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The Future of Brand Marketing w/ Robert Katai

In this discussion with Chris Do, marketing expert Robert Katai reveals why cultivating in-house creators is the key to building trust and driving growth.

Chris Do

Founder, The Futur™ · May 16, 2024

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The Era of Branded Content is Over

Every brand is producing content. They are all following the same dusty funnel diagrams: awareness, consideration, conversion. Marketers operate as if consumers travel a neat, linear path, but reality is far messier. A potential customer might open five different social media apps, read a newsletter, and listen to a podcast, all within minutes. They are not in a funnel. They are everywhere.

This reveals a fundamental, and uncomfortable, truth about modern marketing. “Consumers are aware that they are marketed to,” says marketing expert Robert Katai. They see the transactional nature of the content brands push into their feeds. This awareness has bred skepticism. Simply publishing your work and waiting for the masses to arrive is a strategy doomed to fail.

The entire paradigm is built on a flawed foundation. Brands think they are the center of the story. They are wrong.

The Three Uncomfortable Truths of Modern Marketing

The first truth is that awareness of marketing has changed consumer behavior. The second, and more powerful, truth is that people trust people far more than they trust brands. They crave human connection, even on digital platforms.

Katai points to the entrepreneur Nick Huber, who observed a significant boost in engagement, followers, and sales after he replaced his companies' brand names on Twitter with the names of their CEOs. The lesson is simple but profound: people want to connect with other people, not with faceless logos.

This leads to the third truth. Take a moment and scroll through the accounts you follow on any social platform. How many are corporate brands versus individual people? The disparity is almost always staggering. We overwhelmingly choose to follow individuals: creators, experts, friends, and personalities. As Katai notes, “social media is getting more and more social.”

This presents a massive problem for companies. The old playbook is broken.

Building a brand page with organic reach is now an arduous, uphill battle. Platforms know businesses have money to spend, so they throttle organic reach to push paid advertising. The more you want to grow, the more you have to pay. It’s a game of diminishing returns, where smaller brands with limited budgets can’t compete.

At the same time, the popular solution of influencer marketing is showing deep cracks. Influencers who work with a new brand every week erode their own audience’s trust. They become, as Katai describes them, “the walking billboards of digital media,” their recommendations feeling transactional and hollow.

The cost of acquiring customers is also exploding. Katai references a tweet by Patrick Campbell, the founder of ProfitWell, who found that customer acquisition costs had increased by nearly 70% over five years for both B2B and B2C companies. The cost of getting attention is unsustainable.

These forces create a perfect storm with predictable effects:

Paid marketing becomes a pay-to-win game. The companies with the deepest pockets will dominate the ad space, squeezing out smaller, more creative competitors.
AI will flood every channel. As generative AI makes content production nearly frictionless, the internet will be inundated with generic, soulless content. Distinguishing between human-created and AI-generated brand content will become impossible, further devaluing it.
Businesses avoiding human connection will fade. In a world saturated with ads and AI, the only durable competitive advantage is authentic, human-to-human conversation. Companies that hide behind their logos will become invisible.

The problem is clear. The effects are undeniable. But there is a solution.

The New Mandate: Cultivate Creators

The answer is not to create more content. The answer is to stop thinking like a publisher and start thinking like a talent scout.

We don't need to create more content; we need to cultivate in-house creators.

Consider the math. Your company can have one LinkedIn page. One Instagram profile. One voice shouting into the void. But what if you empowered five employees to build their own voices? Suddenly, you have five LinkedIn profiles, each with a unique perspective, each building a distinct audience. You have multiplied your reach, your credibility, and your points of connection. An authentic personal brand is now a business asset.

Katai highlights Apollo.io as a prime example. The sales intelligence platform has achieved some of the highest engagement on LinkedIn in the SaaS industry. This success is not driven by the corporate brand page. It is fueled by its employees, who create content daily. They are not just posting ads for Apollo. They are building their own audiences by sharing genuine insights about sales, marketing, and professional growth. When Apollo has a new feature or announcement, these trusted voices can spread the message authentically because they actually believe in the company.

This is the power of turning your employees into the brand’s most valuable players. The benefits are transformative, creating a flywheel of talent, distribution, and audience growth.

The In-House Creator in Action: Amanda Natividad and SparkToro

When Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, started his new audience research company, SparkToro, he brought on Amanda Natividad as VP of Marketing. For many in the marketing world, Natividad’s ascent seemed to happen overnight. She began creating consistent, insightful content on Twitter and LinkedIn, but her influence exploded after joining SparkToro.

She took over the company’s blog, newsletter, and social accounts, infusing them with a conversational, human-centric tone. While Fishkin was already a titan in the industry, Natividad became a new, powerful-yet-approachable face for the brand. She possessed what Katai calls “creator DNA.” She understood the platforms, the audience, and their struggles. Her job was not to write press releases. It was to build a bridge between the brand and its audience.

