0:01
Daniel Kushner
Hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinar, how to build a Successful Content Creation and Distribution Plan. I'm Daniel Kushner, the CEO here at Oktopost, and just in case this is the first time you are joining an Oktopost webinar, we are the only dedicated social media management platform for B2B companies. So before we get started, some regular housekeeping. Yes, this webinar is being recorded. We will send the link to the recorded webinar once we're done here today. And please feel free to use the Zoom Q and A button if you have any questions, and we'll get to them either during the webinar or at the end when we answer the Q and A. So for today's agenda, we want to keep it interesting. So. So instead of having one single talk track, we brought in two amazing executives, and we're going to have a Fireside Chat style session. So with that session, let me introduce the panel. First of all, myself, as I said, Daniel Kushner, we have a fun fact for each of the participants. My fun fact, London Fried Chicken and Atlanta Barbecue. So what does that mean? We have, besides being headquartered here in Tel Aviv, Israel, we have an office in London. The only thing I eat there is fried chicken. The best fried chicken in the world in Atlanta. I have the top five top barbecue places that I visit every time I'm in Atlanta. So if it's for 24 hours, over 72 hours, always at least five barbecue places. Next, we'll introduce Kara, and I'll give you the floor. Kara, if you can give a quick introduction.
1:51
Kara Burney
Absolutely. Hey, Daniel. And hey, everyone. So my name is Kara Burney. I head up marketing at Skyward. For those of you who have never heard of us, we're a content marketing company, both from software and a services perspective, where we're focused on helping folks build and maintain a content center of excellence internally. So whether you need that software to move your content forward and manage the workflow, or you need those services to help you build and deliver content consistently, we're here to help. I'm coming to you live today from Mexico City. So that is my fun fact. I'm new to expat life, coming to you from down south in Mexico City, Mexico. And you can find me on Twitter ekendernies.
2:31
Daniel Kushner
Thanks, Kara. And joining us, Eyel Katz.
2:36
Eyal Katz
Hey, everybody. Thanks, Daniel, for the introduction and thanks to everybody who's joining in. So I'm the CEO of MVP Grow. I'm also a marketing consultant for octopoint post at MVP grow. I basically help B2B companies grow and help them build their marketing operations and strategies and also implement them. I have crossed the Atlantic twice on a boat. It was a very nice yacht. Not my own. Just used to work on boats. And you can find me on Twitter @Eyalk100. All right, back to you, Daniel. Great.
3:16
Daniel Kushner
How long does it take to cross the Atlantic?
3:18
Eyal Katz
Two and a half, very long weeks.
3:20
Daniel Kushner
Two and a half weeks?
3:22
Eyal Katz
Yeah. Usually it was. Yeah, from around. Yeah. From St. Martin to Gibraltar or from Fort Lauderdale to Gibraltar, it's pretty much the same between two to two and a half.
3:34
Daniel Kushner
We'll do a webinar on that later on.
3:36
Eyal Katz
Yeah, salesman.
3:37
Daniel Kushner
Okay, let's get this thing kicked off. So we have three main topics or three main questions we're going to be covering today. The first one is something that we hear asked almost on a daily basis here at Oktopost. I'm sure it's the same at Skywood. How much content should I be creating? So to kick this off, Kara, what's your opinion on the amount of content that needs to be created?
