How to build & scale a modern content team at a SaaS startup with Mark Kilens

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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.

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Key Insights

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.”