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Every day marketers sift through dozens of headlines, posts, and slacks telling us about the latest and greatest trend we should be following.
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and like you have to figure it out by yourself. But you don’t have to do it alone. Content Matters with Nicole MacLean (Compose.ly’s CRO) is your digital partner for filtering the trends and focusing on the content that matters most — creating connection that drive results.
For more, head to our site: https://compose.ly/content-matters
Produced in partnership with Share Your Genius: https://shareyourgenius.com/
[00:00:00] Amanda Salem: You're gonna get better results if you utilize segmentation. The same is true for bigger businesses who are trying to refine that messaging. There are going to be messages that. Not meant for everybody. And so those committees have to have some really passionate advocates within them who say, no, I know this is who we're talking to.
[00:00:22] Amanda Salem: Put yourself in their shoes.
[00:00:23] Nicole MacLean: I'm Nicole McLean and this is Content Matters Created in partnership with Share Your Genius. This show is your digital partner for filtering the trends and focusing on the content that matters most, creating connection that drives results. Let's cut through the marketing chaos together.
[00:00:46] Amanda Salem: my name's Amanda Salem. I'm the director of Content Marketing at Constant Contact. I think most people know us as an email marketing company. In fact, we've been in. Business 30 years this year and did start, in email marketing. But I think everybody knows, right? The marketing landscape has changed and added a lot of things in the digital sphere.
[00:01:05] Amanda Salem: So things like SMS and automation and things of that nature are also in our wheelhouse, uh, social media, all of those things. So, now have grown up in 30 years from an email marketing company to a digital marketing company particularly specializing in small businesses.
[00:01:21] Nicole MacLean: Okay, first of all, happy anniversary. This is so exciting. 30 is like, wow, that's so and crazy that we're at the point now I feel old that email marketing can be 30 years old or like a dedicated tool for it,
[00:01:36] Amanda Salem: where I felt old was, we were celebrating our 30th at kickoff this year, and they asked everybody to change their profile pictures to that year. And then these like full adults who I work with, and I'm aging myself here, right? So these full adults that I work with are like, maybe I have a baby picture and I'm like, okay, here's a picture of me in my marching band uniform from high school.
[00:01:56] Amanda Salem: So you're welcome, you know.
[00:01:58] Nicole MacLean: is savage. No, we should, that's so mean. I mean, it's a cute idea from your team, but also. We don't need to think about where
[00:02:06] Amanda Salem: No, absolutely not
[00:02:08] Nicole MacLean: because how many like Gen Zs do you have? We're like, I don't even have a picture from 30 years ago.
[00:02:13] Amanda Salem: enough that I felt like crawling into my own grave, preemptively. I.
[00:02:17] Nicole MacLean: Well, that's okay. You know what, 30 years of experience, 30 years of knowledge that, constant context bringing to the market. Very excited. Yeah. You mentioned a couple things that I'm sure we're going to. Dig in on especially the kind of, market sophistication journey and probably being, you know, going from a disruptor to a leader.
[00:02:41] Nicole MacLean: Like all of that, I'm sure we'll dive into, but I always love to start and understanding your own journey and then we'll talk about constant context journey. But, you know, how did you get into content marketing and what's kinda led you to where you are today?
[00:02:54] Amanda Salem: Sure I. I am a storyteller. Like, uh, my friends refer to me as an aggressive extrovert. Like I love connecting with people. I'm constantly talking. And when it came time for me to go to college, I was so gung-ho about being a music education major. And as your in Indiana, uh, no
[00:03:14] Nicole MacLean: Yes,
[00:03:14] Amanda Salem: surprise to you that,
[00:03:15] Nicole MacLean: all missed that. We, uh, Amanda's originally, we had a lot of prep on this, but Amanda's originally from Indiana, which is so fun. So
[00:03:22] Amanda Salem: um. Yeah, so I, uh, now I'm telling Tales outta school, but I decided to go to Ball State University and I went full in chirp, chirp. Uh, I went full in, uh, and then I said, oh my gosh, I'm not sure that I wanna do this. And so I asked everybody between accepting at college and going to orientation, what should I do?
[00:03:42] Amanda Salem: What am I good at? And somebody said, you should go into journalism. I think you'd be really great at that.
[00:03:48] Nicole MacLean: State does have an excellent journalism school.
[00:03:50] Amanda Salem: I, this, the synergies that fell into place that sort of allowed me to, I thinking about making these decisions when you're 18 is so chilling now that I'm an an adult. Uh, and the fact that the universe sort of gently guided me into this spot where the journalism school was incredible and I, uh, I pursued a journalism and public relations degree with a creative writing minor and just really kind of.
