Episode Summary
Content marketing is used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media. And it can be one of the most effective tools to help businesses grow.
But not all companies are successful at creating a content marketing strategy. Some often focus too much on tactics and not enough on strategy, while others target too broad an audience. Also, the fact that different types of companies should have different marketing strategies is ignored.
Fortunately, there are content marketing agencies that strive to create the best content for the web. One of them is Animalz, which provides high-quality content marketing to enterprise companies, startups, and VC firms.
In this episode of Content Logistics, our host Camille Trent welcomes Ryan Law, VP of Content at Animalz. Camille and Ryan get into the importance of a content marketing strategy and the right approach to it. In addition, they discuss thought leadership as one of the tools for content strategy and how to create a content marketing strategy for different types of companies.
Guest Profile
- Name: Ryan Law
- What he does: Ryan is the VP of content at Animalz.
- Company: Brendan: Animalz
-
Noteworthy: Ryan is a content marketer who's worked with a heap of startups and enterprise companies including Google, GoDaddy, Clearbit, ProfitWell, and Hotjar. He has been a writer, content strategist, team lead, marketing director, VP, and agency co-founder.
Ryan is currently the VP of content at the remote marketing agency Animalz. He is also the author of two novels, the host of the Ash Tales podcast, an amateur landscape photographer, and a guitarist for The Schrödinger Effect, an electronic-pop-rock band.
Key Insights
- Approaching content marketing from a channel-first perspective is wrong. With the development of digitization and the online sphere of life, the influence of social media on most businesses has also increased. When a company creates a content marketing strategy, a social media presence is a mandatory step. Ryan, however, points out that people often have the wrong approach to content marketing and that the channel is not the content marketing strategy. "The thing I see people do the most is approach content marketing from this channel-first perspective. They start by thinking, 'We wanna do SEO. How do we do that?' Or, 'We wanna do thought leadership. What's the process of getting started?' And there's actually this huge missing step, right at the beginning, which is, 'As a business at whatever stage of growth we're at the moment, what is the hardest problem we are facing? And is there an application of content marketing that can help with that?' You should always be led by whatever the problem is towards the growth, towards the channel you wanna pick, and that kind of nuance, that conversation. I don't see much of that happening because social media algorithms don't reward it. It's too complicated and too nuanced."
- Thought leadership is one of the tools for content strategy. Animalz is a content marketing agency that provides content strategy and creation to B2B SaaS companies, venture capitalists, and other tech companies that are well known for thought leadership content. According to Ryan, thought leadership is just one tool in the toolbox they recommend to customers, but it's not something everyone wants and embraces. "We sometimes work with companies that have similar business models, and actually, for them, thought leadership is a great thing to do. Sometimes early-stage founders are a great example of that. In their case, building their personal brand is one of the most valuable things they can do because maybe they're trying to raise funding, or maybe they want to communicate their vision for the industry. And all of that is more important and more immediate than generating a bunch of search traffic. But that's not always the case. Some companies come to us, and they just want as much organic traffic as possible. That is totally the right thing to do."
- Email is very important in a content marketing strategy. Although email used to be the only means of online communication, many rejected and neglected it and favored social media over it. Ryan's opinion is that email is very important in a content marketing strategy, even though the industry says it's dying. "From my experience at Animalz and especially thought leadership content, I think other people's email lists are one of the biggest distribution channels we have because, fundamentally, these are creators; their product is the newsletter — the curated, thoughtful selection of links and ideas they share every week — and the way they grow their list is by having that be really, really good. So one of the things we've done with customers, and ourselves, is take a little research project and work out, 'What are the ten biggest industry newsletters, who are like the substack influences of this industry, and let's build relationships with them.'"
Episode Highlights
Creating Content Marketing Strategy For a SaaS Company
“Two factors are the most immediate and most important. So one of them is average contract value. How much, on average, are people spending with you? Because, obviously, the point of a business is that you serve a market; you build something great, but you also get enough revenue from doing that to hire people, have a company, and create something that didn’t exist before. So that is the kind of core constraint or the core unit economics. How much, on average, do people spend with you? ‘Cause then you can work out how many people you need to come and buy something from you. And that’s the start of the calculation.
The other part of that is the buying process. So how do they go about spending that money? In some cases, that can be an immediate thing. Like, I was looking for a pen; I may not even need a pen, I may not have this whole buying process — I may literally see a pen on the internet, and I will buy it because it’s low stakes enough that I don’t mind doing it. At the other end of the spectrum, there are companies where maybe they’ll close five customers a year, and those accounts can be millions of dollars.
And the total number of people who even exist in the world capable of buying those products is tiny. It could be in the hundreds, for example, and the odds of them Googling about their problems and using that as a mechanism for purchase are basically non-existent.”
Creating Content Marketing Strategy For a Consulting Agency
“The status quo of how most agencies generate a lot of their business was inbound marketing. So a case in point is the agency I co-founded, where I did the traffic thing. I tried to rank for as many keywords as I possibly could and get as much traffic into the site because I’ve very much bought into the inbound ethos, and I thought that was how we would grow. And I know some agencies do that and actually grow on the back of that. They get lots of people at the top of the funnel. And then I think the key process there is having really good lead qualification and lead scoring.
Creating Content Marketing Strategy For a Solopreneur
“If you’re an agency, you would most likely have a bigger budget, and that will unlock some different types of content that you couldn’t do as a solopreneur. So I think the content efficiency angle as a solopreneur is probably the most important aspect of this. If I were doing that, I would focus solely on thought leadership, and I’d probably try to distribute it in places where I know my target audience hung out a lot. I want them to understand that I’m an expert. I know this stuff. I want to demonstrate my experience and the success I’ve gotten from people like them. I wouldn’t bother going broader; I’d go as focused and niched down as I possibly could, probably spend loads of time hanging out on Slack groups and little Twitter threads.”
