#209: Content | B2B Content Strategy, Distribution Tactics, and Organic Social with Ross Simmonds, Founder and CEO at Foundation & Distribution.ai

Summary

Podcast Summary: B2B Marketing with Dave Gerhardt

Episode #209: Content | B2B Content Strategy, Distribution Tactics, and Organic Social with Ross Simmonds, Founder and CEO at Foundation & Distribution.ai

Release Date: January 9, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode #209 of the "B2B Marketing with Dave Gerhardt" podcast, Dave Gerhardt engages in a deep and insightful conversation with Ross Simmonds, Founder and CEO of Foundation & Distribution.ai. The episode delves into advanced B2B content strategies, effective distribution tactics, and the nuanced role of organic social media in driving marketing success. Throughout the discussion, both hosts emphasize the importance of leveraging existing content, optimizing social media channels, and integrating AI tools to enhance content creation and distribution.

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Leveraging Existing Content

One of the foundational topics discussed is the strategy of repurposing and reusing high-performing content to maximize its value and reach. Dave shares a personal success story about recycling a LinkedIn post, highlighting its effectiveness:

Dave Gerhardt [06:10]: "I copied and pasted the exact same thing that I posted six months ago. And that post drove 200 new newsletter subscribers."

Ross praises this approach, likening it to Disney's strategy of re-releasing classic hits with modern twists:

Ross Simmonds [07:35]: "It's the reason why Lion King comes back with Childish Gambino and Beyonce... they recognize that these stories resonated and continue to do so."

This segment underscores the efficacy of revisiting and updating successful content rather than constantly creating new pieces from scratch.

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Content Distribution Strategies

The conversation shifts to the intricacies of content distribution across various platforms. Dave elaborates on his method of identifying and rescheduling top-performing posts to sustain engagement:

Dave Gerhardt [06:53]: "When I initially posted it a couple months ago, we got 700 new newsletter subscribers on that first day. Reposting it drove another 200 subscribers."

Ross concurs, emphasizing the universal applicability of this playbook across all creators and brands:

Ross Simmonds [07:35]: "That is the playbook that every creator should apply, every brand should apply, every marketer should apply."

They discuss the importance of consistency and the benefits of focusing on high-impact content rather than spreading efforts thin across multiple channels.

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Importance of Social Media in B2B

Dave and Ross delve into the underrated significance of social media in B2B marketing. Dave highlights his experience with LinkedIn:

Dave Gerhardt [11:40]: "You have 160,000 followers on LinkedIn. The more followers you have, the more people you can reach with your content."

Ross expands on this by discussing how building a committed community can lead to substantial ROI:

Ross Simmonds [12:34]: "If you can build a network and a community that actually cares about what you say... that commitment can translate very nicely into actual revenue."

They argue that social media isn't just for superficial engagement but is a critical channel for delivering value and driving business results.

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Building and Engaging Your Audience

The hosts explore strategies for growing and maintaining a dedicated audience. Ross introduces the concept of "SERP domination" and "mindshare domination":

Ross Simmonds [19:18]: "SERP domination is on the SEO side... Mindshare domination is being the go-to resource when someone has a problem."

Dave agrees, likening it to HubSpot's success in becoming a trusted resource:

Dave Gerhardt [19:25]: "When I was a 23-year-old marketer, I built brand affinity with HubSpot through that process."

They stress the importance of understanding where your audience spends their time and tailoring content to meet their specific needs and preferences.

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Empowering Sales Teams through Social Media

A pivotal part of the discussion focuses on leveraging the sales team as content creators and brand advocates. Ross shares practices from his clients, where proactive dashboards track content output:

Ross Simmonds [28:31]: "Focus on proactive metrics... how many posts do we get up, how many blog posts did we publish."

Dave adds that empowering salespeople to build their personal brands can exponentially increase a company's reach and influence:

Dave Gerhardt [46:52]: "Empowering your entire sales team to think that way... you'll have an army of people preaching the right song to the social world."

This approach not only enhances individual sales performance but also fortifies the company's overall marketing strategy.

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Role of AI and ChatGPT in Content Creation

As the conversation progresses, Dave and Ross address the evolving role of AI tools like ChatGPT in content marketing. Ross presents a forward-thinking perspective:

Ross Simmonds [49:07]: "These tools don't make the work less valuable... they provide a shortcut to achieve more."

Dave shares practical applications, such as using ChatGPT for generating interview questions or translating content:

Dave Gerhardt [52:56]: "It's a copilot to me as I'm going to do work... someone out there is going to launch businesses, career opportunities that were never possible because of this technology."

They collectively assert that AI serves as an equalizer, enabling both mediocre and great marketers to enhance their productivity, though true excellence still stems from human creativity and strategic insight.

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Conclusion

The episode wraps up with mutual appreciation for the insights shared and a reaffirmation of the strategies discussed. Dave and Ross emphasize the importance of consistency, leveraging existing content, optimizing social media channels, and embracing AI tools to stay ahead in the competitive B2B marketing landscape. They encourage listeners to experiment with these tactics, remain adaptable, and continuously seek ways to add value to their audiences.

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Notable Quotes

• Dave Gerhardt [06:10]: "I copied and pasted the exact same thing that I posted six months ago. And that post drove 200 new newsletter subscribers."

• Ross Simmonds [07:35]: "That is the playbook that every creator should apply, every brand should apply, every marketer should apply."

• Ross Simmonds [19:18]: "SERP domination is on the SEO side... Mindshare domination is being the go-to resource when someone has a problem."

• Dave Gerhardt [46:52]: "Empowering your entire sales team to think that way... you'll have an army of people preaching the right song to the social world."

• Ross Simmonds [49:07]: "These tools don't make the work less valuable... they provide a shortcut to achieve more."

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Key Takeaways

1. Repurposing Content: Reusing successful content can significantly boost engagement and subscriber numbers without the constant need for new creations.

2. Social Media as a B2B Powerhouse: Platforms like LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter) are crucial for B2B marketing, offering vast potential for audience engagement and business growth.

3. Community Building: Establishing a dedicated and engaged community translates to higher ROI and sustained business success.

4. Sales Team Empowerment: Training sales teams to create and share content amplifies the company's marketing efforts and fosters stronger customer relationships.

5. AI Integration: Embracing AI tools like ChatGPT enhances content creation efficiency and opens new avenues for innovation and productivity in marketing strategies.

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This episode serves as a comprehensive guide for B2B marketers aiming to refine their content strategies, optimize distribution tactics, and harness the full potential of organic social media to drive measurable business results.

Transcript

[Dave Gerhardt]

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[Ross Simmons]

1, 2, 3, 4. Exit.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Exit.

[Ross Simmons]

Exit.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right, Ross, good to see you, man. It's been a while.

