How to bootstrap your content strategy? Marketing conversation with Devin Bramhall

Who is Devin Bramhall?

Devin: My name is Devin. I'm the CEO of Animals. I came up as a marketer, so I got my career in start-ups, in marketing. Actually, when I started, I was a community manager, and that was back when community management was more of a thing. I think it's slowly faded into other titles, spent my career doing B2B marketing for SaaS companies and stumbled upon animals in my career. I was actually working at Help Scout. We hired animals, which is how I knew it existed. And about two years later, I was looking for my next gig and I talked to Walter Chen, who's the founder. He's a lawyer, turned a software developer like that. Yeah, who leveraged content marketing to grow his company, which he was able to sell, and all of his other friends, who at the time were also startup founders like, Hey, how'd you do it? And so and content marketing was his strategy, and he built the agency to help out his other friends and software. And here we are six years later, I believe, and I'm now the CEO doing my favorite thing in the world, which is helping companies win with content.x

How did Devin Bramhall come up with Helpscout's brilliant content strategy?

Devin: I am so proud of that. I think they've since. It's been many years since I've been there, so I don't think you can see it anymore, but I was. The premise of content marketing is to be helpful, right? And that was something that helped scout as a brand really embraced one of the reasons why it was a dream to go work there and run their content team. And so we had all this really great, helpful content about how to be a great customer service person. And we had this idea that we had all these different things we were doing in different, you know, different blog posts that are like, what if we try to create a community around this idea of being a customer support person? What are those folks need, right? They need education, they need community, and they need to see themselves and other people. There's a whole video series called Humans of Support that one of our other teammates had that we started doing and, you know, helpdesk tips and other videos. So like, we had events listed on there. And so it was a very helpful page where we just unified all of our resources for customer support, folks in a fun way. We're kind of gamified. They're like Spotify playlists, right? So then there's the business side where it's like, OK, you can subscribe to a list and you get access to the first part of it. And then as each new blog post gets released, it becomes visible and you get an email about it. So it was a really. Why I'm proud of it is it felt genuinely useful, and there was a strategy behind it that would help grow the business.

Trying something that's been personally important to me for most of my career. I don't know. It is funny, that you mention that because I hear community used a lot now and it's I know it's kind of been boiled down and now it's not what it used to be. And to me, it still means like, you know, eating a bunch of people around something, whether it's an idea, a cause, an industry, whatever it is. And I still really believe in it. Even though that concept has been sort of boiled down into like a business metric for me, the community is something that isn't easily measured, and probably shouldn't be measured in the traditional sense of like a number. It should be measured in terms of people's engagement, excitement, attracting other people there, and how much they get out of it,

Public speaking, storytelling, and personal branding?

Devin: So, gosh, this is we're just going into the deep, deep end of my career. So when I was coming up as a marketer in startups, it was very exciting, but also a little bit nerve-wracking because at least back then we were not post-pandemic and there weren't a thousand thousands and thousands of jobs around for marketers that pay very well. It was the opposite for me, and I was always worried about my ability to move up in my career. And so I leaned heavily into doing things outside of my job to help build up my resume. And one of those things was I had always done standup storytelling where like, you stand up on a stage in front of an audience, people and you tell a story. And I really believe that there was a clear link between storytelling. Again, this is before storytelling became a buzzword. So I was like the storytelling thing in this community. They all relate to this, you know, sort of your business world or whatever. So there was a place called General Assembly for professionals to teach. I pitched a class. I made up this title and it became this thing that they kept teaching it long after I stopped teaching there.

 So I pitched it because I knew a woman there. And she said, Yeah, go ahead. And what they do is they let you. A lot of people try. If they like the idea, they'll let you teach at once. And then if they get good feedback on it because people give feedback after each one they keep. I think I was doing it monthly at one point like it was a lot. So it was called How do you storytelling to get what you want? And it was all about how to grow your career through the way that you speak. So whether it's like negotiating, presenting, talking to your boss, whatever it is. And my marketing brain came up with a really good title and the course seemed to help people, so they kept letting me teach it.

