Maximizing Your Content’s Mileage

Kate Adams, VP of Marketing at Drift, and MarketMuse Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Jeff Coyle cover everything you need to know about repurposing content. After the webinar, Kate participated in an ask-me-anything session in our Slack Community, The Content Strategy Collective (join here). Here are the webinar notes followed by a transcript of the AMA.

The Content Life Cycle

Think about content like squeezing the lemons to make sure you get all the juice out of it. Drift took an unpublished e-book of ours and used it to create a successful webinar. This, in turn, generated demand for that e-book. Plus, that information was used in multiple presentation documents as well as a blog post.

Where Does Repurposing Come In?

Repurposing starts at the planning stage. Drift runs pretty tight and integrated marketing campaign process. On a quarterly basis they identify key themes for key personas. From there they identify their offers.

Are You Losing Out On Potential Customers?

Sometimes a small lift is all that’s required to turn one piece of content into a multitude that can hit any point in the funnel. At the top of the funnel, you need to figure out how to educate people on the problem and make them aware that the problem exists.

Then you need to educate people that there is a better way to solve the problem and that the solution exists. What’s the value of the solutions? What do people need to look out for? Which solution is best for their situation?

Meet Your Buyers Where They Are

Repurposing content helps with brand and category building as it repeats a consistent message; something that’s crucial for this purpose.

Convert One Piece of Content Across Multiple Mediums

The industry has turned everything into an acronym; MQL, SQL, CRM, and the list goes on. It’s easy to lose sight that there are live people with real problems they’re looking to fix. It’s marketing’s job to help with that conversation.

The modes in which people want to consume content is wildly different. Some people are visual learners, there are those who learn best through audio while others prefer text.

Incorporate Conversational Marketing

Drift takes existing content and modifies specifically for account-based-marketing (ABM) use. It’s not a heavy lift and creates opportunity for conversation.

YouTube has surpassed Google as the #1 search engine. If you’re not posting video content about your content, you’re missing the mark.

Drift embeds some of their e-books into conversational content pages so that readers can ask questions (and get answers) about the material in real-time as they work their way through it.

Synchronize Your Marketing Campaign Infrastructure

Having sufficient staff with the right skills and maturity level is just the beginning. The campaign level is where everything comes together to ensure all teams are working in unison. Getting the content into the hands of the sales team requires them understanding what to push now and why.

AMA

Are there any marketers/publications you follow or read regularly?

I try to consume as much as I possibly can right now I am listening to “What you do is who you are” on Audible, I try to join as many CMO/VP of Marketing round tables as I can get into, and I’m a big podcast fan…Seeking Wisdom David Cancel’s podcast is back, one of my faves…and Untamed is a book I just finished.

What are the biggest misses you see people make with their chatbots? What about Facebook messenger or SMS channels?

Biggest misses on chatbots, not using the conversational marketing blueprint… fundamentally thinking through engage, understand, and recommend. The generic message of “Hey there let me know if you need anything?” As opposed to “Hey “company name” we work with other Financial Services companies to help them generate more leads every day. Want to learn how we do it?”

What is Drift’s process of creating content and repurposing it? How does one begin to put together structure behind this process?

I break down our process pretty deeply in that webinar, so definitely check out the recording when it’s available. In terms of making content marketing more human, we really want to make all marketing more human. We think that one of the biggest problems with marketing today is that all we worry about are acronyms so we forget a lot that the reality is that these acronyms are people.

When you are constantly reminding yourself of that, then you do things differently. AI is an important part of what we offer because it helps both the customer and the company side. The customer gets an answer immediately to their question and the company has a solution on chat that never takes a break, sleeps, or goes on vacation.

Our conversational content offering also makes content marketing more human by allowing you to start conversations right alongside your PDF. So rather than someone downloading something from you and running away and you never know what happens, they can talk to you as they are consuming your content.

What is the difference — if there is any — between publishing pillar content like your product marketing guide for 2020 vs publishing a blog post?

We think of pillar content as the content that we’re all in on, making sure that it gets to the top spot. We think of complimentary blog content as content that helps that pillar content get there, so any time we’re talking about a related topic on the blog, we’re linking back to the pillar content. Here’s an example: https://www.drift.com/conversational-marketing/

How has Drift adapted their content strategy in light of COVID-19?

Good question; from a content perspective, I think early days, it was just trying to keep up with everything, really. Marketing was shifting so quickly, and we had to shift everything we planned to write about on a dime. With all of the movements happening around the world, we shifted again and made sure that we were using our platform to give people of color a platform and a voice.

Celebrated LGBTQ marketers and salespeople for pride, and we opened our blog and other content channels to more guest posts from underrepresented people. Our content team killed it at that. Now that things are “Normalized” a little tiny bit, we’re talking about all things digital. Digital events, digital transformation, digital advertising, creating great teams in an all-digital world. etc.

Are there any specific events or general formats that stand out as a win?

My biggest advice is to watch this: https://www.drift.com/summit/revgrowth-virtual-experiences/ all about virtual events from people WAY smarter and funnier than me.

Other event headlines for you would be we’re seeing success in large scale events like this one ^^ when we go in with partners on it that are aligned with us on creating a great experience. We’re also seeing great success in smaller more intimate events with people that are at higher job titles within the organization — big ABM play for us with these and they are also great for customers.

As leaders in AI, how is Drift positioning their product against the narrative that AI is taking over human jobs?

We think of AI as the doing the work humans don’t want to be doing, so  humans can get back to the work they love doing — or doing things like sleeping, going on vacation, spending time with their loved ones etc. The value of AI is that it never sleeps. Some of my favorite messages from our customers are “Drift just booked a meeting for me while I was sleeping.”

How do you leverage/repurpose content for your sales team?

Jeff and I dove into this a lot on the webinar so be sure to check out the recording. We’re using Highspot for sales enablement content. We also always think about three things for our reps: 1. What is this thing? 2. Why does this thing matter to me? 3. How do I use it or follow up with someone that consumed it?

What tips do you have to help ensure that all departments stick to the brand message and value, especially as organizations grow?

You have to nail what Who we are, what we do, how we do it and recite it to your company every single place. Your execs need to say it every time they present internally and externally, it needs to be in every deck. Reps and sets is how you nail that.

How do you know something is worth repurposing? How do you choose what to extend?

I’d argue if something isn’t worth repurposing that you are creating net new then why are you creating it? For older stuff go through your stuff that is consumed the most and create it in ever mode you can audio, video, blog, webinar, events.

Can you give some additional insight into what type of content is best for top, middle, and bottom of funnel?

I think about it like this. Engage and educate are top, research is middle evaluation and justification are bottom.