00:03 Hi, my name is Patrick and I'm joined today by Patrick Cumming, who's the head of marketing at ClientBoost. And basically, welcome to the first episode of the Dear From Marketing Experts series talks, where we talk to the brightest minds in marketing to unlock some of the insights behind marketing strategies that help generate pipeline. First, I would like to give our guests the space to introduce themselves. So, Patrick.

00:31 Please just say a few words about yourself and what you do and then let's hit it off. Yeah, for sure. So I don't know how comfortable I am with being tagged as one of the brightest minds in marketing, but I appreciate that as an introduction. It's super nice. Yeah, I'm Patrick. As you mentioned, they're head of performance, sorry, head of marketing, Client Boost. And we are, I would say one of the top performance marketing agencies in the US.

00:59 Currently really what my role entails is I would say kind of client or prospect acquisition. That's like a big focus for me. Alongside that, I've also recently launched the client boost kitchen podcast, which I know we're going to talk a little bit about today, but to summarize what that is, it's just kind of me sharing actionable B2B recipes that other B2B marketers can use to improve their own marketing.

01:26 I've been in the B2B marketing space in some capacity for the last six years. And I think I'm probably most known for paid ads, like B2B paid ads specifically. That's been intentional about how I've tried to position myself. But it's interesting because one, I have experience really spanning the kind of like full breadth of different digital marketing disciplines.

01:53 but also to quite a heavy degree brand as well. So I actually started my journey in a brand agency and have worked as the kind of marketing arm of branding agencies in two roles that I've been in. But yeah, it's interesting. As I say, I think I'm most known for paid ads, but I would actually say for me, the biggest strength is really more strategy and content. I'm very excited about this episode today, because we're going to be touching a lot more on that. And I actually think to some degree,

02:23 I probably have even more value to give on that side than purely the paid ad side. So yeah, it's going to be fun. Cool. Yeah. So yeah, from my side, I approached you for this episode because I think from what I see on LinkedIn and also from Client Boost Kitchen, I was very impressed with how valuable and helpful the content is that you post on an almost daily basis.

02:50 And so I thought this is the perfect topic to talk with you about because I think this is one of your like superpowers, let's say. And so I'm really excited to jump into the topics. So my first question would be, why is it important to be helpful with content nowadays? What I would like to get into here is also what has changed on a content side between let's say 2025, 2024 and before that.

03:21 Yeah, let's just dive into this and dig into this a bit. Yeah. Yeah. So there's this kind of two questions there, which is good. And I definitely have some strong POVs on this. I think answering the first question there, why is it important to be helpful with content nowadays? think it did to some degree. It really always has been. And I think HubSpot kicked off that content led strategy a long time ago. It was very successful for them. And I think a lot of businesses have tried to emulate that.

03:50 because it is such a solid strategy. But I think for me, the reason it's so important to be helpful is to build trust, right? So I think we live in a world where one, I just think people are maybe more distrusting of brands and quite rightly, I think lots of brands maybe haven't acted as ethically or responsibly.

04:12 as they should have of the, especially over the last kind of like 20 years. And especially since we've been using digital marketing tools and tracking people, it's the equivalent of digital stalking. So I think that's a big one is building trust. And I think it's this idea of you really want to build trust before you, before you ask for the sale. So I think we see this a lot on LinkedIn where creators will say don't pitch slap in the DMs because people don't want a random stranger coming up to them and just trying to sell them.

04:41 products, right? They're craving that more human connection. And I think what content marketing does is it shows that you care about them and you care about helping them, like whether or not they buy from you. And I think that puts you in a really strong position that I think if we come to this concept that's become really popular in the last two years, this idea of the 95-5 rule, which is 5 % of your market is in market any one time.

05:10 95 % of it is out market. And I think when you build trust with helpful content, and especially if you do it in a way that it's building the right associations between your content and the problem that you solve and how your products can solve that, it puts you in this really strong position where as that 95 % out market moves, starts to move into in market, you have mental availability built up. So they associate you with the problem that they're trying to solve.