[Ross Simmons]

We likewise, great to see you.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I almost don't even want to record this. I wanted to just keep talking with you for an hour, catch up. Should have just caught up. I was going to ask for your advice because I noticed that you all were just at Disney and we're going there next week. Are you? Yes, sir.

[Ross Simmons]

Nice. I got all the tips I got all the tips.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right, give me one. Give me one dad tip.

[Ross Simmons]

All right, so if you're doing Magic Kingdom, you're going to want to get the lightning Lane rounds, like fastpass stuff. Like, just make sure you're not caught up in the chaos of a two hour line because it will waste your entire day. So you got to wake up at 7am and you got to be there ordering that, like access to the park. Order right away, set an alarm in your phone, get it, and then book whatever ride stands out to you as like the must do ride to be your first one. And then you can't have a bad day. You can't have a bad day after that.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right. It's crazy. We went last year. Don't you think you could do a whole masterclass, a podcast on how they've monetized that business?

[Ross Simmons]

It's the best. It's the best. I go there thinking, oh, this is a great experience for the kids. But it's also a great experience as an entrepreneur and as a business person. Like, the marketing is brilliant. The cast members are brilliant. Like the way that that entire concept is structured, where they always are in character perfection. The prices are also brilliant. Like you can get a Starbucks coffee at Disney for like $14, or you can go outside of the Disney World and get one for $3. And it's like just because you're there, you're okay paying a ridiculous premium on their stuff. Yeah, no, I love it. It's a, it's a cool spot. It's a magical place. How long are you guys going to go down?

[Dave Gerhardt]

We're going for a week.

[Ross Simmons]

Oh, nice. Nice.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Which we just talked about this offline fun fact, now that I'm no longer a solopreneur, it means that it doesn't mean my business is going to pause possible.

[Ross Simmons]

Right? Exactly 100%.

[Dave Gerhardt]

We're going to get the vacation paid for while we're there.

[Ross Simmons]

I love it. That's the key. The goal for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially as you get into the wonderful world of dad life and mother life and all that stuff, is like, you don't want to always be working for the business. You want the business to work for you. And like, for me, I've been able to do like a month and a half to Italy with the fam brought out my mom. We've been able to do Disney with the kids. Like, we're able to live our best life because we got owed of Rossimmons.com which for many years was just myself. Freelance grinding every single night, pushing everything. And now we've just got an amazing team, and it's no longer me. So that's. That's awesome, man. Enjoy. You're gonna love it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Many people know you from social media, from your writing, from your tweeting, from your exing. A lot of people, you've. You've been talking a lot about this topic of content distribution, and I thought of you this morning because dan, who is COO at Exit 5, he sends me this screenshot, and he says, Dave's LinkedIn post from Sunday drove 200 new newsletter subscribers. Okay? So I click on it, and I have all my social media stuff scheduled. Like, I write it in batches, and then it's just. Life is easier if I can do it that way. And what I posted was this lead magnet that we have. So, like, an incentive for somebody to join our email list. Because it used to just be, like, get on the Exit 5 newsletter. That's not a great call to action. So we took this talk that I gave a couple years ago, which was 16 lessons that I learned going from PR intern to CMO about B2B marketing. We redesigned it. We turned into a lead magnet, and so it says, like, join our newsletter, and we will also send you this guide. So it's a better incentive to get people to join the list. Anyway, my point of this is, when I initially posted it a couple months ago, we got 700 new newsletter subscribers on that first day. So what I've been doing since then is this will make you proud. Just replaying the hits.

[Ross Simmons]

I'm already done. I'm proud. This is it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I've done nothing different. And so I see this post from Dan. I'm like, what did I post on Sunday? And I go and I look, and I copied and pasted the exact same thing that I posted six months ago. And that post drove 200 new newsletter subscribers. Now, that's really significant for us because on a given day, we add maybe 10 to 20 new people to our list, right? And I wanted to talk to you about this. I just thought of as I was just driving from somewhere, I came back in my car. I'm like, man, I got to use this as my first story to tell to Ross. Because this, to me, is just like a marketing lesson in itself. We already did the hard work to create the thing. We already proved that it worked. I just posted again. And by the way, not a single person has messaged. I think we have this fear of, like, someone messaging me and be like, yo, man, you already posted this.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah, this worked.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And so I've been doing that. And so now I'm going to do it every other month. I'm going to post the same thing. And that thing is just going to do hundreds of emails, drive hundreds of people to our list. The other thing I've been doing more lately, and now that I'm investing and going hard on Exit 5, I've been taking a lot of this stuff more seriously. So I'm telling you about this. As a content person, social media guy, I've also been going, and I've been looking, at least once a month, I look at which social media content is performing the best and I copy it and I send it right back out into the queue. And lo and behold, the posts that were the top performing posts are the top performing posts again. And every month I write new content. Sometimes you get a new batch from there. I grab those. And now you have this. And I was like, man, I got to tell this to Ross and see what his reaction is.

[Ross Simmons]

That is the playbook that every creator should apply, every brand should apply, every marketer should apply. But everybody has the fear of being judged when they share something every other month that somebody's going to comment and say something negative. They're fearful that somebody's going to unfollow them. They're fearful that it's going to be a dilution of their personal brand or their creative. But you have demonstrated. You have two posts and combined, that's 900 subscribers.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yes.

[Ross Simmons]

Two posts.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I know.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah, two.

[Dave Gerhardt]

That's actually, I put Dan on this the other day and I was like. So he bought. We use Shield app for LinkedIn. Shield is one. I got taplio now, and I guess you can do it in there. But so he buys Shield app. It was like 144 bucks or something for the year. He hasn't been writing on LinkedIn a lot because he wasn't in this field for a little bit. So he goes in shield, he finds posts that he wrote two years ago when he was in the trenches doing VP of marketing stuff. And he sends me this post the other day and it blew up. You know, hundreds of likes, bunch of comments, way more engagement. And he's like, the funny part is I wrote this post two and a half years ago.

[Ross Simmons]

Right, Right. And it still resonates today.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And I think a lot of people are afraid to play the game, like, or admit to themselves that this is a game.

