Is Everything Actually Content?

Lee Densmer (00:02) part of it is having the content come from an actual person on somebody's LinkedIn profile, not the corporate page, with bylines from an actual person, with a newsletter coming from an actual person, and then treating content like a product, as I said. It's a shift from creating anonymous kind of. multifunctional content versus reaching a real audience people to people. Ben Ard (00:50) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Lee. Lee, welcome to the show. Lee Densmer (00:55) Thank you, Ben. Nice to see you. Ben Ard (00:57) Yeah. Lee, you are a second time visitor on the podcast. It's been a couple years. That's how long the podcast has been around, but Lee, for anyone who didn't listen to your first episode, let's let the audience get to know you also share your big news of what just happened for you and what you accomplished. Let's catch the audience up. Lee Densmer (01:13) Awesome, yeah, I'm Lee Densmer, so I'm a content marketer. help enterprise level content teams level up or fix a struggling content program. My big news is that today I released my book. I wrote a book over the summer and it is comprised of the top 40 problems I see in content programs. The top 40 places where teams get stuck and then I lay out an approach for getting unstuck. So it's super tactical. am kind of a content strategist who dislikes strategy. think I have a healthy hate for strategy because you could get so stuck there, right? So it is not a strategy book. It's a tactics book and that one is available today. Ben Ard (01:53) love it. I'm excited for this book. I'm excited to read everything in there. I know I'm excited. I love it. And I got the nerd out about data and all sorts of good stuff there. So that's what I love. Lee, what I also want to say for the audience is that if you want good LinkedIn content to follow Lee is a great LinkedIn follow. So you post daily and the content is on point from experience. And like you said, Lee Densmer (01:57) I quoted you like twice. You're in my book. Yeah. Ben Ard (02:19) There's strategy, but there's always tactics. There's always like this nice takeaway of what I can do today to improve my content marketing. Something I really appreciate that I don't get nearly enough on LinkedIn. So quick plug in, follow Lee on LinkedIn. Fantastic stuff right there. So for today's discussion, I'm excited to dive in. So the title of what we discussed, why brands need to think and act like creators do. Lee Densmer (02:34) Thank you. Cool. Ben Ard (02:44) So what does it mean to actually think and act like a creator? What does that mean to you and why do we need to even make that distinction when it comes to brands and creators? Lee Densmer (02:53) I'm gonna start with a story. So I love to travel. We travel as much as we can and recently we had the chance to go see Rick Steves. He came to my hometown and we paid a lot for tickets and we went down there and we saw Rick Steves. And he is like 70. He's a boomer. He is nerdy. and he is super successful. He's created an empire. And as I sat there and listened to him talk, and it was a book signing event, he's got movies or rather TV shows, which we've all seen. He's got all the books, the yellow guides. He's got a podcast. He sells suitcases. And I thought this guy's the OG creator. He built this brand on things that he created. He created tours, then he started writing books. And that's how he has succeeded. today I'm gonna... apply that to where I am and what I do and what I see today. When I see a B2B that succeeds in this landscape, they are treating media like a creator. So with Rick, his creations came first and then his brand followed and his money followed, right? His creations are the product. And most brands don't sell or don't think of selling content. They don't think of content like the product. But when you switch to treating your content like a product that your customers consume, it's going to elevate that content. It's going to make it more meaningful. It's going to make it more powerful. You're going to double down on your investment, and it's going to move the needle. What's the opposite? The opposite is not having any content at all, right? Not even creating it. And then your audience doesn't have any breadcrumbs leading to you. So that's what I mean by creator. So treating your content, your blog posts, your newsletter, your social posts as part of your product. So you're not just creating or selling that product, you're selling your content as well. You're not charging money for it like Rick does. That's the difference between a B2B brand and Rick Steves. But you are crafting it as if it were a product you were selling. Ben Ard (04:54) So when I hear that as well, I think my mind immediately goes towards this idea of behind the scenes content or founder led content, content coming from individuals who are still kind of acting like creators inside of a business. Do you recommend that or should we post from the brand side or it should be a combo? What are your thoughts with that? Lee Densmer (05:11) off. Maybe a combo, but brands used to only create content or publish content from marketing at, you