Aug. 16, 2021

The Next Frontier of Content Marketing: Performance Tracking

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In this episode, Olivia Hurley talks to Joe Hanson, Senior Content Marketing Manager, at Observe.ai

Transcript
WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.040 --> 00:00:00.250 Mhm 2 00:00:05.840 --> 00:00:10.920 Hi everyone, welcome back to be to be growth. I'm Olivia Hurley and today I'm 3 00:00:10.920 --> 00:00:16.309 joined by joe Hansen who's the content marketing Manager at observe ai joe, 4 00:00:16.309 --> 00:00:20.460 how are you doing today? Good Olivia and really excited to be here and talk 5 00:00:20.460 --> 00:00:25.920 content for a little bit. Oh awesome, Well I'm super excited to you have a 6 00:00:25.920 --> 00:00:30.730 perspective on content performance and how people engage with content after 7 00:00:30.730 --> 00:00:34.580 it's been downloaded that I'm curious about and I want to kind of poke into a 8 00:00:34.580 --> 00:00:38.910 little bit and see what we find there. You specifically have your eyes on 9 00:00:38.920 --> 00:00:44.850 getting insights from how content after it's been downloaded and how to take 10 00:00:44.860 --> 00:00:49.860 action on those insights. Can you bring us all into your world a little bit and 11 00:00:49.860 --> 00:00:54.890 talk about the current state of content, performance tracking? Yeah, yeah. And 12 00:00:54.890 --> 00:01:01.920 the content specifically um that I want to talk about is pdf assets, which you 13 00:01:01.920 --> 00:01:05.900 know, traditionally we've always put behind a gate, someone's downloaded it 14 00:01:05.900 --> 00:01:09.840 and then we sent him an email and they open it and that's it, You're, it's 15 00:01:09.840 --> 00:01:14.260 really a black box on the assets that we're spending tons of money creating 16 00:01:14.540 --> 00:01:18.510 and tons of money distributing. So eventually I realized that there is an 17 00:01:18.510 --> 00:01:22.790 answer to this and there's actually ways to track, not just many times 18 00:01:22.800 --> 00:01:26.570 downloading a piece of content or opening it, but also how are they 19 00:01:26.570 --> 00:01:29.750 actually engaging with it and that's what I'm going to talk about today, 20 00:01:29.750 --> 00:01:35.550 which is kind, it's opening up that black box of content we have today and 21 00:01:35.550 --> 00:01:40.560 going deeper into it and you can do all those insights you get from that so 22 00:01:40.570 --> 00:01:45.320 currently and I think you might have mentioned this but just to clarify 23 00:01:45.320 --> 00:01:51.670 currently what can you do with the insights that typical pdf's deliver? 24 00:01:51.680 --> 00:01:57.300 Yeah. Yeah. So really like in the past it ended at download that was it and 25 00:01:57.300 --> 00:02:03.210 now we're really able to look into not just what people are downloading but 26 00:02:03.210 --> 00:02:07.700 how they're engaging with it. So there's a couple really powerful use 27 00:02:07.700 --> 00:02:12.390 cases that stem from that. The first biggest one that your C. R. O. Is going 28 00:02:12.390 --> 00:02:17.360 to care about is how can we pass these insights onto sales? How can we arm 29 00:02:17.360 --> 00:02:21.020 sales with valuable information about the accounts that they're spending lots 30 00:02:21.020 --> 00:02:25.980 of time working to say this is the content that both the people you know 31 00:02:25.980 --> 00:02:29.720 what that company and the people you don't know at that company are engaging 32 00:02:29.720 --> 00:02:33.410 with. You know about the topics that they're reading about what kind of 33 00:02:33.410 --> 00:02:36.590 assets they're interested in. The customer stories that they're reading. 34 00:02:36.600 --> 00:02:40.920 That's a really powerful tool to pass on to sales. The second one is knowing 35 00:02:40.920 --> 00:02:45.010 what resonates beyond just your landing page and the title of your e book. And 36 00:02:45.010 --> 00:02:48.890 that's back to the black box that I talked about. You know a lot of 37 00:02:48.900 --> 00:02:52.990 conversations that you're having with your digital team is like make more e 38 00:02:52.990 --> 00:02:57.240 books about this specific topic because people care about this but then you dig 39 00:02:57.240 --> 00:03:02.030 into it and you might realize that yeah a lot of people download that asset but 40 00:03:02.030 --> 00:03:05.900 no one's actually reading it and that's not doing your business any good Or 41 00:03:05.900 --> 00:03:09.080 they hop into it for five seconds and then bounced there. You have the 42 00:03:09.080 --> 00:03:13.420 conversation is that it is a design thing, is it how you know you only have 43 00:03:13.420 --> 00:03:17.160 five seconds to attract their attention and is it a navigation issue? And then 44 00:03:17.160 --> 00:03:21.890 the last thing is near and dear to your marketing teams heart, which is how can 45 00:03:21.890 --> 00:03:26.070 we use this for both our marketing nurture and our lead scoring that we're 46 00:03:26.070 --> 00:03:29.930 doing. And that's where it starts getting really quite complex and 47 00:03:29.930 --> 00:03:33.620 sophisticated. That's where you start looking at how long are people spending 48 00:03:33.620 --> 00:03:38.750 on these certain assets And does that change their lead score from being cold 49 00:03:38.750 --> 00:03:44.320 to hot or can we put them in specific nurture campaigns based on the content 50 00:03:44.320 --> 00:03:48.190 they're consuming. So those are some really really powerful use cases. Once 51 00:03:48.190 --> 00:03:52.800 you start diving into your content insights beyond just the stuff on your 52 00:03:52.800 --> 00:03:56.250 website and the stuff on your blog which you're already looking at today. 