#105: Content | 100% Organic Marketing Strategies, How Three Marketers Use Content To Drive Revenue

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts, everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far, we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op so you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more. One, two, three, four, exit.

I guess we're live in one minute, but I see some people in there. Apparently Lachey has a fan and Ian McGriff, shout out to you, Ian McGriff.

Hi.

All right, so Ben is here, I'm here, Rachel's here, Lachey is here. If you're listening to this on our chat right now, maybe you're listening this in the future on a run on a podcast. But if you're here right now, this was probably the one of the highest registrations we've had. If I go, I'll go check in a little bit, but we had 939 people registered when I checked about 20 minutes ago. So do me a favor, go in chat and drop your name and where you're watching this from, from. I'm glad people showed up because I always say that this is better when like Other marketers come in, in the chat and say hello. So Brad's in Indiana, Katie's in Reno, Bertrand's in Austin. Jess is in. I'm already lost, people. Steve, look at. This is unbelievable. Kansas City, South Africa, Texas, Serbia, North Carolina, Kansas City, Ohio, Tampa, Costa Rica. I'm in Vermont. All right, this is great. So everybody's here. This thing is working. We're going to get into this because we're going to fly through this hour. I just want to do a little bit of housekeeping. So, first of all, everyone that's here is also in marketing. And so what I want you to do is, as you're following along, some of the best stuff that happens and why I push people to come to these live, even though it's going to be recorded, is because in the chat, I love when people, like, help each other out or add an example of something that you did or drop a link to something. And so if you're here live, like, also consider yourself a contributor and a participator on this event. We'd love to get your perspective. But if you have a specific question, I want you to use the Q and A feature. And please listen to this, because not everybody always follows instructions. Go to add your question in the Q and A, because in the Q and A, you can then upvote. And so then I want you to upvote the questions that you want us to answer. We're going to get more than we can get to, but that'll help me, as the host, pick the right questions to get to. And before we get to our lovely guests today and talk about this, the reason that we're here, the topic that we're going to spend an hour talking about is organic content. And what I say by organic content, I don't mean paid channels or things that you have to spend lots of money to reach an audience. I'm a believer that from what I've seen in my marketing career, and I'm seeing it all over again with what we're doing with Exit 5. It's why we have almost a thousand people sign up for this. But the most powerful tool you have in marketing is if you want to sell something to someone later down the road, the most powerful thing you can do in the beginning is build an audience. And I think that the way you build an audience is through content. And we call that organic marketing. That's what we're going to talk about. We have some great examples from our guests today. We're going to talk about everything from Podcasts and books to top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel, so we can talk about anything for an hour. So we're going to do really quick intros. We'll go around the way that I see it right now, we'll do Ben Lachey, Rachel, and then we're going to get right into it. So just say hello, who are you? And let people know what your voice sounds like before we hop in.

What's up everyone? My name is Ben Battaglia. Great to see some familiar faces or familiar names in the chat. Previously led inbound at a tech company called Lessonly and then led brand at Seismic, which is enablement software, and now at a startup seed stage called your Moneyline where we help people with their finances. So been in the B2B SaaS marketing world for seven or eight years now.

Hey everybody, my name is Lashay Lewis. I am founder of Authority Plug and I've been doing content marketing and strategy for maybe about 14 years now. Anybody that knows my story knows that I started building websites at 16 and it's led me up to here. But what I do is I help SaaS companies create profitable content marketing strategies using bottom of funnel content. So super excited to be here with you guys. Excited to see some familiar names in the chat and I hope we can give you guys some value today.

All right. Hey everyone, my name is Rachel Salzgaver. Before I really moved into B2B SaaS, I had a background in marketing for a financial services industry. And then I actually joined Ben at Lessonly, where we marketed the heck out of our brand and training software that we had. And then we moved over to Seismic, which is enablement software. And there I really lead up our organic content strategy and specialize in SEO.

Awesome. All right, I want to start with first just talking about content and how you all see the value of content overall, specifically mostly for B2B SaaS, which is what most listeners and people that are watching this are going to come from. And I want to ask it with this lens, which is at a time where a lot of people have been asked to cut back on budget and only do things that deliver a clear roi, how do you see the role of content? And to give you some more perspective, for me, like content is market, I would love to hear how you explain this because for me, like, content is marketing, period. And I think a lot of times we get in this world where we try to articulate the value of content and the CFO or the CEO whoever expects us to write a blog post and get new customers. And that's not always the case. So let's go Lachey, Ben and Rachel and just hear your quick perspective on like, why content as the marketing channel? What value do you see content playing? What role do you see it playing inside of a b2b SaaS.org?

Yeah, so I look at content as sales enablement and I tell a lot of companies, like I tell them they need SEO optimization. But when I say SEO, I don't mean search engine optimization, I mean sales enablement optimization. So essentially stretching your content out and being able to repurpose it across multiple, not just platforms, but even using it in your current pipeline to be able to push current pipeline, for example, like case studies and white papers and things like that. So I think content plays a very important role, not even just in lead generation, but just in brand building in general. I know this is more of a Rachel's zone, but like top of funnel, more thought, leadership style, explainer style. I think every piece of the funnel is very important, but I feel like content is just that thing that sits and it just continuously drives inbounds over and over and over. Now, of course, we can talk about paid as well. Paid will drive inbounds, but you only get out what you put in versus with content. It's compounding interest. It's like a moat. The more you continue to publish, the more you continue to put yourself out there. Those compounding interests start to build up and then once they do, you'll find yourself in a very good situation.

