Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Content That Connects: Erin Balsa on AI, Authenticity, and Standing Out image

Content That Connects: Erin Balsa on AI, Authenticity, and Standing Out

S3 E154 · Marketing Spark (The B2B SaaS Marketing Podcast)
Avatar
101 Plays1 month ago

In this episode of the Marketing Spark Podcast, content marketing strategist and founder of Haus of Bold, Erin Balsa, takes us behind the scenes of her journey from early marketing days to becoming a freelance powerhouse. 

We dive into the evolving role of AI in content creation, uncover strategies to break through the digital clutter, and talk about the importance of consistency—without sacrificing creativity or risking burnout. 

Erin shares her go-to methods for smashing writer’s block, offers fresh perspectives on thought leadership and brand voice, and reveals how she measures success beyond clicks and likes. 

Finally, she looks ahead to what content marketing might look like in 2025 and offers the one skill that marketers need to own the future. 

If you’re hungry for practical tips, big-picture insights, and a spark of inspiration, this episode is a must-listen!

Recommended
Transcript

AI's Impact on Content Marketing

00:00:15
Speaker
a content marketer in 2025. It's been just over two years since chat LGBT was launched, and for better or worse, AI According to AIA detection startup Originality AI, more than 50% of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are probably created by AI.
00:00:36
Speaker
Meanwhile, many companies are leveraging AI to publish content, even if the quality is at best good enough. To me, it feels like the wild west. We're in the middle of a content marketing gunfight in which humans are battling robots. And that may be an overly dramatic description, but there's no denying that the content marketing landscape is volatile, unpredictable, and arguably fascinating.
00:01:02
Speaker
to make sense of it all or at least offer insight into where we're at and where content marketing is heading.

Erin Balsa's Career Journey

00:01:09
Speaker
I'm excited to have Erin Balsa on MarketingSpark. Erin is a content marketing strategist with House of Bold, which creates bold, high impact content for B2B startups. And according to her website, she puts the boom in your shakalaka. I think that's the first time that I've used the word shakalaka on the podcast. Welcome to MarketingSpark, Erin. Thanks so much, Mark. Thanks for having me.
00:01:33
Speaker
Let's start with how you got here. Can you walk me through your journey from your early days in marketing to becoming a freelance content marketing strategist at house of bold? You're currently located in London, but I guess your hometown or your home is in Boston.
00:01:48
Speaker
I started off in college studying marketing at a business school. Unfortunately, for the first year and a half, I didn't take a single marketing class, but they put me through the wringer in terms of macroeconomics and microeconomics and all of these things that I struggled with and really advanced math courses. I was never that strong in math.
00:02:06
Speaker
good enough to get into a good business school, but not good enough to truly excel at these courses. After about a year and a half and really struggling to have a GPA of about 3.4, it was a struggle. I had to go to the tutoring center all the time. I thought, maybe this isn't for me. But at the same time, I was looking at the hundreds and thousands of dollars of debt that I was going to have to pay back. I took a pivot, went to state school, saved a crap ton of money, studied English, which is my real love, writing and reading.
00:02:35
Speaker
And I got my teaching license. So throughout my 20s, I worked in that world. I worked in education and I worked with children and teenagers who were out of district. So they were in residential programs, facilities, they were incarcerated or at juvenile detention centers. And it was really rewarding and it was a great period of my life.
00:02:56
Speaker
One day I was 30 and I was at the hair salon getting my hair done, flipping through my favorite local city magazine. And I noticed an ad saying they were looking for an assistant editor. And I thought, wow, that's so cool. I had been blogging for fun on the side of my nine to five for about a year. So I just went and I bypassed the normal application instructions. Instead, I sent a link to my personal blog to the managing editor.
00:03:22
Speaker
And she loved it. And I got an interview, took some writing and editing tests, and landed the job. So my real first experience was magazine journalism. Print magazines were if you made a mistake, you could not just hop on to WordPress and correct your mistake. It was there for all to see. And that was a little scary. So for me, making the shift into digital content was actually Amazing because it really removed that level of risk. You could always go and quickly edit a mistake.

