By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing
Late in 2015 we started producing a radio program called Sales Pipeline Radio, which currently runs every Thursday at 11:30 a.m. Pacific. It’s just 30 minutes long, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales & marketing professionals.
We’ve already featured some great guests and have a line up of awesome content and special guests coming up. Our very first guest was Funnelholic author and Topo co-founder Craig Rosenberg. Next we had Mike Weinberg, incredible writer, speaker, author, followed by Conrad Bayer, CEO & Founder of Tellwise. Recent Guests: Jim Keenan; Joanne Black; Aaron Ross; Josiane Feigon, Meagen Eisenberg, and Trish Bertuzzi.
We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities heading into and throughout the year. We’ll publish similar highlights here for upcoming episodes. You can listen to full recordings of past shows at SalesPipelineRadio.com and subscribe on iTunes.
About our guest: Shannon Dougall, VP of Marketing at Uberflip
She has been called, “a marketer of the future.” She is an adventurer, scientist, and artist in the field of marketing. She had been compared to a Swiss Army Knife, using her experiences and learnings towards an all-in-one type of demand generation and customer acquisition that includes storytelling, blogging, lifecycle marketing, digital marketing, SEO, paid advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, positioning, pre-product/product marketing, app store marketing, content marketing, growth hacking, and analytics just to name a few. Shannon’s true north is to help business’ transform to realize their true potential.
Some highlights of this episode:
Results from research highlighting the most important content features
Examples of successful, sales-converting content campaigns
Key B2B content trends for 2017
Listen in or read below:
Matt: So I got back last night from a great week down at Scottsdale Arizona, the Content to Conversion conference, that was a great week, one of my favorite conferences of the year. It’s kind of the beginning of the or late winter and spring conference schedule. It combines content and demand gen marketers together so it was a good week and a good I guess segue into today’s topic. We’re going to be talking with Shannon Dougall, vice president of marketing at Uberflip about content marketing, what’s working.
Paul: I hope you’re going to ask her why this term Uber is so hot, I hear it everywhere, it’s over everything. Everything is the Uber!
Matt: And somewhat controversial if we follow all the news lately relative to Uber the company. But no, I couldn’t imagine a company further away from Uber’s cultural PR woes and Uberflip and the work that they are doing. So excited to have Shannon on today and Shannon thanks very much for joining us.
Shannon: Hi Matt! Thank you so much for having me.
Matt: Now you were down at this conference as well and I know you just got back like last night, this morning and so probably like a lot of us working on fumes to finish off the week here. But it was exciting for me to see the continued advancement of content or the continued investment in content. I think more and more companies especially in B2B are realizing the importance of content marketing to their efforts. We’re going to talk a little bit here about the study that we did in the fall that kind of looked at the content that’s working and the features that are separating great effective content from others.
But in your position running marketing for a content marketing company, what are you seeing in the field especially as we now sort of get our sea legs under us for 2017, what are trends in content marketing that are most pronounced right now?
Shannon: It’s very interesting being a marketer who is marketing to marketers in the content world. You differently see a big spectrum. So you see those on the cutting edge and you see those that are of the and coming so it’s definitely interesting out there. Definitely seeing overall that B2B marketers believe that content is important and it’s more important than ever which is not surprising, you can’t have paid, owned or earned marketing without content so definitely get that that’s an awesome trend that we are seeing the continuous increase.
And you know it’s interesting because I was reading a study the other day, it was a CEB that said 84% of B2B marketers are planning to increase their investments in content in 2017 so you definitely see that people are looking at continuing this trend. And they also noticed that 65% of B2B marketing budgets are spent in some form of content investment.
So we are seeing that there is a lot of value put into marketing but I would also say though that we are hearing from a lot of B2B marketers that they are just not getting the value out of content that they thought they would, that they say that their content is underperforming. And so to me this kind of means two things; it either means that their content is not very good or it means that experience surrounding the really good content isn’t performing to the way that consumer of their content need to perform.
Matt: This morning on Sales Pipeline Radio with Shannon Dougall who is the vice president of marketing at Uberflip. Yeah, I think the CEB data is very interesting. You’ve got people definitely spending a lot more money on content marketing, investing more in content efforts.
On the downside of that, we are seeing companies that aren’t able to really measure the impact, they are not seeing the result. Some of that could be the measurement tools they do or don’t have. Some of it could be that they are just producing more of the same content everyone else has. And we did this study in the fall that really in part asked what helps effective content stand out? What were some of the features that you have seen or what are some of the elements of content that you are seeing across industries that is helping companies sort of not only gain attention but really sort of drive the kind of education engagement that companies are looking for?
