Latest / Content, Briefly / Minuttia: George Chasiotis on the content recession. Is it finally over?

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Minuttia: George Chasiotis on the content recession. Is it finally over? · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  On a macro level, I think that content marketing enters its adolescence phase as it matures and sort of tries to, to find its position somewhere like in brands, marketing, growth, somewhere in there.
• 0:17
  Okay, that's on a macro level. On a micro level, I see that content marketers start to realize that, first of all, text-based content is not the be all and end all when it comes to content marketing. But
• 0:32
  if it's not, you know, then what should we do next? [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly.
• 0:43
  Today, we're talking to my good friend and longtime Superpath partner, George Chasiotis, managing director at Minutia.
• 0:50
  You may remember last time we had George on was in July 2023, and the title of that episode was something related to the content recession.
• 0:59
  That was a particularly difficult period for content marketers, freelance, in-house, agency, pretty much across the board. We start this conversation off by checking in on that.
• 1:09
  How did it go over the next couple of months? Where are we today? What is he seeing among his B2B SaaS clients?
• 1:16
  Interestingly, many of his clients are asking for more diversified set of services, which Minutia has been putting together and building a team around, so we talk about that, of course.
• 1:25
  We also talk about George's new business, Growth Waves, which is in its infancy, but is a media business, and we kind of get the how, what, and why of that. Overall, great conversation.
• 1:36
  Was really happy to check in with George and just see how things are going since the last time we talked, which like I said, that was a tough period for pretty much all of us.
• 1:44
  [upbeat music] Quick plug for the Slack community. If you're not already part of our paid Slack group, we'd really encourage you to come check it out. Twenty bucks a month or two hundred and twenty bucks a year.
• 1:53
  We're closing in on five hundred paid members, and the conversations that are happening there are really fantastic.
• 1:58
  The copy on our landing page says, "Content marketers talking about stuff you can't Google," and that's truly what it is.
• 2:03
  There's quite a bit of vulnerability, really interesting questions there, stuff that you're just not gonna see on LinkedIn or X or anywhere else. So go check that out, superpath.co/community. Thanks so much.
• 2:16
  This podcast is brought to you by our friends at Minutia.
• 2:20
  Only two years ago, content marketing and growth services were generally characterized by financial euphoria, growth at all cost, increased budgets, very little ROI scrutiny, a hiring frenzy, and all of that was backed with eyes on long-term results.
• 2:34
  But today, the space is very different. There's financial uncertainty in many B2B industries. Investors and companies are demanding sustainable growth and profitability.
• 2:42
  Budgets are limited, ROI scrutiny is high, there's a hiring freeze, and there's plenty of short-term planning. Add the never-ending changes in search and AI, and you have the perfect storm for content marketers.
• 2:52
  Does that strike a chord? If you work in-house and need help with your content marketing, you should work with the folks at Minutia.
• 2:59
  The team at Minutia specializes in adaptive content marketing that drives growth without the guesswork and without excuses.
• 3:05
  They help established brands grow by writing a new content marketing playbook that's designed to work in any financial environment and amid any industry changes.
• 3:13
  They've also been a long-term partner of Superpath, and we have done many great webinars, podcasts, and reports together. And they're also producing this very podcast, Content Briefly.
• 3:22
  They come highly recommended, and if you need any help with content marketing, visit their website at minutia.com. That's M-I-N-U-T-T-I-A.com and request an intro call. [upbeat music] Hey, everybody.
• 3:36
  Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. George, welcome back. I think you're first returning guest.
• 3:43
  Yeah, I think you're the first person that made two appearances on this podcast, so welcome and thanks for coming back. Well, that's great. It's good to be here, Jimmy.
• 3:51
  You know, the last time we talked, I think we ought to just jump right into this, we discussed the content recession. I think that was a phrase that you coined yourself.
• 4:01
  We probably recorded in June of twenty twenty-three, published the episode in July twenty twenty-three, and with the benefit of hindsight, that period of time was even harder than I thought while it was happening.
• 4:17
  It was a really difficult time for Superpath specifically, and I'm happy to elaborate on that, but I think it was a very difficult time for agencies as well, for in-house teams.
• 4:25
  Like content just across the board went through a very difficult time. Budgets dried up. A lot of people were laid off. A lot of agencies had to downsize. Anyways, is that behind us? [chuckles] Like what...
