Content IP As A Marketing Strategy

In this episode of "How To Sell More," we're joined by Brendan Hufford, a digital marketing strategist with extensive experience, to explore how storytelling and customer insights generate demand.

• The strategic use of storytelling to establish meaningful connections with your audience.
• The crucial role of identifying and understanding customer pain points in securing a unique market position and driving demand.
• The critical importance of ongoing customer engagement in ensuring product evolution and market relevance.

Brendan's background as an educator has equipped him with the unique ability to simplify complex marketing concepts into practical strategies. His transition into the digital marketing sphere has been marked by significant contributions to the SaaS industry's growth. His current projects, Growth Sprints and the ALL IN community demonstrate his dedication to advancing companies within the content and SEO domains.

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Links to This Episode

• Apple Podcast
• Spotify
• YouTube
• Audible

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Key Takeaways

• The Power of Naming the Problem - Creating a unique identifier for a common problem can capture attention and drive action. Brendan discusses the concept of 'sleep divorce' as an example of how a relatable term can resonate deeply with an audience, highlighting the struggle and the emotional weight of the issue, leading to a greater willingness to seek solutions.
• Content Intellectual Property as a Marketing Strategy - Brendan emphasizes the creation of content intellectual property (IP) as a cornerstone for effective marketing. By developing unique concepts that speak directly to the problems of the audience, businesses can create demand where there might not have been any previously.
• Customer Proximity and Market Adaptability - Maintaining close proximity to customers is essential for understanding evolving needs and pain points. Brendan highlights the importance of continual engagement and interviews to keep the business aligned with the market, especially as it changes.

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Top 3 Reasons to Listen

Expert SEO Insights: Brendan Hufford brings years of SEO expertise, providing listeners with actionable advice on how to leverage SEO for sustainable business growth.

For the Aspiring Thought Leader: This episode is a goldmine for anyone looking to position themselves as a thought leader in their industry by using innovative content and SEO strategies.

Overcoming Marketing Challenges: Listeners will gain insights into overcoming common marketing challenges and how to turn them into opportunities for growth.

Follow Brendan Hufford on Social

Website: https://brendanhufford.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebrendanhufford/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendanHufford

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanhufford/

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More About Today's Guest, Brendan Hufford

Growth Sprints, SEO for the Rest of Us, Exploring how SaaS companies actually get customers

While teaching full-time for over a decade, Brendan Hufford built and sold two online businesses. Frustrated at the state of SEO education, he created and launched SEO for the Rest of Us in 2019. Since then he’s helped over 6k subscribers and 1k customers navigate the world of SEO.

He’s worked with enterprise SaaS and software companies (leading the SEO team at two agencies), and growth at ActiveCampaign.

Most recently ActiveCampaign, Brendan:

• Grew traffic to revenue-focused content +245%
• Increased glossary page traffic +308%
• Millions in revenue directly attributed to his work, including building 70+ free tools and templates
• Revised all core product pages and pushing (for the first time in company history) to rank for email marketing, marketing automation and CRM.

Again, frustrated with the state of SaaS marketing agencies, he launched Growth Sprints in 2021 to help SaaS companies navigate the new game of content and SEO.

Those clients have seen results such as:

• SaaS company added a HALF-MILLION users after a year of failed content efforts
• SaaS company added 50,000 new users in six months
• SaaS company went from 0 → 518+ referring domains (with ZERO outreach)
• SaaS company added $1.6M in annual traffic value
• After historically flat performance, this SaaS client 4Xed traffic and increased MQLs by 2,750%

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A Transcription of The Talk

Mark Drager: So Brendan, you are well known, of course, as an SEO leader, and you've talked about myths of SEO, about all the detailed stuff. And earlier, before we hit record, I was like, are we going to talk about SEO? Or like, "Fuck yes." I don't know if you want me to say that out loud.

Brendan Hufford: Where you can say, man, it's a distribution channel, right? Like, it's not the thing. The industry gets super romantic about it, and it's like, I'm just not. I'm really good at it, and I'm just not romantic about it. Like, I'm very agnostic, especially as somebody who has bridged from marketer to seller, right? A lot of marketers never have to sell, so they don't understand why the stuff they're cramming in their SEO blogs or their emails doesn't compel anybody to buy our stuff. And it's like, because you're just passing off leads, and then the sales team has to try and make something happen.

