7 Insights From Starting GTM News & What's Next For 2024

Taylor Wells (00:00.478)
Hey everyone, welcome to the GTM News show. This is the final episode for 2024. And in this episode, I wanted to highlight two things. Number one, I want to give you seven learnings from starting this show, this podcast, and seven learnings from starting it. And then also I wanted to give you some ideas of what's coming in 2024 and where I'm taking the show, especially from these learnings, right? How can I optimize and do it better in 2024?

And if you're a client of mine, or if you're just somebody that's looking to do a podcast or a show, create content in general. I think my learnings will be super helpful. And then also the things I'm gonna start doing in 2024 to only increase engagement and get more out of this effort. So let's jump right in. I kind of have seven learnings, but I wanna give you kind of an idea of what I've been able to achieve since starting the show in February of 2023. I've published about 45 episodes.

So I definitely have had some definitely lots of learnings. If you look at all my episodes, I have maybe 45 different haircuts too. I have a lot of different haircuts, long hair, short hair in between, which is always funny, kind of embarrassing to be like, wow, actually that was a really horrible haircut. I can't believe I had that for so long. But one of the side learnings didn't have on the agenda but something to highlight there. And yeah, hindsight's 20-20.

When it comes to haircuts, that's for sure. A couple of the things I've achieved about 3000 followers, subscribers across different platforms. Um, that's, uh, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, uh, and LinkedIn newsletter and also email newsletter. And all those places people follow, listen and watch, uh, the show and kind of what I've done to promote the show has done things, I posted three to five clips a week.

on LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube. The biggest drivers were my personal LinkedIn, which I have a decent following, about 20,000 people on there that watch it, went and then subscribed to it, et cetera. But actually YouTube, which I only have like a couple hundred followers on, subscribers on YouTube, but YouTube has been probably the biggest place I've gotten just views for the show, number one, but then just followers in general. It's been amazing how many views

Taylor Wells (02:19.678)
In fact, my first episode on YouTube has almost a thousand views and hundreds of hours of consumption has driven new subs on YouTube and overall has ultimately driven engagement, which is pretty interesting. YouTube is the number one podcast platform and I attribute that because number one, people love to watch a video podcast. Spotify, you can watch a video podcast on Spotify and I let people, you know, upload my video podcast to Spotify.

But YouTube, because it's a search engine and because it's obviously tied into Google, your videos get ranked, right? And it's just so powerful. And what I think too, from a consumer standpoint, I personally love watching and listening to podcasts on YouTube. Because of the algorithm is so powerful, they really have a great recommendation system. And it helps me find it. Like all the other apps are really hard to just like navigate and just, you know, I ended up like deleting, I get like 13 gigs of

of episodes downloaded on my Apple podcast setup. And it's just not, user experience isn't great. Whereas YouTube is just really dialed in when it comes to what it presents to you and stuff like that. So as a side note, YouTube's super powerful and a great way to build your show podcast in general. So YouTube has been great. LinkedIn newsletter. So I started a newsletter every week, which the newsletter has, you know, it definitely features the show.

and highlights from the show, et cetera, but also some other things too. It has different posts, different kind of things I've noticed in the industry and stuff like that. So you can subscribe on my website, GTM.News, or you can go to LinkedIn and subscribe through there. But the idea is people then watch the show on there and get linked to the show, but they also get some other value add content that I add in that newsletter to provide more value and more insights as it relates to go to market.

A couple of, I've had hundreds of thousands of impressions. I haven't been able to count how many impressions I've gotten across, you know, the video clips, the distribution, the repurposing of the podcast has been pretty powerful for just driving engagement on my LinkedIn, for getting views, you know, all sorts of things. I think the repurposing of the content's really powerful. And then my guests helped promote it as well too. So my guests, I'm getting that reach. Sometimes they take the episode and put on their podcast.

