This is the second part of a four-part video series of a conversation I had with Justin Champion, digital nomad and author of Inbound Content. If you missed part one, you can find the video and transcription here. In part two we talk about how much content you need to start seeing returns, dig into the importance of website authority, and why helping is the most important thing you can be doing.
You can watch the video here or (if video isn’t your thing) read the transcription below.
Todd: Now again, from a strategic perspective, I know a lot of companies we talk to they kind of freeze up when you talk about content. But how much content do you think you need? And how much depth of content do you think you need to kind of start down the road of this strategic kind of thinking or changing? Because I know a lot of people we talk to are hesitant. They don't think they have the resources or the time. In my experience, that's always the excuse that's basically saying they don't value it. They put their time, their money, and their effort into what they value. Again, we'll throw a couple of questions at you. There's a quantity versus effectiveness piece there. And then how do you see making that argument to business leaders or decision makers to move more of their resources to that quantity to be effective?
Justin: Sure. Yeah. Great point. I think the first thing is, if I was pitching this to anybody because I've been, before HubSpot I've worked at different startup agencies. I've worked with a lot of customers and I've had to help them build content processes for their business.
The one thing that I always talk to whenever I'm talking to the executive team is about how much money are they spending right now with the traffic they are getting with doing all paid ads. Not that I'm saying that paid ads are bad because I think paid ads are actually helpful, but they're not sustainable, right? You might be doing all this stuff and you're spending money but if you're to shut the budget off all the visibility would go away. So, what would your thoughts be if you were to be able to spend your time and efforts on creating content? And it was a sustainable way of attracting traffic to your site as opposed to always having to pay for it. It's actually cheaper to be able to run initiatives like that versus just constantly having to pay for something. And obviously you could marry both those things together.
But I think the first point is that it's a sustainable way of growing your business. It's like a marathon, it's not a sprint. Paid ads are like a sprint. You're gonna get that traffic and visibility immediately, but if you're willing to train for this marathon and put the effort into it, it's something. And there's so many studies out there that it's easy to show, no matter what industry you're looking at, that you can provide a story of like look at this business that not only created content but they understood the story and the experience they're trying to create out of it. And how it's grown their business. And they're not paying for this traffic. That's one side it's all organic traffic.
But then it's also building your website with content that people want to keep coming to it right? Most people say they need a website but how many times do people actually go visit websites that there's not some helpful information. So, if you're not always adding content or adding new things, why would anybody have a reason to go to your website. And kind of to your point of "should content, like quantity versus quality.”
The first thing you want to do, the first thing is you want to understand what is your website authority. Website authority really helps you. Search engines going to look at a website authority and say "hey how credible is this website?" And website authority is ultimately going to be the secret sauce of making sure that your content is seen by more people. And the way you can build website authority is by getting inbound links from other sites. So, having another site link to yours as either a vote of confidence or piece of content that they find helpful. To do that you need a helpful piece of content.
So, I would recommend starting off with one really helpful piece of content. Maybe it's like a guide or depot because maybe you unrated. Make it something that is really meant to help and solve for the search engine so they can find it as well as the visitors coming to it so you can actually educate them. And that's going to help you get inbound links. It'll give you a reason to reach out to people and try to build links.
So, I think initially focus on inbound links and have one piece of premium content that you can use as link bait. Something that you can start getting people to want to link to because if you create an e-book and have a landing page would you link to a page, like a landing page for somebody else. Like if this person can't see the content like you want to make sure that you're showing the content so that you can ultimately get those votes of confidence from other websites. Generally, people don't link the landing pages that just have minimal content with a form to download it. You want to show people what you have to offer.
Todd: Exactly. I'm going to take a little detour here. You used the word over and over and over in there that I'm going to come back to and that's the word "help."
For the listeners, Justin just completed a book called "Inbound Content" and I just finished a book with Dan Tire called "Inbound Organization." And one of our key premises is the core inbound belief in the idea that you help first and that you give value before extract value. And in your relationships, as well as your content, the goal is to help somebody first.
Very little product based or feature based content is helpful or has ever really helped anyone. That's a huge difference in mindset from those people, especially traditional businesses who think that marketing and their content has to be about them, about their product, or their features. It might get into benefits but they rarely make the switch to say "is it helpful?"
Would you agree that the key kind of mindset shift there is to take yourself out of your own shoes and to put yourself in the other person's shoes? And to understand from their point of view the issues they have and problem they need to solve, the job they want to do, and then work back from there? So, the kind of content that would help them do that. That's the successful model mindset change that we see inbound and it sounds like you agree with that in terms of content.
Justin: Yeah. I think the old saying was, "People like to do business with people that they like." I think nowadays people like to do business with people that they can trust. So, if you're creating content that is helpful, you're going to build trust. Your ultimate goal should be to build a relationship and a relationship is built on trust, right?
Generally, if somebody is looking for something they're not generally looking for your product and services first. Your product and services will be the byproduct of them learning and then trusting you as an advisor on the best route to go about solving whatever situation that they're in. So instead of trying to force somebody to make a sale the best thing you can do is really make sure that you can build trust and credibility up with this person.
And a lot of times, maybe this person won't be the one who does business with you. And this is something that people forget that say, “I don't want to ungate my content,” for instance. Not that I'm saying everybody should be ungating their content, but “I don't want to give all my content away for free because I want to make sure, what if this person doesn't convert and doesn't want to come back?” Well, I would say think about if you become somebody who is a trusted advisor - think about word of mouth. Word travels nowadays. Someone can talk to somebody that they know that's trying to find information. So, maybe this person isn't doing business with you but maybe somebody they know is doing business with you now because they talked to the person who originally told them about your company.
