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In this episode of Confessions Of A B2B Marketer, I’m joined by B2B SEO and content wizard Brendan Hufford of Growth Sprints. We get Brendan to share how he uses Zero Click Content to grow, the SEO skills needed in 2022, his own personal content strategy and the biggest opportunities for B2B growth right now.
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Thanks for listening and hit me up on Linkedin if you have any questions!
Episode transcript
Oh, this like myopic, here’s the keyword tool, and then I use this crawler tool, and then it’s like, why don’t these convert to customers? Why doesn’t this work? Right? Oh, SEOs. That’s not how people buy anymore. Wrong.
Brandon, how are you doing? I’m awesome. I’m awesome. Sweet. So thanks for jumping on. Now, the reason that I actually wanted to bring you on the show was because it seems like, or I think you are killing it on LinkedIn, Would you agree? I mean, when you’re inside the jar, you can’t really read the label. So just trying to share stuff that I’m proud of.
That’s interesting that I enjoy writing, and that is maybe a little bit different than the usual LinkedIn broa tree that we read everywhere else. For sure. And I actually read something that you shared, I think it was yesterday, about zero click content. Mm-hmm. . And it seems like you’ve been doing that for a while, Right?
Which is essentially just putting all the value into the post on LinkedIn and maybe other platforms. But I’d love to learn like why you start doing that, how you start doing it, and what impact is having on your business slash businesses. Yeah, So zero click content, at least the phrasing around it. A way of understanding, kind of coined by my friend Amanda Nada over at Spark Toro.
She’s a brilliant marketer. People should follow her on Twitter. That’s where she shares most of her best stuff, even though I’m trying to convince her to share more on LinkedIn. She kind of coined this term zero click content, and it’s just this idea, and we’ve been seeing this as marketers for quite a while, that platforms are wanting you to go off less and less, right?
Like LinkedIn specifically, if you click a link, it even takes you to a splash page and it’s like, here’s where that’s taking you. Are you sure you want to go there? And it’s just. Whatever they can do to get you like back on the platform and other, I mean, LinkedIn or LinkedIn. Instagram’s always been this way.
You had like LinkedIn bio and even swipe up was delayed so long being rolled out. Everything wants to keep you on the platform. I think TikTok was one of the first that was like, we’re just gonna watermark this stuff. You can download it and share it everywhere. But that was a growth strategy for them.
The way I think about zero click content is how can I give you the most value right here? So I do that a lot. In my post, I’ll share a framework and I’ll be like, Save this image. This is a full slide. Save it, Put it in a deck that you’re sharing, right? Cause that’s what I want. I understand how humans work.
They work. Marketers especially work very similar to me. There’s no reason for me to be like, If you want a PDF of this, like go to this page and enter your email address and I’ll email it to just give it to ’em. They don’t. That’s all they want. So as much as I can, I try to share on the platforms that was originally threads on Twitter.
That’s how I operate on LinkedIn. That’s how I do emails as much as possible. The only time I’ll send people off of, it’s like I do an annual review every. I can’t put all that in one email. It’s too much. I mean, even the mail chimp or converter or whatever will like inboxes. It will like cut it off and be like, If you wanna read the rest of this, go somewhere else.
So I’ll take them off the, the platform if it’s really that important. They read more, but as much as I can, I wanna share on the platform. I, what it’s done for me is that platforms that want to keep people on the platform have rewarded that behavior. Right. LinkedIn does it specifically, since we’re talking about.
I think that it has been really valuable. It also gives me the constraint of like, I can’t be lazy and just be like, go somewhere else and read this whole thing. I have to figure out like, what is this? What do people on this platform want? What does my audience that I’m trying to build and attract on this platform want?
Then how do I give that to them? Uh, LinkedIn specifically with copywriting and the read more click and stuff like that. And has LinkedIn been the one that is getting you the most engagement at the moment? Yeah, by far. It’s also the only one that I’ve really doubled down on and tried. To get good at. Mm.
Like anything, like any platform getting good at it is a skill that can be learned. I would argue by anybody. I have some training because of my, because of past careers and other things that make this a great platform for me. But yeah, I think that that is been pretty essential. Do you get the same thing as me when if I’m about to post something and I’m like, This is rubbish.
Or I don’t wanna post this. Those typically perform the best. Always surprises me, like, I think I know what’s gonna do well, and then it’s just like, that’s not great. I can tell you what typically happens. The reason some things don’t do great is if I’ve tried. I like looking. I study other people. I look at like frameworks and stuff, just like you should.
