Get your Content Aligned to Growth

Kathleen (00:02)
think of content as like an essential piece of each of your strategies and each of your activities. So instead of thinking like I have content here in this silo and then I've got email and paid social and events. It's like content is relevant and is the fuel for all of those other.

silos or groups.

Benjamin Ard (00:51)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Kathleen. Kathleen, welcome to the show.

Kathleen (00:57)
Hi Ben, it's nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Benjamin Ard (01:00)
Absolutely, Kathleen, this is gonna be a fun conversation. I'm excited for it. I'm excited the audience is gonna get to eavesdrop in on all of the good pieces of knowledge that we're gonna share today. I love it. But before we dive into that conversation, let's get to know you. Tell us about your career and work history.

Kathleen (01:17)
Yeah, happy to. So I'm Kathleen Bunshoft. I'm a New Yorker living in San Francisco for many years now. And I'm a senior full stack marketing leader with a focus on revenue and also really a passion for team happiness.

Benjamin Ard (01:35)
I love it. We're really going to kind of focus on how to connect the dots between content and growth. Kathleen, you have four very specific steps really in how to level up our content for growth, how to connect these dots, maybe help us understand how do we really turn content into growth? Like sometimes it sounds a little counterintuitive.

How do we really make that happen?

Kathleen (01:56)
when I think about upleveling it to connect

as deeply as possible to growth. I have kind of four ideas that I wanted to discuss with you or four steps. The first one is to revisit the basics. Whether you're a marketing leader and I've been in your shoes, you are busy, you are fighting fires, the data is messed up, sales wants X, Y, and Z, leadership wants to talk about a strategic shift.

I get it, you're in the weeds trying to deliver and support your team, or you're a content marketer. Both of those groups of people need the basics in place. And this could be established in multiple different ways. But if you think about what you as a leader need to provide to your content people,

to make them as enabled as possible to deliver great work. I would say that you probably have a lot of this in place, but maybe I have a few new ideas. The first is, you know, a deep understanding of the market and the ICP.

That ICP, we probably understand their title. Maybe we understand something about their technographic information, like their stack segmentation in a specific industry. But have we gone far enough to understand like their mindset? What are they dealing with in the day to day? And I'll give you an example of where this really unlocked content performance for us.

at Malwarebytes, I squatted up with Kelly Sims, my colleague who was running research to do a quick but really thorough multi-view of these SMB and mid-market security buyers. And what we discovered is that, you know, we discovered lots of things about the features they needed and the things going on in their business that would initiate them looking to buy our solutions.

But we additionally discovered that they were overwhelmed. They were worried about keeping their jobs. They were overwhelmed. They were dealing with incredible stress about the cyber threats and the business outcomes that could happen if they were, you know, breached. So they went on to tell us that free trials, which in that space, free trial, and in any space where you're dealing with like a technical ICP or practitioner who's going to use your product.

It's always a good idea to have a free trial. In many cases, those users will want a free trial, but these users were likely to also be a CEO CFO in some cases, an office manager, a head of operations, who wasn't necessarily technical. And what we learned from the research was that they didn't...

want to do a free trial because it felt like more work to them. Like, I'm going to start a trial and you to learn your product and evaluate it. And then if I decide to use it or not use it, like then I might have to do that with another thing. Like I just want to make the right choice and start learning it and using it and pick something that's easy to use and hits all my goals. Part of this also about the overwhelm is they

wanted interactive demos. They wanted a demo that was on demand. They did not want to have to commit an hour to listen to a demo. And these were kind of shocking to some of my colleagues who have been in cybersecurity for a really long time. But all this to say, really helped us to understand we need to get to the point with these people. We need short form content. It needs to be on demand. Everything we put in front of them needs to acknowledge

the fact that we've learned that they're overwhelmed and we're here to help. We're here to simplify and we're here to take some of the burden off of you. So in looking at the ICP, it's really important to understand their state of mind and their psychology. The other thing that I would put under the category of like getting the basics right is what are the macroeconomic and kind of secular trends going on? mean,

These have been talked about on your podcast. And again, I know a lot of the leaders and content marketers on here know about this, but short form content, right? Like we can't ignore the fact that we're all bent over our phones watching 30 second videos. That is really what people want to see short form content. Give it to me as quick as possible.

And then, you know, podcasts fall into that. People are looking for more content that they don't have to stare at a screen for. Are we making audio content, that kind of thing? Within the world of B2B marketing, you have the rise of outbound marketing. Now, outbound marketing is probably the second biggest marketing channel in most B2B companies. So with tools like outreach and now kind of next gen tools like clay.