know, blank.com or marketing team or whatever. Very generic, very anonymous. But we all know that people buy from people full stop. So why aren't you publishing from, even if you're ghostwriting from them, why aren't you publishing from your CEO? Why aren't you publishing from your subject matter experts? You can ghostwrite. They don't have to do the heavy lifting and create the content. They don't have to be the creator. But your brand needs to be creating human-led content. That is, Rick's brand is about Rick, is about this dorky, older guy who loves to travel. That's the brand. You don't know the actual name of this company. I'm betting you don't. But everybody knows the name Rick Steves. So if brands start thinking that way, and yes, part of it is having the content come from an actual person on somebody's LinkedIn profile, not the corporate page, with bylines from an actual person, with a newsletter coming from an actual person, and then treating content like a product, as I said. It's a shift from creating anonymous kind of. multifunctional content versus reaching a real audience people to people. Ben Ard (06:27) Okay, I love that. Plus, as I'm hearing that, that's the kind of content I enjoy consuming for a business. want the behind the scenes. I want the details. I want to see the work in progress. So let's say I'm a marketer listening to this podcast today and my business has only published content on the brand's behalf. We don't really have any inroads to having individuals posting content, you know, the human led content. Lee Densmer (06:31) Mm-hmm. Ben Ard (06:52) What can I start doing today to start shifting the mindset of the business and preparing people and even motivating people to be okay with posting content and really show them the value of doing that. Lee Densmer (07:03) Right. Two things come to mind. The first is that you need to train your people. This is something that I do. So you train everybody who is willing on how to use their handles for on behalf of themselves and the company. So people don't even know how to do it, right? They don't know how to show up online. They don't know what really that cringy idea of personal brand means. They don't know how to post or how to engage. So teaching people. and how that effort benefits both them and the brand that they work for. lot of companies are like, we don't want people to build their brands on our behalf. What if they quit, right? We need to get over that. Yeah, your personal brand is portable, but if you're using it on behalf of a company that benefits you and the company in the moment. So empowering the people who work for your company, but also putting a face on just your regular brand content. So aside from the CMO posting on his own handle, you've got the content marketing team who's putting out content, just shifting their vision of themselves as a marketing department and more of a personality, a personality within the brand. So, and maybe that's a little bit esoteric, but again, sending your email from brad at, you know, massit.com or sending, you know, having the byline be yours, whether you wrote the blog post or not, and putting profiles of your people on your website, just to make it all more human. I that's what we're talking about. We're talking about making it all more human. Ben Ard (08:29) Yeah, I love that. And it feels like we're going almost back in time to what content kind of used to be. So back in the days of magazines and newspapers and all that kind of stuff, where you had authors who were writing columns, you had cartoonists and things like that. And yes, it may have been the whatever times are, you know, newspaper, but you had your favorite like, that's my sports columnist that I love. And that's my, yeah, that's my favorite, you know, a cartoon and, I really love this person's political column every week or whatever it may be, or I write into so-and-so and hear their comments and responses. It feels like we need to have a publication, which is the summation of people inside of a business writing authentic, unique, and with a point of view, human led content. Is that kind of what you're getting at and how we can kind of structure it? Lee Densmer (09:21) Yeah, I kind of love the idea of a B2B cartoonist. So if your software company can pull off a thought leadership cartoon, I want to see it. I'm here for it. Ben Ard (09:30) I managed to pull off one, by the way. I found the cartoonist. did all that kind of stuff and made a cartoon. It's my dream to be able to have a full-time cartoonist on staff that could do like a weekly newsletter with cartoons. I think that would be amazing. Lee Densmer (09:45) like a B2B graphic novel. I think we're on to something like a graphic, a graphic, ebooks, white papers, a B2B graphic novel with your graphic novelist who is a guy who, you know, knows your brand and is a subject matter expert. Yeah, I like it a lot. Ben Ard (10:00) Yeah. So one question I have is there's so much noise in the space. mean, there's artificial intelligence that has like 20 X. think the stat I read was like 26 X, the amount of published content on the internet. There's all sorts of LinkedIn material. It's overcrowded, extremely