[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, welcome. In this podcast we talk B2B marketing and what it takes to know your customer innovate and profit. We're glad you made it. This is the campaign by 97th Floor.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Hello everyone. Happy Friday. I am Paxton Gray, CEO of 97th Floor. 97 Floor is a digital marketing agency built to deliver world class organic and paid channel strategies for mid level and enterprise organizations. Thank you for joining us today for another episode of the Campaign. The Campaign is a B2B marketing podcast about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice and converting visitors into customers. You can find past episode episodes of the campaign on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify
[email protected] today. We've got a great topic for you. We're talking about trust. And perhaps no institution has a better hold on the seismic shifts in trust than Edelman. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 68% of respondents believe that government leaders, business leaders and journalists deliberately lie and mislead them. And that is an 11.11 point increase over last year's figures, which is just massive.
This erosion of trust has huge implications for how people behave in every part of their lives and absolutely so in regards to their purchases and businesses that choose to follow and support, 93%, in fact, of business executives agree that the ability to build and maintain maintain trust improves the bottom line.
But building trust, it just can't be procedural.
There's not a quick hack. It's interpersonal. And the authenticity and consistency that people require before they trust is something that just can't be faked.
Today I've got a fantastic guest to talk about exactly this topic.
We're joined by Ashley Foss to talk about why trust is the fastest way to ROI and what it takes to be a brand that is trustworthy and in our current political, social and economic environment.
Ashley Foss is a marketer, writer and speaker by day, and a singer, actor and fitness fiend by night. And if you think the kind of person who would do all these things must just have so much energy, I can testify that she has boundless energy.
I first met Ashley, I think two years ago at Inbound. We had dinner together and we've met a few times since. And I can just say there's nothing Ashley can't do. She just has so much to bring and so much to offer.
Her work has been featured in Time for Forbes and the Journal of Brand Strategy and she shared insights about with audiences at Harvard Business Review, Inbound and marketing profs. She works for Atlassian, a collaboration Software maker on a mission to unleash the potential of every team. Ashley is the author of a brand new book, it's about to launch called Human Centered Marketing how to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI. And that's available for pre order now and comes out on Tuesday, May 27th.
So just a little bit here, Ashley, thank you so much for being here and congrats on your new book.
[00:03:09] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for having me. And I think, you know, the framing of this whole episode, being around trust, that's one of the core themes in the book and something that I think again, as the title mentions, you know, in the age of AI, I think the human elements, and trust is one of those big elements is going to be so key as we go forward. So, super excited to talk about this today.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Yeah, me too. So I know, you know, the amount of time that you spent writing the book is small in comparison to the amount of time that you spent living the practices in the book.
And I'd love to learn kind of about that as in this discussion here.
Some marketers, you know, when they hear the idea of trust, their eyes start to glaze over. It's like, we know we need this, but not fully sure what that means. It's, it's kind of ethereal for some people.
So let's start off by saying like, why is this so essential right now? Why this idea of trust? What's the risk for those marketers who don't try to understand it and connect with their audience in relatable ways?
[00:04:11] Speaker C: Sure. So you mentioned the Edelman Trust Barometer. I, I love that body of research. It's a longitudinal study that's been going on for over 20 years. They survey thousands of people across lots of different countries, in a variety of different walks of life, industries, et cetera. So it's not just a biased study about, about marketing and building trust there. And so I'd love to actually pull up a couple of stats. I think this is actually from their, their 2022 study, but this has proven to be the case over the years as well, saying that 58% of people buy or advocate for brands based on values and beliefs. So do they trust them? Circumstances. 60% choose a place to work based on this, 64% invest based on this, and then 88% of institutional investors look at the overall, it's called ESG. So it's environmental, social and governance impact. And so this is not fluffy. It's not a nice to have. It's not something that just feels kind of nice and like, you know, wouldn't it be fun if people trusted us? That would be pleasant, right? No. This has significant financial ramifications in the short term in terms of revenue and how people buy in the long term from a talent management and a shareholder value perspective, and then obviously in the super long term from an investment standpoint. And so what I found kind of in my own work and part of what inspired me to come up with the frameworks that I have and now the book, I found that when I was talking over the years about how to solve these problems, and people would basically ask me, like, what are you basing this on? Is there some real reason to do this? And, well, how do you know that these tactics work compared to other tactics? Is there a framework? Is there a way for us to measure these things?