Taylor Wells (04:43.498)
Super powerful sometimes they take clips or they just promote the episode and I know I've driven a lot of new Audiences because of the gas promoting the show as well And then overall about 5,000 listens to thousands of hours of consumption over the last 45 episodes and Overall, I feel pretty good about you know, you always are like, oh, I wish I had 10,000 people watching it I'll take 3,000. I think that's a good benchmark for 45 episodes and

Um, you know, the amount of time I've invested in and stuff like that, which I'll talk about in a second, some of the learnings, I feel pretty good about it overall. And, and I think it's for me, when I started it, I really wanted to create a show that was really me seeking my curiosity and, and seeking to learn more about go to market and go to market. It's a really big category and kind of, um, uh, my, one of my first learnings we'll jump right into the learnings here.

is that your topic and your audience, right now my topic and audience is super broad. It's go to market. Go to market is like marketing, sales, customer success. It's like pricing. It's like, it's a lot of things. It's a huge category. And then it's also a really broad audience. Like it's B2B, go to market. So that's a little bit narrow, but there's enterprise, there's SMB, there's mid market, there's service, there's SaaS. And so it's a really broad, and when you're creating content in general,

you know, if I were to look in hindsight, I'd probably find a niche and create content for that niche. Like if it's startup, go to market or if it's cybersecurity, go to market or whatever it is, and be really specific. So you kind of build an audience around that niche, because there's just so much content online, there's so many podcasts, surprisingly, there's actually not a whole lot of like go to market podcasts. And that's why I started it. Number one was a couple things like first, that category is new. It's only been popularized really in the past couple years of like

It's not just about marketing or sales and these different environments, like taking a step back and looking at the entire customer experience, looking at the entire revenue org and all the different ways to go to market and how do we optimize the whole thing? And it's one whole team versus all these silos, right? So the category is new, which is great. I also wanted it to be really focused on, yeah, how do we combine all these things and do it better?

Taylor Wells (06:57.822)
And then also my own curiosity, right? Like I wanna learn in all these different areas as a consultant, as a demand gen leader, as a marketer. I'm like, hey, I wanna learn more about sales. I wanna learn more about customer success. I wanna learn more about pricing or how to pick a TAM or whatever all these different sub-topics undergo to market that may fall into marketing, may fall under sales, may fall under customer success, may even fall into product, right? Cause all those things work together to make sure you have an efficient, effective go-to-market engine. So.

Big learning for me is like niche down, right? Like I think I could probably have gotten more traction if I niche down to a specific audience to versus being so broad. And as I move into 2020 form beyond, I may niche down even further. I have no set plans yet to do it, but based upon my trajectory of where I wanna grow, the different areas of go-to-market I wanna grow, the different industries I wanna be in, I might niche down the show or not. Maybe I'll keep it super broad and it's interesting enough that it...

captures enough of an audience and it gets traction enough. A takeaway though in that is that if you go broad, it's probably gonna take longer to get traction. So you have to be more patient. But if you go really narrow, you probably can accelerate traction faster. So that's something I learned. Another thing is it takes a while. There's so many podcasts, there's so many shows, there's so much content out there to build an audience of people that enjoy your content.

It just takes time. It takes time to refine your content, to get better at it. Takes time to get the right guests. It takes time to figure out the right marketing strategy, et cetera. So all those things just take a lot of time and there's so much saturation of content out there. That's kind of my number one. Number two is it really takes time to build any sort of content engine, to build an audience really of people that consume your content. Number three is,

Guests are actually relatively to get easy to get on. That's probably one of my biggest things of like, oh, it's gonna be hard to get awesome guests on. But I've had incredible guests, people that, all sorts of people in this industry that are really successful and great thought leaders, great practitioners. And overall, that's actually been the easiest thing is to get people on. Maybe it takes a couple months, right, to get them on the actual, get them booked. But getting people on, especially if you have a great marketing plan, you have great content.

Taylor Wells (09:18.198)
You have a great overall topic. It's been much easier. Another learning is build a process. I think that's something you kind of figure out as you go along is like, hey, have a repeatable process. So every week I kind of know exactly what I'm gonna do of like, here's my steps, right? And then making sure I have enough, I have four to six weeks of guests lined up. I have my topic, how do I release it? So building out that process, I have a whole webinar.

