Many startups begin with creating content on their blog. But does a consistent investment into Content Marketing pay off?
I invited my friend, and VP of Marketing of Storyblok Thomas Peham to talk about how he’s using content marketing to grow the SaaS companies he’s working for. We dive into many related topics like content distribution, external content writers, SEO, KPIs and many more. It was an exciting GroWTF? podcast episode. Worth listen.
The podcast will include the following topics:
- How he started at Usersnap and build a blog with 100,000 visitors per month
- How he grows Storyblok (the headless API-CMS which powers the website of Coca-Cola) with many content writers and 2 blog posts per week
- When Content Marketing pays off and when video or audio can make the race.
- When to put your money on paid vs. organic
- What are essential KPIs that he used when it comes to content marketing
- What are essential tools that he used for content marketing
- How important is the technical part (SEO)? Content length, Text/Image ratio, structure of content, backlinks
- How important is keyword research and some tricks from a pro
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Transcription:
this is the grow what the [ _ ] podcast a growth podcast of hog class m hi my name is clausem schremzer and i’m co-founder and head of growth of user snap in the grow what the [ _ ] podcast i want to share with you the successes but more the failures and learnings from growing our b2b sas company as a co-founder and as a head of growth in the last years i was and i am still confronted with all kinds of challenges from growing our product company and our team also i want to become a successful head of growth since i joined a growth agency some years ago and this podcast should be the platform to share my experiences about what worked and what not so what is this company i’m working in usersnap is a feedback platform that helps businesses to build better more successful products and services with user feedback a bit about myself i’m a serial entrepreneur and in the last 20 plus years i co-founded three companies within the tech marketing industry two of them got acquired one by atlassian let’s start with today’s podcast but before that don’t forget to subscribe on itunes for this podcast or sign up on grow what the [ _ ] so it’s g r o w t f dot com to stay connected this will bring you seven years of good luck so hi and welcome to this episode of the grow waterfall podcast and today we’re talking about how to grow your sas b2b sars with content marketing and with me is tom payham and i’m very very happy to have you here tom hello hello hi claus happy to be here as well that’s great so i mean i have to confess that i know tom quite for some time and we we worked together and i’m working in the same company where tom started uh so this will be hopefully a great podcast today talking about the past but also about the current and future things so tom maybe do you want to explain or tell a bit to our audience you know about where you’re coming from what you do personally and also what you do professionally sure so let me try to to be quick on that where do i come from so i i live in austria i’m from lower austria and i basically i basically come from the business side which means i i started business administration at university mainly because i didn’t really know what else to do in life and i sort of thought well studying business doesn’t sound too bad because you can be a manager and being a manager sounded like a nice plan so yeah that’s basically how i how i started and that’s also the reason or the way how i ended up in online marketing digital marketing as it was called back then and yeah i worked at an agency marketing agency typical agency here in australia that was running all different sorts of campaigns and projects and i came in as being a project manager for different online projects which meant we’re launching websites for our clients um launching newsletter campaigns running some social media campaigns like the whole the whole line of online marketing the whole channel and yeah um this basically got me hooked on on digital marketing and i’m i’m here since then um so i’m i guess i’m in this industry for more than 10 years now and i absolutely love it since you mentioned uselessnap in the beginning it uses nap was basically my first adventure in b2b sas marketing back in 2014 so after university i was just i was working back then at a big austrian um media company and i was really not happy with the way i worked as a as i really wanted to go smaller in a sense i really wanted to join a team where i can have do like a lot of hands-on stuff where where i can where i can do stuff whatever that meant and yeah that’s how i ended up at usersnap in 2014. uh stayed there for four years um with some really like amazing adventures that we tackled and a lot of learnings along the way and it yeah i said it got me hooked with b2b sauce marketing and after those four years i made the switch to dynatrace um also being a b2b sas marketer there and um yeah basically at dynatrace i i learned a lot um in terms of digital marketing in terms of google ads in terms of performance marketing but it also made me realize that in the end i’m i’m a doer i’m a maker and that’s why i started a freelance business um back in 2018 um helping other sas companies build up their marketing um build up their marketing strategies help them with content marketing and that’s how i got to know dominic and the team at storyblock where i’m now i’m the vp of marketing since earlier this year so i basically shut down my freelance business end of last year to go back to to the business side and join the b2b p2p sas company full time and yeah now i’m here and it’s really exciting to see how we um from an inbound marketing content marketing perspective really supports the business and how how um it’s growing quite nicely if i put it that way yeah tom that that sounds awesome thanks