One of the things I'm proud of was I was really good at my personal brand like I was. I was very thoughtful about what I put in my social profiles, and what I talked about was really kind of focused and succinct in the things that I spoke about, wrote about, talked about. So there it was very clear who I was and what that did was like. It attracted me that I got asked to do a lot of seminars speaking. People always kind of thought of me for stuff, and I do think that's really important now more than ever. I mean, you're talking about meeting down in community is like, how do you stand out on Twitter now, right? Which I actually don't think standing on Twitter is that important. I actually choose LinkedIn. Yeah. And it's like, that's for me and my job. I focus on LinkedIn. So to answer your question, yes, I think a personal brand is really important. And now actually even more than before when I was focusing on it. And I think you have to try a lot harder now.

Content marketing strategy or content strategy?

Devin: Your question is unnecessarily confusing, like you posed a very clear question, right? But the question itself is unnecessarily confusing because back in back in my day when I was a kid, you know, it was like content marketing was one thing and content was, you know, blog posts, social media newsletters. It was all the stuff that you sort of assets that you created in your content marketing strategy that you executed for the company that you worked for. But an NFT is considered content now, you know, video, Instagram videos, ads, or considered content. So I think it's harder. I think that's why there's some confusion. There is like to me, content strategy and content marketing strategy. I think they're the same thing because I operate in the world of B2B SaaS, which is the discipline of content marketing to help those companies grow. Right? OK. So it's different from B2B marketing, right? Like B2B marketing, you're probably going to read more how crazy you're going to be using different platforms, different strategies, and platforms. But content marketing is applied primarily to B2B companies. Specifically, it came out of B2B SaaS, and so it's like, you know, for me, a strategy, a content marketing strategy. And again, if you asked me over a cup of coffee, I would call it content strategy for content marketing strategy and think the exact same thing. I in my brain do not differentiate between the two because I'm a content marketer, but my I would say, you're not. A content marketing strategy is. It's weird to simplify this content marketing strategy as something that you would use as a means of leveraging web content to help a company. Grow. When you use it very broadly, very broad.

Content strategy for the global marketing plan v/s content marketing strategy for the “how-to” part?

Devin: I think it doesn't matter at all. I think it is splitting hairs to me. I'm like, OK, so I, and maybe this is too narrow-minded. So yes, I agree that one could think about content broadly and say everything that anyone does is content. This is what me talking this content. This bag of dates is exactly.

And I think that's like, I think it just completely misses the point and is like sort of one of those conversations that I imagine having if I'm like five smoked too much pot or something and I want to get really like everything is content, man. Like, you know, it's like, who cares? Where do you work? What are your

I think the question I would ask the person is, Why are you trying to answer that? Why do you need to know the difference? And I would flip it back and say, like, where do you work? What? What size company? What type of company are you with a B to B, B to C, like whatever, what are the type of company workouts? How big is it? How big is their marketing or what is your role in it? Right? What, what? What, do you have under your domain? Are you managing there? Are you managing ads? Are you doing like kind of middle follow-like email stuff? Like what? Like what is your role? Right? Because yes, I agree. Like, there are, you know, a Coca-Cola, for example, for example, their global marketing strategy is like going to have way more buckets in it. And one of those buckets may be content marketing or some, like aspect of content marketing, whereas like at a small startup, content marketing might be like a bigger piece of the pie. Yeah. So I think ultimately as I get really, I can be a little lax day of all-around titles and terms. I just don't. I think they like everyone's going to assign meaning to everything based on their own experience. So like, define it for yourself in a way that's useful to you. And that's all that matters.

