Ben (00:01.546)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined with Sarah. Sarah, welcome to the show.
Sara Giddens (00:07.508)
Hi, thanks for having me.
Ben (00:09.262)
Perfect, well Sarah, before we dive into the subject today, we'd love to maybe dive into your background, your experience, and then we've got a really fascinating subject. Sarah is absolutely killing it when it comes to content marketing, and she's agreed to share some amazing insights, so really excited to dive into the subject, but before we get there, Sarah, maybe one, two minutes, if you're willing to share your background, would be awesome.
Sara Giddens (00:36.472)
Sure. So my name is Sarah Giddens. I'm currently the Director of Industry Marketing at Kahua, which is a construction software company based in Alpharetta, Georgia. I have about 12 years of experience doing B2B marketing, kind of in the high tech space, a lot of software focus. Yeah, that's kind of my background in what I do.
Ben (00:59.662)
I love it. Well, one of my favorite things is Sarah came prepared with numbers. Like one of my favorite things are when people come with numbers, I love numbers, I would train my marketing team on how to actually pull numbers and do stuff like that. So I absolutely love it. So what we're gonna talk about today, and that's just foreshadowing about how good this subject is, how to align your content with a customer journey. Now often we create content and try to kind of
fitting in and things like that. But Sarah, what are your initial thoughts? Why should we focus on the customer journey first and then craft content? What does that look like for you and what do you recommend?
Sara Giddens (01:41.092)
So for us in everything that we do and everything that my team does, we're responsible for creating the campaigns, you know, kind of that lead gen, demand gen component of marketing down to our website and how that is a lead magnet for us. So everything that we do is with the customer journey top of mind. We have made a real effort.
in the last year, year and a half, I would say, to think about how do we map the content to the different phases of the customer journey? And for us, the proof is kind of in the pudding, as they say. So I can sort of dig into some of those stats that you mentioned, if you wanna go ahead and do that.
Ben (02:23.722)
I love it. So when something that is super cool, if you focus on this system, and it's cool because this isn't just, oh, we had a good year. This is we didn't do this in one year. We did this in one year and here are the results. If you're willing to share, we'd love to hear the results about what that transition did for your business and the results for your demand generation.
Sara Giddens (02:47.036)
Yeah, it's really, really exciting to see on paper. So in 2022, compared to our 2023 numbers, in 2023, the amount of marketing sourced opportunities. So those are opportunities that came in through a marketing channel that have been vetted by our SDR team that sales is currently engaged with. So marketing source opportunities actually increased 70%.
And then the flip side of that is the number of marketing qualified leads, MQLs, actually went down 21%. So to me, that data is saying that we're doing more with less and that we're talking to the right people because we're not getting so many MQLs in, and then sales or the SDR team is just kind of disqualifying. What is actually happening is we're talking to the right people.
And I can directly contribute that to the fact that we have made this pivot over to creating content that better aligns with our customer journey.
Ben (03:53.482)
I love it. And that's incredible, hats off. That is not a small feat. And I love it that you, like you said, you're doing more with less, and I can guarantee your sales team is way happier, not just because of the opportunities, but the fact that they're not the one that has to siphon through all the extra MQLs to get to those opportunities, I think is amazing. So when you're looking at this, and you're, you know, and someone's saying, cool, content, customer journey.
Sara Giddens (04:12.97)
Right.
Ben (04:21.158)
What does that practically mean? Like what is a customer focused or a journey focused content campaign actually look like in practice? How are you mapping it out from a content perspective and a channel perspective? What does that actually look like if someone wants to run a campaign in that space?
Sara Giddens (04:41.)
Right, so we look at it from the awareness consideration decision phase, and then we think about the types of content that fit into each of those different components of the journey. So what makes sense to be kind of awareness type of content, what makes sense to be decision type of content. That's really what we consider when we're thinking about how do we build out these campaigns.
