How to Make Your Content Strategy Process Easier and More Effective

Unedited Transcript

Jim Rembach (00:00):
Okay. B2B DM gang. All right. So we’re going to talk today about something that’s really essential to your existence, and you’re going to be surprised at some of the things that we’re going to talk about today that are going to potentially impact you, not just today, but in the future. And you know what, here’s the beauty it’s constantly shifting and as not as something to get excited about. So I, uh, I’m really excited today to have Jeff Coyle on with me. Um, and so Jeff, before we get into knowing a little bit more about you and your organization, can you please help us understand what question should B2B digital marketers be asking themselves today?
Jeff Coyle (00:40):
Well, well, you know what question that the, you know, the questions that BDB marketers should be asking themselves today really go along with their workflows. Um, primarily how much oversight and understanding do they have of each stage of the, you know, the various campaigns that they’re creating, the various channels that they’re targeting and breaking those up into components, how much control and oversight do they have into all of those things? I have really with market muse focus on content, but I think that the same thing should apply to whatever, uh, campaigns and channels that they have. And there shouldn’t be any black boxes, the questions they, she should be asking are, do I have any black box processes? Um, and how many of these processes are in a constant state of optimization, um, or improvement or continuous improvement, state versus ones that are historical, um, or could be dated or could be static, um, and floundering, um, and AI, and as we’ll probably talk about today with artificial intelligence, you can put every one of those processes into a state of continuous improvement. Um, so the biggest question that marketers should be asking themselves today are, is how many processes do I have in, in place or ideas or quote, unquote, best practices that haven’t evolved in the last one year, three years, five years. Um, and I need that list front and center.
Jim Rembach (02:14):
Okay. As you’re talking, and we’re going to get into a little bit known a little bit more about you and your organization, right? Um, as I, um, gosh, by your talking, I almost start thinking that, gosh, if I’m a small operation, this doesn’t apply to me, you know, just talking to enterprise big stuff. And I don’t think that’s the case, is it now?
Jeff Coyle (02:31):
Absolutely not. I mean, if you were a two person show, five person agency, you know, however size, you probably have things that you just do, you think this is the way something is done. Um, and you do it, or you have some, you know, subjective things that you go about doing things. I mean, the most common one that we will often see is, is in research, the research phase of a, you know, content plan or a content strategy. I’ve done keyword research in this way, because this is the way they it’s been done, you know, for the last 10 years, or this is how I learned how it was done, you know, five years ago. Um, and no, I mean, you really gotta be thinking about your existing operating procedures also. It’s where, if you’re a smaller operation, where are you spending your time? Um, and is it being positioned in a place that am I putting time against things that are having huge, out-sized positive impact on my business because when you’re a small business, um, or a one person shop, uh, it is the most, the, your time management is the most important thing.
Jeff Coyle (03:40):
So if you’re wasting time on something that could be automated, I can’t automate or scale you. Right. Um, I can only automate the tasks around you. Um, so if you’re burning clock in things that you don’t need to burn clock on, um, you’re, you’re, you’re killing yourself.
Jim Rembach (03:56):
Oh, that’s vitally important in a definitely talking about something to tweet, something to continue to send out is what you just said right there. Okay. Now, before we get deeper into this conversation and you and I are going to have a great discussion about AI, the impact, the visibility, because you didn’t exactly say that word, but visibility is critically important. Understanding, knowing value, ROI, they’re all important. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your organization and why it’s so important in germane and relevant to this conversation?
Jeff Coyle (04:26):
Sure. So, uh, my name is Jeff Coyle. I’m the chief strategy officer and co-founder of market muse and market muse is a content intelligence platform. We’re a SAS platform that’s focused on setting the standard for content quality. Um, so what we look to do is give you ways to improve the quality of your content and also enhance your content workflows with artificial intelligence, whether it’s in the research, planning and prioritization, um, adding or improving your content briefing or proposal processes, speeding up writing processes and editing processes, or even post published, troubleshooting and optimization. So being able to understand what you should create, having it be data-driven not just subjective or whiteboards. And then also what should you update and why should you update content to make it better, to make it more up to date, to make it more appropriate with today’s intent? Um, so we go through all of those things and we build out, we built out technology that can fast track the most simple workflow of, you know, updating a page or, you know, how should I plan my entire year’s content strategy?
