Growth Sprints’ Brendan Hufford on What’s Killing Your Content Marketing & What to Do Instead

Welcome to Content Disrupted. Bold takes on brand marketing. I'm your host, Dan Baptiste, and together we'll explore what it takes to excel in brand marketing at one of the most exciting and disruptive times in industry history. Welcome to Content Disrupted. Today I am super excited to talk with Brendan Hufford, the founder of Growth Sprints, where they help take SaaS companies from 10 million to 100 million arrows through their unique marketing Sprints approach. Brendan is a super curious person who always pushes boundaries and has receipts to prove the value of his innovative thinking. At least that's what he tells me. Brendan is one of the smartest, funniest indirect people in the content marketing space, which we all need right now. And his insights regularly challenge me and help me evolve my thinking around strategy. If you don't Follow him on LinkedIn like 50,000 of your friends, then you should do that immediately. Brendan is the perfect amount of grumpy to complain about marketing these days, but also has a clear path on how we can work together to fix it, which is what we'll talk about today. Brendan, welcome to the show. How did I do? Allegedly, Dan. Allegedly to every. Like, put a big asterisk in there. You know, I was recently on a podcast with one of my friends and she was like, how do you describe yourself? And I'm like, grouchy Midwest content dad, I guess. And I think you also nailed that. Thank you. It's like Oscar the Grouch. Like, you liked you because you're grouchy and you bring that to the party for sure. Yeah, man, we're working on it. It's a work in progress. Funny enough. Like, I'm actually working on being a little less snarky, but then I just find myself falling back into it and I'm like, why fight it at this point? Yeah, man, that's your brand. I think you need to continue to embrace it. I think that would be a huge mistake. So, you know, a lot to cover here, but wanted to talk about the current state. I was reading your gross Sprints email from this morning. Use some marking up in one sentence, which I loved as even a fraction of a sentence is dot, dot, dot, messy. Couldn't agree more. Talk to me about what you're seeing in the Today. So let's talk about marketing being messy first. There is and probably has never been. As much as we would love there to be a marketing funnel or a clear buyer journey to anything, we have to remember that the idea of a marketing funnel, it's funny. Like, Dan, most people don't Know this. The idea of a marketing funnel was created at the same time when the top concern in cities was how are we going to clean up all this horse poop? There's a marketing funnel and there's no cars and the cities are full of horse crap. Like, how are we ever going to deal with this? Right? But that sounds insane to all of us living, you know, in 2025. That's how old the marketing funnel idea is. So the idea that there's any sort of linear path is really, really challenging. And I think we all got really excited with technology that we're like, well, we can see some of this stuff now. We can see digitally where people are going and what they're doing. And now we think we know some things that the problem is that led to a lot of like, really bad decisions. Prioritization of, you know, how do we hyper optimize things? Or the idea of, like, if it's working, let's do more of it. That sounds silly because they're, I think in every other. Let's use like exercise for an example. You're like, wow, when I squat a hundred pounds, this is great. Why don't I squat a thousand pounds? Well, cause that'll kill you. Like, that's too much, right? Unless you have a squat suit and you're super jacked. But like the. We think that like, because one is good, all is best is not always true. So it leads to both messy on their side of it, on a buyer side, on a consumer side, and also on a marketer side of things. It's messy for them, it's messy for us. The problem is like, how do we continue making really good decisions? And what I've found is that there's some really good discussions happening around this on LinkedIn, especially right now, currently around like, how far we've gotten away from marketing fundamentals, especially in a lot of the orgs that I work in, SaaS and software companies, especially B2B, where most of the 4Ps are not things you are even allowed to touch in marketing. You're not allowed to touch pricing or product. Those are completely separate teams that own that. And it's like, well, what can we really do anymore as marketers? So I think it's just hard to find our place. And then it's, I think at the end of the day, we all want to have impact, but it's also hard to do work that you're proud of, that you're happy to show your peers. Because as much as, like, we all love to See an up into the right graph of revenue or traffic or whatever. You know, if I came to you and I'm like, look at 10,000 really spammy, low quality, whatever, generative AI pages on this website. But look at the outcome. And people look at them and they're like, yeah, but those are kind of weird, man. Like, we want our peers to respect our work. I know that sounds silly. This is something I've become more in tune with over the last like year or two is like, we just want to be proud of it. We want to be able to show each other. I want to be able to have a conversation like this with you where it's like, yeah, like, look at this newsletter that I've written to your point, or whatever else. Like, we just want to like what we make. And. And I think that's a little bit underrated too. You've been in the space for a long time in different nooks and crannies in the space. SEO, things like that. When was the last time, if ever, you saw this sort of classic approach to content marketing really working and what changed to cause it not to work? Okay, so I might flip your question a little bit. There are a bunch of people doing what I would call classic content marketing. I think classic SEO, for the sake of SEO doesn't work anymore. Did it ever? We don't know. Just we were using first touch or last touch attribution and we forgot branded search is a thing. And that was throwing everything off. But like, if we talk about genuine content marketing, I think that SparkToro as a company still does best in class. Amanda and Rand at SparkToro, Amanda, Natividad, Rand, Fishkin, still do best in class, true content marketing. And they do old school stuff that we've kind of gotten away from. And I think that playbook, we're seeing the pendulum swing back a little bit where it's like some of these old school things, like we're guest blogging and stuff, where you were like, surely that we left that 10 years ago. Why would I guest blog when I have all of this intent data? Like, you know, we forget those things still really matter. You know, going on other people's podcasts and stuff like things like that, or even just having a really good podcast. That's an opinion and a premise. Like just classic things that have always worked. We kind of got away from it because we got into this, you know, some people call it like go to market engineer type of thing, where it's like we can just spreadsheet this I can micro optimize 10,000 little things. And that in aggregate makes a big move on the whole. I think we're just kind of coming to the realization of like, you can't optimize zero. Like, if you don't have a brand, if nobody actually likes you, you're nobody's favorite, nobody wants your stuff. Sure, you can outbound everybody to death, right? Just yeet the BDRs at them. But I think we're just seeing like, the more common these tactics are to your answer your question of like, when did it stop working? When everybody started doing it. When everybody started doing the same stuff. We've seen that over and over again in marketing. Whether that's. You remember when you used to like, be able to send emails to people to get backlinks and like, people were like, sure, I'd love to link to your website because you asked. Like, it was so novel then everybody did. It didn't work anymore. Right now it's like, AI SDRs. Let's just have the AI outbound everybody. And that was really cool for a minute. Or the. All those products that uncover the identity of anonymous website visitors or whatever. Like, basically, hey, saw you on our website. Did you want to become a lead? Like, I don't think those softwares work to do anything other than sell those softwares. That was really novel of like, whoa, I was on this website. Or remember those abandoned cart emails you would get from like Shopify stores and you were like, I was looking at that. That was in my cart. I did forget. I'll go buy it now with a 10% discount. Thank you. Now everybody does it. I don't know about you, but I will absolutely leave something in my cart and leave from the website just to see if I can get 20% off. Like, I don't know when these things get more common marketing tactics. I think if I can zoom out a little bit, when the tactics get really common, it exposes who doesn't have strategy behind it. Like those places that are just like four tactics in a trench coat. I mean, would you agree, Dan? Like, what do you think? Yeah, I, I would actually. I think it's interesting and novel when you have something to say in a vehicle to say it. But to your point, if you're just using