Building a Brand Strategy and Content Goldmine with Chelsea Castle, Head of Content and Brand at Close

Summary

Podcast Summary: Building a Brand Strategy and Content Goldmine with Chelsea Castle

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Exit Five CMO Podcast
• Host: Dave Gerhardt
• Episode: Building a Brand Strategy and Content Goldmine with Chelsea Castle, Head of Content and Brand at Close
• Release Date: July 7, 2025

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1. Introduction & Viral LinkedIn Post

Dave Gerhardt opens the episode by welcoming Chelsea Castle, highlighting her viral LinkedIn post featuring a Taylor Swift quote paired with a WordPress screenshot.

• Notable Quote:
  • Chelsea (02:04): “It was just funny. Like one of those off the cuff things. A good example of like, you can't plan virality. It's just like lightning in a bottle.”

2. Viral Content and Content Strategy

Chelsea discusses the spontaneity and planning behind her viral post, emphasizing the unpredictable nature of virality and the importance of authentic content.

• Notable Quote:
  • Chelsea (02:25): “I almost thought it would be better if I waited until a little while after Taylor Swift's new album came out.”

3. Managing Content Ideas with AI Tools

Chelsea shares her method of organizing an overwhelming number of content ideas using ChatGPT. She details how she exported her 519 notes into ChatGPT for categorization and subsequently into a spreadsheet for better management.

• Notable Quote:
  • Chelsea (04:39): “I like to write from abundance. So I literally have pages and pages and word docs and notion docs and notes on my phone of ideas.”

4. LinkedIn Posting Strategies

Dave and Chelsea delve into LinkedIn as a primary platform for content distribution. They discuss scheduling posts, the impact of timing, and the challenges of LinkedIn’s algorithm, especially regarding link sharing.

• Notable Quotes:
  • Dave (07:23): “If you put something on your calendar and 90 days from now you posted the exact same WordPress Taylor Swift thing again, it would go, it would, it would work again.”
  • Chelsea (08:33): “I schedule things sometimes... I always try to post in the morning.”

5. Transition to Close and Role Overview

Chelsea explains her move to Close, a company led by Steli Efti. She reflects on Steli’s early adoption of founder-led marketing and his subsequent burnout, hinting at a potential comeback.

• Notable Quote:
  • Chelsea (11:12): “It's just the way I like to think about it. So the workshops go through, like, really fun exercises of, like, if we were a car, who would we be?”

6. Content Strategy at Past Companies

Chelsea recounts her experiences at Chili Piper and Lavender, highlighting successful content initiatives like the Centers of Excellence series and the repurposing of podcast content into written formats.

• Notable Quote:
  • Chelsea (13:38): “They would write about the experiments happening on the CRO and things that the engineers were doing... it was a way to not only elevate the brand but also create valuable content.”

7. Measuring Content Success

The conversation shifts to the metrics and qualitative measures of content effectiveness. Chelsea emphasizes the importance of aggregating qualitative data, such as conversations and direct feedback, over mere quantitative metrics like views.

• Notable Quotes:
  • Chelsea (39:13): “Finding a way to aggregate the qualitative data I think is one of the best ways to start measuring.”
  • Dave (40:07): “It's about showing up and learning and engaging. The community that I've built there is just invaluable.”

8. Common Content Strategy Mistakes

Chelsea identifies prevalent mistakes in content strategies, notably the overemphasis on skyscraper SEO content, where the focus is on length and keyword optimization rather than providing unique value.

• Notable Quote:
  • Chelsea (43:38): “You're not actually saying anything different, you're just saying the same things differently.”

9. Gated vs. Exclusive Content

The discussion explores the pitfalls of gated content, with Chelsea advocating for making valuable content freely accessible to build trust. She differentiates between traditional gated content and exclusive content that offers genuine value.

• Notable Quotes:
  • Chelsea (44:59): “The best way to build an audience and build a brand is through trust and gated content traditionally degrades trust.”
  • Dave (48:06): “Gated content does work to grow your email list, but it often fails to drive meaningful engagement.”

10. Developing a Brand Strategy

Chelsea outlines her approach to crafting a brand strategy through interactive workshops with company leadership. These sessions involve creative exercises to personify the brand, define its personality, and establish brand associations that resonate across all marketing channels.

• Notable Quote:
  • Chelsea (50:21): “It's all about creating, like, if we were a person. People tend to have a hard time with brand because it's a little more nebulous.”

11. Exploring New Marketing Channels

They touch upon the exploration of emerging marketing channels like Instagram and Connected TV, discussing the potential and strategies for experimentation without diluting focus from core platforms like LinkedIn.

• Notable Quote:
  • Chelsea (37:34): “Instagram has a lot of potential for agencies and coaches... So I think that'll be like a big channel for us to experiment with in the future.”

12. Final Thoughts and Takeaways

In concluding the episode, Dave and Chelsea emphasize the balance between maintaining core content strategies and experimenting with new channels. They advocate for value-driven content that fosters genuine engagement and trust, rather than relying solely on quantitative metrics.

• Notable Quote:
  • Chelsea (39:13): “Even if it's like five people who are your ICP saying this is amazing, this is helpful... that means so much more than maybe like a thousand views on a LinkedIn post.”

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Key Insights:

• Authenticity Over Virality: Genuine, relatable content resonates more deeply than contrived attempts at virality.
• Organized Content Management: Leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT can streamline the organization and categorization of vast content ideas.
• Value-Driven Content: Prioritizing value in content creation fosters trust and meaningful engagement, essential for brand building.
• Qualitative Metrics Matter: Engagement, conversations, and direct feedback are more indicative of content success than mere view counts.
• Strategic Brand Development: Collaborative workshops and creative exercises are pivotal in defining and refining a brand’s identity and strategy.
• Balanced Channel Exploration: While core platforms like LinkedIn remain crucial, experimenting with emerging channels can unlock new opportunities without compromising focus.

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Conclusion:

Chelsea Castle provides an insightful exploration into effective brand and content strategy, emphasizing the importance of authenticity, organized content management, and value-driven engagement. Her experiences across various companies highlight both successful initiatives and common pitfalls, offering valuable lessons for marketing leaders aiming to build robust and impactful content ecosystems.

Transcript

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[Chelsea]

One, two, three, four.

[Host]

Exit. Exit. All right, Chelsea, good to see you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. You're the author of one of my Most favorite recent LinkedIn posts, which was a Taylor Swift quote with a screenshot of WordPress.

