Garrett Sussman: Oh, man. This person who’s coming up next, she is infectious. She has the best personality. Way back in the day, I I almost worked with her. I was a little too expensive at the time. But she is the former CEO of Animals. Devin Bramhall was tripling revenue to nearly $12 million in two years while leading the top content marketing agency for B2B SaaS. She’s a storytelling expert, TEDx speaker, creator of the popular generally Assembly workshop. She has a book coming out. Like, she’s about to do the book tour. So if you wanna meet, like, a super famous person, go make friends with Devin, like, right after this presentation. Coming up, presenting Stop Doing Marketing, please welcome Devin Bramhall.

Devin Bramhall: Oops. Hold on. This thing just oh, it does just turn on. Wow. True to my actual presentation, I’m very analog in my presentation, so I’m gonna have both holding the mic and the remote at the same time. Cool. Hi. So, right. I’ve spent my entire career in content marketing and then I led a content marketing agency and I made a lot of money off of it. And so everything that I say next is going to completely surprise you. Get ready. All right.

So do you know how the simplest questions sometimes become the hardest ones to answer? This actually happened to me one time in a really embarrassing way. So I was out to dinner with my dad and this is after I had left Animals and I was starting to consult and I was new to consulting. And so I’m telling him about some client, I’m doing some fractional CMO shit, I don’t even remember, and I’m trying to explain it to him and he’s like, Hold on a second, hold on. He’s like, Can you just remind me, what is content marketing? And I was like, as a content marketer, I was like, well, let me tell you, we love a good what is question, right? I was getting all ready, prepared to get on stage right there at this random bar in a suburban restaurant outside of Boston, right? And when I started to explain what content marketing was, I realized that it was too difficult, right? Like I had trouble actually explaining it. So I took a step back and I was like, okay, what is marketing? Let me set the context for what content marketing is. So I literally took a napkin out and was drying this out. I’m like, okay, what is marketing?

And I broke it in two buckets. It’s like organic, you attract people to you and then you’ve got paid and it’s like you have people delivered. So you got your little Uber Eats for company growth, right? And I’m like, here are all the little, like, here’s some tactics in between to kind of explain what this all means, right? And my dad looked at it and he paused for a second and he was like, so it’s just marketing then. You do marketing. And at the time I kind of laughed because I was like, Dad, way to be cheeky, very cute. But I’ve actually didn’t stop thinking about it ever since then. Especially when I got to starting writing this book about B2B content marketing strategy, something really started to bother me. And truthfully, it’s the same thing that all of us in the marketing industry kind of like have as our Achilles heel, right? It’s like we spend all this time talking about search and quality content and we go on LinkedIn and we develop brands around doing it better, right? And we make companies. Like, I made millions of dollars for somebody else which, PS, I’ll never do that again. But like all on the back of content marketing, right? And we do this because we want to help other businesses do content marketing or do marketing better.

But the problem with all of that is that while you’re focusing on doing marketing better, you’re missing something really important. Marketing isn’t even always the best solution to growth. And I experienced that firsthand running a content marketing agency, right? And when I started, I was like, this is great. I get on a sales call and the first thing, the same exact two things at every single company, whether it was Google, Amazon or Ramp before it was cool, right, they were just coming out, they’re like, we need marketing. It’s time for marketing. And my first question that I always ask them, I was like, to what end? What are the outcomes you’re looking for? This is mine, okay? But for them, they were always their goal was ultimately to grow their business, right? And so as I start as I left Animals, right, out of this bubble of like I run a content marketing agency, I provide content marketing solutions for growth, right, and I start consulting and I’m talking to agency owners, I’m talking to SaaS companies, right? And They all come to me and they’re like, I want you to help me grow, right? And I realized a lot of times the first one to three things I recommend they do aren’t marketing activities at all.

And this is when I started to realize, when I really looked honestly back at my career and what I had done to grow companies, there are so many other ways that I’ve deployed to help these companies grow. So when I first started freelancing, had or consulting or whatever you call it, I don’t know. And they were like, okay, Cisco, we knew them, they were former client or someone, POC, former client, whatever, she reaches out and she’s like, I need your help doing marketing, right? It’s like they have this amazing team actually of really, really talented marketers from all different paid marketing, SEO, they have this really amazing team and they’re really capable at executing. Their problem was the corporate density of the process was so confusing and required the skill that none of them had, which was actually kind of like corporate politics and creating – how to create a strategy to work around the slowdown that they were getting from the company. So I came in and I just implemented a new process. That was it. And guess what? They were producing more content. They were finally starting to see results against their KPIs.

