Is It Time to Replace Funnels, Customer Avatars, and Cold Outreach?

Speaker A: Welcome to the Briefing. Today's report will provide you with the latest insights and analysis regarding the current state of humanized content in our world. You're here because you believe in what humanized content stands for, standing out and truly connecting with the people who matter most. You're also here to help not only defend humanized content, but but maintain it by learning more about the fakes, the threats and the best examples of it. And we're glad you're here. This is the Human Content Brief. Now here with today's intel. Scott Murray,

Speaker B: hello and thanks for joining me today. This is your Human Content Brief, a report on what's happening in the world of content strategy from a human perspective. In today's briefing, we'll break down some ways podcast hosts can risk making a good first impression on new listeners. Next up, Brook Sells Podcast brought uh, us some interesting advice on a framework that could replace the marketing funnel or at the very least expand it to be more specific. And finally, speaking of evolving the way marketers do things, Mark Evans discussed a more comprehensive approach to cold calling on his show. So in a way, today's briefing is about breaking out of old habits, trying new ones, or just improving the way we do some things, all in the name of standing out and building that meaningful relationship with our audience. So let's get to page one. Okay, so if you are producing a podcast tied to your business, you're thinking about doing it. I want to share some insight with you about ways you can make a good first impression because it's important to point out that while podcasts definitely have their unique position in the realm of content marketing, there are some pretty consistent things about audience when it comes to podcasts in that they going to make quick judgments about you and your show within the first few minutes. In fact, Melanie Scroggins of uh Scroggins Creative, they help businesses with podcasts. She shared something on LinkedIn this past week that I think you'll find very interesting. She said the first 60 seconds of your podcast can make or break you. According to the podcast study Focused on Growth, surveying 1,200 listeners presented at Podcast Movement this year, here's why people stop listening. Number one, the content is boring. Number two, there's too much meaningless chatter and off topic banter. And number three, hosts repeat themselves too often. 51% of listeners decide in under five minutes whether they'll stick with you or not. Most of them within a minute and 40% say they don't finish episodes or for the same reasons. So with those two things in mind. And we're going to look at a couple of other potential things here that might turn off listeners, going to share some things that could happen in the first few minutes that might run people like this off. I mean, here's one of the things I feel like. Not enough new podcasters, whether they're hobby focused podcasters or business podcasters, they don't think about again, not enough time spent on audience, and it doesn't even need to get into, like, industry audience with what I'm talking about here. That is important and that should always be considered. But then you just have to start thinking about the likelihood and the trend of just general listener behavior. And I think one of the things people don't think about enough is why somebody is going to fit you into their listening routine, especially if they're like a power listener, where they're listening to multiple podcasts a week. You know, podcasters can get so caught up in just producing the show and getting out the door, they haven't stopped to ask the question, well, why is somebody going to come back and why are they going to add my show into their routine? I first started podcasting in 2011, and I remember when it was a lot harder to go out and find good equipment. And so it was a little more acceptable if you didn't sound really good. Now I don't think there's an excuse for it yet. I still hear plenty of business podcasts who sound like they're on microphones that are built into the computer. And what's really weird is when clearly they went to like fiverr or somewhere and got somebody to record like a high quality open with music and a voiceover, uh, that sounds really, really good. And then as soon as that's over, the audio shifts into something with a lot less quality and it's jarring. It kind of sounds like this. This is the podcast example podcast with your host, Jim Miller. Welcome to the podcast, one and all. I am Jim Miller, your host today on the show, and we're talking about the Oxford comma, so buckle up. I don't understand sometimes why people are okay with that. And there's programs out there like Descript, which I use, that even if you're not on a high quality microphone, you just upload it to Descript and flip a switch that says studio quality, and it instantly improves your audio. So there's really no excuse for this. And here's the thing, there are a lot of podcasters out there, obviously a lot of podcasts that are aware of these tools and use them. So if your potential listener is used to a certain type of quality and you don't give them that, it's easy for them to say, well, they just don't care. Or they're just so used to better that they can't get used to having something inserted into that routine that doesn't sound at least half as good as what they get from everybody else. You might be offering something really unique there, but they may never know it because they've already decided, oh, no, no, no, no, no, can't do that. Another thing that I, uh, think will turn some people off is not talking like a human like this. Thank you, thank you, thank you for tuning into the podcast. I'm Jimmy Fever and this is the best podcast in the world. Today's episode is brought to you by Ocean Breeze Soap. Buy that today and it will, uh, help you feel clean. It will, it will feel clean. And speaking of clean, we're going to sud you up with some great content today. Yeah, when I was getting my bachelor's degree and it was, it was mass communications, broadcast journalism, we called this broadcast diction. And the last several years, I've grown to hate Broadcast dictionary. You hear it all the time in local news, you hear it in sports broadcasting. There's people who do it so over the top, it just doesn't sound human. And it made me think of that time Gabriel Iglesias was talking about the guy that he hears all the time on the radio. And then when he met him, he sounded the exact same way.