And in part, the answer is yes. I'm not coming up with something that's so brand new no one's ever thought to measure marketing. Right.
But some of the fundamental shifts around how we think about the buyer's journey, how we think about which metrics to use in which situations.
I was really struggling to match those kind of traditional frameworks with the tactics and more of this modern marketing. And I think that as the barriers to entry have become lower in places like social media, as trust has eroded in traditional markers of authority, like traditional media sources, you know, government officials, clergy, local people, you know, that tend to have those traditional authority markers, as all of that has happened, I found that I needed new language and I needed new frameworks for people to actually be able to track these things. So, yeah, that's a good answer in terms of, like, how this affects businesses in the short and long term, and then how that initial set of work impacted my approach to marketing and my approach to actually creating these frameworks and then codifying them in the book.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: Great. Can you give us like an overview of the book and tell us a little about who this is for and what they can be expected to learn?
[00:07:19] Speaker C: Yeah. So the book is primarily targeted at mid to senior level marketers. I think there's definitely some good stuff in there for junior level marketers and business owners or business folks, CEOs, et cetera, but really focused on that mid to senior level marketer. And there's three core frameworks that I talk about that all help you build trust in the age of AI. The first is the playground. And so it's reimagining the linear funnel and really thinking of it more as a playground. And how do you create that seamless, delightful and impactful journey for your audience to serve them and also serve your business goals. The second framework is the social media spectrum. And this is really about how brands show up, not just on social media from a conversation standpoint, on branded channels, but really thinking about how to facilitate, grow and foster community to really help build that trust over the long run again for those results that serve the audience and the business. And then finally the four pillars of thought leadership. So those are credibility, profile, being prolific and depth of ideas. And I have extended that framework a little bit to talk in general about B2B creators. And I think this is something that, particularly in the age of AI, showing the humans behind the brand, people trust people like themselves and people buy from people they trust. And so how do you showcase the humans, which work remains important for the humans to do and having the thoughts and connecting with folks continues to be something that I think even in the age of AI is going to be more important. So those are the three core frameworks and again, they're all oriented towards building trust to drive both short term and long term business impact.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: I love that. Let's, let's talk for a second about this idea. And we're not going to cover all these frameworks if you want to cover them by the book and but I do want to touch on this idea of the content playground. I think it's a fascinating way of looking at it and very contrarian to the typical way of viewing the funnel.
So can you tell us a little bit more about this content playground model way of thinking about and how that differs from the classic awareness consideration conversion funnel?
[00:09:33] Speaker C: Sure.
So there's a couple of pitfalls with both the linear funnel. And I know a lot of people might be listening and being like, no one uses the linear funnel anymore. It's a looping decision journey. And I'm like, okay, yes. But then how come the retention phase just drops you directly back into the awareness phase? Like that's step one. That makes no sense. And then one of my favorite images for this whenever I present on this topic is, you know, I googled like the looping decision journey. And there's this Mobius, which is an infinite loop of sales and marketing content. And you're like, I'm stuck there and it's terrifying. So first of all, I think we all acknowledge that neither of those models are actually reflective of how people figure out that they have a problem, decide they want to solve it, go search for a solution, evaluate solutions, buy solutions. Like, yes, fundamentally humans do that, but it's Not a linear process. So we know that the second piece of this is, I think that it's actually more of a retrospective measurement tool than a forward looking strategy tool. It's almost kind of similar. We talk about this with dating or with fitness.
