Why your content doesn't need a sales pitch

Ben: Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I’m joined by Aubrey. Aubrey, welcome to the show.

Aubrey: Thanks so much for having me.

Ben: Aubrey, I’m excited for this conversation. It hits really close to home from a lot of my experience and I think it’s going to be fun. I think it’s really relevant to dive into your background, what you love about marketing and content to really set the stage. So let us get to know you for a second.

Aubrey: Absolutely. I am a content marketing manager at Authenticate. We’re a cybersecurity startup, and I produce our podcast on open source intelligence called Needlestack. I also write for our blog and run our social media and influencer strategy.

Ben: That’s a lot of hats, which is kind of fun. Yeah. I love it. I think this will be a great conversation.

Demand Generation and Content

Ben: Today we’re going to talk a little bit about demand generation and how content plays a role. A lot of times there’s this internal and external battle of what kind of content at what stage of the funnel and call-to-actions. How do I produce it? Know what to do. But really, you have this cool approach of, can I just provide value instead of making everything a sales pitch? How does that work? How does this philosophy help your prospective customers?

Aubrey: Yeah, I feel lucky because the strategy was already started before I came on board. It’s actually one of the reasons that I came to this company. Not because I have some incredible technical background, but because I was like, I really like this and this is interesting.

Aubrey: We try to just provide resources. Our customers are in a tough field. It’s a new field, and there’s not a lot out there. Through people we’ve talked to, we’ve learned that people are just grasping at straws to find any good information they can on doing this kind of research. So we thought, why not help them? That has grown from just blogs to a podcast that is not salesy. We very rarely mention ourselves. We just interview people in the field and what they’re doing and try to find resources.

Aubrey: Tools and tips are always important, but also just anecdotes of how they use these kind of high-level ideas in their everyday life to get results. That’s grown to, you know, even training and skill-sharing events.

Call to Action Without Sales Pitches

Ben: I love it. So, every marketer is always going to say you’ve got to have a call to action. You’re going to have to push towards leads and revenue. What is your natural way of helping actually progress the buyer without having everything via sales pitch or gimmicky? How does the natural flow of things work so you’re actually still generating leads?

Aubrey: Yeah, absolutely. And don’t get me wrong, if you go to our blog, you can find information on our product. It’s not like if you’re searching for that, you wouldn’t be able to find it. But we do kind of just want to prime them with giving information. If they stumble into us, that’s incredible.

Aubrey: But what we have learned is that by giving all this quality information, we garner people’s respect. And actually, we find they kind of are like, anyway, what do you do? And they start learning about us because we have their attention and we’ve produced something that has helped improve their workflow.

Balancing Metrics and Relationships

Ben: I love it. I love it. So, I personally believe the same philosophy. I love the concept of, hey, I’m in marketing. My job is just to build relationships and get people to really like know and trust us. When the moment is right, you know, the 95 and 5 % rule, 95 % are not in market, 5 % are. So let’s get trust from the 95. So when they are the 5%, they look for us. But often marketers have to have metrics and things associated with it. How do you track? Like, what do you track? What is more qualitative? How do you balance that?

Aubrey: So, we do track through UTMs pretty heavily. We have a great digital marketing person who is in charge of our website and I think does a great job of doing our tracking. But we also find that it’s important right now, especially for such a small company, we have to grow brand awareness.

Aubrey: I think that that is my big focus and building a community of experts. We find that when we do that, we do see MQLs come in the door, even if it’s not our focus.

Leveraging Content and Building Awareness

Ben: So, you talked a lot about really leveraging your content marketing subject matter experts, right? How do you leverage that content and still drive awareness? We live in a day and age where every YouTube video is sponsored by a brand. It’s in-your-face kind of an idea. How do you first of all, build these relationships? And second of all, how do you still point it in the direction of your business being helpful without it being so in-your-face?

Aubrey: Yeah, I actually sometimes tell people on our podcast that you don’t have to talk about us. That’s not what you’re here for. Some people will because they truly are huge fans of the product. For the people whose niche this is, our product can be a lifesaver quite literally because we’re in security.

Aubrey: But for the most part, I do a lot of consumption of news in this field of open source intelligence. By way of that and researching for the podcast, I’ve reached out to a ton of incredibly generous people who all give their time and come on and then end up by way of being friends with me on LinkedIn or other kinds of things, finding some of our blogs and start sharing our content.

Aubrey: Through that, we’ve actually grown a ton. I think that these people would balk at being called influencers because it’s not like a Kardashian selling makeup on Instagram, but they are influential in this particular space. And for good reason, because they are experts, because they have a lot of experience and they share really relevant content. Because of that, we’ve found some friendly partnerships.

The Impact of Meaningful Content

Ben: That’s really cool. Because your philosophy is to create meaningful, helpful content, it seems like they’re willing to republish your content because they know it’s actually beneficial and less of a sales pitch. Is that right?

Aubrey: Yes, that is a really key part. I don’t think that anyone would really come on our podcast or be sharing our blogs if it was just like, here’s why we’re the only way. I think that the quality of the content is really key to that. That’s actually something we’ve had to drive home in any marketing strategy. I think you get questions internally, and we’ve had to be like, look at how this is working.

Hosting and Leveraging Content on Different Platforms

Ben: I love it, I love it. So, when you’re looking at it, more of a logistical question, most of your content, I assume, is hosted on your website. Is that like the primary driver for everything you’re doing, or are you leveraging other channels really well?

