How to Build a Content Marketing Creation & Promotion Machine

Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.

Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Content marketing is hot, red hot. For B2B SaaS companies, content is how they've attracted and engaged customers over the past nineteen months. And even with conferences slowly reemerging, the strategic importance of content marketing will continue. But here's the thing. Content for the sake of content is a waste of resources, time, and money. Like any type of marketing, content needs to make a financial impact by turning prospects into customers. Rashidi has seen the power of content marketing firsthand at Visme, which became a highly profitable rival to Canva and Venngage and generated organic traffic of more than 2,000,000 visitors per month. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Farzad.

Farzad Rashidi: Glad to be here. Thank you very much for the invite.

Mark Evans: Before we get into the content marketing magic that happened at Visme, I'm interested in your take on the content marketing landscape. How have you seen it evolve over the last nineteen months? What are some of the things that have surprised you the most?

Farzad Rashidi: So one thing that's quite clear is that there's a lot of noise. And, unfortunately, a lot of companies have started to do content, and they sort of have a checkbox of having a blog on their site, and they, you know, purchase a few pieces of content, put on the site, and call it a day. And they get zero traffic from it, so normally, they just never think about it. Right. Right. Lots of other companies that are doing pursuing content seriously, it's more so becoming a matter of SEO traffic. So they basically are overdoing the scientific portion of writing content, is, you know, doing keyword research, keyword stuffing, and then they normally don't care as much about the content piece that's actually being published whether or not it adds value. And so the happy medium where, basically, you're still researching your audience, understanding what they're looking for, and writing actual, you know, valuable, actionable pieces of content where your potential customers and audience could put it to use is done quite rarely. But people have started to figure this out that, you know, the only way to really make this work, they actually have to start investing in content. And that's sort of been something that has been happening over the course of the past ten or so years. But nowadays, what's happening is people's attention spans are sort of shortening. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that, you know, there's just so much going on with, nowadays, especially with social media, that it's hard to grab an audience's attention for long periods of time. So what businesses started doing is to start creating content through a variety of different channels. It could be video and take an omnichannel approach where I see definitely things are heading towards. But as far as content itself goes, I think that the good old text-based content not going anywhere. It's just that to do it right and put all the pieces of the puzzle together is still quite time-consuming and resource-intensive. The companies who actually do invest in it are at a competitive advantage compared to their rivals who aren't.

Mark Evans: So let me ask you the $64,000 question. It's relatively easy to create content as an ex-journalist and a content marketer. I know that you can put a bunch of writers in a room and they can create content. But as you say, it's a noisy landscape right now. There is so much content being published, and more companies have jumped on the bandwagon in the past eighteen months. How do you create high-quality content or valuable content that actually resonates and makes an impact, content that breaks through? I'm asking you a loaded question, but as someone who has been in the midst of this content marketing landscape and helped the company stand out from the crowd, what are your thoughts about this?

Farzad Rashidi: I'm glad you asked. So the answer to that question is quite a few hours long. Well, let's limit it to a few minutes. We're gonna summarize a little. The way I frame content marketing is always as a house, and building a content strategy is a lot like building a house. You need to have a good foundation and a good infrastructure and a nice facade. So step one in any content marketing strategy is the right site structure. So that normally requires attention of a person who's somewhat SEO-savvy. Again, none of these is rocket science, but you need to understand, okay. What are some of the key keywords that we are operating in? So say for Visme, as an example, there's multiple use cases for our platform, presentations, infographics, and, say, social graphics. These are our parent keywords, per se. So these are the ones that we ideally want to build our site around. Within that site, we want what we call a landing page or a sales page. So for example, as a consumer, when I need to create a presentation tomorrow, what I need to do is to go look up. What do you do, Mark, when you are looking for a solution in any space? What's the first step you do intrinsically?

Mark Evans: Do a search.

Farzad Rashidi: There you go. And where? Where do you do a search?

Mark Evans: Google. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Right.

Farzad Rashidi: Google. Exactly. So presentation software, infographic maker, right, report maker, etcetera. So these are what we call our landing pages, sales pages. In order to make these landing or these sales pages competitive, what we do is to create what we call topical authority. So we create these categories or silos as, you know, fancy marketers call it.