[Ross Simmons]

Right. It's an interesting. I don't think you did this Intentionally. But think about Disney. Think about Disney and their hits. There's a reason why Lion King comes back with Childish Gambino and Beyonce and is going to hit again. It's because they know that this story resonated with people back in the 90s. They recognize that, oh, Aladdin resonated back in the 90s. Let's give it to people again, but make it modern action, live action. Let's continue to replay the hits, adjust them slightly, and see how people respond. How do you think they're going to respond if the content was good, they're going to like it again. Six months, six years, 20 years later, they're still going to like it. Especially if you're able to add a little bit more polish to it. So if you're able to take away. Okay, I created this meme back in the day by just like I was walking to the bus stop and I shared this meme and it resonated with people. What if I add a little bit more polish? What if I threw in a logo? What would happen if I shared it differently? You're going to see more engagement. You're going to see better results. And I think, like, a lot of organizations don't realize that they have fallen into the trap of content is king. And because they bought into that idea that content is king, they thought, oh, I just have to create content every single week, every single month. New content, new content, new content, new blog posts, new LinkedIn updates. And they beat their head up against the wall creating a ton of content without thinking about, oh, right. This idea that I shared back in December 2021 still resonates today. And if I modify it slightly or if I keep it, the exact same people aren't going to care. They're going to like it, they're going to share it, they're going to engage with it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I'm glad you mentioned that point about editing it, because there's actually a bunch of examples where we all change. And I look at something that was popular that I wrote two years ago, and I cringe at it a little bit.

[Ross Simmons]

Right, right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So should I throw it out? No, I didn't throw it out. The topic hit. Right. And so I'm like, let me just rewrite this now and write it as, you know, mature Dave, or whatever it is. Right.

[Ross Simmons]

State of your audience and the state of affairs. Right. It's like a great example of this is Hustle as a concept. I'm a big believer in Hustle. I've been a fan for years. Blah, blah, Blah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

How dare you.

[Ross Simmons]

A lot of my content back in the day would talk about hustle. Okay. The Internet is now cool. So you've. Instead of always saying hustle, I'm going to say work hard. Nobody gets triggered, nobody gets offended. Everybody buys into this idea that you should work hard. And I don't throw at the word hustle because I don't want people to get. Pull out the pitchforks and start yelling. So, like, you have to adjust with the times. You have to be able to be aware of, okay, this needs to be changed slightly to fit my audience and the people that I'm trying to connect with. And if you do that, your content is going to continue to win.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I like that. I like talking to you about social media. You say content, I say social media. I just feel like with B2B, social media is like the most underrated.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Channel not underrated in that it's not obvious. But, man, so many people and companies are not good at it. And I think you've done this. I've done this as people and brands with companies, you just see so many people, they have to go spend money on paid in order to do things. Right. You have a book coming out at some point in the spring.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

You've already built up an audience. Right. And so to sell that book is going to be send email, write tweets about it, post on LinkedIn about it, and especially in B2B, channels like LinkedIn are so underrated. I think X is underrated. What holds companies back from being better at the social media part and how can we help them a little bit today on how to tackle that?

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah. So the books coming out, create ones, distribute forever. You can go to RossSimmons.com subscribe to my newsletter and I'll be sure to get access. Combine this book, though, with founder brand, and I think a lot of people are going to have a ridiculous resource to be able to take these two things and do some ridiculous.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Hey, don't sleep on founder brand. I got a deposit this month from Authors republic for $167. Now, there you go.

[Ross Simmons]

There you go.

[Dave Gerhardt]

You know, it's more. If we translate that over to Canadian money, it's. Yeah, I got a little bit more.

[Ross Simmons]

It's a mortgage in Canada. Like that. That's crazy. But, yeah, like to your point, I think when it comes to social, there's a lot of things that people underestimate. The biggest thing that people underestimate is like, if you can build a network and a community that actually cares about what you say, your voice, your point of view, then those people aren't just like visitors to your website that are there for a second and then move away. They're people who have committed by just hitting subscribe, by just hitting follow, by just hitting that, like, button that they are engaged and interested in hearing the stories that you're gonna tell. So that commitment can translate very nicely into actual revenue and actual dollars. But a lot of brands make the mistake of thinking, oh, social media is just a place for fun. It's just a place for people to share funny dance videos and share what they've had for lunch and dinner. But in reality, some of the best content might not generate a bunch of likes, it might not generate a lot of shares, but it will actually drive better ROI for your business by simply being educational, by simply providing people with value directly in the feed. You had a great episode with Amanda from SparkToro talking about no click content. Like, if you can deliver value in the feed of a user, it's gold. And then on the flip side of that, I know we're talking a lot about social, but another distribution channel is also search, right? Like, everyone thinks that distribution is exclusively on social. SEO is also an organic distribution channel. If you can capitalize on the fact that right now the hundreds of thousands of people are looking for certain keywords that might be relevant to your industry, the problems that you solve, et cetera, and you can start to capture a percentage of that that can pay significant dividends as well. And I think a lot of organizations are afraid to do this work because it doesn't have necessarily that cheat code that paid has. And that cheat code is a credit card. With paid, you just swipe a credit card and you're good. You're going to show up. You're guaranteeing that placement. But with social, there's algorithms that you have to deal with. With SEO, there's algorithms you have to deal with. There's the understanding of your customers that you have to deal with. There's a lot of variability associated with that game, but that hard game can actually pay significant dividends down the road.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah, I love that. I think people like paid because it's like, we need to generate X, right? It's very quantifiable. Let's go take $10,000, $50,000, whatever, and go spend it there. Like, what I love about social and LinkedIn specifically as a channel for B2B is I think there's a wrong narrative that followers are a vanity metric.

[Ross Simmons]

Right? I agree.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I don't think they're a vanity metric at all? I think they are a very important metric. And the reason why is because the more followers you have on a platform means the more people you can reach with your content. And so that example that I talked about earlier, I have 160,000 followers on LinkedIn.

[Ross Simmons]

Right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

The only reason I got 200 newsletter subscribers from that was because I have that audience. And so the goal is create content. Over time, more people find you interesting, more people engage on your stuff. When more people engage with your stuff, more people are likely to see your stuff. When more people see your stuff, they're more likely to follow you. So over time you add followers.

[Ross Simmons]

Right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Then when you have something to promote, right. You can promote it and people are going to sign up. And so I've been at companies, I've advised companies, I've been around startups who are like, people are smashing their heads against the wall to try to figure out how do we drive more people to our webinar.

[Ross Simmons]

Right, Right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

When we can do a post with Exit 5, we have a webinar coming up. We have 900 people registered for it and we sent one email and two LinkedIn posts about it.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah, that's it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And so you're building an opt in. Like the followers, maybe people get caught up in the name, but you're building a people that have opted in to see your stuff.