Mark Drager: I know what you're passionate about and what you're really focused on with growth sprints at your agency. A lot of the work you do, as you just mentioned, is not enough to just get attention. We know this in awareness advertising, right? Like, "Oh, great. So you got awareness. So you got views, okay? Or with SEO? Like, oh, we have this page traffic. Okay, we got these rankings, okay." It excites all the technical people that US business owners work with. But what we care about is like, "How much money are we making?" And so you're in a really unique position because you have this other approach, this slightly different approach. Walk me through this idea of content IP. What do you mean by it? What's the power of it? Help us understand how we can leverage this.

Brendan Hufford: Great question. So content IP kind of happened because I saw two different things happening in the world. One was in my world of working with SaaS and software companies, I saw a lot of them naming their category, creating these super corny names that were overcomplicated because they all wanted to pretend that they weren't just email marketing software. They wanted to be customer experience automation, or—it's just things marketers do when they are bored, I guess, or don't have enough work. That was happening in the world. And then I also came upon this thing called a conceptual scoop. Have you ever heard of a conceptual scoop before?

Mark Drager: I have not.

Brendan Hufford: Okay, so this is going to be really exciting. You have heard of conceptual scoops before because you have heard of the Great Resignation, and you have heard of quiet quitting. What happens is these are conceptual scoops where a long time ago, journalists needed insider information or some sort of data to back up a scoop. Now we're seeing journalists kind of zooming out and going, "Oh, wait, I see this large macro trend happening, where we have the Great Resignation." And all these people—which is just such wonderful wordplay. That really matters, the words. You have to spend time on the words.

So we have the Great Resignation. And it's like, well, now people aren't leaving their jobs. They're just quite quitting. They're staying there for security, but they're just doing the bare minimum, right? They're tired of their employers asking them to work 90 hours a week, things like that. So they notice these conceptual scoops happening in the world, and then they give names to them. And it took off like wildfire. The reason it took off was that a bunch of people heard those words and were like, "Yes, that is what's happening. I feel that every day in my day-to-day life." When you give somebody words for a thing that they have been seeing happen and can't describe in long form—like I just gave you that short rant about being tired of having to work 80 hours a week or whatever else, no benefits—they now had words for what was happening. So everybody latched on to it and ran with it.

And the same is true in your business. When you really understand your customers and your clients, and you give them words or phrases—we can get into how to do this in a second—but you give them the words or phrases to describe the problems that they have been describing to you a long form for years. And as sellers, maybe a little bit different than marketers, you have the closest possible proximity to them at a moment of decision-making. Right? You can do this probably better than anybody.

Mark Drager: And so maybe because of my background in creative and strategy, marketing, and advertising—and at the end of the day, I'm a strategist—I work with business owners to help them through some of the stuff you're talking about. But, you know, earlier I said like, "Isn't this a direct response?" We were just kind of joking about that because I come from a corporate communications and advertising background. The more exposed I got to the modern version of direct response, or online sales, or info products, or whatever you want to call it, the more I was like, "Oh, it's just shifting from solution-focused to problem-focused. It's just trying to get in the heads of the people we're communicating with." And rather than "me, me, me, us, us, us, we can, we can, we can, we're the best, we're the best, we're the best," it's, "You have this problem that we are aware of. We have a solution for you, and we can help you with it. We can save you time, we can save you money, and we can get you better results." Is this what you're talking about with the idea of content IP, or is this a step further?

Brendan Hufford: Sometimes there's an interim solution; there's a way they've been solving it so far. And simply saying, like, "We can help you do it better," or whatever else, isn't compelling enough to get them to change. We're humans. When we find things that work, for all sorts of adaptive evolutionary reasons, we don't really want to change. A great example of this in the non tech world is people with sleep apnea. For people who are having trouble sleeping at night, and snore super loud, you're familiar with what I'm talking about, you know.

