The B2B Content Waste Problem Nobody Talks About

G'Day everyone.

It's Michelle J Raymond and listeners this week I'm excited because we've got

another guest on the show who normally I say this is someone I'm friends with,

but we're actually talking for the first time after I've been secretly stalking

pretty much newsletters, content, anything I could get my hands on.

Lee Densmer, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

I'm so happy to be here.

But we're friends now, Right.

It's legit now.

We've, we've spoken for half an hour.

We're friends now.

That is exactly it, and I knew we would be talking a lot because

honestly, like when I see your post.

And I sit there and I'm like, yes.

That's the same thing I see with my clients.

And I'm like high fiving you from a distance.

And as I said, I read your newsletter as well because today's episode

listeners, we are here to help you stamp out corporate content waste because

Lee, You and I, we've seen too much.

And this just has to stop, right?

It has to stop.

So in today's episode, let's start with, when we talk about content waste,

what does that actually look like in a B2B company in your experience?

Yeah.

Let me tell you a story.

It's gonna demonstrate all of it.

So I had a client a couple years back now, and I walked in and began auditing

their content and After a couple days, I realised that they had, in the, the

thousands of pieces of content, they had, I think 1700 pieces of content

that I found on SharePoint drives and here and there and on hard drives, and

people kept sending me content and I was like, this stuff isn't updated.

It's not maintained, it's not findable.

Sales isn't using it.

That's what waste looks like.

Somebody spent money to write each of those pieces and nobody was using it.

That makes me cry.

And I'm also at the same time, not judging anyone out there, because

I'm pretty sure my website is where great blog articles go to die and

very rarely make their way back.

And the thing that also makes me cry a little bit is with how much effort

and sometimes cost also goes into content that goes out onto LinkedIn,

that for me, this waste is often content that's not helping anybody.

Like it's just literally done For the sake of it.

And I'm pretty sure you would see that as well.

But post after post with no strategy, you don't know where it's going.

You don't know who it's for.

And I'm thinking how much time and money is going into this?

And it's just going down the drain, like it's crazy.

Yeah.

I guess there's two forms of waste.

One is good content that nobody's using, and then the other one is

content that never had any purpose.

And either way, you've wasted time, you've wasted money.

You've lost an opportunity.

The opportunity cost of this crappy content is pretty high.

Yeah, it sure is.

And the other thing that I look at that is, as someone that's putting

out the content, I don't think anyone, Lee is sitting there going.

Oh, today I am gonna go to work and I'm gonna write some great content that

no one sees and I'm gonna feel good about myself, or I'm never gonna get

trained in how to do great content or build a strategy or understand things.

So then I'm gonna put it out there and it's gonna flop.

It just feels awful for people when that that's happening, and I think that's

why I wanna have this conversation today and make it practical for our

listeners so that They don't get stuck in feeling like I'm working my butt off.

Mm-hmm.

I feel like I'm getting nowhere and everyone in the business is actually

judging me thinking, you know, marketing or content is pointless and

my job isn't really that important.

So I think we can change that conversation today.

But why do you think that so much Good content out there

never actually gets used.

Right?

If we're talking about good content, you know, you did understand the buyer, right?

You did understand your audience, and, and it's good content.

It's well written, it's unique, it's even differentiated.

It Never gets used.

It goes to waste because no one knows about it.

So your sales team doesn't even know it exists.

You never told people that you published it and wrote it.

Nobody can find it.

You're not working in a tool that's searchable and nobody knows how to use it.

And this is sales enablement I talk about all the time.

You've not literally not trained people who aren't content people,

how to use content to do their jobs.

They don't know what to do with an ebook.

So that needs to be discussed.

Another thing that Really contributes to this is silos in your organisation.

So the marketing team goes about creating content.

Who is using it internally?

It's your sales team using it.

It's your account team.

It's maybe the product team.

But since there's silos, there's no synergy, there's no

information passed back and forth.