Devin [00:17:18] So one of the things I learned when I became a CEO, this was like, I wish I had known this. When I first started working in the period, I became CEO and realized that no one knows what they're doing. Like not a single person. I was like, OK, there's got to be a whole family of CEOs are going to tell me what to do when they're like, I'm going to plan by them, and they're like, Yeah, that sounds right. Like sounds right? What do you mean, really? Don't you know, like you were like, I don't know. And so take that back to your marketer. Try those that you're like, This is the contest, right? Is the content marketing strategy. I don't care if you're talking to your CMO, they don't know either. Nobody knows that. Like just and the terms are so confusing. Like a lot of times, if you say something, they're like, I don't know if that's right. Are they wrong? They may even argue with you, and you could argue back and be like, What are you? How do you define it? So like, that's why I think it's pointless. Like, who gets like, there isn't some secret person standing around somewhere being like, I know the kids or I have the dictionary of the world? My name is God. And like, I know there are all these terms with so many different things. And so it's like deliver it with confidence, know why you're using it, like, know why you believe that, know why you believe the thing and know like even if people question you there be like, Wow, she's that person seems really smart.

Difference between SEO and content marketing in 2022?

Devin: I never differentiated them. I mean, sorry. They both. There's a lot of overlap. So like fine SEO is like a very specific tactic, right? You're like, OK, I am trying to get traffic from search and there is a specific set of things I'm going to do to get traffic from search that includes, like, you can write content, there are ways you can structure your site, etc. So internal linking all that to like SEO kind of has to me, SEO is more of like it has its own distinct thing. But part of how you execute on. Search is through the things that you do in content marketing, and so I'm like, well, I don't know. I don't know if I can think of it off the top of my head. A content marketing strategy that does not in some way involve search. Which is why I don't like it. I don't necessarily differentiate or they are different, but like there is. They still kind of want to get like they're always together, do you know what I mean?

If I was a strategist, I don't ever start with tactics. I think that's not super useful. Going back to good strategy, bad strategies like you want to start with the kernel and the kernel is like, What is this for? Like this foundational problem or question that you're trying to solve? Like, What are you really trying to achieve here? So I always start from here. It's like, what are you trying to achieve? A really deep, deep understanding that and then you choose your tactics, right, you can go the number of companies that came to us for a while about creating their own brand. Oh my God. Like people, really smart marketers like go out and they say, these things are like you should create, create a category and then they all come to us and we're like, Oh, God, like, do you know how hard that is? Like? And do you know how much work you have to put into this that you like neither probably of the money or what to put in the effort to do so? So for me, it's like, what is the objective? And then you start to explore tactics, right? SEO is a tactic. Different forms of distribution are tactics. Whether that's like, you know, thinking about your strategy through the lens of the platform itself, through the lens of the content on that platform like video, audio, etc. So like and then saying, OK, for the people I am trying to reach and achieve the objective. I'm fully objective, I'm trying to achieve. And the people that are following that objective like to be really reductive. I would say, OK, now choose from a suite of tactics and then think about how those tactics go together, right? Because I think one thing that I see a lot is like, OK, we're going to do this channel that you know this, you know, people kind of put things side by side. I'm a big fan of like, how can I? You create one cohesive strategy of things that are really working together kind of more efficiently versus come up with these different lanes like, oh, we're going to do like, you know, paid search and we're going to target these keywords and then we're going to have this distribution strategy over here. I'm like, No, no. Let's create a community and find out where your community lives and figure out how you're going to reach them in different places where they are right. I think that's a better way to think about it than segmenting your tactics.

Those things that you're talking about people should still do regardless of how difficult it is or competitive search is right? I think. We wrote we talked about this in a blog post once about like, I forget how we phrased it. It's like it's not content first, then the distribution plan, right? It's like you should be thinking with the distribution channel in mind. I would say the same applies, like if you're a company trying to build community or build a brand or get customers, whatever. I do think you need those pillar pieces, those clusters, just to let people know when they land on your site like, Hey, this is what we're experts in. We thought about it deeply, like, here's how we can guide you. But if you think it begins, if you think like, OK, well, now I created that and I would have done something different. What I'm talking about with merging is saying like, OK, well, how can you reuse? That content over and over again, can you take a look? Can you take parts of what you wrote and boil it down to a tweet series of tweets storms that you get someone at your company who's got a big following to start publishing? We built a brand around Matt Patterson. It helps Gal like we built a whole like. He had a strong following in the customer service entry, but in a year, if people loved him so like we put his face on, he started a video series like things were coming from Matt Patterson because people like I love Matt Patterson, right? So you, I would say, like, you absolutely need those pieces, those clusters, those pillars, whatever regard,

