Teaming up with the team at Convince & Convert, Vidyard’s VP of Marketing Tyler Lessard hosts the Content Pros Podcast. For this week’s episode, Tyler is joined by Travis Bickham, VP of Marketing at Concord, to discuss how a focus on quality and providing the Netflix experience is turning heads in a crowded marketplace. Check out the full podcast:
Here are a few of our favorite moments:
Ho are you approaching your content strategy and what are some of the tools that you’re trying to put in place to help yourselves stand out and compete in this market where content can’t just be good, it has to be great?
There are a few things we’re doing there. I think one is speaking to the organizational side of it. How do you organize your team and how do you organize the structure of your content? I’m a pretty firm believer in what I would call the content pyramid, which I think keeps you honest in your content creation and also keeps your content very clear and focused. The way we do that is we’re actually rolling out one new piece of highly curated, intensely focused content every month. Think something along the lines of the original Marketo essential guides, but specific to your industry and really answering a question that you might pay a consultant to come in and answer for you. We see so many of our customers going through similar things, and I’m sure other companies do too, that we have a unique perspective that a company on the inside that’s really looking in their silo might not. We want to give that knowledge to all of our prospects and all of our customers and really go ahead and hand them something of value right out the gates. We create that core piece of content every month. It could be something like a 30-page e-book, could be a really well thought out interview. It could even be a podcast. Then from that core piece of content, we’re actually going to cascade derivative content, so every blog post, every whiteboard Wednesday, all of our smaller pieces are going to follow up on that main theme for the month. Then from there, we have microcontent, so think social, an email from a salesperson, anything like that. It’s all going to go back to that main theme, much the way you would watch something like 60 minutes and it would cover one thing and then everything would cascade from there. That’s how we’re organizing our content. We have people that are really focused on demand generation and they’re in charge of actually executing that theme throughout the month. Is the email going to be about this? What are we saying online? What’s going to go on the blog? Then we have people that are purely focused on content. Their job isn’t to think about leads. It’s not to think about the sales journey. It’s about producing something incredibly, incredibly compelling and so we want to actually lead people down that journey. The second part of it is we want to give people the Netflix experience. This is something that we do primarily through our video strategy, but a lot of it involves not gating content that shouldn’t be gated, producing things that people actually want to watch or actually want to interact with and really investing the time in thinking through what you’re going to say and what value it’s going to give to the end customer. If someone comes into our website and watches a video, we want them to immediately click play next and we want them to actually walk themselves down that journey that traditional marketing was in charge of via emails, banner ads, what have you. People are happy to consume your content if it’s good enough.
How do you think about applying ideas, not just to an inbound strategy, but to an outbound strategy? I know you’ve talked a lot in your past about account-based marketing and how you can leverage great content and great tactics to go out and proactively engage key accounts.
Yeah, definitely. I think that the world has never been busier, especially when we think about anything digital. To stand out is actually incredibly difficult. Part of the way you can do that and you can actually improve the attention span of your prospects is through creating fantastic content. When we’re thinking about account-based marketing, aside from understanding who we want to talk to and building target lists and all of that really pre-marketing stuff, we’re intensely focused on creating content that people actually want to read and is going to give them value immediately. If we’re not sending them something that’s polished and professional right off the bat, we’ve already lost the battle. If we’re going to spend the time to create this entire journey, create the messaging for someone, the content has to be flawless. One thing we do is we’ll really seek to understand our prospect’s business. That’s kind of easy to do because we’ll actually look at what industries and what competitors and what groups of companies are good for us until we understand really what the problems of that industry are. Then we’ll dive into that specific company, see how they’re interacting with the macro themes and we’ll create the content from there. That generally involves understanding who to talk to. Obviously, the higher in the organization you can go, the better. If you’re selling what we’re selling, it’s really an organization-wide approach, so that’s pretty easy. Then we’ll create something along the lines of a personalized e-book, obviously, personalized video has long been a favorite of mine. Thank you, Tyler, for turning me onto that.
We’ll go ahead and we’ll send that out across a variety of outbound channels, email, direct mail, digital, even retargeting and also dynamic content on our website. The point is to let our prospects understand that we know what they’re going through and we want to learn more and we’re here to help. Content is the best way to do that because, I think LinkedIn originally had this statistic, 80% of the buyer journey happens before they even talk to sales.
If you want to hear the full podcast, we’ve posted it above, and you can read a full transcript of this talk on Convince & Convert, where it was originally posted!
The post Content Pros: How Concord is Turning Heads with Content appeared first on Vidyard.
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