One of Natividad’s most significant contributions was popularizing the term “zero-click content,” a concept she detailed on the SparkToro blog. The idea, that marketers should provide value directly within a social media feed rather than always trying to drive clicks to a website, resonated deeply across the industry. Data from BuzzSumo showed a massive spike in backlinks to SparkToro after she published the piece.

This single idea transformed Natividad from a content creator into an industry voice. Companies invited her to speak on podcasts, webinars, and at conferences. Her topic was almost always zero-click content. And in every presentation, when she discussed the importance of understanding your audience, she had the perfect example to showcase: SparkToro.

This created a virtuous cycle. Katai calls this the content flywheel. An in-house creator with a powerful idea generates organic traction, which leads to distribution opportunities on other platforms. Each opportunity reinforces the creator's authority and, by extension, the authority and visibility of their company. It is a far more human and effective form of marketing than boosting a post with advertising.

The result is a powerful audience-building engine. Today, SparkToro has a substantial social media following and a newsletter subscriber list in the tens of thousands. What is most remarkable is that the company behind this impact consists of just three people: Rand Fishkin, Amanda Natividad, and CTO Casey Henry. They are not a massive corporation with an endless marketing budget. They are two in-house creators who put their names and faces on their work. When an email arrives from SparkToro, it feels like it’s from Amanda or Rand, because it is. This is a level of trust no corporate brand page can replicate. It's about learning how to build content people actually react to.

The Founder as Creator

Another powerful model is the founder who is also the primary creator for their brand. Chris Do is a living example of this, building The Futur into an education powerhouse by directly teaching and sharing his expertise. This model turns the founder’s vision and authority into the company’s primary lead-generation engine.

The business world is filled with founders who have embraced this strategy:

Nathan Barry of ConvertKit: Barry consistently creates content about the creator economy and entrepreneurship. His personal audience becomes a direct bridge to his email marketing platform.
Noah Kagan of AppSumo: Kagan is a prolific creator. As Katai notes, whenever Kagan appeared on a podcast to promote his book, Million Dollar Weekend, he was almost always wearing an AppSumo t-shirt or hat, seamlessly blending personal brand authority with company brand awareness. His success demonstrates key principles from his own teaching on how to grow a million dollar business.
Shaan Puri of My First Million: Puri leverages his massive podcast audience to drive interest in his various ventures, including the recruiting platform Support Shepherd.

Some might argue that this is only feasible for early-stage startups. But Peter Caputa, the CEO of the established B2B software company Databox, proves that a commitment to content can, and should, scale. Caputa posts on LinkedIn daily, a practice many CEOs would dismiss as a poor use of time. But he does so with strategic intent.

In a LinkedIn post, Caputa outlined his reasons for creating daily content. It's not just about marketing. It is a core business function. He posts to share his vision, collect direct feedback from customers, learn from others in his industry, connect with consumers, evangelize the product, and validate new ideas. Recently, he announced he was doubling down, moving to two posts per day. He understands that his voice is a critical asset for Databox.

This is the fundamental shift. The in-house creator, whether an employee or a founder, is not just a marketer. They are a direct line to the market, generating insights, building trust, and fostering community in a way that paid ads and faceless corporate accounts never can.

The Playbook: Building Your Own Media Platform

The ultimate goal is to transition from borrowing attention on social media to owning it. You must build your own media platform.

This is not about simply creating content because everyone else is. It is about having a purpose and a strategy. As Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute have long argued, content without a strategy is just noise. The key is to create episodic content that builds an element of anticipation.

Rand Fishkin’s legendary Whiteboard Friday series at Moz is a classic example. It was a weekly, five-minute educational video that built a loyal following. Viewers knew what to expect and looked forward to the next installment. This transforms content from a random act into a reliable resource.

Another innovative example is HockeyStack, a B2B analytics company. They created their own content platform that functions like a “Netflix for B2B marketers,” with original shows that are entertaining, funny, and educational. They tackle problems their audience faces daily, but in a format that feels fresh and engaging. This is how you build a brand, an audience, and a community.

Katai offers a simple but powerful framework for this process, which he calls the Attention Flywheel. It consists of three stages.

1. Attract Attention with Social Media.
Use short-form content to capture interest. Joseph Hill, a B2B marketer, created a Google Slides deck compiling the ultimate LinkedIn ad library. Instead of hiding it behind an email gate, he offered to send it to anyone who commented. One post generated over 3,500 comments, giving him the attention he needed to launch his own B2B ad company. Similarly, Tim Davidson makes the “boring” world of B2B marketing fun by using short videos where he cuts fruit while discussing industry struggles. He proves that any topic can be engaging with the right format.

2. Maintain Attention with Owned Channels.
Once you have their attention, move the relationship off the volatile algorithms of social media. The goal is to create a direct connection. This is where newsletters, podcasts, and exclusive content come in. SparkToro’s newsletter, for instance, provides value without a heavy sales pitch. Their webinars and office hours deepen the connection. Katai also points to their “Spark Together” event, which was positioned as a one-time-only experience with no recordings. This created immense value and urgency, rewarding their most engaged audience members.

3. Convert Attention with an Invitation.
After delivering consistent value, conversion becomes a natural next step, not a hard sell. Katai admires the approach of creator Justin Welsh, who famously used the call to action: “Whenever you are ready, you can buy from me.” This simple phrase shifts the power to the customer. It communicates confidence and respect. The message is clear: “I have given you so much value that I trust you will come to me when you need my solution.” This is the pinnacle of a value-first-selling approach, a topic explored deeply in how to develop an irresistible offer.

This flywheel is not a marketing trick. It is a long-term strategy for building a durable, resilient brand by focusing on trust and value above all else.

Your Brand’s Most Valuable Players

The implications of this shift are profound, not just for companies but for every employee within them.

“Life is too short to work for a company that doesn't value employee personal brand,” Katai concludes. Companies that fear their employees building a following are operating from a scarcity mindset. They worry that an employee with a strong brand will leave. The reality is that a powerful vision inspires a culture of creation. Companies like Lavender AI and ClickUp actively encourage their people to create content, and they benefit immensely from it.

The story of Dave Gerhardt at Drift is a testament to this. CEO David Cancel saw Gerhardt’s potential to be a voice for the company and encouraged him to build his personal brand. Gerhardt started podcasts, hosted events, and wrote a book, all while sharing Drift's perspective on the market. He didn't just share press releases; he had an opinion. This built his authority and, in turn, made Drift a household name in conversational marketing. Today, Gerhardt has moved on to build his own B2B media company, but his legacy at Drift created immense value that long outlasted his tenure.

Your employees understand the industry, the product, and the customer’s pain points better than any outside influencer ever could. With some training and direction, they can become your most powerful storytellers.

They are your brand’s MVPs. Take care of them. Make them happy. When your employees are fulfilled, they will talk about your brand with an authenticity that cannot be bought.

And for those building their own brand, the final lesson is the most important. It is not about self-promotion or chasing vanity metrics. Real influence is not about you.

Building your personal brand is simply the byproduct of helping other people.