Transition to Content Marketing

00:03:55
Speaker
My husband and I got married. He took a job in the city in Boston. So we moved a little bit further up toward the city. I decided to look for a job in the city. Prior to this, I was living in Providence, which is about an hour commute from Boston.
00:04:09
Speaker
So I started searching for jobs as an editor and I found something that said a section editor at a content marketing agency in Boston. So I said, I don't really know much of anything about content marketing, but I've managed people before I'll throw out my twenties and I'm an editor. So why don't I just apply? I applied to a job that I was really under qualified for, but they hired me and I started off by managing a team of 15 full-time content writers.
00:04:36
Speaker
And really learning by diving in headfirst or as they say in the tech world, drinking from the fire hose. And I had very little training. I just had to figure it out as I went. Turns out I loved content marketing and my story really starts from there. After working for three and a half years at the agency and working my way up to manage the entire Boston editorial department,
00:04:58
Speaker
I went in-house upon a recommendation from a former colleague at the Predictive Index, a B2B SaaS company, and I there built out the content function, got a few promotions over a couple of years, and ended up there as a marketing director overseeing a team. I think it was about 12 people by the time I left. It was editorial.
00:05:19
Speaker
which means all the writing that's done for the whole company, as well as video production, graphic design, and digital learning. So when I talk about content marketing, I'm not just talking about blog posts. I'm talking a much more holistic experience, everything from podcasts and videos. At the Predictive Index, we even did a documentary film, and we released it to people that we invited to attend a documentary premiere.
00:05:45
Speaker
That's an important point too. When people think of content, I always say just don't think of the blog. That's just one tiny sliver. It is interesting when you look at the journey of many marketers, a lot of them never went to school for marketing, never aspired to be marketers and somehow found themselves

AI vs Human Content Creation

00:06:04
Speaker
as marketers. I was a newspaper journalist for many years. I loved being a reporter. It was very exciting way to make a living. Never thought of myself going to the dark side of PR or corporate marketing. It seemed not like the right thing to do or the thing that I didn't want to do somehow.
00:06:21
Speaker
Along the way, I fell into the world of marketing. The the message here for a lot of people is that you never know where you're going to end up, even though if you're on like on a career path and that's what you want to do, opportunities arise. You get laid off. Someone offers you.
00:06:36
Speaker
a job that you never imagined someone would offer you and away you go. I like your spirit and your willingness to apply for things that you may not be qualified in. You've done really well. That's a great origin story. I wanted to get back to the world of content marketing in 2025. Interested in getting your perspective on the content marketing landscape. AI is everywhere. The number of apps that promise to make writing easy and create content at scale is endless.
00:07:06
Speaker
I'd love to know how AI has changed or for that matter has not changed the way that you approach content creation strategically and tactically. And where do you see the biggest opportunities or pitfalls for marketers? That's a loaded question. We can unpack this, but I wanted to get your personal take on content creation and, and how marketers should be thinking about content these days. That's a huge loaded question. Before AI tools helped anyone and their mother create content, we had a small kind of bottom of the barrel of people who called themselves content writers, who created created really low budget, awful content. But now that's happening at scale because people who
00:07:52
Speaker
don't even want to invest the time can just use AI and they can do it faster. What that means for editorial and articles and things like that and social posts and even comments on LinkedIn. People are using AI to leave comments on LinkedIn right now. Nevermind LinkedIn posts and blogs and all that. The biggest thing that I'm seeing is there's even more really mediocre meh kind of content that doesn't get your attention or make you want to interact with it or have any conversations. It doesn't spark any conversations. It doesn't have a soul. So there's a lot of soulless content out there. And I think because of that, people are really going to be more and more
00:08:31
Speaker
hungry for content that helps them trust that it was made by a human. Because nobody wants to fucking interact with content made by A. I don't want to read it. I don't want to look at comments from it. I don't want to go on to meta in the metaverse and see some fake profile from some fake guy saying, hi, I'm a mom of two and I like to jog and bake cookies. Shut up. I don't care about that. That shit scares the hell out of me if I'm being honest.
00:08:57
Speaker
I think that in content marketing, it's going to be important to have faces behind the brand, faces that people believe in, that they think, oh, this person's actually creating this content. I think it's important to be on video because right now we're not at the point where we can deep fake everyone on video yet, thank God. So if Aaron Balsa and Mark, we hop on a video or we film a podcast and it's our voice and we're talking, that's far more authentic and people are going to want that more than they would want to just read some blog posts by some faceless company and they can't really tell if it was written by a human or chat GPT or any other of the hundreds of tools that are available to write content. Video is going to be huge. Podcasts will continue to be huge.
00:09:43
Speaker
seeing people's faces, hearing their voices, as well as in-person

