#200: Drive | Create Once, Distribute Forever: Content Marketing & Distribution with Ross Simmonds, Founder of CEO at Foundation & Distribution.ai

This episode is from Drive 2024, Exit Five's first-ever in-person event for B2B marketers in Burlington, Vermont. Ross Simmonds, Founder of CEO at Foundation & Distribution.ai , hosted a session on creating and distributing B2B content that drives real results.

Ross covers:

• Why "create once, distribute forever" should be your mantra for content marketing.
• How to blend educational, engaging, entertaining, and empowering content to captivate your audience.
• Tactical approaches to dominate distribution channels like LinkedIn, Reddit, and niche communities.

Timestamps

• (00:00) - - Intro to Ross
  
• (02:55) - - Content Creation Mistakes
  
• (05:49) - - Thinking Like a Modern Media Company: Distribution Strategy
  
• (09:22) - - Crafting and Distributing Engaging, Impactful Content
  
• (14:19) - - How to Continuously Engage Your audience
  
• (17:10) - - Optimizing Strategy through Reddit and Niche Communities
  
• (24:07) - - Tactical Content Distribution Tips
  
• (29:54) - - Embracing AI and Automation
  
• (33:38) - - Framework: Research, Create, Distribute, Optimize
  
• (35:15) - - Creative Strategies for Engaging Your Online Audience
  
• (36:43) - - Write Casually: Communicate Like a Friend
  
• (41:30) - - The Power of Reusing Stories in Content Creation

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:15]:

Hey, it's me, Dave. So this is a special episode. This was a session that we recorded live at Drive, our first ever in person event, which was early September in Burlington, Vermont. It was incredible. We had 200 people there. The NPS after the event was 88. We're going to do it again this year. Don't worry.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:32]:

I know there's a lot of FOMO out there. For those of you that didn't make it, we're going to do it again September 2025. But we have all of the recordings right here for you on the Exit Five podcast. Now, this is just the audio if you want the full video and see the slides and everything. That is available exclusively in our community. Not on YouTube, not on the Internet, nowhere else, except inside of Exit Five in the community. Join 4400 members, exitfive.com and you can see all the content. Okay, let's get into this session from Drive.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:04]:

Actually, I told my daughter, we're gonna have a band for this event. This is. I'm just ad libbing. It's a funny story. The other day in the car, I said, you gotta come tomorrow. There's gonna be a band. She said, dad, you bought a band. She said, are you rich? I said, no, it wasn't that much.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:19]:

All right, so anyway, this is a tough session, man. The Post Lunch, like, everybody's just, like, filled with sandwiches right now. You got to have a good speaker in this session and this next guy. I think my bias in marketing is obviously content, social media distribution. And I think there's nobody better out there that talks about this topic. He's an amazing speaker. I have his book on my shelf, and he believes in this idea of, like, you gotta replay the hits. And so something we talk about even at Exit Five.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:48]:

Like, our newsletter gets a 40% open rate, right? That means 60% of the people, though, never that we worked hard to get on our list. That means 60% of people never even open that message. Right? I have a bunch of followers on LinkedIn, but when I post on LinkedIn, like 1 to 2% of them ever see it. And I think it's very important that once you find something that works to replay those things. That's a big part of his playbook, too. Please give me. I need some energy. Post Lunch, give it up for my guy, Ross Simmonds.

Ross Simmonds [00:02:22]:

That's my jam. Take me back to the 90s. No, I wish I had Some under everybody's seat, but I got three. Anybody want a book that hasn't read my book? Yeah, if you haven't read the book, you're making a big mistake. You can get one. I don't want to hit anybody. I'm like, oprah, you want a book? Who wants a book? Who wants a book? You get one.

Ross Simmonds [00:02:43]:

You look friendly. Hello. You didn't have your hand up. You don't get one. Here you go, Rachel Ross and Rachel. There we go. All right. I'm sorry if you didn't get a book.

Ross Simmonds [00:02:52]:

But I'm also sorry for another reason, which I'm gonna dive into in a second. I am starting this very Canadian by apologizing, but I am so, so, so sorry, folks. I'm sorry because the industry is all messed up the industry is all messed up because of folks like me. Marketing gurus who have gotten on stage since 2014 telling all the CEOs, all the leaders, create more content, write more content, build more content. And then you're getting these slack messages that got you all spiraling out and saying, why do we always have to create content? I apologize. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to the CIOs, the CFOs, the Chief Marketing officers, the demand gen folks. I am sorry because I have gotten on stage and I have told brands that if you create content, the world will be yours.

Ross Simmonds [00:03:39]:

Throw back to when I had no facial hair. Covid was good for me, except I came on stage at an event and I didn't have my glasses, and usually I didn't. And I was speaking, I couldn't see any of my notes and I was like, I'm blind. Like, the behind the screen thing for two years was bad. Either way, I am sorry. I am sorry on behalf of all of the marketers who have said at the top of their lungs, create, create, create, create, create. I apologize. I apologize because right now there are so many B2B brands making this ridiculously stupid mistake where they are creating content calendars and they're calling it a strategy.