TRANSCRIPT

hey everybody my name is Robert and in this video I will teach you how to go from an unknown employee to a top celebrity that will make your brand Skyrocket today I will talk about cultivate in-house creators so I will I have 17 years in marketing and now I think that I can call myself a Creator I'm also the founder of B2B Creator the newsletter and also the the company and I can say that I teach Brands how to build inhouse Creator programs and uh I can say that I'm somehow the proof uh behind of my advice because what I will teach you right now is what I lived and what I observe and what I see around me that is happening so what's very interesting is that these day like every brand is producing content and we all know these funnels about the uh awareness and about the consideration and people are just like how brands are think right now and that's the consumer Journey that marketers believe that uh people are consuming the content but in the same time if you if you are going a little bit downside consumers are not just like uh in a funnel they are everywhere and if you are just producing content on one platform it's not like you putting those consumers in a funnel because those consumers are let's say opening maybe in five minutes all their social media platforms reading one newsletter or an email or listening for a podcast so that's somehow the yesterday mindset and what I want to talk with you is that there's one truth that we need somehow to be aware of that is that consumers are aware that they are marketed and these days I'm talking to let's say marketers entrepreneurs creatives design ERS that wants to show their work and they think that if they are putting themsel or publishing their work people will come to them but the consumers are somehow aware that brands are marketing their products to them with their content and that's one truth the second truth is that people trust people and from my perspective people trust more people than they trust Brands and here's this guy Nick Huber who wrote A tweet a few year I believe last year when he said that all his accounts com all his companies that are having their Twitter profile he Chang his brand name with their f with their CEO names and now he can see uh a boosting in their sales in their engagement and uh even in their followers because people don't want just to connect with brands on social media people want to connect with people on social media and that's very interesting when we are looking around how people are consuming the content that people are publishing and also the brands are publishing and the third through is that people follow more people on social media than they follow Brands so here is somehow this balance that Brands they want to be in front of people but people don't want to consume their content if if it's not like let's say a more likable content a more engaging content or we all know that inspiration or entertaining or even educational so here's a challenge for you and I somehow want to challenge you right now uh because if you take your phone and you are looking let's say take Instagram or take tikt or take LinkedIn whatever it doesn't matter just look at how many brands do you follow right now on social media just look at your following how many brands do you follow on social media and this doesn't matter like your company that that you are working there or maybe the ones that you are uh consuming every day the brands that you like the type of content they are consuming versus how many people do you follow on social media and that's very interesting because we can say that social media is getting more and more social so what this mean what do this mean right now is that there's a big problem the problem is that building brand pages on social media media and organic it's very very hard because the platforms they find out that okay these Brands they want to grow their businesses so these Brands they are having money to invest in these platforms so we will let's say scale down their reach their engagement so if they want to grow they need to invest money so the organic growth on social media is getting harder and harder and harder if you are a brand and you want to grow your page let's say on LinkedIn or even if you want to grow your page let's say on on Instagram or or or on Facebook and the second one is that influencers they are uh they are working with more and more Brands and lately the influencer is are asking more money and somehow they don't build let's say a loyal trust audience because today maybe they are working with Brand X but tomorrow they will work with brand I don't know B or C or D or a so what does this mean is that their Their audience they don't trust anymore because it's very let's say it's a problem for them as influencers and content creators because they are changing their brands and I heard this talk about these influencers they are somehow the The Walking Billboards of digital media these days so that's the second problem it's the context and the third problem is that uh Patrick Campbell he wrote an a tweet a tweet thread last year and he found out that the customer acquisition cost increased by 10 18.9% that means that you really need to invest money so now we are having these effects and there are a few effects that we can say we are seeing around us so money will dictate the competition in paid marketing and everything around marketing the more you the uh how many how much money you will invest in your in your platforms that's how much money you will get from the platform so it will be let's say the big Brands can win in that but the small Brands they need to be creative and there will be a solution that where I will talk with you about it so the second effect is that AI will flood every marketing channel and yeah we can already see these let's say AI generated cont content and I'm I'm not saying that's a problem I'm just saying that the AI will flood more and more content so if you will see the content that is published by a brand by a brand page you don't know if that will be like a human created content or it will be like a brand like an AI created content so and the third one is that business will fade because the they they will avoid the conversation from Human to human and that's that's really a big problem these days so that's also an effect but there's a solution so now that I presented you the problem the effect the the context that you are leing there's a simple solution and here's what I'm recommending right now is that we don't need to create more content we need to cultivate inhouse creators so let me give you an example your company is can publish one type of content on let's say on multiple Channel but you can have like a company like a brand and you can have like I don't know five different LinkedIn Pages or 10 different Instagram profiles you only can have like one Instagram profile or one let's say LinkedIn page if you are let's say a small medium company so if you are changing the game you can you can just like hey what if we are cultivating these in-house creators and every one of these in-house creators they are having multiple Pages like you are working with free creators and you're having your in-house free creators so now you are having free type of creators that are publishing on free LinkedIn pages with different audiences and now you're are multiplying your audiences and let's give you an example there is Apollo IO so Apollo IO right now in the software as a service uh let's say industry they are they are having the most engagement on LinkedIn and why is that because they employees they are creating content day by day by day and they are not just like hey