How to Build a Content Marketing Creation & Promotion Machine

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Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Content marketing is hot, red hot. For b to b 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 Disney, which became a highly profitable rival to Canva and Vengage and generated organic traffic of more than 2,000,000 visitors per month. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Farzad.

Guest: 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?

Guest: 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 and they, you know, put purchase a few pieces of content, put on the site, and call it a day. And and they get zero traffic from it, so normally, they just never think about it. Right. Right. Lot lots of other companies that are do doing pursuing content seriously, it's more so becoming matter of SEO traffic. So they they basically are are overdoing the the scientific portion of writing content, is, you know, doing keyword research, keyword stuffing, and and then they normally don't care as much about the content piece that that's actually being published or not it adds value. And 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 is done quite rarely. But but people have started to figure this out that that, you know, the only way to really get make this work, they actually have to start investing in content. And and that 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 are people's attention spans are 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 that it's hard to grab an audience's intention 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 where I see definitely things are heading towards. But as far as content itself goes, I think that that the tech the good old text based content not going anywhere. It's just that to do it right and and put all the pieces of the puzzle together is still quite time consuming and 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 easy 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?

Guest: I'm glad you asked. So the answer to that question is quite a few hours long. Well, let's let's finish it to a few minutes. We're gonna we're gonna we're gonna, summarize a little. The way I paint 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 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 that that we ideally wanna build our site around. Within that site, we wanna 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 when you are looking for a solution in any space? What's the first step you do intrinsically?

Mark Evans: Do a search.

Guest: There you go. And work. Where do you do a search?

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

Guest: Google. Exactly. So presentation software, infographic maker, right, the reports maker, etcetera. So these are what we call our landing pages, sales pages. In order to make these landing or these these sales pages competitive, what we do 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.

Guest: Of content. Meaning, basically, it's just a simple way of saying just create content about presentation. So for our presentation landing page, create how to make a presentation. What how 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 reference cross reference each other, right, so that the soft the site is well woven together. So that that's step one. That's building a right site structure. Step two is to start identifying what are some of the phrase 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 wanna 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 wanna go after, you need to start what what I call I I made this little simple formula, what I call the opportunity keywords, where we're trying to prioritize these phrases where they get a lot of hits. So they're actually 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, wanna 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 you you make this little formula for folks can Google it. Just look up Visme marketing strategy. And I wrote a little ebook that go through all this, for, that sort of step by step so folks can download that ebook and kinda follow through. It's free. But anyhow, as far as the, the the content strategy goes, once we have our or keywords that we know what we're trying to create, then you wanna 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 these pages on your website, and that's what I call a right infrastructure or a a base for your website. Now you gotta build a facade up or 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 magic to kinda show up at their door and and people are gonna just form lines and and and try to knock down the doors of the website to come in. And 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 are in Apple or Google or or these Fortune 100 companies. So what what do we do? Well, that's where content promotion kinda 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 or 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.

Guest: 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.

Guest: So a lot of people think of content promotion as just going out and and putting it under 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 but it it it's not even in our strategy. It's just something that naturally happen. Content promotion to us comes back to the main purpose of the content piece. So once you create a piece of content, you wanna 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 like or service like you would would naturally and organically find you. Most of that traffic happens on Google. So how do you get that content piece 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 girl's popularity con the way the search engine is this crawler works that the more other authoritative relevant websites in your space are talking about you and actually, obviously, mentioning it a link to your website, that's a vote of popularity in NICE Google and other search engines. It just tells them that, hey. This is 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 wanna make sure that that the people who are actually talking about you are are 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 a active process of promotion. So that's sort of what was also the original story of how Respondent came into play. So back in the day, what we were doing anytime 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. Alright? Ultimate guide to lead generation. And I'm a lead generation agency, and I wanna get that guide up in the search results. Now it's a very competitive content. Now ideally, what I wanna do is to find other content pieces that are mentioning what are some of the top marketing strategies for b to b SaaS companies. Right? And they and and 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 wanna ideally identify first these noncompeting posts that happen to mention our keyword in there and and and reach out to them and incentivize them to mention us. Now that's a whole slew of different, you know, tactics and and and strategies. I wanna keep it to the broad. And also another thing we wanna do is to reverse engineer what's already working. So we wanna 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 or other posts and blog articles that have mentioned them. Extract list and reach out to them if especially if you have a superior post and it's what we call it, a reverse Skyscript. 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 a guest post and and then leads to a part longer term partnership. And that that's sort of the whole process of prospecting, identification, finding contacts, and outreach, something that we were sort of put piecing together at Visme manually, duct taping bunch of different tools and and and had a bunch of data miners and manual work, and and and it was quite tedious as you might

Mark Evans: Can imagine. Yeah.

Guest: That that sort of sparked the idea of Respondus. So we were like, alright. 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 let me stop you there because you've talked about Responder, but you maybe tell the story of Responder 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 Responda? How does it work? And is it just available to Visme, or is it going to be available to other content marketers?

