Season 1, Episode 14 of Martech Masters:
John has been leading the marketing for Databox for the last two and a half years. He currently has a podcast series called “Ground Up” where he talks to marketing and sales leaders about how they set their goals, prioritize work, and set their teams up for success.
Learn more about creating and repurposing content, understanding the impact of each type of content, and what it means to be content driven.
Listen to the Podcast version of this episode:
Guest-at-a-Glance:
Name: John Bonini
What He Does: Director of Marketing at Databox
Find John on the web: Databox | LinkedIn
Top Takeaways:
How Content Has Changed Over the Years
“I think over the years it's gotten easier for brands to produce audio, to produce video,” Bonini says. “You know we've seen marketers, we've seen brands, sort of go all in right on different channels, whereas maybe five six years ago, like blogging was the only game in town.”
Many channels that weren’t considered the mainstream for media have matured and so have the users that use them. It’s important though, to make sure that you don’t lose your strategy dispersing content across more channels.
“I think the brands that are doing it well are the ones that create audio and video and then they use that content as sort of like a backbone or an outline for other content right? Such as a blog post, social media campaign and email promotion.”
What Are the Challenges In Creating a Content Strategy?
There are often many unique challenges that arise when creating a content strategy. What are some of the challenges you’ve had putting together a strategy working with people and bringing them all into one piece of content?
“Having good writers solves a lot of that,” he says. “And all of our writers have unique tones and unique voices and I think that that's necessary and I want that on our blog. Part of the reason why we didn't want to go single point of view is, we want unique viewpoints, we want different tones, we want a more diverse, you know, representation on the blog in all areas.
“Have a really tight process and hire great writers. I don't want to oversimplify it, but that's really what it's all about; that's what it's been for us.”
What Does it Mean to Be Content Driven?
What does it mean to be ‘content driven’ as an organization? It means putting the majority of your marketing strategy behind your content and focusing your efforts on providing unique, informative blogs that help your customers during each phase of the sales process.
“Content driven is really just another way of saying like you're not really investing in short-term solutions—paid ads, things like that,” Boninisays. “Being content driven for us, especially being a smaller team, is to focus on first understanding what outputs actually result in outcomes and then we have to make sure that we set goals around those outputs.”
John’s Top Quotes:
[4:53]
"I think for the smaller brands, or even startups, the great ones are figuring out how to transpose content, reuse it across channels, so they're appealing to everyone, the person in the car commuting, the person working out, the person that just wants to scan and get the bullets."
[7:09]
“It's important to create content and transpose it across channels; even more important to understand where the intent is where users typically have more intent, because it's easier to condense video.”
[22:01]
“Being content driven for us, especially being a smaller team, is to focus on first understanding what outputs actually result in outcomes and then we have to make sure that we set goals around those outputs.”
[23:46]
"You need to publish high quality content at a high frequency."
[28:56]
“You always hit these traffic plateaus and I feel like the answer to fixing that, especially when you get more traffic and you have more content published, is to go after a lot of the low hanging fruit and going back to your existing content. Ask yourself: What am I missing? What did we do? What keywords are we missing?”
Learn More:
Check out these resources from the episode.
