People Want Your Expertise, Not Your Logo

Tom Nixon (00:01.699)
Welcome back everyone to Bullhorns and Bulls Eyes. Hey Curtis, I’ve heard people lately been describing this podcast as a show about nothing.

Curtis Hays (00:11.815)
Mmm sure about nothing

Tom Nixon (00:12.751)
To which I always respond, this is called Jerry Gold. And so if you are catching those references that you are of kindred spirit in mind with our guest today, who Curtis you found, who happens to be a big Seinfeld fan on top of everything else that he’s going to explain to us today.

Jared (00:12.875)
I get that one. I get that one.

Curtis Hays (00:15.803)
he gets it.

Jared (00:19.457)
Yeah. yeah.

Curtis Hays (00:32.278)
Yeah. Let’s let the insanity begin, shall we? So Jared Gibson, Jared found you on LinkedIn. You’re connected with a great colleague of ours, Amy Schuster. And Amy is somebody who’s been on the show twice and largely respect and saw some of your comments on her and then went and checked out.

Tom Nixon (00:36.943)
Let’s.

Curtis Hays (00:57.964)
your posts and those types of things. like, man, this is a guy we got to have on the show because he’s speaking our language. So welcome to Bullhorns and Bull Thighs.

Jared (01:06.273)
Yeah. Thanks for, uh, thanks for having me on. Um, I watched the puffy shirt episode last night. It’s a, it’s my go-to fall asleep after watching the news and being miserable for 15 minutes. I’m like, all right, I gotta throw Seinfeld on and go to bed.

Tom Nixon (01:12.335)
Excellent.

Curtis Hays (01:20.878)
I don’t want to be a pirate. Isn’t that what he says?

Jared (01:23.093)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tom Nixon (01:25.655)
Yep. And that’s also if I’m doing my math correctly, isn’t it? Also the episode where Costanza was a hand model. Yeah. All right. All right. I’ve got.

Jared (01:31.743)
Yeah, yep, yep.

Curtis Hays (01:31.948)
Yeah. Is that, so is that the soft talker episode? Is that how he ends up wrapped into the, yeah, gosh. Wow.

Jared (01:36.661)
Yep. All in one.

Tom Nixon (01:38.425)
Wow, jam-packed. Yeah. Well, hopefully this episode will be jam-packed as well. We wanted to introduce Jared, what you do and who you are. So you are a co-founder of a company called Outworks. And as I read your homepage here, it sounds like I’m reading from my own website, which is great. It says, help amplify awareness, authority, and trust by transforming your founder or executives expertise into engaging content that resonates with your prospects.

Jared (01:40.693)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (02:06.009)
Beautiful. So explain what that is and why you’re focused specifically on founder led content.

Jared (02:12.031)
Yeah. So, I’ll say founder led content is just kind of the, what’s easy to say, but it’s really any employee, any executive, content for us, it was, you know, we kind of put our stake in the ground on it being the individual as opposed to the company content, like pandemic happened. Everything pre pandemic was company marketing, collateral company, content company, LinkedIn pages.

pandemic happens and you start to see into the lives of these executives, these founders, these CEOs at home, you know, in their element with guitars in the background with kids running around and it really like humanized them and gave them a personality and people gravitated toward that. So you started to see more of these executives step out from behind the company brand and really put themselves out there and build trust that way. And that trust just transferred back over. for us, that was.

Like we just felt that there was an opportunity because we knew that executives really should be doing more of this, but they just didn’t have the time or the resources. I couldn’t tell you how many times we heard, yeah, I know I should be posting more on LinkedIn. You know, I just don’t know what to say. I have the time to say it. So well, let’s start a company where we can help guide them and make it easy for them. And that’s ultimately what we’re doing is, is we put together a strategy for our clients around what their content pillars are, do a profile audit, and then.

What we do is interview them for 60 minutes each month based on a few questions that we’ll send over ahead of time. We take that interview podcast style, super casual. and we chop it up for content, consistent content, video, image, graphic, text space content, and help them post minimum 12 times a month. and just continue to build that content engine for them.

Tom Nixon (03:58.135)
Excellent. Yeah, that sounds like our formula as well, Curtis. Reminds me of when we had Ryan on and he said, stop hiding behind your logo. Remember that quip? That was one of your favorites.

