Dennis Shiao: Your Content Won't Sell Itself

Sourabh:
Good morning, good afternoon, good day, everybody, and welcome to this live Q&A with Dennis Shiao. Hi, Dennis.

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Dennis:
Hey, Sourabh.

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Sourabh:
‍How are you?

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Dennis:
‍Doing pretty good. How are you?

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Sourabh:
Oh, my gosh, it's so good to see you. I'm doing well, thanks. So for those of you who don't know, it's been another lifetime ago. Dennis and I are old friends and we actually competed with each other when we were both doing marketing for webinars and virtual events. Which has blown up recently.

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Dennis:
Yeah, I would say so. Yeah.

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Sourabh:
‍Definitely. Dennis, for those of you who don't know him, Dennis is a content marketing expert. He's a contributor to Content Marketing Institute, CMSWire. He has run campaigns for many, many famous tech brands. Most folks in Silicon Valley that do marketing know Dennis or read his stuff. So with that, Dennis, I'd like to jump in, and if you could, first, help our audience understand a framework by which you think about creating content for demand gen campaigns. Could we start there?

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Dennis:
‍Yeah, sure. So I'm going to provide a very simple answer. I don't think I have something as fancy as a framework, although our framework is certainly something good to have, but my simple answer is the key to creating effective content for use in demand gen is to deeply understand your target buyer, so otherwise known as your ideal customer profile. I think that's a step that a lot of marketers don't spend enough time on or don't get right enough. I believe it's an always on or ongoing process. It's not like you define your ICP today and then you're done and then you check on it next year. No. It's got to be updated almost possibly monthly because the ICP change, the market changes, and the needs of the ICP changes.

If nothing else, the pandemic has taught us that when you were selling to a potential customer pre-pandemic versus during pandemic, there's a whole bunch of different decisions you need to make with your content and your marketing. So it's deeply understanding your ICP, and then the key is to deliver to the ICP things that he or she needs, even things that he or she needs that they don't realize they need but they do. If you can do that and surprise them and they'll be like, "Actually, I do need to learn about this. This wasn't top of mind, but thank you. I do need to learn about this." Then you've really done something well to make an impact with the, quote, unquote, "lead".

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Sourabh:
I love this. This is so thoughtful and really a really personal approach in B2B. We're talking about selling to someone who will make a decision first and foremost for themselves, but then move that purchase through their team and their whole procurement department, which can take weeks. So Dennis, when you do create content that really is of interest and value to your ideal customer profile, to your target buyer persona, now, how do you see that content developing as you notice and you see the signals in the engagement for that buyer moving through the funnel, getting closer to what we considered a buying window? What content works better for when they're actually considering your solution versus competitors?

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Dennis:
‍So I'm going to give two answers. One answer is there is some conventional wisdom out there. I know some B2B media companies or even B2B vendors have done research on what content works well at each stage of the buying cycle. So some of the conventional wisdom I've heard, and I've seen some of this in practice, is top of the funnel tends to be blog posts and thought leadership articles, infographics, maybe even a slide presentation. Middle of the funnel is analyst reports, where the typical analyst space provides a vendor landscape of your space. So the middle of the funnel, people want to understand who are the players I should be looking at.

Towards the bottom of the funnel is maybe where you have a vendor list that gets compressed down to a short list, so you're deciding among three choices. So, bottom of the funnel tends to be even some product literature, sales sheets, documentation because you want to see, "Is there good documentation if I buy this thing?" customer case studies, so to see how other people have implemented, and this is not necessarily a form of content, but customer referrals, so they want to talk to other people who have used your solution.

Now having said that, that's conventional wisdom. I think everyone's journey for the buyer, as well as the journey for the B2B marketer is going to be different for each situation. So one industry is going to have a different set of preferences than another. So I think you need to figure out for yourself what's working for your content. So it's a little bit of a chicken and egg, but you need to instrument some content and use data to figure out what format is working when. Really, everyone's answer is going to be unique. So don't just read the industry report and say, "This must be the case that an analyst report works best here." You have to figure it out yourself.