4:07
Kara Burney
Yeah, so this question is one we get all the time, Daniel. It's probably one of the first questions people ask when they're trying to build out a content program, whether they're building it from scratch or trying to refresh their existing content program. And the kind of the TLDR here is that it really doesn't totally matter how much content you publish so long as you are published consistently. So the thing we always preach at Skyward is consistency matters so much more than a spike in content that you then just leave to die on the vine. And, you know, we've been in the content business for almost 15 years here, and we're also a big data company and I'm a big data nerd. So you're looking at a big graph on the screen here that I'm going to talk through quickly just to back up this advice we push out. But the big takeaway for me when we get asked this question about how much content we should be publishing is just think about your content strategy like you would think about your 401k. So the more you can contribute early and the more you can contribute consistently, the more interest it yields over time for your brand. So that's what we're looking at here in this Figure 1 you have on the screen here. So we've actually found that brands that publish consistently, In fact, on average, B2B or B2C brands, it doesn't really matter if you are Publishing consistently. After about two years of doing so, you see three times as much traffic coming in to your website. So talking about publishing content to your to your website, to your content hub, you get about a 3x lift in traffic from organic search just by publishing consistently over two years. So that's a huge boost. Rather than thinking of content as a linear thing where each new blog post gives you one more incremental lift, it really is an art. Just like a 401k you see about that 3x lift over time. And in fact if you're the B2C side, you actually have a better interest, so to speak. They see it a little over that 3x lift over time. So a great case for that consistent publishing over time. Now I've got a lot of data to talk through today, so I'm going to keep it high and light and leave some time for us to have Q and A at the end. But I have one more figure I want to talk through with you all. What is the impact of old content versus new content? And similar with this ROI question that we have at hand here, we found that on average that new content actually yields a different impact for people whether you're B2B or B2C. So what we're looking at here is that for B2B folks, there's actually a little bit more of an impetus on producing content more consistently over time. So by that I mean that newer content doesn't account for as much of a lift for you. The big takeaway for you to have here is that if you're on the B2B side of the business to keep this short, it's more important for you to keep refreshing your content and to keep publishing newer content over time. That impact is really huge for you. On the B2C side you have a little bit more of a halo effect. So we found is that that newer content actually accounts for a little smaller time so you can actually experience more of a halo effect for you. So you're a better case to be producing content on the B2C side. You get that kind of lift for a longer term halo. But. But regardless you can see that up into the right graph. It's a great case to keep publishing consistently. One more take here. Now I was talking to you from a content strategy perspective, so meaning content published to your website, but social media analytics company and so we've got some great data at our disposal here too about how that content should be brought to life on social. So it's a little hard to read. I Think on this slide here, but I'll break this down for you. Basically what we did here is we analyzed across a whole host of different brands, so thousands and thousands of brands. And we looked at this from a social perspective to take a peek at how much our brands social audiences growing. That's the Y axis. So the higher up on that Y axis, the faster that brand's social audience is growing. And we also looked at the engagement. So on that X axis we're basically saying is by industry, how much engagement are you getting as a function of your audience size? So not every industry has the same size social presence, but how much of that audience are you engaging to be in that real sweet spot? You want to be at the top and to the right. You want to be both growing and engaging your audience on social. And so we wanted to provide some benchmarks here for you all and a couple of quick takeaways across the board. Higher education is that industry that's up and to the right there. So it's both an industry that is growing on social across the board and engaging their audience. So really early signs that higher education brands are embracing social and using it to meaningfully engage their audience. Finance and insurance and the construction industries are also some great examples in that sweet spot, growing and engaging their audience over time. A couple of other quick takeaways here. Consumer goods across the board, they lead by engagement. So this is the most engaging industry on social media. So if you're in that consumer goods space, there's a lot more pressure and a lot more competition to engage that audience. You really have to be pushing out content consistently across channels, driving interaction with your audience if you want to compete. One last takeaway here across the board. So I mentioned at the very top there that Y axis is follower growth on social and higher education is by far the fastest growing industry and growing their social following. So a lot of folks in this space were late to the social media game but have leaned into it are seeing a lot of great growth on their social audience over time.
10:00
Daniel Kushner
That's great. Just for the non US folks, 401k is like a pension plan. So we have compounding content just like we have compounding interest. Let's very, very insightful. The volume did go in and out on a few of your sentences but we got 98% so that's good eyel how much content?
10:29
Eyal Katz
So for me the answer to how much content if for Cara was consistency. For me it's more about efficiency. I would say that how much content you need to be Producing the answer is just enough. For content to be effective, it needs to be done efficiently, meaning you need to produce just enough content to reach your content goals. So if your goal is to generate brand awareness, for example, then you can reverse engineer the process where you set a goal for your content marketing. Say you measure your brand awareness by direct entries to the website and or brand mentions on social media. So you can set yourself up with a goal that you can measure and hit that goal. For example, I want to increase social media mentions and direct website traffic by 30% this quarter. So that's my goal. So first I need to make sure I can first measure that accurately. I don't want to end up setting a goal only to realize I can't accurately measure it. Then I run tests and have the right tools in my stack to make sure I can measure accurately across all my channels. And secondly, I create the content that will provide the most impact on social media and, and that will get people curious about my brand. So for example, it's highly likely in the scenario that I mentioned that if we create one very well produced, researched and targeted video, that it will do a much better job than let's say, 20 press releases. So I like to think of it as a precision strike. If you can use one piece of content to strike engagement and conversation right into the target audience, then that will be the most effective plan. Now in my mind, this type of approach is best suited for B2B marketing in general and ABM style marketing in particular. And that is to say, as long as you have a good distribution plan in place.
