[Top Agency Series] Unlocking the Secrets of Content Marketing With Ross Simmonds of Foundation

Ross Simmonds is the Founder and CEO of Foundation, a content marketing agency serving global clients ranging from fast-growing startups to established SaaS companies. As a speaker, angel investor, and author, Ross contributes to the growth of startups and global SaaS companies through strategic content creation and distribution. His methodologies emphasize marketing post-publication and the balance between creation and distribution.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:04] Ross Simmonds discusses how Foundation approaches content marketing with a focus on distribution
• [5:06] Ross’ journey from running a fantasy football blog to a global marketing agency
• [6:45] The importance of niching down and the evolution of industry focus within an agency
• [8:37] Client milestones and the pivotal moment that shaped the trajectory of Foundation
• [17:12] The specific purposes of different types of content
• [21:58] A behind-the-scenes look at Canva’s content creation and distribution strategies
• [25:43] Strategies for crafting content that leverages search intent
• [34:39] Ross explains the power of generative AI in content creation
• [44:50] Tips for embracing personal branding and culture by creating visually engaging content

In this episode…

Have you ever considered the true potential of the content you create? What if there was a way to ensure that the countless hours spent crafting blog posts, videos, or even memes could contribute significantly to your business growth? How does one unlock the true potential of a piece of content?

Content marketing expert Ross Simmonds delves into the intricacies of content marketing and distribution. He shares how his agency, Foundation, applies a unique approach by creating content and actively distributing it across various platforms to reach the right audience. He explains the concept of a content portfolio, urging businesses to think of content like financial assets, each serving a specific strategic purpose. With anecdotes from his work with large SaaS companies like Canva, Ross provides actionable insights into leveraging search intent to dominate SEO rankings.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Ross Simmonds, Founder and CEO of Foundation, about leveraging content creation and distribution strategies. Ross discusses how Foundation approaches content marketing with a focus on distribution, his journey from a fantasy football blog to a global marketing agency, and the power of generative AI in content creation.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Ross Simmonds on LinkedIn
• Ross Simmonds
• Foundation Marketing
• Create Like the Greats
• Create Once, Distribute Forever: How Great Creators Spread Their Ideas and How You Can Too by Ross Simmonds
• 5 Great Insights to Keep in Mind When Targetting Generation Y

Special Mention(s):

• Second Bite Podcast
• MozCon
• ElevenLabs
• Midjourney
• HeyGen
• Giphy
• Loom
• ClickUp
• GifJif
• Smith.ai

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “From WWE Wrestler to Popular Podcast Host with Colt Cabana of ColtCabana.com” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Fired From His Dream As A WWE Wrestler With Colt Cabana of ColtCabana.com [One Question]” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[One-Question] Growing Your Business Through a Recession with Rand Fishkin of SparkToro” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “If you invest 20 hours to create something, you are doing a disservice to yourself to only spend 20 seconds promoting it.”
• “Brand is now more important than it ever was. Brand makes all of those things like LTV, CAC, and demand generation easier today.”
• “We’ve gotten into this habit of just creating and not promoting. We need to share and promote our content.”
• “Recognizing that two similar words can be very different in search intent is crucial to SEO success.”
• “Some of the best content ideas and even podcasts will never reach their full potential because the creator didn’t know how to promote that idea.”

Action Steps:

1. Develop a content portfolio strategy that aligns with your business goals: This enhances your marketing efforts by allowing you to invest in content assets with purpose and intent, much like a financial portfolio.
2. Embrace content distribution as much as content creation: Sharing and promoting content is key to maximizing its reach and impact, turning your marketing efforts into tangible results.
3. Utilize AI tools for innovative content creation: Tools like 11 Labs and Midjourney showcase the potential of AI in crafting engaging and high-quality content efficiently, which can revolutionize your content marketing practices.
4. Focus on search intent when creating SEO-content: Understanding the different motivators behind user searches leads to more targeted and effective content.
5. Incorporate company culture into your content: Showcasing your company’s ethos helps in attracting talent and provides an additional touchpoint for engagement with potential clients and partners.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Ross Simmonds of foundationinc.co, and Ross, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast. Since this is part of the top agency series, there was a really good one I did with Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech. He’s had an agency since 1995 and so we talked about the landscape of the internet business, agency life back then, and kind of the ups and downs through the journey. So that was a really interesting one.

Also, Todd Taskey was another good one. He helped pair agencies with private equity. He actually helps sell agencies. And so he has a Second Bite Podcast, and he has agencies come on and talk about the sale of their business. But it’s not like the traditional sale. It’s called the second bite, because they’ll sell the private equity. The Private Equity sells again. So sometimes those companies are making more on the second bite than they do on the first. So it’s just interesting to hear the agency, space, valuations and everything like that on that one. And you can check out more on inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25.

At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. We’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. Ross, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host and the company so they can develop amazing relationships and create great content.

For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about having a podcast, you should. If you have questions, you can go to rise25.com to learn more or email us at [email protected].