you should buy from Apollo you should buy our software they are building up their own audiences and whenever Apollo is launching a new uh service or a new feature or they want to announce something and these people really love they are enjoying working there they will get this idea they will get this topic and they will spread it because they believe in this company so that's that's one benefit of having in-house Creator are spreading the message from in-house from your company around the multiple audiences so here's one benefit uh the content talent and we all know Amanda Amanda natividad so I didn't know who was Amanda before uh she joined spark Toro and when Rand uh talk Rand fishkin talked about her on Twitter and he welcome her to the spark Toro team I was like okay let's follow Amanda and see what is she doing how is she creating content and then Amanda started like uh creating consistent content on her Twitter and on her LinkedIn even before that she already started like creating the content but after she was like um hired at spark Toro she took the the sparktoro blog and she took the the the sparktoro newsletter and she took the sparktoro social media account and she started making very conversational content and now Rand even if Rand is a talent on on creating the content now he multiplied the the spark to Audience by bringing Amanda in the team and now Amanda is having this Creator DNA in herself and it's publishing the content and she published the the zero click content and everybody in the marketing industry it's talking about the zero click content and now am man she's let's say uh the phase of spark Toro and this is the one benefit when you have like an in-house Creator you have the content talent that is understanding the platform that is understanding the audience that is understanding the struggle the the let's say the ICP the ideal client profile and that Creator knows how to create the kind of content that it's building a bridge between the brand and the audience and the second benefit it's a distribution channel so look at what when Amanda started like publishing the the zero click content and these are some data from from Bas from Bas Sumo that when she started like uh WR writing the content and after she published the the sporo zero click content they started getting more and more backlinks and because it was let's say a very interesting topic she started getting more traction and maven.com invited her okay you can do like a cohort about content marketing and then other companies invited her in their podcast in their webinars even at their conferences and guess what was her topic of presentation it was Zero click content and in her presentation what was very interesting is that every time she discussed about the audience research the audience the importance of understanding your audience and whenever she get to that topic she went directly to spark Toro and now we have this let's say the content flywheel where you have this in-house Creator and is changing the game uh beh she's not like uh doing the press releases or just like hey okay let's let's write a a copy and everybody will will uh will read it because we are publishing it and we are boosting with advertising it's more humanly so that's that's the second benefit the third benefit of having uh an in-house creator it's an audience Builder now if you look up uh at spartor Twitter profile they are having like 21,000 followers and only free following but the way they are creating the type of content is more directly to Their audience and their email newsletter is getting like 60 uh, plus uh email people subscribe and that's because and now let's understand the sparktoro uh company behind the sparktoro company are only three people there is ran fishkin who's the CE who's the CEO there is Amanda who's the VP of marketing and there is Casey who's the CTO and yeah they are working with different Consultants but there are only three people behind this amazing product and amazing let's say content that they are publishing and Rand and Amanda they are the in-house creators that are creating the type of content and they are putting their name there so whenever I will get like an email for spark from sparktoro I know that it's from Amanda or I know that it's from Rand because they are the one behind that are creating and Publishing the content and uh they are bringing new Talent like let's say whenever they are uh inviting for an office hour or for a webinar there is a Manda that is connecting with the with their guest and now I'm having this familiar facee that I trust and because I'm following I will watch this webinar because is now friend with Britany and okay Britany will will say she will present her idea to the sparktoro audience so that's the fourth benefit of having this in-house Creator so there's the solution of the second one the second solution is the founder Creator like what you're doing right now Chris with with the future you are the Creator and you are the founder of the future and you are presenting uh whatever you are doing at the future and you're let's say like like a funnel bringing the new leads and take for example there are a lot of example from conver kit we can see that nanberry whenever he's talking about conver kit whenever he's talking about the new features he's just putting up uh the content and creating and building up audiences and creating build uh Bridges between his audience and conver kit and there is Noah Kagan what's very interesting every time when Noah went to lately uh to a podcast interview discussing about the million doll week book every time he had like an an appsumo t-shirt or an appsumo hat and that bring a lot of brand awareness for his company and then we have a support shepher where is new cuber and shamp Puri where wherever whenever they are creating content and maybe let's say whenever Shan it's publishing for my first million there in the description there is a link between the my first million audience and the support shepher and just like you you are the type of the founder that is having the uh Creator DNA whenever you are going to a workshops or whenever you are going to a presentation and even this kind of discussion you are taking these nippet and you are creating the type of flywheel content that is bringing you new followers building up the audiences that are that that uh next will be let's say the the user and the consumer of your of your content so let's take Peter caputa who's the CEO of datab box so Peter he wrote a very interesting LinkedIn post and he said that he's posting on LinkedIn daily like uh and what's the reason why is he posting daily on LinkedIn because CEO is like a big uh because the data box is like a big company right now so and he doesn't like hey I don't have time to post on these social media because I I need to manage my team so these are the reasons that I took from this idea because he wants to share his vision because he wants to collect directly uh feedback uh he wants to learn from others he wants to connect with his consumers evangelize the product validate the ideas so these are the kind of let's say the reasons why a CEO for this kind of company is publishing daily and I believe that today he wrote a post that he started like publishing twice on LinkedIn he's doubled down on his content just up building up his audience and doing all these stuff that he wanted to do with uh with data box by uh Distributing content on LinkedIn so that's why I really believe that the inhouse creators right now are getting more and more traction more and more credibility than the outside influencers and that my third solution for our uh earlier mentioned