Episode 7: How to Build a Content Strategy for Complex Buying Journeys | With Megan Zink

Full transcript:

David Bain  00:00

To build a content strategy for complex buying journeys - with Megan Zink.

The Strategic Marketing Show is brought to you by Insights For Professionals - providing access to the latest industry insights from trusted brands, all in a customized, tailored experience. Find out more over at insightsforprofessionals.com.

Hey, it’s David. Does your content marketing strategy revolve around right and hope, rather than designing premeditated pieces of content for a specific audience at each stage of the buyer journey? If so, today's episode could be just what you're looking for, featuring a lady who believes that if you're not educating or inspiring, then you're doing it wrong.

She's passionate about creative strategy, data-driven decision-making, and empathetical marketing, and leads a team of inbound marketers as the Director of Demand Generation Marketing at ReviewTrackers. A warm welcome to the Strategic Marketing Show - Megan Zink.

Megan Zink  01:07

Hi, thank you so much for having me, David. I am so happy to be here to talk about Inbound Marketing, Demand Gen - all things that I love best.

David Bain  01:16

Great stuff. Good to have you here, Megan. You can find Meghan over at ReviewTrackers.com.

So Megan, how do you build a content strategy to better align with a lengthy, convoluted buyer journey?

Megan Zink  01:28

Well, there is hope.

David Bain  01:32

It is possible.

Megan Zink  01:33

One dash of hope, I guess you could say, but it is complex. You're building a buying journey for complex buyers - and it is complex. To give the audience just some quick perspective, I actually came in as the content marketing manager at ReviewTrackers, and have since had a hand in content strategy, overseeing social media, SEO, technical SEO, user experience on the website - all the important pieces of this content strategy. I moved up into the Demand Gen world and now I’m Senior Director of Demand at ReviewTrackers.

I know we were going to talk about a case study, but I'll use ReviewTrackers, because it's been quite a journey. I'll start by saying we were steering a very big ship that is very slow. ReviewTrackers is a marketing SaaS - which stands for Software as a Service, which I'm sure everybody knows because it's for B2B here. We are a review aggregator, and we also use natural language processing to allow people who use our platform to see business insights, and we're talking to C-suite. I say all that because they were very important factors in this big, slow ship turning. We decided to strategically move up-market. Moving from a historically small business buyer to a mid-market enterprise buyer is a very complex journey. 

Not only that, but I will say that the name of our company - it's amazing, we have wonderful brand recognition, we've really built that for ourselves, and we've got a really great legacy of content as well - but ‘ReviewTrackers’ is a little literal. We actually do much, much more than that. So, trying to rank for keywords, and things like that, with content strategy was really difficult. 

When I got in here, one of the first things that we did with our content strategy was I led the charge on examining how people were actually consuming content on our website. We realized that it wasn't really the greatest experience. So, we overhauled that.

David Bain  04:05

How did you establish that it wasn't the greatest experience? Did you actually talk to people? Or is this just reading your content yourselves and realizing that?

Megan Zink  04:12

Great question. We were doing a lot with a little, and we didn't really have the resources to go out and do a huge market study or anything. One thing that we really did, and you said this when introducing me: I love a good data-driven decision. I will always go back to the data and say, ‘Okay, what is our success measurement?’ and ‘How do we measure success and how do we move backward from that?’ Then, that's how I would like to create that strategy.

What we ended up doing was, we looked at usage data from Google Analytics, and we were noticing that people were using the search bar in a lot of different capacities. They were doing major searches by review platform, and they were doing major searches by industry – and we are industry agnostic. We've got a couple of different verticals that we really specialize in, but we do support quite a lot. We noticed that people were actually looking for specified industry content. Then, we also got some feedback that people often confused us for TripAdvisor and actual review platforms. They couldn't really tell the difference once they saw our content.

A couple of different ways that we addressed that was to very clearly state where they were - make that very, very prevalent. We actually sorted our content. In my background, I taught myself a lot about the backend of WordPress, which we happened to use - using tags and categories, and nesting content appropriately, to make sure that our users could really find what they needed.

