Channel Mastery - Ep. 122: Tyler Benedict, Bike Rumor
“You said the word experience a couple of times. I think the experience is the next evolution of that. People have identified with the brands for sure, but it's the brands that speak to them and give them the experience they want because ultimately, that's what we remember, right?”
- Tyler Benedict
EPISODE PREVIEW:
Tyler Benedict, founder and publisher of Bikerumor.com, is my guest this week on Channel Mastery. Eleven-plus years ago, Tyler started Bikerumor.com and during that time, he's seen a lot of evolution in terms of how consumers use and share his content, and how his site factors into the consumer decision journey. In this episode, Tyler gives his well informed take on what's working, and what's not, with endemic content today. You'll learn how his team approaches and optimizes content across multiple channels, including the Bikerumor.com website, blog, Youtube channel, newsletter, podcast, and through events. We also talk about the ongoing evolution of the media landscape as well as how brands can best serve super busy media covering events like Sea Otter and Outerbike. I'm fairly certain that Tyler is one of the hardest-working journalists in cycling today, and he keeps pushing into new frontiers. Check out his upcoming Peak Content Summit, a gathering of some of the brightest minds in content marketing today taking place in Asheville, NC., March 11-13, 2020.
Any cycling and specialty brand listeners should take notes during that section in particular as we get closer to kicking off the cycling season!
GUEST PROFILES:
Tyler Benedict
Tyler Benedict is a serial entrepreneur who’s leveraged his fearlessness and passion for the outdoors, adventure and cycling to avoid getting a real job for more than two decades. He’s the founder of Bikerumor.com, the world’s largest cycling tech blog, and host of Peak Content Summit. The latter is his content marketing strategy conference that’s focused on helping outdoor/active lifestyle/cycling brands and media grow their business through smart, ethical content-based marketing efforts.
SELECT QUOTES:
“And then of course that video you can use elsewhere, we'd put it on our site, we always embed it on our site and try and bring people back onto the main site to see photos and more tech details, because there's things you can do with video and there's things you can't, nobody wants to read like a bullet point list of features, but they probably want that information. And so you put the information that belongs at one platform there and the other there and hopefully people will look at all of that at some point.”
“...I think we just found the right people that are super passionate about it.... we don't spend money to promote stuff, we're not boosting anything unless the brand wants us to do something for them. So all of our growth is 100% organic.”
“If you're going to send something out ahead of time, send it out maybe a little earlier than you think without a start of show in embargo day or if you're going to show us something at the show, just make sure that you have all of the information, easy to digest, readily available...if you hand me a one sheet of paper with the information I need to know, great. That's perfect. I can talk to you a little bit about it and make sure I understand everything, take the pictures I need to take and move on…”
“For me...when I go to conferences, I want to be inspired for sure, everybody does, but the other side of it is, I want to walk away with information I can use. So I call it half inspirational and half tactical. Like you're going to get there, you're going to have a lot of great ideas, but then you're going to go home and you're going to know what to do with those ideas. And I think that's going to be what really separates this conference {Peak Summit Conference} from some others is that, you're going to walk away with the game plan.”
“You said the word experience a couple of times. I think the experience is the next evolution of that. People have identified with the brands for sure, but it's the brands that speak to them and give them the experience they want because ultimately, that's what we remember, right?”