Benjamin Ard00:00 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Scott. Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott Hild00:05 — Thanks a lot, Ben. Great to be here.
Benjamin Ard00:07 — Yeah, Scott, I'm excited. This is going to be a fun conversation. I'm excited to dive into it. But before we get into it, let's let the audience get to know who you are, what you do, work history, background, all that kind of fun stuff.
Scott Hild00:20 — Sounds good. Yeah. My name is Scott Hild and I lead brand and marketing for a management consulting firm called Propeller.
Benjamin Ard00:30 — I love it. Very cool. Two seconds. What does Propeller do?
Scott Hild00:33 — Yeah, so Propeller is a management consulting firm, which kind of seems a little esoteric, right? What does that mean? These days, what that means is we work with companies that are going through transformation and transformation can look like a lot of different things, right? That's business process, that's operating model, that's organizational design. You know, these days, probably the biggest transformation that our customers are going through and we're going through as a firm is AI. So we do a lot of work around AI strategy and enablement. We're not on the technical side of AI, we're on the change and the people side and the strategy side and how do you align your AI initiatives to your business initiatives.
Benjamin Ard01:24 — I love that. And that is such a big opportunity in the space because everyone knows they need the AI. Everyone's pushing it, making sure everything's going well. But really when it comes down to it, it's saying, okay, well, how am I actually using this to accomplish my goals? And I love that focus right there. Scott, we were emailing about what we wanted to talk about today and a part of content that you really love. And you use this strategy. And I want to give you credit for it. I know in the pre-call you wouldn't take credit for the name, but you have something you call the visible expert strategy, which is really making your content feel like advice from a peer who's really been there, done that, gotten their hands dirty, bought the t-shirt, all that kind of fun stuff. I am excited to kind of understand this a little bit more. So let's dive into the business at the beginning. Propeller is what you call a credence business. Can you unpack what that means and why it changes your approach to thought leadership? How does this all kind of tie into this visible expert strategy as well?
Scott Hild02:25 — Yeah, absolutely. So Propeller as a management consulting firm, like you said, what is called a credence business. And what that means is we don't sell a product, we don't sell a widget. I always joke and say we're not selling cat food, right? What we're selling is expertise. And we're selling our people and their expertise. So when we think about thought leadership and content, what that gives us the opportunity to do is put our experts, our people front and center in the creation of that content and humanizing that content, making it be about their lived experiences in the work that they do. So really, you know, we call it the visible expert strategy and that is all about telling the story from our people's point of view as opposed to from Propeller the brand.
Benjamin Ard03:30 — Love it. So with this, and this is the kind of content people want to read, they're less interested about what a business has to say, but really the people behind the business. So when you are using people instead of brand content, what does that actually look like? Cause everyone talks about, we have thought leaders and all that kind of stuff. What does that look like in practice for Propeller and what have you seen work well?
Scott Hild03:53 — Yeah, yeah. And I think that, you know, if you think of a visible expert strategy, as opposed to just traditional thought leadership content, when you talk about visible experts and telling the story through the people, it's really about telling the story of what Propeller does through the work that we do. Right? So through our clients eyes. So the main difference if you think about that, right, a traditional thought leadership piece might go into the five things that you need to know about organizational health or whatever. And you know, you get on your soapbox and you're the professor and you're going to list these five things where we flip the script a little bit is we still may give the advice and list here are the five things you need to know about AI transformation. But in each of those five things, we're going to talk about a real life example. We're going to talk about a conversation that we had with a client, what they were thinking at the time, how the conversation went, what got unpacked during that engagement, where they started, where they ended up. So what it really is is helping people to quickly understand what we do and how it relates to their world.
Benjamin Ard05:26 — So not only from the perspective of the individual and how the content is being told and who it's being told by, sounds like it's also a big component of a story, that you're telling the actual story of the experience. How does that make the content feel more personal? And how have you seen engagement, results? How does that change things from your traditional, I loved your example, educational content? The five ways to do this. How has that kind of shifted the narrative, shifted how you tell things and ultimately how people kind of interact with the content.
Scott Hild05:59 — Yeah, that's a great question. And I would tie that back. I'm sure from a content perspective, you and your listeners are probably familiar with StoryBrand. StoryBrand, yeah, absolutely. Yep, yep, Donald Miller. And that's another piece that we've really embraced. And if you think about that, right, kind of the premise behind that is making the customer the hero, right? So to kind of refresh everybody on what that journey is in StoryBrand, right? It's the customer is the hero, they have a problem, they encounter a guide, that's your company, right? That's the way we look at it. The guide provides a clear plan, the customer is spurred to action, failure is avoided and success is achieved, right? And so, when you create content and you tell the story through those eyes, what that gives the reader or the listener, the audience, it gives them the opportunity to identify and connect themselves with the hero of that story, which is the customer, which is a peer of theirs, right? So when we create content that we kind of measure and use that rubric around, that gives people that opportunity to put themselves into that story.