53 00:03:56.640 --> 00:04:00.930 Talk to me about the limits now though. So those are three powerful things you 54 00:04:00.930 --> 00:04:05.560 can do but they have clear end zones and that's all that you can do with 55 00:04:05.560 --> 00:04:10.750 them. Tell me about the limits of the data. Yeah. So one of the major ones 56 00:04:10.750 --> 00:04:14.240 and anyone who is in marketing has probably had a conversation with their 57 00:04:14.240 --> 00:04:18.300 executive team on them asking who's coming to our site and who's reading 58 00:04:18.300 --> 00:04:23.040 our content. This is actually getting harder and harder to answer. As cookie 59 00:04:23.040 --> 00:04:27.700 policies change web browsers are getting better at tracking or at 60 00:04:27.700 --> 00:04:32.080 blocking the tracking on contacts and visitors coming to your website and 61 00:04:32.080 --> 00:04:35.750 then work from home too has changed everything with enriching anonymous 62 00:04:35.750 --> 00:04:40.790 leads because the IP addresses don't match to the company anymore. So these 63 00:04:40.790 --> 00:04:44.810 are major challenges and it's only getting harder. So that's that's still 64 00:04:44.810 --> 00:04:49.060 a major limitation if an unknown visitor comes through and an unknown 65 00:04:49.060 --> 00:04:52.860 visitors basically they haven't given you their email and the system isn't 66 00:04:52.860 --> 00:04:56.530 able to match them to being the visitor on that content. So that could be 67 00:04:56.530 --> 00:05:01.800 someone has forwarded a pdf to a teammate that's an anonymous visitor. 68 00:05:01.810 --> 00:05:06.960 That's still a bit of a black box. The other big one is yeah. Id'ing those 69 00:05:06.960 --> 00:05:12.740 users and de anonymized them enrichment tools are only so powerful at matching. 70 00:05:12.750 --> 00:05:17.250 But back to what I said earlier about new cookie policies and work from home. 71 00:05:17.740 --> 00:05:22.360 That's really hard to so you get the insights on the activity but you might 72 00:05:22.360 --> 00:05:27.790 not be able to pinpoint every single activity to a specific user and that's 73 00:05:27.790 --> 00:05:31.210 just something to keep in mind. You'll find new ways to do it. But those are 74 00:05:31.210 --> 00:05:35.250 the the geniuses who are actually building these marketing technologies 75 00:05:35.250 --> 00:05:41.660 to figure out was there a moment or a project or a part of your strategy 76 00:05:42.140 --> 00:05:46.400 where you realized that you needed more data from the content and that kind of 77 00:05:46.400 --> 00:05:51.350 spurred along the rest of your philosophy and strategy of performance 78 00:05:51.350 --> 00:05:56.910 tracking. Yeah, I guess they were kind of two defining moments. One of the one 79 00:05:56.910 --> 00:06:02.090 was looking at our, we did a deep audit basically of all the demand generation 80 00:06:02.090 --> 00:06:06.950 campaigns that we ran over the year. So and we were just looking at blunt 81 00:06:06.960 --> 00:06:11.600 conversion rates on the landing page and I found that that didn't tell a 82 00:06:11.600 --> 00:06:15.580 true story because there were certain assets that were pulling in really low 83 00:06:15.580 --> 00:06:19.360 cost for lead, really high click through rates and conversion rates. But 84 00:06:19.940 --> 00:06:24.810 if you went down funnel and you looked at the actual deals that were closing 85 00:06:24.820 --> 00:06:28.610 and the content that was influencing those deals, it told a very different 86 00:06:28.610 --> 00:06:33.960 story. So I started thinking like maybe looking at just the content that's 87 00:06:33.960 --> 00:06:37.790 being downloaded isn't painting a true picture of the content that's actually 88 00:06:37.790 --> 00:06:42.360 being consumed. I didn't have answers though into how much that content is 89 00:06:42.360 --> 00:06:47.020 being consumed. I couldn't directly correlate the activity taking place on 90 00:06:47.020 --> 00:06:51.560 the content to influencing the deal down the road from both the known 91 00:06:51.570 --> 00:06:55.820 visitors and the anonymous visitors. So that was like a big thing for us 92 00:06:55.820 --> 00:06:59.640 because there's a lot of money riding on this decision, your digital team 93 00:06:59.640 --> 00:07:02.860 needs to know how much money to put behind each asset that you're rolling 94 00:07:02.860 --> 00:07:08.560 out or each campaign that you're rolling out. So That was 1, 1 big 95 00:07:08.560 --> 00:07:13.620 defining moment. I would say. The other one was looking at, at a major 96 00:07:13.620 --> 00:07:19.010 challenge that we're having observed was um, we're driving a ton of content 97 00:07:19.010 --> 00:07:23.440 downloads. A lot of em que els, but they're stopping there, that people 98 00:07:23.450 --> 00:07:28.460 aren't converting to SQL, which in our case was raising the hand and saying 99 00:07:28.460 --> 00:07:33.420 I'd like a demo and then that we set up for leads coming through. So from there, 100 00:07:33.420 --> 00:07:38.660 I said, why are we driving so much, so much attention? We're getting tons of 101 00:07:38.660 --> 