Second, I worked for this growth marketing agency last year or I consulted for them. You can tell I really love being a consultant because I just keep on the side of my mouth. And so there’s growth marketing agency and the owner’s like, I wanna grow. I wanna get to $5 million a year. Every agency owner wants to get to $5 million a year. It’s like, they all come in, This is really important. I’m like, Okay, whatever. And they have this year one goal to get there. And when I came in, he’s like, So come in and do marketing for me. Grow this company. Get me to $5 million. Great. So I came in and I looked around and I was like, Listen, man. Your biggest opportunity is not marketing. I’m like, Your margins are effed and your structure is totally wrong. And so what I did was come in and I was like, first of all, I fired three people and then I hired a ton more because they were actually short staffed. They just had these three people leading departments who were doing a shit job and shouldn’t have been there anymore. Then I said OKRs, I put together these processes. You know what I did was I started listening to the team who had really good ideas that the CEO was ignoring. And guess what? By the end in less than a quarter, we were comfortably on target to hit our annual revenue goal and I had hit their gross margin target, their end of year gross margin target by the end of one quarter and I started almost halfway through.

That’s growing companies. And I wasn’t gonna talk about this but I have to put it in there because they’re here and we’re all friends, hopefully. When I tell the story about growing animals, I take all this credit, I was like, okay, I joined VP of Marketing, it was like $1.8 million, got up to $12.5 by 2022 when I left. And I take credit for that, but when I’m talking to other CEOs and other marketers, I’m like, listen y’all, let me tell you something. First of all, all I did was create process and set us up to scale in the first two years before I was CEO. Then when I took over, guess what it was? I took over March 2020 after losing, I think it was like $100k in MRR in six weeks. Then we had this content renaissance where all of a sudden everybody wanted our shit. And so, if I were to look back and point to the thing that helped me grow Animals, helped us double revenue year over year, two years in a row, it wasn’t marketing. It was capitalizing on a moment in time. It was all the process that I built before to be able to accommodate that demand, which is a big problem that a lot of agencies experience is scaling.

Right? And here’s the crazy thing. Speaking of fans, Wil, we didn’t do any marketing. We were literally a content marketing agency and we based our content marketing strategy on doing SEO, right, like organic traffic. We didn’t deploy an organic traffic strategy at all. Our posts were not designed to rank in search. In fact, one of them did by accident. It’s called Bluff and it was just because it was a totally random thing that happened and it didn’t do anything for our business. That is literally how I grew the company, as a content marketer who had no business being CEO but actually turns out ended up being the best It’s because I didn’t just follow along with all the activities that everybody’s already doing and that were part of this playbook that we somehow adopted.

This is a recent example. My friend Emily Epstein works at Sigma. She just signed on last year as the Director of Marketing? Yes. Okay. And she went about growing the company using existing tactics that weren’t actually marketing tactics. They were advertising. So, they were getting a ton of organic traffic already. The problem that she faced was nobody was taking action once they got there. And she looked at it and she’s like, well, we’re putting the same freaking CTA on every piece of content across the site, no matter how the person came in or what the topic was. She’s like, this isn’t relevant. Why would they follow along and do the next step? And so she thought about how she could solve it and she’s like, listen, I can’t manually update all of these CTAs across the entire site. That actually, it’s not scalable. She can’t do it. So, thought back to her time being a journalist where they’re serving ads across the site and she’s like, what if I could build my own programmatic ad server, right, using our own customized content? So instead of going to her any tried and true content marketing tactics, no. She went to her head of web and was like, dude, can you do this? And he built her a plugin where she can programmatically – they have four ad spots. I think you can see that, yeah. Throughout each piece of content that they can change in the plugin itself without having to do it manually so they can test things a lot faster, see what works. Right? This isn’t and it did work. Right? Her internal ad network, their what was it? Their time on-site went up by 118%. Their pages per session went up by 13%. And this is in less than a year, mind you. This is in like a couple of months. And their influence pipeline increased as a direct result of what they were doing. Okay? And so when I think about doing marketing and all these other tactics that I or all these other strategies that I just mentioned, the big difference is that me and Emily and other folks who are doing stuff like this, we’re focused on the outcomes. We’re not focused on the activities. Are these content marketing activities? Does this count as content marketing or marketing or whatever it is? We’re looking at the constraints of the company and our team and we’re looking at the unique advantages we have. Maybe we’ve got some people who are really, you know, already influencers in the industry who have big followings, right? We’re leveraging them. And what we’re doing is we’re creating a strategy that will produce outsized impact in the shortest amount of time. 

