How Can You Make Content Timely and Impactful?

Rya Manners (00:02)
They talk about what happens. They talk about their views on it. They talk about how it could have been prevented. And I think that that opens up like a line of communication, that sense of like comfort of like, okay, hey, this person knows what they're talking about. Let me reach out to them. Let me see what their thoughts are on

Benjamin Ard (00:41)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Raya. Raya, welcome to the show.

Rya Manners (00:46)
Hi Benjamin, thank you so much for having me.

Benjamin Ard (00:48)
You bet right. I'm excited for the conversation. It's going to be a ton of fun, but before we dive into it, let's get to know you. Tell us a little bit about your career and background and then the question we ask everyone. What do you love about content and what do you love about marketing?

Rya Manners (01:03)
Yeah, absolutely. So funny enough, I started out pre-med and realized I was really terrible at that. So I quickly discovered marketing and discovered I really liked it. It was exciting. It was something that I thought I was really good at. You I can figure it out. I gave you the opportunity to be creative. So I've spent the last, I want to say 13 years of my career, guess of my life growing my career in a security industry.

started out as a coordinator and I am a VP of marketing now for one of the largest security

Benjamin Ard (01:35)
I love that. going to talk about content creation, especially when it comes to breaking news, timely content, things of that nature. Often when we look at business content, it can feel so stale. It's just these best practices, evergreen content that honestly isn't that relevant to what's going on right now.

But in your industry and in your experience, you guys have done some cool things to really stay on top of current trends and really showing the news, things like that. So first and foremost, how do you personally stay on top of what's going on and how it relates to your business? Any techniques for like knowing and discovering, How do you stay on top of everything going on in the industry?

Rya Manners (02:19)
Yeah, it's definitely hard. are a lot of resources that I think help out. Like personally, I have Google alerts set up for a lot of our competitors, for a lot of keywords that are relevant in our industry, just to know what's going on, what everybody else is doing, what's going on with them, what should we be looking out for? know, like I think there are other like social listening tools that you can use to monitor those online conversations as well. We have a lot of like internal experts too.

so we have like a, like a risk management division, that's, that's kind of what they do. They, they're on top of like the most, current events that are happening, whether they're, you know, some sort of conflict and some war, you know, some sort of war or something and overseas, they're going out there extracting people, they're finding people. but they're, just kind of always know about it way before us. They,

have all these tools where they're monitoring, I guess, security alerts. And they have connections with a lot of law enforcement and a lot of FBI, CIA. So sometimes they get a lot of these events that are happening kind of before even it hits mainstream. So it allows us to plan for it.

It doesn't always happen that way, right? That's kind of like if you're lucky. Sometimes it's just other, you know, just the news. Like you hear things and you're like, hey, this is relevant to us. This could affect us. I hate to say it, but sometimes you learn from your competitors too, you were all kind of trying to do the same thing. And sometimes one of us gets to it before the other.

Benjamin Ard (03:47)
Yeah, I love that. So speaking of competitors and looking at this news, when you see something, you say you talk to someone internally and I love that you have the internal resources to figure that out and have a good pulse there and the alignment internally and that value there, or you're looking on social media or elsewhere, the news, whatever it may be, you found relevant stories that you feel like your audience would care about.

How do you take that and turn it into something that your audience wants to read from you? Why would they read it from you instead of going to a news outlet themselves or something like that? What do you do to kind of add your company's unique brand and point of view or, you know, secret sauce to the content?

Rya Manners (04:28)
Yeah, good question. I think we try to make it educational, know, where it's not like, hey, here's the news. We try to kind of give them a little bit more of the background on it or, you know, how it could potentially affect them, even if it's indirectly. try to, I guess, make it relatable or do we try not to scare people, especially if it's like something going on in current events. I think a very recent case with

the CEO in UnitedHealthcare, like that was a very scary moment for a lot of those individuals and those kind of roles. So it's kind of on us to make sure that we're addressing it in a sensitive way. But at the same time, letting them know, hey, we're here, this is what we could do, this is what's happening, this is what our sources are telling us, this is what exclusive sources are telling us, whatever it is, right? We just try to make it.

as engaging as possible from a relatable standpoint or relevant standpoint for them.

