Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Hello. Welcome back to Rogue startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. We are done. So we finished the series on LinkedIn, back on the mic for a solo episode. And I think, first of all, just to wrap up on the LinkedIn series that we had, I hope you enjoyed it. I'd love to hear comments, suggestions, feedback on our series like that. This is the second series like the LinkedIn one. We did. We did one right before the end of the year about YouTube. It was about five episodes long. This one was six or seven episodes long. So a little bit more. But I hope you enjoyed it. I hope it was entertaining and helpful and allowed you to level up your LinkedIn game. I hope that was cool. If you're watching on YouTube, yes, I am in a new office setting. Yes, it is dark in here. Yes, I think it's really cool, but it's intimidating. Honestly, I feel a little pressure to level up my game if I'm in such a cool place. But Yoda made the trip with me and so all is good.
[00:00:57] I wanted to take this opportunity to, I've been reflecting a little bit about what we covered a lot in the LinkedIn series because there was a lot to that and distill some of that down into how I'm thinking and acting on marketing right now. I think one thing that has definitely changed in the last couple of years, year and a half maybe, let's say, since the kind of AI craze started is that content marketing and SEO and the way that a lot of companies like ours found customers has changed a lot. Right? So the old day of just write a bunch of content and people will find you and sign up for your stuff is not as effective as it used to be. I won't go so far as to say SEO is dead, but I think it's definitely very different. I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One is people are just not going to Google as much. That's one. The second reason is if they're going to Google, there are other things there. So not just paid paid placement, but like generative AI responses, right? That's there. And then as a result, people are like, why don't I just go to Reddit or why don't I just go to YouTube as these platforms are just really great at finding answers to questions. And so I think, and this is not just my opinion, right, but this is me talking to a bunch of people in the SEO space, us hiring a bunch of people in the SEO space. Take a look at our current situation and give us advice on it is yo like when you think about generating content to attract customers, which I'll just call content marketing. I don't know if that's accurate or encompassing enough. I used to think about that from a just Google perspective.
[00:02:42] It is not sufficient or accurate or complete enough anymore. And so what we are thinking about is when I want to market to my target audience, I really have to put out my content basically in the places where they are going to consume it in the end. And this is, I still think there's a lot of value in putting this on your turf on casatos.com. but I also think that it damn sure better well be on YouTube. It should be on social media. Love it or hate it, the maybe best way these days for new eyeballs to meet your brand can be through social media. And if you're new to the show, I am not a social media person. I got a couple thousand followers maybe, and I just don't love it. But sure enough, the best way to go meet individual people online is social media, right? It's not blogging. Maybe it's creating a podcast. But still you're relying on people finding you somehow, reactively. You're putting something out there, hoping someone subscribes to your podcast, finds your YouTube video, searches, some random long term key phrase, and finds your blog. But if you want to get into a discussion with people, hands down, the best way is to to chat with them on social media and get into the DM's. So I think when you're putting your brand out there into the world, social media has to be a pretty big part of this. You know, I saw Dave Gerhart say the other day, like a social media strategy is not separate from a marketing strategy. It's like all together. Like marketing strategy and social strategy is all together. And I think that really, that is the tip of what I'm talking about. But I'll take it one step further, which is like a marketing strategy is not on a channel. It is. It has to be everywhere. So like I think about if I want to go out into the market, I first need to break down my marketing activities into passive and active. We talked about this with Adam Shaw in a previous episode and we'll link to it in the show notes. But like active, impactive, passive. I'm talking about passive marketing for the most part here, which is I want to talk about building chicken coops. We're thinking about getting chickens. And so I want to create a piece of content about chicken coops. Okay, here's what I'm going to do. And this is literally like what we're doing these days. We write an outline for it, and we use a lot of AI for this because this is something AI does really good. So we use a version of kind of the skyscraper technique, pull assets from YouTube, pull assets from Google results and blog posts to get an outline of what we want to talk about. Cool. Review that. The first thing we do then is we shoot a YouTube video on it. Right? So every piece of content on your website should have a corresponding YouTube video for it. I believe that. Then. So you have the blog, you have YouTube, you have a snippet for the email to go out to your existing audience or newsletter to talk about this thing. You can repurpose that down into a podcast episode as well. Cool. So you're reaching web content, YouTube, podcast, email. You're getting social clips because you're recording video for your podcast, right? I'm nodding my head. If you're watching on YouTube or if you're not watching on YouTube, I'm nodding my head. Every podcast should be video. So you're getting the short clips for social media. Cool. And then, so you're going to publish all those places, and then you're going to link to this asset in strategic places like Reddit. Quora Kastos created its own subreddit recently, and I believe every brand should have this. So yeah, we in the podcasting world participate heavily in the our podcasting subreddit, but we also have the slash Kastos Reddit. And you probably should too, right? So create a branded user that is, ours is Kastos HQ, same as all of our social handles. You might think about doing the same thing too. So you as the company can go out there and have a presence, something like Reddit, just like you do on Twitter and just like you do on LinkedIn.