Speaker C: We go on the air and he's

Speaker D: like,

Speaker B: I meet that same guy in the hallway. He sounded just like that. Hey, how's it going?

Speaker C: Are we on the air?

Speaker E: No.

Speaker B: Why are you talking like that? Just talk normal talk like yourself. Be yourself. Because if this is for your business and you talk this crazy way or really unique way on your podcast and they meet you and you sound completely different, that can be a little jarring too. So Melanie talked about time and this is, believe it or not, this is not something new. This has been a problem for years. And again, you can't help but ask yourself, how do we still have this problem? And two ways that time gets wasted. I think in business, podcasts is somebody who shares their entire resume at the beginning of every episode. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Rick Roller and I am a content marketer, producer, consultant, author, speaker, YouTube specialist, creative thinker and part time AI story writer who helps businesses elevate their social media with amazing best in class ideas that Enable them to win the day. And this is a self awareness thing too, because you have to wonder, why do you think you've got to say all these things about yourself at the beginning of the episode? And have you taken a moment to realize your listener, even if they want to hear your stuff, realizes they're going to have to hear that every single time. And that's not what they came to hear. Not even when they check it out for the first time. That's not what they came to hear. I m mean, if you provide clear insight and expertise and the focus of the show is clear, your listeners are going to get who you are and what you bring to the table. And if you want, explain how you can help them at the end of the episode after providing them with something valuable in the content. And if your show has a website, you can highlight your expertise there. You can even allude to it in your show description versus making it part of your introduction. And as Melanie said, meaningless banter. I think we've talked about this before. People have read what your show is going to offer them and they go, oh, that sounds interesting. They hit play. Let's say it's going to be about AI and you're like, okay, I want to learn something about AI today. And you click play to check the show out and this happens. Well, as you know, we are talking about AI and its impact on business today. And Larry, I don't know about you, but I'm kind of scared of robots.

Speaker D: Totally, Barry. I mean, totally. I mean, I've seen Terminator like 400 times.

Speaker B: Terminator 1 or Terminator 2?

Speaker A: Uh,

Speaker D: both of them. Both of them. I mean, you know, I'm just a big fan of James Cameron.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, I like just about everything he did. Except that Titanic movie. That was a little too lovey dovey for me. But you know, I think most of his work is pretty good and he was very influential.

Speaker D: Oh yeah, it was one of the reasons why I went and saw a lot of stuff that he did. You know, I really like the Abyss too. Have you ever seen the Abyss?

Speaker F: I have.