There's absolutely no way that you can help them do their

jobs if you never talk to them.

I know that we laugh around that, but I remember having a conversation with a

client and I got to talk to both sides.

I got to talk to the marketing team who had a goal of what they wanted

to achieve, and then I took that and had a conversation to understand

a few things more with the sales manager, and I asked him why he hadn't

been sharing any of the content and quite frankly, he was Embarrassed

because it didn't sound like him.

It wasn't aligned with who they were targeting.

It wasn't speaking to the problems he'd discovered.

And I know that that's not good content, but it like For me, it kind of underpins

the problem here when teams are working, as you say, in silos and nobody's

actually getting in a room and having a conversation and saying What should

we be doing to help you sell more?

And the feedback from the sales team around what they're hearing, what

kinds of content would make good content for them to be able to share.

So who would've thought, Lee, that a conversation between teams

Is the secret to good content?

Do we have to really repeat this?

I think we do.

We do.

It is one of the secrets, it's one of the hacks, if you will get

your people to talk to each other.

Sales tells the content team about customer conversations.

The content team tells sales about what formats they're experimenting or where

they wanna publish content and events Team gets involved and tells people, what

conversations they had at events and where they're going and what they're planning.

Yeah, and that's the thing is when we all work together and come up with the

strategy that is actually aligned to the whole team's business goals, then

you can actually start creating content that really lands, really sticks.

It performs everybody's high fiving themselves.

And it's kind of funny because obviously like my specialty that I

talk about is all things LinkedIn.

LinkedIn company pages, and getting your employees active as well, but I realised

a long time ago that when I was creating content on LinkedIn, and it could be

some of my best work, you know there, there are some times when you create

something and you're like high fiving yourself, but what actually was happening

was It was drowning down the feed, down the gurgler never to be seen again.

At that time it was 24 to 48 hours.

Maybe now content lasts for a couple of weeks.

Mm-hmm.

But when I was putting my heart and soul into this thing and only putting it in

the LinkedIn feed, that's when I went.

Oh no.

Oh no, this, this has to stop because I wanna put it in other

places where people can find it.

So this is how this podcast was born because it's searchable.

The longevity was there.

And same with my YouTube channel.

And I guess you would see that with businesses as well, where they're putting

all this effort into some really cool content, but maybe only using it once.

That to me, is another waste.

It's insane.

Yeah.

I see LinkedIn as one distribution channel for content.

It's a channel.

Channel meaning where people go for information.

LinkedIn is a big place where B2B businesses, buyers go for

information, but it's one channel.

So there are other channels you should be exploring with the content.

Your content should be going out in multiple channels.

Is it because we don't have a strategy that we end up just the

goal is post three times a week?

Is that the underpinning problem that we need to solve first?

I think that it's possible that there just isn't The awareness of the way

different channels and different content types should fit together.

So for example, you've got your spicy point of view, right?

You, you're taking a stand on something in the market and you've

written a blog post about it.

You use that post on social media.

You write zero click content based on that post.

So you're putting the idea on your website, you're putting it

on social media, and then you also send a newsletter on it.

And then your employees also post around those concepts on their pages.

So it's one concept, right?

Multiple channels and LinkedIn, you know, in your corporate page.

On your employee handles.

In a newsletter that's also on the platform.

So it's one content piece, multiple venues.

Yeah, and the cool thing about this that I'm seeing right now with all

the research and Dare I say the words, AI, when we're talking about content,

because I know it's meant to be the solution to everything, but what I've

been reading is large language models, even if they're reading your LinkedIn

content, whether it's a newsletter or posts or things along those lines.

They're actually looking for credibility that comes not just from one source, but

how you show up on your website, how you show up with blog or YouTube or LinkedIn

posts, and they all work together, which makes this Even more important to take the

good stuff and make sure we repurpose it.

So to your point, I currently write an email newsletter.

That's my baby email newsletter.

So hopefully all of my listeners today, you'll subscribe to it.