And so while you’re sitting here listening to me and you’re like, okay, this bitch is supposed to be talking about content marketing and she isn’t talking about marketing at all. And I’m like, yes, that’s the point. Right? It’s like, we shouldn’t be talking about marketing at all. And the thing that content marketers are guilty of, and I have to like, and you guys have seen this for a long time because I’ve worked with, SEOs have always been my people that helped me actually hit my goals, and you guys are always really creative, and you’re always thinking about the latest changes as a form of opportunity, right? Content marketers are like, is this content marketing? Is this quality? What’s this AI doing to the quality of our blog posts? And I’m like, this isn’t that’s not strategy. None of it matters. Who cares? Think about content marketing to begin with. This is a whole strategy that evolved out of us little community managers adapting Twitter to have these company profiles before they even accommodated business accounts. You’ve got SEOs being brilliant and they’re like, oh, it doesn’t have to be keyword stuffing, right? You can do this in a nice, write good content kind of way. And all of a sudden, content marketing is born. And then HubSpot, they get into it and they’re like, they grow their entire empire off of naming content marketing and creating a playbook that guess what? We all follow dutifully. Right? Talk about followers. We’re the wrong kind. And we’ve been going on and on doing this and it’s like, yay, okay, whatever. But at the end of the day, content marketing was just made up. It was a made up solution to solve a problem at a time when B2B SaaS companies were coming up and they had longer sales cycles and they couldn’t follow the kind of consumer type of marketing activities to grow. Except now, guess what? How’s marketing doing these days? Well, guess what? We’re all sitting here following it along and it’s not a strategy anymore because we’re all doing it. If everyone is using the same tools, following the same playbooks, that’s not strategy.

Let me take a breath. I want to go back to this wonderful woman who’s like, breathe, breathe. I’m like, yes. Yes. Okay. So how is marketing doing these days? Okay. So I do want to take a look, right, and I want to start with my favorite thing which is the customer journey because marketers totally fucked it up. So here we are. You’ve got marketing and marketers are like, okay, we have this place that we want our customers to go. Right? There’s the end point. And we’re like, cool. And so to get them to go there, we created this map, right? And it’s a linear map with these squiggly lines going up and down for some reason. I actually, there’s a lot about the customer journey I will never understand. And if you can get from one end to the other, you win the game. Yay for you. And to verify that you’re on that path and where you’re at and where to take you next, we create these milestones and we call them touch points. Okay? Physical touch points. And we wonder why there is so much struggle in how things happen in the workplace. We, marketers, created a map in which there are physical touch points. And we basically created this path with these touch points to help companies know how well you know them, how much you like them and whether we’ve touched you enough times in enough ways that you will move to the next step. It’s freaking gross, right? And this, marketers, we did this, right? This journey with these physical icky touch points was us. And so, as we were making all this right, we’re making these touching campaigns and we’re supposed to motivate people to like stay on the path until the end when what, we’re all winners? Like, this creepy customer journey, we’ve been following this just as we’ve been following these same playbooks. Right? Like HubSpot is literally going to the bank on getting you to follow these playbooks. They are the strategists. You’re the followers. Right? And so, if you look at something like the customer journey, right, and you look at it from like just a blank slate, don’t look at it through the lens of marketing, what I saw, not only was it not linear, it wasn’t a path at all. It looks kind of like this. And yes, this is as good as I can draw. It doesn’t get any better than this. 