How can you reuse it in different ways to test out everything? Yeah. Can you give for a video? Can you spin it into a webinar or can you pitch it as a series when you want it to get guests on podcasts, right? And so I think it's more about the idea or the concept. It's like, OK, what is the concept we're trying to spread out? And then like, you know, when you talk about classic content clusters, right? It's like, OK, you've got this piece and then you got all these spokes, right? So you get the piece on the main here and you got all these things. Get to it. What if you thought about your strategy that way, you're like, OK, I have this concept I want to spread, and that's how I want to build me that's my that is my strategy for the building. This brand is like, if I can unify everyone around this concept, then I'm going to achieve all, you know, whatever. My objective is great. The concept includes pieces of content, others, you know, et cetera, et cetera. That's kind of how I would approach it.

How did Animalz start its own content strategy?

 Devin: I love revealing this to people like we are a content marketing agency that does not have a content strategist-like product strategy. Currently, we have applied content strategies in the like, I would say, not even strategies like more tactics in the past. So when the company was born, Walter now chairman, was the CEO. He had a single landing page. It was that way for a few years. He is currently primarily through the business, through his networks. We actually didn't use content at all for years, for about three years until Jimmy Dailey, who was really the founder of our blog and content marketing. He joined the company and became, I forget where his title as director of marketing, but then he started the blog. You can see the very early posts that he created were very liked, there you can see where he's targeting content marketing keywords. So like, you can see some strategy there, but even Jim, like Jimmy and Walter, talk about this a lot like they we wrote what we knew and what we were learning from working with customers. And so while there are some articles that were written for keywords that rank for keywords, a lot of them were just things that were useful information about content marketing or ideas that we had that we shared with folks. So I would say we had a complete lack of strategy for a long time or sorry, not Coca-Cola. We had one strategy which was like, Share what you know. And we applied some tactics for writing blog posts and creating the newsletter. Jimmy created the podcast, which I continued on. And then when Ryan Lau, who was a former content manager, then strategist, became our director of marketing. He started experimenting with more stuff. I think I was the one that came in and was like, We need a website like our website was not things like we did this beautiful website. So I made us. I gave us a brand. Right? Ryan gave us some more. He experimented on the strategic front, but no, like we. And right now. I'm sharing a little secret. We do not have a director of marketing at animals, Ryan Lau is still here. He's still writing for the blog, as are other really smart marketers who work here, but he is actually in a different role here. He's our VP of content working with customers on the internal teams. So I actually don't have anyone officially in charge of marketing animals right now. And it is,

Chief Marketing Officer or Chief Content Officer?  

Devin: As I must say, I'm a CEO with a marketing background, right? If you're I think I've also worked for a lot of product CEOs who got in the way of marketing and made it really difficult, in which case you do need a CMO. Like, I have worked for CMOs, and we've had to like be the advocate for marketing to product. CEOs like this can be like that. You have other product CEOs who get the need for marketing but don't understand it and you don't know how to support it. So like I was saying, yeah, I think like ideally, I think myself and Ryan and even Walter and Jimmy when they were like, we're sort of these ideal pairs of people because we get it, we've executed it, and therefore can kind of wing it a little bit more. But I think also that's uncommon. I don't I don't know that there's a lot of companies out there with that with a CEO who has that same, you know? So my answer to everything is always, it depends.

Bootstrapping your content strategy: by what should you start?