Curtis Hays (04:07.786)
Yep. Yeah. I mean, you got to get out in front of your target audience. Get let people get to know you, show that you’re hopefully likable. They can start to trust you, you know, all of those things that are going to help, you know, kind of warm up to your target audience. We’ve been calling them thought leadership, even on the organic side. But I think since LinkedIn came out with these thought leadership ads post pandemic.

Jared (04:08.565)
I love that one. That’s great.

Curtis Hays (04:35.574)
And I know that I don’t understand the algorithm, Jared, you might understand it a little bit better than me, but it seemed like a lot of the organic content got throttled with the thought leadership ads. Those correlated about the same time, but we did lean into that idea of, if LinkedIn is asking us to promote content from individuals and not brands, maybe they’re seeing something that we need to pay attention to, which is

your potential customers want to see more content from real people, not from the brand. And so that we had Ryan on recently, he’s a videographer, has a video studio, and he was really big on that. It’s like, stop hiding behind your logo, stop posting content from your brand and actually get the real people that work there out behind your content.

Jared (05:22.613)
Yeah. A hundred percent agree with that.

Tom Nixon (05:25.323)
My company went through a similar shift actually, Jared, during that same time period, kind of post-COVID and recognized that I, you know, I was serving a B2B audience almost my entire career and it feels like I’m always like trying to drag clients to the latest, not even the latest, but like the current.

method of marketing, you know, whether it’s you need a website. This is back in the 90s where you need to be on social media. There’s always resistance in the resistance, I think, sort of devolved from. I’m trying to explain to you what content marketing is to now. All right, the world is blowing up with content. I need to do this and I don’t have time to do it. So we saw the same need. And if we could get people over that hump, it’s not that they don’t have the ideas. It’s not that they can’t write generally. It’s that they just don’t have the time. So.

converting that subject matter expertise into content is, you know, and you’re not selling, but we’ll get into all that. I wanted to ask you about something that Curtis just said. the, it’s not even a conspiracy theory, but it just so happens at the time when, LinkedIn is introducing thought leadership ads. other words, boosted posts for your people’s content. all of a sudden everyone starts noticing that the reach of their organic posts is going down now. It could be coincidental. It could be time to now people are out of the pandemic and they’re offline more than they were.

So what does this, whatever the truth is, we all see the reaches down. The numbers are down unless you’re Gary. What is it Gary V. So what does this mean to a founder or somebody doing content for a founder or an executive? If reaches down, is it the inclination to say, well, what, what the juice isn’t worth the squeeze anymore.

Curtis Hays (06:50.456)
Carry me.

Jared (07:01.621)
Yeah. So there’s man, I could go many different directions with this one, but you’re right. mean, reach is definitely down. you know, even like I’ll go on LinkedIn. I’ll see people that have, you know, 50,000, a hundred thousand followers saying there, well, my reach isn’t down. It’s like, okay, well, you’re, in a, you’re playing in a different game than, most of us common folk here are. but reaches down for sure. LinkedIn, you know, we’re doubling down on video. Video is huge right now. Like video is, I think everything.

It should be everything it, you know, it’s the future and LinkedIn kind of gave us a tease, last year, early last year when they re when they came out with this Tik TOK style feature video, and they just boosted basically the organic video content. So people were putting video out and they were seeing so many impressions and the reach was insane. So everybody jumped on, not everybody, a lot of people jumped on this video train and then overnight one night.

LinkedIn just pulled it back. And then you started to see what was getting 5,000 impressions get 300 impressions. Right. And it pissed a lot of people off because they were used to that dopamine hit that they were getting. Right. The way that we are going to look at this, is that this is social media. This is the social media platform, right? The B2B buyer is on LinkedIn, you know, whether you like LinkedIn or you don’t like LinkedIn, it’s just where we are. You know, maybe someday YouTube passes it is the

Maybe there’s another one that comes out, right now LinkedIn has the data. LinkedIn is the channel and the decision makers. think I saw a stat that the average B2B decision makers, 36 to 37 years old. So I’m to give you three stats, 36 to 37 years old. The highest, the people that are most active on LinkedIn are between 25 and 34 years old. The second group right behind them are 18 to 24 years old. Put all of that together. That’s the social media generation. Right.

Tom Nixon (08:34.927)
Mm-hmm.

