Kris Hughes 🪓

Social Media Content Creator

Zanate Marketing

* Fractional marketing for growth-stage companies that drives revenue.
* B2B focus, but we're chameleons -- we meet you where you are.
* Focus areas: cold and warm outreach, organic traffic engines, thought leadership, social media management and company story development.

Founder | Fractional Marketer

Gallium Solutions

* Fractional marketing director for a rapidly-growing government grants consulting company.
* Building out a warm and cold outreach engine to consistently drive leads.
* Executing a content strategy to consistently increase organic traffic and niche authority.
* Developing the company's social media presence to amplify thought leadership.

Fractional Marketing Director

Prospology

Working with Prospology.com as a fractional brand strategy coach to help the medical writing community's students develop a strong presence on LinkedIn and a storytelling strategy that supports the growth of their freelance medical writing businesses.

Brand Strategy Coach

Several Clients

* I'm a LinkedIn ghostwriter for 3 founders: The owner of a CRO consultancy, the owner/CEO of a SaaS company, and my friend who runs an eCommerce growth consulting company.
* As a ghostwriter, I publish a total of 36 posts per month on these accounts and do 30 hours a month of community cultivation work to help drive more interest for my clients with their ideal clients.
* The goals are to increase profile views, attention on content, and cultivate leads for my client's business.
* LinkedIn Ghostwriting has been a core service offering of Zanate Ventures since I founded the company in March 2020.

LinkedIn Ghostwriter 👻

Point One Navigation

Helping to develop and manage the content pipeline operations for a major precision navigation company with clients across industries like agriculture, drones, and self-driving cars.

Content Operations Consultant

Optimist

Fractional managing editor for Optimist's link building project, Juice.

Responsible for progression of articles through developmental funnel from topic generation to writer assignment, to the final product that's ready to be pitched to guest post websites to land links for our clients.

To date:
* Overseen hundreds of articles through the editorial and publishing process, all of which required my topic generation and editorial touch
* Managed a team of writers across timezones and around the world which has helped Juice become profitable in less than a year and maintain that level of profitability to date

Managing Editor

Mayple

* Working as a freelance email marketing consultant for Mayple via their contract with MailChimp/Intuit. 
* Audit MailChimp client email accounts to find areas for improvement through health checks. 
* Present on findings and implementations to solve gaps in use.
* Conduct implementations based on these identified gaps and report to clients.
* Occassionally continue with Mailchimp clients following process as an email consultant.

Email Marketing Consultant

CB Company

Social media ghostwriting and niche community building for the CEO of a series of cannabis industry events held each year in Switzerland.

Audience & Income

Member

DataHawk

Content Creator

Coaching ambitious freelancers to build better businesses.

Developing a strong marketing program isn't easy.
A couple of roadblocks stand in the way.
Some have to do with time, and others, resourcing.

Here's the typical scenario for many companies:
* They're doing some marketing content and storytelling now and then.
* They may occasionally fire off a cold campaign, or run some ads.
* Their marketing is 'good enough,' but they know it could be better.
* Marketing responsibilities are split between several different people.
* Who check the 'task boxes' begrudgingly.
* And the resulting work is disjointed at best, or confusing at worst.

For these companies, marketing is anything but strategic. Or the strategy is made of sticks and string when it should be concrete.

Things can be different, though.

Our work as Fractional Marketers helps these companies:
* Tell a more cohesive and powerful story
* Identify their core audience and create a marketing narrative that resonates
* Find the right channels to develop so effort isn't wasted
* Execute quickly on short-term opportunities and lay the foundation for long-term growth and sustainability 
* Install and execute on repeatable, predictable processes & strategies that continue to move the needle

We offer three options for engagement:

* It all begins with our Marketing Tune-Up. Over 30 days we'll take a 'look under the hood' of your current marketing and find 2-3 opportunities for quick wins that we can work on together. 
* Your investment for the Marketing Tune-Up is directly applied, to one of two monthly retainer options if you choose to keep working with us, the Scale plan and the Soar plan.
* Under the Scale plan we're developing warm and cold email outreach, an organic traffic engine, social media marketing, and thought leadership content to have things firing on all cylinders.
* Under the Soar plan, we become your marketing team, hiring freelancers from our network and going full-speed ahead to help you pour fuel on the fire of your marketing momentum.