And recording actually did it repurpose it as an episode of the show that you can listen to That's all on how to do a video podcast and how to create your own show It's like an hour long I go into like all the nitty-gritty tons of stuff in there that I think is Superviable a lot of things I learned so feel free to go check that out It's more about the process and the technicals and the things you need to do to do your own show But definitely go check that out if you're interested. I'll put a link in the show notes to check out the pod

to check out that episode. And then another thing is tools have made it a lot easier. I have a nice tech stack of probably, it's probably I think seven to eight tools that helped me do the whole show, right? Recording, post-production, newsletter, website, creating clips, all that fun stuff. And AI tools in particular have gotten a lot better over this past year, no surprise, right? As the investment in AI has only increased.

So it's pretty cool and it's not crazy. I spent under a hundred bucks a month to do all of it. So it's not a huge expense to create those, to have those tools and to do all the AI repurposing, publishing, all that fun stuff. Number seven is the cost, right? Like there is some sort of cost, but actually the, excuse me, number six, the cost really is the time investment. So I've dialed it in where I spend probably about four hours, four to five hours a week on my show.

That's from booking guests, recording. That's from repurposing content, publishing the newsletters, all the fun stuff. Engagement, et cetera. So it does take time. And over 40 episodes, that's, what is that? That's over 200 hours I've spent on this show, right? And so as you look at that, like, what is the value of that? And I can tell you about all the benefits of it and the future benefits.

Taylor Wells (11:39.054)
especially the future benefits. Cause if I were to say it now, like if I were to walk up, if I were to stop it now, I would probably be, it probably would have been valuable enough, right? I've created enough content. I've helped me get customers. My customers, my clients listen to the show, prospects listen to the show. It's helped me in the short term. And I've learned a ton, right? I'm able to take these skills and then use them to help my clients with it, et cetera. But it probably, 200 hours, I probably could have done that, you know, maybe done something else and got that same value.

So I'm looking to like, what is it gonna do in a year or two years as I continue to refine this show, continue to do it better. So there is some sort of time investment. And obviously if you're a larger company, you can hire somebody to do the pre and post production, booking guests, all that fun stuff. But even as a creator, as a host, as a moderator, whatever, it's gonna take some time. It's gonna take some creative energy. So you can pay somebody to do that, to accelerate that, or you can do it yourself, unlike what I've done. And...

So it really, you know, that time investment, but it's really a long game. Like most great things in marketing, most efficient great things in marketing, the long-term gains where it's gonna be, you know, in a year or two when I hopefully have tens of thousands of listeners and it's, I'm selling sponsorships or I'm able to generate even more revenue, more clients for my business or whatever the outcomes, the business objectives I'm driving, that's probably gonna be where I will see the gains, right? In the last.

10 months, it probably is, you know, it may not be a net positive, right? Maybe, it may actually might still be a net positive, but it probably is gonna be a year down the road, right? Or maybe even two years down the road where I'm gonna see the real gains from it. And then last lesson is focus on a few distribution channels and get really good at those. I think a lot of times we wanna put them everywhere and it's okay to try things like, you know, I've tried posting on, you know, TikTok and Facebook and,

X and other platforms. But you know, it was, I didn't really, I don't spend time on those platforms. So I didn't really optimize them. I didn't really find creative ways. I do spend a decent amount of time on LinkedIn and YouTube. So I, it's funny, you know, when you think about distribution and email as well, when you think about distribution, distribute for the channels, if you're a solopreneur, if you're a small team, distribute the channels or first where your audience is at, number one. And within that, distribute for channels that you consume.

Taylor Wells (14:06.19)
Because there's a kind of a beautiful marriage of that, of like, on one hand, where your audience is at, obviously create content for where they are consuming content, right? Don't put it on a platform where no one's at, where none of the people that you want to target are at. But on top of that, create content for the platforms that you enjoy and you spend time on, because it's only gonna make your content better, because you're gonna figure out the nuances, you're gonna figure out how to create content that actually sticks out. And it just kind of, there's a great...

you know, a cycle and, you know, opportunity. Create content for the audience, where your audience is at, but also create content if you can create content that are the platforms that you enjoy because you'll learn a lot, you'll be able to take those learnings, put that back into your content and engage more, et cetera. So YouTube, LinkedIn happened to be the platforms that did the best. Those also platforms I spend time on personally.

and I do have other business functions and things like that I'm doing on those areas. So super, super helpful. So those are the seven learnings. Number one, it takes a while. Number two, you know, always refine your topic in your audience. I think there's so much content out there. I wish I had niche down more in hindsight. In hindsight though, I was, you know, at the time I was working a full-time job when I started it.