Mark Evans: Right.

Farzad Rashidi: Of content. Meaning, basically, it's just a simple way of saying just create content about presentations. So for our presentation landing page, create how to make a presentation. What are some of the best ways to present in front of an audience, right, etcetera. And each one of them have an internal link structure, so they cross-reference each other, right, so that the site is well woven together. So that's step one. That's building the right site structure. Step two is to start identifying what are some of the phrases or keywords that your audience are searching for, but that's not enough. You need to prioritize it because there's gonna be a gazillion of them, right, in any sort of space that you want to touch on. Anything from manufacturing to beauty. So what's gonna happen is they're gonna end up with a million keywords. Now in order to prioritize what are some of the keywords that you want to go after, you need to start what I call, I made this little simple formula: the opportunity keywords, where we're trying to prioritize these phrases where they get a lot of hits. So people are actually curious and they're actively searching for. So they get high volume and clicks. And you gotta make sure they actually have some commercial intent. So it's not just googling about stuff, but they actually are looking to take action and purchase something, whether it's a product or a service. And at the same time, want to make sure that these keywords are not dominated by the big guys in the industry, so the competitiveness is somewhat relatively lower. So that sweet spot, that middle ground is what we call the opportunity keyword. So you make this little formula for folks can Google it. Just look up Visme marketing strategy. And I wrote a little e-book that goes through all this, that sort of step-by-step so folks can download that e-book and kind of follow through. It's free. But anyhow, as far as the content strategy goes, once we have our keywords that we know what we're trying to create, then you want to segment it. Okay. Is this better suited for a YouTube video? Is this a better blog post? Is this another landing page? Is this a template page? Right? And you create these pages on your website, and that's what I call the right infrastructure or a base for your website. Now you gotta build a facade up or build the walls and the plumbing, the electricity to go up in order to show that, hey. This is a house. It's not just the foundation. Right? So a lot of people just stop there. I would say 90% of people are not. Just basically just put out a piece of content, create a bunch of landing pages, and they just think that people are magically going to show up at their door and people are gonna just form lines and try to knock down the doors of the website to come in. And that's rarely the case, right, unless you're Apple where, you know, when you release a new iPhone, you get a spike in your traffic. So most of us aren't Apple or Google or these Fortune 100 companies. So what do we do? Well, that's where content promotion kind of kicks in. So we actually spend 20% of our resources on content creation, and that includes building landing pages, development, creating content. 80% of our resources go into content promotion. And it sounds quite scary because a lot of businesses are like, hey. We don't have all these resources to go start promoting pieces of content. And to answer that, I said, just don't produce as much content then. It's a matter of dedication of resources. When you put out a thousand blog posts on your website and nobody looks at it and it doesn't rank for anything, that's a waste of money. Produce one blog post, one very good blog post every month and spend the rest of the month promoting that piece of content.

Mark Evans: Well, obvious question is, in theory, it sounds great.

Farzad Rashidi: Mhmm.

Mark Evans: But in terms of practical terms, how would you take a blog post? Let's say it's a 750 to a thousand-word blog post, good content, helpful content. What do you do with it? Walk me through how you would extract as much value from that one piece of content.

