The Quiet Shift: How B2B Teams are Winning Post-SEO

Summary

Podcast Summary: B2B Marketing with Dave Gerhardt Episode: The Quiet Shift: How B2B Teams are Winning Post-SEO
Release Date: May 1, 2025
Guest: Brendan Hufford, Founder of Growth Sprints

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of B2B Marketing with Dave Gerhardt, host Danielle welcomes Brendan Hufford, a renowned figure in the B2B marketing landscape and the founder of Growth Sprints. With a rich background transitioning from education to marketing, Brendan shares his unique perspective on modern B2B marketing strategies, particularly focusing on post-SEO tactics that are reshaping how B2B teams achieve success.

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Brendan Hufford’s Journey: From Classroom to Marketing Leader

Brendan begins by recounting his unconventional path from being a high school teacher to a marketing expert. He highlights the parallels between teaching and marketing, emphasizing skills like engaging an audience, curriculum development, and adaptability.

Brendan Hufford [02:51]: “Every single hour, I had to create material. Like, the stuff that worked first hour, you kind of, like, test it again the next hour.”

His experience teaching subjects like psychology and sociology provided him with a deep understanding of human behavior, which he seamlessly transitioned into marketing. Brendan reflects on the challenges of climbing the educational administrative ladder, ultimately realizing that his true passion lay elsewhere.

Brendan Hufford [05:44]: “I had to figure out what mattered. Right. And these are the things that matter from technical.”

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Founding Growth Sprints: Revolutionizing Client Engagement

Transitioning into his entrepreneurial venture, Brendan discusses the inception of Growth Sprints. Differentiating his approach from the traditional retainer model commonly used in SEO services, Brendan introduces the concept of "sprints" — short, focused projects that deliver quick, impactful results.

Brendan Hufford [13:34]: “I push back against the retainer model. I don't like working on a retainer specifically.”

This sprint-based methodology allows Growth Sprints to work with a diverse range of clients, fostering agility and delivering measurable outcomes without the prolonged commitments typical of retainers. Brendan emphasizes the benefits of this model, such as engaging with multiple clients and maintaining high levels of creativity and impact.

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SEO Insights: Beyond the Traditional Framework

A significant portion of the discussion delves into Brendan’s innovative approach to SEO. He challenges the conventional belief that SEO requires long-term retainers, advocating instead for targeted, sprint-driven strategies that yield quicker results.

Brendan Hufford [33:53]: “If I came to your house, I fixed your water heater, I was like, I fixed it. I need you to pay me every month from now on because you're enjoying the benefits of it. You'd be like, get out of here.”

Brendan argues that SEO should be treated as a series of actionable tasks rather than an indefinite service. By focusing on specific, short-term goals, businesses can achieve tangible improvements without the financial strain of ongoing retainers.

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Content Strategy: Maximizing Impact Through Multifunctional Content

Brendan underscores the importance of developing a robust content strategy that serves multiple purposes for a business. He advocates for content that not only caters to SEO but also engages the audience, supports sales enablement, and builds authority within the industry.

Brendan Hufford [41:15]: “Everything I recommend to clients is very specific on it has to do more than one thing for the business.”

This multifunctional approach ensures that each piece of content contributes to various aspects of the business, thereby maximizing its value and effectiveness. Brendan provides practical examples, such as creating detailed competitor comparison pages, which serve both SEO and sales objectives.

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Building a Defensible Career: The Power of Networking

Brendan highlights the critical role of networking in building a resilient and defensible career. Drawing from his own experiences, he emphasizes that a strong network can provide safety nets and open doors, especially in volatile industries prone to layoffs.

Brendan Hufford [11:11]: “Your network is your net worth.”

He advises marketers to cultivate meaningful relationships and leverage their networks to create opportunities, positioning themselves as indispensable assets within their professional spheres.

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Tactical Approaches: Internal Linking and Content Optimization

Delving into specific SEO tactics, Brendan shares his strategies for improving website performance through internal linking and content optimization. He explains how strategically placing internal links can significantly enhance a website’s SEO by signaling to search engines the importance of certain pages.

Brendan Hufford [24:43]: “Internal links. Like connecting...sounds dumb. It was one of the first things I did at ActiveCampaign...we just set 200 internal links. It works.”

Additionally, Brendan discusses the importance of aligning content with user intent and ensuring that it addresses multiple facets of the audience's needs. This alignment not only boosts SEO but also enhances user experience.

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Mindset Shifts: Embracing Evergreen Content and Avoiding Checkbox Marketing

Brendan advocates for a paradigm shift in how marketers approach content creation. Instead of constantly producing new content, he recommends leveraging evergreen content that remains relevant over time, combined with timely, ephemeral pieces that address current trends and events.

Brendan Hufford [37:15]: “We have to constantly be on this hamster wheel treadmill for email newsletters. Like just Immortal newsletter all the way, half ephemeral, half evergreen.”

This strategy allows marketers to maintain a consistent presence without overwhelming their teams or diluting their message. Furthermore, Brendan criticizes the "checkbox marketing" approach, where marketers focus on completing predefined tasks without considering their broader impact.

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Naming Problems vs. Creating Categories: The Power of Terminology

A notable insight from Brendan is the strategic importance of naming problems rather than creating new categories. By identifying and naming specific challenges, businesses can position themselves as problem-solvers, fostering stronger connections with their target audience.

Brendan Hufford [40:19]: “It's naming the problem, right? There's a company called Operator that talks about the great ignore...they own it in the minds of their ICP.”

This approach helps in establishing authority and clarity, making it easier for potential clients to recognize and relate to the solutions offered.

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Practical Examples: Competitor and Alternatives Pages

Brendan provides concrete examples of effective content strategies, such as creating "alternatives" or "versus" pages that compare the business's offerings with competitors. These pages serve dual purposes: enhancing SEO by capturing search traffic related to competitor comparisons and aiding the sales team by providing easily accessible information for prospective clients.

Brendan Hufford [44:26]: “If you’re vetting alternatives to us, here’s some great ones and here’s why we’re different.”

Such strategies not only improve search rankings but also demonstrate transparency and a customer-centric approach, fostering trust and credibility.

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Immortal Newsletters: A Sustainable Approach to Email Marketing

Brendan introduces the concept of "immortal newsletters," a blend of evergreen and ephemeral content that can be redistributed over time without losing relevance. This approach contrasts with the traditional model of producing fresh content continuously, offering a more sustainable and impactful method of engaging with the audience.

Brendan Hufford [36:33]: “We have to constantly be on this hamster wheel treadmill for email newsletters. Like just Immortal newsletter all the way.”

By repurposing high-quality content, marketers can maintain engagement without the constant pressure to create new material, ensuring that valuable insights continue to benefit the audience over time.

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Final Thoughts: Aligning Incentives and Sustainable Marketing Practices

Brendan wraps up the discussion by emphasizing the importance of aligning incentives between marketers and their clients. He advocates for strategies that deliver immediate value and empower clients to sustain their marketing efforts independently, reducing dependency on external agencies.

Brendan Hufford [33:53]: “I don’t want you to be indebted to me. Where like, and some people want it as like they want a retainer is like, I just need to know somebody’s there.”

Brendan's approach fosters long-term success by equipping businesses with the tools and knowledge needed to thrive without ongoing external support, promoting autonomy and resilience.

