And if they fail to serve different languages and cultures properly, they’re missing out on significant revenue. 

The usual reasons we see companies delay—or refuse to invest in—localization are financial and the fear of what it takes to do it right. While the work of localization can look daunting or complex, setting the right structure and working with the right partners can make the process easier than you imagine and much more profitable.

To learn about the topic of localization and its effect on content strategy, I talked with Markus Seebauer, managing director of Gateway Translations. Listen to the full episode for insights into the strategy behind localization, choosing the right time, how global marketing changes affect localization, and more.

Below you’ll find the 3 main highlights from the interview.

About the Guest

Markus Seebauer is a managing director of Gateway Translations, a provider of technical translations. This German-born digital nomad has been in the translation and localization business for over 10 years. He guides strategic aspects to identify the right markets, consults on translation technology (vendor-independent), and creates translation workflows that scale a process and provide translations into 45 languages with his team.

1. When should a business start thinking about localization?

The answer often lies in your analytics, says Markus. In his 10+ years experience of working with devtools and software companies for technical audiences, the stages of companies reaching out tended to differ, but there have always been some common denominators.

With technical audiences like these, it’s very likely the majority of the audience already has an intermediate grasp of English. That means they will likely be able to find their way around your tool, once they convert.

But will they find you persuasive enough to convert? There are two sources of truth for that.

1. Analytics

You can easily check that in the analytics. If you already have a considerable amount of traffic from, let’s say, Latin America, but they spend noticeably less time compared to the US-based audience, it probably makes sense to analyze the content and see how it can be adjusted for the Latin American audience.

2. Your sales team

Your sales team is in direct contact with your most chatty prospects. At this point, they probably already have insights into what are the common challenges preventing leads from certain regions to convert (Anything from legal regulations to payment methods in localized currencies).

According to Markus: “When companies already have internal marketing teams or local distributors [...] there’s already a lot of knowledge that just needs to be collected in a systematic way.” Paired with the insights found in the analytics, they are then able to prioritize goals and the next steps.

2. Localization = Translation + Cultural Match

To successfully localize your online presence, it’s not enough to just hire a good translator.

Successfully localization lies at the cross-section of translation and cultural match. A speaker of Spanish won’t necessarily do a good job on localization for a Mexican-based business, as they would for a Spanish one.

A good analogy would be to consider the differences between British English and American English usage. While it is one and the same language at the core, the cultural differences affected various aspects of it:

• The use of idioms

• Differences in the vocabulary

• Changes in spelling

Those are just the linguistic differences. When you add to it the cultural differences, and the different practice of conducting business, it becomes more apparent how localization is a much broader approach compared to translation

To match culturally with the region you’re trying to grow in, Markus advises to consider:

• How people communicate

• How trust is built

• How open people are

• What adjacent country are they more culturally influenced by.

Markus draws a parallel between Mexico and Chile. Mexico, due to its proximity to US, is far more influenced by US cultural references and products. The same can’t be said for Chile, whose exposure to US is far less present.

“In some markets, it’s a benefit to be perceived as a foreign company. And in some markets, it’s better to look more local,” says Markus.

3. Building and training a localization team

So how do you build a team that can do it all? When looking for new potential team members, Markus values hiring subject matter experts with a knack for writing.

“You can’t just hire a translation service and expect them to get it right.”

Having these 2 combined in one person, already makes the rest of the training distinctively easier.

They often look for candidates with experience in technical writing, developer tools, and a working knowledge of coding.

The team at Gateway Translations provides localization services in 45 languages, and is continuously being trained in tools and workflows with regard to:

• Tone of voice

• Translation tools

• Glossaries

• QA

• Working with AI outputs (compared to translating from scratch)

There is a noticeable shift in enterprise tools building more human brands. The tone of voice for a majority of them went from professional to more casual and easygoing, creating a shade somewhere between formal and informal writing.

Markus says that a good localizer should know how to adjust to it, and not purely translate word for word.

The next step in your growth

Markus’ advice is to start thinking about it sooner rather than later. Even if it’s still not in your budget, SaaS businesses should keep localization in their peripheral vision, rather than sleep on it.

Mid-market businesses with PMF tend to be a good fit for localization content. They already have a proven business model and can leverage the changes in their funnel based on different regions for optimal results.

In cases like these, the next logical step would be to do a localization audit. According to Markus: “We can help with localization audits so companies understand where they are in terms of the quality of their content, international SEO practices, consistency in terminology, and the whole funnel.”

If you wish to talk to Markus or his team more about localization practices, you can reach out through the website or LinkedIn.

Gone are the days when a good SEO strategy amounted to keyword-optimized blog posts and technical optimization to make your website load faster. Search optimization is getting much more complicated and competitive. 

I spoke to two SEO experts, Greg Heilers and Paul Andre - aka Dre - De Vera, about how SEO is changing and what content marketers need to consider when building out a comprehensive SEO strategy. Yes, we talked about the impact of AI, but that’s not the only change you need to stay on top of.

SEO is moving to be more multimedia and experiential-oriented. For instance, Google search results pages are pulling in more and more video content, map data, and more. And a comprehensive SEO strategy doesn’t stop at Google. (And I don’t mean including Bing). Your SEO strategy needs to consider everywhere your prospects are searching for products or services like yours or your clients.

What follows is a highlight of some of the components you should consider in an expansive SEO strategy.

The Experts

Greg Heilers is a Co-Founder of Jolly SEO, where the team creates future-proof, Google-safe, white hat backlinks & media mentions for clientele. In podcasts, articles, and courses, Greg enjoys sharing the knowledge he and his team have built through 5 years training hundreds of writers to send 150,000+ pitches & earn 15,000+ high authority wins. Connect on LinkedIn.

Paul Andre de Vera is a 15+ year B2B digital marketer who creates engaging, educational, and entertaining video content that ranks. His innovative approach has made “Dre” a sought-after speaker, online educator, and brand strategist for professionals and companies. Nowadays, you’ll find “Dre” speaking on podcasts/webinars, looking for the next great place to devour a delicious rib-eye steak, and occasionally sipping a glass of whiskey. All while providing SEO consulting at PaulAndre.com, hosting the livestream SEO Video Show, and producing the SEO Knowledge Bombs podcast. Connect on LinkedIn.

1. SEO and PR Strategies Are Merging Together

Recently I was conducting an initial content audit for an enterprise software company. There were tons of opportunities to expand their organic reach, but these opportunities weren’t straightforward. I mean, it wasn’t just as simple as finding relevant keywords and writing blog posts to target them.

To give you an example, say you’re putting together an SEO strategy for a supply chain management software company.

One of the most relevant searches you’d want to show up under would be “supply chain management software.” But writing a post about “supply chain management software” isn’t going to do you a bit of good, because it’s not going to match the search intent. So what’s your strategy?

It’s all about your PR efforts.

Those top-ranking organic results? They’re list posts from sites with high domain scores like Forbes, Capterra, and Shopify. So part of your SEO strategy needs to be getting added to these lists.

This is part of why Dre considers PR to be one of the three pillars of SEO, along with content and technical. Especially when it comes to branded search, Dre explains, you’ll be working with his PR team. “They will get you the brand mentions. They will go out to get you picked up on the high authority websites, like Forbes and the Wall Street Journal.”

Another key aspect of the search results page that’s relatively new are logos of top-ranking companies.

Getting listed there is like VIP status. This is where brand strategy really mixes with SEO.

How does Google come up with this list? Most likely it’s a mix of what companies are mentioned the most around the web related to supply chain management software, meaning what you publish on your own site isn’t going to cut it. You need to get more people talking about your company.

And this isn’t the only way in which brand SEO efforts are changing.

Your Brand Search Strategy Needs to Include Key Products, As Well

Greg has seen brand searches becoming a more and more important part of SEO, and brand searches are expanding to more than just a company name or its competitors.

“As marketers, a lot of the content you write is around campaigns supporting some of these core products,” he explained, “so you're in a great position to drive SEO success if is true that branded search is becoming increasingly relevant and can include the products, as well.

Dre added, “If you can attach your name to a generic keyword, you just develop that brand authority, like an authority within that space.”

Your SEO Strategy Needs to Be Multimedia-Minded

People like to think SEO is search engine optimization,” Dre explained. “I feel like it's becoming more like a search experience optimization because the experience on search is changing big time. Like I mentioned earlier, there's videos, there's going to be  maps. There's carousels of news stories. There's TikTok carousels, Twitter carousels: all these different types of things that you have to optimize for. So you're not necessarily optimizing for those ten links anymore. You're actually optimizing for the search experience on Google.”

Case in point: did you know people are now searching for software on TikTok? Especially if you’re marketing a B2C brand, you need to be considering SEO for up-and-coming social platforms.

Don’t Discount Crowd-Sourced Platforms

Here’s Greg: “You know something is happening when haters emerge, and if you go to any SEO group, you will see a ton of frustration that Reddit and Quora answers are ranking above the pages that used to rank.”

This still isn’t a beginner’s level SEO play, especially because sites like Reddit are notorious for blocking sponsored posts or comments. But if you’re serious about being in control of your company’s brand presence, you can’t afford to ignore crowdsourcing site’s influence.

But I’m hopeful that most experienced marketers know this by now.

The problem is that even if you know you’ll see more success when you align your marketing strategies and content around this deeper market research, you still need a strategy to conduct this research and figure out how to use it.

That’s the conversation I had with customer research and copy experts Adrienne Barnes and Sam Howard.

Listen to the full episode for insights into conducting better customer interviews, creating better audience segments and personas, and a lot more.

Below you’ll find two highlights from the interview.

About The Guests

Adrienne Barnes helps early-stage B2B SaaS companies find product market fit through market research.  Her marketing superpower is “pulling information from people, pulling information from internal demands, and then turning that into something that's useful for the organization.” Connect with Adrienne on LinkedIn.

Ekaterina (Sam) Howard works with growing B2B SaaS startups that need help speaking to their best customers in a way that would resonate and convert. According to Sam, their superpower is translating customer research into copy. (Per this interview, if I had to guess, I’d say it’s aligning content, web, and user experience strategies.)  Connect with Sam on LinkedIn.

Why Prioritize Segments Over Personas And Tips on Creating Both

Personas have their place when they’re built using research rather than assumptions. But when it comes to building and executing marketing strategies, segmentation is also key. And your personas and segments may not overlap.