the vehicle with nothing behind it because we've seen other people have it work, then it's just frigging annoying. And if you're on the receiving end of those messages, people have found a unique way to get to you or manipulate an engagement model. But the message sucks, right? So now instead of you saying like, okay, am I operating in service of my customers or am I operating in service of myself in this message that I'm going to try to wrap in some different kitschy thing that's going to get your attention, then people just start tuning you out and it has the opposite effect. So instead of you influencing and creating relevance with the market, and instead you're just pissing people off. So I think that's kind of how I view it. Yeah, but those pissed off people don't show up in your spreadsheet, right? Like, you don't know Otter. AI has no idea how many people them doing. So if you sign up for their free plan without any consent, they now invite their thing to their little like, call tracker into every call. And if you haven't paid for it, 30 minutes into the call, it drops a comment into Zoom and is like, hey, Dan's on the free plan. He should really upgrade. And it just shames you. It makes you look like a cheapskate in the middle of the call. And you're like, wait, I didn't even invite this thing in here. Also, I thought Otter did transcripts. Why is it a meeting call recorder in here, but on their spreadsheet? They're like, look at all the upgrades we got this month. Look at all the trials we generated. This is going great. And it's like, yeah, but everybody who didn't upgrade from a free plan to a paid plan hates you. They hate you. Like, I posted about that on LinkedIn. Half the comments are like, that company sucks. They're awful. Like, yeah, they just hit 100 million in revenue. Respect, great, but they could be 500 million in revenue if everybody didn't freaking hate them. But they don't see that show up. There's no tracker for everybody thinks you suck. So we miss those sites of things. Like I said, we just become like spreadsheet marketers. I love that post. And I actually, there was another one recently that you had that had me rolling. I think you titled it something like, content marketing is being dismantled as we speak, not from AI replacing jobs. And then you said in parentheses, like, despite what the LinkedIn think boys are saying. And I was like, I laughed. And I'm like, I don't even know what LinkedIn think boys are. I had to like, Google it as a trend. There's another term that ends with BOI that I don't know if we want to get the explicit rating on the pod here or like, thread Boys or something. All these, like, bros that just are like, I've got a keyboard and I have thoughts, yo, it's just, shut up. Like, you're not doing a good job. There's a lot of those, like, think boys. And the thread boys on Twitter were like, rampant for a while, you know, where they're like, I'm going to go on Reddit and just rewrite Reddit threads on Twitter. And look at all of it. Just drove me crazy. There's so many tactics out there with no soul that I feel like half of my content at this point is me just being like, please stop. Yeah, that's your grumpiness coming through loud and clear. Which I think to your point is, is your superpower here. And you talked about what we hit at the beginning, which is like, what used to sort of drive pipeline no longer works. And if you don't do it with purpose, it burns cash and erodes trust. Which is totally true. Right? So as marketers and content marketers, we have to look in the mirror. And I think when we started in this space, I think I'm a little older than you, but being in here for about 15 years, you know, there was a lot of talk in the early days about how to build relationships with people. Now a lot of the talk that you're hearing is about to your point, micro optimizing a tactic in a spreadsheet and the message almost gets lost. And you start thinking of today when you see tools to get a further distance from a point of view or something to say with tools like AI, wow. Like, this could get worse and worse. And we're starting to see it happen. So I guess one question there is you spend a lot of time in data and you spend a lot of time hopping into clients that maybe are working on like a classic keyword oriented blog strategy or things like that. Have you seen a slow decline in that performance? Are you starting to see a negative, like, cliff happen where it's happening at a more aggressive fashion? Well, I think what you're describing is like the classic content strategy of like, export all your keywords sort for like, highest volume, lowest keyword difficulty. And then you just go down the list and you're like, this is our content strategy. That's the worst. Again, like, worked or did it for a long time. What I'm seeing across all of my clients is I'm very sensitive to the fact that, like, people were tasked incorrectly for a long time. So I come at this not from a place of like, I'm smart And you're dumb or like, I'm good and you're bad. Of like, I get why companies wrote about anything for a long time. Like they would write, you know, they had like, they did the Forbes move where it's like Forbes ranks number one for best truck tires and best SEO agency. And that drives me crazy that Google lets them. But they did and so many websites did for a long time. I think it was really well documented where HubSpot lost a ton of traffic in all the SEO tools. You could kind of see it fall off. And then they had their best quarter to date ever, all time as a company. And it's like, you know, Kip and Kieran, one of the SVP's of marketing and their CMO were like, everybody relax, we're good over here. Because like, the things they lost traffic for was, you know, like how to type the shrug emoji, the old one with like the backslashes and stuff. And it actually was a good post about that. That's the terrible thing. The irony is they've since redirected that post to how to do blog posts about how to do content refreshes, which I think is like the funniest troll you could possibly do. So sometimes it falls off a cliff. I had one even when I was in house at activecampaign a couple years ago. You know, it was probably, I just celebrated three years of growth sprints. So this is probably like four years ago. We had like the great traffic panic of 2021 where our top posts of company slogans, what is an sdr? How to become a life coach. All started losing traffic and everybody was like, we have to get the traffic back. And I'm like, why are people googling how to become a life coach Becoming they buying an email marketing platform. What is an SDR? They're going to buy ActiveCampaign. They're not. These are good for other reasons. Traffic, brand awareness. They're earning links for us. They're doing other things. That's fine. But I wouldn't choose to write those and try to rank for them. Net new. So who cares that it's falling off? I think I've seen a lot of clients losing traffic for crap they probably shouldn't have written in the first place. I've also seen clients do really great work and see traffic fall off. Like, I have a client right now who's in martac and they have best in class content and it's kind of fallen off and it's like, well, why is this happening? And it's. There's simple like things that we could probably do better in there, but for the most part. I'd like to answer your question directly. The big drop offs are happening because of like we've written for crap we shouldn't. And Google's like, you're not actually an authority on best truck tires, Brendan. Or you know, these niche sites are being destroyed. Or it is like a gradual kind of slow decline. But the gradual slow decline is good. That should happen over time. We haven't updated any of these posts since 2022. We haven't like done certain things we probably should. Um, our website is kind of falling apart because we built it on a, you know, out of toothpicks, marshmallows and dreams. Like we probably should, you know, move to a, a cms. That makes sense, like things like that where it's totally manageable. You mentioned Ran's coming on next week as well to dig into this. He's the nicest person I've ever met in my whole life. He's wonderful and you know, really digging into what I think the term he coined the zero click marketing or zero click environment. Are you starting to see a lot of these platforms that aren't returning the traffic back to own properties and part of that starts to change your strategy as well as you start thinking about creating more of a distributed influence versus like breadcrumbs where you're chasing people around and assuming they're going to come back. Are you seeing the impact of that as well? What I see is the bigger impact is small teams trying to be too many places. They're doing the checkbox marketing approach of like, we need to have webinars. We have a podcast, we have a blog, we have a newsletter. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm doing this. We also have YouTube trying to be on 20 platforms and it's like you have two marketers. Stop it. SparkToro has two marketers. They don't do a lot of marketing. They write, they post on social. They used to do a lot of office hours, which I wish they would get back to because it was so, so fun to come. The vibes were just immaculate. That's what I'm seeing happen quite a bit on the zero click side. When I think of Rand's counterpart, Amanda was the first one that came up with zero click content or zero click marketing. They've now adopted it as like a company kind of piece of. I'm seeing more and more of that, but I think this is more of us Coming to the realization of like this has always been true. Of course there's zero click whether it's, you know, people searching in ChatGPT or Google, Google still sending out, I think like 90% of traffic to the Internet generally comes from Google, but it's still less maybe than it was previously, whether that's you know, generative AI in the search results or things like that. Again my point is like if somebody trusts Google's AI or they trust ChatGPT, which is most of the time just like a really confident 13 year old you and I are pretty familiar with, right? Like would you take advice from like a really confident 11 to 13 year old? Not really. But if they are willing to trust that and not look at any other resources, were they ever going to be a customer really? Especially for a considered purchase like B2B. If I ask ChatGPT what is the best content optimization tool and it tells me it's Surfer, which it just did the other day, that's great. But if I just go buy Surfer and I don't look at any other options, am I really a great customer for Surfer or anybody else? Like you should probably have a consideration set or even if like it's a higher acv, right? So I think like that I'm, I know I'm all over the place the zero click content thing is happening, but I think it's similar to like the lost SEO traffic from random blogs where it's like should we have had that in the first place? Is that actually hurting the business? Yeah. And to your point that you've made over and over again directly and subtly is, is this a strategic position that we should be owning as a business? And I think the phrase that I've, I've started to use is, you know, we used to look at content as this like bottom up approach where it's just like, you know, to your point, could we be everywhere and have this really shallow broad coverage and chase ranked positions on topics that semi random or can we start crafting a market position in a point of view and a deep connection with people that has empathy to what they're going through and the purpose behind why our company exists in the first place. And I think, you know, that's kind of an interesting transition here as we think about, you know, we've just spent a lot of time talking about what's broken and where we're spending a lot of time, you know, wasting time and money in some cases now how do we reposition that to start thinking about the future and I don't want to kind of gas you up too much, but your work around Content IP I think is awesome. I want to say I've borrowed it, but I've probably stolen a little bit of it. And I think this sort of gateway to the future of like, how do we just reconnect with people and have a point of view and be important and be relevant. Having something to say to them consistently and being known for that is really important. So I'd love if you could walk through the principles of Content IP and kind of how it works. Totally. I will say before we move on the zero click content piece, like I came up in SEO, right? And then I realized I could not compete in SEO. About SEO. I was never going to outrank Neil Patel. Semrush, whatever. But I did realize I was way better than Neil Patel on camera. I realized I could podcast better than him, I could make YouTube videos better than him. So I leaned all the way into that. I figured out you. I did a hundred day project where I did like a hundred blogs, a hundred newsletters, a hundred podcast episodes and 100 YouTube videos in a hundred days. Don't recommend anybody do that. That was way more work than I thought it would be. I will not sign up for that. But it was good. It got me on the radar. It totally changed my life and career. I'd recommend anybody, if you're listening to this, watching this whatever, do a hundred day project. It will get you on the rad. Like it's just such a volume of work in such pace that like it's kind of unignorable. Very Cal Newport be so good they can't ignore you type of thing. So zero click content accidentally became how I got all my clients right. Like, I don't say like, hey, I published a blog. Go click on my blog and read. I just put the whole thing in the email and I'm like, if you want to read it on the web or you want to share it, do that. Here's a link. But I want you to get it all here because you're in the inbox. You're here. Here's all of it. Same thing on LinkedIn. Here's all of it. It's a carousel. It's long form. It's however I can deliver it to you just here. So I'm a big believer in that too. Despite a lot of my work still being around SEO and stuff for clients. Also on the idea. So Content IP came from me being in house at activecampaign and loving this company loving the product. The main value prop of that product was enterprise grade email marketing and marketing automation. $11 a month, it was accessible. That's what you used to have to do to run all these advanced things. And then ActiveCampaign was like, oh, we can very Midwest of them. We can just make this successful to every small business that exists. But then they tried to become customer Experience Automation and it was like you renamed a really good solution that already existed and nobody wants this new one. Respect. Again, love the company, love the team there. But I realized, like we're naming the solution, we're not naming problems. And this also coincided with what I came to understand. My friend Kurt, who's the director of content currently at ZoomInfo, Kurt Woodward, he's a journalist and in journalism. These are called conceptual scoops. Everybody listening to this right now will recognize when I say the Great Resignation. Quiet Quitting. First of all, those are a plus. Chef's kiss, copywriting. Right? But. And we love a good alliteration, but we all saw that happening. Like nobody said the great Resignation. And everybody went, nope, nope, that's not happening. We all saw it already. They gave a name to the tsunami wave that we were all watching wash over us. And all of a sudden that was what we called it. Quiet quitting, Great resignation, all that stuff. And I'm like, oh, when we just name the problem and we give it a clever, catchy name, we know this works. I remember I was reading a book. I love personal development stuff. I'm a total sucker for it. It's so woo woo. But I love it. And this guy wrote that there's a throwaway line in the middle of the book where he's talking about fitness. And he was just like, I remember. He says, I remember when my body used to feel like a weapon. I'd never heard my body described like that. But I can viscerally put you in the moment of me in my 20s standing in the bathroom, looking in the mirror and going, holy. And I could. Didn't have the words for it then, but now I know that was the exact moment that I felt like my body felt like a weapon. And. And I was like, I don't care what you're selling. You could sell me supplements, you could sell me coaching. I don't. I'll buy anything you're selling right now. Doesn't matter. You're my new life coach if you want to be that. Because you have given me words for this problem that I have felt for a freaking decade. We could all describe it long form. Oh, I'm a former athlete, you know, I remember when I used to be in shape. Dad, bod, father figure, all of these types of things, we all have long form ways of describing them. But like all of a sudden I had a very visceral, clear way of describing it. I've noticed the same thing to be true in B2B and tech and whatever, where simply giving words is what I call content ip. Giving words to the problem that we solve. All of a sudden we're like, oh yeah, that's called this. And they're like, oh, that is called that. Totally makes sense. Like, I talk about Checkbox marketing all the time. I've started talking about the content Cold war, which maybe you have to be a certain age to get that, but then again, that's my audience, right? Like us and older talking about like content Cold War and instead of mutually assured Destruction, talking about mutually assured Distraction. I see this echoed. People are like, they'll comment on LinkedIn this line and they'll just paste content Cold War or mutually assured Distraction. And I'm like, checkbox Marketing. I remember my friend Mac who's the founder of comsor, was like, can I get death to Checkbox marketing on a T shirt? And I'm like, that's the signal you're looking for. Of like, I named the problem, they're echoing it back that they wanted on a shirt. Done. I've become really good friends with Devin Reed. One of the first times we Talked was he DMed me and was like, he's like, I'm so pissed that you named Checkbox Marketing first. Because we'd all lived through that just being in these companies, checking all the boxes. We talked about a little bit today as well, but not seeing impact from it. Just doing more work than ever. Again, I experienced this when I was in house. Naming those problems goes a really long way because then they trust you however you solve it. To my point about like, do you want to sell me supplements or me my life coach? I don't care how you solve it. I just trust you more than anybody else. And that's what I think we've lost with like