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Conclusion

Brendan Hufford’s insights offer a fresh perspective on B2B marketing, challenging traditional notions of SEO and client engagement. His emphasis on sprint-based strategies, multifunctional content, and sustainable practices provides a roadmap for modern marketers seeking to navigate the evolving landscape. By prioritizing impactful, strategic actions over conventional, prolonged commitments, Brendan advocates for a more agile and effective approach to B2B marketing.

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Notable Quotes

• Brendan Hufford [02:51]: “Every single hour, I had to create material. Like, the stuff that worked first hour, you kind of, like, test it again the next hour.”

• Brendan Hufford [05:44]: “I had to figure out what mattered. Right. And these are the things that matter from technical.”

• Brendan Hufford [13:34]: “I push back against the retainer model. I don't like working on a retainer specifically.”

• Brendan Hufford [33:53]: “If I came to your house, I fixed your water heater, I was like, I fixed it. I need you to pay me every month from now on because you're enjoying the benefits of it. You'd be like, get out of here.”

• Brendan Hufford [41:15]: “Everything I recommend to clients is very specific on it has to do more than one thing for the business.”

• Brendan Hufford [24:43]: “Internal links. Like connecting...sounds dumb. It was one of the first things I did at ActiveCampaign...we just set 200 internal links. It works.”

• Brendan Hufford [37:15]: “We have to constantly be on this hamster wheel treadmill for email newsletters. Like just Immortal newsletter all the way, half ephemeral, half evergreen.”

• Brendan Hufford [40:19]: “It's naming the problem, right? There's a company called Operator that talks about the great ignore...they own it in the minds of their ICP.”

• Brendan Hufford [44:26]: “If you’re vetting alternatives to us, here’s some great ones and here’s why we’re different.”

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This comprehensive summary captures the essence of Brendan Hufford's expertise and strategic insights shared during the episode, providing valuable takeaways for B2B marketers aiming to enhance their strategies in a post-SEO dominated landscape.

Transcript

[Dave Gerhart]

This episode is brought to you by Webflow. If you're a B2B marketer right now, you're probably being asked to do more with less. Less budget, fewer resources, tighter timelines, and you're expected to somehow grow pipeline anyway. They don't say do less, but also we're shrinking the goals. They say do less, but do more. That's why more teams are switching to webflow. Webflow is the website experience platform that helps you consolidate your stack, reduce program spend and move faster. Instead of juggling a dozen tools and waiting. Webflow gives marketing and design teams the power to build, launch and optimize sites all in one place with no code flexibility, dev level control built in, a B testing, SEO, localization and AI tools. They've got everything you need to turn your website into your highest performing channel. So you can check out webflow right [e-mail] exit5webflow.com exit5 bonus. Since you like to get marketing examples, I often reference them as a great marketing website for someone who sells to a bunch of different Personas. So check them out. Webflow.com Exit 5. You're listening to B2B Marketing with me, Dave Gerhart.

[Brendan Hufford]

Exit 5.

[Dave Gerhart]

1, 1, 23 4. Exit 5.

[Brendan Hufford]

1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Dave Gerhart]

Action.

[Danielle]

Hey Brendan, we've been chatting a little bit behind the scenes, but now we officially hit record and super excited to have you on today. Brendan is the founder of Growth Sprints and also just kind of like one of those legendary B2B marketers. He's been in like all of the cool shops, has a ton of experience. You've definitely seen him on LinkedIn. He runs a really cool community called all in for in house SaaS marketers. I still have an application pending by the way.

[Brendan Hufford]

Okay. Sometimes ConvertKit breaks. I apologize. That actually happens where I'm like, people are like, don't tell anybody but it auto approves. Like I do. We do a lot of filtering in the thing, but I don't, I don't have them. I used to like wait for every application to come in and I'd be like, yes or no. But that just felt weird and bad and I didn't want to have to open everybody's LinkedIn and see if you looked like you worked at a SaaS company. But really you're going to sell us backlinks? Like, yeah, I just say yes to everybody now and you'll filter out. There are people that come in and they immediately self promo three times and we're like, you got to go, or they DM everybody to sell backlinks.

[Danielle]

And we're like, get out of here.

[Brendan Hufford]

You're out. But that's so rare.

[Danielle]

We have that in Exit 5, too. But more about you. I'm excited today. I want to learn a little bit more about what you're doing now. I think something really cool in your background that I love seeing in marketing is that you were actually a high school teacher the first half of your career. So, yeah, tell me. Just give me the lore. What's the Brendan lore?

[Brendan Hufford]

The lore. So I was a high school teacher, and I think it's, like, the best training for this because I was, like, half energy. So I also. I taught high school. I taught psychology and sociology. I also taught government. I taught a really cool course that we invented for the kids called College careers and Skills, which was. I was literally Danielle. I was literally assessed on, like, whether the kids believed in themselves or not, because I was teaching in Gary, Indiana, on the south side of Chicago. And, like, all teaching is hard, but I'm good at that. Hard. I am good at. You don't believe in yourself. You see nobody successful in your community. I can hype you up. I'm not good at the rich, preppy, helicopter parent part of teaching because I'll just be like, I hate you, and you're dumb and bad.

[Danielle]

Different beast.

[Brendan Hufford]

Very different beast. But I did really well there. The thing is, I had to be the show, and I had to be good at making kids believe in themselves and teaching them life skills. And I also spent a lot of time learning by teaching psychology and sociology. You can only see this looking back, but it was a perfect path to what I was doing. Now I spent 10 years having to educate and entertain. Every single hour. I had to create material. Like, the stuff that worked first hour, you kind of, like, test it again the next hour. I had kids that would switch during the day. Like, I had kids that were in, like, second period or first period, and later they would be in. I had a kid come into eighth period, and he's like, I'm back. And I'm like, his name is Jazz. I was like, jaz, why are you here again? Like, I thought, he's funny. His name's Jazz. You can everybody pictures Jazz, right? So Jazz just came in and sat in the back of the room. I'm like, get out. And he's like, no, I'm here. He shows me the schedule. He's like, guidance just told me to stay here. And I'm like, all right, cool. Start teaching. My lesson, I start doing a little bit of, like, I don't know, whatever. I'm talking about some stuff. And he's like, huffer, do that joke. Do that joke. You do. And I'm like, they know. They know it's material at this point. And, like, it's almost like you're like.

[Danielle]

A stand up comedian. And he's like, wait, from the last set?

[Brendan Hufford]

Yeah, yeah. He's like, oh, he's going to do it. I love this one. Like, it's so silly. But it is perfect for this, right? You go on podcasts, you share similar stories. It is material. I do sales calls. I say the same thing on a lot of sales calls that I know are going to get a laugh or seem funny or resonate. That is what we do as marketers.

[Danielle]

And also, you know, like, the psychology of teaching, of how people learn. And that is a lot of what we do in marketing. That's. I'm just like, I'm so bullish on teachers. If they want to be marketers, I would hire a slew of them if I could.

[Brendan Hufford]

Yeah, if you get a good, charismatic teacher that understands things like curriculum and how to, like, take people through stuff and not explain it. Like, I'm five. But treat them with respect. Like, you are smart, you can fill in the gaps here, but I'm going to lay the path out ahead of you. Like, there's so many things that overlap. Teachers are also, like, super organized and, like, meet deadlines. Not me. I'm a hot mess. But, like, most of them are better than me.