Every great copywriter, Eugene Schwartz that I study, like David Ogilvy, stuff like that, they’re like, Just steal for the first five years. Just steal other people’s stuff. How they lay things out, how they do this, how they do that. So I study like frameworks from other people that do really well in LinkedIn.
Austin, I’ll probably say his last name wrong. I think it’s Belc. He has like a million followers. He talks about career and stuff, but he’s a really good copywriter or somebody on his team’s a good copywriter. I don’t know, He’s really good at LinkedIn. So I study him a lot and I’m like, Oh, that’s a cool way he’s structured this sort of post.
That’s interesting. Why does that work? Can I use that framework? And I’ve noticed if I overuse a framework, like I do it a couple weeks in a row, people are a little tired of it. But usually the reason that things don’t perform well is just cause I buried the lead. Like the actual headline is like, I’ve put it 75% of the way down and I’m like, Dang it.
Like that was the thing that would’ve, that people wanted to know. I shouldn’t have buried that, but that’s a very common, like trope in writing is burying the lead and the read more thing. I understand they’ve been testing like where that goes. And so you might have one line, you might have two lines over, like three lines before they hit the read more.
And so he is like fascinating, isn’t it? Like experimenting with, this is one my best performing post. My first line was, I’ll be honest, dot, dot, dot. And like on a one line read more. That’s probably like, I don’t wanna blow my trumpet, but it seems like that’s pretty clickable. What do you think? Kind of, as long as I would put something in there of like, There has to be some like, I’ll be honest, and then dot, do dot.
Like I’m not gonna click that cause I don’t have any context. So if I already follow you and I like following you, I’ll click that, but otherwise I won’t. I think the one line thing is hard. You have to, I use a thing, I’m trying to remember what paper it came from. There are these things called curiosity levers.
We call it. A lot of times in marketing, we call them open loops. Open loop is just one type of curiosity. Lever curiosity levers come from this old PDF that my, a previous manager, Benjamin Elias, he was at Active Campaign, he’s at podium now, shared with me this pdf. The only way to find it is Googling it and it’s a scanned in pdf.
That is not like you can’t highlight anything. and it’s crooked. It’s like kind of scow. Wow. Like sideways a little bit. It’s so bad. But that content in there is amazing and it talks about these different curiosity levers. Things like starting something and not finishing it or telling somebody they used to know something and have since forgotten it.
Stuff like that. Those curiosity levers. So I try to put as many of those curiosity levers in that lead as possible. And when you can stack them. Like when I know I have two or three really good ones in there, I’m like, All right, this’ll make people want to click more. There we go. And what’s the like, cuz obviously you’re getting all these impressions, like shares, et cetera, what’s like the next step that you want people to take once they’ve like engaged or started to follow you?
Yeah, so I’ve totally restructured my business. I left Active Campaign, went on my own consulting business called Gross Sprints. It’s gross sprints.co. Uh, help SAS and software companies that wanna scale from 10 million to a hundred million in. Focusing completely on. That means that’s all of my work, right?
I’ve had other things I’ve done. I’ve had different communities. I have a project called SEO For the Rest of Us, which is SEO training and content training and stuff like that. I’m gonna roll that all up into growth sprints. So really all that I’m looking to do right now is give away all the knowledge I can for free.
And then if you want to hire me, then you can inquire about hiring me. But that’s the next step for everybody. There’s other projects I’m working on. We’re launching a podcast, starting a newsletter. The premise of each of those is pretty unique. I’m pretty proud of what we’re gonna put out. It’s definitely different from what you see everybody else doing, but other than that, like that’s the next step right now that I want people to take is hire me if you wanna hire me.
But really, I wanna keep it to the point of like zero click content. I just want people to follow. Right. That’s why my headline says, Exploring what works in SaaS content and sharing it along the way. I want people to be like, Okay, I, he’s exploring this, He’s sharing what he learns. I’m gonna follow him for that.
Like I wanna elicit the follow, not go sign up for my newsletter or hire me right away, or anything like that. I just want more. Like really great people to follow me and we can kind of explore those things together. Cause let’s say like on LinkedIn, you know this too, on LinkedIn, like the values, the comments, like that’s where the best stuff is.
So I want smart people to follow me who are gonna be like, Ah, I disagree, or like, Have you thought about this? Or, I read this book and I’m like, Oh, I never heard of that book. Like, cool. Like that’s where I get a lot of value too. Is building true. You hear a lot of this is like a trope now. It’s like build community and like what does that even mean?