[00:04:14] Amanda Salem: Locked into place and felt like everything was, was clicking along. And right outta college, I joined a small PR firm and just really fell in love with that content, that writing piece of it. And at that time, I. Again, aging myself a little bit. Content marketing wasn't really there yet. There were those elements of storytelling, but in terms of how companies were communicating themselves at that time, it was still very, here's what we do, here's what it costs, like here's what we give you.
[00:04:43] Amanda Salem: And we weren't educating customers or things like that. And so it's really over just the course of time from job to job, to job. Seeing more and more of those opportunities to tell those stories and to write more and to get more into content started to grow as marketing evolved. And at some point it just flourished into this like real cohesive role, uh, and content marketing, doing things like blogs and infographics and video scripts and really the heart of it being in educating the customer.
[00:05:16] Amanda Salem: Uh, I think really where I. Hit my stride was I was working at Staples corporate headquarters for their B2B division. And, no one ever said like, I really feel like I hit my stride writing a white paper about bathroom, about bathroom paper products. And yet, uh, truly there were, you know, that was kind of the moment.
[00:05:35] Amanda Salem: And so that's how I, I got where I am. And there's something really incredible about being, to take, being able to take a topic about a service or something. Thinking about it from the customer's point of view and saying, what is it that they care about, about why are they even thinking about this?
[00:05:51] Amanda Salem: That's kind of the motivation. I just love it.
[00:05:54] Nicole MacLean: I love everything about that. So I also went to Penn State.
[00:05:57] Amanda Salem: Uh, I love this.
[00:05:58] Nicole MacLean: love so listeners, you're just finding like, this is friendship blossoming right now. That's actually what you're.
[00:06:03] Amanda Salem: Perfect.
[00:06:04] Nicole MacLean: Being on this similar, I was undecided going in and I had a very lovely teacher who literally dragged me to the guidance counselor and made me take a marketing class. I said, I love, like,
[00:06:17] Amanda Salem: Click.
[00:06:17] Nicole MacLean: I wanna do and changed to marketing before I started. And rest, the rest is
[00:06:23] Amanda Salem: It's that synergy. It's the universe again, like gently guiding you into the place where you can provide the most impact. Dragging you. You're like, it wasn't gentle. Let's be real here.
[00:06:33] Nicole MacLean: But yes, the uni for the universe, it was gentle. Well, and I think something you said that's so poignant right now is ai Google.
[00:06:42] Nicole MacLean: Recently, at the time of this taping, it was like two days ago, and this comes out maybe a couple weeks ago, is talking about everyone's gonna be in ai. The future's completely different, and of course there's even more. Scare tactics on LinkedIn being like, content's dead. SE o's dead. What are we gonna do?
[00:07:00] Nicole MacLean: Marketers and I, I feel like we've lost where content marketing, content marketing came from, which is exactly what you just said. realizing that we're not shoving sales messages down people's throats, where. Trying to educate. We're trying to relate to our buyers and build a relationship and
[00:07:17] Amanda Salem: Yes.
[00:07:18] Nicole MacLean: And just because AI is now a new channel and AI is a hundred percent changing the game, almost feel like we need to go back to our roots of storytelling and remember, why did we start creating content in the first place? this is just another channel to think about how that that's gonna be impacted by it.
[00:07:36] Amanda Salem: I, it's interesting that you, that you mentioned this, I don't think there's a content marketer. Who's practicing today, who's not constantly either being asked about AI or thinking about AI and its impacts? We even talked to our own customers. So we do research, uh, a few times a year called Small Business Now.
[00:07:54] Amanda Salem: And a few years ago, you know, we, we polled our, like a sort of a body of small businesses and said, what are your thoughts on, on using AI and, and marketing and I, small numbers. They were all like, what? Why? Who's got time? I'm scared of that. Whereas this spring we asked the same question. 72% of small business owners said they planned on using AI to help with their marketing this year.
[00:08:22] Amanda Salem: But there's like a key word in there and that's help with, and so, you know, obviously. Constant contact does, you know, have some AI content generation tools and campaign generation tools. And the idea of that is always to help get off the the blank page. Not all of us love sitting down in front of a blinking cursor and like tackling that challenge.
[00:08:44] Amanda Salem: And there are days when even I don't have it in me. And so using AI for that spark of an idea or to help you get that. Cursed word off the tip of your tongue and and onto the page. 'cause you're like, I know there's a way that I wanted to say this. Those are the places where I think it can provide real value.