But I started that and that has like 600 subscribers, roughly, right?

And so that's my, you know, favourite kind of audience that I can have,

you know, particular conversations with in a much closer kind of way.

And I enjoy that.

But it takes time.

Everything that you create takes time.

So then I realised, oh, actually I've spent a lot of time on that.

Maybe I could create like a LinkedIn newsletter from it.

And then from there, there are ideas that go to the website and you know, sometimes

podcast ideas and they all come together.

Even I was like wasting so many good ideas, only putting it in one

spot because that was the thing.

I wrote this for my email newsletter.

It must stay in that bucket.

And actually, no, you can adapt it into so many different ways.

And you know, the podcast is the classic example of Ends up in a newsletter,

ends up a blog on the website, ends up in the emails, short form video

clips, like there are so many cool tools now that's what I love AI for.

Take the good long stuff and turn it into some cool short stuff.

Yeah, it's a really, so I like to think of content strategy as it's a

discussion around your centre of gravity.

Your centre of gravity Michelle is your podcast.

That's your anchor.

Centre of gravity.

And from your centre of gravity, you have other kind of planets in the orbit, right?

LinkedIn posts, a newsletter, a LinkedIn article, and so an off platform

newsletter, an on platform newsletter.

So some of the companies that I work with have their blog is their

centre of gravity, and that's great.

It's great.

It's a good mid, mid length content format.

So I think I would encourage listeners to think about what their

centre of gravity is and how they're going to put forward big ideas

In that venue and then distribute it in other ways across channels.

So the podcast is a very logical centre of gravity, but I won't tell

everybody to go start a podcast.

No way.

Yeah.

Who would've thought that it's not right for everybody?

And this is the thing that I'm getting a a little worried for people out

there that are going to tools Like ChatGPT or the large language models

and saying, give me a strategy.

And the strategy comes up The one size fits all for everybody, you know, based

on the averages out on the internet.

This is what we think that you should do.

And I know you and I are very aligned in the fact that no, that is not a one size

fits all approach to this, uh, finding the thing that you're really good at.

So one of my clients, you know, sh shout out to the team at Pluggable.

They have this amazing YouTube channel that is just really has picked up

and grown in the last 12 months.

They've been doing it for like 10 plus years, but in the last

12 months they've nailed it.

Mm-hmm.

And so what we were able to do is look and go, well, what's working over there?

What can we bring to LinkedIn with your employees and with your company page?

And so I can't wait to see when they enabled that strategy to, number one, get

so much more return on the effort that they're putting into a lot of that video

content and switching up the formats.

But I think LinkedIn works really great for that distribution

side of things, right?

You know, you've built communities and you can get that message in front of as

many people as possible because Lee, one of the things that I think people get

worried about is, but if everyone posts all at the same time or, you know, in a

similar kind of period around the same topic, won't people get bored of that?

Won't they judge us?

Won't they hate us because we keep saying the same thing?

Not at all.

What's your opinion on this?

Because I have a pretty strong one, but I'll I'll let you do some talking first.

Yeah, we agree.

You'll get bored of your point of view way before your

audience does, and if you have.

2, 3, 4, 5, you know, pillars, points of view on specific things that you stand by.

You must be, it's mandatory for you to repeat those.

Don't start coming up with opinions outside of those lanes, because pretty

soon your market's not gonna know what you really stand for, but keep

repeating the four or five things where you really wanna plant your flag.

Yeah, the repetition, I think is the biggest Easiest thing that

you can do to have wins across all the platforms that most people

go, we already posted about that.

We did a post on that two months ago.

We've already talked about that.

And if you think about Organic distribution, especially on

social platforms like LinkedIn.

We know that our content more and more and more is not being shown to as many

people, and you are relying on your ideal audience having been online at

the time that you spoke about that once.

Right.

And when I say it like this.

It sounds crazy that people think it.

But our brains, I think, protect us and go, we don't wanna say it too much.

What if we say it too much?

And it's the repetition that is critical.