Jeff Coyle (05:35):
Um, my background I’ve been in the content strategy search engine optimization, lead gen AB multi-variant testing, anything that involves going putting traffic through a website for about 21 years, uh, worked, uh, I went to Georgia tech for computer science. So I have a computer science usability theory and search engine design background worked at a lead gen focused company. Really one of the first companies that was doing content marketing, uh, called knowledge, um, was acquired by in 2007 by tech target, which I’m sure many of your, uh, listeners are very familiar with that organization. I managed in-house there for almost eight years. Really grew their network managed hundreds of websites, um, number of acquisitions as well, uh, before, uh, leaving to, um, take a brief stint in private equity. And then, uh, soon after that, uh, create market muse and, you know, the unique thing there is I went from a place of all search engine optimization and lead focus, and then being acquired by such a wonderful editorially driven organization, like tech target.
Jeff Coyle (06:36):
I started to see all the manual content workflows and how painful they are and how subjective they are. Um, and I built out, you know, manual processes to balance them. Um, and you know, when the time became possible now being able to automate and semi-automate those painful manual processes, um, one of them is, is called topic modeling. Um, and it’s basically to say if I were a subject matter expert and our covering a topic comprehensively with content, what would that look like? What’s that ideal expert content look like. Um, and that’s the basis of everything that I do. It’s taking that and using that technology that we’ve built to solve common B2B marketer problems.
Jim Rembach (07:22):
Well, okay. So, I mean, gosh, your depth of his experiences, let’s just say unmatched without a doubt. Um, but, but as you’re talking about this, I start thinking about something that I read in a statistic the other day that there’s a two of them that I want us to talk about. One is that 90% of all the data that exists on the internet today was produced within the past three years. Okay. Think about that. And then the other is, uh, the U S census Bureau. Um, I just caught the report that said in the third quarter of 2020, there was a 77.4% increase in filings for peoples to start a business that were considered entrepreneurial. Yeah. Now I had this discussion and I shared this with you and also I’ll share it to the listeners and Watchers. I asked my 15 year old son, the question about what do you think about that? Just to kind of get perspective, right. Engagement in the conversation and see what his thinking was. And he goes, well, I guess a lot of those people are trying to, you know, maybe take advantage of a lot of the open storefronts, those businesses that have closed them. Like, I don’t know, son, I think they might end up being digital entrepreneurs. What are your thoughts on there? Yeah.
Jeff Coyle (08:33):
And so the first part, um, it’s not it’s, there is a spike of written text. There’s other media also rich media, um, rich media being processed into text or not. Um, and then data capture people. Obviously there is a huge, huge, huge spike in the amount of data being creative, but not only that it’s people being able to capture process it and make use of it. And that’s the real, that’s one big component that I feel is, you know, when I’m thinking about the, the applications and the reason that’s important, it’s people are turning those things into business applications. They’re turning data into a business application. They’re understanding intent behind this conversation, this podcast, a sales call, um, they’re understanding intent on user behavior, on websites, user behavior in a particular media publishing set to be able to drive decision-making more clearly more quickly, um, and being able to tune in and turn that into real business intelligence before it was databases and, you know, maybe, you know, associate of matrices matrices.
Jeff Coyle (09:49):
Um, and that was what was driving decisions. Now it’s, you know, always States or continuous improvement with data. The other piece you mentioned with entrepreneurship is because of the accessibility to data, these entrepreneurs, these new ones who are filing for businesses can actually make an impact. And I had a conversation with an entrepreneur today, um, who launched a company in December has 2000 clients with this business. I called them, I didn’t know how large the business was. Um, they’re in an adjacent space to market muse. Um, and I got on the phone and he’s like, Oh no, it’s just me. And this is, Oh, no, this is the first product I’ve brought to market. And I’m like, you know, amazed that is the prototype. You can do it, you can do it with public libraries. You can build applications quickly. You can build tuning applications for existing things, even with very little consumer customer, uh, you know, um, computer science base.
