Episode 069 - Quality Is The New King With Content

It's 2022. You know what? We've made it. It's January. And it's just amazing to look at where technology has come, where marketing has gone, how the algorithms have changed just in the last 12 months, that what we are facing and what we're going into is really about quality. And that's what I want to talk with today's guest about is quality. And that, you know, the underlying idea is that just putting out content for the sake of putting out content is not going to cut it anymore. And it comes down to investing your time, your money, your resources in top quality content. And Google recognizes that and their algorithm changes have allowed for that. I'm excited to be talking to James, the VP of Growth at Codeless.io. Now they are a content marketing agency and they've worked with, with such companies as monday.com. I know when I talked to James, he said they were putting out a large amount of quality content in a in a very short period of time for them and really helped them scale in leaps and bounds. Now James is in the UK and he is an entrepreneur-featured copywriter. He led inbound marketing teams in Vancouver before going remote as a director of editorial and now the VP of growth for Codeless where he focuses on internal brand growth as well as managing client strategy. So I had a great talk with James and we covered a lot of topics around content marketing. So let's get right to it. James, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk to us here on the show. Now I know you are an expert in the content marketing side, and that's what we really want to cover in today's episode is content marketing, the importance of it, and where you see things going, uh, you know, into 2022 and even beyond, if that sounds great.

Absolutely. Thank you very much for having me, Shaun.

Excellent. So first of all, before we talk more about, about who you are and your company, tell us first what your definition of inbound is.

Oh, that's a hell of a question. Um, okay. Inbound for me, I always like to use the idea, um, merit-based marketing, the idea that you are generating awareness for your brand, um, by creating, by giving them a good reason. Um, so inbound is the idea as opposed to outbound that people are coming to you and ideally they're coming to you for a very good reason as opposed to you going to them with advertising, um, and et cetera. Uh, so that's kind of the core of it is creating high quality something that attracts people to you.

That's a great definition. Now I know a lot of businesses, they, they tend to focus, you know, more so easily on, on outbound, you know, paid ads and trying to put their message in front of people. Um, but you know, when it comes to this inbound marketing and, you know, content marketing, this is not a, a quick kind of process, right? This takes a bit of time to develop. Would you agree?

Yeah, absolutely. Which is, I mean, for me, you know, working for a content agency, a content production, content marketing agency, that's probably our biggest hurdle to that we need to like get over with clients is the idea of like, this can be extremely profitable. It's one of, if not the most profitable marketing campaigns or growth campaigns that you can engage in, but it's not going to happen tomorrow. In fact, it's probably not going to happen this month. Um, and for a lot of people, especially, you know, in early stage businesses, they're wanting those quick wins. There's nothing wrong with that. But if we talk about, you know, early stage or small businesses with low budgets, um, this is one of the most, you know, one of the most positive ROIs you can get is through inbound and content. It's just going to take you a second to get there. And a lot of businesses, especially early stage, they're impatient and that's a legitimate thing. So, you know, it's, it's part of the conversation for sure that we have to have with clients.

What's the benefit of having a really good inbound content strategy?

Well, let's go back to the merit-based idea, right? If you're attracting people to you through the creation of great content, the creation of great podcasts, webinars, blog content, white papers, industry reports, whatever it is, you, the, your prospect's first touchpoint with you is an extremely positive one. It's not, I got hit by an ad and then I came to a super optimized landing page that was throwing pop-ups at me, whatever, whatever. It's this brand delivered value to me the first time I ever interacted with them. And why they may not necessarily, you know, convert that first time, they'll go away. And then if you're retargeting or if they're typing in related searches into Google and they see you again, then they have a positive association with your brand, which is why it's such a core component. Like I talk about merit-based inbound marketing because that is, you are earning and having positive interactions with people right off the bat. And however, whatever you do with them down the line, that first interaction is the core one that they're going to remember, you know, until they buy.

Absolutely. And I think a lot of people may think of, you know, when we're talking about content marketing, you know, blog posts and being found in search, that's only a small part of it. I mean, I, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, there's other touch points for inbound other than just coming up in a search, correct?