And so I was like, alright, this is chaos and it doesn’t work. And so I thought about it some more. I was like, I can’t come up with a strategy on chaos, so let me think of it differently. And so I started thinking about it like a subway map. Right? And basically, my friend Ashley has a similar concept. It’s like the content playground, right? Where it’s like basically there’s all available journeys and types and lengths and entry points and they all exist on this thing, right? And you can travel through them in any which way. And I was like, okay, this is better, but honestly, it still isn’t real because guess what? Subways have conductors. They have control rooms. They have all these things that help them run on time. Life is not like that. Okay? Life is chaotic and crazy. Whatever that like, life is what happens when you’re making other plans, like, that is literally us. We are marketers making plans while life is happening all around us and we’re sitting here wondering like, why isn’t this working? What’s going on? And so when you try to put, like, map a customer journey of human beings with all these complicated scenarios in their specific environments and in their industry, etc., to expect those decisions to follow this linear path or any path at all, It actually isn’t logical. It’s not only bad strategy. It literally isn’t logic. And so when I think about like how’s doing marketing going these days, I’m like, not great. 

And here’s why. We shouldn’t be doing marketing in the first place. We should be building businesses. And when we think about growth from that standpoint, we move ourselves in the shackles of like, we’re doing marketing, we’re doing SEO, right? It’s like, no. When you think about it from the perspective of what does the business need to grow? You open up your mind to more and different ways to grow the business. You have more options, Right? It’s just as simple as a mindset. And so, when I think about, like, here, these are just some of the examples. These are only the ones that I had a story for. So, you know, things like firing customers and pricing strategy, that was immediately how Haley and I added a million a year incrementally at Animals, the first two years. We were like, all right. It turns out that early stage start ups, really tough to satisfy. Right? It’s like we were undercharging. And so we added a million each year, the first two years, just doing that. M & A, listen, that’s not just for big corporations. The first thing I did when I came in to Animals and I was the CEO is there was this other agency that we really liked and respected and the guy was talking about how he wanted to sell and I was like, hey, we talked about acquiring him. Right? And similar with community building. It’s like the first thing I did when I went into animal or to Help Scout, rather, customer service software. All of our customer service people were in this random Slack group for customer support people participating. And so my solution, it’s like instead of trying to build a community from scratch, I went in and I was like, how can we support this community? And you want to know what I didn’t do? I didn’t try to slap logos on things. I didn’t start with merch, although I ended up with a merch strategy that worked really well. What I started off by doing was supporting the programming that they were already doing. They were having these customer support events. Guess what I got our CEO to do? Pay for them to get or pay to get a higher level speaker to come in and talk at these conferences for them. They couldn’t afford it. And that was how we were in – we, at the end, looked like darlings. Right? 

These are just a couple examples. This whole content as revenue things, I was talking to Ross Hudgens about this yesterday and he’s a friend of mine and I was like, I saw his face. You know when your friend looks at you and they’re like, sus, girl, sus. Prove it. This is a wild thing to me is that we’re in this creator era where people are making money off of content. Why the fuck aren’t we doing this at companies too? All those early stage startups that were impossible for us to serve, right? They have these really amazing founders and people working there, right, who have audiences on their own. Why aren’t we building newsletters for them, funding our own department when there is no money for it and starting to get the company growing that way. And, let me tell you something. If you’re a company that ends up wanting to, if you’re trying to get acquired or whatever and you’re trying to sell, this adds value to your company in more than one way cause now you’re not just building audiences and getting more people in the funnel. You’re literally increasing the amount of revenue the money makes. And even though, fine, it’s not gonna be the thing that breaks the bank, right? But, it does add value and that is something that will make you get a better deal at the end of it. I get really sweaty and anyone wonders why.

So look, at the risk of sounding like another marketer who’s just trying to give another name for the same exact thing, right, because I am so obsessed about that, right? You’re like, Devin, you’re really just talking about the same exact thing and you’re calling it something else, you know? And the answer is no, I’m not, and let me show you how. Over the years, I think I was really lucky because I never knew how to do any of the jobs I was doing, yet somebody always let me do them for some reason. I’m very convincing. And so I got to be both CEO of a company and a content marketer and kind of play both, be in both roles. And now I’m doing a consultant and I’m seeing it all at scale, right? And there’s two kinds of principles that came out of it, that I realized I’ve been following the entire time. It’s like, look, a growth strategy needs to be grounded in this idea that you’re doing the fewest amount of actions necessary to reach your outcomes and that you’re pursuing tactics that you can logically, or outcomes that you can logically achieve, right? You’re doing things that could actually happen, right? Because it doesn’t make sense to have if you have this great strategy and you can’t implement it because you know you can’t get buy in or you know you don’t have the resources or whatever, that’s not it doesn’t count, right? So it’s like it has to be able to work. And anyone who reads Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, this is the one business book I ever read and it’s heavily this had a big impact in my career. 