Jeff Coyle (10:55):
So the kids coming out of school today that are digital natives, they understand, you know, how SIS business systems work. If they get even a little bit of computer science knowledge, they’re deadly. Cause they know this stuff, they live, it they’ve always lived it. They didn’t have to learn it. Um, and those are the people putting out companies that spin out, I’ll get into some of the situation in natural language processing, natural language generation. Um, but we’ve seen 20 new, uh, companies who are kind of adjacent competitors are kind of, you know, co co competent, you know, what do they call co-op petition? Um, enter the space just as these data libraries become more accessible. And that’s amazing cause we’re a build first business. We’re not a, you know, connect first business, but a lot of these new businesses you’re going to see are ones that are, I want to connect first, then build a brand. And that’s something you couldn’t do before because there just wasn’t public to data.
Jim Rembach (11:55):
You know, you bring up a really compelling case for, you know, a lot of people in a lot of ways. And also when I start thinking about, you know, the whole content piece and the entire ecosystem costs associated with it, um, and the whole visibility piece, I mean, I mean, like I start even thinking about these people who were, you know, entrepreneurs prior and they had a big digital presence. If they don’t change the way that they’ve been doing business, they’re going to be dinosaurs. They’re going to extinct. Yeah. Okay. So then when I start thinking about chief strategy officer and given the discussion that we just had and talking about your background and experience, what is the chief strategy officer at market muse? Actually do?
Jeff Coyle (12:38):
Good question. I think all the people inside market me as some of them are still getting used to that too. And you know, it’s, it’s a role I just switched over prior to that, I was a chief product officer, um, and I oversaw product data science engineering as well as marketing. Um, but what we did was we really wanted to mature the organization. Um, and my co-founder and me both kind of separate ourselves from the tip from the natural work structure. Um, and one of the he’s our president and he’s focused on, um, some fundraising and financial and partnerships primarily. Um, and I’m out outside of that org structure focused on effectively horizon scanning, understanding the market. Um, but also, you know, making sure that we are innovating constantly. Um, and then we’re not standing still for any period of time. Um, so my I’m a kind of a two-prong one is making sure, you know, I’m the person on stage typically and I’m the person on the podcasts and you know, but I’m also staying abreast of, of what, what this world’s going to look like 12 months from now, um, with all of the spaces that we’re in and that’s really what makes sense.
Jeff Coyle (13:48):
It makes sense for it. So,
Jim Rembach (13:50):
Hmm. Well, that’s very helpful. Uh, and, and I would like to get into a little bit of that, um, space, if you want to call it that, you know, um, talking about the content optimization, uh, and I think for us to start that for those that aren’t totally familiar and maybe the world is new entrepreneurs that says, okay, you know, I need to make sure that I’m on the front edge of this and not follow people who’ve been doing it for 10 years that are changing. That’s important. Uh, is first of all, it’s probably in your perspective, I’d really love to hear this is what is NLP or natural language processing.
Jeff Coyle (14:25):
So what is natural language processing or NLP, um, it’s programming computers to recognize and understand, you know, large amounts of natural language data, and that natural language data can take many forms. It can also be transcribed or trans created from other forms. Um, but basically it’s understanding and recognizing large amounts of natural language data.
Jim Rembach (14:49):
And then we have to flip that and then that’s where NLG comes into place. So what does NLG,
Jeff Coyle (14:54):
So that’s transforming the structured data into plain language. Um, it typically English, uh, in it’s kind of base form, so that’s yeah.
Jim Rembach (15:05):
And NLG stands for what is language generation generation, right?
Jeff Coyle (15:12):
Right. So it’s the, it’s the process of taking that natural language generation and transforming that structured data into plain language with, you know, the goal of building a language model and the language model because natural language is informal and can’t be precisely defined. Um, it is to say I’m assigning probability collections of probabilities to sequences of words. And so that way I’m able to generate text through those probabilities. So it’s a really a, uh, a novel approach to probabilistically writing content.