05:39 But you also have trust built up, which is equally as important, right? It's not just about getting on the vendor list. It's not just about being thought of, it's being, it's about being thought of and considered. And I think for me, that's why it's important to be helpful with content. But then to come back to that other question about what's changed in content marketing. And this will probably lead on to talking into why I went about McClientBoo's kitchen the way I did, but.

06:09 I think I, I recognized as soon as AI came out pretty quickly that the old way of doing content, which was just how to content could easily be duplicated by AI. So it's a very easy strategy to rip off and it's not the case. That's not still a valuable strategy. It's just in that way, it's not valuable anymore.

06:33 And what's more valuable is experience content. So it's like taking the same strategy, but doing it from an experience perspective. Whereas instead of saying how to do this, how we did this and here was the outcome. And the benefit of this new way of doing it is it's much more dynamic. So I think the old way was very static. You go to HubSpot, they give you a nurture sequence. You expect that if you put your MQLs through this nurture sequence in six months, X percent of them should have converted. And I think we all realized.

07:03 Most of us realized that stopped working about five years ago. It probably took us until 2024 to fully, deeply understand it didn't. And so I think that's the benefit of this new school, which is it's just more dynamic. It's based on you're constantly experimenting and constantly putting out new ways of doing things that keeps up with how fast the world is accelerating. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really interesting take. I like this.

07:31 experience content. Yeah. And I think you're really good at that. And that's why I think we're talking today. So in order to show the right content to the right people, think you really need to understand who your customers are and what they care about. What is your look on these? Like, how do you learn about your customers and how do you in the end then also understand them? What's your strategy there?

08:00 Yeah, yeah, that's a good one. And it's, think I'm in a very, very fortunate position as the head of marketing for a marketing agency, because my target audience to some degree is me. So I know that most of my audience is having the exact same problems I am. Do you know what I mean? For example, I don't want to get into politics with recent tariffs announced in the U S almost immediately.

08:27 We were able to see from clients internally that pipeline was starting to drop off. saw that our own pipeline started to drop off. We're seeing it in the markets. And so immediately I'm like, okay, I'm having this problem. So I know that my audience is having this problem. And then because I'm so active on social media, I'm also seeing that nobody's talking about it because nobody wants to admit that's a problem because that's like admitting that you're maybe not doing your job properly.

08:55 And so I'm like, okay, I'm going to be proactive with this. And so that's the first thing is like, I had to distill that, I would actually say it's about maybe taking a step back from customers and not just listening to customers, but actually listening to the market. And this is another pretty strong POV that I have, but I think marketers at some point since the age of the internet forgot that part of their job wasn't just to understand customers, but also to understand market dynamics. because it has such huge.

09:25 Influence and it's interesting. So I actually saw a post from Sam O'Brien, your VP of marketing from last week, where he talks about exactly that, where he says in the digital age, marketers forgot that they were building markets and they got so hyper obsessed with attribution that they weren't looking at the bigger picture. so that would be the first one is not just listen to customers, but listen to markets. And that's something I've always tried to do. And the benefit of doing that.

09:53 Is that it prevents you from making bad decisions too. If you have a campaign that's not working because it's a campaign, a bad campaign, or you have a campaign that's not working because there's market dynamics, the way that you respond to that is completely different, right? Because if there's poor market conditions, yes, you still want to respond in some way, but what you don't want to do is be reactive because what might be the case is you have something that is working, is ticking the right boxes.

10:22 You just need to write, you just need to weather this storm a little bit. Whereas content that's not working, that's a little bit different. So that'd be the first thing. Listen to markets, I think. the other one is just find out where those people are hanging out and specifically like where they're having conversations. And so for me, a place I love to go is exit five. I think that's brilliant. spent quite a lot of time in exit five, responding to conversations that happen in there, reading conversations that happen in there. I'm also signed up to a bunch of Reddit groups.

