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 in a saturated market, content marketing can help brands stand out from the competition and reach audiences, adding value by providing informative and engaging content to drive brand awareness, loyalty, and ultimately, sales.
But content marketing is not static, and it doesn’t look the same now as it did ten years ago — just as it won’t look the same in ten years. Today, content marketing comes in the form of websites, social media, podcasts, blogs, etc., and if you form your content marketing team, you must be careful in your selection, and choose only those who love the job.
In this episode of Content Logistics, our host Camille Trent welcomes Mark Kilens, the CMO of Airmeet. Mark and Camille get into the importance of content marketing and how to build a content marketing team. They discuss who are good marketers and what falls under the purview of the content department.
Guest Profile
- Name: Mark Kilens
- What he does: Mark is the CMO of Airmeet.
- Company: Airmeet
- Noteworthy: Mark has 15 years of marketing leadership experience in helping businesses use event-led growth to discover, engage, and grow more customers through immersive and integrated events across the customer journey. Mark joined Airmeet from Drift, where he served as VP of Content and Community. Before Drift, he served as VP of Marketing at HubSpot, where he founded HubSpot Academy, which helped HubSpot surpass $600 million in revenue. When he's not at Airmeet, Mark enjoys plenty of steak and lobster, a round of golf or two, and loves being on the snow or in the ocean.
Key Insights
- A great content marketer is genuinely passionate. If you build a content marketing team, you must be very careful when choosing who will be part of it. The success of the company today depends a lot on those people, so you shouldn't be hasty. According to Mark, you should hire people who have passion and believe in and genuinely love the job. "Great content marketers aren't just great at writing and editing and interviewing and critical thinking — all very important things — and some programmatic demand gen thinking, but also what they're really great at is taking that to the extreme. Sometimes, the best case is extreme passion and belief for that topic, that category, and translating that into content that they might create or co-create with someone else."
- A good content marketer has an entrepreneurial spirit. To be successful at content marketing, you need to be curious about the customers, the product, and the topic. Without that, you will hardly be an effective seller. Mark says that when interviewing anyone, it's very important for him to understand people's inner motivations, and those with an entrepreneurial spirit are preferred. "Entrepreneurs take risks. They're bold. They're curious. They're always trying to look at the world a little bit differently and figure things out. And so, one of my ultimate tests that I've seen to be successful when hiring content marketers is like, 'Does that person have some type of entrepreneurial endeavor?' It doesn't mean it has to be a business; it could be anything from, 'Look, I'm helping a local non-profit — to help them grow and to help them have a bigger impact in that local community.' That's entrepreneurship, in a way."
- Everyone needs to do content marketing. Although 20 years ago, content marketing was not that important, everything is about content these days. With the development of digitization and social media, content marketing is something you have to do. Mark notes that a content marketing whiz is one of the first three people you hire. "I'll give you my top three hires: a generalist in demand gen, a generalist in content marketing, and a generalist in product marketing. That's the golden triangle to me in the most fundamental terms. And then you could loop in a lot of other things into those if you want to."
Episode Highlights
What Innate Qualities Should a Content Marketer Have?
“Belief and passion are number one. Number two, I also ask a really important question around, ‘What is one of your personal principles or values?’ So what I mean by that is we all have these things that we believe deep down. They’re taught to us by our parents, a teacher, a mentor, or someone in sports, whatever. Who knows who teaches you these things, but you have them innately. […]
Belief in the brain, belief in the product, belief in the industry — super important. But I’m looking for these innate character traits that make up a great content marketer. So curiosity, someone who actually likes to build relationships. I’m not saying they have to be extroverted; you can be introverted but someone who likes learning and building relationships with other people; someone who’s also not afraid to take a risk and who’s actually comfortable with being uncomfortable.”
The Importance of a Demand Gen Person
“My first hire, if I were the founding person doing marketing on this team, I would hire a demand gen person. Because I know I would be able to create enough content through other folks. I would also be able to use freelancers, maybe an agency relationship, and be able to scale in that way initially because my expertise is there. Demand gen? I could do it, but my expertise is much more on the content side. So that’s what I mean by finding out what that person’s basic superpower is. I’ve done all of the marketing now, and I oversee a 30-person marketing team now; my three core marketing teams are branding content and events, revenue marketing aka demand gen, and then product marketing.”
The Role of a Product Marketer
“That’s the only leadership position, like director, senior director, and VP, that I don’t have on my team right now. I am the de facto product marketing leader. We’re a Series B company. Given where we are in the transition we’re making from chapter one of our company to chapter two, I think it’s best that the CMO — me being that person — is the product marketing leader.
So, it goes back to the skillset. I always thought that I was pretty decent at product marketing; I had this content background; I always thought product and content marketing go hand in hand; you have to have that holistic viewpoint. So, I would bring in a product marketer because I want to have three people ideally; I always love the rule of three. So I would have a demand gen person and a product marketer, but at the end of the day, if I couldn’t hire that person, I would then lean a little bit more into product marketing, and then I would outsource a little bit more of the content stuff.”
The Content Marketing Department’s Purview
“If you have someone who has that point of view, enough experience, and desire to learn and step up into that position, have your content, your events, your creative and your community teams under one person. That, I think, is ideal. So we did that at Drift. It worked out pretty well.
We’re not quite going to do that at Airmeet yet because I haven’t found a person to be able to do all of those things. I’m going to have two people, in fact — maybe even three people to start with — to own four or five different things. There are going to be like three leaders, and the reason why that’s the case is I think you need two types of content these days. So, you’ll probably need two people to lead each of these content groups. Unique content is much more about getting people engaged with your brand; the problems you help them solve; how to think differently; and getting them engaged in the content that is in any way about your product or service and is only hinting at or slightly touching on either your product-oriented category or solution-oriented category.”