Yes, if you lift weights and eat well, you will lose weight and get stronger. If you spend a lot of time with someone and you get to know them really well and you have shared values and you enjoy each other's presence, yes, you will fall in love and potentially get married. Right. But those ingredients are necessary but not sufficient. Right. You didn't get married because there was a proposal. Right. Which kind of lends itself to another pitfall, which is that it's very company centric and it's very focused only on what we can measure at scale and show in a pretty dashboard. And so this Last Touch attribution. And again, I know many marketers on this call will probably say, oh, no one's using Last Touch anymore, it's all multi touch, or we do a weighted decision attribution model, et cetera. But it still forces us to try to draw a one to one line between every dollar in and it must output $1.25, $52. And I have to be able to connect those dots immediately. And so all the way around, it's a company centric model that only recognizes somebody once they're already in a buying process, which means it's retrospective, not forward looking.
And then it locks us into doing the activities that are easiest for us to measure in a dashboard instead of the activities that most resonate with the audience. So those are some of the core issues with the traditional funnel. So if we're not going to map our journeys, map our content to that, what should we do instead? And I outline a couple of different things in the book. One is this idea of content depths. So conceptual, strategic and tactical.
And again, I get this a lot where people are like, oh, you've just renamed the funnel stage pages. And I'm like, no, no, they're actually different. So conceptual is the what and the why of the idea. It helps the audience think about and understand the problem. Space strategic is process tools and key knowledge components that must be in place to make that idea a reality. It equips the audience to do their own research and helps them think about the criteria for success.
And then tactical, this is nitty gritty, prescriptive, where the rubber meets the road to implement the strategy to make those conceptual ideas reality. So that's one set of kind of sub Frameworks that have tactical use cases that I that I outline. And then the second thing is around the intent and this is very specifically focused on the next audience, next action for the audience. So most marketers, we love to focus primarily on buy intent and use intent, but there are actually other intents. So there's a trust or an affinity intent, there is a help integration or remediation intent. This is where a lot of support tickets, documentation, help center content and experiences tend to happen. And then there's a true learn intent. And that's really just, you know, process people practices.
You don't actually have to take an action that will benefit the company in order to get value as an audience member from true learn and take content. So I'll pause there. Cause I know that's a lot to cover with like the pitfalls of linear funnel and why we need to shift to the playground and then two of the core actual practical things that you can implement from the playground framework.
[00:14:02] Speaker B: That is a lot. And I do have some questions to follow up.
One is a little bit more of a conceptual.
I want to. Here's what I'm feeling based off of what you're saying and I want to see if this is accurate. But when you talk about this is about building trust with the audience, I detect in you and the things that you're saying, that there is a lot of trust with you, that you are extending trust to the audience in the sense that there are those marketers that are feel like if I don't have complete and perfect attribution or if I don't have complete ultimate control or if I don't push them, then I will not get this return.
And what I detect from you is a little bit more of like, listen, I trust that if I put this out there and I have their best intent, I trust that that ROI is going to come one way or another.
Would you say that's accurate in your kind of lens, marketing lens?
[00:15:01] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think that it's so funny because I've had a number of experiences where even when I'm not selling something, if you put that value out there, people will ask to buy it and like literally say, do you have a course on this? Can I hire you for consulting? Can I pay you to come speak? Right.
Can I buy your book? Where's the book? Right.
And so I've seen this personally. I've also seen this obviously from an Atlassian perspective. I've had folks DM me where I've gone in and I'VE you know, a couple of people will say something, I'll be like, oh, we actually have something in the Atlassian playbook. It's free, it's ungated, you don't have to have our products, you don't have to give us an email address. And someone dm's me and is like, I am blown away by this. How, how do I get the products or how can I hire you or someone from Atlassian to come speak to our audience and we'll pay you for that. Right. So I've seen this both from a personal standpoint and an Atlassian standpoint, that this mindset of showing, not telling, giving, not just receiving in a transactional way builds that trust, builds that long term affinity and does ultimately turn into revenue.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: So we've had this, this idea on the show a couple of times and I feel like I have a sense of where you're going to fall on this. But the classic debate of to gate or not to gate, where do you fall on that?