[Ross Simmons]

Exactly, yeah. And that's the key. Whether it's followers, whether it's subscribers to an email newsletter, when you own access to your icp, it's a game changer. But a lot of brands struggle with this because even when they are willing to try to connect to those people and those people are willing to press that follow button, they don't actually know what to share. Like, a lot of brands also struggle with this idea of, okay, what do we talk about if we don't have something to sell? Like, am I supposed to talk about five other ways that you can use my product? Am I supposed to talk about the different features? Like, a lot of brands struggle with what I call content market fit, which is understanding what content your market actually wants. And the best way to figure out what content your market wants is actually to send out smaller tidbit, ideas, concepts and see what resonates. So on X I do this all the time. I'll share a tweet and if it generates a lot of reshares, lots of reposts, lots of likes, lots of bookmarks, I'm like, okay, this piece now needs to become a podcast. That podcast needs to become social clips. We need to write a blog post on this piece as well. Because now I know I have content market fit. And when leads start coming through from that one thread, from that LinkedIn post, customers start coming through it. I know that I've hit something that rings the cash register, so I'm going to go double down on that asset time and time again. So for a lot of brands, they're afraid of not knowing what to share. Here's what you share valuable things. You create content that's going to educate them, it's going to engage them, entertain them, or empower them. And if you do that consistently enough, you're going to win at the game of social and you're going to start to get those followers.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Do you work mostly with B2B brands?

[Ross Simmons]

All B2B? So, yeah, like, we work with the B2B SaaS companies, some of the largest in the world, so to speak. Like, we do everything from social management, content creation on their blog, ebooks, gated assets, all that stuff.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I was asking because I think to build on what you said there, I think that the best marketing strategy, the best content strategy for B2B is to become the expert or the go to resource in your niche. And so you sell to hr. Your whole marketing strategy should be to become the go to resource for people that work in hr.

[Ross Simmons]

Right?

[Dave Gerhardt]

What's your reaction to that?

[Ross Simmons]

When we work with clients, we always talk about, like, there's SERP domination and then there's like mindshare domination. And when we think about SERP domination, it's on the SEO side. Like, you want to be able to show up in multiple places for people.

[Dave Gerhardt]

That might not know. What does SERP mean?

[Ross Simmons]

Search engine results page. So the SERP is essentially I go to Google and I type in, what is B2B marketing? If we can have a YouTube video, if we can have a Twitter account, if we can have a blog post, if we can have content on that search engine results page. When people type in what is B2B marketing? Then we're owning that phrase. Like, that's SERP domination. Being able to own a lot of that. When it comes to mindshare domination, it's thinking through when someone has a problem in the wonderful world of hr, where's the resource that they go to to figure out what to do if you miss payroll? What's the resource that you go to when you're trying to figure out whether or not you should send somebody a W2 or a W9 or what the difference is you want to be that person and that media engine that has all of those answers because that's going to earn you the subscribe and in many ways. And I hate to be the guy who's like pumping you up too much. But like, Exit 5 has become that for a lot of B2B marketers. I see people who literally won't write their boss a question. They'll go in and ask an anonymous question in Exit 5 to get an answer because they don't want to look dumb internally. Yeah, well done. Right?

[Dave Gerhardt]

Like, thank you.

[Ross Simmons]

Hey, you know what?

[Dave Gerhardt]

I'm not having a great day today, so I'll take that. Sometimes you gotta take a compliment and you just gotta be like, you know what? That feels good.

[Ross Simmons]

I'll take it. Thank you 100%.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So thank you. No, thank you for saying that. That means a lot. But also, this is what I've been doing for 10 years, right? This is like some guy on LinkedIn the other day was writing about how I need to I'm giving market. Like I have a big audience and I need to be more. You have a responsibility to show people that marketing is about more than demand gen and performance marketing. I'm like, dude, you're talking to the wrong person. Like, I'm the word guy, I'm not the math guy. Like, are you serious?

[Ross Simmons]

Right, right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

You got the wrong gu. But I love the content piece and I think the reason why, like, what's the secret to Exit 5? Well, this is kind of the playbook that I've done at a couple companies and now we're doing it without a SaaS company behind it. We're building this resource for B2B marketers. Now I love the example you talked about. Your brain goes to search and that's great. And that's a weakness of mine for sure. I just want to build on that. So that is one approach you can take, right? Which is like, let's write the articles. Let's write the like, you know how to articles.

[Ross Simmons]

Right?

[Dave Gerhardt]

But what I think is cool today is you have multiple channels available to you to try to do this, to try to build the resource. And so you could say like, ah, we want to try to do that content approach. But right now we just like, we don't have the budget to work with like a foundation. We don't have the time. You could do something like stand up a TikTok account and make funny and relatable like just do life of an HR pro, like life of an HR person and make A hundred videos. It's, it's now, it's not that easy, right? Not to go, Gary V. You just make a hundred videos. It doesn't work like that. Right, but I just want to give people these ideas. It doesn't have to be one thing. It's like, okay, how do we become the Go to resource now? That TikTok page can either work or not. And you're going to build off of that. But there's multiple avenues here. You could start a newsletter, it could be the founder writing on LinkedIn, it could be a podcast, it could be one article, it could be one webinar. You need to shrink this down and say, like, our content strategy needs to be built around this person.

[Ross Simmons]

Exactly.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And the goal is to become known. And like, hey, we happen to sell software to that person. But I always think back. I always use HubSpot as an example. Not to beat a dead horse, but when I was a 23 year old marketer who had no idea what he was doing and needed to build a marketing plan, guess I did exactly what you just said with HR. Go to Google, find a HubSpot marketing plan template, customize that, pitch it to my boss, she's like, wow, you came up with this marketing plan? I'm like, you're damn right I did.

[Ross Simmons]

100%. 100%.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And in my mind, I build brand affinity with HubSpot through that process, right?