Most people, it just means like start a shitty slack. For me, it’s, you know what I’m talking about. We know, we all know we’re all in on it, but like for me it’s like I want a community around my post where there’s like 10 to 15 people that always engage and I know who these people are cause they always do.
I wanna like have that sense of community around this topic. But the place we gather is just my LinkedIn post. There’s so much about that that I really like. Like it’s two things. Two trends in B2B that I think you are encapsulating here. One is give away all your best stuff like through the LinkedIn post, but author, I assume in the podcast and newsletter, just gonna be giving stuff away because the people that are gonna be good or like have enough money to like want to do the stuff you’re doing are like, don’t have the time to do it, so they’ll just come to you and get you to do it and pay you handsomely for that.
That’s the first thing. And then the second thing, Also understanding that not everybody in B2B is ready to buy right now. So your main CTA here goal is increased followers so that when they’ll come a follow engage that will get you a great audience, but then also in like three years when they’re ready to hire you, they will, because they’ve been learning from you for the past three years.
So loving this approach. I wanna, and actually, let’s give a like mid episode CTA for everyone to search Brandon Huffer on LinkedIn and check out that through the exact tagline we have right now. Check out his profile. I follow. Okay, cool. So everything’s being rolled up into the growth sprints and these are just three months SEO focus sprints.
Yeah, so I also do a lot of agency coaching and stuff because it’s also something I love doing. It’s inside a program called the Blueprint Training. We help people start and scale seo. It is everything that I’ve done, it’s all the behind the scenes stuff, right? Like I’m not building an audience on LinkedIn of agency owners.
I don’t talk about that, and not that I don’t have anything to say. I have a lot to say. I just share all my best stuff inside Blueprint and the way that I’ve structured. My offer is based on my positioning. So in a lot of times, people that do SEO or do content or whatever service, they’re like, I do this service now.
Let me figure out how to do it for who wants this thing, whatever. It’s the wrong way to build a business, you need to have a matter of positioning of like, who do I serve? And then exactly what do they need. And that’s how I built things over time. The last agency that I worked at was very much just an SEO and PPC agency.
We realized everybody on, well, first of all, we had no positioning. We were like, We’re a B2B performance marketing agency. Then we became, if you looked at all of our case studies and all of our client logos, they were all SAS companies. We just were never saying it, and we were nervous to say it. Then we set it and all of a sudden that influenced our offer.
We noticed all of our clients were using Drift or HubSpot Chat, so we made that a part of our offer, right? That’s not seo. That’s not ppc, but it’s a more compelling offer of like, Hey, you’re paying five grand a month for Drift. Can we optimize that for you? And that also makes our PPC results better. Our Sseo results better.
So I’ve done a lot of that. It’s not focused on seo, it’s certainly not focused on technical seo, right? We’re not in the business of doing, uh, $10,000 audits just to give you a monolithic list of stuff that’s not gonna actually move the needle. So my offer is very much based around what I find actually works in SaaS and software in seo, but also in content.
I think a lot of people come to me for seo and then when I, we get into the discussion. What my services include and where I can best help them. It’s like, Oh, that it’s that, and it’s that too. Wow. You really understand what we are working on and what we’re doing. And that offer I think is really key. We did the same.
It works in software too. So if you work at a software company, we have to align incentives, right? Like the active campaign spends all this time and all their marketing, talking about marketing automations and things like that. But how does Active Campaign make more? We make more money when people grow their email lists cuz we’re people pay on subscriber tiers.
So instead of telling people like, Here’s how to add more automations, here’s how to do all this other random crap, why don’t we just teach people how to get more email subscribers? We know that’ll grow their business. So in all of our content should focus on that. Our nurture sequences, like everything should focus on how to get more subscribers, how to get more subscribers.
That would also grow the business. Little bit of an uphill battle for various reasons to get that done. But I think that’s the biggest thing is like understand how you make money and understand how you also help people. But that’s, yeah, I think that’s an important clarification. I’m happy to go into the offer even more if that’s helpful.
Okay, cool. So we have. Covered this one thing that I think is a big opportunity in LinkedIn right now, which is B2B right now, which is LinkedIn. There’s also a LinkedIn, both of you did, outlining what you propose or a suggested like content approach if you were advising like a new, let’s say, a relatively new SaaS founder like seed.
Stage funding had no, like they haven’t started anything marketing or content or social, What would you say explain to them to do so? That’s a really good question. My question is how big of a customer base do they have? How much money are they making? And how close to genuine product market fit? How much does the product, I look at product market fit is like the product markets itself.