Ross Simmonds [00:04:14]:

And they think that a bunch of blog posts in Notion with a few keyword to them is a strategy. It's not, folks. It really isn't. And I apologize because I kind of made them do it. So I am sorry. I am sorry. And then there becomes that story and that idea that you need to think like a media company, yet the newspapers are all going out of business and we're all like, okay, so we're supposed to think like media companies, but we don't really think about the fact that the media companies only work because they had a baked in distribution channel that had the newspapers dropped off at your door every single time. And then now that we have the newspapers in our pocket, we no longer have that distribution.

Ross Simmonds [00:04:52]:

And then everybody's saying, well, content marketing isn't working, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, it doesn't. You just can't keep creating things and hoping that the world will be yours. Content marketing is a two word industry. Content marketing. You have to market the content. You can't just press, publish and assume that the world will be yours, folks. You have to think like a modern media company.

Ross Simmonds [00:05:18]:

A modern media company. Example would be the folks over at Masterclass who have literally put on a masterclass of how to take one simple idea, create a piece of content and then distribute that piece forever. That is the playbook. You have somebody who is an authority in your space, create ridiculously good content. Like Chef Ramsay. He has this one episode in his masterclass where he's talking about Demerara sugar. I don't know if you know what Demerara sugar is. I didn't know at the time, but if you're doing a Google search for Demerara sugar, you're probably pretty sophisticated in the kitchen.

Ross Simmonds [00:05:49]:

So that's somebody who's probably going to be interested in taking a course on learning how to create great food. They go in, they repurpose that content into YouTube videos, into Reels, into social clips, into LinkedIn content, all that stuff. They don't just blog. Now, before y'all get me canceled and say, is Ross saying, don't blog and put that on LinkedIn and try to get me killed, folks? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying create things that are worth distributing. We need to get out of this idea of just like throwing every. I love AI.

Ross Simmonds [00:06:23]:

I love AI. I'm a big fan. But I'm not saying take your content calendar, hey, ChatGPT, write me a blog post and then press copy and paste, and then press publish. That is not it. That's not the playbook. You will get mediocre results and then you'll get evicted off of Google, which we've all seen to. A bunch of SaaS, companies that shall not be named. And then they wonder, like, what happened? What happened to all our traffic? Folks, you do need to create valuable content.

Ross Simmonds [00:06:44]:

Can you use AI to facilitate the creation of valuable content? 100%. 100%. It is an augmentation tool. But you have to start at the fundamentals. What are the fundamentals? The fundamentals are understanding what types of content humans have wanted since the beginning of time. And those are these four things. The four E's people want content that's educational, engaging, entertaining, and empowering. If you can create content that falls into these four categories, if you can do one that falls into all four, well done.

Ross Simmonds [00:07:14]:

That's like the Ice Bucket challenge. It's the only one that I can think of in recent history that does all four of these things. If you can do that, if you can create content that educates, engages, entertains, or empowers people, you are creating content that is worth creating. That is the key, right? It can be educational content that provides people with insight on how to do something, how to achieve a goal that they've always set out to try to accomplish a problem that they're trying to solve. If you can create content that's engaging, it gets the people talking. It's provocative. Do it. Some people got that reference.

Ross Simmonds [00:07:47]:

Entertaining content. If you can tell some jokes, if you can add in a little bit of personality, pop culture references, throw some shade at a few folks. That content does ridiculously well. If you can create empowering content where you're celebrating the people within your organization or your customers and clients, well done. That stuff gets the traction, right? But then after you've done that, after we're aligned, that we shouldn't just create mediocre content, we should create content that's worth creating, and then we need to distribute it. We need to spread that like wildfire. Folks, that is what I'm talking about today. Why is it more important now than ever before to start embracing this type of thinking? Well, back in 2014, when I had no facial hair, no hair on my head, all that stuff, rocking suspenders everywhere I went, you could go and press publish on a blog post, share it on X.

Ross Simmonds [00:08:37]:

The algorithm. It was Twitter then. Share it on Twitter, share it on LinkedIn. Algorithms weren't that sophisticated. You could reach a bunch of people now. The game has changed. You press publish, you think you got to send it out to your newsletter. Everybody's reading it.

Ross Simmonds [00:08:49]:

Nope, there's a bunch. People are skimmers now. Like, you got to think about your audience. You have to think about the way that your audience wants to receive the content, the way that they consume it, and then all of the different things that go into their buying decision. Right. In B2B, it has never been more chaotic. And I hate talking to. I'm sounding very Aggressive.