Jared (08:58.389)
So if you are not on social media, if you’re not on LinkedIn, putting content out, even if the reach is down, any one of those impressions could turn into a client at some point in time. So if you were getting a thousand and now you’re only getting 400, does that mean you stop, you pout and you complain about LinkedIn? No, you have to continue to do it and just be consistent with it because you may get 300 impressions on your post Monday. You may get 300 on Wednesday, 300 completely different people are seeing your content.

Tom Nixon (09:25.529)
Mm-hmm.

Jared (09:26.559)
are going back to your profile page and you’ve built this library of consistent content that they can start doing their homework on before they even have a conversation with you or anybody at your company.

Tom Nixon (09:36.771)
Yeah, Curtis, I’m to run a little experiment with you because something you just mentioned, Jared, a lot of our clients are B2B, right? And they’re serving B2B buyers. And so I would ask, you know, when this was happening and clients that were had gone all in on LinkedIn and now they see the throttle, they’re like, wow, Jesus, isn’t worth it anymore. And you just run a quick math problem and you say, Curtis, you can answer real. How many new clients could you get this month to make a significant impact on your business?

How many would you need?

Curtis Hays (10:08.718)
One.

Tom Nixon (10:09.423)
Okay, one. Could you take 10? Right. So why are we chasing 5000 impressions when 300 will do 300 might be too many might be played. I know it’s a numbers game, but it’s not always a numbers game, Curtis. It’s a quality game over quantity. And I’d rather have my clients niche so far down that they are talking to just a very discrete audience of buyers than going chasing 10 to 1000s of internet fame and viral posts.

Curtis Hays (10:12.684)
No.

Tom Nixon (10:39.458)
ala TikTok.

Jared (10:40.959)
I had a post today about that. This shouldn’t be the only tactic that people have, right? This is a motion in the overall strategy that aids in everything else that you’re doing. And if you think about it through that lens, I think it’s a lot easier to digest the fact that you’re not going to have as many impressions as you did a year, year and a half ago, right? Put your ego to the side because it’s the ego that’s pissing people off right now. That’s it. Right. It’s still a social media platform. So if they put that to the side and understand that there’s

Tom Nixon (11:04.015)
Yeah.

Jared (11:10.751)
I’ve got all these other motions in play. I’m going to conferences, I’m networking, I got an email play, I got a DM straight, all this stuff. This is just making sure that you stay top of mind with all the people that you’re communicating with.

Tom Nixon (11:23.545)
Curtis real quick again, not to throw you under the bus or put you on the spot, but I just remember there was a time where concurrently you were texting me something like, hey, do you want to help share this? My reach is horrible. And then like literally two hours later, hey, I got a lead from a guy who’s been following me on LinkedIn. I’ve known him for years. He saw our podcast. Remember? So you’re complaining about reach, but you’re actually achieving the outcome.

Curtis Hays (11:43.874)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (11:48.3)
Yep. Yeah. No, and it’s true. Like, I think I fell into that trap when we first started the podcast two years ago, which was right before I feel like the major change happened. And we were on every post getting the numbers you mentioned, Jared, like 3000, 4000 impressions on the video content, the shorts from the podcast, announcing, you know, new episodes and those types of things. And then it was pretty much overnight. Everything went to like 300, 400.

And it was deflating. it’s hard to, especially me, a numbers guy, to look at those numbers and be like, and I’m putting in all this work and investing all this time to do this marketing activity. But yet at the end of the day, like it’s all about what Tom’s saying, the right people, seeing your content, getting to know you. And we’ve talked about this before. We’ve got a client who jumped on the second call with the two decision makers and basically kicked off the call.

talking about the episodes, he was asking some questions and relating to some of the episodes he had watched. And we realized real quickly in that call, it was already a done deal, because he spent a few hours consuming our content. And that’s there’s the content that sold him. We didn’t have to sell to the two decision makers. It was already done internally. So the I think that’s one of the things that people don’t realize is we’ve been so focused on the sort of the Legion component. And maybe I’m getting ahead here, Tom, but like,

marketing is to generate leads and what I’ve come to realize over the last couple years is that the marketing can actually help to accelerate the pipeline and accelerates the pipeline by educating and entertaining or you know whatever it’s doing to that audience to get them to know and like and trust you as a person as a brand whatever you are and if it comes from an owner like what you’re doing Jared even better and

Jared (13:25.525)
Yes.

