It’s been another testing week at Content Army. So much is spinning through my head trying to make sense of this business as I try to figure out:

1. Marketing
2. Sales
3. Fulfillment

It feels like there are a million things I need to figure out and change and I’m having to remind myself that at this stage of business, upon reflection, leads to the best self-development.

Running around like a headless chicken trying to make things work feels immensely frustrating at the time but it is what you usually look back on in hindsight and appreciate it’s where the real growth happened.

Here’s an update on this week's wins and learnings (not losses).

WINS

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1: New Cohort Launched

My August cohort is now underway. I’ve got 7 incredible CEOs/Founders motivated to scale their content marketing strategies and I couldn’t be more motivated to help them.

I’ve (re-learnt) a huge amount about the need for speed during onboarding from the sluggish start I had with my June cohort and have used the learnings to make sure everybody hits the ground running and is posting consistently within 3 weeks of this program.

I’ll keep everyone updated with the early results next week.

2: June Cohort Going Viral

Just over a week ago, gold landed into our lap with one of my clients (Edward Upton at Littledata) being served a cease & desist letter from Wunderkind.

As of writing, we’ve been able to generate over 75,000 impressions and attract 400 new followers for Ed as well as a ton of publicity through his response.

It shows that when you speak what's on everybody else’s mind, people sit up and take notice and you gain their respect.

Kudos to Ed for making a stand on this, and for Josh Behr at AMB (another Content Army client) for taking a stand and equally generating a ton of awareness for his business.

Viral posts aside, there has only been 1 individual from the June cohort (there are 4 people) who has missed a single day of posting 3 weeks to date. I’m blown away by how consistent everybody has been and I’ll be sharing more results in the coming weeks.

3: Sales Engine Humming

Content Army requires a much higher velocity of lead generation and sales than Magnet Monster to prosper as a company. Because of this, I’ve spent some time this week migrating my hybrid CRM from ClickUp over to HubSpot. Whilst it’s not yet fully operational, it’s a step in the right direction needed to professionalise the company and get things prepared for Martin (Business Dev).

I also have my first outbound program now running via La Growth Machine, proactively growing my “new” audience with my defined ICP of SaaS founders. The connection acceptance rate is at 32% and the overall response rate at 6% so far. I’m not overly concerned or looking too much into these stats - the goal right now is to just proactively build my network so they can consume my content.

4: Marketing Engine (Slowly) Getting into Gear

It’s still a struggle for me to break free from posting about email marketing and the agency side of Magnet Monster, as it’s where my audience was built and people still really want my insights. I’ve realised that I don’t need to necessarily abandon sharing opinions on this segment of my audience, but that I also don’t need to be held hostage to catering to this audience to move in the direction I need to generate new business opportunities.

My posting has become consistent again on LinkedIn, the media mix more diversified (carousels + long-form video returning), and the podcast is in a decent enough groove (more on that below).

Everything is a decent work in progress, with lots of improvements to be made.

LEARNINGS

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Podcast Needs Revising

I’m struggling a little with my podcast and it’s only 3 episodes in.

This Live event format on LinkedIn is putting immense pressure on me to continuously generate attendance numbers each week in order to validate the guests (who are large creators) perceived ROI of agreeing to commit.

Whilst I had over 50 people commit for my last episode with Chris Walker, it’s evident to me that I need to reconsider whether live events are even necessary to carry out.

The post-show distribution from the first few episodes has been used across YouTube, Twitter Threads & LinkedIn carousel summaries, creating follow-up content for the guests themselves and wide-scale distribution. The crazy thing is, I haven’t yet uploaded these to Spotify/Apple podcasts and syndicated them there, and I know this is where their primary consumption will lie long-term.

I’ll have to think about the best way to proceed with this, as well as who the most appropriate guests are for my show. If my ICP is going to be SaaS or agency founders, then it makes sense to just focus on interviewing these folks, and perhaps sideline the idea of bringing on large YouTube creators and other content creators who specialise in other channels. At the end of the day, that’s probably not what my audience will find valuable - they’re almost exclusively focused on LinkedIn & Twitter growth. What do you guys think?

Agency Service Needs Improvement

This isn’t a dramatic cause for concern but Karthik shared something with me this week that I couldn’t shy away from: “Can any of our existing clients become a Chris Walker or Adam Robinson in the next 1.5 years? If not, what do we need to get them to that level?”

And he’s absolutely right.

The “time-saving” and “consistency” elements of creating content alone cannot sustain the business as the sole value proposition, otherwise, churn is always a risk once the client establishes a baseline consistency of posting. It’s the foundation underpinning content marketing's success, for sure, but it’s not the end destination.

Our clients want to build large followings and create viral content to grow their businesses. THAT is what we need to become exceptional with.

We’ve helped a fair few already create banger pieces, but we need to become far more intentional about this strategy, which we will.

I’m sure any agency owner feels a constant need for improvement in how they service clients. We’re no different.

PODCAST RECAP

I missed a Newsletter posting last week due to having to take a day off work, so here are the last two episodes of Creator Journeys to catch up on.

First, Phil Graham shared how he built one of the most successful fitness businesses in the online world through content marketing. This particular line stood out to me: “your best clients will always come from your long-form content”. Too damn true.

​Chris Walker also came on the pod and dropped many gems, reiterating a key line Phil said. I love this particular snippet when discussing long-form content and why despite getting fewer impressions, you should still prioritise it: “If the video is longer, less people are going to consume the whole video. But the people that do consume it are going to see 10 minutes, not one second of an impression of a text post, which creates trust and depth. And in this game that we have on LinkedIn today, trust, depth, unique perspective, non-obvious insights, that is how you win. It's how you've always won in content.”

Gold!

SOCIAL JUICE

I sent 2,000 cold emails for my marketing agency. These were the results.

The traditional Klaviyo agency business model is dead.

Everybody should become a creator. Here’s why.

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