Ross Simmonds [00:09:12]:

I hate talking to marketers. They're like, we press publish on a blog post, and then that blog post ultimately is going to rank in Google and then we're going to get all the money. It doesn't work that way. No, it's not that simple. Am I a big SEO guy? 100%. I believe it has a ridiculous amount of opportunity. But you have to think about the fact that across the buyer's journey, there are tons and tons of things that are influencing the people that you're trying to connect with. Your sales team needs to be empowered with content that they can use to nurture your leads.

Ross Simmonds [00:09:38]:

You need content that shows up over captier and G2. If you're in the building, my apologies, but they are leeching your traffic. Get in front of them, like, create the content that they've created, but make it 10 times better. Solution pages make sure that you have strong solutions pages, ensure that those solution pages have case studies, have videos. All those things exist in them. You wanna think across the full funnel with your content. It's not just blog posts, it's not just a notion sheet, right? I've done this for some of the biggest brands in B2B, in SaaS. I've used these playbooks time and time again with our team at foundation to do it for myself.

Ross Simmonds [00:10:11]:

We've done it for clients. I've done it with my podcast, where we've taken the episodes and we chopped them up into a bunch of different clips, right? You don't just create once and then think, oh, everybody's going to find it. We got 100,000 downloads last year, and it was because of this playbook where we took the podcast. We uploaded it to blog posts that were on similar topics, embedded at the top. People land on it, they listened to it. We've reposted on LinkedIn, reposted it on Medium, sent it to a few friends in the DMs, got them to feature it in the newsletter. It's how you do the game. You have to create your content ridiculously valuable and then distribute it time and time again, right? You have to go where your audience is spending time.

Ross Simmonds [00:10:55]:

Dave talked about it. I'm a big believer in the remix. You take a thread that goes viral that gets a bunch of traction, turn it into a podcast, turn it into a blog post. You do that over and over again. If something hits, if something resonates, that means that you have what I call content market fit. Content market fit doesn't stop, it continues. So when you have it, continue to milk it and continue to tell that story over and over again. The results off of this has been wild.

Ross Simmonds [00:11:22]:

We've been featured on the front page of Hacker News. We've been featured on the front news page of Reddit. I've been blocked from Reddit like, eight times, and I'm still there. Huge fan, right? Like, I love Reddit. I love Reddit. Y'all are scared of it. I got some ideas on that in a second. But, like, this is the same strategy that I used to make us, like, the number one bestseller in marketing.

Ross Simmonds [00:11:41]:

Like, if you haven't gotten the book, you gotta get it. Shameless plug. Sorry Dave had to do it, but, like, oh, it's a funny story about this. So when my wife first got pregnant, we did this photo. She's there. She got so mad when she found this social. And I replaced her with the book. It was not fun.

Ross Simmonds [00:11:58]:

It was not fun. Yeah, that was a tough dinner conversation. I was like, babe, I love you. All right, so let's embrace this simple framework, folks. This is the framework that I just want you to leave with. I'm going to try to drop as much knowledge bombs on you as I can, but if you leave with this and you print it off and you put it on your desk and you just say, you just, like, use this to, like, mentally think differently about blog posts and your strategy, I think you'll win. So, research, creation, distribution, optimization, four simple concepts. And if you can embrace these things, your content engine and content culture, which is actually the way that we should be thinking about our content teams, is the content culture that you have within your company, the way that you approach it.

Ross Simmonds [00:12:44]:

This will make everything better, right? You are researching your audience to understand their pains, their problems, the things that they're trying to fix. You're trying to listen to your sales team or jump into a transcript of a sales call to understand the objections that your team is getting all the time. And then you're using that to map out the stories that you should be creating in the formats on the channels, which goes to the distribution that they're spending time on, right? And then you optimize it quarterly, let's say you're quarterly going through these assets and making sure that you're not collecting dust on all of this stuff that you've created. And you're improving it from a conversion rate optimization lens, SEO lens, all of that stuff, all while recognizing the motto, create once, distribute forever. This work that we've. The ideas that I'm gonna share with you are not Based off of just theory. I hate listening to people who just talk theory and all that stuff. We did this playbook with Unbounce.

Ross Simmonds [00:13:36]:

We saw like 10x the amount of traffic to the pieces that we ran through distribution channel versus not. And this works, folks. It's like you need to start thinking like this type of media company. This is the media company that I want you to emulate. The folks over at Disney have done it ridiculously well, where they don't just come up with, oh, we're going to create the Lion King, and then we're going to do it again with Childish Gambino. And then they just say, like, cool, it's over. Let's just have people show up. No, they don't do that.

Ross Simmonds [00:14:04]:

Instead they think, okay, how can we make sure that we have licensing agreements? How can we make sure that we have soundtracks that are going to have Beyonce on them? How are we going to make sure that we have a deal with this toy company? They think holistically around the things that they are creating. And with your content, you need to do the same thing. And your role is to recognize that. It's also important that you talk to the other folks within the company to understand the role that content plays. It can't be done by yourself. You can't be in a silo. If you can bring in some of the stuff from the earlier presentations around financial modeling directly to content and you can understand how to communicate with leadership, then, well freaking done. That is when you bring your powers together to have a thriving modern media engine.

