How Owner.com 42.2X'd audience YoY with a 3-word strategy: "world-class content"
Nolan McCoy's full playbook
This is the third edition of Demand Collective’s Practitioner Deep Dives. Deeply researched playbooks from marketers *actually doing the work*.
Today I got to sit down with, and I don’t say this lightly… the best content marketer I’ve ever met. Nolan shared his modern content playbook that’s driving 4,220%+ YoY audience growth and has been a core driver to Owner.com’s exponential ($1B+) growth.
Nolan’s doing a private event diving deeper on his specific playbook and tactics week after next. Join the community here. If you’re already a member, you can register for the event here 🙂.
Nolan and his team are crushing bigger, better-funded competitors with a playbook that fits on a sticky note. Three words: “world-class content”
For Nolan and his team, creating world-class content boils down to doing three things well (which we’ll dive into below 👇).
Picking the right ideas
Executing like a full-time creator
Building a system (& team) to scale
Does this content pass the “busy restaurant owner test”?
Restaurant owners are busy, the Owner team deeply understands them and every content idea starts here: “would a busy restaurant owner, in the 5 minutes they have to pull out their phone and scroll, spend that time on this video?”
Are we actually helping them (is this useful)?
Do we have proof & research to back up what we’re saying?
Is it edited, packaged, and produced in the most compelling way?
David, Owner’s VP Marketing came to Demand Collective to talk about their broader marketing strategy a couple of months ago. One of my favorite things he shared was ahref’s BREW framework.
This is a cool framework, it’s cooler to see it in practice in Owner’s marketing. They have 6 content buckets that fit into a neat “funnel”. Ideas organized by reach & impact.
At the top you’ll see “restaurant growth stories” that’ll attract anyone interested in how Chipotle grew, down to restaurant marketing strategies that beautifully plug their tool where it helps.
And of course, they’ll come up with “trojan horse bangers” that go viral and are deeply tied to the problem that Owner solves.
The secret tactic for creating viral videos: invest & hire a great team
Like any nerdy, scrappy demand marketer I wanted “the checklist” from Nolan. Just give me the recipe for a viral video so I can do the same!
That’s not how this game works.
YouTube is [insert stats on how hard it is to win in YouTube]. We’re not just competing with other b2b brands, we’re competing with Mr Beast. One marketer (who has 6 other things on her plate) is just not going to win that battle for attention.
Not to dunk, but Toast’s YouTube is a great example of a company whose content is just never going to win the war for a busy restaurant owner’s attention, even though they may technically ‘have the right strategy’… (they have a 90s video explaining what brunch is and why it’s important to restaurant owners 🤦♂️).
In the war for your ICP’s attention, strategy loses to execution every time. And if you want top 1% execution, you need a team. If you are ready to invest, Nolan mentioned a couple key roles:
Script-writer/producer. Someone who can take a “nugget” of an idea from a SME (from a 30m meeting), and turn it into a polished script the face of your brand can sit down and record.
Filming & production. Someone who can help the face of your brand film *good* videos efficiently by managing the whole production process.
Expert editor. Someone who understands YouTube, retention, channel best practices. So that your videos look like real YouTube videos.
Expert ‘shorts person’. Someone who can find unique insights from long-form, turn those into killer scripts for shorts, and edit for max virality.
*this person could be your script writer.
Data analytics/retention person. Say “hey I checked the retention curve on the last 5 videos and noticed X. So in our future editing we need to make sure to Y.”
Takeaways for any marketers NOT doing YouTube
It was so inspiring to sit down with Nolan. He really is the best content marketer I’ve ever met, I hope now you see why. We can learn so much from him and the Owner team, even if we’re not going hard on YouTube & shortform.
Just because you’re in B2B, doesn’t mean you get a hall pass to create shitty content. Buyers don’t want another horrible whitepaper, they want the great content they’re already consuming on their lunch breaks.
Form strong opinions on what good means. Nolan has a 9-page notion doc on what ‘good’ means at Owner. Examples of top 1% content elsewhere, and everything they will never do at Owner. Um, I should do that.
Radically defend those opinions. Their team consistently gets videos all the way through editing only to cancel them because they simply don’t pass the busy restaurant owner test. The best have the discipline to say no to whatever doesn’t meet that bar.
Better Leadership → Focus → Differentiated Execution → Results. Owner is only able to see results because they’re 1% executors. Which is only possible if they focus their resources. And focus doesn’t come from Nolan, it comes from the very top, their CEO & leadership. Their whole team is bought in on this, it shows.
You may not need to go all-in on YouTube. You my not have a CEO who will spend his Saturdays making videos. You may not have budget to do this well.
But you can learn from these 3 words:
“world-class content”
-Eric
ps.
If you like these deep dives, you’ll love FED Talks— the virtual summit for demand marketers FED UP with the fluff on LinkedIn. 7, 20m, no-fluff practitioner deep dives like this. Sign up here (to join, or just get the recordings).