Mandy Hornaday: Hey, Brendan, welcome to the Growth Activated podcast. I'm so excited to have you here today.
Brendan Hufford: Yeah, Mandy, thanks for having me. I'm super excited too.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, absolutely. I know I shared this with you, but just for my audience, you came highly recommended with some people in the community when I was doing some speaker research and outreach. And I myself have already learned so much from you just from checking you out and following you on LinkedIn. So really looking forward to the conversation today. And with that, think let's dive into your background. Bring us through. I know you have a little bit of a non-traditional background.
Mandy Hornaday: but would love to hear about it.
Brendan Hufford: Yeah, so I was a high school teacher for 10 years because we let 18 year olds decide what they want to do with their lives. And at 18, I was like, I guess I want to be in high school for the rest of my life. And I went to college to be a teacher, tried to climb that ladder. I got my administrative degree, was a vice principal, all these things. And I was rewarded with that decade of work with, you know, the
Brendan Hufford: Sunday scaries, Monday morning panic attacks, an extra 25 pounds around my midsection, a very unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and a myriad of other things. And I realized I had climbed this ladder, but the ladder was leaned up against the wrong wall. And this whole time I had been building things on the side. Little projects, little websites, little email lists, just around my hobbies and things that I love.
Mandy Hornaday: Mm.
Brendan Hufford: I started an e-commerce brand, sold that. I started an affiliate website, sold that. And then I was looking for what to do next and I started working with clients. And I remember I was sitting, was back to being a teacher again. I was an assistant principal for a little bit. did what I would call like an Einstein career move. I don't know if everybody's heard this, but he actually worked in a patent office. And so he could get his work done in like...
Brendan Hufford: a couple hours a day, and then the rest of the day just closed the door and work on his own stuff. So instead of continuing to climb, which wasn't sustainable, you know, I the lowest paid assistant principal in my state, because you can look that stuff up. And I was like, this is awful. Went back into the classroom. Everybody told me I was throwing away my career, taking a step backwards. What it gave me was time freedom. And I remember I was out in my little Nissan Versa. There's a scene from The Incredibles where Mr. Incredible is this big guy in a tiny car.
Brendan Hufford: And he's really frustrated. Like that was me and my Nissan Versa, big dude, small car, just mad. And I was, I'm going to phone my friend and he's like, why don't you just go work somewhere? Like just go work in marketing professionally instead of trying to build all these side projects and get rich off of them. And I was like, I, this sounds so dumb, Andy. I'd never considered that. Cause I came up in like the world of not professional digital marketing. I came up in like online marketing, like get rich quick YouTubers, like that whole scene.
Mandy Hornaday: Yes.
Brendan Hufford: And then I it went, it feels like, you know, just yesterday, but it went so fast. I joined a web design agency, became the SEO director there, moved to a B2B SaaS marketing agency, helped scale that from 10 to 25 million went in house at a pretty big tech company called ActiveCampaign for a little bit. And then the whole time I was just still building on the side, I just had this muscle to keep building on the side.
Brendan Hufford: And I built my own kind of consultancy, which is called Growth Sprints, where I work primarily with SaaS companies, helping them scale from 10 to 100 million in revenue, mostly through content.
Mandy Hornaday: Wow, wow. Well, that is such a fun journey to follow. And thank you for your authenticity through all of that. And bye, my sister.
Brendan Hufford: I don't know how to be any other way. It's kind of a problem. It sounds nice on a podcast, but I'm kind of a lot in person.
Mandy Hornaday: Well, I would be your friend in person in real life. But I, you know, again, just PSA to any hiring leaders out there, definitely consider teachers because I've actually hired teachers that wanted to get out of teaching and had brought them on to the marketing team and they were some of my best, my best performers. so, and
Brendan Hufford: Perfect.
Brendan Hufford: Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford: Yeah, they don't have any pretense about putting up with any sort of BS from like customers, clients, leadership. They've seen it all and been broke. if you're like, hey, we'll take you for making 40 grand a year to, you know, I literally went overnight. I was making I think 45 grand. And then I went to that agency and they're paying me 75 and you would have thought I hit the lottery. I didn't even know what to do with myself. And I could go to the bathroom whenever I wanted. Teachers can't do that. You're not even adults. All of a sudden you're like,
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah.
Brendan Hufford: Whoa, what is this other world? I don't have to ask permission to go to the bathroom. This is crazy. So they're wonderful. They will be the best person on your team. Absolutely.
