Goldenhour Live: Mark Jung and James Carbury
One of the biggest struggles that content marketers have when trying to launch an owned media strategy is getting buy in. Mark and James have successfully done this countless times and share their secrets so you can too.
We've been talking a lot about the old way versus the way today, but switching
gears is oftentimes a big commitment and hard to convince leaders to do.
In this session, we have two people that have done this both internally and
also helped several clients make the switch.
So please welcome James Carberry, founder of Sweetfish Media, a podcast agency
for B2B Brands, and co-hosts of B2B Growth,
a top 100 marketing podcast, and Mark Young, founder of Authority B2B, the
LinkedIn-led growth agency that turns attention into authority on LinkedIn and
host of the Marketing Notes podcast.
Welcome, guys. Thanks for having us. Thank you. This is going to be fun.
So the first step in implementing the new owned media playbook is convincing
leadership.
Yes.
And I know you've both had a lot of success getting buy-in both internally as
well as with clients for owned media.
Can you share some of the things that content leaders can do in order to
convince leadership to really buy into this?
Yes. So I think when you start talking about this stuff, you're talking about
getting executive buy-in.
I think one of the first things that you have to think about is how you frame
it with the executive.
I think you have to frame it the language you need to use around media as an
asset.
This is an asset on a balance sheet, not just an expense on the P&L.
And when you can speak that language to the executive who, as we learned this
morning, that's the language that these folks are having to talk about that
with their board.
And so you have to frame media as an asset.
And you then have stories to reinforce.
Like, look, when we do this the way we want to do this, outcomes happen.
Morning brew gets acquired for $75 million.
The hustle gets acquired for $27 million. Industry dive, a collection of V2B
newsletters gets acquired for $550 million.
So tens of millions of dollars in value by investing in the asset that is your
media.
And so you look at Mr. Beast getting a billion dollar offer on his YouTube
channel.
And he turned it down because he knew that the audience that he had built was
even more valuable than a billion dollar offer.
And so when you do own media the right way, you're effectively building your
market's favorite corner of the internet.
And when you build an entire market's favorite corner of the internet, that
becomes a very valuable asset.
Other companies, non-competitive, non-competitors, will also want to reach that
audience.
They'll want to pay you to sponsor a content that you're doing.
And now the marketing that you're creating is allowing other companies to do
marketing and pay for it.
So you're effectively building this advertising platform that cash flows
independent of the revenue that it generates for your business.
And so that's the one side of it. You've got to frame it correctly.
And then the second part of it, when you're having these conversations with
your executives,
you've got to think about the systems that enable owned media success.
And so systems to an executive are a signal of sustainability and relevance.
And so you have to speak in systems. If you're not talking to them about the
systems you're going to use to drive those results,
they don't want to think about it as a campaign or an experiment.
It's one off thing. You can't think about own media that way.
You've got to be repeatable. And so the systems that we talk about as we fish,
the first one is audience first.
I think a lot of marketers want to think that they're thinking audience first
when in reality it's a lot of company first content that we're seeing.
And the beautiful part about how to validate, how do I know if my content is
audience first or not?
The algorithm on social, on YouTube is a brutal meritocracy.
The algorithm will tell you whether this is audience first content or it's self
-serving company first content because the algorithm will not show it to more
people.
If it's self-serving and no one's interested and no one watches beyond the
first four seconds of it or whatever.
And so it's brutal but it's true. And so I think bringing creators into your
content ideation process, folks who have already engaged your audience that
know that understand human psychology,
they understand platform nuances, you have to bring in talent that truly knows
how to do audience first content because it does not happen naturally.
I think the second system that you have to be thinking through and talking to
your executives about is personality led.
We all know Dave Girhart, we all know Chris Walker, we know Jess Cook because
they leaned into their personality.
And it almost feels silly to include it here because everyone at this event
knows this.
Morgan Ingram, all these folks here, they have great personalities.
They're charismatic. They're great communicators. They work for companies or
started companies that have strong points of view.
And so when you have a great point of view that actually resonates with a
personality that can communicate that point of view,
it is a recipe to do great-owned media because the human, the personality is
going to be what connects with the audience and what makes that sticky.
The third system, the last system that I'll talk about here, wraps both of
those together.
It's audience first and it's personality led. And it's a format that I don't
see a lot of people doing now,
but funny enough, it looks like we're on a sports center set right now.
ESPN has been doing this for decades and it's co-hosted commentary.
We are up here, we're co-hosting this experience, and we're giving our
commentary on stuff that we know people are already talking about.
And so the magic of co-hosted commentary, where I see a lot of individual kind
of influencers, they're so reliant on their points of view
that they end up just saying the same things over and over and over again.
But when co-hosted commentary is the format that your episodic show is
following,
it's not reliant on coming up with a new POV every three months.
