Honest Marketing

Skyler Reeves: How to Stand Out in Content Marketing

• Honest Podcasts • Episode 51

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As we navigate the vast sea of content marketing, the question often arises: How do we rise above the noise and get noticed?

Answering this query is far from easy, but this episode is dedicated to providing you with some insights to tackle this challenge head-on.

I'm thrilled to welcome Skyler Reeves, the innovative founder and CEO of Ardent Growth, to explore this subject with us. 

With an unconventional background and unwavering passion for marketing, Skyler shares the strategies his team uses to help businesses stand out amidst a sea of competition. 

He also sheds light on the art of successful prospecting and tailoring our sales approach to provide more value to customers.

Make sure to catch Skyler's awesome tips on standing out in the world of content marketing. Hit up the full episode and give your marketing game a real boost!

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

  • Strategic prospecting and efficient pitching
  • The pitfalls of multitasking and the focus on throughput for individual customers
  • Creating a competitive advantage in the market through effective content marketing strategies

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And if you have a guest in mind who you think would be a great fit for this show, drop me a line at hello@honestpodcasts.com. 

Sklyer Reeves  [00:00:00]:

No one wins by trying to chase after their competitors. By definition, you're chasing. You win by making them chase after you. And the only way that you can make them chase after you is for you to chase after what's leading everything, which is the actual market.

Travis Albritton [00:00:17]:

Welcome back to the Honest marketing podcast, where you learn proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. I'm your host, Travis Albritton, and my guest today is Skyler Reeves. Skyler Reeves is the co founder of Ardent Growth, a marketing agency that works with other marketing agencies to help them establish just killer content marketing strategies that drive strategic goals for their business. And so in this episode, we cover a lot of topics. Definitely lean into the chapter markers and the timestamps to hop around if you want to, but really start off with just his origin story of jumping into marketing and how he transitioned into that. The specific things that they have done internally with their team to optimize for what he calls throughput or key deliverables for clients. If you're any kind of service oriented b two b space where you're always trying to think about how to best leverage your team members and really get the most out of what you can produce to get the best ROI in the mind of your clients, then that's going to be a great section for you. And then we go into their unique approach to developing content strategy.

Travis Albritton [00:01:19]:

How do you figure out what to talk about, who to talk to, and then choosing the right communication platforms to leverage in order to get strategic results and growth for your business. So definitely stick around to the very end where I give you my number one takeaway from my conversation with Skyler, as always. But here it is. Let's dive in. Well, Skyler, welcome to the Honest marketing podcast. Super happy to have you here and to dig into all the questions that I really want to ask you for my own selfish, you know, again, just thank you for being here.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:01:47]:

Thanks for having me on, Travis. Appreciate it.

Travis Albritton [00:01:48]:

So let's start off with just a little bit of context. Who you are, what you do, and then the work that you do at ardent growth.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:01:55]:

Yeah, so my name is Skyler Reeves. I'm the founder and CEO of Ardent growth. The work I do is varied. I tend to always try to find unique and novel problems, but the work that the company does specifically is tied around content marketing across whatever channel or media that we have to use to reach a targeted audience.

Travis Albritton [00:02:14]:

And how did you get into content marketing and the company you have now? Because this isn't your first stint in marketing. Like, you've had a track record what was kind of the origin of where you're at now in the business that you have now?

Sklyer Reeves  [00:02:27]:

Yeah. So I think in my mind, I don't think I came from an unconventional background, although some folks tell me that I may have. So I, out of high school, went and did a stint with the military. I was a combat medic with the Marine Corps, specifically within the fleet Marine force. Towards the end of that, I decided, okay, I'm ready to go get an education, and gave me an opportunity to grow up, went and got educated, studied computer science, philosophy in college. And I've been doing design pretty much my whole life. But I never really thought of it as a profession, just thought of it as something I enjoyed doing. And right after college, I went and worked in the logistics industry, where my main focus was on algorithms.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:03:12]:

And then I'd evolved into business process improvement, things around operations, and just how to just improve things across the board. When it came to efficiency and being one of the few people at a very outdated company, they knew that I knew how to code, and I guess they assumed that that must mean I know how to develop a website. I had never developed a website in my life at that point. Often my work was, like I said, predominantly math and or just core algorithm work, and I said, sure, I can figure it out, developed a website for them. And then that quickly slotted me into sort of a marketing role there. And as I began to explore it and learn more about it, that's when I learned about SEO, content marketing, how you can leverage content across different channels, things like that, and started to really like it. I saw it as a nice balance between two passions that I had, which were the data analysis side of things, solving problems from the computer science side, and the deconstructing arguments and explaining things in writing when it came from the philosophy side. And so started consulting and consulted for several different companies, few tech companies, and got a stint as a CMO for a running startup company.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:04:30]:

And we did that for about, I think I did that for about two and a half, three years, and then bowed out from that as they were going to win a Cobb nator, things like that. And so then I reached a point where I realized, well, I think I'm losing money working for this logistics company. So struck out on my own and started this business thing and had no background in business and have been steadily learning ever since.