[00:09:07] Amanda Salem: What it can't do is know your customer and to know your customer inside and out. And so as you said, when you're really thinking about the reason we got into this in the first place, which is. What is your pain point and how can I address it with education and with information? That's something that you need, you need a content person for, but you also need a company that understands that customer knows who they are, knows what their pain points are in order to connect all those things together.
[00:09:38] Amanda Salem: I AI is and has been and can be extremely sophisticated. It doesn't know your customer. It doesn't know who's walking through your doors and paying your bills.
[00:09:48] Nicole MacLean: That is such a great. Point because it's only gonna know it if you tell it. So it's that classic garbage in, garbage
[00:09:54] Amanda Salem: Yep.
[00:09:55] Nicole MacLean: If you don't know it or your company doesn't know
[00:09:58] Amanda Salem: Right?
[00:09:59] Nicole MacLean: and you, you are trying to use these helpful tools, it's still not going to be very good. And so is, is almost like job security
[00:10:10] Amanda Salem: You.
[00:10:11] Nicole MacLean: to to point.
[00:10:12] Amanda Salem: For sure, and particularly again because my company, constant Contact is dealing with small businesses who are so unique and so diverse, and all of their stories are so incredible that, that I. Emphasis is really on use these tools to save you time so that you can keep doing what you love, but it doesn't replace your story or who you are.
[00:10:36] Amanda Salem: And so just continually helping. But again, that's an education opportunity. So part of what we do is educate our customers on how do you use AI in a way that you can still be yourself, represent your brand? How do you use it to provide inspiration without. To your point, taking away that uniqueness, that security, that spark of who you are.
[00:11:01] Nicole MacLean: Yeah. Well, and it reminds me, you know, when TikTok was being banned and even just the way people think about TikTok, there's one side of it of, oh, it's another social media. It's rotting our brain. We're doom scrolling, whatever. And then there's the opposite side, which is look at these small businesses that tick. Talk has been able to expand their audience and change their lives and take their message, their story, and share it out. And I think AI is another tool for that. I think Constant Contact is a great example. We don't often think of some of these structural frameworks or workflows or tools that have a very human element to what they do.
[00:11:43] Amanda Salem: For sure and, and you started to talk about something that I think is really valuable, which is these small businesses have used TikTok to expand their reach, expand their audience. The idea there being that this is a channel that they discovered had to direct. A direct line into their, their audience and their customers.
[00:12:02] Amanda Salem: And sometimes that's TikTok, and sometimes that's Instagram, and sometimes that's email, and sometimes that's having an event. It's about knowing where those people are and, and leaning into that. And that's gonna look different for every single small business, but even every single marketer for a bigger business, the, your audience is always living somewhere different depending on who they are and how they gain their information.
[00:12:28] Nicole MacLean: So speaking of marketers and her audience,
[00:12:31] Amanda Salem: Sure.
[00:12:31] Nicole MacLean: audience's, small business owners, marketers, is it primarily small business owners or is there kind of this balance between the two?
[00:12:40] Amanda Salem: We do have a, a par, we do have a partner program where we service larger organizations. Think about things like franchises where it's a headquarters, but with a, a lot of smaller businesses beneath it. So still kind of serving that small business. But the real core of our business is around. Small businesses, and the majority of people that we're communicating with aren't marketers.
[00:13:02] Amanda Salem: They're people who have taken their passion and turned it into a profession. And marketing is something they have to do. And I, I will tell you, there's a challenge inherent in that because we are marketers, we know the lingo, we fall back into it, whether we mean to or not. And when we're talking to these small businesses, this goes back to what I was saying about, putting things into your customer's voice. This is something that I'm constantly challenging my team to do, but also myself, because it's really very easy to start talking about marketing as a marketer, and you forget, oh my gosh, I'm talking to somebody who's not a marketer, and I need to kind of bring this back into the way they talk about it, the way they think about it, the things that they're worried about, the benefits that they're trying to get.
[00:13:50] Nicole MacLean: Okay, you just said the, the things they're worried about, the things that keep them up at night,
[00:13:54] Amanda Salem: Yeah.
[00:13:54] Nicole MacLean: often so much great fodder for messaging, for content ideas, for campaign ideas. And I can't, I don't remember where I heard this, but I, someone said that if you can articulate your prospect or client's. Problem better than they can. You will learn the business
[00:14:14] Amanda Salem: Right.
[00:14:14] Nicole MacLean: because they feel heard, they feel seen. They feel like, if you can articulate words out of my mouth, odds are that you've probably figured out how to solve it. If that's, you know, the business you're in.
[00:14:27] Amanda Salem: And they wanna feel understood.