Ross Simmonds [00:14:50]:

Some of you didn't grow up in the 90s and you're like, who are these people? The Planeteers is the best cartoon of all time after Gargoyles, But I'm not gonna get into that anyways. You wanna think like Disney and the way that they think about media. Ryan Reynolds recently followed me on Social and I'm like, can I get him to do the Planeteers movie? Like, I'm really thinking, if you got ideas on how I can make this pitch and not get blocked, because that would suck. Canadian to Canadian, let me know. I would love to figure it out. Think like a media company, folks. We can't be in this siloed world where we're just thinking content writer, editor and SEO, boom, it's it, right? We gotta shift to thinking about the role of writers, distributors, even engaging your development team, finance. They got to pay for it.

Ross Simmonds [00:15:35]:

May as well show them the models around how this is going to lower our cpc, how we're going to increase our brand search volume and how it's going to impact the bottom line. These things matter. Outreach, your BDRs, you need to do all of this, bring it all together. But you need to start by understanding where your audience is. So my goal today is simple. I am going to talk you through research, creation, distribution, optimization, some tactical ideas so you can get into the weeds. I hope that if you're in the more senior level, you can at least get some frameworks that you can take back to your team and support them in executing and change your mind so you don't just think that a notion file with blog post ideas is a strategy. And you can stop just telling your team to create things because it's a keyword.

Ross Simmonds [00:16:13]:

All right, first thing that I want you to do, Reddit research. So many people are already breaking out into the hives and they're like, bye, Felicia, I don't want to hear you, Ross. I'm not going on Reddit. Hear me out. The reason why Reddit is important is just from the perspective that you can learn about your audience. If I can't convince you to create content on Reddit, I'm okay with it. Can't convince you to distribute, I'm okay with it. But it is very likely because Reddit is the third most popular site in the US today, that your audience in some way is using this site to communicate, to learn, and to talk about things in your space.

Ross Simmonds [00:16:45]:

So what can you do with that information? I want you to take your website, your company's URL or a big competitor if you're a small guy, and plug in your URL site colon at the beginning and do a search. What you're going to look for here is you're going to sort the content by top post and what you're going to see is content that has content market fit within your industry. The only posts that get a bunch of traction in Reddit are pieces of content that the community found valuable or that they wanted to rip to shreds. And you better run. Kidding. Kind of. I get why everybody's terrified. I get it.

Ross Simmonds [00:17:16]:

I 100% get it. But when you see data like this, where in 2024 Reddit went from a site that was generating about 200 million visits on an annual basis to generating over 500 million visits, it's time to wake up, folks. It is time to wake up. Reddit is not just a small little niche community with a bunch of weirdos on the Internet, right? It can help you win fantasy football championships two times. Let's go. All right. Reddit.com 500 million plus organic visits folks every single month. Why? Because shout out to capitalism.

Ross Simmonds [00:17:50]:

They got a relationship now with Google where Google is obviously going to benefit after an investment into Reddit to Drive more traffic. It's amazing. Why not be there? So we've been using a tool called Stat, which is an SEO tool, it's owned by Moz, where you're able to analyze your brand versus competitors in the serp. A lot of companies always think that their competitors are just the other companies they show up against in Capterra, G2, et cetera. Wrong. You're also competing against the user generated content that is showing up in Reddit more than ever before. We looked at a bunch of alternative pages. Some of these companies might be yours, or at least that you compete with.

Ross Simmonds [00:18:27]:

And when you look at this, when you look at alternatives, Reddit is showing up in the SERP more now than ever before. And this number continues to go up every single month that we've been tracking this. Reddit is taking the place of G2 Capterra Trustradius every single month. But keep sleeping on it. It's okay. Look at this. Right? Like you can see and I hope I'm not showing anybody's companies. Okay, best imaging software.

Ross Simmonds [00:18:54]:

You do these queries. Reddit's now showing up in the serp. So when we think about marketing and we think about search, oftentimes brands, just think, write a blog post, show up in Google. What you should be thinking about is how you can do what we call SERP domination. Meaning you don't just show up with your one blog post and you call it a day. You start to think about how can I show up in TechRadar? Okay, I'm going to reach out to them, that journalist. I'm going to ensure that they include us in their list. Two, this is a common post in the MSP community about hard Drive cloning software.

Ross Simmonds [00:19:23]:

What should we do? We should be in this community creating content. We should be answering that question with a bunch of content. And then we should have a bunch of our friends go in and give it an upvote. But I never said that in front of people. All right, how should B2B brands navigate Reddit? These are the simple things. I'm not going to spend too much time going through this. I have a video on LinkedIn that I recently shared that breaks this down in more depth. But These are the five playbooks that I've seen working B2B that Drives ridiculous results.