Mandy Hornaday: Totally. Well, hey, I'm sure that managing sales teams is sort of like managing eighth graders in some ways. So, oh my gosh. All right, Brendan. Well, so I know one of the things that you've built Growth Sprints off of is this four part growth framework, right? And I know, I think you specialize specifically in companies growing from 10 million to a hundred million. So,
Brendan Hufford: 100%, it's not that different.
Brendan Hufford: Mm-hmm.
Mandy Hornaday: break down that framework for us and why it works for maybe specifically that stage and if it applies to other stages of companies as well.
Brendan Hufford: This is a really good question. So the 10 to 100 million is my like public positioning. This is a good positioning lesson for anybody. My my h1 tag on my website is not long enough to say, if you're too small and can't get work done, I don't want to work with you. Or if you're too big, and you're a bureaucratic nightmare, just to ship a blog, I also don't want to work with you. That's what that's a proxy for. I just figured it's some round numbers made sense. Now do I work with
Brendan Hufford: companies making less than 10 million all the time, all the time. It's just a qualifier for me that you got to be able to ship stuff. And do I work with companies bigger than a hundred million? Sometimes, but only the ones where it's like, we don't need legal to review every single blog and email that goes out. Like if that's where you're at, I'm all set. You're not, there's people that are good at that. Not for me. So could you imagine, could you imagine like somebody with my personality living in a
Brendan Hufford: bureaucracy of just approvals and meetings about meetings. It's a nightmare. I'm a nightmare. Somebody the other day was like, you see this trend in job descriptions where they're like, we only hire A players. We only hire the best. And I'm like, I think they think they want A players, but A players are like a total pain in the ass. Like we were nightmares. Like you actually don't, you probably don't want an A player because we're going to be messy and try to push and ship and do all these things. You might not want that. And just like know that.
Brendan Hufford: So the framework that I found helps my clients the most. this is, I'm agnostic to stuff. I came up in the SEO world. So I was raised in the world of keywords and traffic and rankings and all of that stuff, which I think we'd all agree is still relevant very much, but it has changed dramatically. And I'm agnostic to stuff. I, when I was building my own business, I was like, I can't do SEO about SEO. I was brand new.
Brendan Hufford: I didn't have a strong enough website. I was never going to outrank Neil Patel and HubSpot and SEMrush and Ahrefs and Google. just was never, Brian Dean from Backlinko, if people remember him. I was never going to be able to do SEO about SEO, so I had to figure out other ways to grow my business. So I did a 100 day YouTube challenge where I produced, it was called 100 Days of SEO, 100 videos over the course of 20 weeks where I did a podcast episode, a YouTube video, and a blog post every single day.
Mandy Hornaday: my gosh.
Brendan Hufford: also a nightmare, will help you grow your career. Anybody trying to grow their career, do a 100 day challenge. Just do something really, do an amount of work that's hard to ignore. That line, be so good they can't ignore you. Do that, people will take notice. So I'm kind of agnostic on all of this stuff. I came up in that world, but I just wanna win and I love content. So originally my framework was around SEO related stuff, like technical.
Brendan Hufford: content, backlinks, whatever. And over time it's more, then it became like, all right, cool. Then it's around SEO and some other stuff. And what I've found works best now is these four things. One, what I call content IP, which is naming the problem we solve. I work primarily with tech and SaaS software companies and a lot of them want to name their category. And what they really should be doing is naming the problem they solve. Like nobody wants to buy
Brendan Hufford: You know, the AI copilot for customer experience automation. Nobody wakes up in middle of the night and they're like, I really wish I had an AI copilot for my customer experience automation platform. Like no, what? Nobody wants that. Quit giving weird names. Like you do email marketing, just be regular. Second. So name the problem you solve. This is huge. This happens all the time. I remember I was listening to a radio ad. This is also in the B2C world. Once you hear this, you'll start noticing it everywhere.
Mandy Hornaday: I don't?
Brendan Hufford: uh, we found, or I was listening to the radio and they mentioned, um, like a sleep apnea surgery. And they said like a lot of couples, I wasn't aware of this because it's not, it doesn't happen in my house, but a lot of couples get what's called a sleep divorce where they have to sleep in separate bedrooms because one of them is snores so bad. And they were like, you don't want to sleep divorce. And I'm like, Whoa, that is, that is like a visceral knife twist. Like I don't want to sleep divorce. Oh my God, we are sleeping in separate bedrooms. We have a sleep divorce. This is terrible. Like
Mandy Hornaday: wow.
Brendan Hufford: that pain of that, all of a sudden you're like, I got to call this, you know, whoever this doctor and see what's up. We've also seen this in journalism. We all noticed two trends happening in the 2000s. One was everybody was like slowly checking out of their job. A journalist did what's called a conceptual scoop and they named that. They're like, that's called quiet quitting. And we were like, done. That is what we all, we all did what's like what I call a snapping point. We were like, you know, we snap pointed. We're like, that's what that's called.
