How Does Content Create Growth and Scale?

Benjamin Ard (00:00.549) All right, let's make sure it's recording. Again, we edit. Feel free to call me out if I ask a stupid question. We can always edit it out, so it works well. Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Billy. Billy, welcome to the show. Billy Cripe (00:14.938) thanks, Ben. How are ya? Benjamin Ard (00:16.489) Good, Billy, I'm excited. This is going to be a fun conversation. Yeah, this is so good. Before we dive in though, Billy, let's get to know you. Like, let's have you share a little bit about your background, who you are, your experience, so the audience can get to know you. Billy Cripe (00:20.0) I think it's gonna be a blast. Billy Cripe (00:32.278) Sure. Well, my name is Billy Kripe. I'm currently the global vice president of marketing for Solify at Solify.com. We are a financial services SaaS technology company really focusing on secured financing. That's basically loans and equipment financing and captive financing. So kind of the back office of financial services technology for equipment and auto financing and banking and things like that. Throughout my career, though, I have spent my career in B2B SaaS marketing. And I've done that across many different industries. I actually started life as a computer programmer because I needed to get a job doing something. My undergraduate degree is in philosophy, so I was going to think deep thoughts about unemployment or figure out how to do something productive, which meant computer programming back at the time. And I went from programming into product. product management and then into product marketing and then into full marketing, typically for private equity or VC backed companies. And that's where I really found a passion for growth. The growth story is really what drives me and motivates me. I don't like spending my days as a head of marketing behind spreadsheets or Power BI dashboards. I would rather be out there creating, juggling, solving problems, hair on fire. And I also have a deep passion for the &A space where growth can be defined by bringing complementary organizations and talent and content and market approaches together and creating something greater than the sum of their parts. So that's the thumbnail sketch. can go deeper as we need and as the conversation progresses. Benjamin Ard (02:29.979) I that. That's so cool. I love the background. I love your experience. And I love this passion for scalability and growth. Clearly you've been in a lot of circumstances where you figured out how to do that, what that takes. So my main question where I want to focus today for this conversation is content's role in scaling and growing. So when it comes to that, what is your initial response? If you're a business and you're trying to scale, you're trying to grow, that's like, Billy Cripe (02:47.406) Mm-hmm. Sure. Benjamin Ard (02:59.539) the number one priority for the entire business, every company meeting, they're talking about scalability, growth, the numbers you're hitting, all of that kind of stuff. How does content play a role in that whole process? Billy Cripe (03:11.79) You know, as somebody who started life at a content management company, I have a really deep and profound view of the role of content and all types of content have in sales enablement, in customer relations, in customer support, in go-to-market strategy. then, you know, content is, especially in the B2B world. is the way not just to capture attention with something that's shiny and interesting, but also then to hold it and establish credibility and to create moments of engagement for the audience. think audiences, that's whether the audience is on our mobile devices and looking at reels and TikToks or, you know, ex-posts, know, short little snippets, or whether they're doing deep research on how to solve a problem or how to create a short list of vendors to investigate. Content is the gravitational mass that creates that attractive force in the market. And knowing how to create that gravity is, I think that is part art, part science, part data. And that's really, in this day and age right now, kind of what we as B2B and SaaS marketers are really focused on. It's not just about the latest pricing incentive. Those are important. But what's getting customers and prospects to that point? Why should they believe what you say? What sort of credibility do you bring in? How are you adding value to them and their experience rather than just kind of beating your chest and saying look at me and the stuff that I did, you last week or today That's not interesting. So I think content is really really vitally important There and it's not just content right content gets burst into a whole constellation whole galaxy of constellations Billy Cripe (05:20.622) of assets and packages and learning pathways and assets that create engagement and interest and capture that attention. Benjamin Ard (05:33.693) I love that. So when we talk about scalability and growth, one of the big things, and I've been in demand generation for a long time, it is very numbers driven. You know, the expectation on marketing and demand gen and all that kind of stuff when you're responsible for growth and scalability is to look at the numbers, justify your actions, and then move forward. How do you measure content's impact? on scale and growth, what are you looking at? It doesn't necessarily even need to be metrics that we're talking about, but how do you know content is actually moving the needle and know what is working and what isn't working when it comes to that whole system? Billy Cripe (06:13.25) Yeah, I think in some cases content is like air. Like how do you know that you're breathing air? Well, you're breathing and you're alive. When it comes to demand, Jen, what is the thing or the things that are creating demand? On one hand, you've got a