?
• 17:30
  [chuckles] Like if all of our marketing ideas executed properly would work, but the challenge is, you know, will they work if you do them all at the same time? Yeah, totally. And the answer is normally no.
• 17:39
  So that, that's been like the, the lesson for the one person team is that, you know, be very, very careful when adding something new because it's more likely to like damage the existing things you're working on and, you know, can you take that hit?
• 17:54
  So that's like one way of it. And then I think the other way of looking at it is our company is growing. Like we're adding, we're adding more salespeople.
• 18:01
  We're gonna have like a three, four person sales team soon, and I've been able to keep up from marketing perspective.
• 18:08
  And so I think the, I think content is the last thing we're gonna hire if we hire more of a marketing team.
• 18:14
  Like what we really need is events people, growth people, like things around it, like more of a complete marketing team. But in terms of content, like I think I'm doing pretty well, just me and the CEO.Yeah.
• 18:25
  Well, you can always-- content's a little different, I feel like, than some other marketing disciplines in that, like, you can steer the ship and bring on freelancers to help make it happen.
• 18:34
  Like the-- 'cause the production is what is the really time-consuming part of it. Yeah. And I think the other thing is as when you're at a company for longer, like, you just build a really good stable of freelancers.
• 18:44
  Yeah. So now I'm two years in and, you know, when I joined, it was like find ten people who can help me ASAP, and, you know, some of those people are a good fit, some of them don't, and you sort of...
• 18:54
  Like churn is probably an aggressive word, but you sort of, like, churn through freelancers over time, and you just get settled with a really great team.
• 19:02
  So now I have, like, now I have a person I can just throw, like, odd job tasks on the website. I have a person who helps the podcast. I have, like, ten people writing blogs for us.
• 19:11
  Now I have this huge, like, army behind me where my life is, like, I can scale myself up and down much easier at any given moment, and I'm constantly asking people about their capacity.
• 19:21
  "If I doubled this, could you handle it?" And then if the answer is no, then I have to go out and get another person and just be proactive about that.
• 19:27
  And so I've learned, like, my job as a one-person team is keeping everybody else busy and making sure that I'm never the blocker to projects getting started.
• 19:35
  So it's better to, like, get all these projects started and out in the world than, you know,
• 19:40
  finish or optimize something sometimes because I just need to make sure that every single one of my resources is actively moving so that I'm not, yeah, I'm not the one slowing it down. Yeah. I love it.
• 19:51
  What's twenty twenty-five looking like? What's on your radar? Yeah.
• 19:54
  So on the note of being, sort of sticking with what's working well is we're trying to take, add new channels and add new projects, but keep them super tightly related to things that are already working well.
• 20:05
  So for example, we have our SEO is going well. We have, like, good website authority, so, like, what additional SEO channels can we add?
• 20:12
  And so one thing we're working on is this revenue archives, which is basically gonna be a big example of sales assets, or a big example library of sales assets.
• 20:21
  So we'll have, here's twenty sales decks from real companies. Here's twenty ROI reports.
• 20:27
  Here's, like, basically any type of sales asset that would be used because that's something you could embed in a doc workspace or use, put in your, like, doc content library.
• 20:35
  It's something that sales enablement people are always looking for. And what I've noticed as we've been doing, like, our blog strategy is that there's so much search volume for, like, X examples.
• 20:45
  You know, people want sales deck examples. People want- Mm-hmm. Yeah...
• 20:49
  ROI report examples, etcetera, and most of what's out there is blog posts that don't actually have examples, or it's just really hard to find these things 'cause companies are guarded about their sales assets.
• 21:00
  And so what I, for the past year, I've just been, every time I come across a good example of one of these things, I've built my own sort of private database, and now we're making that public. And so that will be- Cool.
• 21:11
  And it also, I think, fights against SEO or AI a little bit because AI can steal answers to questions, but it can't necessarily steal, like, here's a great example of something, and then they have to still show- Yeah.
• 21:25
  Yeah... something, right? Right. So I want...
• 21:26
  Like, basically my philosophy now is, like, if we build things on our website, like tools and example libraries, things like that, that's harder for AI to replace to a degree- Ooh... depending on what it is. I like that.
• 21:38
  So, so that's... We're trying to build just, like, a really helpful asset, and it's not just, like, an SEO thing, even though my, it does have SEO as a distribution channel.