[Chelsea]

Yeah, well, thanks for having me here. Hilarious that you're starting off with that. It was my first viral moment, which, yeah, I was like, this is viral, right? I'm like, okay, this is, this is insane. It was just funny. Like one of those off the cuff things. A good example of like, you can't plan virality. It's just like lightning in a bottle. It was really, really funny.

[Host]

So was it like truly not planned? Did you just like literally open up LinkedIn? You had this idea like you, you took a screenshot of WordPress, you went to Google, you found WordPress screenshot and then posted it.

[Chelsea]

So I had this idea for months, honestly. And I hesitated posting it. And I almost thought it would be better if I waited until a little while after Taylor Swift's new album came out. And yeah, I've had. I was just kind of sitting on the idea and one day I was like, I don't know what I'm gonna post. It was a Friday. It made me laugh. I was like, okay. I had to find like the right screenshot. So I like overthought the right word for a screenshot to use. And then it just took off. Like I was just kind of sat on it for months, not thinking it was funny enough, not knowing if I wanted to post something like that. So it was just one of those things.

[Host]

You can go to Chelsea's LinkedIn and find this at some point when this comes out later. But the quote was, you wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me. And then it's a screenshot of an all too familiar WordPress dashboard. The best part is like once you reach that and it has as of, this is going to come out like a bit later. But it was almost 3,000 likes, 300 comments on it. Once you reach that level of virality though, you get the most obnoxious comments from people who think that this was like your actual screenshot. Like literally just as I'm looking that some guy writes, search engine visibility is off. That's a bold move. Like, like, like that was like, all right, you missed the joke, buddy. That was literally, literally not the point. So as somebody who runs content and brand, I'm just curious personally, how do you use LinkedIn and what does your writing and content process look like there?

[Chelsea]

So it's always funny to answer that question because I don't have a huge process or a strategy. Some folks really optimize for growth. Optimize with like content pillars and the strategy and really in depth. I guess I have a bit of a process. I like to write from abundance. So I literally have pages and pages and word docs and notion docs and notes on my phone of ideas. I recently organized all of them. I think it was like 519 notes in my phone. Just a little embarrassing. And I organized all of it, put it into ChatGPT and had it helped me organize and like categorize my ideas. So that is probably like the only process oriented thing that I do.

[Host]

I love that. Wait, that's kind of a crazy.

[Chelsea]

Yeah.

[Host]

Did you have to go to. Did you have to go to 519 individual notes and copy and paste so.

[Chelsea]

You can export your notes on your desktop. Yeah, there's. I think it's literally called exporter.

[Host]

Nice.

[Chelsea]

It's like a valid, safe tool. But I had to do it in chunks because ChatGPT like limits the amount of characters that you can submit in one prompt. So it took a while from that standpoint. It took a lot of prompt generating, but it helped me categorize all my ideas.

[Host]

So did you ask it to categorize them and then like, basically you get it back in like a table or something that you can export and then sort by topic?

[Chelsea]

Yep. And then I basically just put all of it into a spreadsheet manually and then organized it with filters based on content type. I asked it to or like analyze which ones were funnier, which ones were stronger. It's not great at those things.

[Host]

Like ChatGPT is not the funniest person thing. They. Yes. Who know is it? I could be listening right now on any of my devices. So if you're listening, please. I try to be very kind and I notice that my answers are more kind back. So it was just like a bit of like a catch up exercise. And so now you have this database which is a spreadsheet and that's what you're going to use to. To write from moving forward.

[Chelsea]

Yeah, because what I found is I just have so many half written posts, half written ideas, like in notion. So it can be really overwhelming to be like, okay, I know there's a lot of good ideas here, both for my personal LinkedIn and professional work. So how can I like organize and make sense of all of that? So that was really interesting.

[Host]

My issue is I have a backlog, but then every now and then I'll have an idea that I like or think is funny or good in the moment and I want to just like jump the queue and, and post that one. And so I'll go through and like move everything around. Does that happen to you?

[Chelsea]

Yes, although I don't schedule too much. But yeah, the ones that I tend to, although I've been doing that a lot for repurposing old ones, which I know you've talked a lot about. Like, I'll schedule out the old ones.

[Host]

Yeah, that works so well. It's such an underrated thing. Like, so LinkedIn offers this now like as. As a feature. They lack a lot of things, but one of the things is you can go to your posts and you go to analytics and it's going to show you all of your posts by like engagement and activity there's some people that don't, that don't like this, but I don't think they're thinking about it the right way. So I have like 165,000 followers on LinkedIn. On average. A post is going to reach maybe like a decent post is like 20,000 impressions. So I'm reaching like 10% of the audience that I have on LinkedIn. And so I think you should always take the opportunity to go again, especially if you, if you know things. Like, I actually guarantee you if you put something on your calendar and 90 days from now you posted the exact same WordPress Taylor Swift thing again, it would go, it would, it would work again. And I think you should do it.

[Chelsea]

I think I'm going to try that. Maybe in six months. I'll give it some time.

[Host]

Yeah, you could do it six months. It could be, it could be whatever. And most people are not going to see it. And I just think it's a great way to resurface stuff. Obviously if you don't care about engagement and growing your followers and impressions and like, don't do any of those things. But if that is, if that's one of the goals and like for me using LinkedIn is to have an audience there to then drive traffic to other platforms. So like followers and engagement is important. It's not actually not a vanity metric at all. So I want, I want more engagement, I want more followers. So I'm going to play that game.

[Chelsea]

Yeah. Going back to your initial question here, my why is just kind of like showing up and learning and engaging. The community that I've built there is just like invaluable right now. I'm very much like leveraging it for like my work brand. And how can I connect the two, right? Like, how can I elevate the new company I started at through my personal brand, getting people to know the company more that way and then like long term game, like maybe I do my own thing one day and I've built this community, but right now it's just very community focused, just nice.

[Host]

You don't schedule anything. Do you just decide? Like, do you try to write once a day? Do you go, like when you go check your inbox in the morning, you're going to write something? How do you figure out when you're going to post something?

[Chelsea]

I schedule things sometimes. If I have like a really good idea and I already posted that day, then I'll schedule it for the next day, try to space posts out. It's a little different. I'm Definitely all over the place. I always try to post in the morning. It's like one of those, like, when's the best time to post? And like the viral post that you mentioned, I think that was posted in the middle of the day. So to an extent it doesn't always matter. I do think morning is optimal. It hits everyone's feeds, you know, as they're hopping on. But I'm kind of all over the place.