Travis Albritton [00:04:58]:

Well, and that can play to your advantage too, right? It's like if you don't come from a traditional background, you don't make the traditional background mistakes?

Sklyer Reeves  [00:05:07]:

Yes, I suppose there's less assumptions, right? Like maybe you don't paint yourself into quite a corner and maybe think just apply the standard principle to the scientific method of just discovery and hypothesize, test and repeat. But at the same time there have been plenty of things that I think had I had some guidance or good mentor prior would have definitely helped short circuit my learning curve and paid off that ignorance debt a little bit faster for sure.

Travis Albritton [00:05:40]:

Well, everyone can benefit from mentors, but the school of hard knocks is undefeated as far as giving the right, here we are. Right, right, here we are. Here we are. So I want to talk about your company, ardent growth. One, because it's what you work on, but two, because the clients that you serve also happen to overlap perfectly with my personal business model. So I'm really excited to dig into what you do. And we align in a lot of ways in that I believe content marketing has so much untapped potential for brands and businesses that kind of overlook it in favor of direct response or performance marketing where it's like sure you can throw more money at something, but at a certain point you're going to run out of people to spend money to get in front of and then how are you going to sustain any kind of measurable success? But you cater to marketing agencies. So companies whose business model is marketing for other businesses, not an ideal customer avatar that many people would think, oh yeah, that's a great market to tap into.

Travis Albritton [00:06:46]:

So where did you see that opportunity with helping marketing agencies with marketing themselves?

Sklyer Reeves  [00:06:51]:

Yeah, I think most marketers, at least in my experience, especially marketing agency founders, we're really great at marketing our own customers, but we're not the greatest at marketing ourselves. Not that we couldn't be. It's just a prioritization issue that I think we run into a lot of times. It's a resource issue. We often either find ourselves too busy to do it ourselves or too incapable of quite letting go of the reins to let others do it for us at times, and especially whenever it's internal junior staff or things like that. Unless you're probably 15 20 million up or you're extremely good at delegating or don't have a marketing background yourself, then it's a lot harder, I think, to delegate to junior folks. And so historically we worked with all sorts of different types as we were figuring out, just like I'm sure many agencies do. Over time, though, we had a few agencies who, they liked our content, they liked some of the stuff that they'd seen us do prior.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:07:55]:

Some of them had reached out to us. One of them was actually a former competitor that we directly competed with whenever we were niche down a particular service for an industry. And they said, hey, how would you feel about creating some of our content? And so we said, sure, why not? And it was perfect. And after working with them, I talked to the team internally. I said, how do you folks feel about this? Did you enjoy the projects like, I enjoyed it, and we turned out we did. They were one of the easiest customers we'd ever worked with. We're actually still working with them today, three years later. So we said, okay, let's try a few more agencies, then see if anybody else needs content or whether it's at a high level that they can't really get internally or oftentimes it seemed like the resources internally would be a client fire comes up.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:08:47]:

They've got to do XYZ for a customer, and it really makes it hard to pull people toward that. And so we started doing it for other agencies, and we liked it, they liked it, so we kept doing it, and that's where we're at today. So it definitely wasn't something that I thought of from the beginning. We just sort of fell into it after one of them reached out, and it turned out to be a pleasurable experience for both sides.

Travis Albritton [00:09:13]:

Yeah, those can be some of the most rewarding pivots. When you're not even looking for the opportunity, it just kind of smacks you in the face, and you're like, oh, well, here we go. Who knew? And then three years later, it's like you've carved out a completely different direction that you couldn't have even anticipated. But the opportunity was already proven. You weren't, like, testing some edge case, business model idea. It's like somebody came with a problem and they want to spend money with us to go fix it, and do we want to set up a system to repeat it?

Sklyer Reeves  [00:09:40]:

And we both knew what was nice about this particular customers or this type of market that we work with is that we don't really have to explain anything to them. They get it. We get it, and they don't have to explain anything to us either. We understand what they do, who they do it for. Of course, there's sometimes a little bit of learning curve whenever we're going to work with somebody who works with an industry that we've never worked with before. And usually at that point, we're diving in to do some pretty in depth market research on their behalf. But we never get pushback on it because oftentimes they've never done it, which is surprising, but not surprising at the same time of how few marketing agencies have actually done legitimate qualitative and quantitative market research on their industry to figure out where their numbers and constraints are at. But we get up to speed on the audience pretty quick.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:10:33]:

It's usually really easy to talk to internal sales or the founder themselves. And what's really nice too, is that I think on their part with us is we're a team of what I would call, like, high level strategists for the most part. And so they're able to get a level of quality that they just couldn't get otherwise, or would sometimes be too cost prohibitive. Or if they were to hire people at that level, this might not be something that they would have them working on. They would probably have them working on different sorts of objectives or running client accounts, things like that.

