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Practical Go-to-Market guidance specifically for B2B software and service companies between $5MM-$50MM in revenue.
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#35: Where Product and Content Marketers Meet: Insights from Mary Keough
Welcome to our first episode of the Content August Series!
This episode is packed with wisdom on conducting insightful customer research and translating those insights into compelling content. Unlock the secrets of strategic content creation and product marketing with our special guest, Mary Keough, a luminary in the world of B2B marketing. Learn the art of recognizing customer pain points, tipping points for change, and downstream impacts, all while enhancing your product pages, feature pages, and use case pages to boost sales and marketing strategies. Mary sheds light on prioritizing depth over breadth in content marketing, ensuring your content addresses the key challenges of your target audience thoroughly.
Mary's LinkedIn
Our Favorite Mary Posts:
- As a new Head of Marketing for a B2B SaaS startup, what's NOT on my list of priorities is brand building.
- I use ChatGPT to write.
- Some of y'all can't get out of your kooky wonk talk and it shows.
- Here's the exact formula we used to re-write the Use Case pages on our new website
- For early-stage SaaS, SMB companies and even midmarket: everything about your product does not have to tie back to pipeline or revenue.
Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B software and services companies, especially those with less than $50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support.
Gary:Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now, works now. Why don't we get started? We're like jumping in already. Who are we kidding? Let's just have a conversation here. So very excited here at GTM Pro to have Mary Keough. Mary, I'm going to let you dive in and provide your background, but I do think it's helpful to you know. The thoughts and situations that you're managing today are all a reflection of what you've experienced in the past and I think that arc is really helpful for people to see, like you know, the major things that you picked up along the way that now inform how you manage product and content marketing. So, if you can, just, you know, give us a quick pass at that. That would be really helpful.
Mary:Okay, you bet. So I'm Mary Keough, like really excited to talk to your audience today too. I started out as just a lowly technical writer for a manufacturing company about eight years ago now, just freelancing, doing a lot of editing, figuring out exactly what I wanted to do, and I had a really fantastic leader who pushed me into this kind of sales and marketing realm. I think he just really respected the way that I thought about people and connecting content with people. At the time my technical writing role was only for internal documents. So we had it was called almost like an internal university. So we had a lot of engineers who were coming in. They were gonna be sales engineers, so they knew a lot about their technical background. They knew a lot about engineering. They didn't know a lot about our products. So my job was to create educational material tying engineering to our about our products. So my job was to create educational material tying engineering to our actual physical products. So that was just kind of like where I come from as far as being able to communicate product value really early on to people with a very technical background.
Mary:So moved into kind of this business development intro to marketing kind of role in a smaller subset of a larger company Did really really well there, did some really fun marketing activities.
Mary:Like I said, the leader who pushed me to do this was really forward thinking, really innovative and kind of let me do whatever I wanted, as long as it was relatively cheap or, even better, free.
Mary:I wanted as long as it was relatively cheap or, even better, free. So as long as it was it met those criteria, I got to do those things and got some attention, made my way into corporate marketing for the same company, spent a little bit of time there just kind of revamping some of our marketing, especially in the digital realm, digital marketing strategies. This was during COVID, so a lot of our shift went from in-person physical events to the digital realm. So they brought me on to kind of help with that. Then I moved on to a marketing agency called Gorilla 76, who helped mid-market industrial companies build digital marketing strategies, and from there I moved into the SaaS realm, where I am now. So I'm with a company called CoLab Software and we sell engineering software to big manufacturing companies. So kind of like not on purpose ended up in industrial and manufacturing for most of my career.
Gary:Yeah, but what a great. I mean going back to your technical docs, right, who could have foreseen the benefit of that experience and where you are now.
Andy:Oh, totally yeah absolutely.
Gary:Well, I think, too, that you know what was really intriguing to us and it's evident in your LinkedIn posts and in the way that you approach content is very near and dear to our hearts as well, which we'll dive into. So, first of all, thank you for that. That's really helpful and provides a lot of insight there. So, actually, just before we hit the go button, we were talking a little bit about this idea of what we would call problem marketing and content marketing, and so, to set the stage, we were talking earlier about the lower middle market, and so I think that's really important, because when people are out and about and they're reading stuff on LinkedIn or blog posts or whatever, it's so easy to lose the context for which the advice is actually being given or the perspective, and in our experience, it's typically one of two places. It is a high growth startup environment Could be, they're still in product market fit stage and there's all these things you need to do scale up, what have you. But it's kind of the traditional venture capital playbook which is, hey, we think we have something here and so we're going to pile money into this and you have to spend it to grow and, by the way, go find the best people you possibly can and you're going to be twice as big as you are six months from now and then twice as big after that, and you just go, go, go. At the other extreme are companies that are 50, 100, $300 million in revenue and there's a marketing team of 50 people and we're talking about what we're doing from a quote content perspective and it's like that. Then you bring it down to the lower middle market where you're lucky to have a product marketer. You know you might have a quote content marketer and and it's kind of like a really small, very mighty team doing a lot of different things.