And we don’t have to just keep growing, we just want to accelerate that because those other, a lot of times marketing is brought in to fix. Other things, and marketing very rarely fixes those things. It can’t fix your terrible churn. It can’t fix your terrible revenue retention rate, that NR and stuff like can’t fix that stuff.
It could put a band-aid over it. It can give you a false sense of growth because all of a sudden we start moving into the green versus in the red before. So I think that that’s an important caveat to understand. Yeah. That, I mean, it’s so good that you, you asked that question to get more context because I’ve seen it so many times when like a sassy of like thinking the marketing, like getting more people into the funnel is gonna make their product better.
It’s just completely ridiculous. But for the point of this discussion, let’s say a hundred k, Mr. Like all the metrics are going in the right way. So it’s, there’s a suggestion that there would be Yeah. All things optimal, right? Yeah, exactly. So, but they haven’t really done anything, content, social seo.
Mm-hmm. , what do you recommend? So I think two things. There’s the marketing and content piece, right? There’s also a more important piece of, is somebody on my team that is closely tied to content? Or is the content person, or am I, if I’m the CEO and I’m kind of starting the company, I’m still wearing a lot of hats.
Am I doing two things? Am I spending time interacting with customer? Every single day or on a regular basis, or somebody on the team does, right? So let’s pull the CEO out of it a little bit. Let’s talk about maybe team or something like that as well. Cause if you’re doing over a million ARR, then you probably have some people that are working with you, right?
So 30 minutes a day, or at least a couple times a week, talking to customers, 30 minutes a day. Interacting in community, in communities that our customers are in. Right? And by community, I don’t mean like again, a Slack group or a Facebook group. It can be those things if those things exist. But it could also just be in the comment section on somebody else’s LinkedIn post.
It could be in the like community is any place where. The person that organizes it is out of it, and it’s about the people interacting with each other. Audiences like I help you community is you help each other. I don’t even, I’m just a homey hanging out here. I don’t even need to be here. I just make it better for everybody to connect.
So, anywhere that a community exists, are we spending time interacting there every day? That’s gonna influence a lot of the content. We’re gonna see what resonates, what do people share? What are they interested in? We’re gonna have a really good sense for that. And if you’re an early seed stage ceo, like you should know if you don’t know your customers, like we might be building the wrong product, right?
Like you should already know where the watering holes are. You should know who your audience is. You should know who your amplifiers are, right? Like, who are the people that have our sources of influence within that audience? We should know all of those things. Assuming again, all things optimal. We know those.
I look at early stage, creating depth is really important. There are some platforms that can go really wide. There are some that can go really deep. A podcast. Can go very deep. It is very hard to use a podcast as a growth channel. It’ll get cited if you’re doing, uh, especially if you’re doing like high acv, uh, B2B sales and stuff or whatever, like your product is really, whatever.
I’m using too many buzzwords. If your product’s really expensive. Then you need to go deep and on your forms, it’ll be like, How did you hear about us? Oh, the podcast. The podcast. The podcast. But the podcast isn’t the growth channel. It’s the thing that brought them deep enough in a relationship to go, All right, I’m gonna finally buy this thing, right?
Or like, I can’t wait to buy this thing when I have the budget or work at a company or whatever. So I think there’s podcasts element, and you’ll notice a lot of this comes back to community, right? There’s a podcast element to it. There’s a live event aspect to it that can be part of the podcast. We can repurpose those live events as the podcast.
But I think live events are really cool. I think. Understated. Use a platform like DEO if you’re starting gold Cast, if you’re more enterprise and need more capabilities and stuff, some way to stay in touch, like a newsletter or social right newsletter usually comes secondary cause you have to get their email address.
Social. It’s a little bit easier. It’s also a better discoverability platform. And then revenue focused content is how I talk about content. Like especially at the beginning. You don’t need some SEO stuff. You just don’t. That’s why I don’t usually work with companies that are just starting out, right. It’s just because SEO is not always like, you need a significant investment.
It is a winner. Take all channel. It is hard. For years, we heard, well, if I make an investment and it pays off, I’ll invest more. That’s literally not how this works. That’s like saying, I’m gonna put a dollar worth of gas in the car and if it makes it all the way there, then I’ll do it again. Like you gotta put enough gas in to get it all the way there.
And with SEO being a winner, take all kind of platform. Right? Uh, and there’s some argument to that. It’s not always right. You can go after different things or whatever. But in rankings, whatever ranks first gets the most clicks, right? There is some zero sum aspect to it, so you have to make a significant investment.