for sharing that i mean about storyblock maybe we have to say a few more words so because storyblock is an awesome company also in austria an api based cms as far as i know and like growing like hell that that’s really great um the founders did an amazing job and now i’m i’m super happy that you also joined there and i hope to hear even more from you about this this talk uh this amazing story so you you said before that that you had some adventures or you went through some adventures in usersnap and i want to think a bit into the past and and and talk about that so it’s especially around content marketing and as this is our this is our topic for today you know how can how how important is content marketing for a b2b um sas company and and how much or you know how big should this growth channel be and would be wonderful to talk about maybe you can remember some special campaigns that helped user snap grow in the beginning um yeah sure um so where do i start maybe i’ll start there that i mentioned that i joined them in 2014 is being basically the first person in marketing and what what does that mean it basically means as you do everything that is non-product non-deaf related right and um when when i joined back then in 2014 i was just finishing my master thesis about content marketing finally so um i i basically was writing for half a year or so this master thesis about content marketing and best practices in content marketing and how this sort of new trend is also coming to to austria as i was i was studying in austria and i was writing about the austrian landscape but it sort of it sort of made me realize that or at least i i thought so that i had quite a good theoretical background of what what is content marketing and how how it helps and supports the business and achieving your business goals um so that was sort of one angle i was coming from but the other angle that i was coming from is that i had a personal blog for years i had a chairman blog where i was writing about all the the tech stuff that i i cared about so it was really a personal blog where i simply shared some some tech reviews and such but i’m coming at coming back to users now but i basically joined and i was like okay what can i do right like as a startup you don’t have much resources you don’t have the money to hire like an agency to hide your freelancers to to get off the ground with your content projects so i was like okay i believe in content marketing i believe that this can have this can have a major business impact and i think the only thing that i’m good at is maybe writing so let’s write let’s let’s do something there because i didn’t i knew nothing about audio and knew nothing about video but i had this experience with my personal blog so i was like okay let’s start let’s start with a blog because that’s something i can own 100 i don’t need anybody else i can just do it myself as thomas um so that’s in the end to be honest the honest answer around how it all started in the sense of building up the blog building up the content marketing strategy in looking now back i i have to realize there was no other option like what else should i do as a one-man show right um so i guess there was no there was no deeper reasoning behind that than just me sitting there and what else can i do i can write so let’s do that so that’s how i basically started producing two blog articles per week and um yeah with the main goal of we’re like raising the awareness for user snap and user feedback and bug tracking um bringing in new leads and yeah great creating that content topic that supports us as a business in positioning ourselves in this industry and yeah um what was your question actually yeah no no that that that’s great insight so i mean as i as i took over kind of you know the work and the the success you already brought to user snap and i’m still very happy about what you did in the beginning because the blog currently of usersnap has around 100 000 um visitors per month which is amazing i mean this is number like even higher than 100 number 100 000 in the world in in terms of um websites ranking from alexa for example and and that brings still a lot of like traffic and of course um leads with that and that’s that’s that’s awesome and and and it does it you know even without my work i mean of course we’re working for the block but if we go on vacation it brings in leads and that’s amazing you don’t pay for it well yeah yeah that’s that’s the greatness about organic and content marketing and just to add two thoughts on that i’m not a growth hacker and always disliked when people called me a growth hacker because as a growth hacker you would look at our business like when we started with the blog and after three months you would have had to you you would look at the data and you would say it’s not working it’s not growing fast enough it’s not working out in terms of business impact because obviously it takes a while to get to that number you just shared it’s not happening overnight it’s not happening in a week it’s not not happening in a month to to generate that traffic to generate that lead leads but um i think because you mentioned that number what really helped was the consistency the frequency we just we just stuck with with no matter what happens there needs to be two articles per week and um yeah we need to have that as a as a cycle and in addition we always optimize like all the seo the performance of the website because in reality i have to admit that after five or six months we looked at the website performance from his pref speed perspective and realize that it’s super slow and by optimizing the technical part of that that suddenly boosted like organic seo traffic so obviously looking back we should we should have done that earlier we should have conducted the analysis earlier but i guess what i’m trying to say is there was no there was no like concept or more growth hacking behind that but it was just us trying to get um the content out that we want