Jim Rembach (16:00):
Right. Well, and, and, okay, so let’s, let’s be clear here, uh, because what you’re talking about impacts and affects somethings that we think are pretty normal and simple, like, Hey, customer service, and I want to go, and I’m interacting with this automated system. It started with, you know, a lot of us doing it with IVR interactive voice response units prior to that, um, there was actually a different, accurate acronym, uh, which had to do with voice response. Uh, and it was all, it was, is voice scripts that were prompting one to another. And that’s where we’ve all seen the shift from. It was press one, you know, to now it’s say, you know, our calls tell us what you’re asking for is that maturation that’s occurred. So how is that maturation from, let’s just say business rules and writing to get to the point to where machines are actually now in real time interpreting and therefore responding how that is happening in your world with marketings.
Jeff Coyle (16:59):
Well, I mean the first commercially available natural language generation applications were rule-based templates and it was if then statements, um, and it required structured data. So I mean, you might’ve seen, you know, some people might reference even these is like spinners, right? So you have either beautiful, gorgeous or stunning. How many bedrooms is it? Bedroom? What type of house is it? So you get gorgeous four bedroom, two bath in prestigious neighborhood, right. That was the first type of natural language generation. That’s not where it is today. That’s like mad lips, right. It doesn’t connect to it. Doesn’t have a ton of applications. It doesn’t have a ton of applications, um, outside of these really, you know, structured narrative and structured database narrative. So.
Jim Rembach (17:46):
Oh, cool. Yeah. Okay. So I think this is really important. This is where your expertise can, you know, possibly breeze over many of us, cause you can still buy those tools out there. They’re called article spinners. I mean, you can actually probably get one for us, you know, $29 and download it and it’s going to, you know, teach you how to create an article faster. Right. They still exist. They’re still in use. And that’s rules-based thing, um, that we’re talking about here. It’s very simplistic in nature. You can even, you know, um, overwrite some of the coding. And then in one way it will say was, and this way will say this, I mean it, and you can do all that.
Jeff Coyle (18:24):
Yeah. Yeah. And that was really like the first flight. And then the second flights was second flight was with, um, you know, really starting to try to solve real publisher challenges. So you had two wings. One of them was like, we need to do this, but in a way that’s like really creative and has a lot of variability. Um, but we’ll also try to do it to solve problems. So Washington post, um, built a platform called Helio graph. And this was really inspirational for me. I was learning all about how they did that because it really, it connected to a lot of common content, strategist and B2B marketer and publisher and e-commerce marketers problems. And it was saying that basically their problem was when events come along like elections or the Olympics, we only cover like 10% of them. We want to cover them all because our readership needs information on all of them.
Jeff Coyle (19:20):
You know, why are we the ones that choose is it really exhibiting our true journalistic expertise when we have all the data, but we’re not getting content on the page. And that’s really when, you know, my brain clicked that there’s applications here, but in the case of a Washington post in the first year that they implemented Helio graph, they were able to publish content on every single national state and local election and every single event on the Olympics. And they’re able to program the inf the, the, uh, natural language generation platform to account for exceptions, but it was still a little template. Um, but it got them to the next step. So for example, a judo has two bronze medals. So if it was like a strict template and didn’t have some logic behind it, you know, their, their results page would have been pretty poor.
Jeff Coyle (20:16):
It would have not been accurate. Um, so you catch up with a couple of things like, and that’s what really clicked with me. It was like, Whoa, I’m going to be able to do this with content that is appropriate for marketers to publish for editors, to publish for writers to publish. Because my innovations at that point were focused on building outlines and structuring content, the topic to say, if I were covering this topic comprehensively, what are the things that would include my next frontier market muse was how do I structure that into a logical outline to accelerate writers? And now the newest versions of what we’ve built starts to write, to comply with the outline and to be able to be tuned for my exists from my existing content. And so in parallel, you look at things like everybody has probably experienced like Google smart, compose.