Benjamin Ard (06:43)
Yeah.

Kathleen (06:48)
and the reliance on kind of hunter sales reps to drive, you know, pipeline on that side of the house. This is a whole reality. The content team is no longer just serving the marketing team. They're serving the entire go-to-market team and that is an important channel outbound. So make sure you're looking at kind of the macro and secular trends that are going on in your industry and in the world in general.

And then, you know, if you're in a sales led company, make sure that your content marketing team has some context for the sales team. Have they personally connected with any sales reps? Do they understand the remit of these sales reps? Like, for example, are they running like, do they have a geographic patch that they're in charge of? Are they, do they have a set of named accounts as part of an ABM motion?

Are they responsible for delivering a certain amount of pipeline? Is the sale that they're making a replacement sale? So the prospect has our competitors product and we now need to not only convince them we're better and they should switch, but that the switch is worth it and the switch is gonna be smooth and they'll be supported and there's not a lot of risk around the switch. Or is it a green field?

So I would just say as deeply as possible as you can connect your content people to the sales team, that is great. Sales teams don't always like a lot of people rolling up on the reps to take up their time. So this can be done through the enablement or leadership level to say, we want a spot at your monthly all hands where we're to do a content spotlight. We want to establish a form or a poll that we regularly

use to connect with the sales rep about exactly what they want to see. And then we also want to have an opportunity to return data to them. So that sales team connection, I would really put under the category of kind of revisit what are the basics in this modern day to make your content marketers successful. So that I would say would be the first thing would be revisit the basics and make sure

that you're going deep enough and that all of those basics have been kind of updated for the current market conditions.

Benjamin Ard (09:01)
I love it. I love it. That makes perfect sense. So now as we go to number two, what do we need to look at when it comes to, making our content really drive some of these growth channels?

Kathleen (09:11)
Yeah, would, that question I think kind of gets at kind of the creative part of content, but let's first in my number two point here, expand our mindset about attribution. Most companies are probably using a first source attribution model. Maybe I'm not right, but I would guess a lot of them are, maybe a majority.

So they're looking at that lead or contact or meeting or opportunity as having a first source that is related to one of these channels, whether it's Google Ads or Organic Search or an email that you sent or any number of other paid social or other paid content syndication type channels. So that is an attribution model that is

decaying in its usefulness. No pun intended because there's a decay model of attribution, but it's decaying in its usefulness because as time goes on, instead of having 70 % of our traffic or leads attributed specifically to Google Ads or organic search or any number of the social channels and 30 % have no attribution.

we're now getting to a place where 70 % have no attribution and 30 % have the attribution. So that is just generally decaying. I think it's something that we're going to continue to look at and continue to use, but it's not enough anymore. And here are some other ways that you can think about attribution. You can look at anecdotal attribution, such as polling the sales team.

you can look at first party reported attribution such as a, did you hear about us question that some companies insert on the like lead form page. And it can also be collected as a field that the sales reps have to complete in order to move a lead or opportunity forward.

The thing about those is the categorization and keeping it simple is really the key there, right? You don't want to have a, did you hear about us? That's now got every single test variant of an ad. And I think that this will connect to my next point about like being really strategic about your content topics and keeping it a little bit more simple. Like we're going to cover this one topic. We're going to have one main piece of content.

and then we're going to make 10 different sub-assets from it. But in the how did you hear about it, it's that data report about trust and confidence in your endpoint security products. So that is kind of like a first party capture. The other attribution aspect, another one is like I mentioned in my previous point, which is

your case study is its own surface. You could be booking meetings through your Chili Piper integration or getting people to fill contact sales forms or putting them to the pricing page or getting them in free trial directly from that asset. So I would say kind of like page level attribution of leads, meetings, opportunities that are coming out of your actual asset.

And then the last thing I would think about is this sort of like the point in time impact. This is especially relevant for emails. So you make a great asset and it's a poll about the attitudes and product usage for your practitioner who's using your product. It's going to be a great benchmarking tool for them to understand how other people are using it, how they're doing in their career, et cetera. And you launch that in an email.

you send it to the biggest list you possibly can, and then you're able to say, okay, we 10xed our inbound demo requests for the day of and next day after. And that's another way to do attribution. So just expand your mindset and understand that teams are grappling with attribution totally. So you need to look at many different pieces of information.

Benjamin Ard (13:19)
You love it? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I love those first two points.

Kathleen (13:22)
Great. And then number three is to...

insert content or

think of content as like an essential piece of each of your strategies and each of your activities. So instead of thinking like I have content here in this silo and then I've got email and paid social and events. It's like content is relevant and is the fuel for all of those other.

silos or groups.