Gary:Content the challenge I think we have, especially for CEOs, is that there is what they traditionally believe is product marketing, which is go tell people what our thing does, and then there is content marketing, which honestly, if we're being honest, even today, is really clickbait stuff. To get people to read our click on our website and hopefully fill out a form and call it a lead right. So we have framed up this problem product situation where, if you think about the awareness spectrum, there is a content person or there is a person responsible for falling in love with the problem Like what is that environment? What does it do? And I think you bear that out in a lot of the research that you're doing. And then at the other end of the spectrum is how do we then, from a product perspective, connect what our product does to that problem? And they kind of meet in the middle.
Gary:And so what is really unique is that you are over both product and content marketing. So can you talk about? Were these just brilliant people that brought you in and realized how important that was to bring together? Was it you like saying, hey, I need to own these? Like what was the manifestation of that?
Mary:Yeah, it was the former. So the CMO here, chief marketing officer, is MJ Smith, and she came from a manufacturing background. She was a product manager in manufacturing. She had a very similar career path to mine, but a little bit higher growth, higher trajectory, and she realized how important it was to have product and content sitting together inside the marketing realm. So, yeah, that was all her vision and honestly, I'm glad you brought that up, carrie, because it's a huge reason on why I even applied to the role in the first place. You know, I was very happy where I was. I loved my position, loved my job, but like the opportunity to work for, first of all, like a company where I understood the product, I had what I would call like an unfair competitive advantage from a knowledge standpoint and also got to work for somebody who already realized this kind of shift in, you know, buyer perceptions and the buyer journey was just like you know, no-brainer yeah, yeah, you got it awesome.
Gary:So so now, with that in mind so which is really rare, by the way, and hopefully we see other companies start to have that mindset shift Tell us about you know. So you're coming in in that role and it's a new role. At this point, I assume, right, what did you think going in that was really important? And I'm asking these questions largely because how could we replicate this as a blueprint for other companies of this size? What should they be thinking about? Are the necessary ingredients to enable something like this, and what did you learn along the way as you've been building it?
Mary:Yeah, I would say I don't want to like totally derail the conversation, but you know CoLab is a venture backed company, so we are high growth. We are flushing money to get the best people in so that we can grow really quickly. So our marketing strategy and marketing execution plan is really speed focused and then quality focused, so we just are able to plug a lot more resources into seeing that trajectory kind of build. So I think my advice would be what I'm doing now would be a little bit different than what I might advise a lower mid-market company to do Selfishly. Mj had already done a lot of the work that I would have recommended to a company. She had already built that great foundation. Jay had done already done a lot of the work that I would have recommended to a company like she had already built that great foundation.
Mary:So it was she brought me in to just be like we need, you know, fuel on this fire. You are the wood. I have this small little fire. Now I need to make it like a giant bonfire. What are you going to do to make that happen? So that's where a lot of my first, probably six months in the role was honestly throwing spaghetti at the wall. What's sticking? What's working now? What do we need to keep doing? What do we need to stop doing? And I wrote a post on LinkedIn this is July 31st, if anyone wants to go look it up about exactly what we did and why we made the shift. So a lot of the second half and going into 2025 will be refocusing our efforts on what we saw work during that spaghetti throwing at the wall phase.
Mary:And even what we saw working really well just before that phase. So a lot of what we're seeing is this shift toward buyers respecting data, respecting research that ties back to your product or your service.
Gary:Yeah, okay, so can we go back to some of those building blocks that were in place before you got there? Just describe what those were in terms of the components. To get to the content itself, oh yeah. Something actually that I'd love to.
Tiana:Oh, sorry, but something that I love to hear about is that you also made a post I don't remember when, but you made a very good post I loved it about.
Tiana:We have this concept going on for lower middle market companies, which is the investigative journalist, which is maybe a person that relies.
