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Spend Way More Time Promoting Your B2B Content
61 Plays4 years ago
Every B2B company wants to capitalize on the power of SEO.
But there are fundamental mistakes at these companies make that undermine their marketing activities.
Dev Basu, chief experience officer with Powered by Search, said SEO delivers when companies create research-driven content that meets the needs of target audiences.
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Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark and guest Dev Basu
00:00:04
Speaker
Hello, my name is Mark Evans, and I'd like to welcome you to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers small doses of insight, tools, and tips for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches. By small doses, it's conversations that are 15 minutes or less. Think of Marketing Spark as a snack rather than a meal. On today's show, I'm talking with Dev Basu, the chief experience officer with Powered by Search.
00:00:27
Speaker
which helps B2B SaaS and tech companies grow monthly recurring revenue, book more demos, and drive trials with content, SEO, and paid acquisition.
How COVID-19 altered marketing strategies
00:00:36
Speaker
Welcome to Marketing Spark.
00:00:38
Speaker
Thanks for having me, Mark. This, it goes without saying, is a very interesting marketing landscape. COVID has in many ways changed the rules of engagement. A lot of brands are doubling down on content and things like webinars and eBooks. And I'm really interested from an SEO perspective. What are you seeing?
Company responses to COVID: Fear vs Strategy
00:00:58
Speaker
Are companies approaching SEO differently?
00:01:00
Speaker
It's a great question i see that there's usually three camps of companies related to code nineteen we did a webinar on this particular topic and identified there were. Fear focus companies that basically pulled back a lot of different marketing activities they first cut their paid ad spend and then i pull back on seo as well there's ones were unfocused to basically continued with their publication schedule around their editorial calendar and pull back ads and the strategy focus ones realize that.
00:01:26
Speaker
Even though there's a slump in demand where effectively commercial intent-oriented queries, like basically people looking to buy software, that started to go down for a number of different cloud-based companies. The strategy-focused ones really said, this is now the time to double down, look back at our systems, improve our workflows, and then really start ramping this up because it's not going to last forever and the demand will come back.
00:01:50
Speaker
In your estimation of those three groups the strategies group like how big was that and how hard do you think it was for them to embrace that approach because when the world is about to end or at least go into what people thought was the apocalypse it's easy to pull back easy to play it safe and not push forward with a ten percent twenty percent.
00:02:10
Speaker
So it's a really interesting question. We did a poll with a number of other consultants and agencies. The ones that saw about a 20% drop in revenue, really that came from that fear focus and unfocused group. The strategy focus group is somewhere between 20 and 30%. And I mentioned that range because a number of cloud-based companies obviously have seen a huge surge in demand and their stock prices have effectively doubled in the last 180 days here.
00:02:36
Speaker
part of it was if you had more demand than you can handle you had to have your engines firing on all cylinders and then there's the other group that basically had to wait and see where specially in b2b sass where deal cycle started getting a bit longer that's where that lower end of the twenty percent basically comes from where they said hey we need to continue investing in
00:02:58
Speaker
marketing initiatives and activities and seo is one of those long-term plays it's not something that you really think of as a quarterly you know turn it on and turn it off to the thing they invested heavily in it.
00:03:08
Speaker
It's an interesting strategic approach because if you think it in terms of the long run and how you can establish a competitive advantage, pushing forward when a lot of companies are pushing back makes a lot of sense. The entrepreneurs that you've talked to, what's been their overall thinking in terms of how they approach marketing? Do they have a particular attitude? Do they have a particular strategic focus? What's separated them from other companies that have pulled back?
00:03:34
Speaker
So the ones that really pulled back saw their place playing field in the market as renting the market which is usually what we think of from a paid perspective once you turn an ad off it stops working for you. The ones that really believed in their product and the value that they bring to the market even though they saw their audience their market being scared just like they were.
00:03:56
Speaker
I think they have the courage really to put a flag in the ground and say, we're going to be here to help our audience through this thing. And that showed up and just like you're saying in webinars and eBooks in terms of content to help their customers through COVID-19. But at the same time, they said, look, longer term, a good 60% of our
00:04:16
Speaker
demand generation comes from organic search so it would be foolish to turn this off it's always been there for us and one of the things that my clients and i often talk about is how.
Impact of strong brand positioning during COVID
00:04:27
Speaker
Best performing content was actually content that they published a year or even two years ago and so the efforts of their investing in today are really gonna pay off a year from today and become their best performing content today that.
00:04:40
Speaker
Before we dive into the SEO world, one of the things I wanted to ask you is I spend a lot of time focused on brand positioning. Have you seen a discernible difference in the brands that fall into the strategic camp in terms of the strength of their brand positioning versus weaker brands? My take is that.
00:04:57
Speaker
companies with compelling brand positioning they'll do well because people are distracted their multitasking they're doing more with less or the same and so if you don't stand out from the crowd if your position isn't bang on then that's gonna put you at a competitive disadvantage.