12:48
Daniel Kushner
So that's very helpful and insightful. So you're basically saying do less, but make sure that the target is there and the quality is there.
12:59
Eyal Katz
Exactly. It's really about making sure that you have a goal in mind and then finding the path of the path of least resistance to reaching your goal. And hopefully that can be accomplished by producing very high quality content at a low volume.
13:17
Daniel Kushner
That's interesting. So, two similar but different approaches. So thank you both on that. Let's move on to the next question that we have. And this is about the channels. So which distribution channels are most effective? Maybe a generic question, but we'll see how this panel answers and let's start where they are now.
13:42
Eyal Katz
So in this just enough pinpoint strike marketing approach, that's at least what I'm calling it, you're producing just enough content to reach your goals. And in this approach, your content strategy becomes less about production and more about distribution. And this is where I Think you should lean in if you've put a lot of time and effort into creating your amazing video just for the purpose of the example. That is funny, it's informative, it's visually spectacular, it's engaging, and as a bonus, it looks like it's going to be pretty effective for lead generation to boot. Then for it to be truly successful, you need to have a distribution plan that will put it out in front of as many relevant eyeballs as possible. Right? Because we're just producing as little amount of content as we can, and we want it to be very effective. So we know, and if we've done our research and we know that we need to just put it in front of the right people. So for that to happen, we need to research our audience. Now, I'm not talking about like academic research or bringing in a consulting firm. I'm not saying that's necessary. You just need to know where your audience is, whether it's online or offline. For that, you need to define first who your audience is. Now, once you've created that marketing Persona, which I'm not going to get into the whole process of how to do that here, this webinar is just not going to be long enough, then you need to go undercover, so to speak, meaning you need to become your audience. And online gives us a great opportunity to do that pretty easily. We can just join online forums, we can can join Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, chats, and follow hashtags and read content from competitors and understand what's working for them and what's not. And then you can see the input from that we get in these communities, and you can better understand the stuff that motivates the content, that can motivate these people to action. And you can, once you really immerse yourself in their world, and the reason you want to do that is that if you're doing this precision strike marketing, it can only be as successful as the intel that led to it. So without good intel, our precision strike is not going to be a hit, it's going to be a miss. So then if you have good intel, all you need to do is just launch your accurate tool, right? And in this case, the video just into where you know your audience is. And if you've researched, then you know exactly which subreddit, for example, they commonly use, which Facebook group is the most active one, which Twitter hashtag just, you know, explodes with engagement. And this will allow you to launch a campaign that has the possibility of turning viral. Now, if you do this over Time and consecutively, then you will develop a reputation within that community and your time to virality and the time it takes you to become viral and the amount of effort they need to put into becoming viral will diminish over time as your reputation within the community builds. So if your content is good and it's some value and, and you'll have a good reputation, then you have a high chance of going value, sorry, going viral. This is why a good distribution plan is one that is well researched. It helps you find out where your audience is, it helps you map out the type of content that the audience responds well to and it plants the seeds for ongoing engagement. And now to do all this successfully, you need to be able to track, measure and attribute your brand mentions and the leads coming in all the way down from the first time they make contact with the brand, all the way down into becoming an opportunity. And in this case, it's most likely gonna happen on social media organic channels like the Facebook groups that we mentioned, the Twitter hashtags that we mentioned. And you need to be able to track that engagement all the way from the first time that person is exposed to the video on the social media feed, all the way down to them becoming an opportunity in your CRM. And this part is critical because if we're doing our pinpoint precision strike type marketing, then we need to create high value content for a very specific audience. And this type of content, as I'm sure most of you know, is expensive. And even if we're doing it just in air quotes right now for brand awareness, we still need to be able to show ROI for it so we can get budgets for it later on. If we want to keep doing this, if we want to do this over time, then we should be able to show ROI even if we're just doing brand awareness.