[00:14:28] Nicole MacLean: Okay. End of podcast. 14 minutes,
[00:14:30] Amanda Salem: We've got it. Content marketing. Your customers wanna feel understood. Truly that is at the heart of it, and I, and it's harder than it should be. Sometimes,
[00:14:41] Amanda Salem: I think some of that comes from the death or death of messaging by committee. And especially, I'm curious how you guys handle this because there is something so special in being that startup or small business or even mid-market, where as a content marketer you can, you can infuse a little bit of your voice to it.
[00:15:00] Nicole MacLean: You can be close to things and really drive that. And as you get more larger, needing to enable people, which you know, it's kind of important as a marketer, I guess I do you think you lose a little something? And things can get watered down. And then suddenly you feel like you have this great perspective, you understand a pain point and objective, and then suddenly all these people have opinions.
[00:15:23] Nicole MacLean: And it went from being like, kind of like, Hmm, I'm gonna punch you. Like the that was good to being like, oh, that, that was like a little flick.
[00:15:31] Amanda Salem: Yeah.
[00:15:31] Nicole MacLean: it loses the punch.
[00:15:33] Amanda Salem: I'd like to add to that, that, and you've helped to provide some context for something that I've been talking about a lot lately, which is the idea of committing to an audience. This isn't a constant contact problem. This is a marketing problem that I'm articulating, which is that companies often want to talk to everybody at once.
[00:15:53] Amanda Salem: And so that messaging to your point, becomes so watered down because we're so afraid to lose a segment of the audience. And it's interesting because I think of all of all the types of companies to name here, um, fast food restaurants, and. Heavy retail brands. At some point they figured that out, right? So they started really talking to very specific audiences and sometimes it seems extraordinarily off-putting to other people, but they decided at some point you're our audience.
[00:16:29] Amanda Salem: And if you don't get it, then it's not for you. And there's a certain amount of bravery behind that that does make the the message land a little harder. For the people who do get it. And so I, I think that, and it all goes back right to that, identifying your customer, but being hyper as hyper specific as you can be so that you can speak directly to that person.
[00:16:54] Amanda Salem: And today, maybe I'm talking to you, but maybe next week I'm talking to somebody else and that, and now it's, now that one's not for you, it's for them. I think there's an ability there to kind of get that punch back, but you, to your. So. Segmentation. Oh my gosh. Right. We, this is something we educate our customers on all the time.
[00:17:14] Amanda Salem: You're gonna get better results if you utilize segmentation. The same is true for bigger businesses who are trying to refine that messaging. There are going to be messages that. Not meant for everybody. And so those committees have to have some really passionate advocates within them who say, no, I know this is who we're talking to.
[00:17:37] Amanda Salem: Put yourself in their shoes.
[00:17:39] Nicole MacLean: I do feel like I have to make a. Confession. 'cause we talk about ICPA lot on the show and I agree with absolutely everything you said transparently. Internally, I'm having the same fight except I'm on the other side where everyone on the leadership team, our CEO EO, is like, Nicole, I need a documented ICP.
[00:17:58] Nicole MacLean: I need to know who we're saying no to. And there's a bit of like, it's in my head, trust me. And a bit of like, but that's not fair. It should be documented and like totally get it. I'm, again, we're being real and honest. I. There is a piece of me though that I think I felt this in every role I've been in in marketing is I think everyone wants a nice pretty ICP that's like I am targeting and no offense to fast food, like I think there is a, a cultural or psychographic piece to some of them, but it can sometimes be like, I want the 18 to 26-year-old male like Taco Bell.
[00:18:35] Nicole MacLean: I just picture
[00:18:36] Amanda Salem: Of course.
[00:18:37] Nicole MacLean: to 30-year-old men, it's just a pretty like industry title, demographic size of company. Cool. That's our ICP. That's who we're talking to and what I have found in every company I've worked on worked at, it's less important what those are and it's more important that the person buying or that the company aligns philosophically your product. of my first jobs was working in HR Tech. engagement, the number one deciding factor on whether or not that was gonna be a good client for us is whether the CEO believed in people or not. And I can build messaging to that. I can't build a list off of that.
[00:19:18] Amanda Salem: Right.
[00:19:19] Nicole MacLean: can't, I, you can find communities, you can try and find places you think that mentality will be. But it's hard. You know, you wanna say, well, we're only serving this industry, so I'm gonna go to all those conferences and I'm gonna go to all those communities. And I think where I just struggle transparently is like, I just think when people say ICP, they want the easy check box of demographics. And what actually makes the messaging interesting and helpful is the psychographics. And that's way harder. it, I feel like it doesn't often get people what they think it's going to to have this ICP, but I don't know. I mean, yeah, I'm still struggling with it. I'm trying to figure it out, so that's why I'm just being honest about it.
