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A Deep Dive into the World of B2B Content Production: Brad Smith
66 Plays3 years ago
As more B2B brands embrace content marketing as the way to engage, educate, and connect with prospects and customers, it's becoming increasingly difficult to break through and stand out.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Brad Smith, CEO with Wordable, offers in-depth insight into:
- How companies should approach content marketing
- The importance of focusing on keywords that can be ranked for in the short term.
- How to build a content marketing team and how to assess its performance
- How to never run out of content ideas
- How to effectively distribution content once it's been published.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
45 minutes or whatever. Exactly. It's usually five minutes and then you have to apologize. Okay, here we go. In three, two, one.
Rise of Content Marketing Post-Conferences
00:00:14
Speaker
It's Mark Evans and you're listening to Marketing Spark. According to the popular adage, content is king. That may or may not be true, but many B2B SaaS companies have enthusiastically embraced content over the past 18 months. Content marketing took on more importance
00:00:34
Speaker
when conferences disappeared. And many companies scrambled to not only create content, but create content that engaged, educated, encouraged, and made an impact.
Meet Brad Smith: Perspectives from Hawaii
00:00:45
Speaker
As the CEO of Wordable, Brad Smith has a front row seat in the world of content marketing. And it should be noted that his front row seat is located in Hawaii, which is a pretty sweet place. Sorry. And it should be noted that his front row seat is located in Hawaii, which is a pretty sweet place to operate. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Brad. Thank you, Mark. Looking forward to this.
Evolution and Competition in Content Marketing
00:01:10
Speaker
Let's start by talking about the content marketing landscape over the past 18 months. As a content creator, it has been fascinating to see how many brands have jumped on the content bandwagon, some of them successfully, and some of them appear to be going through the motions and creating content for the sake of content. What's your take on how the landscape has evolved since COVID emerged in March of 2020?
00:01:37
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. I would definitely agree with your point. And if anything, it almost like things got accelerated. The trends, the underlying trends were already there. I think they just were sped up and made even more intense. So you see things like huge publishers, for instance, doing affiliate content. So you see big websites getting better.
00:01:59
Speaker
And what that does is it kind of raises the bar. And so not only do you have more competition for your direct competition that everyone thinks about, you have more competition indirectly. So you're now ranking against Amazon or Forbes or whatever, even if you have nothing to do business-wise with those people, you're competing in a sense of a search engine.
Challenges with Google's Search Changes
00:02:18
Speaker
rankings, the actual results on the page. Other issues too, like if Google actively taking spots away through a few different ways. So one, they're doing more paid listings on the search and result page. Two, they're doing instant answers. So what they're doing essentially is like scraping your content. If you search for like how to make it old-fashioned, you're going to see a recipe show up and it's going to be scraped from some website that's already ranking.
00:02:44
Speaker
someone's gonna get their answer they're gonna get their recipe and they don't have to actually click into the page to read whatever it is that's on that site and so you know if that if that person is monetizing through ads or something else then they're in trouble um jim all these kind of like issues that are all coming to a head and and what we're seeing is a uh
00:03:01
Speaker
a greater divergence between the haves and the have-nots, for lack of a better expression. The amount of focus and attention going to the first few positions on a page when you're trying to rank something,
00:03:16
Speaker
is becoming much greater. You might see a more skewed landscape, whereas anything else that's not good enough or is just kind of mediocre or average to your point, it's almost just getting pumped out into the black hole that isn't getting seen or clicked or shared or linked to or whatever. So it sounds like content marketing has become a more challenging landscape.
Leveraging Brand and Domain Authority
00:03:38
Speaker
And I'm curious about what has surprised you. What's separated companies that have thrived amid fierce competition for eyeballs? What are they doing? And do you have any examples of brands that are doing content marketing well? That's a really good question. I definitely have a few examples of companies doing it well. I think one thing that has surprised me is how much big websites are still able to leverage their
00:04:04
Speaker
brand and their domain authority to rank for things in categories that they might not have that much to do with. Uh, and so you see this a lot again, and going back to like a publishing example or affiliate spaces, just as a point of comparison where you might have, uh, huge websites like a Forbes or someone else ranking for something like, you know, invoicing software reviews or something just completely kind of random, but you would, you wouldn't think would have anything to do with that.