Ben (05:06.422)
love it. And then when you launch those campaigns, are you focused on specific content for specific channels? Have you mapped the channel to the stages or do they sometimes mesh? How does that kind of work and look like for you?
Sara Giddens (05:21.376)
They sometimes can mesh and I think that's great because we like to reuse our content as much as we possibly can. For us, what we really consider first and foremost is the part of the customer journey where it makes sense. If a channel makes sense, then we wanna include it. We don't ever try to force anything, but we're certainly willing to try all channels, all avenues to get the right message out there at the right time.
Ben (05:47.406)
I love it. I love the experimentation nature of it. I think that there's a lot of value in that. So okay, I'm a marketer and I want these big results. I kind of understand, I know what the campaign looks like. I need to build content for these stages. What's the process for going back to leadership, cross department, you know, cross functional, buy-in, things like that? How did you kind of convince?
and align and orient everyone to this idea of journey-based content and marketing and demand generation. What does that process look like to get that kicked off?
Sara Giddens (06:25.64)
Yeah, I think for me personally, I always think about marketing because I'm a consumer, right? So I think about marketing in the way I would wanna consume the information. And I think that's helpful as you're starting to have the ideas of how to make your strategy come together, right, or what you could do differently. That's how I like to frame it in my mind. So this was definitely a team effort across the board. We have a great team of marketers, really sharp.
bright people who've contributed to this. But ultimately, I think showing the need to leadership for.
you know, how you need to better align with what your customers are essentially hoping that you're going to do anyway. Um, you know, it almost makes too much sense to not do it that way. Um, your customers, when they're in that awareness phase, you know what they're looking for. They don't want to go straight to a product demo. They don't even know if they like you yet. So those are the kinds of conversations we were having with our leadership team, our CMO. And of course they were like, yes, this makes sense. And then once we kind of got their buy-in,
of this pivot that we wanted to do in our marketing approach, then we brought in the whole team and we actually did a whiteboard session where we laid out the different components just at the top of the board. We wrote awareness, consideration, decision, and then we started to fill in about what content we actually had and where that fit in those journey phases right then.
And we, from there, looked for gaps, right? So we would say, okay, we have a ton of thought leadership stuff, but we don't have any product content for, you know, consideration decision. And that really showed us, one, where the gaps were in our content, and then two, where we're missing the mark with the customers by not serving them up things that they would want to be seeing.
Ben (08:11.342)
I love it. When you're looking at it, you know, it sounds like you had a really good idea of what the customer journey looked like. I think for a lot of marketers, sometimes there is some effort to be done on understanding, okay, what does the realistic journey look like for a customer in the buying process? How did you as a company, as a team?
actually map out what did that look like? Is it on a whiteboard in some kind of a document? How did you actually map out the customer journey to then say, okay, cool. Now we know what the customer goes through. How do we help them? What did that process look like to figure that out?
Sara Giddens (08:56.38)
It was challenging, I mean, to be honest, because when you're in a highly technical B2B space, like the construction software that we're in currently, there are a lot of people, a lot of competitors out there that people are researching for one, that's part of their customer journey. The other part is too, it's a long sales cycle.
It can be many months into the sales cycle and you have to kind of keep up with what your prospects are doing that entire time. You can't just, you know, nurture them a little bit in the beginning when they've Google searched you and then you're done. That's just the beginning of a marketer's work at that point. That's my opinion. So I would say it's a lot of collaboration, not only with marketers throughout the whole team and what everyone is seeing, but also with sales.
with the SDRs, with the customer success team, everyone kind of coming together and saying, okay, when I've seen this data or the customer interactions, this is kind of what has happened for my part. And then you start to piece it together like a puzzle. And you think about what makes sense for the customer or the prospect in their next phase. Like...
if they're requesting a demo, then does it make sense that they probably are then going to need some kind of validation or approval from their manager or leadership to go and spend this money? And then how do you continue to nurture that component of the relationship? So I would say a lot of collaboration and a lot of like just mapping that out together. And it's okay if you need to scrap it and start over. We certainly did that several times.