Farzad Rashidi: So a lot of people think of content promotion as just going out and putting it on social media and gets, like, two likes, and they're like, yes. We made it. And then they put it in their newsletters, send it to their own existing customers. That to me is not content promotion. Yes. You gotta do that because you have to, but it's not even in our strategy. It's just something that naturally happens. Content promotion to us comes back to the main purpose of the content piece. So once you create a piece of content, you want to use this as a magnet to bring in potential customers, to position yourself to show up in places where people who are looking for a solution or service like you would naturally and organically find you. Most of that traffic happens on Google. So how do you get that content piece to rank for that target keyword? And in order to do that, you need to understand how some of these search engines work. And I always come up with this example of a mean girls' popularity contest, the way the search engine's crawler works that the more authoritative, relevant websites in your space are talking about you and actually, obviously, mentioning it and link to your website, that's a vote of popularity in Google and other search engines. It just tells them that, hey. This must be a credible source because other people are linking to it. Right? Just like how universities research papers are valued based on the amount of citations they have. But not all citations are created equal. So you want to make sure that the people who are actually talking about you are authoritative. Now in order to do that, people just don't naturally come and find you again. It's not a spray and pray approach. It is somewhat of an active process of promotion. So that's sort of what was also the original story of how Respona came into play. So any time we would put out a piece of content, we'd have to actually go and use these Google Advanced Operators and try to do some research, try to identify what are some of the content pieces that other people have created that have mentioned or talked about very briefly about the content piece. For example, let me give you an example so it makes sense. Say I put together a guide on lead generation. All right? Ultimate guide to lead generation. And I'm a lead generation agency, and I want to get that guide up in the search results. Now it's a very competitive content. Now ideally, what I want to do is to find other content pieces that are mentioning what are some of the top marketing strategies for B2B SaaS companies. Right? And they as part of their content, they happen to mention lead generation as one of the strategies. But that obviously, the focus of the content is something else so they don't get to dive deep into the topic. So I want to ideally identify first these non-competing posts that happen to mention our keyword in there and reach out to them and incentivize them to mention us. Now that's a whole slew of different, you know, tactics and strategies. I want to keep it broad. And also another thing we want to do is to reverse engineer what's already working. So we want to go take a look at all the other guys' lead generation and the top 10 search results in Google and see what are some of the resources or other posts and blog articles that have mentioned them. Extract a list and reach out to them especially if you have a superior post and it's what we call it, a reverse Skyscraper. But identify these opportunities that you could reach out to. And that whole process then leads you to start finding the right people and understanding, okay. For this site, for this page, who would be the best person that I could reach out to? What would be the right pitch? That collaboration also, you know, leads to a guest post and then leads to a longer-term partnership. And that's sort of the whole process of prospecting, identification, finding contacts, and outreach, something that we were piecing together at Visme manually, duct-taping a bunch of different tools and had a bunch of data miners and manual work, and it was quite tedious, as you might

Mark Evans: Can imagine. Yeah.

Farzad Rashidi: That sort of sparked the idea of Respona. So we were like, all right. Well, we are a software company. Why don't we just put together the whole process that's already working for us manually, put it in the software so we can scale without losing quality?

Mark Evans: So let me stop you there because you've talked about Respona, but you maybe tell the story of Respona because it's a spin-off, something that emerged from within Visme. You have this problem that you're talking about in terms of content promotion. It's a classic. We've got a problem. Let's build a tool to fix it. What is Respona? How does it work? And is it just available to Visme, or is it going to be available to other content marketers?

Farzad Rashidi: So Respona, there's no d in there, by the way. So Okay. Respona. You got it. We built this initially as an internal software. So we were basically like, hey, guys. This content promotion process is long. It's tedious. Let's put together a really ugly UI and duct-tape these steps together so we could sort of have just one screen so that one person could sit down, go from A to Z in a few minutes instead of spending hours doing research and hopping different tools. So that was initially built as an MVP as an internal software. And what happened was that it just worked very well. We sort of 10x that productivity or more. And, also, we cut around 80% of average cost because we let go of six full-time staff members whose job was just data mining, canceled a bunch of paid subscriptions that we had. And we're like, all right, guys. I think we got something here. And up to this day, Visme is still Respona's biggest customer, but what we decided to release Respona as a standalone product, start a separate company, and then sort of have that, run its course. And over the course of the past couple years, I've been mainly catering to other SaaS companies that are doing the same thing and also a number of really high-level SEO agencies and people that are doing these sort of tactics for their clients and other publishers, people who have a publishing website or they have some sort of affiliate website. So that sort of led to the creation of Respona. Now I sort of shifted away from Visme and sort of running operations here at Respona. We've got a separate team here now. But, yes, that initially was sort of it was sort of incubated out of Visme.

Mark Evans: So I'm curious about the separation between the two companies. So are they different entities, and what are some of the management challenges when you've got this love child, for lack of a better word, that has emerged from the parent, is now standing on its own two feet, and it could become high-growth company. Are they split in half? Are they still interweaved? How have you structured this new entity?