[Danielle]

So now you're not a teacher anymore and you're the founder of Growth Sprints. But how did you get from there to where you are now? What was the story again? The lore?

[Brendan Hufford]

Yeah, I. So I was teaching and I become an assistant principal. I tried climbing that ladder, Danielle, like, sincerely. I tried everything I could. I got my master's degree in educational administration. I became a principal for the privilege of making $45,000 a year. I was the lowest paid assistant principal in my state. You can look that up. And I looked it up and I was the bottom. I was at the end and it sucked. Like, it was really hard. I realized that I climbed a ladder and the ladder was leaned up against the wrong wall. And it was all for the privilege of, like, having an extra £25 around my midsection. Like a not super great relationship with alcohol and Monday morning panic attacks. Like, I genuinely had a panic attack driving to work Monday morning. And I would have to regularly, like, in the Middle of the day, when I had some time, I would leave and because there's some really cool beaches on Lake Michigan just outside of Gary. And like, I would drive to the beach and just like stare out my front window. Just like trying to cope and dreaming. Dreaming of one day doing exactly what I'm doing right now. That's why stories like Lachey and stuff, who's been a guest on here before like that and why she's a friend now. Like, that resonates with me so much of taking full ownership of your life and your career and figuring out what that career mix looks like for you. Not everybody needs to like, quit their job and do their own thing. I think that's terrible advice. Most of the people telling you to quit your job are also selling you something to get you to quit your job.

[Danielle]

They're selling you a course on how to quit your job.

[Brendan Hufford]

Yep. A hundred percent day job to dream job. Okay, got it.

[Danielle]

Yeah.

[Brendan Hufford]

But I came up in that world too, and I thought you had to hate your job and quit your job. So every summer I would be like, I'm not going back next year. I'm doing my own business. And I kept trying and trying and every. It was so defeating. Every August I'm like back teaching again and it was just so heartbreaking. And then one day I was sitting in my. I'm a big guy, right? Like we've met. I'm a large human. I was sitting in my Nissan versa during my 20 minute lunch break. I looked like Mr. Incredible sitting in his tiny car. But I'm on my phone with a friend and he goes, why don't you just go work somewhere and do marketing somewhere? And I had come up in that like online marketing world where you hate your job and quit your job. And I was like, holy shit. Like, I never considered that. I never considered working professionally in marketing. I was not a very good teacher. The rest of that day I went back in, probably sent out 50. I went in like Built in Chicago and all the Chicago tech job boards filled out like 50 applications, did a ton of interviews. Oddly enough, one of which had activecampaign, which they said no, but I ended up working there later. A couple years later, I got a job at a really great web design agency being their SEO lead. I became SEO director there. I literally ended the school year on a Friday and the agency was like, do you want to like, take some time off in between? I'm like, guys, I have been ready for this for, for 10 years. Let me cook. I want to get in. I showed up overdressed in my teacher clothes. Like, I showed up and the owner of the agency was like, wow, shirt and tie. He's like, it's your first day.

[Danielle]

He's like, let's get you a T shirt.

[Brendan Hufford]

He's like, respect. Don't wear that again. And I was like, oh, we can wear T shirts here. This is crazy. Like, I had no idea what it was like to be an adult. Like, I just had no clue.

[Danielle]

Yeah.

[Brendan Hufford]

So I worked at that agency for a few years, realized it would always be a web design agency, it would never be a marketing agency, but learned a lot. Wonderful team, incredible leaders. Like, I could have worked there the rest of my life. They're so great. Went to another agency, learned a ton. Paid a pretty heavy toll with my physical and mental health working there, but left there. Got a job at ActiveCampaign, worked there, worked for one of the best bosses I've ever had, Benjamin Elias, who left and now is. It is actually back there, funny enough. And then after a couple years at ActiveCampaign, it was stupid to not do my own thing. This sounds like such a dumb flex. I told my wife in the car after, like, a really rough spot Benjamin had left, I had a new boss who was like an absolute nightmare. And I looked at my wife and I'm like, when GROSS Rents, makes $500,000 in a year, I can quit my job. My wife kind of like, looked at me like, really? She put her hand on my leg really, like, compassionately. And she's like, brendan, they pay you $97,000. Why do you need 500 to leave 97? And in my head, I was like, I'm an idiot. Like, I don't know. I just kept moving the goalposts. And I think a lot of people do that. Like, you just keeping, like, when we hit the next milestone, you know, I mean, like 97 at work and 97 in my side gig. And I was like, okay, cool. But what if I made 200? What if I made three? And I just kept, like, moving it? And it was like, why? Because I was just scared.

[Danielle]

Yeah.

[Brendan Hufford]

I think we've seen over the last.

[Danielle]

Couple years, like, yeah, you're taking away that level of security, which is that full time job. Whereas, like, you maybe have a little bit of scarcity mindset with, like, the work coming in of, like, oh, it's going to dry up tomorrow and I'm not going to have either of them.

[Brendan Hufford]

And it does, which isn't going to happen. I've Seen people quit their jobs and it dries up. They exhaust that initial demand, and then they're like, oh, I don't. I have to build a pipeline of, like, people continuing to want to hire me. And it's like, yeah, everybody was chomping at the bit. You got your first 12 clients, you thought you were going to make a million dollars in a year.

[Danielle]

Yeah.

[Brendan Hufford]

And then you did in. And now it's hard. And there's no. I hate it when people feel shame. I felt so much shame about my career for so many years. People will put shame on like, oh, you're going back in house. Because, you know. No, no, no. Everybody has a career mix that's right for them.

[Danielle]

No, you're doing whatever is right for you.

[Brendan Hufford]

Yep. And being in house is not that safe. We've seen, if you go to layoffs, dot, FYI, you can look at all the tens, hundreds of thousands of. It feels like hundreds, not. But like an exponential amount of layoffs in tech in the last three years. Like, it's not that safe. So you have to figure, like, how do I build a defensible career where even if my client worked right up tomorrow, this is going to sound very arrogant. I could probably call 10 friends and be like, hey, do you know of anything? And I guarantee half of them would be like, I could probably make something for you here. Like, you're really going in house. Can I come work? I'd hit you up. I'd be like, hey, are you guys hiring?

[Danielle]

Yeah.

[Brendan Hufford]

And you'd be like, are you kidding? I'm not saying you would hire me. I'm not airing it like that. But, like, it would elicit a conversation. Right. Because we built enough trust and enough audience and all of the buzzwords. And I think that's where, you know, if anybody approached you, if any, like, past guests that are amazing, Lachey or Anthony Perry or whoever, you would have that conversation, you'd be like, wait, yeah.

[Danielle]

And I feel like that's how you build that defensible career is like your network, too, which sounds, like, really cliche.

[Brendan Hufford]

And cheesy, but your network is your net worth. Yeah.

[Danielle]

Yeah. That was very similar to me. I ended up taking this awesome role, and I thought I was going to be amazing, and it didn't turn out that way at all. And then I kind of find myself, like, flailing, and I was like, what do I do? And then I didn't even realize I had built this network. And I was talking to someone and she was like, fuck. Like, I would hire you to do this for me. Come in next week if you want. And then I was like, wait, I could get a client. And then I slowly got like, so many more. And I was like, oh, awesome. And then one of them turned into full time again and it was like. So I was like, okay, like, I'm ready for this now. Like, I did what I wanted to do.