00:04:32
Speaker
And they're starting to rank really well with relatively average content. So that's kind of like the bad news, I think, in a way, where it's kind of like a trend that I don't love to see because, again, I don't want to see poor content be rewarded that greatly. But the good news is you do have a lot of, like,
00:04:51
Speaker
smaller in a sense of where they're starting, but smaller SaaS companies being able to do content really well and go deeper. So if that example, if the form example is they're going like broad but shallow, I think what you're saying today is a lot of really good companies being able to go really, really deep in their categories or in their spaces and still do really well.
Importance of Integrated Marketing Strategy
00:05:14
Speaker
Now I'm not sure if this is a fair question, but what do you see as the keys to breaking through when everyone is pumping out content? Is it quality content? And I put quality in quotation marks because it's a very subjective kind of thing. Is it SEO?
00:05:31
Speaker
does it depend on having the right strategic plan? It isn't isn't a matter of luck. I mean, what are some of the variables that that you see as critical when you're trying to, you know, merge amid a content tsunami? Yeah, definitely. I think it's I like to think of it as a balanced scorecard. So you have the brand and the website strength overall that and you have like the strategy and the strategic kind of
00:05:59
Speaker
strategic viewpoint behind it of like where you're going and why you have the content itself. So how it's written, whether or not there are subject matter is experts included in that or not. Again, you can tell pretty quickly if something's kind of generic and watered down, or if it's really interesting and nuanced and kind of balanced and complex. Then you have just beyond the actual writing itself, you have things like, you know,
00:06:22
Speaker
multimedia. So images, podcasts, video, how is that being included in that? Then you have the actual nerdy SEO stuff. So everything from topical authority to the actual keywords of researching to the link building, link building and PR and distribution. So I think if you think about it, the good news is if you think about all this stuff,
00:06:40
Speaker
like how marketing and advertising and promotion used to be back in the 60s, it's pretty similar. So like I just gave you an example of distribution. What we're doing today isn't that different. It's just kind of like a new medium. I think the important point is figuring out how you get all the things to light up. So if we're talking about how you distribute content, are you working, do you have PR teams working together with content teams? Do you have advertising teams working with content teams? Like those disconnects are often where things fall, but the better you can like align all those things,
00:07:10
Speaker
Typically, the greater success we see with less of the larger companies we work with. Yeah, I think it's interesting that coordination and having a strategic plan is so important because many companies look at content as simply creating content and then they forget about SEO, distribution, identifying and connecting with influencers. So there's so many variables that go into content marketing success that a lot of companies just don't take
Successful Case Study: Monday.com's Tactics
00:07:36
Speaker
into account.
00:07:36
Speaker
I guess what I'm curious about who's doing content. Well, I mean, really well. Is there content that you want to read because it's because it's interesting or compelling and you can you can recommend or suggest one of your clients as an example of a company that really is standing out from the crowd? Yeah, that's a good question. I was gonna say a loaded question for sure, because I can just sit here and mention all of our work. But so we work with Monday.com. I think they're doing an amazing job. I think one of the challenges they face is
00:08:05
Speaker
Uh, they, their tool could work for almost any category, any like B2B category. So we might be doing content on project management, but we might also be doing, uh, might also be doing content on agile software development. We might also be doing, uh, something completely different. I say, I think that's extremely challenging and it means you're doing not just quality content, but high quantity too. And that brings up a whole host of other issues like, well, how do you get super high quantity?
00:08:33
Speaker
Without letting the quality bar drop and that's through a bunch of other you know intense things like operations and processes and role specialization so kind of just brings up a whole slew of other issues where a lot of companies that do content well today especially smaller ones.