Ben (10:37.486)
I think that last part is really golden advice. I think often we're afraid of doing something because we think we're gonna fail, so we never try it at all. And I think it's really important to say, hey, well, let's just take a stab at it. And if it's not right, great, we can toss it in the trash bin, but that means the next time around, we'll do it even better. And that one might still find it in the trash bin, eventually we'll find it, but the pathway to success is through failure. I love the mentality, you talked about testing channels and all that kind of stuff, so I think that does go hand in hand.
with all of this. Obviously you're very data driven, which is one of the best things when it comes to experimentation and things like that, to actually know what's working and whatnot. When it comes to mapping the customer journey, we actually had one of my businesses, a consultant come in and she asked, hey, I want you to write on a piece of paper. She hated doing this digitally. She's like physically was there in a conference room. We had the room reserved for the day and we wrote each stage.
and we taped it to the wall. And then we physically stood there shoulder to shoulder and walked each step through the customer journey and she would ask very specific questions. What are they feeling here? What are they thinking here? What are they seeing here? How are you helping them get to this next step and things of that nature? And honestly, there's a lot of times where you're walking through that and all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm not doing anything at this point.
I, you know, they, they have no idea where to go. They have no idea what to do. We need to shore that up. And so I love the process of really mapping out the customer journey and looking at that. So you went through this transition, saw incredible results. How do you measure the, the different stages? So you talked about the awareness consideration and decision phases.
Sara Giddens (12:05.053)
Right.
Ben (12:30.838)
What metrics are you specifically looking at to know that they're flowing through the journey the way that you're properly looking at and maybe identify which content is working and which content isn't working in this process? Do you have a good system for doing that? How do you manage that?
Sara Giddens (12:47.712)
We are really data driven in what we do and we have a great tool set that helps us do that. So we have a combination of like an ABM platform, we use HubSpot and then we also have like Salesforce and different things, content tools that help us tell, understand like if someone read 10 pages of a 20 page document, for example.
those are all things that we look at. I would say ultimately it comes down to a few custom dashboards that we've built in Salesforce. Not hard to do, anybody could do this, if you have kind of the right tools funneling in. But we look at our pipeline by month. And I think that's for us the best indicator in our business.
So we can see, you know, in this month, we had five opportunities created that were marketing sourced, and then next month we had 10 or 12. And then you can kind of start to go back and look and see what were you doing at that time or the month prior, you know, where it would have made sense that someone had consumed that content and then they've moved on then to become an opportunity in the right amount of time, et cetera. So something that we look at is really that month to month pipeline growth. And then we consider, you know, what is kind of
early pipeline stages that has just come in, what is late stage pipeline, how has that grown from this time last year, et cetera. So I would say we are super into the data and we love it.
Ben (14:15.47)
I love that, that's awesome. And that's a great call to action as well. If you wanna be good at anything in marketing, get comfortable with the data. And I think that's a big, big win. Well, as promised, this goes by extremely fast. Sarah, thank you for your insights. This information is so helpful, so valuable. If anyone wants to connect with you and continue the conversation or learn more, how do they reach out? What's the best way for them to appropriately get ahold of you and kind of contact you?
Sara Giddens (14:22.24)
Yes.
Sara Giddens (14:44.828)
Yeah, anybody can reach out to me at LinkedIn. I'm on there, it's Sarah Giddens. Feel free to shoot me a message if you wanna talk about anything more or better understand something we've mentioned here. I'd be happy to help.
Ben (14:57.914)
Love it. Perfect. Well, Sarah, again, thank you for the time. Super valuable. Really do appreciate it.
Sara Giddens (15:03.84)
Thanks so much, Ben.
Ben (15:05.962)
Yep, have a great day.
Sara Giddens (15:07.657)
You too.