So starting with understanding what are the strategic motions that we need to make here? Do we need to become broadly visible and credible? Are we trying to drive highly targeted opportunities? Are we trying to accelerate opportunities that already are in the pipeline? Or are we trying to

get new upsell opportunities out of our existing customer base? Like, what are the motions that the marketing team is being asked to focus on? Maybe you're not focusing on all of them. Maybe two of them are the priority for this half year or quarter. What is the strategic priority that the CEO and the CRO and everybody is asking about? What's going to be asked about at the board meeting? And get your

thinking about content right into that. And then as it relates, you know, and maybe the company is really oriented around campaigns. Okay, well, each campaign should have a keystone content asset that, right, is going to be sliced up into lots of different other assets. We have a data report that's going to help us get in front of C-suite executives in this like larger deal size segment that we're going after.

but that data report is going to spawn three podcast appearances, a couple of videos of our internal subject matter experts talking about the data report, display ads, blog, and on and on and on. So if your company thinks about everything in terms of campaigns, your content is the keystone for that. And then finally, with regards to events, something that always occurs to me about events is like,

A lot of money is invested in an event. The booth looks amazing. The team looks amazing. The customers are smiling. Everything looks perfect. And everyone who's at the event loves it. And everyone who sees the photos is jazzed about it. And then two weeks later, it's like, well, we could really use some video of our customers talking about why they upgraded to our security module. Think about how content is going to get created.

at the events, you know, if you have that cute step and repeat, are you investing in lighting, getting how are you going to get kind of creator style audio, think red carpet interviews at your booth, how is that going to become content that you're then going to stitch together and turn into, you know, a reel of customers talking about why they upgraded to that product. So the event can spawn

content. The other and last way that I'll say that content can be strategic is obviously like there's a massive hype and movement around AI lately, right? AI can be used in all of the things that I'm talking about here. This isn't specifically a podcast about using content, AI for content, but imagine that you did that like mother of all data reports about

the attitudes of your prospects across multiple different segments that you were targeting or about your product usage data. That asset itself is going to be really important fodder to train the AI that you're using to help you create content, of be part of your audience guide to be able to help you create content at scale.

That's another strategic way that content can be used. Even telling the AI, are our top performing Google ads headlines. These are our top performing blogs. This is all fodder to train the AI. So that's what I would say is my number two point is just insert content strategically across all of these different work streams or ways of thinking about

what you're doing in marketing and go to market more broadly.

So my last point in the weeds about optimization of your

content. I have the philosophy that no content should be created unless it has a distribution plan and a goal for how many people are going to see it. So if you start to think that way, then you're immediately going to switch from quantity to quality. I've definitely worked at organizations where the mission was to pump out as much blog content as possible.

the reality is if like you have a steady drum beat of a blog a week and you also have like those two or three blogs that make the case for your product perfectly that are going to get like 80 % of the traffic and drive 80 % of the results that the mission should be to get distribution and eyeballs on this content. so when you think about, you kind of rethink and revisit

optimizing content. If you're a content creator or a leader of a marketing team, like, okay, this asset's going to get made. How's it going to get distributed? Do we have a content syndication deal with some kind of website that our ICPs love to read? Are we going to distribute this through LinkedIn via all of our executives?

Do we have a place on the website where we're merchandising our top asset or a couple of assets? I've seen this, obviously this is often done with like a pencil banner at the top of the website. Those drive me crazy because they're always driving the buttons below the fold. But it could also be done say in one of the drop downs of your menu, there could be a spot where it's like, here's our latest report. So really think about like,

we're making this asset, you need input from your SEO team and your email team and your paid social team. They need to be pitching you on how they're going to distribute it.

Benjamin Ard (19:43)
I love it. I love it. Kathleen, we actually have run out of time today for this episode. There's so many good pieces in this. Kathleen though, if anyone wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?

Kathleen (19:53)
Yes,

that would be great. I'm Kathleen Bunshoft. My name sometimes trips people up.

It's B-U-N-S-H-O-F-T and I am on LinkedIn. That's the best place to connect with me.

Benjamin Ard (20:11)
Kathleen, thank you. This has been super good. I've just been sitting here enjoying all of this knowledge you've been sharing. So I really do appreciate it. Thanks for your time today.

Kathleen (20:21)
You are so welcome. Thank you for listening and for having me on and I do feel like we have a million other things to talk about and I look forward to keeping in touch and continuing to listen to your great podcast.

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