There are, I would say, absolutely. I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that the mass majority of businesses are investing significantly in SEO-oriented content and they should be. The creation of high volumes of SEO-oriented content is absolutely, again, I'll use the word core. It's, it is integral to a successful inbound content strategy. However, you're absolutely right. And this is especially going to be relevant in '22. And it, you know, it has been for the past couple of years. Video content, podcast content, webinars. I would say video is, you know, I remember reading an article in 2017 or something that video is the next big thing. Video is the next big thing. I don't know how else to— it's still the next big thing. The problem is that no one's done it well for the past 4 years. So we said it's going to be the next big thing and no one invested heavily in it. There are— there's more search volume on YouTube than there's ever been for educational content. So, you know, at our content agency, we are, we have an entire video branch that is creating high-quality video content for our clients on top of written content. So no, blog is not the only avenue for success in inbound, but on top of video, on top of webinars and podcasts, I would say that is still 75 to 80% of what businesses are investing in, and rightfully so.

Now, you said something interesting in there. You said, you know, we've been saying since 2017 that video is the next big thing, but you also said just people haven't done it well. What makes great video content in your opinion?

I'm looking at you right now and you have a professional mic, and so do I in front of me. I'm working with a Blue Yeti, or I'm not, I'm not an affiliate, but like it's a, it's a, it's a legitimate microphone that allows you and I to have clear audio quality when we're— when I jump on a podcast. I have AirPods in my ears. I have headphones in my ears, but that's for you to talk to me. Audio quality is such a hugely important thing. Video, the video, you know, the resolution of the camera you're using and then like editing that content succinctly and well and with somebody who knows what they're doing. Those are core components. The technical components of producing podcasts, webinars, and video is more than 50% of what you're going to get in return from those efforts. The content you include is of course hugely important. And I don't want to like just, you know, spew meaningless nothingness here so long as we have great quality content or, you know, great quality audio. But that is, I think, the main thing that brands have continually failed to invest in is if you get the technical side right, you're more than halfway there.

Absolutely. You know, and one thing that I like about video, my background is in video production, so I have a high focus on that part of it. And one of the things that really stands out is people will be a little more lenient with lower quality video if the audio is great. But if you could have, you know, 4K high quality video and not so great audio, and it's a distraction, so your message gets lost in that part of it too. So, and you know, and with what we've been working with, with certain clients, you know, being able to shoot in video, you can then repurpose that in other formats, transcribe it, use it in a podcast, you know, all those different elements.

Cut it into clips for social, cut it into clips for the top of your blog article, cut into, you know, YouTube versus social media. Like it's absolutely, and you can do the same with blog articles. You know, you can repurpose a blog, please, a blog content into a video and then the video into social media clips. And then., you know, the blog article into a slide deck. You know, it's, you don't have to use whatever value you're putting out there. The idea of merit-based marketing is creating high-quality content, but you can repurpose that high-quality content in, you know, a dozen different kind of platforms and different types for sure.

So where should somebody get started if they want to really build this merit-based content, um, strategy? Um, aside from obviously, you know, contacting you guys and having you guys help them with it, but where should they start to get their, their mindset around the starting points with it?

It's an interesting question. It's an interesting idea. If your question— I'll start here. If your question had been, James, what is going to be big in 2022? Unfortunately, that ties really closely into how somebody gets started. Because it's going to be really, really big in 2022 is— we all know that there is more content being published today than there was yesterday. And there's so much content being published tomorrow that it's extremely difficult to compete. Google is getting very, very good at identifying what good content looks like and how it sounds. As a result, starting, um, starting to create great content is more difficult today than it has ever been. Um, so if you're just going to get started with, with content production, I would start slow. And I would invest in every single piece more than you think you need to. We have clients who do hundreds of pieces a month, 100 pieces a month, which is, you know, they have massive marketing budgets and we do custom images for them and all the rest of it. And that's, you know, a good use of their time and their budgets. But we're able to create high-quality content at that volume without having that quality slip. Small businesses who are just getting started, who are kind of feeling their way into it. If you're not going to throw thousands and thousands of thousands of dollars at this by using a content production agency, you need to at least throw significant investment into each piece because, and I know it's scary because we all recognize that with SEO, you know, you throw something and you hope that Google notices it fly past them and grabs it and sticks it onto the first or second, the first page of Google, you know, um, So there is, there is that, that game component of it that is really scary for people. However, the fact of the matter is that in 2022, Google is not going to even see your content if it's anything less than stellar. So start slow, create stellar content, and you'll give yourself a better chance for Google to see it. You can't get away with starting quick, publishing 20 articles per month that are 800 words and that you threw together on your, you know, commute in today on the train. It needs to be— I'm sorry to say, it needs to be significant investment per piece. So absolute truth to the quality over quantity method for early stage businesses, so long as you can— I mean, content at volume that is quality is far better than content that is exclusively quality and you have no volume whatsoever. Because again, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's a, there's a certain amount of, it's, it's a, it's a volume game. And I recognize this contradictory to what I just said, because I guess what I'm saying is that Google will only be rewarding high quality content. Um, if you are creating 100 pieces of high quality content every month, then 50% of them should perform really well if you're also investing them. But you're not going to get anywhere unless you're creating, creating quality content. So quality is the start of it, and quantity is a very close second place.