Brendan Hufford: Now it's called quiet quitting. Everybody was like leaving their jobs. And another journalist was like, this is the great resignation. And we were like that, first of all, those are both like a plus copywriting, but we were like, so we've all experienced this in our lives. But when I say name the problem, people are like, well, I don't trust me. It works. And if that doesn't prove to you, it works. There's also a lot of software companies that have done it really successfully. So first we named the problem. And then the other three, which I'm happy to go deep around, but I'm kind of monologuing is discovery loops.
Mandy Hornaday: They really are.
Brendan Hufford: When somebody's searching for something in Google or in an LLM like ChatGPT, Perplexity, whatever, do they find us? A virality loop, which is very different going viral and B2B is very different than B2C. B2C it's like, let's get a billion impressions on TikTok. In B2B, it's just, I need to see you at the top of my feed every time I open LinkedIn. And then the third is a relationship loop, a recurring marketing motion that allows you to build an ongoing relationship.
Brendan Hufford: A lot of times as a newsletter, that's where a lot of my clients work, but it could also be a podcast, could be webinars. Anything that is a recurring marketing motion builds that relationship loop with them. Those four things combined, you don't need Claude Code yet. You don't need all the, like, I say that like loving, also like the head of marketing there, Kacie Jenkins is amazing. Like I joke about that, but like people get really caught up on so many of this, like these new products and things. And it's like, you need foundations in place.
Brendan Hufford: And that's where I help people with this like foundational content across those kind of like four pieces.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Okay. So wait, rapid fire. What would remind us of what the four were? What are you calling? Okay. Okay.
Brendan Hufford: Yeah, so it's content IP, discovery loops, virality loops and relationship loops. So you have to be discoverable, you have to be able to go B2B viral and you have to be able to build an ongoing relationship.
Mandy Hornaday: Yep, yep, okay, super helpful. So let's start with content IP then. How do you encourage, how do people figure out? Because I mean, the great resignation, such great examples, quiet quitting, great resignation. I feel like it's a lot harder to name the problem and have it stick than some of those examples might seem. So.
Brendan Hufford: Yeah.
Mandy Hornaday: How do you walk through, I imagine that's probably one of the first things you do when you walk into a company is make sure that they have this. What is your process for helping them identify that and where do companies get tripped up?
Brendan Hufford: Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford: So it usually looks like interviews plus a workshop. If you want to practically, you can even steal this. You can do it for yourself. Please do. I just want people to win. Right. if you're hungry and you're like me you're driven and want to just do, this is a weird thing. Like when people put out LinkedIn posts and they're like, here's what I do. I go do it. And then I report back to them. It's how I've gotten like half of my mentors. I'm just like, I'm going to go do this. So please go do it. Let me know how it goes. First, as I do, it's called three S interviews. I'm talking to the three S team sales, success and support.
Brendan Hufford: A lot of marketers don't get access to them or they don't think to interview them. Spend a lot of time with them, interview them, ask them questions like what's come up on Prompted on three or more calls in the last six months? What's changing? What don't people understand? After you close a deal, what causes people to churn afterwards? What's the hardest part of onboarding? Like ask those hard questions and figure out those things. And then after we do those interviews, let's workshop some stuff. Let's figure out like
Brendan Hufford: What do people struggle with? What do they say out loud? What are they not publicly acknowledged? Like if I made a LinkedIn post about this, they'd all DM me, but they wouldn't comment because they don't want anybody to know. Like let's talk about those things and then let's peel back layers. Let's say like, what's under that? What's under that? And sometimes we go too deep and we arrive at like, it's the patriarchy and it's like, okay, cool. We can't solve that today, right? Like we're an email marketing platform or something. Like we can't solve the patriarchy. So let's like maybe zoom back in a little. We've zoomed out too far, too close to the sun. But.
Brendan Hufford: When we were trying to workshop that, I'm really just trying to find like what those struggles are. And then we're just going to try a ton of names. I've tried tons of names for things all the time. People now joke in my comment section on LinkedIn when I named something, they're like, throwing a little content IP at us today. And it's like, yeah, I am like I the other day, I don't the problem is I don't solve it. So it has to relate to what you solve. I posted about prove it purgatory, like how marketers get caught in this purgatory cycle of just having to
Brendan Hufford: the value of their work and sing for their supper over and over. Half the comments were like, prove it purgatory is so good. And I'm like, well, I don't solve that. So that's not a good one for me. Another good example, And please do. The thing that I help with that I found resonated most was checkbox marketing. The organizations that I work best in are ones that are doing a lot of content, but it's just a box checking exercise.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Someone else could steal that though. You know, I said someone else could steal that though.