[Brendan Hufford]

Yeah. Somebody asked me if I'd ever go in house again, and the answer is, of course. Of course I would.

[Danielle]

Yeah.

[Brendan Hufford]

If it makes sense. It makes sense. Like, I don't know. I don't know what the few. I am so excited about this adventure in my career of, like, I have no idea what the next couple years, Couple years ago, I had no idea we would be doing this. Right now. I'm just super excited. I just, like, have like a bit of puppy energy of, like, I'm just really happy to be here every day. I don't understand how this is working. I don't understand how we're talking right now. I'm very flattered. Like, this is all still crazy to me.

[Danielle]

I love it. All right, cool. So tell me more about growth sprints and what you guys do, what your, your little niche is right now. What's lighting you up? Tell me about it.

[Brendan Hufford]

So with growth sprints, it's wonderful because I push back against the retainer model. I don't like working on a retainer specifically. That was for SEO. I thought it was always silly that you'd be on a six to 12 month retainer because, like, SEO, quote unquote, takes six to 12 months and it fricking doesn't.

[Danielle]

Ooh, spicy.

[Brendan Hufford]

That's how they sell the retainers. So I pushed back against it. I'm like, what if I just did sprints? I invented sprints. Inside of ActiveCampaign. Working with Benjamin, I was, here's what I want to do. We're going to run in sprints and I'm going to check off these things. And it wasn't checkbox marketing of like, let's just run the repeating thing every week, month, year. But it was just like, these are short sprints. I'm going to do an internal link sprint. I'm going to do this sprint. I'm going to do this boom, boom, boom. And that turned into like, how I run client work. So that means I get to work with a ton of different clients. And I like that. That fuels me of, like, I get to see inside a lot of different companies, have a lot of impact and all this different stuff. The thing that lights me up the most, the way that I break things out is usually like, I think in bets a lot, like I really was influenced. What's that? I think it's the title, like Thinking in Bets, Andy Duke's book. I was in very like inspired by that idea. So I think about like confident bets and quick wins. I think about making bigger bats. That looks different, but it's almost always content. So the stuff that lights me up is there's still an SEO bend to what I do. We travel in the world of Martech a lot and marketing to marketers. So it's like, well, it's super saturated. SEO is so saturated. It's like, yeah, if you're HubSpot, SEO is dead. If you're HubSpot, yeah, it is. And like in a lot of industries, yeah, it is. But if you're an AI call trainer for sales teams, it's not. If your revenue cycle management, which 99% of people listening to this have no idea what that is and I didn't know what it was a couple years ago. It's the business of between medical providers and insurance companies. They do so much back and forth. It's called revenue cycle management. They do so much back and forth communication of like getting things paid and submitting this and do that and blah, blah. It's a nightmare. Revenue cycle management, wide open. There's so many wide open where it's just like, there's nobody doing this and there's nobody doing it well. And there's some industries that are super small where it's hard to figure out where. It's like, nobody's really googling this, so what are we going to do? But people are googling it. SEO is just wrought with flaws. We can get into like how even the SEO tools are probably wrong about a lot of things and why based on where they get their data. But that's still a win for a lot of clients. And then what's cool is like they also get to see me doing stuff. So they're like, wait, you built a 20,000 person email list? Can you help us with ours? Yes. You have 40,000 followers on LinkedIn. Can you help us on LinkedIn? Yes, that sort of thing. And then you just build, you do it once. I have like a semi productized service. You do it once and then you're like, this could work for a lot of different people. So those like weird questions of can you help us build our community and figure out how to manage it and leverage it for content? Yeah, I can, because that feels crazy to do this one off. But now I have it forever. It's an asset for me. It's something I can help other people with. And that's the stuff that lights me up. Of. True, true. Like multi channel. Like, what is our content strategy? Like I said, they come in being like, I need help with SEO. And I'm like, what about these seven other things? Like, I think I can provide value here. And they're like, for the same price. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, we would love that. Because no one's.

[Danielle]

It's like an easy no brainer.

[Brendan Hufford]

Yes. And I love that. I want like the biggest impact possible and I want it to be, like you said, an absolute no brainer to work with me. That's the stuff that lights me up is like figuring out what their content strategy really is and then like, how do we have impact with it and what does that even mean at their company?

[Danielle]

So how do you do that? Like, we were talking a little bit before we started recording around content strategy and how it's not just this document you write once that's like, we're going to go after a newsletter of B2B SaaS marketers, and that's the strategy. But how does that actually come to life? And how do you measure that impact?

[Brendan Hufford]

Like, okay, so I push back on. Like, they always have like a Persona. Like, we sell the B2B, Brendan. And it's like, don't, don't create some dumb generic Persona. Personas are really cool and interesting when they're backed by qualitative information and quantitative information. Like, that can be really interesting when you're like, hey, we know these people really deeply. We know that people in revenue cycle management struggle with these five things. And this is what makes them hate their jobs. But this is also what makes them scared of a solution like ours. Because this, this and this. Like, oh, I love that. Like, when you have really good understanding of your audience, that's a dream for me. So I think, like, it's first of all understanding that stuff and the way you asked me, the way I do it, I start in like a weird way that I always thought was really bizarre of just, I'll joke with people. I'll be like, if there's a place PDFs go to die at your company, I want to live there for a while. I want to watch all the old webinars. I want to read your last 30 sales decks. Like, I want to just let it wash over me. And I thought it was really crazy. And then I read Ogilvie on advertising, and in there he talks about, like, how he would just read the technical manuals for these products and how I want to say, I forget, is it Bentley? It's like, hey, you know Rolls Royce? Yeah, Rolls Royce. What is the. What is the line? Like, at whatever kilometers per hour, the loudest sound you'll hear is the clock.

[Danielle]

Yeah.

[Brendan Hufford]

And he was like, that came out of, like, page 212 of a technical manual. And I was like, if that has worked for 50 years before me, maybe I'm not nuts. It's cool we arrived at the same, like, conclusion independently. But that is very much a part of my product. Like, I just really obsessively want to understand three things. Your product, your audience. And also, this is something I don't think a lot of people spend enough time on is like, understanding the business, whether you're in house or coming outside in understanding, like, things that I do well meaning. And maybe the right decision are also going to cause a lot of problems for you. I need to know that ahead of time. I'll use a lot like this analogy. A lot of. How big of a withdrawal is this from the, like, social bank account, the emotional relational bank account with your peers, with your boss? And sometimes people are like, that's going to be a big one. That if we push for this, that's going to be a big withdrawal. And I don't know if I have the social capital to pull it off.

[Dave Gerhart]

Good.

[Brendan Hufford]

I'm glad we know. Because if I was hardline focused on this or you were hardline focused on it, it's probably going to screw things up more than it helps.

[Danielle]

Yeah. So, like, you don't want to go in and propose this huge initiative with the person that you're working with. They are not, like, on the fence. Like, they don't have the, like you said, the capital to go and say, like, hey, we're going to invest in a podcast.