Here's how I understand the difference between personas and segments:

Persona: a grouping of customers or prospects based on similarities in what they do and how they'd use your product/service.

Segment: a grouping of customers, prospects, etc. that you'd like to engage with in a specific way. A persona and a segment could overlap. Or you could further segment inside of a given persona.

One use of segments is deciding who to prioritize when conducting customer interviews. There are three types of users (IOW segments) that Adrienne recommends talking to:

1) Your Biggest Fans

“You want to talk to … the ones who have been around the longest and have spent the most money. They're recurring customers. They talk about you on social media in very positive ways.”

2) Your Newest Customers

Those who have “just recently converted where it's all fresh in their mind.”

3) Your Biggest Enemies

The folks “who hated your product, who like basically left poor reviews.”

She explains: “If you can talk to those three segments, that's how you can identify who your personas are. And those personas are really in-depth and nuanced ways to describe buyers within the organization.”

Adrienne recommends creating customer personas according to “jobs to be done.” In other words, everyone trying to accomplish the same thing using you product or services.  You want your personas to answer questions like common job titles, common industries they work in, “their roles, their rituals, their relationships, and their responsibilities. Here's where they sit most likely in the organization. Here's who reports to them, who they report to, their buying process, their entire journey.”

So wait, why segments over personas?

Obviously, both are necessary. But my point is to not stop researching your users and considering unique ways to engage with them once you’ve happy with your personas.

Some examples:

• Special offers for your biggest fans or biggest spenders.

• Email campaigns that target users who use specific features or who are prime candidates for upsells.

How do you learn what segments to create? You just have to do the homework.

“You go through the data, you read the insights over and over again, and you're like, ‘Oh, these people are devout, and here's how they're segmented.’”

Your Content, Copy, and User Experience Strategies Need to Align

“Talking to content folks and making sure there is a strategy that works for the website as a whole is probably the most important and sometimes missing piece,” Sam explained when I asked them about creating a user journey on the website.

Here’s my 30-second mockup of what it should look like when your strategies align together and are all based on well-done research:

In the interview, we touched on two really important points about how to align these various strategies.

1. Don’t assume that the homepage is the most important page.

“I've had cases where, based on the search terms, it was the folks that were already brand-aware that were landing [on the home page]. So there's drastically less work there. They already know what they want, why they're here. They just need a quick confirmation that this is the right place,” Sam explained.

In ideal situations, they explained, you’re controlling a larger percentage of how folks enter your website and what you know about them. You’re using tools that tell you who’s landing on your site. You’re conducting well-segmented campaigns that direct people to specific landing pages, etc.  And if they’re coming to your site directly, it’s because they’re aware of what you do and the home page doesn’t need to start their education from scratch.

“But for organic traffic, that's a much more fun challenge, especially if it's content-driven,” Sam added. “Like, okay, they read the post. What's next? How can we get them to go to the proper web pages and start their journey to conversion?”

2. SEO-driven content should educate people about your product or services (or at least show them where to go to learn more).

Here’s Adrienne: “Sometimes when I've come in as a content strategist, it looks like the blog is completely separate from the website. Like it's got its own branding, it's got its own name, and that kind of has been perpetuated by the ‘every B2B SaaS company should be a media company’ theory out there.”

The big takeaway here is to maintain one cohesive strategy. Personally, I think it’s fine to consider your blog as a media company if you remember what funds it. Like Sam asked: how do you get people who happened across your blog to start associating the content with your product or services? If you’re asking the right questions (and interviewing the right people instead of building your strategy off of assumptions), you’re on the right track.   

I recently spoke to Andrew Nicoletta, Senior Manager of Content Marketing at ServiceTitan, and Cecilia Li, Content Marketing Manager at NexHealth, about content marketing strategies when you’re targeting small businesses.

ServiceTitan serves home service businesses while NexHealth works with private healthcare practices.

Listen to the full interview for insights into content budgets,  rolling out initiatives, and more. And we talked A LOT about creating content are customer stories.

Here are a few highlights about how to get more value out of content featuring customers when travel is involved.

1. Line Up Several Shoots or Interviews in One Location

NexHealth will line up several case studies in one place to make a trip worthwhile.

Initially, her team was using local production companies to film and edit, but they found that the editing process could take a long time. By lining up multiple customer stories in one place, it made it more financially viable to fly out an in-house team.

They also film with several pieces of content in mind:

“Besides just a case study, we usually chop. all the raw footage up into different segments to maximize other channels. Can we do a short one-minute bite for social media and use it for a month? Can we add some different text overlay and make it suitable for TikTok? So those are the things that we think about before we go in for each case study.”

2. Offer Your Customers Content They Can Use in Return

If you are filming in person, some businesses may have to shut down in order to collaborate for case studies, so make it worth their time. Sometimes a discount on your services or platform will work or financial compensation for their time. But for other companies, offering them digital assets they can use is just as valuable.

“Branding is important, but they don't know how to build that brand,” Cecilia explains of some of NexHealth’s customers. “They probably have their office manager help them with a marketing task and things like that. So we try to give back to them in that way. Sort of like  helping them film a photo shoot when we're there or helping them create a brand video.”

Bonus tip: Use social platforms in different ways. For instance, NexHealth doesn’t see as much organic engagement on their own content on Instagram, but Cecilia and her team have found that it’s a great place to initiate conversations with prospects by commenting on their content and starting DMs.

3. Create Content That Centers Your Customers, Not Just Your Business

Some of ServiceTitan’s top performing customer-based content features their customers, not their own platform. Their Shop Tours videos in which ServiceTitan customers give a behind-the-scenes look at their shops, are incredibly popular earning 5- and 6-figure views.

4. Have the Campaign Strategy Nailed Before Asking for a Travel Budget

Andrew makes sure that his team knows exactly how they’d use the content from a customer before requesting the funds to make it happen: “Whether it's a geo-focused campaign, if there's radio, how your email team's gonna leverage that, and so on.”

Andrew emphasized making sure you know the primary promotion or distribution channel you’re pursuing, as well as how you plan on reusing content in the future.

This podcast is brought to you by Prism B2B, a marketing consultancy specializing in multimedia and multichannel content strategies. Email info@prismb2b.io to be considered as a guest for this podcast or to learn more about Prism.

One of the most difficult challenges in content marketing is finding that sweet spot where you’re talking on your ICP’s level. You’re neither over-explaining concepts they find too basic nor going over their heads.

But that’s just the beginning.

Not only should content speak to your target audience on their level, it also needs to offer insights that stick with them.

And this is no small task.

Recently I spoke to Shawn Nichols, Founder of Metriq, a UX design firm, and Chelsea Castle, the head of content for Lavender AI. The theme of the conversation was balancing brand voice and usability in content and design.

Listen for insights into the psychology of the site visitor, how a designer sees the relationship between design and content, and a multifaceted approach to content usability.

One of the themes that kept coming up was whether content marketers should “dumb down” content for their consumers.

Short answer: it depends on what you mean by dumb down.

Simple and Clear Doesn’t Mean Shallow or Primitive

The folks at Lavender are constantly analyzing platform data to see which emails were the most effective and engaging. What they found is that marketers should be writing on a third to seventh-grade reading level (the exact level depends on the data set, because it fluctuates).

“And that's not to say that you should be writing as if they're a 10-year-old or dumbing it down,” Chelsea clarified. “As humans especially when we are writing online, we're trying to make ourself present a certain way or diving too deeply into a brand voice. Like sounding boastful or using big words. But you don't need to use big words to sound smart, and it's actually harder to write simply or to explain complex things in simple words.”

Key Takeaway: Don’t shy away from complex topics, figure out how to write or speak about them as simply as possible.

Be Aware Of How Much Effort It Takes a User to Comprehend Your Content

Here’s Shawn with some of the psychology behind this same idea:

“I advocate for what used to be called ‘dumbing it down.’ Now, to me, it just resonates as being more usable. I want to ‘dumb down’ whatever I'm producing so that way I can take as little of your bandwidth as possible.”

Shawn brought up cognitive load, which is the amount of working memory it takes a brain to process information.  He explained that humans tend to approach their cognitive loads with a sense of scarcity. There’s only so much new information you can process in a day before you’re exhausted or lose focus.

“So if you can make it easier for your user to not have to surmise or paraphrase your content or copy or engagement or conversation, it goes a long way,” Shawn said. “We do the same thing in UX. It's pretty much the entire premise of UX.”

Key Takeaway: Users will remember and appreciate things they don’t have to work too hard to understand.

Other Things to Consider

• Do you create content for a global audience? A brand voice that relies heavily on idioms or cultural references can alienate consumers.

• Do you write for a large audience with different levels of understanding of a topic? Content needs to be clear about who it’s for, and you should make it easy to navigate to content on their level.

• Multimedia content can help with clarity and cognitive load. Allow people to consume ideas the way that’s easiest for them.

That’s all for now!

Next up: Best practices when creating case studies and how to market to local businesses.

Resources Mentioned in the Episode

• Zag: The Number One Strategy of High Performance Brands by Marty Neumeier

• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

• UX Design Field Book by Doug Collins

• Laws of UX  by Jon Yablonski

• Deepak Chopra podcasts

• Organizational psychologist Adam Grant’s Rethinking podcast

• Nudge by Richard Thaler

• Adrienne Barnes’ Twitter

• Katelyn Bourgoin — Person to follow
  

The newest Content Marketing is Dead podcast episode is live! Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

B2B businesses have been slow to adopt video content as a core part of their marketing strategy.

"Every company by now has made an explainer video," Josef Newton explained. "But the number of companies that have actually adopted it as consistent part [of their marketing strategy] — it's tiny."

And those that are using video content aren't necessarily doing so in a sustainable way. “A lot of the time the goal is to make things that just look sexy and cool rather than things that actually get consumed,” he said.

These are two of the reasons that Josef and his cofounder Sergey Ross started Sway, a B2B video strategy and production company. “Our goal was to help companies consistently ship out video content that gets consumed. That’s the number one objective.”

I spoke to Josef (or Joe) about B2B video strategies. Listen to the full episode for best practices on video usability, utilizing TikTok, finding the right interview clips to use on LinkedIn, and more.

Below are highlights from the episode: Seven reasons why B2B video strategies tend to fail.

1. Your Video Production Isn’t Integrated Into Your Overall Marketing Strategy

“A lot of video gets created in its own expensive isolation,” Joe explains. “It's not connected to the rest of the written content engine: your blog, your case studies.”

This is a theme that keeps coming up again and again on this podcast: the siloing of marketing functions. When components of your marketing strategy (such as video and written content) are created separately, the result is missed opportunities and a disjointed brand.

2. The Wrong People Are Creating Your Videos

Per Joe, there’s a ton of amazing talent in the B2B space around written content, but significantly less talent that has a true video marketing background.

“There's a lot of video production people, but not necessarily people who understand how to make videos for YouTube, TikTok — these social channels and platforms,” Joe explains.

Video specialists need to understand what kinds of content work on different platforms and in your market.

If you don’t have internal talent that is well-versed in B2B video marketing, there are a couple of options. One is utilizing companies like Sway that specialize in this exact thing. 

The other is recognizing that whatever content your team produces is going to be an experiment, so prioritize testing. Try out different video formats and lengths. Try out different topics. Track everything and iterate quickly.

3. You’re Not Balancing Sustainability and Quality

A lot of the B2B video content that exists today is filmed in person, and it’s unsustainable. While it’s great to get as much in-person content as you can, it probably shouldn’t be the majority of your video strategy.

When companies look for a positive ROI from costly footage and don’t find it, it can be super tempting to just give up on a video strategy altogether instead of trying different, more sustainable approaches.

What I've found is that a B2B audience isn't looking for high production value — they're looking for insights to grow their businesses or careers; they're looking for an explanation of how to use a product; they're looking for reasons to keep their eye on a company.

Instead of spending thousands getting in-person footage, invest in video usability and strategy. Things like video SEO and utilizing easy-to-create videos throughout the customer journey.

4. You’re Expecting Videos To Be Directly Tied to Conversions

There are cases when videos can be directly tied to conversions, such as outbound Loom videos from your sales reps, or personalized videos used in an account-based marketing approach. All of this can be extremely effective.

But when you're using videos as part of an organic social media approach, it's much more difficult (and beside the point) to try and track the conversion rates of videos.

When utilizing videos on social — especially newer channels like TikTok, a better perspective is to think about how to create an engaged community.

"It's like insanely cheap brand awareness is how I see it," Joe explained.

You’re Not Changing Your Strategy to Increase Engagement

Video engagement is one of the best ways to tell if something is working.

On YouTube, Joe recommends looking at overall subscriber growth from month to month and longer watch times. Ideally, you want to increase video retention to average between 30% to 60%.

He also recommends looking for an increase in thoughtful comments:

Are they leaving interesting comments? It's not people just saying, ‘Great video,’ and that's it. It's like people are talking about something that was said in the video.

That’s a good sign that your video content is onto something memorable.

These are good metrics to use across social platforms. Are people watching the entire 30 to 90-second clip on LinkedIn or TikTok? Are they responding to them or sharing them? You’re on your way to building a loyal online following.

(Chili Piper’s TikTok account is making waves for covering remote work culture and other workplace topics.)

5. Your Videos Aren’t Accessible

“A mindset that I'd call out is: you want to make your videos as easy to consume as your text,” Joe recommended.

Video accessibility isn’t just about captions. For instance, if you’re using longer videos, and they’re not broken up into chapters or have easy-to-find key timestamps, it makes it more difficult to consume your videos in a meaningful way. This will help with video SEO, as well.

Joe mentioned Y Combinator as a brand that creates viewer-friendly videos.

Y Combinator uses a variety of methods to help viewers navigate their videos, including in-video outlines.

Another aspect of video accessibility is how well it's integrated into your other marketing assets, such as blog posts. For instance, if you have an in-depth blog post, Joe recommends pairing it up with a video with timestamps that match the main points of the post.

7. You're Limiting Video Content to Certain Parts of the Sales Funnel

From product launch videos to  how-to videos to video case studies, there are video buckets that can be used across the sale funnel and beyond. 

"It surprises me how many companies don't create case study videos," Joe said. "I think again because there's that perception that they need to be done in person with really expensive equipment, and that's why they don't get created. But doing case studies remotely is not that difficult. And I think that's where a lot of companies should start."

Looking for a better video strategy and help with video production? Reach out to Sway.

Looking for a more cohesive marketing strategy that includes video content? Let's chat.

If you want to build a successful career as a content marketer, Nathan and Brooklin are two people to listen to.

Nathan Collier is currently the Director of Content at PERSUIT, an enterprise legal platform. He’s also the founder of the Content Marketing Lounge — a supportive community for freelancers, consultants, and professionals working in content marketing. Nathan is one of the top 100 influencers in content marketing, according to Semrush.

Brooklin Nash is the cofounder of Beam Content, an agency that specializes in content for B2B SaaS companies. With a decade of freelance and in-house marketing experience, Brooklin focuses on helping both clients and freelancers stand out in B2B marketing. The memes are free.

During our chat for this podcast, the two gave a lot of advice that can level up any content marketing career, including advice about how to show value right away and what sets apart a $200 blog post from content worth $1 to $2 a word.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Resources Mentioned

• Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller

• Great Leads by Michael Masterston and John Forde

• Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins

• Devin Reed’s newsletter, The Reeder

Highlights From Our Conversation: 5 Ways to Level Up Your Content Strategy

1. Have a New Client? Start with a Case Study or Customer Story

A huge part of maintaining happy clients and being able to charge what your worth is showing clients the value your content is creating for them.

For freelancers, showing value early on in an engagement can be difficult.  (By the way, this is especially true if you’re focused on SEO content which is a long-term play.)

So how do you start to create value right away? Here’s Nathan with a tip:

“If you get the opportunity to start working with a new client, the first thing I always asked when I was doing contract work was: Can I do a customer story? Can I do a case study? Can I do a profile story?”

This was a hack he used to get in front of his client’s customers in a way that created value for everyone.

See It In Action

Check out this customer story from PERSUIT in which the platform’s CEO and founder interviews a customer about how their team moved from time-based to value-based billing.

What I love about it:

• It features the customer as the hero while still explaining where PERSUIT fits into the story.

• It utilizes the CEO as the face of the company.

• It provides value for prospects which makes it memorable.

2. Can’t Talk to Customers? Try These Alternatives.

The easiest way to create better content is to base it on interviews instead of research. Especially when you’re writing for a new market. If you believe you understand an audience based on what you’ve found online — think again. You’ll miss out on all the nuances of their lives, jobs, goals, and frustrations that can make anything you write for them more practical and relatable.

The ideal is to talk to customers since they’re the people you’re writing for. But if that’s not an option, consider these alternatives.

Try Other People In the Target Market

Nathan suggests researching people in your target market. “If you can reach out to them and find a way to include them in some content piece that you're working on, that gets you on the phone with them and then you start to understand them better.”

Talk to Sales Or Internal People Who Match Your Persona

Brooklin recommends talking to the sales team“because guess who's talking to prospects every day?” And if your client contains the roles you’re trying to reach, talk to them, as well.

See It In Action

You can even involve the sales team in your content. When I was managing content at FastSpring, I hosted a LinkedIn Live with sales lead Tony Markov about a data report we’d just published.

The live stream gave us both the opportunity to showcase the content and our knowledge of SaaS customer markets. Tony was able to use it to start conversations with prospects, as well. And by interviewing Tony live, I also learned more about the kinds of conversations he was having.

3. Want to Charge More? Multimedia for the Win!

If you want to charge more for your content, make each piece go further by adding multimedia components.

There’s a bit of a war right now with many content marketers creating exclusively text-based content while others in the industry are recommending a switch to a video-first approach.

Really, we need both (and more mediums), because the best content gives people a choice on how they want to consume it.

Nathan tries to incorporate text, video, audio, and visuals into each piece of content he creates: “If I’ve got a visual person that's just scanning, they can get the point. If I’ve got a reader, they can read and get the point. If I’ve got an audio person, they can take that same information — I'm telling one story but in different formats.”

Brooklin added that you need to think about this before you start to create: “If you take the time to go through this curation process before creation, you're going to be set up with a lot better opportunities for audio and video and visuals.”

This includes how you’re going to promote the content. Think about ways to break it up for social and email before you go into interviews or publish the piece. “If we're starting a piece of content with an hour-long conversation with the CEO, do you know how many little sound bites and video clips and visuals come out of that conversation? So why limit it to an article?”

See It In Action

This post on Beam’s website uses people’s Twitter responses and GIFs to make the post more engaging. Best? Beam and Brooklin have a ton of images for social posts that don’t even need to be connected to the blog post. And since they were crowdsourced, they have people to tag who will be more than happy to share the posts.

4. Tie Everything Back to Your Target Audience’s Pain Points, Core Goals, or Values

“When we're going through editorial strategy with our clients, it starts with the pain points. There's usually four, five, or six pain points per. So that the individual pain point helps inform actual topic ideation of what we want to cover because it's content that addresses that direct pain point,” Brooklin explained.

I’d argue that those four to six themes don’t have to be based on pain points. They can also be based on a market’s goals or values. But there has to be an emotional connection to whatever content you’re producing.

Too many content strategies are based solely on what people search for or similar research/ideas that don’t directly connect back to a consumer’s motivations. Content that stirs an emotional response will always win.

This is the best way to optimize content for conversions. As soon as you explain you have a solution to readers’ pain or a way to help them reach their goals faster, they’re going to be much more likely to want to learn more — whether it’s signing up for a free trial or a demo or a consultation.

5. Be Bold — Create Content a Computer Can’t Create

“How can create stuff that no computer can create because it doesn't exist yet? It's unique, it's insightful, it's a customer story. It's a subject matter expert. It's something that doesn't exist on the internet or in a book yet. That's what I want. That's what I'd love to see happen,” Nathan said.

AI marketing tools work by taking in what content they can find on a topic and regurgitating it in a new way. “But it can't replicate well articles based on conversations. It can't replicate social roundups. It can't replicate in the weeds, real-world examples,” Brooklin explained.

These are the types of content that can add real value to a company and part of what, according to Brooklin, makes the difference between a cheap piece of content and one worth $1 to $2 per word.

“The key to making differentiated content is maybe 30% about the quality of the writing itself,” Brooklin added. “It's much more about making sure we're hitting the right topics, making sure we're pulling in either real-world examples or quotes from leadership or an actual expert or screenshots — just making it tangible.”

Transcript

Brooklin Nash: [00:00:00] I think way too often you have content marketing who puts stuff out there, but then you have product marketing and customer marketing who they get to talk to the customers, but content doesn't, or demand gen talk talks to sales, but content doesn't. Or brand talks to the leadership, but content doesn't. And it just, I think content flows through, not just all your marketing functions, but like the entire go-to-market org. So I think we need to stop treating content marketing as this siloed thing that sits alongside and treat it something that's more foundational to functions.

EJ Brown: Nathan, Brooklin, welcome to Content Marketing is Dead. You're two of my first guests. I'm super excited to have you both together.

Brooklin Nash: Thanks for having us.

Nathan Collier: Thanks EJ.

Brooklin Nash: Good to meet you both.

EJ Brown: I'm gonna let Nathan go first. So what I would love from you is just a thirty second pitch. How do you introduce [00:01:30] yourself at a conference, like something like the, you know, content marketing world where you're not pitching your company, you're pitching yourself, and what is your content marketing superpower?

Nathan Collier: Oh well, I'm Nathan Collier. I'm a content marketer by trade, former journalist. I started the Content Marketing Lounge about seven years ago now, almost eight years ago. Which is a community of 8,000 plus people. We start on Facebook now. There's a podcast and some training courses and some other things that are out there.

That's kind of my online home and what people know me for. By day I'm the director of content at a company called PERSUIT, which is a legal tech company based out of New York. But I live and work out of my, my hometown here in Dayton, Ohio. My content marketing's superpower To be a content marketer, you have to wear so many hats, right? So it's like, which one? Storytelling is, is where I come from, right? So that journalism background for me taking, and I, and I think the voice of the customer, bringing the voice of the customer or even not like, could sometimes even be like the future customer, right?

Like the, the voice of the audience and bringing that into content is, that's where I live. That's what I love. And that's what That's, that's probably the thing I do better than any other thing.

EJ Brown: So, I know Nathan way better than I know Brooklin. I have worked with Nathan at three different companies and he knows that I'm incredibly envious, jealous of his interviewing skills. Every time I listen, I think, how did you keep up with that? You know? And then I listen to myself and I'm like, I just got lost. You know?

Nathan Collier: Many, many, many, many conversations with high school football coaches and, and [00:03:00] all of that when I was in my twenties.

Brooklin Nash: That journalism background coming in handy.

EJ Brown: Yep.

Nathan Collier: does.

Brooklin Nash: I love that.

EJ Brown: All right. Brooklin, thirty second pitch at some sort of content marketing conference and your, your superpower.

Brooklin Nash: Hmm. Yeah, I'm a co-founder at Beam Content, along with a couple of other co-founders. We started in June of last year, so we're pretty new. I I, before that, I was freelancing for about eight years and worked in-house for a couple of years at other B2B SaaS companies. Yeah. Superpower. This is totally gonna sound like I'm copying Nathan.

I wouldn't say storytelling, but the whole reason we started Beam was we wanted to offer content that started with conversations with actual experts. So, Most of our core offering focuses on content that pulls out insights from internal experts. Future. I love that you said future customers, Nathan existing customers, other people in the space.

Just to give that next level of, of truly educational content. And sometimes that's like a ghost written piece. Sometimes it's a feature piece. It just depends on the needs of the topic. That's what I've loved working on these last couple years.

EJ Brown: So what, what was it that really spurred the start of Beam? What were you seeing or not seeing in in marketing that led to it?

Brooklin Nash: It was a couple of things. So number one was actually my in-house role. I was at outreach focused on community content. So kind of by default a lot of the content that [00:04:30] we. We're creating, started with actual sales experts, VPs of sales, SDR managers, people who knew their stuff, they weren't necessarily writers.

So we were kind of like walking them through that process. And it was just really fun. So that was point number one. Point number two is I've seen a lot of agencies either go all in on SEO or be generalist agencies. And it really did. It was super anecdotal, but it did feel like a gap in, in B2B SaaS, so that's why we decided to, to go this direction.

EJ Brown: Sweet. Nathan, I wanna ask you too, like you, you really help launch a lot of content marketing careers to the content marketing lounge. It's fascinating just being in it and seeing people's questions and then their questions evolve, you know, over time. What's, like, what's one common piece of advice that you give?

Do you find yourself giving over and over again to, to just help people become better content marketers?

Nathan Collier: Well, it's on theme for, for what Brooklin was saying, and I think what we're, it's, talk to the audience. And I'm, I'm, I'm just, I'm so, so shocked by this because it seems so fundamental to me and it, maybe it's the journalism thing, like maybe it's just my journalism muscles, is I cannot believe how many marketers go through their lives never — they never get on a call, they never go to a conference. They, I, I've talked to marketers who've been in a content marketing role for years and they've never been on a call with a customer. Like they've never literally had a discussion with the [00:06:00] people who they're trying to sell. And that just, I don't know.

I, I personally can't do that. Like I can't, I can't do my job if I haven't spent some time with the people that I'm trying to reach with the content. And I think and, and I know it can be hard, right? The very first job I had in marketing when I made the switch from marketing or journalism to marketing back in 2008, it was really difficult.

Like just, it was a huge organization. We had 50 people in marketing. 300 people in sales, 5,000 people in the company. Like they just didn't let you just join calls, right? You couldn't just like jump on a call. And, and so it took me, it took me a while to sort of figure out kind of how to do that. And my biggest hack for that, honestly, esp there's a lot of people who come into the Content Marketing lounge who are self-employed or who want to become self-employed.

And so maybe they have a job today, maybe they're freelancing maybe. Doing both, which is what I did when I started. So, cause I freelance for a while as well. But what I tell them is, if you get the opportunity to start working with a new client, the first thing I always asked when I was doing contract work was, can I do a customer story?

Can I do a case study? Can I do a profile story? And it was just a hack, but what it did is it got me on the phone with one of their customers and it, did it in a way that wasn't just. Hey, I want it wasn't just a, it wasn't just a pure ask from their customer. It was like, Hey, let me, I'm gonna actually feature you in a story.

And so it's value to them, but it's also value to the company and it's value to me as a contractor. So it wins, all over the place. And so my [00:07:30] best, my best like advice for people who really wanna get good at content marketing, it's just find any which way you can to talk to the audience. And that can be, it's usually customers is the easiest thing. But if you, if you can't do that, then the, the people in market that you're trying to reach, if you can just reach out to them and find a way to include them in some content piece that you're working on, that gets you on the phone with them and then you start to understand them better. Because once you have one conversation with, with somebody, they stop being that like blank persona, right, that HubSpot taught us. Like that Marketing Mary thing where it's just like, this is Mary. She cares about leads.

Brooklin Nash: Yeah.

Nathan Collier: She drinks her coffee black, whatever, whatever it was that they put on that. And it's a, it's an okay story. Like I'm not bashing HubSpot. They're really good at what they do. But that person is just two-dimensional and once you talk to them, they become a three-dimensional person.

You start to, you start to just have that human connection. It just becomes so much easier to create content from that point forward. now I have somebody in my head that I can actually, they're a real person and I can start to think about them when I create.

Brooklin Nash: What's worked for us if you can't connect directly with customers, is talk to sales. Cuz guess who's talking to prospects every day? And especially if you're a larger company, talk to the people inside your company that match your personas. Like if you're selling to VP of people, talk to your people team.

Nathan Collier: Mm-hmm.

EJ Brown: By all means, feel free to to. Just turn this into a conversation, but I'm really curious, Brooklin, like when, when you start engaging with prospects or [00:09:00] new customers, do they know what's missing? Is that why do they come to you or they just know they need something different?

Brooklin Nash: most of the time it's, they know they need something different. Often it's walking through to what that thing maybe 90% of the time they come to us and they have their SEO on lock, we don't need to help them with that, thank goodness. Cause we don't do SEO. sometimes they have customer stories that like case studies down, but haven't figured out how to leverage customers for more than just a challenge solution outcome type case study.

Like instead getting in with your champions and telling an actual story. So we just spend a month, our first month kind of walking them through. Can do. and that really helps kind of fill the gaps with what they have in place versus what's missing.

Nathan Collier: What's the aha moment for them? Like when they, they realize that this is the thing that, that has been missing.

Brooklin Nash: I think there's a mini one and then a main one. The mini one is when we come back at the end of our kickoff month and present. Okay. Here's what we heard by talking to your VP of sales, your ceo, your head of customer success, listening to customer interviews and pulling a topic. Ideation out of that, rather than just like pulling it out of a hat and kind of formulating, this is what people are talking about.

Here's the questions they're asking. And I think it kind of clicks once they see the types of topics we can cover. And then number two, and this is, this sounds braggy, but I think seeing the first deliverables and the, [00:10:30] the quality of the content, because I think we all know there's such a huge range. Like you can pay a writer 5 cents a word, you could use ChatGPT or you could pay a $1.50 or $2 a word, the equivalent.

So there's such, such a big range in the quality that you. In content and I think when those first drafts come back, they can, they it.

Nathan Collier: Yeah. Interesting. I think, I think the I was on job boards taking like those crappy jobs where, you know, some company would just throw a keyword at me, right?

And be like, go write a 800 word article about gutters or paint or whatever. And I didn't know anything about gutters or paint or whatever, so I just opened up Google. Searched around, and if I could find some list posts, those were the best, right? Because then I could just, if I got three list posts, I can take two points from each and then boom, I'd create my own article, right?

And they would pay me 60 bucks or 80 bucks or a hundred dollars or whatever. But that's not insightful content. That's not good content. Right? And, and I think we were, so we as an industry are, so we're just inundated by that. I just see that is still rampant today. And I wonder. I wonder if ChatGPT is finally gonna like wipe that out.

Like, because ChatGPT could do that better than any human. Right? Like that's fundamentally what it's doing is it's

Brooklin Nash: You can do it faster.

Nathan Collier: Faster. That's a good point. That's a good point. It's doing it faster. Certainly cheaper.

I just want us to get more into, I would love for the industry to get more into how can we we, those of us who create content, how can create stuff that [00:12:00] no computer can create, because it doesn't exist yet. It's unique, it's insightful, it's a customer story. It's a, it's a subject matter expert. It's something that doesn't exist on the internet or in a book yet. That's what I want. That's what I'd love to see happen.

EJ Brown: I think, I feel like this all ties together that what's missing in content marketing is often that the writer goes in or the content creator, whatever, gets hired to be the expert. In most cases, as opposed to being the person who knows how to find the expert, frame the expert, et cetera, which is often the customer, right?

Or it's somebody internal in the company, or it's, you know, or it's even maybe like studies and things that you can find, but it, it's not generally what Nathan tends to refer to as like dumpster diving, which is really what ChatGPT does. You know, it's the expert dumps, dumpster diver of like just finding content online and making it sound like a typical right now content marketer would write it.

You know, and I just wanna say I just lost my first possible job to ChatGPT I just, I just left my full-time job at, at FastSpring where I was leading content after Nathan left. And I was talking to somebody who was looking for a company a young company. Who was looking for a content lead and they decided that they were just gonna have ChatGPT write all their content, as opposed to hiring somebody to create strategy and content. I thought this is [00:13:30] scary, like, yeah, so

Brooklin Nash: I think that's the first I've heard of that. Yeah, that actually happening.

Nathan Collier: Feels like you might have dodged a bullet on that one.

EJ Brown: I, yeah, exactly. I think a new company that is willing to, to go that way with their brand is probably not seeing the big picture. But I'm curious, like, I feel like this is often the case of so many agencies that I've worked with in the past that produce content. In this way of, without, like, in some ways like doing the soul searching of the market, you know, that it, it feels sort of par for course.

Brooklin Nash: Hmm. Bland, is that what you mean?

EJ Brown: Yeah. Like, I don't know how many times that I've been asked as a writer to write based off of a brief that was created by somebody who has not talked to customers, has not talked to people inside of a company and is just doing it based off existing content. And it, you know, it's, it feels just like rabbits reproducing in a way.

Like, no, we just need more of the same content as opposed to, and I feel like that's both what you both are saying, right? Is that, you know, if you talk to customers, if you talk to people inside of the company, if you, then the quality goes up because. You actually become experts in this thing as opposed to assuming you can research your way [00:15:00] into that role.

Does that sound right?

Brooklin Nash: Yeah, yeah, the rabbits reproducing is spot on because that's exactly what ChatGPT can do. Just faster.

EJ Brown: Right.

Brooklin Nash: And I loved how you put it, Nathan, of like, how can we as content marketers aim to create content, the type of content that AI can't replicate.

And I feel like I've had to modulate my response here. Cause I'm a content marketing agency owner, so of course I'm gonna sound like the grumpy old man on my lawn, like yelling at chem chemtrails or but I just don't see it.

I've tried again and again and I just can't see the quality. I think if you're trying to replicate what you're talking about of let's peruse Google and rearrange things and rewrite, then yeah ChatGPT can replicate that, but it can't replicate well articles based on conversations. It can't replicate like round social roundups.

It can't re. In the weeds, real world examples. So I think the, at least for us and what we work on with our clients, the key to making that differentiated content is maybe 30% about the quality of the writing itself. And it's much more about making sure we're hitting the right topics, making sure we're pulling in either real world examples or quotes from leadership or an actual expert or somebody screenshots, just like making it. Tangible for because even in the research stage, I don't think it works that well. Cause you can ask ChatGPT to spit out a list of 10 [00:16:30] topics. But are those really tied to what your customers and your prospects really

EJ Brown: I would love for you both to give me an example of something that you've recently published that you were proud to put out into the world. Does anything come to mind?

Nathan Collier: I got a bunch. We've been, we've been like, I've produced so much stuff lately. I'll give you one. It's, it's not even like it in terms of like, it didn't go viral. It's not like, you know what I mean? It wasn't, it wasn't a piece that had like a world shaking impact. But for me, in the work that I'm doing, so, so to give you some context, like the, we're at a company called PERSUIT was founded by somebody who used to be, A practice head in, in one of the global regional heads at the third largest legal firm in the world.

And the companies that we sell to are all comp, they're all, they're all Fortune 500, and many of them are Fortune 100 companies. So the biggest companies in the world, like there's no, there's no going up market for us. We are at the top of the market. It. That in that world, and we sell to the legal departments inside of those companies.

Like they are, they're all like, they're all, you know, they all have law degrees. They all went to Princeton and Yale and like the, they're all incredibly smart and incredibly bright. Like, I can't, I can't just spit out a G P T piece, so put it in front of them, you know, like that, that audience is, they, they could just do that themselves, right?

They don't, they don't need me to do that for them. And so in that, in that world, like we have to do something, something that's a little bit different. Something that's a little [00:18:00] bit. It just has a little bit of bite to it especially in a world like legal, which is traditionally very conservative, very like cautious about doing things.

And so we, we have been playing around with this sort of, this campaign called Kill the Billable Hour, Kill Billable Hours, which, for the rest of us is just sort of like a billing … Like, okay, I charge hourly versus I charge my project. Like I was a freelancer for a while. Like, whatever, like you can pay me however, I don't really care.

As long as it, as long as it makes sense. But in the world of legal, like that's a, it's like a whole, there's like a whole cultural thing that's built up about the, around the billable hour and all this stuff, and I, and I've had to sort of like learn that market as I've joined this company. But we did, I did a podcast with the founder and it was just, just a, just a, like a, we do one a week, right?

But I sat down with the, the guy who runs the company that I work at, and we went through like, if you really like, because of the billable hour, because this is the like, Billing model of choice in this market. It has all these negative downstream impacts, right? Like, like the lawyers are very unhappy people like statistically, like they have high rates of depression, alcoholism, and suicide, depression, all this stuff, and. It was jarring. Like some of those stats were jarring. And, and so just, I, I, my job was to come to it and be the journalist, right? Is to sort of investigate and to dig into those kinds of things and to bring the stats, to bring in the research and that kind of stuff.

And I just, I, I was really proud of the output on that one. And it became like an anchor piece that I can refer back to anytime we, [00:19:30] like, even when I get like a, somebody who's joined the company, like I could talk, I can sort of point back to that episode. I'm like, you should listen to this. This will really sort of get you. Into this story, this sort of brand story that we're building that's, it's bigger even than just the brand. It's a market level kind of story. And it was fun to be part of that. That wasn't, I didn't come up with that, right? But it's my job to amplify that thing as as much as I can to sort of get that thing to go out into the market so that people know who we are and what we're about.

So that was a, that was

Brooklin Nash: Yeah.

Nathan Collier: proud of.

Brooklin Nash: I love that it started with the founder. Yeah, I do. I have an answer for you EJ but I You mentioning your job to be was to be the journalist Nathan. I, I wanna interject with a question, if that's ok. Probably one of my most controversial tweets ever was content marketing is crappy journalism with better pay. curious I'm curious for your thoughts on that.

Nathan Collier: You're not wrong. That that's a, that's a, so EJ's laughing because like EJ and I, that, that's a phrase that I use a lot. I think the way I would phrase it, having lived both of those lives is content marketing is journalism. Journalism, but it's sales. Like, I have an ad, I have an agenda, right?

Like, so when I, when I worked, when I worked in, and, and I don't mean that to be like, I, I don't mean that to be it, it sounds a. Sketchy. Right. So let me unpack that a little bit. When I worked in journalism, like you go in a newsroom, I worked in sports, right? I was local sports, I was covering high school football [00:21:00] games, and basketball and baseball, right?

There wasn't anything that controversial about it. There were a few pieces that I did that were like, there was one piece, there was this field, right? That was all screwed up and peop kids were getting hurt on it. And it became like this story about what the community was doing about it and funding and all this kinda stuff.

But that's pretty rare, right? Normally it's like this team beat this team. They had a good quarterback or whatever it was. But I did spend a lot of time in an, in a newsroom. And when you talk to journalists, there's this like, there's this, I don't know how to say it. There's this culture in journalism that is about objectivity and bringing the truth to the market.

And, and I'm talking about like the reporters, like there, there's plenty of jaded people do within journalism and there's plenty of sketchy stuff that happens in that world. But most sort of people who work in journalism, they have this, they have this idea that the stories are. They're valuable in and of themselves.

And that, and that, like getting to the truth of a matter is a, it's like a public good. It's like a public service. They, they view themselves as public servant. I'm in marketing today, right? My job is to find products that I believe in, right? And if I do truly believe in them, I'm gonna push them, like, and I, and I mean push them as in like, promote them in a way that like, good products solve real problems for real people.

And so I'm proud to be a part. Like a of a career field that does that. Right. And that's like when I do my job well, I'm legitimately wake up every day and I get to help people solve their problems. That's what I get to do. And me as a content person, I get to do it at scale, not just like a, not just like a salesperson who does it one to one which is also [00:22:30] totally honorable work if you're doing it in, in, in a, in the right way.

But make no mistake, when I write my pieces, I have an agenda. Whereas in journalism, my agenda was just to capture the story and to. Sort of the truth to the newsprint that that went on every day.

Brooklin Nash: Yeah. I'm glad you uncovered that because that's exactly what I meant by that. It just is inherently biased, which is inherently bad journalism. So I think people thought I was saying, Content for B2B or tech, whatever, is inherently crappier than journalism. And that's not what I mean. It just means it has an outcome in mind, and if it doesn't, then it's bad content marketing.

So it's this inverse.

Nathan Collier: The pay is.

Brooklin Nash: Thanks for indulging me in that.

Nathan Collier: The pay is definitely better though. I like no doubt.

Brooklin Nash: That was the sticking point. Yeah. And I think this is super anecdotal, but I think in the responses overall it was the journalists who agreed and the content marketers who disagreed.

yeah. Speaking of journalistic approach, I think one of the, my favorite pieces that we've published on our site was all focused on how to write a B2B intro that doesn't suck and it. Ended up being really in depth in the weeds. It was like over 3000 but our writer just pulled in probably 10. It was 10 or 12 outside content marketers to get their take and examples that they had worked on. So the whole thing was filled with number one, super tactical advice. Number two, that validation and [00:24:00] context.

Those who are really good at content marketing with quotes and number three visual examples to show, okay, here's the tactical advice, here's what it looks like in and it was so much more effort than writing a thousand word posts that was ba that's basically a listicle, but it's something that's evergreen, really resourceful and sets set itself up recycling and repurposing and putting out in all sorts of different formats, right?

Rather than, I'm going to die.

EJ Brown: I'm curious for both of you and, Nathan, I sort of know the answer for you, but I mean, I personally believe that content is becoming less and less synonymous with text, you know, or text-based pieces. Where for both of you how is your work as a content marketer evolving to, to include content from different mediums? Nathan, we'll start with you.

