We had our first #pipelinemarketing Blab on Thursday, December 10th at 1:00pm EST with guests Andre Konig, Director of Strategy, Open Topic and Brad Zomick, Director of Content Marketing at Pipe Drive. The chat, centered on creating #killercontent, drove home that data is truly the catalyst used to create effective content that reaches the target audience.
Our moderator, RenderTribe CEO Peter Dean, asked some great questions. Here are the questions and some highlights from the conversation:
Q1: How do you craft effective content?
In regards to crafting effective content, Brad Zomick highlighted qualitative data, in other words, talking to users to find out what problem is being solved for them, and then map those problems to keywords. Ongoing feedback really helps in upping the right traffic.
Andre talked about his own journey to crafting effective content which occurs in three stages:
- Start from nothing – first phase is Google Analytics which is fantastic and powerful in looking up very typical metrics.
- Do some testing to see what works; redirect traffic, landing pages, layouts, audiences which is helpful yet still incremental and requires the daily grind – check for improvements and changes.
- Use your own platform to replace manual tracking to algorithms and automated metrics, which then allows them to go back the beginning to compare to see what is working.
Q2: How do you leverage data after executing on the content?
One thing Brad said was: “If we produce evergreen content that’s not producing, we revisit in 90-days to see if we need to re-socialize it to make it better.”
Andre commented, “At some point we decided to put blinders on to focus on conversions. We are all set up through Google analytics and we do content mapping for different stages and metrics for specific stages to see what’s working and what’s not; looking where performance is. Try to find in each stage what is working and then find best content. We also look at Pipeline funnel from acquisition from MQL to SQL to closing; look at different conversion rates and what email templates, tone, etc. to see what of those are producing results.”
Q3: How do you measure the content effectiveness?
Andre said they measure content effectiveness by using pivot tables. “Google Analytics and Excel are kind of all you need in most cases”. Keep each other honest and put aside all assumptions. The challenge to deal with is we all do so much, have to look at the long term effectiveness rather than what’s working this week. With respect to Open Topic we try to add a tracking script into each piece of content published and attach a dollar amount to it – this audience net as this much ROI. That’s the only way we can justify our budgets.
Brad commented that you aren’t going to know the true value of a piece of content for a few months, unless you’re doing paid distribution. The other part is educating people around you by setting expectations about how content works.
Summary Statements and Blabber Resources
“It is important to remember you have to build the train tracks before you actually get onto your train and arrive at your destination. We use a URL profiler to pull data from Moz, Majestic and Social Count to analyze top level traffic, as well as social signals and inbound links. Quality links win over quantity of traffic. Take a big picture view and frontload big effort in the beginning. @Brad_Zee
Brad provided a link to a 2-week sales education email course where marketers can learn a little bit about counterparts in the sales organization. https://www.pipedrive.com/en/sales-pipeline-academy.
Andre – I like what Brad said, that It is important to remember you have to build the train tracks before you actually get onto your train and arrive at your destination. Be authentic with your audience, with your content, with your pipeline. If you are authentic and use the data you will be successful and do the daily grind; set up your pipeline and funnel and make data-driven decisions every day. @AndreMKonig @OpenTopic Visit: www.opentopic.com to learn more about Andre’s company.
We encourage you to watch the Blab recording on writing #killercontent- it’s only 30-minutes and you will be sure to learn something new! You should also sign up to receive notifications about RenderTribe’s upcoming Blabs and events. Don’t miss our second blab: SaaS #PipelineMarketing: How To Define Your Target Audience.