[Brendan Hufford]

Yep. Let's use a completely hypothetical example and say, like, hey, we're an email marketing company. We should have an email newsletter because we don't have that. And then it becomes like this. If you didn't know the big bureaucratic stuff of, well, the design team needs to design the emails and the product team wants input and that we're going to need a copywriter. We also need to talk about the team that sends emails, because that's a separate team. All of a sudden you're like, straight to jail. Absolutely not. I don't want to do this anymore. You have to understand, like, how companies work internally. And I think we've gaslit a lot of marketers into being like, if you can't sell this up to leadership, that's your fault. I come from, like, such a deep place of empathy of like, some situations just suck. It's not your fault if you can't explain marketing to your CEO. Dave joked a long time ago of like, life's too short to work for a CEO that doesn't get marketing. And like, sometimes there is a level of education. But the reason I left, like the web design agency back in the day is, are there things I can change internally? Yes. Have I changed everything I can change? Yes. But in its DNA, it would always be a design agency and I would be getting the design clients that we sell marketing on the back end to. And that makes them like bad marketing clients most of the time. And then it's like, okay, cool, I can't change the DNA here. Time to move. And the same is true for my work now, where it's like, do I have the potential to have impact?

[Danielle]

Yeah. And there's always going to be this kind of limit on what you can and can't do as you yourself a person, and also like the other person involved at the company or people. So, yeah, I think knowing that is really smart.

[Brendan Hufford]

I mean, you asked, like, how do I do what I do? How tactical can we get?

[Danielle]

Let's get super tactical. I want to hear about a play that you've run. Like, tell me about a sprint. I want to know the nitty gritty ins and outs.

[Brendan Hufford]

I'll just give it. Here's the thing is, like, I want everybody listening to this. Cool, cool, cool. If you want to hire me, awesome. But my best clients are the ones that have like been following you for years, ran a bunch of your plays already. We got these big results and that's why we're bringing you in. Because you already just by sharing stuff freely, like, you know, it's just good content marketing. Right? Educate, empower, entertain, do all those things. So mostly, like I said, I think in bets, like, it's confident bets and quick wins, bigger bets. There's some authority building pieces in there. I think the stuff tactically, here's where I begin with a lot of clients is if we have the easiest wins and the most confident bets. If you already have a base for, let's do. Can we do SEO first and then like move on to other pieces, other channels? I don't think everything has to be channel based either. But if you're thinking about SEO specifically improving what you already have. In fact, I'm also happy if you want to link to it in the show notes, I'll give you my checklist. Like, I created a checklist when I was at activecampaign. We were getting like 200,000 visitors to the blog every month and we took it and this is again traffic. It's not revenue. We went from 200 to 240amonth in 30 days and then like kept growing from there. I'll give everybody my checklist. I don't care. I'm happy. If it helps, great. But I It's improving content. You already have one of the easiest levers there is. Just looking at how Google's AI and machine learning parses content and using a tool like Clear Scope, Market Muse, Freight. I use phrase only because my friend Bill used to work there. How much martech have I bought just because my friends work there? I don't know all of it because.

[Danielle]

My friend used to work there. I know all of it.

[Brendan Hufford]

People are like why do you use nutshell for your CRM? And I'm like, I don't know. My friends Jack and Ben used to work there and my other friends like partner owned the company. Like I just bought it because I like I'm loyal and it works. It works and it's not broken. Cool. And switching costs are high.

[Dave Gerhart]

Email, in my humble opinion, is still the greatest marketing channel of all time. It's the only way you can truly own your audience today. But when it comes to building those emails, well, if you've ever tried building an email in an enterprise marketing automation platform, you know just how painful that can be. I won't name names, but templates get too rigid. Editing code can break things and the whole process just takes forever when it shouldn't. That's why we love Knack here at Exit 5. NAC is a no code email platform that makes it easy to create on brand high performing emails without the bottlenecks. If you're frustrated by clunky email builders, you need nac. If you're tired of hoping the email you sent looks good across all devices, just test it in Knack first. And if you're a big team that's making it hard to collaborate and get approvals on your email, you definitely need nac. The best part? Everything takes a fraction of the time. You can see Knack in [e-mail] exit 5. That's K N A K.com NAC exit-5 or just let them know you heard about Knack from Exit five. That's us.

[Brendan Hufford]

Anyways, I use phrase but getting those entities right sometimes. I'll give you an example. I was working with a buyer intent software that shall remain nameless. They had an article about intent data, and in that article about intent data, they never talked about revenue, the buyer journey, sales cycles, all these entities that Google's AI and machine learning would say an authoritative article probably should talk about these phrases. We never use them like the risk is. Then you just cram them in and turn it into word salad. Don't do that. But improving your articles with those goes a long way. It also, from a human side of it, should still do it because like, it just makes it more rich for human. Like, can you imagine talking about intent data, never talking about revenue? Probably should as a human, but fixing that sort of thing. The other easy win is internal links. Like connecting. If we have a page we want to rank on a certain topic, find all the places on your website you use that phrase that you want to rank for and just hook them up. Sounds dumb. It was one of the first things I did at ActiveCampaign is a big contributor to that. That internal links. We did it with a person on my team did it when I was at an agency with Allstate Insurance. And they've ranked just from internal links, ranked number one for car insurance for like the last five years worth like hundreds of millions of dollars. Just. It wasn't like a cute campaign. It wasn't. I wasn't even a campaign. We just set 200 internal links. Like it works.

[Danielle]

Really dumb question.

[Brendan Hufford]

Yeah.

[Danielle]

So like, SEO is not my bread and butter. I'm like dipping into it a little bit right now with like the new articles thing at Exit 5. And like, I know internal links are important. I'm doing it wherever we can. And then like when we publish something new, I'm making sure to go back and if there's an opportunity, like link it. Why does that work? What are the search engines looking for? Is it that you spend more time on the website? Because I. I'm reading an article about ABM and then I click on something about paid media and I'm spending more time there and it's relevant. Or is it something with how Google, like catalogs it? And you said. I think you said you ran a whole sprint on this. So, you know, this is maybe a weird place to kind of like dig a little deeper, but it's one of those things I'm so curious about.

[Brendan Hufford]

So just to wrap the last piece in a bow. Like the make sure your stuff you already have if you have nothing. Different conversation, right? You're starting this thing with the articles. Different conversation than some of this. But like the internal links and like I said, I'll give everybody my checklist. They can run through it. I don't have a strong sense. Like we also have more info in the algorithm that we've ever had for Google. Like there was a huge leak that happened and people like Mike King and a bunch of others did a lot of digging into that and it turns out like Google's been protecting its stock price because the stock price goes down when everybody, when it gets leaked that we're really manipulating their algorithm. And it's not good search results because marketers ruin everything. But we have more info than ever. But spoiler, it's still content and backlinks are the main things. But we know that to your point, links from other websites matter. Connecting to our stuff shows like it's almost like a social graph of like they have a bunch in there or a bunch of connections to this one page. Same thing with internal links. It looks at the words that we use to connect it and when they are that exact match phrase that tells Google this page is very. Is the most important page on this website on this topic versus like a messy anchor text. Like it just Google's crawlers are dumb. They're robots. The simpler you make it for it to understand, the better good news. It also makes us better for human. I keep caveating with like, it makes it better for humans too because when I click a link, I know exactly what page I'm. I know it's going to be about those words. Yeah, I don't think Google knows how much time people spend on the site. I think it knows if you pogo stick. Like if you Google something, click a link and then come back, it knows that and it doesn't like that.