Devin: Oh, OK. I'm excited that that's the second one because that gives me time to think about what that is. So number one, when you're creating a strategy, I think the most important thing is research. I think you really like

So you like if you have a customer base already, like talk to your potential customer base, your existing customer base like you're really one of the reasons why I'm so proud of the work I do to help scale is like I used to because I start my the very first. My very first job in tech was a course in customer support. I knew I knew, I knew that I knew everything about them, I knew how annoying it was that like on Thanksgiving, when you show up at Grandma's house, like if you are on call that day, you weren't fully relaxed, right? Like something so specific. Like, I knew that personally. So like I would say, research, and understand whoever your potential customer is going to be really like and you can't replace conversations with surveys. I think surveys are useful like they help you kind of like aggregate information, but like surveys, talking to people, looking at data looking or other, you know, what are your competitors doing? Just like, really, do your research because that's where the ideas are going to come from. Your ideas will come from like you have to you can't break the wheel and play not to make the wheels like learn the wheels, so like learn the research and then I would say. Narrow down your tactics. And set. Narrow down your tactics, if you try to do everything, it'll be really confusing and hard for you to identify what's working or not.

So like a blog strategy, so like maybe in some cases it makes sense if you have if you don't have a blogger at each or establish a blog and start writing long-form content. There's a sub-question. There's a sub-strategy in there. What type of content? Where do I start? How to content if I'm bootstrapping and I don't have a marketing team, I'm just the founder. I would probably lean, harder on opinionated stuff for me about the industry and kind of leave a thought leadership. But again, that really depends. I'll take your word for the blog. You could start with brand building. Use your personal brand to help grow the business you could cost. You could even have an event strategy. You could start a subset like, I mean, from a bootstrap perspective, you kind of have like, your very limited time. So I think it really but like the world is your oyster, right? There are a million things that you could do for your specific company. The combination of that tactic, those few taxes that you choose, are very different. But I would say pick a couple that works together really smartly and then establishes how you're going to measure success at the get-go so that you can say, OK, this thing seems to be if my goal is I don't use traffic, it's the easy, easy example. So it's like, this thing is getting me. This one change is going to be more traffic. I'm gonna lean harder into that or similar types of things. Or, you know, I'm not actually getting I like this newsletter. I started like for some reason, a ton of people are signing up for trials from this newsletter or whatever. So I think the measuring like, I don't like to get overly reliant on measurement. But I do think in the early phase, if you're talking about early strategy, it does help you understand what's working or not and helps you know where to concentrate your energy if you're trying to get off the ground.

$15,000 to start and succeed with content marketing? 

Devin: if you hear me fifteen thousand dollars. I and I was like a software company that needed customers like I probably wouldn't start. I might not start with content at all if I'm like, Hey, I need to get people on the platform, I might just pay for that user right, like find out where they are and have a paid strategy instead, or at least as part of that, just to get like. Because then you've got, you know, like, you're starting it. Yeah. So like potentially I mean, I might even go really basic because again, content marketing isn't going to get you off the ground really quickly. So if that's your objective, then I wouldn't necessarily lean into content marketing at first. My general advice to companies who are starting to get their marketing program off the ground is to start two things simultaneously. Content marketing and whatever your page strategy is, whether it gets it depends on the company, but like. So it's going to happen faster, and it gives you time to build this content marketing program because this is by design, and it's going to take longer to be effective. And so and I think people who are like, you know, trying to make it go faster or doing it wrong like they have the completely wrong expectations, they don't understand it. You don't even it's like six months. And also like. Be better at planning, like if you're a company and you're like, OK, like you, you can't be silly. I know that we will find in this age everything seems like it can happen super fast. But if you talk to you, listen to stories from people who go viral for whatever. A lot of them, the ones that there are accidents, right? And then there are people. A lot of times are like, Well, actually, I tried this two times and then it went viral. There was a movie that came out in the US. I'm going to forget the Zola. If you hear the interview with her, she's like, Well, I wrote on Twitter and then I like it didn't get a lot of traction until I did it again. A different way. And then it will. They're trying. You know what I mean, it's like you need to give it time, and so I would say like. Number, the number one thing I would do to start my strategy before any actual tactics would be to plan a realistic timeline for success. That's number one.

To grow your blog fast: 1 outstanding piece of content + great backlinks?