• 4:37
  You know, we're what, nine months later, eight months later? Do you feel that that is in the rear view mirror, or are you still seeing some of the effects of that?
• 4:46
  It's interesting that a friend of mine, I will not say her name, but she's very popular in this content marketing world. She told me, uh, when, when we spoke, it should've been around like Q1, Q2 maybe.
• 5:00
  She told me that, you know, from July onwards, things will start getting a bit ugly, let's say. And I was like, "Why, why is she saying that? I mean, what is it with July," right?
• 5:10
  The thing is, interestingly enough, for us, July is when things started getting really ugly, right?
• 5:17
  So we had to deal with, you know, engagements getting on pause and clients not being happy with the service because we messed up with something. And so it was definitely a challenging period.
• 5:30
  However, I would say after the second half of September, things started getting a bit better.
• 5:37
  Overall, though, twenty twenty-three was a very challenging year, not just for agencies, but also for, you know, people working in-house because many people lost their jobs, a lot of uncertainty,
• 5:49
  things happening on the AI side and also things happening, you know, the SEO side. So many things that kept us up at night, at least me, right?
• 6:00
  Now, when it comes to where we are at right now and whether we, you know, all these things are behind us, I would say that I'm trying to think of-Our clients and the industry we serve, right?
• 6:12
  And I try to categorize them and put them in buckets to see whether or not this is a temporary slowdown or this is something more permanent, in which case we have to take some sort of, you know, action, right?
• 6:26
  So the three types of, or categories of companies that I see right now, first, we have capital-intensive SaaS companies, right? Or B2B companies in general, right?
• 6:36
  And I would say that exactly because they are capital-intensive and exactly because right now access to capital is a bit more difficult because the cost of money is still high because of the high interest rates, I would say that these companies are a bit tight.
• 6:55
  And even though some of these companies made layoffs, still things are a bit frozen when it comes to, you know, projects they may wanted to do, stuff they wanted to outsource, and so on.
• 7:06
  And we have cases like this, right? Then we have companies that are, in general, more efficient. They didn't overstaff during the post-COVID two-year sprint, let's say.
• 7:18
  Or they are vertical SaaS, which are not, in many cases, they are not as affected, let's say, and they keep performing well.
• 7:27
  And even though some of them may be somehow capital-intensive, I don't see signs of a slowdown, and thus these companies are a bit more, let's say, open, not so tight when it comes to their budgets and overall spending, right?
• 7:41
  And then you have a third category, which is, you know, growth industries, which for us, we primarily serve the SaaS industry, cybersecurity, native AI, which, you know, native AI, just a handful of companies.
• 7:54
  But AI derivative products, right? The Jaspers of the world. We are talking about companies that are riding a wave right now, especially for AI companies.
• 8:04
  And of course, you know, not all of these companies will survive and have the outsized returns that their founders and investors expect, but some of them will.
• 8:14
  In terms of, like, their spending and how these companies approach growth and, as an extension, content marketing, I would say that there are many opportunities there, right?
• 8:23
  So we have two out of three categories, as per my, you know, thought process, that are still open to, you know, services.
• 8:33
  And for me, that's a positive sign, meaning that there are still people out there willing to, you know, invest and spend, and why not accelerate their, their growth, right? Yeah.
• 8:46
  You know, George, we kind of skipped our normal intros. Would you mind just giving people an overview of Minutia in case they're not already aware, just so they have more context on where your perspective comes from?
• 8:57
  Sure. So the previous time you, you may have heard me on this podcast, I would say that Minutia is a, an organic growth acceleration agency. And I don't know if I said that back then.
• 9:09
  I remember saying that in another podcast with my friend Emilia from Userpilot. But anyway, I said that our positioning is off and that we don't meet the market where it is right now.
• 9:22
  And so this quarter, we did a repositioning, and now we kind of adapted, let's say, let's see if that will land and will serve us well, this term of adaptive content marketing.
• 9:34
  Also, we tied that to what we feel companies need right now, which is growth, and what companies don't need right now, which is guesswork, meaning uncertainty or excuses, right?
• 9:48
  So Minutia is a content marketing, adaptive content marketing agency that helps companies grow without the guesswork and without excuses.
• 9:57
  And part of our repositioning was that we felt that, as I mentioned, our positioning doesn't serve us anymore.