18:56
Daniel Kushner
Does that make sense? Yeah, makes perfect sense. And I think what's interesting is that you said something very similar to what Kara said in the first session is about being consistent and it has a compounding event effect. So if consistency compounds over time, so your content becomes more valuable. You're saying the chance of going viral or the.
19:24
Eyal Katz
Yeah, it's not, it's not just that the value of your content compounds over time, it's that the value of your Persona on social media, on all kind of other channels, the value of your brand is also compounded over time. So as time goes by and as the more content you push out and as the quality is good and improves, then so it will become much easier to become Viral and it will come easier to deliver results from your content.
19:56
Daniel Kushner
Very interesting. So let's go back now to Skywood. I know that you guys have tons and tons of data on this, so let's talk about distribution channels and what's effective.
20:10
Kara Burney
Yeah. So I couldn't agree more with the advice that I gave around really getting into the shoes of your audience, understanding what they care about, where they hang out, where they talk, where there might already be some existing groups and some already consensus across channels. That's fantastic advice across the board. What I want to add here is we put a little bit of data color behind that to maybe help you kind of jumpstart that discovery process. This is by no means a one size fits all solution across the board. You should certainly heed that advice and really get to know your specific niche. We wanted to present some data here that might just help you kind of speed up that process for you with some really broad cross industry data. So what we're looking at here is on the left hand side we analyzed by industry, what is the average audience size for a brand across the different social networks? So that dark blue is Facebook, all the way out to the red being Pinterest. So you can see a couple of interesting trends here of just where brands are finding audiences across the different social media channels. Sports and entertainment brands we're seeing, they have some really big audiences on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can see at the top there in the sports entertainment industry, those three channels are really the biggest consensus of audiences across the board. The media and publishing industry by contrast, really has the most diverse set of social audience following. They have pretty sizable audiences across the board on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, a small but still sizable on LinkedIn, Pinterest. So across the board you can see a bit of a makeup and learn from your industry where your audience might already be congregating. It's a great way to hack your way into some exposure here. However, over time, the over time the algorithm themselves on the social media data has changed. So whereas you used to see brands amassing really big followings and putting a lot of pride into massing those followings, we know that the algorithms across the board value engagement much more. So on the right hand side here, that's what we decided to take a look at. We measured the engagement rate by industry. So we're really saying by audience size and engagement levels across the board, which channels do folks get the most resonance and reaction from their audience? And some interesting things here is across the board, Instagram was by far the winner across the board, whether it's B2B or B2C. We found that the Instagram algorithm is so favorable across the board that 12 out of the 13 industries we analyzed saw the most engagement on following. The only real exception to the rule here was the real estate industry, which saw the highest engagement ratio on LinkedIn. So a takeaway here across the board for you to take to mind is if you're not on Instagram yet, you should consider exploring that channel. I hear a lot of B2B brands saying to us, like Instagram is too much of a B2C play. We don't have a way to engage here and we can see there's, there's really no data to back that up. If you're interested and have the resources to invest in Instagram presence, the likelihood is there that you will see that return in the engagement from your audience. However, like I said, benchmarks are benchmarks. They're directional and give you that broad guidance. You're the one who needs to take the time to heed IELTS advice and get to know your audience. Explore hashtags as a great way to discover some of those sub industries and where they're engaging across the board. For example, sports entertainment. There is a sports biz hashtag that is found to be highly engaging. Some simple tools like social listening can be some great ways to help you understand where those audiences are hanging out and where you can really just tap into those conversations that are already happening. That's a great way to build up that audience and engage yourself. If you don't have the resources to build up that really magnetic pull to your audience yourself,
24:10
Daniel Kushner
that's great, Kara. And one question. I'll try to keep this GDPR compliant, so I'll give the initials. So a question from PC. This data is from 2016. Is Skywood going to be doing additional research and getting more recent data?
24:29
Kara Burney
Great question. Thanks for asking, Peggy. So we have redone this data year over year and we found really comparable trends over time. This one happened to have the most diverse data in years since we have done it more specifically for B2B and B2C. So for the purposes of today, I wanted to give all folks on the line today the broadest sense of industry so that I didn't exclude anyone on the line. But we do have more updated data on the Track Maven website, but the trends have held largely steady over time, so we haven't seen any large shifts. Instagram still remains a really highly engaging channel. That said, we'll be Taking a closer look in the upcoming year because. Because Twitter's made some pretty significant algorithm changes as had Instagram. So we hope to see how those play out, but we need a bit more data to see and come to a conclusion.
25:20
Daniel Kushner
Okay, so more data on the Track Maven Skyward websites. And if you want even more, send Cara an email and she'll get you more.
25:32
Kara Burney
It looks like we've got another question from Emily quickly that I can chime in on to. How can you engage on Instagram if you only have stock images? And it's a really cool question, Emily. Like, the first thing I challenge you on there is typically like, stock images do not perform well on Instagram. So the caveat there though is that user generated content performs super well. And with smartphones becoming so good, any way that you can use to encourage user generated content is a great way to boost that engagement. So whether that's inviting folks to to post their own images using your product or service and using a hashtag that you can repost, that's probably one of the quickest and simplest ways that you can actually have your audience create content for you. So without a big team and without access to a lot of on the ground photography, invite your audience in to be a part of that content creation process. That's a simple way to boost your own presence on Instagram.
26:29
Daniel Kushner
That's great. So let's move on to our third and final question for this panel. How can I measure my content's effectiveness? Because I think at the end of the day, if we can't show the value that we're creating from our content and from our marketing efforts, it's not good. And everything in marketing, especially in the B2B, you need to attach some kind of ROI to show whatever you're doing, the value it brings to the actual business. So we're gonna kick off with Skywood this time. So, Kara, measuring effectiveness.
27:13
Kara Burney
You may have seen my theme throughout the day, which is, you know, we really break down data into a couple of different components here. And there's a couple of different ways you can think about it, one of which is, you know, top of bottom, top of funnel versus bottom of the funnel. And there's a lot of great metrics from the very, very top where you can measure your engagement or brand mentions, down to more attribution data at the bottom of the funnel. So I'm going to put a pin in that to let Ayala and Daniel speak a bit more to that. But one other kind of framework that we like to Preach is thinking about first party versus third party data. So first party data is things like your own engagements, your own leads coming from social and things like that. Those are really valuable metrics and like I said, they can go from top to the bottom of the funnel. But one angle that I want to provide to the conversation today is that third party lens. So by that I mean zooming out across your industry and taking scope of how you rank in comparison to other thought leaders in your space. A really simple phrase for this is competitive analysis. And so one really useful way that we have found that helps folks measure the value of their content is by using competitive benchmarks. There's a couple of different ways and different lenses that you can use on competitive analysis. It can be as simple as looking at a couple of your big competitors and thought leaders and saying, how big is their audience on social versus ours? Where are they building up a big following where we are not? This gives you a couple of easy takeaways. It shows you opportunities to either join the conversation and be a direct competitor on that channel. Say, for example, your biggest competitor has a far bigger Facebook following than you. It might be time to reinvest some of your resources towards towards regaining that share of voice on Facebook contrast. The flip side to that is it can also help you spot the white space. So if your competitor, biggest competitor in your space, has a huge Facebook presence, maybe it's time for you to vet out Instagram or Pinterest and say, maybe there's a chance for us to build out and dominate the conversation on this channel. What we call that over at Skyward is share a voice. So by looking at something like share a voice, you can say, where am I winning and losing overall on a specific channel and also specific to certain topics and keywords. So it's pretty simple and easy to measure keywords on social media. You can do it through a lot of the core channels themselves just by searching for keywords and seeing the volume of use. So it's a great way to measure where certain topics are catching on on different channels and where you might have an opportunity to lead or to generate a totally different conversation. So share a voice is one great and simple way you can do it. Like I said, there's lo fi ways to do competitive analysis by just doing some quick searching and seeing where you stack up. But I do want to put one more point on this before we