Benjamin Ard (05:18)
I love that.

Yeah, I love it. So it's cool is you've nailed down your audience so well that it sounds like when you see a piece of news or something relevant, it's not just sharing the facts. You're also digging deeper and saying, okay, how does this relate to you? How can you apply this? What should you be worried about? What should you not be worried about? Things of that nature, you make it really applicable. It sounds like that's kind of a unique point of view that you're able to share with your audience.

With timely content, how are you distributing the content? Are you focused heavily on social media? Are you using email newsletters? You know, with more relevant content, it seems like you probably have to have a pretty decent distribution channel to give that out to people in kind of a timely manner.

Rya Manners (05:59)
you know, we do rely heavily on social media. I do feel that that's where we get the most engagement from. And then of course, like, you know, we do send, you know, we update the blogs on our website. So we make sure that we send that out to all of our marketing email, marketing contacts, with like mass emails just to get the

just to get that information across, we get pretty good feedback on it, you know, in terms of like, hey, I didn't think of it from this point, or your content was like valuable. you know, people reach out and they're like, I didn't think about how this could affect me and my role and my business. So those are the ones that have been, I'd say the most productive for us or efficient.

Benjamin Ard (06:37)
I love that. And I think that's really a gold standard when it comes to content. If you're getting people reaching out and saying, I hadn't thought about this this way, or I didn't know how this really applied to my life. And they're saying those kinds of comments. think it's such a good indicator that you have really nailed down your point of view with your audience. I like to call it the content market fit.

because that is where they're saying, I could have read this article anywhere, but you're the one who made it relevant. And so I love that little piece there. How are you collecting feedback? mean, obviously, hopefully people reach out or comment on social media, but how are you working with your audience to kind of discover new and better ways of giving them content that's relevant to them?

Rya Manners (07:23)
good question and I want to say that it's in our industry it's a little tough because it's you know it's b2b so a lot of the people out a lot of the folks you know our audience basically if they see something relevant they're not necessarily communicating with us on the marketing side they're

they're interested in and go straight to, you know, those security experts and they're like, Hey, I want to talk more about this, but that's their starting point. That's, that's kind of like how they figure out that, Hey, this company knows a little bit about this. so I'd say, I'd say we, they don't really talk to the marketing people. but you know, oftentimes we would get comments on a social media post. We do get some replies back to the email, either asking for more information or who they can talk to. I've seen a lot.

Benjamin Ard (08:00)
He

Rya Manners (08:11)
of people actually just sending like replying and commenting on what their thoughts were, whether it's to how we presented or just thoughts about the trend or current event taking place.

Benjamin Ard (08:23)
So I want to double click on that because I think it's a really good call out. You have established yourselves as experts in this field so much that the company isn't necessarily going to all of your marketing channels all the time, but they have direct content or sorry, direct contact with people inside your organization where they can go to and say, hey, how does this apply to me? What do I do for this? And they have genuine resources.

I don't care what B2B company or industry you're in. If your customers don't feel like they can reach out to, you know, their contacts inside of your company and ask relevant com, you know, questions about breaking news and how it applies to them. That's probably something you should be working on. Now it may not be a blog post or something like that, but it could be, how do we level up our internal team to be experts?

and position them in such a way that our customers, when they're working with us, feel comfortable to reach out and ask those relevant questions and get that advice and get that feedback. I mean, obviously you're in security and so you naturally have to have these experts, but what have you done to kind of position yourselves as the experts where your companies feel comfortable saying, Hey, internal contact, what do we think about this? What should we do about it? Here's what I'm worried about.

have you done anything specific there or has it just been the nature of the employees? How do you like pulled that off?

Rya Manners (09:43)
I think the background of a lot of our employees, especially in those kind of like operational, like expert roles there, they've got the background. They've either had like a law enforcement or military or, you know, some sort of government agency background where they do either just know a lot about the situation at hand or they get the intel on it, you know, and, and we talk a lot about personal branding too. So in terms of like on LinkedIn, a lot of, a lot of those

people are very active on LinkedIn.