10:51 So I can see what market, what problems a market is asking to solve. And that's honestly a huge influence on some of the content that I do. So I'll often be an exit five. so I use the example is one thing I'm seeing loads on exit five on LinkedIn. In Reddit is lots of people asking, okay, everybody's telling us the new most popular playbook is brand, but I don't know how to measure this. How do I measure this thing?

11:16 And then in my mind, I'm like, oh, last year at Client Boost, we actually developed our own framework for how we measure brand. I'm not doing a good enough job right now of getting that information out there. So I'm like, okay, this is going to be a focus for us content wise now, because again, that's listening to the customers and also listening to what the market's asking for. you're doing both with that. It's okay. This is the area that we need to do content about now. So that's one thing, but the other one that just any...

11:44 head of marketing should be doing at least once per quarter is, is getting stuck inside their CRM and just, this takes loads of work. not, I would say, I repeat, like, do not outsource this to AI. Go into HubSpot, go into Salesforce and look at all the email chains that your sales team is having between the different pipeline prospects that you have. If you have a tool like Gong or you have sales recordings, watch those recordings.

12:12 I'm very lucky because one of our SDRs, we call them growth strategists. In fact, they're not even, they're more like sales reps, to be honest, than SDRs, but we call them growth strategists. Actually has set up Gong now so that after each discovery call, it gives a really detailed overview of like pain points, gain points, what they're looking for. And it's big. It's probably like 500 words of information. And so at the end of last quarter, I took all of our highest value, most close to.

12:42 to ICP related deals and looked at all of those transcripts and got loads of really valuable stuff out of there to inform like the next batch of content for client boost. So I would say do that hard scalable work. Another thing as well, again, I'm in a lucky position being a marketer, marketing to marketers, but like a lot of heads of marketing and CMOs will engage with my content. So whenever they do.

13:08 I'll just send them a follow-up message and say, Hey, appreciate you supporting the content. It's does this topic resonate right now? Is this a focus for you? And two things happen from that. say you either learn or you earn, right? So you either learn, you have a really good conversation with that person and learn some more information about the problems the market's having right now. Or you earn, which is sometimes they'll say, yeah, I'm actually trying to solve this problem right now. Do you want to jump on a call?

13:34 And that's happened a few times. Yeah. That's another thing that people should be doing. Get creative. would say, find out where people are, get creative, talk to them. Yeah. That's really interesting points. I think especially the, really digging into your CRM and reading through those conversations or watching the videos or whatever. That's a really big hack that I've also used many times and it does really help if you do the work and actually sit down and spend some time reading those. Yeah.

14:04 Definitely. Nice. Thanks for those insights. Those are really interesting. Then let's go into the next topic, which is how does valuable content contribute to pipeline? You talked about the 95-5 rule earlier and like that is a concept that has really risen in importance over the over like the last two years, as you said, and

14:28 Some would argue or especially like CEOs and CEOs would argue that, okay, yeah, we're creating content, but that doesn't get me short-term leads and short-term pipeline. So how would you say, does it contribute to pipeline? And could you also share an example from your own experience for that? Yeah. Yeah. That's, it's one of those things that's content influence on pipeline is really

14:58 tricky to measure one because it does have a really long lag time. And I say really long. So if I was to give the most obvious example of the wrong way to approach content and find it out almost by accident that you needed to put more time into content. So I'll just take Client Boost. We, two years ago, so the previous head of marketing before, before I joined, I think it was actually head of content, put it just a huge focus on building and it

15:27 amazing content library. So our website just has so much incredible content on there. And it's always been a huge source of inbound for us, like huge source. would say like organic content, we actually get more influenced pipeline from organic search at client boost than we do from direct traffic, which I would say is very unusual because direct traffic will typically be the, you know, the highest influenced deal. then you have the CFO saying.

15:57 How do we invest more in direct traffic? So we did this huge piece of work on that. And when I first started at Client Boost, I was head of performance marketing for the EU side. And so I would, I was jumping on our sales calls at that point. So I would say 50 % of my role was sales and just so many people you'd be on a call and they would be on that call. Not only because they liked the content, but they would be excited to work with Client Boost because they love the content. And half the time.

