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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai 0:00
So, how has being a CRO changed the way that you think about good content?
Timi Olotu 0:04
That is a good question. The answer is a bit weird, because essentially part of how and why I became a CRO is the evolution of my view of content. So, by the time I got here, the view I now hold is what got me here, if that makes sense, but what I can say is what's changed is earlier in my career I thought my job was to demonstrate how good of a content writer, or even sometimes how good of a writer I am. Now I think the important question, or the key imperative, is how effective am I at solving problems using my writing, which sounds like a subtle difference, but they actually diverge quite significantly, because let's say, for example, if I'm writing an article about use cases for our product. If my orientation is all right, I need to show how good of a writer I am. I'll make certain decisions. I'll make decisions to, let's say, deploy highly sophisticated metaphors or create incredibly rich analogies to try and bring to life the use cases of our ideas, so yeah, I might make those kinds of decisions that really show how skilled I am, but maybe my target audience is not very literary, so maybe what I need to do is actually use the simplest possible analogy, or no analogies at all. Maybe what I need to do is just speak as simplistically as possible, and that's a skill I need to deploy, but all of that is predicated on the level of customer insight I have, right? Because for some audiences, maybe those rich analogies are exactly what will bring the product to life, and kind of land the value proposition from all some audiences. Maybe it's the opposite, so you become almost more chameleonic when you shift that perspective, and it's like my writing prowess is a tool, it's not the outcome. So that's like one big shift, and then the other thing I would say is my perspective on measuring content and the impact of content. I used to think that measuring stuff like devalued it, but I actually don't think that's the case. I think what happens is I come, or what happened with me is, I conflated misuse of what I was measuring with the act of measuring itself. So, if I measure views, or if I measure leads, and then in the business it becomes, oh, like the most impactful thing the content does is it generates views, so then there's a push, it's generate as much views as possible. That the problem with that isn't the measurement to go back to the storytelling point. The problem with that is I haven't established, or there doesn't exist a sophisticated or constructive enough story around what we measure, why we measure, how we use the things we measure in the business, so they're prone to be misused. So I think now my orientation is measure as much as you can usefully measure. No one measure is like the magical thing, but then you have to take on the responsibility as well of owning the narrative around those metrics that you measure and how, how they're ingested and metabolized in the organization. So, I'd say those are the two big differences.
Tom Rudnai 3:55
Yeah. Well, and so let's talk about the second one a little bit. I like that different, like identifying that the gap between I don't like how this is used versus it in itself isn't a good thing to be doing. What's your relationship like? How have the metrics that you do look at changed? Right, so are you what, like what role would you say in when you go to analyze content performance, traditional content metrics have at the moment, engagement, traffic, that kind of thing, is that still a component of the analysis?
Timi Olotu 4:25
Yeah, I don't do deep analysis anymore, because thankfully I have a great team that does that work. But the two things I do look at from time to time are essentially the very top and the very bottom, so I look at our, I go into Google Search Console, and I look at what's happening with our branded search volume, the click through rates, the number of queries, the average position, all that stuff, and then I also go and look at marketing influence pipeline, either created or influenced, so at the. Bottom, what's happening? Is it turning into more deals? Is it turning to higher value of pipeline? Does it turn into a larger pipeline from a value perspective? Are the deals moving faster, that kind of stuff. So I just top and tail it, and I think about it in terms of mental and physical availability. Basically, are we showing up more in people's minds? I like this description of the mind as the first search engine. If people can't even retrieve you from their memories, they're not going to find you online in a search engine. And then are we doing a good job of turning that interest into revenue, or at least revenue potential from a purely marketing perspective.
Tom Rudnai 5:48
That's interesting. So, I like that. Yeah, are we capturing pure top of the funnel awareness? Do people know who we are? And then later on, is that translating through to what we ultimately need to see? It, I guess, what was, what interests me about that is, I reckon what a lot of content marketers probably do is they report in the middle of those two things, because they're trying to move as close to revenue as they possibly can, but they're not very well set up to do that, and so they end up not reporting on either of the two things that you would care about.