The other cool thing that we did was that I really wanted to future-proof it. Our syntax on the backend allowed us to sort content in specific ways, and I had this vision where we could sort by our value propositions. We help users retain customers, acquire customers, manage their reputation and reviews, and then also just grow from a business perspective.

We actually categorized our content into those major groups so that, not only could people find it much easier, (we created some pop-up menus on the homepage of the blog) but the other thing that's neat is that we nested them with the URL. We inadvertently made these in-blog landing pages that we could utilize for social media, or as calls to action. It basically would collect any content that was tagged with those specific high-level categories. That was kind of neat.

I'm all about doing a lot with a little. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Kill two birds with one stone. Work smarter, not harder. To be able to use the content, and not have to go out and create separate landing pages, was pretty neat.

David Bain  07:11

If someone was wanting to replicate what you did - the successes out of it - how would you put it together into a list of action points for someone to do a better job with their content strategy?

Megan Zink  07:25

Well, I will say that the user experience is only a small part of it, so I do want to go into some other areas, but definitely look at your user. Go to your user and ask your user what they need, or what they want.

Whether it's with surveys, whether it's doing customer interviews, whether it's looking at the usage data like we did with Google Analytics - because you can actually look at the search queries through the website. That was a big clue and indicator. Then I looked at traffic, and what was popular and what was not, and made some inferences off of that.

David Bain  08:03

You were also kind enough to share some notes with me beforehand of your thoughts on the potential discussion. One phrase kind of jumped out: ‘The Ideal Customer Profile’, or ICP, and applying that to a content strategy. How did you actually decide who the ideal customer profile was, and what actually makes up an ideal customer profile?

Megan Zink  08:29

Again, it’s the idea of going directly to the measurement of success. Our marketing team, I'm so proud of them, because everybody is so data literate. That was definitely a mission of mine: to teach my team data literacy so that we could all make really great decisions that could decide our strategies. Especially with Demand Gen, we're putting so much out there so if we're not attracting the right person, then that's a problem. 

We went directly to our sales data. We looked at who made up our closed on deals. We really built the ICPs off of that. We also talked to the sales team, we talked to partnership - it was definitely not built in a silo. We made sure to reach across the aisle because, at the end of the day - there's that tale as old as time: sales and marketing are a little head-to-head sometimes – but really, we're trying to be in service of each other.

I think that's our major philosophy at ReviewTrackers: always saying, ‘Okay, is this working? Are you closing deals? Are you closing the right deals?’ Going to that end-of-the-road, to ‘This is what we hope to achieve.’ Then, working backward slowly was able to help us to build that ideal customer profile, by vertical specificity, by seniority level, etc.

We identified that there are the front-end users of our product, then there's also the buyer, which is not necessarily the front-end user of our product. But, they see the value - the business impact and the operational impact of our program. On the face of it, it looks like maybe it's just helping you respond to reviews, but you can actually pull out customer experience data and apply that to your business operations, and make valuable changes that help you to not only retain customers and build loyalty, but also acquire new ones.

All of that has to do with SEO, and how you are visible online. That's a big deal. That’s a long-winded way of saying: ‘Go directly past Go. Do not stop, do not collect $200.’ Go to the final end-of-the-road success that you're hoping to achieve, and then work backward.

David Bain  10:56

Okay. Let's put some more meat on what content strategy means because I think that a lot of marketers think they've got a content strategy, but it's really just a list of different article titles that they intend to publish over the coming few months. So, from your perspective, what is a content strategy? And how often does it need to be refreshed?

Megan Zink  11:22

Wow. How much time do we have David? Because I could talk about that forever. That's a really good point. When people talk about content strategies it’s often like, ‘Oh, are we producing blogs? Yes, great. Check off the box. We've got a content strategy.’ Giving a bit of an anecdote about one of the things that we needed to solve for that will kind of answer this. We did a content audit.

We actually built an asset library because we have so much content. We’re in marketing technology, I'm in marketing and marketing technology - we know the importance of content. I was very lucky to inherit a very strong content foundation, but we had over 700 posts, possibly even 1000. One of my goals was to organize all of that.