[00:16:29] Speaker C: So my, my hot take is if I had it my way, I would ungate. Like, I fundamentally don't believe in gated content at all.
If I had it my way, if I was in charge of everything, like that just would not exist.
I get this argument sometimes too where people are like, but what about webinars or newsletters? And I'm like registering for a webinar.
I don't see that as gating. I see that as I would like to attend this thing and if I can't attend it, please send me the recording. Right, so if the only reason you're gating your webinars is to basically nurture people on the back end so that they will eventually buy when they have given absolutely no indication that they are in any way willing or able to buy in the short term, then like, no, you shouldn't gate that. If you are going to send them a reminder to attend, you're going to send them a recording if they can't attend, or you're going to send them, you know, the slides or something like that afterwards, you're going to give them value.
Great. Collect the email address so that you can actually give them value. But yeah, I, my, my hot take is we should ungate all things everywhere. Now again, I get people being like, but Atlassian has gated content. I'm like, yes, well, Atlassian also has, you know, tens of thousands of employees at this point and hundreds of marketers. So take, take what I say with a grain of salt of how much control I actually have. But yeah, I've, I've used a primarily ungated strategy and other other programs in the past and it is successful.
[00:17:55] Speaker B: So with this playground model, I'm not sure if this is related or not, but I do. I'm curious your perspective on measurement.
On the two extreme ends of measurement there is the like, hey listen, let's not really bother measuring much and let's just, you know, have a bias towards action and providing value and you know, we're going to trust that this is going to come back.
And then on the other end there's like the extreme measurement. You know, I mean brands can kind of sink themselves trying to figure out and crack the code on like complete attribution.
This playground model I think lends itself a little bit more towards the like we can't measure everything and so we're not going to try to. But I'm curious if those two things relate at all and what your perspective is on measurement and attribution.
[00:18:48] Speaker C: Sure.
So I am pro measurement, I am not anti measurement. And I know again people might say like, but you just had to ungate everything. How can you, you measure? And I'm like, hear me out, form fills are only one metric.
So first from a very like super first principles perspective, one of my colleagues years ago made this comment about this spectrum of GUT led to data driven. And to your point, this is very similar to kind of the dichotomy view setup of like it's really hard to measure. We can't measure everything, so we'll just measure nothing. We'll just go with whatever our gut says. And then on the flip side, there's what I've talked about that a lot of marketers fall into of this one to one nitty gritty. Every single action has to be measured in exactly, exactly the same way. On the data driven side, where I fall is more on data informed. And this is yes, we want to measure. Yes, we need to understand what's working, what's not working. Yes, we need to use that information to make the right investments. Where I struggle with this from a marketing perspective is that frequently the only thing we actually want to measure is short term revenue conversion, which is a buy in tint only set of metrics. And then we further make those basically only things that are easy to measure in a dashboard. So it defaults to digital touch points that basically have a short term transactional cta. So literally buy now, sign up for free, try for free, activated trial contact sales. And we want to see that in a one to one correlation. What I actually outline in the book, I have an entire chapter on metrics and I actually outline leading indicators and lagging indicators per intent. And so we need to be matching our CTAs and our metrics with the intent, which is the next action for the audience and the assets and channels. So a perfect example of this that makes intuitive sense, right?
The average watch time on an article makes no sense. You can't watch an article, sure, you can have scroll depth. That's a different metric than average watch time. We intuitively understand that watch time belongs with videos and scroll depth belongs with articles, not videos. Right.
But most of the time we don't actually have that discussion of like here are the video metrics, here are the article metrics. Same thing on social media. You'll get basically dichotomous or opposing views we want to optimize for in feed engagement and, and ctr.
Okay, well you're not going to get people commenting and liking and sharing on social media if the only thing you give them to do is to click a link.