Travis Albritton [00:11:13]:

That's a great position to be in, where agencies can get a bad rap of they promise the moon and they deliver next door. And if you really want to have staying power and develop those long term relationships, you really want to be able to put yourself in a position where you can demonstrate a skill set that is above market value for what they could get elsewhere. That they really do see you as a partner in what they're doing, instead of, we'll outsource this for a bit, but really the long term solution is to figure it out internally, or they can't really do what they say they could do. So that's great that you've been able to carve out that position.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:11:52]:

Don't be wrong. I always encourage folks to figure out how to build it internally eventually. And we're pretty open playbook with folks. So we're like, hey, here's what we'll do. We're going to get you where you need to go, help you accomplish your one two year goals, whatever the objectives are right. But it's like our playbooks are open. Feel free to take them and use them if you want to use it for your own services, if you want to use it to hire internally, we'll help you out. Just don't poach our people.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:12:13]:

That's all we ask. That's fair. Beyond that, I like to see people thrive and grow on their own, and I think it's good. It's the same reason why maybe you don't want to stick with the same particular customer for too long, unless what you're doing is more of a commoditized productized type service, because over time, I think you do need to inject new life, new blood, new ideas into the mix. And so, yeah, we always encourage people to either try to grow and do it themselves, or begin to take some bits of it themselves internally as well.

Travis Albritton [00:12:50]:

Speaking of giving away the farm and trusting people to work with you when it's beneficial and then internalize different processes when it is. Something we were talking about offline before we started was this idea of optimizing team utilization, or how do you streamline your internal processes to make the most of the resources that you have? Because any service based business where you're delivering something to a client or a customer and there's hours attached to that or deliverables attached to that, there's always a tug and pull of how do we maintain the quality of what we do, do so in an efficient manner that doesn't burn out our team, but allows us to deliver a level of service that really delivers for the client. So what are some of the things that you've learned internally as you've constantly looked at your own processes to really capture that balance?

Sklyer Reeves  [00:13:39]:

Well, so this is sometimes a contrarian answer, but I think if people kind of reason it out, it tends to make a bit more sense. But one thing I think that most folks get wrong is an over focus on utilization and less of a focus on throughput. They need to put more emphasis on throughput and less on utilization. It'll just sort of shake out. I'm not saying don't track utilization, it's useful, but it's not the end all, be all. If you constantly index towards utilization, you will burn out your people, you will reduce the quality of work, you will encourage multitasking and context switching. And that's just going to eventually you're going to see ramifications across client churn, across employee churn, across your own mental well being and things like that.

Travis Albritton [00:14:25]:

And then real quick, when we say utilization, how would you define utilization versus throughput? Just so people have context.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:14:31]:

Sure. So capacity is the total number of hours that you have available to do a thing, right? Utilization is what percentage of that capacity are you actively able to, whether it's billing. So you could consider that active utilization, or what would be total utilization is just the total number of hours spent from the available capacity. Just divide the numerator by the denominator to get the percentage. And then throughput is the, you can think of it, the way we define is the total number of valuable work items delivered to a customer. So let's say you produce blog posts or you produce social media posts or you produce podcast episodes, right. Throughput is just how many episodes did you produce? And usually benchmarked by some period of time. So what was your throughput within a given week or within a given month? Right.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:15:32]:

And so a key point there is valuable work items. So that doesn't mean every little task that you complete. It means what tangible thing did you deliver to a customer that they perceive as valuable? And so if they don't perceive it as valuable, it's really just sort of a subcomponent of something bigger or you're selling them something that they don't really need. So a lot of folks will focus on, when you focus on utilization, what happens is you're trying to balance a how many hours can I get out of this person? Right? So a lot of people, even when they try to focus on, say, a 70% to 75% utilization to be sort of what's, quote unquote, considered an ideal balance, I don't think that that's useful because what you don't see are the hidden opportunity costs that you incur from the context switching that comes as a byproduct of it. Because with utilization also comes utilization per account. And so people will talk about not wanting to over service a customer. So let me preface this by saying if you bill hourly, utilization probably is the way to go, but then you need to be thinking long term about how you can get away from billing hourly. In my opinion, no one really wants to pay hourly.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:16:52]:

People would much rather pay for an outcome. That being said, if you're doing work that's obviously completely new, it's a very unknown, novel problem. Sure, bill hourly, right? But then try to figure out how to scope some sort of tangible outcome around it in the future. But if you focus on, say, delivering, whether it's an actual deliverable, like a podcast episode that's produced and lived and syndicated across networks, right. Or whether it's x amount of revenue increase year over year, or a new hire that if you're recruiting agency, let's say you help someone, you help find a new director of XYZ department. That would be something that I don't think that you need to be focused on. Am I over servicing? Because if you focus on over servicing, you're always going to be at ods with the amount of value that you can actually deliver. I believe in figure out how to deliver the maximum valuable value possible, and then from there begin to figure out how to make it more efficient, whether that's stripping elements of it away that aren't really necessary.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:18:08]:

Whether that's a role, whether that's a step, whether that's some piece of deliverable that the customer doesn't really care about and doesn't really make that much of an impact, or whether that's just looking at your process and identifying where are the bottlenecks, how can we reduce the total time that it takes? And that's where metrics like active time, cycle time. So active time is what was the actual amount of hours that you spent on this? Or days, that's how we tend to measure it. Or half days and then cycle time. What was the total time it took to complete? Because that's the other problem about utilization, is when you focus on it. Let's say you spend 7 hours doing something, but let's say it takes you three weeks to do because you're context switching and trying to balance that across different customers, because you want to keep them all happy. What you end up doing is you kind of keep all customers kind of, they're still around, right? But none of them are exactly excited or delighted. And whereas if you just reduce the amount of work that you have in progress any one given time and just focus on throughput for that individual customer, you'll end up, believe it or not, it's a paradox, but you'll end up actually getting more done in less time and delivering more valuable to customers on the back end. I didn't believe it when we first started doing it, but hey, it worked.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:19:29]:

And I've looked at the math and across several different folks that we've seen, put it in place now too. And now I'm a believer. But yeah, happy to elaborate. Keep elaborating on that if you want, but feel free to interject and get some clarification on things if you need to.

Travis Albritton [00:19:45]:

I mean, it makes intuitive sense to me to rather than focusing on the hustle of the creation process, focus more on the outcome and the deliverables and optimizing towards that direction. I would be curious how you communicate because within that, especially if it's a client facing role like an account manager, depending on the level of service that your clients have come to expect from you. If it's like, hey, I'm just used to getting a 15 minutes reply window whenever I send you an email because that's just how we've interacted in the past and now you want to shift them to be able to focus deeply on specific tasks so they're not always trying to multitask and context switch. Have you run into any instances of either yourself or companies trying to implement this and retraining their clients to help in the long game service them better, but readjust some expectations in the short term?

Sklyer Reeves  [00:20:37]:

Not so we haven't. That's probably because we kind of approach it from this way, from the get go. From the very beginning. I've always told customers, I check my email twice a day, I open up slack once a day. That's about how the response time is going to work, right? And it's like that kind of across the board. That being said, the way that you can mitigate it is one, just have a conversation with them. Most people are adults and they understand if you say, hey, look, no one likes context switching, literally no one does. No one really enjoys it, right? So you say, like, look, I'm context switching all the time.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:21:09]:

That's also affecting my ability to be able to deliver you the most valuable, that most value I possibly can. Because of that, here's going to be the windows in which I'm going to be able to respond. I'm doing this because. Just give people a reason. Most people are pretty understanding. If they're not, you could replace them. You probably didn't need them anyway. We've helped other agencies do this too, and I've yet to have anyone just blow a gasket.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:21:33]:

That being said, if you work in an industry where you think you have people like that, ideally what you would end up doing is having a separation of roles between. So Paul Graham talked about this and his famous essay, the maker schedule manager. Schedule, right. An account manager is a manager, right. They live in that world of 30 minutes hour increments, right. And so they're constantly context switching. That's normal. People who live and work in that role, it's fine for them to context switch.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:22:02]:

That's the role, right? But if you have people who are responsible for any sort of deep work or really getting things done, so who your doers are, who's working on delivery on the back end, right. These people should not have to operate underneath that schedule. They need longer periods of time to be able to stay focused so they can get a thing complete because it's much easier. So like the mantra we say is it comes straight from Kanban, which is stop starting, start finishing, right. And so just work on the thing until it's done. Don't pull something else into the pipeline until the first item is finished because there are switching costs. There's also restart cost, right. Whenever you put something down for a while and then you have to pick it back up.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:22:47]:

You have to kind of regather your thoughts on where you're at, and that's the easy way to go about it. So that's the way I would split it out if you can. If you're in a position you can't really do that, split your time schedules that way, then where maybe the first half of the day is maker time or however you want to do it. I think it often works better if you make the first half of the day maker time, just because if you try to take meetings in the morning, it'll derail your entire afternoon most of the time. But if you split your day like that, I think most customers could be understanding to that, knowing that they get a standard response window of 1530 minutes or whatever during the afternoon. Again, I would break those habits as fast as possible. Nothing is ever really that urgent that it needs to be responded to within 15 minutes. And if there are be very clear about what those are in your slas and if that's the case, they would probably just call you anyway or call the business or something.

Travis Albritton [00:23:49]:

Yeah. If there's a five alarm fire, you're going to know they're going to be breaking down your door.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:23:54]:

Yeah, 100%.

Travis Albritton [00:23:57]:

So I would love to pivot to specifically your approach to helping agencies and your clients think about content marketing for themselves and marketing for themselves. Because there's obviously the executable strategy of we'll create LinkedIn content or create a podcast, or do some blog content or webinars or X, Y and Z. But in order for any of those strategies to pay off long term, you have to start with the right strategy and the right approach and point of view and perspective. So I'd love to hear your process or your approach to helping companies figure out what's our voice, what do we have to say, what's our point of view to then populate all of that content marketing in a way that's really going to drive strategic growth for them.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:24:43]:

Sure. So it's going to be very similar to what folks would do for their own customers. So one thing I'll kind of preface by saying is that anytime I hear anyone talk about LinkedIn strategy or podcast strategy or blog strategy, all I hear are communication channels. Right? Like, none of those are strategic. They're all tactical communication distribution channels. Right strategy exists at a layer above this. Strategy operates at the business level, and it's what informs all downstream motions of your organization across operations, success, finance, marketing, sales, et cetera strategy is answering five core questions. It's defining what does winning look like? Having a very clear idea of what winning looks like to you.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:25:30]:

And then from there, once you know what winning looks like, it's answering the questions, where am I going to play such that I will win? How will I play such that I will win the way that I want to win? And then what must be true? So what are the must have capabilities we need to have in place in order to win? How we want to win, where we want to win. And then finally, what are the enabling management systems that are going to, that are enabling management systems, meaning what are those systems that are going to be necessary? Not all the, you're going to have plenty of other systems, right, like the way you do. Your PNL is probably not going to be an enabling management system for a marketing agency. It's very important, but it's not an enabling management system, depending on your size, unless you're trying to acquire people and going through that whole game. Right. But then the neighbor management systems are what enable all of those things to exist and work the way they need to. But the hardest strategy is where to play and how to win. So what you have to be very clear about there is where can you create a disproportionate competitive advantage in the market such that, not that you're guaranteed to win, but it gives you the best possible ods, right, so that you can stack the deck in your favor.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:26:43]:

And this is a lot of hypothesis testing. It's less looking at the competition, which I know a lot of folks do, and it's more looking at your market. So getting very market oriented. What does the market want? What are they telling me? If you just turn to them most of the time, instead of looking at what your competitors are doing, you will stay far ahead of your competitors, because no one wins by trying to chase after their competitors. By definition, you're chasing. You win by making them chase after you. And the only way that you can make them chase after you is for you to chase after what's leading everything, which is the actual market. So what we start with is just standard marketing 101.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:27:25]:

Identify where we're playing, what do we do? Right. Start there, and then from there start talking to the market. Do some qualitative interviews. There's no specific number. 510, 15, whatever. It's got to be, right. If you're geographically centered, sure, like segment it however you want to. So do some qualitative interviewing, then begin to segment your market.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:27:45]:

If you haven't already segment it out, identify what your total addressable market looks like, where the value is. Pick a target segment, figure out your positioning, which comes from the qualitative messaging. Right. And when it comes to or comes from the qualitative interview. Sorry. And then from there, if you have the means available, which it's not really that hard these days, you can run it on Facebook ads or something like that. To get enough responses, you only need like 96, no matter what your audience size, what your population size would be. But do an actual quant survey.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:28:21]:

All you have to do is really ask a handful of questions. Here's a set of brands. Or let's say you're an agency that specializes in marketing for lawyers, right? Okay, survey 96 to 100 lawyers. Let's say it's 100. Right? Survey them. Ask them if you can do it through a third party, that works great too. You don't have to do it through a third party. But if you can make it appear as if it's through a third party, that works a bit better.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:28:49]:

That way you don't accidentally buy things. But ask them what marketing agencies have you heard of and have them just write them down, list them out. Right. They're going to list, let's say four or five. And then from there that's going to tell you two things. One, it's going to tell you your level of unaided awareness and your level of top of mind awareness, whoever the first one is, right. And across, let's say 25 people listed your brand first, right. And then, okay, you got 25% top of mind awareness.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:29:16]:

Then after that next question, show them the names and logos. Right. Which of these marketing agencies for lawyers have you heard of? They select whichever ones they've heard of, right. That tells you your aided awareness. It's like marketing one on one, right. It's very, very simple, but it's there for a reason because you end up with some really great insights after the fact. And most agencies don't do this for themselves and they really, really should. It's very enlightening.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:29:39]:

After that you're asking, okay, who have you or would you consider? If you're in market for services, for whatever it is that you do, which of these agencies would you consider? They will then tell you that, okay, now you know what your consideration is across the market. And then if you had to pick one, who would be your preference? Right. And then that will tell your preference. Well, they can only pick one. So not only does that tell you what your numbers look like across the market and it's a representative sample if it's truly random, but it will also tell you what your competitors look like across the market. And this is about the only time I think it's useful to actually look at the competition. And it's because it gives you a landscape to understand where their weaknesses might be, because it can tell you where you might want to play, because you want to play in an area where you don't have competition if you can. Right? So identify where they're weak and you're strong.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:30:36]:

That's probably where you want to play. And when you look at those numbers, though, the next thing you can do is say, okay, you take them literally. Just flip the funnel. It's all it is, a funnel, right? Awareness. All the way down. You just flip it on its side and you do the math on it. And then from there, you can say, okay, where do we have our greatest drop off at? Right. Add a percentage in terms of basis points to each one to say, okay, where would it be that if we increase this, we would have the greatest lift in terms of revenue, that then becomes the greatest constraint of your acquisition across marketing and sales that you need to go tackle.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:31:15]:

So let's say the people who do know of you really prefer you. You don't have a problem. Most of them people you've heard of you, they consider you. But across the whole market, not a lot of people are aware of you. Okay, you have an awareness problem. That means you don't need to do direct response marketing. For the most part, you can, you will get some people to become aware of you just in virtue of them receiving an email or something like that. But you can reach much more of the market if you just.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:31:44]:

A lot cheaper if you just run more brand style educational, right. Just awareness campaigns on some social platform. Right. Run that. Let's say your awareness is 15% of the market, right? Your next closest competitor is like 40. That's the other thing, too, is if you look across competitors, you can kind of get a baseline on what's normal in a given range. And so if everyone else is two x, what you are or whatever, right. If the numbers shake out, you would say, okay, I have an awareness problem.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:32:17]:

All right. So then this year, set your objectives, increase awareness from 15% to 40% year over year. And now you have a very clear objective, and you know exactly what the tactical execution needs to look like in order to fix that constraint. So always focus on the biggest constraint, whether that's in marketing or like what we were talking about earlier in terms of operations, whether it's to the constraint, the bottleneck in the actual throughput flow of the delivery or service that you're providing. Right. So we start with that. And once you know that, that kind of just tells you everything else because it's what's going to tell you, okay, where's your market at? What channels do they use? You find out that out during the qualitative interviewing by asking them how they like to buy what sort of things they consider, right. Things like that.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:33:03]:

That all bakes into your messaging. And you just run that sort of messaging across the various channels that you're going to use to reach them, whether that's LinkedIn, whether that's podcasts. I think the best way, and what I recommend folks do is try to create some sort of center nexus in which all things can proliferate from. So podcasting or some sort of event like hosting a weekly live event or a biweekly live event called a webinar, if you want whatever, just don't try to sell people stuff is the difference is just get on there and just talk to the market, answer questions, have some point of topic that you want to talk about. That way you can record it locally, capture your audio video that you can then use to push out across channels to get your thought leadership or your brand's opinion on things. Whoever's doing the talking, capture that locally, and then go and do A-Q-A. You can use that stuff as well to basically just give you a center nexus engine that you can turn into content for TikTok, content for YouTube. Podcast.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:34:05]:

Right. Repurposing to a podcast onto LinkedIn, maybe less so on Twitter. Videos, a little less popular on there, sometimes on Reddit, but even on the channels that aren't necessarily very heavily video focused. Well, now you have this coordinate of an idea that you can then turn into written content. I'm not talking about just taking your podcast transcript and just publishing it. That's kind of a waste of time. Like no one wants to read a transcript, right? It's not closed captioning. There's a big difference here, right? Unless you have a really solid editor, then they might be able to make it work.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:34:40]:

But even then, it's still difficult to read because the intonation is different. Right? But you can take that and transform that into a long form piece of content, whether that's newsletter, whether that's on your blog, whatever it's going to be, transform it along format it, change the language, make it make sense for how someone might read. And you can also expand upon ideas that maybe you went a little bit lighter on. For example, in this podcast, when we're talking about active time, cycle time, it's like, what are those? What's flow efficiency? How do you do a Monte Carlo simulation to forecast probabilistic values on what your capacity utilization going to be? Right. This is the type of stuff that can kind of be explained in audio, video format, but is really better with visuals, examples, graphs that people can look at, scenarios, things like that, right? And those are great opportunities for that, because people are going to want to learn more and they want a place that they can turn to to go deeper. But if you try to do the inverse and start with all of that content and work your way back, it is much more difficult, it is much more time consuming, and you're always going to feel like you're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole or whatever the saying is, right. But if you start with the core idea in the beginning, it makes it much easier to produce after effect. Not only that, it keeps you from wasting your time as much because you can test different ideas, see how people respond to things, you can begin to develop your own voice.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:36:08]:

And also if you do a live event by doing the q and a with people, even if it's only four, well, look, you take sales calls one on one, right? Like, okay, sit on a call with four people and let them ask you questions. Not only do you develop relationships with them, but the questions that they have, I guarantee you the rest of your market has them, too. And so it gives you this opportunity to refine and grow and rearticulate and reformulate what your answers to these things are, what your position in the market is, right? It's one of the best ways to do it, versus just kind of sitting in our heads thinking what the market wants to hear. Coming up with this great offer that we think is so amazing, come up with this great marketing campaign we think is so amazing. But we have never once talked to a customer, and then we put it out there and wonder why it falls flat. So that's our approach. It's what you do with your customers, right? Even if you're not talking to your customers customers, you're talking to the founder or the head of marketing or a sales rep or a customer service person, something like that, right? You're getting still insights on what the market wants rather than just kind of guessing. That's our approach.

