Building Billion Dollar Business with Strategic Marketing w/ Ross Simmonds, Foundation Marketing

Sarah Chen-Spellings (Intro):

So a couple weeks ago, the Berkshire Hathaway annual letter to shareholders landed right on schedule. Beginning, of course, with a tribute by famed investor Warren Buffett himself to his longtime business partner and friend Charlie Munger, who died in November.

This brought me down a little bit of a rabbit hole of how Berkshire Hathaway's secret success ingredient actually is, drumroll… strategic marketing. This inspired today's Billion Dollar Bite, where we take a bit of a breather from our usual current day venture heavy episode to this very topic on strategic marketing and how us in the venture world can learn a thing or two.

To do that, I brought in my friend, the expert himself, Ross Simmonds, the founder of today's leading content marketing firm, Foundation. Foundation works with B2B and SAS brands to build content marketing engines that generates millions of visits a year, generating millions worth of new business.

Foundation works and has worked with brands like Canva, Procore, Unbound, Java, Snowflake, and we cover a range of topics from A.I. and marketing reskilling your workforce and break down some amazing case studies from billion dollar businesses, MasterClass to Berkshire Hathaway. This is a bite unlike any other and I hope you enjoy it.

Ross Simmonds:

Artificial intelligence is viewed by many as the enemy, but it should be viewed by any good marketer as a opportunity. It should be viewed as an opportunity for them as a marketer to focus on things that really still need that human touch.

And tasks that still need that human touch and leverage AI to essentially be An accelerator and an augmenter of your own skills and capabilities. I think if you give a bad marketer AI, you'll still get bad marketing. But if you give a great marketer AI, you will get great marketing more frequently, more rapidly and more quickly.

So my belief is that yes, there is no question that some of the roles that exist today in the marketing function are going to evaporate and are no longer going to exist on the back of the developments of AI. There's no question.

Artificial intelligence can do so many things so much faster, so much more efficiently and sometimes even more accurately than a human can that it has to be embraced and it's going to fundamentally change the way that the marketing function operates.

A lot of marketers hear that, they break out in hives and they are terrified for good reason. But the way to counter that is to identify things that you can do that artificial intelligence cannot, which are things like leadership, which are things like creativity, which are understanding the nuances of human psychology, behaviors, et cetera, strategy, and developing your own organization's culture around how you're going to operate and show up within your space and in your landscape.

When you have that mentality, it gives you the opportunity to win. But a lot of marketers are stuck because they're still doing things that an AI can now do, when in fact, they should probably rely more on the AI so they can focus on higher value tasks.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

Yeah. So, and tell us a little bit about that. How are you thinking about what are higher value tasks that you should be focused on, upscaling your people in versus what you already foresee might not be here yet, but eventually, these tasks can be taken over by some software, right? That we're going to invest into. How are you thinking about that?

Ross Simmonds:

Yeah, so we think about it in the sense that like, humans will always want to connect with humans. People love people, and if you as a marketer can understand people, if you can spend time with customers to learn about their pain points, if you can do interviews with customers to actually create content, there is nothing that an AI could do to really replace that yet.

Will it come? Possibly. Like there is a world where all of us have avatars. Those avatars are powered by ChatGPT. We have a voice clone that has been uploaded to the Internet and it can speak and talk like me. But it's going to be very difficult for AI to essentially replicate my jazz hands that are always moving around when I'm talking.

But eventually we could get there. So I believe that the best teams are moving their teams more and more towards the initial strategy phase, the initial creativity phase of like identifying unique creative angles. Humans are still needed for editing. So when you produce an asset on the back of AI, I can use AI today to write a 2,500 word blog posts and that blog post will still need a human editor to get it to a point where it's optimized for search, et cetera.

There are different areas where humans are still needed to take something that an AI could have created to final fruition. But it really does start by understanding what AI's gaps are and where there are problems and challenges. And then applying the human element to that to just be able to move faster and more efficiently.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that we're talking about in a whole new world are businesses that have truly emerged as real serious Goliaths that built their business out of content marketing.

And one of those businesses that you and I have admired from afar, is master class. And I've absolutely loved that business case. Can you unpack some of what you shared? And of course, everyone should listen to your episode, but share with us a little bit about what really struck you there and how are other businesses able to replicate to get to the one to 10. What can we learn from MasterClass?

