How To Scale Your Business To Reach A Larger Audience With Brandon Andersen From Ceralytics [AMP 062]

How to Scale Your Business to Reach a Larger Audience How can you scale a business with marketing? To answer that question, we’re going to be talking to Brandon Andersen, the chief strategist at Ceralytics. He’s going to share with us why failure helps you improve, how to overcome your marketing challenges, and how to position your business differently than your competition does. Brandon has focused on some key marketing tactics that have really paid off, and today you’re going to learn how to implement some of them to begin reaching a much larger audience.
By A CTIONABLEMARKETINGPODCAST

Some of the highlights of the show include:
  • Some information about Ceralytics and what Brandon does there as the chief strategist, as well as what Brandon did before Ceralytics.
  • Some of the marketing challenges that Brandon faced as he moved Ceralytics from a startup to a successful company, as well as how they got past those challenges.
  • The concept of a blue ocean: what it is and why it’s important.
  • Successful things that Brandon did right away to build an audience in the early days of the company.
  • How focusing on influencer is a great marketing tactic.
  • A step-by-step way to build relationships with influencers.
  • Tips on getting into guesting.
  • Brandon’s best tips on marketing strategy and how to build one as a new marketer.
If you liked today’s show, please subscribe on iTunes to The Actionable Content Marketing Podcast! The podcast is also available on SoundCloud, Stitcher, and Google Play.

How To Scale Your Business To Reach A Larger Audience With Brandon Andersen From @ceralytics

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Transcript:

Nathan: How can you scale a business with marketing? I mean really do it. Brandon Andersen is the chief strategist at Ceralytics. His work has been featured in Forbes. He guests all the time on podcasts like Convince and Convert’s Content Pros. I know you’ll meet him next year at Content Marketing World 2. Today, on the Actionable Marketing Podcast, Brandon is sharing how he’s scaled Ceralytics with marketing, specifically you’re going to learn why failure helps you improve, how to overcome your marketing challenges, and how to build a blue ocean in your marketing to position your business completely differently than your competition. As Brandon started Ceralytics, he focused on a few key marketing tactics that have really paid off like connecting with influencers. You’re going to learn how to get started with that to reach a much larger audience. Im Nathan from CoSchedule, with that, let’s check in with Brandon. Hey Brandon, thanks a lot for being on the podcast today. Brandon: Thank you for having me. Nathan: I'm excited to have you on the show. Let’s talk a little bit about Ceralytics. Tell me about that, what do you do there? Brandon: Ceralytics, I'm a co-founder of the company. My title is Chief Strategist. Basically, I oversee all the fun stuff. Ceralytics, what we do is we’re a content intelligence platform. What that means is that at the basic level, we’re trying to identify what topics you should be writing about using data based off of what has worked on your site in the past to drive awareness, to drive engagement, and to drive conversions. We look at that at the topic level. We say hey, here are the topics that are driving all of these things on your website, here are topics that are underutilized on your website. We also look at your competitors. You can actually look at your competitor websites and say hey, competitor ABC has these topics that are performing really well on their site. That’s really good for you to know how are they positioning themselves, what’s actually having an impact on their audience. But then we also show you whether they have underutilized topics. What’s something that they had really good success with that they, for whatever reason, never went back to and wrote about. Now you know hey, here’s something they uncovered and they never picked it up. Now, you can pick it up and write a piece of really great content around that topic. Finally, we look at your entire industry set. We say hey, here are the topics that are resonating with your industry that you don’t write about. It really just identifies what you should be writing next. Nathan: Nice. It’s a really smart idea which kind of leads me into my next question for you. What were you up to before you started Ceralytics then? Brandon: I was working at a large PR software company and I oversaw US marketing for them. The pieces of our team that I oversaw were demand generation, marketing operations, and contact marketing. Those are three very different types of teams and we used different types of data for those. For demand generation, it was very data driven. We knew what programs we should put money into, we had a really good idea of what kind of ROI we’d get out of it, because we had data on everything. It