Benjamin Ard07:25 — I love that. Plus every time you read a story, there is empathy. Like you said, there's that peer, but there's this level of emotional attachment to the hero of the story and you're able to put yourself in their shoes. And I think that's so cool. Now stories and content and thought leadership, all of this is awesome. Be so cool if we could be storytellers and that's all we had to do, but you have to worry about the business side, the activation, the conversion, the actual things of, we built this content or people actually using it and how is it performing and how is it received and all that kind of stuff? How do you look at the logistical side of the content inside of the system, making sure people use it, measure it, things of that nature.
Scott Hild08:15 — Yeah, you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about what is the purpose of the content that we are creating. You know, we will have our service offering teams come to us at the beginning of the year and say, you know, we have a goal of creating six blogs this year. We're like, great, great. Why? Why do you wanna create six blogs? Is it just to check the box because that's on your scorecard of what you said you were gonna do? For us, creating content, creating another blog, another byline article, whatever, that's not the challenge. The challenge is how can we create content, we talk about content that converts. Right? So how can we create content that we can tie some type of offer, some type of asset to, whether that's an interactive, you know, downloadable calculator or something like that, or it's an actual trigger to a landing page for a six week engagement that we may do. But, you know, so we, again, we spend a lot of time thinking about the why behind a particular piece.
Benjamin Ard09:32 — I love that understanding the why. I love your example with blog posts like a blog post in and of itself doesn't do you any good. So let's figure out why it is a vehicle for good. So Scott, we're almost out of time. These episodes are short and sweet to the point. We'd like to let people get back to their day to day. Two more questions. Number one, how can businesses that are also in the same side of things, you know, other credence businesses, consulting, law, agencies, how can they start to make the same shift?
Scott Hild10:02 — Yeah, that's another great question. You know, we really, as a brand and marketing team, we do a lot of what I would consider white glove handholding, you know, nurturing with our leadership team, who are our visible experts who we ask to create that content. A couple of quick pieces of advice. You may have, you know, 10 people that you've identified as your visible experts, your leaders, the people that you want to create content. I will guarantee that all 10 of them are not enthusiastic and it is not easy and it doesn't roll off their tongue or through their pen. So one piece of advice is you take those 10 people and you identify who has the passion and who is really interested in being a part of a program like that and go with your hot hand, right? You may have two or three people that really have that enthusiasm for it. I would double down on those two to three people and then let the other seven go, my gosh, they're actually producing really interesting content and it's moving the needle around engagement and connecting with customers and things like that. So I wouldn't force it. And then the other thing that we started doing this year that has been really successful is we spent 45 minutes to an hour dedicated at the beginning of the year with each one of our leaders and developed what we call a visible expert plan for the whole year. So we essentially interviewed them about trends that they see in the marketplace, things that are important to them. We went, we took it a few steps further. We developed abstracts based on those conversations, you know, basically ideas, suggestions of content across a lot of different platforms and formats that we can then activate on throughout the year. But we put together that whole plan. Now they kind of know what's coming up for the rest of the year. It gives our team some organization around it. And then we can use that in regular touch points throughout the year to actually execute on creating.
Benjamin Ard12:20 — I love that. I love the planning. I love the real talk here of not everyone's going to want to be involved and that's okay. Go with the individuals that are excited and have the passion. One final question. Does this strategy in your opinion work for businesses that are not in professional services? Let's say they are selling the widgets or the software or they are manufacturing some kind of product or something like that. How does this work for those businesses and does it work at all for them?
Scott Hild12:53 — Yeah, I would think that it definitely could. It's going to have to, you would shift a little bit, right? So if it's not a credence business, that means you're selling a product, right? Not just pure expertise. But one way I think you could do that is if you identified some people within your organization that then become the face of the organization, but still tell a story through how the end customer utilizes the product. So I think as long as you still tie that piece to it, you could create some visible experts who really are the experts in telling the story of how your customers are using your product.
Benjamin Ard13:41 — I love it. Very cool. Scott, we're out of time. Thank you for all the insights today. For anyone who listened and wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Scott Hild13:51 — Yeah, I would say LinkedIn is definitely the best place. It's Scott Hild, H-I-L-D, and the company I work for is Propeller.
Benjamin Ard14:00 — Love it. For anyone, regardless of what platform you're listening on or viewing, scroll down to the show notes. We'll have links there so you can connect with Scott. Scott, again, thank you so much for the time, insights, and everything you shared with us today.
Scott Hild14:14 — Thanks a lot, Ben. It was fun.