Brendan Hufford: weekly, you know, daily blog, weekly newsletter, quarterly webinar, like this just like time plus channel. And then that's how that's their content strategy. Right. And I posted about that and people were like, can I get death to checkbox marketing on a t-shirt? Can I get, you know, you know, I got DMS from like brilliant people who I've gotten to really good friends with that are like, my God, I'm so mad you named that first. Like that is exactly the problem with everything. and that's what you're looking for is some sort of resonance there.
Brendan Hufford: I worked with an HR tech company and I was talking to their founder as a part of the workshop and he was like, and I was like, so, you know, what, what's the big issue here? And he's like, you know, people are still doing HR. it's 50 years ago where you would work one place for 40 years and then retire and they'd give you a gold watch. And I was like, I immediately was like scribbling notes down or maybe typing, I guess. and the IP we ended up bringing was this golden watch era.
Brendan Hufford: you're still doing most companies are still doing HR or expecting you to do HR like it's the Golden Watch era. And it's just not. As soon as you say Golden Watch era to a person in HR, they're like, they do the snap and point and they're like, that is, that is the expectation and it is bullshit. And it immediately resonates and when somebody you name their problems, they trust you to solve them. Another one other example is there's a company called Sendoso that I'm absolutely in love with. I've worked with them for a long time. They do gifting.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. I love.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah.
Brendan Hufford: and direct mail. And we workshopped a bunch of stuff. And the thing that we've ended up talking a lot about is this idea of digital fatigue. Do they solve digital fatigue? Yeah, like we're all so overwhelmed. They have new data coming out now that marketers this is so wild. Marketers are just as burned out at by marketing emails as they are by cold emails. Your marketing email lands as well in their inbox as a cold email pitch.
Mandy Hornaday: Hmm.
Brendan Hufford: That's got to tell you something and that's true across audiences, whether you're selling to marketers or whatever, but we're all burned out by that. And that digital fatigue, I made a post about digital fatigue just to see, just on their behalf, just to see if it would land, absolutely crushed. Half the comments are like, dude, I am so exhausted by ads that follow me everywhere and whatever. we're not going to display ad our way to a billion dollar valuation. Like that's just not going to happen.
Brendan Hufford: We're just exhausting our audience. What cuts through the noise is a really thoughtful gift. Something in our mailbox, something like this, something we can hold in our hands. Heck, even this is an amazing, like this is one of my favorite things to show people. This isn't even a gift, but this is like the Dreamdata benchmarks reports for LinkedIn ads. And it's like really well done. And I've had it on, this isn't even this year's. I don't even remember, this is 2020, I mean, this was last year's and like they put it out and they're going to do another one soon.
Brendan Hufford: This has sat on my desk for a year. I've shown this to hundreds of people on calls and I look at it all the time. Like those sorts of things make a difference. All that to say this idea of naming the problem is so, so powerful and you just got to test a bunch of stuff. Your audience will let you know when it lands.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, I love that. And I would imagine too, because I know back to one of your earlier things of like talk to people, talk to your customers, talk to sales success support. Are you finding that that's even easier now today as marketing leaders where we can just use Gong recordings and do all the synthesis through AI or are you still like, no, no, get in front of real people and talk to them to figure this out?
Brendan Hufford: Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford: Get in front of them because I want to see your face. I like that as a layer. That's great. Do the AI call analysis, do all of those sorts of things. Because a lot of times as marketers, we'll get asked to produce certain things, especially in content. And then I like to go in Gong recordings and type that phrase in and be like, nobody has ever said that on a call. We're not writing a blog about it. There's something like content IP and stuff like, yeah, nobody had said, I'm experiencing digital fatigue.
Brendan Hufford: Like there's some things where we have to go first and be the tastemakers and name those problems. But a lot of times it's like, people are struggling with this. And I'm like, nobody's struggling with that. At least nobody we've spoken to in the past three years. So I love that as a resource, but I want to see when I'm talking to a salesperson, I want to see when they lean in or when they get a little bit pissed off or something else. Like I'm also looking for their emotional reaction when they're talking about something. You know, I talked to a CS leader,
Brendan Hufford: customer success leader at a client's company. And he started going on about like, the bullshit that like we always as marketers, we hear about, what happens after you pass sales a lead and how it's, you know, all this dynamic. But as marketers, we're not really privy to the like closed one to customer success pipeline and all of that BS. And I got some insights from him where I was like, this is like, these are foundational things for our content.