[00:20:02] Amanda Salem: This is, I, I love this. Okay, so like I could talk shop all day long. This is, my husband says I'm insane because I, I like to give interviews and I like to go on interviews and I like to have these types of discussions 'cause I could talk shop until I am falling asleep for sure. You You started to tease out something that, for my team is very important, which is.
[00:20:24] Amanda Salem: The psychographic piece of it. What's driving these people? What are you thinking about? What are you looking for? And so my team talks to a lot of customers. We do case studies, we do, testimonials. We do things like that. And we learn so much from those that can't really be teased out of. A data set very easily and we can, you know, there are ways to, to get at that.
[00:20:49] Amanda Salem: But doing things like listening to our sales crews Gong calls and we invited, my team, invited, uh, it was actually a friend of one of my team members who is a photographer and this is a woman who wasn't interested in our product and in fact had tried other email marketing products and, and kind of bounced off of them.
[00:21:13] Amanda Salem: And I said, can we talk to her? Can we ask her questions? I wanna understand what's driving her marketing decisions, but also what's driving her hesitation. And so starting to understand some of those inflection points and really listening to what is making customers make the decisions they make. No, you can't like.
[00:21:34] Amanda Salem: Put a slide together around that. Selfishly what you can do is create some really great content from it, which is a little harder to disseminate across an entire org as a rallying cry. But for
[00:21:46] Nicole MacLean: we have to try and solve it. I will give that it's, it's a hard problem, but.
[00:21:51] Amanda Salem: it, it is. And I, and to your point, I think when we're looking at an ICP, a lot of what we're trying to do is. Hone our focus so that we're not distracted and identify things in a way that make it easier to determine how do we find these people?
[00:22:07] Amanda Salem: How do we get in front of them? How do we pick a channel mix? Um, and. I, this is going to sound like the most self-serving message in the world, but some of how you do find those people is in the types of content that they're engaging with. I can't identify whether you're a CEO, who cares about people based on your, your age, your title, and your your zip code.
[00:22:34] Amanda Salem: But I can tell if you're a CEO who cares about people. If I know that you've been reading about employee engagement and the importance of company values and that you've, you know, downloaded a white paper about how more young people are selecting employers based on their CSR efforts. All of those things help me know who you are.
[00:22:57] Amanda Salem: So by the content that you're engaging with, I can start. To really understand a little better. That does require casting kind of a wide net though, so, and it is a little self-serving as a content marker to be like, Hey, you know, you can put some Bain out there and it might give you some info.
[00:23:12] Nicole MacLean: Job security.
[00:23:13] Amanda Salem: Of course.
[00:23:15] Amanda Salem: Yeah. Right, exactly.
[00:23:17] Amanda Salem: a sales and marketing leader, I'm always interested to hear about a team's tech stack. At Composely, we use Apollo with HubSpot to fuel our outbound outreach. My team loves it. It consistently provides accurate contact information and is incredibly user friendly.
If you're thinking about changing your data provider or just want to hear more about our experience, connect with me on LinkedIn or check out the link in the show notes of this episode. Improve your inbound, increase conversion, and keep your marketing database squeaky clean with Apollo.
[00:23:50] Nicole MacLean: are there any other maybe non-AI kind of challenges that you or your team are working through or recently solved that you kinda share with with the folks I.
[00:24:00] Amanda Salem: Sure. I think one of the biggest challenges that my team often has is I, and I, I started to allude to this and I've, I've kind of talked about it a few times. It's taking off our marketing hats and really, truly centering ourselves in that customer experience. I can talk about. Social media engagement and I can talk about lead generation and I can fall back and 'cause like I said, I love talking shop.
[00:24:32] Amanda Salem: My customers don't wanna talk shop. They wanna talk about how they have a guitar store, they have a, a corner store. They provide mediation efforts for people. These are extremely diverse small businesses with extremely diverse concerns. But the one thing that most of them have in common is they are not big old marketing nerds like, like we are.
[00:24:56] Amanda Salem: And so, um, that's one of the challenges that. My team is really tasked with kind of like keeping each other in check for, and I'll be candid, SEO makes that a little bit harder because if you're not talking about certain things in certain ways, then Google says, uh, you must not be an expert.
[00:25:16] Nicole MacLean: about. Yep.
[00:25:18] Amanda Salem: And so it's a constant balancing act.