[Host]

Yeah, I think it would only matter if you had already. It would only matter if you had already posted that day. Like if you, you didn't post that day and then you post, then like you could post any time that day. And I think it would work. Like, for me, I have stuff scheduled and sometimes I'll forget and I'll like double cross myself and I'll look at a post and it has like no engagement. And I'm like, what happened? And then I look and like a scheduled post went out and I'm like, damn it, I just screwed my reach for the day.

[Chelsea]

Yeah, I'm kind of all over the place though. I don't have a huge method to my madness.

[Host]

Okay, that's fair. So right now you are. Oh, actually the other thing I was going to say is I've been using the link, so I used the. I was using a scheduling tool for a while called, actually doesn't matter what it's called. And I, I recently switched to the LinkedIn scheduling tool because it's just like there. And I had this hypothesis that like, maybe the engagement is better if LinkedIn knows it's its own. They're using its own tool. But the only thing that I hate about it, and I try to share this every chance I get in the hopes that maybe somebody's listening and can fix it, is that you can't edit a. Once a post is scheduled, you can't edit it.

[Chelsea]

I know, I hate that. It drives me crazy. I've messed up so many posts.

[Host]

Oh, so many. So you can't edit it. And then like, it's the worst because often, like if you tag somebody in it or if you have a video or an image with it, you have to copy it all, grab the image, grab the video, then do it again. I don't, I don't know how they haven't just, you can't just click into a post and edit, so you can't edit the content. And the other thing that's annoying is you can't just like drag and like, you should just be able to drag and drop like the. So if I have two posts scheduled for tomorrow and I want to change up the order, I should just be able to drag them and change them. And I have to. You have to click on each post, change the date, go look at the date, change the time, and then publish it. It's.

[Chelsea]

It's a headache.

[Host]

It's a first world problem. But it's a reality of LinkedIn content, so.

[Chelsea]

Yeah, but. But they have games though. Got games now there's games.

[Host]

I didn't even know. I'm. Guess what, I'm. I know what I'm doing this afternoon, you know. All right, so right now you're head of content and brand at Close and. And we'll talk about that. Is that Steli's company, by the way?

[Chelsea]

It is, yeah.

[Host]

Okay, interesting. I. I used to listen to him and Heaton's podcast a lot back in the day and I remember it was. Yeah, Close IO. Is it not Close IO? Anyway, it's still the website, but now it's just Close.

[Chelsea]

It's just closed.

[Host]

Nice. Just drop the IO.

[Chelsea]

It's cleaner. Yeah, it's just.

[Host]

It's cleaner.

[Chelsea]

It's funny you bring up Steli because this was like seven to ten years ago. I think he was definitely one of the first people kind of leaning into founder led marketing before that was even a thing. And he got burnt down on it. Kind of stopped doing it.

[Host]

Sure.

[Chelsea]

And yet people like yourself and others know clothes because of him and his videos from like almost a decade ago.

[Host]

Is he still involved in the company?

[Chelsea]

Oh, yeah, he is, yeah.

[Host]

Cool. So he's just kind of like done the founder led content thing. Burnt out. Now he's just running the business behind.

[Chelsea]

The scenes, running the business. We are, I guess I can tease. We're doing a little bit of a comeback. So Staley will be coming back.

[Host]

Nice. I love that. Because you know what you're doing from a content standpoint and you go inside this company and you're like, hey, this is an advantage. We should be using this guy. He's very good.

[Chelsea]

Yeah. And the content will be founder focused this time in terms of building a company, whereas before it was really heavy on sales. So.

[Host]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chelsea]

Still, I come back.

[Host]

How did you get this job? You were at Lavender for a little bit over a year. What led you to go take a new job and go do something new? Go go to a new company.

[Chelsea]

Yeah. Where do I start? So I was at Chili Piper and then lavender. Really love B2B SaaS and sales especially, apparently. Can't get away from the sales icp. And I just love sales now, which is funny as a marketer, but I was at Lavender, enjoying the work I was doing. And Aaron, who is our marketing leader here at Close, she just outbounded me with like a beautiful cold email, got my attention and it was a beautiful fit in terms of what they were looking for, trying to build the brand. And it was a good fit.

[Host]

Didn't bother her that you're. I think it was. You didn't bother her that your LinkedIn profile was upside down. Is that you? Is that yours?

[Chelsea]

That was me. I did make it right side up, so. But I don't think she cared either way. That was a fun pattern disrupt.

[Host]

That's great. I think that's, that's how you find all the best candidates. You know, we. You can post Outbound, but I think you gotta be always recruiting and looking at people, looking for people to kind of build your dream list of like, who's doing interesting things and who do you want to work with one day? Let's talk about Chili. I want to talk about some of your. So you've been in this, like, head of content, director of content, type of role, content and brand at a couple of companies that are very relevant to a lot of people that are listening. So let's rewind back and talk about Chili Piper first. What are some of the things that you did there? Content strategy wise plays that you're proud of and were impactful on the business with the goal of giving people some, some ideas of things that they can take into their companies.

[Chelsea]

For sure. I think my favorite and probably one of the most successful that they're still doing today is a content series that we called Centers of Excellence. I think they've recently rebranded it to be Chili Experiments. But the whole idea is that we had a written content series that wrote about the work that we were doing internally. So the whole idea is that we were uplifting and highlighting how each function within the Chili Piper company was a center of excellence. So we would write about the experiments happening on the crot and things that the engineers were doing, the way that the people team were structuring certain aspects of onboarding, some of the really cool things that the SDR teams were doing, different approaches how, we don't discount things like that. So they're still doing it to this day. So it was a way to not only elevate the brand and the company and the work that we were doing, but they were all helpful, relatable stories. So it wasn't super self serving because they were all relatable things that our audience, our core ICP could learn from, and they're still doing that today. And that's also a play that I think others have replicated. It's one that I want to keep replicating. It's just a really great way to showcase the people behind the company too, and, like, create valuable content.

[Host]

I think it works because, like, there's so much knowledge stored inside of a company. Just by the nature of what you're doing, you're building, you're at this company. The company is selling to a particular Persona. A lot of people inside of the company are gaining a lot of knowledge and experience about that Persona. The engineers, the product managers, the founders have a vision. The sales leaders are talking, you know, sales team is talking to these people all day. I think that's what one of the best ingredients for a content person today. You have, like, superpower to, like, you can use, you know, chatgpt and Perplexity and tool like that. They do, like, amazing research at scale. Pair that with the insights that you're getting from your team and your customers and walk into a company and have so much stuff to do marketing with. Right?