Ben, as a head of marketing, marketing leader, and even in your role as chief of staff at lessonle. Like, how have you articulated the value of investing in content in the past?

Yeah, I mean, I think we so often think of paid as the rocket fuel. That is, if we have enough paid, that's what's going to power the marketing engine. And I actually think content is the rocket fuel that powers a marketing engine. If you have terrible content, your marketing's not going to go very far. Like, you're not going to have great paid, you're not going to have great hooks, you're not going to have great offers, you're not going to have lead magnets. And so to me, content is the atomic building block of a great marketing strategy. And that plays all across. Some of it's going to be more focused on paid, some of it's going to be about research, some of it's going to be brand. But you're toast without it, in my opinion. So I subscribe to the DG School of content is marketing.

What do you say, Rachel?

I completely agree. I think content is that foundational piece of any great marketing function and any great marketing org. Love that Lachey. I'm gonna take that now. Like yeah, I specialize in SEO, but this idea that it's also sales enablement too and you know, seismic is in the enablement space. And yeah, when you look at buyer engagement and how buyers interact with brands these days, you know, so much of that is done on their own and not at their own time. And so if they're coming to your site and you don't present great content and a great content experience, you've lost them from the get go and you're not going to have success in bringing them through that funnel and you know, eventually turning someone who could be a raving fan of your brand and of your company into a long term customer. So I think without that foundational piece, you really are missing driving force for great marketing.

Also, just to expand on the point about content being sales enablement, I think it's easy to look at that definition literally and say like the goal inside of the company, it's collateral to help the sales team sell. But I think if you zoom all the way out, your website is the number one thing a prospect could have. Your website should help someone buy and the better and more helpful and useful and content that makes it feel like, wow, this company is totally in my head that is going to enable someone to buy. So it's like I don't know if it's like capital as is like sales as a function, sales as a sales team and just people who are going to buy from the company. I love that. Go ahead Ben, what were you going to say?

Well, I was just going to say, Lachey, follow up question for you. How do you think about spreading across? Like my sales team requests more content than I have hours in the day to make. So how do you think about like what's worth doing to support marketing efforts versus you have a seller banging on your door asking for something specific?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's dependent again, just like you said, upon the specific goals. So if it's like if their goal is to push more prospects through the pipeline, I'm immediately looking at bottom of funnel content. So when I say bottom of funnel, I mean like case studies and things of that nature. But I feel like it plays a role in every part of the sales process. I know Dave mentioned when we started about like, you know, just being able to attribute that Content to the revenue and be able to show your value. That's the tricky part. But I think content, it plays a role in every part of the process. Depending on the company's goals will depend on, like which type of content you would use. Maybe somebody that's a little less familiar with the product. That's when we would go top of funnel. People that are already warmed up, prospects that are already in the pipeline, and we just want to push them. Maybe they want, you know, a case study or a white paper or something that kind of just breaks things down a little bit further for them. Instead of having to create that piece from scratch, use the pieces that are on the website already. A lot of companies don't do this, but you can actually tie case studies into an SEO article. I like to do that. And then repurpose that content to push pipeline.

I'm just reading some of the questions in the chat and I was going to ask, like I told you this was going to happen. I had notes of things that I wanted everybody to go to, but I want to flip over to a question and let this kind of drive our discussion. This is from Andrew in the chat. We're going to get more tactical into content and I'm going to ask each of our guests today to share some of the best plays and give you real tactical examples of things they've done with content. But I think this might be a good bridge to get there, which is this question. How do you decide which content to make freely available and which content to put behind a form? Is the idea that if all content is free and good, people will request a demo when they're ready. I'm curious to hear how our panel of marketing experts will answer that question.

Yeah, I go both ways on that. I see at different points in my career I have indexed to either side of this and I do think it is situational to your business and where you're at. If you are in a spot where lead gen is eminently necessary to survive, I can understand wanting to gate something. I tend to err more towards giving away content, only gaining the highest intent, either pieces or experiences and capturing leads and following up that way. But in general, I err towards give, give, give, give, give and trusting that that's going to pay out on the back end. What do you think, Lachey and Rachel?

Well, I definitely agree. I think it's very situational and I think it is based on the goals of where your organization is at. You know, at lessonly we lean hard on give, give, give Not a whole lot of our content was behind a form utilize drift conversational landing pages with our ebooks to really kind of engage with users across the site. But then we would gate those really high intent pieces. So if we did, you know like white paper or a research, you know, report with an analyst firm, those type of things were gated for a certain amount of time. I think it's important to note that it should not just be a decision that comes from the content team and that made in that silo. You really need to partner with your demand gen teammates to discuss what the overall goal is and the long term strategy is before you kind of make this blanket approach of hey, everything's going to be gated or everything's going to be ungated. I think there's room for both. But it's important to have that larger conversation cross functionally to determine what the ultimate best route is for each campaign and each asset that you create.