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Sourabh:
That's so true. Thank you, Dennis. It's really encouraging to hear that because there is so much noise around marketing and customer centricity. I think a really important point you just made there is that just the difference between what could be considered two identical SaaS companies, but one really sells a pretty hefty first year contract with services builtin because they onboard their customer, so that's really full-service SaaS, and another company is truly self-service. They've designed it so that you sign up from their website with one user. That person's happy in a week and now you're engaging them of, "So how do you want to bring your team onboard?" Totally different content that would work for those two considerations.

When you do see more self-service companies, companies that are growing really quickly where it's very easy to start using their software or their service, have you seen any content that, like you said, as they're getting closer to purchase and getting a feel for what it might be to be a customer, like if I'm going to use this, I'm going to have questions. What's their FAQ like? Are these guys going to be there to support me? Has there been any content you see that really wins to win people over at the end of that sales funnel?

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Dennis:
‍Win them over. I think the self-service SaaS solutions, in a sense, the product is the content marketing in a sense, where all you need to engage a target buyer is to make them aware of what you provide and then they make it really easy or most of them make it really easy just to hop in and try it sometimes without a credit card or without even signing up. You could probably try some initial version of the software without even making yourself known, but other times, you might need to sign up for a trial account. In essence, that is the content marketing, if you think of it that way. It's like that experience is how you get into the funnel and then the convert.

I think your question is then once you're in and trying out the product, how do you convert them? Sometimes it's some of the same content I mentioned earlier with other customers' testimonials and such, but I believe that the best conversion is to have a great product, a great experience of trying it. That converts itself rather than inserting a piece of content to convince them.

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Sourabh:
I think especially when you think about the shift to the subscription economy, it's not just about software. Media is dominated by tech, but the real shift is the subscription economy is that you can consume things in much smaller chunks. You don't have to make massive buying decisions anymore. You can actually try and appliance even as a person before you commit to buying it. You couldn’t do that before.

So I think that's a key point there of merging between your demand gen and your marketing into your customer success and onboarding and, to a really salient point you made, even before they technically buy, before you monetize the relationship, you're already supporting them. That's going to drive that acceleration and, frankly, it should make them an advocate for other customers pretty quickly.

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Dennis:
‍For sure.

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Sourabh:
‍Awesome. Now, if we switch gears for a moment, Dennis, and talk about the other B2B clients, which do tend to be, say, enterprise customers and, say, they are bigger, more difficult sales, complex sales. So account-based marketing, ABM, it's like a lot of marketing things that came up and then it went down because I think in the early days, which was almost a decade ago, if you and I recall, the idea was that you could personalize content for your largest target customers and then that would somehow convert them quickly.

However, I think what most marketers are realizing, this gets to my question, is the combination of your ICP, your ideal customer profile, and your enterprise targets, your ABM. Have you seen anything work really well from a content perspective that is tailored towards a group of, say, 10 or 15 target large accounts versus everybody else you're marketing to?

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Dennis:
‍Well, I think most people who have found success with ABM rely on intent data, so they're understanding that these sets of companies are, quote, unquote, "surging" in interest so they are ... You have to partner with an intent data provider to get some of the data, but it's like if we know that there are these three banks that seem to be interested in the solutions we provide, then I think what you would do, and I think content marketing is both, for ABM, is both publishing content, but also all the other elements of an ABM team like the sales development and business development reps, that in a sense is content marketing in the emails they're sending or in some cases the phone calls they're making.

So the key is if you're understanding what the surge in interest is about to deliver to those three banks, say, content that helps them understand what they're getting into or helps them think about how to make different decisions in that interest area so that you can target them specifically, but then you could also create an e-guide or a blog post to banks. So it's not to those specific companies, but you know that those companies are in the sector you're providing content about.

