chumming

Hi folks —

If you've been on a call with me or Danny or just about anyone else at RevBoss recently, you've heard this metaphor:

Content is chum.

Lotta fishing metaphors in this one. :)

Thanks for reading,

Eric Boggs
CEO @ RevBoss

Content isn't the point for a marketer, just like chumming isn’t the point for a fisherman.

Nobody is out on a boat because they love throwing chunks of frozen fish parts into the ocean. You're out there because you want to catch something. And chumming definitely makes it easier, depending on what you're trying to catch of course.

This is how we think about content at RevBoss. The content — the posts, the newsletters, the founder brand stuff — is the chum that gets the fish closer to the boat.

It gets your ICP paying attention, following along, building some familiarity with who you are and what you know.

Closer to the boat means easier to catch…but closer to the boat is not in the boat.

Once you've got an audience of the right people… that's when the real work starts. You deploy lightweight engagement plays, event-driven asks, DM sequences (that don't feel like DM sequences), great one-off messages, etc. to surface intent and hook the people who are warm and move them into actual conversations.

Content >> Audience >> Campaigns >> Pipeline.

That's the system.

I find that our prospects and clients often get hung up in 3 places when it comes to content chumming:

First — they post on LinkedIn for a few weeks, wonder why it's not "working," and don't realize that content was never supposed to close deals. It was supposed to get the fish closer to the boat. You still have to do the fishing.

Second — they try too hard to make their chum into James Beard Award-winning seafood delicacies. Yes, the content needs to be good. Really good if possible. But chum is not a tasting menu. The key to chumming is that you keep throwing it in the water. The fish don't show up because one piece was exquisite. They show up because there's always something good there.

Third — they don't realize where their chum ends up. A SEMrush study from earlier this year analyzed 325k prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. LinkedIn is the second most cited domain across all three platforms. On average, 11% of AI responses referenced a LinkedIn URL. The chum is spreading way further than you think — it's training the AI tools that your buyers are increasingly using to find you and make decisions.

Fishing is harder nowadays, generally speaking. But it mostly depends on where you're fishing and what you're trying to catch.

I grew up fishing in a cow pond in Dallas, NC. My buddies and I could catch endless bluegill and catfish with a can of corn. Small pond and a ton of fish — you just needed to show up with some bait and a hook.

Contrast that with fishing on the open ocean. It’s much harder. You're covering huge amounts of water, you’re burning lots of fuel, and you might go hours — days — without a bite unless you know the right spots or you can read the signals — e.g. a bait ball, birds working, a school breaking the surface, etc.

It's a different game entirely and most people aren't very good at it.

The recent and previous B2B GTM paradigm easily and consistently rewarded cow pond tactics in the open ocean — blast outbound emails, run some AdWords, hire a couple BDRs, wait for the leads to roll in.

You didn't have to be great, it just kind of worked.

That bite dried up, for reasons I’ve written about extensively.

So now everybody's out on the open ocean, trolling around, burning fuel, wondering why they can't catch anything.

And in my expert fishing and fishing metaphor experience…you need to stock your own pond. Trolling the open water is a brutal way to build a business.

That’s me holding a 10 lb block of actual chum, in a boat somewhere off Islamorada last week. Caught a lot of fish that day! Mostly snapper and a few barracuda.

We did a NC»FL»NC road trip for spring break to see a few National Parks (Everglades, Biscayne, and Congaree) and to spend some time soaking up the sun and blue water in the Keys.

I think that our National Park count is up to 11 or 12 now, most of which we visited in the past couple years.

Any other NP buffs on this list? If so let me know your favorite…