to get out and that would help us position usersnap um in the beginning i know i know about uh a story you once shared with me and i guess this this was about you know that you tried to build even kind of uh a new island of content for for user snap around the topic because users that back then was around backtracking and and and kind of you know what i what i remember is that you build a new or you took a new domain and you kind of got interviews or did interviews with um some uh famous um ctos etc from famous companies and that must cause must have cost a lot of money or um i guess so um well well yeah i i i’m not even sure if the the website exists anymore but um but back then i think it was around 2015 mid 2015 we had the assumption of creating this separate space um where we like gather and conduct interviews with as you said ctos head of engineering to showcase basically their lives and how they how they work um with the assumption of again us positioning ourselves in the space of backtracking um it and i think we published in total around 20 or 30 interviews and all the interviews have been like manually curated and a lot of work went into it and i still still think that the content itself is is nice and has some some really nice insights but again we were doing that on the site as a side project as a side business and the direct influence towards usersnap so that was really hard to achieve because it wasn’t our brand we just create tried to create a new brand and now looking back i wouldn’t do it the same way because that’s a super long journey right to build up a brand from server um so if i would do it over again i obviously would do it in the usersnap brand um because this would have had a much larger impact right away um but in the end i think it was a nice content project and like i mean it got us talking with um with morgan premdau the cto at zendesk um we we got some really awesome other stories on on the site as well we republished some on on the usersnap site afterwards but yeah from a content marketing perspective it was a really nice nice side project that’s great i mean when i understood this from you that first of all content marketing is kind of something for for startups in the early phases especially that they are like on this end it’s a cheap start because they could like when they have someone who can write uh they don’t need a lot of other things um you have to know some seo etc but basically you can start with a wordpress blog whatever and and get some traffic and leads and hopefully also convert them that’s great um on the other hand uh you would do it only like around the brand not starting totally new side businesses because you’re building up new brands that’s that’s a great learning um i guess i can i would also um see it in the same way what what’s interesting as you also said that you did with the freelance job you you helped a lot of b2b companies uh p2p sas companies or b2b companies um to to build up their digital marketing when when do you decide to to suggest uh such a company to go into content marketing so when i have a business a digital business when should i emphasize on uh content marketing because it’s still a significant investment it takes a lot of time it’s a long tail story and so on yeah um yeah i mean there are various factors so i guess the general answer is it really depends it depends depends a on on your business is it are you are you focused on generating self-service like is it a self-service business with server sales interception is it an enterprise sales funnel um do you have other funnels that might be already in place um so so i i wouldn’t generalize it but when when i started working with different sales businesses i would usually look at the current stream right the current funnels how what’s the status quo and where are you where where could content marketing in a sense help you achieve um certain kpis certain revenue goals that you you might have um one yeah so so that’s that’s i think the the generalized answer on it um sure as you said it it’s it’s it costs you resources someone needs to do it so in generally usually i would say if it fits your culture it’s it’s a plus because someone in your team or your heart need to hire someone that can a write content produce content in any form be the audio video and be needs to be an industry expert right so that combination is is sometimes quite unique depending on the industry obviously but there are so many industries out there so usually i would also recommend like when i talk to founders um and founders raising that question on should i do content marketing should i start blogging i always ask ask them do you feel comfortable blogging yourself is this something you can do is this something that feels natural to you as a person especially as a founder and does it feel natural to you as a i would say business culture side um like does it fit your culture because if you’re just sales focused content marketing won’t make you happy it will take three months six months until sales will see some impact maybe a bit sooner but um if you just drill down on sales don’t do it like that it won’t make you happy yeah that’s that’s great that’s great because there are two things which which come to my mind when i hear that the first one is the reason why we are on video here and on audio is because i decided initially i wanted to write the blog but then i asked myself is this like natural for me do i write regularly and i had to answer no and then i said okay video might be better first it seemed like an a new trend trend i i wouldn’t even call it trend because it’s already like fully there but um it’s kind of you know when you’re not the writing guide and maybe you’re the talking guy and i felt that it’s better to me see and the second thing is what you said about like when you have a sales and then you’re building up a blog and that might take too long for your sales people um this this is still a thing i’m circling around