It’s not always the best for those types of companies, but revenue focused content is, we can back into some SEO stuff. We can back into some, I call it demand capture, right? Demand that already exists in search that we’re capturing, but it’s also demand gen platform or content. Sales enablement content, this revenue focused off, and that comes out of the customer conversations that comes outta what you’re seeing in the communities, right?
All right, but what are people really struggling with? Oh, what they’re really struggling with is not like SEO tactics or content tactics. What they’re really struggling with in these companies is building a culture of content. What if I wrote an article that’s like the definitive guide to building a culture of content in whatever type of, in my case, $10 million a year SaaS company, something like that.
There’s a piece to it where you really figure out like where the money is and it’s not just like a lot of people go with those bottom of funnel searches, like best whatever software. Those are fine, but that’s cool if you wanna start with a keyword. But I wanna start with the stuff that all the SEO tools says nobody’s searching for, but I know people are.
I would start. Got it. So we’re not advocating like a hardcore, keyword driven SEO strategy at first with first trying to like actually understand what problems are, engage, create a real community, and then start creating, I think much like bottom of the funnel content based on the actual problems that these people have.
Yeah, I think it was, I don’t know if it was Rolls Royce, I should get this analogy better. We’ll say Rolls Royce for the sake of this, but Dave Ogilvy had that like famous line where it was like, at this speed, the loudest sound you’re gonna hear is the clock. Hmm. He found that on like page 87 of a technical manual.
And all of a sudden that’s like the best headline. So you’ll find like if they have persona decks and collab like whatever, like this is on my agency side, but like if you’re in the company, that stuff comes out of customer conversations. That comes out of, I call it like a threes strategy, talking to sales success and support, talking to the people who talk to customers a lot.
Right, Talk to them directly, but then talk to the people who talk to them. If you’re in a bigger company and you have access to Gong or something like that where you can hear all these conversations and search for terms and then pull up all the conversations where they talked about these things, like I think Gong’s the best content tool out there personally.
Mm-hmm. . It’s not cheap, but it’s amazing. There’s a lot of cool stuff you can do, but it all comes back to those conversations and that’s where you figure out like why people. So what I’m hearing here is that the gold sits within the minds of the customer, and because we can’t get into their minds, we need to hear them talk.
And once we have that we can create stuff that’s gonna help them. Yeah. I also like to go a bit deeper cause I think a lot of times we start with like, Oh, what are your pain points? What are you struggling with? Like, dude, I think the thing is the other, and you learn this in sales really early. It’s these things you’ve heard of.
I don’t know if you, Have you ever heard of phantom pains like in your body? Nope. I have a friend in the armed services and he lost his leg and in combat and still. Terrible pain. Sometimes his, the nerve endings still send messages to his brain that his leg is in a lot of pain even though there’s no leg there.
And he calls it like this is a thing called phantom pain. This is also true in marketing, right? People have phantom pains. If you ask him what they’re struggling with, they’ll give you an answer. And then you’re like, you figure out ways to ask why like two or three times and all of a sudden you get to the bottom of this, it’s like, Oh, this tool will save you time.
Well, why do you, why do you wanna save time to give you an answer? I get why you wanna save time? Why is it important? You save time, like right now, And they give you another answer. Oh, interesting. So I get why it’s important. That you save time right now or you know why? Whatever you say the next thing is, why is that important to you?
Based on something else or just use a uh, I’m trying to remember the negotiator who wrote the book, Chris Voss, I think is his name, where you just mirror back to them. They say like, I need to save time, and you go save time. And all of a sudden they’ll like gush. They’ll just elaborate more and more and more anyways.
You don’t just ask why three times. That’s super annoying. I wanna give people actual advice. So you ask those types of questions. You take that question, you get down three layers deep, and you’re like, Oh, they don’t wanna save time. They want to, they’re afraid they’re not gonna hit quota and they’re gonna get fired.
That’s the real pain point, right? So maybe we start putting some, like, maybe there’s some thoughts there. Maybe like, here’s a guide to hitting quota, getting promoted three times in six months. And never worrying about getting fired again. That’s gonna get somebody’s attention. Right? Like that’s revenue focused content.
Got it. So we’re doing this, we’re taking those insights. We’re publishing them on one single social channel together, working. I guess if you are like within the business, then either you do it or you have the CEO do it. And then we’re gonna be writing like a few of these posts like a month or one per month.
This revenue focus. Once that’s all going well, we’re getting good feedback. Do we then move on to like keywords that are higher up the funnel? I think a couple different things. So again, if we’re early, there is no downside. If you are the majority shareholder in a company, there’s zero downside to building an audience around your customers.