was really cut and dry. That was nice because it gave us peace of mind that what we were doing was going to work before we even did it. But then, we’d have the contact marketing meetings. We tried really hard to get as much data as we could to identify what should we be writing next. What kept coming up was we kept saying ah, we think we have enough data for this. At the end of the day, we’re really still making assumptions and we’re really kinda guessing. We’re hoping that we’re going to be right. Strategy, planning for what were we going to cover became a lot of guessing. That really stuck out to me as that’s just not the right way to do this. Unfortunately, it’s the way that the vast majority of companies create content. They say hey, we guess that this is the stuff that’s going to be happening, here’s the stuff that we should probably be covering. Or here’s what’s happening right now in the news, we’re just going to cover that and be the next in line to create a piece of content for something. It’s not data driven, they don’t know before they write it what’s going to work. I thought gosh, if I'm having this problem and clients that we had at that company, we knew that they were having similar issues, there’s got to be a way to do this. Actually bring data driven metrics behind what content you should create. That’s what spurred the idea for Ceralytics. Nathan: Nice, that’s pretty smart branding. Obviously, there’s a need for Ceralytics. I am wondering then, you went from this really massive company to a startup. Running this thing, what were some of the challenges with marketing that you faced as you got Ceralytics up and running? Tell me about that. Brandon: It was night and day difference. The obvious things were the budget. I went from millions of dollars of budget with a great team of people to no money. It was like no budget. We bootstrapped the thing and had really no money for marketing. We said what we’re going to do is when we get clients, we’re just going to reinvest back into the company. Starting off, it was zero budget. That was a shock. The other thing was we were doing something completely new. There are no other companies that do this. We had no competitors to learn from, there’s nobody to look at and say hey, let’s get some competitive intel from these people. We tried to look at people who were kind of in the space and at the end of the day, we were on our own. It was a blue ocean, it was here we go, we’re going to do something that’s brand new. Trying to navigate that was really challenging. Nathan: Nice. You just mentioned the word blue ocean, I love that approach. Could you tell me about that with Ceralytics? How did you find your blue ocean? Brandon: For those who are not familiar, you got a blue ocean, you got a red ocean. Blue ocean is wide open, it’s new territory, it’s untapped markets, it’s some new offering that goes to an existing audience, or an existing offering that goes to a brand new audience. That’s what blue ocean really means. For us, it was we wanted to go out and we saw that there is an issue with people needing something like this and nothing existing. That made the most sense to say hey, people need this, it doesn’t exist. If we create it, there’s automatically demand and we’re going to supply it. The alternative is to go into a red ocean. A red ocean is hey, we’re going to go into some place that it’s just some industry that already has a lot of competitors, we’re going to try to differentiate ourselves in some way. That’s where companies are. Most companies are in the red ocean trying to battle it out with the big people in their industry. Those are actually people who we help the most because we do the competitive aspect. If you're saying hey, if you're in CRM software and you're up against SalesForce and NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics, if you're up against them, it’s great to know what they’re doing so you can get an idea of what’s working for them and then you can learn from it. But in a blue ocean approach, it’s wow, alright, this is brand new. What we really did is we looked at publications in the space and we looked at what topics are resonating in these publications that then matched with what we do? Things like content strategy, content intelligence, those things start coming out from that. Nathan: Nice, I love that. We try to apply some of that same approach into our marketing too. It’s fun just to hear how other people do it too. Brandon: Yeah, it’s really cool. Your story is really fantastic too. I don't know if there’s a way like link to a podcast about you telling about your story because when you told me about how CoSchedule got everything started, it’s really amazing what you were able to do in a very short amount of time. Nathan: Yeah, we’ll definitely include that in the link. Thanks for the props. I don't know, it’s fun to talk shop. Obviously, we’ve done it a few times. Brandon, I have another question for you. Based on that blue ocean, obviously there’s