00:08:49
Speaker
they have like a good writer or a couple good writers and they're heavily reliant on individuals and talents, which is a good thing. But I think for some of the larger companies or like the hyper growth companies, what you see is they're more reliant on like the machine and building out the machine and the factory and the assembly line.
Keyword Targeting and ROI Focus
00:09:08
Speaker
Yes yellow person works with the strategy person who hands it off to the writer who hands it off to the editor grants it off to the optimizer the producer and there's like this is very detailed assembly line very kind of like old-school manufacturing mentality of operation that i think is really important in today's environment and not enough marketers and marketing teams are strong in that area that makes sense.
00:09:32
Speaker
So if you look at what money.com is doing, and I see their ads all the time, so it's hard to escape them. Are there two or three things that they've embraced that has helped their content marketing thrive? Yeah, definitely. I think, again, it goes back to, from the very beginning, a very strong focus on who is their customer and why. So what segments convert the best?
00:09:57
Speaker
who has the highest lifetime value as a segment, and then backing that into what key categories, for example, should we even be publishing in at the very beginning? Because they could be publishing on everything and anything, like how do we actually focus and narrow it out? From there, it's then figuring out, okay, well, how do we actually target keywords and spaces that we can win? And so this is something I like to harp on, but again, it's kind of an old cliche, but measure twice, cut once. In today's competitive kind of SERP environment,
00:10:27
Speaker
Uh, the outsized results, let's say, if you look at click-through rates on a search as a result page, let's say 60, 70, 80%, go to like the top three or four results. So it's not good enough to like, to top out at position eight on a surf. You might as well, like not even, uh, it sounds good because you're on the first page.
00:10:45
Speaker
but you're probably getting like a sliver of any traffic. Whereas if you can get up until like the top five, top four, top three, it becomes heavily skewed where you're getting all of a sudden 50, 60, 70% of the action. So if you're applying that to like a much broader content strategy where you are publishing in a high quantity, it's super, super important that you're making sure that you're publishing
00:11:08
Speaker
not just on the biggest keywords in your space or the ones with the most commercial intent. Yes, those things are important, but they might take years to actually to rank for. So what are we targeting and why? Meaning let's actually create content that we know we can win and that we know we can rank for within the next six months, because that's going to give us the biggest boost to then kind of stair-step our way up to that other competitive stuff.
00:11:32
Speaker
You know, I love that piece of advice because I've been working with a lot of B2B SaaS clients looking at how to leverage content marketing. And you're right. I mean, you want to win in particular keywords or phrases because there's so much competition out there.
00:11:46
Speaker
that it's gonna take you forever to rank for the top keywords, and that's just not a strategy that's gonna produce ROI in the
Balancing In-House Teams and Freelancers
00:11:52
Speaker
short term. No, totally. You've hinted at it a little bit, but what do you see as the biggest mistakes that B2B companies make when it comes to content marketing? I suspect the list could be fairly extensive.
00:12:02
Speaker
Definitely. So that's one that we just touched on is competing for the wrong things, the wrong times. So knowing that it's kind of a chicken and egg problem. As an example, Wordable is really small. We just acquired it about a year ago. Traffic was trending down. I think we were at like 5,000 monthly visits when we acquired it. So super small. One of the first problems that we were facing is, okay, well, we can't go after the biggest keywords in our space right now. Long term we can, but it might take two, three years realistically to rank for that stuff.
00:12:30
Speaker
So in the short term, we need to do something else and we need to take a, take a different approach and go after keywords we can rank for. And I think now we're up to like 30, 40,000 a month in terms of monthly traffic. And it was just this whole stair stuff approach of, okay, we're going to go after this, this less competitive stuff first, because we know we can win there.
00:12:47
Speaker
And we're going to rank well for it. And once our website's bigger, once we have more links, once we have more content, once we have more topical authority there is, we can come back and rank for that competitive stuff. The other big one we touched on already too, which is operations. So I think marketers don't have an issue with creativity.