Curtis Hays (13:44.748)
You know, here, once it gets into sales, well, it’s an easier job for sales, you’re getting right to pricing, or you’re getting right to, you know, some integration issues or those types of things, just to check the boxes to say that this is going to be a good decision. They don’t need to be convinced of this platform over this platform. So it’s all about removing that friction.

Jared (14:05.025)
Yeah, the buyer, mean, it’s, it’s, following the new buyer journey. The buyer journey is very different today than it was 10 years ago. It’s very different today than it was five years ago. Right. So as long as we continue to adapt to that buyer journey and knowing that buyers don’t want to have conversations with people anymore, they want to do their research. And if we can give them an opportunity on LinkedIn or whatever social media channel you choose to do their research along with the website. Like we want them to be 85 % of the way there by the time they reach out and say, Hey, I’m ready to talk.

Curtis, exactly like you said, and there’s a good chance that your competitors aren’t doing this. Right. So it’s a cheat code and you’re already a leg up on the competitors that may, they may be spreading.

Tom Nixon (14:47.305)
And by the time I always like to this by the time the prospective purchaser is in market, they’ve already done all their research, right? And they’ve whittled down the shortlist. And if you get out in advance of that, here’s the whole point of constant content is that if you get out in front of that and educate that market, entertain that market, influence that market to the point where now they’re in market.

There might not even be a shortlist. There might not even be any vetting because they’ve already sold on you. And that’s why I love the way that this, that same LinkedIn post concludes. say, so yes, reach is down, but influence is still up for grabs. Right? So you say there’s three things that you could do as a, as a result, either you can throw gas on your organic content with some ad dollars. You can take your ball and go home quit, or you can stay the course and use that cheat code.

code that 99 % of people miss. Consistent executive lead content. And obviously you’re advocating for number three.

Jared (15:49.589)
Yeah, for sure. mean, I don’t want to talk to number two. I’ll talk to number one because we do thought leader ads too, but you got to have an organic strategy if you’re going to do the thought leader component to

Tom Nixon (15:52.911)
Right.

Tom Nixon (16:00.283)
What is relentless that word that I hear you use? What does relentless mean to you? Because I give some context in terms of how much of an owner’s time that this is going to. Obviously, they need someone like you to kind of fulfill all this. But what what are we talking about? One post a week, one post a day.

Jared (16:15.657)
I mean, for us, there we go. That wasn’t good for us. I would say we do three minimum of three a week. Like I I’ve heard people say you should be posting every single day. I mean, I don’t think you need to post every single day. I post usually four or five times a week, from my own account. but I also am a co-founder of a small company. We have.

My me, myself, my two co-founders, two full time and then six. So, you know, we have a little over 10 employees. I’m not a CEO of a 50 million, a hundred million dollar company that has time to do this. Right. This is like, when I say relentless, like part of that is like build putting, this is a lifestyle. Like noticing content in every step that you take and jotting that down and making sure that you can remember that. Right. Cause you.

You know, if you don’t write it down, you’re going to forget what that post was about. So CEOs don’t have time to do that. So unless you have a system in place internally as an organization, like for us, we help, one of our offerings is we help build the system, the content creation system internally for organizations with a coach. So they need to have a coach internally. They can run this process and make it easy on the executive, make it easy on the CEO. Don’t depend on the CEO to give you more than an hour a month to do this, because if you do, it’s not going to work.

Tom Nixon (17:42.51)
Yeah.

Jared (17:42.766)
so that’s, guess when I say relentless, that’s it’s kind all of that together.

Tom Nixon (17:47.437)
Yeah. But this is another thing, Curtis, going back, tell your former self who got discouraged at one point, because you do a great job of taking one piece of content, say a 35 minute podcast episode. And obviously that’s an audio podcast, but then it also becomes a long form video on YouTube. You chop it up into shorts, right? So there’s a number of shorts. Those get very well consumed. We use those shorts to post on LinkedIn. So you and I both post a single episode multiple times on LinkedIn.

We have a newsletter that goes out. I have a newsletter that goes out. I have a website. goes out. You have a website. It goes out. I’ve met. If you went back in time and said, Curtis, sit down, let’s add all of these numbers up together and then decide if we’re having an effect. Quantifiably. And then we’d say, okay, yeah, that’s not bad. Then I would say, okay, now go back and look at that small number that you were fretting about that listened to the entire episode. That’s your prospect base. They were willing to spend 35 minutes of their time.

to sit down and listen to an entire episode, completely distraction free and hear everything you think on a topic. I mean, what is that worth? Right? So there’s quality and quantity all wrapped up to this relentless approach. And I know you’re an advocate now, Curtis. So I didn’t mean to.