because user snap has two big traction channels the one is organic traffic um or organic the organic channel and the other is word of mouth and um the organic channel is it’s not only from the blog so let’s say only 13 of our leads are coming from the blog the rest comes by the website but as the blog has so much traffic and thanks tom for putting the blog under the user snap domain because there is also this discussion should you have blog.usersnap.com or usersnap.com blog and you decided for usersnap.com blog which might have some impact on the domain and give it a positive ranking i i believe and this is unfortunately a belief because i cannot look into google um that that that this helps us to push our ranking of the website and get a better um a better ranking in research so but still there is the problem and i had the first episode i presented on the grow what the [ _ ] podcast was about our growth lead engine because we had the blog and it drives a lot of traffic but how do you convert you know visitors readers into customers that’s a long journey and if you just put in the banners and say hey bye nobody will buy it yeah that’s the problem but this is another story yeah yeah i mean that’s that’s a valid one and i i think you talked about it in the mentioned episode um i think it also comes a bit down to your like your your strategy and what in the end you want to achieve because like
content marketing can also be a branding effort right you can also see content marketing or your blog as a 100 branding effort which means which means you have other kpis to monitor you have other metrics you will look at and because in the end you want to influence how many people know about you how many people search for your brand that’s something different than how can we build up a blog as a lead gen machine an engine that’s driving describing direct impact in form of leads product signups etc um so yeah but otherwise i’m 100 with you that it’s it’s a long journey in in some way and i wouldn’t look at vanity metrics much like traffic because um you can eat like easily get traffic by blogging about all sorts of things but it’s probably not helpful for your lead legion and your brand so that’s true that’s true so that’s great yeah i would suggest to if it’s okay for you i i have like thought about some topics because content marketing goes around a lot of little tiny or tiny maybe it’s not tiny but there are so many topics connected to content marketing it’s not only writing because when i think about our blog we wanted to have and block which is like you know from the quality of intercom etc and i was not sure if we can manage that at the end to be honest i’m i’m i think we’re pretty near to that standard because we a found a person that can write and that has the the eager to you know get a is an expert uh in in in content uh customer feedback and customer experience and b we have a uh senior principal designer and and he um like is first of all bringing also the visuals in a certain way so it’s not only you know what you read it’s also how it looks like eating with the eye as we say the eye the eye also eats uh also the lunch so um so my my ever prepared some questions um and about topics and i would love some you know some initial thoughts you have about or maybe you have to share a short story about what you learn about that so um how how regularly from your past um endeavors how regularly would you recommend let’s see when a when a founder comes to you and says okay we want to to use content marketing as a growth channel how regularly should a b2b startup publish content
um that’s a good question and i would say it um it depends a bit on your resources that you have internally externally and it depends a bit on the topic and the area we want to tackle and we want to cover so assuming those two things i would say everything between
two articles a week three articles a week up to one article per month is something fine i think each company each business needs to find some sort of cadence and should stick to it as long as possible but i i don’t have any recommendation if this needs to be twice a week or once a month because it could also be totally awesome that you produce this awesome piece once a month that everybody is looking for and everybody’s expecting an email on it because it’s such an awesome piece on whatever it is you’re working on and it’s just you and it’s super unique so do it once a month that’s totally fine but stick to that and tell people that they can only expect that once a month to be honest we did it twice we started or i started back then twice a week and funnily enough also here at storyblock now we tried to publish two articles per week um mainly also because we’re starting with from a content topic perspective with a lot of groundwork so we we try to position ourselves in the cms space in the digital experience space and i believe the more content that obviously has some sort of quality level goes out the the better it is so that’s why we we are now again starting with a two articles per week schedule but i wouldn’t say that this is set in stone okay great you mentioned quality standards are there quality standards that you internally set or are there any any standards someone could take and say okay this like this is the minimum standard an article has to have to to reach some you know organic um
