Episode Summary
Welcome to the new episode of Slice and Dice. We decided to start April by analyzing the five best-performing pieces on the Juice in March.
Our guest on this episode is Mariya Delano, the founder and operator of Kalyna Marketing. We first asked Mariya to share her take on AI and how it influences content marketing. Then, we switched to our five pieces, discussing the similarities between the companies that created them (Brave, the HubSpot Hacks team, Jebbit, Hotjar, and MarketMuse) and what made these pieces stand out. We also focus on the best performing article from the previous month: 16 Content Brief Templates by MarketMuse.
Guest Profile
- Name: Mariya Delano
- What she does: Mariya is the founder and operator of Kalyna Marketing.
- Company: Kalyna Marketing
- Noteworthy: Mariya is a content marketing consultant for technical brands.
Key Insights
- Practical and simple headlines contribute to an article's success. There's no such thing as one-size-fits-all when it comes to titles, as it all depends on your brand's voice and style. However, the data from The Juice shows that straightforward headlines boost engagement. Even our guest Mariya says, ''My brain is still very academic writing trained, and I think of titles the way I think of a good essay title or a good academic paper title, which means it needs to tell you what it's about and whether you're the relevant audience, but mostly, it needs to be a little salacious and a little scandalous, and it needs you to stop and think, 'Wait, what are they talking about?' [...] Which works well when you have a targeted audience and it works well when you're just trying to stop the scroll, but it does not work well when people are looking for something specific and practical.''
- Creating quality content makes these brands celebrities of the content world. When we analyzed the best-performing pieces, one fact stood out: the creators are companies that have built prominent communities and have a substantial following across different channels but don't dominate search. ''I recognized every single one of these brands. I know about Brave. I know they're a browser. I've seen HubSpot Hacks around, even though I don't watch the videos. I know they make guide videos. I knew about Hotjar. I knew about MarketMuse. I've been on three out of the five of these websites before and read their blogs here and there. So it was surprising to me that I knew every single one. And none of them are the Semrush of the world or anything. So it's pretty interesting.''
- Four out of the five content pieces are standard, SEO-optimized articles, none of which we can refer to as thought leadership. Instead, we have unpretentious, how-to articles that meet their purpose. The HubSpot piece is the exception because it is a guide. ''The standard format of, 'This is what this is, this is why it would benefit you. Here's an example. Here are some options. And at the end, here's how you can use our product instead’ fitting into the list. So all four are in the same bucket of this top of the funnel, middle of the funnel content that's SEO-optimized.''
Episode Highlights
Five Top-Performing Pieces on the Juice in March 2023
#5 Google Ads Alternatives by Brave
#4 The Ultimate HubSpot Workflow Overview 2023 from HubSpot Hacks
#3 Build Loyalty Through Customer Engagement Strategies from Jebbit.
#2 Five Best Examples of User Personas by Hotjar
#1 16 Content Brief Templates from MarketMuse
The Similarities That Make These Brands Recognizable
”There is a commonality between the three of them. So the top three, Jebbit, Hotjar, and MarketMuse, I know about all of these the same way. So it was a combination of seeing something about them on LinkedIn, posts by their team, or somebody mentioning them.
Or I’ve heard about them on Slack in marketing communities, and for all three of them, I’ve seen them in both places, both on LinkedIn and in Slack, when people talk about tools and discuss certain companies. I know that I’ve seen the names of all three of them multiple times across the last five, six months.”
Analyzing the Best Performing Piece: 16 Content Brief Templates by MarketMuse
”I wanna give them so much credit for how freaking cute the illustration is. And I was looking through what their other illustrations look like. And they’re great. […] That caught my attention because it’s not a stock photo. It is an actual proper unique illustration with good colors. A humanoid robot looks cute and appealing, and I love it; I saw it immediately.
And then their title is super practical. It’s ‘content brief templates.’ I feel like templates are marketer candy. And 16 is a big number. So I get intrigued. They spent more than 10 minutes putting these together. This should be good. […]
But I want to talk about the actual article now, and I need to preface this. I know this is going to sound mean, but it’s a compliment. I promise it is because, to me, this was fascinating. I’m going to start with why it sounds mean: I don’t think a human wrote any words in this article except the title. […]
And it straight up took me 15 minutes to read a single word, and I was doing that for this podcast where we would talk about the post. I don’t know if I would’ve looked at them otherwise, which is fascinating because this content worked. It was number one, the most popular. It worked on me.
I could see myself sending it to other people because the list is so good, and I don’t know what any of the words say. I’ve noticed multiple grammatical mistakes. I don’t think most of the words make much sense, and I don’t think it matters.
But they’re giving me the candy, and I can still leave. So you know what, in my book, that’s a successful deal because the article has templates. There are 16 templates; they’re all relevant.”
