Why You Shouldn't Always Provide Value in the Feed

Todd Clouser 3 min

Why You Shouldn't Always Provide Value in the Feed

I don’t know if I’m gunna make many friends with this one, but here goes…

Let’s talk about “providing value” in the feed.

For a long time (let’s say 2-3 years) we’ve been seeing a lot of people saying, “You need to provide all the value in the feed.”

Zero-Click content is something that everyone pretty much universally agrees with, yeah?

I’m not going to pretend like I haven’t said it, I have. Many times.

I spent almost two years pushing this narrative forward during my time with Refine Labs. And in many cases, that’s the right thing to do.

But sometimes, dare I say oftentimes, it's not.

So I’m here to walk that thought leadership back just a lil bit. Because it’s not always about providing value in the feed that your audience is on.

Sometimes it’s about driving traffic or attention to something completely different, because the goal of every piece of content is not the same.

Indulge me in a story if you will.

(Don't worry, I'll tie this back to B2B)

Prior to entering the SaaS space, I spent almost a decade of my life building the largest YouTube channel in the welding industry. And if you don’t mind a not-so-humble flex, let me share some stats (this has relevance, I promise).

We distributed content through three primary channels:

YouTube (long-from) - 7 million monthly views
Instagram - 1 million monthly views
Facebook - 2 million monthly views

(in a time before Reels, Shorts and TikTok we were pretty proud of that)

Our primary revenue was generated through product placement sponsorships on our YouTube channel—not the typical one-off posts or baked in pitches, but using the products while we created adjacent educational content.

Old school product placement.

The way we justified price increases was an increase in viewership on that content.

Our sponsors wanted access to that active, long-form viewer, and cared very little about the 3 million pairs of eyeballs every month on those short form channels (we can argue whether that’s right or wrong in a different thread, but those were the facts).

That meant our primary goal was to drive as much traffic as humanly possible to our YouTube content.

And we did that extremely effectively, but not by chopping up the entire long form video and repurposing it to IG and FB.

Every week, our short form content consisted of something like this:

One promo video: Not zero-click. It gave enough to intrigue and sent people to the full video.
Bloopers/behind the scenes: No “value” just pure audience engagement to build stronger connections
Some “Weldporn” images scattered throughout the week: “Wanna see how we did this, video’s on YouTube.”
One zero-click video: This helped us build trust - It’s always going to be a big part of the mix, just not the whole thing.

By using that mix, we consistently drove huge impact to our viewership on YouTube, and we knew that because we obsessed over our analytics and could see the spikes when we posted to IG and FB.

Now, could we have driven more views on those short form channels if we chopped up the long form into several shorter parts and posted it natively?

Maybe, but like I said earlier, that's not what our sponsors were paying us for.

Would it have drove more people to go to our YouTube channel? I think not. Why go somewhere else when everything you want is right there?

So bringing this back to SaaS the question becomes what are your goals?

What are you measured on and how can you impact that with content?

(And yes, I realize it’s all about revenue at the end of the day, but that comes later)

As long as your goals are ones that actually impact revenue’s future state, then you need to determine what’s going to help you meet those goals.

If that’s accomplished by only posting zero-click content and waiting for inbounds, then by all means.

But if you’re in the same boat as most of us, we need to build a closer relationship to the audience, in a place where we can use qualitative AND quantitive data to advance our content strategy and get one step closer to revenue.

I'd argue the zero-click movement has made most of us over-index on vanity metrics and wonder why content isn't making an impact.

Why You Shouldn't Always Provide Value in the Feed