You get two of us at Zanate—me and my wife Julie—who bring a combined 30+ years of experience in content, marketing, and storytelling to the table to help your portfolio companies custom-craft and execute a content strategy that's right for their unique situation and niche.

The cost?
Less than half the annualized cost of a typical full time Chief Marketing Officer, on the high end.

Interested to learn more?
It all starts with a free Marketing Strategy Call to set the table.

DM me or book 30 minutes here:
https://savvycal.com/krishughes/marketing-strategy-call

Founder --> Ghostwriter & Content Creator for Growing Coaches & Solopreneurs

I'm thrilled to be joining the K12 Sports Tech team as a Fractional Marketing Lead starting today!

Thanks to Abby Emerson and Alec Brown for the opportunity to dive in and help with the marketing initiatives for K12 and help build momentum for a truly powerful mission to bring together Athletic Directors and Sports Tech Vendors to help them all realize their collective potential.

I'm excited to dive in and get to work!

leapfrog-collective

content-snacks

zanate-ventures

collablab

kris-hughes-content-strategy-consulting

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showpreneurs

blog-to-scale

Talks about #freelance, #ghostwriting, #solopreneurship, and #freelancewriting

Fractional Marketer | Founder - Zanate Marketing & Pitchline Partners

Cold outreach doesn't work anymore!
It's a total waste of time!
Why would you even bother?

Going to have to HARD disagree there, ya'll.

101 connection requests sent, 28 accepted. 
18 LinkedIn messages sent. 6 responses.
2 meetings booked.
And this campaign is just scratching the surface.

Smart cold outreach can be a massive momentum generator for you, it's all about the structure and talking to humans like they're humans.

This campaign's in its infancy but I'm very excited to see where it goes as it plays out between now and the holidays.

Happy to tell you a little more about tools and the structure if you're interested -- just shoot me a DM!

There's no one right way to find your clients as a fractional.
Anyone that tells you there's only one way...

Is lying.

Our current clients came from:
1. Responding to a LinkedIn post from a marketing manager looking to replace herself as she was moving on.
2. Responding to a post on a Slack community for fractionals.
3. Cold outreach that led to a conversation which led to an opportunity.

If you lean on only one method, you're immediately selling yourself short.

So try these things (if you aren't already):

1. Use search strings in LinkedIn like "we're hiring + marketing + contract" or "now hiring + marketing + contract" and sort by Posts to find people posting about what they're hiring for. DO NOT apply for open jobs, search for these posts and respond quickly, DM the decision maker.

2. Join a community like Fractionals United and become active there. It's only $10 a month and if you find even one client, it'll pay for itself multiple times over.

3. Set up a simple, perpetual cold outreach sequence using something like Skylead for multi-touch and ZoomInfo or Apollo for a leads source. Or heck, just search for a title in LI and let that ride. I have a campaign like that running now that's killing it.

Moral of the story - get creative.

Organic's not enough by itself, neither is paid, neither is outreach.

Try a lot of different things to see what 'sticks' for you and double down!

When you visit a company's website and the first thing you see is a laundry list of features of the product, what do you think?

Unless it's immediately backed up by the human impact of those features:

* How they solve your primary problem
* How they help you sleep better at night
* How they help you remove that massive headache

I'm willing to bet you don't care much at all.

An AI-enabled revolutionary category-defining groundbreaking disruptional technical platform sounds cool.

But you couldn't care less about jargon.
You care about the IMPACT to your life.
And the emotions you're feeling now.
Which you'd like to feel the opposite of more often.

When you're building a company story, lead with why it matters to people.
Not with what it does.

And I bet you'll see a massive difference in the way people engage with your story, and, then, with what you have to offer them.

Most sports industry founders think their biggest marketing challenge is visibility. It’s not. It’s clarity.

Evaluating companies across youth sports, AI tech, alternative leagues, fantasy sports, and performance technology, I’ve noticed the same pattern:

The product is strong.
The mission is strong.
The story… isn’t.

And when the story isn’t simple, emotional, or aimed at the right buyer, traction slows no matter how good the tech is.

So I put together a short carousel walking through the most common places sports-industry companies fall short in their marketing and the fixes that help founders break through the noise, build trust faster, and actually stand out in a crowded category.

If you’re building something in sports, this will give you a clearer sense of why marketing feels harder than it should and where small adjustments can create big momentum.

If you want to move faster and build real momentum, check out the link in the first comment!

13 Ways Sports Industry Companies Fall Short on Marketing

One of the most difficult things to do in a crowded marketplace - especially like sports and entertainment - is to get your product to truly stand out.