Well, I hope you're enjoying this conversation with James from Codeless.io. We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to be talking about what does he mean by quality content. Now, if you've been looking for resources in your business, whether it's the best tools, the best equipment for podcasting, shooting videos, copywriting, we have a page on our website at Blue Cow Marketing at bluecowmarketing.ca/tools. And this is where we list all of the equipment that we use for all of our projects and our clients' projects, as well as the best deals on tools, softwares, and all the different resources that you need. So if you're in the market for upping your game and increasing the quality of the content that you are creating, you'll check this page out. Bluemarketing.ca/tools. Now let's get back to our conversation with James. Let's dive a little deeper into this. When you use that word quality, what do you mean by quality content?

Quality content has, um, a few core components. First and foremost, the page that it's on needs to be beautiful and have, um, great user experience. Uh, that's even more important since spring of 2020— sorry, spring of 2021, when the page experience algorithm was updated by Google, which basically says that they are identifying pages that have low load speeds, massive images, pop-ups, etc., as less trustworthy and less worthy of being ranked than pages that, you know, have, you know, are quick to load and are really easy for a user and a visitor to get information from. We can talk about the in-depths, in and outs of the SEO algorithm all the time. But, so first and foremost, it's that the blog article needs to be beautiful. Then you need to include custom images or high-quality images that are relevant and eye-catching and branded., and that you have had a graphic designer work on. You can use, you know, screenshots, absolutely. And you should use screenshots of, you know, of analytics platforms or whatever, whatever. But you should also be making sure that if a blog article is the face of your brand, the first thing that a prospect sees, then that face needs to be, you know, smiling. And that's custom images, high quality, page design, et cetera, et cetera. Then the quality needs to be really good. You need to be adding something to the conversation, uh, not just regurgitating, you know, what Seth Godin said last week or what, you know, HubSpot said, you know, last month, um, which can be a challenge when you're doing volume, but that's a core component of it that, you know, high quality content means that you're adding value and you're delivering whatever the reader is looking for and more. Um, and then, you know, there's a component here that I'm going to, you know, kind of shoot myself in the foot to a certain extent. But high quality content also looks like content has links to it. And that's social media to a certain extent. But, you know, we talk about the Google algorithm. Link building is still a core component of content marketing success. It really is talking about the variables that affect, you know, the factors in SEO. Links are still the— it's the vote in your content's favor in the election that is SEO. So driving, you know, creating high-quality content that looks great and the page experience is great and delivers value is the first and very, you know, that's a major component of it. But making sure that that content is seen by posting on social media, using your newsletter, driving traffic to it, and then Yeah, getting some links up, throwing it to a link building agency or having somebody on your team who is invested in outreach to drive, you know, links back to your blog content and back to your site and back to your site. That's still absolutely massive. And I've seen our clients who, who if so, Coldlist works with a, we have, we have a link building like sister company, User.. And we work very closely with them and all of our contracts kind of combine the two. So content production and link building, because it's such a major component of it. And the clients who don't use Usurp, again, I don't work for Usurp. I work for the content side, but the clients that don't use the link building stuff simply don't see success anywhere near as quickly as the ones that do. And I kind of wish it were otherwise. I kind of wish that high quality content could stand on its own and win on its own. And it can, it just takes forever. If you want to, if you want to see success with inbound marketing in even remotely the short term, like 3 to 6 months, you have to be, you have to be driving some links to it.

Absolutely. So you mentioned your company Codeless. Let's talk about that a bit more. Tell me what you guys do.