• 10:05
  It's not basically addressing what people have in their minds right now, our potential buyers and the industry we serve. And in that context, you know, we kind of shuffled things up a bit and repositioned ourselves.
• 10:19
  Whether or not this will work, we'll see. So since we last spoke on this podcast, you've gone through this repositioning exercise. You launched Growth Waves, which is your newsletter, which I want to ask you about also.
• 10:34
  You launched a podcast production service. Maybe there were other changes too. What I'm getting to is, were all those things a reaction to what you were seeing in the spring and summer of last year?
• 10:46
  I would say Growth Waves, you know, it was, I bought the domain, I don't know, four years ago. It was something I always wanted to do, but I postponed it, and at some point in September, I just felt that, you know what?
• 10:57
  Let's just do a landing page and get this thing out there, right? The ultimate goal of turning this into a full-fledged media company sometime in the future. It's going well.
• 11:08
  I mean, we have a bit over around two thousand four hundred subscribers right now with a fifty-five percent open rate or less. And we also closed the first sponsorship, and so, you know, I mean, it's picking up.
• 11:23
  And it's interesting because you would assume that, you know what? Are you sure? Another newsletter covering B2B growth topics. I don't know.
• 11:33
  There are too many newsletters that do that, and content creators in general that do that, right?
• 11:38
  That's not the feedback we get, and so we exist, and even though Growth Waves is self-funded, meaning that we have to fund it ourselves, there is something there. And also,
• 11:51
  besides the sponsorship side of things, which it will get better in terms of, like, how much we can charge people and companies as the newsletter grows and as we have a, an engaged audience, we are working on the pro version, which is basically going to be what you get now from Growth Waves.
• 12:09
  The content is, is really good. You will be able to get that only through the pro version, right?
• 12:13
  So it's going to be a product, and we plan-I'm doing many more things like, you know, a quarterly AMA or webinar, built a, a list of, of tools people will have access to with a discount that's, you know, only for Growth Ways Pro members, and so on and so forth, right?
• 12:30
  So this is what Growth Waves is all about. I wouldn't say that it was a reaction to what happened in our industry and what's happening in our industry.
• 12:39
  It was more of a thing that I wanted to do and planned on doing for quite some time, and I just felt that, you know what? Let's not wait any longer. Let's just get it out there.
• 12:48
  Podcast production service, I think this ties nicely to the fact that we are moving to a multi-format approach when it comes to content marketing. Content marketing is not just about words, right?
• 13:05
  And will not be about merely about words. And so, you know, Minutia is trying to adapt, thus the, the adaptive part of our homepage headline right now. And podcast production is just an expression of that, right?
• 13:20
  Now, to be clear, we are not just a podcast production agency, and since we are new in this space, I know that there are many things that we have to learn.
• 13:32
  But the same applies to all the other service lines that we opened. Podcast production is just one. Another prominent one is paid media.
• 13:40
  All of it in the context of listening to our clients and potential clients and understanding that to serve them better and to serve a company right now, writing and publishing blog posts is not enough, right?
• 13:58
  And I want us to be their source of growth and source of, you know, education, expertise, whatever, when it comes to all things, uh, growth.
• 14:09
  Now, having that said, we will not do [chuckles] affiliate marketing or anything of that sort, right?
• 14:15
  Still, we have a selected, let's say, line of services, but we opened up things a bit, all in the context of we are trying to adapt to the changes and serve, you know, the industry we are trying to serve better.
• 14:34
  That's really cool. I have so many follow-up questions and thoughts about all that. But first, kudos to you for making some of these changes so quickly, because I think there is a lot of uncertainty out there
• 14:46
  in the, I was gonna say the content marketing world, but it's much broader than that.
• 14:50
  And I think that one thing that the SaaS industry needs is companies like Minutia to step up and say, like, "We're gonna, we're gonna offer you something different.
• 14:57
  We're not gonna just be another SEO agency that isn't able to adapt." So one question I have for you as a follow-up is the skill set of your team.
• 15:05
  Have you had to bring on new people to offer new services or retrain existing team members to do this? Yes. So, A, yes, we, we have to bring in different people, and B, in some cases, I will give an example.
• 15:21
  We have a person from our team, I will not say the name, and that person is working in the SEO team as an SEO strategist, right? But we see two things. The first,
• 15:35
  that person's qualities go beyond the, let's say, the scope of what that person is called to do as part of their position and their role.