Following up on that quickly, Rachel, I also think it depends on what your content mix is. So earlier stage when you only have ebooks maybe you need to gate some more but later stage when you start to build out experiences, whether that's like audits or maturity models or a PLG model or something like that, those heavier assets become the thing that's gated and you can give away and over index then on giving more on content. So I think your content mix and the stage you're at really is a big determinant too.

Yeah. To that point you could use when we now here at seismic if we have a more in depth ebook we will kind of parse out that ebook that might be gated and put some teasers out on the blog on social in other forms of content to kind of give viewers that like sneak peek of the information that they might be getting to then kind of entice them to like hey if you're if this is something that's really of interest to you and you find it valuable, here's this more in depth resource that you can grab.

Yeah, I think it's important what you said to Rachel about like that cross functional communication because a lot of the time companies don't have good communication between teams that the communication is very siloed between the teams that must have alignment to even kind of make the content work and speak to the correct icp. So I do think it's really important to sync up with demand gen and kind of see I guess what the overall landscape is like. To me personally, I don't like gated Case studies. The reason I don't like gated case studies is because I feel like you shouldn't have to force a prospect to understand how you serve them. I think if you were to be able to freely give away case studies, that's something I would more than freely give away because it shows my value. It's a peek behind the curtain of how I work. I feel like I wouldn't want a prospect to have to give me anything in order for you to see how I can serve you. Let me just show you how I can serve you as it relates to top of funnel. I do like gated content for top of funnel, mainly because you're bringing that person into your ecosystem and then you can nurture them further with, you know, repurposed content, whether that be YouTube videos, email sequences. But I'm pretty bullish on not getting bottom of funnel, specifically case studies.

Interesting. So we can duke it out over gated content at the top of funnel. I like that.

I think it's all you can make a case for either. And I would just push back on all of it and say, what is the goal period? Because I've been inside of a company and we gate content and it's great. And we get 226 email addresses. What are we going to do with those email addresses? Right. And I also think we're now in the digital marketing world where like kind of having contact information is table stakes. And so I would just try to weigh out like, is it worth getting 200 email contacts for this when we probably already could get those anyway. And are there some SEO and organic traffic trade offs that we're making by getting this content? But you could also make the case that let's say you're selling more of a high volume. Actually you can make it on on either case. What if the 200 people that downloaded that content were enterprise buyers because you created some incredible in depth content offer. I actually think that the bigger question is more about the content and what content is worth someone giving their email for. And I think it's now become table stakes. Like you can't do the HubSpot 2006 play, which is just like write 50 ebooks and gate them all because nobody else is doing that now. Content is free, Right? But you could also look at this webinar and say this webinar today is a form of gated content. Right. People had to put in their email address to either come to this session today or get the recording. And so I think it all comes back to like do you have a clear story around the strategy for content and how is this going to help us sell? That's the decision that you have to make internally.

Yeah. And I think you also have to think about what are the alternatives for someone. So if this content that you're putting out is available for free to someone who is better at presenting it than you on YouTube gating, it probably isn't going to win the competition for someone's eyeballs. I love what Aaron said here. Can you imagine having to sign up to enter a retail grocery store? I love that metaphor. I just finished this book called unreasonable hospitality. 10 out of 10 recommend Will Guidera. But I think about that when you come to a website, how can you be unreasonably hospitable to someone coming to your website to give them whatever they need to succeed there and want to come back? So I dig that. Aaron, thanks for sharing.

Yeah, I can attest to that as well. Even just from kind of running my own consultancy. It's like. So I do have a top of funnel piece. Dave was kind of teasing me about this on the podcast we recently recorded, but I have what I would consider a top of funnel gated piece. So usually I run clients through a notion dashboard and I give that dashboard completely away for free. Right. But people will still pay for aggregation. They'll pay for you to condense things down to them where it makes sense. So I think if companies lose kind of the scarcity mindset around, oh, I don't want to give this away. I'm not saying don't. I'm not saying like ungate everything. I mean, you can. And again, like Carrie said in the comments, like, it's not an all or nothing. It really is just totally dependent on company goals for sure.

And I think it's going to change over time too, as your market changes, as your company progresses and grows. What might have worked for you and how you were bringing people into the pipe six months ago might not be the way forward for a new fiscal year or a new quarter. So I think it's also really important to, to not get into that mindset where you're like, well, this is what's what we've always done. But to actually like lean into the evolution of how you are treating your content and how you want to present it to your visitors.

All right, I'm tired of talking about gated content. Let's go unpack. I want to hear each of your one or two of the best content plays that you've run. Rachel, let's start with you.