I was more just a pet project. I was doing it on the side. It was more for my own curiosity and like, you know, learning. And how do I learn more? How do I investigate these new go to market topics so I can learn and be a better practitioner myself and the business outcomes wasn't a huge focus. That being said, if I niche down more, I probably would have been further along than I am now. That being said, you can still niche down. I may still do that, right? I may pick a specific industry and focus to show on that. Um, who knows?

But that's, and then number three, guests are easy to get on, that shouldn't be a concern. Number four, build a process as you start working things, document things, build a process. Number five, AI tools and tools in general have only gotten so much better. And there's some great tools out there to make everything way easier. You don't need to even hire anybody to do stuff, to do audio editing, to create clips, to do all that fun stuff. You can do it pretty fast, pretty effectively, create a newsletter, et cetera.

Taylor Wells (16:24.142)
Number six, focus on, you're gonna have to spend some time, four to five hours a week, you know, to do a podcast and newsletter combo, create content, create clips, get guests, et cetera. And then number seven, focus on a few distribution channels, a sweet marriage between where your audience is at, your ideal audience, your ideal customers potentially, and then number two, in conjunction with that, an audience, if you're a small company or a solopreneur, an audience, the platforms that you enjoy.

For me, it was email, LinkedIn, and YouTube. So I've optimized for those channels. Cool, so awesome. Let's look into next year. So these seven learnings, I hope it was super helpful. Once again, check out the episode, my hour long podcast on how to do a podcast show if you wanna learn more about the specifics or obviously reach out to me directly if you have any questions, happy to answer any questions about how to do a show or broadcast in 2024. Let's talk about what I'm gonna do for next year. So.

I'm continuing to refine my content and figure out, you know, in that vein of what I talked about earlier, targeting, et cetera. So I'm really being focused on, first of all, it's sort of me go to market, right? Go to market ideas for B2B, right? How do you take your product to market? How do you get in front of customers? How do you get customers, get prospects to turn into customers and stay with you longterm, et cetera? And so I'm gonna get even kind of even more niched in that area. We're gonna be talking about things like, you know, get experts on about

how to identify your total addressable market, how to do pricing, how to build a sales team, how to focus on go-to-market motions and what motion is right for your ACV. So all these kind of different go-to-market topics and high-level stuff and particular stuff, but in general, my goal is every guest I have on is a practitioner. Probably not always gonna be true because I'm gonna have some really incredible thought leaders out there that are.

you know, maybe just industry leaders that have some great ideas. I think you should, you should learn about, but in general, my goal. Is that somebody that didn't do it 10 years ago and that was successful. Somebody that did it yesterday, that was successful. Somebody that's going to do it tomorrow and continue to do it. And that's in, in the weeds on the front line, so to speak of whatever the topic they're on, right? And the reason I'm doing this is first of all, there's so much like generic advice out there. And I actually got this idea from marketing against the grain. They talked about.

Taylor Wells (18:45.858)
People don't want advice, they want prescriptive takeaways. And I love that concept, prescriptive takeaways. So when your content, think about what is the actual, how can they actually go execute whatever you're advising them on, right? Giving them actual takeaways of like, go do this thing. I think a lot of times, especially in B2B, the content is so generic, it's so high level, it's advice. It's like, you know, it's really broad. And there's so much of that out there.

I want actual tactical, in the weeds, specific things you can do, and specific things I can do to improve, right, what all these different go-to-market functions. So in general, the show is gonna have all of that, right? Whether it's me doing a deep dive, like that podcast, right? How to launch a podcast or how to do a video podcast, or whether it's me having somebody on that's gonna do a deep dive, give you prescriptive takeaways to improve your go-to-market. So that's one big part of it.