Jeff Coyle (21:14):
So if you’re in your Gmail and it starts to finish your sentence for you, that’s an application of natural language generation. If you use Grammarly or Hemingway, that’s an application of it as well, where it’s giving you information. If you’ve seen, uh, like Microsoft Azure computer vision, um, where it does image captioning on the fly or seeing these new artificial intelligence solutions. And I’ll talk about GPT three in a second, where they’re summarizing texts, you know, all of these things are use cases that have immense value. These are things you’re doing manually. Um, and so what we’re trying to think of every time you’re typing text of any kind, the future is what of that could be automated. And that’s really the question, the answer from a natural language generation perspective, um, that all marketers should be saying, if I’m doing anything in a repetitive nature, if I’m doing something that isn’t truly coming from the heart, it’s not coming from subject matter expertise, it’s not truly blue ocean something only I can put on paper, should I be doing it, or should it be automated?
Jeff Coyle (22:23):
And that’s really the question that gets to the bottom of, you know, the same quandary that Washington post had and said, wow, we have all the results, but we don’t. We only cover 10% of the events right now. It’s to say, I know exactly what I should write on my website. I know all the content I want to build, but for some reason I only get 5% of it onto the page, 5% of it published, or I want to be able to take on 20 clients because I could really help them all. But my bandwidth only allows me to service for as an agency. Those are the types of things we’re looking to solve with NLP and natural language, naturally just processing and natural language generation. Um, and that’s where I’m looking to truly innovate is situations where someone could help the world to be a better place, the quality of content on the web getting better. But today they can’t,
Jim Rembach (23:17):
You know, as you say that, I started thinking about a conversation I had with somebody earlier today who is a content creator. And she started mentioning something about her production process. And, um, you know, she’s been in business for 30 years and I started thinking about that process. And I’m like, uh, you know, talking about those statistics, talking about the competition, talking about, um, you know, um, I, I’ve got to produce faster, I’ve got to produce better. Uh, and you know, otherwise getting, I’m just getting drowned out with everybody. You talked about blue ocean, you know, no I’m in nothing but a red ocean Jude up, and I’m getting flushed down with, you know, all the other stuff. There’s no way I can stand out. So I think, I think for a lot of us, we have seen the progression and maturation and success and what it looks like the bar’s been raised and it’s continuing to be raised, you know, at a faster rate. Um, and we can’t ignore them.
Jeff Coyle (24:13):
Yeah. In my dream. I mean, my dream is that there’s no market for low quality content. I mean, I say this, I want to raise the bar for the quality of content on the web. So that, that entire bottom, that onesy twosy scent, garbage content, ceases to exist. And, and we’re really close to that being a reality. Um, and I’m excited about that. That’s what, that was one of the things that was like rid the world of low-quality content, you know, that was one of Margaret music permissions. And I love that because it makes subject matter experts. It makes great writers, it makes strategic, insightful, strategic minds and content strategists in the pole position. Um, and they’re not reliant on poor processes or whatever. And, you know, you had the question that B2B marketers should ask at the top of the show. Um, I’ll say the question that content strategists and content marketers specifically should ask is, do they know their content efficiency rate, which is how much content do I publish, or how many content update motions do I take and how many, how many of those achieve the KPIs that they are set to create to, to generate that percentage number?
Jeff Coyle (25:33):
That content efficiency rate is the, that is the number one 2021 question, all content marketers should focus on because I think the world has said that that number should be about 10% and we should be okay, publishing 10 articles to get one, to be successful. And that’s complete garbage, complete garbage solutions. Like what I do make that number 40, 50, 60% plus. Um, and so you get a writer that’s stumbling and fumbling across a manual process. And then after all of that, the thing you publish is only 10% efficient. Like only one in 10 is going to be successful. There’s no more, there’s no more life there. There’s no more life.
Jim Rembach (26:17):
Well, so maybe it’s important for you to, um, define what efficient really means. Because again, you’re, you’re coming from a base and level of understanding that as I said, none of us have. All right. So, so what do you mean by that?