Or if you give them all this meaty stuff and you're generating discussion and you give them a carousel on LinkedIn. Right, give them all this stuff, it's highly unlikely that they're going to click the link. And so if your only metric of success from social media is referral traffic, you're missing how the algorithms work. They like to keep you in the platform, right? The platforms are greedy and people are lazy. And so if your primary success metric is ctr, you might be fundamentally opposed to what the algorithms and the humans actually want. Right? So from a metrics perspective, I think the leading and the lagging indicators per intent and then assigned per channel and perhaps per asset. Another example of this and small ways that we break the trust of our audience, the Learn More cta. This is my other, my other hot take is we should never use a Learn more cta. I don't know what that is. Am I going to watch a video? Am I contacting sales? Do I have to register an event? Am I making a purchase? Like what happens when I click that link, right?
So I see this a lot in like a last touch attribution model, right? We'll do a piece of thought leadership content and the CTA will be download the ebook, download the white paper, download the report, whatever it is. But then at the end of the month in the monthly business Review or the quarterly Business Review, everyone will say, well, that piece of content didn't do well because it didn't generate pipeline and it had low MQLs.
Okay, but the purpose of that asset was actually not buy intent content and the CTAs were not buy intent CTAs. So like, why are you measuring it on buy intent metrics when the entire intention stated by the person who created it and the person who consumed it was not a buy intent action? Right, like you're missing some things there. So I am pro measurement, but I am pro data informed and matching intent asset and channel, not just blindly saying we're going to measure MQLs or we're going to measure pipeline as the sole marker of a successful program, asset or campaign.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: So to drill on that a little bit more. So you know, if there's an ebook that says, like, hey, download this ebook to learn how to become a better leader or organize your team in X way, and then if that's being judged based off of, well, I didn't produce these results, your argument would be, well, if it was an ebook that said download this ebook to learn how Atlassian can benefit you in X way, that would be more fair to judge that on these by intent KPIs.
So in the prior example of, you know, learn how to, you know, organize your team in a better way, is the next step then, like, what, what is a marketing leader to do with that? Are they to say, no, that the intent is to educate them on this subject and it did its job, therefore victory? Or is it supposed to say, you know what, we could maybe do a better job of connecting this to the bottom line, you know, because I think that that could eventually end up in a very short term, nearsighted marketing plan. Like, how would you kind of square that?
[00:24:58] Speaker C: Yeah, so I think we've actually done a really good job of this at Atlassian with two huge content hubs. The first is our Agile microsite. And so from a conceptual end, it basically covers all content depths, conceptual, strategic and tactical. I would say it primarily focuses more on the strategic and tactical depths, but basically talking about Agile methodology and how to apply it.
And so at the conceptual level, talking holistically about the shift from waterfall project management to Agile methodology, the benefits of it, the Agile Manifesto and how that looks in real life, and some of the pitfalls and benefits of adopting Agile methodology. And then there's a variety of articles, again, very practical, telling you how to adopt them, how to run a stand up, how to groom a backlog. These are some core actions that agile teams take.
Now, handily, Jira has a backlog function, right? Like Handily, Jira has, you know, a variety of things that will help you do this. You can choose Scrum or Kanban projects when you first start setting up your projects.
And so we do have some tutorials that say, learn how to groom your backlog with Jira. Right. So at a conceptual level, you don't have to buy anything to buy into.
It makes sense to have an ongoing list of places and things that you want to do from a list perspective of to DOS and requests. And at some point you're going to have to prioritize those. So again, strategic and tactical. Here's how to think about making those trade offs. And then again, regardless of whether you buy Jira, you can run Agile on a whiteboard with sticky notes. You can have that list there. You can move the sticky notes into the to do column. As those get shipped, you can move them into, you know, review and finished or shipped.
However, that's pretty inefficient. So like, maybe let's show you how to do that with Jira. So that's a, that's a very obvious product kind of direct place where you can get value from that content from a learning tent or use intent standpoint. Or you can get value from it from a buy intent or use intent standpoint. On the flip side, we have the Atlassian Playbook. And the Atlassian Team Playbook includes a mix of practice, practices, processes and plays that you can do. And again, yes, you can run a retro in Trello or Confluence, or you could run a retro verbally or on a whiteboard. You don't have to buy our products to get value from that.
