CHARMAC CASE STUDY
Ryan Flynn is the Founder & CEO of Charmac. Charmac provides done-for-you account management and content creation solutions to helps brands succeed on the Amazon marketplace.
How’d You Create Content Before EBC?
“Before Easy Breezy Content, we didn't really have any content being produced for our website, for social, or any marketing channels. I would try to produce content here and there when I felt like we had to produce content, but it was never a priority for me just because I was busy focusing on growing other parts of the business. But in the back of my head I always knew that we needed to produce consistent, quality content to reach our prospects and our ideal customers, but I just didn't have the bandwidth and didn't prioritize it.”
What Was Hard About Creating Content?
“I think the hardest part about consistently creating content was knowing that I had to do it but not seeing the immediate results of it. I know that it's beneficial, that it brings value, and that it helps support the sales function and the overall business. But to me, because I come from a sales background, I couldn't link writing a blog post to acquiring a specific customer.
Because of that, since I’m growing a small company with limited resources, I try to focus my time and energy into the biggest impact items first. The tension with that was in the back of my head I knew I need to create content. I could hear this drum beat getting louder and louder, saying ‘you need to produce content, you need to produce content’.
Another issue with doing your own content is: where do you start? Because you've got all these formats available to you, and it’s hard to know whether I do blog articles, or do I do videos, or do I focus on social posts? And how does all this content work together? Should I focus on one of them at a time, or all of them? So despite feeling the need to prioritize it, it feels overwhelming. This feeling that you had to do everything and do it well. And that is in such tension with focusing on the largest impact things first.”
What’d You Try Before EBC?
“In the past we hired an agency and looked at other freelance firms and writers to do that. The drawback to that was I didn't always feel like they were aligned in terms of what we were saying. They would select content topics on our behalf, and sometimes they’d align with issues that were relevant to our ideal customers. But the process of an outside company selecting and writing the content didn't gel with what I needed.
And then if you're dealing with trying to hire freelancers yourself, you're dealing with availability, scheduling, contact, follow up and managing that whole process. And frankly, I just didn't want to have to worry about that.”
How Does EBC Help Your Business?
“Easy Breezy Content allows our company to produce consistent, quality content with minimal effort from myself or our team. I can literally sit down and have a 60-minute recording session in total, and we can get a high quality blog post, a high quality long-form video, and short-form video clips posted to our social media accounts. And again, the content is stuff I'm already talking about every single day with our team, with our clients, with our prospects. For me, coming up with these ideas and talking about them extemporaneously for 20 minutes is not difficult.
On top of that, the recording process gives me prompts and helps me drill down on questions in the content we create. The process makes it feel like we’re aligned because they want to create high quality content as well. And then when that recording session is done, that's all I do. Then, all of a sudden, it just gets posted to my site and YouTube channel, shared on social, and we do the next one. So it makes content super easy.”
What Do You Like About EBC?
“What I like most about Easy Breezy Content is that it's all done for you. As a Founder and CEO of my company, my time and resources are stretched in a million different directions. One of the issues I always had with content originally was prioritizing it and making the time for it. Using Easy Breezy Content holds me accountable to the process because we have recurring time in my calendar where we're going to do an ideation and recording session. I don't have to prepare for those because it's my business and I can talk about this stuff at length without a problem. For that reason alone, it just saves me a ton of mental bandwidth versus creating content ourselves in-house.”
How Do You Measure Success With the Content We Produce?
“So as with any content, you can use a ton of different metrics to determine whether or not it's having a positive impact on your business. You can look at page views, you can look at shares, you can look at engagement on social. That stuff's important, but for me, one of the bigger impacts I saw recently was from a large prospect of ours. They were in the initial stages of a sales cycle with us and after a discovery call we connected on LinkedIn and liked one of our most recent videos talking about advertising on Amazon.
For me, that was like a big selling point of EBC. It was a moment where this ideal customer, who doesn't know us from any other company in the space, had a good discovery call with us and then gets another touch point from our company of high quality content. He can see that and think, "Okay, these guys do know what they're talking about. They can help our business.". All the metrics are great, but for me, it's all about the engagement with prospects, and also reinforcement from current customers that goes a long way.”
What’s the Overall Value You Get From EBC?
“So I think of the content we get from EBC as two different things. Number one, it's building our brand. We're in a competitive space with lots of different providers and other agencies that do the same thing we do. So content helps us build our overall credibility and overall brand in the market. The second thing is it creates thought leadership, which has parallels with brand building, but we also view it separately. Reason being, we're planting a flag in the ground around what we believe, how we think things work best in the Amazon space, and how our clients can be successful. Our clients and prospects see that in the content we create.”