Devin: Not really but sometimes, yeah. I could see I mean, the danger with that is that you're putting all your eggs in one basket, but high risk, high reward. As I would say, the chances of them working are not guaranteed. I mean, it's a little more guarantee if you're if your focus is on link building like you could hire an agency whose entire job it is to build links to a piece of content. One of those is quality links depending on how good the agency is that you hire and what parameters you put around that agency. So like, you know, I think if you're looking for a simple answer, I don't have one for you. Like, I think that everything to try to do is like, right, it's so complicated. So yes, you could hire a gross marketer and they're probably going to try a bunch of experiments like that where it's like, how can we make create this shot in the arm? And there are folks that really specialize in that, as Dave Gerhart strikes me as one of those folks was just like, really good at like, he's someone I'd be like, You can create a category. You're really good at that. Like, I know you could do that. Yeah, I would say like. If you hire the right person who's really good at gross marketing, who can like, kind of like growth, happy stuff. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Sure. Why wouldn't you like that's a great idea? Or you could do a help scout, which took like years. They spent years becoming well known. And then all of a sudden everyone's like, Oh my gosh, help scout, right? It sort of depends on what you're working like, what your resources are to right, and what your objectives are to grow the company, your marketing strategy, should reflect, in some ways, your vision for the company itself. Some people want to grow a company really fast and sell it, in which case, content marketing is probably not for you, right? Whereas like, if you're trying to build a long-term, sustainable business, you might say, OK, let's start with content marketing plus some other stuff, right? Let this grow. Kind of hopefully have this replace the other, some of the other stuff later.

Top criteria to evaluate a great content strategy for start-ups?

 Devin: is it helpful?

Do like whatever and however, you measure that with your audience, right? But it's like, how do you measure? Is it helping?

It's why I get that we got all these tools like what I started. You couldn't measure anything like it was so difficult right now. Google Analytics just got more and more sophisticated with all these other tool apps. Like all that you, we can measure

More things are better than we could before. It's still not perfect right there. So like there's you know, you can't necessarily equate every blog post with a new customer, but yes, you can measure better. And I get that that makes it feel more necessary to do so. But it's missing the point. The point is for you, the company to be helpful. To the people, you're trying to serve. And so if I had to choose one. That would be it

To see more, look at the engagement time-on-page. OK, excellent bounces. You're like, OK, we missed the mark there somewhere. Right? So it's like, What do we do wrong here? Like, is it the way the page is laid out that it's confusing or uninteresting? Is it the content itself, right? You can get one? Yeah. So I'm like, find out how many people are engaging with it, how many people are sharing it like sharing isn't about ego. It's like if someone read something and thought it was so useful that they assigned it to their own personal brand on social to share. Oh my, wow, that's a huge indicator to me. So I think there's actually pretty simple ways to measure, and I wish more people did. Honestly, I would like that a word. Your content is so good because it was helpful, not because you won some, you know, you got a certain amount of money for it, like whatever you it's like or people are grateful for it.

Content strategist, Director of Content, Chief content officer, content marketer: what should we call it? 

Devin: I'm going to start off with something, but I'm really going to answer your question. I don't think the title is important in general. I think it's important to identify at your company.

What is yet what is the need and then say, OK, this is X, and I have very specific criteria. However, you bring up a very important and good point, which is that having general, generally agreed terms for titles helps everyone in the industry in certain ways, like understanding what skills they need to become good at that job, right? Or to be able to do that job. How to grow in their career. How to benchmark salaries. If we've got all these different titles for the same job, how do you benchmark? I don't know what I should be asked. Like, how do I know what's fair? How does a company establish what's fair? So like, you know, while the like one side of me is like, OK, here's the other side of me is like, Well, actually, it does kind of matter. Right? So if you're asking about the content strategist role specifically and what that title would agree, the title should be. I don't know. I have been a content marketing manager for companies back in the day and managing people nowadays, I think means more of an individual contributor. And then if you're a director, you manage a team so like to me, if you're a content marketing manager, you're doing the work you are executing. You may also depend on where you work and maybe come from ideas

Yes, if you're a strategist or a director, and I would probably put those two things, I would put content strategist and director of content together because to me, both of them are in charge of strategy and then they have teams.