Curtis Hays (18:58.924)
No, the other thing I’ve come to realize too is that not everybody’s in market to buy from you right now. And so this relentless posting and then having this content live in perpetuity, whether it’s on LinkedIn or whether it’s on YouTube or wherever, that once somebody does come into market, they have a place to go and they can find all that content or they’ve been what we’ve called these lurkers, right, Tom? Where they’re consuming the content, they’re not commenting.

They’re not liking, they’re just consuming it and somewhere down the line, they’re going to have a problem that they think you might be able to help them solve. And then you get that email or that phone call or that message in app that says, hey, I’ve been following your content and I’m at a new company now and we’ve got a problem I think you can help with.

Tom Nixon (19:52.333)
Yeah, that prospect will have been then completely educated as to what you think, what you do, how you do it, why you care. They if they’re still listening and still reading, they’re probably now engaged to the point where they fairly convinced that you’re an expert, right? So the phone call outreach is and hey, Tom, I’m putting together a short list of agencies. I want to know if you want to be on the bid list. It’s something like, hey, Tom, we need to hire an agency to do this. Would you talk to my founder today? That type of thing, which goes back to

The other posts that I wanted to touch on Jared was where you cover the whole concept of recency bias. Why is that important when it comes to this idea of being a relentless content creator?

Jared (20:33.439)
Yeah. So if you think, I want to go back to what Curtis said, I mean, only what’s the numbers are, that’s the larger market formula, right? 3 % of people are in market, hands are in the air, pain aware, solution seeking. You know, I think it’s like 37 % are pain aware, but they’re not solution seeking. And then the rest don’t realize they have a problem yet. Most of the cold outreach that we see, that we get spammed with every single day is just focusing on trying to get that 3 % of people, but there’s not a lot.

out there right now that other than this, that is focusing on that group that may be paying aware, but their hands aren’t in the area. So how do you stay in front of those people? And you have to do it through consistent content. used to work at, Cranes Chicago business and I was in ad sales there, some time back. And, know, I remember I would have people that would come to me and say advertisers and say, we want to do a full page ad in Cranes and spend $20,000 on.

And I would ask them, what’s the purpose of that? They’re like, well, to bring in new business. I say, okay, well, how about you take that $20,000 and you spread it out with a bunch of quarter page ads, page ads over six, you know, additions, whatever. Right. Because you never know that person may not need you on the first four, but they’re going to need you on five. And if they see you, it’s going to be that, you know, I saw your ad today and you know, I need this. it, I didn’t need it last week, but I need it now.

And that’s just what recency bias is, is like, we remember the last two or three solutions to what we’re looking for. I like, I have friends that are, that do certain, their roles, whether their company, they’re selling a certain service, right? If I haven’t talked to those friends or if I haven’t seen those friends in eight months, nine months, and I talked to somebody that says, Hey Jared, do you know anybody that does X, Y, Z?

I’m going to, unfortunately for that friend, I’m not going to remember them. I’m going to remember the last two or three people that I talked to about this. And I may pick one or two of those and say, I know a few people that you should talk to. Unfortunately for that friend that I haven’t seen or heard from in the last, however many months they’re as so well, because you know, they’re not staying in front of me. So this is like, it’s, it’s, I forget the phrase. It’s a, if you’re visible when they don’t need you, you’ll be, they’ll be, you’ll be visible when they do need you. Right. Is what it comes down to.

Tom Nixon (22:31.321)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (22:53.443)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And again, I’m an English major, so this math may be all wrong, but that one and done approach that when your time at Korean in Chicago, or you just let’s say you wanted to see if podcasting works. So you record one podcast episode, you put it out once and then the the math of trying to hit somebody in that 3 % with their hand up ready to go is really difficult. But if you continue to do that and now we’ve been in this doing this podcast for two years, right? Every week, there’s a new episode that

3 % the recency bias people that is just kind of compounds with interest. So now you’ve built up all this time and now just the singular ad that was two years ago is done. But every other point in the cadence continues to make an impact on somebody in that 3 % or somebody who will eventually move into that 3%. Question.