we do have some checklists technically speaking so we we have a checklist like on on sort of roughly the length on on the content diversity obviously for google nowadays it’s also important that an article for example is has some device content formats be it an image be the table be it some bullet points so we do have like a technical checklist a technical seo checklist in a sense but we don’t have like a quality checklist per se but we do have like feedback loops and um in the end there needs to be one person who decides okay this goes live or this doesn’t go live and um yeah and for us at storyblock it’s me as i’m responsible for for marketing here um but i think in generally speaking there needs to be someone who has a who has that decision making power um and yeah back then that uses nap like back if i go back six or seven years the standard mainly was um is that um is that content that i’m proud of and would i share that personally on my network and if the answer was yes then i i would hit publish if the answer was no i i needed to tweak it so that’s that’s a good one that’s a good kpi but now now you have to re reveal our uh the secret um are you blogging at storyblock on your own cms or are you using wordpress yeah sure we we drink our own champagne so
that’s great okay that brings me also to my my next question are there any like uh essential tools you would recommend or that you have used or are using for content marketing i mean the main ones i mean it depends what you see as a content marketing tool but i would say start simple or like if i would think about the tools that really helped me as a content marketer i would think about google search console for example that helps me gather searched intent and helps me understand what people are searching for and ending up on our site in general i would also probably mention seo tools like ahref or semrush that help you do like keyword research help you do competitor research help you understand um how easy or how hard certain search intents might be from a content production perspective i would definitely mention grammarly which makes my life easier um as yeah many people’s life um and yeah i think that those are the tools that come to my mind obviously it depends on the area if you look at seo if you look at content publishing distribution but um overall um like what i could also mention is that if you have a team have a kanban board have a content schedule an editorial plan um i do a lot of brainstorming and and brainstorming mock-ups and and such in figma so figma for example is the place where we as a marketing team get together and brainstorm certain content ideas and build like pillar pillar content strategies for topics so we just use a blank figma page and throw in our ideas so yeah i think those are the main tools that come to my mind and we are using airtable for for the together all the ideas and keep track on what is out what is in the plan it’s etc because it can get like pretty like a lot of information and data you have to handle them um so that’s that’s working great for us um i mean still for me the like one thing because you mentioned speed google page speed and like gt metrics um still tools i’m using regularly to see because you’re over time something gets lower of course storyblock not but in general other tools are getting slower and then uh you should regularly check in and see how the speed is especially on your blog that’s great we talked before we dived into the topic of kpis i just want to touch that briefly um are there any like main kpis that you’re looking at and keep an eye on observing when it comes to content marketing
yeah sure so um if i think through the kpi sheets that we build up um i i would i always start with or i try to capture brand right because to some extent we as content marketers also do branding and as mentioned before it depends on your priorities but um the first kpi that i look at is what’s the monthly search volume for our brand how many people search for that month over month because i believe that with our content activities we can influence that and yeah that hopefully increases over time because i said content marketing is a long tail game and i i think um it will be reflected in how many people search for your brand and how is that going or how many people if you don’t have the search console i mean i recommend everybody to use the google search console but if you don’t have it look at your homepage traffic because usually the homepage traffic in google analytics is your brand traffic people end up on the homepage as a landing page when they search for you or for one topic that is core to your business um so that’s that’s the first metric i usually start tracking with from a top of humble perspective um yeah sure i mentioned before traffic is maybe a web identity metric nonetheless i track it to some extent to calculate conversion rates um and to understand how that is developing but yeah traffic on on on your content pieces that’s one thing directly sourced leads coming through your blog like depending on the business for example we have like a product call to action so you could sign up for product trial or maybe you download a gated content piece so we nowadays also dated content assets are quite popular um so cracking those lead numbers obviously another thing one thing just to mention um also look at assisted conversions because um sometimes you might be surprised in google analytics to see a bigger influence on assisted conversions meaning someone read your blog article first and one week later came back through something else um so yeah assisted conversions it could be an interesting metric just a secondary kpi to keep an eye on and yeah then it obviously depends on how far your content marketing responsibilities go if you’re also the the team or the person responsible for user activation retention metrics um referral metrics um yeah also also track that um i also crack like the the number of customers obviously that we generate month over month and how that’s inbound influenced or or not and that brings me to another interesting uh for me interesting question um how do you spread the the topics you’re writing you know like when you look through a journey of a user or you when you go into awareness versus you know acquisition or you know there are the different funnel stages uh because i believe if you only write top 10 cms in 2021 that’s great you should also do that but maybe that’s not the only one how do you split up your efforts uh during uh between these uh topics yeah um yeah that’s that’s that’s a good question