We kind of did a v2 version, where we organized every single piece of content into a spreadsheet, and we labeled it. Not only by the level of the funnel in the buyer’s journey that it would apply to best - so either awareness, consideration, decision - but we also labeled it with the buyer in mind. So, is it the decision maker or is it the user of the product? And what product? Because, again, we're a software. so what product feature does the content line up to? At the end of the day what we're trying to build is that understanding and education, inspiration even, to use the product.

When we did that, we actually noticed that a majority of our content was awareness. We had next to no consideration or decision content. So, when we're creating those blog topics - that's not doing it for us. We were like, ‘Why are we not producing more content-driven leads, content-driven ops?’ and started to say, ‘Oh, my gosh, we're getting traffic to the site, which is great - that's a successful thing to do - but then nobody's going any further because we don't have the rest of that funnel to take into consideration.’ We started actually tweaking the topics, on that list that you mentioned, that we're producing.

I have an absolute rockstar production team. They're producing, like, three posts a week but it's all about quality, not quantity. We got to that point really specifically because I also think that is extremely important. You should not be putting things out there just to put things out there. There's so much noise on the internet. If you are not inspiring or educating, or doing something in service of your ICP, you shouldn't be doing it and it's probably a waste of your time.

David Bain  14:11

I’d just like to pick up on your phrase there: you said, ‘If you're not inspiring or educating’.

I think educating is what a lot of big enterprise brands and B2B brands need to do more successfully. Again, they don't really have a very well-planned-out way of doing that. How does an educational experience fit into a B2B buyer journey? And how do you track the success of that education?

Megan Zink  14:43

One of the things that I think was a bit of a eureka moment for me, and it took me a while in my career to realize this, is that: just because they're coming to your website, that doesn't mean that what you're presenting to them is right for them in that particular moment, or what they need in their journey.

To kind of illustrate this: when I was saying that we had so much awareness level content, the call to action on that page was a demo. That means that they're getting ready to talk to a salesperson. If they're coming into the awareness level up here, and they're just finding out about reputation management, then they are not ready to talk to a salesperson.

We needed to be very strategic about what they needed next in their educational process. I talk a lot about empathetical marketing because I think that it's very easy to get excited and get off on these creative tangents. And I think you should - the brains should always be flowing - but if you're not putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and saying, ‘What do I need next?’, then you might be missing the mark.

To be able to measure that, I'm always in sales data. Just because I’m doing stuff on marketing, I'm typically looking at how many leads, what the quality of the leads are, what stage the leads are at - are we producing a lot of closed unqualified, for example? Because if that's the case, that's a problem with content. We need to be tweaking it. We need to be going after, maybe, a different audience.

Then, when they get to the opportunity stage, if we've got a lot of closed lost opportunities - there are a lot of different factors - but one of them could potentially be that they didn't have enough information to be able to make a decision that would lead to them working with us. That's where we are revamping. Again, my team is full of rockstars. We've got a whizz at automation nurturing, email automation, chat, and things like that. She's got a background in ABM so she's kind of overseeing how to create this multi-channel experience with content. She's repurposing the content that brought them in the first place, in emails and in the chat. It’s about whether they get the right information at the right time.

I mentioned that audit that we did. Another piece of that audit was a call to action audit. We were thinking, ‘Okay, we've got awareness, we probably want to get them to the consideration stage, not the decision-making stage’, which we had been blanketing on the site with demos. And again, that's not what they needed in that time period of their educational process. Now we've started inserting, if this is awareness content, we know we need a consideration call to action. We’re starting to measure the efficacy of that reorchestration and reorganization of the content that we already had, and we're starting to see some really exciting success.

I was actually pulling numbers today, out of pure curiosity, and, from 2021 to 2022, (so this was the full year of 2021, and we still have four months of 2022) we actually increased our total opportunities from organic search traffic by 366% from last year. We are also engaging an external agency that is working a lot with us on technical SEO, and optimization in areas where maybe we're falling through the cracks.

The educational journey is very complex, and we just started really reimagining: ‘Are we really serving everybody the things that they might need in each step of it?’ And if not, then we need to rethink that.

David Bain  19:01

There’s a question that you asked, towards the beginning of what you said and just then, something like, ‘Did we serve them the right information at the right time?’