16:26 When you would like reverse engineer where they came from, wouldn't necessarily be super obvious that content had influenced that deal. So I think that's one thing. But then what also happened is that we found we had like maybe an 18 month gap with, without ahead of marketing or not really without ahead of marketing, but without going really hard on contents. We took our foot off the gas on that. And then around December, we really started to see inbound.

16:56 from organics start to drop a little bit. so again, we're in this fortunate position where loads of work has already been done on content. And I'm talking blog content specifically. know there's loads of different types, but this is just a good, I think, example of how it influences things. And so because we've got loads of domain authority from January to the end of February, we just put a huge push.

17:20 on upgrading all of the most valuable pieces of content on our websites. When we say most valuable, we measured that by the pieces of content that in dream data, which is attribution tool we use, get that have the highest conversion path to pipeline. And so that was the metric that we used. And also to some degree, the ones that get the highest traffic too. And so we did that and then immediately saw a huge surge in organic traffic.

17:49 And a huge surge in inbound as a result in March. So I think for me, that's why it's so important. And you really have to be looking at it holistically with content to understand the true impact. It's very difficult to measure, like to tie growth directly to it. And like with attribution, it's more of an uplift that you're going to see. And for most businesses that haven't done it before, you probably are looking at six to 12 months runway before you.

18:18 really start seeing some benefits from that. But the other thing with content is it can help influence pipeline right now. And I think that's something that gets massively overlooked. know paid ads isn't necessarily content, but it is too. One thing that companies don't like to do is they'll have a company become pipeline and they want to exclude it from targeting because they're like, oh, we've already got sales talking to them. It's not marketing's responsibility anymore.

18:46 But what we see consistently and what I've seen consistently is when you actually target that existing pipeline with content that's relevant to the objections that they're raising in calls to the problems that they're trying to solve. When you base it around what's the cost of inaction going to be. If this prospect doesn't choose this decision, you actually will see that you can have higher average order values. You can reduce sales cycle length. You can.

19:16 have higher close rates as a result of targeting that pipeline with content first without. And the thing is, you're not going to be able to attribute that directly because that pipeline's already, already submitted a form, right? So you're not going to get another conversion, but again, if you measure it holistically, as opposed to just trying to directly tie everything to a specific activity, you do see that targeting existing pipeline right now with content, especially when it's tailored to their problems.

19:44 It's just going to help improve all of the sales teams metrics as well as the marketing teams metrics too. Okay. Yeah, that's, it's really interesting. Thanks for those insights. So let's get back to the part of like you've detailed earlier, how to understand your customer and how to learn about your customers. What is your general process from having understood your customer to a

20:12 finished content piece? Like how do you approach basically planning and then executing the content piece itself? If you can give an example. Yeah, that's a really great question. I think it depends on the type of content piece that it is. And I would say I probably fall somewhere smack bang in the middle between a data-driven marketer and a vibe marketer.

20:37 So there are five marketers that will just follow that intuition all the time and do whatever feels right. that if you've got good instincts and there's people out there, Dave Gerhart, for example, who talks about this vibe marketing approach all the time, seems to be working for him. He seems to have built a really impressive career of doing that. And I'm sure he follows loads of data too. So I'm not trying to say that he doesn't, but for me, yeah, I'm like smack bang in the middle there where I try and be really data driven.

21:05 But I'm happy to follow my instinct when I'm about 80 % confident. And if it's something as simple as I go into exit five and I see that loads of people are talking about, okay, how do we measure brand? The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to test how that might perform organically. So using LinkedIn as a barometer, although that's tricky to do sometimes because you never know if it's just the algorithm trying to stab you in the back that day, but I'll do that. So I'll say, okay, if I write a LinkedIn post about that, how does that perform?