Travis Albritton [00:37:21]:

Okay, so a lot of great nuggets in there that I want to unpack and then kind of like transition a little bit to some more practical things. So first, I loved the whole, I don't think I've ever heard of that strategy before, like run paid traffic to a survey for your customer profile and let them just literally tell you what they know about the offers and the other people that are out there. I've never heard that before, but that seems like so simple because you can do that for like $5 a day.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:37:51]:

And get it's way cheaper than monkey. The one caveat I'll throw in there is like, depending on your market, let's say. Obviously when you're trying to do GL specific, it's very easy. But if you're trying to do a very particular type of buyer Persona, like if you sell to doctors, emergency, emergency doctors at hospitals that are XYZ, right, sometimes you might be better off going a more formal route. Otherwise you're going to need to include disqualifying questions in there, too. Type form is probably one of the best ways to do this because it's just the way the routing and conditional logic works. But that way when someone begins to fill it out, it can short circuit and be like, hey, thanks for your participation. Close it out.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:38:32]:

That way you're able to get to the responses that you know that are coming from people that actually fit your criteria. Unless you're using something like Clearbit and can more specifically, like for b two b can more specifically target the titles. Otherwise you could run it on LinkedIn. It's going to get significantly more expensive. But that's another route. Don't send it to your list. Don't send it to your email list. Don't send it out across your social channels.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:38:57]:

Organically, you can't. Like in the absence of any route, talking to your market is better than not your market. So by all means do it. But your data is not going to be a representative sample because it won't be truly randomized.

Travis Albritton [00:39:15]:

Right?

Sklyer Reeves  [00:39:16]:

Yeah.

Travis Albritton [00:39:16]:

You're starting with the audience of people who already have awareness of who you are, otherwise they wouldn't see it. Right. And then real quick on the execution of that, do you offer any kind of incentive or reward for filling out the survey? Or is it just like, hey, you got five minutes, fill out the survey for doctors. How do you position it, the value for the person coming in so you.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:39:35]:

Can, we've seen it two ways. First off, offering any sort of paid incentive doesn't bias the results whatsoever. Some folks might argue that, oh yeah, but people are more likely to take surveys if you're paying them. Yes, they are. But go look at the academic literature on it if you want to. It's been very well established that it doesn't impact the actual data that you get back, at least not in any sort of significant way. It may across some very particular niche audiences, but I doubt that we're going to run into that. That being said, another route you can take, depending on your audience.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:40:12]:

So let's say you're working with any sort of. We see this a lot in b two B. If you're working in b two B, which is where getting survey responses tends to be more expensive because you have to get more targeted with who the respondent is going to be. One of the best approaches you can take there without having to spend money is offer to let them see the data when it's finished as it's anonymized. Because most of the time they're interested, they would like to know, especially if you ask additional questions across, let's say you've got your core like five to seven questions. If you ask some additional questions interspersed in there related to the industry itself, almost like what you would do from a qualitative standpoint, like, what are the common problems you face? Where do you turn for information? Right. They're interested in that information as well. And so if you extract that information out and then provide it to them, that is oftentimes a pretty good incentive for them.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:41:14]:

I'm sure marketers like founders agencies have seen Pete Kabuta is pretty good. This with databox rival. But I was trying to get responses for a survey and we'll tell you, hey, after you answer it, you can see the results of the survey and a pretty high percentage or enough people take them. I don't know what the exact percentage is. Enough people take them because we're interested. We would like to know what our peers are doing, where they turn to for information. Right. Other b to B professionals are the exact same.

Travis Albritton [00:41:42]:

Yeah, it's kind of like YouTube polls where you see the options, but you have to choose your choice before you see the results. It's like, oh, I wonder if other people chose my answers and if I'm in the majority, the minority and all that kind of stuff. So I'm glad you brought that up because, yeah, that doesn't cost you anything. It's like just literally see the results at the end. That's fantastic. Yeah. And then the other thing that I loved about your approach to figuring out the strategy is directly connecting the strategy of what you're doing to the greatest leveraged opportunity. If you think about the whole buying journey, which your process captures really well from level of awareness, problem solution, product aware, other competitors in the space, it's like you can really capture the whole buying journey from first discovering who you are to making a purchase decision, but then reverse engineering what to talk about and how to position yourself based on where you see the greatest opportunity to close that gap.

Travis Albritton [00:42:43]:

Instead of just like, what do we feel like talking about today? Or somebody else wrote a blog on this, so we should write a blog on this. And it's very reactionary. Instead of being really intentionally focused on what are we producing to drive a strategic result that is financially valuable to our business. And like you mentioned, it's like those very basic things that you take a step back and think, well, why would I not do that? But in our minds, as people running agencies, it's like my own company does not pay me a monthly retainer to do this work, this client does. So I'll do it for them. And then if I have time left over, which you normally don't, then maybe I'll get around to myself.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:43:26]:

It's called equity.

Travis Albritton [00:43:27]:

Exactly. Profit distribution.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:43:30]:

Yeah, exactly.