Nathan Collier: I'll give a short answer because it's not complicated. I think you gotta give people a chance to, the best pieces I like are the ones that are. This is what I try to do whenever I can, is I try to, I try to incorporate text, video, and audio in one piece if I can. Visuals too. Text, pictures and so, so if I got a visual person that's just scanning, they can get the point. If they got a reader, they can read and they get the point. If I got an audio person, they can take that same information. It's just like I'm telling one story, but in different formats, right? Like, Visual and text.

And I, I think the, the most robust content marketing strategies will allow people to consume information the way that they, like. I think I've, [00:25:30] you hear this debate come up every now and then, like, people don't read. People don't listen. People don't — that's just, that's missing the point because you've got a, you've got a wide audience of people.

Some of those people read, some of them. Watch some of them listen. So like your job is to make that information accessible to them in whatever way that they want to consume it. If you can,

Brooklin Nash: Yeah, I think the key for us is that the type of content we're talking about, if you take the time to go through this curation process before creation, you're gonna be set up with a lot better opportunities for audio and video and visuals. so we're a pretty hyper-focused on what we offer. Like we don't do SEO, we don't do email marketing, et cetera, but we did bring social into what we offer, because in our minds it's so tied together. Like if we're starting a piece of content with an hour long conversation with the ceo, do you know how many like little sound bites and video clips and visuals go, come out of that conversation? So why? Why limit it to an article?

EJ Brown: Right.

Brooklin Nash: on the site,

Nathan Collier: Yeah.

Brooklin Nash: know,

Nathan Collier: EJ and I were just, we were just talking about using descript to sort of subtitle videos and how to get that like to, to work better.

Um, you know, stuff like that.

It's just, and when you were at — Brooklin, when you were talking about that article that had all the different examples, like in my head I'm just like, boy, I'm just filling that into my content calendar for social.

There's 10 right there. Boom, boom, boom. Right. You know, I got two weeks, two good weeks of content.

Brooklin Nash: Mm-hmm. Yeah, you get away from. [00:27:00]

Sorry to interrupt you. You, it's like this mindset of social is, here's a link to our post. Go check it out. Rather than you have all these insights and visuals, like there's probably 20 posts there if you chop it up.

Nathan Collier: yeah, I think that's one of the things I learned. Go going, because I've, I've done it too. Brooklin you have too, where I've sort of been in house and I've been freelance at different parts of my career. I'm in house today. Who knows where I'll be in five years. When I was freelance, it was very, like, I was very tight.

Like I had like two types of things that I delivered. Like I delivered ghost written thought leadership, and I delivered like profile story style stuff, right? Like sometimes that was a case study. Sometimes it ended up being like a longer form piece, but it was two styles of thing and they were very distinct, right?

I did this in this way and it this in this way. Now that I'm in house, I'm sort of, you know, running, sitting in the director's chair. It's, it's much. I, I see this a lot where I'll, I'll, I'll be talking to somebody and they'll have like a podcast strategy and a webinar strategy and a blog strategy, and they'll be separate, right?

They'll be somebody who owns all these different things. What, what I, the way I think about it though is like, I want like a story. Or a set of stories, and then I'm gonna tell those stories through the blog. Like I'm gonna tell, it just makes it easier, right? Like, okay, during the next six weeks or so, I'm gonna tell a story about this particular topic.

This is what I'm doing for Q2. Q2 just started yesterday, right? I've got two of 'em. We're gonna tell these two stories. Or like, I got webinars and blogs and social media posts like, and so it's one strategy, but it's against all these different channels, and so it simplifies it for me from a strategies [00:28:30] perspective, because I don't have to come up, I'm not constantly just trying to come up with a good idea for the next webinar.

Like I just, I'm like, okay, how can I tell this story through the webinar that we're gonna do, you know, in four weeks or whatever. so that has helped me simplify sort of my thinking.

Brooklin Nash: Any chance you are subscribed to Devin Reed's newsletter? He was at Gong and that was at Clarity. I'll forward it to you too, but I think it was his last one walked through exactly this and he has some great visuals for kind of this waterfall of if you're starting with like, here's the narrative one or pillar one, pillar two, pillar. Webinar that goes with that, articles that go with that gated asset, that goes with that, social posts that go with that, and it just waterfalls down. and approach works well.

Nathan Collier: the, the strategy just, it just becomes obvious, right? And I, I think what's fun about that is like we create the stories first, like, we don't even think about, I'm not even thinking about the channels yet. So I've been too conver, too many conversations over my career where it's like, oh no, we need a blog next Tuesday.

What do we do? And that, that, that sort of like scrambling it leads to content that's, it's oneish. It's not, it's not as, it's not as good as it could be when it's paired with a sort of a larger strategy.

EJ Brown: I wanna pivot. We, Nathan, you and I were talking about brand positioning earlier and, you know you were talking about the content that you were creating around the idea of killing the billable hour and how. The billable hour [00:30:00] is the villain in the story when it comes to the legal industry and really love this idea.

And we were having this text exchange, and I texted you back that there was this lesson that I learned as an English undergrad. That no story exists that isn't based off of conflict. You have to have conflict in order for there to be a story. And it, it also goes along with Donald Miller's story stuff like, I think it was in Blue Like Jazz.

No, it was one of his other books where he was talking about that like, people are reticent to change, you know, like they don't wanna change. There has to be something that pushes them to change and that, that pushes usually conflict, you know? And.

Nathan Collier: Hmm.

EJ Brown: So I'm curious about like where you both are in terms of like building a strategy around, I mean, is it the same as pain points or is it something different to you when you're thinking about like the brand messaging is the, you know where does the villain

Brooklin Nash: fit in?

I think it's,

EJ Brown: Yeah,

Brooklin Nash: sorry.

EJ Brown: on.

Brooklin Nash: For us, when we're going through editorial strategy with our clients, it starts with the pain points, but there's usually four or five, six pain points per. So that the individual pain points help inform actual topic ideation of what we want to cover because it's content that addresses that direct pain point.

But then we also try [00:31:30] to identify what the commonalities are and boil that down to. I mean, if it's branding like one message, like kill the billable hour like you're talking about Nathan, if it's for content strategy, like here's the three max four themes that we want to talk about over the course of an entire year, and unless it's like opportunistic or topical, nearly every single piece of content should pull back to tie back to one of those three or four themes.

Nathan Collier: That's exactly how, that's exactly how I set it up too. Same, same exact thing.

We just went through the whole messaging. We went through the messaging exercise. We ended up with six. I'm not gonna attack all of those all at once. It's six f it's six across three personas. So it's to each that's, and we wrote, we wrote value props for each one.

Sort of, there's tons of overlap between the, the two. So it's not quite as, it's never quite as clean as just, you know, if I have three, there's usually overlap between them. But yeah, a hundred percent, like, I think, I think you're talking about A Million Miles and a Thousand Years is, I think that's the book from Don Miller that was talking about that.

But the conflict, it's interesting, you know, you get back into some of those old school copywriting books where they talk about like the awareness ladder and do people even know they have a problem to solve? And I think there's a really good book called Great Leads. I think the, the authors are Masterson and Forgetting, I'm forgetting the next one.

I'll send you the link EJ so you can put it in the show notes or something like that. [00:33:00] But it's, it's based on the awareness ladder from that book, Scientific Advertising from Eugene Schwartz from like 1967 or whatever. But it just says like, if you have an audience that doesn't even know they have a problem, you can write headlines that look like this.

If you have an audience that knows they have a problem and they're searching for an answer, you can write headlines that look like this, right? You can be, because if you go to an audience that doesn't even know they have a problem, you can't talk about product. They don't care.

Here, buy this umbrella. Well, it's not raining. Like I don't need an umbrella. Right? But if I go up to you and I'm like, your head's on. You've lost all your hair and you don't have any sunscreen on your head, and you're gonna get sunburned. Maybe you want this umbrella and now you started somewhere and introduced me to a problem and then give, handed me a solution.

So the, the villain in all those cases is, it always comes back to some sort of problem, right? Some sort of issue that they're trying to solve. And so I do, I do think that, Easy. This is what we learned at when we were working with Grow and Convert, right? They talk about pain point SEO. That’s the way that they talk about it there.

And so even for things like SEO, like those pain points, if they're, if they're compelling enough, if they're real problems, problems we're solving, those are villains in those people's lives. So I don't. The, the danger, I think is the danger when you start to talk about villains and conflict and modeling against like the, the hero's journey stuff is in the hero's journey. It's the villain is a person and there's a really, there's a really big danger I think that some, some marketers fall into where they make, [00:34:30] they make some other person or some other group of people the villain in the way that they tell their story. And that always just comes across. Kind of gross.

Um, the, best villains when you're talking about marketing are problems where it's a system that's the problem, where it's a symptom that's the problem, where it's -in the case of the billable hour, right, it's a system itself. It's, not any one person that created the system. Everybody is sort of, they find themselves boxed in by the system and we're talking about breaking free from the system, right? Tear it all down and do something new.

This, this kind of stuff. So you have to be really careful not to villainize people. Right. Otherwise you end up you know, even that is a bit controversial though. There are marketers out there who will say, you need to like, pick a villain and go after them. I dunno, I, I've always found more success by talking about systems that are broken that you maybe didn't even realize or maybe have never even examined. That, that tends to open people up to, to just considering new ways of doing things.

Brooklin Nash: I think another good, I really love all of that. I think another good villain is the, the actual thing that you're working on. Like I think of Lavender, which is a sales email tool, and they, they don't talk about sales reps being bad at sales emails. They talk about sales emails being crappy because guess what?

We've all received a crappy sales email. So their whole thing is making better sales emails, and I think it's. Smart because it's not a person, it's not save time on your emails. It's let's make a better sales email.

Nathan Collier: I love it. I was, I was working on a conference in, in Vegas last fall and it was again, [00:36:00] legal, right? And so every, every, there's probably 7,500 booths there or something. They're all blue. Or like dark green or like purple, and it just, they're all like, we'll save you time, we'll make you money, we'll make you more efficient.

Like they, they all could have been created by the same exec person, people. And we're like, in the cor, we had a crappy booth location, but we're in the corner with like bright yellow stuff, just kill the bill, flower down. Our shirts running around like you couldn't miss us. And it was just good. It was just because we had something to say, right?

Something to say that. That wasn't just the same old thing that everybody else was saying. And so, my boss

Brooklin Nash: and guess what You.

Nathan Collier: it's so easy to be ignored. Right?

Brooklin Nash: Because you could have gone that route, like, help find, help with finding outside counsel, save time in the process, save money.

Nathan Collier: Yeah.

Brooklin Nash: but you didn't, you found the more compelling

Nathan Collier: Oh, I

have tons of that stuff still on the internet that I gotta eventually replace. Right. It like, that stuff is still floating around there. Like, like it's not, it's not as, That stuff that isn't out there eventually, but I've got a website, revamp project to, to work on over the next couple of months.

So stuff like that takes, it takes a while. It takes a while to really sort of get your hands around something like that and, and really make it go in all the different places where people might see it. But but yeah, spot on in terms of like the courts, the storytelling.

EJ Brown: I am really excited. I'm, I'm actually talking to Chelsea, who's the content person. Lavender in a day or two for the podcast. Yeah.

Yes.

Brooklin Nash:

She's been great.

EJ Brown: sweet. I, I haven't talked to her yet, so I'm excited. But one of the [00:37:30] things that I told her I wanted to talk to her about is Taking risks in brand, you know, which I think is what we're talking about.

You know, like there, and I think there are some brands that really lean into it, like lavender. But I think as when you're working in an agency setting or as a freelancer it's, it's harder to build that trust and that confidence up to really. Have bolder brand or even just encourage bolder brand statements and that kind of thing.

And I, I think that's one of the things that I, I didn't realize I was missing, only freelancing and, and never having worked at a, for a corporation until I worked for FastSpring was that, oh, when you have a couple of years to really like. Dig into what a company should be or wants to be, then you can start to get a little bolder and, and just more aware, I think, of what those stories are that are hiding under the surface.

Right. But I'm curious do you, do you have examples either of you of like these these aha moments where All of a sudden, like content marketing, like the, the possibilities or the, the content that you created got deeper and better because there was a relationship that had developed with the company that you're working with or writing for.

Brooklin Nash: I think for me it was, it muted a similar path as me, Nathan, I, it's one of the reasons, one of the pieces of advice, not universally, but I said just consider it. If you're a freelance writer and you've only been a freelance [00:39:00] writer, or it's been a long time since you've been in-house, go in-house for a while because you'll learn so much more about the broader marketing function and go to market.

and that's what it was for me. It was when I went from, I was only a freelance writer for seven years and then I was in-house for two years at two different startups. And for me that was the turning point because, then I Connected the dots between, okay, this is what demand gen is looking for out of content.

This is what sales is looking for out of content. This is what the CEO is looking for and wants, and they all want different things. So you have to figure out how to juggle and then I found the best way to juggle it and land on something that appeals to everybody internally and let alone your prospects and customers is what we, just, what we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation is starting with those Insights and being purposeful.

Nathan Collier: I think every time I talk to somebody from my target audience, like I come away. So many things and I'm like, man, I wish I would've known that before. That always happens. And I'll tell you the first time that happened, it was, it was probably is like 20 10, 20 11, something like that. This is wait first job back, back after I made the first marketing job after I moved outta journalism.

This was the one I was talking about earlier where it was like, 50 people, marketing 5,000 people in the company. Really difficult to get in front of a customer, but I talked my way into doing it ride along with a salesperson. And would they, they would actually, like, they had like company cars and they would visit, so we were selling we were selling software to car dealerships across the US and Canada.

So if you, [00:40:30] if you've ever, ever been to a car dealership to try and buy a car and they like pull out a tablet and like type your name in or computer and type your name into that system, there was a 40% chance it was that company's, that company's software. Selling software to car dealers. Like there is no more aggressive sales audience than the car dealers.

Like, like those, those people are up for the fight. They're like, you wanna sell me something? Let's go. Like, they, they, they do it almost just for fun, right? And so I didn't know it at the time because I was really, I was completely new to marketing. I, but I, I know now how good of a sales team that team was.

Like they were, they were among the best salespeople that I. Had a chance to work with. And so, so I did this ride along with one guy and he was taking over an account, right? So one guy left, he was taking over part of his territory. So he's like, come on, we'll just like, we'll go visit this, this dealership.

And it was in, it was in Indiana, two, two hour drive to get there. And going to this guy like, Hey, is the dealer there? And the guy, like, the dealer's like walking out as we're walking in and he's like, are you from, are you from that company? Like, and apparently like nobody from our company had visited him in like two and a half years and he'd been under this big contract dispute and. He was beyond angry. Like he was like red hot, angry. He's like, come here. And he takes us up to his little office, which is above the showroom in this car dealership and where, I can't even remember where we were in Indiana. And he like, he's like, sit down. He's so, sit on his little chair and he like opens his file cabinet and it pulls out like the contract we had him in like locked in a seven year contract. And we had forced him through the contract to, to do [00:42:00] some really expensive upgrade on something. I don't remember the details, but he was so angry and he had two years, two years left on that deal and he slapped that thing on the, on the on the table and just started like laying in to the both of us.

And I'm like, what is happening right now? This is the first like sales experience first, first time in front of a customer at this company.

Brooklin Nash: Oh God.

Nathan Collier: and. I, I'll never forget my, the sales guy I was with, he was just like, oh, interesting. He just sort of like, he just sort of, he listened and listened, listened. The guy just raised and raised me.

He probably raised for 10 minutes or so, and then finally he took a breath and our sales guy said, well, I'm sorry to hear all that, but I'm your new sales rep. You got me for two years. Is there anything I do to help you? And he just started to ask him questions and the guy was like, well, you could do this.

And well, you could, if you come back, you can at least show my service guys. You know, improve how they do. And like, quietly, gently, like my sales guy just started to sort of get buy-in for a few next steps to sort of get into the account. And the guy was not, it's not like we walked outta there. The guy was happy, he was still angry as, but I, we wa we eventually walked outta the dealership and the guy went, he was going to lunch, we cut him right for lunch, which was like the worst time ever. But we got the sales guy's car and I looked at him and like, does that happen a lot? He was like, oh, it happens every now and then. You just gotta let 'em get it out. And I remember thinking like, okay, like that's the audience. Like that's the audience I'm writing for. When I go back to the office and I write the email that goes out this week that goes out to [00:43:30] 70,000 people, that's who it is, right?

Like this guy. This is who it is, this is, this is who he cares about. This is what's interesting to him. And that's how to make it completely changed everything for me like that, that having that insight into what was important to him, even though it was delivered in a very angry way, but to have, to have my sales guy be so. Just it, just roll with it like that, that experience was so eye-opening for me personally. And I have, I've never had an experience quite that combative before, but I think every time I've, every time I've been on a call or had an opportunity to talk to somebody from the, the audience, whether that's a customer or future customer it's always like that.

I always learn so much about what they care about. And so that, that's just what it was for me.

Brooklin Nash: Nathan's story was so much better than mine. That was

Nathan Collier: I've been practicing that story for a while. I told that one a few times. So

Brooklin Nash: a good one.

EJ Brown: Well, I, you know, superpower is storytelling. There you go. We've already got, I, I was gonna end by asking, you know, if you could change one thing about B2B marketing, what it would it be? And I feel like both of your answers would be something around, you know, actually talking to people, talking to customers.

So anything else, like any. Here's how I'd like you both to, to leave it is for content marketers out there, wannabe content marketers or any type of marketer who's working in b2b. If you're not able to talk to customers [00:45:00] what are other ways that you encourage people just to learn the market that they might not be thinking about and to break down these really shallow personas.

Brooklin Nash: I think for me it's, we've talked a lot about talking to your customer and your audience. I think it honestly can start with, I mean, when we first started chatting, we were talking about content as a silo. And I think way too often that's the case where you have content marketing who puts stuff out there, but then you have product marketing and customer marketing who they get to talk to the customers, but content doesn't, or demand gen talk talks to sales, but content doesn't. Or brand talks to the leadership, but content doesn't. And it just, I think content flows. through Not just all your marketing functions, but like the entire go-to-market org. Like everybody needs content. So I think we need to stop treating content marketing as this siloed thing that sits alongside and treat it something that's more foundational to functions.

Nathan Collier: Wholeheartedly agree with that. I think that's what I would say is that if we can get content embedded more into the other parts of the organization that'll go a long way to giving, it'll solve this problem where we're isolated and just writing stuff based on what we find in Google.

EJ Brown: Great. Well, thanks again both of you. This has been great, so, and I'm so happy you now know each other.

Brooklin Nash: Yeah, finally, face to face.

EJ Brown: Love it.

Nathan Collier: ej.

[00:46:30] Appreciate it.

Brooklin Nash: Thanks for EJ. I love the, the multiple guests format. This is really fun.

Content Marketing is Dead preaches about the evolution of content marketing. Specifically, I believe that:

• The text-based foundation of content marketing is going away. Video, audio, and visual content are just as important when it comes to reaching and engaging with your audience.

• Creating content one piece at a time — and not building a multimedia approach into your creation process — is unsustainable and a waste of resources.

And yet, when I decided to start this new project, I stuck to my comfort zone (text), because of limited time and resources.

I knew that in the long-term, exclusively creating a text-based newsletter wasn’t going to meet my brand goals, nor was it demonstrating how to best use content to create a thriving brand.

So I’m very excited to announce that Content Marketing is Dead is expanding to include a podcast. And I’d like to explain why I’m going to host the podcast on Substack and why I’m duplicating this newsletter on Linkedin and Substack.

1. Why I Started My Newsletter on Both Linkedin and Substack

When I started this newsletter, I knew I wanted to publish each issue on both Linkedin and Substack.

(You can find my newsletter on Linkedin here.)

Pro: Be Where Your Audience Is

The big reason? It’s more findable that way. If I’m taking the time to write out a long-form newsletter, why not post it in multiple places? This enables me to expand my reach with minimal extra effort.

Pro: UX AND ROI Win: Blog and Newsletter in One

Linkedin and Substack also share one important thing in common: they both allow subscribers to have the experience they prefer. Both Linkedin and Substack email new issues to subscribers, allowing them to consume the content in their inbox or by visiting the site.

Con: SEO

The biggest potential pitfall to posting the same content in two places is SEO. Google’s not a big fan of duplicated content, and if I want my Substack to have an organic presence in the future, I may need to rethink this. But for now, having visibility on two platforms is more important.

Linkedin = Stronger Findability and Shareability

But both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses. With a much larger user-base, people will more naturally find this newsletter on Linkedin, and I already have a small following on the platform. Linkedin is set up in a way to make it easy for people to share content.

Substack = More Versatile Brand Hub

On the other hand, Linkedin has fewer connected tools to expand a brand (like a branded website or podcast hosting). Overall, there are fewer options to make the newsletter a legit brand hub like you can with Substack.

2. Why I’m Starting My Podcast on Substack

Here’s where I’m really in love with what Substack is doing for individual creators.

Substack creates a one-stop-shop for a branded website, newsletter, and podcast with minimum effort to get set up, easy tools to grow and engage with your audience, and publish consistent content.

For instance, check out Lenny’s Newsletter, a Substack about growing a product and career as a product manager.

At first glance, this might look like a typical influencer’s website, with a blog, podcast, and even CTAs to join Lenny’s Slack community. But Substack has some fun features that encourage fan engagement.

New Podcast Episode Notifications Are Built-In

Anytime you publish a new podcast, it emails all of your newsletter subscribers and notifies followers via the Substack app. So people interested in your podcast can also sign up for your newsletter and get double the value.

Substack’s app doubles as a newsletter reader and podcast streaming app, which means people can follow creators they like and engage with their content in multiple ways in one app.

Communication Tools Are Also Built-In

Subscribers to your newsletter can engage with you via the Substack app. As a tool with growing popularity, Substack users are often already on the app and can interact with multiple brands in one tool.

Plus, it’s the only podcast streaming platform that I know of that has commenting and sharing functionality built in.

Substack Limitations to Be Aware Of

If I’m winning you over to Substack, there are limitations to consider.

Since, at its heart, Substack is an email marketing tool, there are big limitations regarding the kinds of content you can post, how you can format that content, plugins, etc. You’re not going to have the flexibility of a typical CMS like WordPress or the analytics of something like HubSpot. Overall, it was designed for journalists and other writers. It was not designed for businesses.

Substack’s podcasting functionality is also a work in progress, and its limitations can be frustrating. For instance, while podcasting pages feature a “listen on” drop-down, the options are very limited. You can’t add Spotify or Google Podcasts to the list. And the newsletter’s limited layout makes it difficult to add additional “listen” buttons that could link to the streaming service a user prefers.

Overall, for me at least, the ease of putting out three forms of content (a blog post, newsletter, and podcast) with one click of the “publish button,” is well worth the limitations.

What to Expect From the Content Marketing Is Dead Podcast

I’m interviewing a diverse array of marketing specialists about how content marketing is evolving and how content fits in the larger marketing ecosystem.

Most episodes will be double interviews with two guests who may or may not know each other and have unique perspectives on a given topic.

For instance, for my first episode (coming next week!), I spoke to Nathan Collier and Brooklin Nash — two leaders in content marketing — about what ChatGPT can and cannot do for content marketing, among other topics.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll also hear from:

• Chelsea Castle, content lead at Lavender AI and Shawn Nichols, founder of the UX design firm Metriq, about usability and brand voice.

• Andrew Nicoletta, senior manager of content marketing at ServiceTitan, and Cecilia Li, content marketing manager at NexHealth, about marketing to local businesses.

• Josef Newton, founder of Sway, about B2B video marketing.

Want to be a guest? Email me at ej@prismb2b.io!

It didn’t go well.

“Translators worried that relying on translation memory would make their work more repetitive, and decrease the pay and amount of work available. Twenty-five years later, the same arguments are being made about machine translation,” he writes.

For over thirty years, there’s been a strong contingent in the language service provider (LSP) community who believe that relying on technology will harm the quality of translations. 

They’re not wrong. While AI-enabled translation has come a long way, no translation tool perfectly understands the nuance of context. And when unchecked, machine translations can lead to sometimes humorous — sometimes disastrous — misunderstandings.

Last year, a news site warned Germans against buying hamsters due to the ongoing food shortage. While in a 2020 machine translation mishap, Facebook translated Chinese President Xi Jinping’s name to “President S***hole.”

So yes, in 2023, the translation industry still requires a human touch: translators and editors capable of reading context and identifying when something seems off, not to mention the world of translation that is in itself an art form. Would you want to read poetry translated by a computer? (Don’t answer that.)

But let’s talk about sustainability. According to Jean-Luc, translation businesses that are not utilizing machine translation in one form or another are not able to compete with those that have. “The reality is that machine translation is cheaper, faster, more secure, and increasingly better quality,” Jean-Luc explains. “LSPs that do not adopt this quickly dominating technology will not be able to compete in this new market.”

There are cost and time considerations. Companies that utilize machine translation are cheaper with faster turnarounds  — even when you factor in human post-editing. And especially for larger projects, faster and cheaper is usually going to win out.

Machine translation can actually increase quality, as well. Utilizing translation memory — a database of text and terminology and preferred translations — in coordination with machine translation can increase the consistency of a project or client-specific lexicon. Similar to tools like spellcheck and Grammarly, machine translation tools can often catch more errors than a human can. 

All in all, the localization industry is stronger because of AI. And the same is going to be true about marketing ... eventually.

Buzzfeed just announced it would begin using OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, to create personality quizzes and assist staff in personalizing content. Not surprisingly, Buzzfeed’s shares jumped more than 150% after this announcement.

Marketing and media organizations are hungry to jump on the #ChatGPT bandwagon. But my fear is that we are going to misuse these tools in order to simply crank out more low-quality content. And it’ll be easy to do. A number of AI-enabled tools are cropping up that promise high-quality computer-generated content on supposedly any topic.

This, of course, will only add to the content pollution I wrote about last week. Even if artificial intelligence is capable of writing content that’s indistinguishable from that written by a human, is it doing so by simply mimicking much of low-quality content that’s already out there?

While this democratizes content creation by making it easier for any business to produce content at lower price points, it also will make it significantly harder to stand out with unique ideas or find resources from verifiable experts.

Meanwhile, there are better uses of the technology that can enhance the performance of media and marketing professionals while making our jobs easier.

Many of the same tools that write entire posts for you come with other features that can be useful even for AI critics like myself:

1. Generate ideas for blog posts, keywords to target, ad copy.

2. Write first drafts of press releases, blog outlines, etc.

3. Generate metadata.

4. Recommend clips from longer videos or quotes from long-form posts.

5. Make transcripts more useful with automated outlines and topic clusters.

In order to stay relevant, every multimedia creator, content strategist, and content manager needs to begin forming a strategy for how to incorporate AI technology into their workflows.

And we certainly won’t be the first industry to have done this work.

Over the years, the localization industry has learned smart ways to integrate machine translation into the translation process. For instance, in his post, Jean-Luc identifies situations that call for different levels of post-editing. Little or no human post-editing may be needed for translating support forums or internal communication in a company. He also believes there are situations in which machine translation will not work, such as public-facing materials that require enhanced cultural sensitivity, such as marketing content.

Similar to what I said last week, as we explore the uses of new technology, I hope we keep in mind that whatever we produce is how the public will shape its opinion of our brand. Do we want that opinion to be based on content created by a computer or a human? 

Featured image Image by Mohamed Hassan.

It means things within content marketing are in flux. In fact, I don’t believe that content should stand alone as its own function in most marketing departments. And I’d like to explain why.

1.  A Writer Is No Longer the Ideal Content Marketer

The word content used to be synonymous with text. At least in the world of marketing. Content marketers were writers. Dipping your toes into content marketing meant starting a blog. And search engine Optimization was dedicated to promoting text-based content.

That is no longer the case.

Today, content can mean videos, emails, live streams, podcasts or audio snippets, an interactive report, or a web page. For marketers, content is simply a deliverable we use to send out a message.

So what does this mean for the future of content marketers?

A content marketer should be an expert in which mediums best fit the need or goal.

A content marketer should be an expert in how to offer the same message in multiple formats.

Of course, we still need text specialists, video specialists, and so on. But when it comes to overall content strategy and what a content team is producing, text is no longer king. 

2. Most Content Is Digital Pollution

Most content that businesses produce does little to build positive brand recognition or increase revenue.

Want proof? Run any random Google search for a subject you know well, go to the second page of search results, and read through the titles. Click on one of them and scroll through the content. 

Pretty bad, right?

The problem is that most companies farm out their content to content specialists who know very little about the topic. Instead, they’re world-class Googlers and can create content briefs and blog posts that sound like everything else out there.

Nathan Collier calls this dumpster diving. I call it getting an A in being an imposter. (And no matter what you call it, it sounds a lot like what Chat GPT is producing). 

Full disclosure: I’ve done it. I’ve written many a post on subjects I have zero experience in. It’s also a content strategy I now advocate loudly against.

For years, content teams and agencies have gotten away with it because they can produce crap that still results in traffic to a website. And that’s all that companies have cared about: traffic.

Finally, companies are starting to catch on that a bunch of traffic isn’t the ultimate goal. They’re raising their expectations which is leading to changes in how we think of content marketing. 

Have you noticed the trend to talk about content that leads to conversions? This is as it should be. It’s a good start. But it’s just the start.

The other problem with content pollution? It makes it ten times harder to promote actual quality stuff. And marketing teams are scrambling to find new ways to create an impact.

Yes, we need to be bold and creative.

 We also need to stop putting out garbage.

3. Content Marketing Shouldn’t Be a Separate Function

Ok, hear me out content marketers …

Of course, companies need content creators. (And remember, I mean video creators, copywriters, long-form content writers, audio engineers, etc.) But when the strategy behind that content is created in separate meetings as the strategy behind customer marketing, demand gen, product marketing, customer marketing, and so on.

Content is a tool that enables a company to connect to its customers, to utilize partnerships, to send out examples of its brand, to promote its product, etc. When a content team sets its own goals separate from the goals of these other functions, two things happen:

1.     Competing priorities drawing from the same marketing budget.

2.    Sooooo many missed opportunities. 

What I’m really advocating for is more collaboration from the get-go and one strategy to rule them all.

4. Content Shouldn’t Be Separate From Brand

You’ll never spot the most egregious content mistakes your company has made. The potential customers you lost because of it are not around to tell you about it.

All that traffic that doesn’t convert? Some of them will leave your site with a positive or neutral opinion of your brand. And some of those folks will be back. That’s the best possible outcome.

But what about all of the prospects that leave your website thinking, “Wow, that company doesn’t get me at all!”

That’s when your content has failed.

To succeed, content should be led by a detailed understanding of a company’s:

• Product(s) and services 

• Culture

• Values and mission

• Goals and roadmap

And what does all of that add up to?

Brand.

I’m starting to think that the future of content is a happy merger with brand. Because a brand message cannot exist without content.