At RingLead, Amanda oversees the strategy and execution for their content marketing. Previously she’s worked at salesforce.com and Radian6, and has an extensive agency background. She’s an avid blogger, thought leader and speaker.

Amanda’s presented at conferences like the Online Marketing Institute, Direct Marketing Association, Content Marketing Institute. She’s also an Adjunct Professor at Quinnipiac University, where she teaches graduate courses on Social Media, Community Management and Content Marketing.

Press play below and start listening to Amanda Nelson share her unique marketing insights on this week’s episode of the B2B marketing podcast. The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/ringlead/

Beginning of Transcript

Amanda Nelson: Right. Well, thank you Jeff for having me today. Yes, my name is Amanda Nelson. I’ve been in content marketing for about four years. Prior to my current role, I worked at Radian6 and then Salesforce.com doing content marketing for both brands and today, I am at

Amanda Nelson

RingLead which is a Salesforce partner. We also work with Marketo and Eloqua and Pardot and other marketing automation CRM providers doing data quality. So my role is really leading marketing for RingLead and our major initiative is content marketing and really creating helpful thought leadership content for marketers and salespeople.

Jeff Zelaya: Now, Amanda, one of the things that I was very amazed by is that in the short amount of time that you’ve been at RingLead, you’ve made significant impact. You’re popping up all over my radar and I’m seeing the great work that you guys are doing and I’m very intrigued by that and want to know for other content marketing directors that are starting that, who are going to get into that role, to lead the growth of the marketing department. What are some important things that they should be doing? What have you done in your new role starting there that have made you guys get off to this great start and what advice would you have for others that are following in those same footsteps?

Amanda Nelson: Yeah, thank you. I mean you can’t do it right without a plan. You really need an action plan for what you’re going to be doing and so from day one, we sat down with other members of the team. I talked to and I interviewed almost everybody at the company to just get a sense of who the company is and who our customers are and where we want to go and just kind of really immersing myself in the people and the products and everything about the brand.

Then from there, once we were able to really use our data to understand our customers and what their challenges are and how they use our product or how – where our product can go, from there, I was really able to craft a vision and tie goals and metrics to that vision and focus because at a start-up, you really can go in so many different directions and be pulled in so many different ways and wear a lot of different hats.

It’s really important to have a focus and really dedicate all your time to that. So with everything that’s asked of me, I ask myself, “Does this align with the vision that I’ve set forth?†If it does, I do it and if it doesn’t, I don’t. That’s the only way I can really focus and get things done and when you focus and you know exactly who you’re targeting and how you can help them with your content, your expertise and ultimately your product, your services, at that point, you can really start to make a difference and see an uptick in your results.

Jeff Zelaya: Very true. I mean there are so many folks that are starting to do content marketing but the plan is not in place and if you don’t know what you’re aiming for, you don’t have that vision, chances are you’re not going to hit it. You’re not going to hit the goals that you had in your mind and writing it down and having a strategic plan I think is key. So thank you for giving us that insight on how important having a plan is. Now, with a plan comes a lot of different moving pieces and your team is growing. You’re doing a whole lot of different stuff. How do you manage it all? Is there a system that you have in place to make it easier managing all these different moving parts?

Amanda Nelson: Yeah. So in terms of team, it’s really me and one other marketer right now and he and I are really yin and yang where he’s marketing operations. So I have a lot of the ideas and I curate and create a lot of the content and he’s the one executing on all of it with our marketing automation, our email marketing, our paid media, all of that. So it’s a nice balance back and forth and we work together but as you said, our team is growing. We’re hiring actually. We’re looking for folks, but as part of that adjustments we made and scalability needs to occur as well.

So overall, outside of just resources, it’s – a big important piece is the fact that content marketing is not always about new content. You don’t always have to be reinventing the wheel and so one thing that I’ve really taken in these past couple of years of being in the spaces, the idea of a content engine where you have one centralized piece of content, usually a gated piece, like an ebook or a webinar that’s meaty, that has a lot to it and then you break it apart and reuse it and recycle it to make it blog posts, additional ebooks, info graphics, future webinars.