00:13:05
Speaker
That's why we all do this. That's why we're all in this field. They have an issue with processes and all the boring stuff. All the operations, all the role specialization, how do you coordinate handoffs with a writer in one time zone to an editor in another time zone, especially in today's environment where everything's asynchronous? How do you iron out all those little kinks? Because that's where the ball gets dropped. You might have a writer who's really good, or you might have a marketer who's really good.
00:13:32
Speaker
They have to hand it off to someone three, four time zones away, if not more. And then that person has to hand it off to somebody else. How are you actually doing that to make sure this person's waking up and is ready to go and has everything they need and has their stuff completed by the person before them without those two people having to jump on Zoom every five minutes? I think that's the challenge from a blocking and tackling standpoint that a lot of companies are
00:13:57
Speaker
Facing today because they are trying to ramp up content and do all this stuff in the absence of conventions and conferences and other things But yet we're all forced to again Be more reliant on asynchronous communication
00:14:10
Speaker
So we've talked about the importance of content and how to approach it. I want to explore a few other areas, including building a B2B content team, generating ideas and distribution. How should B2B companies approach content production? On one hand, they could use freelancers, agencies, or contractors.
00:14:27
Speaker
But if they want people who drink the proverbial Kool-Aid, many companies want in-house writers. So where should B2B companies start when it comes to creating content? For sure. Yeah, I think it's important to realize that they all have their own strengths and weaknesses. So there's no right or wrong answer necessarily. As you mentioned with drinking the Kool-Aid, internal people are usually best for all the intangibles.
00:14:51
Speaker
They understand the unique point of view. They understand the differentiation and positioning of the product versus other ones in the space. They understand all that stuff intimately. Their problem is usually output and production. So internal people usually get caught up with meetings and Slack and whatever, proofreading someone else's presentation. Like they get pulled in all these different directions that you're not able to publish a ton of stuff on the back of a lot of in-house writers unless you're spending a ton of money on it because it
00:15:20
Speaker
they can get a sampling expensive as you can imagine so the the challenge is always well freelancers offer you that flexibility you can wrap them up and down if you want to do a big concept push for three six months and then switch gears down the road it's easy to kind of like build that team out let them run for a little bit and then ramp them down over time you don't have to deal with the same you know
00:15:40
Speaker
internal HR headaches and other things to like ramp people up and down. The problem with freelancers is, is usually getting everyone on the same page and making sure you have consistency across whatever, you know, three, four, five, 10, 20 people who are all external and have their own things and their own lives and their own clients. And that's incredibly challenging because you, you spend a ton of time
00:16:01
Speaker
that isn't always accounted for on project management, on editing, on things that are like the soft and tangible to get all those people together. Agencies offer a different approach of like, usually get skill sets you might not have internally. So for example, when someone hires our agency, they get strategy people, they get SEO people, they get not just the writers and editors, but also designers, video people. Again, trying to hire all those roles externally or excuse me, internally would be super cost prohibitive and not always like realistic.
00:16:29
Speaker
Agencies tend to be more expensive on the surface. But again, if you if you account for some of those things like the extra manpower so to speak of Management and everything internally it becomes expensive. So I guess the point is Where are you at in terms of resources in terms of internal team already? So do you internally have the people in place to manage a team of writers? if not, then you're probably better off going with something like an agency and
00:16:55
Speaker
Conversely, if your problem is more bottom of the funnel, not top of the funnel, meaning if your problem is more conversions and doing things that speak the language of the customer and creating case studies and other content around that type of stuff, you're usually better with internal people because it's easier to get them on board with that as opposed to external agencies, which might give, or freelancers, which might give you the horsepower that's better suited to scaling out like top of the funnel kind of content, if that makes sense.
Building an Effective In-House Content Team
00:17:26
Speaker
That's great. It's great advice. And I can tell you from personal experience that finding good freelancers is a huge challenge. And then there's a lot of work that I find that goes into editing their copy because they just don't know the brand tone, the brand language, and they just don't have the domain expertise to really nail it. So there are pros and cons to every single angle. But let's assume that you want to build an in-house content team. Where do you start?
