Speaker 1 00:00:05 Hello, welcome Rogue Startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. Here. Each episode I'm gonna be sharing a nugget and a piece of wisdom that I'm learning from growing my business. CAOs from seven to eight figures and hopefully beyond, you know, business is tough. There's no easy button to push to take all the right answers in the shortcut to, to GED success, but I truly believe that with the collective wisdom we have from this tech community, we really can do better and easier than we could alone. You know, I'm basing a lot of this on an amazing amount of help and feedback I've gotten from other podcasts and other founders and other YouTube channels, and, and this is my attempt to give back a little bit to the community to help you grow your business more sanely to a higher level, more profitably, to where you're having a better experience in this journey.
Speaker 1 00:00:49 I sincerely hope you like the new format here. You want to connect with me, head over to Twitter, I'm at the Craig Hewitt, and for show notes for this and every episode, rogue startups.com. Lemme know what you think. Hello, welcome back to Rogue Startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. Uh, glad you could join me for a solo episode today. Uh, as I mentioned a couple of episodes ago in our reboot episode, um, Dave is, is no longer with the podcast you saw on for 280 plus episodes, and, and he's decided, you know, this is enough for me. I'm gonna, I'm gonna take a break for a while. And so I'm flying solo here for a while and I really am excited about the interviews I've been doing. I've done four or five of 'em. I've got another four or five scheduled here for the next few weeks.
Speaker 1 00:01:29 But I also want to take time to have these solo episodes so I can share kind of what's going on with me, my business, how I'm thinking about growth, productivity, marketing, sales, and, and just really running an effective business. You know, I think that, uh, I talked last episode with Colin Gray about how some of the tailwinds that we had, uh, for the last handful of years, um, might be behind us. I think, especially in the zero interest rate environment being gone, money's not free. Thus, our customers just don't have as much money to spend as they used to. And, and I think that this is a good segue into what I wanna talk about, which is owned versus borrowed media and the concept of a media brand. You know, a lot of you <laugh> have been reaching out to me on Twitter and LinkedIn just saying an email and saying, you know, Craig, I I, I see you doing a lot more on social media.
Speaker 1 00:02:18 I see you as a founder creating a lot more content these days. Um, you know, that, that's partly 'cause we scaled back our team and I am kind of more involved and more vocal at this point. And I think the reason for this is I'm seeing the same thing a lot of you are seeing probably is, you know, uh, ad rates are more expensive, right click-through rates and conversions are more expensive than ever. Facebook, you know, the good old days of, of Facebook arbitrage are, are probably behind us. Who knows if threads will, uh, present another opportunity for like an early mover advantage There? I, I think they probably will, but, but largely like the meta platform isn't working as well as it used to. AdWords, you know, there's probably still some gold there, but, but we found it really difficult. Um, and, and what we're seeing with like talking to our Casto Productions customers is many people are saying like, you know, LinkedIn outreach and cold email are, are not working as well as they used to.
Speaker 1 00:03:12 I'm sure they still work for some folks. Ads more expensive than ever. I want, and this is what our customers are saying, and, and, and we feel the same way. We've been banging this drum forever. I want, uh, a customer acquisition strategy that I own entirely or as much as I can, and I control the fate of it, right? And I want to talk about how we're discussing this with our customers at Ketos Productions where we're helping create winning media brands for leading B two B companies. And interestingly, it all starts with social media, right? It all starts with awareness. If you think about the, you know, the five stages of, of customer awareness when they're entering a buying journey, uh, a lot of them don't even realize they have a problem at first. And for me, that's where social media plays a huge role, is creating demand or creating awareness for the problem that you then solve.
Speaker 1 00:04:04 Um, and, and many, many of you have said, you know, Craig, don't build your house on the, on, you know, a, a sand or beach or something like that, whatever, whatever the euphemism is. But like the, the expression is like, and a lot of you said, like, Craig, why are you building your brand on social media? And, you know, because I've been more active on Twitter, LinkedIn is probably my text platform of choice. And YouTube overall is like the platform for me. I think where we see the biggest opportunity to grow, um, YouTube arguably is a search engine and it's a content platform. We'll get into that more later. Um, but, but the way I see creating content for generating awareness and demand, right? The very top part of a funnel, if you imagine a funnel, um, the top third is borrowed attention because you don't own those platforms, right?