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Sourabh:
‍This is perfect. So if we think about it that way, the content's going to carry them not just through interest, and I mean Lead2Pipeline. We're right here. We actually do a ton of investment in intent data. It's one of the things our customers ask for the most is, "Of the leads I'm getting, which ones have clear intent and which ones are we still nurturing?" So when you do identify leads with intent and you start to develop content, which will go beyond marketing, it will go into SDR, BDR, and even sales, sales enablements, some of the decks and the messaging. Do you find it's most beneficial to focus on probable pain points or is it more customer success stories? What are they dealing with now or how they'll come out the other end?

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Dennis:
‍My belief is that it might be less about pain points. I think pain points is earlier in the journey where somebody is deciding, "Do I have this pain point? Yeah, I guess I do." Whereas with ABM and intent data, I think the organization that's doing the research knows what they need in a sense, so they've identified, "This is a pain point we need to solve for." So it's more about helping them, educating them as they make that research into X, whether it's marketing automation software, and help guide them to how to make a decision. You're almost not necessarily guiding them to your solution just yet, but you're guiding them on how to ask the right questions, and then your brand can come along for the ride because you help them.

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Sourabh:
So this is going to be a controversial question because I'm going to split marketing and sales right down the middle based on what you just said. As you are guiding that prospect through lead, through trial customer, through paying customer, as you're guiding them, how do you balance your voice? Because you have an obvious bias, you are one of the providers. You also clearly want them to be your customer. I'm asking you specifically, Dennis, because your content, the stuff you produce is extraordinarily likable. People like what you write. Can you help us understand? Because a lot of your content is sponsored. How do you balance the brand's voice with what the customer cares about and so it's not too hard to sell?

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Dennis:
So I think the question you're getting at is a perfect fit for content marketing as a discipline. So you need, as the marketer, you need to ease up on your brand focus because content marketing is often thought of as the top of the funnel, whereas an ABM account, you're probably already starting off in the middle of the funnel, but you almost have to think of it and back up because if you're initially engaging with a target account who's you know is researching, you have to start with the top of the funnel mindset, which is to provide them with value. If you lead too much with your brand and your offering, it might turn off some of the people you're reaching out to.

It'll come later if you do your job well with providing useful information, then you can start to insert your brand or they might even ask you, "Tell me about more about your offering," or, "I want to get some initial pricing." So I think you just need to ease up and focus on the content marketing slash useful approach upfront and let the product mentions come naturally.

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Sourabh:
‍Love it. So let's step back from the focus of the messaging to formats because we still have two or three major decisions to make when it comes to format. The first is, "Is this something that's packaged and gated? Do we want someone to have to register for this?" That decision has become increasingly difficult. Through the pandemic when every other marketing is shut down, all we have is direct to buyer. Then the second thing I'd love to ask about, let's do gated, ungated first, but then I'll circle back and ask you also about formats when it comes to social and specifically video, how you think that plays in? What are your thoughts on gating or ungating content?

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Dennis:
I think the answer from gating versus ungating is there's a unique aspects of ABM, which we said it's a complex sale, so that means you're going to have a committee and not just a single buyer. So you're going to have not only the functional group that's responsible for bringing this in. As you said, there's going to be procurement. There'll probably be influencers inside the organization, so other ancillary groups. So you might have a committee. There's probably research out there that says the average buying committee size, but it's probably 7, 10 or more. So I favor when you engage with an account ungating because if you're just going to capture Joe in finance and Jane in marketing and Tom in presales and just capture lead every time, I'm not sure how useful that is. I think provide the content ungated, and there might be other ways you can measure that the account is engaged.

So maybe it's by IP address. You can say, "We provided this content and shared it," and then you can infer internal shares because maybe there's traffic from that company's website. IP range is now surging on your website, then you can know that you're making movement in that account. Whereas if you gate stuff ... The downside of gating is that you end up with nothing. You send the form URL to 20 people and nothing happens, then you're stuck. What do you do now? Then can you repeat the second question about format?