00:07:42.100 people into the door. But what's going wrong with the content where they 102 00:07:42.100 --> 00:07:46.770 falling off? And that's where having a deeper analysis of the content 103 00:07:46.770 --> 00:07:50.760 consumption outside of just blog or clicking your emails comes into play. 104 00:07:50.770 --> 00:07:56.160 You can start seeing the drop off point for people on the static assets. So 105 00:07:56.160 --> 00:08:00.490 those are two kind of defining moments for us where we started to think, hey, 106 00:08:00.490 --> 00:08:06.030 maybe we need to start investing in content experience technology and then 107 00:08:06.040 --> 00:08:10.710 using all the deep insights you get from that content experience platform 108 00:08:10.710 --> 00:08:14.960 to actually make better decisions on the content you're creating and how 109 00:08:14.960 --> 00:08:22.360 you're serving it. So how then do you build content that is trackable? Yes. 110 00:08:22.360 --> 00:08:28.420 So it does require picking a certain content experience platform. Most of 111 00:08:28.420 --> 00:08:31.960 these, there's all sorts of different various offerings. You can get some of 112 00:08:31.960 --> 00:08:35.460 them are like rip and replace your entire website and it becomes your new 113 00:08:35.460 --> 00:08:39.960 CMS. Other ones are lightweight and sit on top of your website. We decided to 114 00:08:39.960 --> 00:08:43.440 go light away with one called Path factory, there's tons of other ones out 115 00:08:43.440 --> 00:08:47.820 there and that's where we saw that it served our purposes in both building 116 00:08:47.820 --> 00:08:52.590 these content experiences. So that's like a content track where you just put 117 00:08:52.590 --> 00:08:56.790 together, you know, any number of pdf assets. It can be one or it can be 118 00:08:56.790 --> 00:09:01.750 seven. You put them in a content track that you might base around use case 119 00:09:02.140 --> 00:09:07.540 your product offering industry persona and then you build these tracks and 120 00:09:07.540 --> 00:09:12.520 then you put them as part of demanding campaigns or you blanket them across 121 00:09:12.520 --> 00:09:16.430 your website, you put them in your resource center and then you dive into 122 00:09:16.430 --> 00:09:20.350 the analytics on those specific tracks and that's where you can see the source 123 00:09:20.360 --> 00:09:26.170 of people coming into the track and then all the engagement metrics. And 124 00:09:26.170 --> 00:09:31.120 then normally most of these solutions will also have integrations with you 125 00:09:31.120 --> 00:09:35.020 know, your salesforce and that's how you connected to the sales team and get 126 00:09:35.020 --> 00:09:39.270 them the insights so they start getting alerts and it says like four or five 127 00:09:39.270 --> 00:09:44.330 people from Nike have looked at have looked at this track and then they can 128 00:09:44.330 --> 00:09:49.320 be like, oh well Nike is interested in observe ai whereas some other account 129 00:09:49.320 --> 00:09:53.030 that I'm just like Grinding to get in contact with hasn't looked at anything. 130 00:09:53.030 --> 00:09:56.630 I should spend my time there. And Nike is a big company, maybe not the best 131 00:09:56.630 --> 00:10:00.040 example in this case probably want to go down. What's kind of cool is like if 132 00:10:00.040 --> 00:10:03.230 you're looking at like a 50 person company and five people look at it, you 133 00:10:03.230 --> 00:10:07.080 can kind of assume who those five people are and have better insights 134 00:10:07.080 --> 00:10:12.420 going in. But that's a conversation for later. If we're talking about the 135 00:10:12.420 --> 00:10:15.970 connection to sales. But overall, yeah, that's how you do it. You build content 136 00:10:15.970 --> 00:10:20.240 tracks, you analyze the content tracks, build content tracks, analyze the 137 00:10:20.240 --> 00:10:25.640 content tracks and maybe we've just planted the idea of observe ai and 138 00:10:25.640 --> 00:10:32.140 Nikes head and no, yes. Nike if you're listening, check us out, they'll come 139 00:10:32.140 --> 00:10:35.230 to you and think it was your idea, the whole thought their their idea of the 140 00:10:35.230 --> 00:10:42.700 whole time. Oh my gosh, I ruined my own punch line. Oh, I guess. Okay, so you 141 00:10:42.700 --> 00:10:47.540 have these insights, You talked a little bit about how they impact sales 142 00:10:47.540 --> 00:10:52.450 and then we rerouted. I'm curious about what you do with these as a content 143 00:10:52.450 --> 00:10:57.960 marketer. Yeah. So you know, just recapping on the sales, use case you 144 00:10:57.960 --> 00:11:02.060 set up the alerts and you let sales know when their accounts are engaging 145 00:11:02.060 --> 00:11:06.910 with content. This is also really valuable for your pre sales BDR 146 00:11:06.910 --> 00:11:11.760 activities. You know, they're hungry, they're sending out hundreds of emails 147 00:11:11.760 --> 00:11:16.730 a day to too low intent, whether it's a low intent, outbound message or 148 00:11:16.740 --> 00:11:20.060 following up with an inbound that's really valuable information to them 149 00:11:20.060 --> 00:11:23.530 because they know can I refer to observe a, because this person has 150 00:11:23.530 --> 00:11:27.390 spent five minutes in the asset and they're at least moderately familiar 151 00:11:27.390 --> 00:11:32.150 with observe or is it a complete cold outreach and they've never