Speaker 1 00:04:52 Elon Musk can take your Twitter, Twitter handle away like he did this week with the guy who owned the ATX handle. Um, you, you know, who whatever a new platform comes out like threads and disrupts potentially a lot of stuff. You don't own any of that. So every minute I spend on social media, I know is borrowed time. And the attention that I have there has borrowed attention. But the only goal of posting on social media is to increase brand recognition for, for me or for my company, and then get folks to take the next step. And that next step is not all the way to go to the website and sign for a free trial or, you know, book a demo or something like that. It is check out the other shit that I'm doing, which is podcasting and YouTube, right? Uh, and, and on YouTube that's really easy 'cause it goes a lot of times from shorts to long form on social, it goes from, you know, a short clip on LinkedIn or Twitter or Instagram or something like that to check out my podcast, listen to a full episode where you can hear me talk for 20, 60 minutes, uh, about a topic that, that I probably know pretty deeply.
Speaker 1 00:05:53 I'm interviewing someone who's a real subject matter expert, and you begin to like, earn this respect of your listeners, and they begin to know, like, and trust you, right? Because that's all that people do. They buy from people they know, like, and trust. And there's the whole goal with all of this. So the top part is maybe they begin to know you, they like and trust you in the longer form con content in the middle right there. YouTube and podcast are the two mediums and channels that sit in the middle, I think. And then at the bottom, it's, let's go on a date and let's get married, right? Let's take the next step, come to my website, sign up for my newsletter, uh, join next week's webinar. Uh, sign up for a trial, book a demo, talk to our team, whatever it is. Um, you know, buy my course.
Speaker 1 00:06:39 That's the conversion. But I think for so long we've thought that we can take people from social media or from ads maybe, and convert them to being a customer. And, and the reality is, it, it just doesn't work that way anymore. And it's not sustainable. It certainly is not profitable. And so what we're seeing is there's this intermediate step where long form content and multimedia content of podcasting and YouTube plays such a huge role in gaining the trust of our prospective customers to where then the buying journey is pretty quick and pretty easy. And, and we'd like to say our customers and, and we hopefully become the obvious choice, right? Because you become aware of us, you get to know us through our long form content, and then when it's time to buy, you're like, of course I need a podcast host. I'm gonna choose Casto.
Speaker 1 00:07:23 'cause I just know Craig and I hear him talk about all this stuff. He seems like a really smart guy. That product looks great. It's obvious that I'm gonna buy this. Hey, it's Craig here. You know, while I love podcasting and long form conversations like this, also really love writing and really love email newsletters. I have a newsletter called Founder Insights, where every Saturday morning I share something I'm learning in my business that I think could help you grow your business sustainably, insanely, and profitably as you go along in this journey. If you're interested, head over to Craig hewitt.me/join to get Founder Insights my newsletter along with your cup of coffee this Saturday morning. See you there. You know, when it comes down to it, we talk about borrowed versus owned media, borrowed being social media. And, and to some extent I put YouTube in there and owned media.
Speaker 1 00:08:09 Really, there's only three places where you entirely own the relationship with your customer, and that is email, podcasting and your website, right? If somebody knows cast oss.com or hubspot.com, they know like, Hey, I'm gonna go there. I'm gonna find the answers to my problems. Um, email, right? You own your email list. Sure, you might pay Drip or ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign or someone like that, or Bento, uh, for the ability to send emails to those people, but you sure as shit can download that file in a C S V format and move it over to another provider next week and start emailing those people again. So email you a hundred percent. On the third one that not a lot of people talk about is podcasting in your R S SS feed, you know, podcasting directories like Apple Podcast or Spotify could, could like, you know, kick you off the platform, but you still own that R S Ss feed and you literally are connected from your r s s feed, which is hosted at a place like Casto.