So many companies are doing virtually the same thing, with some minor differences in product, and even more minor differences in their marketing.

In industries like AI tools, wearables, alternative sports leagues, daily fantasy and youth sports everyone sounds exactly the same. They focus too much on 'disrupting the market,' or bringing some 'revolutionary' or 'game-changing' solution to their potential customers.

None of this wrong, on the surface, but when you sound the same as everyone else, you're more than likely going to meet the same fate as everyone else:

Racing to the bottom.

When everyone is racing to the bottom there's only one way to compete:

On price.

And when you compete on price you lose the chance at building any real leverage in your space, much less a financial foothold that will allow you to make the decisions necessary to truly take things to the next level.

So what's the solution?

Anchoring to a unique point of view that defines your category.

I know, easier said than done, right?

Not necessarily, especially when you have some guidance to get there.

Marketing to potential customers in the sports industry requires a different type of nuance. Often, without realizing it, you're not marketing to the buyer that you should be.

Most of the buyers in this space:
* Athletic directors
* High school coaches
* Youth sports coaches
* Some parents

.... aren't really 'tech' people.

So when you bombard them with all the technical specs, features, and jargon surrounding your product or solution it causes them to tune out.

Complexity in your language introduces friction.
Friction kills the consistency of product adoption.

So, in these cases the best thing you can do is to translate the nuances and complexity of your tech into everyday, simple language and use real examples that these folks can immediately identify with.

It's not about pandering to your audience. It's about meeting them in a place where they don't have to work too hard to understand what you do, and more importantly, why it matters to them.

The less work you make your customers do to buy from you - regardless of niche - the more likely they are to buy.

If the University of Utah manages to close on this private equity deal with Otro Capital, you can kiss any remaining facade of 'amateurism' in college sports goodby. It's the proverbial nail in the coffin.

After all, PE and VC firms care about one thing and one thing only:
RETURNS.

And this case certainly won't be unique. The University of Utah athletic department will be forced to make every institutional decision with ROI in mind. Not the development of their young men and women as student-athletes. Not the long-term viability of competing at the highest levels.

Just RETURNS.

And that could lead to an incredibly confusing, convoluted, and confounding scenario for the athletes, coaches, donors, boosters, and yes, the equity ventures, alike.

If we're in the Wild West now, this deal will shift things into Westworld.

🫠

Don't sleep on the holidays when it comes to sharing your story. While a lot of people will be offline, sure, something else is going on...

People who are rarely online, might be for the first time in a very long time because they actually have some downtime to check LinkedIn, comb through their emails etc.

So don't hesitate to schedule out some posts.
Send one more email.
Try another follow up.

You may be surprised at the responses that you get.

When busy founders are 'doing marketing' begrudingly, and it's a box to check off, the wrong channel, wrong focus problem surfaces.

It's temping when you're wearing all the hats as a founder to do whatever takes the least time and will provide quick results.

Often this manifests as:
* Spending too much money on paid ads, or not properly targeting the spend so there's a poor ROI.
* Chasing the same audiences everyone else is chasing on the hottest platform of the moment because that's what everyone else is doing.

Two things happen here:
* You torch your marketing budget.
* Momentum's hard to come by for that very reason.

It's essential that you take the time to find the right channel, and apply the right focus to that channel.

If your potential customers are professionals, it's likely LinkedIn.
If it's parents, it could be Instagram.
If it's older generations, it could be Facebook.

When you understand where your potential customers are hanging out, and how aware they are of what you offer, it's easier to marry channel to focus.

If you have high awareness, case studies should be a priority.
If you have low awareness, focus on social.
If you have no awareness, focus on partnerships.

It's some serious grunt work to identify the right channel and then apply the right focus, marketing-wise, but the alternative is piles of cash burning in front of your desk.

When marketing is founder-led, it can operate fine for a while, but there's often one primary issue:

There isn't a consistent content rhythm.

You have the best intentions about your marketing, and create content when you can - a social media post here, a blog post there, a video shared now and then - but there isn't a consistent rhythm to this production.

So if there isn't a rhythm, there inherently isn't a strategy.

When you share content only around feature launches, big news, or company updates you're leaving so much potential on the table surrounding your story.

Building a content strategy that's rooted in consistency does one thing - it builds trust. When your content is sporadic and scattered, it's almost worse than sharing nothing at all.