Shannon: Yeah, I mean you touched on it right there speaking about engagement for content to be successful it definitely has to be engaging. And I think that there are few elements to engagement that we need to think about. One is the type of medium. Different people like to consume their content in different ways. Some people like to read it, some people like to listen to it, some people like to interact with it. Playing with the different mediums of content helps with engagement.
But I think there is another aspect to that too which is you have to be creating insightful, new relevant content for your audience. You can’t just produce content that everybody else is producing, definitely see a loss in engagement. Which kind of leads to the other area, I think it’s personalization or customized content is something else that is definitely a trend. And in addition to that it has to be action oriented. You can’t just have a piece of content and not expect something to happen at the end of it. Engagement, personalization, action oriented.
Matt: I think that’s really important, these are not hard problems, these are not hard challenges for marketers to address. It may seem like common sense but it really does it stand out.
And that last one is really important I think for people to think about. I mean we are not expecting top of funnel content in complex B2B environments to close deals. We are not expecting you to read a blog post and buy necessarily right away. So talk a little bit about what next step means? If you’ve got it at the beginning of a buying journey, at the top of sort of a buying stage, what’s some examples of next step?
Shannon: There’s a few things that I think we need to think about as we looking at that. So you get somebody in, they are interested in your top of funnel content, you are starting to educate them, you are now wooing them over with another piece of very relevant content, you understand their intent based on the actions they’ve taken of the top of the funnel. And now you want to say okay let’s get you into our database and make you a marketable future customer advocate instead of a buyer or prospect because they are people, not just leads and numbers.
We need to understand what it is that the consumer individually, that consumer needs for the next stage of the buyer’s journey. Mapping out a buyer journey is so critical. They have different needs, different intents at every single stage of interaction they have with your organization and the information requests are going to be very different. So I think first and foremost understanding what their problems are, where they stand inside the buyer’s journey and aligning your content to that and then that is the best and most efficient way to get somebody to take action on your content.
Matt: Let’s talk a little bit about that content at the top of the funnel and the level of not just precision but discipline and patience required to make that work. And I specifically want to address some of the objections that I’ve heard from people relative to content marketing is I think the category has matured. Sometimes I feel like they would rather spend money on demand gen than content. They are not convinced that measuring sort of the attention and engagement is going to lead to a closed deal. Maybe that’s a part of the reporting.
I ask these questions mainly because I see these objections a lot from the marketplace and yet there is ample evidence throughout the market. I mean when there’s an investment in content marketing, that is such a more efficient investment. I mean you get such a higher ROI over time if you are investing in the right type of content and engagement platforms and strategies. But that isn’t an immediate return. When you guys see that in your pipeline, when you see that from your customers, how do you address that and how are your customers that, even in their own environment, maybe buy Uberflip and yet still are educating the executive teams and why this is important. And what are the messages and angles that they are using there?
Shannon: Yeah, that’s a great question actually. I think that I was asked this the other day, C2C actually, the question was how what do I value more? Do I value more in terms of engagement or do I value more in terms of demand generation? I think the simple answer is you need both. You can’t have one without the other. And I think that the beautiful thing is that we understand this as smart marketers that you definitely need to have that engagement in order to educate the consumer of the content. You need to put the effort in to get your prospect or your future customer understanding that there is going to be value with your brand. So you do have to put that in place.
But I am starting to see that content marketers are connecting the content to lead to revenue attribution dots which I think is amazing. Is that the best way to show your CEO or your board that investment in content actually has true revenue results. So historically we were measuring on engagement and sort of stopped there, considered more of the cost center. And of course that is very important but being able to tie this to the impact in revenue, it gives content and marketers themselves the muscle to prove the valuable element of marketing.
Matt: I think it’s interesting to sort of think about the evolution of that understanding inside organizations. And sometimes it’s not just put in direct ROI on the content but the marketing organization itself adopting the profit center mentality. Have you seen that as well with a lot of your client organizations when they adopt the executive dashboard as their own dashboard? Is there a greater level of patience that such to exist? Do those organizations get more time to be able to prove the impact?
Shannon: Absolutely, absolutely. Actually I would say that we are starting to see a trend as well that you are doing your content marketing in general but specifically content marketing right that you can align your content across the entire revenue engine. So what I mean by that is you look at marketing and you look at sales and success, every interaction that a prospect would have with your organization during the buying process and this can have a significant impact on revenue.
If you look at the content at the top of the funnel at the awareness stage, you know that you need to scale that content throughout the entire buyer journey in order to recognize that impact. And I think that having buy-in at the top of the funnel when you’re producing content at the top of the funnel and you see the revenue impact that it has as it goes through, you can then start to attribute pipeline to the content.
We actually in our study, we did see that an increase in content investment has a positive impact on pipeline and vice versa, a decrease in content investment has a negative impact. So it’s interesting to see.