You can have consistent POVs, but now the game is, let's curate what is our
market already talking about?
What's the tweet that went viral? What's the LinkedIn post that popped off?
What's the newsletter that everyone in our industry reads? What did they send
last week?
Let's take that. Do we have any thoughts on it? Any insights we can add?
And let's weave in our point of view into the topic that people are already
talking about.
And so it's personality led because it's co-hosted. It's audience first because
we know our audience is already engaged with this idea
and the internet tells us that. It validates it. Social, YouTube, like we know
already.
Okay, this is an interesting concept. Now we produce content around it.
We've our two cents into it. And because it's relevant and it's audience first,
social platforms, YouTube are going to give distribution to that content.
And you're actually going to be able to build an audience and build something
that can add tens of millions of dollars to your company's valuation.
Which your leadership is going to care about? Yes, exactly.
Now they're listening. So speak in systems and start talking about media for
what it is. It's an asset.
Not just an expense on your P&L. What are your thoughts on it? You've done this
at three different companies.
Yeah, and my goal here is to give you a really tactical rundown of the exact
three step playbook that I've used to go from zero in budget to millions in
budget to build media.
And this is the foundation now that, you know, myself and my partner, Daniel
Murray are building authority B2B on with LinkedIn because collectively there's
close to 1.4 million marketers and go to market leaders that sort of follow us
in the media pages.
This is the tried and true playbook from zero to how we've done it. And it's
three simple steps. Step number one. And again, bear with me, the names are
weird.
You need to be the remora godfather. Okay, stay with me. The remora, if you don
't know, is a type of fish that latches on to sharks, does no work and gets to
benefit from all their hard work.
The analogy here is you need to find a media company or an asset that reaches
your ideal profiles that exists already and latch on to their existing
distribution. That's step one.
That's smart. Godfather, you need to make them an offer so good they can't
refuse. So flash back to about four years ago.
I was the first marketer into a company called Julie and I found that there was
sales humor pages on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook that no B2B brands were
using.
They were reaching hundreds of millions of people every year. No B2B brand
would touch them. So I cold emailed these founders and I created some content I
thought that their audience would enjoy and I said, Hey, I will give you half
of the lifetime error for anything that closes if you be willing to post this
one thing I think your audience would enjoy it.
This was me cold emailing Daniel Disney who runs the daily sales. He agreed. We
struck up a friendship. He posted it. We reached 150,000 people that afternoon.
That same week we increased our web traffic by 3000%.
The pandemic hit and we said, Hey, companies are doing webinars, virtual
content, but no one's standing out. Let's create a hot sauce sales show of Go
to Market leaders.
And the content was so good that he was willing to be our live streaming
partner for that show. We reached a quarter of a million Go to Market leaders
in the first 60 days.
We had Udi, the same old Gong at the time, come on, and he announced their Gong
Super Bowl commercial results with us, a no name early startup because we had
distribution and we had something interesting.
So, or more a Godfather, very, very easy undeniable offer. The second thing
most marketers say, Hey, CEO, Hey, CFO, here's this idea I have for content. It
's going to look like X, but they don't show they tell.
The problem with when you do that is it's abstract. It's not like, Hey, here's
something that you can see and feel and here's what the KPIs are going to look
like. It's just telling them.
So the CEO goes, Well, like, how long will get results? What kind of budget do
you need? What does this mean? What does it get to look like?
What you should do instead is use your own channels to do it yourself. That's
what I did. I started posting on my personal brand on LinkedIn a few years ago.
I started with just a few hundred impressions, whereas now I'm doing between
750,000 to a million impressions per week on my LinkedIn.
And this all just started from investing in myself and testing. When you do
that and you show your CEO qualified pipeline that closed, we had deals that
one call closed from Instagram memes, from LinkedIn posts, from people just
seeing because we could hit the social and emotional pains.
Your CEO goes, How can I invest more on this? So it's not a conversation about,
Hey, how do I get budget? It's, Hey, you've already driven results in the space
by doing it.
So you've made it not from like having to push it on them, but you're pulling
them in because you've shown them not told.
The last part is the most, I think fundamentally simple concept that a lot of
marketers forget. You're a marketer. You don't need a ton of budget. You need
an iPhone, creativity and consistency.
So really what you can do is fund your own media by building a cash full asset.
So look at Doolingo. They have a taco truck that is $700,000 in ARR.
$700,000. What can you do as a marketer, host a dinner, do something to bring
that cash back? So again, three steps. Remora Godfather, show results yourself
and then fund it in that cycle. And that's the flywheel that grows.
Amazing. If they're not about it at that point, go to another company.
Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you both for joining us. I just learned a ton. So
thank you.
It's great chatting with you.