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think that what you just articulated there is kind of the essence of my MO entirely. It's like, yes, search is a play, LinkedIn is a play. But so is Reddit, so is podcasting, so is a private Slack group. The playbook around adding value is not dictated by. You have to be everywhere. It's finding exactly where your audience is spending time going very intentional into these communities and adding a ton of value. Like, I've been blocked from Reddit probably eight times. I love Reddit. It's my favorite network, literally in the world. And I've been blocked because in the early days I went in, I just submitted links and I thought, oh, I'm going to make it to the top of Reddit. Didn't happen. Bye, Felicia, you're done. They kicked me off. It sucked because I also used Reddit to win my fantasy football championships and I couldn't win that year because I got kicked off. But I came back, I learned the game and I understood now what Redditors want. So now I went into these channels in these communities, I sorted the content by top posts, I analyzed it and I started to realize these are the types of things that these people want. Okay, marketer, now if you want to do TikTok, how do you figure out what people on TikTok want? You don't just wake up and say, I'm going to apply 2021's Instagram playbook to TikTok. You're going to go on TikTok. You're going to type in some keywords that are relevant to your industry and relevant to your space. You're going to use hashtags that are relevant to your space. You're going to look at the content on this topic that have generated the most likes, that have generated the most comments. Because now you see what on TikTok is working. So you might not have the ability to win at search, but because there's only five competitors on TikTok right now, maybe you start to recreate some of the videos that you've seen on TikTok that are just completely smashing it. There's One account on TikTok called Creator Kit and their SaaS company. They're crushing TikTok. What they're doing is essentially educating people using the formats that TikTokers love and talking about influencer marketing and they're doing amazing at it. Like so many brands can win at different channels. If you immerse yourself into those channels, study the people who are there, understand the formats that they want and then give it back to people, whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's X. Yes, you do have to spend time to learn it. But I guarantee any brand can win on one channel if they're willing to be focused, they understand the best practices and then they apply that to their industry and they know with confidence that their people are there and then they give it to them. You'll win every time.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah. What? Hey, it's Dave. Quick interruption of this podcast to tell you about my friends at Compound Growth Marketing. They're sponsors of Exit 5. They're an amazing agency and I've worked with them not once but twice. Hired them at Privy, hired them at Drift. They're the Go to Growth partner to help you figure out demand generation. They've managed over 50 million in ad spend working with everyone from fast scaling mid stage startups to publicly traded companies. But what really sets them apart from the other agencies out there? They were built by someone who has actually done the job that you're trying to do. John Short, founder and CEO, was a VP of marketing in B2B SaaS. Like many of you that listen to this podcast. He worked at companies like Log Me in workable and monster.com and he's built this company through that lens so they can focus on accountability, delivering results, and being an extension of the marketing teams that they work with. So many B2B agencies that we see are B2C firms in B2B clothing. They focus on cost per lead, not pipeline, but CGM Compound Growth Marketing. They don't just run campaigns. They engineer compound growth strategies that turn your dollars into measurable roi. They know how to talk about it. They know how to help you present to the CEO, to the board to do it all. I've seen it firsthand. They take the time to understand your business, your goals, and your challenges, and they execute with prec precision. They are truly a growth partner. I can't say enough good things about John and the team at Compound Growth Marketing. And I'm pumped that they signed up to be a sponsor of Exit 5, because I think they can provide a ton of value back to you as a listener if you're looking for an agency. So if you're ready to unlock your next level of growth, head over to Compound Growth Marketing. Com and tell them you heard about them on the Exit 5 podcast. Hashtag attribution. Compound Growth marketing, you said, is really important. And I've made this mistake a bunch of times, which is you try to do this across, like, three or four channels at once, and it really takes picking one.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah, does.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Because each channel is unique in its own. I do feel like, however, once you get momentum on one channel, you can add another one.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

It's not to say that all the content is going to work there. Like, just because you've had success on Twitter doesn't mean you can just take the same exact content and work on LinkedIn. But there's enough there where you can do that. But I think you do need to have the discipline of being like, we're gonna just focus on one channel here. And then you also need to be able to suck for a long time at it.

[Ross Simmons]

Right? Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I follow this guy on Instagram. His name is Colin Landforce. His Instagram is at Landforce. He posted, like, golf merch and brands and stuff like that. Anyway, it's very random, but he posted this one video of this guy who has now blown up making, like, custom handbags.

[Ross Simmons]

Cool.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And he scrolled all the way back through the guy's account and he made a video and he's like, look, six months ago, this guy's videos sucked. And you can actually see where he started to, like, make videos. And it just was like, he just was a guy making videos with his phone. Now if you scroll all the way up, he's got a million followers. He's got all these videos that have gone viral. But especially inside a company, it's very hard to be patient and be like, I'm going to do this for six months. And don't you feel like the goal almost has to be output as opposed to, like, some measurement? It's like, hey, we're going to make a video every day for the next hundred days. Like, how. How would you push someone to actually go and do this inside of a company?

[Ross Simmons]

Within a few of our clients, we actually have developed these things we call, like, proactive dashboards, where the metric is the proactive things that we own and we can control, which is literally how many posts do we get up, how many posts did we share on LinkedIn, how many blog posts did we publish, how many times were we able to get an influencer to create a video? Talking about you. Like, you focus on the things within your circle of control. You can't control when you have 500 followers, how much virality or engagement you're going to get with your content. You don't even really have much to benchmark, so you focus on your proactiveness and your ability to actually execute the tasks. And then by doing that and getting more reps, you start to figure out the nuances of the stories that resonate and the things that work for them. So that is something that we've encouraged a lot of internal teams to take on their own and start to execute, because when they're able to do that, they're able to start to figure out for themselves, oh, this is how we should be doing it. This is the blueprint of, like, some of the best artists of all time. If you go back and look at Justin Bieber's first video, it was trash, right? Like, if you look at some of the top YouTubers, like Mr. Beast's first YouTube videos, he wasn't creating Willy Wonka in the Chocolate Factory with the first video. He set up a camera, and he might have said the same word over and over again a million times. And yes, it was cool and interesting, but it wasn't near what it is today. And I think a lot of organizations, especially those that are early, need to create a culture that embraces experimentation and embraces the idea of failing once in a while with these smaller efforts and investments in the content. And then what you're able to do with these investments is you're able to find a competitive edge. Because when you're able to create something on a channel that everybody else is saying is risky, like Reddit or TikTok, you're able to get an advantage ahead of them and start to win before them. Especially even today. Like, you look at X, X has been around for a long time, but a lot of brands have stepped away from X. You can make your own choices on where you go with that. But here's one thing to note. When fewer competitors are on a channel but your ideal customers are still there, it's probably an opportunity. It's probably an opportunity to tap into and be able to get some value on it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

It's funny you said that. My little pet experiment right now is I've taken the Exit 5 Twitter handle. I'm always gonna call it Twitter. I've taken the Exit 5 Twitter handle and I'm just gonna run it for 30 days.

[Ross Simmons]

Right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And because I feel like we have done a good job on LinkedIn. Text Content Works really well for us. I know that B2B marketers are on X. Maybe they're just not engaging with our content or following it. We happen to have 5,000 followers there just because of me tweeting about it over the years.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Out of all the places we could be going right now, like, could we go and go after TikTok? Like, we could, but I just kind of feel like let's go where we have a little bit of momentum and we want to find another channel like LinkedIn. So we're going to go hard on Exit 5 Twitter for the next 30 to 60 days and see what happens.