21:35 If that performs well, then what I'll do is probably move it to the, the client boost kitchen conveyor belt. So I'm like, okay, this is performed well. I want to try and get a client boost kitchen episode done on this because the kind of core idea, and I'm probably like jumping a few steps ahead here, but I think it's helpful. The kind of core idea behind the client boost kitchen or one of the core ideas.

21:59 was that it could be like a multi-use content engine for us. So it's like everything starts with a client boost kitchen podcast episode. And then from there, we can take the transcript of the episode and use that to turn into literally hundreds of different content pieces. And so that's what will typically happen. I'll be like, okay, how to measure brands really important. I'm going to record a client boost kitchen episode on that.

22:24 If there's somebody that comes to mind who I think would be a good guest, whether it's internally or externally, I'll reach out to them or otherwise I'll just do the episode solo. And so what that looks like is I'll create a slide deck that has a structured flow for me to follow on the podcast episode. Again, that's just to keep me reigning in because I have a tendency to like dart in different directions if I don't have that. And then I'll use.

22:53 What I'll do is create really janky, ugly visuals in there and then pass that to a designer to go make look pretty. And so I can record the podcast. also have supporting visuals. So then I can take that transcript, turn the transcript into a newsletter, turn it into a blog post, turn it into 20 different LinkedIn posts. But then I can also take those visuals and use those to build out a LinkedIn carousel or to build out a LinkedIn cheat sheet. For example, you've probably seen some of those like.

23:22 And then, yeah, exactly. But then also, so coming back to that previous question about how to use content to influence pipeline, I've also been taking the relevant stuff and enabling the sales team with that. So the sales team have started adding some of the QuietBeeze kitchen content to their sales decks and seen a decent response to that. And from there, we can also take the podcast episode and then turn that into, I have an AI tool now that can turn the podcast episode.

23:50 into 2020, in fact, the most recent one was 40 video snippets that are all centralized around one single point. And it tells you what the point is in the summary. And so you can do that. And then you can pull the transcript of that small point and then have AI create a really decent post in your tone of voice. And so you're able to scale content that's human content, right? So I think the problem with AI.

24:16 Is when you try and get it to write content, that's not based on your own POV. It's not in your own tone of voice. It's not your own ideas. And so what we're doing is that we're using our brains for the start. then, so that will be the customer insight usually. And then like using AI to just create tons and tons of really valuable content as a result of it. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great strategy. I think that makes a lot of sense. like starting with video, which is like a very.

24:46 authentic format to begin with and then working from there into both text and also like video snippets and so on. It's a very good workflow that also works well. Yeah. I actually, I had tried initially to go writing first. So I tried to write a blog post first and then go to the episode and I was like, man, this has taken way too much time.

25:13 It's so much easier to just spend 30 minutes talking about something and have AI clean it up than it is to spend two hours trying to, because I think the problem when you're a content writer, because I cut my teeth in content writing as well. So 50 % of my first role for the first two years of my career was just writing content, just writing blog posts, just writing social media posts, just creating ads and writing ads and landing pages and all that sort of stuff.

25:40 And it's really hard not to try and write something that sounds really good as opposed to doing it really quickly. Whereas when you talk, it doesn't need to be as polished. Yeah. No, thanks for walking me through this process. It's really like interesting to hear how you do that. Let's get to the next question, which ties into this a bit, because I think it was our...

26:03 content marketing director, Jamie, that told me once that content created and not distributed is a wasted opportunity. So how do you approach content distribution when it, for example, comes to client boost kitchen? You went into this a bit, but what's your process there? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. So again, I would say.

26:26 We have a very strong strategy and maybe not the sharpest plan, but it's probably the way to do that. it's like create good content, put it in front of people. It's probably the easiest way to describe the distribution strategy. what I did early on was created a kind of content hub for all of the client boost kitchen stuff, somewhere to just store all the different assets that we have to have like a roadmap of.