Speaker B: I have seen the Abyss, you know, but also, you know, let's talk about avatar for 10 minutes because I think that's really important. This has been a problem for a while. Uh, my wife listens to a lot of podcasts and I remember one time she said she was listening to, she was trying out a Marvel themed podcast because she listens a lot of business and marketing podcasts, but pop culture too. And she said they spent the first 15 minutes talking about wrestling and it's like, why? And I hear other people talk about this too, about, you know, they got a group of people and they're all just like, hey, what'd you do this weekend? Oh, that's hilarious. And all this stuff. And you wonder why that happens. I've always estimated that some of these people grew up listening to wacky radio crews in the morning and they feel like, well, since this is audio, then I need to sound like that wacky radio crew because, you know, that's what's entertaining. Not realizing this is podcasting, and in this case it's business podcasting, and they want you to get to the point. Podcasts aren't as fringe as they used to be, and tools to make them sound good are much more accessible and people are using them. You don't have to go all out and make a full blown show, but show that you're putting an effort into it. And at least start with good audio quality, because that's going to be the first impression and people are going to approach podcasts like they do anything else. You're going to have a little bit of time and the brain's either going to decide to move on or it's going to want to listen a little longer. And the best thing you can do is think of how you can make a good first impression within those first few seconds. And maybe, as Melanie's pointing out, maybe it's the first minute or so to keep them listening because there are so many other podcasts out there, it would take nothing for someone to just jump and see if they can find something better. All right, next page. Well, Brooke Salis had a human centered conversation on her podcast this past week, the Social Media CX podcast. Her guest was Phil Tregas Evans, who is the CEO of Giraffe Social Media, an agency that says they believe marketing isn't about shouting louder, it's about connecting better. Sound familiar? Anyway, like we do on this show, Phil talked about some of the old habits businesses hold on to these days and why they don't work anymore. For example, marketing avatars and funnels, no matter how long you've been in marketing or you've been familiar with marketing, you've heard about those two things. And when it comes to the challenge with avatars, uh, Phil says it kind of turns people into this set of demographic labels. Everybody just fits under these labels. And when that happens, you risk missing the real human differences of the people under that label. He pointed out, you could have two people that look identical on paper, same age, same location, same interests. But then when you take the time to look closer, you find out one is more like King Charles and. And the other one's more like Ozzy Osbourne. So how you communicate and try to connect with those two people despite being under that same label, it's going to have to be different. So he's got a framework that allows you to go deeper and learn the more relevant attributes of that audience on a more human level. He calls it the Empath framework. And here's how it breaks down.

Speaker C: The Empath framework is the idea of creating like what I call a human understanding map. And it's from five sources. So each of the letters stand for something. So the E is the emotional understanding. And you can get that from speaking to people. But I. One of my favorite ways to understand the emotions that happen for your audience is to look at your reviews, your competitors, reviews, forums, social media. And one of the best things to do is like copy and paste all of this into a document and then use a tool like ChatGPT and say, give me a word map of the emotions that are coming up the most. So that's, that's a good way to understand the emotions of your audience. And then you have. This is always tricky for me to remember them. M, um, is for market trends. So this is about understanding the context that your audience are kind of in at the moment. So what's happening in their world. P is for patterns of behavior. So understanding how they make decisions. You know, how do they look at your website? What pages do they tend to use? How many times do they visit the site before they make a decision? What do they engage with on your social media? A is audience feedback. So this is pretty out there, but it's about actually speaking to your customers.

Speaker E: Oh, what?

Speaker C: I know, I know, I know, it's crazy. It's a crazy idea of mine, but it's uh, yeah, it's. I mean, we recently did this for Giraffe, my social media agency. So we, I spoke to some of, uh, our biggest clients and said, look, let's go back to when you picked us as an agency. What did that process look like? You know, how did you whittle it down? Like, were there any red flags about us? Any things that you really liked about us? Just sort of really trying to understand what it is that they, they were looking for. The T is for team feedback. And again, I think this is uh, an often overlooked element that, yes, the marketing department might not necessarily be speaking to the sales department or the customer service department. And in a, in a big business, the customer service and the salespeople, the people on the front line, if you like, they're the ones who understand your customers probably better than anyone else because they're speaking to them all day. You know, I do a lot of the sales for Giraffe, and I have a really good understanding of what, you know, CMOs and marketing, uh, managers are looking for and the problems they're facing.