[00:25:21] Amanda Salem: I think that's one of the. Biggest challenges that, that my team has and that we're constantly kind of trying to check each other on. And I have an incredible team who is very willing. I've created a, an environment where they're very willing to check me, and I love that. That's what I want. I want them to challenge me.
[00:25:40] Amanda Salem: I want to be able to challenge them without them feeling like it's personal. And we, it's, I could not be more fortunate for the team that I have.
[00:25:47] Nicole MacLean: There's a lot there, which I think is, is great. You specifically mentioned something in SEO OI hear a lot and specifically with small businesses, so this is kind of a nice little Venn diagram of overlap with your experience. But the SEO, which is the. Do I write kind of the basic foundational topics that my audience may not actually really read, or maybe is it written for them versus the bottom of funnel content or the 3 5 0 1 level content? And I hear a lot, I think, from small businesses where you get the CEO who maybe still has some oversight into what's happening and they see a blog go out and they're like, why are we writing this blog? Like. It's two, it's 2 1 0 1. Our buyer's more sophisticated or whatever. And then they get frustrated and think that marketers or SEOs are not doing, like, you don't understand our business.
[00:26:35] Nicole MacLean: Why would you write that? Because they don't understand the, understand the algorithm. And yet we also in the same breath say, well, don't write for the algorithm. Write for people. Cool. They super helpful. So what advice would you give her? How do you try to kind of walk that fine line?
[00:26:51] Amanda Salem: Man, this is rough. Let me first start by saying I understand and respect the value of SEO, of, of understanding the algorithm. We're in an inflection point on that though, because the types of things that we're talking about that typically helped to power that. Are those, I have a question. I can answer that question.
[00:27:13] Amanda Salem: Now. Google has sort of supplanted that, right? They've, they've implemented this AI search overview. Everyone sort of panicked, oh my gosh, where did all my traffic go? But there's a bit of there's a bit of self qualification happening in that, which is. If a small business just wants an answer to a question, of course, constant Contact is happy to be there to answer that question.
[00:27:39] Amanda Salem: But those folks might not be ready yet. They might not be ready to, dive into all of the vagaries of having an actual digital marketing tool. It's providing the content that both answers the question, but engages. What, and what I mean by that is yes, you can answer the question and, and you can appease the algorithm, let's say, which sounds a little bit cynical, but where's the value for the reader in that?
[00:28:06] Amanda Salem: Are we looking at things like. Explainer videos, customer testimonials. Within that interactive content, like are we, is there like a calculator you can use or a calendar that you can put to use? Is there something that I've provided you that helps you take the answer to that question and put it into action and, and blend it into part of your own strategy?
[00:28:27] Amanda Salem: And I think that's where you hit that sweet spot. You wanna be visible to those folks. You're not going to see the same kind of traffic, but if the numbers aren't. The people who really are ready for you and your product or service, are they the effort that you want to put in? Or do you wanna find, you used the word Venn diagram, which I love.
[00:28:49] Amanda Salem: Do you wanna find the middle of that Venn diagram of people who need knowledge and who are ready for like the tools and services that you have to offer? And I would argue that that's the sweet spot. That to me is more important than. What are your organic numbers looking like with no context,
[00:29:08] Nicole MacLean: Yes. So much there. One, traffic has always been a vanity metric and now it's just really coming to fruition and it's our jobs as marketers to educate the rest of the company on why that is.
[00:29:20] Amanda Salem: right?
[00:29:21] Nicole MacLean: trying to save our butt. It's, no, it's. But it's
[00:29:23] Amanda Salem: Yeah.
[00:29:24] Nicole MacLean: you know? really is a vanity metric. And then two, I think it just goes back to kind of this whole thing of the purpose of content marketing.
[00:29:32] Nicole MacLean: Content marketing is hard. There was a period of time you could get away with just writing a bunch of articles and throwing it on your site and
[00:29:39] Amanda Salem: Yep.
[00:29:39] Nicole MacLean: going to work. And now to your point, I mean, there are so many ways you can find that Venn diagram. It can be. Do great explainer videos be found on YouTube and that drives them to the site or have YouTube on the on the page.
[00:29:50] Nicole MacLean: And so when they get there, they're more engaged. It can be a really good interlinking strategy and aligning everything to the funnel and the journey. Having visual CTAs, I'm purposely trying to talk fast to say there's a lot you can do
[00:30:01] Amanda Salem: Yeah.
[00:30:02] Nicole MacLean: you have to figure it out. For your company, your buyer, you know what your strategy is there, but you can't just write an article and throw it on the site and expect things to work anymore.