Matt: The differences are stark, right? And I think enough companies that are investing in content marketing, we’re starting to see this in sales enablement as well where there is enough companies doing it, enough companies not doing it where you can look at not only how they are executing on these strategies but then you can look at what the impact for the overall organization. And even without necessarily knowing how much pipeline individual blog posts create which is kind of a ridiculous question in general.
Shannon: Right.
Matt: There direct correlation between all of this happening. We are spending the time today on Sales Pipeline Radio talking to Shannon Dougall. She is the vice president of marketing at Uberflip a fantastic fast-growing company in the content marketing growth space. I want to ask you before we have to go to break here Shannon, that sometimes controversial question in terms of creating content. Should sales professionals be tasked with creating content for their organization?
Shannon: My opinion on this is that marketing should support sales needs in creating the content. So I love the idea, you know we were just talking about marketers owning the entire buyer journey as it relates the content and if we do that right then we can affect the entire revenue engine and part of that is making sure that we are not working in siloes in terms of our voice and message and brand that gets to that person who is going through the buying journey.
So I think that if the marketer can own the buyer journey in terms of content, they create content at the very beginning of the journey and they can then support through sales enablement, create the right content for the consumer of that content during I guess the engagement stage all the way through the consideration stage, then there is that one consistent voice and experience that buyer has throughout the journey.
And I think that it also alleviates the pressure the sales has in order to produce the content they have built into the relationships with sales and if they have access to the right content they can just grab that, share it with them and it just makes it a seamless experience for the consumer of the content.
Matt: We are going to take a quick break to pay a few bills. We will be right back in a couple of minutes. We are with Shannon Dougall from Uberflip talking about content marketing. A lot more about where we think this is going, how companies can stay ahead of the curve, how companies that file they are under investing can and should get started and much more. We will be right back – Sales Pipeline Radio.
[Break]
Paul: And now okay let’s pick it up back with Matt and his guest!
Matt: Thank you Paul. Paul, I forgot to ask you, the weather situation, it’s the drama of Sales Pipeline Radio so far this year. Paul our producer works out of Southern California which as many of you knew has been in a severe drought and in the last month has been in the opposite situation. How are we doing down there?
Paul: Well today the sun is out, the skies are clear and blue and we are assuming that the worst is behind us but you never know, one more storm could be right around the corner here.
Matt: What I tell you, I will be down there a week from today for a short visit. So when I think of Southern California, I think of flying into LAX, I do not want flooded runways so if you can keep that stuff at bay for a little bit that would be fantastic.
Paul: All right, we will work on that.
Matt: I appreciate that. We would not be the same Sales Pipeline Radio without you Paul, thank you for all the work you do.
Thank you everyone for joining us each week, we are alive every week Thursday at 2:30 Eastern, 11:30 Pacific. You can also subscribe the Sales Pipeline Radio directly to your favorite podcast player. We are available via the iTunes store and Google play. You can catch every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. I believe we are somewhere around episode number 58. I looked at some of my favorite podcasts and they are somewhere in the mid hundreds, way, way ahead of us but better late than never so every episode on demand at www.salespipelineradio.com.
If you like our conversation today with Shannon Dougall talking today about the future of content marketing and want to share that episode with your colleagues, with your friends, with your peers, you can catch that on the podcast, on the websites. We will have a breakdown and a transcripted version of this conversation on our blog at www.HeinzMarketing.com.
So Shannon Dougall, vice president of marketing at Uberflip. You know for companies that had a content strategy but it has been really sort of more random acts of content, they do a blog post here or there and occasionally they might do a webinar, there is no cohesive strategy, like how do you get started with developing that? I think a lot of people may look at that like other initiatives that are not doing sales enablement and others and they get flustered and aren’t really sure where to start. What’s the roadmap to getting up to speed here?
Shannon: Great question. First of all you need to look at what the objective is with your content strategy. Are you trying to influence revenue in the end? And if that’s the case, what type of content do you need in order to do that and how do you scale that content across the entire buyer’s journey? So there is, I think that’s the tip of the day is you can create content for the top of the funnel, especially in cycle pieces.
So let’s just say you’ve recently done a webinar or created an e-book, I think from that content you need to figure out how you can repurpose that content for later stages in the funnel. So I have an example, we created an e-book series – The Four Pillars of Content Marketing. And we created, it was a bundled series of four e-books and we were interviewing and talking to an expert in the marketing industry. And we now pull from that in order to provide some stats and we put that information and put it into our sales stack so that when one of our agents is talking to somebody they can say oh hey, look, here is an expert in the industry who is talking on this really irrelevant point.