brand logo, OK, so you've got your branded keywords and you've got your inbounds and organic search hits and things like that. What are people coming for? They're beyond the name. They're looking for a solution. Well, what is the description of that solution? How are you addressing the problems that you're trying to address? How are you talking about what you offer out there? It's not just here's a price tag on some software. Would you like to buy some? There's a whole world, a whole universe of descriptors and case studies and a videos and overviews and help and how to and celebrity breakdowns of that kind of stuff. Influencer evaluations, all of these sorts of assets are out there. There's speeches on stages at conferences and events and there's webinars and there's podcasts like this. Why are we doing this right now? This is content that we're creating. Well, what are we going to do with this? This isn't going to. This is going to come to life somewhere out there. It's going to be a demand hook for you and for your company. It's going to be an awareness and an exposure hook for me and for Solify. And how are we measuring that? Well, how are we as marketers? integrating and curating these experiences that are aligning and synchronizing these different content assets in a way that's going to move the market for us. That's really how we're measuring it. So when we're talking about DemandGen, well, what do you mean by DemandGen? Well, I have a campaign going on. OK, what is that campaign? Billy Cripe (08:12.524) What is that centered around? Well, we've got some emails and some phone calls and a landing page. What's on the landing page? we've got an e-book and a podcast and an event registration form. OK, how are we describing those? Why do people care? Why should they bother? Well, we're adding something of value to it. We're creating a moment of engagement. We're that moment of engagement. where the audience is out there saying, yeah, I'd like to learn more. Why are people watching this right now on your website? Well, and on your channel, why are they watching this right now? Because one, they know you, they know you produce good content, and I'm new to them, they wanna be like, what does this Billy guy have to say? that's interesting. And if they like what they hear, if we've created a moment of engagement, they're gonna come to you for content. and demand solutions, they're going to come to me to learn more about Solify and secured finance SaaS software, if that's their industry. And that's the world of demand generation. So how do you not quantify that? The other piece is when we talk about internal content support, or sales enablement. One of my roles was director of sales enablement for a number of years. And that's internal marketing. Benjamin Ard (09:21.008) you Billy Cripe (09:35.35) You are equipping your market-facing teams with the content assets that they need to be effective in communicating the value proposition, the opportunity, the deal, the incentive, whatever it is, out to their market. the worst thing, I absolutely hate this, the worst thing that marketers can do is to spend their time building up content that never gets used. And that... is the worst thing ever because you are getting your RPMs up really high and you're not moving anywhere. And what does that lead to? Well, in a car, it leads to burnout. Same thing it leads to in people. It's like we need to feel and understand that what we do, that our work has meaning and that it matters. It may not be effective, right? That's a learning and a growth opportunity. But if we're just doing stuff and then it's just getting buried and never used, that is so... It's demotivating and dehumanizing and it just is stultifying. And so to know how things are being used, I think is absolutely critical. That's where metrics and internal systems of record and enablement become really, really important. I think you probably have something to say about that. It's also where we... Benjamin Ard (10:38.751) . Benjamin Ard (10:53.431) Just a little bit, yeah. Billy Cripe (11:01.014) as marketers create when we're effective, create these assets with empathy. We have to be engaged with our sales field with our support staff, with our market facing teams, so that we can understand and learn what are they hearing out on the front lines. As marketers, we're rarely on the front lines of what customers and prospects are facing and what they want to achieve. So we have to get out there. We have to connect with and empathize with and listen first. to what the salespeople are hearing from their prospects and clients, what the support staff are hearing as the challenges that are being faced by existing customers. And then we internalize that and then... synthesize it and craft it and reflect it back out to the sales staff and the support staff and the pre-sale staff and the BDRs of the world and to the market. So they go, yeah, that company, they know what I'm facing because we're just reflecting that back out there. But then we reflect it back out in such a way that It is, you know, it creates that interest and that engagement and that opportunity for us to say, not only do we understand because we've listened what you're facing, but we also have an idea about how we might come together with you and solve that problem. So that's kind of a long way of talking about the rule of content, but it's so important. Benjamin Ard (12:26.303) I love that. Yeah, the analogy from it's the air, it's everything you do, it's completely inseparable from everything else inside of demand generation and scale and growth. And I love the internal alignment, the empathy, all of that is really, really powerful. We are getting close, so I can only get one more question in, which is sad. We'll have to maybe do another follow-up episode. This is really cool. With AI. And everything going on