noisy. It honestly feels impossible to kind of stand out on a lot of these platforms. how do you actually cut through the noise? And that sounds like really cliche, but like, how do you actually get people who want to engage with your business and your content? Lee Densmer (10:35) Curating your audience So that means finding out who really want really really wants to hear from you not talking to the thousands talking to the ones who really want to hear from you whether they've signed up or you've done your research Figuring out how to place your content in front of those people so Do your ideal customers go to events? Do they read newsletters? It's just standard channel decisions. So putting the right content in front of the right people in the right places, but always with a human face or name behind it. There is a lot of AI slop out there. A lot of people are just hitting the easy button. They're creating agents that create content, and some of it is not bad, right? But it... Ben Ard (11:13) Yeah. Lee Densmer (11:16) It is devoid of, and you can throw in human quotes. I'm not saying don't use AI to create content. But I'm saying don't ever forget that your human opinion, spicy point of view, very narrow topics for your audience should always be front and center. Ben Ard (11:30) I love that. I love that. So it almost sounds like we kind of have to embrace. I'm trying to think of a way to word this right. We have to embrace what people may not like about us to help attract the right people. Like you mentioned the word spicy. Like, is that a part of it? Like to find our people that maybe, you know, we may dissuade other people from engaging with our content. Lee Densmer (11:51) That's hard for brands because investors don't really like it, right? If you find some controversial guy in your company, right? But he's the interesting one because he's got a spiky point of view. He might piss people off, but he's interesting. Different brands have different levels of comfort with that. So each brand needs to find how comfortable they are with controversy or spicy opinions or just, yeah, you know, just... Viewpoints that are different from the norm and yet if you don't have a viewpoint that's different from the norm What do you what are you even doing? You sound like everybody else so I would push marketers I would push CEOs and CMOs and C-level people on their opinions And when I interview people for blog posts or for thought leadership pieces, I'm always saying, why is that different? What do you really think? What is it that absolutely makes you crazy about what people think? And that's the interesting piece. That pisses you off, right? Yeah, you gotta dig deep. And the truth is most people have a spicy point of view, but they've been conditioned to not share it, not say it, sugarcoat it. Ben Ard (12:39) I love that. So really digging deep. Yeah. Lee Densmer (12:51) So. Ben Ard (12:51) Well, and it's interesting because algorithms like always reward that at the same time, but we have this built in thing like if not trying to upset anyone in the process. Lee Densmer (13:00) Right. mean, startup can do it much more easily, know, a private startup can do it much more easily than a big company that's owned by a PE firm, right? because generally those content engines are more conservative. It's harder to get them off dead center. It's harder to get a bold tone of voice or a spicy opinion out of those kinds of situations. how bold you can be really depends on your industry and the size of the company and who's paying the bills, right? Ben Ard (13:28) Yep. A hundred percent. Okay, Lee, we're almost out of time. So one final question before we run out of time. Again, I'm a marketer. I a hundred percent believe in this human led content. And I love how you've talked about this. Should I just walk up to the CEO's office and just say, Hey, can I interview you and start posting for you? Or how would you kind of tackle that? Let's get this off the ground kind of mentality. Lee Densmer (13:52) Yeah, it might not be your CEO, right? And there's a couple reasons for that. It might be that he's too busy. He's too busy running the business. He doesn't have time to give things thought. So he has those spicy opinions. It might not be that guy. It might be ⁓ somebody on the product team. It might be a software engineer. You got to find who to talk to. And then, yeah, you got to push them a little bit. Hey, I'll take care of it. I'll write the content, but you need to give me those thoughts. I will make you sound really smart in the right channels. I'll put your name on it, but this is a partnership. Yeah. Ben Ard (14:24) I love that. Very cool. Well, Lee, again, congratulations on the book. We will link to it below. But if anyone wants to reach out and connect with you online, how can they find you? Lee Densmer (14:28) Thank you. Yeah, just LinkedIn. I'm there every day. So that's where I am. Ben Ard (14:36) Okay, love it. So everyone scroll down. We'll have a link to the book's landing page and to Lee's LinkedIn profile. Again, Lee, thank you so much for the time and the insights today. Yeah, appreciate it. Lee Densmer (14:45) Okay, talk to you later.