Timi Olotu 6:17
Yeah, it's, it's a real challenge, I think, with Charlie. We've gone on a journey, and I'm really grateful for the team we have, just in terms of the mindset they have, and how open they've been to some of the challenges I've thrown at them. But I think you're absolutely right, a lot of teams get lost in that noisy middle, and there's a temptation, there's a certain, and I'm like this because I think certainly my academic background is much more creative, artistic, that's kind of that's kind of the bucket you would put me in, but like my personality, the way my brain works is also super analytical, and before I kind of combined the two, what I did is I flip-flopped between extremes of both, and one of the things that happened is there was a period in my sort of content marketing career where I realized the relationship between my work when writing and the numbers associated with them, and I took full control, and a manager at the time helped me. I went on an analytics course, and then my analytical sort of orientation went into overdrive, and I just went more and more and more granular, more and more and more, and you think if a segment by every possible permutation then I will get to the answer, and it's not to say that's a bad thing. Again, none of these things are binary, but what it means is we have to be very thoughtful about what type of analysis we're performing and why, and for whom. So, for example, for me as a CRO, if a content marketer did that to me, it would not be helpful, not because I can't understand it, because in my case I literally did that, but I don't want to, like it's not.. it's not.. I don't.. I don't need to go to that level. What I need to know is what are the broad trends and do you know why they appear as they do? Is for example, is our mental availability going up? Are more people becoming aware of our name and searching for it? Do you, can you explain the things you're doing that could be contributing to that? Great, and similar thing for the pipeline, where it could be useful to get more and more granular, is if, for example, you've noticed a very specific high-level trend, and you want to understand granularly why it's happening. So, I must split it into, for diagnostic purposes, going as granular as possible is useful, and that should usually be a pretty sort of contained exercise. So the content marketer and a few people who are invested, so it's like, want to understand why this is happening, go deep, but from a prescriptive or descriptive perspective. So I want to tell the team or the CRO what's happening, and what we're going to do about it. Actually, zooming out and telling a broader, maybe multi year story of some high level metrics is much more compelling and much more useful, partly because those bigger timelines and those larger data sets are associated with higher leverage, and that's what people care about. I want to, I care about a Leaver that, if we pull it, it can give us 20% growth in new business, not a Leaver that, if we pull it, it will give us 5% growth in leads. And also it's more strategic because that's an easier sort of level of data for me to plug into data from other parts of the business like sales or product or whatever,
Tom Rudnai 10:13
yeah. Well, what you've just, what you've described to me, it's storytelling, right, and being able to tell a story with data, but adapt that story to who you're talking to, right? So you're going to need one story for your CRO, probably another story for your sales rep. So you're desperately trying to get to use content in the way that you've always asked them to. There's a story that needs to be told to them in order to explain to them why and how to do that and make it easy for them. You've got other stakeholders in marketing, right? If content is the engine that feeds pretty much everything across revenue. Then you need to adapt that story as needed. I think one challenge is that you've just described those that they're different frames of mind sometimes, and I think it's very us very difficult asking someone to be deeply analytical, yet incredibly kind of thoughtful and free with how they think. Like, what's your take, and what have you done at Charlie HR? Who should own this stuff? Should it be on the content marketer to do this, or should it be something that sits more with marketing operations and is done for them with them?
Timi Olotu 11:12
Very good question. I think it depends on the team structure. I will start by saying if you're the only content marketer, it is extremely in your interest to do this, even though no one will pay you up front to do it or tell you to do it. What I can tell you is, if you do it, I'm pretty confident your career trajectory will change in a positive way, and I don't even mean in terms of changing worlds, but even if you stay as a content marketer, you will be forever grateful that you learned how to exercise this skill, especially in the world of AI. So, if either you're the only content marketer, or you're the most senior content marketer, or something like that, where essentially there is no one who cares about content marketing as much as you do, it's in your interest to do it, I.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai