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.
Guest Profile
- Name: John Bonini
- What he does: John is the director of marketing at Databox.
- Company: Databox, Some Good Content
- Noteworthy: John is also a content consultant and a podcast host.
Key Insights
- The quality of our content depends on our questions and the people we send those questions to. So, the Databox content team developed a strategy that includes collaboration with subject matter experts. Instead of creating content independently, they send surveys to professionals and create articles based on their answers. ''We're making sure that we're asking the right people. In the early days, it was customers, and then, people who would make good customers. So it's like ABMish, except that we're not pitching the product or anything. [...] We wouldn't open it up to anybody in the market because we would get different answers. So we were very specific about who we want to answer these and which questions we're asking them.''
- Respondents are our content distribution allies. As John explains, the program they developed, where they get answers from experts, allows them to grow their business network. In addition, these partnerships enable Databox to reach new prospects, as the respondents gladly share the articles they are featured in. ''When these people participate in your content, they're gonna share it. So you have a built-in distribution where if I quote 15 people in an article, those 15 people are gonna tweet about it or post it on their LinkedIn. [...] And that list begins to grow. Ten people become 25, and 25 become 75. A year later, you might have a thousand people on that list who have contributed to your content. So, scaling at that point becomes a lot easier. You have all these people to get quotes from. And the more you have, the quicker you're able to wrap new post ideas and get them written. So, while it takes time, you can certainly scale it.''
- Consistency is vital. No one can deny that quality goes before quantity, but in the modern-day business world, you must be visible to your customers. Otherwise, you risk being forgotten as new possibilities pop up by second. John adds, ''We had to be unique. And then, at one point, it was like, 'All right, we have to publish a lot too; frequency helps.' If you're publishing the right stuff and it's good, it helps. When people say publishing frequency doesn't matter, it depends on what your goals are. But if you're starting and trying to gain traction, it matters.''
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.”