Content Bounce House: Recent Episodes
Ryan Sargent
You aren’t alone: Other content marketers are probably struggling with the same stuff you are. Join us for group therapy in the Bounce House. The Content Bounce House is for anyone and everyone who leads a content team, even a team of one. (And since the walls are fully inflatable, it’s safe to bang your head against them.)
"That's just kind of the nature of content marketing: you publish a lot of stuff that doesn't work. And you just kind of have to be okay with it."
"I have a visceral reaction to people who say, AI won't take your job. It's people who know how to use AI that will take your job. AI is absolutely tearing apart the content world right now. I don't think it will stay this way forever. I think that it will bounce back."
"Preserve your time for what you can do that ChatGPT can't. Strategy, creative thinking, internal cross-collaboration, education…and if you can use ChatGPT to have even more output and be even more productive, it’s only going to help you and help the company."
“I think once you test [AI] out and see it for yourself and see how much faster it makes you and see that you're not being replaced, you’re just being enhanced, you feel really good about it.”
"Sometimes in B2C you get to be a little more clever than clear, and I think that's flipped in B2B, but I don't think that has to mean boring."
"You have to have a point of view, an opinion, something original to say. It can't just be ten things you need to know about webinars. That won't cut it. Give me something useful in value, and give it to me quickly. "
"That is what brand is, it’s every interaction. It says something about you. And if your content is saying the same thing that everyone else's is saying, then you don't have a brand, you just have content. It's just noise."
“Take what your interests are or the sort of marketing things you're used to in your hobbies, whether that's YouTube streams or TikToks, and then bring that into your own personal brand. What are you uniquely able to do that other people aren't doing? Do that.”
"In terms of making your team feel like they're not being micromanaged and like I'm not gonna nitpick them, a lot of it comes back to trust, and I like hiring people who are smart and thoughtful and that I trust. And trust doesn't happen in a day, but if you hire somebody who you think is smart and capable, then treat them that way."
“Just because something has thousands upon thousands of searches a month doesn't necessarily mean that's the best thing for you to go after. That content topic that gets 15, 20 searches a month might be the better play because you know that that intent is really in-tune with what you serve up as a company, and you might convert all of those.”
“Until the robots can go out and have their own lived experiences, they gain sentience and start a brick and mortar store, I'm not too worried about them being able to take over that aspect of the content. Maybe they can help speed up the very basic foundational surface level content. Sure, that's fine. But that's not like the exciting stuff anyway.”
“One of the things we like to do is go beyond the KPIs, the metrics, to talk about the impact of those results. What did it mean that they got 10% more traffic? What was made possible by that? What did it change for them?”
“All we really focus on is writing for the user. You know, trying to help the reader, find out whatever they wanna find out or solve, and solve the problem that they have.”
“I think that, generally speaking, the thing that I'm most heartened by and what I think is most important about this particular content strategy, which is driven by the message proceed with confidence, is that it goes against the grain of the gloom and doom.”
"The idea is to really determine outcomes first. Do you wanna build your brand? Do you wanna drive website traffic? Are you looking to engage more people on social media? Once you have those outcomes identified, then it's really easy to reverse engineer a strategy and figure out what you need to be doing or what levers you need to pull to make that happen."
"Sometimes the creation of a brief can take almost as much time as just writing the dang thing yourself."
"The sooner that marketers can appreciate that the only reason their job exists is to make sales easier, the better they'll be at their job."
"We measure input rather than output. We measure things that are in our control. ...Things like sessions and impressions and clicks, we measure them for sure, but we understand that the input is more important there and that often if we're seeing a drop or an increase, we can trace it back to input."
"The metaphor that I like to use is operating less like an assembly line, which is what a lot of companies would kind of think of, and more like a Formula One pit crew."
"When I was teaching writing, I started every writing lesson with audience and purpose because kids needed that. And that's the first thing that shows up in my briefs as well: Who is it for? And what are we trying to do?"
"Things that people can't find elsewhere or things that give people an easier way to find the information that they're looking for seem to be the best content for us."
"We want to make sure that we're not just trying to rank for the keyword, but we're bringing something new to the table. We're looking at what's ranking with a critical eye."