• 15:43
  And we saw that, wait a minute, like, these skills and qualities could be leveraged in a different position, right?
• 15:50
  And so this brings us to the second point, which is, okay, why don't we take that person who has these different skills and qualities and tie that to a position that we wanted to open and we feel is needed, which is that of a content marketing strategist, right?
• 16:07
  Because... And that's one of the points I wanted to discuss about, like, the changes in content marketing right now.
• 16:13
  Like, it's not enough anymore to be someone who just prepares a content brief or writes a content piece. Content marketers have to level up and go beyond that, right?
• 16:24
  And so, yes, we have to bring in people with, let's say, diverse capabilities, and also when we see that there are people in the team who may be a good fit for a position that we, you know, think of opening,
• 16:38
  then we will discuss, we will have a discussion with that person, and if they are up for it, we will, let's say, transfer them. We will make the change, right? And this is happening a lot right now.
• 16:49
  The good thing about Minutia and the way we run the company and approach everything we do is that we are not afraid to take risks, if that makes sense.
• 16:59
  Because at that point, the safe, quote-unquote, for me, it's not safe, but the safe thing to do would be to just continue, like, using the same, you know, like,
• 17:12
  messaging and positioning and things that are already, like, well-established in people's minds. A well-established thing is SEO, okay?
• 17:21
  People can somehow unders- especially content marketers, somehow understand, okay, this is what you mean when you say SEO, right?
• 17:29
  And in that context, we could say, you know, what we do is SEO-focused content marketing, which we are not going to do, right?
• 17:35
  I'm okay taking the risk of using a value proposition and a positioning statement that's kind of, let's say, new and
• 17:46
  may not be well-established in people's minds, but that may put us in a better position in the future, just because I think that the conversation needs to change, right?
• 17:58
  And that all goes back to the changes that happen in content marketing, which if you want, you know, we can, we can get into.
• 18:06
  I think it's a great point because by doing that, actually, you may give people the language that they've been searching for to help solve their own problems, right?
• 18:16
  Like, how many teams do you think right now are saying, "Should we continue to run thisHeavily SEO focused content strategy, and then if they come across a term like adaptive content, that may resonate because they've been looking for the term for something that's more flexible [chuckles] and they don't have it yet.
• 18:35
  So I think that positioning makes a ton of sense. I did wanna also just ask you a quick follow-up question about Growth Waves.
• 18:40
  I know I'm going back a bit now, but I find it interesting, and I'm sort of calling this out because it struck me that Growth Waves is not just a newsletter that serves as lead gen for the agency.
• 18:53
  You're building a, a separate business. I mean, I, I'm assuming you'll take a customer if it comes through there. That wouldn't be a bad thing, but it's not its primary intention.
• 19:02
  Could you just talk about that for a moment? Like why create a media business, and is it part of Manusia or is this your thing separate from Manusia? No, it's even a, a separate entity. Oh, okay. Interesting.
• 19:13
  I was imagining it was part of the agency. Got it. That makes more sense. It's a separate entity and, I mean, yeah, let's be honest, [chuckles] if a client comes from there, we will not say no, right?
• 19:23
  And at the same time, I mean, we see the emails of people who subscribe for Growth Waves. Many of them are people we, you know, we would like gladly sell to.
• 19:32
  We have our clients there, we have prospects, we have people we are connected with, so yeah, a lot of opportunities, right? However, that wasn't the main objective.
• 19:42
  The main objective was and is to essentially, as I mentioned, like turn this into full-fledged media company that has developed its own-- that will develop its own revenue streams. And yeah, that's it.
• 19:57
  But can we get clients from it? Sure. Why not? I will not say no. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Well, it's the best of both worlds.
• 20:04
  I also-- I wanted to ask you about SEO and if you're able to share, like what is your client's temperature on it right now? Are you
• 20:14
  seeing that some customers are continuing with an SEO focused strategy that may be similar to what they've done in the past?
• 20:21
  Are you sensing that other companies are looking to diversify the type of content a little bit more, somewhere in between or something else altogether? I would say that SEO is just a part of the whole picture.
• 20:36
  Now, if you allow me to approach this question a bit differently, because I think this will help us kind of try to understand better where we are at right now, and SEO will fit in nicely as it's part of the whole equation, right?
