How to run community-led SEO at scale with John Bonini

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Episode Summary

Developing an effective content strategy is a top priority for a lot of marketing teams. And marketers have to constantly stay up to speed with algorithm changes in order to rank their best content.

But if you monitor the algorithm too closely and don’t pay attention to your customers’ questions, then your content may miss the mark (i.e., won’t lead to revenue).

And that’s where a community-led content marketing strategy comes in. This type of strategy can help your team balance SEO requirements and customer questions.

In this episode of Content Logistics, John Bonini, the Director of Marketing at Databox, joins our host Camille Trent to discuss community content. John shares how his company approaches it, why they decided to go in that direction, who is involved in the process, and why content writers should be reporters rather than columnists, at least at the beginning of their careers.

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Episode Highlights

The Story Behind Community Content at Databox

”Our CEO, Peter Caputa, spent over a decade at HubSpot and built the partner program there. And I think it was his last year there; he was helping build up HubSpot’s sales blog. […]

He had a lot of personal experience when blogging about sales. But he told me something he felt after a while, ‘You circle the block many times on the things you know about, and you start to think, all right, what can I write about now?’ 

So, he started including the insights of other salespeople, asking other people questions, and then including their quotes in the article, which gave him room and space to create a narrative around what they were saying. […] 

So he brought that to Databox in the early days, and […] that was the start of the content program at Databox, which is like, […] let’s not do what everyone else is doing, which is to write another article about how to do X, Y, Z. Instead, let’s ask the people who would be our customers and our early customers how they’re doing it.”

Why Do You Need Subject Matter Expertise When You Can Hire Writers Specializing in Your Niche?

”Volume for the sake of volume is pointless. If we need something we can scale, we need to move quickly; go ahead. There are a lot of ways to do that. Hire a bunch of writers, write surface-level, single-point-of-view content around the subjects you think your audience cares about, and go nuts. Publish ten times a week. […]

But the expertise about your product and your space, it’s not always internal. […] There are certainly people inside companies that have more domain knowledge than others. But a lot of times, the people who have the best view of everything are the people using your product and the people who would be using your product have the pain that you solve.

So, by having them tell stories, or at least including their quotes, you’re more of a reporter than a columnist. […] You’re getting real quotes and publishing more honest and helpful content.”

We Went from One Open-Ended Question to Thematic Surveys That Took Our Written Content to the Next Level 

”Once we left the listicle format, I went more to the journalistic style format. It’s scaled up, and we were getting like 60–150 responses per survey. […]

So now, we could create graphics in Canva and say, ‘60% of respondents have been podcasting for more than three years.’ And it would not only provide interesting color to the article, but also it would provide good insights to distribute afterward.

So we weren’t dropping the link to the post. Instead, we would tweet the graphic and say, ‘60% of respondents to a recent article we wrote said that they’d been podcasting for more than three years.’ And we would include little nuggets about why that was interesting or [provide] some additional context. So it did a lot of good things for us.

We added alt text to all those images because we’re asking questions that other people are gonna type into Google. So it gave us good collateral for distribution, which was super helpful.”