Farzad Rashidi: We were very adamant about keeping both products separate. And the reason why is that Visme, in and out of itself, is a very successful company. For folks who don't know what it is, it basically is a brand management or brand content creation platform. Mark, you create all sorts of social media assets and you create presentations and, you know, especially in large organizations where they have to keep everybody on the same page in terms of brand guidelines and logos and colors and fonts. Visme is sort of all-in-one hub that allows businesses to be able to create these sort of content pieces without lacking or impacting quality. It's a pretty interesting product. Our founder, Visme's founder, Payman, who is a co-founder at Respona, actually. Launched this back in 2013. Now it's got over I think we've passed just 12,000,000 active users. And over 80 employees, fully profitable, and growing at a very healthy rate. And so that whole operation is what Payman's managing. So Respona was sort of since it was initiated by me and created by me, the responsibility for the management on the Respona side fell on me. So we hired a separate engineering team. We have a separate marketing team. So we try to keep things separate so that not one is impacting the other by eating up resources.

Mark Evans: Maybe going back to the content marketing production world, what are your thoughts about how to maintain the production of high-quality content? Because it's easy to get excited in the short term and to create a number of great blog posts or e-books or infographics. But in time, that enthusiasm can wane. The ideas aren't as many. They don't flow as well or as fast as they used to. So when you look at Visme and the way that it approaches content, how do you keep the engine rumbling forward so that you're constantly creating great content month after month, year after year?

Farzad Rashidi: Content production, once the content is out in the world, doesn't mean your job's done. So every six months, we actually run a content audit and go back to posts that are six months or older and see what posts are underperforming, and that includes time on-site, whether it's lost in rankings, whether it has any backlinks or getting any sort of traffic. And we actually delete posts that don't have any links or get any traffic after six months. It's just a waste of space. So it is, and there are posts that have a good number of backlinks mentioned, but the rankings have started to drop. So let's go ahead and update and refresh that post. So it's a constant, dynamic process of evaluating content pieces that have been created in the past and keeping the blood going. So that's number one is that you don't want to just put out a piece of content and let it sit there for ten years. Right? At some point, it's gonna hit zero. Aside from content refreshes, another thing we do is that we don't have just two people at the company whose job is to write. Because sooner or later, they're gonna run out of topics to write about or what's gonna happen is that because it's almost impossible that a person is a jack of all trades. So they start writing about stuff that's not necessarily relevant enough. For example, it's like if I had to run a cooking website, I'll be horrible because I can barely scramble eggs to get it. Right? So I can't write about topics I'm not. So what we do at Visme, we have a pretty good network of writers we've tried and tested over years, and each one is an expert in something. So, like, one person is good with writing content pieces about design because they have a design background. Right? So there's a million pieces they can write about about design. And we have another person whose expertise in digital marketing. Right? They come from the marketing world, who know the ins and outs. So having a network of writers, to bounce ideas off of, and not just necessarily have two people in charge of writing content per se, that helps a lot with keeping things creative.

Mark Evans: So to be clear, do you have in-house writers as well as a network of writers? So you're tapping both internal and external resources to create content.

Farzad Rashidi: Yes. But the in-house folks are predominantly in charge of quality control. So they basically are, you know, delegating tasks, reviewing content, editing, publishing, and also doing the research part at the top of the funnel. Right? So, okay, understanding what do we need to write about? What do we need? What are we underperforming? Do we have a new feature coming out? Okay. Let's see what silo we need to target. Their job is mainly predominantly to put together this content brief that they get passed on to the writer who's now going to sit down and write from the heart.

Mark Evans: What are some of the mistakes that B2B SaaS companies make when it comes to content marketing? I know you're gonna talk about promotion. You're gonna talk about how to create quality content, but what do you see as the top two or three mistakes that many companies make when it comes to content?