• 20:51
  Now, on a macro level, I think that content marketing enters its adolescence phase as it matures and sort of tries to find its position somewhere, like in brands, marketing, growth, somewhere in there.
• 21:09
  Okay? That's on a macro level. On a micro level, I see that content marketers start to realize that, first of all, text-based content is not the be all and end all when it comes to content marketing.
• 21:22
  But if it's not, then what should we do next? Where do we go from here, okay? Or where do we get started with non-text-based content? This is a concern that many content marketers have.
• 21:37
  The second point, SEO is not the be all and end all when it comes to text-based content, but people are in a dilemma. Okay, it's not. If it's not, then what else should we do, right?
• 21:52
  Because not all companies can run like content marketing programs like, you know, Mailchimp or HubSpot, right? Where you can do
• 22:00
  more than just content for search audience and content that somehow you can tie back to pipeline and revenue generation. Third,
• 22:10
  I see that the whole AI is going to take over the text-based content narrative gets somehow deconstructed, and also a positive development, let's say, Google shows its, quote-unquote, "allergy" towards AI with its recent updates.
• 22:27
  That's great for content marketing. Fourth, verification is more prominent for content marketing, right?
• 22:34
  Uh, verification is more prominent, and marketing departments increasingly demand to know what's the contribution of content marketing to the pipeline, and that's something that makes content marketers feel uncomfortable.
• 22:47
  Then we have something that you will allow me the expression, the death of the content writer and the rise of the content marketing strategist, which means that content marketing, as I mentioned earlier, stops being just about words, and content marketers try to find their identity, so to speak, right?
• 23:08
  Because if I'm not a content writer, just a content writer, then what does this content marketing strategist mean? What am I supposed to do? What is expected of me?
• 23:19
  Then, and I know that I may get a couple of negative comments from people working in-house.
• 23:24
  With all due respect, though, I feel that in-house content marketing becomes very expensive and outsourcing starts to become a better alternative, right? And last but not least, we are shifting from input
• 23:41
  to output to outcome now based content marketing. Okay? So these are like many changes that are happening right now. And as, as you noticed, like SEO is just one of these things, right?
• 23:57
  SEO is just a part of the equation.
• 23:59
  We can dive deeper into it if you'd like, and like I can analyze my thoughts, but I think that it's worth analyzing them in the context of what else is happening and what else is changing right now. Yeah. Yeah.
• 24:11
  You just summed up so many important points all in about two minutes. That was wonderful. I think that is probably gonna be our, uh, our LinkedIn clip for this episode.
• 24:20
  I think it's interesting what you said about the death of the content writer-I find this to be fascinating because one thing that we've observed at Superpath is the shrinking of internal content teams over the past few years, and the increased reliance on vendors, agencies, freelancers, consultants to help with actual content creation.
• 24:44
  And then this year, we published our salary report, which just came out a few weeks ago, and we saw a pretty significant jump in average annual income for content marketers, which caught me by surprise, and I think caught a lot of other people by surprise as well, because this is analyzing twenty-three data, and as we already discussed, it's a really tough year, lots of layoffs.
• 25:04
  And so in addition to sample bias, which is definitely a factor in that survey,
• 25:09
  I think the other thing that drove salaries up is the increased seniority of internal teams and the letting go of the content creators that used to be part of those teams.
• 25:23
  So the folks that made, maybe they worked in-house at a SaaS company and they made seventy thousand dollars as a content creator, like that role may not exist anymore because that's actually a quite expensive way for that company to create content.
• 25:35
  But they've kept the senior strategy type roles. Those are the folks who do the strategy, reporting, collaborate with other teams. They manage the vendors. They find the freelancers.
• 25:47
  Like, they run this whole content program, but they probably don't do very much content creation at all.
• 25:51
  Anyways, that's just an observation, but I'm curious on the agency side, if you've seen a similar thing where perhaps the teams that, you know, where your points of contacts work are smaller than they used to be or structured differently than they used to be.
• 26:05
  I wouldn't say that I noticed anything in terms of the size of the in-house teams, and I think that your observation is spot on. Maybe it's the case that companies understand, start to realize really that
• 26:22
  these are things that we can outsource, and it doesn't make sense for us to have a person that costs X amount of dollars.
