Conversations With Christine

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Diane Wiredu is a messaging expert and the founder of Lion Words. She helps scaling SaaS and B2B companies achieve message-market fit so they can stand out from the crowd, market more effectively, and sell more.

In this podcast episode, she shares her step-by-step process for crafting messages that work for B2B brands. You will learn the importance of B2B messaging, how customer research impacts B2B messaging, and how to get internal alignment for your new B2B messaging strategy.

Here's a breakdown of what we discussed.

00:00: Diane's Story

3:51 - 6:00: Is Every Copywriter a Messaging Strategist?

6:58 - 9:47: The Discovery Phase of Messaging Strategy

11:20 - 14:55: The Customer Research Phase

16:11 -18:44: How to Get Customers to Agree to Interviews

21:14 - 24:16: Customer-Informed Messaging

24:16 - 30:41 - Prioritizing Messaging

30:41 - 33:45: Conversion Rate Optimization Example from Messaging

33:45: Getting Internal Alignment for Messaging

Connect with Diane on LinkedIn ➡️ https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianewiredu/

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Internal marketing and employee advocacy help companies leverage each team member's online visibility to raise brand awareness.

However, I've found that facilitating this process sometimes means that employees risk losing their personal brands. I've been mulling over this risk for a while.

I was delighted to discover Lia Zneimer while scrolling through LinkedIn one day. Her posts demonstrated a keen sense of connecting her personal brand with her employer's brand.

Here's a breakdown of what we discussed.

00:00 - Start

03:10 - Why Is Lia Passionate About Helping People Find Jobs?

06:24 - Finding Your Core Passion for Brand Promotion

08:30 - Overcoming Self-Doubt

10:52 - How to Find Your Authentic Nugget

13:50 - How to Preserve Your Personal Identity While Supporting Your Personal Brand

18:15 - How to Deal with Mandated Company Promotion Using Your Personal Brand

21:41 - Getting More Employees Involved in Employee Advocacy

25:26 - Employee Advocacy & Content Strategy

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Most people do content distribution like this — they take a larger content asset, chop it up into several pieces, and publish those smaller pieces on social media. But there's so much more that can be done to get your content in front of the right people.

Former VP of Marketing at The Juice, Brett McGrath, shares some great content distribution tips that will expand the reach of your content. Here's a breakdown of what we discussed.

00:00 - Start

01:28 - The Biggest Content Distribution Mistake

02:44 - Focusing on the Bite-Sized Bits

04:40 - Overcoming Content Distribution Overwhelm

06:28 - Content Distribution Mindset

08:54 - Internal Marketing & Content Distribution

11:30 - How to Get Your Team Involved

13:16 - Brett's Podcast

14:34 - Distribution Channels

17:30 - No-Lift Distribution

18:23 - Tech Tools for Content Distribution

19:32 - Final Tips Content distribution supports your content marketing.

Get content distribution right and your content assets will work for your brand.

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One of the most common pieces of marketing advice is to reach your audience where they are, and it makes sense. You wouldn't go to a molehill to find a dolphin. But what tends to happen is that brands focus a lot on the popular (and most obvious) channels for content distribution, which leads to missed opportunities.

Yes, you should be on the obvious social media channels but are there other platforms you can creatively leverage to expand your reach? Crystal Waddell, founder of CW Media and the Simple and Smart SEO Show, explains the power of Pinterest in this podcast episode. Although Pinterest is primarily used by B2C, D2C, and e-commerce brands, there are also B2B marketing opportunities.

Here are three of the top insights I got from this fun conversation:

Pinterest content can still be found several years after being published
Matching your website keyword strategy with your Pinterest keyword strategy can increase your visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs)
B2B brands can couple Pinterest ads with their organic B2B strategy

Check out Crystal's Simple and Smart SEO Show. https://www.simpleandsmartseo.com/

Reach out to Crystal by visiting her website https://simpleandsmartseoagency.com/

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Nate Turner, CEO of Ten Speed, joined me to discuss the art of content maintenance. This podcast episode covers:

What content maintenance is
Part of a content maintenance strategy
What content decay is and how to manage it
Tips for maintaining content

You can read Ten Speed's article on content decay here.

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Jess Cook is the Head of Content at LASSO and co-host of an amazing podcast called "That's Marketing, Baby!". She and I had an interesting conversation about what big picture thinking looks like in content marketing. Jess shares some fantastic insights about how content should tell the brand's story, how that ties in with business goals, and what B2B brands can do to truly stand out in a sea of sameness.