heard of us 152 00:11:32.160 --> 00:11:35.220 even though they've downloaded an e book. So that's kind of the sales use 153 00:11:35.220 --> 00:11:39.360 case. There, there's a lot of ways you can integrate that with nurture in 154 00:11:39.360 --> 00:11:44.250 particular. This is where you can get really sophisticated because you can 155 00:11:44.250 --> 00:11:50.020 set up rules to put people in relevant nurture tracks, not just based on what 156 00:11:50.030 --> 00:11:54.240 you think is relevant to them, but what they've identified as relevant to them. 157 00:11:54.240 --> 00:11:59.200 So you have to say you're targeting a specific persona and you're dropping 158 00:11:59.210 --> 00:12:04.720 that person into title, but meanwhile they're consuming tons of content 159 00:12:04.720 --> 00:12:08.850 related to different use case. If you're say putting this in marketing 160 00:12:08.850 --> 00:12:12.700 terms outside of call center technology because we're all marketers listening 161 00:12:12.700 --> 00:12:16.830 to this podcast. You know, I'm a content marketer and I'm reading a ton 162 00:12:16.830 --> 00:12:23.930 of stuff on demand generation and using content in paid campaigns. Maybe that's 163 00:12:23.930 --> 00:12:27.690 more relevant to the problems I'm having today. So drop me in that 164 00:12:27.690 --> 00:12:32.910 nurture drip that you have versus one that's focused on Ceo for instance, 165 00:12:32.910 --> 00:12:36.810 because I'm focused on paid at acquisition, that sort of thing. And 166 00:12:36.810 --> 00:12:41.650 you can get as deep as you want. Like I was on some webinar I think of his path 167 00:12:41.650 --> 00:12:44.930 factory, maybe another and they were talking about, they had 27 different 168 00:12:44.930 --> 00:12:48.900 nurtured drips and I'm sitting there like, you know, we have like five and 169 00:12:48.900 --> 00:12:54.560 observed which they have 27 because they have crazy sophistication in there 170 00:12:54.640 --> 00:12:58.630 address, right? It's getting it's on people and putting them in their 171 00:12:58.630 --> 00:13:03.610 relevant drips. And then with scoring it's not just based on top level 172 00:13:03.620 --> 00:13:08.310 activity. So this person looked at five blog posts like but they only 10 173 00:13:08.310 --> 00:13:11.490 seconds on those five blog post by because they're just clicking, clicking, 174 00:13:11.490 --> 00:13:17.840 clicking and drop vs one person, maybe One asset. But they spent 27 minutes on 175 00:13:17.840 --> 00:13:21.650 it because they watched the full webinar or read the entire e book cover 176 00:13:21.650 --> 00:13:25.310 to cover. Which would be sweet. That person is higher intent even though 177 00:13:25.310 --> 00:13:29.180 they have much lower count of activity. So when you're thinking about lead 178 00:13:29.180 --> 00:13:33.710 scoring you can go beyond just top level quantifiable activity and 179 00:13:33.710 --> 00:13:37.430 actually go deeper into the engagement metrics. And then there's some other 180 00:13:37.430 --> 00:13:42.090 things built in where you can say like looked at three assets on a specific 181 00:13:42.090 --> 00:13:46.240 track and these three assets are actually very high value because it's a 182 00:13:46.240 --> 00:13:50.690 one pager and like an R. O. I document that person is going to be higher 183 00:13:50.690 --> 00:13:55.180 intent from your lead scoring model. So it's really powerful. But just like a 184 00:13:55.180 --> 00:14:00.680 sidebar. Word of advice don't try to boil the ocean with lead scoring or 185 00:14:00.680 --> 00:14:05.460 nurture like start small and test and make sure that you're not leaving any 186 00:14:05.460 --> 00:14:09.210 gaps gaps in your nurture because you're getting really sophisticated 187 00:14:09.210 --> 00:14:13.490 with one specific nurture track. But those are, those are some really 188 00:14:13.490 --> 00:14:18.780 powerful ways outside of outside of like you as a content marketer. And 189 00:14:18.780 --> 00:14:23.570 then the last thing which I I should've covered first is it lets you know what 190 00:14:23.570 --> 00:14:28.310 to write about and what not. Do you need to look at the topics that people 191 00:14:28.310 --> 00:14:32.080 are actually reading, not just downloading through digital ads. So 192 00:14:32.090 --> 00:14:36.660 those are kind of, I guess the four for huge values you can get out of 193 00:14:36.940 --> 00:14:42.810 analyzing your static assets. I want to go broad picture for a second and talk 194 00:14:42.810 --> 00:14:47.920 about how how this information in this new technology and content performance 195 00:14:47.920 --> 00:14:51.820 in general has changed your content strategy. But before I do that I'm 196 00:14:51.820 --> 00:14:59.370 curious based on what you just last said, has this data affected the volume 197 00:14:59.380 --> 00:15:04.860 or quality of your content? Yeah what's interesting is you actually find that 198 00:15:04.860 --> 00:15:08.850 it might decrease the volume that you're creating because you're not 199 00:15:08.860 --> 00:15:13.800 using the content itself or like ton rolling out tons of new content and 200 00:15:13.810 --> 00:15:17.390 doing tons of volume to test what's resonating with people and what's not. 201 00:15:17.390 --> 00:15:21.160 So hey, it holds your content to a higher standard because I can't just 202 00:15:21.240 --> 00:15:25.090 produce an asset or have an outsourced team produced an asset and then