get into some discussion, which is if you are leading on social media or even content efforts within a bigger company, the odds are that you Report your metrics up the chain, often to folks, executives who might not really understand social media. This is something I hear a lot from folks, especially in the social media space that says, you know, I report up the chain and unfortunately the people at the top, they just don't get social. They don't understand what interactions are, they don't understand what engagement is, they have no idea what social listening is. And so often that can fall really short or you can fall on deaf ears. What's great about competitive analysis and competitive benchmarking is for higher up stakeholders who don't always understand the ins and outs of social. They do understand what it means to beat the competition. So we've had a lot of clients who, the higher up their reporting, the more likely they are to use competitive benchmarks to prove that they are winning, to validate that opportunity. So think about using competitive analysis in your tool book your toolkit, so that you can help to prove to folks, you know, here's where we are, here is where our competitors are and here is where we are winning. It is a great way to show over time too. So if you can show that a competitor was winning on a certain channel, you focus your efforts to it and then you show gains over time. It is a really simple and easy digestible takeaway for execs to listen to and to digest. So we've had folks successfully do this even at a super high level Investor Day. We had a client who, who took some competitive benchmarking data to Investor day where they presented this social data from a full room full of VCs and investors who are not the most savvy on the social metrics. But it painted the picture. We are winning and we are beating back the competition on the topics that matter to us. We have a lot more resources on the skyward side and be happy to continue that conversation with some more detail. But like to put that framework out for folks to consider extending into third party data to put yourself in context.
32:01
Daniel Kushner
That's a very interesting approach. Thanks for that. And let's move on to Eyal. And I guess from this slide you're going to be focusing on social media.
32:10
Eyal Katz
Yeah.
32:11
Daniel Kushner
And how to measure the effectiveness of social media. So go with it.
32:16
Eyal Katz
Yeah, I just wanted to say that that really resonated with me, Kara, because I consult quite a, I consult a lot of startups and when with startups, they don't really have historical data of their own to lean on when they need to project their future, you know, their future, their future strategies. So looking across the competitors and benchmarking yourself across your competitors are sometimes the only options that you have. And then finding the gap, doing like a gap analysis of where your competitors are not as strong as they can be, then that is some great advice. So thanks for that. So, yeah, and for me, and allow me to continue to use my analogy of precision strike marketing. Good measurement in precision strike marketing is important because precision strike marketing is no less data driven than the carpet bombing type of marketing, which is what most common inbound marketing is. But not to say that there's anything wrong with it, but that is how most inbound strategies are done. So you know you have a certain, certain audience and you Hope to hit a 9, 3%, 9%, 5% hit rate conversion rate, meaning that 91, 95, 93% of your engagements don't end up hitting the target and converting. So again, there's nothing wrong with this type of marketing. I do it all the time and it works. However, with precision strikes, we need to be more strategic and measure things a bit differently. So we need to get granular data on every touch point that prospects have with our content. We need to know who did what and where, but we also need to see the whole picture too. So this is where a solution like Oktopost comes in, because it provides visibility into one of the most important channels for B2B marketing. And you're going to be surprised at social media. Now, I know it sounds like a pitch, but truly a lot of B2B marketing now happens in social media with social selling and employee advocacy tactics leading the charge. So it's one of the final frontiers for B2B. Everybody in B2B is pretty much doing inbound marketing. There's a lot of content marketing going on, there's a lot of ebooks and white papers, but organic social media is something that not a lot of B2B brands are doing well or are investing enough in. And that leaves it as an untapped market. And this is partially because it is very difficult to measure the success of this channel. And with Oktopost, you can deploy a precision strike marketing or, you know, you can just call it ABM marketing right into the heart of where your audience is and then track their engagements across channels. You can do that across devices. You can do whatever you want all the way through to them becoming an opportunity and attribute it all the way back to the right source or the first engagement that they had. And this allows you to create more content because you can now attribute it correctly so you can feel free to create the content that you know is working and you can grow your marketing presence, production, and also do some fun stuff for a change. You know, like do fun videos that you, that you're now able to measure. Because that kind of stuff mostly resonates in organic social media. So it's, it's really a win win. Back to you, Daniel.