Curtis Hays (23:43.566)
Jared, yeah, so what do you recommend there as when you’re working with a new company? I don’t know if you’re going to call them a campaign or when you get some somebody set up, what’s the minimum time that you want them to be engaged with you to creating content? Is it three months? Is it six months? Is it a year? Because we’ll have clients who want to do a one month to three month campaign. And I’m now saying that’s, yeah, it’s not enough time.

Jared (24:06.411)
Who would say no to that? I would say no. Yeah. If somebody says, I want to try this out for two or three months to see how it goes. First off, I want to know what, what they’re looking for. Why do they want to do this? Right? What I want to hear is I understand the value as a CEO or the founder of this company to put myself out there and create this content that helps accelerate the sales funnel that helps keep me and my company top of mind that helps show my personality with consistent high quality content.

That’s what I want to do. Right. If I get people saying, I want to generate leads ASAP from this, that is not an ideal client for us because that is, there’s no easy button to this. Maybe the easy button is thought leader ads. If you’ve got lead magnets that you can tie back to some of the content, and actually have an offer that makes sense other than just selling. But I would say I tell everybody, every single person going into this.

Your mindset needs to be at least six months in an honest moment, probably a year or more. Right. So they know going into it, if they just say that I don’t want to do it, I let’s try this out for two months. It’s, not going to work. And I’ll tell them that upfront.

Tom Nixon (25:15.151)
I think I know where our hearts collectively are and truly are in our minds and I wouldn’t even advocate for six months to a year. I would say this is a lifestyle change. You’re going to do this like you’re not going to lose 50 pounds in six weeks and then be done and keep it off. You need to consider whether you’re willing to invest. This is your new way of life to do things from here on out. We might change the tactics and we might change the medium or whatever, but this is what you’re doing now. And if that’s not the case with you, then you should probably go find someone who has an easy button.

Curtis Hays (25:16.994)
Mm-hmm.

Jared (25:42.837)
Yeah. One, one of the things that’s a great point. And I always like to equate it like to the gym, right? Because it literally is like, can equate it to going to the gym. The first time you go, you’re going to walk around and I’ve used this before. You’re going to walk around and you’re going to feel like an idiot because you don’t know what to do. And you’re just going to assume and tell yourself that everybody’s looking at you. Everybody’s judging me. Everybody’s laughing at me right now. And you do your workout.

Tom Nixon (25:44.941)
Jared (26:12.427)
And then you leave and you’re like, thank God that was over. Now you can either not come back the next day because of the false narratives that you created in your head, or you can go back. You’re a little bit smarter, right? You know, a little bit more about what to do. You feel a little bit better. Then you come back day three and then it becomes a process and a routine. And you realize all those narratives you created at the beginning are completely false. You work out and you get in shape after a year. Are you going to stop working out? Like, yeah, I feel good. I think I’m done. No, you’re not right.

Tom Nixon (26:39.311)
All set now.

Jared (26:42.111)
You’re going, you have to keep doing it like long-term. so I like the fact that you said that it needs to be more than a year because it does need to be more than a year, know, and there’s going to be ups and downs along that, right? And you’re going to learn a lot throughout that process. but it should be, it’s, it’s a long-term, like, like we said, lifestyle.

Tom Nixon (26:45.273)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (27:00.493)
Years ago, I was so inspired by somebody who posted on Facebook back when I cared about Facebook, but she posted up. woke up this morning. I decided to say out loud, I’m a runner. And she went running that day for the first day. And then I ran into her like three years later and she was doing marathons. just was felt great, look great or whatever. But the whole point is you need to wake up and say, I’m a content creator. And that’s just who I am now, whether you’re getting Jared’s help or somebody’s help to do it. That’s that needs to be the mindset. So

Let me ask you this question so that content doesn’t become a show about nothing or yada yada yada. What do you think is the effect the most effective forms of content? And I don’t mean you mentioned video and audio or whatever, but in terms of what does the content actually do for let’s say a B2B audience in a perfect client for you, the founder.

Jared (27:51.455)
Yeah. So I think that it does a few different things and I would go and answer that with just talking more about the pillars that we help our clients create. Like the foundation of what these pillars are and what the purpose of each one of them is. Like there’s usually four. One is domain expertise. Like we want you to talk about your expertise, what you do, how you help companies solve challenges that they have. Right? So let’s talk about that. So your expertise needs to be out there, right? The website can help out with a lot of that too. So.