Connect With Jess

https://bit.ly/3ToUmrC

Listen to That's Marketing, Baby!

https://apple.co/3Z39k7I

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Technical SEO is one of the most overlooked areas in content marketing. We often like to make on-page SEO and off-page SEO our primary focus. But technical SEO is what really makes our website content discoverable to search engines.

Aatif Mohd is the SEO Growth Consultant at Flying Cat Marketing. He shared some great technical SEO tips in this episode related to:

What technical SEO really is
The role website hosts play in SEO
How to use Google Search Console to unearth and address technical SEO issues
The four key elements of technical SEO that you should pay attention to
Tips for creating and implementing a technical SEO strategy

You can connect with Aatif by visiting his LinkedIn profile.

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Content creation is meaningless if your content isn't useful to your audience. Useful content has to accomplish the specific goals of the business and it also has to improve the people who're engaging with it. Those goals should be related to how you want your business to grow so that you can create content that goes along that path.

Juma lives by the QCF formula for useful content creation: quality, consistency, and frequency. The quality of your content doesn't necessarily mean using high-resolution video and creating stunning images. Instead, it relates to the meat of the content you create. Post this type of content consistently and frequently and you'll build a loyal audience.

Here are some other points that Juma and I discussed:

How to include useful content in a content strategy
Tips for creating useful content for business growth
How to repurpose video content
Tips for Tik Tok success
How to stick to your content strategy

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Winston Henderson has an amazing podcast, called the Revenue Alignment podcast, where he has insightful conversations with business leaders about what's needed to prove the ROI of content marketing. I invited him to be on today's episode because proving the ROI of content marketing in the short-term is one of the most difficult things to do.

Yes, we know content marketing can have amazing long-term benefits for an organization. However, business leaders want to clearly see the short-term impact and how what they're pouring money into is going to yield results.

Here's what Winston and I discussed:

How to come out of your marketing bubble to better understand the holistic needs of a business
How to use content to close deals in the short-term
How to tie content to revenue
Tactics for better supporting sales teams
Using content to get customer buy-in for a product that's completely foreign to them

You can check out the Revenue Alignment podcast at any of the links below.

Apple Podcasts

Google Podcasts

Youtube

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Content marketing managers sometimes struggle with building strong teams. Sara has managed content marketing teams throughout her career and that's why I invited her on this podcast to discuss the topic. She's now the Director of Operations at Audience Ops and has a few tips to share on building a thriving content marketing team that works well together.

Here's what Sara and I discussed:

How To Onboard A Freelance Writer
How To Hire The Right People
How To Create Better Content Briefs For Writers
Who Should Be On A Content Team?
How To Effectively Manage Projects Within A Content Marketing Team
How To Build Relationships With Your Team

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Adrienne is the founder of Best Buyer Persona but she's also a content strategist who helps brands create customer-first content.

Here are the links to her website and newsletter.

Website: https://bestbuyerpersona.com/

Newsletter: https://bestbuyerpersona.com/newsletter/

You can follow her on Twitter @adriennenakohl.

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If you follow me on LinkedIn or have watched most of my Youtube videos, you'll realize that I fervently believe in customer research. It's the foundation of any good marketing strategy. So, I invited Claire Suellentrop, co-founder of Forget the Funnel, to join me for a discussion on customer research within the context of customer-led growth.

On the Forget the Funnel website, customer-led growth is defined as "a strategic approach that leverages customer insights to qualify and quantify customer value, then operationalize and optimize the end-to-end customer experience.‍ Customer-led growth does not presume what marketing, sales, or product experience your business should offer. Rather, it begins with creating organization-wide understanding around what experience is most appropriate for the company's best customers. Value to customers is then delivered — whenever, wherever, and however they need it — throughout their relationship with the company."

Resources

Forget the Funnel workshop with customer interview and customer survey templates ➡️ https://forgetthefunnel.com/resources/jobs-to-be-done-for-saas-growth
Forget the Funnel certification https://forgetthefunnel.com/customer-led-growth/get-certified

Here's what Claire and I discussed.

Why is Customer-Led Growth Important?
How to Implement Customer-Led Growth
Why Focus on a Target Group of Customers?
Should We Speak With People Who Hate Our Products?
How to Interpret Customer Research Data
How Customer-Led Growth Helps Align Content Marketing with Business Results

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In this episode, Melanie shares:

Three common mistakes content marketers make when coming up with content ideas
How combining focus with format helps with content ideation
Tips for humanizing content so it's more appealing to readers, listeners, and viewers
How to choose the right content format so that the message of the content is effectively delivered

Check out The Content Fuel Framework.

Visit Melanie's website.

Need a content marketer, content writer, or content strategist? Check out my website.

Conversations With Christine: Recent Episodes

Christine McLean