Brendan Hufford: Like we have to talk about these things because I want to get ahead of it in our marketing. And then we can start like, it'll, it'll increase renewals. It'll do all these things for the business. also just makes it better for our customers.
Mandy Hornaday: Yep, yep, I love that. Okay. Yeah.
Brendan Hufford: So yeah, you got to talk to them. This era of like, I think AI made it worse. I saw it a lot in SEO where these people were labeled, SEOs were labeled marketers and they weren't, a lot of them were just website managers. These were devs that wanted to improve the schema and the technical stuff and the Google core, whatever it was, core web vitals and think, and I'm like, you guys got to talk to humans. You own the website. You have to talk to the people that use the website. And they were like, absolutely not. I don't want to talk to people.
Brendan Hufford: As a marketer, you want to be in this is I think AI and like things like Clay and stuff have made it a little bit worse where we just want to all be spreadsheet engineers. That's fine. But if you're never surfacing insights from your actual customers or the people who talk to customers, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. You're probably not doing a bad job and I'm not judging you, but you are leaving a ton of money on the table.
Mandy Hornaday: Hmm.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Well, hey, know, spreadsheet engineers, that could be a content IP, too. That makes me constantly improving. OK, I love it. I love it. So, Brendan, I want to talk to you a little bit about the other three, the three loops, I think the discoverable, the viral and the relationship loop. What do you have specific strategies within those that you sort of bet on and you really believe right now everyone in B2B should be doing?
Brendan Hufford: It is. I've talked about it a bunch. I'm bringing material today.
Mandy Hornaday: And maybe like, what is the intersection of those? Because even as you were talking about like the relationship loop and how that could be a podcast, you know, my mind goes to, okay, a YouTube podcast could be great for discoverability, but could also be great for relationship building and probably virality. So as a CMO who's tight on time, like maybe that's the number one thing I should be doing because it accomplishes all three. talk, talk to, talk to me through that. Where, what are you seeing?
Brendan Hufford: Yeah. So I think it's a couple of things. I think there is maybe some like potential for like a cascade of like a content cascade kind of thing where it's like, Hey, this becomes this becomes this. problem is though, a lot of times we don't create the podcast with the other pieces in mind. So it's just not built for that. It's a meandering conversation between two people and we're wasting all this time and half of it could probably get deleted anyways. Things even I'm thinking about is worth talking right now.
Brendan Hufford: But like the, there is stuff like that, but a lot of times when people try to take a podcast and then turn it into a bunch of other shit, it's not built for that. And it doesn't work super well. Now, if that's all you have, if you're a solo marketer and you're like, I got to make some bets and we got to figure out how to do all of these things. My, you know, my heart goes out to you. I have nothing but empathy for marketers. You're not dumb or bad or anything. Um, I totally get it.
Brendan Hufford: But if you can do all of these things and do them right, the way that I think about it is primarily discoverability loops is going to be the thing you can own as website content. Any place you're mentioned on the rest of the internet is a bonus to influence that. I'm trying to get mentioned in as many pieces in the LLMs training data and on other things that are ranking in Google is great, but you have to cover your own bases. Usually I like to start closest to the money, which means like, do we have
Brendan Hufford: platform pages, do we have really solid product pages? Do we have competitor pages where it's like alternatives to us, alternatives to like us versus competitors, competitor versus competitor, be a good guide. If somebody's trying to decide between buying two of your competitors, give them the honest truth. I just worked with a client on this and they're like, hey, look, if you're judging between these two competitors, one of them has like more support agents than the other company has employees.
Brendan Hufford: just so you know the scale of these things. There's a reason one of them only costs $50 a month and the other one's thousands per month, right? It's very different. So I think stuff like that, like competitor versus competitors is really good. Or like one of them, a different client, we put out a competitor versus competitor page and it was like, hey, these guys just got bought by private equity and they laid off half of their staff immediately to increase valuation. You should know that. We're not making fun of them. That's just stuff that might not get surfaced and their salesperson isn't gonna tell you that.
Brendan Hufford: that they've laid off all their support and you're going to get an AI chat. Right? Okay. But be that good, trusted guide, and then you earn the right to talk about yourself. So I like all that down funnel type of stuff. Listicles, best-of, whatever, like put yourself next to them, compare them side by side, do it honestly based on the best information you have. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That helps all sorts of search. From there, you can branch out into other things.
Brendan Hufford: the second piece is on the viral loop side. I'm a huge believer people buy from people. So you need humans posting for you. If you don't, for whatever reason, you don't have humans in your company posting on your behalf. You have to do what there's a company called Navattic. Everybody should study Natalie Marcotullio from Navattic, has put out really, really great information about how she built her creators and advisor program. study her, look at what she did. Build that.