Mark Drager: When I was heavier, I had some issues with my sleep as well.

Brendan Hufford: I'm a big dude. But what happens is, that people often snore really loud, they wake up many times, and they stop breathing throughout the night. And a common solution is to get a breathing machine. In a lot of cases, it's this giant, over-the-head astronaut-looking thing with a tube that's incredibly loud. And a lot of times, it's like, "Look, if you just get this surgery, it'll mostly fix it. And then you don't need the machine." But surgery feels expensive and scary, even though it is the best possible solution. But why would you do that when you can just get this machine?

Mark Drager: Isn't the better solution to just diet and exercise and lose weight?

Brendan Hufford: It could be, but people have breathing issues. It's not always just big people, right? So, the thing is, maybe a year or so ago, I heard a radio commercial. The guy doing the ad read used a unique phrase that I had never heard before that moved me in a way that I didn't think I cared so much about this issue. He said that a lot of people who suffer from this end up getting a sleep divorce, where they end up sleeping in a separate room from their spouse or their partner, and they lose all of that connection. That term, sleep divorce, is extremely triggering and volatile. It's also the reality for many people who can describe, in long form, issues like having to sleep in a separate room, not being able to travel because it's too loud, or whatever else. Sleep divorce is what moves people to be like, "I'm willing to spend more, take on a bigger risk, maybe do something outside of my comfort zone," because I have named the problem. Prior to that, people could describe it as, "Yeah, they sleep in a separate room." But "sleeping in a separate room" does not move people to action the same way "sleep divorce" does. I think that a lot, we would get a lot more benefit out of focusing on the problems and then naming them, creating true IP, and intellectual property. And then, regardless of the channel, whether you're using this in your SEO articles or in emails, postcards, billboards, I don't care, any kind of marketing—when you have that IP and you're the one championing this name for this problem, customers and clients are like, "Shut up and take my money." Because you understand me better than anybody else. There's a truth in marketing and sales we've known for a long time, right? When they feel like you can define the problem better than them, they choose you. I think this gets us there, and it's something that a lot of people have missed for a long time.

Mark Drager: Yeah, this is amazing. I hadn't heard that term before. And I think the idea of content IP is great. With the clients that we've worked with over the years, I've always explained to business owners that there's a certain stage where you have to professionalize aspects of your business as you're scaling, growing, and moving up. You may start by professionalizing, let's say, your delivery or the backend, or your ERP system, or you may be professionalizing your leadership team, thinking, "Ah, we've gotten by this far, but we need to start hiring a real CEO or a real CFO," and you're going to professionalize parts of your business. People come to us because they're ready to professionalize their brand, their sales, their marketing, their positioning, and their copy. But I've always seen this idea that at a certain point, you have to stand for something. You have to create something with white space that's uniquely yours. That's what you're describing right now. You know, I was on a call yesterday with an amazing company and leader. But as we broke down all of their 12-month growth plan, it was either extremely generic or leveraging someone else's brand. They were getting leads through affiliates and other things, but there was nothing that I could grab onto to say, "This is yours. This is what you stand for. This is your message, your focus, your USP." That's why they're talking to us because we're going to help them develop it. But I've never thought of it as this idea of content IP, other than just at a certain point to me, every brand needs to hit a stage where they have to do this because you can't just be like everyone else. Is there a stage? Is there a size? Is it a mindset? How early should people be grabbing onto this idea and developing this in-house?