and i think a lot of people struggle with that so i we i try to approach it from a cycle perspective so if i if i look at cycles there there’s one core you always have one core topic and that’s you so you can write about yourself you can write about your brand to make sure that people searching for all sorts of search intents come to you so your brand is at the center what comes next usually is us it’s your product right people if if your brand it has to if your product has the same name as your brand okay that’s nice it’s the same thing so write about your product um your core features your core capabilities your core usps your core business values that come with that that’s their search intent there believe it or not usually there’s a lot of long tail search intent there if you did all that great write about all the use cases and solutions so people search for solutions in your space um people might search for bug tracking solutions user feedback solutions um customer experience solutions write about all the solutions um next bucket write about all the problems so as you see i’m always getting broader and broader write about problems people have in that particular field but also from a buyer persona problems that your buyer persona generally has so if you’re if you address um agencies let’s say and in those agencies you address projects managers um they might not only have problems correlated to usersnap but also other problems maybe you can help them there as well if you tackled all the other things let’s get broader write about all those those problems and how to educate your buyer persona there because in the end the content will be appreciated by the prior persona if it solves a particular field or problem and at some point in the future that person hopefully comes back to you and will remember you at some some somewhere back in their brain that that person was already here um so it increases the likelihood that that person will try out your product so i guess to summarize it i would say cluster your content and prioritize it and prioritize it in a way that you start with the the search intent that is sitting closest to your business that is sitting closest to your product although not a lot of people will search for it those people who will search for it are high quality leads who are more likely to become paid customers that’s great that’s great yeah because this is i see a typical problem you write some articles and then people come and and if they’re not near your brand near your product product then they even might sign up for some reasons because people are curious or confused and but you don’t get qualities leads and this is something we are tackling right now to to differentiate um the leads i i once heard a art a talk from from the the vp of marketing of uh i think salesforce was and she she differentiated between leads and quality beats and this is something we’re also tackling now and the the more the topic is along of course or near your product or you’re the core of your product the better the leads normally were that’s great and also the onion layers you described i like that concept um it’s easier said than done though yeah like it’s it’s yes absolutely i totally agree one thing that that kind of interests me a lot is if you have to differentiate because writing on your blog is one thing and then you can hope for google to bring you some leads that’s great but there is like another approach that could bring either content distribution social media even guest blogging what do you think about these approaches you mean guess the article writing on other people’s blogs versus building up your own blog for example yes maybe i mixed a lot of topics right now so the one thing was yes that was uh would you rather write on your own blog or you go to other assets other uh locations and right there yeah and bring down start with your own blog i would say and if if you already have a solid base of blog article and blog content you could think about guest articles and addressing new audience audiences but i would always start with your own channels like build up your own channels first and then expand to guest articles and such guest articles can be nice like because you address new audiences that don’t know you and you can still hijack those audiences but still the the long tail impact is is less compared to building up your own blog repository so when we look you say you said that you’re writing around two blocks per week which is around let’s say eight per month um how many how many guest blogs guest posts to you right per month right now sir or to be honest
that’s that’s also good okay understood yeah the other question the other part of my question was kind of content distribution creation created it’s there google comes hopefully um if you have your your site map right and put it into the search console but then the question is do you do you use other methods to distribute your content yeah yeah that’s a great question because i think we talk usually too much about the production side and less less about the distribution side um my like my mantra always is that split your work 50 50 right like split if if you if you write um like 50 of your time can go into content production and 50 of your time should go into like thinking about distributing it and where and how to distribute it best and which channels come come to your mind so this obviously there is a lot of social activities there are a lot of specialty groups out there depending on your industry but i’m sure if you’re in b2b sauce there will be a linkedin group for your industry there will be um if you’re if you’re more techie there might be a stack of low threats there might be quora questions there might be reddit forums or other places where you could think about distributing it so um i would say split it 50 50 and see how it goes back at usersnap when i started i i tried to live that and it basically meant um on monday i would write an article on tuesday