Episode Summary
When it comes to achieving success on social media, what is more important: the quantity or the quality of posts you publish? Of course, many will argue that quality always beats quantity. However, it doesn’t mean you can publish one post and repost it for the rest of your life. But should you, in general, republish your content?
According to our guest Ross Simmonds, “the life cycle of an article doesn’t end when you press publish. “If your post is valuable, you can publish it repeatedly because today’s audience may not be tomorrow’s audience. Each day is an opportunity for someone new to come across your content and use it as a valuable learning source.
Ross Simmonds is the founder of Foundation, a content marketing agency on a mission to help B2B brands create and distribute high-quality content. In today’s episode of the Rep Your Brand podcast, he talks about the most common fears marketers face when creating content. He also explains why reaching the right audience and finding adequate channels leads to success.
He believes being authentic and providing value can be the same thing, but no matter what professional sphere you are in, don’t forget to show your true self; just be human. At the end of the day, as Ross says, “people connect with people.”
Guest Profile
- Name: Ross Simmonds
- What he does: Ross is the CEO at Foundation, a content marketing agency for B2B brands
- Company: Foundation
- Noteworthy: More than 36,000 followers on Twitter prove Ross is one of the must-follow content marketing experts in B2B.
Key Insights
- The game isn't just about creating great content. It is also about reaching the right people. Looking back at his first professional experience, Ross remembers what it was like when he graduated from college and started searching for his place in the marketing space. He knew building a career means connecting with as many people as possible. What did Ross do? He published a post on Facebook. The reactions were not what he was expecting, and that's when he realized it wasn't the quality of the post that caused the lack of engagement; it was the lack of the right audience. ''And that was when the game changed for me. And I started to embrace distribution across channels, like medium.com, Quora, across SlideShare back in the day, across Reddit, all of these channels. I started to put them in my back pocket as distribution channels, and then the game became easier to make my stories spread because I recognized that creation is not enough.''
- Negative comments help you grow as a content creator. Once you start publishing on social media, you can't expect everyone to agree with you. Of course, positive feedback is what all of us aspire to, but negative comments are inevitable. That's why becoming a high-range marketer or a content creator requires developing an ability to embrace every comment and use it for professional growth. ''If people are commenting and engaging in a dialogue with you, and they're challenging your ideas, one of two things can happen. Either you can engage in this dialogue, and you can learn something from them. It can adjust your thinking, which ultimately will pay dividends for you for the rest of your life, or you are going to leave that interaction with the same belief that you had in the first place. Because, that person just gave you additional engagement, which means you might reach another person, which means that you might have another net new opportunity in the future.''
- Figure out what differentiates you from your competitors and emphasize that. Ross says people connect and collaborate with people. In fact, whether they are clients, users, or customers, people want to have that emotional connection with brands they are either using or working with. Therefore, you need to show them why your company is the best fit for them. ''You can look at some of the most successful brands and say there's a very clear difference between brand A and brand B. In SaaS, for some reason, we underestimate the value of a brand. And we think that there needs to be a bit of normalcy where we all sound the same. But I think we are starting to move into a time where B2B and SaaS are going to be more increasingly inspired by B2C. And it's going to become more and more important for SaaS brands to lean into the idea of having a brand voice and an identity.''
“I encourage folks to create content and distribute forever.”
Ross Simmonds
CEO
Foundation
Episode Highlights
The Life Cycle of an Article Doesn’t End When You Click Publish
”The fundamental, key reason why it’s so important to create your content and then distribute it is that when you log in to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, any of these channels that people who are online at that exact time, aren’t necessarily going to be the exact same people who are online two months from now. They’re not even going to be the same people who follow you.
You might have a great post that generates a lot of traction and drives new results for your business, et cetera, in Q1 2022, but in Q4 2023, that same piece of content, if it’s valuable, could do the same thing for your business, with all of the net new followers, all of the net new subscribers, all of the net new attention that you are now able to attract.”
Don’t Be Afraid to Distribute Your Content as Many Times You Think Is Necessary
“There are two things. I think the biggest thing is fear. Fear of being judged; fear of being validated that the piece of content that they’ve created isn’t actually that good; fear of judgment amongst their peers as being seen as someone who is overly promotional.
People have, as marketers, fear that I believe holds them back. And that is something that I think is the root cause for a lot of people’s dreams going unfulfilled. And a lot of marketers are not achieving their full capabilities because they’re fearful of what could happen if they did promote something multiple times.
The second thing is truly just the lack of understanding of the value. A lot of marketers just don’t see the value in a distribution, and it’s a difficult thing, and it’s important to overcome. But the actual inability to realize that, yes, distribution is important, it is something else that holds people back.”
The Key Is to Ask Yourself: How Can I Tell This Story Differently?
”You can’t say, ‘I have one piece of content, and I’m going to share that same piece of content every single day for the rest of my life.’ You do still have to create things. That still needs to be a part of the equation as it relates to the content you’re putting out there.
You have to come up with new ideas, and you need to promote them. But once you have a set of, let’s say, five to ten assets that you have, what I would consider content market fit. Meaning, these are stories; these are themes; these are ideas your audience is going to be interested in and is going to want to have a conversation and dialogue about. Double down on those stories and tell them those stories differently.”
Go Where Your Audience Is, But Make Sure You Can Create Content for Such Channel
”Once you’ve identified the channels that you believe your audience is spending time on, and that there’s a lot of opportunity there, you are now going to distribute content in these channels, and you’re going to rank based on the ease of distribution in these channels.
So you’re going to start thinking through how easy it is to distribute content in these channels. And you’re going to be thinking about that in a few different ways. One, is there a cost to distribute it? What are the skill sets required to distribute content on these channels? If you’re looking at a channel like YouTube, that’s very different from a channel like Reddit. You’re talking about written content versus video content. So your skill set is going to be different.
And then, you have to think about resources. So do we have the people and the capabilities to allocate people or money to do that thing? And then the next part that you’re going to ask yourself: Is this distribution channel inside of our circle of genius? Is this something that we can execute really well?”
The Idea of Being Authentic And Creating Valuable Content Can Be the Same Thing
”If people want answers to a question and you are able to go above and beyond to figure out the answer to that question, and you can, with confidence, backed by data, backed by research, putting in the time to figure it out, and you provide that to the world, that’s value.
And if you want to make it personal, it’s personal. As soon as you put your name on it, it’s personal; it’s authentic. As soon as you put your name on that asset, it becomes something that you own and that you’ve created. So I think two things can be true at the same time.”