00:17:53
Speaker
What's the first move to make to get the ball rolling in the right direction? Like what type of person should you hire out of the gate? Yeah, definitely. I try to urge role specialization early just so you kind of get in that mindset. So in other words, don't just hire don't just think you're going to hire like a couple writers and then like let them go. You really need someone who's like a content manager. Sometimes these people can can
00:18:17
Speaker
do multiple things. So sometimes a content manager can also edit. What I don't like to see is when you try to make a good writer, a content editor or manager, because it's almost like the Michael Scott problem of taking a good salesperson and making him a manager, like their skill sets are often don't overlap. So in other words,
00:18:35
Speaker
A content manager is really good at building out these processes, building out a style guide to make sure here is how our brand voice should look and sound and feel and all those things. Like I said, they can often edit. They can often also write, but again, it doesn't always go in the same direction where you're not always going to get a couple of good writers who then have like their project manager hat too, because that person is also going to be doing keyword research. They're also going to be doing both like the qualitative
00:18:59
Speaker
brand voice and style, but also the quantitative of like metrics and figuring out, okay, now how are we gonna actually promote this thing too? Writers, even like, you know, even really good writers don't always have that skill set. Really good writers thrive on ingenuity, on saying the same thing multiple different ways. And so they're almost like rewarded internally for purposefully doing things differently each time. And that's like the opposite of how you want like a content team to actually run.
00:19:29
Speaker
What are the different ways to assess the performance of your content team members? What separates the good ones from everyone else? So you could look at
00:19:37
Speaker
the standard KPIs, time on site, click throughs on CTAs, that kind of thing. I mean, those are all very data driven, very quantitative. But how do you assess, how do you balance quantitative and qualitative when it comes to content production? Because a big part of it is creativity, thinking outside the box.
00:20:00
Speaker
approaching content from different angles so that your content is engaging. From where you sit, what separates the good ones from everybody else? Yeah, definitely. It's it is hard, like you're saying, because it's, it's, it's like a little Venn diagram that you want. So you want you want someone who is a subject matter expert, especially if you're hiring them house. Otherwise, again, it's probably not worth the time or the money to hire a house unless they're a subject matter expert in the space already.
00:20:26
Speaker
So that's a critical component because what you don't want is your content to sound hollow and generic and watered down. You want there to be nuance involved. You want that person to be able to consider different complex factors, especially the more B2B or complex sales your product gets, the more that's important because your audience tends to be more sophisticated. Your buyers, your customers tend to be a lot more sophisticated, and they're going to see through that pretty quickly. So subject matter expertise is one.
00:20:55
Speaker
But writing and style is the other one. So is there a voice, meaning like, does this person actually sound, do they write like they sound when they're speaking?
00:21:07
Speaker
because when I'm talking right now, I sound very choppy. And I sound especially if you look at a podcast transcription, and then you think you're just going to publish that directly. Sometimes it doesn't work as you know, because it just comes across as choppy, you switch topics too much when we talk, you want a little bit of that in the actual writing itself. So you don't want like super overly formulaic stuff, you don't want super formalized
00:21:30
Speaker
wording and phrasing even if you have a company culture that's very formal you still want something that's relatable when when you're reading it because again someone's trying to read information educational content whatever and they need to feel some emotional engagement to that they don't feel motion emotional engagement to like a wikipedia page or something that's just kind of fact fact driven and dry and technical you know and then the other component like you said is some knowledge of seo and so either
00:21:55
Speaker
If the writer doesn't have that already, that's where it's good to have some sort of content manager or similar who's able to help structure how the content should look. And so I think we're going to touch on like promotion and distribution in a second. But I think one of the important points to touch on here is that if you don't structure content properly from the very beginning, you're only going to make your life super difficult when it comes to promote it and to try and rank it down the line, meaning
00:22:19
Speaker
If you're writing how to make iced coffee, a piece of content on how to make it really, really basic, how to make iced coffee, if you try to get your product page to rank for that, it's never going to work. So in other words, the actual structure of that content, it doesn't line up with search intent from the very beginning. So you're leading the writer down a bad path that two years from now is never going to help you rank for that term.