Codeless is a content production agency. I say content production rather than content marketing, because we are devoted to the creation of high-quality content rather than, you know, your entire marketing strategy. The idea is that businesses, you know, know the value of content marketing, and they come to us to create that, the content component of it, then they promote it into the newsletters and optimize the funnel or whatever. Themselves. I, as VP of Growth at Codeless, am responsible for the internal kind of growth of the brand, but also our clients, kind of the, the content creation strategy as far as like, which topics are we going to be working on? How long are they going to be? What needs to be in these, those topics? I would say that what we do is I think, I think what we do better than a lot of brands is actually volume, um, because we have set up— we're a fully remote company, and so the processes that we've built to create content are very, um, clear and delineated. So we have the pipe that like produces content, and we can throw new writers into it who aren't massively familiar with our brand, but if they understand the process of how we create content, then they can do it very easily and very quickly, which allows us to bring in a lot of new writers without a lot of friction. So we create long-form, high-quality content at volume. And then of course, we work closely with a link building company to make sure that that content has the best chance to rank on top of the quality of it. So that's kind of the core of what we do. And yeah, we work with a lot of early-stage to enterprise. We work with like, you know, startups that have just done a round of funding and are in the fintech or SaaS space. We've worked with, you know, we are, one of the cool success stories was Money.com in the past a while. They're a sizable project management company. I was working with them and growing their, we did like 750 articles for them in 9 months. They wanted to do volume. They wanted to do quality. They wanted to do quality at quantity. But yeah, it's fun work for sure.

Excellent. So I'm just on the website, Codeless.io, and I got a popup here for a free video course you guys have as a as an opt-in here. And I think that's targeted for people who want to learn how to scale their, their content production as a small team.

Yeah.

So great opt-in for that. We'll check that out. My last question before we wrap up here, I know we kind of alluded to it a little bit in the episode, but being 2022, what should business owners that really want to get serious about their marketing, maybe they haven't done any content or they've done some and maybe not that well, What should they be focusing on? You hear a lot of people talking about, you know, you know, video or positioning yourself for voice search and stuff like that. But in your opinion, what's the main marketing focus that's going to really reign supreme this year?

The short answer is still quality. And that's a bigger answer than just that single word. Video is going to be a huge part of it. And again, yeah, I did allude to this. I think for businesses who, who are just getting rolling with this, or who have invested in it, but not necessarily seen success with it, the biggest variable that I can really hit on every time is invest in each article. If that means that you're doing a video introduction, which we've done in the past for clients where like there's a video that talks about what the article is going to cover, and that's at the top of the page. Make sure that each article that you have, you know, includes great, beautiful, professionally designed images. If you're using screenshots, make sure that those screenshots, you know, are high quality, high resolution, and then compress them because you don't want your page experience to be too, too, you know, you want to emphasize page experience. Um, the short answer is You're gonna need to do it all. And if that means that you do fewer pieces, do fewer pieces. Don't skimp on production. And if you don't have the time or energy or resources to do that, don't be afraid to go to the professionals who do. There are a lot of great content production agencies out there who, because of the difficulty in doing this, especially at scale, Um, like, there's a lot that goes into producing an article, you know. It's not something that you can just flippantly do, and definitely not in 2022. So don't be afraid to say, listen, I'm, I'm not— I don't do the electricals of my house. I get somebody who knows how to do this in to do the electricals of my house, otherwise I'm gonna burn myself. So don't be afraid to bring in a professional, um, like you do with, you know, any other elements of your business. That would probably be the primary takeaway for me. Don't skimp on quality.

That's great advice, James. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about this. This is very interesting. And you know, what you've shared with us today, I think is going to resonate with our, with our listeners. And again, Codeless.io is the website for all the links with the podcast and with this episode. And again, is there anything you'd like to, to leave us with?

Any words of wisdom? Words of wisdom. I mean, I think I've said it all, honestly. The words of wisdom are that I'm sorry it's so complicated. I am sorry that you need to invest as much as you do. I'm sorry that the fact of the matter is that you need to drive links and they're expensive and you need to create great images and they're expensive and you need to like invest in the quality of the content itself. And that can be expensive too, to get vertical experts in. Um, but that is the fact of the matter. And once you do all that, there, it is still evergreen content is still going to be driving. If you get one of these articles to the first page that you invest in, and it's scary up front, but once it's there, you don't have to touch it. And it can drive thousands and thousands and thousands thousands of visitors to your site every month without you even being involved. Um, it is still a massive win. It just takes a little bit more to win now.

Running your own business is hard. Those long hours, the doubt, The challenge to meet demands, but you're resilient, strong, dedicated. You do all of this for more than profits, success, or money. You do it because you care. You care about the people who shop here, eat there, drink here. You care about your community. You care about your team. Despite all else, You care. No matter what life throws your way, you power through it with grit and perseverance. You are the epitome of dedication. You are a small business owner. For this reason, Blue Cow Marketing salutes you.