the tactics over strategy piece. Yeah, the naming thing is real. So I think probably 10 years ago we were working or still are working with adp, the HR payroll company. And at that time they were super sales driven. Right? So the marketing and content team was like a fulfillment center for like, I need an infographic, I need a white paper, I need a blog. And they were doing all of these one off things. And we came in to help say, like, all right, let's put our arms around this and work together to create a leadership position for people. Right? Like you're working with HR leaders and CFOs and small business owners, like, you're playing a meaningful role in their lives. Like, how do we not just do a whole bunch of random activities that are rooted in a sales position, but instead invest in driving change in this community? And what we did was at that time, like named the effort which still exists today. It's called Spark. And the idea was all of the people, like HR was kind of a softer function, but coming to the table with like talent wars and upskilling and how do we create a spark within our people that's going to drive change in the organization? So then they're looking at things like legislation and employee development and all of these different elements that work together to create the spark. You know, what was missing, which I've really gravitated toward with your work, is we're naming the solution, but we haven't articulated the massive problem if you don't do that. Right? So, you know, I look at that as like, oh my God, like if you can articulate the problem, wrap the solution and then point, you know, whatever your offer is to create that world, like perfect storm as we think about trying to really create impact in the market. Absolutely. And you also touched on something else that is very near and dear to my heart, which is offers. I work primarily with software companies and I think a lot of times they just think the software is the offer, that's the offer. And I think they've conflated like marketing offers and business offers. Kind of just thought like everything is the business offer. If you can imagine if the only way you could interact with me was hire me, that would might be kind of crappy. Like I don't have a newsletter, I don't have any sort of like free course. All these other cool things that we forget are like really good marketing offers. We've moved away from that. We've also moved away from like I came up, a lot of people probably came up in the digital marketing world, proper adult digital marketing, right? I came up in what I would call online marketing, like webinars about webinars, a lot of like personal development ebooks for $400 and like all this like spammy, scammy, weird stuff. And I love that because those guys, and they're all guys, were just masters of offer design. Like they understood the, you know, this is the click funnels world, the offer stack and like. Objection. Handling within the offer and then bonus stacking and all these different things. Like, I'm obsessed with that sort of stuff. I don't see a lot of that in B2B. Like, we forget that, you know, especially in software, it's like, well, we don't want service revenue. We don't want it. Well, maybe that's the unlock. Like, I have a client right now that was like, screw it. Like, what our clients actually need. We're going to go buyer first. What our clients really need is services. They sell, like, really cool AI sales, roleplay software. And they were like, look like they. We can give it to them. We can give them all the training and the onboarding and change management and all this crap doesn't do it. We got to be in bet. We got to have a consultant in with every single client, especially early on to, like, get them to really do this stuff. And it's monumentally changed because they just changed their offer. It's not just by the software. Figure it out. Right. Or using more tech to solve tech. Like, there's still a human element in there. I love offer design, so I'm glad you mentioned it. Like, it's something I'm super passionate about. Yeah, I mean, I. I think there's two things to unpack there, Brendan. So one is picking a problem that's commercially relevant. Right. Like, if you pick the wrong problem, you joked about your body as a weapon, and you can sell me anything, but in most cases, if your body doesn't feel like a weapon or used to be a weapon, I remember when it felt like a weapon, and then, God damn it, I can help make it a weapon again. If you're chasing that fountain of youth, come over here. Like, I've architected a problem. You see me, I solve the problem. So one is, how do you pick the problem? And then two, mapping those solutions directly to, you know, whatever the problem is that you're solving. Yeah. You know, I remember when my body used to feel like a weapon by my beard oil. That's great. It's affinity. It's probably your audience, like, you know, like the age and the gender and all this. It probably is, but probably don't do that. Like, I. I think a lot about Chris Walker and people probably might follow him on LinkedIn. He popularized the attribution mirage and dark social problems that everybody was like, not new, not new, not new. This is dumb. Why are we making up words for things that already exist? And Then everybody was like, this is what we call it now. We didn't have, like, we could talk about the messiness of attribution, we could talk about how it's hard to track all these. Like, what is the ROI of a comment on LinkedIn? Who knows? But he gave us words for those. The problem is his agency ran your Facebook ads, didn't connect super well. Like, did a lot. But everybody was like, what do they do? They're 40 grand a month for an agency. But did they do attribution mirage work? Did they do dark social? They didn't. And there was a big disconnect there to the point they even started a consultancy spinoff that actually addressed the IP that he had created, which was the right move. You know, I was talking to, just to really put a pin in this. I have a client that works in the, the AppSec space, application security. And there's a very big. For people that aren't familiar, there's a very, very big disconnect between security people that prioritize things being secure and developers that want to move fast, which means they are ripping code out of generative AI. Copying code, pasting code. The problem is if you're copying pasting code out of all this open source stuff, you don't know what part of the open source stuff you're copying. Pasting has security issues, has vulnerabilities. Well, security is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, we need to look at all this. Here's all these issues. And developers are like, dude, we gotta ship this tomorrow. I don't have time to look at 47 tickets from you about looking like, I don't even know where to find this crap in the code because I've pasted it from 97 other places. It's like you made a. Imagine you make a stew and I'm like, something in that stew has poison in it. And you're like, why? I can't even pick it out. But like, in their space, to make a point. There are so many problems we can touch on in the AppSec space and especially the relationship between security and development. They don't solve a lot of those problems. They are known problems. It would resonate deeply with the audience, but the audience would then be like, well, why would I buy this? Why would I buy this solution? It has nothing to do with this stuff. So you do have to like, I just literally, that started this top of mind. We were talking about it literally yesterday. It was like, here's these five problems. And I came up with all these Cool names. And they're like, yeah, yeah, it's just column B though. Column B is the only one we solve here. And I'm like, I'm dumb. So I just. Bit of humility. Like, I screw this up. I get so excited about naming things. They're like, these will make great emails. These will be cool webinars, really top of funnel. Can we do the foundational stuff first? And I'm like, you're right. That's why you're cmo, because you're better than me at this. What did they go with for the problem name? We haven't decided yet. So we started looking more at. Instead of like these problems, I can give you an idea of what problem we focused on. So, like the fact that like the security teams in engineering have these. Have this disconnect good problem. They don't solve that. Security has this old, like, checkbox security mindset of like, we just have to checkbox all of our things and make sure everything's buttoned up because breaches happen and it looks really bad. But there's a joke about, like, buy the breach. Because I don't know if you, like, I don't know if you follow this stuff. Like, CrowdStrike took down global supply chains. Like, CrowdStrike completely crapped the whole scene. And their stock is better today than even it was before the breach. We think these breaches have business impact. Turns out security doesn't matter. Nobody cares. The market doesn't care long term. But what their solution helps with is what's called dependency management, which is pulling out, like, in the code. It'll actually look and be like, hey, I know you copied and pasted code from 30 places. These three lines are the problem. Fix those. And here's what it needs to do. And it empowers security teams to tell engineering, like, here's actually what you have to fix. It's super fast. Takes four seconds. And also, don't worry about all these other. We were talking about, like, how security can kind of become a red flag factory. I love that. I love that. Like, it's got a good alliteration. Red flag factory. Because in security teams would be like, dude, we are a red flag factory. That's all we do. We just throw up the red flags everywhere to engineering. They hate us. They don't solve that though. They solve this other part, this fact that like 80% of code is copied and pasted. We have to, like, work on this dependency management. So that's my point is, like, we have all these bigger problems. We just had to focus and start with the problem we solved. I actually help companies get out of checkbox marketing through these various sprints that we work on together, doing the things that matter, doing it in a way that has impact versus let's do a hundred different random acts of marketing. You have to, have to, have to like, stay focused on that stuff to that point, I assume the altitude of the problem matters, right? Like, so you can't pick something small, insignificant, or maybe like too focused. Where if you think of the Red Flag factory or wherever you land in that account, it matters to developers, to security, to the C suite, who's now opening up security vulnerabilities. Like, you don't want to be on the wrong side of a supply chain disaster. So you can have a problem that matters, but then, you know, translating that problem to each different stakeholder. But it's the same problem, right? Like, so through your work, are you seeing selection of the problem being like, hey, this value or fear matters at all different levels of our client organizations. Dan, how many people have you worked with where you're like, hey, tell me the problem you solve. And they're like, well, we could do anything. Like, we solve everything for everybody, you know? And you're like, yeah, but just, just pick one. And they're like, we can't. We do a thousand things. And you're like, that's the problem. That right there. You can't figure out what the core problem you actually solve for your customers is. Or they're like, you ask about the problem and they're like, well, our software does this. That's not the problem. That's just what your software does calendly helps me schedule meetings. What's the problem? Problem is I kept losing everything in my inbox trying to schedule this crap. That's a problem. What your software does isn't actually the problem, it's just how you think it should be solved. So what's funny is like this, the. The real value, which I wouldn't sell cause it would be weird. But like, it's hard to price. Like, I'll help you figure out what your actual problem you solve is, but it's truly, this exercise is a forcing function of like. Yeah, yeah, no, it's this. No, actually, it's this. No, it's that. And now, all of a sudden, now that we focus, now we know what our podcast is about, what our office hours and webinars are going to be about. We know what we Talk about on LinkedIn. We know what we. What keywords we should try to rank. For now, we have a lot more focus. That's, I think, the real value of those types of exercises. Thank you for your thinking around the subject. As soon as I started consuming it, I saw there was a gap. There was one of our clients in a commoditized space that was trying to be differentiated. They didn't have a well articulated problem statement. So I got on a plane and I flew out there with the team and spent a couple days and went through that exact exercise. And we left. And it did a few things that were really important. One was focus to your point is like, now everything can work together to create momentum, but it also was a forcing function for empathy. Right. Because if you're talking about the problem, you're not talking about, like, how great you are. You're actually trying to say, like, let me, like, really understand the customer environment and what they're struggling with and why it matters. And, oh, that one's not big enough. I'm dealing with the symptom. What's the core problem? And it forces you to, like, really think critically about your customer, which is, you know, lacking. Especially. Especially in, you know, that checkbox marketing sphere that you're talking about where you're creating assets and you're creating a whole bunch of them to fill functional boxes, to hit some sort of quota. It wipes that away. And I think even in our business, like, we've oriented our business to say, like, okay, how do we create really smart pillars around your point of view, largely around the problem that you solve? You know, so thinking of the role of content IP in creating a market presence and, you know, we've leaned into AI not to create content, but to atomize content into dimensions and formats and things so your message can travel. Just that exercise in moving from creating a bunch of individual assets to creating pillars and ecosystems and content that have the ability to scale changes strategy. Right. Because it forces you to be like, well, why does it matter in the first place? And to whom does it matter to? And before I create anything, I better know the whole story. And you didn't have to do that in the checkbox marketing sphere because everything wasn't comprehensive enough. Maybe it wasn't tied together in the same way that you're describing. And it's low risk because you're just pumping out 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 of those things in May and you'll do another in June. Right. Like, so it starts to really kind of screw your head on differently, which I think is important. Yeah. And you Also know like what stories to tell. You've worked in corporate long enough. Tell me what the end of this story is. You see, you're looking at your calendars, 3pm on a Friday. You see a calendar invite from 4:45 to 5:00pm Your boss is on it. HR is on it. What's happening in that meeting? I'm probably getting fired. We all know how that story ends. Yeah, I didn't have to tell you. Finding moments like that where your customer is like, I know the end of this story. I've been in this. This story is me finding those moments. This is all a forcing function. And we can be hand waving, be like it's brand and it's talk to your customers and it's blah blah, blah. What's hard is finding people like you and me that like, know how, like yeah, yeah, here's how you turn that into marketing. One of the ways we turn that in marketing is when you are really focused on the problem. All of a sudden you're like, oh, these are the stories that go with it that I've lived through that they, if I'm not my customer, like I'm not a appsec, like professional. But when you talk to enough of them and talk to the people who talk to them enough, you know, RSA just happened a huge like security conference conference. They went there and they talked to a ton of people and came back with like way better ideas about like what the problem they actually solved was huge. Right. All of a sudden we're like, all right, I'm just searching for these moments, I'm searching for these stories and we're going to tell them again and again and again. Because when my customer can finish the story for me or they've been in that, they've looked in the mirror, they know when their body was a weapon. Like all of a sudden those are the stories we tell and we tell them until we are sick and tired of telling them and we tell em for about two more years. Cause our audience hasn't heard it yet. We're just tired of it. Yeah. And to that point like we actually did something similar at RSA. There's a company called Devo, they work with CISOs. And part of like the DevOps function, if you're unfamiliar with it, like there is a whole bunch of noise where in a, if you're in a junior role, you spend so much time just dealing with stuff that doesn't matter, right. So like 85% of stuff is just annoying. And because of that There was high turnover at the junior ranks in the. Similar to the example you gave. Like, their software actually eliminates the noise, focuses on the problem. So you need maybe less people, but they're focused on real problems all day. But because you didn't have that before, there was a whole bunch of turnover. And CISOs didn't develop their teams until like, the kind of future of the industry. Yeah, same as SDRs and sales. Right. It's just like, this is awful and we're losing probably good people because it's just terrible. Exactly. Churn and burn. So as their software solved that solution, they said, well, we need to help not only these security teams with the software, but we now need to, like, help develop these teams and have them work together and everything is now more strategic. So we worked with them to actually, like, write a book. And we had CISOs giving reflections on what they wish they knew if they were in the emerging shoes. Fantastic offer design, by the way. Thank you. I didn't come up with it. Amazing. It's a great vehicle. We're like, well, let me write this e book. It's like, dude, just print it out. Yeah. I mean, they brought it to rsa. Their booth was a bookstore on the stage. Somebody held up the book. They weren't even on a panel on the main stage. And they're like, we need to all be more, like, devo and invest in our community more. They had coffee hours with the authors of each chapter. We atomized it