Aubrey: I would say yes. Most is on our website. LinkedIn is going to be because we’re B2B sort of our key social media platform. But the one that’s really growing is YouTube. We have a video podcast, so about 50 % of our consumption is on YouTube. We see a lot of opportunity on that platform.

Ben: Very cool.

Transitioning to Digital and Physical Events

Ben: That’s awesome. I love it. How does the same mentality translate into other mediums that aren’t as digital, like physical events or things of that nature? How does that kind of, you know, maybe even digital events in general, but how does that kind of work and how does it translate?

Aubrey: Yeah, we actually got the idea because actually the only training resources in OSINT are these really expensive physical events that are only in usually Washington DC or somewhere like that, that aren’t really accessible for most people. So we actually hosted a digital event and it was streaming on social media.

Aubrey: I think I had to explain maybe 75 times to our marketing ops person, no, we are not going to gate this. No. And asked him to take like a million fields off of a form. You didn’t even have to sign up at all. The signup was a reminder, a calendar reminder, and to get the schedule ahead of time, which we did have.

Aubrey: We were blown away by the number of people who signed up, even though it wasn’t required. But another few hundred people more streamed it just on LinkedIn Live and YouTube Live. It ended up being maybe three times our most successful webinar before that was gated. Not only that, but I was like, this is a brand awareness event. We don’t really expect a bunch of MQLs to come in. On top of that, we did end up getting a ton of MQLs because a bunch of people were like, what is this? Huh, this is cool.

Aubrey: So, yeah, we invited some experts to come talk about their favorite trainings. Everything from geolocation to strategies you can have to official certifications that can help you further your career, which is another area where people are often missing information. It was hugely successful. It’s inaugural, and we’re going to do it again.

Aubrey: My boss wanted us to do it again every six months. We said no, please. But yeah, it went great.

Internal Buy-In and Measuring Content Success

Ben: I love it. So, that conversation, you talked about it a little bit. We’re not going to gate anything, just trust in the process. How did that go internally? After the results, have the conversations been easier for you to say, “Hey, this is the same kind of scenario. Look at what we did before?”

Aubrey: I think there’s a lot of convincing every time until it works. But yeah, I think when I first said we were hosting a webinar that we’re not gating, they looked at me like I had turned purple. There was a lot of, “No, really, just trust me, please trust me.” And then immediately, we had so many signups that it was better than any webinar we’d hosted in the past. Then people stopped asking me so many questions.

Ben: I love it, I love it. How do you measure that directly back to it?

Aubrey: So, through the signups, through, we were able to see through the program we use to stream everything, how many people were streaming. We did get just a ton of people. I want to say, I wish I could remember exactly what it grew by, but maybe our LinkedIn followers grew by like 30%.

Aubrey: A lot of people shared it, SMEs in the field. The other thing is it was free, so free training events are just so few and far between, particularly in this field, that everyone just jumped on it.

Promoting the Company Name

Ben: I love it. I love it. Did you ever even mention your company name, or was it purely on your website and social media profiles so they saw it anyway? How often did you even promote yourself?

Aubrey: We did a little bit. Myself and a fellow Needlestack host were the emcees, so within the breaks between speakers, I think we did play one little product introduction video that we had, like 30 seconds. Then at the end of the day, I think we offered an extended trial to people who had signed up. But otherwise, not really, no.

Aubrey: Everyone else, no one internally from our company actually spoke at the training event other than us emceeing. In the comments, we had a really healthy comment section. People were asking, and there we had put links to the free trial.

Customer Engagement

Ben: Very cool. With your current customers, I imagine they played a role in this whole process as well, with comments and things like that. How active were you in getting them engaged with the event so that they could kind of evangelize for you as a business?

Aubrey: Yeah, we do have a great relationship with some of our current customers. We find evangelists is the right word. Certain people are really passionate about how much they love our tool, which is incredible. Some of those people also happen to be in interesting sort of issues within this niche field.

Aubrey: They’ve come on our podcast to talk about that. We did invite some of those people who are growing their own open source intelligence programs at universities, which is sort of the first of its kind to help formalize what is normally just a you-come-to-it-through-the-internet vocation.

Aubrey: We had a panel on that, and a lot of those people were really active, as well as their students. So that was great.

Ben: That’s awesome. That’s amazing. Well, again, I love this approach. I love the concept of how do we provide as much value as possible and then let people come kind of looking for us after we’ve built the trust. I think it’s so powerful, and the results are speaking for themselves. I love it. I love it. Hats off to you and the whole team. That sounds amazing.

Aubrey: Absolutely.

Aubrey: Thanks so much. Yeah, keep an eye out. We have more fun content. We’re working on another podcast coming out later this year with a true crime bent. So I’m excited about that. We’re taking the strategy further and further.

Ben: Ooh, very cool, very cool. I love it, this creating entertainment and things like that. That’s so cool. We’ll have to make sure in the show notes, we’ll link to you. We’ll link to your podcast and anything else you want, because that sounds really exciting to go see how it’s done really well.

Ben: But Aubrey, if anyone wants to connect with you and reach out, like what is the best way for them to connect with you?

Aubrey: Yeah, LinkedIn. I’m definitely really active on Twitter. If anyone’s still there, I’m kind of still there.

Ben: Love it, love it. Very cool, well, we’ll link to all of that. Again, Aubrey, thanks so much for the insights and sharing everything today. That was amazing.

Aubrey: Yeah, absolutely.

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