Tiana:It could be in sales, it could be in marketing we think it's more focused on marketing but this person actually really listens to every single conversation the company has with the buyers and everything they're listening to and just gets completely involved with their environment and what they like, what they don't like, their language, how they speak. And you did a post that said that your first weeks were actually not focusing strictly on brand but actually listening to what the buyers were thinking and speaking and listening to actually conversations of sales. And we also have this concept which is called the voice of the customer is always on voice of the customer program, which is just literally doing that. What you just did and this basically just gravitates towards that role that we were talking about the investigative journalist. So I know maybe that was part of you throwing spaghetti at the wall, so if we could just hear a little bit more about that it would be great, thank you, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Mary:I mean what you just described, tiana, is a lot of like what mj had already done. So she had already done a lot of like voice of customer research, a lot of product research. Um, what I would advise companies do is exactly that. But this is like the really hard part is you know, gary you brought up earlier, you hear all this like marketing advice on linkedin and everyone's like oh, you have to talk to your customers. Talk to your customers and no one really tells you how or why or what you should be pulling out of those conversations, and I think this is where the product mindset comes in. So what you should be pulling out are what are the problems your customer is having? That relates back to your product. You just like, like I hate the question what keeps you up at night for buyers? Because it's like my kids paying my mortgage. I don't know.
Gary:Not your product?
Mary:Yes exactly Nothing related to your product keeps me awake at night. So that's one thing is making sure your customer research is super focused on, of course, the problems your buyer is having, but as they relate to your product, and then what you're trying to pull out is the catalyst. So the reason, what was like the final tipping point where they were like this problem is getting so bad, I need to change. And then from there, what were the downstream impacts? So what is this tipping point that's causing them to change and what's the downstream impact? Because I'll give you a really specific example.
Mary:One of the problems our customer has is design reviews in collab. So this collaboration happens in a lot of spaces. I'm sure we can all relate to that. It happens on Slack, it happens on Teams, it happens over email, phone calls, spreadsheets, powerpoints, like there's all these like disjointed communication channels. This feels like a very low level problem, like, okay, too bad, communication happens everywhere. But Collab is kind of this platform to bring all of that engineering communication into one place and in the context of a model.
Mary:So, okay, what are the downstream impacts of that? Okay, if it takes hours and hours for this to do, your engineering team is wasting time on non-value add work, too much administrative, and then what they're seeing later, downstream, is they're delaying product launches and they're losing competitive advantage now of their product to stay competitive, where if they would have launched that product maybe six months earlier, they could have charged, you know, 50 to 100 more because it would have been higher innovation, less competition, so the better you can tie. That's what you're really trying to pull out of customer research. What are the big problems? What's the tipping point? What are the downstream implications?
Mary:So, like I said, mj had already done all of that work, which was awesome, and she had even better translated that onto the website. So those are the two biggest things I think are missing in most mid-market companies. Is they haven't done a lot of targeted customer research, so really good product marketing research and then translated that onto their websites to make it really easy to communicate their value. Um, so yeah, that's what I think yeah, that's.
Gary:You bring up a really, really good point, which we see all the time is that you actually have to know who your target customer is before you start doing that research, and that's like the building block number one is a meticulously defined ideal customer profile. So go back to previous episodes on that, folks, and watch that, yes, okay. So so now you, you have those, you have the ingredients, right. You have insights. You pointed out something very important, which is also actually taking those insights and translating it into a consumable, digestible message on a website, right, so people can resonate with. What do you do? How do you solve it, so on and so forth.
Gary:Now you're in the process of quote, creating content. So what is that vehicle? What does that process look like for you? And then, who are the? You know even down to the mechanics of who are the people involved. You know what's the velocity and what is. How do you prioritize content? How do you have a framework for there's? You know, think of it as the scale of one to 10, there's like impactful to really impactful. Um, you know how do you think about it.
Mary:Yeah, I think this will depend a lot on the market that you're in. The market that I've been in, the most is SaaS and then industrial. So I think, in my opinion, for those types of companies that are in that mid-market range, the most important content you can make is product marketing content and I think when people hear content Gary, before we hit record, we were talking about this the problem is most people think content is just blogs like blogs for SEO. What is engineering Top?
Gary:seven tips on how to blog.
Mary:Yes, yes, that's not content, like it is content, but that's not all content is. Content can also be your product pages, your features pages, your use case pages, and I think that is absolutely where most people should start. That's the highest impact content you can make, because it's sendable by sales, because you're going to get questions when you have that first sales call. They're going to need resources. Nobody wants a PDF anymore. Sorry to break it to you, but nobody wants your PDF one pager that's full of marketing jargon. The easiest thing to send them is hey, what's up we? We just talked about this, this and this.
Mary:Here are some web pages that go into a little bit more in depth on what that looks like. You know that just as an example. The other great thing about features and product pages is, if you do a really great job, you can start pushing those into paid channels. So we use most of our use case and features pages in paid social. So we do a lot of LinkedIn and a little bit of meta. So, once you like, that's. The biggest unlock, I think, is making sure you're making relevant use case and features pages that tie back to those problems that we talked about earlier and using your customer's language to do it.