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Sourabh:
Yes. No, this is perfect and it's a perfect segue. So when you do have a prospect or even part of a committee or the whole committee engaged, one thing you touched on there is so key is you want to make your content internally shareable. You want the buyer to be able to share it with the other folks so that they can get them on their side to buy your stuff. They're your champion. So in that regard, there's a lot of information with technical products. So there's still white papers and guides around. There's third party validation with the Gartners, the Foresters and others of the world. Then there's also video, where either a person or graphics are explaining something. Are there formats that work better when you are dealing with a buying committee, a B2B sale?

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Dennis:
I'm sure there is. I will go back to my earlier answer, which is it's probably going to depend on the industry you're in and even potentially the account you're targeting. I believe that the journey through to a sale from account A versus account B can look completely opposite. It just so happens that the people on buying committee A preferred certain types of content, whereas on B, they preferred other.

So one piece of advice I would say is spend a lot of time with your customers. Maybe you close the sale with one of those accounts, see if they can spend some time with marketing. I know they're probably going to be busy onboarding your product, but if marketing can understand their journey to why they selected you, and you can ask them questions about the format. So I wouldn't say just bank on video to do it to be the most effective. I would say try to understand what your audience prefers, but also do enough varieties to cover your bases. You're not relying just on video. You might have a handy two-page sales sheet to complement that video.

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Sourabh:
Especially when it comes to ... It's somewhat ironic because when we think about consumer sharing content, it just seems automatic that people will watch videos over reading things, but when you have to share content to a VP or an SVP or an executive, if you share a link to a video, they're actually probably not going to click it as opposed to if you just put something in the email itself where they can read it right there. So this is a really valid point, especially if you think about completely different buyers like a government entity that'll have a very structured purchase approach, nothing you can do about it, versus a well-funded startup that could buy tomorrow and figure it out later, right?

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Dennis:
Exactly.

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Sourabh:
So I have a key question about what you mentioned earlier, which was the call to action. When you have a variety of content as your buyers are making their way through the journey, one of the key indicators that many of us in B2B sales look for is, when are they asking about price? When are they starting to imagine themselves using the solution, "So how much does this cost and is it annual, monthly per license?" So when it comes to call to actions, what do you think is a good call to action for something that's following up on, say, the core product information? You've got them really in the middle of the funnel, they're really considering your solution. What's a good call to action? Because I'm going to say talk to sales is probably not the right one.

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Dennis:
‍This one's tricky because we talked about self-service SaaS versus more of a complex sale. So the answer for self-service SaaS is you see a lot of companies do this well, which is provide that pricing matrix because it's transparent. It's like you've got, starter, beginner or medium and deluxe and it's X per month per user. So that's the easy answer for self-service. I think it gets trickier with complex products. I've been in a lot of debates where it's like, "Do we publish pricing on our website or not?" So the pro argument is it's transparent. People will know the neighborhood, even if you give a neighborhood, they'll know, "This is within my range," or, "This is not for me." So you can get people to figure out whether they want to continue.

The argument against it is that it could be commoditizing or making it overly simplifying that your product costs X and people will make a rash, a flash decision like, "X is not the right price," but they might not get the full story on why it's priced at X.

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Sourabh:
That's a really good discussion debate, like you said. There is a counterpoint of view to that right?  Is that even if you do establish transparency, which is almost always helpful, especially when they've got to get other people on board like, "This is what they do and this is what they do and this is why I'm going with them." The argument that by putting yourself at a certain price point, you may be either too low or too high. Wouldn't you say, Dennis, that if a client is truly interested they would lean into that and ask why you're pricing a certain way?

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Dennis:
What I said was if you publish a range or, "This is price is starting at," what can happen is that Prospect A will say, "Oh, that's way beyond my price range," so they'll just leave. Whereas Prospect B will say, "That is in my range," and if that's the case, they will probably engage you further and say, "Can you have sales contact me because I want a specific price quote?" At least it shows them that if you're in their range, then they will engage with you.

