How to Get 10X More Traffic From Content You Already Have (with Ross Simmonds, Foundation Marketing)

Hey, it's Dave. So Zoom webinars and events has made our recent exit five live sessions way more pro lately. But don't just take my word for it. Check this out. This is what Kelly B said. She said, I compare all other webinars now against exit five. I love that. And look, in a world of AI Slop, we just want to make something that's actually worth going to. It's not easy to get an hour out of your day. I'm just the on air talent, though. So I'm going to kick it over to Marissa and Maria. This is our exit five live production team, our content team here at exit five, since they're the ones actually making this all happen. Marissa. I've been doing B2B content a long time. I know it's hard to hold attention for more than 30 seconds. Let alone a whole webinar, but zoom webinars helps recently. We've had nearly 2000 registrants over 500 live and hundreds of hours of watch time on our sessions. Maria, what would you say is driving that it all starts with prep. We do up to seven hours per session, choosing a topic, prep calls, building the run of show and so much more. We zoom webinars and events, everything's in one place, registration, emails, polls and analytics. So it's simple to run that cycle every two weeks. At showtime, I handed back to Marissa in Zoom's production studio. With Zoom's production studio, I can set the scenes in advance. So on the big day, I just send them live with speakers and content already in place. Clean transitions, crystal clear audio and video. I feel like I'm running a big game back there. So this is why our webinars have been crushing it lately. Look, they just said we're spending seven hours per session on this. Don't just take our word for a come and see firsthand. We run these every other Friday, it's called exit five live, now powered by Zoom webinars and events. So come and check us out. See this whole thing live. And if you want to learn more about using Zoom at your company, check out zoom.com/exit5. That's zoom.com/exit5. Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Convertive, a B2B marketing agency that helps enterprise teams build an AI-powered go-to-market strategy. Q4 is the time of year when having a great agency partner matters more than ever. If you're shopping for a new agency, Convertive is worth looking into. They work with marketing and operations leaders to help grow revenue across the business and AEO. One of the things I know you're thinking about right now is one of their specialties. Trusted by companies like DocuSign, DataBank, and Constructor, Convertive builds on the search and marketing work you're already doing and helps optimize your site. So more of your buyers find you and turn it into pipeline. Right now, they're offering exit five listeners a free AI search review. They'll run the questions your buyers are actually asking through your Google and AI tools, show you how you stack up against competitors and tell you what's worth fixing. If you're looking for a refresh of your AEO strategy in 2027, this AI search review with Convertive is a great place to start. Check it out. It's convertiv.com/exit5. That's convertiv.com/exit5 and you can also see the link in the share notes. We're listening to the Dave Gerard show. Hey, it's Dasha. And the episode that you're about to hear was recorded live in person in Silvermont at exit five's drive event. I sat down with marketing legend Ross Simmons, Ross is the founder and CEO of not one, but two companies. One is called distribution AI and one is called foundation marketing. Ross is an expert when it comes to educating marketers around what it's like to actually get the most out of the content that they're creating. He is the king of content distribution and that's exactly what we spend some time talking about in this short but mighty episode. I also ask Ross what worked for him in his team in 2026 and what that they're making for 2027. I hope you enjoy this episode. All right, Ross. Welcome to the pod. Thanks for having me. It's not your usual podcast environment. What a place. It's crazy. Excited for this. First time in Vermont. Second time in Vermont. First time doing a podcast outside. Yeah. Honestly, me too. The sun is beaming down on us. It's good. Got to get the vitamin D. This is your second drive. Second drive. Second drive. Excited to be back. You went to the very first. You went to the OG drive. We went to the inaugural. inaugural drive event. And it was a blast. It was so much fun. So I'm excited to be back. Did you have any takeaways from the first drive? The first drive. Wow. Take away. Take away. Take away are like things that you did after drive that you wouldn't have otherwise done. Before the podcast, Ross said, "Ask me some hard-hitting questions." I've never been asked before and I said, "Say less." I've never been asked that. I think one of the biggest takeaways that I took from that was that AI was actually going to be playing a massive role in the way in which we worked. And it came true, which is fascinating, because it's been like, like, 30 some months since then. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's changed literally everything. Yeah. I understand. We should introduce you. Please introduce who the heck are you? Yeah. What do you do? Why are you here? I run multiple companies, primarily known for foundation marketing as well as distribution. AI. I'm helping enterprise brands get their story spread. I've been one of the OGs in the world of distribution and Reddit and marketing and content, all of that good stuff and have always been in B2B and SaaS. Say more about the distribution of content. You help enterprise companies distribute their content, how? Yeah. So it started off with this belief that a lot of companies were creating great content, but just letting it collect us. I would talk to companies, CMOs, executives, and they would produce white papers, ebooks, all of this stuff, and they wouldn't do anything with it. They wouldn't promote it on LinkedIn, they wouldn't share it on meat Reddit. At the time, there's a site called SlideShare. They weren't using that, medium, none of those things. And I was like, the biggest problem in marketing is that we're creating things and not actually spreading them. So I started to talk about organic distribution, built foundation around that concept of distributing your stories through Reddit through SEO, through paid, through all of these different channels, and then as you fast forward through AI, AI is now using all of those different distribution surfaces to translate back into the LLM's answers to questions. So our services have increased in demand because of that. In addition to that, I launched distribution.ai, recognizing like, hey, software is definitely still a key part of the world in which we live in, so can we build a platform that allows brands and marketers in their teams, sales executives, et cetera, distribute their stories online at scale. How has AI changed how you view distribution of content? Does it make it harder? Is it more important, less important, easier? Like, how has the dynamic changed? Because you started before AI was like a big thing, say some more. There's two key things that have changed in distribution with the rise of AI. One, it has never been noisier. There's a lot of slop. There's a lot of trash content being produced. You can go on any channel and you'll see it. A lot of people like to like pick on sites like Reddit, et cetera, but it's everywhere. It's on X, it's on threads, it's on LinkedIn, it's on Kora, every site you go on is filled with a lot of slop. That creates an opportunity if you can create authentic, valuable human content and then put it on these platforms, you can win. But it's noisier than ever before. What AI has also done is it's given us a superpower as humans. We now have the ability to distribute great content, valuable stories across multiple platforms for a fraction of the cost that it used to take. It used to take hours to listen to a podcast and find the key moments that you have to cut up and then send it off to an editor and chop it up. Now, AI can do a lot of that for you. I think it's created a lot of challenges, but the opportunity that it is presented as remastered as well. Can we take a real example of a piece of content? Let's take a blog post because everyone's producing blog posts and maybe with AI even more. So you have a blog post, a lot of marketers will stop there. If I'm working with Ross, what am I doing with that blog post to distribute it? Yes. As long as the blog post is good, I will do something with it. Let's assume it's not a blog post. I don't want to just like send out something that's trash, so assuming that it's a good blog post. The first thing we're going to do is just send it on social. So if you have a LinkedIn account, you have an ex account, a threads account, a blue sky message on your name it, we're probably going to write a piece of content that can promote it on those different channels. LinkedIn's probably going to be a little bit longer, have a strong hook and then send it out that way. But you're not just going to do that once you're going to schedule it, so it goes out the next week as well. Because the people who are online today at that moment aren't going to be the same people that are on next week, so you're going to reshare it the next day. You're also going to send it out to your email newsletter. You're also going to tap into your sales team and hopefully ask them to send it out to their contacts. Anybody who's in the pipeline that might have gone quiet, they're going to send it out to them. I would recommend that you also create a video on the blog post, ideally a long form video that you can then chop up into shorts. Take those shorts. You're going to share them as individual shorts on Reels, on TikTok, on all those platforms. Hopefully, you're also going to share it on your stories and then share it on LinkedIn again. At that moment, you're probably going to have a cup of coffee and then you're going to ask yourself, what else can I do? You can take the blog post and then upload it to Reddit, submit it into key subreddits that are relevant to your niche in your audience. Then, after those pieces are submitted to Reddit, I would say you're probably going to also want to create like a carousel or something that can go on Instagram or LinkedIn with the slides functionality. From there, if you're really feeling ambitious, I would advise that you just put up a story talking with the blog post and then put a green screen behind you so you check the link and then people will swipe up and go to it. I think that would be a nice add-on. From there, you're going to go back to those social media channels because it's probably been two weeks and reposted again on those and then schedule a few more to go it next week and the week after that. Holy heck, I am not repurposing content enough at all. For the marketer listening to this, that's like, all right, I can do all those things, but is it worth it? What are you seeing? You work with clients, so you get to see the before and after. Not just with one client, but across multiple. But on average, are you seeing like, if you do this, what happens to your business? We've seen like 10x the amount of traffic to multiple brands, websites. and their content because they actually distributed it. A brand came to us a few months back. They had a white paper that they created. It spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, design, stats, surveys, all of this stuff. And they promoted it once on LinkedIn. They got like six leads. The right approach is to do what I just said and then distribute it and start to amplify it, et cetera. And from that, you're just going to see the leads start to trickle in. We've had one example where we created a piece of content for a client. And