Why? Because trust decays in the gaps between posts.

If you're going to keep your content founder-led for now, cut out 30-45 minutes a week to dedicated to it without distractions so you can create what you need to share for the upcoming week.

But, also know, it's not something you have to continue on long-term if you don't feel it's the best use of your time.

This is where having a content strategist by your side makes a massive difference.

Even the most powerful brand story can quickly become ineffective if it doesn't evolve over time, and react to changes happening around your industry.

When you lead the evolution in your product to meet the evolutions happening in the market, but the story you share with potential customers, investors, and other stakeholders doesn't reflect this movement, you're left with a substantial messaging gap.

Messaging gaps create confusion.
Confusion creates friction.
Friction creates lack of conversion.

Worse yet, when your message doesn't evolve to meet the changes in the market , you look 'frozen in time' while your competitors look both dynamic and innovative.

It's not a good place to be.

So what's the solution?
Constant evaluation of the story you're telling.
Not every 18 months.
EVERY quarter.

Your brand story is a living thing.
Let it live.

My default mode with any new fractional marketing project, whether in sports or in another industry, is one thing...

Hit the ground running immediately.

The best thing I can do to establish strong relationships with my clients that become long-term and less transactional is to immediately dive in, and drive a quick win in the first 30 days.

Sure, there's plenty of groundwork to be done at the outset of any new relationship, but that said, there's also always an opportunity to make a quick impact and drive a win that supports my client's primary KPI.

It's not rocket science, but it's not a common thought process either.

If you're a fractional CMO, COO, CTO - whatever it may be - make sure that your discovery process prior to and when starting with a new client identifies an area for a win.

Then win.

If you're an early stage company in the sports industry - or any niche - your marketing has to crawl before it walks if you're going to establish a strong foundation for success.

The stages you've likely heard of Top of Funnel (TOFU), Middle of Funnel (MOFU), and Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) still apply, even though they may seem overused at this point. 

Everyone knows them because they're highly effective as long as you take the time to really build within each using best practices.

Building TOFU is where you begin crawling to build awareness:
1. Basic social strategy
2. Basic content strategy
3. Lightweight warm and cold outreach strategy
4. Instilling brand, voice and image consistency

TOFU is the foundation and takes a few months to build.

Once you're done crawling, you can start to stand up.
That's where you build the middle of the funnel.

If you try to start jogging before you can crawl, you're going to crash and burn, and I see this mistake made often.

If you need help building the foundation I can help.
If you've built the foundation, I can help you start jogging.
If you're jogging at a nice pace, I can help you sprint.

We serve all parents of young athletes.
Our target customer is every athletic director.
We want to work with high school coaches.

No.

Too broad.

When you position yourself to serve everyone within your niche, even if it seems 'doable,' you are effectively marketing to no one.

However far you've niched down to identify your primary ICP (ideal client profile) you need to niche one step further.

You want to serve parents of travel team program athletes.
Your target customer is athletic directors of large-school programs.
You want to work with high school volleyball coaches.

The more you niche down, the easier it is for your marketing messaging to break through the noise to make enough of an impact to deliver the return on investment of what you need to justify the spend.

When your messaging is too diluted, and your ICP is too broad, you're going to fall right into the sea of content with everyone else out there doing the same thing and it's going to be very difficult to gain traction. 

Focus on one sport.
Focus on one buyer.

Hammer on that use case for 90 days, revisit what the data is telling you, revisit who you're targeting, experiment again and double-down on what's working.

Rinse.
Repeat.

It's easy to default too far toward a 'professional' voice when you're first crafting your company story and sharing it with the world.

After all, you don't want to come off as amateurish or like you're learning on the fly not only about your niche, and your place in it, but what your potential customers want to hear before they'll want to work with you.

This is particularly true in sports tech and other sports niche businesses. You want so desperately to seem 'professional' and buttoned up because it feels somehow more important to do so building in the niche, to gain the legitimacy you crave.

However when you position too far this way your marketing reads like you're selling enterprise SaaS, not something that matters to people in sports.

Sports is emotional.
Sports is tribal.
It's inherently personal.

So you need to make emotional appeals to your potential customers, speak to them as former coaches, as former athletes, because regardless of what they're building, it's likely they once were. 

Appeal to their competitive nature, their inherent desire to build community, and the goal to make something that's truly unique.

Don't talk to them like a 'consultant.'
They'll see straight through it.

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