• 21:45
  It's also just a really, like, beautiful asset for us to have, uh, on our website. I love that. And, and we can reuse it.
• 21:52
  And so now we can write blog posts where we say, "Here's ten examples of sales decks," and we just have our own... I can just give that over to a freelancer. There's already a library built out there.
• 22:02
  They don't have to go and do that research. And so we can, it can be reused for blog content as well. So- Right. That's... So again, it's like, how do I compound on things I already have?
• 22:13
  The other thing we're adding is, like, we've done almost only SEO at this point from a content perspective, which is okay, but we need to, you know, diversify our strategy a bit.
• 22:22
  And so we're gonna take our podcast, which is really awesome, but, like, only so many people listen to it, and turn that into more of an editorial newsletter because we don't-- We've still never taken the time...
• 22:33
  We've been really hesitant to build, like, serial things that we have to keep up with, but now we think we're ready to handle a newsletter. Like I said, like, I've got the blog optimized, got the podcast optimized.
• 22:43
  Now we can handle a regular newsletter. And so we're gonna take our podcast and turn it into sort of like a first-round review style, like editorialized version- Oh, cool... of the podcast. Okay. I love this.
• 22:54
  I feel like this is such a great opportunity for anyone, any company who has a podcast. Like, it's just so rich with stories and personality and opinion. It's like, what can you do with that?
• 23:05
  Well, this, this would be a great example of what you could do with it. Yeah. And I feel like so far, I just had an email list where you say, "Do you want to subscribe to the podcast?
• 23:12
  Here's the podcast," and, you know, it gives three summary bullets of the episode, and that was it. But now we wanna take it that you don't even have to listen to the show.
• 23:19
  We just a full, you know, what's the storytelling version of what is the story of the episode? And so it doesn't have to include the whole thing. It doesn't have... It could include additional outside research.
• 23:28
  It's just a really nice piece of, like, well-researched content about- Yeah... in our case, it- Love it. Yeah.
• 23:34
  So our podcast is called Grow and Tell, and it's for go-to-market leaders, so it's sales, customer success, and marketing, and it's normally just a story of how that leader grew their arm of the business at a particular company.
• 23:46
  So we have, like, sales leader at Facebook.
• 23:48
  We have, you know, customer success at GitHub, and they tell a, a specific story versus they're not normally advertising, like, the company they work for now, so they're, they can kinda get more into- Mm-hmm...
• 23:59
  the weeds. And so- Yeah. Yeah... it also makes good success stories. Content briefly. Yeah. [chuckles] Yeah. I know. Well, you had one recently with, uh, Michael, who talked about Clari. Yes.
• 24:07
  That was a good one, I thought. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I like-- Yeah, I like the idea of, like, getting people to say what they really wanna say by talking about their last job. Yeah.
• 24:16
  And so, yeah, so we're adding that kind of, like, subscription-worthy content, which I know is not- Yeah...
• 24:21
  revolutionary, but it makes, going to the one-person thing again, it makes use of something we already have, which is our podcast.
• 24:27
  We can repurpose it for another format but make sure it's actually, likeAlso good in that format and not- Yeah...
• 24:33
  just 'cause so far we've done like video clips and things like that, which is great for distribution, but we want to give people also, we have lots of blog traffic now to our site, and we wanna give them something.
• 24:43
  If they're not signing up for the product, we wanna give them something else to subscribe to- Totally. And the newsletter would be great for that. Totally. Awesome.
• 24:50
  You know, I don't know if this episode will go out before or after Tracy Wallace.
• 24:54
  We were talking about her Klaviyo twenty twenty-five plans, and she actually said something very similar, which was like, y-you know, kinda boring, like what we're planning on doing is kinda boring. Yeah.
• 25:03
  We're gonna do more events, more webinars, and content, and we're gonna just make that content as good as we possibly can. Yeah. That's the plan. I like it. I like it, you know? It's kinda like back to basics. Yeah.
• 25:14
  And I'll say webinars too, like we-- So we did webinars this year, and then we did, so we did both the sponsored community ones I've talked about, and we did product webinars.
• 25:22
  And I was surprised how effective those were, not necessarily at drumming up like huge amounts of signups or anything, but to get, to make like a, something that's good enough to make people come and sit through for forty-five minutes about your product.
• 25:37
  Right. That is so... That has so much repurposing value for your blog, for social posts, for everything. Like that is...