36:06
Daniel Kushner
Thank you, Eyal. So we're ending the questions now and before we open up the floor to Q and A, I would like each one of you, starting with Kara, to give no more than 60 seconds on what's. If we learned anything from the last 30 minutes, like, what should I take home with me today?
36:28
Kara Burney
Yeah. So I think the biggest thing that we like to preach is before you start over indexing on distribution and trying to optimize your distribution and get it to the totally optimal level, make sure you have something that is worth distributing in the first place. By that I mean take stock of what's going on in your industry. Do you have something unique and interesting to say? If you're going to fall flat and not be found in search and not be found on social because of just boring, uninformative or uninteresting content, it's not worth your effort in the first place. So pause before you go too deep on optimizing and make sure you actually have something interesting to say from there. It's so much easier to optimize your distribution strategy when you actually have something unique and interesting. It makes that push out much more fun and much more rewarding from an ROI perspective. So pause, take a look at your industry. Take a look at what is unique about your stance in the market. Make sure you have something worth distributing. The distribution comes really easily from there.
37:30
Daniel Kushner
Perfect eyel.
37:31
Eyal Katz
Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, it's about quality and I would add that it's about measuring that quality. You need to know what is what would be considered quality content and set up goals to measure that. Whether it's engagement, whether it's lead generation or anything else. But you need to be able to understand what is considered good quality content so then you can produce more of it. But first you need to be able to measure, measure your content so you can create more of that good content and not just continually produce content.
38:10
Daniel Kushner
Yeah, all about measurement. Like what I like to say you can't improve what you can't measure. So make sure that you can measure so you can improve. Great. Let's move on to questions, guys. Please use the Q and A panel to submit your questions in so let's start with a question from James and Eyal or Kara. Feel free to take this one. Do you think we try and use too many channels to fragment content?
38:42
Eyal Katz
Yeah, I mean, I can take that one. So what I think is that there is a lot of trial and error when it comes to, when it comes to good content marketing. We do want to better understand what we need to better understand what the fit is with our audience and with the content we produce and with the medium that kind of acts as a marketplace between the content and the audience. So, for example, we can have a certain piece of content, say a video again, and we, we put it out on LinkedIn and it's very successful. On the other hand, we tried on Quora and it's not. So we want to understand why it worked on LinkedIn, why it didn't work on Quora. Is the audience different? Is the, is it the medium that's different? What resonates there more? So there's, there's a lot of trial and error that goes into it. So sometimes it may seem like we're spreading ourselves very thin and just, you know, like putting out content in every possible channel. But I think that once we find that a certain channel produces that engagement or is kind of like reacting in a way that is positive, in a way that we're providing what we're looking for, then we need to focus on that and focus less on the channels that don't provide that.
40:05
Daniel Kushner
That's great.
40:07
Kara Burney
I'll turn on that too quickly because I totally agree with what you're saying, and I think it can be especially challenging depending on your team size too. So historically, on the track maintenance side of the business, when we worked with some folks, specifically at places like nonprofits, who typically had smaller teams, we'd use a framework which is on one axis. Think about your team, your team bandwidth. Do you have great bandwidth with great ability to distribute and manage multiple channels, or do you have a small bandwidth where you might be better suited to be single threaded on one channel? I've seen a lot of people set themselves up to fail by trying to be all things to all people without taking into account just their own internal bandwidth theme and resources? It might be better to just focus it on one channel and make it really excellent versus trying to spread yourself too thin. The other axis to put and round up that box is again, looking at your competition. If most of your competitors are all on one channel, then maybe you might be better suited to dive in and really try and split up and feed that audience on that one core channel, or pick a different channel where you're seeing early signs of a similar audience and try and cultivate your own following. So is that of competitors and where your audience is focused. And it should help you figure out whether or not you have the ability to go wide or feel better served going deep.
41:28
Daniel Kushner
Okay, so the next question, and Kara, I'd like you to respond to this because you have more experience in larger distributed teams, the question is, what is the best team structure to support a good content strategy? So all about team structure.