some challenges that you have when you get anything started. Let’s just talk about you getting Ceralytics up and running, what are the things that you did to overcome the challenges that just kind of talked about? How did you get past those things? Brandon: The first big challenge is not having a budget. What it became was we knew that we had to get a client on as soon as possible. I use my existing network to start reaching out to people to identify people who might have this need. A week before we officially launched the product, we actually landed our first client. We didn’t even have the product out there yet and we got a client on. That client, the revenue from that, ended up paying for a sponsorship to Content Marketing World, we had a booth at Content Marketing World. We were able to launch the product officially there and then from that we were able to get more clients that we then invested into other events, and then we got to invest into paid advertising and Facebook advertising and more content. That’s been what we’ve been doing so far, the fact that we had no revenue. Now, we basically just build on our own success and keep reinvesting into the business. Nathan: I think that’s a really smart way to approach that because you need to reach that audience. I want to know more about building that early audience, what were some of the most successful things you did right away to build that early audience at Ceralytics? Brandon: There were a few things that we did that really worked well and there were some things that didn’t work very well. But, the things that really worked well, we built a small, but pretty tight group of Twitter followers, by simply… We got on different Twitter chats and we were just parts of the Twitter chats. We were never promotional. We just wanted to add our voice to the conversation and whatever kind of information we have that could help people. That’s what we did. It was a lot of us linking to other people’s websites, linking to Content Marketing Institute’s survey results for their B2B and B2C marketing which are absolutely amazing. If you haven’t downloaded the new ones, go do that right now. We also got some great testimonials. Jay Baer was one of the first… He and [00:13:54] were some of our first beta clients and we got a great testimonial from him, great testimonial from Chad Pollitt over at Relevance. When we launched our product in the content marketing world, there’s a lot of word-of-mouth and everything from there, we got to meet with more people, and network with more people. We just started building this. It’s a small, and it still is a pretty small tight-knit group of people who just know who we are, they know what we’re doing, and they’re our audience right now and we’re working on building that audience out. Nathan: I think that is really interesting. Talk to me a little bit more about that. Why do you focus on “influencers” marketing tactic? Why did you prioritize that? Brandon: My previous role that I had, I was very lucky. I was collaborating with big names all the time. It helped that I had a really big budget at the time. I had a team of people. It was something that I saw working at a larger company. I thought, “Well, the catch is if it works at a larger company, why not bring that tactic to Ceralytics?” What was nice was I already have the connection. I already knew Jay Baer. I already knew Rebecca Lieb. There were all these people who I already had in my network that I can go to and say, “Hey, I’m starting this thing. Here’s what I’m doing. What can we do to work together?” That was something that was huge for us because we had no audience. We had no audience, no budget. What do you do with no audience, no budget? Well, we could start creating a bunch of great content. But we have no network to get it out. What we did was sort of lean on these different influencers and they helped us get in front of a bigger audience. You think about it like those influencers were just introducing us to audiences that would’ve cost us a lot of money to get in front of otherwise, and they were doing it for free. Jay Baer has a quarter of a million Twitter followers. When he tweets something out about us, well, great! I mean, it’s not like a quarter of a million people actually see it but a small fraction of that do, and that’s an audience that we’ve never had before. By using “influencer marketing” we were able to capitalize on other people’s audiences. You’re also capitalizing on their trustworthiness too. Because if somebody sees that as Jay Baer is backing a company, even Jay backs CoSchedule as well. He loves you guys. That’s a testament to like, “Hey, if this thought-leader really believes in this company and he thinks they’re doing really cool things, I should really check them out.” Nathan: Yeah, I love that advice and you’re 100% correct. We love Jay and Jay loves us. We try to share the love both ways. It’s a really great approach to do that. I’m wondering, Brandon, because you’ve done this really