Visualizing Content Team Dynamics
00:22:42
Speaker
And that becomes an issue for the promotion aspect at the very end. So that's the little Venn diagram of subject matter expertise.
00:22:49
Speaker
writing ability and kind of copywriting or voice or whatever you want to call it like some, some interesting and engaging way of actually getting the words out. And then, and then some sort of background or knowledge of like a solid SEO foundation. That sounds like a classic infographic for creating a content marketing team that resonates. I like that. I like the concept of
00:23:10
Speaker
illustrating what it takes to create good content because content is subjective and it's quantitative and qualitative, so that's really good insight. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, like a lot of people these days, I see a lot of posts about the challenges of coming up with ideas for content.
00:23:27
Speaker
I spent many years as a reporter and i was trained to see story angles from all kinds of different perspectives you know i understand that. Content marketing is a beast that needs to be continually fed from where you said how do brands continually come up with content ideas.
Aligning Content with Customer Insights
00:23:46
Speaker
let alone content that they're going to publish. What are some of the key processes or systems that they need to have in place to make sure that the machine is fed and is always fed? Because if you run out of content ideas, then you're dead in the water. For sure. Yeah, first, if you do it right, you should never run out of ideas. I struggle for the opposite problem where I have too many spreadsheets.
00:24:09
Speaker
of like potential areas to go into that I'll probably never get to. I think first and foremost, more marketers need to work in, when I say work in, I mean in air quotes, work in customer support.
00:24:20
Speaker
And I learned this like the hard way early on at a travel company where I was kind of on the front lines from a digital and social perspective. And I was kind of forced to deal with like, customer problems and inquiries and everything. And so I got good or you know, had to get good at talking to customer service, customer support operations and learning more and trying to figure out like, just there are so many
00:24:44
Speaker
problems and issues that people run into without you even being aware of it. And unless you are actually reading customer support emails, or unless you're actually reading these problems firsthand, or you're reading your Captera reviews, or your G2 reviews and taking the good and the bad, unless you're actually, and again, that can even go to your sales team too, unless you're actually in
00:25:07
Speaker
talking to customers or getting that feedback from the people who are talking to customers like sales, like operations, like customer support, you're not really getting the full picture. You're getting a very narrow view of who or what you think customers are. Yes, you should definitely also be doing the things like jumping into your favorite keyword research tool and looking at adjacent spaces. All those marketing tips and tactics that people love to talk about is like, oh yeah, go to answerthepublic.com and type in a keyword and
00:25:35
Speaker
It'll show you all the related questions. Those things are good, but you should also just be looking at what are customers actually trying to do with your product and what's holding them back. And there should be no shortage of potential topics and ideas that come from that. The challenge is always, how do you make those types of topics that are very customer-centric from a support or pain point arena
00:25:59
Speaker
link back to the SEO. Because again, if we're going to the effort and expense of producing content, and you're hiring subject matter experts, this stuff gets really expensive really quickly. So the only way it's worth it in the long run is if you do have that solid foundation of SEO, so you know it's going to produce results, not just tomorrow when you share it on LinkedIn, or tomorrow when you share it as a
00:26:23
Speaker
with your support team or on a webinar, but like two, three years from now, uh, to rank well too. So I think that's always the challenge in my mind is how do you, how do you tie the two worlds together of like all the potential keywords and topics you can go after by doing all the classic things of searching around? Okay. Well, my product is, you know, whatever best, uh, my, my product's a CRM product. So therefore it has these features.
00:26:48
Speaker
Those are basic topics from there. It's like, okay, well, how do people find this? It's going to be there. They're searching for comparisons. So best CRM product alternatives, sales first versus HubSpot CRM. Like what are all the kind of more classic affiliate publishing and then back out it from there. Like, well, do you as your sales team dropping the ball because their email reply templates suck. So email reply templates becomes the keyword. And then you just keep like going broader and broader and broader. Again, how do you connect all that kind of classic keyword research oriented stuff?