The Role of Events and Authentic Content

00:09:48
Speaker
events. And there's such an opportunity to use content both in promoting the event, both at the event, and use the event to create more content. So it's like a really easy way to get your content engine humming is doing in-person events.
00:10:05
Speaker
People love them. Yes, they're expensive. Yes, they're a big lift. But when I think of an in-person event, I think of it as like writing a a physical book or coming up with a really meaty research report. That's going to be the center, the hub of your content engine for bare minimum a quarter. You're going to be able to squeeze so much juice out of that effort. It becomes really worth it. And it's something that you cannot outsource to AI. I think that is really important.
00:10:34
Speaker
Boy, there's a lot of places I could go, but I did want to focus on something you said ah about companies or individuals getting credit for creating human powered content. Then playing around with the idea that you could differentiate your content by being very clear.
00:10:59
Speaker
Bluntly clear that it was written by a human as opposed to a robot for now You can tell if AI has written something whereas that may change but I'm playing around with the idea that Companies and individuals will get bonus points if it's handcrafted as opposed to created by a robot. Whether you have a disclaimer that says this blog post was written by human consumers, prospects, customers will look at that content and go, oh, okay, I'm going to reward this company or this individual for doing that, for not using a machine.
00:11:37
Speaker
Do you think that will be something that will resonate and help companies establish a competitive differentiation or a competitive advantage? I don't know if people will believe that. I can go stick a stamp on any piece of content and be like, hey, I wrote it. Nobody really knows for sure. They only know if they see my lips moving or they hear my voice or they see me physically at an event or see footage of me leading a presentation or giving a talk at an event. I don't know if they're going to believe a label that's on ah a blog post or a LinkedIn post saying this was created by a human. I think what is important, like low hanging fruit for brands
00:12:14
Speaker
Stop labeling your blog posts from the so-and-so company team. Stop sending your emails from the so-and-so company email address. While I'm at it, stop using those fake emails. Everyone knows that when you're saying something's coming from the ceo or someone else at the organization if it's a newsletter we know the email we know like the naming conventions of email so if you have some weird wonky email address or if you're saying that your ceo is writing the email and you're ah a company over a hundred employees that's just so fake and people can read right through that so authenticity rules.
00:12:48
Speaker
Even if it's someone who's more like junior on your marketing team and you're sending the email from that person, that's way better and much more believable than having your CEO of a hundred person company in their fake email address sending a newsletter. People see through that, stop doing that, and attribute your blog to actual people at your company.

