In this episode, Ryan is joined by Sam Gocher, Head of Content at Rocket SaaS, to work through the 5 traps that stop content driving revenue. Most B2B SaaS companies are producing content activity, but when the CEO asks whether any of it is actually generating pipeline, nobody can give them an answer. Ryan and Sam cover why guessing your topics never works, how to extract real thought leadership from time-poor founders, why content and paid teams must stop operating separately, and if your content is not boosted and not helping SEO, you should probably stop making it altogether.

Takeaways:

• Even if you genuinely know your market, asking a thousand of your ICP will tell you far more than a team guessing in a room
• If your content is written purely with AI, any competitor could put their logo on it, and in-house teams or agencies will never know the industry like the founders do
• Get founder buy-in with a small ask: a 15-minute interview every fortnight gives you a transcript that becomes blogs, newsletters and posts. To scale it, pitch one 60-minute studio session a month, which is two episodes and a fortnightly podcast
• Use the thought leaders inside your business who match your audience, because buyers trust their peers far more than a vendor
• Content and paid should never run in silos. Your content team produces something they are proud of, and nobody ever asked whether the paid team intends to put a penny behind it
• If your content is not being boosted and is not helping SEO, almost nobody sees it. Either realign it with paid and SEO, or stop and put the resource elsewhere
• Don’t let all your content sit at the bottom of the funnel. Your top-of-funnel content is super important, and adding a thought leader to the mix gives you plenty tofu content to work with
• Batch your recording, keep a content calendar, repurpose relentlessly, and revive old content that performed well rather than going quiet

In this episode, Ryan steps away from the usual marketing tactics to share the eight books that have had the biggest impact on his career and his business, Rocket SaaS. He covers what each book taught him and how he applied it.

Takeaways:

• Profit First (Mike Michalowicz): Take a set percentage for profit, tax, and your own pay into separate accounts every fortnight, rather than hoping something is left at year-end. Ryan ran this for around a decade
• The Pumpkin Plan (Mike Michalowicz): A pumpkin farmer rips out the rotting pumpkins and replants seeds from the prize winners. Your draining, unprofitable, scope-creeping clients are the rotten ones
• They Ask, You Answer (Marcus Sheridan): This is demand generation before it had a name. Stop hiding pricing and competitor comparisons behind forms and give buyers what they actually want
• Deep Work (Cal Newport): Focused, undistracted work is the only thing that actually advances your career, and it will never happen by accident. Ryan treats it as a ritual - calendar blocked, Slack off, phone in another room, and focusing on one task at a time only
• Key Person of Influence (Daniel Priestley): This book focuses on the five Ps: pitch, publish, product, profile, and partnerships. Ryan credits the accompanying course with saving his business in the early days
• Obviously Awesome (April Dunford): The ten-step framework for positioning and messaging, and the first step towards a genuinely strong marketing function
• Traction (Gino Wickman): Introduces EOS, a system for running a company around its vision, people, data and processes. The part Ryan rates most is the weekly leadership meeting: pull up the numbers that matter, colour-code them, and roundtable anything sitting in the red until you have actions for that week
• The Elon Musk biography (Walter Isaacson). This one focuses on finding the single biggest bottleneck holding the business back and going all in on it, then moving to the next one

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Joe McLaughlin, Rocket SaaS’s Director of Strategy, for a run through the ten things they most often see going wrong with LinkedIn ads. Plenty of B2B SaaS brands have tried the platform, seen no return, and switched it off, while others are seeing a great ROI. Ryan and Joe work through everything on what not to do, from budgets, to targeting, all the way down to the creative that doesn’t convert. If you fix all ten things mentioned in this episode, your LinkedIn goes from a channel you gave up on to one of the highest ROI channels.

Takeaways:

• Poor budget allocation is the most common problem. LinkedIn is expensive, and a large audience with a small budget means you don’t show up regularly. It’s time to shrink that audience
• LinkedIn’s native filters are too broad, so build an account list from the companies actually buying from you
• Targeting the wrong decision makers wastes budget. Check your CRM for who actually requests demos
• Too much bottom-of-funnel activity limits you to the 5% of your audience that are ready to buy. What about the other 95%?
• Busy creative kills performance. People spot an ad instantly, so aim for ten words or less, a big header, and no clutter
• Poor messaging is causing your audience to leave. Name the problem you solve in plain language and skip the buzzwords
• The wrong ad format costs you. Carousels take ten times the effort and rarely stop the scroll. Single image ads drive pipeline
• No retargeting means leaving the fastest conversions to fade away. Sploit your budget roughly 70% cold audience and 30% retargeting
• What happens after the click decides everything. The landing page is where the conversion happens.