There’s so much you could do to kind of chop, slice and dice your content to reuse it. So you’re not always starting from scratch every day. A lot of times, you can find this content already existing in your case studies or in your FAQs or even in emails or on Chatter, on Salesforce, those kinds of things. All this content is already in existence. It just takes somebody to actually find it, curate it, organize it and then serve it up.

Jeff Zelaya: Yes. We can’t be afraid to repurpose content because chances are people maybe haven’t seen that piece of content you’ve been promoting. If you’re able to break it out in a variety of ways whether it’s a slide share or a new ebook or tweets or blog posts, you can make one piece of meaty content go really far and extend the life of that. I think that has been very efficient with your content marketing initiative. So that’s a great advice.

Besides repurposing and repacking content, what are some other tactics that you’ve put into your strategy for the new year? What are some new initiatives that maybe you’re trying to execute or experiment with? What are some tactics that you’re implementing in your strategy? Can you walk us through maybe some of your checklists for 2015?

Amanda Nelson: Sure. So 2014 was a year of really ramping up. So we created over 15 ebooks. We did a number of webinars. We have – we blogged every day since the day that I started. So we have all of this content. So now it’s about going back and finding the content that worked and didn’t work and really re-sharing and service back up that content that did well and also keep breathing new life into the content that may not have. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to optimize and rework your existing content. The internet is all about what have you done for me lately and right now versus six months ago.

So it’s always about kind of serving something relevant and timely in the moment and as I’ve mentioned, the existing content can really do that. The other thing we’re really working on is qualified leads. So not just looking – bringing in tons of leads from a quantity standpoint. But what is quality? What are the biggest opportunities?

That’s really about working with sales and aligning and looking at what we’ve brought in and what we can do with that going forward and how that impacts future content that we create. A lot of the content just because it was top of funnel doesn’t mean it can’t be middle or bottom of the funnel either. What’s really interesting is a lot of our content not only brought in new eyeballs but it brought back the dead. It brought back leads that have gone cold or contacts that just kind of wither away.

People started coming out of the woodwork to really be like, “Oh, what is this? This is happening.†It’s really exciting to see and so that means like – that we could take content that we already have and say, “Oh, you were interested in marketing automation. Well now, we have the newcomer’s guide to marketing automation. Check it out.â€Â So really moving the content through the funnel and using it in different ways. I work closely with your sales guys and we call it content selling where it’s about if they need a piece of content, I can even blog about it that day. How can I be responsive and help them? And they also help us by bringing great people to our webinars and telling me the pain points. There’s definitely a give and take and the importance of alignment between the two teams.

Jeff Zelaya: Yes. Working in sales, I’ve seen that happen many times where you have a really good piece of content. You share it with the right prospect and it breathes new life into a deal that you thought was dying and they’re like, “Wow, this is awesome content,†or “I really like some of the ideas that you shared with me,†and again, they are interested in just having a further discussion about how we could partner up. So content definitely could save deals and having the right content or updated content at the right time and making sure the sales team is enabled and has that at their fingertips is very important in this day and age.

Speaking – you talked earlier about this year for you in 2015 will be a lot about measuring and looking at what worked and what didn’t work and zoning in on those metrics. What metrics do you speak of Amanda? What are the key performing indicators that you’re looking at as you assess your marketing, your content marketing results and initiatives? What will you be tracking and measuring?

Amanda Nelson: Sure. Well, we look at total inbound leads and marketing qualified leads from that and seeing if the percentage of marketing qualified compared to the total that’s going up. On top of that, we look at cost per lead and cost per acquisition. You want to make sure that again, we’re – there’s a nice balance between what we’re pulling in and what’s actually working.

Then in terms of our website and – our website is our leading driver. It’s our biggest salesperson. It’s a leading driver of revenue for us and our website – if we spend more time, more budget on it, what is going to be the payout, obviously we want to take care of that great salesperson that we have, being the website, but – so with the website, we definitely look at the traffic and what’s the main sources and how long are folks staying on the site and what are they doing and what are their – how are they getting there? How are they leaving? Organic traffic is our leading driver of traffic. So that’s huge for us. You want to keep the organic up and determining ways to do that.

