• 139. How Taking the Path of More Resistance Led to More Than 6 Figures in Revenue

  • Jun 23 2021
  • Duración: 21 m
  • Podcast

139. How Taking the Path of More Resistance Led to More Than 6 Figures in Revenue

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  • Resumen

  • “Two roads diverged in a wood and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” - Robert Frost Sometimes in our business, we might be tempted to take the well-traveled road, the road everyone else is taking. We may not want to put in the effort that taking the harder path requires. In today’s episode, Ali Schwanke and I will discuss how doing video may be harder but worth it. We’ll also discuss Ali’s entrepreneurial journey, content marketing, and quick wins. Ali Schwanke is the CEO and founder of Simple Strat, a boutique agency that simplifies content marketing for B2B technology companies worldwide. She has more than 15 years of marketing experience ranging from an in-house marketing agency to sales and entrepreneurship. She brings a practical and data-driven perspective to the practice of content marketing. She's also the co-host of the popular YouTube series HubSpot Hacks. The Path of Most Resistance When I asked Ali what the greatest home run of her career is she said the most recent one is the YouTube series Hubspot Hacks. This series has generated over 3 million impressions on YouTube. The channel has almost 9,000 subscribers, and it has generated over 500 different top-of-funnel leads. Hubspot Hacks has also made well over six figures in revenue. “The reason that it's a home run is,” she explained, “it's one of those projects that came out of an inclination from a customer experience.” Ali explained how Hubspot is a marketing technology platform that was originally created to help people automate their marketing activity, but it’s grown into more than that now. “It's so big now that people don't really know what to do,” Ali said. “They end up looking for how to do these very tiny things.” “HubSpot has a lot of different knowledge center articles: ‘here's how to set up your users,’ ‘here's how to use video,’ [etc.]. But people were saying, ‘Show me, show me, I still don't get it.’ [We knew] that people were using platforms like TikTok and . . . Instagram videos were really hot, and so people just wanted to see it.” “We recorded some screencast videos,” Ali said. “It was literally: I record my screen. My face is on the lower left-hand side, I'm wearing a t-shirt, and we're just walking through this screen share. We did it for a couple of things like ‘how do I do a workflow,’ ‘how do I do a landing page,’ and discovered that those got thousands and thousands of hits. People started asking us additional questions, and we thought, ‘Whoa, what's going on here? Why isn't this content anywhere else?’” “So we decided to spin that off into a separate series and use that as a lead generator for our agency. We did that, and about six months into it, re-optimized based on what we knew about YouTube SEO at that time. It just took off, and then the pandemic happened and it really took off.” “Even if there's a type of content right now from your competition that already exists, people learn in different forms. Video is still one of the hottest places to get some traction because it's hard [to do]. [But first] you have to be okay with being on video. Yes, you look like that, and yes, you sound like that, so stop freaking out about it. Secondly, you can't edit a video the way you edit a blog . . . because you have to be a lot more thoughtful when you record it. That scares a lot of people away.” Hubspot Hacks has been so successful because they gave value away for free to their target audience, and as a result of giving it away for free, they gained credibility and reach. Revenue came as a natural result of that, but it all came from providing value first. Another reason they’ve been successful is because of the bigger barrier for entry. Video is harder for competitors, so there's not as much competition there. Sometimes, as water looks for the downhill path and follows the path of least resistance, businesses look for the path of least resistance too. Often, we should be heading in the opposite direction of the water because most of our competitors are going down the path of least resistance; they're going to do the easiest thing. If we want to differentiate ourselves, set ourselves apart, and provide something unique, one of the easiest ways to do that is to take the harder path. Video is harder to do; not as many people are doing it, but it presents a great opportunity to position ourselves in the number two search engine in the world, YouTube. “People forget that YouTube is a place,” Ali said. “It is home to a lot of people who [create] content: Red Bull videos, skateboard videos, cooking videos. But there's an equal amount of people that are looking for business-to-business how-tos. I know I've used YouTube when it comes to ‘how do I do something in Evernote?’ ‘How do I set up something in QuickBooks?’ I've ended up on YouTube, and most of the time ...
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