Travis Albritton [00:43:32]:

So this has been really great, and we're just really scratching the surface on this. Where can people go to learn more about your approach? To see the kind of content that you're producing on the communication channels that you have and just to connect with you and what you're doing over at art and growth?

Sklyer Reeves  [00:43:47]:

Sure. Probably the best place to connect or see anything that's going on with me is going to be over on LinkedIn. You could go to our blog, but I don't write very much on there. I need to. I write more documentation than anything else, and it tends to be in our git book. But I don't follow my own advice at times. That's part of the problem, but thus far I haven't really need to. And that's something to be aware of too, is if you're marketing, if you find that you get plenty of work through referrals, then just continue to do that and promote the case studies and things that come off the back of it.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:44:26]:

You don't necessarily have to adopt and do everything just because it's what everyone else normally does. Just do what works. And when it's constraint, then fix it. But LinkedIn is probably the best place and or if you're in any sort of slack communities, dm me what they are on LinkedIn, I might check them out. I'm in superpath. It's a great community of content marketers. Jimmy Daly runs a great community over there. I'm in a few others.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:44:57]:

Vault from Chris Walker at refined Labs is a great one. It's a paid community, but it's a great place. But yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best place. Just tell me where you heard about me, or I probably won't pay attention to it just because of how many come in all the time. So I think we all know what.

Travis Albritton [00:45:13]:

That oh yeah, it's like, would you be interested in more highly qualified prospects at no cost to you? And we'll just deliver this pipeline that's ready to go and just explode you to eight figures. Okay, yeah, sure.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:45:25]:

Or the lead in with the seemingly innocuous interested question about something and then the immediate pivot to and then buy my stuff. Those are the most endearing.

Travis Albritton [00:45:39]:

Yes. My favorite is when they mispronounce or misspell my last name or they have zero context. Funny little anecdote, because we produce this podcast for YouTube and we post clips. So I love whenever I get inbound spam messages and it's like, have you considered repurposing your long form content into short form content? We can do that for you. It's like all you have to do is go to the YouTube channel, see that I post shorts to know I already have this problem fixed. But thank you very much.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:46:06]:

We had two things offensive. One is a lot of people messaged me thinking that we're a SaaS company because we develop software as well, but primarily for a tech enabled service. Like, we developed some software. We'll talk about this another time around. Building what we call the total searchable market so we can understand exactly what content to create to rank in the shortest amount of time. But the anecdotally, one of the funniest ones that we ever had was when we first got started, we focused on local businesses, and I had written a guide years ago and was ranking number one for Google. My business guide nationally outranked Google everyone else. And we'd get the phone call about wanting to know if we wanted help optimizing our Google, my business listing.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:46:51]:

And I remember taking that call at one point in time. Of course, I was young and whatever, and I was just like, we googled this for me. And they did. And I was like, there you go. I was like, good research, though, but I understand everyone's just trying to hit a quota. I get it. I never hold it personally against anybody.

Travis Albritton [00:47:08]:

Yeah, I don't take it personally. I don't justify it. With a response either.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:47:13]:

It's just like, sorry, vi, no, I don't either. Every now and then I will. And it's usually to provide feedback and the fact that they even get me to pause sometimes, perhaps telling, maybe read those, by the way, read those emails. If any email ever does actually cause you to pause to read it, that's like that they might be doing something right from a pitch perspective. So worth noting. But yeah, I mean, same thing when it comes to work that you deliver for clients, right? Like if you're doing any sort of outbound for your own agency is maybe prospect and pitch and sell the way that you would like to be prospected, pitched and sold to, and you'll be surprised what results you'll, yeah, maybe come with a little bit of value in hand, do what everyone else is not doing, and you'll be surprised how often you'll actually get a positive response for sure.

Travis Albritton [00:48:05]:

Well, Skyler, I really appreciate your time and just all the expertise that you shared. Thanks for coming on the podcast. It's been a blast.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:48:12]:

Yep. Thanks for having me on, Travis. Enjoyed it.

Travis Albritton [00:48:13]:

So I would say that my number one takeaway from my conversation with Skyler is that when you are looking at the opportunity for your business to leverage content marketing, whether that's live events, webinars like we talked about, or podcasts or blog posts or LinkedIn content, reverse engineer the part of the funnel where you can make the greatest gains. Whether you start with a survey or just look at your internal numbers and your sales pipeline and process wherever you're getting the most drop off, use that as the inspiration for the content that you create, because that's going to then reverse engineer back into higher leverage results for your business than if you talked about something that maybe got a lot of impressions or a lot of lift, but wasn't going to move the needle as much. So just really appreciate his approach and philosophy when it comes to marketing and really looking at a holistic approach to your business. And I hope you took that away from it as well. So definitely check out the Skyler's LinkedIn profile, which is linked in the show notes below. Let him know you heard him on the honest marketing podcast. We can connect with them. And yeah, hope you enjoyed another interview here on the honest marketing podcast.

Sklyer Reeves  [00:49:15]:

Until next.