Patrick Campbell is the Founder and CEO of ProfitWell, a company that builds revenue automation products for subscription companies. While his personal interests range from woodworking, metalworking, and typewriters (much to Gabriel’s excitement to have a fellow typewriter-enthusiast back on the show!), Patrick is truly most passionate about his work at ProfitWell.
Learn more about the creative strategies and foundation behind ProfitWell’s intentional push to become a media network, the difference between creating content and creating episodic content, and how to measure success on these efforts.
Listen to the Podcast version of this episode:
Guest-at-a-Glance:
Name: Patrick Campbell
What He Does: CEO of ProfitWell
Find Patrick on the Web: ProfitWell | LinkedIn
His media network: RECUR
His latest series: Boxed Out
Top Takeaways:
Can You Tell Us About ProfitWell’s Push to Transition into a Media Network and Creating Episodic Content?
About 15 years ago, Inbound Marketing was really starting to come about. Early on in Inbound, the playbook for content was, you have some sort of offer and you create a bunch of content around the offer to drive traffic. However, the bar for the quality of the offer was continuing to rise. But Patrick and the ProfitWell team realized that there was a way to really push their content.
“When we started, we were always doing content. We're in a space, at least in our market, where people crave knowledge. But, there's not a lot of people talking about some of the things we talk about and we have a smaller market. There's probably only 150,000 subscription companies out there. We started doing the research and we discovered a couple of cool factoids. For a B2B kind of blog, the max average number of touches you could expect (meaning, if everything's well, the number of times good leads would come to your site per week) was 1.6, meaning you could get almost two touches a week from good leads. But in reality, it's less than one touch per week. With media companies like Bloomberg, and The Skimm heir max averages are between 5 and 8. We started thinking, "What would we need to do as a company to send an email every single day "and you not get pissed off?" The basic thesis was media companies are the best in the world at driving traffic. They're the worst in the world at monetizing that traffic. SAS companies are pretty good at monetizing traffic, right? So let's put these together.”
What Did You Learn Through the Process of Creating Episodic Content?
During the development of the many shows ProfitWell has created, would you say there is anything that you wouldn’t do again? Were there any mistakes?
“We have multiple different products that serve different customer types, so when people asked ‘What do you guys actually do?’ that was a challenge,” Patrick said. “The one thing that we got really good at is developing concepts as quickly as possible. The one big mistake we made was trying to create new content daily. And I think with that, we tried to do it way too long and way too much.”
It would take ProfitWell’s team about six weeks to prepare for about 90 days of content. It was only after they realized how long this was taking them to develop, that they readjusted their strategy. Now Patrick says they’ve gotten really good at developing a concept quickly and efficiently.
Patrick’s Top Quotes:
[17:29]
“This is what I recommend people start with, if they want to do video, just start with making a blog post into a video. Maybe it’s just you talking and people take out the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ and they just put something nice on the front and back. Just start there. Or the alternative, just start a podcast.”
[26:40]
“Not everything is measurable in a perfect manner. You can have really high confidence though, and that’s kind of what you should focus on.”
[26:52]
“We will measure a blog post view at a different rate than a video view. If they engage with a video, they’re worth more to us in terms of momentum than a blog post.”
[35:44]
“Don’t think that you’re too small to be interesting when it comes to creating content.”
Learn More:
Check out these resources from the episode.
RECUR: ProfitWell's Media Network