Farzad Rashidi: All right. Number one, content marketing is not for everyone. Right? So a lot of companies feel the obligation to have a blog, feel the obligation to start producing content just for good measure and no clear strategy in mind. And I always advise them, like, sometimes some businesses say it just doesn't make any sense. Like, if you're a super enterprise software that sells, like, $100K+ a year licenses, it may not make sense to start writing content about it because guess what? Your target customers aren't googling for a $100K+ license to a software. Normally, that requires different sales cycle. It requires some outbound, requires some, you know, salespeople and SDRs, etcetera, or events, venues, you name it. It's not always done through Google. So first understanding, okay. Where are my audience hanging out? And that's a question that a lot of businesses don't even consider. They just start writing content or just hire writers. So that's number one. Mistake number one. First, understand if it's the right fit for you. That leads me to number two, and that's dedicating enough resources to it. So a lot of businesses, they do not like okay. Think about I would assure you 90% of businesses who are actually listening to this spend most of their money into paying salaries of SDRs or paid advertising. Those two channels normally occupy the majority of the marketing budget. Very few startups invest as heavily in content as companies like Visme or Respona do. And the reason being is that it's a silent channel that has a very large lag. So you can just put some ads, and once you start doing Google Ads, you can see results. You can say, okay. Here's how many impressions we got, here's how many conversions. This is clear-cut, this is great. Let's keep on doing this. It's a never-ending black hole of cash. Content is something that you're just sort of producing educational resources, putting out in the world, no idea who's going to see it. You just get some traffic or if you actually convert into customers. Because it's not as clear, people don't invest as much in it. So once you identify that, okay, this is a channel that people are actively looking for our services online and mainly through Google. Now I'm producing business content. Don't—I'm sorry. Excuse my French. Don't half-ass it. Go all in. You know, you want to make sure you're putting the pieces right because if you, it's a waste of money otherwise, if you're going to skip any of these steps. Dedicating enough resources and, personally, I don't know any other marketing channel has had this amount of ROI that content and SEO has had for us. This means traffic. You know how much money we would have to spend in AdWords in particular based on the keywords that we're ranking to bring in this level of traffic and sign-ups using AdWords? Pick a number.

Mark Evans: Million dollars.

Farzad Rashidi: It's about $1,400,000 a month.

Mark Evans: Wow. That is huge. That's a huge number.

Farzad Rashidi: Every month, we would have to spend $1,400,000 to bring in this amount of sign-ups and traffic. When you think about the amount of money we spend in content, that's a pretty damn good ROI. Granted, it took us a few years to get here. It didn't happen overnight. But when you actually put them head to head, okay. Do we need to spend $1,400,000 a month every month forever versus, you know, planting the seeds and putting together these pieces of content? Now over time, they're gonna actually start yielding results. Given that your audience is looking for solutions like you do on Google, then that's a no-brainer to me.

Mark Evans: One final question. And this is a loaded question, but it's being talked about a lot these days, is where you fall when it comes to gated versus ungated content. A lot of B2B SaaS marketers want to gate content because it generates email addresses. Growing number of marketers are saying that content should be free. What's your view of the world when it comes to gated content or ungated content?

Farzad Rashidi: I don't think they're mutually exclusive. You know, I'm not against either one. I think you should do both if you have the resources for it. It's just a different type of content. If it's an educational resource that people are actively searching for, then great. Let's go ahead and put this as a blog post. There's no reason for it to be gated. Now if you've done some original research, run some surveys and got some data and you got something interesting that people who are in your space would be willing to put in their information and take a look, and it's not really a type of content that you would put on Google and people are actively searching for, then, yeah, that that's much better suited for a gated piece of content. Now the way you acquire impressions is different. You gotta be spending some ads on LinkedIn with these, like, forms that people can automatically pre-fill and opt-in to your list and get access to that e-book or you already have an existing newsletter base or our audience you could promote this to. Another cool thing we've done also with gated content is that we partner up with another company. So we partner up with Mark, you, and we say, okay, Mark. You go ahead and take care of this research part and we flesh it out and we take care of the design and the writing out the content and sort of putting it together. Let's put our money together and let's both promote it to each other's audience and split an ad budget in both ways. Let's share the leads that we get from both of these or from these e-books. Right? To both. Right? So you sort of double up the ROI. So it's also something that we do on an ongoing basis with our businesses as well.

Mark Evans: Well, Farzad, this has been an excellent and inspiring conversation. Where can people learn more about you, Visme, and Respana?

Farzad Rashidi: You can connect with me on LinkedIn. There's not a whole lot of people named Farzad Rashidi, so I'm pretty easy to spot on social media. LinkedIn is my main channel. You can connect with me there. And also respana.com, visme.com, and that's where they can learn about our business.

Mark Evans: Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to Mark@MarketingSpark.co or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you next time.