26:52 What's coming, what's coming next. And then I can prioritize and reprioritize based on what I think is most, most relevant to the audience and the market right now. And so that's the first place. And then we have a, like, would say we have a content plan where it's okay. On these days, we're going to post this type of asset. And on these days, we're going to type post this type of asset and et cetera, across these different channels. So from the organic perspective.

27:20 That's how we do it. I'm not super rigid with it. I prefer to have some embedded flexibility where I'm not too beholden to doing the exact same thing on the exact same days of the week. I think it's important to have a little bit of cushion and be flexible because you do want to sub something out if it's not relevant and bring something in that's relevant, typical to that, to that week. I think is really important. think your content director is absolutely right. And so one thing that I got wrong over the last couple of weeks.

27:51 last couple of months really is we launched the client based kitchen newsletter and podcast at the same time. The way that works is I record the podcast, then send the transcript to our content manager who will then turn the transcript into a newsletter, again, enhanced by AI. But every Friday I'll then take that transcript, publish, we'll send that out to an email list and I'll also publish it on LinkedIn. And as a result, I've been so focused.

28:18 on getting newsletter subscribers, which we did really successfully. So we got to 1,600 newsletter subscribers in a couple of months, which I was super, like honestly surpassed all my expectations. but I realized we were getting no visits, like barely any visits to the, to the actual recorded podcasts. And I was like, duh, like I'm just not promoted enough. And so just this week, for example, I was like, okay, what I'll do.

28:45 is when I promote the newsletter, I'll just put a link to the podcast and say, Hey, if you can't be bothered to read this huge long newsletter, here's a link to the podcast. If that's like a preferred method for you. And then what I also did was included a link from the Quiet Boost company page as well. And that's another little hack that people don't know about company pages is that they get a lot less reach, but they get way higher engagement rates.

29:13 way higher, like the engagement rates on those company pages is really high. If you have a fan on your company page, they are a hundred percent going to engage with it. And so what I did was posted it on the company page too. And then suddenly we've got three times as many listens to this podcast than we did for any of the previous ones. And that's, that's because of distribution. Like you have to distribute it. Like you can't build content and it will come.

29:39 And so I think people probably overcomplicate the distribution strategy, which is just tell people about it. Just tell people about it. Tell people about it again. Learn from market feedback about what they like and what they don't like. Do more of what they like, do less of what they don't like, and then just keep doing that consistently. It's tricky sometimes because algorithms change and like mess with things. So it's not always hard to tell exactly what's working or what's not working, but generally you can use engagement rate is probably the best.

30:08 Barometer or dwell time is another one. But yeah, the other thing that gets overlooked is just use paid, like use paid. If you're running paid, promoted via paid too. We're doing that now. So we've taken the top performing Clive's Kitchen carousels, dropped them into a top of funnel LinkedIn campaign to add cold ICP list and just getting like 20 % plus engagement rate, which for any LinkedIn ads marketers out there, that's insane. Like those are not normal engagement rates and those are not.

30:37 normal for us either, we have some campaigns that get 0.5 % engagement rates. That's another thing. think again, lots of people are so focused on trying to get the conversion right now. They forget that like one of the jobs of distribution is just to get it in front of people and paid a really good way of doing that. Yeah, definitely. We've also had our experiences with that at DeFront. I can highly recommend using paid as well. Cool. Then I think next we can...

31:05 We can finally officially get to the topic that you've been talking about in multiple instances during the last questions, is Client Boost Kitchen. So you started this a few months ago together with your founder, Jonathan Dane, who's the founder of Client Boost. And yeah, I would just be interested in how you came up with the idea and how has the response been from your audience so far? Yeah, great question.

31:34 Yeah, client boost gets my baby. So when I first stepped into the, it's an interesting one because I didn't realize this. it's crazy tangent here, but it's funny. So we're talking about, was clearing up, I was going through some old notebooks at the weekend and this is from like my first agency. that was like five years ago, six years ago, maybe. And it was interesting. I was flicking through it and I saw this mockup of a, an

32:03 a recipe page and this idea of doing a cookbook as this interesting way, this interesting take on playbooks. And that never got executed at that agency. And I honestly totally forgot that I even came up with that idea. And then when I first stepped into the client boost, head of marketing role, one thing that was immediately apparent to me from a lot of the, especially the closed lost analysis and just.