[Danielle]

Interesting.

[Brendan Hufford]

And I think especially in B2B, you're going to open if I'm googling things with a level of distrust, like I'm going to open a couple in different tabs. It's not like I click a link, read it, click the back button. Maybe some people do, maybe I'm an oddball, but I'll open a bunch of stuff in different tabs and it can tell those things. So it's not that it's keeping you on the site longer or it can see in your analytics or something like that. I don't think it's pulling Any of that especially, I mean, what an absolutely catastrophic thing that would be if it was like, hey, Google was actually spying on your customer level data. Like, I don't know, like I feel like that'd be bad news. Especially in GA4. That thing can go straight in the trash.

[Danielle]

I hate it so much.

[Brendan Hufford]

Yeah, it's a mess. So there are some like levels to like these signals that matter. The problem is when we hear signal like these SEO signals, the marketers brains are like, how do we manipulate that? How do I get them with more time? We always use. I had people in the past that were like, we need more time on page. No you don't. Most of the time when people are spending a lot of time on page, they're confused, they can't find what they want. Like unless you're writing like long prose and you're like a really good writer. Like Nobody's reading your 16,000 word article on what is marketing automation? Like, they're just. Most people are not. So if you see them only, wow, the bounce rate is super high. Yeah, they probably came, found what they needed and left. It's okay. Especially in B2B. You're not going to earn a conversion off a blog. Like you're just not. They're going to Google the brand later and come back and SEO will get miscredited for it because it probably is 20 other points of influence which we can talk about. But like that's very much. I think where I start is like the easiest wins. There's also some technical stuff we. Danielle. I used to do these like 90 point technical audits. Like I was like a real big brain, smart boy and I was like, the more, the more rows in this spreadsheet, the more value I'm giving them.

[Danielle]

And it seems super legit. Right? Like if I'm investing in that and you show up with a 90 point technical check sheet, I'm going to be like, yeah, I hired the right person maybe.

[Brendan Hufford]

But I also had a CMO be like, this is when you know you're in trouble. When they lean close to their monitor to like look at something and she goes, if I'm math in this, right, this is about 50 dev hours. It's pretty expensive for us. What's going to be the ROI of this? If you want to see a large human become a very small human very fast. That was me. I just like Homer Simpson into the bushes fully. Yeah, you're just like, oh God, I don't have an answer. And I went with because it was somebody on my team when I was at an agency that recommended it. And I was like, it's a. I don't know. It's just like a best practice. Just like everything we should do, we just want to pull out. You know, I like, finessed it. This is the other thing you get really good at when you've been a teacher. Like, just finessing stuff.

[Danielle]

Mm.

[Brendan Hufford]

AKA lying. Like, put a nice name on it, we'll market it. Is lying. But I. And I was just like, I don't ever want to do that again. So I figured out what mattered. Right. And these are the things that matter from technical. And I would love for somebody to argue with me about it. Cause I'll die on this hill. Are we accidentally burying content on the website? Like, if. As long as we can crawl everything. Like, I had a client the other day, one of their competitor pages, like an alternative competitor page set to no index. I was like, why? And they're like, oh, I think like a year ago, somebody got mad. So we set it to not show up in Google anymore. And sales was using it. And I'm like, can we turn that back on? You'll find those types of things where it's like. Or you'll find like a small hinge that swings, a big door where it's like, every page has this dumb thing on it. If we get rid of it, they all do better. Right. But sometimes we just bury content on the website. Stuff is 15 clicks from the homepage unintentionally. It's just how our website was built.

[Danielle]

Yeah.

[Brendan Hufford]

Whenever the last time was built and people aren't thinking about that, they didn't have any oversight. But Google's like, well, if our crawlers can't find it, humans can never find it. Decrease the ranks. Don't prioritize this. It's not that important. So stuff like that happens too. Outside of that, as long as like. And we're also. I'm also looking for, like, correlations of. As we've made more pages, you know, you can hop into an SEO tool like Ahrefs. As we've made more pages, has traffic gone up in correlation? If not, let's dig into that. As we've got more backlinks, does traffic go up? Are they moving up together? If not, if they're going opposite directions, something's wrong. Yeah, let's dig into why that is. But outside of that, I don't think anything really matters on the technical side. Like, it's really not worth. You know, nobody needs to know if your Gzip file is functioning or something, who cares? This is the other thing with SEO. This is a my spicy take on the industry. A lot of SEO people are web developers, they're not marketers. They are technical website people who want to live on the website and live in their SEO tools and run their crawls and their audits and do their keyword research. They don't want to talk to people, they don't want to interview a customer, they don't want to write creative copy. That's why you see a lot of this like proliferate is like a lot of people who are not multifaceted marketers have become the ones running the content on the website. And the content strategy for years was like export all the keywords that use CRM in it, sort for most volume, lowest difficulty. And that's the content strategy. And that's how we've gotten here, that's how we've arrived, where we are, where with people being like, SEO is dead. And it's like it's not. But the thing that used to work 10 years ago doesn't work anymore.

[Danielle]

So something you said earlier, speaking of hot SEO takes, when you were talking about like retainers and you're like, okay, it needs to be like a six month retainer because that's how long SEO takes to work. And you said, no, it's not. Why tell me more about that. Cause that's the common kind of thinking, right? It's like, oh, SEO is an investment. It's going to take at least three to six months to start seeing results. Tell me why that's wrong.

[Brendan Hufford]

Use that analogy anywhere else in your life. If I came to your house, I fixed your water heater, I was like, I fixed it. I need you to pay me every month from now on because you're enjoying the benefits of it. You'd be like, get out of here. I'm paying you to fix it. Get the fuck out of my house. Sorry, I'm a little cursy over caffeinated.

[Danielle]

I like it.

[Brendan Hufford]

It's good. Like that sounds absolutely out of bounds. In every other place in our life, the way I explain to people is, yes, play the long game, don't pay the long game. You're smart now. Maybe it's, I'm being selective with my clients. I only work with really smart people with capable teams. They're smart enough, they can run with it. I've given you all the tools, all the everything, the education, like that's usually also a part of what I do. Like I'M also teaching your team and helping make sure that we're aligned. Talk a lot about aligning incentives. I want the incentives to be aligned the right way so that you're able to like keep running with this and you don't need me. I don't want you to be indebted to me. Where like, and some people want it as like they want a retainer is like, I just need to know somebody's there and somebody's keeping an eye on it. And there's some organizations where that makes sense. It is not most organizations in my experience. So there's just no reason to pay me while you're doing all the work. And if I'm doing all the work, I mean, can you imagine signing a contract with me? And I'm like, hey, this is a six month contract. And you're like, cool, can you tell me what you're going to do? And I'm like, well, generally these things, but I can't tell you what I'm going to do in months four through six. Yeah, that doesn't feel aligned. Those incentives aren't the right way. Also incentivizing me to drip things out to you. Do the checkbox marketing of I'm going to give you two content briefs every week. One content brief a week, four per month. Like it just. I don't need to drip it out to you because behind the scenes, let me tell everybody here, spoiler behind the scenes, they're doing all the work in the first couple months anyways and then they're just dripping it out. And if they're not dripping it out, if they're really like, can't figure out more than two content briefs in the first month or they're making two content briefs for you or writing two articles for you. God forbid you're letting your SEO agency write your articles. Don't. Sorry. More hot takes. But like, if they're Dr. They've only thought through two in the next month, they are genuinely starting fresh and thinking of two more. You're working with somebody who doesn't understand strategy because they haven't planned that out. And if they have planned it out, give it all to you right now. Give it all to you up front in the first two or three months and then maybe they stay on for part. I don't know. There's a lot of ways to, to do engagements. I just don't, I don't like paying the long game. I don't think it's the right way to do it.