Ross Simmonds [00:19:48]:

First highly valuable content assets intended to Drive karma. You gotta get upvotes. Upvotes are like. It's like likes. Yeah, likes. It's like likes. How many people are on Reddit show to advance. Cool.

Ross Simmonds [00:20:00]:

How many people on TikTok? I like this, y'all. My people. Okay, I can't dance on camera. It's not happening. I can't figure out the TikTok thing. Community Driven content that supports the industry. Native links to assets published on your website. This is becoming increasingly important, especially amongst the rise of OpenAI.

Ross Simmonds [00:20:17]:

Using Reddit to inform the responses in Claude and ChatGPT. All the OpenAI relationships right now are wild. Major opportunity there. Paid media. You can run great paid media ads on Reddit, but they have to be advertorial. You run ads that are corny in a cheesy little meme, you're going to get told where to go and how to get there. Brand owned subreddits create branded subreddits. We talked about this in our breakout session.

Ross Simmonds [00:20:40]:

Love the breakout sessions. Do those again next year because you are doing this again next year, right? Anyways, all right. Brand owned subreddits focus on your story and your message. You want to create your own branded like subreddits where you can talk about your product. A few brands that have done this well are Stripe Twilio. They actually have full time people who are managing their subreddits in their community. So you take a social media manager, if you're an enterprise, throw that person to be responsible for managing that as well. Works ridiculously well.

Ross Simmonds [00:21:09]:

All right, how can we get tactical with this? So I want to give you folks again some clear examples on how it's done. So this is a copywriting subreddit. This person essentially wrote a long form post. What does that look like? Look at all those bricks. It looks like a LinkedIn post, right? It made it to the top of the copywriting subreddit. Tons and tons of engagement there. This guy was like, hey, looks like you enjoyed my podcast. Thanks for mentioning it.

Ross Simmonds [00:21:31]:

Podcast nudge. And then he got the person who originally put up the post to edit it and include a link to his podcast. He said that he had more listens to his podcast after this subreddit post than ever before. Helping an MSP decide to rehire or fire their salesperson. Lesson learned from recent experience. Put up by a brand called MSP by msp. I clicked their account and it turns out that they just run a lead gen company on msp. So why are they in this Subreddit because they know that their audience is there, there, I believe, going off the top, man, 200,000 people in that subreddit.

Ross Simmonds [00:22:03]:

Who's joining that? Who's joining an MSP subreddit? Only an msp. My mom ain't joining that. Mom ain't even on Reddit. I'm not joining that. But like you are only going to get the people in that community that make actual sense to you. That's why they're super valuable. Do a site domain search and you can like brands like HubSpot are curating and distributing their content into various subreddits after they go live. Major opportunity.

Ross Simmonds [00:22:27]:

Another play is to run ads. I kind of think the Starbucks ad is corny. I wouldn't do that. But what they're doing is they're trying to get brands. So in the B2C world, Reddit is a great brand play. But in B2B I believe and what we've seen to work the best is advertorial style. So you create a top 10 list and then you submit that and then you promote it and throw some media behind it. Or you reverse engineer the most popular content in a subreddit, recreate it, include your brand and then run ads against that thing.

Ross Simmonds [00:22:56]:

Cool. All right. LLMs are going to consume everything on the Internet by 2026. So what happens when that takes place? You need to ensure that the LLMs that are already being used to inform buying decisions are talking about you. Where are these companies? What are the LLMs looking to partner with? The last kind of domain, the last mile, so to speak, for where they need to scrape in terms of the Internet is user generated content sites. They've already struck a bunch of deals with Reddit, so that's locked in. They already struck deals with Quora. That's locked in.

Ross Simmonds [00:23:30]:

You can distribute your content there. It is a spam field, but that's a different combo. Stack overflow, haven't gotten a deal with. But these are the sites that I believe are the go to places for where you should be distributing your content. If you want to start showing up. These are the announcements that just keep going out. And when you see them, it makes it clear you have to create great content, ridiculous content, and then distribute it forever. All right, but that's not the only thing you can do inside of Facebook.

Ross Simmonds [00:23:57]:

Again, people are already like, well, Facebook B2B people aren't on Facebook. Okay, well, there's 295,000 people who joined a group on Facebook called Digital Marketing. Who's joining that people in digital marketing, obviously. Digital marketing group, Digital Marketing Group, 4,200 people are going into these communities and they're having professional conversation. There was this other B2B marketing community that was on Facebook. It's not anymore, but the good old days. Just joking. I love circle or whatever it's called.

Ross Simmonds [00:24:27]:

But yeah, fine. Graveyard Facebook pages is also a ridiculous play. So I have been in this game for a long time. Back in the day, I bought a bunch of Facebook pages and I run a bunch of media sites and stuff like that. I have a website on plant based food. I have one on barbecue. I'm polarizing. I do all this stuff.