i would publish it distributed on wednesday i would write another one and on thursday i would again distribute the second one so and it all starts over and over again that’s great that’s great now i totally agree um this reminds me that we might sometimes shift too much to content creation which also happens to us and we wrote for example three blog posts in the last uh three days um but we we haven’t distributed it too much uh up beyond the normal social media activities which is easy done but to find the right sources as you said of the right groups also to publish it there in a way that it’s not like spammy and so on that’s that’s kind of an art you have to learn and and it’s quite it’s getting more and more challenging right like nowadays and i guess it brings me back to that’s why organic is so nice right it compounds over time and but by default if you do great content but distributing it beyond organic i think that’s it’s definitely more and more challenging at least in a written form but also i think in an audio and video form um i think paid i guess becomes more and more important when it comes to distributing it especially if you want to see short short time results so we try to experiment with that as well when it comes to new content
i’m a bit of a disbeliever in you should distribute your um organic traffic while paid it sounds a bit like controversial for me and and i we tried that too but it never really brought the right leads i don’t know i mean lead magnets yes or remarketing so we do a lot of remarketing on our but this is in our episode number one uh on the content lead engine are people visiting our blog posts uh in a certain category and then they get remarketed with the lead magnet and in this way you know you you you i wouldn’t say monetize the the traffic but you move them you nurture them down the funnel but um like bringing like fresh leads in yeah maybe it works but it’s quite cost intensive so don’t see you as a lead champ thing see it as put put 100 euro in promoting your article that you just wrote among your audiences so remarketing through look-alike audiences through interest based um don’t don’t measure hard metrics on paid performance on like blog content for example that’s that’s not working is are you and your team writing all the contents or do you have also an outsourced content writer team um yes so right now we have two in-house content creators um that work full-time on content creation content distribution in-house and we have a small agency who assists us with content production yeah okay yeah that’s similar for us so we have uh two writers internally but they are not like we have more general digital marketers and two have a speciality in content marketing but we we hired quite a lot of content writers uh in wire upwork um we love the upwork platform and and after like a very long process where we approved or you know found the right ones uh since then we have a team there and they help us produce and that’s great um so as we talked before i have to ask you is like because it said like i i moved i i didn’t decide for a blog to write it but for a video to produce a podcast a video pod video blog in the beginning and then now a podcast what do you think about is is video taking over the typical content marketing or not is it taking over i don’t think it’s it’s either or it’s not a decision between either or i think it’s for some industries content maybe become a video become a more important content format than in other industries for me it’s a need no no question about you have to choose one channel over the other
for me b2b sauce of the common companies i worked with i still see plenty of opportunity in written content um like there is so much room to grow there so my experiences video is definitely like from a production perspective more challenging in a way but it also comes a bit back to the question of where do you feel most natural and what’s what what works for you and what you as a personality but it’s it’s not a question of neither or um yeah okay i i i tend to agree i mean i have to i have to tell you i have one secret growth hack for you you have to read your next blog post on a clubhouse session you know you have to read it but yeah have you tried that or what no no no no no we tried clubhouse once but but i i haven’t found my my path into that okay so tom it was awesome one question i want to ask you because you’re an expert on on on content marketing is there any book you would suggest to the audio to our audience about content marketing oh i’m super prepared i i always have some books as you can see in my background um not a book recommendation on content marketing itself but in general on writing it’s it’s it’s i think a book from the 70s or 80s and it just is super nice if you want to get started with writing content and it gives you good copywriting tips and it was named on writing writing wall on writing wall and it’s by william since and i have i don’t know when it was first published but it definitely was first published before the internet existed um so that’s one book 1976. um yeah other than that go and read this is marketing by seth godin um that’s a classic one love his books in general yeah yeah i think those are the two that i would recommend the most great tom uh it was so awesome that we kind of went a bit over time but for me it was super insightful and i loved it thanks a lot tom so yeah i wish you all the best for your next endeavor as a vp of marketing of storyblock um that’s great so thanks a lot and yeah to our audience don’t forget uh to subscribe to the grow what the [ _ ] [ _ ] podcast on itunes you can find us easily there we are also now on spotify that’s new and yeah i would also be happy to hear from you um whatever you have to cont uh to contribute to the topic um just write us on our website grow what the [ __ ] dot com that’s g r o w t wtf.com tom thanks a lot and thanks for hosting me and talk to you soon yes perfect thanks bye-bye bye