[00:06:42] And we're active in those markets, right? We're active in r podcasting, talking about podcasting, being helpful, giving advice, and just generating some awareness of our brand in places like Reddit, which is where people go to get answers to questions. So, like, why only generate web based content on our blog to get SEO and all this kind of stuff? Why not just go to where people are asking questions, which to me really is YouTube and Reddit, right? And so I think about from a content perspective, like really these days, the thing that ends up on our blog is the third or fourth most important destination for it. Really, like the first most important to me. And this is just me personally is YouTube, right? I think if I had to just do one thing, it would be YouTube. But because you're starting with video, you're able to repurpose down and redistribute a whole bunch of other places. And so that's what we're doing is it all starts with the, the effort of this thing being to get a YouTube video out of it in the end. Then we're making a blog post out of it, we're creating an email newsletter, we're creating social clips. Maybe it's going to be a podcast. We're not currently doing that at Kastos, which is funny because we're a podcasting company and it's going on Reddit and it's going on social and it's going to other platforms and communities, right? So like, this is totally achievable, I would say for one person to do this.
[00:08:05] If you're hiring out the editing of YouTube, you could do this in 2 hours a week.
[00:08:11] No shit. No shit. Especially as you get good with your prompts and AI. Yeah, 100%. You could do this in two weeks if you're doing a ten minute video, take you 30, 45 minutes to script it and do the research, shoot it a couple times, fire it off to an editor. There's tons of them out there. We've used videohusky.com as an editor. They're really good. 100%. You can do this, right? And that's the bulk of the work and the rest of it is just the stuff, right? Put it up the blog post, put it on your WordPress site, post it on Reddit, engage with the community there. But like, a very important thing for me at this point in my journey as a founder is like sustainability, right? Like, how can I be cool with the amount of work and effort and stress and wear and tear on me emotionally to where I'm happy to keep showing up for another seven or eight years like I have been. And to me, like, this feels really good, right? If I can do a few hours of work reasonably, maybe once a quarter, spend a half day on strategy, and then spend a few hours a week on the actual work of creating the content and the assets for the passive marketing side of the growth engine for my company, I feel pretty damn good about that. And then I have built and I'm sustaining that, that block of content and brand and reputation and awareness in my market to where I think part of it is I don't feel guilty about, I'm not doing marketing air quotes, but also the compounding effects of that over time are enormous. You think about if each of these channels is getting a touch point or touch points each week. You're just giving yourself that many more opportunities for your target market and that perfect customer to find you. We talked about passive and active marketing. I think it's really important. It's super, it's super critical to not just think this is the only thing that you can do, though. What you have to do from there is you say, okay, I spent, let's call it 3 hours a week doing my passive marketing. I've got this out there. It's marinating and it's judging and it's doing its thing right from there. I gotta put my sales hat on, I gotta go freaking talk to people, right? I gotta go into the community, I gotta go get feedback from customers, I gotta get on sales calls, I gotta go talk to partners. I gotta go do stuff really intentionally put yourself in people's way so that you are increasing your luck surface area if we want to use an overused term, right? But just sitting back and expecting the Google gods or the YouTube gods or the Reddit gods to just serve you up customers is a fool's errand, right? It's foolhardy. I think it can happen, right? And you can get customers from this, but sure enough, the way to get more customers is to literally pick up the phone or get on a Google Meets call or whatever, right, and talk to these people. And there's a bunch of ways that this can happen. There's probably a lot of ways that you can waste a bunch of time with this, but there's also probably a lot of serendipity that will happen as you get out into the market and talk to people about what you're doing, talk to them about the challenges and the problems that they're facing and find ways that you can work together. I think the reason that I wanted to talk about this today is, I think this is where LinkedIn comes in so much is it is a professional social network, and so people just like talking about work there. And so if you're Danny Del Vecchio, who's on the show and you want to talk about doing video for LinkedIn, you got a whole bunch of people who might be prospective clients and just want to chat with you about doing this. And I think regardless of who you are, you probably can go have a bunch of conversations with folks about what's going on in your industry by starting on a place like LinkedIn, where people are just apt to engage in a professional conversation. So if you're saying, craig, I hear you, man, I know I need to talk to a bunch of people in my market. How do I do this?