before we click record you and I nerded out a little bit about AI and all the tools we'd use and all that kind of stuff. Where do you see content going in the next five years when it comes to AI how people are consuming content and just what that looks like any predictions or things or trends that you're noticing that you feel like be helpful to share. Billy Cripe (13:13.518) Yeah, you know, that's such a good question. just yesterday received in the mail a physical book written by a human being, my old graduate professor, David Gunkel, you can find him on LinkedIn, called Communicative AI. And it's basically a critical review of LLMs and the idea of authorship. What does it mean for AI to be authoring? Stuff and I have not finished this book yet. I barely cracked it, but this is such an important question And you asked for you know, the next five years I don't think we can legitimately predict the next five months because the pace of change in this industry right now is so rapid, you know, we're seeing you know changes and updates and and Changes of position, you know almost, you know, certainly weekly and sometimes daily Between no this company now has this innovation and this company has that innovation the the the one thing I think is certain is that AI and especially LL M's in general in particular have democratized access to to Production of content assets whether those content assets are code or whether those content assets are video, or whether those content assets are podcasts. We were talking a little bit before about Notebook LM from Google and how it can create its own podcasts or audio overviews. Certainly, textual production from the popular consumer-facing LLMs, the chat GPTs and perplexities and geminiities of the world are out there. able to produce a lot of high quality content. What is needed right now, and how I'm using it, and how my teams are using it, is to really engage AI as an always on junior level marketer who's good at writing, but doesn't necessarily know the nuances of what we want to communicate. And so it requires a lot of iteration. Billy Cripe (15:31.806) And I think that is important. think people thinking, I can just put in a high level prompt and I will produce a paper or video or a podcast for me. It will produce that stuff, just like Mid Journey will produce a piece of artwork. But it's not exactly what you want. It's what it wants. And I think we have to be very much in the loop on this stuff to refine and refine and refine. and then bring it out of the AI space to produce it. I also think that that limitation, I think it is a limitation currently of AI models is because that. that lack of contextual or nuanced knowledge, the lack of tribal knowledge is simply because the LLMs, the publicly available LLMs are not specifically trained on my industry, on my company. And as my company grows enough data and as LLMs become small language models and I can input in my company, then they become much more. aware of tribal knowledge and nuanced knowledge and context and they become much more like somebody who knows what's going on inside my industry and can actually produce something. I don't think we're there just yet, but I think that within a year we're gonna be there. And then what does that mean for content production? I think we're just at the tip of the iceberg right now. We're gonna be seeing more highly specific, highly nuanced know, contextually aware, market aware assets coming out of AI. I think it's our job as marketers to shift from how do I produce this to how do I check it and then how do I deploy it effectively? And this is where the idea of a curator comes into play. think marketers are going to become much more akin to curators of a museum than Billy Cripe (17:35.158) the producers of the content. A curator at a museum rarely has his or her paintings up on the wall. Certainly not all of them. The job of the curator is to create a story, a theme, a mood, a feeling across many pieces of artwork and to orient them, to organize them in such a way that it tells that story or it conveys that communication to the patrons viewing that exhibition. As marketers, we have the assets currently with agencies and humans and increasingly with AI, those are the painters, those are the artists. And our job as marketers and marketing leaders focused on scale, focused on growth, is to curate these exhibitions in such a way that it's going to be attractive to the audience. Why should they come in and look at it and create an impetus or a moment of engagement? How are they going to engage with How do they want to know that they want to come back? How do they know that they want to buy a print of two or three of those copies up on the wall? I think that's probably where we're going. But you know what? It's moving so fast. I could be on everything wrong and that's not my feelings. Benjamin Ard (18:47.761) I love that that's so cool i love the insights i love the perspective and i do agree i think that there's a lot to be said there about the curation as opposed to the artist themselves. There's gotta be that i the empathy the understanding you know how to how to translate the emotions i think that's so cool. Billy we've run out of time this is gone by quick this is gonna ton of fun for anyone listening who would like to connect with you online how and where can they find you. Billy Cripe (19:12.846) Sure, you can find my company at solifi.com, S-O-L-I-F-I.com, and you can connect with me at bcripe, C-R-I-P-E, at solifi.com. I'd be happy to chat with any and all of you. Benjamin Ard (19:26.415) I it. For anyone listening, scroll down to the show notes. We will link directly to everything that Billy just mentioned. Billy, thank you so much for the insights and everything you shared today. I really do appreciate it. Billy Cripe (19:37.496) Benjamin, it's been a blast. Thanks so much.