well, do you have any advice on steps, what if you don’t have those relationships to begin with? How do you build those relationships with those influencers? What does the step-by-step look like there? Brandon: If I were to break this down, I’d say that it requires three things. The first thing that it requires is courage, and that’s a big thing. It’s I’m willing to reach out to these people and be courageous enough to ask them for something. The thing that you ask them for can’t be a, “Hey, can you do this for my company?” Because most of them will say no. They’re not going do anything for your company. They’re not going to promote your company for you for no reason. That brings the next thing which is you need to bring something that is of value that is a value to them and their audience. Some influencers will pitch whatever you have if you give them enough money. But other influencers will bend over backwards if you’re giving them something that’s gonna help their audience. If they see the value in what you’re doing will give their audience value, they will take it up and they will help you with that. That’s the big step right there. Just bring something of value to their audience and don’t ask for a favor. Don’t be, “Hey, help me promote my company.” Say, “I’ve got this thing, I think it’s of value to your audience too. Would you help promote this in some way?” And then the third thing, which I think is incredibly important, is to nurture those relationships. Once you’ve established your relationship with somebody, don’t annoy them, but reciprocate. If they’re sharing stuff that you’ve shared with them, reciprocate by sharing their things. Get them involved and help them out wherever you can and always offer to help them. I love to always end an email with, “What can I do to help you?” What can I do to help you right now? What can I do to help you? A lot of these people say, “Oh no, I’m good” But, sometimes people are just like, “Hey, actually I have a new webinar that’s coming out next month. Would you be able to help promote that?” It’s like, “Yes, absolutely.” That’s how you build those really good strong relationships as influencers. I’d like to give a quick example here because you might say, “Well, yeah…” I had a lot of people who I knew in the industry but you can actually build upon influencers that you have worked with. For example, we did a content challenge at content marketing throughout this year where people came to our booth and they wrote down what their biggest content challenge was. We had influencers answer those questions. It was a really big deal because we got eight big influencers in content marketing to do this for free. They got nothing out of it other than they get their name put on a bunch of material that’s gonna be out there and them answering questions. We started with just two people. It was Jay Baer and Rebecca Lieb. They were like, “Yeah, we’ll do it. That’s awesome. Fantastic.” And then, there were other people who I had never met. I’ve never met Anne Hambley, for somehow, someway, I never met Anne Hambley. But, I reached out to her on Twitter and said, “Hey, Anne. Here’s this idea that we’re doing. We’re gonna do this at Content Marketing World...” That could have been enough but then I said, “...and Jay Baer is helping with this, and Rebecca Lieb is helping with this.” She got back to me right away and she’s like, “Yeah! That sounds fun.” So now I got Anne Hambley. I just kept snowballing it. We’ve got Joe Pulizzi. We’ve got Robert Rose onboard, and then Jay Acunzo is somebody who I really like. I love his podcasts. Look up Jay Acunzo. He has a great audience and he has a ton of experience and is super smart. But I’ve never met him either. What I did was I just reached out to him just like Anne Hambley and said, “Hey, will you help us do this thing? We’re trying to get this content out there. We’re trying to answer people’s content challenges. Jay Baer’s onboard, Rebecca Lieb’s onboard, and Anne Hambley’s onboard.” It just snowballed, you basically say, “You can be a part of this thing that we’re doing and we’re helping out with your audience too.” For people who are out there, who are just getting into this, you don’t have to have a great network to make this happen. Just follow those things. Be brave, bring something to the table that’s gonna help their audience, and then nurture the relationship. Nathan: I absolutely love that, Brandon. I think that’s good advice that people can put into practice a lot, and speaking of building some of your network or building those relationships with other people in your industry… I wanted to pick your brain on this. You’ve been guesting on podcasts and blogs, all over the internet, I see your stuff everywhere. Why did you choose to do guesting as a huge tool in your marketing arsenal? Brandon: It goes hand-in-hand with influencer marketing. It’s very similar. We do this because it works. We saw gains right away. They reached out to us and said, “You know, I heard you on Content