I think that every content marketer needs to be asking that question with every single piece of content on their website. I think that was so well put. If you are serving the right piece of content at the right time - to the right audience member, to the right target buyer - then surely your content strategy is spot on. I think that’s a wonderful phrase for many marketers, content marketers certainly, to be thinking of.

I also think Megan, perhaps we can arrange, ideally, a Part Two of this discussion because I sense that you've got so much more to share. But, for now, let's move on from what works now to planning for the future. In your opinion, what is the biggest marketing trend or challenge for marketers over the coming year?

Megan Zink  19:59

That's a great question, David, and I don't know if I can narrow it down to one, so I'll give half of an answer of one and half of the answer of the other. I think one of the biggest challenges facing us today - I talked a lot about that full circle data analysis, and really leaning on the data to make the decisions, to get the right content in front of the right person at the right time – is the lack of potential attribution that we are facing. The fact that they’re doing away with cookies is a little scary.

That was a huge uphill battle. That was something that I had been advocating for. We now have an absolute, I keep saying ‘rockstar team’, but they really truly are. Our Marketing Ops person, our Sales Ops people, our Director of Revenue Generation, Sales, Leadership, everybody has really believed in this. It's allowed us to really be able to measure, efficiently, what is working. Now, on the horizon, we’re having to reimagine all of that without cookies, because that's kind of what drives our strategy right now. We are certainly thinking down the road, about how we're going to rectify that, because we know that one day that will come.

One of the other challenges that is going to be facing marketers is that we have absolutely blown past the Information Age, and we're in the Information Overload Age. There’s too much stuff out there. I can't consume content. I am a black sheep because I create content for a living, and I literally can't even consume it, because there's too much. People ask, ‘Oh, what do you do to get inspired?’ and I'm like, ‘I don't. I put on blinders.’

I think it goes to show you that we're gonna have a tough time if you are not really paring it down to the absolute necessities of content. What engages, what inspires, and what educates. I think you have to be really ruthless about that because we're all starting to feel it. 

We're putting so much time and effort into email marketing, and we actually have wonderful open rates and click-through rates - we're at like 16%. In terms of B2B industry best, we're doing really well, and I'm super proud of the team, but we are going to be facing this cacophony of absolute noise out there. I think there's some kind of stat that's like, every minute four pieces of content, or like 400 pieces of content, are created.

David Bain  22:44

It's got to be high quality as well, doesn't it? It's got to be hyper-relevant, and hyper-high quality as well. I use podcasting as an example because, 10 years ago, you could get away with producing pretty inferior quality. But nowadays, I think with the Netflix culture, people are used to consuming high-quality content all the time, on-demand.

Unless the content you're producing, not necessarily exactly matches professionally produced content, but at least doesn't let people down significantly after they've been consuming that kind of content, then they'll forget about your brand. Anyway, that's my particular rant.

Megan Zink  23:27

I absolutely agree. That's why, going back to that end-of-the-road vision of success, and what is actually working to close deals and get you new customers, is so important. You could create all the things in the world, but if they're not servicing that small group of people who are actually proving out success for you, then it's futile.

You can waste so much time and effort spinning your wheels but, if you're starting with that Northstar, of being that right content - high quality, what they expect, whatever tickles their fancy, whatever really resonates with them - and then you're working backward from that, it's a good strategy for this potential challenge of white noise out there.

David Bain  24:10

I've been your host, David Bain, you can find Megan Zink over at ReviewTrackers.com. Megan, thanks so much for being on the Strategic Marketing Show.

Megan Zink  24:18

Thank you so much for having me, David. It was a pleasure. I would love to connect with people on LinkedIn. You can find me with just ‘Megan Zink’. I have a picture of myself holding a camera in tie-dye. If you find that picture, you'll know you have the right one. I love talking about marketing - and potentially Part Two!

David Bain  24:37

Superb, that sounds enticing, and we will of course include the social links that you mentioned in the show notes at InsightsForProfessionals.com. Thanks again.

And thank you for listening. Here at IFP our goal is simple: to connect you with the most relevant information, to help solve your business problems, all in one place. InsightsForProfessionals.com