[00:30:12] Nicole MacLean: There has to be, again, something AI could probably help you with. You could give it your site map. It can maybe help guide you to where those things are, but you still have to be driving that strategy overlapping everything together to get the same outcome that maybe you could a few years ago just by throwing some content on your website and saying, I'm good.
[00:30:31] Amanda Salem: We're definitely not in like Field of Dreams territory anymore, where if you build it, they will come and for a long time that for a much longer time really. I mean, it's a very short time in that. Right. But when you look at it, you're like, wow, we kind of got away with this for longer than we really thought we could have.
[00:30:47] Amanda Salem: For sure.
[00:30:48] Nicole MacLean: Yes, and I was just on a episode, so apologies for our audience if you hear me say this twice, but I do think right now too, I just want to encourage marketers. I think you're gonna have some people that are gonna start reacting and saying like, I'm done with seo, I'm done with content. Google's dead. Like, why would we keep investing in it?
[00:31:08] Nicole MacLean: Let's go build the next thing. And frankly, you should. We need to figure out what is next. We need to keep evolving. Things are 100% changing, but I think if you can have discipline as a marketer and probably a leader leadership team, we're still not, we're still not out of it. Organic is still going to continue to bring
[00:31:27] Amanda Salem: Absolutely.
[00:31:28] Nicole MacLean: It's gonna look different. You may have to reassess your benchmarks and what success looks like, but I actually think the ones who have discipline probably actually won't have as much of a decrease because other people are gonna jump ship and you're gonna take that share of voice.
[00:31:43] Amanda Salem: I think that's a really great point of view, and, and at no point has it occurred to me like, oh, we should just jump ship. I, the reality is we should, to your point, I don't wanna say like, put your nose to the grindstone, it's about getting more refined. So now I maybe am not looking for the person who's asking.
[00:32:04] Amanda Salem: How many words should be in my subject line? Maybe I'm looking at a set of keywords that is more refined, more niche, but really speaks more to a person who's sitting there going, oh my gosh, I need a tool to help me with this. And, and you're not gonna see those like. Big uh, you know, potential audience numbers, but you're gonna reach an audience that needs you.
[00:32:27] Amanda Salem: And that's, I think, more, more critical. I also think it's extremely shortsighted to take a look at what's happened within the last eight to nine months and say, this is what it's gonna look like forever. The way that AI responds and gathers information is going to change as well. AI's impact on itself is going to make some of these change.
[00:32:49] Amanda Salem: Some of these things change. Google itself is going to start to value things that are more meaningful, more engaging, that people are spending more time of pa time on the page of. I could be wrong about that, but that's my guess. Right? That's my little crack at like the, the glass ball of looking into the future.
[00:33:08] Amanda Salem: It might, it might not be that, but I think it's, I think it's very premature for people to say forget it. Like, content's a dead game. I'm gonna spend all my time on social media, which spoilers social media is driven by content, so you can't get away from us. I'm sorry.
[00:33:24] Nicole MacLean: folks, right? It is. Well, and I think people, I think part of what's gonna buy us time is that there have been enough egregious. and people losing their jobs and flat out wrong
[00:33:37] Amanda Salem: This week has been a big one for that.
[00:33:40] Nicole MacLean: what did I miss this week?
[00:33:41] Amanda Salem: There was a newspaper I want, um, I can't remember right offhand. I do think it might have been a Chicago newspaper though, that published a summer reading list and a strong majority of the books on it. While they sounded quite plausible, did not exist. It just straight up hallucinated a whole bunch of books that.
[00:34:01] Amanda Salem: I'm sure the authors they were attributed to are now like, okay, I wish I'd thought of that. I read Taylor Jenkins read and she was on the list and it was a book about a reclusive like art collector. It's not a real book. It's not part of her pantheon. Right, exactly. Exactly. But it was, it was a relatively large number.
[00:34:22] Amanda Salem: It was more than half the list was hallucinated, and I think other publications picked up the, I mean, you just, it snowballs very quickly.
[00:34:30] Nicole MacLean: And so I still think that while it, it's again, it's gonna be harder, traffic's gonna be harder, we still are gonna wanna I still think that citing sources is going to be important.
[00:34:42] Amanda Salem: Yes.
[00:34:42] Nicole MacLean: have the chance to show up and to point, like I think of Wikipedia. How many times was it like you're like, you're gonna get an F on this report if you cite Wikipedia as your source, and like, that's just not the reality anymore. But Wikipedia, I had to go through years of building credibility and putting in place and trying and error trial and error, things. And I think that's kind of where we are with AI and AI overviews is. Trust but verify.
