Content Lessons for Hyper Growth Marketers
Highlights of the talk:
- How to create authentic content to attract a larger audience?
- What matters the most when you segment audiences?
- Mental models and frameworks for Campaign design
- Creating large volumes of content with small teams
Corey Haines kick-started into finance and accounting, but got introduced into the world of marketing during an exchange program. He started as an intern and stepped up into multiple marketing roles with his last stint being as the head of growth at Baremetrics. Then, he created SwipeFiles which is a platform that brings together a community, courses, and content to master marketing.
While summarizing his marketing philosophy, he shares his experience which led him to conclude that, “Traditional education is not useful when it comes to business.”Corey went on to create SwipeFiles as an afterthought of the need for a marketing library that helps people know what works well, where to begin with when marketers have to solve problems, resources with real stories to depend upon, and so on. Later, he discovered that knowledge hubs also have a need for a community to fall back upon to discuss failures and seek help. You would find all this at SwipeFiles.
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Authentic approach to Content
Corey: I approach content with an intent to provide the highest level of content and help end-users find content that is not created by anyone else. It requires one to talk to industry experts, partners, customers and a lot of other research. This leads to writing really long articles on the website. This process of content creation required me to tap into subject matter experts within the team and gather content out of it. It is about finding out who the end user is, helping them find information about what they are looking for, and getting them what they need.
Is content personalization important?
Corey: Yes, content personalization is important. I use tools to personalize a CTA. This is to ensure that I don't show the newsletter to people who have already subscribed to it. Or, it allows me to suggest users to subscribe to a different list that provides more specific content to them.
Setting audience segments and what matters most when you study your customer
Corey: Begin with who they are: for me it could be an agency owner, entrepreneur, marketer, podcaster, etc. And, knowing them helps me understand where they come from and learn about their expectations. It is important to try and understand what they are looking for, why they are here, how they got here, what they want to take away. It is about being able to answer some fundamental questions to know more about them.
Mental models and frameworks for Campaign design (Secret formula!)
Corey: To me, it is all about, ‘How can I take someone else’s awareness as they engage with my content and give them more awareness at the end of the journey. Eugene Schwartz in his book Breakthrough Advertising, mentions that your prospects go through five stages of awareness for them to develop an experience with your brand.
- Unaware: You start with your prospect being completely unaware. They are not aware that the problem exists.
- Problem awareness: There are prospects who are aware of the problem, but not sure about the solution.
- Solution awareness: This is the stage where prospects know about the problem, but don’t know about the solution.
- Product awareness: These are prospects who are aware of the problem and solution, but are unaware of your product.
- Customer awareness: These are prospects who know about your product and are evaluating different options. Then they are product aware but they are not sure if they are right for them.
Successful and failed campaigns
Corey: We reached out to all expired trials to find out what are the problems with Baremetrics. So, our goal was to identify why our MRR curve was flat. Also, how to retain our customers than to just keep acquiring. We asked a simple question to all those who ended trials with us. It was to find out, “What would you need to start using Baremetrics again?”
This resulted in almost 200 replies and that helped us grow Baremetrics. This led to a 90% open rate and a 15% reply rate.
The failed campaign is when I ended up sending an incorrect link twice via an email campaign!
Correlating team size and content production volume
Corey: There isn't a huge correlation between team size and how much content is being produced. Even single content creators are able to produce a huge amount of content. But, strategy and some consistent approaches helped us create a lot of content.
How did you achieve 300K monthly visitor traffic?
Corey: Three things really helped us gain more traffic.
- Consistent creation of blog articles year on year
- SEO is magical because it creates repeatable searches that surface the same content and make it more and more discoverable.
- We started creating an open startup culture where we started taking examples and started talking about our customers, and they were also talking about their metrics on their websites. This helped us get traffic from some top sources.
Owned, rented and borrowed platform is the strategy outlook. For instance, at Baremetrics to have more owned platforms we used our website. We moved our blog from Medium to our own domain. We hosted two podcasts and a newsletter with 25,000 subscribers. We use twitter audiences and engagement on twitter for a borrowed platform approach.
And, because of this mix, I prefer organic ways rather than to get paid.
Advice to entry level marketers
Create a portfolio. This is all about marketing your work. And, this could include your blog and podcast.
"Traditional education is not useful when it comes to business"
Contact Corey
http://linkedin.com/in/corey-haines
