The content marketing hierarchy you didn't know you needed

Hey, Jacalyn here 👋

Just wanted to say welcome, and thanks for subscribing! This is the very first issue of That Marketing Newsletter—best to buckle up, because it’s going to be bit of a lengthy one 👻

But first, a quick fun fact: I wasn’t always in lifecycle. In fact, once upon a time, I was a humble content marketing lead 😌

And if there’s one thing I wished I’d learned back when I first broke into content marketing—not hives, though marketing does sometimes give me those—it would be to ditch the darn funnel and follow a hierarchy, instead.

So, in this first issue, we’re going to walk through a content marketing hierarchy I’ve used at multiple companies to ensure content doesn’t just keep the blog going, but actually benefits other departments and biz objectives.

(Future issues will focus on lifecycle, too, scout’s honour 🤞)

The good news is, you can skip the blood/sweat/tears/whiskey sours I went through, and get the tactics to building a hierarchy for yourself.

Ready? Let’s go 👇

Stop trying to make the funnel happen—it’s not going to happen

(Couldn’t resist a Mean Girls reference, sorry)

Content marketing used to be all about creating content for TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU stages. But people don't consume nor convert from content that way.

Instead, the real goal should be to educate, inform, and drive value for our audiences at every stage of their journey (kinda like lifecycle).

To do that, we have to immerse ourselves fully in our customers' lives, including their challenges, fears, and aspirations, by starting from the bottom.

Here’s how you can create a content marketing heirarchy that's designed to help you do just that.

Start with product-market fit

This is one of the most underrated aspects of content marketing that no one talks about. Understanding your company's product-market fit is critical to creating content to help meet your audiences' needs while assuaging fears/doubts.

When you understand your product-market fit, your customer becomes the centre of all of your content marketing efforts—and that's really non-negotiable.

If you’re not sure where to start on understanding your company’s product market fit, personally, I like to create a table or spreadsheet categorized by different teams, and note Q&A I ask those teams about our product.

For example:

• Talk to product teams about their roadmap and ask curiosity questions

  • Ex. “Why are we prioritizing features A, B, and C right now?”

  • Ex. “What signals are you seeing that indicate we need to launch X solution vs updating Y and Z functions?”

• Sit with Sales to understand what prospects ask of them

  • Join weekly Sales stand-ups or run weekly marketing/sales syncs

    • Ex. “What’s a challenge you keep hearing from prospects this week?”

    • Ex. “Are prospects asking for any specific follow-up materials that you’re creating ad-hoc?”

    • Ex. “Is there anything prospects ask for that’s not readily available?”

      • Prospects may want to look at changelogs, or have access to deeper API documentation, for example.

  • Attend demos as a fly-on-the-wall

  • Read a call transcript or two each week

    • Note any similarities you find/see/hear in how prospects talk about your product

    • Jot down any competitors, content, channels, or similar that prospects mention having looked into

• Work with your CMO (or leadership) to better understand:

  • Who your ICP is (not just fluffy personas)

  • What your company’s core value prop is, and how it displaces that of your competitors

  • How existing customers feel about your product (ex. you can talk to CS leaders)

Perform audience research

Do you know who your customers are? I'm not talkin' personas, but the real people who are looking for a solution like yours.

Audience research is required if you hope to create content that helps solve for the challenges your customer experiences.

The secret to great content is that it gets under your customer's skin and makes them yearn for more information—aka the answers only you have—that will solve their greatest challenges.

You can't create content like that if you don't know your customers 🤷‍♀️

The insights you glean from this research inform your strategy. But if you're not sure where to turn to for audience research...

• Talk to your customers

  • You can do this by fielding support tickets, for example

• Talk to your prospects

  • Ask your AEs if you can chat with prospects during demos, to understand their challenges from a different team POV

• Talk to your sales teams

• Talk to your customer teams

• Talk to your newsletter subscribers

  • Ask for feedback and insights, leverage polls or surveys, you get the picture!

• Look at search intent

• Look at trends in communities

• Read support ticket threads

  • There are so many valuable nuggets in customer support threads!

• Offer to moderate CABs

Now, if you’re anything like me, you’d probably just dump all of these insights into a Google Doc, or a notes app on your computer 💁‍♀️

However, as I’ve gotten older, wiser, and more organized, it’s been super handy to automate the collection of feedback, Q&A, etc and add it to a dedicated table in my roadmap.

At Copy.ai, for example, we have a Zap that connects one of our Workflows, along with user survey + feedback data, to a dedicated Slack channel.

Insights are piped into that channel automatically; when I react to a message in that channel with an emoji, those insights are sent to a table in my Lifecycle roadmap where I can apply the helpful data to improving, updating, or informing my own activities 👀

It’s free audience research that I can tie into my work immediately. And, if I’m being honest, it’s incredibly low-lift. I have no excuse not to do this research 😅

Do as the Romans didn’t—audit your sales process

If there’s one thing you do after reading this newsletter, it should be gaining an understanding of how your product is sold.

This is, hands down, one of the best things a content marketer can do. You have to ask questions about your Sales process and team, like:

• How do they sell?

  • What materials do they use during the prospecting process?

• What does the sales journey look like for prospects?

  • What does follow-up look like?

  • What does call or discussion prep look like?

  • What content do Sales folks leverage?

  • What’s your company’s POC process?

• What does post-acquisition look like?

  • How do AEs perform hand-offs?

• What's the company's sales cycle?

  • What’s being done to shorten the sales cycle?

  • What’s a typical sales cycle for one prospect type vs. another?

• What are common objections prospects have?

  • How do Sales teams surface common objections with one another (and other teams)?

*These are just a few questions you can ask, as a baseline, when engaging with Sales.