[00:35:10] Amanda Salem: Yeah.
[00:35:11] Nicole MacLean: verification is still with a link, is still going to, a site is still saying, do I trust con constant contact or do I trust this other less inferior email platform?
[00:35:23] Nicole MacLean: And I th and to point, that's where it's the. That nose to the grindstone is, we still probably have more time in that than we think,
[00:35:31] Amanda Salem: Yeah.
[00:35:32] Nicole MacLean: it keeps making blunder. Like, this actually just validates my point more. It keeps making blunders that eventually everyone's like, oh, it's been really good.
[00:35:38] Nicole MacLean: There hasn't been a lawyer who's been disbarred recently. So like, we're good.
[00:35:41] Amanda Salem: Right,
[00:35:42] Nicole MacLean: And then, a pretty major publication just flat out makes up half the list. Not intentionally,
[00:35:49] Amanda Salem: right.
[00:35:49] Nicole MacLean: there's gonna be enough of those reminders that then everyone just gets a little more like. okay. Mm. I need to maybe click some more links now.
[00:35:57] Nicole MacLean: Okay. And we just, we still have time. Doesn't mean we shouldn't be forth. Thinking ahead doesn't mean we should be trying new things. And may I always talk about having room to experiment
[00:36:07] Amanda Salem: Yes,
[00:36:08] Nicole MacLean: 10, 15% of your budget or capacity to be trying those things, finding where your audience is. But I would just caution on like the drastic where it's dead, we're done.
[00:36:18] Amanda Salem: agree.
[00:36:19] Nicole MacLean: Messaging. Okay. This has been such a lovely conversation. Any, I kind of will just give the floor as yours. Any final advice or just thoughts that you'd like to leave the audience with?
[00:36:29] Amanda Salem: Gosh. Yeah. Where do I start? I, yeah. I think the biggest thing is to not, I, so particularly as, as marketers and content marketers, don't underestimate your audience's hunger to learn. I, I think that's so huge and we hear it from our customers all the time. And in fact again, I'm gonna like cite some research we did 'cause I thought this was crazy interesting.
[00:36:54] Amanda Salem: So we said like, how are you planning to overcome your biggest marketing challenges in 2025? This was part of our small business now report. The number one answer was building stronger customer relationships, which like agreed same for us. The second highest was learning new strategies. This was higher than increasing their marketing budget.
[00:37:14] Amanda Salem: There's just this hunger to learn and. It's, and you know, for us that's specific right to, to how small businesses are marketing, but I don't think this is uncommon. I think that hunger to learn is across. Nearly everyone, depending on what their passion is, what their role is, what their job is like.
[00:37:37] Amanda Salem: Again, it's, it's down to those psychographic elements, uh, of what makes them tick. But don't ever underestimate that. And, and that can be a strong relationship builder. At the heart of things. That's really what. You wanna do to create that trust before anyone signs on the dotted line. When we talk about being credible, so you mentioned that when we talk about being credible, when we talk about being an industry thought leader, when we talk about constant contact has 30 years of expertise, what all that translates into is.
[00:38:10] Amanda Salem: I have knowledge that I'm willing to share with you and you can benefit from that knowledge. And I just think that's a strong core for a relationship. It's a strong core for content. It's even a strong core for customer retention and, you know, just ongoing customer relationships. Um, it doesn't stop with a product or a service if you can keep teaching one another.
[00:38:32] Amanda Salem: That's amazing.
[00:38:33] Nicole MacLean: Oh, so good. And I think it goes back to if you can understand your target market, they want to learn. That's really, it's where the Ven Venn diagram
[00:38:41] Amanda Salem: Yeah,
[00:38:42] Nicole MacLean: Understand them. They wanna learn bridge that gap. And I think those are gonna be the, the companies that really win over the next years.
[00:38:50] Amanda Salem: I agree with that. I, and people talk about customer centricity a lot, but it means being a very good listener,
[00:38:57] Nicole MacLean: Oh, so amazing. Well, speaking of that, you are one of our customers, so thank
[00:39:03] Amanda Salem: of course.
[00:39:04] Nicole MacLean: Hopefully we will listen and implement those things if we are being customer centric. But truly, this was such a, an incredible conversation and just thank you for. You're welcome to come back anytime in talk shop,
[00:39:15] Amanda Salem: I had a blast. I had a blast.
[00:39:18] Nicole MacLean: just call us up.
[00:39:19] Nicole MacLean: Be like, it's time. I got another one.
[00:39:21] Amanda Salem: I have an hour. Let's get it in the can. Let's go.
[00:39:24] Nicole MacLean:
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Till next time.