Pros at Convince and Convert and that’s what got me interested in learning more about your product.” A lightbulb goes off and goes, “Wow! This is actually working.” That’s why we’ve been continuing to do it. This is content marketing. What we’re doing is content marketing and a lot of people see content marketing as, “Oh, I’ve got to create my own podcasts or I need to just create a ton of content on my site.” Well, content marketing is also being a guest on other people’s podcasts, doing videos for other people. Basically getting in front of other audiences that other people own. That’s what we’re doing. We’re realizing that while we build our own home, on on our website with a lot of great content, we also want to be out and getting bigger and in front of bigger, better audiences. Nathan: I think that’s great advice and obviously, something that I want to start taking up again. It’s been awhile since I stepped out of the guesting role. Fill me in on that. I want to get started again, what would you recommend for someone getting started there? Walk me through those steps. Brandon: If you have anything that you can trade with somebody, that’s great. It doesn't have to be a product. It can be, like I mentioned before, I’m going to bring a certain level of content or certain level of expertise that you can share with your audience. If you can say that and then point to other things that you’ve done, even if it’s just, “Hey, I’ve written a blog post about this. I’d love to pretentiously be on your show, talk about this topic that I’ve already shown that I know my stuff.” That’s one way to get in front of people. It’s just building, building little successes at first. You’re not going to be on CoSchedule’s podcast right away. You’re not going to be on Convince and Convert’s podcast right away. But there are a lot of people doing podcasts, or even just guest posting on their site. Start little and build your way up and build your credentials behind you and say, “Hey, I know my stuff. Can I bring this knowledge to your audience for free?” People are looking for more and more content every single day and they’re looking for great content. If you can prove that you can bring that to them, then they are more willing to hear you out and more willing to actually bring you in as a guest. Actually, can I flip the table real quick? Nathan: Of course, go for it. Brandon: Why did you ask me to do a podcast? Nathan: I asked you to do a podcast, and that’s a great question, because we’re talking about relationships. You and I met at a Content Marketing World this past fall, and you set up a chat with me just to talk shop about marketing and I was like, “Wow, we should have recorded this chat for the podcast.” That’s why I asked you to come back and have this conversation with me so that we can share it with our audience. Brandon: It was a great conversation. It was way better than this podcast. Sorry everybody. This is garbage. It was a great conversation. We just had a great conversation. We didn’t try to sell each other anything which was really nice. Nathan: Yeah and I loved that too. We’re just sharing knowledge back and forth. We didn’t try to sell each other anything. It was just making this connection with another human being who has the same sort of challenges in the same industry with the same sort of audiences. It’s almost like we’re mentoring each other in some ways. Brandon: Well, yeah! There was a lot of things that I learned a lot about like CoSchedule that you’re doing and I was like wow. You went against a lot of norms and that’s what I really like. I like bucking the norms because the norms make you average. If you just follow best practices, this is a Jay Acunzo thing, if you just follow best practices, congratulations, you’ll be average, because everybody will be following best practices. What’s gonna make you stand out above that? It’s being exceptional at something. Nathan: Speaking of kind of going against the grain, last time we chatted, you mentioned a lot about marketing strategy, fill me in on that. Brandon: When you think about marketing strategy and people think, “Ugh, okay. Marketing strategy is pretty easy, I have to deliver this many leads.” It’s just crazy. Marketing strategy will impact every piece of your business. It will impact every piece of your business and it should be tied to every piece of your business. One of the things that we did and it’s actually out there is we took out entire business strategy which included our marketing strategy and we just posted a link to that. We said, “Here’s our business strategy for 2017,” which was pretty interesting. When it comes to marketing strategy, you have to look at marketing strategy as more than just building awareness and getting sales. I know that’s where a lot of us spend a lot of our time. You’re gaining sales, you’re gonna be driving revenue, so those are the givens. You also should worry about retaining customers because it’s not just client services, that’s you, marketing should