That’s there, but it can’t be all that. Like that could be a big chunk of it, but it’s also got to be thought leadership. Like let’s have a point of view on things going on in your industry. It may not directly affect your domain expertise or what your company does, but it’s showcasing that you are a thought leader in the space and you know what you’re talking about. Right? So those are kind of the first two that are more on the professional side.

But then there’s the other two. And I think this is where a lot of people miss. And this is the stuff that humanizes you, that builds trust, that gets people to really like you. talk about no like and trust. One is your story. Like how did you get from where you were to where you are today? All the landmines that you stepped on, all the failures that you had, what did you learn from all that stuff? That is the stuff that resonates with people and truly builds trust. So tell your story. Like there’s, we all have stories. Like we all have a million different stories.

Like start to tell that. And then the last one, and this is probably the one that people push away the most, but I think that we’re in a different world. You know, you’ve heard people talk about this isn’t Facebook. This is LinkedIn. I think it’s more married today, post pandemic than it ever was. And I’m not saying you throw up a picture of your cat on LinkedIn and say, check out my cute cat, but let’s talk about passions that you do outside the workplace that we can tie back.

to the business, right? That’s part of your story. That’s part of your journey. And these are things that you love. have clients that take cars apart, put them back together. We have a client in Australia that’s a seaweed farmer on the weekend. You know, we’ve had clients that run Ironman. like all that stuff together creates like you, talked about earlier, like I jumped on the call with you. I already knew who you were. I was already sold on you because of everything that you’ve talked about within your content.

Tom Nixon (30:05.519)
Yep. The only thing I would, I think it’s perfect by the way, but maybe consider adding in the storytelling pillar. You can also tell other people’s stories too. Either people that you’ve met, things that you’ve learned, client, you know, client came in the other day and you know, threw his phone on the desk said, I’m never using that thing again. What he didn’t understand was, you know, that type of thing. just really resonates. And I know Chris, the whole reason we have this podcast is because you wanted to do some storytelling.

Curtis Hays (30:31.682)
Yeah, well, you convinced me to do the podcast. Forget to do storytelling. It your idea. Yeah, Jared, what I did was I asked Tom to write case studies for some of my clients. They had really good stories I wanted to share. And then he interviewed a client and came back and said, hey, it was a great conversation I had, but it was 90 minutes long. I don’t know how we turn this into one blog post. It’s probably four blog posts, but it probably shouldn’t be blog posts. And then came back and said, what if we interviewed?

Tom Nixon (30:34.861)
yeah, what a idea.

Jared (30:43.392)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (31:01.378)
Mario and what if it was a podcast and what if and what if and what if and then what if became let’s do it. So yeah.

Jared (31:05.067)
Yeah.

Jared (31:10.463)
Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it’s fine. Toot your horn. If you have stories to tell your clients have stories to tell about how about the work you do case studies or whatever. Yeah. Put that stuff out there too. That, I guess that would probably for me fall more into the domain expertise a little bit just because it’s your company, but that is the stuff that resonates with people because they want to hear from people that are, that were in their shoes that were making the decision. Do I want to work with these guys?

Curtis Hays (31:25.805)
Mm-hmm.

Jared (31:37.565)
Okay, I would like to talk to some of you or hear from somebody that is has gone through the decision making process, what they felt at the beginning and what they feel now.

Tom Nixon (31:45.369)
Yep. Well, Curtis, I’m glad you met me before you met Jared because I, but you never have gotten into the picture here because he thinks it says all the same things I do, which is good. good. So you’re smart enough to cover yours up. speaking of podcasts and toot your own horn, you have your own podcast here, don’t you?

Curtis Hays (31:45.516)
Yep, exactly.

Curtis Hays (31:51.936)
Hey.

Jared (31:55.307)
We have the same haircut too, right? We all do? Yeah, we’re good. Perfect.

Curtis Hays (31:57.686)
Yeah, we all do. Yeah.

Jared (32:06.337)
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, it’s a podcast that does nothing for my business at all. If anything, it probably deters people from ever wanting to have a conversation with me. Uh, sorry. My phone is ringing. Um, but. All Hold on one second. Sorry. So of course my phone goes off and anything that I had a YouTube channel opens at all starts. So hopefully we can edit that part out. Sorry. Um, yeah. So I’ll go back to, yeah. So.

Curtis Hays (32:31.01)
Yeah, I’ll cut it out.