Media's Role in Building Trust

00:13:09
Speaker
The other angle that I wanted to explore is video versus copy. You and I are word smiths. We've been doing this for a long time. i I suspect you love words as much as I do, but as we move forward in this AI world, I want to pick up on your comment about video creation and whether every single piece of content or most pieces of content that we create should be accompanied by video so that we can actually validate or authenticate the fact that You created this content and people, it's believability. People will look at that content and go, Oh, Aaron created that because there's a video. Do you think that copy text should be accompanied by video in some way, shape or form just to make sure that there's an artist authenticity label associated with it?
00:14:00
Speaker
I don't know. I never like to make blanket recommendations like that. I think it really depends on who the person is creating the content. So you can build up a lot of trust over time so that you don't have to do that if you don't want to. I know a lot of people who have a lot of trust, they've built a big audience through their hard work and their dedication. If they write a post or a blog, people are going to believe that it's them. They don't need to also make a video. That just might not be worth their time.
00:14:25
Speaker
In terms of a company, I think the same thing is true there, right? So some companies have employees or leaders or subject matter experts who have built a reputation. They speak at conferences. These are people who are active online. So I don't think they do have to get in a video every single time because they've already put in the work. They have that trust equity built up, and I don't think they need to do it. Now, if I am taking a brand new startup who maybe they don't even have product market fit or maybe they just found it but they're still really early in their journey and they don't have any really known people who are on stage or on podcasts or creating content on LinkedIn. I think that's not a bad idea, honestly. I think that it helps people not only trust that this person is not just outsourcing these blogs to some random agency
00:15:15
Speaker
This person sitting down and sharing their experience and taking the time to educate the audience. And the more you see someone's face and hear their voice, the relationship really does build. And it's funny, for the first year or two that I went on a bunch of podcasts, I used to do so many. I barely do them anymore, but I used to do so many. And when someone would finally meet me for a coffee chat or for a discovery call, they would be like really excited to meet me because they're like, oh my God, I've been listening to you on podcasts or I feel like I know you.
00:15:45
Speaker
So people say, oh, podcasts, it's not worth the effort because a lot of times they don't result in business. It's a relationship game, right? So yeah, that person might not hire you who listens to your podcast, but guess what? They're going to trust you. They're really going to like you. They're going to see you as almost a friend or a mentor. And when someone in their circle asks, Hey, does anyone know who I can hire for X thing? Or Hey, does anyone know what tool I can use to help me accomplish X?
00:16:11
Speaker
goal, they're going to immediately think of you, their trusted friend and guided mentor, and they're going to recommend you. So I think that the voice and the face is really important if you haven't yet put in the the time to build up that trust equity.
00:16:26
Speaker
It is an interesting comment about podcasting because I'm always surprised because of my blog. I love my blog, but it's a labor of love and the audience is relatively small, but I have been to places where people recognize my voice. I've been to Mark Evans where you're Mark Evans. I go, how do you know that? sort This 1984 kind of stalking thing that's going on, but you do make a really interesting point there.