And so there’s an example of this from very early in my career before I actually knew what I was doing, and it’s this event called the Master Slam, and I was working for this personal organization app in Boston. It was like 2013 and they were looking to grow their presence locally. I can’t remember why. And so I was a bait. It was my first content marketing job. No idea how to do it. Came from customer support. And I started going to all these networking events. And I was like, cool. It was freaking exhausting. After a month, was so tired. And that wasn’t my only goal I was going after. I had other goals. I had a day job. And so I was like, how can I make the same or more impact but do less? And that’s where I came up with this idea, where I was like, okay, all these events that I go to, they’re either a panel discussion or a speaker and networking. And I’m like, if I want to bring people to a brand that nobody really knows, and no one knows me either, I’m like a nobody, I have no friends, I had spent the past year and a half in Bali, no friends in the marketing or SaaS space Boston. And so I was like, really need a hook to get people to go here in the first place. And so, I’m like, look, there’s this boring format that everybody does. What if I iterated on that? What if I did something different? Well, I’m also a stand up storyteller at the time and so I’m like, hey, I’m going make this a game. I’m going to make it a competition. It’s going be a story slam style debate. I’m going to give everybody this super divisive topic. I think the first one was Android versus iOS, which one do you develop for first? Because yes, this is 2013. Let’s take it back. And I’ve got this really cool idea, right? So good, fine, cool format. But the format of this thing requires six competitors and six judges. Again, I’m nobody. So, what do I do? I go, I look within my company, I leverage my existing resources, my CMO is like, I know this guy, Mark O’Toole, he heads up this really awesome, he made this great PR agency in Boston, everybody knows him and loves him. He’s like, I can connect you with him. Great. I pitched Mark O’Toole on this and never We’re on the phone too. I don’t even do it face to face. I’m like, listen. And I will never forget, I finished and it was silent for a minute and I’m like, oh my God. And he was like, Devin, I don’t really understand what this is, but it sounds really cool. I’m in. Right? And so now I’ve got these things, I’ve got this event, we’re putting it out there, and the format itself is also built to fill the room because we’ve got these people, twelve participants in the format alone. They’re all bringing people to the event. It works. It sells out from the beginning. Boston Globe tries to copy it. Everybody knows about us. They’re all like, yay, SpringPad, you’re so awesome. Blah blah blah. Right? And so, look.

I’m not trying to say that marketing is dead. I’m not even trying to say that content marketing is dead. What I’m trying to say is that content isn’t in fact king. Okay? Because think about it, kings can be conquered, kings die, empires. You didn’t put me on the billboard. Just saying. I mean, if you think about it, literally empires are conquered from within. And so when I think back to this original phrase, we need content, which used to really excite me when I was running a content marketing agency. Now it makes my hair stand on end. I’m like, do you? And then I quickly look behind me and I’m like, oh, King Content’s back there. He’s kind of haunting me from the back. I’m like, oh, don’t hurt me. And again, I am not saying that content marketing is dead. But I do think it’s worth considering. Do you want to be the hoodwink king of content? Or would you rather be the kid standing on the side of the road recognizing that you’re just a dumbass guy walking down the street with no clothes on? Right? 

Oh, I have to wrap up, you guys. I didn’t practice the time. Okay. So, marketing isn’t dead. What it is, and this is the dirty little secret, marketing is just a really small piece of a company’s growth strategy. All these other departments are working on growing the company and they’re doing all these other things. Your little marketing department, it’s just one tiny part. And so when you think about, and content marketers, right, we sit here thinking, look, you guys will relate to this. We think we’re hot shit. We’re always like, oh, look at us. We’re content marketers. Quality content. We’re so great. And you’re like, shut up. I remember joining Healthscout and the first thing that we did, I was like, I had to add like 125Ks in new users or something. I don’t know. This was back in the traffic days, the doldrums. And I remember the thing that we did, I had nine months to do it. The first thing I did was follow along with this plan that our SEO team had come up with and they were like, look, if you just refresh these posts, you’re be fine. And they were right and I did it. And even still, SpringPad, we had this I remember one time, they used to call this growth hacking, where it’s like, oh, okay, you’ve got a – there was a competitor who was going, another personal organization app was going out of business and my co founder who was this product engineering guy, he’s like, hey, do you He’s like, what if we made a tool to help export their data from there and bring it into Springpad? We got a ton of new users that week, and the question that us content marketers will be asking is like, well, is that product or is that marketing? And I’m like, what if it’s just a good idea for growing a company? And shouldn’t that be the things that we’re focusing on?