handed 203 00:15:25.090 --> 00:15:29.120 off and then say my job's done, it's actually measuring the success of the 204 00:15:29.120 --> 00:15:33.220 content itself the same way you would look at a blog post and say, you know, 205 00:15:33.230 --> 00:15:37.240 people spend 12 seconds on this blog post and it has a really high bounce 206 00:15:37.240 --> 00:15:41.120 rate. Maybe that's not the most powerful blog post. Same goes now with 207 00:15:41.120 --> 00:15:44.760 your pdf asset so it holds the content to a higher standard and you start 208 00:15:44.760 --> 00:15:48.440 revisiting that content, say how could this be improved? We don't need to 209 00:15:48.440 --> 00:15:52.440 reinvent the wheel, create new asset, we can improve the existing one and 210 00:15:52.440 --> 00:15:56.830 here's how and that's based on the insights. The other thing is, is 211 00:15:56.830 --> 00:16:02.550 definitely like the reusability. So if I'm looking at a track and a specific 212 00:16:02.560 --> 00:16:08.090 actually real life use case for this is we build tracks around industries and 213 00:16:08.100 --> 00:16:13.550 had launched a number of industry specific white papers that were focused 214 00:16:13.550 --> 00:16:18.610 on copies for these different industries and the KPs are radically 215 00:16:18.610 --> 00:16:23.040 different for the different industries, but it follows the same how we're 216 00:16:23.040 --> 00:16:29.090 presenting this information. So built those tracks. Built five white papers 217 00:16:29.100 --> 00:16:33.430 for five industries and then put it out there and tested it. We found that in 218 00:16:33.430 --> 00:16:38.140 all five industries this resonated really well. So that tells us and by 219 00:16:38.140 --> 00:16:41.590 resonated, I mean the people actually read it, they didn't just download it 220 00:16:41.600 --> 00:16:46.120 and they even would skip down to the part that said how observing I helped 221 00:16:46.120 --> 00:16:51.670 you with X. So that's showing like, hey now we're onto something, it's tested 222 00:16:51.680 --> 00:16:55.440 and we can reuse this over and over rather than if we had just put those 223 00:16:55.440 --> 00:16:59.670 pdf's out there. Yeah, we would have seen that the ads resonated really well, 224 00:16:59.670 --> 00:17:04.599 people care about copies but we wouldn't have the reinforcing insights 225 00:17:04.599 --> 00:17:08.250 that say like this content is actually read. These are the most important 226 00:17:08.250 --> 00:17:13.430 parts of it. So reusability is huge and being able to test it so you can make 227 00:17:13.430 --> 00:17:17.770 the right decisions and then holding yourself to a higher standard looking 228 00:17:17.770 --> 00:17:21.700 at the content and knowing that it is actually high quality and not just you 229 00:17:21.700 --> 00:17:25.740 know, a good click baby catchy piece that doesn't actually provide the 230 00:17:25.740 --> 00:17:32.220 reader like any sort of information. Hey everybody Logan with sweet fish 231 00:17:32.220 --> 00:17:36.200 here. If you're a regular listener of GDP growth, you know that I'm one of 232 00:17:36.200 --> 00:17:40.250 the co hosts of the show but you may not know that. I also head up the sales 233 00:17:40.250 --> 00:17:44.770 team here is sweet fish. So for those of you in sales or sales ops I wanted 234 00:17:44.770 --> 00:17:48.380 to take a second to share something that's made us insanely more efficient 235 00:17:48.380 --> 00:17:52.780 lately. Our team has been using lead I. Q. For the past few months and what 236 00:17:52.790 --> 00:17:57.330 used to take us four hours gathering contact data. Now takes us only one 237 00:17:57.340 --> 00:18:02.520 where 75% more efficient were able to move faster with outbound prospecting 238 00:18:02.530 --> 00:18:07.530 and organizing our campaigns is so much easier than before. I'd highly suggest 239 00:18:07.530 --> 00:18:12.070 you guys check out lead I. Q. As well. You can check them out at lead I. Q dot 240 00:18:12.070 --> 00:18:22.620 com. That's L E A D I Q dot com. All right, let's get back to the show. So 241 00:18:22.630 --> 00:18:27.820 now take community high level how of all these tactics, impacted your 242 00:18:27.820 --> 00:18:35.560 overall strategy. I think the biggest thing is thinking of content in like a 243 00:18:35.560 --> 00:18:40.350 journey rather than an individual campaign and that's what I like about 244 00:18:40.360 --> 00:18:47.620 the idea of bucket ng content into, into tracks. So in bundles and actually 245 00:18:47.620 --> 00:18:51.800 thinking now that's why the third reason that I started looking for a 246 00:18:51.800 --> 00:18:57.590 content experience platform, I like put together a bundle of content in the 247 00:18:57.590 --> 00:19:02.100 most bootleg way possible, just like mashing it together using hubspot 248 00:19:02.100 --> 00:19:06.300 landing pages and hosted links. Had no insights on how this bundle performed. 249 00:19:06.310 --> 00:19:09.700 I said there has to be a better way to collect your PDFs and put them together. 