Jared (32:36.401)
I have a podcast with two buddies of mine. It’s probably never going to bring us any clients. If anything, it probably deter people from wanting to work with me, but it’s called Businesses Bullshit. It is a podcast with myself, James Hornick, who’s the CRO of a company called Hirewell, and then John Serakis, who founded a company called Oyova, their marketing agency as well. And it started from us three just kind of going out, having drinks.

and just bitching about everything that was going on in the business world. And we realized like, why don’t we record this and just have these conversations? So basically what it is, is we pick a topic each episode. We’re 17 in, so very early, 17 episodes. And we pick a topic and we honestly just dump on it. You know, whether that’s cold outreach is BS and we talk about things that we can’t stand. It’s probably a lot of the stuff that people think, but they don’t actually say out loud. It’s definitely a rated R podcast. I wouldn’t have your kids around if you were.

you were listening to it, but it’s fun. It’s in, we don’t care if nobody listens to it because we still have a blast doing.

Tom Nixon (33:40.473)
It sounds like kind of how smart list started, which of course the whole world listens to now, but it’s like just we had nothing to do during COVID. So let’s just get on a zoom call and talk and now look at them. So Curtis, any final thoughts as we kind of round into the home stretch here?

Curtis Hays (33:58.282)
Well, I was going to mention I tried kind of one of the more personal LinkedIn posts that Jared, you were talking about and recorded a video of myself in the garden a couple of weeks ago, just kind of walking around the garden. I tried to tie it back to marketing a little bit. But one of the things I noticed with it was I actually got some likes from people who aren’t in my network. So was like LinkedIn did do something with that, like took it outside of my

Jared (34:25.505)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (34:27.882)
ecosystem and the people who normally follow me and put it out to some new audiences, probably because it wasn’t marketing content.

Jared (34:33.941)
Yeah. Second, second degree, second degree engagements. Good. If once you start to see that, like it’s, it’s definitely a good thing.

Curtis Hays (34:38.658)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (34:42.838)
Yeah. So, yeah, it was a fun thing to do. And honestly, it was super easy, which I was kind of playing awesome. Gary V, I think has launched a new book here recently and he’s been all over my social media and coming up in my feed on stuff. And, you know, it’s just this, I’ll keep saying this relentless pursuit of content marketing and like he’s got a phone or a camera on him, I would think 24 seven, except, except maybe when he’s sleeping.

But otherwise there is, he’s being recorded to everything that he does. And not that we need to go that far, but yeah, it was just like, Hey, why not just grab the phone, flip it around and walk around and talk. if people listen, great. If they don’t, who cares?

Jared (35:26.443)
Yep. I’ve started doing that for, some outreach DMS, take the dog out for a walk. Have a list of three people on the walk that I want to reach out to hold the phone up to super casual message to them, make an assumption that, know, they, this is, I assume that this is the challenge you’re having. If you ever want to wrap through some of this stuff, let me know. And that’s it. There’s not like not sending them over a bunch of followups. It’s hyper personalized trying to cut through the noise. So I, I love the idea of just that, like holding the phone up and just shooting a video that way.

Tom Nixon (35:57.251)
Yeah. It, my final thought is just the relentless pursuit of the word relentless, because if you’re going to get going on this, if you’re not already doing it, you have to trust that it’s working, even if the naked indicators aren’t telling you the story that you want to hear. Right. So just keep at it. it find ways to keep at it. So you need to either find someone like Jared who can do a lot of this for you, or you need to find something that you will get energized to do. And it could be going on.

walk with the dog with the video. could be writing for me. It’s writing, you know, or podcasting. but figure out what they say, figure out what you love to do and you’ll never work a day in your life. So same thing goes for content. Yep.

Jared (36:37.899)
Yeah. Got to have fun doing it. Got to have fun doing it. If you, if you viewed this as like a chore or something you can’t stand to do, it’s going to be an uphill battle for you.

Tom Nixon (36:45.967)
Yep, the counter to that is though George Costanza might say when you look annoyed all the time, people think you’re busy. Alright, well, I’m going to go look annoyed. So people think I’m busy and get back to what it is that I do for my day job. We’ll you do the same. Jared. We appreciate you coming on. Maybe we’ll have you back if you ever want to share some of the deeper thoughts on Seinfeld or content development. See you all next time on Bullhorns and Bullseyes.

Jared (36:53.313)
Yes. It’s great.

Jared (37:09.365)
Yeah. Giddy giddy up.