problem is that you as a company and you as a brand you need to build your own media platform and that's very interesting because I'm looking around myself and I see these smart creators and these smart Founders that understand that I'm I'm a media company right now publishing the content is not is not just a way of doing stuff because everybody is doing because I'm now creating the type of content that is connecting me with my prospects and I'm going back to Rand fishkin he started like creating these five minute whiteboards and he started educating his audience uh around Their audience and around their user uh uh let's say problems and it's it's a five minute episodic content and every week he started like publishing and you go on their website you can watch this video you can uh read the transcript and just like triple down on on the content creation because spark Toro is not investing money in paid advertising I believe that spartor right now everything they are doing it's organic content because they are having these faces the founder face and also the talent faces as as Amanda is right now and then we have H hockey stack so here's hocky stack and what hockey stack have done they created their own platform where you can go and it's like let's say like a Netflix for B2B marketers B2B salesperson and you can go right uh right there and watch all these shows that are uh let's say directly for the marketers problem directly for the marketer uh need because I want to learn in a different way and they are let's say tackling the idea of okay we can be funny we can be entertaining but in the same time we can just like point out different perspective about marketing different perspective about about sales and these are the idea and these are the topics their audiences are struggling day by day and that's how they are building up their brand that's how they are building up Their audience and their community and episodic content is not something that you're putting it's it's creating this element of anticipation of content consumption that's why uh when I'm subscribing to a YouTube channel I have this let's say um this perspective of I want to see next week another video and I want to see maybe after two weeks another video and I need this anticipation of content consumption as a consumer but also from the other part as a content creator if you're just publishing content without that kind of strategy that Joe pit and Robert Rose are discussing in this old marketing that's not content strategy that's just like pouring out content without having a purpose so here's your uh my let's say here's my um advice on build your own audience and how can you build your own Audience by creating this attention flywheel and I divided them in three simple parts so you're using social media to attract the audience and now with let's say with the short videos and let's say with the short content you are attracting the audience on your on your own profile on your own uh let's say post and you're engaging with them and then you're maintaining with the newsletter with the podcast with the with the episodic uh content and after that you're moving to conver uh where you are converting these audiences by giving them the product and the service and uh yes attract you can attract attention with social media so I have my friend uh Joseph Hill and he created like a slide deck where he gather all the ultimate let's say LinkedIn ad library and he create like a Google slide where uh where you didn't have to download the ebook you just had to ask him hey give me this uh Google slide and he just send it over and I found out that he started let's say like a template in how he's creating this type of content and attracting uh his uh audience's attention and you can see that he's having this introduction where he's saying that hey I spent like 100 hours on screenshotting the best B2B ads on Google or maybe on LinkedIn and then he showing look like what can you get uh in these slides and after that he's moving to how can you get it the conclusion and the visuals and I'm moving back because now I can see that he's having like 3.5 uhk comments in one post on LinkedIn and that bring him the kind of attention he needed to Now launch his own B2B ad uh B2B ad comp company the second example it's Tim Davidson and Tim Davidson he's using the short videos publishing on LinkedIn and creating let's say a movement around talking about B2B problems B2B marketing ideas B2B marketing struggles by cutting fruits and just like making it a little bit funny but also interesting and engaging enough for him and his audience and that's an another example that where you can get like a boring industry and a lot of people are saying that B2B it's boring and he said like okay let's make boring funny how can you maintain attention with the newsletter and that's how you maintain attention right uh these days and I told you about spark Toro and I'm getting back to sparktoro because even I don't want to be at the mercy of the social media algorithms I want to I want to control the type of content that I want to consume so I'm subscribing to these emails and that's how a Creator it's maintaining the attention not just only publishing on social media and playing the algorithm uh game they are creating a connection in the email where they own Their audience and that's how spartor is doing right now with their with their email so you won't see here like hey you should buy from us right now it's not something like uh whenever they are launching a new feature here is our new new feature by it we are giving you discounts and uh that's how they are also maintaining attention with their webinars with their office hours and uh like I told you with the Whiteboard so and even with the spark together event and that was very interesting with this spark together because their value proposition was you can come you can watch the event but we won't record it and we won't send the record so it will be a one time onetime event the presentation that these speakers will share here they won't share it anymore on any stages so it was very unique perspective from the type of company that sparktoro is building up right now in their industry and how can you convert the attention you are giving them the product and the services and uh okay now I love spark Toro and now that I I'm following up uh I'm following uh sarand and I'm also following Amanda and I'm subscribing to their newsletter I want I now want to try this product and there is a CTA a call to action that I love from a Creator is called Justin Welsh and he had I don't know if he's having any uh right now but he had this great CTA where he said that whenever you are ready you can buy from me and the idea on whenever you are ready that's because he's building up his audience and he let the audience and he led the client to decide whenever now I'm ready now I want to buy from you because you gave me so much value I want to give you back and I want to buy from you so these are these are my conclusions right now and the first one is I believe that right now life is too short to work for a company that doesn't value employee personal brand and uh if a company doesn't understand that when an employee and it's building up their personal brand they are somehow let's say afraid that hey maybe this employee will go away or maybe this employee uh they are not let's say uh grateful for working for us but there is an opportunity on letting these employees build up their personal brand and now they can be the voice of their company my second conclusion is that a powerful Vision encourage the culture of In-House Creator and whenever I can watch around me and