• 26:32
  Having that said, this may be an opportunity for, let's say, people with lower seniority to level up, right? And to understand that this is not a threat, really. It's an opportunity for me to become better and
• 26:48
  turn the threat to an opportunity by, you know, even increasing my salary and, you know, how much money I make. So I don't see that necessarily as, you know, something bad.
• 26:59
  But at the same time, I understand that and I see that content writers, which is something, by the way, that we communicate to our content writers.
• 27:07
  Like, we had a workshop a couple of months ago where I said exactly that. "You're not just content writers. Forget about it."
• 27:14
  Because if what you're doing now is just bringing in words to Google Doc, that's not enough, right? You have to be the one who we are talking about a certain process or methodology.
• 27:27
  You will have to be the one who will find people who talk about this process online and reach out to ask for a quote.
• 27:34
  You will be the one who will work with platforms like Quoted to get and featured to get, you know, quotes from experts. You will be the one who-- And I'm not saying all that.
• 27:45
  That doesn't mean that we expand, let's say, the, the scope or the expectations, and we work people to their bone, right? That's not what I'm saying.
• 27:54
  What I'm saying is that it's not enough anymore to be just a content writer. You have to approach-- Even content writing, you have to approach it differently.
• 28:03
  You have to do interviews, and so you have to be good at, like, prompts and questions and navigating a conversation to turn that conversation into a narrative or a story or whatever.
• 28:14
  You have to be good at, like, getting quotes. You have to be good at building relationships with SMEs. You have to be good at promoting the content. So it's a different mindset, really.
• 28:27
  And I think it's necessary because I'm not sure how long it will be enough just to say that, "You know what? I'm a good content writer, and I'm even a good content writer who specializes in, you know, just two topics.
• 28:42
  That's all I know. That's all I cover," right? Because you have to go beyond that. That's how I see it. Yeah. I think you are also spot on.
• 28:49
  And I, I feel that we're actually entering a very good period for freelance content marketers, assuming that they can adapt to this changing environment.
• 29:01
  Actually, a couple, maybe last week, I posted in our Slack group just asking everyone, like, "How's twenty twenty-four going for you?" You know, are is it-- "Are you feeling a little better?
• 29:09
  Are you having some of the same challenges you had last year?" And the responses I got were totally polarized. Some people were like, "Everything is great. We're crushing it."
• 29:19
  [chuckles] Like, "I'm getting lots of freelance work. I'm super happy." Other folks are saying, "I'm really struggling." And I kind of understand how each of these situations is happening right now.
• 29:28
  I think from a macro sense, like, it's entering this period of it'll be good to work independently. You'll have a lot more flexibility. You can test out new services. You can build your own skills.
• 29:39
  That does not alleviate any of the short term challenges that freelance folks have, where, like, you need a project this week or next week, right? Like, you may not have the runway that a business does.
• 29:49
  But I actually feel that assuming this plays out roughly how I think it's going to with, like, kind of smaller in-house teams and this greater reliance on vendors, is actually gonna create, like, a pretty happy medium because it will actually give both sides more time and more space to think about strategy, creativity, and reporting.
• 30:09
  And it will be less reliant, at least less reliant than it has in the past, on just kind of executing this playbook, which typically is SEO, but executing it as fast as possible.
• 30:19
  So I'm quite hopeful that there's gonna be a lot of really cool, interesting content that companies and individuals are putting out over the next year or two because there's these constraints that are kind of forcing people to approach things differently.Yeah.
• 30:33
  We all have to adapt, and we all have to think different, right? And speaking of outsourcing stuff, I mean, Minutia is an agency, and we use agencies for work, right?
• 30:43
  Not for client work, but for, you know, things that, like, we do on the growth side a-and so on, right? For our websites and so on. One thing I want to say is that there are many benefits when it comes to outsourcing.
• 30:56
  First of all, you don't have the emotional burden of an in-house relationship, right? You will not feel the same firing your agency than firing a person you work with for, like, two years, right? Then there is this...
• 31:12
  or there should be a bit more accountability in the agency-client relationship.
• 31:17
  And then there is also this ownership aspect of it where whereas you, you may be very clear about what the agency's, like, limits are in terms of what is expected.
• 31:28
  This is what you-- we want you to do, and we want you to be absolute owners of it, right? So I see many benefits there, and quite frankly,
• 31:38
  I see that flourish in the future as, you know, companies' way of getting things done, right? Absolutely. A few weeks ago, you presented a webinar to Superpath members, and the topic was reporting.