Speaker D: And.

Speaker C: And then you combine all of those things that you've discovered and you put it into what I call a human understanding map that goes beyond demographics. So you've got all of those different sort of areas.

Speaker B: Yeah, a lot of good advice there. And I really like all the steps that he lays out as part of this process. I really like the idea of using ChatGPT to elevate the emotion. It wasn't that long ago on this show we had someone point out how they used ChatGPT to look at a message and show where it lacked emotional intelligence by saying, well, if the audience is thinking this, this may not come off really, really well. And you're not touching on this factor either. So, uh, we're seeing again, at least kind of an interesting way that while we can't rely on, on AI for, uh, the type of emotional copy and content that we can develop as humans, it can help us figure out where some of that emotion might be missing. There was the market analysis component too, of really knowing what's going on in your market. I think about the recent discussion I had with Shira Abel, who talked about learning how people are feeling in your industry and market. You know, are they stressed, are they down, are they concerned? And how can your content show that you understand that on an emotional level and then create content that triggers a feeling that combats that and inspires them to feel like you can solve those problems for them or relieve that stress for them. I think the idea of looking for areas where you can see patterns of behavior and measuring that to some degree, like what they're doing on your website, was a really good idea. Audience feedback. There's just so many ways that you can do that today. And, uh, I really like the example that he used about talking to the client. Team feedback 100%. Some of the things that we're hearing here is why it's important to not only find ways to talk to customers and talk to people that might be interested in your business, but talk to those who talk to them. I've mentioned before, I've worked places where Marketing is not talking to sales, and both teams. Teams are doing separate things when it comes to how they're communicating with the same audience. Now, I also mentioned that Phil is not very fond of the modern funnel. Are using the funnel today. So what's wrong with that?

Speaker E: Talk to me about once you do get to that content, how do you get people, the audience, the Personas, if we will, how do you get them to take action on this content now that you know them so well, you know their behaviors, their desires, their feelings about the product or the. The services that your clients offer, how do you take them from content to conversation and then from conversation to conversion? What does that look like?

Speaker C: I don't want to sound like I'm just someone who likes to burn down the. Any sort of practiced marketing techniques, but at the end of the book, I basically say that funnels are stupid and that we should stop using them.

Speaker B: Diva moment.

Speaker C: I was gonna say you started by saying I wasn't a diva, and I'm just like, that doesn't work. That doesn't work.

Speaker B: Let me show you how I am.

Speaker E: No, I love this. Keep going. Funnels are stupid. Why?

Speaker C: Obviously, uh, everyone uses. If you work in marketing, you know, the marketing funnel, and, you know, traditional funnels are slightly different, and you kind of have, like, variations now where you have, like, the marketing flywheel and these sorts of things. And I didn't know this, but the concept for the funnel was created, I think, in 1898.

Speaker E: Okay, now that is a fact. I did not know.

Speaker C: This is a really old technique, and obviously it's changed over time.

Speaker E: Sure.

Speaker C: But the modern consumer journey is anything but linear. It's chaos.

Speaker E: Totally agreed. Yeah.

Speaker C: Yeah. I think Google referred to it in a white paper as the messy middle, you know, between finding a brand and buying something. And that's because we consume so much media, so much marketing. So, you know, it isn't awareness, consideration, conversion. I know some people tag advocacy on as an afterthought. You know, that's fine, but it. It isn't like that. Like, we. We don't consume marketing in that little simple hop, skip, jump, byproduct. Everything's rosy. Like, it doesn't work like that. We bounce around, we listen to a podcast, then we see an ad, and then we. Someone tells us about something, and then we see a billboard, and then we, you know, see a review for something or there's an ad on tv. Like, we are all over the place. And I think it's daunting to try and create a strategy when you know that because you sort of think, well, how the hell do you plan for that? How do. How do you plan for someone bouncing around multiple touch points in a nonlinear fashion?