Mandy Hornaday: Okay.
Brendan Hufford: If you're like, we don't have the subject matter expertise and I'm selling to, I don't know, devs, but I'm a marketer and I don't want to build an audience of developers on LinkedIn. They're not going to trust me. And I can't get anybody from my company to post. first of all, I would disagree. Like you, you definitely can, you just need to help them understand how it connects to growing their business or serving their customers. They care about one of those. If they're the CEO or the founder, but help them do more of that. That's a big piece of it.
Brendan Hufford: sharing real authentic stories I use, you can use Fathom or Granola to record all your calls, drop that into drop all those weekly transcripts into Claude, ask it, Hey, what are the moments that are most likely to go viral? Cause they're going to generate a ton of comments and, get me more customers, ideally both. And it'll pull all the moments out of all your transcripts from the week. And then you're like, all right, cool. I can drop that into a tool called Stanley and have it write for me if you want.
Brendan Hufford: Or you can just write it yourself, right? You can, there's a lot of ways to create executive content that they're happy with and then just schedule it for them. Have it go out every single day. I will tell you, it's really hard to have the viral loop pieces if your executive is resistant to posting. Or if they don't post, but I've noticed this combo, a lot of executives won't post, but then all of sudden have a really strong opinions about content. they're like, well, I couldn't say that. That's not my brand voice. I'm like, fam, you haven't posted in six months. You don't have a brand voice.
Brendan Hufford: Well, it doesn't sound like me. Nobody knows what you sound like, dude. If you want people fine, just post every day for a couple weeks. I don't I don't care if you post a picture of your kids or your cats, or, you know, the the the Red Rising Lego that your kid built for you on your desk, like just post something. I don't care. But like that sort of thing. The overcoming executive objections for all of these things is something I think a lot about because that's like the real work of marketing, as you know, the
Mandy Hornaday: Totally.
Brendan Hufford: And then the last piece, the relationship loops. I'm so obsessed with the play of just the simple how I or how they content. So it's just simple, you know, your newsletter should be how I do this, how I do this, how I do this, or how they do this, how X does Y is really, really good. There's a really funny article called the win like stupid, where it talks about you have to be too stupid to be scared, too stupid to quit early, too stupid to be like smart and overthink it, like all of these things.
Brendan Hufford: That's how I think about newsletters and that relationship loop is just like, keep it as stupidly simple as possible and just keep shipping that type of stuff. Those at a high level, that's how I think about it from a strategic standpoint. I'm happy to help get tactical or dig into any of them if it's helpful.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah. Well, I guess I would ask, because you gave such great case studies for us to look at, any that you would recommend on the newsletter front that you think do this really well?
Brendan Hufford: Okay. Yes. So I think, I think Sendoso does this really well. I'm their client. So whatever. I don't, the, advise for Navattic. They do this really well. They do a thing called Buyer First Bites, which is really good. it has a good premise. Jay Acunzo is like the master of premise development. He is where he, his line of, your premise should be unlike every other.
Mandy Hornaday: So hats off.
Brendan Hufford: newsletter, podcast, unlike everybody else who does this thing, only we do this. That's how you develop a premise according to him. So I think he's the best. And I think thus he has like one of the best newsletters out there. I'm trying to think of who else I love. There's a couple other good ones. Like I think there's a company called BoomPop that I think does a really good job. They write for like event planners and executive assistants running corporate events like SKOs and off sites and stuff. They have also have a really good brand voice.
Brendan Hufford: Who else do love? Maybe less directly applicable. one of my favorite newsletters, two of them, one is, he's such a bro. But Alex Hormozi has one called the Mozi Minute. I know just by the name of it, I love a literal name. It's why my consultancy is called Growth Sprints. The Mozi Minute, I know in less than 60 seconds, I'm going to learn something. And I can probably apply it today. That's a good premise, right?
Brendan Hufford: And it it delivers on that premise. also really like Sarah Stockdale's newsletter is really good. She's very opinionated, very brash, takes a lot of political stances and I love that. I think she raised a really good one at Growclass. She used to have a personal one that I loved a lot. wish she'd bring back Sarah, bring back your newsletter. And then who else?
Brendan Hufford: Tyler Denk, the founder of beehiiv, has a pretty good one called Big Desk Energy. Now, he is primarily a founder selling to other founders and media outlets that they're trying to get to move to beehiiv. But it's still like, you'll learn a ton just by looking at things. So I think the key for a lot of this stuff is just to consume a lot.