32:31 Again, this was just a feeling, just like an instinct that I had was that I think Client Boost had historically always been really known as innovative agency, the leaders when it comes to strategy. And it felt, didn't feel like we weren't doing that anymore, but it felt like we weren't talking about it enough. But it felt like the audience didn't feel like we were that way.

32:55 And we've got clarification of that in some of the closed loss deals where we'd lose deals because they say, oh, I've seen these strategies before. There's nothing new here. And so I really, I could see from the market that they wanted us, they wanted to feel like we were more innovative, like we were going to push them to do new things. And like we were the agency that had innovative strategies. And so I...

33:21 felt like we needed to have some form of experimentation engine. And so the core concept of the client boost kitchen isn't just the content. It's for us to conduct experiments that we then talk about. we can say, instead of wasting your budget as a client, I'm trying to figure out whether this works or not. We'll do it on our content first, and then we'll give you the strategies that work for us.

33:46 As opposed to you having to waste your money on things that may or may not work. That to me just felt like a really strong differentiator. And we actually did already have a client boost labs that had been launched, but just, was one of those in, you know how it is in companies. Like you launch something, it doesn't really take off. And the interesting thing is it was launched by a guy that used to work for us, who then went to HockeyStack and then helped HockeyStack launch HockeyStack Labs.

34:15 So my problem was I was like, can't relaunch client boost labs because what about I, I, I would hesitate to call them a competitor because I actually love their content. And I love the founder, but Omnilab for example, I'm like, so we've got Omnilab, we've got Refine Labs, another quote unquote competitor, but I love the stuff those guys are putting out. Then you have HockeyStack Labs. I'm like, if client boost comes out with client boost lab now. That's, it just feels like we're copying everybody else, but I want to do something like that.

34:43 but in a way that's different and memorable. And so the idea behind the client boost kitchen was it's a way of branding that same concept, but in a way that's super memorable, has loads of creative potential is also, think more closely aligned to the client boost brand, which is fun, cheeky and playful. And so that was where the idea came from. was this idea of having, it's more about a concept than an actual thing, which is okay.

35:13 On our marketing, we're going to, and we're doing it with you guys right now, right? We're running experiments on LinkedIn ads, using some of the features in Dealfront. And then what we'll do is create recipes around the most successful strategies we get from Dealfront. And so that was another concept. I'm like, cool. It's not just about running ad experiments, but it's also a great way to build really meaningful strategic partnerships too, where we can build deep relationships with partners, but partners that can also.

35:42 help us improve the experience for our clients, help us improve our own ad performance, but then we can also help that partner get more customers for their products. It's a really good win-win. So that was kind of the core idea behind the Client News Kitchen was really about we need to innovate and we need to show people how innovative we are. And I just felt like that was a really powerful way to do it. And because the concept itself is so bold and so out there,

36:12 It almost is, it displays that we are those things before we even do the content. It's like just having the brass to release cheat sheets with a tablecloth around them and pots and pans with smiley faces on them. That's bold. Most C-suites are going to look at that and think we're not doing that. It's too bold. the reception too, it's been honestly like blown me away. It's blown me away. think loads of key, loads of key marketing.

36:42 influencers and thinkers that I respect a lot either DM to me or commented straight on the content to say, I love this. It's refreshing. The branding is super cool. And so that was really nice. But then we're also seeing leads coming in now from the newsletter, which I didn't expect so soon. We're also seeing again, loads of engagement with the content on paid really high engagement rates. And then also just little things like we have the guys from Fall Funnel share one of the carousels last week. And so.

37:12 There's just loads of signposts that the response has been pretty good to it. would say the only thing I'm disappointed with is we're not getting as many listens on Spotify as I would like, but that's fully my fault. Again, didn't distribute the content. No, but huge congrats on how successful it has been. I'm also a fan, really like the concept and thanks for sharing how it all came together. Then we'll come to the last question today, which is...