• 31:54
  I feel that reporting on content marketing is experiencing sort of a renaissance. Like [chuckles] there's... I think a lot of teams are rethinking, like, "Why are we doing content? How are we doing it?
• 32:06
  How much does it cost? How do we report on it?" Particularly if the strategy they're executing looks different than it used to.
• 32:13
  And one thing we discussed on that webinar was the tension between creative component of creating content marketing and the
• 32:23
  necessary objective measurement of it, and how those two things are sort of always at odds, at least to some degree. Like, it feels a little uncomfortable to put data on top of this sort of creative work.
• 32:35
  That will probably never go away, especially if we're gonna say, like, "Actually, you should be more creative. Like, you know, don't create this kind of, like, cut and dry, run-of-the-mill type content.
• 32:44
  You need to be more creative." Anyways, all of this is sort of a long build-up to this discussion we had on reporting. People should go watch the webinar.
• 32:50
  We'll link to it in the show notes, because you give a very, very thorough overview of how you handle reporting for your customers.
• 32:56
  So I guess the question I'm asking you is not how do you do it, what tools do you use, but more what is the role of reporting in your work right now, and do you feel it has become more important over the last six months or so?
• 33:08
  Definitely has become more important. It's connected back to verification, the verification of content marketing, right?
• 33:16
  And the fact that we try to put a dollar sign behind everything we do, which is obviously not what content marketing should be about, right? But this is one, let's say, end of the, of the spectrum.
• 33:30
  The other end is, you know what? We shouldn't hold ourselves accountable about anything. And content marketing, reporting and measurement, performance measurement used to be
• 33:44
  some kind of a taboo, let's say, and made content marketers, many content marketers, right, feel a bit un-uncomfortable. It shouldn't be that way. And at Minutia,
• 33:58
  we realized at some point through a series of events which, you know, I go into too much detail in the webinar, you, you should check it out, that we, our propos-- value proposition when it comes to reporting and performance measurement and keeping ourselves accountable and also helping our clients communicate the impact of our collective efforts, well, our value proposition was not weak, it was nonexistent.
• 34:23
  Because [chuckles] we simply focused on the, not so much the input, but because we don't charge per hour, but the output, right? The deliverable. And this is very convenient, let's say, for agencies, right?
• 34:37
  This is it, the deliverable, and I'm not able to control, let's say, the outcome because we have inputs, the hours you put, for example, into creating a, a piece of work.
• 34:49
  You have outputs, that piece of work, and then you have outcomes. Okay, what happened after this piece of work went live and we presented it to the world, right?
• 34:59
  And we were very focused on the first two and sort of neglected the third one, which is, well, guess what? What clients care about, right?
• 35:08
  And so after a series of events, we realized that we have to do something about it. But we wanted to focus on the impact that we as an agency bring, right? And so
• 35:21
  we did something about it, and we built Minutia's impact reports, which help us for some services, right? Not for all services. For example, this doesn't apply to our podcast production service.
• 35:33
  But for our content creation service, especially for content that we produce and publish on blogs or other things we do on websites, we have Minutia impact reports now, right?
• 35:43
  And as I mentioned, this helps us communicate not just the impact of our work, but the impact of our collective efforts.
• 35:50
  Because what happens in most cases as we work with bigger companies is that we have a point of contact, and this point of contact is usually our partner, right?
• 35:59
  We work together, and we have to sell, quote-unquote, the extensions and the, the cross-sells and everything together internally, right?
• 36:06
  So this person is really, we are an extension of their team, and they are a partner of ours, really. And so we help these people better communicate the value of what we do, right? Which is also
• 36:18
  a concern that many content marketers have. We saw that through the State of Content Marketing survey we did in the end of 2023, as this was the, the third, I think,
• 36:32
  mostLet's say, a reason with the most responses of what the third concern really of what keeps people up at night, right?
• 36:42
  Now, lately, I've been thinking a lot about this concept of not just reporting, because reporting is one thing, and performance measurement, but
• 36:52
  how content marketers can better communicate the value of their work so that they can keep their seats at the table, right? And I've been thinking of this concept of building impact narratives in companies.