One of the foundational plays is called a health monitor. Team health monitor. And now we actually have built in scorecards into Compass, which is one of our products for platform engineers where it basically kind of scores more of like, how is the team feeling? Does the team know who owns which services and that kind of thing. But again, you can run this. We run it with a thumbs up, thumb sideways or thumbs down. And it's got a series of questions for the teams, one of which for example is does the project have an owner? And so you ask this question and everybody says thumbs up. The very next question you should ask is, who is it? And if everybody says the same name, cool, you're actually thumbs up.
If the team says five different people, you may be actually thumbs down. Right.
Our products are not going to fix the fact that you don't know who the project owner is. That is a human thing that the humans have to Fix, they have to assign a project owner. Now we can in Confluence put a daisy so driver, approver, contributor and informed.
That makes sense. It's got a nice product tie in. But the humans still have to do the daisy. They still have to have the conversations regardless of whether they use our products. So, you know, this, this is a good example of, yes, you can tie the products in, but it doesn't have to only be.
Just make sure they get into the product. It's only successful if they download the health monitor and then they immediately use it in the confluence template. Right. Like that would be a disconnect. That would be too data driven versus gut LED would be, we never mentioned the products and we just hope that people see that there's a template and confluence to run this. Right. No, put the template at the top and say, there's three different ways to run this. You can run an entrello confluence or with a pad of paper or some sticky notes. Right.
So it gives the audience the option while also making that connection explicit so that they don't have to hunt for it and figure out, like, why would Atlassian write this?
[00:29:21] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think that philosophy of we're here to help is what makes great marketing. In the end, you know, I'm providing this great content that itself alone should be helpful and show that I understand you, I understand what you're dealing with. Here's some potential solutions.
And then sometimes on the kind of like helpful end of the marketing spectrum of belief, sometimes those people feel like, I don't want to get too salesy, I don't want to push too hard, but they should also look at this like, no, you're here to help this person and your product helps them. And so you are doing them a disservice, actually, by not saying, this thing can help you in this way. There are other alternatives, but, like, we can help you here. And so I think that's that perfect balance of just like aim to help them, not to shove them, not to trick them, but also not, you know, you need to present them with all the solutions and your product is one of those solutions. I think. I think that's a really great way to view it.
Before we wrap up, I want to make sure we hit on this idea of time horizon kind of lens of content. Can you tell us what you mean by time horizon?
[00:30:31] Speaker C: Sure. So this is another one that I think sometimes many marketers are too focused on the short term. I have to close business this month. I have to help my sales team hit their quota this quarter and they forget about that longer term exchange of value. And this mindset of, of adapting assets, channels, journeys to the short, medium and long term has significant implications on some really tactical decisions. So, perfect example, particularly in the age of AI, right? Everybody wants to know, did a human write this or did AI write this?
And so there's a constant debate of do we put someone's name as the byline on a blog or on a white paper or on a video, or do we just kind of leave it blank or say the team, Right, like written by 97th Floor, right? Well, yeah, the majority of your blog is going to be written by you, but like by who? Right?
So that's the first decision is basically put a human name on it or put, you know, a company or a logo or just leave it blank. That's decision tree number one.
Let's go down that you should put a human out there. And this comes up a lot from a thought leadership perspective.
There is a lot of pushback about employees building their personal brand, who to put forward as the face of the company, whether to hire an external influencer versus try to build someone up internally to become that thought leader.
Because what if they leave? Right? That is a very short term mindset and it assumes that the only way that person adds value is if they talk about the company and they bring in short term revenue and it completely ignores that their thoughts, the way they solve problems helps set up the company as being seen as smart, capable, etc.
And so that's just some of the short term decisions that this mindset helps you make or not make.
And then I think even again from a longer term perspective, just the idea that there's multiple ways to exchange value. So an example that I love to give is an agency that I worked with years ago that I no longer have a need for their services and yet they keep in touch with me. We have a good relationship and I have referred multiple clients to them.