Asking your marketers to build an audience around your customers sucks. Like I’m working at an email marketing company, so I have to build an audience. Like all of a sudden now all I talk about is email market. Like that sucks. And then I go to another company I work in, now I’m working on time tracking software.
So this whole audience I’ve built around email marketing is like, what the hell he is talking about time tracking now. Mm-hmm. like, that’s weird. But if you’re the, like, I don’t have any shares in the company so that I’m not incentivized to do that. If you own the company, you should only be talking about that stuff.
So very much build a hiring brand, meaning like a pipeline of like talent that you wanna, hi, get on board and work for you, but also like talk about those customer pain points constant. I think you can move like SEO stuff up the funnel. But I think, I mean, let’s be honest, if we are really trying to grow this, I think there’s other pieces.
So there’s like I said, a social piece, an events piece, a podcast piece newsletter. There is an SEO piece to it, but I have never worked with a company or seen a company who had completely canvas. What I would call this like revenue generating content where I’ve gone to like do one of my sprints cuz I work in sprints.
Just these like short pieces within like a two to three month engagement. But I’ve never gone to do the revenue focused content sprint and gone well, crap, they have everything already. There’s nothing else here. Right? So you never move on or move up funnel or whatever else you can over time. If you’re still just the CEO or you’re still, you have one like catch all marketer, that’s like trying to run all these programs.
I wouldn’t try and make more of an SEO play yet. You’re not ready. That’s where hiring somebody like me or hiring freelancer, then you become like a manager of a program. I think that’s a little more of a likely scenario if you wanna find success with it. But I wouldn’t go at funnel. I would keep writing that thought leadership forever.
A good example of this is the team at Base Camp. I think they just became 37 signals again, but like they’ve never changed. I don’t disagree with or I don’t agree with most of their opinions. I don’t even think I like them as people most days. But they’re a good example of like you can just keep picking fights and doing thought leadership and that is enough to bring in a lot of customer.
So I’m reading from a LinkedIn post back a month ago where you’re talking about SEO skill sets from 2016 and today I just wanna run through some of the skill sets from today. It’s so you give them the early ones first. It’s so bad. . Talk to customers. We’ve already ticked that off. Very important. Talk to people who talk to customer for three F strategy, as we’ve already discussed.
That’s nice. Support sales success. Number three. I’m interested in you elaborating on the product led content. Yeah, so product led content, I think about like, let’s do three different ways. Number one, all of our content should be a demo of our product. We should be able to share or talk about. Now, even if you’re somebody who’s just like, Let’s talk about like levels of awareness.
I use a Eugene Schwartz thing for advertising, right? They’re problem aware if there are others at top level, they’re unaware. SEO’s not the thing. If they’re unaware of a problem, they’re not Googling it. There’s no demand to capture right now, if they’re unaware. We’re talking about ads and billboards, like letting them know there’s a problem in your life.
There’s a pain. Oh, don’t you feel it? Now they’re aware of the problem, right? You’ve made them aware. SEO is not the place. They’re problem aware, they’re solution aware. They know there are types of solutions out there. They’re product aware. They know our product is a type of solution or they are most aware.
They know our products the best for them. They just need to know the deal. Right. So I look at it kind of that way. In that case, everything but the top level. So solution aware, product aware, and most aware should be a product demo. HFS is really good at this. I asked, I remember asking their cmo, they’re an SEO software for anybody unfamiliar.
They do a great job. They have ugly software. It’s not pretty there I said it. It’s not. It’s very good software. They’re not afraid to book screenshots of their software in every single video in every single blog. Their CMO told me, why would I put a popup on there? Why would I put an exit intent? The article is the demo.
Would you give somebody a popup in the middle of a product demo? No. So I think a lot of things is more people don’t show enough of their product. Their content is not product led. At Active Campaign, I try to put screenshots and gifts from our product in there and the designers freaked out. They were like, No, we only do mockups to like, If you can’t show the product and the design team doesn’t want us to show it in blog posts, then we have other problems we need to fix.
Right? But as much as you can just show the product, people are afraid to show their product. And then it’s like, what do you think’s gonna happen after they give you the money? They see the product. Do you want ’em to be surprised now? Or like have a shock later when they go to, you know, they open the door and they’re like, This isn’t what I thought I was buying.
All of that said, show the product in your content. Please trust me. It works better. Only the right people will buy your turn will go down. All of these great things. Second piece is that like the data from our product can be publicized. It can be anonymized, but like building a dashboard, building something interactive.