250 00:19:09.710 --> 00:19:16.940 So we definitely now think of content as journeys. So putting together tracks 251 00:19:16.940 --> 00:19:21.480 of content that serve a specific stage in the funnel and then connecting those 252 00:19:21.480 --> 00:19:27.270 different tracks together. So I can confidently say in this industry, I top 253 00:19:27.270 --> 00:19:31.430 of funnel bundle, a middle of funnel bundle and a bottom of funnel bundle 254 00:19:31.440 --> 00:19:36.070 and then determine how we're going to distribute those tracks. Whether down 255 00:19:36.070 --> 00:19:40.270 funnel, it might be a salesperson passing that content along top of 256 00:19:40.270 --> 00:19:44.110 funnel, it might be a lead generation add or living organically on our 257 00:19:44.110 --> 00:19:48.690 website, but it's no longer just campaigns, it's not, here's an e book, 258 00:19:48.700 --> 00:19:53.760 go market it driver lead and then give that SQL to the BDR s and my job's done. 259 00:19:53.770 --> 00:19:57.560 It holds us more accountable for thinking about how content influences a 260 00:19:57.560 --> 00:20:02.510 deal from start to finish. And then the other piece is just, is just the 261 00:20:02.510 --> 00:20:06.760 standard of the content, which I talked about earlier. It's actually knowing, 262 00:20:06.760 --> 00:20:10.550 knowing what works and what doesn't from an engagement standpoint, not just 263 00:20:10.550 --> 00:20:15.420 a click standpoint. I'm curious about the results you've seen. Can you talk 264 00:20:15.420 --> 00:20:19.660 to me a little bit about that And so there's a couple of high level results 265 00:20:19.660 --> 00:20:24.350 that we've seen and it's cool to be able to as a content marketer, start 266 00:20:24.360 --> 00:20:31.540 quantifying your influence on the overall marketing metrics. So the same 267 00:20:31.540 --> 00:20:36.180 way that a digital marketer can say like I lowered cost per lead. I it's 268 00:20:36.180 --> 00:20:42.120 not just I shipped six blog posts over the week and drove this much traffic 269 00:20:42.130 --> 00:20:46.070 and it's like that number doesn't really doesn't really speak to the 270 00:20:46.070 --> 00:20:50.330 business. Whereas if you say, you know, looking at engagement metrics, here's 271 00:20:50.330 --> 00:20:55.610 how much I improved the time on site and this is how, how much, how much it 272 00:20:55.620 --> 00:21:00.330 influenced deals pass SQL like you can go really deep on your influence and 273 00:21:00.330 --> 00:21:03.920 that's powerful as a content marketer because for a while, like you could 274 00:21:03.920 --> 00:21:09.740 never quantify your your impact. It was always around influence. So in terms of 275 00:21:09.740 --> 00:21:12.860 results, there's a couple of ways to look at it, but one of the biggest 276 00:21:12.860 --> 00:21:19.090 things for us was keeping people on our homepage and we switched out our sita's 277 00:21:19.100 --> 00:21:23.560 from just being like a product video that shows up. If you click a button to 278 00:21:24.040 --> 00:21:29.890 a attract like the overview bundle and it has different stuff for different 279 00:21:29.890 --> 00:21:33.230 intent visitors, someone might want to watch the two minute video, someone 280 00:21:33.230 --> 00:21:36.900 might want to read the R. O. I. Document. So we put that on and we 281 00:21:36.900 --> 00:21:41.510 found that one in three people who hit that button looked at more than one 282 00:21:41.510 --> 00:21:46.480 asset in that track and that that one in three is people we would have lost 283 00:21:46.480 --> 00:21:50.980 if we just had a video, we're giving them other things to look at and 284 00:21:50.980 --> 00:21:55.930 consume based on where they think they are. So that was powerful. That one in 285 00:21:55.930 --> 00:22:01.040 three because and then the other thing is actually increasing time on site. So 286 00:22:01.050 --> 00:22:04.760 you create these strong content experiences. It hooks people in and 287 00:22:04.760 --> 00:22:10.330 keeps them on site. So we found that if someone clicks through to a content 288 00:22:10.330 --> 00:22:15.600 track At five ext their time on site because we're hooking them in with 289 00:22:15.600 --> 00:22:18.750 relevant content, there's different stuff. They don't have to go looking 290 00:22:18.750 --> 00:22:22.980 for it. We've curated that experience for them and now they're just in the 291 00:22:22.980 --> 00:22:26.410 reading experience and they can go at their own pace. So those are two strong 292 00:22:26.410 --> 00:22:32.120 results up front. The sales use cases newer for us. So we're going to still 293 00:22:32.120 --> 00:22:36.050 see how that nets out. But that's, this is an example of like not trying to 294 00:22:36.050 --> 00:22:40.420 boil the ocean with a full sales rollout and a full organic website 295 00:22:40.420 --> 00:22:45.330 rollout and a full demand gen rollout so patiently awaiting results on that 296 00:22:45.340 --> 00:22:49.560 too. But those are the two like right off the bat five X increase on site. 297 00:22:49.940 --> 00:22:53.230 And people consuming more content on the home page and keeping them from 298 00:22:53.230 --> 00:22:58.600 bouncing what you said about consumers are then go to your website, have a 299 00:22:58.600 --> 00:23:03.030 curated content experience and are able to consume at their own pace. Read at 300 00:23:03.030 --> 00:23:07.560 their own pace. Makes me think about just another conversation happening in 301 00:23:07.560 --> 00:23:12.520 our space right now, which is all about personalization. And we come back to 302 00:23:12.520 --> 00:23:17.730 this idea and I had an awesome conversation with Lynn Capozzi recently 303 00:23:17.730 --> 00:23:22.060 and she was saying it's like netflix, people want an experience like netflix 304 00:23:22.070 --> 00:23:29.330 in that they want to have total personalization and total control at 305 00:23:29.330 --> 00:23:33.730 the same time. And it sounds like you have situated that website experience 306 00:23:33.730 --> 00:23:38.670 right in the crux of both of those things. So kind of like a whole way too. 307 00:23:39.040 --> 00:23:42.930 Now bring content performance into the world of personalization to is kind of 308 00:23:42.930 --> 00:23:47.760 interesting how it fits together. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, as as these 309 00:23:47.760 --> 00:23:52.390 like enrichment services for example, I was talking earlier about the d 310 00:23:52.390 --> 00:23:56.640 anonymous izing the anonymous visitors and overcoming the challenges of 311 00:23:56.640 --> 00:24:02.170 cookies and work from home. But if we're able to better enrich those leads 312 00:24:02.170 --> 00:24:06.400 coming through, then you can serve a much better personalized experience. 313 00:24:06.400 --> 00:24:10.050 And there's certainly intelligence built into all these platforms. So you 314 00:24:10.050 --> 00:24:14.590 can personalize it whether you want to do the company name on the content or 315 00:24:14.590 --> 00:24:20.210 say, we know that Fedex is in shipping and logistics, let's serve them the 316 00:24:20.210 --> 00:24:23.880 shipping and logistics track. So they're not getting stuff on financial 317 00:24:23.880 --> 00:24:29.470 services and retail for example. But that is a really, really cool use case 318 00:24:29.470 --> 00:24:33.720 and that's also like where it falls into the nurture personalization we 319 00:24:33.720 --> 00:24:36.740 need to try to get, it's like trying to get that right message at the right 320 00:24:36.740 --> 00:24:40.880 time to the right person. This sort of insight lets you do better 321 00:24:40.880 --> 00:24:46.550 personalization as well. Too brilliant. So if somebody wanted to take your 322 00:24:46.550 --> 00:24:52.780 advice, use technology to support these endeavors and essentially do what you 323 00:24:52.780 --> 00:24:57.810 are doing at observe ai what would be step one depending on how you like to 324 00:24:57.820 --> 00:25:02.460 because they're really, it's like this isn't really a build verse by situation. 325 00:25:02.740 --> 00:25:06.640 You could try to build something like this yourself using existing 326 00:25:06.640 --> 00:25:10.180 technologies that you have today, but really you want to, if you want to get 327 00:25:10.180 --> 00:25:14.490 the most bang for your buck Well because you're paying, you need to look 328 00:25:14.490 --> 00:25:18.540 for some sort of content experience platform, there's tons of them various 329 00:25:18.540 --> 00:25:22.570 prices. So once you've done that and you're like, okay I need to start 330 00:25:22.570 --> 00:25:28.270 looking for this. You use the various sources. G two blogs read about it. But 331 00:25:28.540 --> 00:25:33.110 the second thing you need to say is like how much do I want to do up front 332 00:25:33.120 --> 00:25:38.660 and when we're going through our search for a platform. I found like radically 333 00:25:38.660 --> 00:25:44.070 different platform offerings from like like I said rip out your whole CMS, you 334 00:25:44.070 --> 00:25:48.400 run your blog on this thing, your whole resource center, everything lives in 335 00:25:48.400 --> 00:25:54.210 that content experience platform. Or do I wanted to just sit on top posted in 336 00:25:54.210 --> 00:25:57.200 there and people can quickly come through and consume this stuff. But I'm 337 00:25:57.200 --> 00:26:02.750 still running my blog separately, still running my web dev separately. So 338 00:26:02.760 --> 00:26:05.940 there's all sorts of various offerings. But that's the second thing you need to 339 00:26:05.940 --> 00:26:09.260 decide. You know, that's going to depend on how big your dev team is, how 340 00:26:09.260 --> 00:26:14.390 big your marketing team is, how good your ops are, all things to consider. 341 00:26:14.400 --> 00:26:19.720 But you know, like I said, don't try to boil the ocean because this is too much 342 00:26:19.730 --> 00:26:23.940 to try to do everything up front slowly address like the biggest gaps that you 343 00:26:23.940 --> 00:26:28.180 had. I talked about our gaps earlier, which was like that lack of insight 344 00:26:28.190 --> 00:26:33.200 into lead generation results on on the content. So I'm like that's the first 345 00:26:33.200 --> 00:26:36.660 thing I'm going to do. I'm going to get analytics on this and build a process 346 00:26:36.660 --> 00:26:40.940 with our digital team and our ops team and then move on to the more advanced 347 00:26:40.940 --> 00:26:44.220 use cases which are going to be nurture and lead scoring and then how am I 348 00:26:44.220 --> 00:26:47.600 going to work with sales? But that's the second thing just no, don't try to 349 00:26:47.600 --> 00:26:51.860 boil the ocean and then you probably have a good idea of what your gaps are, 350 00:26:51.870 --> 00:26:56.050 whether it's sales, whether it's funnel conversions, whether it's organic or 351 00:26:56.050 --> 00:27:00.150 whether it's actually people engaging with your site and like conversions on 352 00:27:00.150 --> 00:27:04.200 your website. So as marketers, we know what those gaps are and that's where 353 00:27:04.210 --> 00:27:09.030 that's where I would recommend starting and then slowly add more and more 354 00:27:09.040 --> 00:27:14.260 content experience features