Ross Simmonds [00:24:48]:

So I reached out to this page that I found on Facebook and they had a plant based food Facebook group that had tons of followers. And then I was like, how much would you sell this for? He was like, five grand. I was like, okay, do you have anything else? He told me he had a website. I was like, cool. What are your thoughts on a lower price? I didn't even negotiate. That's all I said. And he's like, best I can do is three grand. It was like 10 cents.

Ross Simmonds [00:25:07]:

A like two days later, I put up reposts sharing a link to like, these books that were about how to get jacked eating plant based food paid for itself. I was like, ching, ching, let's go. All right. Create once, distribute forever. What I'm saying is inside of niche communities you can find gold. And in B2B, for some reason, we oftentimes ignore that. Now, how many people within their orgs are running podcasts with their teams and stuff like that? Don't be shy, don't be shy. Cool.

Ross Simmonds [00:25:34]:

All right, good chunk. Make sure that you're taking those podcasts and you're remixing them into video content. Right? Gong. There you are. You ran the playbook, like, with excellence. Well done. You need to take podcast content, you need to take these stories, repackage them, and repost them. Then after you get the content, you need to repurpose them into things like carousels and documents.

Ross Simmonds [00:25:57]:

Use tools like Canva to empower your team to create these things. Make sure that if you are publishing a white paper that the stats and the quotes within them don't live and die within those white papers. Pull them out, turn them into screenshots, reshare them, and upload them to social. Make sure that if you have a blog post, you're taking that blog post from your site and republishing it on LinkedIn or on your own. Like Medium account. Make sure you're using canonical links because you don't want LinkedIn to surpass you in the SERP. And right now it's doing that across a lot of sites. But you want to repurpose your content.

Ross Simmonds [00:26:28]:

One of my favorite plays for doing that is to use AI to rewrite the intro and to rewrite the title so it doesn't look like duplicate content. And then you can really start to get some crazy interesting ideas, folks. The motto, create once, distribute forever. You're already drinking out of firehose. I still got more substacks, right? Like if you are finding niche creators, this I believe is one of the biggest arbitrage opportunities today in B2B. Because there's a bunch of creators, a bunch of people who are leaving their jobs, people who have got laid off and they are starting these little niche newsletters. There is niche communities, you should be sponsoring them. We have seen ridiculous click through rates when we reach out to newsletters for people targeting like finance executives and telling them, hey, can we sponsor their newsletter? First of all, they're flattered.

Ross Simmonds [00:27:14]:

They're like, wait, you care about me? I only have 800 CFOs subscribe. 800 CFOs, let's go. And he's like, yeah, it's only $200 to what? Let's play all day, baby. I want a year long subscription. Let's fill this up and I will pay for your child's tuition. Let's go. These are playbooks that you can run, especially in niches where your audience is super technical. If your audience is small and there are people creating content, buddy up, partner.

Ross Simmonds [00:27:44]:

Be the first money in. And I'm getting really capitalist on you, but be the first money in to some of these creators and they will have so much more affinity for you. They'll create better content for you and they will appreciate you and talk authentically about your stories. So do that. How do you find them? Go to substack, type in your niche or go to good old fashioned Google and type in your titles of the people that you're trying to connect with as well as newsletters. And you're going to find some content that you can distribute within them. Create once, distribute forever. Turn trending posts from your site that you see trending and turn it into other content.

Ross Simmonds [00:28:17]:

One of the things that a lot of folks also sleep on, especially in technical industries, is that not all content looks alike. When you look at Stripe, which is one of the darlings in B2B, the vast majority of their Traffic doesn't actually go to blog posts. It actually goes to documentation. Documentation for developers is traffic gold. Stop pretending that everything needs to be blog posts, folks. Documentation can generate millions of dollars worth of traffic for your businesses. And when you take that perspective and you recognize that you're rolling out a new API, maybe you'll take a pager to Shopify's book and start saying, maybe we should also create video content. Because people like video.

Ross Simmonds [00:28:56]:

That's why people watch more movies and read less books, to create more content for this audience, right? Don't get me wrong, not all content assets are created equally, but they all should be distributed ridiculously, forever. This is the campaign that most people run with when it comes to publishing content. They press, publish, it goes live, they share it on their email, they share it on LinkedIn. They call it a day. I'm working on a tool called distribution AI. You can sign up for the waitlist today. Shameless Plug one more time, and from there you can distribute all of your stories and repurpose it like this, folks, this is the way that you need to do it. You need to be sharing your content, repurposing your content, and then measuring it.

Ross Simmonds [00:29:36]:

This is the playbook today. But if you must blog, if you must do it, remember, turn those assets into other assets that live in other formats and then start to get real meta with it and embed that YouTube video in the original blog post that you repurpose. Plan your distribution process in advance. And if you want to get real crazy, let's sprinkle some AI on it. Anybody remember the Burger King ad when they had the moldy burger and it got everybody all triggered? Do you remember this? Yeah, that wasn't it. I did that in mid journey. This is what we can do today. We can create visuals without hiring photographers.