I’m excited to introduce Ross Simmonds. He’s the founder and CEO of the Foundation. Foundation is a global marketing agency that provides services to organizations all over the world, and it ranges from the fastest growing startups to global SaaS companies and brands. They’ve worked with companies from Unbounce to Canva and many more. Ross was actually named one of Atlantic Canada’s top 50 CEOs and one of the top marketers by Buzz Sumo and SEMrush. Ross is also a speaker, angel investor and author of multiple books. Ross, thanks for joining me.

Ross Simmonds 2:57 

Thanks for having me. Jeremy, excited to be here.

Jeremy Weisz 3:00 

So just tell people a little bit more about Foundation and what you do.

Ross Simmonds 3:04 

Yeah, so Foundation is a content marketing firm that focuses on b2b SaaS. So we work with b2b SaaS companies on four key things. First is research. We help them understand their audience, and we do this by really diving deep into understanding their what we call a content portfolio. So we believe that you need to think about marketing the same way that you would think about investing. And every time that you create an asset, you’re essentially making an investment.

And we believe in creating high value content that nurtures and builds relationships, as you talked about with your ideal customer, whether it’s a landing page, whether it’s a blog post, whether it’s an asset that intent is to generate backlinks. We want to help our partners create and invest in content that drives results. Now here’s what’s different about foundation versus most companies. In content marketing, a lot of content companies will focus exclusively on creation. You sign up, they’ll write blog posts, they’ll write more blog posts, they’ll write more blog posts, and they’ll send you a report saying that they publish these blog posts.

What’s different about us is we actually think that the work begins after we hit publish. So those blog posts now need to be distributed, and we run what we call distribution playbooks to make those stories spread, whether that’s sharing that content on LinkedIn, whether it’s sharing it through X, whether it’s sharing it through niche communities or newsletters, we run distribution playbooks on the content that we create to really emphasize that idea that a lot of content marketing companies have forgotten about that second word in our industry marketing.

You have to market the content that we create, and then finally, after we have distributed it, we also come back to it, and we optimize that content for conversion, for SEO and all kinds of other purposes based off of the client. So long story a little bit longer. We’re full service, organic, publicly focused, like not publicly traded, but we’re a private company, but we are publicly focused on that idea of creating content for blogs for landing pages, etc, communities, all of that good stuff.

Jeremy Weisz 5:04 

So Ross, how’d you get into this?

Ross Simmonds 5:06 

Yeah, so I am a digital content geek. When I was in university, I ran a fantasy football blog, and that blog paid for my tuition. And when that blog was going up into the right I realized that this internet thing was going to last. So I went all in. I launched a little website called rossimmonds.com I wrote an article called Five Things That You Should Know About Targeting Generation Y, because back then, Gen Y was still kind of young and hip and cool, and everybody wanted to target to them.

I started to get emails from brands all over the world while I was living in Nova Scotia, small place in my parents basement, saying, Ross, can you fly down to Miami and speak with our C suite on marketing to Gen Y? And I was like, Whoa, this is wild, like this internet thing is going to last. So I doubled down. I started to continue to create more and more content, and then from there, the history kind of just wrote itself. Where I went from writing a fantasy football blog, shifted it 100% into writing about marketing, and then took off. And I launched Foundation in 2014 and we’ve been helping b2b brands ever since.

Jeremy Weisz 5:06 

Talk about niche for a second because you could have gone the, I mean, you started a, it’s very hard to start a successful b2c type of brand, like fantasy football blogger. What made you decide to go into b2b? And what were some of the, maybe the evolution of the industries? Like, I’m looking here at the website. You can see your industries that you serve, the software companies, manufacturing, b2b. And I love this one boring quote, industries here. What was the evolution of the niches?

Ross Simmonds 6:45 

Yeah, so in the early days, I loved b2c because of the scale, the amount of people that you can connect with, the stories, the big ads, et cetera. And I spent about a year and a half working in a traditional agency, running campaigns for some of the top CPG brands in the world. Through that experience, though, I really started to get uneasy and struggled with this fact that I could never see the ROI, I could never know whether or not I was actually resulting in people buying more chocolate bars or people going out and buying more soup like I could never actually feel that. So I had one prospect, which was a SaaS company at the time, and we were working with them, and I was able to see that the blog posts that I was writing, the landing pages that I was creating, were actually translating into demos, and those demos actually led to actual revenue.

And that’s when I fell in love with b2b. I realized at that moment that I love how close to the actual consumer, my content can be to move the needle, and that’s when I fell in love with it. And at that point, it was a gradual shift. We started originally at more general b2b, and over time, the vast majority of our clients have become b2b, SaaS in particular, and that has come from an evolution of us just being really, really good, I think, through the reps at working with these SaaS companies and collaborating with these SaaS companies and understanding the different levers that they need to pull to be able to unlock great results and great wins.