The reason why I find it important to understand how Sales sells, is because content marketing's job is to help educate people, and drive them to buy. Understanding how a product is sold allows you to do that in a way that positions content marketing as an influencer of pipeline.

When you understand how Sales positions and, well, sells your product, you're in a better spot to create content that:

• Answers your audiences' questions

• Assuages fears, doubts, and insecurities

• Empowers audiences to solve their greatest challenge(s)

• Positions your brand + product as the authority

• Educates audiences before they reach Sales

Once you’ve talked to your Sales folks, picked their brains, and have gathered the info you need, add it all to a spreadsheet, table, or channel and categorize it based on Q&A type.

That way, you can pull insights based on the kind of content you’re creating. I’ve found this really handy when content teams need help with creating sales enablement material, or repurposing content beyond the typical blog post teardown.

(For example, if you have a wealth of insights around customer objections Sales has shared with you, those insights could inform content that focuses more deeply on enablement with outcomes, like case studies, use cases, etc).

Now, it’s time to audit your content

There’s probably nothing less that content folks like than a good ol’ content audit.

When you spend a good chunk of your time creating content, the last thing you want to do is audit all of it—especially when other teams ask you for net-new content.

But, hey, content audits are necessary.

In a nutshell, your content audit should help you:

• Realize pre-existing value

• Determine non-existing value

• Find focal areas for improvement

• Discover what gaps you need to fill

With a content audit, you’re basically looking at the overall “historical” performance of your content, but not from a web performance perspective.

You can optimize your content for SEO and the like, but that’s not the only factor in ensuring it assists prospects in making informed buying decisions, aids Sales in closing down-funnel deals, helps CS solve customer challenges…you get the picture.

After all, any new content you create will only be as good as your ineffective content, you know?

So, when you audit your content, you’ll want to be able to clearly answer these 4 questions:

1. What content do we already have that’s proven useful for Sales, CS, and Demand Gen?

   • *Keep in mind, you may have other teams that leverage or repurpose your content, too.

   • For example: Which content does Sales use most frequently in follow-up, prospect calls, or during their POC process?

2. How is that content performing?

   • *Not from a metrics perspective, but from an enablement perspective.

     • For example: Has one content asset been performing better in a demand gen campaign than another, to drive conversions?

3. What needs does content meet (or not meet) right now?

   • *Again, not from a metrics perspective.

     • For example: Which questions is CS getting asked the most when it comes to user enablement? Which questions do prospects keep asking Sales down-funnel? What patterns are you seeing in NPS survey data that point to a lack of product enablement?

4. What gaps do you need to fill?

   • Based on the insights from question #3, you can start to build, optimize, or eliminate content that either helps, or hinders audiences (potential customers) from successfully moving through the stages of awareness > sales > onboarding.

What do you do with the results of your audit?

If you were doing a traditional audit, you’d probably work through a list of tasks like redirecting poor-performing posts, optimizing content that’s driving a lot of backlinks for additional value…all of that good stuff.

But in this case, you’re not focused on web metrics and performance so much as efficacy in driving customers down-funnel and helping teams convert the demand y’all have captured.

At Lever, we did the kind of audit I describe above, and used the insights we gleaned to:

• Create a pillar page framework geared towards middle to bottom-of-funnel audiences.

• Repurpose content for outreach sequences our BDRs needed.

• Develop content for our CS team based on the resources that customers asked their CSMs for the most.

• Inform our post-even follow-up strategy, so we didn’t send stale webinar replay emails 🙈

You can do that, too. And future issues of this newsletter will cover things like pillar page strategies, how to create better post-event follow-up sequences, etc!

Go forth and create more strategic content now

At this stage, you're ready to focus on the development and creation of your content. But there's still some leg work to do 😅

We may no longer be stuck in the era of “create more content at all costs,” but a lot of us are definitely still stuck on writing a bunch of content and hoping for the best.

Anyone can write a blog or eBook.

Anyone can tell you to create content like a media company.

But the content you create has to hit a few key 'markers' in order to be valuable to your audience. Lest we forget, our audiences are made up of future customers.

Effective content creation focuses less on keywords, SEO, and pushing product, and more on:

• Answering real questions

• Solving for real problems

• Meeting people where they are

• Building trust by driving value

• Educating and informing people

• Consistently driving home your value prop

Which means focusing on content that's going to help your customers, not just drive results for your brand.

In the past when I’ve helmed content marketing, these are the top questions I’d ask myself when we’d work on any type of content creation exercise.

Specifically, being able to answer these two questions with our content began informing every piece of content I’d create:

• What problem will the content help solve for?

• How will this content support business objectives?

These questions are sort of like a ouroboros—you can’t help your company if you’re not helping your customers, and doing both is a great way to get a seat at the table as a content marketer.

Let’s sum it all up, shall we?

The goal of a content marketing hierarchy is to help ensure you confidently broach content knowing:

• Who you're creating content for

  • Customers

  • Internal teams

• Why you're creating content

  • Helping customers make informed buying decisions

  • Empowering internal teams to drive results with content as a key lever

• How it'll benefit people

  • The folks buying from you (now, or in the future)

  • Internal teams that need more effective content to help drive results from their own efforts

So you can focus on strategic content vs. content created for an arbitrary funnel that most of us don’t really follow anymore, anyway…

Now, I should caveat all of this by saying: your content marketing hierarchy will look different from mine. Your company may be at a different stage, or pivoting to targeting a new ICP, you name it.

But, you can use this hierarchy as a guide for building your own!

Either way, I’m proud of you for wanting to create more strategic content—and making it to the end of this newsletter 🥳

I’ll be in touch next month with another issue of That Marketing Newsletter!

P.s. here’s what I’m drinking & reading this week

P.p.s. have feedback about this newsletter, ideas to share for future issues, or any gripes? I’m all ears—shoot me an email at [email protected] 👋