Speaker B: And he goes on to talk about a pinball method for approaching this, since that's kind of what we're dealing with now. Instead of, you know, a perfect linear path, it is more like a pinball machine. So I will have a link to the full show so you can hear that. But yeah, so part of my stamp framework for humanizing content ties into this because self awareness means you've taken a moment to become more aware of when you might have trapped yourself or your team in an old marketing process that doesn't align with modern times, at least not the way it used to, because it's on automatic pilot. We don't even realize it until that moment of reflection when you take it finally helps you. And yes, the foundation for the funnel was created in 1898. Much of the time it's attributed to E. St. Elmo Lewis. Now, if you have a name like that, you got to do something. Might as well be an advertising, right? And he was an American advertising advocate back then. And he was later inducted into the Advertising hall of fame in 1951, three years after his death. And what he did was develop an advertising model called ada, which is Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Now, while Lewis is the name most attached to this model, academic research shows that two other people who have names that are worth taking note of and saying, man, if you got a name like that, you need to do something with it. There's academic research that shows that Frank H. Dukesmith and Arthur Frederick Sheldon were also instrumental in the development of ada, which eventually people believe evolved into what we know to be the funnel. And when you look at when these folks were looking at advertising and developing these perfect roadmaps of the customer journey, like Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, it's not hard to imagine a linear customer journey all the way back then. No Internet, no podcasts for a while there, not even TV or radio for several years. There are now multiple considerations that we just can't track in real time or we can't predict in real time. We can't assume everyone is taking that journey. So the question becomes, if you're spending time and resources month after month, year after year, trying to make this work, how many opportunities are you missing to connect with multiple people in your audience and where they are at the right moment, or at that moment, you might be driving down a straight road looking for them, and all you're looking at is that road in front of you, and there's all kinds of stuff happening on the left, the right, behind you in all different directions. It makes me think of Naked Gun when Frank Drevin is standing out in front of that exploding building saying, there's nothing to see here. I mean, you might be saying, well, that's just too hard to track and measure. And it is. You're right, it is. But trying to do things the old way and making it work when it really can't, that's hard too. But hey, for some, it's easier than evolving or trying something different. Maybe that doesn't mean you burn the funnel to the ground. Maybe you have a new way to reconceptualize it or maybe modernize it to work for your business. There are also plenty of people like Phil who have found other ways and they go online and they share their findings with you. The Internet, digital media, stuff like that doesn't have to be just about what it changed for your audience, but also what it changed for your business. The Content Marketing Institute wrote a really interesting piece about how we might have to go back to measurement in 1985 to make this work. Because back then they didn't track every little click or touch point, obviously. Instead they just had tests, clear, easy tests that they could develop conclusions to decide whether or not something related to advertising was working. They said, think about Coke putting a billboard up in Cleveland and another kind in Cincinnati, and then look at which city sold more Coke. And that's really it. You know, you wouldn't be able to say, if we put this billboard here, it's going to increase Coke sales by this much. And on this location, it's going to be this much, because we know that this many people will show up, this many people are going to be thirsty, this many people are going to want Coke and all that stuff. So instead of pretending we can measure everything, maybe we should focus on clear experiments that show what really works and, and think about working harder to connect and provide value to people. That's probably as good a place as any to start rethinking how you might evolve past traditional marketing funnels and marketing avatars. All right, next page on the Marketing Spark podcast hosted by Mark Evans. Michael Maximoff was on the show. Michael is the founder of Belkins, which is an appointment setting agency. And they talked about how the old cold outreach philosophy or approach to connection no longer works anymore. In fact, Mark shared this on LinkedIn and this is what he wrote. Quote, cold outreach doesn't work. It sucks. That's the reputation it's earned. Endless emails, awkward cold calls, and SDRs who don't care about you, only their quotas. Which is kind of interesting to consider when you think about how many people in sales who know about the importance of humanized communication and relationship building are today. And they said, yeah, you need to drop that whole always be closing thing. I think this ties to that. Mark goes on to say, it's no wonder so many dismiss it as ineffective or even dead. But as Michael Maximoff, co founder of Belkins, told me on the Marketing Spark podcast, that mindset is outdated. Michael makes it clear that cold outreach today is not a sales hammer, it's an extension of marketing. See, this is what I mean when we start talking about whether things are dead or they just need to be reframed. And maybe it just depends on what's going to work best for your business. In this case, it's not about saying it doesn't work at all or it should never be done, but how you, uh, approach it has to be different. And really what they're saying here is the one dimensional linear way doesn't work anymore.