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Yeah, so at seismic, we have something that we call enablement experience explainers. So these explainers are very top of funnel. I mentioned this, you know, bringing eyeballs to the site. I think when I looked back at this last fiscal year, 70% of the traffic that came to this type of content was from organic and it Contributed to like 40% of our total site traffic, you know, across all channels. So these explainers are very high level introductions to topics. So think importance of training, how to build a sales enablement plan. And we really cover these topics very top level. So if someone is coming in and really wants that foundational piece of education, it is all there in these explainers and it leans very heavily into SEO best practices and strategy. And then we've made a very concentrated effort with these explain experiences to then cross link and kind of build this topic cluster and hub from the explainer to then kind of steer a user into the next best piece of content or the next best topic that is kind of related to where they're at right now. So these pieces not only include the content about that meets the intent that they were searching for at that time, but then we also bring about some other related topics that we think would be kind of like the next, next progression in their journey. So I think what's important though, and something that we've really seen successful with these explainers is it's not just text. At the end of the day, your users are going to come to the site and some might lean more heavily into wanting to read a lot of content. Others just want to see, skim your page and get a high level of what you're talking about. So we include a variety of different formats from text to imagery and stats. We just started incorporating short form, like two minute videos that are embedded into these pieces. So not only can we track people who are coming to those pages and traffic in general, but then we really dive into how are people engaging with the content throughout the page. And then we use that data to make ongoing enhancements and test different elements to keep improving that engagement and conversion to the site. So I think Lachey had brought up a point earlier. One of the things is, I think a lot of times people are like, I don't know how to attribute our content to dollars spent or pipeline or whatnot. And so we've made a really real concentrated effort of not only are we looking at traffic, but how are these influencing people to eventually turn into an MQL and pipeline and eventually like Deals closed.

Well, even even selling to enterprise buyers. I just earlier this week, I talked to Hillary and Travis from Snowflake about their book Busting Silos and abm and one of the key metric, because I was like, what role does, like the blog and content and stuff that you're creating? Like, what role does that play in, like, you know, enterprise buyers? Because in my experience in the past, it's been like, the sales team wants accounts that you've met with. And it's just something I've always wondered, like, how does content plan? Well, we're all gonna go to the website. All of us who are gonna buy something, especially at a high dollar amount, are gonna go to website. We're gonna read content. And so she was like, well, we can measure how much time and what content those accounts are consuming on our site. And it's not a direct conversion. So this kind of goes back to the gated content piece where it's like, we like the gated content piece because we're like, oh, someone searched, you know, this long tail keyword that you talked about for seismic. They put in their email address, this is who we're going to now have a meeting with. We're like, actually, if we could just attribute that with a cookie or something and be able to know that, like this person, you know, read six articles on our site. That's how we get into like the how does marketing get credit for content? Type of discussions also? And then I'll shut up on this. But I also like this approach from Rachel. And I think this is really related to what Lachey does with bottom of the funnel content is if I could do content all over again. If I went to run marketing at a company, this would be the approach that I would take from the beginning, which is like, less is more, right? It's like we could create hundreds and hundreds of articles. But to me, it's like, how do we do the like two or three, like long form, in depth, really helpful guide level, website level, you know, exit5.com theguide to whatever. And how do we focus on those pillar pieces of content? That's a mistake that I've made in the past is trying to do just getting the volume game with content. And I know there's some of that from an SEO perspective, but I would much rather focus on like these four to eight cores phrases and terms that people are coming to our business for and spending our content dollars and making those pieces great. Not hiring an intern to write that content, not asking ChatGPT to write that content, but doing real deep original research, interviewing subject matter experts, interviewing customers, getting their objections and false beliefs and turning that into the pillar level content on the website.

Yeah, I think that's a great point, Dave. We've, you know, discussed that from a seismic standpoint. You know, when you look at the data across the site, we rank for so many different keywords. But at the end of the day, what are going to be your most high impact keywords? And it might be a very niche topic where like, okay, the volume is smaller but it's so hyper relevant to your audience that they're going to come to that page, you're giving them content that meets their search intent, that they're going to be very much encouraged to continue reading on and engaging with you as a company because you are delivering something that they find high value. So I definitely lean on the side of you don't always want to go after those super high, high traffic keywords. We like to do a good mix and then use those pillar pages to focus and present content around those. And then we really dig into the more tactical strategy side of things on the blog. So that's how we kind of like counterbalance the two areas.

Yeah, I would agree with that. So kind of the way I think about it is the same. So I'll, if I'm starting from scratch, what I'll do is I'll break the site into categories and then within each one of those categories separate content from top, mid and bottom of funnel. And then to take it a level even a little bit deeper than that, what I like to do is something called feature mapping, which is basically taking the SaaS, breaking it down by product and then breaking the product down by features and then mapping those features back to specific pain points and then using those pain points to drive the keyword research. So it's all really very data driven. But I think, and some people may fight me on this, but I do think there's a such thing as data driven creativity. It can get blurry sometimes, but I think just going back to that core component of like understanding what pain points your audience is dealing with, it's like once you start there, not that the rest of the strategy isn't difficult to execute, but it's just like you have such a strong starting point when you know exactly what pain points you're dealing with. There's really no guessing from that point.

Tying together data driven creativity to one thing. I heard Rachel say, Rachel, I heard you talk about briefly like optimizing these pages over and over again. I know that's something super important. And one thing you and I got to do together at Lessonly was build this cross functional CRO team. We were a small marketing team, but once we crossed about 10,000 users or 10,000 visitors a month running tests like aggressively testing these pages because even a small optimization, whether that's like changing out a form or changing the format or changing a button text or adding video, whatever, could have huge like measurable changes on leads and demos. And so I think like CRO teams, if you're not doing CRO and you have any semblance of significant volume to pages like this test, test, test, because I think they're super measurable ways to say we ran this test and here are the dollars of pipeline that came in the door or the increased percentage of dollars of pipeline that came in the door because we did this. And one thing I love about that is it can be a creative team sport to do this. I think so often we leave CRO in the bucket of like the demand gen manager, but it is about content, it is about copy. Our designers loved CRO because it felt like this is an opportunity for me to play and try to have data driven creativity of what actually converts. But really fun way to get people who may not be as closely tied to revenue tied into revenue.