instead of taking the traditional route, we distribute it, we amplify it, et cetera. That content asset that was created back in like three years ago, we continued to update it, distribute it, and promote it, is now cited in the LLIMS consistently across some of the most priority prompts in their category. And they're generating leads on the back of this asset from like three years ago. And this is the key that people don't realize is that it's a long game. Like when you play the long game and you're willing to distribute your stories, the ROI can be infinite, which is why I always say, create ridiculously content once and then distribute it forever. And if you do that, you'll just win. - How often should you be creating original content? Like when do you know, okay, I've squeezed as much as possible to this piece of content. Like we're gonna just let that live somewhere and move on to the next piece. - Well, Nike said just do it for a very long time. And I think a lot of marketers overestimate how many people they actually reach, underestimate how much they have actually promoted things and they should probably lean a little bit more towards the promotion side. If you create something that's absolutely ridiculously good, you should promote that until the wheels fall off. There is no point in which I would say, stop promoting it unless you can say with high confidence that you've reached 100% of the target market in your demographic. And I would argue that simply due to math, that is likely impossible because new people have entered the market. And at the end of that, 12 months, guess what? New people have just entered the market who didn't have that resource. And if you update it annually, you are providing new value to the people who subscribe the first time. So I think you can do it consistently as long as you actually focus on content excellence up front. - Let's talk about the content excellence piece. - Yeah. - It sounds like you have a high bar for a good piece of content. - For sure. - What's like the menu for this is genuinely good. - The best content does what I like to call the four es. It educates, engages, entertains, and empowers people. Now it's hard to do all four, but if you crack that, you will have a piece of content that is super successful. So in the educational side, you provide people with information they never have before, engaging, it gets people talking, it might have a little bit of controversy, it might be kind of contrarian in nature, entertaining, you should try to make people feel some type of emotion. I like to make people feel like they can do anything, which leans in well to the next E, which is empowering. So when you make people feel empowered that they read this and they feel like they can go and do something special, then they'll go and do that. And I think the beauty of content is in the idea that one piece of content can fundamentally change anybody's life. Like I grew up in Hal Fax, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, small town, not a lot of people talking about marketing, not a lot of people doing a lot of things. And I've been able to work with some of the biggest brands in the world because I committed to this idea that if I give value to the internet, the internet will give me value back, and it's unlocked a ridiculous amount of opportunities. So to anyone listening, anybody watching, my piece of advice to you is you are one piece of content away from a fundamentally different life. So just create great things. Publish it out there. Don't be afraid of the cranes. Don't be afraid to get roasted in the group chat. Just do your thing and watch what happens. - Hey, it's Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Optimizely. If you wanna know what AI agents can actually do for a marketing team, Optimizely is where I'd point you to right now for a real example. Last month, we ran an X to five live session where a bunch of our members showed off their best AI agent use cases and McKeill, director of AI Innovation at Optimizely actually won the whole session. He showed us how he used Optimizely's AI agent platform to run an ABM campaign that gave 2,000 accounts their own landing pages built from signals like job postings, press releases, and leadership changes. That's like the holy grail of ABM, by the way. Optimizely's agent platform is built specifically for you, the B2B marketer. You can build your own agents like McKeill did or pull from a directory of 50 plus pre-built ones made just for marketing use cases all in one place. They also just launched virtual teammates. These are digital members of the team that learn over time and can join meetings, complete tasks, support campaigns, and keep your website optimized. If you're being asked to look into AI agents right now, Optimizely should be at the top of your list. Go and see how they can help you reclaim your time and build cool stuff just like McKeill did. Check them out at optimizely.com/exit5. Hey, Steve, today's episode is brought to you by compound growth marketing. They're a full funnel, demand-gen agency that I've personally hired twice. Yep, before I was just a thought leader, I was a real marketer, and CGM was one of the best agencies that I worked with. They help high growth software companies show up earlier in the buying journey where potential customers are forming opinions about which product to use. They've helped in enterprise cybersecurity company grow pipeline 168% year over year with full funnel media, and an HR tech company grow 48% through paid search, and they can do the same for you. They offer a combination of full funnel paid advertising strategy and execution, AEO, and a dedicated go-to-market engineering team. Everything CGM does gets tracked, measured, and improved over time. That means more pipeline for you, and this works because they were started by an actual former VP of marketing who really gets this space that you work in in B2B. So visit compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. To see how they can help you meet your 2027 revenue goals, that's compoundgrowthmarketing.com/exit5. - And you're living proof of that. - On the other side of climbing Mt. Crinch. - Mt. Crinch. - Is Mt. Cool. - That's it. That's it. - You've got to play the game. - You do. You do. - What is a piece of content that's changed your life? - Ooh, there's so many. - Let's break it down like this, okay? - Yeah. - Blog posts that's changed your life. - Okay. - And then we'll do a book 'cause it's a little bit longer. - Yeah, so the first blog post that changed my life, I wrote when I was a young pop. I think I was, oh, there's two. I'm gonna give you two. - Yeah, please. - So the first one that changed my life was a blog post I wrote before I had a job in advertising. - Okay. - But with this blog post that it was titled 14 books that you need to read to get a job in advertising. And then all of the agents, I know. - The irony is not lost on me. - Yeah, and then every agency in the city reached out to me and they're like, man, if he's reading all these books, he's probably worth hiring. - Right. - So that got me my interviews with a lot of agencies. And then I wrote a blog post. This is when Gen Z was still young and hip and cool. I wrote an article about five things that marketers need to know to do marketing to Gen Z. And I was living in my parents' basement, drinking instant coffee, probably an overdraft, like no money. And Bacardi comes across the piece and they're like, "Hey, can we fly you out "from Nova Scotia to Miami to present to our C-suite?" And I was like, "Well, mom." (laughing) And they were like, "Sure, do your thing." So then I flew down and I was like, "Okay, this internet thing is real." I can create content on the internet, reach brands that are like globally known and unlocks amazing opportunities. So I kept going. - That's amazing. - Yeah, it was cool. - Have you worked with Bacardi since? - No, I went B2B. I was in the consumer world as like too much emotions. Let's just stick to capitalism and-- - Wait, what do you mean too much emotions? - With consumer marketing. It's very much a emotional driven purchase. So I did a lot of time in consumer marketing. I sold coach, kick out bars, all that stuff, Canadian consumer goods. And from that, what I realized is there was two things I didn't like. One, you have to really go deep into all of the different layers of a human like an onion and have to play with a lot of different emotions. And that was complex. It was fun and enjoyable, but you're not just playing and trying to understand the emotions of your audience. You're also trying to understand the emotions of your clients who might respond negatively to certain things that don't actually influence the buyer in a bunch of drama. So that was difficult. And B2B is much more linear in nature. It's like, can you solve this problem? And I will give you a certain amount of cash to solve this problem. And it was very much more cut and dry. So I started leaning into that and loved it. I still love consumer for what it provides the market in terms of intelligence. And I love the psychology of marketing. But I like to apply it to B2B because it's just a-- I don't want to say it's an easier game, but it's a-- - B2B is in the best of all four roles. - Exactly. - Exactly. - I got that. - And it's easier to innovate because in B2B most people are slow to respond to the changes that consumers see is quicker. - Is there a brand or a company? It can be a client of yours. It can be just a company that you like that is doing the four keys really well. Like if I'm a marketer and I'm like, all right, yeah, I want to engage with a piece of content. I just want to see what good looks like. What something they should check out. - There's a lot of them. I would look at brands like Kamba have done a ridiculously well. HubSpot is doing a ridiculously well with their shift to YouTube videos and the content that they're putting out there. Bitly does an amazing job with it as well. There's a lot of brands in B2B that are starting to really like lean into educational, engaging, entertaining, and empowering content. But it's always the ones that are just like willing to do things that everybody else is and then they get copied and then the industry starts to catch on. But those are a few brands that do it well. - Love it. What was your biggest win in 2026? - The biggest win that I had in 2026 would have probably been a lot of the partnerships. Like I've been partnering with a lot of brands to create content, helping them like with their actual stories through my team at foundation. And foundation has just grown and built an amazing team. So I would say like the biggest win is actually building the team. The team that we have at foundation and the work that they do to be able to go into some of these top brands in the world [BLANK_AUDIO] their culture amid so much change would probably be my biggest win, even though I didn't actually do it. So my biggest win of 2026, let me put this on a bumper sticker, would be the ability to create a culture where my team can go into these organizations, do best in class work, and really move the needle for these clients on an innovative problem, which is AI visibility, and then translating that into pipeline. It's been really cool to see, and the fact that they're doing it without me and so many of them are better than me now. I read it at LinkedIn and stuff like that is just like Chef's Kiss. That's what it's all about. That's beautiful. We were just talking with Dave about how building a great team is like the secret sauce to building anything great. Yeah. You've hired a number of people. Yeah. How do you hire great people? What have you learned? I've learned the most important thing to hire great people is to be ridiculously intentional of holding up your values of what you care about as a business, and then showing them to the person who's