And then you've got the chief marketing officer or whatever. The chief marketing officer to me is managing multiple different marketing disciplines, of which content marketing is one. And so they're really like, OK. And they're more. They tend to be more revenue focused anyway. So they're like, OK, whatever. Their KPIs are different altogether, but they're like they're overseeing the people that are overseeing individual departments. So I would say. I don't have strong opinions between a content strategist and a director of content, but to me, that is the same role.

So interestingly, I do think so. OK? Let me speak from my experience and from the folks that we have on our team. I think having experience executing content like creating content is really important.

Because that's what helps inform strategy, right? You're going to have to experience nuances in performance and reactions to stuff that help you think more in-depth. I have found that having roles in several different marketing disciplines has served me as a content strategist slash content director in the past. So I was in product marketing, I did Community Management, which back in the day was just managing social channels and support. I had done a lot of email marketing. I worked with PR teams like I. I had done a lot of different types of functions like that. The multidisciplinary experience, I believe, helped me come up with more creative ideas and strategies. I don't think it's required, but it's really, really helpful, honestly,

I think the bigger skills are really important that is probably going to make or break. Whether you get the job and are good at it is like, are you able to report back on the work? Are you able to motivate teams? Can you come up with like, really coherent plans? Can you motivate people to execute on them and then report back, Can you like it's a lot of management stuff like that role, and my experience is more about,

And you're reporting up. You're like, you know, you're reporting up to your boss trying to convince them of stuff. You need some business skills. So like, I think it's really like a really sad people savvy person who's really good at reporting, really super organized, has a super creative background. So like, understands the work and can help level up other people's ideas. That's what's going to happen. Is going to have fewer experience people coming to you with probably really good seeds of ideas that need a little bit of refinement. You can kind of refine them a little bit. So I think it's very much a mix of creative and business organizational savvy.

Content strategist: Do it all by yourself or delegate?

I know I would say no. I relied on other people to help me execute creative ideas like I had an illustrator or designer. I had developers. So like I leaned heavily on other people to realize the idea that was really, really important. I think.

That's kind of a jack of all trades you can write your interest like you can make a basic video, not even editing, but like you can like YouTube videos and stuff. Uh. Writing some other content disciplines like video and audio is cool, you know, being a good speaker, I guess would be OK? Having an editor can be helpful. I know it's not possible for all teams, but editing, making sure there's somebody to polish off your work. I used to do the first layer editing for my team and then we had a copy editor, so the director might end up being not themselves. But I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing.

In my experience, having done the work first may be better at it. There might be people out there that could. I don't know any. I don't know anyone who's ever gone into like the director of Content Roll, who had done content before. I think CMO, I think it's a little easier to understand it broadly, but you don't need to be like a super content expert because you're really overseeing at that level. I think you do. Do you need the experience?

A major historical moment in the history of content marketing?

I think the birth of the startup industry because the startup industry was the birth of content marketing, right? Like, Wow, that's a good one, you know, so I think that I think like WordPress Blogger, all those really old platforms. And I mean, everyone uses WordPress now, but like blogger and like those really, really old blogging platforms that folks use before blogging was a content marketing strategy where like there were individual bloggers or like blogs like the invention of blogs and SaaS companies, you know, I think those two things really stand out to me. And then probably like the birth of Twitter and some of those other social media put out Facebook. Really, those were big moments. Those are big moments for me. Like I remember sitting in this big open office at this little startup called Spring Pad, I didn't know what I was doing. Like, I remember just talking to people on Twitter for my job and like that was really important. And like, you know, it's like, that was, you know, so I think those are those three things are really big milestone, just like the blog

Apple and Microsoft, like, I don't think those are really good examples, but like to me, those are like the original like, you know, it's like the original kind of like and doesn't perfectly match their actual history. But like, that's something that I think about is like, they're there like, especially Steve Jobs, right? He's like, This guy is like kind of a pain in the ass. And like, has this big idea really fuzzy about it ends up getting fired, and comes back like he's a super hero revolutionizes every day. Like, that's a SAS founder.