Brendan Hufford: Look, I'll be honest with you, this can very much feel like a nice to have. You can be a B plus, a better solution, or a midtier player for a long time and be fine. But eventually, a crunch is going to come in whatever industry like we saw during the pandemic with restaurants, and we see it now with software. Whatever you do, where you make money, at some point, that industry is going to get crushed by macroeconomic forces, political things, AI, or whatever else—things are happening in the world that are changing the market. And whenever you have—this is a tech term—but like, when you have product market fit, where it's like, "Hey, we are well aligned. Our product is so well aligned with the market that even if we don't get any new customers, we'll continue gaining revenue because our existing customers keep using our product more and more." The problem is if the product doesn't change but the market does, you lose that fit. So, constantly having your ear to the ground and having conversations with customers, finding out what their pain points are and how they're changing over time is so important. I would argue it's the core skill set. I don't care how good you are at some channel of marketing, or how good you are at closing. The one thing that makes you a good marketer, closer, entrepreneur, or business owner in general is that you're willing to go above and beyond to stay in close proximity to the customer. I joke a lot with my clients, who are typically marketers in big software companies, that your career is going to live and die by how close you can stay to the customer. As a marketer, can you stay closer than the product team? Can you stay closer than the sales team the support team or the customer success team? Usually, marketers are fifth on that list out of five. But if you can be number one, if you can become this source of truth in your organization, your company, your business, for the customer, what you end up doing—and this is so fun—is like an old-school sales technique they use, especially at gyms. When they're selling a membership, they never sit across the table from you. They pull the chairs around to the same side of the table. It's just physically like, "We are on the same team." I love that it's hard to do virtually, right? But you can kind of do it with this IP, right? Like, "Look, I exist to help you solve this problem. The only reason my business exists is to help you navigate this one thing." And eventually, over time, it's like, "Well, they have these other problems. Can we name those too?" So, who's doing this well?

Mark Drager: I'm sorry to cut you off. I'm just so curious. Like, are there a few examples that we might be aware of, just so we can visualize exactly what you're talking about?

Brendan Hufford: I love this. Okay, so part of why I'm beating this drum—and this isn't a copout answer—but part of why I'm beating this drum is I don't think a lot of people are doing this super well. I think that it is really an opportunity, which is why I've started pushing it. It's why I was like, "Hey, I'm doing SEO and all this keyword research stuff. And I'm like, this is cool at capturing the existing demand, but I'm constantly at the whim of the market." Versus, "Let me create demand, right? Where maybe that didn't exist, especially if you do have something interesting or novel to sell, and maybe the market is like, 'I don't know about that yet.'" I'll give you one example that's like a consumer example, and maybe another consumer example would be Beardbrand. They did this thing—and this is where we get a little silly, but it resonated with me—they ran this whole campaign around scent confusion. So, don't laugh at me, Mark. But like,

Mark Drager: I'm just like, they're like, "Man..."

Brendan Hufford: Guys wear a hair product that smells like one thing, they put a different cologne on, they got some random deodorant, and you have these four competing smells. And it's just scent confusion. And I was like, "Oh, what if I did buy a cologne, a beard oil, and a hair product that all smelled the same?" And they were like, "Oh, we got that." And that has a hook.

Mark Drager: You got me. So, ingrain in someone the real problem, invent a wrapper that helps frame that real problem, and then immediately lead to this solution.

Brendan Hufford: Yeah, in the software world. There are a lot of companies that I think do this well. Some of them do it obviously better than others. But it's still exceedingly rare. We're still looking at a very small minority who are not just—they just—everybody generically talks about the same pain points of their audience. But like, do you really think that your team of five marketers is better than the other 30 companies' team of five marketers? Marginally, maybe?

Mark Drager: But I care more, and I work harder. And we have experience and we have our ear to the ground. All of that.

Brendan Hufford: I love that. Yeah, we're in lockstep with our customers—all these buzzwords, right? What's funny about that is that it's just a marginal benefit, stacking on top of things. And when you're willing to do what I've seen, even in my work with SparkToro, how close they're willing to get to the customer. And they're not only using—eating their own caviar, using their own platform for that sort of thing—but also the depth of customer interviews that are happening to figure out, "Who is this best for? How is it best for them?" All of that sort of stuff. Because eventually, being for—I worked at a company where it was like, everybody, every small business, ActiveCampaign, email marketing, everybody's our audience, every business owner should use ActiveCampaign. I'm like, "Yeah, but can we pick?" They're like, "Absolutely not. We're for everybody." And I'm like, "Oh, this is so hard," right? Like that sort of thing. But when you have that IP, the other benefit of this—and maybe the last benefit—is that you also become not just the spokesperson for your customer, but you become the place where the top talent wants to work. Not just the top marketers, salespeople, designers, whatever. But when you can define the problem for a customer base better than everybody else, everybody who's really good wants to come work for you. And that talent pipeline, I have found, is way more important than almost everything we've talked about today. It is what you will live and die by in a lot of cases—not just your proximity to the customer, but what that gets you, which is the best people. The people who are top of the world in their craft want to come do that at your business. And that changes everything.