00:27:18
Speaker
with the stuff that your sales team is coming up with, with the stuff that your customer support team is coming up with? Yeah, I think it's a complicated and time-consuming balancing act between customer insight and reviews and SEO. And I think personally, a lot of marketers don't talk to their customers enough. They don't sit on sales calls. They don't read the transcripts from customer success calls or customer service calls. And they operate blind.
00:27:46
Speaker
You can't solely depend on SEO for your content ideas because then you're just delving into the data and you're ignoring the real world and real people.
Content Distribution Strategies
00:27:57
Speaker
So there's so many variables when it comes to content marketing and I thought a lot of markers just focus on the content.
00:28:02
Speaker
The other area that I want to talk to you about, and this is something that a guy named Ross Simmons advocates for all the time on LinkedIn and Twitter is content distribution. It's one thing to publish content. It's another to make sure that enough of the right people see it.
00:28:18
Speaker
In fact, I believe that one of the new and hot marketing jobs will be the head of content distribution. What are your thoughts about content distribution and the approach the B2B companies need to take to make sure their content gets seen and has the impact that they want? Yeah, definitely. I think it's hard and getting harder to your point because of all the noise.
00:28:43
Speaker
I think that's one of the challenges. Another challenge is you have a lot of, you have a lot of people trying to do the same things. So like if you, um, have you heard of the, the law of shitty click through rates? I think that was a concept from, uh, Andrew Chan, who works at Uber and a bunch of other like startups to basically his, his point was like, if you look at the click through rate of banner ads, when banner ads first came out, it was amazing. Like it was really good.
00:29:06
Speaker
And if you look at the click-through rate on banner ads today, it's awful. And the point, and then you could draw that comparison across other things where if you remember Facebook marketing, like even 10, 15 years ago, you could like-gate pages. So you could like force people to like your page to then like get some incentive. And then the organic reach and distribution was so high at the time, you could kill it. You could do so well just doing the like-gating game of like put a coupon or whatever behind a discount.
00:29:36
Speaker
behind the light gate or do a contest behind the light gate. You have to like to enter and then share stuff on LinkedIn and like, you know, a huge percentage of the people who already like you actually see your results. Again, contrast that today. No one sees your results unless they're paid on Facebook. You've got to pretty much like pay to promote everything, which again, it's good and bad. It's just the tactics have changed a little bit. But the point is,
00:30:00
Speaker
Uh, if once something starts working well and everyone starts doing it from a distribution standpoint, it often gets a lot harder, a lot more expensive or the reach starts dropping off. And so I, one of the things that again, I like to harp on is going back to our point earlier of don't target keywords, for instance, that you can't rank for in the short term.
00:30:20
Speaker
When you're doing that initial keyword research and putting the content ideas together, you should know how you're already going to distribute it. So if I need, if I'm looking at a competitive keyword and I want to rank for it in whatever six months, 12 months, and I look at, okay, it has a hundred links or the average competition, let's say has a hundred quality links to this individual piece of content. I better know how I'm going to get those a hundred plus links to this piece of content before I ever create it.
00:30:49
Speaker
Because otherwise, again, I'm just going to set myself up for failure. So how am I going to do that? Am I going to do, is it going to be related to a promotion? Is it going to be related to a product launch? Am I going to run a contest? Can I do a big PR push? Can we do guest posts? Can we do podcasts? Can we do a paid campaign on LinkedIn or Facebook? Can we tie it in with webinars? What are all the potential tactics that we might already be doing or that we might already be good at?
00:31:19
Speaker
And then the other thing I like to really focus on for distribution, especially for B2B companies, is with our example of link building, you see all these blog posts that say like 101 link building tactics to whatever start this year. You don't need 101 link building tactics. You need like two or three and you need to do them really, really well. So don't, you need to understand like what your organization's good at and stick to your strengths and you need to do it better than everyone else and at a bigger scale than everyone else.