• 25:45
  I've talked a lot about before, like the podcast is a really nice source of original sort of thought leadership or interviews, but I was, I was surprised too at how much product webinars were just used.
• 25:54
  So now I can just give someone a product webinar where we talked about, you know, how to set up a sales room and just say, "Go back to our sales room article and add all of this."
• 26:02
  Like, and it's ten times better than what I wrote as a freelancer back in the day for the article because it's our CEO showing you how to do all these things. Yeah, yeah. So that was a really surprising...
• 26:12
  It, it also became an asset that our sales team could send people or prospects that were like, "Oh, I'm, you know, I'm not sure how difficult the implementation will be," like those kinds of sales objections.
• 26:23
  And instead of sending them to like an SEO blog post that is, you know, wordy, we can give them a webinar they can sign up for and watch through.
• 26:31
  And it's been a really nice piece of content to have that actually has helped us at kinda like every stage of the funnel. Dang. And- That's cool. Yeah.
• 26:38
  I would've thought, you know, webinar is boring, but definitely has been a good asset for us to have. That's interesting. I wonder, hearing you say that, and then hearing Tracy talk about it too, it just...
• 26:49
  I think maybe I was sorta stuck on the, like, virtual event fatigue thing.
• 26:55
  You know, kinda like coming out of COVID was like, who wants to sit on another Zoom call or virtual con- Like, everyone's down with that, but then it's like,
• 27:04
  I-- maybe we've all sorta settled into like, okay, remote is like, nah, we're really doing this. Like we're- Yeah. For most people anyways, like we're not going back.
• 27:11
  And, you know, we are craving connections with other people, and like this is actually like a really cool way to deliver that. Yeah.
• 27:16
  And I think another, this is an aside on that point, but the trap I think people fell into is like, okay, we did a webinar, now we're going to repurpose it into ten clips, one blog post, blah, blah, blah.
• 27:28
  And I, I thought that's how it was gonna go for us at the start, but I realized that that is kind of a waste of time for a lot of a- Like if there wasn't something really gold in there, just move on and do the next thing.
• 27:39
  But for example, we had like a panel- Yeah, that's it...
• 27:41
  we had a panel discussion where it was our CEO, our head of sales, and a customer, and this was like a sponsored community panel where the three of them were talking, and suddenly the customer just gave like an amazing doc testimonial, just sort of on the fly.
• 27:55
  And that was way better than the case studies I did. Like, you know, those are pretty good, but- Right... they're like tooting my own horn.
• 28:02
  But the, the live testimonial on this panel was just like an amazing soundbite, and then I took that and I put that on social and I put it in our sort of sales enablement library that we have in Doc, and
• 28:15
  that was like the example of repurposing done right. But I think when I started, I thought every single webinar, we were gonna have to like piece it into all these chunks- Yeah, yeah...
• 28:24
  and just throw it out there and just like throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
• 28:27
  And, you know, I still do that for the podcast, but it was a lesson that, you know, there's moments of gold in these things, that if you're just like paying attention and you pull them out and don't distract yourself of having to do it every time, that it was, uh, really valuable for us.
• 28:40
  Nice. Okay. After we talk about Superpath for a minute, and here's- Yeah... my awkward segue. How do you have time to work on Superpath also? [laughing] Yeah. You have a lot going on. Yeah. People always ask me that.
• 28:52
  I... And the answer I always give is that it's, I'm a one-person team. I don't have, like, peers to turn to. I don't have, like, sounding boards.
• 29:03
  So to me, it's, they're not as disconnected as like, here's all my Doc time and here's all my Superpath time.
• 29:09
  Like the things I'm, not necessarily like the work I'm doing to manage the Superpath community, but like being in there, being able to bounce questions off people, that feeds back into my work.
• 29:18
  Doing this podcast and having to talk about my content strategy and what I've been doing for the past two years, just writing it down, made me reflect on all these things I'm doing wrong and doing right.
• 29:27
  Like, they're so interconnected that I, I think for me, it's just a super valuable exercise to always be doing both.
• 29:33
  In terms of like how do I have time to do both, I mean, before I was doing freelance writing all the time, and so I would do my full-time job and then do an extra ten to fifteen hours a week freelance writing. Oh, wow.