Gary:Yeah, so that's, you're now unpacking, I think for many people why you're in content and product. Right, Because correct me if I'm wrong, but our experience with product marketing is that there's a lot of focus on what to create, but there's very little focus on the distribution of once it's created or, more importantly, the multiple channels through what you did and for multiple purposes. Yes, Is that? Do you see that? Absolutely.
Mary:Yep. So in the SaaS realm, what product marketing is is a lot of internal work. So you're working a lot with like product managers. You're maybe repositioning the product based on certain features, maybe you're involved in some pricing and packaging conversations, and then the big big thing that most product marketers are involved in SaaS is features launches. So, oh, email communication this new feature is released. We got to email our customer base, got to push it on social, all that good stuff. And then on the industrial side, it's more product management.
Mary:So you don't see product marketing as frequently as you see product management and they're really responsible for updating a physical product. So I mean, I'm holding a can of soda, right. So how do we make sure? Do we need to use a tall boy instead of like a 12.4 ounce can or whatever? So that's really what product management is responsible for. But in none of that are they responsible for like big, huge content pillars, so translating the value of their work to the external audience. So I'm not talking about external audiences in your customer base, I'm talking about people who haven't bought from you yet. So I think to your point, gary. That's where the big disconnect is is a lot of product marketing and product management today lives in the customer realm. So who is already our customer and not enough in the? How do we use that knowledge to get more customers?
Gary:Yeah, yeah, I really love the way you frame it up around pillars, because that is typically what we see is that we tend to think about how do we clearly communicate the benefits, value delivered, of this particular feature, and therefore it tends to be it's hard to it's easy to lose the forest for the trees, right Versus what actually does our buyer really care about. They don't wake up saying you know what I need to, I need this feature, I'm going to go look for this feature, right. They're like I have a problem and so now I need to try to tie that to there, and that relates to the bigger problem that you talked about earlier. So that's where you see it go sideways.
Andy:Totally. What we see, that's, you know, doesn't really work well, is the notion of content being built around keywords, around SEO, and saying, like we think this keyword roughly related to what we do and people search it all the time, so we're going to build content around that and then, on the other side, when it comes to product marketing, we're going to we're going to talk about all the features in a row and just go through them one by one, and that's like a big gap in terms of where those two really should operate and overlap. Which is around the problem, the job to be done, and how they translate into one another. To say this is a happy customer who's reached a moment of value, right. So for one, I'd love to explore, if somebody's in that counterproductive realm, how they can start to break that down and get into the more virtuous cycle of content creation, if you will.
Mary:Yeah, I think the easiest unlock for people who are still stuck in the keyword realm is kind of either educating or experimenting with this idea. I think it was Amanda and Natividad from Spark Toro came up with this concept of zero click marketing so marketing that doesn't require a click or doesn't require it to click on to your website.
Mary:so what would that mean for you? To take your keyword based content and put it into channels or mediums where it does not require a click? You're just adding value with the content itself. And what is interesting and this is a really great education point if you're a marketer trying to move beyond that like you have leadership, like we need to make you know keywords on what is a, you know that, like you have leadership, like we need to make keywords on what is a widget, and you're like, no, I don't need to do that. I need, like way more value than that.
Mary:So you have this like what is a widget content. The easiest way to do that is say okay, I'm gonna plug this into Google right now. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Plug it into Google.
Mary:I guarantee you what's going to show up right now is some kind of like AI generated response, because Google is experimenting with AI now and you say, okay, did you just get the answer in that AI response? Okay, great, You're probably going to move on with your day now and you're not going to care who wrote it. You're not going to click for more info, because Google just gave you the answer on Google's homepage info, because google just gave you the answer on google's home page. So if your content as this is especially true for mid-market, where every single effort has to count, because you are lower mid market and you're competing with these gigantic corporations when you're competing on big keywords is you have to make content that's going to force people to get more value somewhere else, or to associate your name, your brand, your company with the content you're creating.
Gary:Yeah.
Tiana:It's like Anthony Peary said, the revenue talk right.
Mary:Yes, exactly.
Tiana:We help you build more revenue how you don't do that. We help you build more pipeline, every single company and with some AI feature that we just created for you. So like just not focusing on the general talk or the SEO talk, but what specifically, as Andy said, what job you specifically sold for and who do you do it for?
Gary:Yeah, yeah, well, let's also. So well you hit on depth versus just breadth, especially at the lower middle market, that that getting through the concept of man. If you could find the two, three, five things that are really burdensome, troubling you know that that they're just trying to wrestle through, that are related to your product and that's all you wrote about, but you did it in all the variety of different ways and channels you would be so much better off than trying to have this great big footprint, trying to compete or keep up with companies a hundred extra size. So, with that in mind, mary, let's actually talk about the, the content itself, the creation of content, when we talk about that. You, mary, let's actually talk about the content itself, the creation of content, when we talk about that. I just saw the post regarding the research pieces, right? So how are you thinking about? How do I get to depth? What is a depth? What does a meaty piece look like? And then let's think about how it gets distributed, and presumably do you go in with that, sorry to keep.