into landing pages and blog series and LinkedIn. And that one thing turned into a massive legion. And then guess what? We did the same thing for the middle section of the team. And then we did a research report for CISOs with them on, you know, what are the dynamics of change that are taking place? And their entire focus is around helping support and create this sort of next wave of future proof security with teams and development and resources and all of that stuff. So it's crazy. I mean, you start thinking of, like, how do we narrow this thing down into something we can own and we can rally around it. And to your point, the more we talk about a common problem that is important, it creates more and more recognition ownership of that problem attributed to this organization in momentum. So a couple of follow on questions to that. So one is there was comfort in checkbox marketing because you kind of know what to do, right? You're like, I wake up and I know I need 10 blogs this month and a white paper this quarter. And I kind of know, right? And now I just, I got to kind of figure out what to say. Maybe Google give me that answer to an extent and then I'll get creative around it. This is different because now it's like, okay, now I have to understand how to bring this message to market and what are all the channels I need to show up in. And I can't do too many to your point, because I won't do any of them. Well. So are there any tactics that you've seen work well as you think about almost like distribution plans or campaign design on taking a message to market effectively? Like, is it research? Is it gut instinct? Is it just picking channels that you want to dominate? What's your thought process there? So I think first the. The content IP piece, it can feel like it's opposite of checkbox marketing, and it's not. It's actually the middle of a spectrum. The spectrum is checkbox marketing. We're just doing all these things, checking the boxes. And again, like, I love checkbox marketing. It feels good in the sense of. It feels good. Like, I will. I don't know about you, Dan. Like, I'll have a to do list and I'll do something that wasn't on my list and I'll write it on the list just to cross it out. I love it, dude. I love it. Like, I love checking those boxes off, crossing things off the list. It feels good as a human, I get that. And again, empathy. On the other end of the spectrum is random acts of marketing, where we have no checkboxes. We're just doing like, this month we're doing two blogs. The next month is a webinar and then we're doing a product launch. Then we're going to start a podcast for five episodes. Then it's LinkedIn again. Like, it's just, I'm advocating there's a middle ground right between those checkbox and random acts. And that is where this lives. And from a strategic standpoint, I mean, I can give somebody a play. I didn't even come up with this play, but it is something that I've done a lot for myself. I've done it for clients. It's a really cool content distribution play that was created by two really smart people, Pete Caputa and John Bonini from Databox, if people are familiar with them. Pete launched the. I might mistell the story, but Pete launched the partner program. He. I think he was a VP of sales at HubSpot. And if I understand the story correctly, they were like, at the time it was at Brian Halligan or somebody. And Pete Was like, I want to, I think we need a partner program. And they were like, lol, good luck with that. Do it on your free time. And now I think we would all be like, yeah, the partner program is like one of the hugest parts of the HubSpot ecosystem, but it was just created inside hours and stuff. When Pete left HubSpot, started Databox, that's how he did his content play. He was like, we're just going to pull our audience into our content constantly through surveys, over and over and over. John got there, he was there for a very long time, really successful, talks a lot about content brands. He's brilliant. He and a friend and he like took that even further, right? And I was a big part of that. And I saw like these surveys in this community based content distribution strategy of like, hey, Dan, thanks for contributing. We put your quote here in the article if you want, like, here's the link if you want to share it with anybody. But also we're promoting it on LinkedIn, Reddit and wherever else. Have a great day and like, you know what to do, right? Like, you'll click over to LinkedIn, you'll leave a comment, you'll share it, you'll upvote it on Reddit, like you want the thing you've been featured in to do. Well, this is true of marketing to marketers like Databox, but it's also true of AppSec or wherever else, like maybe to lesser degrees in places where they're like, you know, old school security guides are like, don't put my name on anything. Like, that's a vulnerability in itself. I don't want to be open to phishing attacks, whatever, but pretty much in every industry, I don't care if you sell the auto shop owners, like, this play works, works. And it works not just because of, like, hey, we're gonna focus on the IP or whatever else. It works simply because, like, people really enjoy like being seen and being heard and then telling their stories. Like they really like. We really like that. It is a universal truth. I like those types of distribution methods of like, we're gonna feature you, retention's gonna go up. You know, your affinity and trust for us goes up, the trust of the content goes up. Because I see people with my job title quoted in there and they're a part of that. I saw them share like, it does like 60 things for the business. The stuff that I find works best. Have you ever heard of the Eisenhower boxes? No. The Eisenhower boxes is like, how do we figure out what to do when there's so much, you know, President Eisenhower, when there's a lot to do, what do we choose to do? And it's just a four piece box. On one axis is how urgent is this? And on the other axis is how important is this? The problem is like it's very easy to figure out things that are like, if it's important and urgent, that is very obvious. Those are as humans, if it is not important and not urgent, you delegate that out. That's also very obvious. What's hard, Dan, is important but not urgent, which I would argue is most of marketing. So the easiest way to figure out what should live in that box is things that do more than one thing for the business or more than one thing for our audience or customer. That content distribution strategy I just mentioned does like seven things. That's a play we should make because it's doing like seven different things off, you know, whatever marketing you want to invest in. You just have to go through the list and be like, how much does this do? The SEO blog, for the sake of SEO does one thing probably put that last. It's a really easy way to decide like what will work for us. I'm sorry, I could give you a more of a direct answer, but like one specific tactic and then how to think about this for yourself is, is kind of the way I approach most things. I'm happy to share more tactics, but I hope it's more helpful of like, screw Brendan's ideas. Like, here's how to figure this out for myself. Yeah, I think that's definitely important. And I guess to that point, once you figure that out, like I populate my Eisenhower boxes and I get in a rhythm, we run the risk of, you know, we're here trying to like rethink this and at some point you're like, cool, now I gotta operate in this new realm. How do I not fall back into tactic land in this new realm? Is it purely like by everything ladders up to content ip? So I'm purpose driven and everything hooks together and it's designed for audience value and business outcome. Like are we designing so that doesn't happen again or do we risk it happening again if we fall into tactics in some future state and don't revisit whatever the problem statement is. I understand certain tactics have like a lot of value and a lot of people, especially corporate marketing, have different approaches than I do. You know, like where does buying, you know, investing heavily in Gartner and Forester land that doesn't touch IP at all. Unless you start there of like, this is rip in a very. Like, this could be category creation or it could be whatever. It could be Andy Raskin strategic narrative or Chris Lockhead category pirates. Whatever you can tell. Also, like, I've been heavily influenced by those people. I have read everything that Andy Raskin has written on the Internet three times. Promise. But like, all of these things have to be. It comes back to, like, does this address this unique premise we have? Or the premise for our podcast or the premise for our content? Or we're going to do an outbound motion. Cool. Does that tie back to our unique point of view, to this problem that we've named? If it doesn't, we either need to reframe a problem, think of, like, we're doing that wrong, or we need to rethink how we're doing outbound. Or we're doing these. Like, here's how our sales cycle works. Cool. Does that tie back into what got them into the sales cycle? Like, it really just is a forcing function of like, does everything tie back to this? The reason it's one of the first things I do with clients. Like, we can't even talk about keywords until we talk about this. Yeah. I know you spend a lot of time with a specific category