That’s cool. A calculator, something else or just if you can kind of third piece, make part of the product public, right? If you are an event software, all of your event page. For all the events that people make should be public, right? They can get index, they can bring in traffic in aggregate. You’ll end up with this like product, what I call product led SEO effect, where it’s like a, Zillow is a great example of this.
G2 is a great example of this. Even Trello, where like people’s boards can be public. These individual pages may not bring in a ton of traffic, but in aggregate they bring in a tremendous amount. So if you have a product where it’s like, Okay, cool, every time a user makes a thing, it could be public. That could bring in more traffic.
So there’s like those kind of three pieces, right? Show your product, put it, make sure you actually have it in the content, make the data public if you can, and then make the product public kind of like stairstep into it. Very nice. I’m so glad you shared the ah hfs, the HFS example because you’re totally right.
Their content crushes, but it’s all about their product. And so I understand like why I don’t, I don’t really understand why someone will be, will be shared about showing the product. I understand that that’s the matter. My reservation on that is, do we not think that’s bringing the content slightly further down the funnel and therefore we’ll get less attention, less traffic, because people are gonna know we’re just gonna be using our software flight.
The example or how to do things, I don’t know. I think like if it, I love meeting people where they’re at, right? Like most people, most software replaces some sort of homegrown solution. It’s very rare they’ve never tried to solve the product on their own. So help them by all means, in content, help them figure it out.
How they do it. Now, if they’re using a spreadsheet, right, Excel is, most software is just basically Excel or Google Sheets. Help them understand that, right? And then be like, also look at how we just clicked and dragged it. Like that was easy. Right? Same thing as Grammarly Grammarly’s, a great example of, they have a B2B side, but like B2C software, they rank for all these grammar terms.
Like should, do I use this term or this term? Or like what’s the difference between there, there and there? The whole thing. They don’t give a crap if you read the article, cuz as soon as you get to the website, a popup comes up and it’s like, wish you never had to worry about there, there and there ever.
The whole co SEO strategy is just to serve you the popup that is specific to that page. That’s like never wanna worry about that grammar thing you were googling ever again. That’s the key. So is it like, well they won’t trust us cuz like, like if you have a free trial or product led growth, like there’s a lot of reasons where it’s like, or you know, ways that software can work where it’s like, Yeah, you could just, No.
Show them the software. Show them the better solution. Again, we’re only doing this at a level where they’re searching. They’re like, they know that there are, If we’re talking again about software, they know that there is software solutions, So us showing a software solution in there. Now, if our software solution doesn’t actually address how to do it, like we’re not actually talking about like the theory or like educating them, that’s a problem, right?
Like if they come and it’s just like you clicking around the tool, basically, that’s not helpful. So I think there’s a smart way to do it, but I, I trust marketers that they have a really good sense on it. My fear is that marketers shy too far in the direction of what you’re saying, where they’re like, Well, we don’t wanna be too pushy.
So like don’t show anything. Very few marketers are gonna go overboard with the tool side. You might think like, well, marketers are gonna market, we ruin everything. In this specific case. I’ve never, I rarely see blogs that are showing too much of the product. Got it. And final point and final question of this interview is build back links on autopilot.
Yeah, so one of the sprints that I do, I mean, look like I’ve been in the trenches on link building. I have bought all the back links and everybody who talks about like, don’t buy back links, that’s against Google’s, whatever. Trust me, they’re every big software company, every big company that you’ve ever looked up to or whatever, they’re all buying links.
Every single one of them, the big blogs, whatever else, they’re all buying links or they’re trading them with other people. They have a lot of people, or they have people that have access to a hundred different websites cuz they like guest posts there. And then like they just are all in the spreadsheets being like, You gimme my 30 links, I’m gonna get you yours on the sites that I have access to and blah, blah blah.
Right? Like I watched, uh, this guy launched his blog and he. Came out to a lot of fanfare and he was like, Launch your blog like a startup. Look at all this traffic I got. I’m like, Dude, you just launched your blog and you have a link on a HubSpot post from five years ago. , like, Who do you know at HubSpot that gave you a inserted a link to you in a five year old blog post?
Like everybody pretends like this stuff isn’t happening, and that’s the game. I know like five or six people that are members, and this sounds weird, but like they’re like the link building illuminati in B2B tech. Like they know everything. They can get you all the links real quick and they’re good ones.
They’re real good. And you’d be surprised. But my point is like I’ve bought all the links, I’ve also done all the outreach I’ve begged. Trust me, I can show you the threat, the scars and the spreadsheets of like all these people. And I did all the systems begging for it sucks paying for it. Suck. The other game of like trying to trade for it and figure out who the people are that have the thing just, that sucks too.
