In this episode of Leadtail TV, host Bryan Kramer chats with Ashley Faus, senior director of marketing and media for Atlassian, about her fresh approach to content strategy for B2B marketing, and how to use your personal skillset to become the best marketer you can be.
Buckle up, you’re in for a treat!
It’s not B2B or B2C, It’s H2H
Your customers, your buyers, aren’t just numbers on some spreadsheet or “personas” on a whiteboard, they are human beings. If you want to succeed in B2B marketing, especially in these unusual times, consider changing how you think about your customer experience.
It’s about human interactions. It’s about H2H, human to human.
That means when you start planning and creating your content marketing strategy, put aside your B2B marketer hat for a moment and try taking a new path…
The New Rules of Content Strategy for B2B Marketing
At HubSpot’s Inbound Conference, Ashley challenged the audience to think about content less like the traditional linear funnel and more like a playground.
Yes, you read that right!
What does this even mean? How do you think about your content and the buyer’s journey like a playground?
Customers should be able to experience your company’s content in any order they see fit and use it in the ways they find most engaging.
To help you move into this new way of thinking about your company’s content, Ashley shares some questions you should be asking yourself.
“What’s the best way to enter the playground?”
“What’s the best order to play on the various types of equipment?”
“What’s the best piece of equipment?”
“What’s the right way to play on the slider? To play on the swings?”
“How do we design our content in a way that allows our consumers to enter, exist, play, explore, go up, go down, and use your content as they see fit and curate a seamless journey no matter how many touchpoints they have, no matter what order they go in, and most importantly, no matter what goals they have with coming to the playground in the first place?”
Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?
But what about measurement? How do you measure the content playground?
Jump to this portion of the interview [02:11 – 03:30]
What and How to Measure Your Content Playground
Putting in place incremental metrics for each touchpoint is how you measure the content playground, says Ashley.
Yes, metrics such as the number of people who landed on a specific page, the number of referrals you got from social media, the number of people who opened an email, the number of people who clicked on the link in the email, etc., are important and you shouldn’t ignore them.
But there is a way to think about measurement that will help you to better understand your customers and it will bring you closer to them. Plus, they get at some of those harder-to-capture measurements like brand affinity, brand awareness, or brand lift.
Metrics to look at are bounce rate, time spent on your site, how long did the people watch your video, how many additional videos did they watch, etc.
It’s about looking at everything incrementally, like individual little journeys and how they add up to the bigger picture.
When we think beyond vanity metrics of clicks or views, we are going to have a much more holistic and impactful set of metrics compared to what most of your competitors are using today.
That right here sets you ahead of your competition.
Jump to this portion of the interview [03:54 – 05:44]
How to Become the Best Marketer You Can Be
Ashley and Bryan also crack into how you can catch someone’s attention and engage with them, as well as how your interests outside of work can be applied to your marketing day-to-day to increase your ability.
A challenge that Ashley always gives to herself is how she can apply the insights gained from other industries to her work.
A book she read in college, The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson, got her on the road of intersectional thinking.
Think about it for a moment. You meet new people every day. How can you apply the best practices you learn, what others do in their industry to your B2B marketing strategy?
That’s one way to develop your creativity and become better at your craft.
The next thing is to tap into your customers’ motivation. You can do that by becoming interested in people, building relationships and having the openness to connect with people who are not like you and don’t think like you. Speak their language and find that thing that catches their attention, even if it’s not something that interests you.
Conferences, online events, are great places to meet new people with different backgrounds than yours, and with totally different interests.
Your customers are people just like you. And just like you, they have their own set of challenges and problems. So, when you create your content playground, look at your customers like the whole being they are. It will help you frame your human to human marketing approach.
Becoming the best marketer you can be is not only about your customers. It’s also about your team and colleagues. It’s about how you blend together your personality, your knowledge and wisdom with working together with your marketing team.
Jump to this portion of the interview [14:14 – 16:57]
Watch this entire fascinating interview here.
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