• 29:44
  And- That's a lot. That's pretty- And-... hardcore. Yeah. Like- Pretty like energy intensive. Yeah. And it's energy intensive, and it's the same kind of work you're doing full-time and- Right... part-time. Right?
• 29:54
  And so ev-eventually it starts to drain on you. Yeah, and you're starting to plan your day like, hmm, should I avoid writing today for like full-time job when I know I have freelance coming?
• 30:03
  And that's obviously- Right, right, right... not the way you should be doing it, right? So for me, Superpath is like a different muscle that I get to work out for, you know, how do you grow a community?
• 30:14
  How do you keep people engaged? How do you facilitate events? How do you... There's all these different skills that I'm not doing in my day job, and so to me it's energizing to do both.
• 30:24
  Yeah, how do you build a, whatever, how do you build stuff in Zapier that, you know, all these crazy one-on-one invites we have to send out.
• 30:30
  And so, so I'm taking time to do both, but it feels energizing rather thanSort of sucking additional energy out of me- Mm. -is the way I've always thought about it. I like it.
• 30:41
  I'm also gonna clip the first part of what you said as a testimonial, speaking of repurposing content- Yeah. [chuckles] -for other platforms. We-- I feel like- Testimonial by the guy who runs the community. Yeah.
• 30:50
  [chuckles] Yeah. True. I guess that's... [chuckles] The sentiment is there, though. The- Yeah. So I guess we won't-- I promise we won't turn this into an infomercial, but I feel like- Yeah.
• 30:59
  -folks may appreciate some of the behind the scenes. So we relaunched Superpath Pro in October, October 1st, out the door. So we've got almost... We're recording this right before Thanksgiving.
• 31:07
  We've got almost two full months and, you know, you're running this. I, I feel like I'm functioning more as a member than anything else, and it's been great.
• 31:16
  Like, the-- so for people who are not familiar or may, may need a little sprucing up, you know, the new Superpath Pro is, is really built around connecting with other people, you know.
• 31:26
  To echo some of the things we were just talking about, you know, it's about monthly one-on-one calls.
• 31:30
  You get matched up with a peer each month, and then Eric's launched these Superpath socials, which are group calls with breakout sessions, and those, we've done two of those now. They've been great.
• 31:40
  You know, we're collecting a lot of feedback 'cause, like, this is new for us also, but I mean, I've already met a bunch of new people whose names and faces I've seen in Slack forever but never really knew, and the format makes it really easy to just jump into conversations.
• 31:54
  It's not awkward. Two, we're all kinda here for the same reasons, and it just makes it, like, super easy and kinda light, lightweight, you know. It's great. Yeah. Oh, the socials have been great.
• 32:05
  That was the number one piece of feedback when it was actually a nice sort of reset for Superpath when I joined because it gave people the opportunity to give feedback to a new person, I think, and so, you know, it's like- Oh, interesting.
• 32:14
  Yeah. -rather than saying, like, "What is Jimmy doing wrong?" It's, it's like, "Okay, like- [chuckles] -I'm here now. What do you want? Like, tell me, tell me what you would love to happen in Superpath."
• 32:22
  And I heard a hundred times over that people just wanted more opportunities to connect with other content marketers. Like, that was the main...
• 32:28
  The content is great, but, you know, webinars and education sessions and courses, that's all great, but what the number one reason people were in Superpath and stayed in Superpath, it's like, you know, it's my job to keep people in the community too, right?
• 32:42
  Is that people really love the socials, and they love... Or they, they wanted-- they love the opportunity to connect with other people. So they love the one-on-ones.
• 32:49
  They wanted more of that, and then they wanted more opportunities to connect, so we introduced the socials, where we put people in breakouts. And yeah, like you said, it's been awesome. The first time- Yeah.
• 32:57
  -we, like, rapidly made people meet a ton of people really quickly. That was kinda interesting, maybe overwhelming. And then the second one we just did, they were longer.
• 33:05
  It was like twenty-minute sessions of three or four people in a group, and that was... Yeah, it was much easier to get into sort of deeper conversations. Yeah, yeah.
• 33:13
  It's enough time to express anxieties and help someone. You know, you need, you need twenty minutes to do that. Totally. I was actually so surprised that, you know, the first group that I was in last time,
• 33:23
  we, we actually talked, we talked a lot about AI. You know what I mean?
• 33:25
  So we talked a lot about that for twenty minutes, and then I was sort of expecting that to carry over to the next one, but then the next one was, like, a completely different discussion, which was awesome.