They talk about what happens. They talk about their views on it. They talk about how it could have been prevented. And I think that that opens up like a line of communication, that sense of like comfort of like, okay, hey, this person knows what they're talking about. Let me reach out to them. Let me see what their thoughts are on

that's been really helpful. And I think the personal branding of our professionals is like, they're really putting it out there.

just showing people directly what they do know and that they're the individuals to reach out to.

Benjamin Ard (10:36)
love that. So are you supporting them in those efforts, encouraging those efforts, training in those efforts, or in your case, is it just that they're awesome and want to reach out and share that material? How does that kind of work and what can people learn from that?

Rya Manners (10:51)
I'm going to say yes. Yes to both. Yeah, some of the ones like the ones that are really involved, ones that are, you know, really, I guess social, right on social media, they they've kind of got it figured out. But we do have our, you know, town halls where we kind of get everybody together. And sometimes we're like, hey, you know what, it's great that you guys are building our brand. But let's also talk about your personal brand and how you can position

you know, you're presenting yourself in the best way possible while still representing, you know, the company. So we do help them out with that. We give them some tips, but a lot of the knowledge that they have, that's all them, you know, that's, they're just presenting it, I guess, in the best light from the brand, you know, like to make sure that they represent the brand the right way. But a lot of that is all them.

Benjamin Ard (11:39)
I love that and I think it's such a cool balance that you found where you have people in your business that are so excited about what's going on that they want to be genuinely helpful and reach out and you as a

team have said, okay, cool here. Here's how you can be successful at it. Here's how you can represent the brand. Well, here's what you can do to potentially grow your influence and some tips and advice, things like that. But

We're not going to go out there and control your narrative or control your personal brand. We're just excited. You're talking about it and we're going to aid and assist. A lot of times I think businesses are afraid to let their employees go out there and kind of show them their authentic selves because they're afraid of what people are going to say. And I love that you're going out there and really encouraging it and helping support that. I think that's a great example. And really, honestly, that's how your authority as a business grows to say,

We're not going to reach out to the business. We're going to reach out to an individual at the business that we feel like has the answers. And I think that you're promoting that really well.

Rya Manners (12:39)
Thank Thank you. Definitely try.

Benjamin Ard (12:40)
So with that,

one final question, is the business reposting content from individuals, things like that on the business account, is most of your content coming from the individuals? What's kind of the

Rya Manners (12:52)
our company specifically, mean, we do have a lot of like these just, you know, industry

subject matter experts.

and they do provide us the content. We have some individuals that provide a lot more of it than others just because they're like completely in it and they know what's going on. And again, they have those resources or those sources that are giving them the intel so they can kind of write about that and they'll provide us with articles. So it just makes our job so much easier. We do also have like a whole research team that's dedicated to just doing research on trends that are shaping security.

and how it affects everybody. They'll create reports on a bunch of different topics related to security, of course. And I'm not sure how familiar you are, Benjamin, with the security industry, but marketing was not that huge of an, I don't want to say investment. I think people still need to be educated on it in terms of what it can do for you. And the security industry, think, in the past,

five, six years has learned a lot. And I mean like the security guarding industry. They've learned a lot about like what marketing can do. And I think they've been investing a lot more time, effort, know, money into marketing what security companies do.

That's kind of like where this like research team that we have comes in. That's where like our subject matter experts are so willing to provide the content, which we then take and we, you know, repurpose it in so many different ways, whether it's, you know, LinkedIn posts, whether it's on our

whether it's, you know, sending out an email or just kind of using that as a conversation starter. So, yeah.

Benjamin Ard (14:26)
I love it. And I think this is the right way of doing content. think a lot of times, you know, the evergreen content is great and there's SEO value, things like that. But I love that you have genuine experts in the business talking about and promoting content the right way. That's relevant. They are experts genuinely and they're not pretending to be. They have the credentials and background. And so I love the balance and I love the advice here.

But Raya, we're actually out of time today. So thank you so much for the insights. This time kind of flies by. If anyone wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?

Rya Manners (15:01)
Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. Just please look me up, Raya Manners. I try to be kind of active on there, so you should have no trouble finding me.

Benjamin Ard (15:08)
I love it. Well, Raya, again, thank you so much for the time and insights today. I really appreciate it.

Rya Manners (15:13)
Thank you as well, Benjamin. This was really fun.

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