And so these are the things that I developed. This is like the what do I actually do. This is how I prove to you that I’m not just like some theorist up here being like, this a new thing. And you’re like, it’s still a pig, bitch. It’s still a pig. No. These things actually work, right? And so, you need to stop focusing on the best practices and you just stop looking around at what everyone else is doing. Think, reason from your own facts. Think about what you have available, what you think is best and make that point. You don’t need a data study. The founder of Animals, this used to drive me nuts until I realized it was brilliant. I’d be like, well, look, this other company is doing this and blah blah blah and try to prove that what I was doing was right. He’s like, Devin, I don’t give a fuck what anyone else is doing. What do you think is the smartest action and prove to me? Do the math yourself for me from your own brain. Right? It doesn’t matter what it’s called, doesn’t matter where it comes from. Okay? Same thing, internal blockers. It is crazy to me how many times we have these talks about getting buy in as a separate thing from strategy. And, I’m like, if you’re a marketer and you can’t get buy in, that’s part of your strategic plan. It has to be. Right? Otherwise, you’re not gonna be able to do it in the first place. Unique advantages, there’s tons of those, you guys get that. It’s like you’ve to focus on the outcomes first and this whole thing, you have to really think about including the measurable and immeasurable things too because that’s where you’re going to start focusing on what actually matters, not just what you can track, right? And if you’re already counting the fact that buy in’s going be really fucking hard and everyone’s going to question you, it’s like you’ve got that taken care of. You actually can end up doing that, right? You have to be experimenting all the time, is not something I have to educate SEOs on because you already get it. And the most important thing in all of this is that strategy is not about fairness. It is about results.

And in fact, a good strategist isn’t worried about fairness at all. They’re trying to create unfair advantage for their company instead. And when you think about it from that objective mindset, right, now you can use it to your advantage. So now, if my dabber asked me again, what is content marketing? I’d be like, listen, guys, it’s a strategic growth plan. You’re capitalizing on what you have and you’re trying to make maximum impact with a minimal amount of effort. And I’m going to pull a Wil because he did this already and I’ve already gone over time. I’m so sorry. I had everything I needed to succeed. 

So I’ll leave you with this: Marketers are sitting here focusing on change as if it’s challenging the way things currently are, as if the way things currently are were made by God when he invented the world or whatever, if you believe that narrative, whatever it is, the creator thing, it’s like, oh my God, content marketing is these things. But what I’m saying is it’s not. And I remember this time, was like a couple years ago when this kind of moment came to me. I was at this store, local bookstore, and they were like, I had like four fiction books in my hand or whatever and I’m, you know, okay, I only read fiction, by the way, except for Richard Rumelt apparently. And I passed by this book and it really caught my eye. It was called The Book of Eels. But it wasn’t the title that caught my eye. It was the statement on the jacket and it’s like, the most mysterious creatures in the whole world. And I was like, I definitely want to know about that. So, I picked it up and I’m reading about eels and it turns out they live this really migratory lifestyle. They start out with these little squiggly things in the ocean and the gulf stream takes them along, they grow a millimeter at a time, they turn a glass eel and they go back to the stream and they hang out there for fifteen years, turn color to yellow and they go back to the sea, change color a few more times, they lay eggs and then they die. Right? There’s no peak eel in there. They’re just going along their life constantly changing and they’re an example of how change is a way that they thrive. Right? They are constantly adapting to this changing reality and using that change to their advantage. 

So, reacting to it like us content marketers do because we’re so obsessed, we’re so obsessed with content marketing and what it’s called and how you do it, right? We’re going start leveraging it to our own advantage using all the things I just said. I’m so over you guys. I can’t even end this. Thank you so much.