37:40 What would you recommend to marketers that would like to bring value to their audience through content? We've talked about researching your audience. guess that's the first place to start because you need to understand your audience to create good content. But then what would be some hacks that people could technically implement today and see success from? Yeah. I think the way I'll approach this is I think most...

38:09 good marketers should be able to find out what content their audience needs. And so that's obviously the first place to start is like, it's not going to be valuable if they don't find it. I used to have this concept of the three E's, which I've definitely stole from somewhere, but it needs to either entertain. It needs to like make them feel an emotion or it needs to educate. So if there's a hack, was to say.

38:38 Make sure it ticks at least one of those boxes, but ideally all three. So that would be the first place to start. So once you've got that sorted, honestly think this is from having managed a few marketing teams at this point and been, and mentored quite a few marketers at this point is I think probably the mistake that people make when it comes to value isn't so much that they don't know what to say.

39:05 It's that they don't package it. And the number one way that they don't package it is that I think they don't think like somebody that doesn't know what they know. And so I think this is the curse of having knowledge is that it's really hard to imagine what it's like to be somebody that doesn't know that thing. And so one, what that will do is I'll take an example. I post lots of stuff on about paid ads and every now and then I'll have a LinkedIn troll.

39:34 who will be like, duh, do know what I mean, about the content? When I'm creating something that sounds really obvious to them. And I'm like, one, you know, it's usually a paid ad specialist. I'm like, no shit, you know what this is about. You spend all day in paid ads, but I'm talking to CMOs and heads of marketing who are usually on their own or they have a very small team and they don't have anybody that specializes in paid ads. And this information is actually really valuable to them. But where most people go wrong. And so one thing is they'll think, oh, everybody would know that.

40:04 not going to post about it. And that's not the case. That's the stuff you need to post the most. And it's no accident that the stuff that goes viral on LinkedIn is really basic information that you think everybody would already know. it's, don't, they don't. It's actually super valuable. But the other thing is they don't think with that blank state mind of, if I didn't already understand this, what information needs to be in there to make me understand it. And so one thing I put a lot of focus on is, and this is why I have much longer content.

40:35 is I really want somebody to get to the end of it and not have to ask another question to be able to go and action it. And so that's what I would say people need to focus on is if you want to bring value, you need to create content that's the people can follow and they're not asking. And if they are asking follow-up questions, it's out of interest to learn more as opposed to they don't understand.

40:59 For me, think I was fortunate because that always that side of things always came quite naturally because I had studied English literature. So I came from a completely different background to most marketers where I studied writing and really learn and was appraised on my ability to communicate something clearly, coherently and concisely. And so that's why I would say is the best thing to focus on. And that's also a really good use case for AI. So if that doesn't come natural, naturally to you, like upload the content to AI.

41:29 and just have it analyze, say you are a completely blank slate who doesn't understand this topic. Read this and tell me in what ways you might not understand what the exact next steps to do are. And that can really help you create something. I would say that's going to take you your content from that kind of good to great to exceptional if you have the ability to do that. And I would say that is probably something that I hyper-focus a lot on in my content.

41:58 The interesting thing is that stuff will probably be less viral because it's a little bit more in depth, but that is the stuff that will drive value. it's without a doubt, it's those types of posts where afterwards, where I'll look at who's responding to it. And I'll be like, oh, okay, this is CMOs, this is head to marketing. This is getting to the right people. And that's also when I'll tend to get more DMs or connection requests from those exact roles that I'm trying to talk to as well. Okay. Wow.

42:26 Those are really good recommendations. Thanks a lot. Cool. Yeah. Very happy to have had you on the podcast. It's been a very interesting conversation, I think, that people can take away lot from. yeah. Thank you. And looking forward to hearing more and seeing more from you on LinkedIn and beyond. Cool. man. I appreciate your invite, mate.