And this is why I try and say to people, if you've got, 10,000 different products

that you can sell, pick your five favourites that are your best sellers, or

the one that you wanna promote and just talk nonstop about five, instead of trying

to talk a little bit about 10,000 because everyone's like Snoozefest like at the

end of the day, you can't remember it.

This is not your friend group.

This is not your tight group of five friends who were like, really?

You told this story last week?

It is the opposite of that.

Yeah, it sure is.

I've been on the end of it myself where you know, and I'm guilty of it right now.

Okay.

So I'm gonna step into the confession box for a moment because I know better.

So I've written two books and I would be very confident that there would be

a lot of people listening to this show that wouldn't even know I've written one.

I did a poll a while back asking people did they know, and I was

really surprised that some of my close friends on LinkedIn were like.

When did you write a second book?

Or, I didn't know you wrote the first book.

And these are like the close people, not even like the people that

are like, you know, a bit further removed from my everyday world.

Mm-hmm.

And I was like, oh no and then so if you flip it to the other side.

I'm pretty sure everybody in the world knows me talking about Tim Tams

every single Friday for the last kind of couple of years, I get pictures

of them from all around the world, people buying them because they saw

them in their local shops, which is like one of my favourite things.

Okay.

What's tim Tam?

American.

Okay.

What is it?

Tim tam.

Tim Tams are chocolate.

I'm gonna say cookies.

I'd say biscuits here in Australia, but I, I know I've gotta interpret.

So they are chocolate delicious goodies that have just been launched in the

US so you can get them locally now.

Uh, but ultimately every Friday I talk about a Tim Tam tip,

so it's my excuse to eat them.

I record something or take a photo and relate it back

to a LinkedIn marketing tip.

And when I go and speak, so I'll be at Social Media

Marketing World in a few weeks.

Mm-hmm.

My suitcase will have 300 of these.

In my suitcase so I can share them with the people in the audience.

So the first thing that happened when people found out I was

speaking this year, the ones that had seen me in previous years.

The first question, are you bringing the Tim Tams?

Do you like chuck 'em at people from the audience?

I have, uh, thought about that approach and now at least they're individually

wrapped so I can make sure that they all get put on the seat or given

to people as they walk in the door.

But it's about creating memorable moments.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that's the purpose of this content is not just to post content

for content's sake to hit a KPI of, oh, I posted three times this week.

Well, who cares?

Like really?

Does anyone?

You were saying find your Tim Tam.

Exactly.

Find your Tim Tam.

Find tim Tam.

Whatever it is.

Find your Tim Tam and keep on offering the Tim Tam.

Yeah.

'cause people laugh and say, but it's okay for you Michelle.

It's just Tim Tams.

We can't talk about our Product that much and I'm like, you have even more reason

to talk about your product that much.

And you know, for me it's always the reminder that I should be doing that for

my other products and services that I do just as much so that they're connected.

You know, and this is the thing listeners like I have these conversations

'cause sometimes I need the reminder.

Mm-hmm.

You know, and so thanks for, you know, coming on Lee, so I can talk about it.

But let's go the other way.

So we know, that there's a lot of waste going on out there with

all of this corporate content.

Let's go the other way.

What does an actual strong content system look like when it's working properly?

Sure.

Three things.

Okay, we talked about this before, but it's the alignment.

Your sales, your product, and your account Teams are all aware

of content and how to use it.

So they've been trained, they're in synergy, they're passing

information back and forth.

So that's the first one.

The sales team is giving ideas to the content team based

on customer conversations.

They're the closest to the customer.

They have to be informing content, and the content team is actively repurposing.

We've talked about this, so taking the best things From the centre of gravity and

making assets that are easily usable and easily available for those other teams.

That's what it, that's what should be happening when it's all working well.

Yeah, the emphasis on should, but it's not really hard.