Yeah. And that, I mean a big part of SEO is the experience that you are bringing forward. So working with designers like Ben was saying on our CR test, they would come forward with these ideas that I, you know, in my content driven tunnel wouldn't have even like imagined and it just elevates the content to a whole other level. And you see those results on the back end and it's really exciting I think to add on to Ben's point, they don't have to be huge tests like we would do. The simplest of we're going to change the link text from get to do or you know, we're going to change the color we're going to add in this midline component and you would see huge returns on something that was a fairly like light and quick lift. So I think that is a huge thing to keep in mind. And in addition to doing these CRO tests, yeah, we consider these pieces evergreen. So they are constantly being updated and optimized over time. So like a good example example is we at seismic did original research at the beginning of the year to kind of get an understanding of how companies across the world are using sales enablement tools and platforms and how they value enablement in their organization. And we took that original data and research and sprinkled some of that content and those findings across these pillars because again then that's another way that you are bringing about unique content. Like your competitors can, yes, also write about sales enablement or sales training, but they don't have this in depth content and these findings that you've done through this original research.

Hey, let's just stay on this SEO topic for a second. What do you think are the biggest overarching mistakes that you see B2B SaaS companies make when it comes to SEO?

I think a lot of times there's no human element behind it. I think this was something that we really leaned into so much with lessonly and I carried that on during my experience at Seismic. Like just because you are leaning into SEO and using these key phrases and keywords, it does not mean that it needs to be robotic or super stuffy. I think a good balance of SEO and we always talked about this was like it's a great balance of science and story. You have to bring across that human element. And I think sometimes too people really dig into just like that one specific term or keyword where it's beneficial to widen your lens and look at some of these related keywords and related topics that would also be beneficial to include in kind of your cluster because it helps reinforce you as a leader and an expert expert in that topic.

Ben, what about at the marketing exec level? I have been burned twice by getting on the short term hamster wheel and not investing in SEO. And I've been in a place where it's like I need website traffic to have been 30% higher. The best way I've done that would have been to make the investment in SEO two years ago. But it can be tough to do some of that. What's your perspective on SEO from a VP of Marketing seat?

Yeah, I think, I mean marketing is thinking in bets and placing bets. It's like, and I think setting expectations across your stakeholders, whether that's your fellow execs, your senior leadership team, your board, that SEO is going to be a play that's going to take some time. And as a marketing leader, you can't just hang your laurels on while I'm working on this. This is going to pay off someday. Like you're still responsible for a pipeline number and a lead number now. So if you want to invest in SEO, spend time there, that's great. But you need to make sure you're resourcing appropriately. Whatever's going to drive the Lead gen today. I'll double down on your original question for Rachel as well. I think going after one of the key mistakes is high volume, not high intent. Like give me 10 keywords with a hundred of the right people each rather than one. The highest level that you're going to be competing with crazy amounts and not getting any quality traffic for. So it's all about driving quality, high intent traffic. With SEO, I don't think the lower stuff is worth your time, particularly in a B2B context where you need like the targeted person buying. It's not like we're selling purses here or what.

Well, Lachey, Ben just basically made your case for bottom of the funnel, right?

Yeah, for sure. It's one of the things I see companies mess up a lot. They think that scaling content is going to solve their problem. They think that AI is going to solve their problem. The thing is, AI doesn't solve a strategy problem. AI doesn't solve a customer research problem. You and your team solve that. So it's like once you have those things in place, I will always die on. I will die on this hill. Like high intent over high search volume. I've gone after keywords with probably zero search volume a month and get 10 hits a day. I think when you look at a keyword, I think always take it with a grain of salt. Like these keyword tools aren't exactly correct. And just to play on your point, Ben, what you said about us being in the B2B space, it's really important that we talk to the specific person that we're trying to target. And that really comes down again to just, and I keep bringing it back to this is just understanding those customer pain points, their objections, their struggles, and being able to weave that into the content and then position your product as the solution to those pain points. So I think once you do that, you're definitely on the right track for sure. And if you mix that with some bottom of funnel content, you're definitely going to be able to. And then another thing I guess I could touch on as well is like one of the reasons I love bottom of funnel is because to me it's easier to attribute the content to pipeline and that's mainly because they're so far down the buying cycle. So when I look at my stats, usually when I see someone come in from a bottom of funnel content piece, it's like they sign up for a demo straight from the piece. It's like in this goes back to and I'm jumping all over the place but this goes back to the other reason that I'm like, don't gate your case studies. Because case studies is where I would categorize that as bottom of funnel. Right? Because if they're looking at a case study, they're like, okay, they're probably trying to figure out if they want to make a decision with you or not. So I'm just like, yeah, I think being able to effectively weave in pain points to content, creating a storytelling element and then sprinkling some SEO in it is good enough. And I know a lot of content writers are taught to write with the SEO first mindset. And I always tell people, you can rank on Google all you want, but if you're not speaking to customer pain points, that content will not convert. And if it won't convert, what was the point of you ranking it in the first place?