Creating and Distributing Bold Content

00:16:48
Speaker
Going back to your original question, which obviously had tons of threads that we could pull on about the ability of human powered content to break through the noise. I'm going to be a bit of a devil's advocate or I'm going to push back in a very polite Canadian way and say that amid this tsunami of content where AI easily allow content at scale,
00:17:16
Speaker
I believe that breaking through with value added in quotation marks, insightful content, that theoretically makes sense that if your content isn't crappy, but instead it's really great and it's prescriptive and it's content that you can use right away, that makes sense. But how do you get people's attention? How do you break through the noise? How do you actually get people to discover your content and then consume it? Because I think for a lot of companies,
00:17:45
Speaker
That is such a daunting proposition right now because we've only got so much time everybody's multitasking complaining that their days are too short so what are your thoughts and what do you how do you work with your clients to make sure that the content you help them create actually resonates and actually is consumed.
00:18:03
Speaker
Great question. I see it in two parts. First is really the content creation. Make sure you're creating bold content that people cannot ignore. And then the second piece is make sure you're getting it in front of them where they're hanging out. So when I think about bold content, for me,
00:18:23
Speaker
Bold content has five characteristics. First, it's original, and that's important, right? Yeah, you just made the point, yeah, really well written. I forget exactly how you worded it, but ultimately, yes, it's well-researched. It's well-written. It's good content. I use the word prescriptive, right? It's prescriptive, so it's helpful. That's great. that's like For me, table stakes should be helpful. And a long time ago, that was enough because there wasn't as much content available as there is today. So now that there is a huge number of content pieces on any given topic under the sun. So if I want to teach people how to write a thought leadership article.
00:19:03
Speaker
I can't just go and tell them a prescriptive way to write a thought leadership article because that's been done. It's been done really well and in-depth by many different brands and subject matter met experts and thought leaders. right so What I need to do is be original. I need to package my information in a new way, and I think that's really important.
00:19:24
Speaker
Originality can also come from an original point of view, which some companies have a strategic narrative. I personally help um companies either come up with or refine their strategic narrative so that they have a bold point of view.
00:19:40
Speaker
And then we use that to make a narrative-led content strategy, which means we're not just picking random topics based on what the you know keyword tool tells us our audience is searching for. We're creating a cohesive story, content piece by content piece, so that over time someone will learn about these these topics.
00:20:00
Speaker
And they'll get answers to their questions but they will get that through our unique original lens because we have a point of view on this topic in this thing that we help people achieve naturally important the second piece after original for bold content so proven right it's great to have a strong bold point of view.
00:20:20
Speaker
and have a really strong bold strategic narrative. But if you can't back it up with proof, it's just hot air. So there's a few different ways that we can have proof in our content. One is proprietary data and data storytelling. So you might help, I might help my client build a research report. Maybe we'll pull data from their product usage or maybe we'll survey an audience and then we will stand up a report and then that will give legs to our point of view because if we're saying we believe that Rubik's cubes should be not plastic, they should be metal and that's our point of view because we feel that way because we sell metal fabrication.
00:21:00
Speaker
Okay, cool. But why? Give me proof. So now I'm going to be able to say, we talked to 5,000 children ages 10 through 18. And they told us that they have a hard time with this plastic or whatever the story is, we have data to now support our bold point of view. That was a crazy example. If you're listening, I'm holding a Rubik's Cube, which just happened to be next to me on the desk. I have children.
00:21:26
Speaker
So after original and proven, it has to be authentic. You got to be yourself, right? So if you're an individual, just don't always try to self edit, right? So just be you. If you're corny, and let a corny joke fly. If you're a company, I think it's really important to Make sure your content emphasizes the essence of your brand. That means you're not stuffy because you're not in real life, right? Be the you that your happiest customers see. Be the you that your best partners see. Be the you that your most highly engaged long-term employees see. That's what your content should communicate. We've all worked in-house. We've had a Slack channel where we
00:22:08
Speaker
support each other or we share pictures of our cats or our dogs or our kids or whatever it is. What's the personality of the people in the organization? like How can we make sure that life and that feeling and that energy comes through your content? Because a lot of times content is super flat, super boring, super corporate, and I don't really know many humans or workplaces that are really like that. So I think that the content really needs to be authentic to who the brand is in real life. The next piece is content should be novel. And you just asked me, how do we cut through the noise? Originality helps, authenticity helps, but novel is just finding ways to surprise and delight your audience. It could be something as simple as, let me think, an interactive
00:22:57
Speaker
page where they get to see something coming at them in 3D and they get to click a button and take a quiz and interact in a new way that they haven't seen before. That's a good example. I have a ton of examples that I've shared in my email newsletter.
00:23:11
Speaker
There are brands that are doing this kind of stuff. I know Shopify recently did a product update and instead of just sending a really boring vanilla email like most companies do, they made a whole experience where there was like a TV channels and you could choose to change the channel and learn all about these different product updates. It was super cool and creative and novel.
00:23:32
Speaker
And then the last piece is the most table stakes piece relevant. So of course you can say whatever you want to say, but if nobody cares, nobody's going to listen. No matter how flashy or original or novel it is, they have to care. So the the relevance piece is also important.
00:23:49
Speaker
So to come back to your original question, how can we get people to care? And how can the business make money with content marketing? First, you got to create bold content. And that's my five pillars for what I define as bold. And then second, you got to make sure people see it. So you can't just press publish on your blog and like hope people come running. I think one of the best ways to distribute content nowadays is social media, YouTube, depending on the business, and more importantly, other people. So partner with other friendly companies. So companies that sell into the same audience but sell a non-competing product, I think it's really great to do a lot of co-marketing with them. And I am also big on influencer marketing so long as it's not a transactional relationship because people can see right through that. Partner with someone who actually uses your product
00:24:41
Speaker
and do a long-term partnership. So bring them on as an actual partner and not just someone that you're paying $1,000 to talk once about your brand. The distribution part is really interesting because it's easy, relatively speaking, to create content.