[Ross Simmons]

And you don't have to do the research to figure out where your audience is on those channels. So you can say with confidence by looking at a few other accounts, oh, okay, my people are still here. Like, they're using this channel, they're engaging versus a TikTok, where it's kind of like a. An assumption that maybe your people are there. You don't know for sure that they're using it, and definitely not sure if they're using it for business yet. Like, there's a lot more risk associated with that. And I always say, like, go where your audience is. If your audience is on that channel, like, double down and invest in it and then use that. And the other cool thing about it is you can repurpose your Greatest hits from LinkedIn over on X. Right. Like, you can try to find those opportunities to remix those content stories and distribute them there. I think that's another great play for a lot of brands and businesses.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Tell me about your strategy. What goes on behind the scenes with X? Are you. Yeah, I see you write some long stuff, you write some short stuff.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah, it's a blend. Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So how do you, I want to know, like geek, geek out. Take me, actually share some of the secrets. Like, are you using tools? If so, what are you using? How often are you writing? I want to know.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah, so my strategy on X is always been around the idea that I want to create content that's so valuable that people hit follow and then they click the link in my bio and then they go get lost in the Ross world. The Ross world consists of foundation, it consists of courses and books and resources. All of that stuff, my newsletters, podcasts, I want them to just get lost into it. And the way that I focus with my content mix is a blend between threads. I still do them, I still think that, and I study in that. I think I know they still work because I had a thread the other day that just like went bonkers and had like 400,000 impressions. I got two leads off of the back of it. One of them is probably going to pay us 150k over the next 6 months. Like these are the opportunities that still exist on X. And everybody says threads are dead. It's not like you can create a great thread that drives real money. So I throw threads.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Wait, wait, let's talk about threads though. Yeah, this is you're talking about on X, not on the rip threads app.

[Ross Simmons]

The app threads. I throw up like random things. Once in a while I'll be like, oh, I forgot that app. That experience exists. But a thread is essentially, you have one post at the top and then you have a series of posts that go after it. And you want to start your thread with typically an image. The image is going to go into a few different categories. One, it's either a picture of the person or businesses that you're talking about. So if I'm doing a thread breaking down the growth strategies of Zapier, I'm going to take a screenshot of something happening at Zapier or I'm going to show their growth chart because that always captures people attention. If I'm talking about a thread, I did one on Andrew Scholz, comedian. I just got a photo of him. Put that in there. You want to make the first image eye catching and worth clicking. You want to have an interesting hook. Typically, I love to fill that with stats and Data. So if I'm breaking down a company's SEO success, I'm going to say this company has 30 million backlinks. They have 20 million visits every single week. I'm going to break all of that down because that lures people in. And then my focus is the same focus that I have with every single piece of content that I give. I want the core elements within that thread to be ridiculously valuable. So they're like, why is this available for free? Like, why is Ross giving me all of this for free? And then at the very end, I'm either going to subtly reference another thread that I wrote that they can get lost into, or I'm going to tell them to subscribe to my newsletter. Now, the reason why I don't go for the hard sell and say, hey, go buy something from me, is because we have seen, just from our newsletter, so many public traded Cloud 100 companies who subscribe to us like two years ago become customers. Like, we've got publicly traded CMOs who will subscribe to our newsletter, open every newsletter. They saw it on X and then they send me a note and they're like, hey, we're issuing an rfp. I've been reading your newsletter for two years. We want you to go after this. And it's worth 800k. And it's like, ching, ching. Thank you. This is great. Like, I would love to do this. So that's one playbook. There's a few other playbooks on X as well.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Hold on. Pause for a second.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah, paused.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So when you go to write that thread.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Do you just have an idea and you go and write it in a Google Doc? Do you have like, dedicated time? Like once a month I sit down and I batch. Right. I want to know, like, how does the idea come? Do you open a Google Doc? Do you use a scheduling tool? I want to know that stuff.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah. So when it comes to the idea, there are lots of posts that I've shared in the past where I ask questions like, which company would you like me to break down next? Or I'll even go into communities and I'll see where people have said, oh, this company has a very interesting SEO strategy. So I'll go into a community like Exit 5. I'm giving you away the secret. And I will go and look at people's comments on a post that somebody might have shared. Foundation had a blog post where we broke down, like, Canva's growth strategy, and it still generates ridiculous traffic. Someone shares it in a community like Exit 5. I'll go in and I'll see and read the comments. Someone might say another great brand that has leveraged a strategy like this is this, this and this. Cool. I now have three ideas that I'm going to send to myself via Slack and I'm going to set a reminder to myself in Slack to write a thread on that topic in a few weeks, in a few months. So then I do that. I tackle it and I write it, or I send it to my team. And my team, which is made up of researchers and writers, will actually go out and do that for us and they'll write it at first as a blog post, then it becomes an actual thread. So our team is writers. They're great, they're brilliant minds. I'll give them a simple company's name and they'll go out and they'll research that company's name's growth strategy. I've recorded a bunch of internal looms that talk about how to write a great thread. They watch them, they apply my first principles and methodology to this company. They write it, I get it, then I can repost it. So we have that methodology. We use Buffer to schedule like good old fashioned one off tweets we use typefully to schedule threads. And then for long form content, which is now available on X, if you have a premium account, we don't do that in Buffer because it's not allowed for some reason yet.

[Dave Gerhardt]

The only thing that drives me nuts, I use a scheduling tool, I use Tweet Hunter and it's like, and actually there's flaws with all them. And then I'll use taplio for LinkedIn. But you can't, you can't upload videos. And so each one you still need to post natively at some point.

[Ross Simmons]

Brutal. Like, why can't anyone just do everything for us? Like it's brutal. I also hate that I need like multiple apps to see data from LinkedIn and from Twitter. Like just give it all to me. Like, hey, shield, if you're listening, go tap into X or acquire someone who can do X and plug it into. But yeah, like long story, a little bit longer with that. The long form content we do natively on X whenever it's published. And what I've been doing with those pieces is I try to make them like blog post style. So I want the long form content to be written in a way where a C suite exec will send that link to their entire team on Slack. That's the goal. That's the purpose of some of those Pieces where I want it to be very educational and worth sharing. The one off tweets where they're short and snippy. I'm always looking for reach, I'm looking for impressions. I want people to see it. I want to like it's more of a brand play as well. So I'm reiterating philosophies and ideas and concepts. And here's a simple idea that a lot of people don't tap into. If you have a tweet that resonates right underneath, there's this thing that says see similar posts. If you click see similar posts, Twitter's algorithm, AI whatever's in the back end, is going to scan their database of content and it's going to show you all of the best tweets and posts that were on that exact same topic. Now, if you cover a topic well in it, like in depth, like I do with content distribution, you're going to see a lot of your own tweets, but what you're going to see is your greatest hits. So you can copy and paste those greatest hits and reschedule them and add them into buffer and share them in the future. But what you can also do is you can get inspiration from other people. So I can go to Dave's X account, click See similar posts and see, oh, Dave had this great post talking about how you should always work for someone who understands marketing. Cool. All right, let me see what other people are saying on this topic. And I might find five people who shared the same idea, but they got like 20 times more retweets. And then I'm like, why did they get more retweets? Oh, they went a little bit more in depth. Oh, they used bulleted points, whatever it might be. So you're trying to understand and pick up on those little nuances and then you rewrite those and you give them back to your audience as well.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Love that masterclass. It's Justin Welsh has been saying this lately that I like, and I've learned this. If you just kind of show up on one of these channels and just post whatever you're feeling that day, it's not gonna work. To build the growth. To build growth. Now, that might be what you want out of Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram. Right. And so for a while, I was just kind of using Twitter as, like, had a thought, right?