[Danielle]

Well, like you said it's kind of that. That old system of how we used to do it and what do you think the new one is? Like, what are people doing now that's just like not working anymore? Chasing the keywords. And what's an approach that you're seeing that is working now?

[Brendan Hufford]

So there's a lot of things that aren't working. I think newsletters are really hard. I love your newsletter. I think more people with. And we'll talk about like SEO and other things as well. But I think that like more newsletters should be what I call an immortal newsletter. Everybody listening to this should steal this idea where it's 50%. What we know behind the scenes is essentially a nurture sequence, like an autoresponder series. You're going to get the greatest hits and then we're going to intersperse that with the ephemeral current events value that makes the whole thing feel current. Like, I get. I send out my like evergreen emails on Wednesdays and then on like Sundays the I send two emails a week, maybe too much, but drop me a DM on LinkedIn. They're like, loved your email today on a Wednesday. And I'm like, I have no idea what one they got there.

[Danielle]

You're like, what did you just get?

[Brendan Hufford]

I even sent one out on like the six month. It says like, did you miss our anniversary in the subject line. It's the most open to email. And I'm just like, hey, we've been. You've been reading for six months. It's our anniversary. Six month anniversary. Congratulations. Like, it's so silly, right? Yeah, but like I can do that because I don't have to send that out fresh. It lasts. And got. What if I miss a week? Who cares? It's fine. The other stuff is still running, right? It means we have to produce half as much. And I also hated when I wrote like a banger of an email and everybody loved it. And I'm like, well, that goes in the trash. We never use it again. But what about when I double subscribers next year? Can I. Do I have to just send it to everybody again? Do I have to set up filters? Yeah, screw it.

[Danielle]

That's the thing. They've never seen it. And just putting it out there once is not. I even get that too. Like, I've written, I don't know, maybe 30 or more issues so far of just the Tuesday newsletter. And I'm like, well, I need to get a bunch more before I can start reusing. And I'm like, but we've Grown subscribers by so much. There's so many people who haven't seen this and even if they have, there's no guarantee that they've like read it in depth enough that they're gonna be like, nobody complains. We saw this seven weeks ago and.

[Brendan Hufford]

You sent this in 2003. I looked it up and I'm mad that I've read it twice. Well, it was good. It was good and everybody loved it. And you're welcome for the reminder. That doesn't happen. Nobody's pissed like that. We're attention strapped as it is. You've seen it more than once and.

[Danielle]

If it's good, it doesn't matter.

[Brendan Hufford]

Yes, it's a quality debate, right? The tactics debate. Like the think about how many times you've watched a movie more than once. Or listen, how many times have you listened to the same song?

[Danielle]

So many.

[Brendan Hufford]

A lot. Everybody has. But some reason with marketing, we think it's weird and like we can't ever repeat ourselves. It's like you're going to get sick of your crap way before your audience does. So I think the first thing that like, let's leave the old game behind is like we have to constantly be on this hamster wheel treadmill for email newsletters. Like just Immortal newsletter all the way, half ephemeral, half evergreen. Good, let's run with that. I think the other thing is I push back a lot on checkbox marketing. We've kind of like teased at that a little bit, like figuring out what the what matters, what resonates, having functions for that. I don't mean to be vague about these things, but a lot of that comes with like naming a problem and not your category. I call this Content ip. I thought at Drive, Kyle did a great presentation about it. I was pissed when he got off stage because you all opened it up to Q and A and he was like, here's the problem. Here's the problem. We named the problem. It's revenue Leak. When I was at Clary, it's Go to Market bloat at Copy AI. Problem, problem, problem. And I'm like, this guy is. It's just pure facts. And I loved it. You opened it up to Q and a. He got 27 questions about how to create a category. And what about your new category and old category and how do you name your category? And he was like, whoa, he's so polite and like buttoned up. But he was like, very politely. Did you all notice that I didn't mention our category name because like, that's not the most important thing. And people are like, cool, cool, cool. So if I choose a bad category, it's like, oh my God, stop. Like this whole category creation thing has gotten off the rails. And I was like, this is content ip. Like he's naming this, right? There's a company called Operator that talks about the great ignore. They do that really well. Our mutual friend Mark at User Evidence has the evidence gap. Great problem based ip. They've named the problem, they own it in the minds of their icp. Like that's the cool thing about it. It's almost like a conceptual scoop, right? Like, yeah, the great resignation or quiet quitting. There's tons of examples of this. You people should Google conceptual scoops. It's great training for how to think about this. But you're just observed. The whole point is you observed a trend, you observed a problem and now you're giving a name to it. And people that resonates. I think that's.

[Danielle]

Yeah, if you're the first person to name it, that's really powerful.

[Brendan Hufford]

And I think we're also. If I could put like a third one in here. The third biggest issue is not understanding that content has to do more than one thing for your company. And what I mean by that is. Have you ever heard of the Eisenhower boxes? For anybody who hasn't like, basically A4 boxes, urgent versus important on two separate accesses, on axis axes. I don't know.

[Danielle]

Not a math guy accesses.

[Brendan Hufford]

I was told there'd be no math, but essentially. And I struggled with this and I was like, cool, I understand what's urgent. That's very obvious. This is urgent or it is not. Goes in separate boxes. But it's. Everything can feel important. So what is actually important? And this guy at a conference, he was just as a random dude working, wasn't even an attendee. He was working at a conference and we were just rapping about something and he was like, oh, important means it does more than one thing. And the more things it does for the company, the more important it is. Oh my God. Like when you want to talk about like a turning point in my life, I was like, that is going to inform my work for the next 30 years. I didn't know it then, but it has. And not 30 years. I would. I didn't learn this when I was 10, but it will. So that's how I think about content. What are the things that are going to do the most for our business? And if we created some criteria about like, yeah, I need distribution and search, but I also need this to be highly shareable, but I also need this to be part of buyer enablement and sales enablement, which I think are sometimes two different things. How many things can I attach this to? And that helps me prioritize what to produce. That is also not, in my experience, super common. What is super common is like we did a webinar, make it a blog post. We did whatever blog posts. And it's like, well, what's it doing for us? And more specifically, like what's it doing for our audience? Is maybe the better question to ask. And the more things this can do for your audience, the more of service it can be to them, the more reason we should make it.

[Danielle]

Yeah. The more important it is actually becomes. Not just because it's like, oh, we had the webinar last week and it's important that we do this. And it's urgent because we had it last week.

[Brendan Hufford]

Yeah. Good tactical example of this is your common. I say common, but so many people I work with don't have these pages. Just like a common alternatives page. Let's say who is a company you love right now, like a tech company.

[Danielle]

Ooh, Fathom.