I can watch the companies like laender AI or the clickup companies they are encouraging people to create content and just like building up their uh personal band and being the in-house Creator and my my and here's an example like I really love what how uh Dave garad he build up his personal brand by creating let's say this type of content with uh with David canel who's the who's the CEO drift and they created like podcasts different events writing up he even wrote his book Dave gerad and now he's building his B2B marketing Community but that was very interesting because David saw in U in uh in Dave Gerard this let's say the kind of person that can share whatever the company is doing and share the company's let's say perspective and vision with his audience and if we go back like years uh years later we can see that uh Dave started like talking about what drift is doing and he was just like not presenting the press releases and just like sharing the blog post he had his own opinion about the market and that's how Dave started building up his personal brand and now he building his B2B Media company and the third conclusion is just like you don't just create content and publish there you are cultivating in-house creators and that's the idea that even Jay auno discussed in with his community and lately I saw um let's say uh the guys from the marketing Against the Grain where they say that paid advertising is getting more and more or asking more and more money and the the influencer you don't trust anymore in them so why not cultivate these in-house creators in your company like building up these programs so your employees that understand the industry that understand the product or the service can easily create content they they will only need some education some training and just some Direction but I believe that when you are investing in your own employees and they will talk about the the the company product or the company service and the com or the industry struggle they can share uh let's say a more trustworthy and a bigger Authority between the company and the audience and uh your employee they are the the brand MVPs so stick to that take care of them and make sure that they are happy and when your employees are happy your company will get even more and more traction because their employ your employee will talk about your brand uh and whatever your brand is your whatever your company is doing so and also build up your personal brand it's the byproduct of helping other people that's why really that's I really believe that whenever I hear that hey I'm building up my personal brand and I'm just going on this person profiles and I can't see any comments in their on their profile they are not engaging in comments they are not going and helping people they are just like bragging up but they are saying that they are building up their personal brand that's not building up your personal brand that's it's just like feeding your ego what I really believe it's well building up your personal brand it's the byproduct of helping others like whenever you are going in comments and helping people or going in DM and whenever they asking you for something just like dirting maybe and connecting with someone or connecting with your content that maybe for you it's something like usual but for them it can be like a solution for their problem how is what you're talking about with in-house creators different than say the traditional brand evangelists who are content creators who are hired in-house who talk about certain things how do you see the difference between those two things uh the in-house creators that's very interesting and I'm thinking a lot about this stuff because there are the brand evangelist there are the in-house creators and then then there's the third one there are the brand ambassadors so the these are let's say very different because with the brand evangelist and the brand ambassadors they are investing money and they are having these kind of schedules and they are very intangible like you can't touch these brand evangelist because they are having one purpose to promote the brand to promote the to promote the company but the in-house creators they are having in their DNA to create content around the problem to create the content around let's say the brand around the the the industry and they understand the industry better than these brand evangelist because these in-house creators are more directly to the audience they are more connecting directly to Their audience most interesting is that you don't need to have like hundreds of thousands of followers on LinkedIn or maybe on Twitter to be an in-house Creator you can start with your 200 people that are following you around on on LinkedIn and just discuss about how your company is helping maybe a client or how your company can solve a a big problem or a in industrial problem but the brand evangelist they are going on the stage they are writing the books it's more like a more like a press related uh strategy and what's interesting is that I saw lately that consumers are more and more aware that these kind of people they have one purpose to Market them but the in-house creators are having another purpose to help and there's a big difference for me okay that makes sense to me from a practical point of view say for example like right now I run a company I have a decent sized social media following and let say one day I wake up and I say ah I don't want to run a company more I want to become an in-house creator for one of these brands do I then start a new profile or do I use my existing profile and become an in-house Creator because does the content I made before make sense now in my new role as say a as a creator for spark Toro yeah so you can you can be like very transparent and I'm let's say I'm more transparent person and like I really believe in hey I'm starting this new role I really believe in this new company so from now on I will start discussing about these topics so if I can help you just let me know and I saw these days uh I believe one Creator and I I'm it's just like in top of my mind that he said that hey I'm starting a new role it's a new company I know that before you knew me about that I was the marketing manager for this company but now that after a lot of this conversation with these managers and the founder and the CEO I somehow believe in their Vision so from now on I will start discussing about this topic and it's not like a very let's say complicated idea you just start like it's just like starting like a new strategy like a new Behavior so if I want to go on a diet I will talk with my friends I will say like hey from now on whenever you will see me with a donut just tell me that stop with that donut because I want to be a new person and it doesn't mean like if before I I ate the those donuts now I let's say want to start a new life so that's that's how I see it right now I understand so I've been working on content teaching people how to run their creative business and if I go to spark Toro I'm going to be talking about something very different but as you and I know not all jobs last forever so in two years time after I start um they have changes in direction or I don't want to work there anymore what am I'm going to do with this period of like talking about spartor related problems building Community around it helping people solve problems do I then go back and delete all that content because it's going to seem really strange no no way don't don't delete those problem don't delete those content because those content are your thoughts so you want you're not just talking about the the product you're not just talking about let's say the