[Ross Simmons]

Just your thoughts? Yeah, yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Had a witty thing. Sometimes I talk about the sandwich that I ate. Sometimes I talk about B2B marketing.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I guess now that I'm more serious about growing my business and seeing that I can use this channel to grow my business. I'm actually trying to play the game more. And so I have, you know, friends or somebody, whoever, that follows me. And it's like, man, I hate your tweets. I'm like, great, they're not for you. You know, like, this is a channel. The same way a brand might use AdWords or whatever or spend on a channel. Like, I'm trying to use this as a channel. And I think it's cool to hear you talk about it because it's clear that you are doing the same. Ultimately, what matters to you is not the engagement. It's the fact that an ideal customer who's a CMO of a publicly traded company reaches out and wants to work with your agency for content.

[Ross Simmons]

Right When I first got started in this game, I was sharing content, and I would have all of my buddies roast me because they're like, why aren't you talking about the party last week? Why aren't you talking about the keg stands? And, like, what are you doing? And I'm like, my socials are no longer for entertainment purposes. Like, I'm using these things to drive business now. Like, I know I'm going to get roasted in the group chat for, like, this complete shift. But when you make that shift and you say, okay, I'm going to be a creator, I'm going to make content to drive business results, you do have to start thinking differently about the way that you show up. Don't get me wrong. I still think there's room and value in personal content. And if you don't want to play that game and you don't want to be someone who has, like, a personal platform, personal brand out there in the world, do you? You don't have to go down that path. You can use your channels to do exactly what you want. You can share pictures of the weekend. You can do all of that stuff. You can also blend them. Like, I try to incorporate, like, the reason why you know about Disney is because I incorporate my real life into my socials and what I have going on on content. But if you don't want to do that, that's okay. But apply these lessons to the businesses that you work with. Apply these lessons to the organizations that you work with. And also think about how you can empower a sales team. This is also, in my opinion, one of the best distribution channels people have and in B2B that they don't tap into, but tap into training and teaching your Sales team, how to build their brand and how to build their own audience. Because when you get that, it changes everything. Like, that is a ridiculous play that not enough B2B brands recognize.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Yeah, say more. Let's double click on that.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah. Like, when I first got started into this wonderful world of marketing, I was working with a company called Intro a Hive and they were a spinoff from a company called Radian6, which was acquired by Salesforce for ridiculous money. When that whole thing went down, one clear thing came to mind for me. The people who were doing social selling, aka they had platforms and they had an audience on LinkedIn and they started to talk about their work, they started to talk about social media as a software solution, blah, blah, blah. They were hitting their quota at a ridiculous higher rate than the people who just were behind their emails trying to go through their Rolodex. The people who had a brand presence had more direct pipeline for themselves. They also had stronger relationships with their clients. They had prospects that ultimately wanted to work with them long term. And it paid ridiculous dividends for those people. Like some of those people who were sales execs back then are now heads, VPs, like CEOs, CMOs, like they're running the game in many ways. And for a lot of organizations, I think if you can educate your salespeople on how to show up on LinkedIn properly, on how to show up on X properly, and create content that actually aligns with your business, you can do numbers, you can do so much more because you're multiplying essentially your impressions across all of them. So instead of just thinking about it as a salesperson, think about the reach that they could have if they added an extra 10,000, 20,000 followers to their account. It just continues to exponentially grow from there.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I also like that because it matches what we talked about earlier, which is like if the brand strategy, if the marketing strategy is to be the go to resource for your ideal customer, you basically create this mini army of people who are megaphones for that. And I think the right way to do it is the salesperson ideally should know the product really well. You know, I was listening to a podcast recently with Tim Ferriss. He had Noah Kagan on talking about his new book. And Tim was talking about how he started off in software sales, or it was hard, some type of device he was selling. And the way that he won was he knew the product almost to the level of an engineer and to the point where the customers he was working with, they said they'd ask him, hey, who is your sales rep? And he'd be like, I don't know.

[Ross Simmons]

Right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Tim's like a helpful engineer.

[Ross Simmons]

Right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And so I think I love that because if you know the product really well, then you can basically become. And you're the one talking to customers and. Or prospects and having these conversations. That makes for great content to share on social media. And the way to do it right is not just say, like, a lot of people do this and they think they're doing what you're saying, Ross, which is. And they just start posting and it just becomes, rah, rah. My company won this award. It's awesome.

[Ross Simmons]

Yeah.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Where the way to do it is actually to take the lessons. Take the things your conversation you're having with prospects. Share your lessons. You know them, you know the pain points, you know the challenges, you know what they're reading. Start writing content about those topics and.

[Ross Simmons]

Do it like right after your sales call. So an example of this that I've seen work extremely well is I asked a handful of sales execs at a company once, like, what are some of the most frequently asked questions that you all get when you're on a call? And they just went off. And I was like, okay, let's write these all down. So then I started to ask them those questions again. They went off. I was like, all right, folks, now here's what I want you to do. I want you to record a voice note and I want you to say everything you just said answering that FAQ and just upload it to ChatGPT and say, ChatGPT, write me a quick LinkedIn post describing what I said in a way that will work on LinkedIn. They started to share them and they said, ross, I got more impressions on my account than I ever have. I told them, make sure that you adjusted like, you don't need it to always have that weird intro that all ChatGPT posts have with. In the ever evolving changing world of social selling, blah, blah, blah, you don't need that. Modify it to fit your tone and share it. And they did that and they were able to get some results. It's like, answer the problems and answer the questions that you typically get from a prospect or a customer and share that on LinkedIn and see what happens. What's going to happen is simple. You're going to add value to the community. And when you add value to the community, the community will give you back value. And I think so many brands lose sight of that. But if you can empower your entire sales team to Think that way. Like you said, you'll have an army of people preaching the right song to the social world and giving you a ton of extra value on top of it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

So I had a whole list of. I asked Chat GPT what questions they would ask Ross Simmons and they weren't better than my questions for the I.

[Ross Simmons]

Wouldn'T think so, no.