00:31:46
Speaker
you know, as a content company, we're really good at like a couple things. And we're really good at like content in the B2B space. I'm not going to pick up TikTok, or I'm not going to jump on the latest social bandwagon, because I know that I'm not well suited to that. And our company's strengths aren't well suited to that. So don't, don't get shiny, you know, tactics and drum. Don't don't chase those wells, because you're not going to be able to do them as well or better than the people who are going to do them well. You need to kind of stick to your strengths because of these issues like
00:32:15
Speaker
a ton of competition because of the organic reach falling off. You can still see success with those channels in different places. You just need to be able to do it better than everyone else. And again, that goes back to maybe your own internal team, your own internal structure, and what your brand is known for and good at in this space.
00:32:35
Speaker
Two final questions.
Automating Content Transfer with Wordable
00:32:36
Speaker
One, what does Wordable do? And two, how did you end up living in Hawaii? Yeah, definitely. So Wordable, I'll take the easy one first. Wordable, we were a customer of Wordable and I run an agency that does like three, 400 articles a month. So we create and publish and promote like three, 400 articles a month. We found that we were spending like on average 30 to 60 minutes uploading, formatting, optimizing an individual piece of content.
00:33:04
Speaker
doing that times 300, 400 articles a month is very costly and time consuming, especially when you consider who on your team has to actually do that. So what you often see is a lot of teams, even if they do produce a lot of content, it often just sits somewhere in Google Docs or
00:33:18
Speaker
you know, whatever, wherever they end up writing, you have this huge lag and bottleneck between creating the content and editing it and getting reviewed and then actually getting it live. So hopefully, you know, start ranking and producing results for you. So Wordable moves content from Google Docs to CMS, basically. So it'll kind of do it in seconds, you can do it in bulk. And then we'll also start applying
00:33:41
Speaker
a lot of the on-page optimization that companies should be doing but don't always. So compressing images, opening links in a new tab to keep creators on site, being able to select the author and category and all that extra, all the extra stuff you usually have to do when you put a piece of content into a content management system. Again, to like get it kind of published ready, Wordable will kind of automate all that messy stuff for you. So that's what Wordable does. Second question was why? So we had been visiting here and traveling here for a while with my family.
00:34:10
Speaker
And we've always loved it, like most people who've been here. And we've always talked about trying to live here and our trips get getting longer and longer and longer. And so finally we decided to come out and just to try living here. We kind of bounced around different islands for a little bit to see where we want to live and where we thought was a good place for our family and our young kids and all that kind of stuff. And so as you can imagine, it's pretty great. It's remote. Amazon takes super long. That's one bummer.
00:34:37
Speaker
You can't get things in a day or two. So that's kind of one downside. There's not a lot of nightlife. It's pretty quiet. So you got to be comfortable with these things. But I think once you find that sweet spot and kind of can get into it, then you realize it's a pretty amazing place to live.
00:34:54
Speaker
And I guess, as you mentioned off the top, as long as you're willing to get up at five o'clock in the morning to do podcast interviews, that works as well. Yeah, definitely. You could, I don't know if this is video, but you could see like my fluorescent office lights above me. Some of them are just kicking on because you got to like, it takes them a while to warm up. And, uh, yeah, it's about, it's what, five 40 right now. I am. So yeah, you gotta, gotta get comfortable with waking up in the middle of the night. Uh, but you can, you can get done early. And, uh, when you're at by the beach at one PM, two PM, it's not bad.
00:35:23
Speaker
Life is good. Yeah. Life is good. Well, thanks for all the great insight, Brad. Where can people learn more about you and Wordable? Definitely go to wordable.io is the best place. I'm on LinkedIn at, I think my name is BS marketer because those are my initials and also marketers are full of BS sometimes. So it's kind of funny. And then, yeah, I also run an involved in two agencies, a content production agency called Codeless and a
00:35:51
Speaker
a link building company, link building a PR company called Usurf. Wordable.io is usually the best place to start for all that fun stuff.
00:36:12
Speaker
To learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.