00:05:13
Speaker
You're 100% right about that. We did another webinar through COVID called the messaging pivot. And our core thesis is that all SAS companies effectively sell three things. They're selling speed, certainty, and insight. And in boom times, whereas if you're selling those things, you're basically talking about selling automation.
00:05:32
Speaker
If it's certainty, it's about productivity. And if it's about insight, it's about better decision making. All of those things were not things that customers cared about when it's an existential sort of crisis. And so the ones that really did well are the ones who pivoted their message on those same value drivers from automation to effectiveness, from better decision making to making the right decisions right now. And from productivity to just how do I keep the lights on?
00:05:59
Speaker
When we were talking about you doing the podcast, one of the things that struck me is the mistakes that a lot of companies make when it comes to SEO. From the outside looking in, SEO is a combination of art and science. A lot of companies make a mistake because they don't understand
SEO mistakes and content marketing issues
00:06:14
Speaker
it. They may approach it from a position of, I'm not going to say ignorance, but it may be a lack of knowledge. As a result, they make a lot of mistakes.
00:06:22
Speaker
I'm interested in getting your insight into the things that companies do wrong when it goes to SEO. Do you have a list of the things that they should avoid so they can actually leverage SEO successfully? This list is something we came up with over the last 10 years of working with.
00:06:38
Speaker
SaaS companies, some, you know, near and dear Canadian ones like a Clio or a Touch Bistro, the end of the folks in the States, like a 24-7 AI or, you know, point click care, for example, that's in both countries, really. What we found is that the number one thing and stage one of a SaaS website is they tend to have a lack of dedicated features pages. So if you're looking at your features pages right now, and it's got a number of little icons on it, a small headline and a paragraph of text,
00:07:06
Speaker
Generally, that is doing a disservice to your customer's ability to find you and Google's ability to love on you and actually help rank you.
00:07:15
Speaker
So if you don't have a dedicated feature page, meaning a specific page for every single feature that you effectively have as part of your product or platform suite, that would be one of the main mistakes that we see as not really assigning, again, a stake or a flag in the ground to say, we believe in this feature so much that we actually wanted to go do a deep dive and not do it a disservice and write some content on it, not just about what it is and how it works, but why customers love it, and also,
00:07:45
Speaker
why it's competitive compared to a peer group where if you've seen somebody using CRM A and they now want to go to CRM B, having testimonials to actually showcase how much they love this feature is something that we've seen improve conversions.
00:07:58
Speaker
That's interesting because a lot of companies follow that feature formula. They have the page, they have the icons, a little bit of text, and they think that's enough information. What you're saying is the more information you can give them, the more social proof that you can demonstrate, the more effective it'll be from an SEO perspective and from a customer acquisition perspective.
00:08:16
Speaker
Yeah, and you know, we came up upon this insight actually from something quite old. So in the 50s, a high school teacher by the name of Bernice McCarthy came up with this form, this specific teaching format called format with a number four. It's for MAT. And the idea was the brain needs to ingest information in four questions. Why, what, how, and now? Why am I here and what am I looking at?
00:08:40
Speaker
How does it actually work? And then what do you expect me to do next? If your feature page doesn't address those four questions that the brain subliminally kind of goes through, it won't end up converting at its highest potential. Generally speaking, with a headline and a paragraph, you can't answer all four of those questions in a succinct enough fashion.
00:08:59
Speaker
What other mistakes do SaaS and tech companies make when it comes to SEO? Yeah. So the other one that we really see is they end up having no comparison or alternative two pages.
SaaS strategies: Honest comparisons and content focus
00:09:10
Speaker
And it's almost a little bit like not acknowledging that this narrative of a potential customer comparing two different SaaS products is actually happening. And so what they do is they concede that ground to comparison websites like a get app, a G2, a Captera.
00:09:25
Speaker
Really, what we believe they should be doing is creating comparison and an alternative two pages on their own website with a honest breakdown of the types of customers that might be a good fit for them, as well as the types of customers that might be a good fit for their competitor. And this is not to do, it's not a cast shade on the competitor in any way, but really to attract higher LTV customers. If they buy for the right reasons, they'll stick around and love on that particular SaaS company longer.
00:09:52
Speaker
That's got to be a very challenging exercise. Cause I've seen, you know, we've all seen the comparison tables that appear on some websites and you've got a whole bunch of check marks for the company's product. And then the competition has check mark, check mark, and then it's X X X. And you look at it and you go, come on that you can't be serious. I mean, that's not an honest comparison because it's slanted in one direction. If you're a company and you're going to do that and follow best practices,
00:10:20
Speaker
How do you make sure that you're being as honest or as unbiased as possible? And more important, that you're believable. People look at you and go, okay, this company is taking a different approach to this technique. Yeah, so 100% true, right? People have a very good bullshit
00:10:37
Speaker
radar around this. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on your podcast or not. What we do is we run jobs to be done interviews and the best way of figuring this out is interviewing customers who have made a purchasing decision who are what we would call an up switcher basically. So they've used something else in the past. You ask them why they used your platform instead and you extract from the voice of the customer the main reasons that caused them to switch.