What we're talking here is actually not anything that's super complicated, but

it does require planning and setting time aside, and I think quite often

When everyone's pulled in every single direction and they're all juggling so

many different hats that often, like, especially when it comes to LinkedIn and

the company page, the content's like so far down the level of conversation, uh,

that people forget about it, you know?

And so we wanna say, look, the earlier that we get in the room

together And have these conversations.

You are not just creating good content, but effective content that's,

you know, aligned to those goals.

There's one other thing though one other thing.

Yeah, go for it.

Somebody's in charge.

Somebody has to be in charge of this.

You can't just have, you know, your admin who has the spare time or your social

media coordinator trying to run this.

They may not be interested.

They may not know what they're doing.

They may be too busy.

You have to properly put somebody In charge of this.

And again, that sounds like, isn't that so obvious, isn't It like something

that everybody should already have?

Yeah.

No, not in my experience either.

No, not in my experience either.

When I'm working with clients, like you often assume that these things are in

place, but when you actually do a little bit of digging, it's really interesting

to see that quite often, content, I wanna say, is like an afterthought.

It's the last thing that people wanna do, and everything else is more important.

And I'd like to see from this conversation that things get elevated and I think when

we create good content and have systems for distributing it As far and wide and

as many times as possible where it makes sense, not just for the sake of it.

I don't know.

How do you feel like Gary V says, like create 350,000 pieces of content a day,

or whatever number he is up to these days?

How do you feel about that kind of volume game?

I don't personally get it, but I'm always open.

No, it sounds like a purging of words or some sort of, yeah, it

doesn't sound good to me at all.

I would much rather see very aligned, high quality, strong content.

Then I just picture something.

You know when, you know when a kid throws a package of cards up in the air and

they just go everywhere, or you, or you don't put the lid on the popcorn popper

when you're popping and it just explodes.

That is what Gary V makes me think of.

It does make me think of that as well, and I, I, I try, I'm not a podcast listener

as my listeners already know, which is ironic given I do two podcasts, but I

was at the gym trying to listen to one of Gary V's podcasts recently, so I could

learn from that and One of the interesting things he was saying that in a particular

industry, if they weren't putting out, I think it was like five or 10 or 15

pieces of content every single day, and it was in the real estate industry,

actually, they weren't putting out that much a day, then they were losing,

and that's why they weren't selling.

And I was like, wow.

15 pieces of content for an individual to do, like without Systems and processes.

I'm like thinking, okay, and yes, I get that there's a lot of platforms

that we could do it and a lot of tools.

But as I was listening to this podcast, which was just a recording of him

speaking and a really bad recording at that, I was thinking the quality

of this conversation is so hard to listen to and it's distracting.

Like even for someone that doesn't particularly enjoy

podcasts, but I wanted to learn.

But sometimes doing it just for the sake of doing it, it feels like

for me You're just getting slimed.

It's like someone's just pouring stuff over you and you're

like, get this stuff off me.

Mm-hmm.

And I don't know, like I, this is where I'm like, I get

that we can, but should we?

But should we?

I don't know.

You should not.

And AI makes it so much easier to publish and publish and publish.

Yeah, look and again, this is where a bit of discretion and coming back

to that strategy comes in, into play.

And I mean, I'm a fan of playing with the tools to see what's out there.

And there's a, a, an interesting one that I'm playing around with at the

moment from the, the team at Opus Pro.

And basically what that does is takes your blog articles and turns

it into videos and, you know, the technology's new but some of the stuff

that it pulls out is cool because Yes.

We don't have time to all be video content creators and write long

form blogs and do this and do that.

Like, it's just not practical.

So I love the idea and I'm playing around with it so I can

share it with like, you know, the listeners and some of the clients.

But it's something I was like, yeah, that's a cool use of AI.

Like take it in one format.

That's what I do with the podcast.

I use that tool.

So that I can then clip it and take my long form and you know, we get five or

so clips out of every podcast episode.

And then that just makes my content, you know, so much easier to keep up with.

So yeah, I'm not anti AI or the tools, but

not at all.