Ross Simmonds:

Yeah, I think one of the biggest lessons from MasterClass and the way that they approached content marketing was having a focus around search intent. And when I say search intent, it's something that not a lot of people think about on a day-to-day basis, but it's actually the reason why all of us go to Google when we are looking for something.

Search intent is the reason why you go to Google, to type in something and what you type in is typically rooted in search intent, and the intent that you have can vary. It can be a transactional intent where you're trying to find something that you can buy.

It can be commercial intent where you're looking to investigate and compare two products. For example, if you're looking to compare a certain running shoe to another, you might go to Google and say Nike versus Hoka or some variation of that and then get an example of these and then learn about it.

Or you might be looking for informational intent where you might be cooking a recipe and that recipe happens to say that you should use a shallot, and you're wondering what in the world is a shallot because you've never cooked before.

So when you go to Google with that search intent, brands that have the understanding of that philosophy and that fundamental idea are creating content that satisfies your intent.

What MasterClass did that was brilliant is they recognized the intent that someone would have when they went to Google and typed in, what is a shallot? What is some new type of sugar? What is this other various thing? What is a cinnamon roll? How hot should you preheat the oven when you are making a certain thing?

They knew that every single day millions of people were going to Google looking for these variations of keywords. Millions of people every day looking to understand the difference between a shallot and an onion.

Now the person who is doing that type of search happens to be the type of person who would eventually potentially be interested in unique recipes, might be interested in learning from Chef Ramsay, one of the best chefs to ever exist. How to be a better cook? So by them going out and creating all of these pieces on things that were specific to humans and their interests and they aligned it with search intent, they were able to capture a ton of traffic.

Millions of visits, millions of people visiting this content to learn about the difference between a shallot and an onion. Millions of people learning how to perfect their jump shot. People learning how to perfect their serve. People learning how to negotiate for a bigger salary.

And then when they land on these pieces of content, they happen to also meet, call to action saying, hey, you're interested in learning about onions and shallots, why don't you sign up for this course?

Hey, you're interested in how you should perfect your free throw, why don't you take this course with Steph Curry? You're trying to figure out how to perfect your serve in tennis. We actually have a course with Serena Williams. Why don't you take this?

They actually held, I'm going to say, a masterclass in front of everyone on how to create content that aligns with your customers, aligns with the people that you want to sell to, and then use that content to drive conversion and people to sign up for your actual product.

And as a result of it, they've been able to generate millions of visits, millions of customers. And it's ultimately been a success in the world of content and SEO.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

What a case study. I'm going to be searching what a difference is between shallot and onions after that, you can count on that because I am the target customer, which means that I've been getting bombarded by all these ads in every single platform that I'm on.

Is all their marketing budget on digital? Is it basically all Facebook advertising, Instagram, Meta advertising? How do you think about cost benefit analysis there and going really deep on a single strategy versus the omni channel approach.

Ross Simmonds:

They've embraced this idea of weaving the biggest digital web possible. So, they are trying, in my opinion, to create what I would call a content moat. And a content mode is essentially trying to create as much content assets on the internet and show up in as many channels as possible. So no matter where your customer goes, you start to show up.

And they've done this successfully in search. They've done this on Facebook, on Instagram, on YouTube, across all of these channels where they are showing up consistently, and they've created valuable content at the same time. So it's a win-win for both them as a brand, but also the customer. So when you go to Facebook and Instagram and you start to see their content, it's intentional.

And yes, they are investing a significant amount of money into this, but I think it's because they can view the total addressable market of this entire education space as being an entire new area that has never really reached its max of capabilities and capacity, right?

Like MasterClass is competing with the course writers. They're competing with the universities. They're competing with anyone out there who's developed any type of training and resource.

Arguably, they're also competing with the Netflix, they're also competing with the Disney’s, and they are taking on an approach where they're trying to essentially just capture eyeballs and attention.

And the more people that stay subscribed, the better the content that they upload, the more retention, the more eyeballs and the more opportunities that they're going to have long term to be able to diversify their revenue streams as well.

Another organization that did this extremely well is Glassdoor. Glassdoor came to the market with a ton of great content where they were constantly producing assets on things like what are the best paying tech jobs for an intern. And then they released all of this information talking about how an internship could get paid $250k a year, $300k a year at certain companies.