Speaker F: It goes without saying that cold outreach, email and calling is, let's say, an interesting controversial creature. There are many people who believe it's a waste of time, who really likes to be called or emailed out of the blue. If you were to debate someone on the anti cold outreach side, someone who advocated strongly that cold outreach doesn't work is a waste of time, what are your biggest arguments in that debate?

Speaker G: That's a great start to a conversation. I would agree with folks, if you think that cold outreach doesn't work, it sucks. It's not elegant. I think you're right. And the reason you're right is that you're thinking about direct outreach as this Salesforce 2010, 2020 playbook where you have jars or BDRs making calls, sending out cold emails and then trying to get your attention and then handing you over to someone else to visit. So these are usually junior professionals that has been around. They're the less paid in the company. Their job is to just hunt the leads so they don't care about you. They care about their appointments and meetings. And in this way you don't have a good customer experience because someone is just getting on the call trying to get you at a very inconvenient time. That is where everyone was living. This is the world that I'm describing, that everyone was living. The SDR that I'm Preaching and direct outreach is not a part of the sales function where you just try to get people on the phone, but that's a part of a marketing function. SDRs and uh, direct outreach are moving into a more communication type of role where their job is to lift up whatever marketing is doing to build relationship with customer, get intelligence, connect with them, build rapport. But in this whole instance the meeting booking is always secondary. In a way the biggest argument is that if we are all thinking that the direct outreach of the old, the 2010 Salesforce, top of the funnel meter bookers playbook, it sucks, it doesn't work, it's not client oriented now with AI and with every market being a red ocean, so much competition, so much noise out there, so much automations, you don't want to be called, you don't want to get that email. But it doesn't mean that the direct outreach cannot evolve and transition to something new.

Speaker B: So I love how he specifically mentions 2010 because he's telling people yeah, we could do this back then, but it's 2025. And I love this because this again highlights an important part of Stamp when it comes to self awareness and adaptability because we have to recognize when we're still doing things the way we did five, 10, 15 years ago. The other thing I love about this conversation is everything has to be an extreme in marketing and I don't understand why other than it, uh, you know, people get really passionate about it and they don't have the self awareness to stop and think, well, maybe there's an exception to the rule because think about how often we hear it. AI is a really good example of it. Now it's either you're pro AI or against AI. That's it. Well, no, it's not it. We can say I like AI just not to do everything my brain can do. One of the things I think about a lot is attention spans. The debate on whether or not attention spans are a thing or not. You know, I've seen that debated all the time and again it has to be either or it has to be either they're a thing or they're not a thing. Either short attention spans matter or they don't. And it's a lot of times it's like yes they do because research shows, you know, they have 2/10 of a second people are paying attention and then the other side says no because people are willing to watch two and a half hour movies, read an entire book or listening to a two hour podcast which proves that if it's good. That doesn't matter. And I'm sitting there going, no, that's not what it means. There are so many other factors. When are people finding that content? What are they looking for? I'd be willing to bet if you watch a lot of YouTube content, there are days, there are times, depending on what's going on in your life, where you might be willing to watch something that's more than five, six, seven, eight minutes. But if you're at a point in your day where you just want an answer to a problem and you click on something that says, yes, I answer this question and it's 16 and a half minutes, you're like, man, I hope this thing is chaptered, because I just want the answer to my question. And sometimes that's because the content creator has taken way too much time to get to the point. But there's other times where there might be some valuable stuff there. So it doesn't mean their content sucks. It just means right at that time, my attention span is short, so it's not universal. So really, in some cases it's. We need to think about both and act accordingly. That's why predictive intelligence is so important in the stamp framework. We're trying to figure out, okay, what's the more likely scenario when people are looking for this answer, are looking for this content, and then maybe we stop and think, well, you know, how do I feel when I'm looking for this content? What's the likelihood I'm going to listen to this? And what did I just produce? If I. If I listen to what I just produced, can I determine whether or not, if I were in my audience's shoes, whether I would listen to this? And if I say no, what is it? Is it my attention span or is it that the content sucks? Maybe it's both, I don't know. But it doesn't always have to be, no, it's not a thing. Yes, it is a thing.