So I think because I mean know that marketers are busier than ever. There is a stat that I had heard, 50% of marketers delay going to the washroom in order to finish a project that they are working on, so they are not taking time to go pee anymore.
So I think that we need to figure out a way to go pee. And in doing so, if we start to consider creating content through the entire buyer journey, that sounds like big content, just like big data, big content. We can’t be producing that much content so what we need to do is we scale the content across the entire buyer’s journey.
Matt: Yeah, and I think a lot of people, these are good steppingstones to getting into the process of building out and really growing a content marketing program. You are never really done ensuring great content marketing programs, you’ve got to make what you are doing you need. And I think the other thing a lot of people forget is when you are starting out, what is important is not that you are churning out a ton of content but that you understand your target audience, you understand stages of the buying journey and that you’re putting good content in front of some folks.
And in many cases, I think this speaks well to the content at Uberflip offers you, this just isn’t content you are creating. This is going to be content you are curating from other places where you become the hub, you become the source of a diverse comprehensive and highly valuable set of content that keeps your customers engaged.
Shannon: I couldn’t agree more.
Matt: Okay, excellent, good call of comment here. So what should we be thinking about moving forward? I think the market is going to continue to diversify. I mean it’s interesting, we were doing a podcast just a year and a half ago and this has become a critical part of our strategy. Should people think about measurement? Should they think about diversity and formats, this alignment with the buying journey sort of most important? How would you sort of stack rank to those in terms of priorities of programs designed for marketers moving forward?
Shannon: Yeah, so I think that when I was looking through this study that we had done it was interesting for me to see that when people are putting value on content and the outcome that they were looking for, most would put it on the engagement level which understandably makes sense. We do certainly want engagement with our content for steps to making sure that our content is successful.
But what I felt was super interesting is that there was much lower number who had put importance on customization or personalization of content. And I think that were going to start to see an uplift in that. I think there is a trend is going to be there. We need to get to that point. I keep talking about the Netflix era versus the Blockbuster era. Back in the day Blockbuster was very generic, alphabetized, it wasn’t personalized, they didn’t know what I wanted when I walked into Blockbuster. But if I turned on my Netflix today right away it serving of content that they know based on who I am and what I have done in the past of what I would like to see right now. And so consumers, the consumers of content, like I am a consumer of the Netflix content, expect to be given content that only I am interested in. And I want to see that from B2B organizations as well now.
So I think that there’s going to be an uplift in that personalization or customization of content for those buyers who are coming in based on segments, based on where they are in the buyer journey. So I would say that that’s probably the direction and it definitely will take some demonstration. I mean it’s the going to get to the point where you need to determine mapping out that content to the buyer journey based on segments and it may be even going deeper and pulling information that you have in your database to determine what it is that they spoke to last and serving of content that’s relevant to that. So I think personalization is going to definitely take a huge step forward in that.
Mind you, the same time I would say that we need to continue to evolve what we do in terms of content to elevate engagement. Again in this study, it was interesting to see that I think it was a 75% of consumers of content don’t find what they are reading very engaging and yet 76% of the content creators felt that their content was very engaging. So there is a big disconnect there.
Matt: Yeah, we referenced this research a couple times. We’ve got a couple more minutes here as we wrap up with Shannon Dougall, vice president of marketing from Uberflip. If you go to www.Uberflip.com and you go to the webinar page you can see we call it Uncover the B2B Marketing Trends That Matter, you can see an on demand video of that sort of summary of all the research. Just really quickly as we wrap up also just I guess in 15, 20, 30 seconds, give people a sense for what is a Grade My Stack, what offer is that and where can people find it?
Shannon: Oh yeah, absolutely. So Grade My Stack, you can enter in whatever tools you are using in your stack and it will produce a report that tells you how your stack stands up against what we think the best practices are. It identifies if there’s any waste in your stack and recommendations for how you can create a solid stack. So www.grademystack.com.
Matt: Yeah, you can catch that. It’s www.grademystack.com. You can definitely check that out. If you want to learn more about the content marketing trends, research report, go to www.Uberflip.com, find it webinar page and find an on-demand version of that report as well.
I want to thank you very much our guest Shannon Dougall vice president of marketing from Uberflip for joining us today. If you want to catch a replay of this event and learn more, share this with your colleague, you can certainly find that on www.salespipelineradio.com. We will be back again live next week at 2:30 Eastern, 11:30 Pacific with more from the leaders in the sales and marketing space sharing what’s working today and what’s working tomorrow, how to close more deals.
Between now and then, on behalf of my great producer Paul this is Matt Heinz, thanks for joining us on Sales Pipeline Radio.
Paul: You’ve been listening to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio with your host Matt Heinz from Heinz Marketing, part of the Funnel Radio Channel for at work listeners like you.
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