That information went out. And it all hit every press release, all of the media companies were talking about it, et cetera. They, in addition to that, partnered with universities to write journals and publications to create research on, best practices in the workplace. They have every single year, these updates that they share around the best CEOs.

And of course that's just ego bait and all the CEOs share that we're the best CEOs. They share these companies are the best places to work in the entire organization shares this. Similar to MasterClass, what their strategy is very simple - weave the biggest web online as possible. And in doing so, you're able to capture as much attention as possible.

I do believe that there is still, for a lot of these organizations, open playing field in the traditional sense as well. But a lot of them are very digital first, because they themselves are digital first as well.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

Yeah, that makes sense. And of course we have quite a few investors and what I call 1 to 10 founders, right? Billion dollar moves. It's the unicorns.

And a lot of them are actually thinking of global expansion, right? As you're thinking about strategies for B2B, what would you say is the best approach here to expand your brand globally.

Ross Simmonds:

Yeah, I think it's twofold. At the heart of it, it's pretty straightforward.

At the heart of the approach, you have to understand the culture of the space where you're moving into. And you have to understand the buying behaviors of those individuals, the languages, the best practices in business, their problems, their pain points, and even the vernacular and the things that they actually say or ways in which they refer to different things within business.

Because these are little nuances, but those nuances can be the difference between you versus a competitor actually closing a deal.

We worked with brands that are global and have global presence. We work with brands all over the world with a footprint in all different regions around the globe. And it's very interesting to see the difference between the types of things that someone might be looking for in the UK versus Australia, versus North America.

Simple words have different meanings in different areas and you have to understand those nuances, and that comes from research. In addition to that, I think it's probably the most exciting time in software to actually have a global strategy because it's easier than ever to now rank in these different regions from an SEO lens.

But also to translate your content to show up in these regions and speak in their native language. This is very powerful, especially when you can sprinkle artificial intelligence on it.

Currently, there are AI tools that will actually translate us talking like we are right now into any language that we decide. It will mask my lips and move my lips in a different way. It will use my voice, it'll use my tone, but it will say it in a different language.

If I wanted to have me speak in German, it could do that. If I wanted to speak in Mandarin, it could do that. It will modify my voice to speak in that language. This is so powerful.

When you think about some of the brands who have already established themselves with content excellence from a video lens or an audio lens with podcasts, if you can now take those assets. Translate them and start to show up in different regions. It can be a major success.

In B2B, we tend to be slow catching up with these types of trends and opportunities. In B2C, this is already happening. You can look at B2C for great examples like Mr. Beast, who is actually creating a ton of content that is translated into every language. He has YouTube channels in every language and this content is going out there to the masses.

So my advice to B2B brands that want to show up in these markets is start to invest in either leveraging AI to translate your content into these languages or start to think about a localized strategy where you can create content for various regions and various spaces that can align with them.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

Yeah, and so I love how you brought up Mr. Beast there. He's of course, one of the biggest YouTube stars that really pioneered, doing the crazy things that got a lot of eyeballs.

And now, of course, at the end day, what are we competing for as brands? It's retained attention and he's really got that retained attention and trust.

And I'm curious to know from you because you've worked with all these brands, some of them who appear a little bit more traditional but you're sort of pushing them to become creators.

Is the future for all businesses, the expectation that they too have to be creators?

Ross Simmonds:

It's a great question. One of the reasons why I'm going to be a little bit off the typical answer, which is everyone saying, yes, everyone has to be a creator, is I don't think we can say every brand.

I don't think every single brand in the world will need to be creator focused, will need to take that approach because their product will offer so much utility that it's unnecessary.

So if your product has such a strong product market fit and people want it, people need it, people use it. You can still win without having the creator at the forefront telling stories and creating content, etc.

I think storytelling, however, will always be a fundamental. So, if you exclude the individual but you embrace storytelling, I think that will be the requirement moving forward.

A lot of people will look at companies like Berkshire Hathaway and they'll be like, but they don't do any marketing, they don't do any storytelling. That's complete false fake news. Like every single shareholder letter that they release is essentially a great marketing effort.

The event that they have when they bring everyone together. That's event marketing and all of these people are there. They're seeing Warren, they're seeing Charlie and they are consuming that content. It is another masterclass on marketing, except it doesn't show up exclusively digital.

But those shareholder letters are essentially content. It's a content asset that goes out like a PDF, a lead magnet that everybody reads, everyone talks about. It gets the entire world talking and everyone says it's not marketing. It is. It's actual marketing.