service you're also talking about yourself because that's Al also another benefit of having these in-house creators because they are more like human uh let's say related content than having these brand ambassadors that they need to share the content or they need to let's say write something about the product and when whenever you are writing these content about the product about your life about your struggle about the industry you're building up let's say these uh Authority and people are starting following you and ju like you are a great example and a few years ago you wrote a lot about let's say what you've done with blind yeah but but then you change on the future and like you didn't deleted your your post about blind because if you go back you can we you also have those the blind company right and that's interesting because you just change it and you didn't like hey I don't feel it I I will change it I will delete it you don't change the the direction and that's the part of who you are and people they they want to to see transparency and if you are let's say uh changing the company that's great if you if there is a risk and I understand companies maybe will say like hey man there's a risk to invest in these people that maybe they will go and maybe they want to to change the the company and maybe they will go to another company that's great because now you can say like okay I invested in these companies and whenever that in-house Creator will say like hey man I will go to another company okay is there any chance you can do a shout out to our company like hey I will leave this role here's an space whatever whenever uh if you feel like let me know and now it's more likely to build up and find the new Talent be around the your old let's say in-house Creator okay well so here's the thing though as a thought leader as a content creator I often actually go in and prune content that I don't think is the right Vibe or I've grown and I don't want to talk about that anymore so I literally go back and I delete stuff all the time so you'd have to go pretty far back and I'm not sure there's anything left where I'm talking about blind right so I've gone through because Here's my thought process if somebody's interested in following me on social they're going to look at a few things and if it feels like it's all over the place they're not going want to follow you and this is the advice that you're going to give people like you can't be all over the place because it kind of know it's like are you a food guy are you a tech person are you business person and if you do food Tech and business it's very confusing for the audience because the person who tuned in for the food stuff gets turned off by the tech stuff and vice versa so I think there's a natural pruning of stuff and so you're just saying you don't have to change anything about you whatever you do consistently before you become an in-house Creator you can continue doing after is that about right yeah okay yeah so if you never edit and you're always transparent don't edit and always be transparent if you're more curatorial then you can continue to be that way and that's not going to be a problem yeah I don't see it like uh it's a or b it can be also a or uh it can be also B but in the that's maybe how is more comfortable for the for the Creator and if for the Creator that's comfortable to delete these let's say the old content that's fine but I will maybe uh if people will ask you like hey why did you delete these old let's say post because now I want to change my my life and that's okay but if you want to let them right there so for example I was let's say a content Marketing Manager for SAS company uh creat former Banner snack so I created a lot of content around that I will I created guest post I I spoke at at uh at conferences so now I need to go back and just like delete them for now it's like okay it's there so if I said something that maybe it wasn't for right there or maybe uh it's different uh let's say mindset from what was a few years ago that's okay if not then I won't delete it okay I'm excited I'm a content creator and I want to be placed inside of a company because this sounds great sounds like a dream job how much money can I make doing this like what is a salary for someone to do this as an in-house Creator that's really depending on how how can you let's say talk with your manager and how how how much money and how much results can you bring on the table so I believe that you can maybe get maybe 25 35 even 50% on your salary right now with the with this strategy because if you are showing the marketing perspective the business perspective and also maybe you can just like let's say track the measurement of them it can this even can help them uh let's say save money on hey don't invest in that press release invest uh those money in my content let's see how it will go using 20 to 30% increase on the amount of money you're making right increase increase yeah so ballpark figure though what what what kind of numbers you're hearing between this number and that number in US currency what are you thinking let's say 3,000 4,000 per month okay okay and now let's go ahead but that's only by just doing your job and be be uh and in between you can create content and connect with your audience so it's just like having a hobby on creating the type of these type of content on your own platform and you make your manager happy so now let's say that I'm a brand and I'm watching this video and I'm very excited I'm like oh my gosh what Robert's saying is making total sense to me I need to bring somebody in what do I need to be prepared to find the right person like who what are the top three traits you look for in considering someone to be an in-house creator for your brand so first of all they need to be passionate about the product the brand the service the second of all you need to go out on their social media let's say and if they are starting let's say creating the type of content and maybe sharing your your companies ideas you can go from there and the third one you can go and talk discuss with them hey you have a voice you have an idea you know you know the industry what if you we are training you to create the type of content that will help you engage with a bigger audience and maybe we we can just do like a webinar with you because you understand the industry you don't need to be a marketer you know to be a social media manager you can be or a customer you can be let's say a software engineer you can be let's say a designer and just discuss about the the UI and the uek behind your SS and do a webinar so if you can bring like 100 designers on that webinar there's maybe your next hire and or maybe your next colleagues that want to work with you okay so underneath that is they probably have to be somewhat sociable at least on social media they have to be a good communicator and they probably have to like talking to people and they love the idea of writing and creating content is that about right yes okay perfect well this is a real interesting take on this idea of personal branding mixed with corporate branding and a novel solution and something I had not heard before so thanks very much for sharing that with me Robert thank you very much for inviting me if people are interested in building inhouse Creator programs how do they get in touch with you they can follow me on LinkedIn and they can write me Robert robert.com or they can go on my newsletter And subscribe to my newsletter the B2B creator.com [Music]

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Length: 43m
Views: 22,120
Topic: MARKETING

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