Gary:No, no, no, let's think about how it gets distributed and presumably do you go in with that. Sorry to keep. When you start with this idea of oh I've got an idea I think this based on our research that doing something like this will be really meaty, and and then think of all the ways that we can shop this up and distribute it Is. Is that part of what you're doing as the content marketer, or are you working with Demand Gen to flesh that out?
Mary:Yeah, I'm definitely working with Demand Gen on the distribution piece. So on the after the content's created, after we've built the pillar, we need to distribute it. We need to put it in front of more people. Definitely working with Demand Gen on, like, how can we create really good campaigns? Who are we targeting? You know all that good stuff.
Mary:But as far as the content creation itself, everything we create is what we call, like, our messaging pyramid. So at the top we have our POV what's our point of view on the market? What's our point of view on like a big shift that our product is addressing? And from there we have our strategic narrative. Our strategic narrative was created, like with our CEO, our CMO, like everybody at the leadership level was involved. I was not involved in the strategic narrative as like a director level employee, so that's like how high up the strategic narrative goes. And strategic narrative is translating exactly what I just said what's our shift in the market? How are we addressing this into actual content? And from there we're using. Then we go a level deeper. We're saying what are our use cases? How are we addressing this shift in the market? Then we go to the product level with capabilities and features. The reason I go through that messaging pyramid is that is exactly how I am deciding at any given quarter or year, the content pillars that we need to focus on. So, for example, we have our POV, we have our strategic narrative. That is on a page on our website. If you want to go right now it's under, I think resources and maybe why collab or our company and why collab it's under, I think, resources and maybe why collab or our company and why collab. So we have like a really detailed page on like our perception on the shift in the market and how collab addresses it.
Mary:We did not have really great content on our use cases, so tying our strategic narrative to our use cases. So we did a big research project where we hired a third-party market research firm to go out and find our ICP, which is engineering leadership, ask them these questions, gave them the survey, they reported back with the results and we just started. We came back with this I think it's like 70 pages long. You know this like big survey report that they came back with and we just started I mean like bleeding it as much as we possibly could. We did a webinar. We had our executive team speak to this survey at live events.
Mary:We created the research page that I posted on LinkedIn. It's live on our website. We chopped up every single individual finding into its own blog post. We started pushing it on demand gen. So this really became like an entire big effort and I think that's probably the biggest missing piece when it comes to content. In most organizations, I think that they're kind of siloed, so they kind of create content in their little box and they just kind of distribute it on the website or distribute it on social media and say, okay, we're good, we made our content, we put it out into the world and what it's missing is really just like this big internal buy-in and this big buy-in that's also relevant to the buyer.
Gary:Yeah, that's so. I mean, you're spot on when we're talking about in content, right? Is that when an organization has this perspective that we just need stuff to push out into the world so we can get leads, man, that ship has sailed right. And so when you have what you just described, which is we actually have to have a point of view on what's going on in our buyer's world and how we believe we have come up with the best way to solve it, if you look this way right, we're not going to be for everybody in a particular industry but if you look this way and you have these characteristics and attributes and this is your size, locations, whatever then we believe that we have a solution. And here's why we believe that to be the case. And we believe that we have a solution and here's why we believe that to be the case. And it's like not having that and then going out and creating content is like then you're down to like what are people searching for and that's what we'll create content for.
Mary:Yes, 100%, and I love that you brought that up too is like so many people are like, well, we have to like be for everybody. Because, like what if we like miss somebody? And like that is like the biggest falsity. Because, okay, we create stuff for engineering leadership, you know we made that stake in the ground and okay, let's say, a software engineer comes in because we make it for hardware engineering leaders and they just keep scrolling big deal. That's what they would have done anyway.
Mary:So by like, by really focusing in on our market, you're creating content that's guaranteed to be noticed by them, so you're using their language. You're focusing on the problems that are really relevant. That means you can guarantee they're not going to scroll past because you're all of a sudden becoming hyper relevant to their world. So yeah, gary, I'm just like really glad brought that up, because I think that's also especially. Like you know, we're talking to the mid market like we do not have, you know, nike's $250 million ad budget where we can spray and pray to every single person on the planet right.
Mary:We have to be really targeted and really strategic with where we want to kind of put our stake in the ground.
Gary:Yeah, and I think that's where the ICP definition becomes so important and is so challenging for organizations of this size. Because, not to pick on CEOs but you have a CEO who has a vision and is telling a narrative to investors about where they can be and the size of the opportunity, and then you have the go-to-market team. That what it really needs is a very defined box to whom we speak. And so you end up in the situation where we serve companies between you know, 110,000 employees in financial services, healthcare, industrial, like all of and it's like no, you don't, you don't, you can't, I'm like that's way too big for your size. So you, you, you gotta, and that means yes, that means that you're going to be, it's going to be so uncomfortable when you define that ICP and then what you have to say but it's the only way to cut through the clutter and speak their language, otherwise you're speaking nobody's language.
Andy:Exactly Yep, yeah, I couldn't agree more Mary, you mentioned on the spot because it's a difficult, challenging thing. But you do mention what's working and you talked earlier about throwing spaghetti against the wall, but really around being that super defined, putting the stake in the ground, we use that same term for that very specific situation, role, problem, job to be done and so on. What are some of the ways? And I know that they can go a bunch of different directions, but how do you measure, how do you figure out that that's working?
Mary:Yeah. So I think this depends a lot on if this is like a totally new effort for you or this is like a relatively mature program. So I I'll give you guys two really specific examples. You know, get really honest and deep here. Um, we had one mature program that was our webinar program. So we would do a big keynote where someone from our leadership team would give like a point of view on the market, a point of view on something really relevant to both collab and our ICP, and then we would alternate that with a panel so we would get maybe customers, experts in the market, get them together.
Mary:I'm not lying when I say this content was so, so high quality, but for some reason it just didn't get enough of our ICP in there. Like we tried promoting it word of mouth, paid email, distribution. We created our own like LinkedIn event series. Like I'm not kidding when I say I really feel like we tapped every single resource we possibly could to get people to show up to these events and they just weren't. They weren't. Maybe they would register, they wouldn't come, they wouldn't read the email. So when we look back in the CRM, because we were tagging everybody who registered, everybody who attended, you know, as a webinar registrant. They just weren't converting. So maybe they would come in, maybe we would mark them as a lead, we would get a sales development representative and SDR to follow up, and it just would never go anywhere. So we were trying this play for a good I mean 18 months and we just could not tie this to a reliable source of leads and revenue, so we had to kill it. Source of leads and revenue so we had to kill it.
Mary:Another one that I feel like we did a fairly good job on. We were seeing really positive signals, so we started doubling down on is video and then the research piece that I talked about. So we were putting out we created that big, you know 73 page, whatever report that we created. We were putting it out on um social as just like hey, download it. Yeah, just download it. And we were getting really, really positive responses. Met our icp. They liked the research, but when strs would call them, we were even getting demos from it. But it's so funny when strs would call them, they're like oh, yeah, I haven't even read it. Yeah, I downloaded it, but I didn't even read it.
Gary:Yeah, I haven't gotten through it yet.
Mary:Yeah, exactly, but they were still signing up for demos, which was so crazy. So flag for me was okay. This is 73 pages. Of course, they haven't read it, so that's where we got into the. Let's break out each of these findings into their own blog piece so that it's like much more digestible, much more consumable, um, so that's like a really easy one and like what's working, what's not, and when you have to kill something and when you want to double down on it that's such a great example and you know the.
Gary:So the idea of the, the quality that was there, and the fact that you've been doing it for a little while, it. Also we forget that, especially now more than ever, the way the buyers prefer to consume information changes every day, right, so what might have worked even 18 months ago, maybe less effective today. And it is also interesting how you kind of touch on this and actually Jen Allen Knuth is Knuth. Yeah, forgive me, jen, she'll be with us later this month. Oh, she actually posted something today that was talking about learners, right, is that? You know? And the example was the webinar, right, so we get these webinar and oh, it's a lead, and so we call them like hey, so I want to follow up on our product.
Gary:I'm like I'm not there yet, but I would be willing. I'm here to learn that I gave you yet, but I would be willing I'm here to learn that I gave you, and so I am willing to continue to learn from you if you can stay relevant on that topic. And so you know, you wonder that kind of goes with that, the. What is the purpose of the content? And is there a lighter weight way to deliver if, if it's casting a wide net and you're getting ICP there but they aren't yet converting, well, maybe it's because they're still and you're getting ICP there but they aren't yet converting. Well, maybe it's because they're still in that learning phase and we haven't considered the secondary phases to pull them from open to learn, to open to change. So that was really interesting.
Mary:You also go, yeah, I just want to really quickly touch on this is another good way. Again, talking about resource management, when you're a smaller marketing team, you're a smaller company you have to be really careful with your resources. So another thing we considered was okay, like we don't want to give this up, like, like I said, the content quality is high. We're actually getting people to show up. It's just not converting is. It was insanely resource intensive, like we were doing this every single month.
Mary:I had to write, I had to do all the registrations, do the promos. Demand gen was doing the distribution. Then we had to get our CEO involved or someone on the executive leadership team. We're asking them to take time out of their day to come speak on this topic. They have to.
Mary:I would write the outline, but they would have to come in and give any revisions, add extra context, like do the practice rounds, like and that's every single month. And then you know the panels. You have to recruit people onto the panel. Like this is a lot of resources, maybe not monetary, but time intensive resources. So that was another reason where it was like we are spending so much energy doing these webinars that just aren't producing results, although the content quality is really high. I think that's. Another really important consideration that people don't always think about is how much effort to results are we getting? What's the effort to impact ratio? And I think that's also like a not always considered fact is like yeah, maybe this is we're getting results, but is the results we're getting, you know, comparable to the effort involved to get those results?
Gary:Yeah, and if I unpack that a little bit too, as you say that, I'm also thinking of what is required, the effort required to get to the insights that become valuable and in parallel, but not necessarily, the same, as the effort required to produce the content in its consumable form. And what you just described was both right, both were intense, both getting to the insights because of the executive time and the panels and what have you, and then just the process of the mechanics of actually getting it. So that's a great point. So you brought up something that is near and dear to our hearts as well.
Gary:You used use cases and what we see a lot of times. First of all, it's a polluted term, but knowing how you've used it, it's how we're thinking about it, because a lot of times when you come to a website, we have the proverbial testimonials like hey, here's a logo that looks just like you and here's how they solve the problem. And from our perspective and I think you would agree that what's more powerful is again if you have those three or four use cases, regardless of industry, regardless of size, whatever the dynamics are of the company, where you can say now you're actually speaking to them as they're like you have. Here's your situation. This is what the problem is. Here are the dynamics, here's the urgency of a situation, here's how we solved it in that situation. By the way, here are five different industries, 16 different company sizes, all of whom had the same dynamics. And now I can speak to that one thing.
Tiana:Yep.
Gary:Maybe I'm leading the witness a little bit, but no, totally. How would you describe use cases?
Mary:Yeah, I would describe use cases as making your product, giving the context of your product to the customer. So I mean I could tell you. I'll give you just like a really a really funny example. I have split view. One of the features in in collab is split view.
Andy:Great.
Mary:Cool, exactly Like. That's great, awesome. You have split view Now I'm going to tell you, you can compare a drawing and a 3d model side by side and find the differences between the two. It's called split view. Okay, that's exactly what you did. So use cases is really just context setting for your customer. That's how I would describe it, and I think you're dead on is like people don't do enough of that context description. They kind of just jump right into like too low on the product marketing totem pole, which is jumping right into the feature. But it is funny that you mentioned testimonials and use cases, because that's kind of the exact journey on our website that we see from people who are really really great converters, like people who end up being a lead and then a really great opportunity. They almost always home page use case case study like every single time. Maybe there's some pages sprinkled in there, but that is just so consistent is you set the context. They want to see how other people have done it in that context and then they're like, okay, I'm convinced, like let's reason to measure that um, we use hubspot and google analytics, yeah yeah, that's great
Andy:yeah, stack, everybody has, or?
Mary:a lot yeah, yeah yeah, we're not using anything fancy yeah, that's uh.
Gary:Yeah, that's so, all right, this, like we said, we're gonna we can go on for hours here um, so we'll have to have a part two of this. So, as you, so you've made kind of that mid-year adjustment as you go forward, talk, I guess, a little bit about the team that would be involved in this content creation process. Obviously, you know product marketing, everybody's in to some degree, but you know your team. Everybody is to some degree, but you know your team. And then you know, as you think about the typical lower middle market marketing team, which you know has a head of marketing, probably a product marketer, hopefully a content marketer. And then you know somebody who's managing demand gen. Like how would how would you advise that group to reframe how they think about content? And with those players on the field, like this is how I would you advise that group to reframe how they think about content?
Mary:and with those players on the field, like this is how I would go, structure that, this is what I would do yeah, if you were if you were, you know, parachuted into that situation yeah, I think the biggest thing, um, so I have you know, before we hit record on this episode, I was was telling you know, gary, andy and Tiana, that I've only ever been on like single person marketing teams. So before this I was head of marketing for a really early stage company. Only marketer had some a little bit of agency resources. When I was at the big big company that I talked about, the manufacturing company early on, I was the only digital marketer, so you had reporting to the VP of sales, basically, and then at the agency we were often the only marketing resource to a single marketer. So I've only ever worked with like really really tiny marketing teams. So we have actually a really similar setup to what you just described, gary.