Yeah, I remember earlier this year we kind of set out, and this is where it is very important to work with other subject matter experts and listening to those customer calls and even having conversations with your reps who are having conversations with those prospects to be like, what are you hearing on your calls that keep coming up time and time again that, like, would just be really beneficial to us for us to cover in content. And by taking that step back, you kind of get a high level picture of pain points in your industry and then you can go in and look at, okay, well, where can we come from an SEO standpoint? Where can we come from a thought leadership standpoint? Where can we come with research and really kind of tie all of those things together to answer a question versus just really, like thinking based off of, like, what Lachey was saying to you. Oh, I'm looking at a search volume number and whether it's, you know, Semrush or Google or whatever. And this is what we're going to write content about when it could be so far off base with what customers and what your prospects are actually looking for and needing.

One of my favorite exercises was when I was at Drift, we would sit really close with the sales team and we would hear. We were at the time, like, creating a new category in a new space. And so there was a lot of, like, hype and buzz and a lot of skepticism. And so the brand had a lot of awareness, but people weren't convinced that they needed the product. And so one of the issues that we had was like, urgency, right? Like, ah, this isn't nice to have. You know, how do I drive this urgency? And so what we did was we asked the sales team, what are the top reasons people don't buy or don't move forward in the process? And we literally wrote out our answers to those questions and created them as content. And I think this goes back to like an old school copywriting tactic, which is basically you want to. I'm bringing this up now because SEO is great, but if you only rely on what Google tells you is the keywords that someone's searching for, you're missing out on this emotional part of like the buyer's journey, which is these people have this objection. And so one of the things that we wrote was here are the five reasons why people churn. Here are the five reasons why people actually cancel. And we wrote them all out and it was like number one, they didn't effectively onboard the sales team onto drift. Number two, number three, number four. And it forced us as a company to articulate our point of view on these things. I think a lot of times you find out that content falls down when the company doesn't have strong opinions on there. But I wanted to just put that in because I think those conversations with sales and find out why people are not taking meetings, find out why people are not buying is not just like information that should be used internally to optimize your funnels and your processes, but like that can be the best content that you send out and create. And I think this is where like the topic of bottom of the funnel content is so important. Now pair that with SEO and I think that's when you have the right content strategy.

Yeah, I also think about downstream by you creating content like that you have qualified people out of the funnel that your BDRs were going to have to spend time following up with. Like when we started to address objections or admit our flaws up front in content, the BDR inbound BDRs, we could scale their time so much more effectively because we weren't getting the junk leads who didn't need us anyway. They self qualified out on the front end and that is a gift to your revenue engine that you as a marketer can do by actually qualifying out leads rather than just trying to go for the lead number.

And they're not. Instead of having to take what time they do have on a call with them to answer these questions, then you've produced a resource for them to be like, hey, we have content around, you know, this question or this misconception you might have, let me send it off to you and take a look at it on your own time and come back with questions and then we can really make the most out of the call that we have right now. I think that's a huge part of it as well.

All right, there's a question in the chat to take us in a little bit of a different direction. There's a question in chat about newsletters. How do you sell the C suite on the value of newsletters? You can't put a monetary value on thought leadership. To anyone here have a strong opinion on selling the value of newsletters.

I think it's wildly valuable. How do you sell that value? I think it comes back to me about what is the change you want to make in the world? And if the change you want to make in the world or the goal of your newsletter is you're trying to drive leads, that may be a hard case to make directly. I'm sure there's a data story there once you get big enough, but hard to make up front that, oh, if we anticipate this many people convert down the way. To me, I would sell it about mission and brand, like, how do you want to change this industry? How do you want to influence this industry? What's our POV that we have on the world that we want people to start thinking about and committing to, whether that's conversational marketing or sales enablement or doing better work or whatever that thing is. To me, I would always sell on mission and thought leadership rather than trying to sell on leads, at least on the front end of a newsletter.

For me, email is the best marketing channel because it's the one channel that you have a direct relationship with someone. Meaning that. I'll give you a perfect example. I wanted to get registrations for this webinar, right? Yes, I tweeted about it. Yes, I wrote on LinkedIn. But I got about 600 signups because I sent an email to my list. My list is people who work in B2B marketing. This is a session about B2B marketing. When I pressed send, I literally got hundreds of people to sign up for this thing. That's just one basic example. Right. And so I think. I think the mistake people make is they think that, oh, we're a B2B company, we got email. Why should someone. We're just going to have people on our email list where it comes back to the question from the beginning, which is like, why should you even have a newsletter? Why should somebody be on your email list from the beginning? And so I think of it as if I'm a company. I want people to get my content, and the best way for them to get my content is by getting on my email list. And so the newsletter would be a strategy for communicating all of the things that are going on inside of your company as it relates to your ideal customers. And it's the easiest way to reach them directly. Now, it doesn't mean that you should have one because I do think a lot of companies just have a below average email and they just send out product updates and other kind of nonsense and it just becomes a channel for company promotions. But I think if you want to create a real strategy around newsletter, I think the way you communicate that the value is, hey, we're going to, we want to have a direct relationship with the people that we're trying to sell to.

Yeah. Otherwise you're just going to pay for those eyeballs down the way. Like you can either own the audience or you can spend a lot of money to pay. So maybe that's the selling leadership on the cost of having to pay for these eyeballs versus owning them.