be taking care of that. You should also be taking care of driving some innovations and delivering feedbacks to your product teams. There are so many different places where marketing should be measured against business calls. At the end of the day, if your marketing strategy doesn’t tie back to almost all of your business calls, you don’t have a proper marketing strategy. That’s a big thing. When it comes to your content strategy, you should be able to go to anybody on your team and say, “Tell me your content strategy in 35 words,” and you should be able to get almost exactly the same answer from everybody. If you can’t do that, if your team doesn’t know that, you don’t have a content strategy. Nathan: I love it. I absolutely love it. I know that we can do that in CoSchedule, that’s awesome. Brandon, I think it’s about time for us to wrap this up. Let me ask this last question to you. We’re talking about growing an early stage business and using marketing and content marketing to do that, I know how there are other marketers who are in the same boat as us. What’s your best advice for those marketers who are looking to grow in early stage business? Brandon: I think a big piece, and this is something that I missed out on a lot of my career. Regularly meet with the people who are selling your product, whether that’s inside sales or extra sales team or reps, whoever it is, meet with the people who are in sales. Those early days are going be really rough. You’re all gonna be trying to finding your way. Sales is gonna be trying to find their way, marketing is gonna try to be finding their way. You need to communicate with each other and really listen to what each other has to say because you’re both gonna be hearing different things and you’re gonna have to adjust accordingly. The thing is within those early days, you’re not gonna have a lot of data points to go by, it’s gonna be a lot of feedback. “What am I hearing? What kind of quality of information am I getting back to say…” The sales team says that, “This approach is working best.” If they say that this is working best, look at what you’re doing in marketing and make adjustments to that.” That’s what I would say is one of the really big keys, is that your marketing, sales, and if you have a customer support team in those early stages, and sometimes sales and customer support are the same in their early days, just make sure they’re all talking together so that everybody who’s talking to your prospects is in alignment and is gaining feedback from each other. Nathan: I love that advice and I think that’s a great place to end this episode, Brandon. I just wanna say thank you for sharing all your advice here on helping people grow from the very beginning, some of the advice that you learned from being in a larger corporate company and moving to being in your role right now as the strategist where you’re at at Ceralytics. Thanks for all this, it was great! Brandon: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Nathan! Appreciate the opportunity. Nathan: I know we’re hitting our time, we’ve got two minutes but I wanna run through, if you’re still cool, do quick less than five minutes for these bonus questions? Brandon: Absolutely. I’m ready. Nathan: What’s the biggest marketing mistake you’ve ever made? Brandon: Oh god! Oh my gosh. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I have made a lot of mistakes in my career. Actually, it goes back to one of the answers that I had before. My biggest marketing mistake and the thing that I regret the most is not working closer with sales and client support. I feel like that was a huge missed opportunity and working with those two teams more closely, I think that was a huge mistake. I tried to, you always kind of pay lip service to it, but that was probably the biggest mistake that I’ve made as a marketer, not being really a collaborative leader with sales and I will own up to it. Nathan: What did you learn from that then? Brandon: Marketing and sales can’t be silos. You can’t be just like get a bunch of leads and ship them all, throw them over the fence at sales and say, “Hey, we’ve met our lead goal. The fact that you’re not selling them, that’s not our problem.” Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of companies do. The marketing team has business objectives that are lead-based. It’s like, “Alright, we got our 600 leads and if you don’t sell it, that’s your fault. You should get a better sales team.” That’s just terrible. If I can go back and change one thing in my career, it’d be to work much closer with sales. Really focusing on the bottomline of the company instead of just marketing goals. Nathan: I love that advice. What’s one piece of common wisdom you disagree with and why might that be? Brandon: My god, I’m gonna get in trouble. I’m gonna go big with this. Joe Polizzi at Content Marketing Institute is just an incredibly smart guy and I have the utmost respect for him. Having said that, I completely disagree with one of the things