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Sourabh:
Which goes right back to what you said about knowing your customer, and even one step further, knowing your ideal customer profile, that this is probably the range they're considering because this is the type of solution that would work for them. Perfect. Okay. I'm going to round out here with one last question. We're almost at time. Content syndication, have your content being worked on by partners, by third party providers. What have you seen work well for content syndication and what are some things that you think you might end up just chasing your own tail if you end up doing this just too much? Any thoughts?

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Dennis:
Well, I think content syndication in general, so let's just take the scenario where I have my shiny new asset that's a brand new white paper and I have it on my website. The benefit of content syndication is that it provides an audience that could potentially download that white paper that's far greater than the people coming to your website. So that's in general. I think what's worked well is figuring out the content syndication partners that have a good percentage of your ICP. So if you haven't defined your ICP for your white paper, you better do that now.

Then when you engage with a potential partner, you share with them your ICP and it should be as detailed as possible, and have them show you, "Our segment of our audience matches your ICP." Then maybe try a test campaign and see, did they really deliver? The leads that they deliver for the white paper, does it truly match your ICP? You could just do a simple checklist, yes or no, and if more than half are a yes, then you spend more with that partner.

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Sourabh:
It sounds so simple. Why isn't everybody doing it? I think it's about having that focus and, like you said, having the ICP. My last question, and there are very few people that can answer this well, but I saved this one for you. So I'm going to ask the question not from marketing, but your advice to sales leaders and to sales reps because when we think about B2B sales, the demand gen team and the sales ops team are normally working very closely, normally meeting weekly, honestly, and most of them are also meeting to tweak Salesforce because it's a beast, but then you have on the side of content marketing further away from sales and you have the reps on the sales side further away from marketing. From a sales perspective, what advice would you give to sales leaders that would help them understand and maybe invest or partner with marketing to produce better content marketing?

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Dennis:
That's a great question. My answer is going to make it pretty obvious that I sit in marketing because I always want a better connection between sales and marketing at all levels, especially content marketing. As a content marketer, I've often felt challenged to have access to our customers, our clients, and sales is often the conduit. They're the gatekeeper, if you will, to get me access to those clients.

Sales, on the other hand, they're focused on their quota or they're focused on closing deals, which they should be. So they often wonder, "What's in it for me to spend time to introduce my content marketer or my demand gen marketer to my customer when I need to upsell my customer this quarter?" The leap they need to make, in my opinion, is that content and demand gen fuels the pipeline for your future sales, and if you can be a good partner and collaborate with marketing, you'll have a better pipeline down the road because they'll create content that your future buyers want. So it's a leap for sales to spend more time with marketing, but I think they should.

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Sourabh:
Especially, honestly, Dennis, you're talking about a cultural change because sales has culturally been seen as a hunting group. You find targets and you knock them down and you bring them home and you eat them. Whereas, really, successful sales is actually built even more so on farming is that you actually produce more, and what you're talking about is let's get some of those seeds back so that the content can be tighter aligned to the deals that you as a salesperson are better at closing. I know you said it's biased because you're a marketer, but I think it's great advice.

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Dennis:
I think my answer might be interpreted as it's all in sales camp to help us, but I think what marketers' responsibility is to do is as sales helps you to demonstrate how that help resulted in this piece of content, you need to publicize the success that will get more of the sales leaders' peers to also want to help.

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Sourabh:
Exactly because then your ask has become value and your next ask will be better received. I love it. You might be more of a salesperson than you think. Any last words? I'm going to close. We are over time. Any last words for all those marketers working hard right now from home?

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Dennis:
‍I will just close with something I said at the very beginning, which is I think one of the most important things from marketing and especially for content marketing is, really, you need to be experts in your ICP and almost understand them better than they understand themselves. Those of you in a relationship will often think that your significant other knows you better than yourself. That's what you need to be to your ICP.

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Sourabh:
‍Love it. Thank you so much, Dennis. We've got to get you back. I love what you're doing and it's always good to see you, man. Thank you so much.

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