Strategic Channel Mastery

00:24:59
Speaker
Whether you're using AI or it's handcrafted. And then if you listen to people like Justin Welsh or Ross Simmons, who says, create ones distribute forever. Sounds great guys. It sounds like that's basically marketing one-on-one. Of course you want to be as widely as possible.
00:25:17
Speaker
One idea here is that maybe where AI could be really impactful for marketers is the distribution side as as opposed to creation. Yes, you can use AI to create content, but there's a lot of work involved to distribute it. Yeah, for sure. I could do it for different platforms to say, I've got a blog post. I'm going to put it on YouTube and Reddit and Instagram and LinkedIn and X and Blue Sky. But that's a lot of work. That's a lot of manual work. Any thoughts about We could use AI to do that kind of thing. Maybe before you answer that question, maybe you go back to the fundamentals of distribution. It's great to put content in lots of different places, but how do you get people to see it, discover it, consume it? The AI question, I have not used it for distribution myself, so I can't speak to any personal experiences. However,
00:26:09
Speaker
I have seen some interesting articles and newsletters from people who have these new suggestions on new ways to use AI. The most recent one I read was by Andy Crestedina who's over at ah orbit and it was called like the prompt. lot library and it was like twenty or so i prompts to use a i in all different use cases for content marketing i believe if you were for distribution though one that stood out to me and i actually can't remember if it was in andy's article or it was in a newsletter called m family cremer.
00:26:41
Speaker
But it was an interesting use case and it was saying you could plug in this AI tool and what it would do is it would go through your sales calls and listen to the questions that prospects are asking on sales calls. Then it goes through your content library and then it finds content gaps and it says, hey, a lot of people have been asking about this question. You don't currently have any content on this topic.
00:27:04
Speaker
So I think that I know that's not distribution, that's creation, but that's one of the most helpful ones that I've seen in terms of a prompt. If you can go and set that up, that's great. I'm going to remove the manual work there.
00:27:16
Speaker
distribution Yeah, I would say if that's something that you're responsible for outside of the typical typical stuff, which I am not one that believes in distributing things on 100 platforms. i don't think you I don't think the average brand needs to be on X and Blue Sky and YouTube and Twitter and Twitch, and I don't think that's necessarily needed for most companies, especially the earlier stage or series A startups that I work with. I typically recommend pick one or two channels and just get really f freaking good at those before you try to spread yourself too thin and do a shitty job. And I worry that these AI tools that say, hey, we have the capability of taking your blog post and turning it into a podcast episode, or we can take your blog post and turn it into a carousel for LinkedIn.
00:28:05
Speaker
But how good are you going to do it? Do I actually want to put that out there? It might be better. I might be better off if I don't damage my brand new reputation. And I just put out one really freaking good blog post and one really freaking good video that I took the time to make, as opposed to putting out 10 repurpose pieces that some AI made and it's not that freaking good. And it's not interesting to people. It's not bold. It's not novel.
00:28:31
Speaker
Like, why would I do that? Just to say, oh, I checked the box. For me, that might be checkbox marks and it marketing. Like, checkbox, whoops, we did a Twitter thing. Oh, yay, we posted from our company X account. Okay, cool, but does anyone care? I've played around with some tools that could take video from a podcast and autoclip it and magically create these user-friendly, accessible, engaging video clips, and most of the time it doesn't work.
00:29:00
Speaker
They suck. yeah That sounds, but I've been on some podcasts and later on they send me an email and they're like, here's your like three promotional clips. I don't want to share any of those on LinkedIn. I'm like really out of the whole hour, those are the best three clips that you could give me. So I don't know. I agree with your walk before your run approach to marketing channels. The default for a lot of companies, especially early stage companies that are desperate to capture the spotlight is to be everywhere. And I call that the shotgun approach to marketing.
00:29:29
Speaker
They just believe that if they're on all these channels, then somehow it's a better chance of people discovering them. And my philosophy is, it's it walk before you run. As you say, get really good at one or two channels, and and after you've mastered them, then that's great, or you could look to embrace another channel. But the idea of trying to be all things to all people definitely doesn't work.
00:29:54
Speaker
An area that I wanted to talk to you about is attribution.