I had somebody, a friend of mine who was looking for a job, they had a client who was looking to hire someone with that skill set. I basically introduced my friend to the agency client, they ended up getting hired. That's great for me. This person gets a great job, the company gets a great hire. Makes me feel good that I helped someone in my network, right.
If that agency had just decided that because I was no longer buying their services directly that I was not worth investing in and continuing to build a relationship, they would have missed out on all of that. I no longer work at Duarte. I Have a ton of respect for Nancy, her team, the work that she's done. I. If people ask me like, hey, we're looking for work, you know, storytelling or slide design, cool. I recommend Duarte because I know them. I literally worked there and helped build their, you know, helped build them up. And again, it's not just me giving them value. Nancy actually was very kind and gave me an endorsement for my book and is helping me to promote my book. Right. So that's an exchange of value that I don't know. I didn't give her a special code to know exactly how many people bought from Nancy's link. Right. How, how many royalties did. Of my book did she drive?
I don't know. Right. But we have the relationship. She knows my work, I respect her. She is well respected in the industry. That is an excellent exchange of value, even if I'm not clarifying specifically tracking exactly how many book sales she drove.
We have an exchange of credibility and trust and amplification. Right. So those are just a few examples where again, when I say that, it makes intuitive sense, but it is hard to scale. And so when you think about this in your business or an enterprise, really being specific about the time horizons, that if you just launched a campaign yesterday, like, of course there's no results, like.
[00:34:47] Speaker B: Right.
[00:34:48] Speaker C: You know, or, or the results might be press coverage or increased traffic. It might not be closed one bookings for six months or eight months. Right. And that might not be a failure of the campaign. It just might be a function of procurement and legal and security that has to happen on the client side to actually get a deal closed. So that's the other thing. It's not just, just investing in that long, you know, short, medium and long term time horizon. It's also understanding when to expect those things to pay off and measuring accordingly and investing accordingly.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: I love that you had said in the conversation we had earlier about like looking at a tweet or whatever they're called now.
[00:35:35] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:35:35] Speaker B: You know, the half life of a tweet is 8 seconds. And sometimes you'll get people investing so much time and effort into a thing that will have no life in less than a day.
And then simultaneously they'll spend the same amount of time on something that may live on your site for the next four years. You know, and so I think that's a really interesting lens to look at content that you put out through Ashley. This has been so great. I just want to share some takeaways as you're thinking about like content depth, you know, maybe throw away the funnel and start thinking about it in terms of conceptual, strategic and tactical content as the different layers.
Thinking about it measuring content based off of intent and what the next action is.
Instead of measuring everything based off of that buy and use intent and then looking at content with this time horizon lens saying when do I expect ROI from this and does that justify what kind of investment does that justify for this?
Really great takeaways.
First off, if you're listening today I want you to go and check out Ash's book.
We do have a link where you can get her book for 25 off discount that actually will give you a.
[00:36:59] Speaker C: This just in they gave me Covid pages having a site wide discount of 40% off so I will give you guys that or comment on it on LinkedIn as well. It's sale 40 all cap sale and then the number 40. So yeah that I think is only good for another couple days. So okay, sales horizons by now with the 40 discount.
[00:37:17] Speaker B: Yeah and an extra 15 out of nowhere there. 4040 off sale 40. I love that.
We're going to share that in the comments here on LinkedIn live and on in the notes at nice and floor.com also if you're watching live today, you're going to get a recording of this conversation as well as a link to where you can buy Ashley's book and you'll receive that in your inbox on Monday.
For everyone else who is listening to this after the fact, you should be able to buy her book now and you can find this episode and
[email protected].
Ashley, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been such a pleasure talking with you.
[00:37:58] Speaker A: Thanks for listening. The campaign is produced by 97th Floor, a 20 year old marketing agency that helps companies like McKinsey, Pluralsight and Check Point know their customers execute innovative campaigns and drive profitable growth. If you have an allocated growth budget and product market fit, we'd love to do research and build a proposal for you. Visit us at 97th Floor and if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe. See you next time.