[Brendan Hufford]

Great. So Fathom should have a page for fathom alternatives. I want to be in that conversation. If somebody is vetting alternatives to my solution and saying me by name, they're aware of me. Right. If we think about the old Eugene Schwartz, like problem aware, solution aware, product aware, most aware type of framework, they're not just solution aware. They don't just know our categories exist, they know that we exist. But they're looking for alternatives. I who better to tell? And if you do this right, and you're putting your old school sales technique, you pull in person sales, you pull their chair on the same side of the table as you, it's like a psychological thing versus me selling you across the table. I'm going to pull the chair so we're on the same side against the problem. Pull their chair on the side of the table and be like, hey friend, you're looking for alternatives to us. Here's some great ones and here's why they're great and here's why we're different than them. I want you to make the best choice for you. I don't want a bad customer that's going to churn out in two weeks. Right?

[Danielle]

Yeah.

[Brendan Hufford]

So create fathom alternatives. Then all of the their competitors, let's make alternatives to those pages and then let's go even one step further. Let's make versus pages competitor Versus competitor. I don't know who all of their competitors are, but because I use Fathom.

[Danielle]

Yeah, I do too.

[Brendan Hufford]

Unaware. Unaware who the competition is. Let's make versus pages and really break those down. We are experts in this type of stuff. I want to know all of them. Let's make a status quo, like versus the status quo, like Fathom versus whatever they're doing now. Right. That is super important. That's something I learned from Jen Allen Knuth. Like, the status quo is your biggest enemy. You have to create something around that. So I'm saying all that to say we create all these pages. They're going to do great in search because I'm. All I want to do is be in the consideration set. I want to give our sales team or our product led motion the best possible chance. But we're going to get distribution through search. We know that people are going to share this with each other. It's highly shareable if we do it well. I send. Oso has a great one where you can be snarky on some of these pages. You could say, hey, the other competitor's support team usually takes about three days to get back to you. They're also a gifting platform. You'd probably be better off sending their support team a gift because you'll probably get a response faster. That's aggressive, but it's true. Or you can say, like, we have more support agents than our competitor has total employees. It's funny and it's snarky, but, you know, on those pages, they put like a big yellow sticky note that's like, hey, are you trying to make a business case? Click here to copy this note and send it to your boss. We're not. They're not enriching it. They're not gonna inbound, lead outbound or whatever. Vomit. Like, ideas. Those are of like, let's SDR them into the ground because they click copy this on the clipboard. Yeah, vomit. But like, you know what? I. Sorry. Strong opinions on these things. But, like, it's just good buyer enablement. So it's good buyer enablement. The sales team is gonna use it to follow up. Oh, you're vetting these other. You know, you're fathom. You're vetting these other things. Hey, we actually put together guides on those products. Like, here you go. And it'll give you a very fair. As updated as information as we could get. Here's good information. It does a lot of things for the business. That's what we want. I just wanted to make it like I'd give everybody a tactical example of like, let's create stuff that has more distribution. Let's survey people and get quotes from them and then say like, hey, we added your quote to this page. If you want to comment on our LinkedIn post about it, you can. Or if you want to send it to anybody because we featured you, you can do that. Like, there's so many cool, creative ways to do these types of things. I think it's helpful when we like make it concrete.

[Danielle]

I think it's also a great mindset shift too. I think of how do you tell something is important like you said, and going into it thinking like, okay, we're yeah, it's a competitor page, but here are the things that it's doing for the business and here are the things I need it to do versus like okay, we just have to go make a competitor page because it's something we're supposed to do and we're not going to index it or link it anywhere. Like it just makes you think through the impact much more. Which I think is a really important framework, especially when marketers. We have a thousand, a trillion things going on every day of that we could be doing and that's a great way to prioritize the high impact ones. I think I'm going to use that at Exit five.

[Brendan Hufford]

Yeah. I think the Natalie marcutullio also gave a great talk at DRIVE about her framework for the choosing what to do and what not to. I think she's got good ideas as well. But I think as long as we're staying anchored in this and I know that we're talking of specifically from like a content angle. Everything I recommend to clients is very specific on it has to do more than one thing for the business. And if it is, if it is SEO stuff, that's our core case. If we want to pull in traffic from search or we want to treat this like a campaign, we need content that's going to build backlinks on their own because we don't want to buy them, they're too expensive and we don't want to send out emails begging for them. If you're going to do outbound, you might as well be an SCR and get demos, not backlinks. Waste of time. There are other ways to like make even those. This page is just built to get backlinks organically. Like that feels really myopic. And just like that's, that's one thing it does for the business. Cool. How do we make it do three Four, five things for the business.

[Danielle]

Yeah.

[Brendan Hufford]

What could that look like for us? There's lots of creative ways if you. As long as you keep pressing your team of like, how do we get this to do more for the business? That is very much how I think about what I do for clients.

[Danielle]

Yeah. That is a great mindset. I'm gonna steal it. This was awesome. Brendan, thank you for joining us today. I'm super excited. Tell people where they can find you. LinkedIn, your newsletter, the community.

[Brendan Hufford]

Yeah, well, can I make an ask before I tell them where to find me? Cause I don't care if they find me. I want them to just have really enjoyed this. Do me a favor and maybe we could even. I'll be meta about this. I'm really competitive. I want this to be the most popular episode ever. Can you please share if you enjoyed anything in here, don't reach out to me and tell me please, your first thing you do. Sharing it in a community you're in or sharing it on LinkedIn, share it in Exit 5. Like Share this interview. Share the link. And I don't care if it's the Spotify link, that's where I listen or wherever else, share the whatever link you have and how you found this. Share this in a community you're in or with one friend. That's the ask. Don't find me.

[Danielle]

Love it.

[Brendan Hufford]

If you want to find me, you can google my name. I'll pretend it's because I'm good at SEO. It's not. I just have a very unique name. You can type Brendan Hufford. Obviously you see it in somewhere in the notes for this episode. But then you can google me. You'll find all this stuff. LinkedIn is where I share everything I'm learning along the way. And also I just hope people, like I said, will share that checklist with people. If you're trying to figure out what's working in SEO and stuff. This isn't a checklist for everything we talked about, but if you're looking for specifically that, I'm happy to give people my process that I've seen work really well in the past.

[Danielle]

Awesome. I love it. I'm already thinking of title ideas. Spicy SEO 100%.

[Dave Gerhart]

Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit 5 and you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website exit5.com our mission at Exit 5 is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit 5. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100 free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exit5.com and I will see you over there in the community. This episode is brought to you by Customer IO. You know that feeling when you open your inbox and it's just noise, bad marketing, spam, some brand sending you another, just checking in email or hey Dave, did you get trapped under the filing cabinet or referencing some line about your college that you don't care about? Most companies are out here just talking at customers, not talking to them. Marketing messages should do more than just land in an inbox. They should create an impact, mean something to your customer. And that's where Customer IO comes in. They help companies send smarter, more personalized messages using first party data. So instead of another generic hey, first name email, you're crafting messages that hit at the right time, in the right place, on the right channel. Email, sms, push notifications. Wherever your customers are, your messages can meet them right there. And the best part is it's all automated. So you're not just blasting campaigns and hoping for the best. You're running a machine that delivers real human engagement at scale. This is why 7000 brands already trust customer IO to make their marketing feel less like noise and more like a real connection. You can join them by visiting Customer IO to get started. That's Customer IO. Check them out and tell them that we sent you at Exit five.