Measuring Success in Content Marketing

00:29:57
Speaker
And this is obviously gaining a whole, a lot of attention over the past year as attribution becomes increasingly more challenging. You work with early stage B2B, B2B SaaS companies that every marketing dollar counts. So if they're going to come to you and say, Aaron, we need to create some great content so that we can attract and engage prospects and hopefully convert them into customers. They're looking for you to help them.
00:30:24
Speaker
Create content makes an impact as you see on your website, but how do you measure your success and how do brands measure the success of content marketing? Obviously there's different goals that you could have some of its brand awareness. Some of that is just is multiple touches, high engagement.
00:30:41
Speaker
But when you're talking to prospects and clients and they ask you, how do I tell if you're, if what I'm doing with you is actually working and I'm getting my money's worth, what is the answer? And I know it's different ways to, to approach that, but what is, what do you tell them in terms of ROI?
00:30:58
Speaker
When I think of how we started off with content marketing and how I started off, it was all about increasing traffic, increasing the amount of keywords, increasing the amount of people who make it to your site and then click a button to download an ebook. And that's great. And those can be good signals that what you're doing is working. But I think that at the end of the day, what really is important is if you're driving product signups.
00:31:24
Speaker
If you're getting people to not only make it through your free product, but are you helping use content in the product journey so that they don't just churn after their free trial, but they actually become a paying customer. People think that content a lot of times is just getting people to click a button, subscribe to an email, great, my job is done, someone else will handle the rest. I don't think that way. I think about how content can be inserted at all different points of the journey.
00:31:51
Speaker
Again, I work with a lot of sales led companies and sometimes they have a hybrid motion. They might have a free trial or a freemium product, but they almost always have a sales team. And again, a lot of people think content's job is to get them to request a demo. And that's a huge part of content's job, for sure. That's one of the huge metrics that I look at. I look at if we are increasing the amount of high-intent hand-raiser leads. When I start working with a company, I'll say, how many people are raising their hand every month quarter to talk to sales?
00:32:24
Speaker
Okay, cool. So now we're going to be tracking that over time and we're going to be attributing it to these different content marketing campaigns. But after that, then what? So yeah, sales, they're awesome, but how can content support sales so that sales is even more successful? What kind of sales enablement can we do? And that's important too. So I'm going to try to look at high intent hand raise or leads. How many are we getting?
00:32:51
Speaker
Is that number increasing? And then also revenue that content either contributed to as part of the sales cycle or if it was the first touch. A lot of people say, oh, it doesn't count if it wasn't the first touch or the last touch. I disagree. I think that people interact with so many different touch points across the journey.
00:33:10
Speaker
that it does matter if they're interacting with your content. I remember one story we had at my last company, we had set up really sophisticated multi-touch attribution. We could see an entire user journey. And I remember seeing somebody had originally, I don't know, I think they said like social media It's probably content because they probably saw some sort of content on social media, but we'll say social media. And then what they ended up doing was reading some blog posts, and then they ended up downloading an ebook, and then they ended up downloading a report, and then they just went away. And we didn't hear from them for months. Then we had created ah another, I think, report, and we placed an ad, like a retargeting ad. The person got the report, served up to them while they were browsing. They clicked on the report.
00:33:58
Speaker
Then they saw our CTA in the report to interact with our new interactive learning center and they created an account in our learning center. They took three courses and then they raised their hand to talk to sales. You could target that. You could tag so many different things. You could give credit if it was first such just to social media.
00:34:16
Speaker
But without content, what is social media even talking about? Without a strategic narrative or a bold point of view, what are they even talking about? You could give some of the credit to the ad because obviously that retargeted them, it helped get in front of them, and you should give some credit to the ad and to social media. But you definitely got to give credit to the content marketing campaign. And it wasn't just one campaign, it was several, right? So there was two different reports. There was that interactive learning center. There were the courses, which is digital learning.
00:34:46
Speaker
I think it's really important to understand what's working and not to get too obsessed over who owns the credit because it's really a team effort and different pieces need to work together and you should all be celebrating your success together.
00:34:59
Speaker
There's lots of different ways to, as they say, to skin a cat and lots of different ways that you can measure the success of your content marketing.