[Chelsea]

Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, as a former journalist, it's just like you're surrounded by a gold mine of stories. And that I think is like, the most fun aspect of building a brand and building, like, content. Like you say all the time, content is marketing, and brand is mobilized into the market via marketing. So, like, content and brand is everything and you got to start with the story. So you're just surrounded by awesome stories to tell in your company. So that was. Yeah, that was really fun project.

[Host]

What else?

[Chelsea]

What else? Chili Piper still.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Chelsea]

I mean, folks are probably familiar with demand Chat. Kaylee Edmondson was the host for a while. Now it's Dara Robertson. Still going strong. I was a supporter in that we turned a lot into, like, a lot of podcasts into written content. That was really beneficial because that's like a really strong feedback loop. Right. I think it was Chris Walker who shared recently that for every dollar you spend on marketing, you can, like, increase your revenue like 10 times. If you're deploying something like a dark content, dark social content strategy, which I would say, like podcasts that have, like a waterfall distribution effect would be.

[Host]

Can you explain what that mean? What is dark for people that might not be familiar, what is a dark social content strategy? What does that mean?

[Chelsea]

Yeah, so that is a term I only heard Chris use Dark social is the idea of all of these dark channels that we don't have clear attribution for. Right. Like, there's no clear direct line to revenue in terms of saying, oh, these people are talking about you on social. And then they requested a demo, and now they're a customer. It's the idea of the attribution is dark. So what he calls a dark social content strategy is the idea of having some sort of recurring show. Maybe it's a live show, maybe it's webinar, Whatever works for you. And having that as a resource, like podcasts, like XFI Podcast would be an example of that. Right. You have these conversations with people. You learn from the audience qualitatively, quantitatively, what people are liking, what's working, what's not working, what they. What do they want to hear, more of, what's resonating. So that concept feedback loop is beneficial. But then you have this source of content, almost like the nucleus piece of your content that you can then create other content out of, whether it's an article, a Twitter thread, slice and dice the show right into, like, social cuts that you can distribute over the course of a certain amount of time.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Chelsea]

So it's a really great distribution strategy.

[Host]

Yeah. Like, we're coming up on 200. We'll be doing 200 episodes of this podcast, and we've done basically nothing with the content other than publish the episodes. We haven't had a team until now, but I think we can do so much. And we just hired a head of content, and I think we can do so much with the existing content we already have. Now, I think there's, like, the easy, basic play, which is, like, take all the transcripts, post them with the recordings on our website. That's fine, whatever. But the way that I see it, this type of podcast is me interviewing subject matter experts. You and I are talking about content today. I talked to somebody about abm, SEO, dinners, product marketing, like, really specific plays all the way up to, like, your, you know, path to cmo. I think all of that content, we can create so much more content from that by taking the. Like, the words are already there, the plays. Like, we could have newsletter content for two years based on if in every interview, I'm getting at least like, three to five little nuggets and stories. Right. Like last week, I. Or two weeks ago, I did a podcast with Natalie Taylor from Capsule, and she was telling me how they do dinners. And I ask a lot of questions. I ask about, like, I think some people on podcasts they're like, oh, that's interesting. You do dinners? Next question. I'm like, no, no. Where was the dinner? How did you invite people? What emails did you send? How much did it cost? All that stuff, right? We have like, three to five examples of those in 200 episodes. Imagine if we now use a tool like ChatGPT to summarize that, to find all those learnings, to tease those out, then our newsletter can become like, we're trying to reach B2B marketers. Each week, the newsletter is giving you tactical plays about stuff that happened in B2B marketing. And to get that, all we did was sit here on a Zencastr recording and talk for an hour and get that content. So I think there's a super interesting play there that we haven't really done done a lot.

[Chelsea]

And I think most companies, especially content teams, you're always like, okay, if I'm not writing directly from keywords, or maybe if you are, you need to supplement. Where do you get your content ideas? Like, when I joined Close and we were focusing a little less on keywords, that was the question. I was like, well, oh, my gosh, like, if we're not writing off of, like, keywords, like, what do we do? And that's your answer right there, right? Like, start with one thing, repurpose it, and then you're going to have this constant feedback loop that I think is probably the most valuable aspect of that strategy of just, like, listening to your audience and hearing what they want.

[Host]

Well, don't you think you can also go the other way too? You can, if you do want to have build a real SEO strategy and do keyword and do the keyword approach. You can basically say, like, here are all the keywords that are important to us. We probably already have that content in these interviews somewhere. And then let's go and write the content that we need for SEO from these. And so if it's like, we want to rank for product B2B product launch strategy. Oh, wow. Two weeks ago, we did a webinar on that topic, and I have an hour transcript of that. Like, the content is in there. And then maybe do a little bit of original research on top of that. That's what I think is really exciting about these AI tools is like, this is all stuff that before would just be so overwhelming and you'd have to, like, hire a bunch of people or give it to an intern and, like, they might not know the field that well. The use case for AI for stuff like that with content is really Interesting to me.

[Chelsea]

I love that idea. I think that's so important too, because then if you're taking that approach and you're writing content that isn't optimized for a keyword, but it's focused on expert voices, you're going to stand out in the, in the search. Right? And I think the latest Google API leaks, not like that's probably like a whole other can of worms, but one of the learnings from that, for folks who aren't aware, there are a bunch of documents leaked from Google that gave us insight into how their API works. One of the learnings was leveraging people who have a high index in search. Right. So if you're already doing conversations, shows, podcast recordings with experts and then leveraging their content and SEO optimized articles, then using them in your content is going to positively impact your search as well, in addition to supplying content in the SERPs that are also valuable and not written for algorithms.