And the only way that's really going to happen is if you're creating content that's going to be helpful. I do think it's important to have helpful product content or services content, but you want to make sure that you're thinking higher level. Ultimately, if I have successful product or services content, what is the layer above that that somebody would even care that these are important in the first place? You really do need that to somewhat build that trust and credibility. Otherwise it's going to be hard to attract people who don't know you and do business with them.
Todd: So, you're saying even if you're talking about product and feature based content you want to put it in the context of how those products help somebody and who they help, and when they help, and when they apply. It's not just a feature dump or specification dump. Some engineer might need that, right, but that's not necessarily going to be attractive or particularly engaging in terms of a relationship.
You also mention a couple of other things. You talk about the sales process through the relationship. So, can you talk a little bit about how you think content impacts not just marketing but sales and even after sales?
Justin: Yeah. I started my career off in sales. I was a salesperson for a search engine marketing firm back in 2009 right when Google's algorithm update came out where they weren't showing any more search data. It was when everybody thought that the SEO was going to die. It was kind of a scary time, but what I learned when I was in sales was that salespeople actually make the best marketers because they're the ones talking with prospects. They're the people who know whether or not, why somebody's doing business with you, why they're not doing business with you, what questions they have, what sort of content is helpful. So generally, those people are the ones that have the best ideas.
When I was in sales I didn't have a sales budget that I could use to acquire leads so I had to find a way to do it organically. And I came up with all these different ideas where I would run webinars. I would go and promote them on LinkedIn. And it worked. It worked really well.
So, I would say that it's not just the marketing department that should be creating content, it should be the entire organization. It should be a mindset for anybody who is engaging with a customer or a prospect. You can learn from them and figure out the best type of content you can create based on that person.
So, we talked about semi-fictional representation buyer personas earlier, but we're actually passed that now because we're dealing with real people. We're talking to prospects. We're talking to customers. And whatever things you can learn from them, those people that are on the front lines whether they are sales people, whether they are services people. You can use that content to fuel or you can use those ideas and their experience to fuel what type of content you should be creating. So, I would say that the best thing a marketing team could do could be to instill a content marketing mindset within the entire organization. And then use the organization's knowledge to build content that is ultimately based on the experience they're having with people.
Todd: Gotcha. So, a little recap there. We're talking about the persona content through every stage of the buyer journey. Content comes from people who have connections to those contacts, those personas. You want to personalize it to where they are and how they want to engage. That could be where they would get the content, the types of content. Some people like to listen, some like to watch, others like to read right. So, you have got to have a variety of content. And then I heard you also say that, again, obviously being helpful.
But I also heard you also talking about the kinds of questions that people ask. One of the things we've taught lots of our clients for years is that we teach their customer facing people to take note of every single question that a customer or prospect asks and document those. And then use that as your template for the kinds of content you want to create. Because we’ve always said, very practically, if one person is asking that question chances are other people are asking that question. And you can use that all the way through the journey, all the way from SEO and the website all the way up to after-sale. If somebody asks a question you could provide that answer. It gives you a lot of credibility if you've already created content around that answer. It communicates to the recipient that you've thought about these things. You're thinking about them. You're putting yourself in their shoes and you documented it. You didn't just say you could do it, you did it. So, I think it's a powerful way to build credibility.
I think there's a principle called the Reciprocation Principle. This is Robert Cialdini’s book "Pre-Suasion," I think it was, where this says human beings naturally want to help somebody and return the favor when someone helps them. It's a very human thing. To be human, you help first. Then people naturally want to, like you said, not just like you, they want to trust you, they want to build on that.
So, there's this innate thing that happens for us with those relationships when you start out helping. You start the relationship out on the right foundation and you just build on that.
I know in our book we look at the whole organization. The whole organization needs to be aware of that because if the beginning of the process, if marketing and sales are yet service and customer support are not then they operate with a different thing. Then they can ruin the relationship and can detract from what was built earlier and destroy that trust. And I love what you said, it used to be you did business with people you liked and now you do business with people you trust. I hope you wrote that article and have some content around that already Justin.
Justin: I've created quite a few different pieces of content for HubSpot's user blog. I think that one thing that I've learned is that when you become a trusted advisor you have people talking about you without you even joining the conversation. They might be pulling you in and thanking you for something that you did. So, it is really important to really try to build that trust. On that I would even say that focusing on being the best advisor possible is how you really build trust.
Somebody who's a little but more renegade with it is Marcus Sheridan and he wrote a book called "They Ask You Answer" and he's really well known in the content marketing space for somebody who... he owned a business, a river pool spa company, and back when the economy got hit in 2009 he used content marketing. He created a lot of different pieces of content that were helpful. Like different questions people were having and that's what he did, he put all the different questions out there. Answered everything he could about fiberglass pools, for instance, and it really transformed his business.
But one thing he talked about in his book is if you don't have the solution then help people find where they can get the solution. Even if it's not with you. Because, again, if someone does end up doing business with you the best thing you can do is just help them along with whatever they're deciding. Even if it's like a competitor. Because then people will talk about that. "Hey, we're working with this person but we found it out from their competitor." So, you can actually build stories.
If you can think of a bigger picture your attribution might be a little messed up. Attribution is like understanding where things are coming from. But I'll tell you right now, if you can put a really positive vibe out there, it has to be genuine though, you put a positive genuine vibe out there the possibilities are really endless.
In part three of this four-part series we dig into the ‘why’ of business and how a companies mission helps shape and influence their content. You can watch and read the third part of the interview here.