Speaker 1 00:09:05 You could even host it yourself or code it up yourself or something. Use our WordPress plugin and do it on your WordPress site directly. Connect it from there to people listening on their phone. So podcasting directories like Spotify and Apple Podcasts really are just kind of pass throughs to connect r s s feeds to listeners. That's all it is. And so when we think about owned media, a hundred percent, um, this is a relationship with you as a listener that I I own, right? As much as I would own someone's email address or I own Craig Hewitt me my personal site, um, this is something that nobody can take away with me. And when I say own that, that's what I mean is that it's not Elon Musk is gonna take away my Twitter handle, or LinkedIn's gonna change the algorithm to stop showing my stuff.
Speaker 1 00:09:50 If I publish an episode here, you will get it <laugh>. And if you wanna listen, you will. Uh, and so like everything about all of kind of my media strategy and what we're preaching and what we're helping our customers with is generating awareness at the very top. And usually that's through social media, just because it's a really effective way of reaching a really broad audience and potentially seeing new eye, you know, having new eyeballs see our stuff, bringing them into longer form content. And, and this is the thing, all of the social media content should point to that longer form stuff, right? This is something I totally missed for so long. I was creating a bunch of social content that was just arbitrary. It had no real purpose. And I think this is where a lot of folks fall down, is they're creating a bunch of social content that's all just dispersed, right?
Speaker 1 00:10:36 It's just like a scatterplot. Instead, what I believe social content should do is be excerpts or highlights or teasers or enticements to go to longer form stuff. I think that's why like YouTube shorts and short clips are so effective is if you pull a 22nd snippet of a podcast episode or you tease a YouTube video or something, it's great because people who are interested in that will then click through, right? And engage with the longer form stuff, get to know, like, and trust you, and then convert to being, you know, uh, some kind of relationship with you. Join your email list, uh, you know, sign up for a trial book, a demo, whatever it is. Uh, and that's, that's the very bottom of the funnel. Um, but, but all of this strategy is to move people from borrowed traffic and channels, which is YouTube to some extent, um, but certainly social media to, to podcast and YouTube, um, where they can engage in longer form stuff to then, you know, start a relationship with you on your website.
Speaker 1 00:11:33 Everything drives people back to the website. And, and I think that's a good lesson for all of us, is we wanna become this media brand, and this is true whether it's personal for me as an individual and a leader of a company or for the company itself, right? We wanna do the same thing, awareness, interest, and engagement. You know, that's how I think of it. Awareness is social media. Awa interest is en en engaging with longer form content, and then engagement is doing something on the website. So, um, you know, if I think about really good media brands out there these days, there's, there's kind of a handful that come to mind. I'd love to hear ones that I didn't mention that, that you could, uh, you know, drop a comment in below or shoot me an email
[email protected]. But the handful that come to mind are profit.
Speaker 1 00:12:15 Well, right? Patrick Campbell did a great job there. HubSpot, really big company, I think arguably kinda the leader in B two B Media, uh, at this point. Uh, O'Shaughnessy Capital Management. So this started as a podcast, but they have a whole ton of content going on around investing and investing advice, being into crypto and all this kind of stuff these days. Um, I, I'd like to put Casto on that list. We do a ton of content across all different platforms. I think we do a pretty good job of it. Uh, ConvertKit I think is a pretty good example here. Um, but I'm sure I'm missing a lot. And so I'd love to hear, again in the comments below, shoot me a message
[email protected] if I'm missing any, or if you think I'm thinking about this wrong. And you have an approach to this kind of, uh, funnel or path of awareness, interest and engagement from social media to long form multimedia content on podcast and YouTube to the website where folks can take another action.
Speaker 1 00:13:07 Um, in terms of format in the podcast here, I hope this is interesting and, uh, fun and cool to, to listen or watch. Uh, we are definitely on YouTube, so youtube.com/at rogue startups, check us out there, subscribe. Um, every episode that we do from now on is gonna be on YouTube, so check us out there. I think it's a cool way for us to engage. Drop a comment in for this video on the YouTube channel if you can. And of course, like, subscribe, smash the bell so you get every new episode as soon as it drops. As always, thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