What I do on autopilot is I just figured, I’ve been writing content for so long and if you write enough content, you start looking for like resources to cite. You’re like, Who am I gonna link to? Who’s a good resource on this? Who should I share if I’m looking for a statistic or a trend or something, Right.
A take that I wanna include that’s gonna be interesting. A lot of times people Google that and there’s a lot of searches that have what I call link intent. It’s just somebody who’s writing, looking for something. The link to. So be there, be that website, be that person. Sometimes that’ll turn into revenue, but really it’s just, it builds that moat and it makes it so that competitors are like, How am I ever gonna overtake them?
Right. HubSpot is that in the B2B tech space. So you’re just not gonna outran them maybe for like some post, some specific stuff, but like as a whole, you’re not gonna build a more powerful website than HubSpot. Like that’s you just like, they’re the ones that invented that strategy of like build the super powerful blog.
So my point. I like to look at strategies that build that on autopilot that have enough of that content, maybe 10 to 15 pieces of content that every single month we know that they’re gonna pick up links from five or six different authority sites in our industry. And if we did do outreach for them, people are gonna love to link to this cuz it’s not like, Hey, will you please give me a back link to my blog about.
How to write blogs or whatever. It’s like, look, I put together this really cool in depth research. Nobody ever has ever done this before. Or we have like five years of data that we pulled and we’re showing like how trends have changed over time. Like something interesting, compelling. If you did do outreach, people would be like, Of course, I’ll link to that.
It’s a really cool resource. At the very least, they’ll be glad you sent it to them. So I think a lot about that. I call it, like I said, authority on autopilot, and we do a sprint around that at gross rents, helping companies like put together what those are. And then I merge that with data on who the amplifiers are, who are the sources of influence that we can pull into those pieces of content so that they’ll share it so that they, whatever.
Really it’s just we start building relationships with them. I don’t like gaming it where it’s like, I’m gonna include quotes from you in the hopes that you’ll blog about it or, Tweet or comment on the LinkedIn post, like there’s, That’s fine. You can build an amazing program around that. Data box is a great example.
If anybody wants to study them, they’re the best at this. But at the very least, like have that content there and then as it starts getting picked up, showing up in search just picks up links on autopilot. Got it. Well, I’m glad we got into the actual f e stuff am because that’s actually what I thought we were gonna get more of in this discussion.
But actually what we got were a lot more I holistic. Content, customer focus stuff, which I think is actually more important and I think you do as well, because that’s where you took the discussion. Yeah, I think the, It’s also the way I think about seo. I don’t live in SEO as like, Oh, this like myopic, here’s the keyword tool, and then I use this crawler tool.
I’ve been in too many big companies, both on agency side and in-house to see how it’s SEO for the sake of seo. And then it’s like, why don’t these convert to customers? Why doesn’t this work? Right? Oh, SEOs, That’s not how people buy anymore. Wrong. Very wrong. Right? It’s probably, Tell me you’re bad at SEO without telling me you’re bad at seo.
The problem is, too many places, well meaning have just started. They follow all the, It’s just this like snake eating its own tail of like, I follow people in the SEO industry, so I do what they say, but they’re creating content just for the SEO industry. And then it’s like, why isn’t this turning into business?
And I think that’s what you and I are in the business of, right? Like we’re selling money at a discount. And I think when you can figure that out and map to real business solutions, You can’t put SEO kind of in a silo. Got it. Brendan, I want everybody to open their LinkedIn app or browser Search Brenda Huffard, H U F F O R d to follow Brendan at Brendan.
Where else can we tell people to go? What’s the website for Growth Prints? Yeah, Growth friends.co. Nice. You could also Google Growth Sprints. It’ll come up. You can also Google Brendan Huffard LinkedIn. That way you can spell it as wrong as you want. There’s only one of me, so that’ll come up. Let’s just do a check on that growth.
Brent, you are correct, number one, Of course. Wouldn’t expect anything less. Brendan, thank you so much for coming on. Of course. Thanks so much, Tom,
and I hope you enjoyed that episode. We didn’t get what we expected, but we got a lot more from Brandon. Thank you so much for coming on and giving us the more holistic approach to B2B slash SaaS seo. If you’re listening, please search for confessions of a b2. On your podcast app or just open your phone, give a rating and review, send me a screenshot.
Just tell me on LinkedIn that you’ve done it, and I will get you a shout out on this show in a future outro. And of course, thanks for listening.
Tom Hunt is the founder of SaaS Marketer, Fame, Abney and bCast. He lives and works in Hackney, London with his little dog called Bear.