Future Trends in Content Marketing

00:35:07
Speaker
I started this podcast by asking you a loaded question and it's only appropriate that I would end the podcast with another loaded question. And that would be to look into your crystal ball and envision what 2025 looks like for content marketing. The AI models will evolve and get better, more and more companies will experiment with AI, more startups will emerge, offering the latest things since sliced bread to create and distribute content. How do you see the landscape unfolding? What are you most excited about? What are you the most afraid or most concerned about? It's funny, when I answer this question or I think about other people's answers to this question,
00:35:51
Speaker
I'm living in this kind of tech bubble where a lot of people that I talk to and i learn from and read ah from, they're all in this bubble of B2B SAS. And in many cases.
00:36:02
Speaker
We are far ahead of some of the other more traditional industries. I'm not going to call any anyone anyone out by name, but there are other industries who are still getting their case studies in 2025. I don't want to say that everyone is going to be creating episodic video content native for social media or everyone's going to be creating more zero click content so that people aren't always having to go back to the website or clicking um a link to read content because that I think is a very SaaS forward thing. I think those of us who do work in in SaaS and tech, yeah, we are going to be doing more of that because that's what a lot of the conversations are about. Whenever
00:36:42
Speaker
Some people are leading the charge, others will always follow. So I do expect to see more of that in our bubble. As far as the entire industry, I think that there's going to be a wider adoption ah of proprietary data storytelling now that more and more people are starting to learn about it.
00:36:59
Speaker
And they're realizing that it's not as scary as they might have thought it was. Because it for me, when I first thought about, oh my God, I'm going to create this research report. I need to crunch numbers. This sounds like a lot of work. And it is a lot of work for anyone who's ever done it. It's a lot of work, but it is learnable. It is doable. And out of all the content I create, that's the type that typically drives the biggest business impact. So I think that a lot more companies are going to learn how to create research reports and do data storytelling, not the dry kind, they're going to really do it. And they're going to add some personality because just because you're talking about data doesn't mean you have to be dry and corporate, you can still have your own brand voice and personality when you do the data storytelling. So I think that might be something that gets more widely adopted. I love your comment about the fact that
00:37:50
Speaker
People like you and I are, we're drinking the Kool-Aid 24 seven. And it it is interesting. I was doing a ah workshop on content marketing recently to early stage entrepreneurs. And one of the exercises that I did, it it was trying to make an interactive workshop was to use chat GPT and come up with a bunch of ideas for content. I said, here's five minutes. You can go away.
00:38:14
Speaker
and so And so after the five minutes I came back and they were blown away. They could not believe that chat GPT could actually help them do that. And the reality it was is they didn't use chat GPT. They weren't using it at all. So it was all new to them. The lesson was that we just think that these are the tools that everybody's using when in fact,
00:38:35
Speaker
a very small for now portion of the population is using them to do things like content marketing. So that was just interesting to me. Yeah. Aaron, this has been great. Obviously would love to get your information about work. Like what kind of companies should reach out to you? Where can they learn about, about what you do? And yeah, LinkedIn, your blog, your website, your newsletter, obviously give us the sort of the, all the details about who should react to you and how can they learn more about you?
00:39:02
Speaker
Anyone that's interested in content marketing and not just blog posts and keywords, people who are really interested in strategic, full funnel content marketing should reach out to me. You don't have to work at any specific type of company because you can always learn and apply it to your own use case. I think some best practices in marketing, content marketing fundamentals really do apply regardless of whether or not you're working in SaaS or you're working with sales led companies. It really doesn't matter.
00:39:29
Speaker
And the easiest way to find me is on

Contacting Erin Balsa

00:39:31
Speaker
LinkedIn. And my name is Erin Balsa, like as in Balsa Wood. I'm the only Erin Balsa on LinkedIn, which is very convenient for me. yes husband Great last name. And I have a website called houseofbowl.com, but I'm actually currently building out a whole new site to go along with my brand new flagship one-to-one consulting offer.
00:39:53
Speaker
which will be at bland2bold.co. ceo And I will have a one-on-one consulting offer there. I will also have some courses there, including a free five-day email course called Bland2Bold, where people can learn about my Bold Content Framework.
00:40:14
Speaker
Thanks, Aaron, and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a B2B or a SaaS company with $1 million to $10 million in revenue and you're looking to jumpstart your marketing, we should definitely talk about how I can help you as a