• 37:06
  Impact narratives have three main pillars, okay. The first is performance measurement, and, you know, now at Manutia we do that through the impact reports that we built. Then it's not just like measuring something and
• 37:24
  sharing a Google Sheet link or a Looker Studio link with someone, especially someone who is very busy and who is making decisions and expecting that, you know, that someone will bother checking that link and like knowing what you know about the impact of content marketing.
• 37:42
  So then comes communication, right? Which is also something that content marketers didn't do as good of a job and should definitely improve, right? So we have proactive and efficient communication.
• 37:58
  This is the second pillar of building impact narratives. And then we have the third one, which is this concept of building performance capital, okay? Because as a content marketer, you should be practical.
• 38:11
  You can't go, especially for content programs that are not as mature in a way, you shouldn't go and just start talking about like creative things and building a studio to start shooting videos and things like that.
• 38:23
  All these are great, but you should think about how can I get to this point, and how can I be in the position to request these things and have higher chances of getting these things?
• 38:35
  Well, the way to get there is by building performance capital, which essentially means you should cover pipeline and revenue, which is what companies are interested in first.
• 38:45
  You should build performance capital, and then you should think about spending some of that performance capital, you know, for more creative stuff, for bets that you wanna place and so on, right?
• 38:57
  So impact narratives, once again, is what I feel is the solution, and there are three pillars into it. We have performance measurement. This is something you should do.
• 39:08
  And don't think of like the most expensive solutions or the great setups that you may have seen on LinkedIn. Start small, right?
• 39:17
  As I explained in our webinar, our reporting is based on some databases that we built, obviously, and GA4 and GSC data for now, okay? Which is also scalable for us as an agency.
• 39:30
  So start small and that don't seek perfection or one hundred percent accuracy, right? You should have data to inform your decisions and help you build these impact narratives.
• 39:42
  Then proactive and effective communication, just because you know and are well aware of the impact that content marketing brings.
• 39:53
  To put it differently, you should equipped if you are, say, content marketing lead working at a, at a SaaS company.
• 39:58
  You should equip your CMO to go on a call or at a meeting with their CFO to request, you know, budget for next quarter, right?
• 40:09
  And you shouldn't assume that this CMO is okay, is well-equipped just by clicking on a link from a Google Sheet you built without any context, without anything.
• 40:18
  You should proactively communicate and make sure that, you know, they understand, right?
• 40:24
  And the third pillar, once again, all these creative aspects of content marketing are important, especially now, but you should focus on building performance capital first, so that then you can go with confidence in these calls and ask for more things or, you know, communicating bets that you wanna place, risks that you wanna take, and so on.
• 40:45
  I love the idea of performance capital. That's, that's great.
• 40:48
  A, a couple years ago, I created a course for Superpath Pro about content reporting, and it was all centered around what I call the four Ns of reporting, which are numbers, nuance, names, and narrative.
• 41:03
  Meaning numbers, you gotta get all the data. Nuance, you have to be able to explain it. Like if the chart's moving up and down, you have to be able to explain why that's happening.
• 41:12
  Names, meaning you need screenshots of real people reacting to stuff you've done on social media or Slack or wherever. And then the last being narrative, like you have to wrap it all up in narrative.
• 41:22
  George, thank you so much for coming back on. I also-- I should call out that Manutia's been producing this podcast that you are listening to right now, and Manutia's done a great job, so thank you.
• 41:31
  And I fully endorse it, and I'm not being paid to say that, and I have no financial incentive. [laughs] It's genuinely a good service.
• 41:37
  We will obviously link people to Manutia, to Growth Waves, to the webinar that we did. Is there anywhere else we can direct people to follow along with you personally or any of your work?
• 41:48
  My LinkedIn profile is the best, you know, place to say hi and connect, and I think the ones you mentioned are, are enough. Cool. Your, your LinkedIn posts lately have been really good.
• 41:56
  You've been sharing a lot about kind of the background of the agency, some of the trials and tribulations you went through to get it to where it is today. So I would encourage folks to go check that out.
• 42:06
  I'm just comfortable sharing the, you know, the not so good [laughs] aspects of, uh, running a business. So yeah. Cool. Well, thank you. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for being here.
• 42:15
  Thank you for being a longtime partner to Superpath. We really appreciate you and Manutia, and hopefully, you can be our first ever third time guest sometime soon. [upbeat music] Thank you, Tim. Thank you very much.
• 42:26
  Thanks, George. Take care. [upbeat music]