as you deal with those gaps. That's kind of like 355 00:27:14.260 --> 00:27:20.090 step 12. Oh and also like don't be afraid to copy. It's like look at other 356 00:27:20.090 --> 00:27:23.890 people's content experiences and try to recreate them as your own. I'm always 357 00:27:23.890 --> 00:27:28.440 doing that and you know, I'm not play dressing. I'm just using them as 358 00:27:28.440 --> 00:27:32.470 inspiration, but that's another really strong way. That's awesome. Yeah. I 359 00:27:32.470 --> 00:27:36.650 also love that. I think your organization just came through, you're 360 00:27:36.650 --> 00:27:39.540 just like your ability to organize because you just gave me like an 361 00:27:39.540 --> 00:27:44.260 itemized list of priority for where to start this process. I absolutely loved 362 00:27:44.260 --> 00:27:48.340 that. That was like so generous of you did not only give step one but to give 363 00:27:48.340 --> 00:27:54.760 all the way out to 45 I'm living. I'm living in it. I love that. It's near 364 00:27:54.760 --> 00:27:58.830 and dear to my heart. I absolutely love that as somebody who's not necessarily 365 00:27:58.830 --> 00:28:04.390 that clear kind of analytical talking bullet points type of person. I like 366 00:28:04.390 --> 00:28:11.450 yes. Talk to me like that, understand. And there's a nice example of like an 367 00:28:11.450 --> 00:28:15.300 insight you might find on a piece of content, you might see like no one 368 00:28:15.300 --> 00:28:19.580 reads the wall of text that you provide them in an e book, but people do spend 369 00:28:19.580 --> 00:28:24.810 time on the page that has a table or a bullet point list, this kind of thing. 370 00:28:24.810 --> 00:28:28.000 You need to think about it the same way when you're communicating with someone 371 00:28:28.000 --> 00:28:31.870 in person, it's like, recreate that when they're reading because they might 372 00:28:31.870 --> 00:28:36.630 not have time to read eight pages of just text, they're there to just 373 00:28:36.630 --> 00:28:43.360 quickly bounce, bounce through skin through. So you inspired me there, 374 00:28:44.370 --> 00:28:52.450 there was only one thing listeners could take away from this episode if 375 00:28:52.450 --> 00:28:57.430 you were, there was just something you were like, above all else try this or 376 00:28:57.430 --> 00:29:01.160 think about this, what would it be? I would say the biggest thing is just 377 00:29:01.160 --> 00:29:08.050 like invest in content experience, not just volume of content, putting out 378 00:29:08.050 --> 00:29:13.010 more isn't always better and instead look at what you already have and use 379 00:29:13.010 --> 00:29:17.500 that to help determine future pieces of content that you're putting out and 380 00:29:17.500 --> 00:29:22.450 improve the stuff that exists today. I always say two things don't boil the 381 00:29:22.450 --> 00:29:25.980 ocean, which I've said like eight times already and then don't reinvent the 382 00:29:25.980 --> 00:29:29.090 wheel, which I think I've also said eight times, but those are the two 383 00:29:29.100 --> 00:29:34.680 really valuable things that at least I've done with content to actually put 384 00:29:34.680 --> 00:29:38.680 out better content, not just more content, but that's what I would say. 385 00:29:38.690 --> 00:29:42.370 Think about content experience. Think about your readers experience in there. 386 00:29:42.380 --> 00:29:46.190 You know, this stuff might be very fascinating to you and you might have 387 00:29:46.190 --> 00:29:52.520 spent days and days writing Eight pages of text, but but they only have 30 388 00:29:52.520 --> 00:29:57.470 seconds, so give them something quicker and easier to digest. And think about 389 00:29:57.470 --> 00:30:02.940 the experience of them reading joe, how can listeners connect with you and 390 00:30:02.940 --> 00:30:07.770 learn more about observe a I, you know, I'm on linkedin, you can find me there, 391 00:30:07.770 --> 00:30:14.710 my name is joe Hanson and observe a I you know, go to observe dot Ai and 392 00:30:14.720 --> 00:30:19.710 that's our Ural and and you know, don't mess up, see if you come and don't 393 00:30:19.710 --> 00:30:24.700 convert, it's gonna make me look worse. So don't convert on my landing pages if 394 00:30:24.700 --> 00:30:32.040 you don't want to buy our product, please. Oh my God, it would scuttle 395 00:30:32.040 --> 00:30:38.700 this entire conversation. Oh cool. Well it's been so great to talk to you. 396 00:30:38.700 --> 00:30:42.810 Thank you so much for joining me on BTV growth. Thanks for having me. This was 397 00:30:42.810 --> 00:30:43.060 fun. 398 00:30:44.240 --> 00:30:49.370 Yeah, at Sweet fish. We're on a mission to create the most helpful content on 399 00:30:49.370 --> 00:30:54.090 the internet for every job function and industry on the planet for the B two B 400 00:30:54.090 --> 00:30:58.120 marketing industry. This show is how we're executing on that mission. If you 401 00:30:58.120 --> 00:31:01.610 know a marketing leader that would be an awesome guest for this podcast, 402 00:31:01.620 --> 00:31:05.170 shoot me a text message. Don't call me because I don't answer unknown numbers, 403 00:31:05.180 --> 00:31:11.660 but text me at 4074 and I know 33 to 8, just shoot me their name. maybe a link 404 00:31:11.660 --> 00:31:15.590 to their linkedin profile. And I'd love to check them out to see if we can get 405 00:31:15.600 --> 00:31:17.260 them on the show next lot.