Yeah, very true. I also feel like it depends on the angle that you come at them at because it's like, I know the question was specifically about newsletters, but we have this same issue in content. It's like if executive leadership does not believe in content, it's very, very hard to sell them on it. I think the same goes with newsletters. If you have executive leadership that is very bullish on branding, I think it may be a little bit easier to sell newsletters mainly because it's like a top of funnel function. It will nurture someone down the funnel, but when they first come in, it's just top of funnel and it's just like the angle that you come at the executive leadership with. So if they're like very bullish on personal branding, it may be easier to get this over with them if you can communicate the correct value props that they're looking for. So if you have executive leadership that's very like pipeline driven, very revenue focused, you would have to come up with a different angle as to how newsletters are going to embed exactly what you said. Like if you don't pay for it now, you're going to be paying for it later. So making money, saving money, I guess are a few that would kind of like probably help you a little bit. But again, it's just, I take the same approach with content. So it's like if you want to get your point across, come at them from the right angle. And you know, some leaders are great leaders. Like they're willing and open to listen, but it's like you just got some people that are just like, you know, some people in executive leadership. So it's just like trying to communicate the value proposition of what you're trying to sell to executive leadership, simplifying it, because when you overcomplicate the process, it just makes it more difficult to get that executive buy in. So I would say simplify what you're trying to do. Come up with a good value proposition on how it's going to achieve the goal that they're wanting to achieve. And unfortunately, like we, you know, again, it's very dependent on company goals. But if they want to achieve, you know, branding and things like that, come at it from that value proposition. If they're very revenue and pipeline focused, you need to come at it from that value proposition. So it's all about the angle and how you play it.

All right, I wanted to talk about this because we haven't touched on it yet, but Ben, you've done some interesting stuff in your past. Not related to SEO, not related to bottom of the funnel content, but a topic that's near and dear to my heart, which is more of this brand content. Tell me one or two of your best plays that you've done in the past there.

Yeah. One thing that I have found a lot of joy from and success from is not sleeping on legacy media. This entire time, we have exclusively talked about digital channels and duking it out over inboxes and Google rankings and going around that, like pattern interrupts from the rest of every one of your competitors who is digitally marketing and writing a book that you mail to people, producing a newspaper or a magazine that you send to someone's house. I'm sitting in our CEO's studio. He has a podcast and he actually has a radio show as well. Talk about legacy media. That has been some of the best brand plays we have. I especially love books. Like, I think books convey a level of expertise. Anyone can theoretically write a book, but when push comes to shove, harder to write a book than you think. And not only does it convey expertise and pattern interrupt, but it also forces you as a marketer or your CEO to clarify their thoughts. Like, books are very clarifying. And that has downstream implications for your strategy, but as well as all the content you can create. Dj, you talk about podcasts being kind of the building block that you do all your waterfall content from. For me, that's been books that, like, feed all the rest of the content.

I have an example here. I've done this a couple times. And so when When I was working at Privy, they sold to Shopify store owners and the biggest time of year for them was Black Friday Cyber Monday. And there was a lot of content that would be put out about, you know, podcasts and videos and emails about, like, here's how to be ready for, for Black Friday Cyber Monday we decided like, what if we do something completely different? What if we actually wrote a physical book and it's just like a pattern interruption type of thing, right? Like it's in a world where everyone is doing newsletters and ebooks and whatever. Like let's do a physical book because like, I think that there's going to be some social element to this. We're like, oh my gosh, people are going to take pictures and tweet about it. And it became a whole thing and we did it and it, we self funded it in that we figured out Dan Murphy on the team who was amazing, figured out a way to. Him and Lauren hall who were on the team, they figured out a way to like create this book. Basically we had done 50 podcast episodes that year. They went and they got the transcripts and created a bunch of content that we had already existed. They repurposed into a book. We got new expert content for the book. We self published that. We ended up making like 20 grand from the book that we got to put back in the marketing budget. And, and like hundreds of people bought the book and were tweeting about it and posting about it. And so this is the content stuff that I love. Like, I think that like Rachel and Lachey have like the very. This is like the compound exercises in like in working out, you need to eat right, you need to do squats and deadlifts and, and get that stuff right. You need to have these always on things. But for me, I like to think of like once a quarter, like can we do some type of big hit content campaign that I don't know how we're going to measure it, but we're going to know when people tell us. And so that's a thing. Like whether it's the lesson lead board game or the book or a magazine or an event, I think those things all have this like, harder to articulate roi. Like I like the big splash stuff and I also don't think that you don't need a lot of budget to do this. You can benefit when you have budget to do it. Sure. But there's lots of ways you can be creative and just think about like, how can we make a big splash? I think that's what I like when we talk about brand content is the stuff that's going to get people talking about us.

Yeah. And I think so often we feel the need to say how's this going to tie back to our product? And I think some of the best stuff comes from when you throw at least some of your care about that out the window and say what mission are we on as a company and how do we invite people into that mission? Not we don't need promotion. Let's just think about invitation and if they're more aligned with your people, with your culture, with your values, with your point of view on the world, that's going to turn into you being the first person they think of when it comes time to shop for that software down the line.

All right, let's go Freeform. We got a couple minutes left. Anything on either on any of your minds about content that you need to get off your chest before we hang up today?