[00:12:07] Social media is what I would say, or Reddit and YouTuber are flavors of social media. I got to come up with a good term. Maybe I'll call them like social platform or content platforms, right? They're content platforms. They have an aspect of virality, they have an aspect of social media, but they also are longer form pieces of content and not just like 280 characters. So call them content platforms.
[00:12:32] But that's where I'd go to find these, right? You can talk to your existing customers, and you probably can and should talk to your existing customers, and you want to branch out from there to say, hey, ultimately we want to get more of them. So how can we do that? And the answer probably is talk to partners in your space, talk to prospective customers, talk to agencies, talk to anyone that you can just work with. And I think if you're intentional about doing this and really get out into the market and insert yourself into the conversation a lot more intentionally, you'll see the benefit. Because like the passive marketing stuff by itself, like we're, and we're proved this, that's what we relied on for so long. It's not enough. And so I'm saying, shit, I got to go back out into the market and do this. But it's how I'm thinking about it. And it's how I see some of the best brands that I know of, like doing this is they're not just sitting back and expecting Google to serve them a bunch of customers anymore. They know they got to go out and go to the conference and get on the webinar and do the partnership and all this kind of stuff. As I tie together several of these things that we're seeing here through the podcast, right. The concept of active and passive marketing. This kind of one person, founder led wrecking ball of content marketing, where you're really starting with video and YouTube, podcast, blog post, newsletter, social clips, Reddit posts, right? Being active on platforms like YouTube and Reddit, because they are the future, I think, and using AI to do all that for sure. But then also on the active side, really get out there into the market and chat with folks.
[00:14:04] I think one cool thing we're seeing, right, with the AI wave is people want to talk to people and they want to know for sure that it's a person. And so getting on a zoom with someone just to catch up and chat and see what you can do to help them is not as overrated as maybe it used to be. And I think this is a place where we'll see a resurgence. A lot of people are saying like in person events are going to be the next big thing from like a marketing and growth and business perspective. And I don't disagree. But I think the reason that folks think that and the reason that it may be true is because so much of what we're seeing is machine generated and ungenuine. And so I think like, being personable and being unique and being out there and visible in your space is going to give you a leg up over especially the brands who can't do that. So us as small businesses have an advantage in this way. I just wanted to run through how I'm thinking about marketing and thinking about growth, balancing that active and passive, how we're organizing content marketing and how we're trying to be really efficient with my time because I just can't spend hours and hours a week, but I am and I do want to be very involved. And so that's kind of part of it. And the other part is, hey, how can I chat with folks in our space, customers, prospective customers, partners, to see what we can do together? And I think that's probably the missing piece that a lot of folks who historically have relied on content marketing and SEO and the inbound umbrella are missing out on. And so I just encourage you to explore that a little bit as well. That is the update for me in this post LinkedIn series. So I hope, I really hope you enjoyed the LinkedIn series. I thought it was great. I think social in general and LinkedIn as a platform are really great opportunities for almost all of us. And so I just hope that was helpful in you leveling up your game there. As always, if you have any questions, comments and just want to chat about things or want to hear me chat about things, shoot a message. Podcast oest, you can hit me up on Twitter. I am thecragh Hewitt and on LinkedIn just search for Craig Hewitt and you will see me there. And thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next time.