00:11:02
Speaker
The pricing table approach is generally lazy and not very true, as you mentioned. The other thing as well from a positioning standpoint is going back to that Seth Godin quote of people like us do things like this, really giving a nod to the competitor for what they built. And one of my favorite pages on this is Intercom versus Drift.
00:11:21
Speaker
and Drift built this page where they said, look, we are the platform built by marketers for marketers. If you're not a marketer, if you're an engineering, you're in customer service or something like that, go use Intercom. They're amazing at what they do. But if you're a marketer, you're going to love using Drift. And that was just a way of being able to segment the audience, not based on the feature set, but based on what the company stood for.
00:11:44
Speaker
The other thing i want to ask you about is the focus on content these days and from my perspective as someone who's focused on brand positioning and content marketing i'm amazed by how much content is being pumped out some brands were already doing it content marketing was a key part of their strategic approach but many brands who weren't using content marketing or doing it sporadically have all of a sudden decided become publishers.
00:12:08
Speaker
What are some of the mistakes that SaaS brands are making when it comes to content, particularly when it comes to customer focus content and as important content that's SEO friendly? I think that the right recipe is to do it as one and the same. And the way, here's a litmus test. If you are not ready to read your own blog posts on your site, then why would you expect your customer to?
00:12:30
Speaker
And so to hammer that home, the decision by committee led approach of, hey, we should publish about this because a competitor talked about it, or I reckon that we saw a listicle post on Buzzfeed that might be appropriated to our B2B SaaS focus isn't the best approach. That's a spray and pray approach where
00:12:49
Speaker
Frankly i think that hope is not the best strategy a better way of going about it is really a research driven approach where you can segment your audiences keyword research data into what we would call a problem unaware audience a problem aware audience and a product aware audience.
00:13:04
Speaker
and then look at the topics effectively that they're searching for, and then go and look at whether you've got a page for that that addresses the questions and answers that they may have, then prioritize that in your editorial calendar. If you did that, then another good litmus test we use, especially for companies that are just scaling up their content marketing, is looking at what are the top 10 questions that seem to continue popping up in your demos, or that your customer success team faces in a trial type of scenario.
00:13:33
Speaker
and do you have a blog post about that? If not, go do those first. That's going to be your 80-20. When it comes to content marketing, is there an ideal mix between content promotion and content creation? I would suggest that a lot of companies spend a lot of time creating content and very little time promoting it. What are your thoughts about that?
00:13:54
Speaker
Probably like the mistake is 90% on production and 10% on promotion. But honestly, the times of times where we see the publish button being hit and nothing happening after, other than moving on to the next piece of content, it's abysmal really. So the right ratio is somewhere in the 60-40 range. So 60% of time being spent on research, editorial publication, and then 40% being spent on distribution.
00:14:19
Speaker
That's a realistic number although we'd love to flip it to 20% being on production, 80% being on promotion. That's just not a reality in a day-to-day type of scenario, not something we've observed. But if you can get to 60-40, publication versus distribution, that's a pretty nice golden ratio. Any thoughts about best practices when it comes to distribution, the channels you should use, the approaches you should take?
Effective distribution and collaboration strategies
00:14:39
Speaker
Yeah. So from an SEO standpoint, it really comes down to, are you getting mentioned, shared and linked to by relevant publications and websites within your industry? And so one of the simpler approaches is actually to help them build it with you. The way that we do it is we will, when we're building content for a particular client, we'll actually do interviews and actually get other people's opinions in their industry to shape the piece of content. That way they're not being pitched on the piece of content. They are a piece of the content.
00:15:09
Speaker
That way, when you publish, you just say, hey, it's published, here's a link. And because they were a part of it, they inherently want to share it on social channels and such and link to it as well.
00:15:20
Speaker
One final question, what is your favorite SEO tool and why?
Tools for SEO success and episode wrap-up
00:15:25
Speaker
Probably hands down it's Ahrefs.com because it allows you to figure out where the content gaps are and you pick five competitors and maybe four of the five are talking about a specific topic and there's a specific topic that they haven't dived deep enough into or that they publish content on but have not promoted, haven't got any links to. So this is a really great way of being able to
00:15:48
Speaker
focus in on areas of opportunity that are low hanging fruit. And this really, it takes that whole belief that SEO takes forever or it's an undeterminable period about how long it takes on its head and says, here's the stuff that we can do in the next quarter or two quarters and actually get wins around.
00:16:06
Speaker
Well, this has been terrific inside. I really appreciate it. I think for anyone considering SEO, your advice is something that they should consider and really try to implement in terms of their their sales and marketing strategy. So thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, please leave a review as well as subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest or you're looking for help with B2B marketing,
00:16:33
Speaker
Send an email to mark at mark Evans ca talk to you next time