So the perspective that I would encourage people to think is, you need to ensure that storytelling is a key part of the DNA for any organization, no matter your size, no matter your sector, no matter your segment, storytelling needs to be a part of it.

And you need to be strategic in the way you tell those stories. It is icing on the cake to have a creator involved in the process. If you have a creator, if you have someone who can represent the brand as a human, not always necessary, but always, always, always beneficial.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

Ooh, this is landing me in a really good spot here because one of the key things, LinkedIn as a platform, is one of my favorite platforms.

And I realized that, of course, what they really reward as a platform are the individuals. So it's people, not so much the companies.

Because of course they want the companies to pay, right? But they want their voices to be really heard. And so now a lot of CEOs are pressured to be the voice. Can you share what you think about the future of leadership and how CEOs need to be creators themselves? And how should we think about this?

Ross Simmonds:

It's a competitive advantage to have a leader who is acting and operating like a public figure. In many ways, right? Like if that leader is able to show up online, create content, talk directly to customers, create content, talk directly to potential employees. It's a net benefit and net positive for the brand.

A lot of times though, you will have leadership that can't do it. And in those cases, I would say leadership shouldn't do it. If you're not that person who can create good content, who has the ability to speak right or show up on video in the right way to your audience and it be well received.

Then take a step back, have a serious moment of reflection and say, maybe I just need to operate internally, but maybe I should hire a COO, a CIO, a CTO or CFO or someone who else can be on my leadership team to start to show up on our brand's behalf that will assist with attracting clients, with retaining clients, and assist with attracting talent.

When you look at channels like LinkedIn, you are 100% spot on. They're emphasizing and placing a lot of value around people over pages. On LinkedIn, we have seen organizations double down on their page investment.

But the reality is pages don't get the same amount of engagement that a human does, which makes sense. People want to connect with people more than they want to connect with a brand. So if you as the leader or a leadership team can make a cognitive decision to say, we need to start showing up on social, creating content or developing content. There's a wide range of ways that you can do it.

You can leverage your marketing team to start to work closely with you, to share and rewrite your ideas and develop stories for you. You can create content through video where they're interviewing you, have them chop and edit these interviews and share that as content.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

So I want to challenge that a little bit.

Many of the status quo believe that it's a waste of time. You know, how can I focus on the work that I'm actually set here to do? This content stuff, it's a distraction more than anything. What would you say to that?

Ross Simmonds:

I think in a leadership position, one of the most important things that you're trying to do is attract great people to work at your organization. You want to attract people.

And if you show up online and you are telling a story that resonates with people and you have the reach of LinkedIn, which is multi millions of people. If your ideal customer profile or your ideal hire are showing up on LinkedIn, which they are, and you are creating content.

You're essentially holding a sales call with all of those people at once. So that mental shift is very important. It's like I can show up on a zoom call and talk to one individual about foundation.

Which is our company, or I can go on social media, create a video, create a content asset that talks about my perspective on business, on growth, et cetera, and reach hundreds of thousands of people with that same amount of energy that it would have had for that one-on-one call. That is the power of these channels.

One of those video assets that go up on LinkedIn can also reach that person who is currently employed by a competitor, employed by another company, and they watch it and they're like, wow, I resonate with this leadership. I resonate with this idea. I resonate with their vision. I want to join this company. Then they go to your career page and they're more interested to apply and try to join your organization.

This is what is possible by showing up on these channels. So yes, you might not see an immediate credit card swipe because you put up some content that talks about your vision and your beliefs and your perspective and your culture.

But over time you're going to start to see a trending increase in the quality of people who want to work at your company or a quality increase in the companies that are trying to work with you directly.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

I will say one that one of the concerns that a lot of my investors have is, of course, by putting yourself out there in this time where there's an anti-woke movement, where there's so much room for criticism, where people are keyboard warriors.

How do you think about that? Do we read the comments? Do we ignore the comments? Do we engage with every issue?

Ross Simmonds:

You have to pick your battles. I think you have to really identify for yourself like how firmly do you believe a certain thing? And if you do believe in that, then you have to be comfortable with the repercussions that come with you sharing that opinion and sharing that voice.

It's risky. There's no question about it. If you are going out there to the market and you are sharing ideas and philosophies that might make some people upset and might make some people angry.

