Content Strategy and Growing a Content Business with Brooklin Nash and Sam Hembree

One of the rewards of growing a B2B tech content studio has been meeting other PR and content marketing entrepreneurs who have grown similar businesses and can share strategies on entrepreneurship itself as well as the disciplines we practice. This interview marked the opportunity to connect with Brooklin Nash, co-founder, with his wife, Rebecca Nash, of Nash Content Consulting, a fast-growing B2B tech-focused content marketing agency, and Sam Hembree, the agency’s director of creative and client services. 

I met Brooklin months ago when he reached out to me over LinkedIn, content freelancer to content freelancer. Since then, his business has grown a great deal, as has Sharp Pen. We discussed Brooklin’s experience building a B2B tech content business, including content strategy, sales and marketing in our business, growing a content company, and some of the cultural norms around millennial entrepreneurship. Sam, an expert in the social aspects of content marketing, among others, weighed in on social strategies with a focus on LinkedIn.

Let me start with a strategy question. The way I often frame what we do to new clients is that we’re going to create a publication of sorts geared toward their readers (i.e., prospective and current customers and other target audiences). How do you think at a high level about the goals of a B2B tech content strategy?

I come from a background where maybe five years ago I would've conflated content marketing strategy with SEO strategy because that’s the most direct way you can get in front of your audience and measure impact. I’ve realized SEO serves a specific piece of the content marketing puzzle, but it’s not the same thing as content marketing at all.

We’re moving more towards putting together a content marketing strategy that focuses on education and engagement. And then it’s up to individual teams to figure out the best way to plug that in and drive revenue results from that content, whether that’s field marketing, demand generation, sales enablement … our goal is to focus on the voice and the interest of the customer. 

How do you think about how to balance more quantitative factors such as SEO with the storytelling capabilities you need to do content marketing well? How do you think about that balance in terms of your own development of those skills and building a team? 

The number-one thing we’re looking for is solid writing. You said you have a journalism background. An academic background can be good for this.

The ability to do original research and synthesize what you find into something that’s original, engaging, organized, compelling — finding the shortest path to the information that’s out here. The number-one thing in building a team is writing and research ability.

Do you feel everyone on your team or all of your freelancers have those dual qualitative-quantitative abilities? Or are you thinking, ‘Ok, I’m going to spearhead this account, and I’m going to bring in this freelancer because they bring this other thing to the table’?

Sam and I are on a handful of accounts. We have 22 clients currently. We’re on execution for four of those, still creating briefs and editing for the others. Where we want to be 3 months from now is Sam and I very much owning that relationship with the client and the strategy, quality assurance — still being account managers, but then we want to have managing editors who own the execution. The editors should be able to put research in, put briefs together, and work with contractors on the writing and the drafts themselves. We have our first editor starting. Hopefully, we’ll have another in a couple months, so we’ll be more removed from execution, but there’s a lot of reorg that needs to go into that. That’s where Sam comes in.

Sam: We’ll still be a part of every client interaction, managing the relationship but working on pulling out of execution. 

Brooklin: This is honestly the harder part of scaling. I still enjoy that work — the drafts I’m writing this week — taking a step back and figuring out how to document those processes and review standards is more difficult than me jumping in with a draft or Sam jumping in with social media posts. Those elements are still fun to us.

Sam: Figuring out how to take it out of your brain and give it to someone else so they can replicate it is tricky.

It’s part of getting really good people that you can do less and less of that prep work. I used to have a client who would send me two sentences and say, ‘Write the blog post.’ The better your people are, the less prep you need to do. There’s also an interesting talent acquisition question for people in our business, which is where you find more junior talent. Where have you sourced talent, and how are you thinking about the talent pipeline?

We probably want to be hiring full-time writers. What we’re trying to do is find those who can and do go above and beyond with the writing and have that interest in a long-term investment in content marketing. We want to take them from writer to the managing editor role where they can help us with strategy, quality, and research.

Going back to what you said, a big part of the value I’ve offered clients the last few years is the ability to take a 20-minute conversation or two sentences in an email and turn that into a draft. But I don’t want to put that on our writers. I want to find the right folks who work within our team who can take that information from clients and put together robust briefs to set our writers up for success.