Mandy Hornaday: Yep. So super helpful. Thank you. I can't wait to go check out some of those people. Some I follow, some I don't. So go learn from them. But I'd be curious if you zoomed out a little bit across those three loops, how do you bring it all together, I guess, as one strategy? And do you view, I guess, not to get too tactical, but in marketing organizations,
Mandy Hornaday: Does one person own each of those loops or one team own each of those loops or are you against that and you really view it as something different or how do we tactically excel within these loops, I guess.
Brendan Hufford: So each of them has a goal, right? Discovery loops, the goals to get found when they're searching. Virality loops, the goals to be at the top of the feed as much as possible for our ICP. Relationship loops is to build a relationship with them over time. So we always come back to that. Is this helping us get discovered? Is this helping us be at the top of the feed related to what we do, not just going, you you can post all sorts of sensational shit on LinkedIn and it'll, or the,
Brendan Hufford: trend that I hate that engagement ransomware. It's like comment to get my playbook of this insane thing that I definitely just made up yesterday.
Brendan Hufford: Or even the emails where people are like, but we have a new product release. We have to tell them about the product release. And it's like, no, that doesn't build a relationship. Stop it. Stuff like that. So, you know, put it in the PS or something. Maybe their favorite newsletter. And then at the end in the PS, be like, hey, we also launched this thing that's super helpful for you. We made a little video if you want to check it out. Some stuff like that. It's just not that's not a newsletter. You can still send them marketing emails. It's just not a newsletter. Now, Jenny Coupe was my VP at
Mandy Hornaday: Hmm. Yeah.
Brendan Hufford: ActiveCampaign when I worked there and she always said we have to be singing from the same sheet of music. And I think about that a ton. You need a conductor. You need to make sure everybody's playing from the same sheet of music. Otherwise people just, everybody gets like very specific on their channel metrics and I have to hit this and I'm not going to work with you because it could hurt my channel metrics. You know, I remember when I was in house, I asked the person running Google ads,
Brendan Hufford: to see the Google ads that were working. And I'm like, well, if they're working in paid, we should have organic pages for these. First of all, they were a little reluctant to show me. And I later found out when I finally saw them is because we were wasting a ton of money on branded search. I'm like, wait, we're paying a person to run to pay for ads for traffic we would already get anyways? Like, what are we doing? That's crazy. And it was also counter, like my, that's harming. We're spending that budget.
Mandy Hornaday: Mm-hmm.
Brendan Hufford: who gets way more budget than organic to take my organic traffic. And it's not even my organic traffic because it's branded. I didn't even do that. That's everything else we were doing in the world that makes somebody Google the brand. So it's stuff like that. When you get people locked into their channel, and I understand at big companies that that makes sense to have an SEO person, a social person, whatever. You need somebody being like, and you can't just smush them together. You'd be like, right, you all have a meeting, and you have a meeting, and you have a meeting. There, we did it. That's not how that works.
Brendan Hufford: You have to make sure they're all singing from the same sheet of music. I also work in a lot of companies where like the marketing team is less than 10 people. And I think that's kind of the way marketing teams are going for better or worse than most companies, where it's less people, more tooling, things like that. Like I'm a one person team and I'm running content strategy and producing content for organic, like SEO and AEO newsletter and social. And I can do that because I'm really good.
Brendan Hufford: with tooling available and it's good, like, you know, it's a quality debate, not a tactics debate where if it's good, it's good and it is good. And you don't need to have a million people on the team anymore to do that. If I can run that for four to five clients at a time, you can probably have one person on the team run some of this stuff. Where you get into troubles where you have like your content team becomes a service org within the company.
Brendan Hufford: Hey, we need a blog about this. Hey, we need a blog about that. We got to send out an email about this. Just other people giving orders and you're taking them and making stuff. And that's a recipe for disaster. Cause now you're not singing from the same sheet of music anymore. so I think from an organizational standpoint, it can be all over the place. It just depends on whether we're staying focused on our content IP and then accomplishing the goals of those three different loops. When you stray from your IP and when you stray from those loops,
Brendan Hufford: Like the actual goal of the loops of being discovered, showing up in the feed regularly and building relationship. That's where you get into trouble. Or not even trouble. It's just like a death spiral because like nobody's going to tell you it's not resonating. They just stop reading your emails. You know, they just stop commenting on your social and you don't know. Cause maybe new people come, maybe impressions look like they're going up and engagement looks like it's going up, but you're accidentally building an audience of, I'll get using myself for an example.
Brendan Hufford: I could do a ton of building in public, tell you all about my business, how much money I'm making, how many clients I have, how I'm running all my stuff behind the scenes. Sometimes that's valuable. It really just builds an audience of other solo people like me. I don't sell to them, so it's not a good idea. It's really important you're sharing stuff in service of your audience. And most of us are not marketers selling to other marketers.