of businesses. High growth potential SaaS, tech organizations. Do you see this as universal relevance? So, like a bank or my wife, it works for a sleep consulting company. Like, I. I can see it working, but are there any categories where it doesn't work? You said a sleep consulting company. Yeah. Have you ever heard of a sleep divorce? No. It's the best piece of IP ever. A sleep divorce is where one of you sleep in separate rooms. Yeah. Because one of you snores too much, you can't sleep together. It's a sleep divorce. Doesn't that feel like a stab right in the heart? A divorce? I'm getting divorced from this person that I love because I can't get my sleep apnea under. Holy cow. All of a sudden I'm buying a solution to that. Whatever it is, I'll buy 20 CPAP machines. I don't know. Right? Like, whatever. All of a sudden, like, it works even better. It's hard if it's like, you know, if you're chubby shorts or my favorite brand of like, dude, short shorts. I mean, maybe you don't need to have content ip. Right? Like, maybe there's some pieces of that, but there's all these other times, like, maybe you're not really solving a problem, you're Just like, really cool shorts. You're not functionally solving anything. I don't know. Or you're my favorite streetwear brand where it's like, you know, I love this brand called the Hundreds and have been a fan of them forever. They don't necessarily need to have, like a boned problem necessarily. They just have to have opinions about things. I don't know, man. Like some of those, like, chubbies, like, they get into, like, the issue with shorts and pants and they're funny about it, but they get in and talk about that. Same thing with like, Dollar Shave Club where, you know, they talked about the issue of, like, overpaying for razors and they, they are just hilarious about that problem. Absolutely. I don't think it was Dollar Shave Club. Maybe Beard brand talked about scent confusion, where your deodorant smells like one thing, your beard oil smells like something else, and your cologne smells like a third thing. Now that in a lot of, like, CPG and like, consumer B2C stuff, you end up kind of like making up, like, scent confusion isn't a real thing. That's not real. But it felt real when they said it. And I'm like, I am going to buy my cologne, beard oil, and deodorant from you now because they do all smell the same and maybe that'll be better. Didn't make a difference for me personally, but I did. I bought the package because they were like that. You're suffering from scent confusion. You're suffering from a sleep divorce. Like, this is a very universal concept for marketing that I think. Unfortunately, we got into the world of like, optimizing our Google Ads account and we forgot to start with this. You know, what's old is new. But, like, this is a foundational piece for sure. And I think across every brand. Kind of. Last point on that would be, I know you don't operate in large enterprise organizations per se, at least today. Oh, I'm a nightmare for corporate. Could you imagine me? No, I'm a great personality hire. But if you're good, if you're down with, like, corporate bureaucracy, I'm a mess. Yeah, that actually would be really funny. Like, get you hired and, like, bring a camera crew. Dude, it's just Jim from the office. It's Jim from the office every day. Just slow little subversions. Like when I was a high school, I don't. We never talked about this. I don't think, like, I was a high school teacher for 10 years. I started signing all my emails. Social studies department chair. And then I Got a hold of a label maker and I started labeling everything in the school property of the social studies department. Dan, There was no social studies department at all. I wasn't the chair. And then at one point somebody came up to me and asked me a question and I'm like, why are you asking me that? Like, you're the chair of the social studies department, of course I'm asking you. And I was like, like what? It was like 10 years of that. That's how I live in corporate world. Yeah, you should have just labeled your chair and then said, yeah, yeah, go ask the chair. But I think in general, if you were a functioning adult in an enterprise organization, is there an architecture to the content ip? Meaning most of these organizations could have content IP at a product level, a line of business level, a corporate level. And each of those are viable because almost all of them are the size of what any of your individual clients would be from a revenue standpoint. But I think if there's too many things coming out of an organization, it's going to feel confusing. But you know, you might want to say like, okay, what is our collective story and how does that story apply? Or that content IP apply at a product, a line of business level? Like, have you thought about that? And is that even a thing? Like, do they have to be connected in some way emotionally? Or how you present the problem? And I think about when I went to Adobe Max a couple years ago. They're like Adobe's like B2B conference. That was mind blowing to me. Just the amount of like corporate buzzwords, like I heard from the stage. And it was just like, it was just, you know what I mean? It was just that corporate vomit back at each other constantly. And I was like, they're all saying nothing. And it was driving me crazy. But I, I get it. You're a publicly traded company. You can't roll out some IP that like dips your stock price 4%. Like, people get fired over that. Like, that. You have to move slower. I even think, not to be political, but like, people talk about running our government like a company and they want it to be efficient. And I'm like, the government is supposed to be inefficient. There's supposed to be five people making sure there's no lead in my water. Redundancy exists to keep people alive. Don't make it efficient with one person. And then they miss and people die. Like, I understand the reason there is a lot of bureaucracy in corporate. The stakes are too high. We need some sort of Thing. It's a step down from government. Right. But like, I get that. I think that the best framework for this type of stuff is to start really small. Small and low stakes. Start with social posts, start with email subject lines. Like, just try a bunch. I was saying this to my clients the other day, like, we're gonna try six of these. Like, don't feel like we decided today and this is what we're gonna run with. You might do it and be like, this sucks, Please don't have it. Be like you got a bad haircut once and then you stopped getting haircuts forever. Like it just wasn't the right thing. Or, you know, we've all been there. I buzzed my head one time, terrible decision. But like, I still get haircuts. So we're gonna try a bunch of things, but you have to figure out what your levers are in your business for like where and how to try this. Are we trying these on webinars? I default to content. Right. But like, maybe I do. Like what Tim Ferriss did when he was naming the four Hour Workweek where he just ran a ton of Google Ads to see what got the most clicks. And four Hour Workweek won resoundingly. There's a great podcast, I don't know if you've heard of it, called diary of a CEO. They have really good YouTube thumbnails. They, I think Facebook ad test like fifty to a hundred or something, like some obscene amount of them for every episode. And then they just look at their Facebook ads and they're like, well, that one got the most clicks to the, like the people are clicking through to the episode and listening. So they're still getting downloads but it's expensive to buy the down, you know, the listens, but they're just looking for signal and then they're like, cool, these are our top three. We're going to split test those now within YouTube itself. Like, like find whatever works for you to test these different pieces of IP to find some and give some sort of like feedback loop. Like put it on social email. I like those. Put it in a webinar because then you can see some sort of resonance signal. Yeah. So if I repackage that answer, it's definitely do the work to understand the problem and then find low stakes ways to test and start to scale. And as you see resonance response and excitement around naming the problem in the content ip, then you can start to go bigger with it. Yeah. Take it to your corporate meeting and be like, hey, look what's happening. We don't know, like, you know what I mean? Just like, show the results and be like, this is crushing. Should we do more of it? Like, just be dumb. Like, I love, like, just being dumb corporate Brendan of like, I say all the time, like, hey, stupid question. People like, that's not a dumb question. I'm like, I know, I know what I'm doing here. Right. It's just disarming. We all read the Chris Voss book. But like, stuff like, especially in a corporate environment, you have to like ladder up and be willing to like, then just be, you know, pull you and the customer. It's an old school sales technique of like, you would. When you're selling in person, you put your chair on the same side of the table as them. Instead of sitting across from them, just pull your chair to the same side of the table as the customer and then face your boss and be like, hey, look. Look what them and I are doing. Can we do it bigger? Can we put some budget? Could we try putting the tagline on at the booth