Episode Summary
A lot of brands are telling stories that are only relevant to customers ten years ago. To be on top of your content game now, you have to iterate and control the delivery of your content.
Many companies write blogs that nobody ever sees. That’s because they probably do not own their content or distribution. But what if they have it all but still don’t have a content engine that works? How should they expand distribution and make buyers believe in their content?
In this episode of Content Logistics, our host Camille Trent welcomes Chris Walker, the CEO, and Founder of Refine Labs. They get into the logistics of content marketing, the importance of distribution and forcing functions, and explain why content marketing should be owned in-house.
Guest Profile
- Name: Chris Walker
- What he does: He is the CEO and Founder of Refine Labs.
- Company: Refine Labs
- Noteworthy: Chris is the Founder and CEO of Refine Labs, a progressive demand generation firm that challenges the status quo in B2B marketing. Before launching Refine Labs, Chris led marketing at two B2B firms, where he built the foundation of his unique perspective on demand generation.
Key Insights
- To create good content, you need to fill four roles in your marketing department. Chris believes that you need four people in terms of marketing: the subject matter expert, the architect, the marketing manager, and the person (or people) responsible for post-production of the assets. They can help you create good content in a repeatable way. "You have people that are responsible for the post-production of the assets. They're delivered to the subject matter expert, who will then post them through their profile on those platforms. And then from there, you have distribution feedback loops, and all that stuff is happening from the subject matter expert or the architect."
- Forcing functions are a significant part of content creation. When it comes to creating content, there are many moving parts. In terms of the logistics of content creation, Chris firmly believes in forcing functions or deadlines for things that maintain a stable rhythm of content. According to him, that part of creating content is very important. "We'll be recording episode 98 of our Demand Gen live on Tuesday. We started that during the first week of the COVID lockdown in March of 2020 and have continued to use that as an anchor, and we know a hundred or more people are going to show up every week. It creates accountability for us to show up, produce a good event, and think about the topics deeply, allowing for all the other stuff once you do the event. It's the feeder for all of the other content. [...] I suggest having some level of recurrence, ideally every week, with an audience. In my experience, it creates ultimate accountability."
- Distribution is a vital part of the content engine. Just because you make good content doesn't mean it will work. That's why Chris notes that distribution is super important. "If you can, think about how many companies write blogs that nobody ever sees — none of their actual buyers ever see them. To make micro-adjustments, you’ve gotta be okay with doing things that no one's ever done before and be okay with failing. And failing is nothing more than trying something that no one's ever done before and learning something that no one else is willing to do. And so you create massive gains and things like that. A lot of the stuff that I've done, nobody paved the way to do this on LinkedIn. You've got to figure it out on your own."
Episode Highlights
Creating Content In-house vs Outsourcing
“Outsourcing it to somebody that’s going to write you something like a blog is not going to deliver the amount of subject matter expertise and unique point of view that’s required to sell an enterprise B2B product today.
[…] The second piece is that when you’re creating content and then distributing it and engaging in a community or a social environment, you collect a lot of ongoing customer research and insights that fuel what to talk about next.
The third reason is that it undeniably creates a long-term competitive advantage in your business that can’t be replicated in any other way.
[…] The fourth one, I think, is the most obvious, which is that to win today, you need volume and consistency. It’s going to be prohibitively expensive to do that through outsourcing.
And then the last piece that I think is super interesting is the ability to use content to test your messaging and ideas. We do this a lot here, where certain concepts get created in real-time because the audience is asking questions, and then you provide answers to them. So you have this exciting back-and-forth dynamic, where when people don’t understand things, you can rapidly clarify your messaging.”
A Set of Skills Needed for Good Marketing Content
“You need the subject matter expert. That’s one, and the key criteria is they have credibility with your buyer — your potential buyer would trust and engage with them.
[…] Another one is the architect. An architect is a person who gets customers’ insights, solidifies the story, orchestrates the topics discussed, manages distribution, and collects feedback — basically a leader who orchestrates the entire thing.
Next, you need someone who’s able to run the events. We use a framework to create recorded, live events because we get live questions from the audience. We get real-time feedback that doubles as an event strategy, and potentially an influencer strategy. So there are a lot of benefits to why we’ve done it that way. Still, somebody needs to run the events.
You have this whole post-production, which could be one person, it could be outsourced, or it could be an internal team. That is typically video editors. We use the base content of natural video for social. You have the long-form podcast here, and then it’s going to get broken down into micro chunks for LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, or some of the main distribution channels that we have right now. As we’ve continued to scale volume, we’ve started to get people that are specific to one channel.”
Stacking Channels to Make Additional Gains in Distribution
“We started with LinkedIn. I honestly started with text posts; then, we converted to video because I was hitting a wall and not being able to write all the time. So I would show up and get writer’s block, and obviously, coming up with a new idea every day for an extended period is very difficult.
[…] From a YouTube perspective, we’d rip the raw long form that we would use on a podcast and use that with video for YouTube. It’s honestly not a picture-perfect strategy for YouTube because people monitor watch-time and things like that. I do it with my video on LinkedIn. If I cared about the platform’s algorithm that much, I wouldn’t post videos on LinkedIn. The same thing on YouTube; some platforms have certain things in the algorithm. It doesn’t mean that you have to follow all of them. We have a long-form video; we also published three short-form videos that are more topic-centered. They go out on YouTube and are optimized to get maximum watch-time. Now, I’m starting to experiment quite a lot with TikTok.”
How Do Feedback Loops Inform Your Content Strategy?
“This is everything. You are putting stuff out there and seeing how people react, what questions they’re asking, what they don’t understand. When you’re speaking at a live event, you say something, and you see 20 people on the Zoom screen nod their heads, or see a bunch of people look confused — those are signals that you need to take, think about, and adjust. That’s why people struggle with this — it’s all qualitative.”