Jeff Coyle (26:30):
Dang, you gotta know what it means to beat for that page to be successful. So I expect this page to generate this much traffic to level up the rest of my sites authority, um, to generate this many leads over a period of time. Um, so whatever Mike, or to, you know, influence this many, you know, this much data in my, if I’m a publisher for my intent products or whatever it is, I’ve got to know what I’m looking to. Do you know how many entrances, how many, how often is it going to be found naturally by people walking through my site? So page views and other engagements, the efficiency I’m speaking about is knowing how much investment I’m making in that. And then of the stuff I publish or of the content that I’m updating, how frequently do I achieve that per page or per collection goal? So I might say, I need to hit at least a thousand page views in three months. Well, how many of my pages actually achieve that goal? The unfortunate reality is most businesses are doing that at a 10% or worse rate.
Jim Rembach (27:46):
And as you say that, I’m like, Oh, and also too, when you start talking about some of those, uh, you know, your key performance indicators associated with content creation, I’m like, well, nobody’s ever measured that. That’s kind of always been the, the whole, the whole joke about, you know, marketing investments. You know, you know, half of my marketing budget is working. I just don’t know what’s happened. I mean, you know,
Jeff Coyle (28:06):
We just get lucky, you know, but it’s so true. So many people, you know, and that’s why having an on demand content, inventory or auditing solution is so critical. Like if you can’t go in and you don’t know who you are, the mirror isn’t clear of, of, of like, what do you have that you, what is strong? Where are you strong? Where are you weak? Where do you have gaps? Where do you have opportunities? You know, if you don’t have that and you do an inventory once a year it’s it’s, it’s, it’s nonsense. If we were covering natural language generation and we hadn’t updated our editorial calendar or our inventory for a year and have out of date, that would be, I mean, this industry moves so fast, but you know, you probably have a similar situation, you know, it leaves you open to competition. It leaves you open to just the intent of words changing. I mean, there’s just, these things need to be always on. You needed to know whether something is going to be successful before ever even starting to write it
Jim Rembach (29:02):
Well. And as you were saying that, I start thinking about, um, uh, an example of needing to ship, how much do I need to ship? How I actually, uh, are, are creating content and think about it from a style perspective. And I’ll give you a quick example, uh, you know, uh, a good friend of mine he’s written like 25 books. And when he writes an article, you know, for the, for the web, it’s like a, a book page. I mean, it’s, you know, six, seven paragraphs than a six, seven paragraph, and then a six, seven paragraph. And I mean, it’s beautifully written and he’s got good information, but that’s not what works today on the web.
Jeff Coyle (29:38):
And it CA it could, it depends, right? It depends on, you might be able to take an idea. I’ll give you a great example. Um, you know, I’ve worked with teams to take 200 page books and turn them into an entire websites like hundreds and hundreds, thousands of pages, right? And so you can do a lot with the base material. You can also publish that base material in a way that creates a narrative or a stream, whether you pattern it into more of a cluster model, a different architecture, or you piece it out, or you supplement it with, you know, interesting anecdotes or interesting commentary or annotations to make it weave into the rest of your site. You know, there’s so many things that a content strategist and a, you know, very creative information architect or search engine optimization professional can do with written word more so than just plopping it into the blog silo that has a link on the bottom of your site, right? Which doesn’t work. That’s the part that doesn’t work. It’s not thinking about this, your content inventory as this living interwoven thing, which is where many businesses who are product first and not marketing first or not product led growth. First, they kind of subjugate their blogs over here and kind of don’t want to look at them and, you know, that has to stop like those, those that has to be silo broken or else you’ll get somebody who’s a beautiful writer, who’s written 25 books and they publish their blog and no one reads it.