[Dave Gerhardt]

And we hit on most of them. But let's wrap up and just talk about Chat GPT and AI. I see two sides of this. I see people. You're bullish on it. I've seen your stuff. I'm bullish on it. But there is a whole sphere of people in the content world that are like, content is an art, content is a craft. Chad GBT is not gonna. I saw somebody post something like, you know, if you're chatgpt is gonna. The lazy marketers are going to use it, blah, blah, blah. I know you see things differently. Just give me your kind of like two minute elevator pitch on how you see the role of content evolving in a world of ChatGPT and AI writing tools.

[Ross Simmons]

Before humans used calculators, math was a lot harder. Before humans met Clippy. Writing in Google Word docs and Microsoft Word was very difficult. Before Grammarly, always making sure that you spoke perfect English was very difficult. And today pre AI, pretty much doing everything was pretty difficult. But when you insert these types of technologies into our lives, it doesn't make the work less valuable, it doesn't make the work less meaningful. It doesn't mean the content, the output is going to be less impactful. It means that the people who brought it to life are actually going to just have an easier process that it took them to get there. And for all of the people who say, back in my day we had to use a typewriter and back in my day we had to do all of this, like, don't trauma dump on everybody else on the struggles that we had to go through just because in the future you won't have to like, yes, they were beneficial in our day to be able to just start with our own brains, to come up with all of the ideas, et cetera. 100%. But now we have a cheat code, we have a shortcut. So let's embrace it. Let's treat this technology the same way that if you are a superhero, Marvel, let's pretend you're Iron Man. Tony Stark would have treated the Iron man suit. You put it on and you go full speed ahead trying to win. I don't get the hate behind these tools. I think Whether you are, I gave a presentation. There's two thoughts here. One, I don't believe that this technology is going to make the world of difference between a great marketer and a mediocre one. I think a mediocre marketer who uses ChatGPT will be able to create mediocre things 10 times faster. But I think a great marketer who uses ChatGPT will be able to create great things 10 times faster. So it's an equalizer for everyone. And I think those who leverage it are just going to be able to do more. Now here's the other thing. I spoke on stage at a conference in Brazil and I gave this talk about AI. At the end of the talk, I put up a video of myself. I used this tool, 11 labs to change my voice into Portuguese. I landed in Brazil, I was ignorant and I didn't know that so many people didn't speak English. Huge fail on my end. So I used ChatGPT to translate a bunch of my slides. Use 11 labs to change my voice in a video where at the end of my presentation I thanked them in Portuguese and I press play on this video. It plays. People go wild. They're clapping, they're standing up, they're excited by it. A lady comes up to me afterwards, she was in tears. She says, all of these tools are going to make it easier for me to get so much done during my workday that I'm going to be able to spend more time with my kids. People hate on that. I don't care what those people say. If someone is able to use these tools to spend their time with people that they love in this thing that we go through called life once and they actually can optimize their time. It's a net positive. Embrace it, lean into it and go spend more time with your kids.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I love that. I found so many use cases like that and I think that's where people like. Of course if you ask one of these tools to write you a blog post and it's not going to be great, it's not going to be better than the human touch, right? But like just before this I was working on something design related and I'm not a designer and I can't articulate what I like. I found an image online And I asked ChatGPT to describe the image and in super incredible detail. I got. It's like it was a guy doing pull ups and it was like the bar is here, his muscles are like this. He's. It's very specific language and I Got an incredible, like, prompt and guardrails from that. And I think there's just little examples like that or your example of translating a video into a language that you don't speak.

[Ross Simmons]

Right.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Those are the things that I just think you need to have it open and you need to be thinking about, okay, how am I about to go? Even just doing something silly, like, I'm trying to push myself to just use these tools more. Even doing something silly, like, I'm a former CMO and I host a B2B marketing podcast called the Exit 5 Podcast. We share tactical and specific advice where B2B marketers help them do their jobs better. I'm about to interview Ross Simmons, who's a founder and CEO foundation, at Content Market, blah blah. What questions would you ask him?

[Ross Simmons]

Right, that's it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

I got 20 questions, right? And I might not use any of them, but, like, it's this, like, copilot to me as I'm going to do work, and I think that's an incredible advantage.

[Ross Simmons]

And I think there's going to be a ridiculous amount of ROI that comes out of this for a lot of people who embrace it. Like, I am confident that someone out there is going to launch businesses, career opportunities that were never possible because of this technology. There's already on Kickstarter, a ton of board games that are being created built with this type of technology. There's movies that are being funded, built off of the premise, being pitched using AI. There's no question that marketers in B2B can use AI and still be creative. I'm confident in it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Love that. All right, Ross, good chopping it up with you, man. I appreciate you giving us an hour. I'm going to send you a picture from Disney. I promise you.

[Ross Simmons]

Yes. I love it. I can't wait to see it. Here's one other thing I want you to do in Disney. I want you to try to pull the sword from the stone and let's see if you can do it. Let's see if you can do it. I want to know if you can pull it.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right, let's do that. Also, I just sent a note to our team, but let's have you do an ama, like when your book comes out or something in the community. That would be really fun.

[Ross Simmons]

Let's make it happen. I'm 100% down. I love what you do for the community, man. Keep doing your thing and congrats and keep rolling. Enjoy Disney.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right, let's reconnect. I always feel re energized. When I talk to you. And it's been a while, so we'll keep in touch, right?

[Ross Simmons]

I like it. Long overdue.

[Dave Gerhardt]

All right, bud. I'll see you later.

[Ross Simmons]

Cheers. Foreign.

[Dave Gerhardt]

Is brought to you by Ztle. Of all the 2025 marketing predictions out there right now, one that I truly believe in is that events are back in person. Events. They're back in a huge way. We felt it this year. Niche events, conferences, meetups, networking, all type of events. They're back and we have a big year of events planned at Exit 5. We did a couple this year and we're going to double down this year. And I'm excited that we're going to be working with Zuttle. That's what we use for all of our virtual and in person events, including our flagship conference drive, which we're bringing back to Vermont in September 2025. With Zettle, we've been able to get smarter about how we do our events. We can drive registrations, manage invites, and their platform handles all the communication, reminders, analytics and tracking we need to be smarter about our event strategy. You can even track things like Pipeline and Close One Deal source by events using Salesforce, their Salesforce integration, which makes it super easy for you as an event marketer to tie what you're doing back to revenue without having to go get help from Ops to run reports for you. Z is great because what also sets them apart beyond the product is that their team has been awesome. They've been insanely good at supporting us this year. They go above and beyond for any questions or requests that we have using their platform. And I'm excited that this year we're going to be using ZTTL again for our. This is not a typo. 26 virtual events, four in person events. That's 30 total events that we're doing this year with Exit 5. Wow, that's amazing. So we got 26 virtual and four in person events this year. 2025. And if events are a big part of your marketing strategy, like they are ours here at exit 5, go check out Zuttle. They're the top event platform for B2B event marketers to use in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z u d d l.com exit5 to learn more.