Mary:We have our CMO, mj, and she is in charge of what I talked about with that messaging pyramid.
Mary:So she's in charge of POV strategic narrative how we're going to communicate that into the market and then, when it comes to just below, that is me, director of content and product marketing, and then we have a director of demand gem, and what MJ does for both of us is set the stage for the year. Here are the campaigns, here are the customer behavior shifts that we want to see this year. You two go figure out how we're going to do it and that's like really fun. You know it inspires people where, like that kind of direction you give them, just enough to get them like, okay, I have the concept in my mind. Now, what are you going to do to see this happen? And I think this is the big miss. When you have all of these different disciplines inside a marketing department, they don't talk to each other, right, they just are like okay, demand gen's in charge of paid, they're going to go do some Google ads, maybe some you know, lead gen stuff on Facebook. Okay, you have content. They're going to go write the blogs.
Mary:You have product marketing, they're going to start updating everybody on the features and none of it is cohesive. So when you have, like MJ at the top, who's giving me these campaigns to do, who's telling us exactly what we want to see happen at the end of 2024, you are almost forced to work together because if you don't work together you're not going to see those things happen.
Gary:And then you know performance reviews are going to suck and you know, get fired and all that stuff and so, yeah, that's fantastic, a great, very tangible way to think about it. And Andy mentioned kind of measurement as well. So in that situation certainly there are demand gen goals and leads and things like that, but ultimately is there a connection to pipeline and also for those situations where we still need to expand and talk to people who need to become aware of us? So how are you measuring content from a more broader perspective? It's different, various different purposes, based on where the customer is.
Mary:Yep, it definitely does. But I will say again, really respect MJ and our leadership team for doing this. As a marketing team we have a hard. Our primary goal is sales qualified leads and sales accepted opportunities, and I would say our version of an SQL is very different than most venture backed capital because our SQL is convert at 20% or higher to a customer.
Gary:Oh, wow, okay, I was going to say to an office we have crazy tight definitions on what an SQL
Mary:is, and then our SQL yes, exactly, they're super, super high quality. So that's what we are responsible for Number of SQLs, number of SAOs in a quarter, six month, year. And then our secondary goal is audience growth, which is really helpful, because then that gives me, if I can't necessarily tie a particular campaign, like, let's say, the Research Hub is a really great example. Actually we have a subscription page on there. The research hub is really for expanding our audience.
Mary:So, just the people who are gonna start paying attention to the stuff that CoLab is releasing and then hopefully, down the road those will convert to SQLs and then SAOs. So that's actually really helpful is like our marketing department is. We really only have two goals. Number one always, always, always SQLs, saos is at the top.
Gary:Number two is audience growth, and when you think about audience growth, is there a quality perspective on that audience growth? I assume, the audience growth or assumption is that because you're speaking Consistent?
Andy:audience, like it's somebody who's going to be, I would think, maybe repeat, repeat visitors, so like they're not one time, like one indication, but you're saying like if, if that audience is consistent and growing, like it's, it's got critical mass, it's not just one off, like I did a bunch of display and like, of course, I got a bunch of clicks, but it's been this like critical mass.
Mary:Yes, and I will say we measure audience growth more in more than like clicks. Like a click would not be an audience growth metric that we would do. Ours is really people who subscribe. So I mean, we're probably not going to get a financial analyst subscribing to our engineering hardware blog, subscribing to our engineering hardware blog, right? So we have subscribers and then social media followers. That's really the two major metrics that we use to measure audience growth.
Gary:Okay, that is awesome. Very helpful. Yes, indeed, All right. Well, not surprisingly, we're coming up on time. And so we will definitely want a part two of this. But, mary, where can people find you and also learn more about CoLab?
Mary:Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn. Um, dms are always open, so please, if you have any questions following up after this chat, like DM me on LinkedIn. Happy to answer it. And then, colab you can find us at colabsoftwarecom. Um, definitely follow us on social if you want to see a little bit of what our content and product marketing team is up to.
Gary:This is awesome, and we will also put some of our favorite posts from Mary in the show notes, as well as her LinkedIn profile, and if you do have any specific questions you'd like to dig into, you can also shoot us a note at hello at gtmproco. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and we'll happy to answer it there, but until next time. Hang on just for a minute, mary, but for the rest of you, thanks for sticking around and we'll see you next week. Bye, bye. Thank you for tuning in to GTMPro, where you become the pro. We're here to foster your growth as a revenue leader, offering the insights you need to thrive. For further guidance, visit gtmproco and continue your path to becoming board ready with us. Share this journey, subscribe, engage and elevate your go-to-market skills. Until next time, go, be a pro.