interested in the role in seeing how they react to it. And then from there, making sure that there's no surprises on the other end. Give them big problems. Be transparent with all of the words. So there's no like, oh, that was a trick, and then just let them go and thrive. And if you do that, you can win. I think what also has helped us is we eat our own dog food. We promote content. We create software. We do innovative things. We speak out events. We empower our team. We have an unlimited book budget because we are so committed to learning and professional development that people give books just sent to them all the time. We're big on living the values that kind of started with foundation and giving people the capacity to do it. And then I think great people just get interested and then they show up. And we're also fully remote. So we have people who are all the way in Spain through all across Canada, the US, and beyond. So it's been it's been fun. What you just said, the being transparent about what happens on the inside. We call that the anti-cell and it works so well. You're like, look, here are all the reasons you should join. And here are all the reasons you probably don't want to join. And if someone's like, heck yeah, sign me up for that. Like I always say, if you don't like ambiguity, like if you want a really clear swim lane, series a startup, probably not the vibe. And if someone's like, oh yeah, like that's kind of not it. Great. Like we both avoided a bad fit. Yeah. And if someone's like, no, I actually want to be wearing like 12 hats, sign me up. Like perfect. Yeah. It's a good fit. Come aboard. Yeah. Make sense. I love that. Is there a trend that you're hoping stays in 2026 and doesn't follow us to 2027 in marketing? I think it would be manipulating Reddit. I'm a big redditor. I've loved Reddit. Favorite subreddit real quick. Favorite subreddit. Our fantasy football because I am a big football guy. Big football guy. Okay. I spend a lot of time there. But I also like I could geek out. I like best of Reddit update. That's the Reddit is good. So there's a lot of good ones. So yeah, I'm a big redditor. I think people spamming Reddit needs to stay in 2026. It's killing a lot of the good value that comes out of this channel. Pre all of the slot getting dropped into it. I think it's a ridiculously valuable platform still today. There's billions of dollars worth of deals and B2B that are being influenced by Reddit that people don't even realize because Reddit is such a powerful training day. A powerful training data platform for things like Gemini etc. But marketers are starting to mess it up a little bit. So I hope that stays in 2026. Do you include white hat redditing? Have you heard that? That's great. That's good. We like that. Yeah. White hat redditing is the idea that you go into authentic as a brand. Yeah. Yeah. Simply chime in when it is. Yeah. You know, I work at proton. I love that. I love that. I eat that up. I think that's exactly how brand should be doing it. Be transparent. Add value. Educate, engage, entertain and power. If you do that on Reddit, you'll win. But if you go in and every single time your comment is, hey, you should buy my software. Hey, we are the best. We are the top. And you're just using quarters like pretending to be like pretending to be someone else that you're not. Yeah. Like I would say that needs to stay in 2026. What is your biggest bet for 2027? My biggest bet for 2027 would be that there's going to be a massive surge in in real life events. I think people have loved the internet and AI and social and all of that. There's a real desire amongst buyers to get together with real people build those connections in person. I've always been a digital first person. I love the internet. I built my career on the internet. But there's something special about going from pixels to flesh. And I think it will never be replaced and amidst the rise of AI, I think it's becoming more and more of a necessity. Hence the reasons why some of the top AI firms in the world are certainly higher for these community and events roles. Pixels to flesh should be a band. That would be a good band. That would be it. Do you plan and like should we start this? Maybe harmonica. I'll pick it up. Okay, you could be the harmonica. I will play. I played the piano as a kid. But I've like since lost it. But I can't lose it. I will bring it back to start this bad because you came up with this. I call it brand name of all time. Cool. Well, before we go. Yeah. Is there anyone that you're like really pumped to see a drive this week? I am pumped to see everyone. I just just love everyone. Love everybody. It's great industry. You're signed up for workshops. I imagine. I am. And you're giving a talk. I am just cook. Just cook. I'm signed up for our talk. So on. Yeah. I'm looking forward to that. Brand has back or something. It's like baby got back. But baby got brand. Yeah. That's so good. So good. It's so good. It's so good to do that. It was great. So excited to see her. Thanks for coming on to the podcast and the outdoors. Road to beer. This is so much fun. That's great. Okay. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, you know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at exit five. And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website exit five dot com. Our mission at exit five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no better place to do that than with us at exit five. There's nearly 5,000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers, building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing you are so you can have a peer group. Or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free. And then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out learn more exit five dot com. And I will see you over there in the community. Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by customer IO. 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