Ross Simmonds [00:30:11]:

If you're a photographer, I apologize, but you can do this right now with all of these tools. You can also upload a bunch of your own content to Claude, to ChatGPT, et cetera. You can say, give me a speaker spreadsheet. It will give you a spreadsheet with a bunch of quotes that you've created. You can then take that spreadsheet, upload it to Canva, say, hey, Canva, I want you to automate where it says quote and put my content into that Canva sheet. They're like, ain't nobody sharing that corny picture. So you go to midjourney and you're like, I want somebody that looks like Mad Men. They give you this.

Ross Simmonds [00:30:39]:

You say, I want Some melanin thrown into that. Then you get some pictures that look like this. Then you say, all right, let's throw this up on Canva. You share it on Twitter a few times, and you get a bunch of new followers. And it takes you 20 minutes to do it. Create once, distribute forever. You might be thinking, where do I start? And I'm thinking, I'm tired. All right, here's what you gotta do.

Ross Simmonds [00:30:58]:

Start at the beginning of the research. I do not want to see you on Reddit if your audience isn't there. I don't want to see you buying Facebook groups if it's not there. I don't want to see you thinking about Facebook and all these stuff if your audience isn't there. Start with research. You need to understand where your audience is spending time. Folks, it's a new dawn. It's a new day.

Ross Simmonds [00:31:15]:

We can't just keep telling people to create content and the world is yours. We have to recognize that the industry is in absolute turmoil, and we have gone through some chaotic times. Clients want us to have Barbie execution with Ken budgets. It's crazy, right? We need to level up as marketers to think about how we can create things that are ridiculously valuable, distribute them like wildfire, embrace this growth framework. Buy my book, ask questions. Let's get into it. Thank you all so much. You've been great.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:49]:

All right, who's got questions? Who wants to ask a question? I think what's great about what you shared, though, is, like, I think it's very easy to look at this and be like, oh, my audience is not on one of those things. But the real way to think about this is how can you take the way that you think about things and apply it to your industry, whether you sell to cybersecurity or wherever. I think it's very easy to be like, oh, my audience is not on LinkedIn or not on Reddit. Well, there's probably something you can do once you learn how to think this way, which I think is awesome.

Ross Simmonds [00:32:17]:

Appreciate you.

Question [00:32:18]:

Hi, how are you, Tass? I'm on Reddit.

Ross Simmonds [00:32:21]:

Good for you.

Question [00:32:21]:

B2Bance, if anyone wants to follow me.

Ross Simmonds [00:32:24]:

Oh, I like that. Let's go. Let's go.

Question [00:32:29]:

Never again. It's mine now, the rest of the talk. So the problem with Reddit, because I'm an avid Redditor.

Ross Simmonds [00:32:36]:

Yeah.

Question [00:32:37]:

Is. And you are, too. You can smell bs, and maybe that's because we're in it.

Ross Simmonds [00:32:41]:

Yeah.

Question [00:32:41]:

Right. Like, you're just like one of those people that's like, this is the worst, for sure. So when you see posts that are written, like four tips, you can help marketers. I'm like, okay, where's the guy that's like, you know, right? Like, this tool is crap. So, like, I do a lot of research for my clients on Reddit to see what people are saying about them, because they're typically true. But, you know, the ones that are complementary are the ones that are fishy. And then you go and you find out that they work for that company.

Ross Simmonds [00:33:07]:

Yeah.

Question [00:33:07]:

So it's like, how do you put content on there that's still genuine but doesn't feel like it's a strategy? Because we can smell it for sure a mile away. Especially Reddit. They can smell it a mile away.

Ross Simmonds [00:33:17]:

Yeah. So the key is thanks for the question. Great handle. The way that you have to approach it is really thinking about, put yourself into the reader's shoes. So if you're asked this question or you're scrolling through this subreddit, what are you something that you're going to be more likely to respond to? Well, it's probably going to be in the format of a text message from you to one of your besties. So instead of writing in corporate speak, you need to write it like a buddy or like a colleague or someone that you would talk to in Exit Five, where it's like just casual conversation. When you do that, you also have to get comfortable as an organization of maybe dropping so much value that you mention your competitors. So in the comment, instead of just saying, hey, you should buy Salesforce because Salesforce is the best, you say, well, there's actually a handful of great tools out there, like close, like HubSpot, like Salesforce, all of these things.

Ross Simmonds [00:33:59]:

That's the approach. You run that type of a playbook and then you're able to still influence it. So you have to lead with being human first and then marketer second or you're going to get blocked 100%. How you doing? Good.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:12]:

Alex Ferguson. I was trying to take as many photos as quickly as possible as can through that.

Ross Simmonds [00:34:16]:

Cool.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:17]:

Instead of Reddit or Facebook.