We met on LinkedIn, and you have an active presence there. What role has LinkedIn played in growing the business? What advice do you have for others on LinkedIn who are posting regularly and trying to foster a larger presence?

For better or worse, mostly for better, LinkedIn has been the number-one factor for the growth of our business — [getting the founders] to a spot where we could bring in Sam and grow beyond ourselves.

It was a total accident. I got active on LinkedIn because at my first startup job, the head of growth left. I was head of content, so I got more active on LinkedIn because that’s where the sales audience was. Two and a half years later, here we are. Doing outreach in the Sales Hacker role was a big part of that, too. A big part of our job was just networking with people in B2B and hearing their stories and helping them work through content. 

Sam: I like how consistent Brooklin has been on LinkedIn. I don’t necessarily post five days per week, but I post frequently enough that it gets people’s attention and maintains an ongoing conversation where people are interested in what I'm doing next. I have almost 3,000 followers, and that’s been just through semi-frequent consistency and keeping up with relationships.

A lot of content marketing is old-school relationship building. The same seems to be true of LinkedIn. You can post great content, and people might like it, and that’s good, but a lot of the juice comes from building relationships around that content and connecting with new people.

I think that’s 100% true. People think being active on LinkedIn means posting, but that’s only a piece of it. What’s been most beneficial is building offline conversations, and it probably goes against [the traditional] time management advice of being careful with your calendar. The last couple of years, I’ve said yes to pretty much any call, whether it’s with freelancers, marketers, or sales people. There’s a bunch of reasons to get on calls, and those are the relationships that have stuck. Even if they didn’t turn into a project in a couple of months, they’ve come back months later as a referral or direct request for work.

Other freelancers, too — we tried hiring contractors a couple of years ago, and it didn’t go as well as this time around. That’s because I’ve been talking to content marketers and freelancers, so this time when I said, ‘We need freelancers,’ we’ve gotten a much better response from more qualified people. It’s more about relationships than the post that gets 700 likes.

Sam: The people who I’ve seen do really well on LinkedIn are people who’ve been super human. When you talk about your weekend or share a TikTok, when you show who you are as a person outside of work … it helps build relationships. People like seeing that in-between content. There’s a lot of experts talking about the end goal. Talking about how you get there is very valuable — figuring it out as you go, for example, ‘Here’s how we changed pricing,’ is very helpful.

Well, let’s talk about pricing specifically. Brooklin, you’ve helped me a lot with this. I came to marketing from industries where there’s a lot less money. You’ve been helpful by sharing rates and being open about money in terms of what your business charges, minimums, how much volume you’re doing. How do you think about being so open about rates and money?

In terms of sharing it, I was there for the first five years of freelancing where it was very difficult to know how much you could make. I was charging five cents a word and then eight and then was excited when it got to fifteen, and then I realized I shouldn’t even have been charging per word but per project.

There’s not a lot of transparency in freelancing about what rates should be, how to do pricing, how to increase rates and package them. If you can help other freelancers who were at a spot where I was six years ago, it’s worth it.

What sales tips do you have for folks? Relationships are important here, too; nurturing the pipeline is about building your network, taking calls. Another issue is that as you grow your business and get a lot more leads, you also see a lot more leads go cold. How do you think about nurturing the pipeline and closing deals?

That’s another growth area for this year — actually having a CRM where we have notes and a follow-up schedule. The last couple of years, it’s been me in a spreadsheet saying, ‘They’re not quite ready; let’s follow up in March.’ And then on March 29, I go into the spreadsheet and follow up.

In terms of conversations, I think [it’s about] just being open and direct about what you do and don’t do and how you can be helpful. I’ve probably gotten on too many discovery calls where if I'd qualified them, I would've realized they’re not a good fit. But it’s been fun and interesting to get on those calls, and then on the call, I’ll say, ‘This sounds like a great fit or it doesn’t seem like a good fit in terms of budget or type of content or audience,’ and in that case, I try to refer them to somebody else.

It’s not unique sales advice, but it’s more applicable to service businesses. If you can jump on a call and be helpful, whether you get them as a client or not, that can benefit you down the line.