Jim Rembach (31:23):
Yeah, it’s true. I mean, the whole metrics associated with ranking, you know, um, is, you know, we’re, we’re looking for a timeline page. We’re looking for, you know, how they go within the blog to other pieces of content we’re looking for, you know, um, you know, linking of authority to authority sites. We’re looking for all these different factors that, you know, the, as I refer to them, the Google gods want to see in order for you to be indexed higher. I mean, so there’s, that’s what I kind of were referring to when I think about style, if I’m just doing six, seven paragraphs six, seven paragraph, then I, and I, and I have that as my style. I’m probably, probably not going to rank very high. That’s why I need a tool like market muse in order to help me to change those things. So that I’m more optimized. Is that a correct assumption or no,
Jeff Coyle (32:11):
It’s absolutely true. The one piece I’d add though, is that that friend with 25 books, who’s a beautiful writer. He’s the part of the raw materials that can’t be replicated. You can turn him, his, him as a resource, into the most powerful weapon you have with market muse with thinking about these things. It’s how do you, how do you go through that motion authoritativeness as measured by Google? I’m not going to call them the gods, but authoritativeness as measured by Google is a, it’s a tough, tough thing. Um, it’s a, basically it’s not done. It’s done at the topic level it’s done at the site section level, not just the site level. And it’s basically an associative matrix that says, how likely is it that this page published on this part of this website is written by a credible source. Now I can connect that to my breadth of coverage and my depth of coverage and how frequently I cover this topic well, and comprehensively and like that, which a subject matter expert would. So if I’ve got authoritativeness and then I’m covering a topic well and strongly like that, which your friend does probably when he rides that’s, that’s the magic potion.
Jim Rembach (33:44):
So what we’re talking about, and I think you kind of said, it just kind of go back full circle. It’s getting rid of the stuff that is, you know, lower level, um, you know, type of content giving, you know, the people who do have, you know, the, the ability to be more authoritative, authoritative to be that, um, and, and really just, you know, separating out the expertise and all of that value that can be absorbed by us as content consumers in a way that’s just never been able to before. And that’s very helpful.
Jeff Coyle (34:16):
Exactly. And that’s where your that’s why that, that subject matter expert the person, who’s not a good writer, but knows everything like getting all that information out of their brain. And then pairing that with a great content strategist, someone that truly understands buyer persona development truly understands the complex bicycle. Doesn’t fall into victim of these, these like aged tactics, like one word, one page, which is garbage. It’s always been garbage, but you know, it’s, it’s now has even more garbage. You need to have wonderful clusters and collections of content, but tell the story that, you know, all the aspects of every topic, so a topic, then you have all the related topics that you’re covering. Well, you have all the intents that people might be thinking about that are in the journey that you care about, all the different levels of understanding. So it’s not just writing the best definition, you know, what is natural language generation, it’s walking through the entire process of someone wanting to know all the use cases, all the variants, all the comparison, content, all the investment content, all the troubleshooting content it’s getting in and saying, what of that can I produce when you pair that with true experts?
Jeff Coyle (35:30):
And you’re not bogging down these writers, doing things like keyword research, which is the biggest pain you take, who’s a wonderful writer and you make them do SEO work. Oh, just pain. And that’s what we’ve been doing for years, right? Um, when you take away those needs and you make those just part of their tool set, they become deadly weapons. And that’s the key.
Jim Rembach (35:51):
Jeff has been amazing discussion. I want to make sure we hit the hit some things that we have to hit before our time is up here. And if we’re already over, but this has been such great discussion. It’s so important because I think to me, this is like futuristic, but yet it’s relevant today. And it’s going to continue to be that way. I want, I want to get your definition of, you know, what is B2B digital marketing?
Jeff Coyle (36:17):
B2B digital marketing is understanding the customer really well and not just the buyer journey, but the knowledge journey of the target customer and mapping that to a portfolio approach, to all the possible channels that you have at your disposal. And I’m talking everything from paper, click to clubhouse and every channel that you can possibly have, it’s managing that like a money manager, like a portfolio manager, and truly understanding the KPIs and impacts. So it’s, I know customer first, I know the buyer buyer journey and the knowledge journey, but I’m also pairing that against my portfolio approach. And if you go customer to customer, to channel portfolio really well, you’re doing it, you’re doing doing marketing.
Jim Rembach (37:15):
So, I mean, for me, you’re, you’re, you’re saying we gotta raise our level of business acumen and we can no longer accept the response of, well, half of my marketing budget is working. I just don’t know which half we can. We can’t deliver that response anymore. Right.