The next big part is I'm gonna start doing events. And I'm really excited about this. Events have always been something that's been near and dear to my heart. That's how I really kind of got into thought leadership and content marketing in general, was doing webinars, doing virtual events, and the power of it to build relationships at scale, to help people at scale, to provide content in a really engaging environment. So events in general, whether in person or virtual, I think are really powerful. So I'm gonna do a lot of virtual events. I'm gonna be doing...

A monthly series starting in January on it's called the nine series. And it's an insider joke. Actually, my wife and I saw my wife last night about it because Brooklyn Nine is like my favorite TV show of all time. And it's Brooklyn Nine is the precinct that the show is about. I didn't come up with it because of that, but it's a nice little story for myself. But nine stands for nine practitioners will share for nine minutes each.

on a topic. So in January, I'm doing an event about outbound in 2024. So outbound has become really hard, right? Just whether it's cold email, social selling, cold calling, whatever it may be for marketing teams, BDRs, AEs, et cetera. It's only gotten really hard over the past couple of years and diminishing returns for sure. So I'm going to have nine experts in nine different areas, right? Nine practitioners, people that are going to talk about social selling, email

Taylor Wells (21:12.514)
cold email, cold calling, conferences, communities, how to tap into communities, all these different topics, and they're gonna get nine minutes each. So it's gonna do two things. And probably my content in general is gonna move more in this direction. Long form content's great, don't get me wrong. And doing deep dives for a long period of time, like I love listening to a three hour podcast is next to the next person. We've seen a trend of that and going in that direction.

The problem with long form content is you have to be so engaging, you have to be so unique to really stand out. And thankfully, there's a lot of you really amazing and unique people out there to create long form content and B2B and especially professional stuff. I don't think for me personally, I don't think I don't listen to a lot of long business podcasts unless it's very, very often I do it because it's just I don't know. You know, it's boring.

It's usually too drawn out. It's not interesting enough. It's too anecdotal. It's not practical enough. So I think I'm trying to create a combination of short form and long form. So you get these hits of like knowledge, right? Each expert gets nine minutes. So it's, I'm also trying to create constraint, right? I'm trying to filter down to the most important takeaways you should implement this year, right?

None of the fluff none of the intros none of the anything else Not that there's not a place for that and if you know If it's an interesting guess you can get into that but in general these events are really focused on how do you get? As much value as quickly as possible. So as I'm actually kind of playing in both worlds on one level I am providing a long-form experience rights 90 minutes the whole events 90 minutes Nine experts nine minutes each right nine different topics overall one

One main topic, nine subtopics that relate to the main topic. And so it's a long form experience, right? Where ultimately I'm trying to get people to consume, you know, long form amount of content, but it's short form enough that you can keep people's engagement and it's practical enough that folks are going to actually going to have somebody to take away with them. Even if they don't get somebody from each segment, they might get one thing from each segment. If that's one thing for me, that's nine practical takeaways. That's huge. I can't, I don't remember the last time I spent 90 minutes in a virtual event.

Taylor Wells (23:32.702)
and a webinar and a podcast where I got nine takeaways. So if they can get one awesome takeaway from each segment, then that would be super powerful. So I think the time constrained will help, hopefully, the speakers, the practitioners create content that's super unique and just very powerful versus when you have 30 minutes or 60 minutes or 90 minutes, you kind of, you end up, you don't create content, you don't have to...

time constraints, right? You don't have constraints in general. I think actually as the older I get, the more I realize the constraints actually help you. They make you refine, they make you go deeper, they protect you from going into areas you don't need to go. And so that's where maybe even in this show, right? Like I'm at 24 minutes recording right now. I maybe have gone on tangents that I shouldn't have gone on, right? That I haven't given you the best use of your time because I don't have a time constraint, right? I could talk for another 30 minutes.