Ross Simmonds [00:34:18]:

Your thoughts on research for LinkedIn? Oh, I love LinkedIn too. So everybody should. If you believe your audience is on LinkedIn, you should have a swipe file where you're keeping track of the most commonly engaged content within your niche. So my first approach is to try to find content market fit within your audience. Likely there's a few influencers who are creating great stories, analyze their content, look at the number of likes, look at the number of comments and then actually create a big spreadsheet, sort it by top comments, top likes, and then use that to identify the themes and the trends of the stories that are resonating with people. And then you rinse and repeat and start to create that content. LinkedIn's going all in on video. I know.

Ross Simmonds [00:34:54]:

I've worked with LinkedIn. They're all in. I'm telling you. If you can find a way to get your teams using video, right now, it's a massive play. There's a reason why it's a button on your homepage, on your phone. Right now, the algorithm has shifted towards video. Follow the algorithm on LinkedIn. That's also a play.

Ross Simmonds [00:35:08]:

They also have a great engineering blog where they publish a lot of the things that go into the LinkedIn algorithm. 2014, I wrote a piece where I broke down the algorithm for LinkedIn. Haven't wrote it recently, but like they still do that. They still press publish on like their code for how they do it. So check it out. Videos all in, though. Go all. Yeah, that was crazy.

Ross Simmonds [00:35:28]:

First, thanks all for the book. Enjoy.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:30]:

How do you think about the roles and responsibilities of a content team?

Ross Simmonds [00:35:34]:

Yeah, that's all.

Dave Gerhardt [00:35:35]:

You know, you just outlined a ton.

Ross Simmonds [00:35:37]:

Of different channels to distribute. Yeah. So my dad always said it's better to have one good kid than five bad. And it's the same thing. It's the same exact thing. Don't be mediocre at all of these channels, folks. Like, I'm not going to tell you you need to be on LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, Quora, et cetera. If you can't do it, if you have somebody who can crack the code on one channel, let them crack that code and then you give them 10%, 20% to experiment with Net new.

Ross Simmonds [00:36:04]:

And then if they go into another channel and they crush it again, get them to document their approach, their processes, et cetera, and then you bring in someone to supplement them to do that. Now, some of you might say, I don't have budget for all that. I need this to all be one person. Cool. Then you need to empower that person and educate that person. Send that person to things like this, send that person to events and you have to upskill them as much as you can and you have to pay them really well and make sure that they stay with you and give them benefits and all that good stuff. That's the play. So is a person that creates the.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:32]:

Content, that's the creative marketer that is distributing.

Ross Simmonds [00:36:36]:

Or do you see it more as like, More growth hacker mindset where you have a growth hacker paired with a content creator. Yeah. So it's the exact same. In the very first talk, you know, we talked about, like outsource what you cannot be excellent at if you are really good at having the subject matter experts in host to create like the thought leadership pieces, keep that in host, create the ridiculously good content and then allow a third party, a partner, an agency to distribute on your behalf and let that kind of take care of itself. If you have the budget, just because.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:08]:

I know where you're at, I feel like you could hire, like you could hire a writer. Like, it's easy to see content and hire a writer, but the writer can't really do the marketing.

Ross Simmonds [00:37:16]:

No.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:16]:

You almost need a marketer who can write as opposed to a writer who's then going to try to figure out the distribution early on and then you can hire more specialized writers. Makes sense.

Ross Simmonds [00:37:24]:

Yeah. Hey, great talk, by the way. Ryan. Nice to meet you. Likewise. Two questions. Well, really just one actually. How do you do this and have the content still seem original so you're not just like repeating stuff that people put online? Like when you're doing research part? Yeah.

Ross Simmonds [00:37:40]:

So everybody thinks everybody sees their stuff, but nobody actually, like, no one saw your stuff. You published a bunch of stuff this year, fraction of your audience. I mean, like, when you're doing research and seeing trends of stuff that's going on, most people still didn't see that either. Okay. Like, and if they did, it was four years ago. So, like, humans are still just balls of hormones and emotions. We react to the same stuff that was viral four years ago today. And guess what? New people entered the market over the last four years that are now your audience.

Ross Simmonds [00:38:04]:

So people talk about this idea of like fatigue all the time, but in reality, the same stuff continues to work. There's a reason why Disney has done Lion King like five times, right? Like, the same stories, slightly different. Throw in some new data, throw in some new research, throw in some new visuals, still will land. Don't be afraid to reuse your stories or take inspiration from others that have worked and then repost them. Like, it's crazy. Everybody's like, oh, Gary Vee, innovator, doing the same stuff Tony Robbins did. Who's doing the same stuff that somebody else did? They're all different content with their own taste thrown onto it. So I know that might not answer exactly how you would have liked.

Ross Simmonds [00:38:42]:

Oh, I'm just going to take stuff your talk and make it a LinkedIn post. Do it. Do it. Do it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:46]:

All right, give it up for Ross.

Ross Simmonds [00:38:47]:

Yeah, do that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:48]:

Good job, Ross.

Ross Simmonds [00:38:49]:

Appreciate.

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