Speaker G: If you're not with me, then you're my enemy.

Speaker B: So I love the fact in this conversation they're providing an example here where it doesn't have to be, nope, can't do this anymore. So in this case, they can shift the role of the sdr. They can act more like they're in a marketing communication role. Booking meetings is secondary. They share helpful stuff and talk about real pains. And other leaders can join in on this conversation. They get very specific about their ideal customer profile. So in this case, maybe we are talking about avatars, but we're not saying that that's where it begins and ends. And they're going to break it down by sub industry size, region and role. So you can talk their language and then you're using this information to find the right message. And you use AI on sales calls, you know, so it'll take notes and you can learn what people say, how they speak about what they really need. And then you turn that into your content messaging. And then it's about touch points over time to build that relationship and that trust. It can't be just that pitch and it's good and it's done and you're getting the call, you're getting the meeting, you're getting the sale. It's many touch points over time. We're talking LinkedIn posts, emails, later calls, newsletters, webinars, things of that nature. You're basically keeping them in your realm, you're keeping them in your ecosystem, in your universe, and you really measure what matters. You focus on that pipeline and that opportunity. Not just likes or clicks or just that instant gratification from one interaction or a, uh, repeated attempt to get something from that one interaction. I'm so glad we got to talk about this today. You know, in the context of, you know, even when we talk about evolving, it doesn't always mean, at least not for every company, that you have to say, nope, dead doesn't work anymore, or it's either this or this. What's it going to be? I think about gated content. If I can think of, uh, another example here, if I can share another example here. I don't know if I've mentioned this on the show or not, but I, I'm a big believer that you need to pick your spots with gated content. And again, we're thinking about predictive intelligence. We're stopping to think, okay, what is the likelihood that someone's going to fill out this form? If I were in their shoes, would I fill out this form? And why not? And it's a good argument to say, you know what, let's not gate anything. But I've also seen people say, if you've got a really good resource there, that they can get access to show them up front what some of that value is, because at least then you're combating that cynicism in the consumer's head that's going, I'm going to give them my information, I'm going to download this or I'm going to have access to this. It's not going to be as good as I think. And I'm going to be then on an email newsletter list and get spammed every single day. So let's fix that. We don't have to always fix that by saying we're not going to gate anything, but we can give them some value up front. So they go, oh yeah, I want more than that. And maybe you put on that page. Sharing your information will not put you in a newsletter unless you want it, because nobody wants to learn that the hard way. So I love that we were able to spend some time on the show today talking about when we make changes, when we evolve from 2010 or maybe 1898. It doesn't always mean we have to completely get rid of it. Sometimes, depending on our situation in our business, we might just be able to change it a little or redefine what it means to use it. And that's today's Human Content Brief. I will have links to the podcast episodes you heard today, the clips from those in the show notes for this episode, as well as the other resources and insights found in this briefing. You can find all of that on YourContent Brief.com if I can help your business, whether you're looking for a new way to create humanized content or evolve existing content to be more human, I'm here to help you stand out and make a more meaningful connection with your audience. You can find me on LinkedIn or I'm@ScottcottMurrayOnline.com or you can just fill out that little contact form on that website. Scottmurrayonline.com thank you so much for joining me today.

Speaker A: That concludes today's briefing. Keep your communications clear, your content human, and your mission steady.