So that's where this idea of time constraint, and actually one of my clients, Search Tides, Greg Brooks came up with this term that he uses in general for SEO, and they talk about right for time constrained users, right? And I love that concept, because we're all super time constrained. There's so much content out there. You're competing with everyone else. They can just swipe, right? They can flip onto something else more engaging. So how can you create content for time constrained people? And that's the...

the impetus of these events, these nine series is practical, right? Super practical going deep on each one of these topics giving you something really insightful but creating time constraints to make sure the guests and so I'm naming it. It's kind of the beat the tick-tock of B2B go to market events and my idea is to give you really something super impactful. So I'm going to do a monthly event. I'm going to do topics like outbound inbound partnerships.

customer marketing, all sorts of different content, all sorts of different topics that relate to go to market that I'm gonna have experts come on and they're gonna do this deep dive in this unique format called the 99 series. Nine practitioners, nine minutes each, all talking about a subtopic that relates to a main topic, right? First one will be in January 18th. I'll put the link as well in the notes for you to check it out and register. Should be a great time, super insightful. And...

Taylor Wells (25:58.014)
And then the other kind of benefits of the events are lead generation. So people are gonna register for these events and I'm hoping to drive thousands of new leads for the show, for the newsletter, for my business in general. And a great way to generate leads, it's gonna have that time constraint content element to it. I can invite people to attend, which is just kind of interesting. And maybe eventually I'll invite people to watch the show via.

email or whatnot, but you can email people, invite them to the show. There's just so many powerful ways to market an event versus a podcast that I'm hoping to drive ultimately more invites and do more creative marketing. I'll probably do a show, an episode on that, of what my learnings are from the 99 show, and some more on that as we get into the new year. Awesome, more speakers to tap into the audiences. So I have, every week I have usually a guest on.

Well, with these events, I'm gonna have nine guests for each event each month. So over the year, that's almost over 100 different guests for this series, right? So I'm gonna be able to tap into all their audiences. They're gonna help promote this event. And I'm already seeing that. I'm already getting folks for this upcoming event in January. I'm getting in front of people I've never been able to get in front of before, right? Because of those guests. So it's gonna kinda accelerate all of that. And then more...

Guest speaking. Yeah. So yeah, those are kind of the main things focus on next year content getting more practical Getting folks on the front line, right? We're finding that I'll still have some thought leaders in there I'll saw some people that are very interesting that I just like I mean this person's super interesting. I have to have them on the show Um, I have a couple of those episodes coming out in january. I'm like, oh man This person wrote this book super interesting. I have to have them on the show Um, but in general i'm moving more towards practitioners versus thought leaders

Number two, events. I'm gonna be doing the nine-nine series. Check those out. Different go-to-market motions, go-to-market tactics and strategies, right? Whether it's inbound, outbound, partnerships, all that fun stuff. And we're gonna have all those practitioners come on and give you a really, hopefully, intense, packed full kind of the TikTok of B2B go-to-market events where it's just really getting your dopamine fixed of go-to-market content.

Taylor Wells (28:13.662)
And then also gonna be having more, I'm gonna do more guest speaking. So I'm gonna go on other podcasts and share my thought leadership around go to market, around demand gen. I'll repurpose that for the show. So if I do guest speaking, I'll repurpose that. So you can kind of hear some of my experiences, things I'm learning, some of the tactics I'm learning. I don't do that as much for my show. I probably will do some of those throughout the year. I'm like, hey, here's a deep dive into something I'm learning. Or here's a deep dive into something that I found really interesting. And then,

I also will do one-off shows and more guest speaking. And then last but not least, I'm gonna continue to refine the audience and topics. I love your feedback. Please email me, send me a note on LinkedIn. I love to hear what content you like, what do you not like, what do you wanna hear more of. If you're in a specific industry, I'd love to learn what would you love a show around a specific area, but in general, what topics have you enjoyed of the show? What would you like to hear more about? Please, I love to hear your feedback.

as I continue to refine the topics, the audience, and grow from there. So it's been an awesome year. Thank you, I really value, and I'm super grateful for everyone that's listened to the show and followed along. Really excited for 2024 and how it's gonna grow and opportunities to learn myself, right? I've learned a ton over these 45 episodes and then ultimately hopefully be able to provide more value for you so you can grow your business more effectively, grow to your B2B business.

go to market better, get customers better, and ultimately serve people better. So thanks again, everyone for listening. This will be my last show for the year, so I'll see you in January. Happy holidays and take care, everyone.