I got one thing I was just we touched on this briefly and this is not necessarily new, but interactive content. Any experience you can design I think is going to have way more legs for someone where there's a they're interacting with it. It's going to get some sort of unique personalized output that could be quizzes or video click throughs or some sort of assessment. Again, HubSpot has been doing this for 20 years now or something like that. But I still think as marketers we continue to churn out ebooks because it's easier to produce. Think about what's the experience someone could actually gain like interact with you with and get a personalized output. I think that content is going to have way more meaning to their life. They're going to turn and show for us. We do put people through a financial wellness audit so you can actually go through qlik rate your organization. It's going to give you a score at the end of how your company is on financial wellness and you can go take that to your CFO and say here's the ROI that we could drive if we implemented this. Way more interesting than an ebook that talks about generic results. So don't sleep on interactive content either. Hard to produce but well worth it.

Yeah, we launched a calculator at the beginning of the year where people have kind of put in the challenges and solutions that they were trying to address by bringing on an enablement solution and then we would kick out the return that they could expect to see by investing in piece of software or the tool itself. Again they could go in and really customize and put in information that was specific to their company and their challenges and get a very catered output piece of content based on what they shared.

I love that point because I think one thing that drives me nuts about B2B SaaS is that for so many companies, the only call to action, the only offer that we drive to is get a demo, contact, sales request a quote, and then we're like, well, where are the high intent buyers? I'm like, well, the, the universe of people who are going to be ready to raise their hand and get a demo is very small.

I mean, Ben knows this. Like that was one of our most successful things that we did at Lessonly was we created an experience where people could take a lesson. So we write it information about our tool in the tool itself so users could get a sneak peek of what the platform looked like while finding out information about it. And that was a huge piece for us. And so instead of people steering people just to get a demo, that was a good bridge of the people who weren't, you know, exactly ready to take that leap. And it was such a success, we ended up kind of implementing it on Seismic too.

Yeah, yeah.

True PLG wasn't an, wasn't an option for us. I know for many B2B SaaS companies, true PLG, you know, for whatever reason doesn't make sense in your product, but we kind of created this faux PLG experience that got people sort of using the product and ended up as a great conversion method.

Yeah.

Let's do one more question from Matthew. With interactive content, how do you convince the prospect to submit? Potentially, how do you read more potentially sensitive data like conversion rates? Anyone have thoughts on sensitive data there?

Yeah, one thing I like to do when it comes to like sensitive information. So like if I have a client that I want to do a case study on, but they don't want like their name out there or anything like that. I haven't found that it matters too much if you cover up the sensitive information. I mean, I think as long as you get the overall point across. And I think one important thing is just like having, and I know the question had something to do with like numbers and things like that, but it's tough because that's really what is the connective tissue when it comes to like really good case studies. It's just like having the numbers just to give the prospect a vision of what working with you is like and potentially the results they can achieve. So what I would do is see about, see if you have A little bit of wiggle room there. Is it just that they don't want the client to be outed, or is it that they're really sensitive and tight over the numbers? I would just like be clear on that and then just kind of like navigate it as much as you can. Because I've seen plenty of case studies where the client is like an alias or something like that. I say we work with this client. It's like not necessarily the client that's the big deal. It's the transformation that you provide. And if you can accurately convey that.

You'Re going to be good. Yeah. Either you could anonymize the customer too, or sharing. If they don't want raw numbers shared, like share the percentage change, then that's another way to convey what you want without exposing their numbers. So lots of ways to get around it.

Yeah. I think ultimately, and if you're in an industry where people are not going to give you that sensitive information, then that's not going to be a. You can't run a play where you're going to ask. You got to think of what questions you can ask. Again, there's not one size fits all marketing information, but maybe there's a concept or something related that you can change and adjust for your industry. Craig also asked, are anonymized case studies still valuable? Your customers don't want you giving away their specific results. I think they are. I think you can say. I think you don't have to say the company name, but you can say a financial service provider that sells to the Fortune 500 uses my company to do X, Y and Z.

It's always the financial services provider. I want their name.

Yeah. I also think it's all about the delivery because I think everybody even tunes out good case studies. And if I have a picture of Lachey on my website and I say she's the founder of whatever and she used my product, something goes off in all of our heads as that's marketing anyway. Like, every company is going to have some type of testimonials and some type of reviews. And so I think you got to figure out how to. How to embrace that.

I think too, like, if you're just trying to start out with a case study program and you're meeting that challenge where, like, they don't want their name out there. Take what you can get to start building up that collateral too, I think I'm just going to say no, it's take what you can get too, at a certain point to start building up that content and that relationship because that'll help the portfolio in the long run.

All right, we got a wrap. Thank you all for doing this. Do me a Favor, go to LinkedIn, follow Rachel, Lachey and Ben, connect with them, send them a message, ask them to chat more. We'll have this recording out. We'll have this on the Exit 5 podcast. If you are interested in this type of information, get on the Exit 5 email list. Join the community exit5.com I'm gonna give it up in my home office alone for Lachey and Ben and Rachel for giving us an hour of their time today to chat content. I appreciate you all and I will see you all later. Thanks everybody for coming. The chat was awesome. Great feedback on this one already. And we'll see you all later. Okay, bye bye. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode.

Of the Exit 5 podcast.

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