Just cause isn't a reason.

Yeah.

Just 'cause there's never a reason.

Right.

I agree it isn't.

So a question for you, Lee, as we, you know, kind of come round to the end of the

conversation, but if someone's listening to this and realising that they're

actually wasting content and let's assume that it's the good content that they've

done the research, understand the clients, have a goal in mind that's aligned to the

business goals for that piece of content, and they've figured all of that out.

But they're still wasting it.

What do you think that they should fix first?

Probably the first thing to do is well get your arms around

what you've got, catalogue it.

Do you, how many blog posts do you have?

How many, whatever the content pieces are, catalogue it so you

can understand what to update.

Make it fresh, keep it current.

What to deep six, what to literally get rid of, because there is usually a case

for archiving half of your blogs if you have 500 of them And where your gaps are.

You can't possibly know where your gaps are unless you know what you've got.

And lots of the teams I meet with don't, they don't even know what they've

got, so they don't even know if they have good content because there's

a trash pile, a, a zombie wasteland of content over here on the left.

So figure out what you've got.

Update it, keep it current and figure out how to repurpose it.

Focus on that before you go creating all new stuff.

And if you look at your content and none of it has a point of view and none of it's

aligned with the buyer and it's really all bad, then you kind of need to start over.

But I meet very few brands who are actually in that situation.

They're sitting on good content, a great report from a year ago that just needs

to be updated, and then you write three blogs from that and four newsletters

from it, and 25 social posts and an email nurture sequence can come out of it.

Look, and, and I was just thinking you, as you were talking, there

was like a, another client, you know, these clients popped to mind

because this is actually really real problems that we see out there.

And, you know, I had a client that they spend the best part of six to 12 months,

a whole team coming up with these amazing research papers that are, you know, like

there's, there's a lot that goes into it.

Not just one that you do to try and get email signups, but This is

part of, you know, their business.

And I just remember their only goal was, you know, throw it on the website

so you can sign up for something.

Probably send out the corporate email newsletter and do one post on LinkedIn

and no one could see any of it.

And I was like, well we need to switch this up 'cause this is where I think

LinkedIn can come in very handy.

Especially if you've got your company page and your employees both

being active like you were sharing before, and I was like, no, no, no.

We need to let everybody know.

I call it like the big bang effects.

Like you know, drown the platform on you know, a couple of days and go really hard.

So every which way that somebody looks, all they see is people talking about

this particular report and research.

And because this was like next level, this wasn't just, this is like a whole

team of people working on nothing but this cutting edge research.

For a period of time that was literally just getting the plonk it on the website

treatment and one post and it, I, I'm sure it makes you a little heart

cry when you hear things like this.

My heart is crying.

So that needed a full launch plan.

Yeah.

That needed an email nurture sequence.

It needs to be in the company's featured section, in the featured

section of the employees.

It needs to be downloadable from Email footers from about sections.

It needs to be all over the place, and then three blog posts

on it and 10 social posts on it.

Full court press, and then don't take your foot off the gas because that

report doesn't expire after 12 days.

Yeah, hopefully you wrote something with a shelf life.

That's the thing, that's the craziness that people often think, oh, I

already posted that three months ago.

It's too old.

It's like, no, no, no, that research is not going outta date that quickly.

Or if it is, why did you put that much effort into it if it's something

that's disappears so quickly, you know?

And you know, so this is where the thought leadership comes into it and you

know, really, like you said, planning.

Not just what research is going into it, but how are we gonna distribute

it in the best way possible so we are not wasting this great content.

So Lee, thank you for such a wonderful conversation today.

I hope it's the first of many that you and I will have because I do really think

that listeners, if you enjoy newsletters I'm gonna put the details on how you

can sign up for Lee's on the show notes.

So go and check those out because I enjoy it because it makes me think

how can I improve my content planning.

So I appreciate you sharing everything that you have today.

Absolutely.

Thanks for having me.

So until next week's listeners, cheers.