There's risk. There is serious risk associated with that. And the question becomes like, how comfortable are you with sitting with this idea publicly being associated with your name?

If you are very comfortable with it, then by all means, do it. Go for it. 100 percent like own your truth and go live with it. That's a great situation to be in. But if you were still kind of on the fence of whether or not that's an idea that you want to put out. Don't do it. Like, don't open yourself up to that type of risk.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

So I'll ask you this question that I asked at Davos to the CEO of Lego, the CEO of Deloitte and Henry Schein as well, which is this terminology of the nonpolitical leader.

Where today, I mean, I think you recall what happened years ago during the pandemic, the CEO of Basecamp basically post George Floyd decided that, all right, guys, you know, the workplace is the workplace. Keep your politics at home.

But we're in a generation where we talk about, oh, you're a brand, you're a creator, you need to bring your full self to work, which means your beliefs as well.

As a CEO yourself, how are you thinking about this? Do you think that CEOs should take a stand on certain issues? Should they be public about their political beliefs? Should this be one and the same with the company and the body corporate?

Ross Simmonds:

I think for me, when I talk to leaders, there's a wide range. Some folks will say, I'm not going to talk about anything political because I don't want that to negatively influence my organization.

Then I'll talk to others who have politics rooted in the DNA within their company and their culture and they will talk about it every single day. You look at organizations like Ben and Jerry's like that is a part of their DNA. They've done it. They've owned it and they continue to do so.

So you have to start with an understanding for yourself again, what do we want to be known for? What do we want to represent and how do we want to show up in the world?

And then once you are committed and you believe that, then stay true to it and go for it. I don't think that, it's again, one of those scenarios where every leader has to be political.

I think every leader needs to make a choice on what they believe is best for one themselves, their goals, their ambitions, and where they want to go.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

A tough time for leaders to be thinking about where they stand, where they don't, what to speak out on and what not to.

Ross Simmonds:

The biggest mistake that I oftentimes see is either one of two things, either news jacking inappropriately.

So an organization will change their logo will change, put up a post. They will try to jack something that is happening in culture and try to get brand benefit on the back of it.

Whether it's Martin Luther King's birthday and they will put up a picture of Martin Luther King and then they'll put their logo all over it. Like that is so self serving and everyone can see through it. You have to understand, as an organization, that if you are going to be trying to promote a social cause, if you're trying to share and empower a community or group that you don't just throw your logo on it.

You don't just say, oh, we're going to put this as our logo for the week and do nothing. You have to actually show up in some way that does a service to the cause. But more times than I'd like to see, organizations don't take that approach. They just show up, they throw on their logo when they think they've done it, and then they get confused when they see hundreds of people commenting and asking them what they were thinking.

They weren't thinking, right? They weren't thinking about the intent versus their desired intent, which was probably good. But when you throw on your logo, when you start to try to make it about you instead of the actual cause, that's when problems show up the most.

So try to ensure that if you are going social, if you are trying to do something for good, that you are not making the mistake of trying to make that good serve ultimately your business and your brand, because the world will see right through it.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

Well, Ross, there's so much that we can dive into, but that has been a power-packed session in itself.

And I don't want to miss this opportunity to ask you, right? Content King himself, some billion dollar questions. You ready for that?

Ross Simmonds:

Ready for it. Let's do it.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

What do you do to take care of your mental health?

Ross Simmonds:

I love yoga and I love going for runs.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

Fill in the blank. Success is?

Ross Simmonds:

When you can wake up in the morning, go to bed at night and do whatever you want in between.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

What are you obsessed with that others rarely talk about?

Ross Simmonds:

Currently I'm obsessed with board games and creating them from scratch.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

You. What is the most significant thing you've changed your mind about in the last decade?

Ross Simmonds:

The biggest thing that I have changed my mind about is that going from one to two kids is way more difficult than going from zero to one. It's wild.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

Love it. Well, three values you want your kids to espouse.

Ross Simmonds:

Ooh. Empathy, hard work, and leadership.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

Alright, and the final one. In one sentence, so this is going to be tough. But how can we all today, tangibly create like the greats?

Ross Simmonds:

We can all create like the greats by emulating the greatest creators of all time and remixing their stories to align with our ideal customer.

Sarah Chen-Spellings:

Well, Ross Simmonds, thank you so much for your time for hopping on Billion Dollar Moves so we can all keep making Billion Dollar Moves together.