at RSA this year? Like, we, you know, I don't know. Seems like it's working here, you know, that sort of like, just find ways to like, keep moving. Should we put it on all of our swag? I don't know. Stuff like that. That's interesting because I. The enemy of progress is like, trying to make it perfect and go through all these ladders until it gets so watered down that it, it doesn't matter. And you probably land on some stupid buzzword anyway because there's so many people that have landed in. And then you're like, well, this doesn't resonate versus content. Teams that has some at least channel authority depending on role and responsibility and they understand the customer. So starting to pull those things together and do like, hey, let's try a collection or a content series or something like that where it explores this topic. Yeah. Or else you run into like, product marketing is like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not how we talk about that. We're not putting that on this page. We're not doing that. That's not how we say that. And you're like, God, I just got to find my little swim lane to like test this enough to make it be undeniable to them of like, look, if you don't do this, you know, you like getting fired. You're going to. If you don't do this. This is your worst nightmare, isn't it? Your shoulders are going up. You're like, you're just imagining yourself Six meetings in four decks. Just to update this blog post. Like get out of here. So as we wrap here, I'd love to just do a kind of stop start as we think about the path forward. You know, what are three things that marketers or marketing teams should start doing and what are three things that they need to stop doing? Oh, this is so good. I've never been asked this question before outside of the stuff we've maybe already talked about, right? Like start trying to name the problem. Start focusing on one problem at a time. Don't be the everything store. We're not Amazon, right? Amazon sold books at first. I bought my college textbooks from them. Focus on one problem. Create some IP around it, start testing it. I think we also talked about really valuables around like zero click content and things like that. And then the other thing I would say start doing is start thinking if you're not going, if you're going to start moving away from output based metrics and towards impact metrics. You also have to rethink like how you allocate your time and you still can't like throw out all the crap you've been doing. Nobody's going to, no boss is going to be like, yeah sure, no, like let's just throw an event. Let's not write blogs this year. We're just doing events. Like nobody's going to be okay with that. So treat it like I think Coca Cola does this like a, maybe Google to like a 70, 2010 of like 70% of my time and effort and budget is going to like pretty things we're pretty confident in or at least things we've been doing even if we're not confident in them. 20% is like a little bit bigger bets and then 10% is like a moonshot type of like let's go bigger. That's a nice transition step. So also start that thinking about time, budget, et cetera. I think that covers a couple things to start stop doing would definitely be stop letting the, especially if you're in a tech company, stop letting the product team decide what your marketing calendar is, whatever they want to release while they're releasing this. We have to market it when it's released. No, you don't let it be out for six months. Let your customers fall in love with it and then market it to everybody that isn't a customer with 400 happy customer case studies attached to it. Like we all want to launch some, you know, I mean these launches drive me crazy. We can stop the launches. Chill out. Nobody there's not earth shattering news that now the button's orange instead of green. Like nobody cares. No. You know what I mean? Sorry. Sometimes we like launch stuff and it's like, no, we have this new thing and it's like, relax. So stop with all like the launches. Stop letting other teams, sales, product, whatever within your company, like decide what your marketing is. You decide what your marketing is. So stop doing that. And definitely stop checkbox marketing for sure. Hopefully we've given you some practical steps today to get through that. If for whatever reason you are wondering, like you're listening to this, watching this and you're like, I don't. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Brendan. But you don't understand my company. I'm a beautiful, unique snowflake and you don't understand my situation because product or audience or whatever. Cool, cool, cool. Send me a DM on LinkedIn or hit up Dan. Dan also knows how to do this stuff. Like hit up one of us or both of us. If you're real gangster and be like, here's my situation, what you said sounds smart. I don't know how it applies to me. I love doing that sort of stuff. So that offers out there. Same here. How else can people find you? This is, this has been amazing. And is there particular types of work you like to do with clients so folks know why to hire you? Dan, if I didn't do a good job explaining what that is at this point, like, I don't know if now's the time. Fair point. You know, I mean if you're like, Brennan sounds like a real character, but I don't know what to hire him for. I know five reasons not to hire you, but if at this point you're still, you're A, still listening and B, curious look like, I always pretend it's because I'm good at SEO. You can type Brendan Hufford into Google and it will. I just have a very unique name. Spell it however you want. Although you'll probably see it in the episode itself. LinkedIn is where I share all my stuff. Outside of that, I share longer things in email, right? Like I've done a bunch of like CMO interviews that I think are really interesting stuff like that. The other thing that's cool is like I wish more people would kind of like I talked about earlier, like see what I do and then just do that for themselves. Like those are my favorite people to hang out with like you or just like work with period. Is like, hey, we've seen what you've talked about, we've tried A few things or even like, hey, we, we see how you do your emails. We started doing that here without you telling us like how to do it. You didn't give us a how to or how I type of thing. This is another thing that people should start less of the stop doing how to content do more how I or how they content. And I don't mean like case studies, I mean like genuinely do some good journalism. Figure out like how does Canva do? You know, Lenny Rashitsky did this really well with his newsletter where he was like, how Miro builds product, how notion builds product. We think because we see the product, we know how they built it. We have no clue what are your meetings, what are your KPIs, stuff like that. But like just see the stuff I do. Model it for yourself. I the other day. I'll give you one last example, Dan. I wrote a post on LinkedIn that went pretty viral for me, right? Like half a million people saw it. And I used a writing technique that I got from a guy named John McPhee, he's Tim Ferriss's favorite writer, which is just drop people into the middle of a story. Instead of like starting at the beginning, going through a hero's journey and leave them at the end, drop them in the middle of it and just write into the action. And I did that. And then I made a post of like, hey, here's why this posted. Well, here's the technique I use. Some guy did it in like I don't German or Swedish. He tagged me and I clicked the like, see translation. He did the same thing, totally his own story. And I have been getting notifications about that post for like three weeks on LinkedIn because it's also going viral and it's like these things work. I promise I'm not just like giving you some sort of like best practices. I'm like the opposite of the best practices playbooks guy. So if you see something you like, go do it for you. Yeah, I saw your session with Jay Kunzo which was similar where it was like you're talking about the thing you're going to talk about. Just talk about it. Like just go, you know, hop right in. So I think, you know, the more we can test and learn as individuals, share those elements. And I think you're an expert at that by far. And very entertaining if you haven't gathered that so far. But I appreciate you. I appreciate it, Dan. I feel like I just had like the. What is that scene like Will Ferrell in Old School where he just like blacks out and he's like, I don't know what just happened and then you're screaming about meatloaf. But yeah, that's, I think that's the best way to end it here, man. Appreciate you very much. Dropped a lot of knowledge and certainly got more than that on coming, so check them out on LinkedIn. And as Brendan said, if you're curious about any of this stuff and want to hit us up or DM us, we're more than happy to chat. But thank you for the time. This has been incredible. Thanks for having me. Dan. Thank you for listening to Content Disrupted brought to you by Skyward. To stay up to date on the latest ideas and insights in brand building and content marketing, visit our website@skyward.com that's S K-Y-W-O-R- join us for our next episode where we'll continue to challenge marketing norms and inspire you with fresh strategies for growing business through brand storytelling.