• 33:35
  It wasn't, like, rehashing the things I had just hashed out with other people.
• 33:38
  It was, like, totally different based on the exact same prompt, which was, you know, what are your twenty twenty-five plans or something like that, you know. Yeah. I think I had the exact same too.
• 33:47
  I had the first one everyone talked about AI, and, like, what are you really doing with AI was kind of the question. Yeah, yeah.
• 33:51
  And then the second one was, uh, I've got a leader who is, you know, it's tough getting buy-in with, like, what, what do you guys do? Or like- Right. -you know, my leader's expectations.
• 34:01
  So yeah, again, same prompt, totally different. So cool. Yeah. Discussions- We're actually-- speaking of that, we're gonna get a lot of feedback. S-some people want more.
• 34:07
  I mean, we may end up rolling these out twice a month i-instead of just once and then, you know, maybe we-- there's always a possibility we do other things to help people connect too.
• 34:16
  Like, we've talked about speed networking events in the past. I feel like that could be fun. Like, deliberately, like, quick, you know, thirty minutes, meet five people type thing in a one-on-one setting.
• 34:25
  Or maybe we bring back office hours, which we used to do. Basically, just tell us what you want, we'll make it happen. Like, that's- Yeah. -that's the new Superpath Pro is, like, we're just gonna give you what you want.
• 34:33
  I'll say too- So keep the feedback coming. -the member, the member pool is a lot bigger because we have, like, Slack-only subscribers, and we pulled- Yeah, yeah.
• 34:39
  -all those people in, and so one-on-ones too, I think before there was a smaller pool. Now there's a way bigger pool, so people are just meeting, like, a wider variety of people over the course of the year. Yeah.
• 34:48
  Which will be awesome too. Totally. And then I guess one other thing, we've, we've got this app up and running. I know there's been a couple technical issues, so we apologize for that.
• 34:56
  But we have a lot of really cool ideas for the app.
• 34:58
  Like, the reason we're not doing this in Circle or Mighty Networks or other places is that we actually really wanna build, like, functionality into this app that you can't build into a community tool.
• 35:08
  So, like, I'm slightly hesitant to, like, tease too much of that 'cause, like, I'm not a product manager. Developers are expensive.
• 35:14
  Like, I don't know exactly the timeline here, but, like, we have a lot of cool things that will be coming to the app, and if nothing else, you get single sign-on now.
• 35:22
  So however you log into Slack, you log in the same way to the app. You get the courses, the event calendar, and then more stuff being added there too. So send feedback on that as well.
• 35:31
  Like, if there's stuff you want in there, just let us know. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and it, it just makes the possibility, like, we're, we're no longer handcuffed by, you know, what does Slack support or what does- Right.
• 35:40
  -so and so tool. Like, we can build things- Yeah, yeah. -for content marketers, and, you know, there isn't a networking tool for content marketers that exists, so we're building our own. Totally.
• 35:49
  And then I guess one last thing. I don't know when this episode's gonna go out. I haven't really thought about that yet. So if it is on Cyber Monday,
• 35:56
  take advantage of our, uh, twenty percent off deal, and if it's, if you catch this later, just hit us up. You know what I mean?
• 36:03
  Like, if you catch this episode a couple weeks later, just shoot an email to Eric or I, jimmy@superpath.co or eric@superpath.co. We'll get you taken care of. Yeah, absolutely.
• 36:11
  Yeah, feel free to send me a Slack, and we always figure it out for people. Yeah. We'll take care of you. Eric, thank you for all that you do.
• 36:17
  Seriously, I feel like I owe you a huge debt of gratitude for all the energy and life you've brought to Superpath over the last couple years, and then particularly the last couple months.
• 36:26
  So, um, seriously appreciate you. Thank you. And- People are probably really sick of hearing from me, so thanks for having me on, on the show again. But, uh, yeah, I appreciate that. No, and thank you.
• 36:35
  The, the community's so awesome, and like I said, it energizes me and just makes me... It makes me be able to deal with, like, the highs and lows of being a content marketer, I think, with, like, much more- Mm.
• 36:46
  -stability, and yeah, I love it for that. Hopefully, we can give that same thing to other people too. So you know where to find it, superpath.co. Thanks, Eric. We will see you in Slack.
• 36:56
  [upbeat music]