Mandy Hornaday: Yep, yep. As you were talking, I was thinking, they're quietly quitting your content, quietly dropping out. Well, Brendan, I could talk to you for hours. This has been so much fun. I know we have a few minutes left here. So give us some of your best pieces of advice for CMOs out there that are in the slog right now. What are you seeing and what do you think we should be doing?
Brendan Hufford: Yeah. Yeah.
Brendan Hufford: I think one of the most important things is being able to quantify how much content is helping you. We all know content matters. could survey a thousand CMOs and a thousand of them would be like, yes, content is important. Yes, brand is important. But then you meet with the CFO and they're like, how much money did we make from the newsletter? And you're like, I don't, I don't know. Like we have self-reported attribution and I can put that in there, but self-reported attribution is just as bad as software-based. Like it's a good additional data point. If you're only using first click, last click, whatever.
Brendan Hufford: software-based attribution, please stop that out of form field that said, how'd you hear about us? But we all know from human psychology that we have primacy and recency bias. We know the first time, it's just, it's first and last click. What happened most recently and what happened first? And if you have a famous founder, people love putting that in their, been following, you know what I mean? They'd be like, I've been following Mandy for years. And it's like, you're just saying that to be kind of a kiss ass. Like it's not.
Brendan Hufford: You know, I, I've worked with a couple of companies and they're like, our form field only says our founder's name over and over and over. I'm like, well, that can't be it. Cause if they've been following them for years, why today? Why not six months ago or two years ago? That's weird. Like there's an inciting event that is not that. So anyways, start there. Then use a, you know, I showed you Dreamdata earlier. A lot of my clients use them. I'm a huge fan because you can see all the marketing touch points.
Brendan Hufford: When did they open emails? When did they subscribe to the newsletter? And you can see it in one customer journey. When did they receive a gift, a Sendoso gift? When did they, all these things. And all of sudden we're like, this buyer journey that we've always known as a squiggle mess line. We can see finally what it actually looks like. It wasn't the BDR that scanned their badge three years ago at the conference. And it wasn't the one gift we sent. And it wasn't the one blog they read or whatever.
Brendan Hufford: But now we have correlation. Hey, you know what? We noticed, we looked in our Dreamdata, and this is real. We looked in Dreamdata, we found that newsletter subscribers not only become customers at a higher rate than non-newsletter subscribers, we also found that those deals closed 60% faster. So we probably need to get more people reading our newsletter because we know it does that. It prints money for us. Even though we don't have any direct correlation to people saying the newsletter is why they bought our health tech.
Brendan Hufford: software or something. So things like that, right? I think that's the biggest place to start is just being able to quantify like we all know and believe in content, but the hardest piece is convincing everybody else in the org, right? Our CEO, our CFO, all these especially somebody that controls the purse strings and are like, well, I don't know the lab, the Google ads are really crushing this quarter. Let's just keep running those competitive Google ads. And I'm like,
Brendan Hufford: Yeah, people are clicking that, why are they searching us versus our competitors? We did so much work up front and you're going to be like, it's the branded search that we should pour more money into. And then you're like, Hey guys, why aren't the Google ads doing good? Well, half as many people this year are Googling us compared to last year because we stopped everything else. Like that, that's a hard spot a lot of that's why everybody talks about like CMO tenure and like they, I don't think CMOs get fired. I do think that happens because you got
Mandy Hornaday: Mmm.
Brendan Hufford: dopes running other things. But I think the other piece of it is like, CMOs quit. Like they quit organizations where they're in that prove it purgatory. like where the, know, you have a, let's say you have a seasonal business, like some of my clients and they're like, well, I expect this linear line of leads throughout the year. And they're like, here's the last five years. It's all lumpy in a certain season because our buyer, sell into education or we do gifting is a good example. Like the gifting season is a
Brendan Hufford: time of the year when people buy and use software for that. Anyways, all that to say, like, I'm happy to, if you're, if you are a CMO, send me a DM on LinkedIn, I will absolutely help you for free. I'm happy to be helpful. I'm happy to expand on any of this stuff. Like I said, I'm so competitive. I just want people that care about this and are listening to podcasts about it and are in your community and all this stuff. I just want them to win. So whatever I can do to help, will.
Mandy Hornaday: I love that. I love that. Well, thank you so much, Brendan. It's been so fun talking to you today. And I really hope that our audience takes advantage of your knowledge and reaches out. So I appreciate your time today. All right, talk soon.
Brendan Hufford: Of course. Thanks, Mandy.