that he pitches. What he says is, “Find your audience, find your content, be unique to that audience, and then just build the audience and don’t worry about anything else, just build your audience. Just build your audience as big as you can. The first 18 months should just be building audience.” He doesn’t mention anything about metrics. He doesn’t mention anything about business objectives. He doesn’t mention anything about how you actually make money in that process. It’s basically like just stop. Build an audience for 18 months. Don’t worry about what else is going on, after 18 months you’re gonna have a bunch of people that you can now start pitching or whatever. I just don’t agree with it. I feel like it probably works for some companies and I’m sure that there are big companies that have seen this work. But if you’re a mid-size company, you don’t have 18 months to just work on something and get no results from. My take is every piece of content that you create should have a goal. Some piece of the content are about building awareness and building an audience. You really should be focusing on other pieces of the content that are either building client retention by giving existing clients better information or it’s gonna be about lead generation or it’s going to be about upsells. Every piece of content should have a goal with it and then that goal should not always be just to get more people on your email list. Nathan: I think that’s awesome advice which leads me perfectly into this next one. What’s the best marketing or business advice you’ve received? Brandon: The best advice I’ve ever received, I don’t know who told me it or if I just read it somewhere, but it was, “Get to know your customer.” Really get to know your customer and get inside their head, understand what their pain points are. Because at the end of the day, if you don’t understand the things that keep your customer up at night, you’re not gonna be able to provide them the value that they’re gonna be looking for. If you’re not providing value, you no longer have a business. Because the business’ entire purpose is to provide value to a customer, that’s it. It’s really about understanding what makes your prospects, your clients, really tick. There’s never enough data. It’s combination of data, quantitative data. Ceralytics provides lots of quantitative data that gets inside the minds of your prospects and your clients. But, you gotta get qualitative too. You gotta get out there and just talk to them. Nathan: Love it. Brandon, last question. Right now, with your marketing, what’s freaking best? Brandon: There are two things that are working right now. First is this, getting the word out via influencer marketing, whatever you wanna call it, basically just guest hosting, getting in front of new audiences. This is working best for us because, like what I mentioned before, we’re this blue ocean where nobody knows that something like this exists. Nobody knows that there is a platform that will tell you this is the topic that you should be writing about. Nobody knows that that’s a thing. Getting out in front of bigger audiences just to say, “Hey, this exists. This is a real thing.”  This is helping a lot and this has a major impact. The other one is writing great content. We are creating really longform pieces of content, much like CoSchedule. Seriously, you guys are one of the best content marketing firms I’ve ever seen, and you don’t provide content marketing for other people, you do it for yourself and you are fantastic at it. You have best practices that go well beyond the best practice. You’re like the best of the best practices in the things that you do. We’re doing things similar to that in the content strategy space, just trying to understand like content strategy and audience insights. That’s really what we’re focusing. Nathan: Thanks for that. It’s fun to hear the commonalities there. It’s a really great way to stand out is to figure out how you are going to be different. I guess with that Brandon, that’s it. Thanks for sharing that! Brandon: Absolutely! Thanks for having me. Nathan: At CoSchedule, we fully embrace the blue ocean strategy. Not only in the products we build, but in every piece of content we publish. It’s our goal to consistently publish the best piece of content on whatever topic we take on. It’s what we call competition free content. That mentality has helped us improve the results from every subsequent piece we publish. Actually, our CEO and co-founder Garrett Moon is now writing the book on that process. It’s called The 10X Marketing Formula. You can learn more about it at coschedule.com/10xbook. Subscribe to the Actionable Marketing Podcast
About the Author

Jordan Loftis is the founder & head of manuscript at Story Chorus. He loves the nitty-gritty on topics like video marketing, copywriting, and waffle making—the latter being most key to his work. When not creating content or breakfast food, he likes to mountain bike, play music, and travel with his family.