41:46
Kara Burney
Yeah. So I love this question across the board. And I think one of the most important things that that regardless of your team size, where we see folks fail, it's not really a function of team size, it's really function of team structure. So on the skyward side, we've consulted with a lot of people about how to produce content and produce it consistently. And probably the biggest mistake that people make is they make their path from content ideation to publication too complicated. And by that I mean they initially want to make sure that everyone has seen the content they're producing. So they have really convoluted approval workflows, and that is the fastest way to make sure your content gets stuck. We found that adding every person that you add to your content approval workflow internally, it adds probably about seven plus days to the time it takes for that content to go live. So if you really want to get streamlined, we recommend pinpointing just a couple of key stakeholders that can serve as that touch point on the path to publication. So really streamlining that between whether it's an external reviewer, someone in legal, and having one sort of brand arbiter who knows the brand voice and tone internally, that really helps to streamline that process versus drawing it out and making it really hard to get content live quickly. I think one other thing across the board is when you really try and turn up scale, the biggest bottleneck becomes editing for brand tone and voice. Especially if you're trying to scale externally versus internally. By that, I mean if you're tapping external writers to write for you, it becomes really, really hard to make sure that they all know your brand voice. Think about a global team. It's really hard to make sure all of that content goes through your filter. So designating a couple of key editorial members is the most critical thing to be. Vetting all that content over time. If you can't do that yourself, you don't have the resources to do it yourself. There's a couple of easy ways to do it. We happen to be one of those solutions where we can serve as that sort of safety net that secures brand tone and voice. So think of it more structurally. Make sure you have those, those touch points where someone is, is ensuring brand tone and voice is consistent and try to minimize the number of touch points you can on the path to publication because too much good content gets stuck in the approval process.
44:11
Daniel Kushner
Great. Thank you very much, Kara. Let's take, we'll take one more of those. Will be here all day.
44:18
Kara Burney
Sure.
44:18
Daniel Kushner
Everybody wants to get back to their day job. So, Eyal, if you can take this one. The question is how and when should we use video for B2B marketing?
44:33
Eyal Katz
Well, so I think the great thing about video is that we're seeing that it can be very helpful. It can be very beneficial at pretty much all steps of the B2B marketing funnel. So I think it's already pretty much been established that video is great to use for the lead generation part. So there are a lot of companies that are using videos in their advertising and their social media advertising. They're using it in their organic, organic social media as well to kind of like drive leads and get people into the funnel and get people engaged and get people even just aware of the brand. Video is great for that. Not only because it is so engaging and not only because it is engaging on mobile as well, which is a lot of the traffic is currently mobile, but also because the platforms love it, Google likes it and Facebook loves it, and LinkedIn likes videos as well. So we all use it for lead generation. However, I don't think we should stop there, where I'm seeing a lot of success with videos. And B2B is further down the funnel as well. I'm seeing success with creating specific video messages for prospects that are further down the funnel. They're already in a sales process with the sales team and creating videos that are targeted and directly targeted at what a certain prospect may have as a blocking point for them in the sales funnel. Creating a video where the salesperson basically addresses that and does it in a very personal way can make you stand out in the crowd of just another email getting sent back saying, like, no, we can do this or yes, we can, or stuff like that. So it can kind of like set you apart and that sense. Another way to use video is to create video testimonials. A lot of, you know, almost every B2B company has case studies and testimonials on their website. But if you can do that in a video format, if you can have a customer get in front of a microphone and you know, and have their face on it literally with their voice and do it in a way that is engaging. That is something that resonates and works really well. I've used that in like an email marketing cadences as part of a nurture flow, just creating, you know, like video case studies that people receive into their inbox, into their email inbox when they're part of a nurture flow, as part of the sales cycle that works wonders. So I think video is something that is still not used as much as it should be in B2B and there's still a lot of potential potential there to, you know, to use it for many other purposes.
47:33
Daniel Kushner
Perfect Eyel thank you, Kara. Thank you. It's been a pleasure spending the past 47 minutes with you. Definitely interesting conversation. Again, we've recorded this webinar. It'll be sent out to anybody who registered. Here are the emails. If you're interested in speaking with Skywood or with Oktopost, feel free to reach out and have a great rest of the day. Thank you.
48:02
Eyal Katz
Thanks everybody.
48:04
Kara Burney
Thanks all.