[Host]

So I've never really been good at SEO and I've never driven like at each, but I've driven a lot of traffic at each company I've been at through what I would consider more like brand content, or I might even call it gut feeling content, which is, I think we know this audience well and I think I know what we can go and create that's interesting to them. And it gets published on social media channels where there's audience, you use that audience to then drive people to your site and you drive a bunch of traffic that way. And I think that is going to become increasingly more important. There's a thread here with like dark social where basically the future of marketing is like, well, it's happening right now, but you're not going to get attribution data. Like there's no all these social media platforms. Like it's now it's like it used to be the open web and now it's like you can use the web but it's closed in that if you post a link on LinkedIn, like in your Taylor Swift post, if you had a link on that, the reach of that post dramatically goes down with a link in it. But then also, even if you go to click on a link, these social platforms, they don't want you to leave and so they don't want to drive traffic to your sites. So somebody's going to click on that and a lot of those link parameters and stuff is going to get stripped out. We do stuff with sponsors at Exit 5 and sometimes a sponsor will be like, hey, use this UTM link in your LinkedIn post. And I'm like, no way. It's not going to work. It's going to dramatically limit your reach. And so let's figure out how we can write this offer where there's actually no UTM link here. And I actually listened to. So you mentioned that Google leak, Rand Fishkin was on marketing against the Grain with Kip and Kieran, which is a great episode. And he says, like, marketers are going to have to go back to measurement more based on time based measurement. Right. And so like we did this campaign with Exit 5 over these weeks and we generated this many signups. Okay, that's good enough to know like, if this worked or not. It's not going to be like this particular post. And I think that's a lot. There's a lot of similar thinking there to like, what makes a podcast work. Right. If we were at a software company, like, if you had a podcast at close and you had me on the podcast and then you were trying to measure how many people signed up from that one episode with Dave, like, you're never. That program's never going to last. But if you have a hypothesis like, hey, this is how people get educated and buy. We want to get people to know like, and trust us, we're going to do it through interesting content. We're going to bring on experts, we're going to have strong point of views about this industry. We're not going to measure the show in weeks and months. We're going to do it in years. Then now all of a sudden we've been doing this show for two or three years. Or if you, you talk about Chris like they did that, I forget what it was called, but he basically did his podcasts for like two or three years. They didn't think about measuring it, but it showed up in how they brought on new clients. I think that's how you have to think about measuring content. It's not like the 2009, like HubSpot original SEO approach where like you can basically rank for keywords just by existing. And then everybody's going to directly convert on that piece of content and it's going to be very easy to measure.

[Sponsor]

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[Host]

Something like Google Analytics.

[Sponsor]

I love it. We use it on our site. I've used it for exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we we've got 105 visitors to exit 5 from AI search. 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore. It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you gotta go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a h r e f s.com today. Go check them out.

[Chelsea]

Gives me the visualization of like billboards where like my first tech company we were running a lot of localized, geographically strategized billboards. There's no way of measuring the exact success of whether somebody typed in the tiny URL that you could see on the billboard. If there was a URL at all it was all based on time. So if you think about social to like, your point is like, it's all just kind of like public billboards and you kind of have to do your best guess. And I think I kind of want to push back on the link in the post where. Yes. LinkedIn by. In theory. Right. Doesn't want you to leave. It's like a casino. Like, they want you to stay there and live there and like, not leave. But at the same time, I've experimented with it a lot and it doesn't always hurt the reach depending on the content quality of the post. Ooh. So I would push back and say experiment with it. Especially because for me as a user, when people put the link in the. In the comments, I can never find it. It is so frustrating.

[Host]

Well, yeah, because they don't give you the ability to pin it. Why can't you pin a comment?

[Chelsea]

Yeah, and the little pin emoji doesn't work either anymore. It's just so frustrating.

[Host]

I agree with you. I changed my mind a lot. See, there you go. Done use links. But you're right. So basically you're saying, like, the delivery of that link matters and so you have to write a really thoughtful post with the link, add value, give people actually a reason to go and click that link. So what's the. Like, how. What. Let's just talk through the. The delivery of that. How would you do it?

[Chelsea]

How would I do it? So one way that I've done it in the past is where the content in the article or. Sorry, the. The content in the post. Right. Is. I mean, you kind of said like, it's valuable. It's. It can stand alone. It's what, you know.

[Host]

Yeah, I kind of answered the question and then asked you the answer.

[Chelsea]

Yeah, yeah. Like, it's kind of what you said. You're just like serving value in the content. Right. Rather than. Especially if it's like a webinar, for example. So I was on a Rev Genius webinar this morning. If I want to write about it, I'm focused on writing a topic that relates to the webinar but is not directly selling the webinar. So I'm like writing a story about like, how like the webinar topic, for example, was about building your brand with AI. So I wrote a post about a topic that's like, related to that and then I'm like promoting the webinar in a link. So I think the value there and the way to do it is like, not your. The content is not selling the link. It's like selling something that's related to the link and providing value so it can stand on its own.

[Host]

Yeah, that's great. So instead of being like, Thursday, Dave and I are doing a webinar about how to write great cold emails. Here's the link sign up. The reach of that post is going to be limited because there's going to be low engagement. Right. Versus if you happen to write a really compelling. If you write a really compelling post that builds that want for somebody to actually want to go register for that thing and sign up and then you drop the link, it's going to work is what you're saying.

[Chelsea]

Exactly. I think companies need to do that too, because from a company perspective, everyone promoting their webinars, like, looks the same. And I'm not hating on that. Like, I do that too. Like, to an extent, like, they're all going to kind of look the same. So if your content in the post promoting your company webinar has value on its own, it's more likely to get someone's attention, stop their scroll, feel like, okay, they're already offering me value in the post, so then I'm compelled to see what additional value they'll give me in this webinar.

[Host]

Nice. Just from somebody who runs content at a company, when you think of a content strategy, like, where do you see this type of content marketing that we're talking about, which is social media, podcasts, webinar, it's not very like direct. It's more brand, like what I would call brand content. But then there's also the more like keyword driven content. Where do you see mashing those two things together and especially now, now, you know you mentioned how I talk about content is marketing. Right. Content is also like, it's not just written content. It's not just blog posts anymore. It's like the head of, like, we just hired a head of content here. I bet your role is similar. She owns website content, webinars, podcasts, video, social media, YouTube, TikTok. It can be all of those channels. How do you develop a content strategy that, like, how do you figure out where to play? How do you figure out when to do SEO, when to not. Where do you social. Your holistic approach to building a content strategy?

[Chelsea]

That's a really big question. I'm kind of figuring it out.

[Host]

Well, that's why I get paid. That's why I get paid the big bucks here.

[Chelsea]

The big bucks. Yeah. On my own podcast, I am figuring it out in real time. Honestly. Right. Now in my new role. So a month, two at close and I've got a team this time. So at Lavender, I was the only person doing content. I had a marketing team and then I didn't and it was me for a while. So now I've got a team, which also changes the dynamics. And there's a lot of prehistorical content and things out there. So sometimes when a. There are listeners out there, when you kind of enter a new role, you're either starting from scratch or you're kind of elevating something, fixing something. I'm entering into like a 13 year old company, so I've got a lot of material to work with and things to figure out. So for me, I don't know if there's like a right or wrong answer to this. I'm kind of separating things into like a content strategy and a brand strategy. Content strategy has like business goals, objectives, content mission statement, understanding our icp, understanding, like where we're creating content, not just content pillars, but where are our ideas deriving from in regards to SEO, Everything to me is SEO optimized. Secondarily, we don't really. Historically at close we were very like SEO heavy. Now we're focusing more on value over volume, focusing on content that serves our audience. Literally asking them like, what do you want? Which every time I say that, people are like, oh yeah, I should do that. Like, yeah, ask your people what they want. And of course the content strategy has like distribution, lots of other components to it. And the brand strategy. For me, I'm kind of going through brand workshops right now with leadership to decide and really discern and hone in like, who is close in 2024 compared to like where we have been. And all of this is kind of informing a brand strategy that has more of these components into it. Right, Nice.

[Host]

So you'll do the brand. Okay, I want to ask about brand strategy too. So you're going to do the brand strategy and then you're going to do the content strategy. I did actually recorded this morning with two people on the Monday.com content team and they talked about how they have. The reason they have such a great content motion is because the business strategy and goals are like, they come first and then the content strategy has to match that. And when those things are out of whack and I. I've seen this at a bunch of companies, the content team is always busy, right? There's always plenty of stuff to do. They're writing newsletters or doing podcasts, we're writing articles. But none of that stuff matters. Like if you can't hit pause and say, like, hold on, well, what fits into the business strategy? And then if you think about all the things that I listed out earlier, you can't. You have to be. Don't you feel like you have to be realistic and say like, yes, all of those things could work, but we can't realistically be effective. We can't be on all those channels. We need to pick like one or two core channels. Do you know what I'm trying to get at?

[Chelsea]

Yeah, absolutely. And I think historically that's why a lot of people maybe like some mistakes that other, you know, previous lives I've been part of, where, you know, like a very common mistake I think is focusing too much on SEO. Because it's easy, right? Like, you've got clear topics to write about, some easy attribution there. It's a little easier to focus on it. You can see some, like, payback, you can see some results or what we think are results. It's still a little bit of a black box, but it's a little easier. Like the inputs and outputs are a lot easier. So, yeah, I think it's easier to focus now. You know, okay, we're going to do these core projects. These will kind of be like our always on things. And then having a documented content strategy, which I think a lot of people still don't have, enables you to have those conversations, like you were saying, like, well, that's a great idea, but we can't do that right now or it doesn't align with our strategy. And in regards to the brand strategy, I'm actually doing both at the same time, which I probably would not recommend. But we're in this Limpo phase right at close of determining, like, what do we. Because we want to kind of pivot our marketing strategy. So we're taking a crawl, walk, run approach to everything. So that's why I'm kind of doing brand and content strategy at the same time, to separate the different projects under each and then that enables us to prioritize.

[Host]

Are you going to take any bets on newer channels? Like, from a B2B standpoint, I think it's easy to just kind of run the same plays. But I kind of think sometimes now, and we're trying to do this with Exit five, I'm like, should we, should we say, like, screw having a blog? Like, what if our content strategy is going to be YouTube and build YouTube first or TikTok or short, you know, some type of short form video Because I feel like in order to be successful on those channels, the mistakes that I've made in the past and other I see other B2B companies make is we do something like this podcast and then we throw it up on YouTube and then it has 31 views. And then we're like, well, YouTube doesn't work for us versus, like, if you just. If you actually thought like a creator and focus on creating for that platform first, you might actually be able to build an audience there. Are you thinking about anything like that and trying to, like, do something different than they may have done in the past?

[Chelsea]

I think we're still trying to figure out what our different is for clothes. And I think that is the really fun part of brand right of humans. Humans are imitative species, and I think that's why we tend to see a lot of the same things in B2B. Where we talk about B2B is boring or I see of sameness. Like, we're all imitative humans by nature, so it's easy to imitate what we see. And I mentioned that because, like, with brand, it's like, you might be inspired by what somebody else is doing, or, oh, Dave did this at drift, or HubSpot did this. You can't just go and do that same thing. You have to be like, you can be inspired by something, but then, like, you should pull it back and think, okay, what is the on brand way to do that for us and our audience? And I don't think people. People do that enough. So for me, like, our core ICP right now are sellers, B2B SaaS, digital marketing agencies, and coaches. They're kind of all over the place. But the core platform that is like the red thread is LinkedIn. So hard to do anything different. So now we're kind of like, okay, what can we do different on LinkedIn? If that's like LinkedIn first thing. Historically, YouTube has done really, really well for us. I do think there's a lot of opportunity, actually for our icps on Instagram. We're not at a point to start experimenting with that quite yet, but at lavender, for example, SDRs were our end user. So TikTok Instagram actually, surprisingly did really, really well for us. I don't know about TikTok for us at close, but, like, I think Instagram has a lot of potential for, like, agencies and coaches, like, folks like you and, like, love coaches, personal coaches, life coaches, fitness coaches, they all hang out on Instagram. So I think that'll be like a big channel for us. To experiment with in the future?

[Host]

Yeah, I just, like, I think there's an opportunity to just make some bets and like, go where the attention is and try to do something different. The challenge is you have to. A lot of those things take time and it's hard to do it because you have to commit and really, like, create original content. And so it's like trying to do both. And so I think I like the framework of like 70% of things can support, like, the short term business needs and then like, can we be spending 30% of our time building, like, the next couple channels? But I think in your industry, LinkedIn will continue to pay the bills.

[Chelsea]

I'm really bullish on seeing how connected TV plays out, though. We started running some ads for that near the end of my time at Lavender, so I didn't get to see how those, like, performed or what sort of like, fruit those bore. But I think that's also really interesting to experiment with.

[Host]

Oh, interesting from a advertising standpoint.

[Chelsea]

Yeah.

[Host]

Are there. How do you even do that?

[Chelsea]

So I think LinkedIn actually just added it to the business manager. So essentially like playing an ad, I think from the contractor I worked with when we were doing it before, 10 to 20 seconds tends to be like a sweet spot. 10 to 30 seconds maybe, and then your ad is played, you know, on streaming platforms. But I think you can do it through LinkedIn business manager. I do words, not demand.

[Host]

Gen. Yeah, all right, that's fine. That's fine.

[Chelsea]

Yeah.

[Host]

As a head of content, how do you. Or slash, would you like to see content measured? And how should maybe founders or other people, VPs of marketing who manage marketing or even future content leaders themselves, how should they think about measuring content? Good luck.

[Chelsea]

Such a good question. I honestly think there's not enough focus and this is maybe even like a product idea around, like aggregating and measuring qualitative content. That's what means the most to me. Especially at Lavender. We created content that would amass, like, I don't Even know, like 8 to 12,000 views per month. And I'm talking articles, not like videos. Like, I've never had that kind of views on my articles, which is just insane. But that created conversations with people on LinkedIn, on Twitter, even in my DMs, people would give me ideas and then I would write about their ideas or their requests. And then I could go back and say, hey, I made this thing that you wanted. And yeah, comments on YouTube, on LinkedIn, when you're sharing your content, like when you're actually distributing it to your point earlier, like most people just kind of create something, publish it and move on. Finding a way to aggregate the qualitative data I think is one of the best ways to start measuring. Even if it's like five people compared to I think five people who are your ICP saying this is amazing, this is helpful, this is resonating with me. I took this and like applied it today and it helped me like close a deal. That means so much more than maybe like a thousand views on a LinkedIn post.

[Host]

It also comes back to like the business strategy piece of this, right? If you have a high volume, low touch business then like content is going to drive more signups than it would in a model where it's like very sales, sales heavy. The role of content is going to be different at, at those companies. Have you had any experience with measuring like content influencing revenue?

[Chelsea]

So we did do this at Chili Piper. We went through several rounds of kind of changing up our attribution models. We were inbound versus outbound 50 50. We kind of tried all bound, went back to the split, did a lot of self reported attribution and I can't remember the exact tools that we used that can maybe think about it. But we started measuring what we called qhm. So quality held meetings. So we were able to see through cookie tracking, event tracking, organizing, everything I think in mode is what we used at the time. I think that's changed since then. What we were starting to see is these individuals read a piece of content or attended a webinar and it didn't really matter how they converted, whether it was through an SDR or through the inbound form or another form of outbound. We could see the influence and then we were able to actually have like a beautiful pie chart or a beautiful bar graph saying like content specifically however we defined it in our event tracking influenced X amount of pipeline and it was like reader like engagement to quality held meeting which is also just like an SQL. Like did they book a meeting? Was it a high quality lead? And did was the meeting held? Which of course is a little tricky right, because like we can't control whether the person shows up or not. But that was like what we decided on and then did it convert to pipeline so we could directly measure like influence.

[Host]

What mistakes do you see companies make with a content strategy? Common mistakes that founders make thinking about content like just for people to maybe self diagnose like or are we, is this a, is this something that we're stuck on at our company? Or maybe you're taking a new job and you're interviewing. You want to talk about the company. Like, what does bad look like? And I'm sure you've seen it. It's not to knock any company. We've all done good work and we've all done work that was not great and you got. That's how you got to learn. So I'm just curious about what you've learned is not the right approach.

[Chelsea]

Yeah, I think my top two things are like skyscraper SEO content, right? Like, I'm not saying it's a bad thing to optimize for SEO or even to think about that first, Zapier, as most of us know, have built their business.

[Host]

What does that mean? Scott, what is skyscraper SEO content?

[Chelsea]

Oh, skyscraper content. So say you're looking for, I don't know, you golf. You're looking for like the best golf club and you type it into Google and like five articles come up. This is actually a bad example because people probably don't write it like this and golfing the golfing world, but maybe they do and they're all kind of similar, right? So most of the time when people are writing for SEO, they're like, okay, I'm going to write about this topic, like, what is a cold email? And then you go see what everyone else is writing about and then you try to replicate it or write something similar, but you write it longer. You touch on every topic and all of your H2s and H3s and H1s and your meta and you're just pulling in as much info as you can to like try to beat out everyone else saying the exact same thing in the serps, but you're not actually saying anything different, you're just saying the same things differently. So it's like the skyscraper approach where you're just trying to pull everything in and then you've got this like 5,000 word article that's optimized for SEO and maybe it ranks and maybe that like boosts your domain ranking with Google. But then what is that traffic actually netting you? And most of the time, almost all of the time, it's not really netting you anything, it's just a bunch of traffic. So that would be like number one for me.

[Host]

Do you have an opinion today on gated content?

[Chelsea]

I have lots of ideas on gated content. I think anyone who knows me knows I talk a lot about not being for gated content. There's a reason for this, right? So like, the best way to build an audience and build a brand is through trust and gated content traditionally degrades trust because you're asking somebody, like, there's a few different avenues, right? If content is valuable enough to gate, then why not just give it away for free to build that relationship with them, to help them, to make it easy. The guy was trying to get help a couple weeks ago from JetBlue. I think it was JetBlue. And they make you pay to talk to somebody on the phone. And I'm like, I'm so frustrated. I'm just trying to talk to somebody at this company who can help me and you're making me pay $29. So it's a little different monetary value versus email, but I believe in making it easy to give help to somebody. Typically, gated content is like a bait and switch, right? So, hey, we've got this great content. Here's what you'll learn. Give us your email and you'll get it for free. You'll get it for free. And then you check out the article or the content and it's actually not that great. Most content that's gated is not that valuable. So it doesn't create a good experience. And then you're degrading your brand and your trust because now they're associating you with that experience. Just like my JetBlue example. I'm always going to remember that they make me pay for help and that doesn't feel very good as a consumer. So it's the same kind of experience. In B2B.

[Host]

I actually have a. This is kind of somewhat related, but I'm going through an exercise for. I need to set up something like Carta for equity. And I got a. I went through, I did a sales call with them and I got a quote from them and it was a little bit high and it's not what I heard. And so I said, hey, is this really the best price? And I said, actually, no, it. We can offer this. And then another founder told me to go to this other company because they're good and they're newer. And I went to them and I said, hey, here's all the information. Here's what I'm trying to do. I've already talked to Carta. They told me it's going to be this. They said, great, Dave, let's. I'm happy to hop on a call. I said, no, no, no, I don't want to talk on a call. Here's all the information. I just want to know is what you're going to offer me, is it going to be better Than this price. If it is, tell me what the price is and then yes, I'm happy to get on a call because I know we got to do that whole thing to make this. But. But they won't tell me the price they want to get on and do the whole dance with me. I'm like, okay, then I'm gonna, unfortunately, I'm gonna go to go to Carta, so we'll see how this shakes out. But I just, just don't understand stuff like that. I get the sales side wants to like control the conversation, but there's. There's nothing you're going to get me to do to be to. It's going to make me go up on price because I already know what it can cost and what it should cost for something. This is a very specific thing. It's not like a custom home design where there's lots of nuance. And it just is another example of that. Like, those are just such small opportunities to win customers that I don't understand why we do that.