Jeremy Weisz 8:15 

I want to hear about a client milestone for you. I mean, you’ve helped some tremendous companies. I mean, we’re looking at the website here, if you’re listening just the audio, there was a video piece to it, but WebEx, MailChimp, Canva, Unbounce, what was the first milestone client that you remember, and how you got in the door?

Ross Simmonds 8:37 

Yeah, great question. So Rockwell Automation is a publicly traded company. They’re out of the US, and they’ve been around for decades. I forget exactly what their name, Milton Bradley, maybe they were originally but they are a massive company in the manufacturing space. They create widgets, lasers that go inside of roller coasters, things like that. And prior to them, all of our clients were relatively like startups, tech companies that were like Series A, Series B, but we hadn’t worked with any publicly traded companies before, and I spoke at an event called Mozcon, and at Mozcon, I talked about the allocation of budget for organizations being focused around experimentation, as well as the things that you know are going to work.

And I gave this presentation, I talked about how some of the top brands in the world use this allocation of their budget, and how this gives you a competitive edge. And there were a few people in the audience that worked at Rockwell, and I was walking through the hallway, and they were like, hey, excuse me, we want to chat with you for a second. So I brought over for a second, and they wanted to chat about my talk. So we were just like, chopping it up, having a conversation. We exchange business cards. I go back home and I Google, who’s Rockwell Automation? What’s this company? And I’m like, oh, they’re publicly traded. This is cool. Let me see if I can nurture this relationship. So I sent them an email, hey, it was so great to. Meet you too, blah, blah, blah. Hope you’re all doing well. Fast forward about two weeks later, they wanted me to fly down into, I think it was Wisconsin or Milwaukee, a small, small place, but it was beautiful.

Jeremy Weisz 10:13 

I was just there.

Ross Simmonds 10:14 

Were you? Very cool. Just well, the cheese head. So it’s like, is it Wisconsin?

Jeremy Weisz 10:19 

Yeah, you’re right, you’re good with much better than I am with Canadian geography to US geography. So I wouldn’t be…

Ross Simmonds 10:29 

I love it, so I go there, I do the talk, I’m in their offices, and then we just had a great relationship from then on, and continue to partner and collaborate and just expand within the organization. And at that moment, it helped me realize, oh, okay, we’re offering something that’s so valuable that this type of company would want it. Let’s trickle this over into other industries, and we just continue to expand and grow from there.

Jeremy Weisz 10:53 

Love it, yeah. So really, I mean, as I mentioned in the intro too your speaking has really helped. And being an expert for like, not just being an expert, but getting on the stage and sharing that, as well as authoring books, which we’ll talk about too. I want to talk about what you do to Unbounce. And I want to mention too, people can check out. I did an episode with, actually, the Rand Fishkin, who started Moz, who now runs SparkToro, and it’s a crazy story. I don’t know if you know what Ross of like when he got offered to sell and he didn’t sell. So it’s a very interesting background on the story of that.

Ross Simmonds 11:37 

Yeah, I’m a big fan of Rand and SparkToro and the work that they do over there them. Amanda over there as well, she kind of coined that concept of no click content on the internet, which is that idea of just publishing pieces of content that are so good that people don’t need to leave the platform to go there. We use SparkToro all the time, and we leverage it to find the best subreddits and communities and audiences and things like that. Nick Tailors well into the combo around Unbounce, because with that relationship, essentially, we looked at all of the blog content.

We had a two sided engagement, where one, we were creating pieces of content at scale, so creating tons and tons of blog posts, but we also had an engagement with them, where we were distributing these blog posts, so writing threads, sharing them on LinkedIn, etc, spreading them into the places where their ICP was spending time. And the pieces that went through our distribution engine, where we actually ensured that they were being amplified and promoted, etc, had 10x more page views than the pieces that did not. And that type of success we’ve now kind of built into. And this was early on, probably five years ago now, where we ran this experiment, and that’s become a playbook that we run with our clients time and time again, where not only are we going to run your full content engine and write a bunch of great, valuable blog content, we’re also going to write the LinkedIn updates.

We’re going to create a carousel, we’re going to create the thread on X, we’re going to help you understand how to distribute this through subreddits, all of those things we’ve applied to the blog content that we create, and it just drives ridiculous returns out of these investments that our clients make into blog posts. And to the point around SparkToro, one more time, using a tool like that, what you’re able to do is see exactly what subreddits as an example, your community is spending time in so if you see that your community is spending time subscribe to a certain subreddit, you now want to take that blog post that you wrote and you want to share it with that community. Those are the things that you want to do to ensure that if you create something valuable, you can distribute it and get the most out of it.

Jeremy Weisz 12:54 

Ross, can you talk about vanity metrics for a second, because, and I’m wondering if you’re having this conversation with these companies, and they’re like, they’re trying to measure right? And you could tell me if they’re asking, hey, how many views, how many clicks? And you may be coaching them more on if we get into this subreddit and you get five versus, like, getting a post that gets 2000 so talk about your thoughts on vanity metrics and the conversations you have to have with these brands sometimes.

[Continue to Page 2]