Jeff Coyle (37:30):
And there’s a lot of preconception. Um, you know, I, I just like to always challenge anyone that says something that’s definitive. Like if something, if you think something has been true for more than a year or two years, like challenge it really think about it. Like I, you know, I ha I had a great discussion with a VP of marketing the other day. And, um, they said, you know, should I be buying with PPC? Should I be buying my brand terms? And I’m like, what do you think you should do? Well, I think I should. Okay. People have said for years that we shouldn’t, because it’s just wasteful. And I’m like, well, if they’re, if you think that some people are saying one thing love to be able to thinking other, there was more that you need to peel back to peel back that onion. And there’s a really, really good analysis that’s needed to make the right decision there. So I’ve always liked to think of what are your truisms, what is the, what are the truths that you’ve believed for more than two years, get them written down and challenge them.
Jim Rembach (38:33):
That’s, that’s so true. Um, and now that does not to say, forget everything you used to know, but by no means, uh, I mean, it’s just, you know, build upon and stack upon, you know, and I think that’s critically important. Okay. So let’s get to one, um, last aspect here, when we start talking about the investments that are made in the marketing department and looking at where they are being made and how they need to shift for 2021 and going forward, where do you think we should reallocate some funds, uh, in our current spin?
Jeff Coyle (39:03):
Um, I think if you do not have, if you’re, it depends on your size of your organization, um, but if you don’t have, if you are a bigger than a 50 person business, or so if you don’t have a content strategist on your team who is constantly thinking about planning, creation, what should we update? Um, that’s something that I would be thinking about if you aren’t updating content, um, and you’re just publishing new, that’s an investment you need to make. Um, if you do not have artificial intelligence involved in any way in your content marketing program, um, that’s another one. Um, and then another one that I am very, very passionate about is lead scoring. If you are a lead gen focused businesses, most of us are in B2B tech or B2B. Are you predictively lead scoring? Are you using artificial intelligence to score leads? If you’re not, you need to make the investment to begin scoring leads, predictably. Maybe it is a game changer for any business.
Jim Rembach (40:18):
Well, it’s, it’s using data effectively. It goes back to that business acumen also taking that rifle approach or a scalpel approach instead of, you know, shotgun or dynamite.
Jeff Coyle (40:29):
Exactly. Right. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s it’s efficiency. Um, and that’s where, you know, people always laugh at, um, when they look at our technology stack at market muse, because we are like, we’re tooled up, like with software, like a hundred person business, and we’re only a 45 person business. Um, we just, because we’ve just, we’ve just seen the impact of adopting great technology.
Jim Rembach (40:52):
Well, would you just also talk about though from a strategy perspective, um, is scalability. Absolutely. Oh yeah. For, for set the scale
Jeff Coyle (41:01):
And that’s where we are, you know, constantly evolve thinking through it’s just to say, like, what are people doing that people shouldn’t, um, so that those people can do better things and you know, that that’s constantly something that we’re doing. And that’s why we’re always shifting the chess pieces around as well.
Jim Rembach (41:21):
Jeff Cole, I’ve had an awesome time, kinda, you know, gosh, learning conversing, I mean, uh, communing, um, commiserating in some instances, right. How did it, how does the B2B DM game get in touch with you?
Jeff Coyle (41:36):
Um, so, uh, Jeffrey underscore coil on a Twitter, I’m active on LinkedIn as well. Please send me, uh, by request, um, point out that I was on this show. If you, if you saw that [email protected], we also have a wonderful Slack community, uh, for anyone interested in content. Um, the content strategy collective, if you’d like an invite to that community, there’s almost 1500 content strategists, um, data scientists and search engine optimization professionals who have a lot of, uh, fun conversations, but really give it lifting people up and trying to give them ways to solve these common business problems.
Jim Rembach (42:15):
Uh, you can also go to B2B dm.com and search Jeff’s name, Coyle C O Y L E not even Jeff. Uh, and we also have some special things that you’ll be able to download, uh, in regards to help you move forward. Um, and you building the right team for today and tomorrow. Jeff Coyle, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom. We wish you the very best.