Mark Drager: There are things from the past that this kind of reminds me of. For whatever reason. Are you familiar with Obvious Adams? I think it's Obvious Adams. It was written in, I think, the 1920s, and they interviewed him for an Evening Post article. But have you heard of this guy?

Brendan Hufford: No, no.

Mark Drager: So, back in the early days, I guess the 1910s or 1920s when advertising was starting to become a thing, there was this guy who wanted to work in the ad industry. So, he started in the mailroom, and he begged and begged to be moved up but to no avail. However, they noticed that this guy had an uncanny way of spotting the obvious, and they nicknamed him Obvious Adams. You can read his book, or listen to it. It's really quick. But what a great story and lesson for all of us because this guy got hired to be sent to places. For example, in one of the stories, he went to Atlanta where there were three store locations; one did really well, but the others didn't. He just walked up and down the street for a whole day, counting how many people went by. He was trying to answer the question: Why is this store doing well while another isn't? He determined that the entrance was not on the main street, it was on a 45-degree angle. Because of the direction that people walked on that side of the street if they were going up, they wouldn't see it, but if they were coming down, they would. The placement of the sign was what kept people out of the store. Now, you might say, 'Well, that was in the 1920s, and people are more sophisticated today.' But I think it's just a different channel with a different sign in a different place. I love that because it's so simple.

Mark Drager: The next thing that this reminded me of is like the early days of Mad Men, the show, when Don Draper says, 'It's toasted', referring to their cigarettes. And the client responds with 'But everything's toasted.' And he's like, 'Yeah, but no one else says it.' I think if you're listening to this, you may hear this idea of content IP, and what Brendan is suggesting, and you might think, 'Yeah, but I don't have anything special.' It's not that you don't have anything special; it's just that maybe you're not willing to say it. Or you might be so in your bubble that you don't even realize what you're sitting on. You could be sitting on the most amazing thing, and just no one is saying it, no one is talking about it, like the cigarette guy. Don Draper pulled out 'It's toasted' as if it's a unique feature. So, I think this is awesome.

Brendan Hufford: Yeah, the trick I give people a lot is if you want to get most of the way there, you can get really nerdy. You can learn jobs-to-be-done frameworks, how to do customer interviews, and all these things. And I think that's really valuable.

Mark Drager: Or you can just hire someone.

Brendan Hufford: Well, I like working with clients who have tried to do it themselves and then realize how much they value it. Not just in terms of outcomes but also in terms of saving themselves from the hassle of doing it. A lot of times, I tell people to read Chris Voss's 'Never Split the Difference.' Those are negotiation techniques. But it's really about getting to the heart of why a problem matters to someone. He gives you tools like mirroring and such, which allow you to delve deeper into the true pain points. Then you name those pain points, which makes everything else you do so much easier.

Mark Drager: One of my greatest strategies is I try to listen and write down every adjective, every word, the way someone describes stuff when I'm talking to them. Because you might say it one way, and then they ask you a question. You're like, 'Well, I didn't get that.' But I want to know what that question is or the different words they use. So this is amazing, man. I'm so happy that you were able to join us. I want to end off by asking the one question we ask every single guest. What is your number one tip or strategy for selling more?

Brendan Hufford: I'll try to give you a really quick framework for how to do this. Once you create this IP, and I'm assuming if somebody's listened this far, they're in, right? Really quickly, the way you do this is you create content around the problem. The first step is to address the roadblock that people encounter with the problem, which almost everybody skips. So, the problem, the roadblock, give them a template to solve the problem, like I just kind of did. I said read Chris Voss's book, talk to your customers, figure that out. Share a customer story of someone you've helped solve this problem with your IP. Then, share an interesting roundup of other people or companies they aspire to be. Tell them how that company or that person solves the problem. Those five steps will take you a long way.

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