Guest: So Respana there's no d in there, by the way. So Okay. Respana. In it. You got it. We we built this initially as a internal software. So we were basically like, hey, guys. This content promotion process is long. It's tedious. Let's let's put together a really ugly UI and and duct tape these steps together so we could sort of have a one 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 10 x 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, alright, guys. I think we got something here. And up to this day, Visme is still a Respondo's biggest customer, but what what we decided to release Respondo as a standalone product, start a separate company, and then sort of have that, run its course. And and 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 a also a number of, really high level, SEO agencies and and and people that are doing these sort of tactics for their clients and and other publishers, people who are who have who have a publishing website or they have some sort of affiliate website. So that that sort of led to the creation of Responder. Now I sort of shifted away from Visme and and sort of running operation here at Responder. We got a we got a separate team here now. But, yes, that initially was sort of it's it was sort of incubated out of of Disney.

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 tuned feet, and it could become high growth company. Are they split in half? Are they is are they still inter interweaved? How have you structured this new entity?

Guest: We were very adamant of 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, it basically is a brand management or brand content creation platform. Mark, you create all sorts of social media assets and and you create presentations and and, you know, especially in large organizations where they have to keep everybody on the same page in terms of brand guidelines and 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 pretty interesting product. We we our founder, Visme's founder, Paymon, who is a a cofounder at Respond, actually. Launched this back in 2013. Now it's got over I think we've passed just 12,000,000 active users. And and over 80 employees, fully profitable, and growing at a very healthy rate. And so that whole operation is what Paymom's managing. So Respana was sort of since it's it was initiated by me and it created by me, and it was sort of so the responsibility for the management on the responder side fell on me. So we we hired a separate engineering team. We have a separate marketing team. So we we try to keep things separate so that and not one is impacting the other by eating up resources.

Mark Evans: Maybe going back to the content marketing production world, what are your set 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 ebooks or infographics. But in time, that enthusiasm can wane. The ideas aren't as there's not as many. They're not as they don't flow as 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?

Guest: Content production, when 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 post 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 a and there are posts that have a good number of backlinks mentioned, but the rankings has started to drop. So let's go ahead and update and refresh that post. So it's a it's a constant dynamic process of evaluating content pieces that have been created in the past and keeping the the blood going. So so that's number one is that you don't wanna just put out a piece of content and let us 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 the because it's almost impossible that a person is a jackal trades. So they 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 x to get it. Right? So I can't Okay. Can't write about topics. I'm not so what what we do at this, maybe we have a a pretty good network 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're they have a design background. Right? So there's a million pieces they can write about about design. And we have another person that who's expertise in digital marketing. Right? They come from the marketing world, the new one in ins and outs. So having a network of writers, like, bounce ideas off of and not just necessarily have two people in charge of writing content per se, that helps a lot with with keeping things creative.

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

Guest: Yes. But the in house folks are 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 let's see what silo we need to target. Their their job is mainly predominantly to put together this content brief that they get passed on to the writer who's now is gonna sit out right from the heart.

Mark Evans: What are some of the mistakes that b to b 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?

Guest: Alright. 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 business say it just doesn't make any sense. Like, if you're a super enterprise software that sells, like, 100 k plus 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 100 k plus license to a software. Normally, that requires different sales cycle. It requires some outbound, requires some, you know, salespeople and SDRs and and 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 something that that's a question that a lot of businesses don't even consider. They just start writing content or just hire right. 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 peep 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 little startups invest as heavily as in content as companies like Vesme or Respondo do. And the reason being is it's a silent channel that has a very large lag. So you can just put some ads and and once you start doing Google Ads, you can see result. 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 gonna see it. Okay. You just get some traffic or 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 a business content. Don't I'm sorry. Excuse my French. Don't half ass it. Go all in. You know, you wanna make sure you're putting the pieces right because if you if you it's a waste of money otherwise if you if you're gonna skip any of these steps. Dedicating enough resources and 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 advertising in 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.

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

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

Guest: 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. Not 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 every $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 are 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 the where you fall when it comes to gated versus ungated content. Lot of b to b's 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?

Guest: 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 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 and got some data and you got some 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 be 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 on LinkedIn with these, like, forms that people can automatically pre fill and and and opt in to your list and get access to that ebook or you already have an existing newsletter base or us audience you could promote this too. 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 and the and the writing out the content and sort of putting it together. Let let's put our money together in our and and let's both promote it to each other's audience and split a ad budget in both ways. Let's share the leads that we get from both of these or from these ebooks Right. To the both. Right? So you sort of double out the ROI. So it's it's also in something that 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?

Guest: You can connect with me on LinkedIn. There's not a whole lot of people named Farza or Shidi, so I'm pretty into the spot on social media. LinkedIn is my main channel. You can you can connect with me there. And 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 Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more how I help pay to be 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.