[Chelsea]

And sales and marketing. Right. Like, it's so focused on us that we don't focus enough on the other person.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Chelsea]

And yeah, that distraction, like we miss.

[Host]

The tough part about gated content is that it can be really good. So like for our business, which is a content business, it's actually the best way to grow our email list. And that's a really important thing for us. And so we have like lead magnet offers, which is like, hey, get on our email list and I will send you this deck that we have, which is like my 16 lessons going from PR intern to CMO. And whenever we post about that, it drives hundreds and hundreds of new subscribers to our email list. We want to gate that because that could be content that's free on the website. But I want to use it as an incentive to get people on our list. But that also is different because our, in our business, the size of our list is meaningful because it means we can convert more people to buy community memberships. It also means we can charge more money for sponsors. Sponsors will get a better response the bigger our list is. But if you're like a B2B SaaS company and you can basically use like a Apollo or Clay or Zoom info and get the information of your customers anyway, that's where it kind of breaks down. Right. Like you don't need like email content. Knowing that Chelsea works at close and having her email address is not necessarily like an indication that she's going to buy from you.

[Chelsea]

Exactly. I think that's the confusion. Right. Is. And I think gated content, too, is going through a bit of a renaissance right now of not all gated content is bad. I think when I speak about it, it's typically like a written piece of content where you have to go through a form. Like, typically like a webinar. Right. Like, that's technically gated. You have to give your email to get on your calendar. That feels like a different experience than what we're used to when you're trying to download like a PDF or something. And in your lead magnet example, I would bet money that that is like a valuable content asset that people can keep and save and reference. Most of the time, the content is not that. And the other component of it is what happens after that. Right. You're probably not like having SDRs cold call them because they downloaded your checklist or downloaded your template.

[Host]

Yeah, no, you're right. We're not. It's super valuable. Like, I hand wrote the deck. We had somebody design it, but I really made it. And yeah, the only thing that happens after is you're just now on our email list and we're gonna nurture you until you die.

[Chelsea]

Yeah. I think there's a good way to do it. You know, I think there's a good way to do it. Certain things are gated. A lot of folks these days are also talking about the difference between, like, gated versus exclusive content. I think if there's a high criteria for value of the content and then it's like subscribe once, access forever kind of vibe, I think that's a little more appealing. And then you can create like, that can be like a brand moment. Right. You can make them feel like they're part of this, like, inclusive club. Like, maybe they get special swag. Maybe they get to participate in content. Maybe they get to, like, have give feedback. Like, you can make it. It can be a brand moment then too, if you're making them feel like they're part of something exclusive.

[Host]

Yeah, I love that. I think the biggest myth is, you know, on LinkedIn, we all write very binary. Like, takes. Do this, don't do that. Right. The myths with gated content. Does it work to grow your email list? Absolutely. It's that somewhere along the way it got interpreted as some signal of intent and like, oh, Chelsea got this piece of gated content. Let's give her a call. And that's. That whole thing doesn't work. I was going to ask you maybe real quick. So you're doing this, like, brand exercise now? At close to define what your story is, what the brand is. How are you going about doing that? Do you have a particular framework or method that you're using? Just kind of quickly want to hear about that process?

[Chelsea]

Yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of sharing this externally, because folks tend to be like, okay, like, if I want to help support my company with building a brand, like, what do I do? Like, brands don't fit neatly into a spreadsheet. Right. Like, it's a little more nebulous. So I actually used to work at an agency, so before I got into tech, I was a journalist and then I worked at a branding agency. So I'm carrying over a lot of the brand strategy work I learned there. And they're just kind of workshops. Like, you can literally Google brand workshops probably find a whole bunch of different examples. I've created my own that I iterate on throughout the years, and they're usually like two to three part sessions. Usually just like core leadership. We don't want Jimmy Cooks in the kitchen. For us, it was two of our founders, a VP of product, a designer, and my boss. So that's actually a lot of cooks. But it worked out really well. Your founders own the brand story, and then you're like the stewards of the story is the way I like to think about it. So the workshops go through, like, really fun exercises of, like, if we were a car, who would we be? If you were a celebrity, if we are a superhero, who are we fighting? Who are like, the evils of the world that we're fighting against? A lot of these things are also very similar to, like, strategic narrative work and defining your brand story. And then some other exercises around, like, honing in your archetype. And all of these things kind of mesh together into, like, distilling into like, a brand strategy. I don't really know a good way to tangibly tack through, like, how to create a brand strategy, but it's all about creating, like, if we were a person. People tend to have a hard time with brand, I think, because there's like, like not tangible. So you have to like, imagine the brand as a, as a person and then think, like, what's the personality? What do they wear? How do they sound? How do they talk? How do they talk on the phone versus on the computer? How all of that, like, then informs, like, how your content shows up. A lot of it is then, like, visual identity. And then I think the other thing is, like, brand associations. So Chili Piper was a little easier we had, like, a pepper. We were very like, let's go against the grain, do things that are different and bold spiciness, you know, like, lots to play on there. Lavender was like, we were a color. So we leaned really hard into our color and gamification of the product and wizardry and sorcery, and that led into our website. Even when I did, like, a website redesign and it was all magical and we built, like, a game that was also, like, magical and, like, on brand. So all of those things kind of morph together into giving you, like, some direction on terms of, like, who are we as a. As a person in a brand? And then what does that look like in marketing?

[Host]

Love it. All right, well, we'll have to go check it out. I'm excited to see your work there. Thanks for hanging out with me for a little bit. On the Exit 5 podcast, you'll go find Chelsea on LinkedIn, connect with her, follow her for all of her hot takes and screenshots and Taylor Swift lyrics, and she's a viral sensation. But I think you've done a great job building an interesting career in content. I'm excited what you can do with close. So I'll see you soon. Thank you for coming on the podcast. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna see you at Drive. I think I saw your name on the. On the list. So we'll see you there. I'll give you a fist bump when I see you.

[Chelsea]

See you there.

[Host]

All right, enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Chelsea, see you later.

[Chelsea]

Thanks so much.

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