So those are some of the different metrics we look at. I mean I’m looking at our tracking of our website every day, multiple times a day, and then also reporting to our CEO and our investors every other week about how our performance is going and how we match up to our goals. We just finished our 2015 plan and one of the big things we looked at is, “OK, what are our goals for next year now that we met?†or didn’t meet. These specific goals from 2014 and being nine months into this company I’m learning a lot and figuring out, “OK. What’s the bench mark now that I’ve been here and we’ve been doing this huge initiative?â€

Jeff Zelaya: One of the initiatives that I know you’ve executed very well this past year is with guest blogging and thought leadership. I think that’s how I initially started seeing RingLead pop up on my timeline because you guys were getting these awesome thought leaders to post on your blog and of course they were sharing that across their social network. How did – what are your thoughts on the whole thought leadership guest blogging thing?

Amanda Nelson: Yeah. So I started that initiative when I was at Salesforce and working with a team over there. The reason we started the guest blogger program there and the reason I’m doing it at RingLead as well is because I’m a marketer. I’m not an expert at sales or CRM or IT and when you’re talking to an audience that is, there’s a huge disconnect when you’re trying to – the author is not the expert in the topic that they’re blogging about. Not to mention that it’s actually really hard.

If I’m never blogging about sales, the only way I feel comfortable doing it is if I’m recapping an event or I interviewed somebody or something like that. I could never speak from the heart about sales because I’ve never done sales.

People see right through that and that content is not quality. So when I came over to Salesforce, there was a rallying cry to get sales experts in the room. Not just that but I recognized that those folks were actually the ones generating the most traffic because not only are they experts but they have their own audience and their own folks that they could bring to the table.

So the guest blogger program was widely successful at Salesforce. We grew it from about five people to about 150 by the time I left and at RingLead, we started with about the same, about five and in nine months we’re now at 50. It has been really successful for us. So we have guest bloggers covering sales, marketing, data, data quality, IT, CRM, recruiting, different areas that have audiences of ours that are really interested in using CRM marketing, automation data, as best as possible.

It has been great. It’s really – we do webinars with them, ebooks. It opens up a whole new world of content you can do with them and it has been really effective in growing our traffic and also obviously being able to blog every day since I’ve been here.

Jeff Zelaya: Yes. What a great advantage. You’ve been able to leverage it really effectively not only in getting awesome content because these are the experts in the field. But you’re also putting content on your site and they’re promoting the heck out of that. Usually they have a big following and a big network of people that align with your target audience. So it’s a win-win across the board, so congrats on really hitting the mark with your guest blogging initiatives.

What do you see as the new trend or the – what’s emerging from content marketing? Where do you see this industry going? In 2015 and beyond, what are some of the first thoughts that you get around things that we should be on the lookout for or trends that will really dominate in our space?

Amanda Nelson: Yeah. It’s a good question because content marketing is new but it’s also really popular and so it’s one of those things where the bubble could burst. So I think we all as marketers and even salespeople and other – other departments that are getting into content marketing need to be careful of and really use it to the best of its advantage. I mean we see things on Facebook, all the click bait stuff. I mean there is definitely the dirty part of this and we need to be careful of that.

Just focus – I think that if you continue to focus on what it’s all about and that’s delivering helpful quality information to help your audience do their job better, especially in B to B. I mean B to C was a little different. Maybe you’re helping somebody achieve a life goal or something like that. But when you focus on that, you can only do great things. But when you start to think about yourself and your brand and how it’s benefiting you, then you kind of forget where you came from and you go off track.

I think the other metrics in data is really crucial in content marketing. We have the ability to in real time, you know, seconds after it launches, see how it’s performing and optimize in real time. The more we can do that as marketers, the better we’re going to be at executing content marketing.

I think the other piece is that maybe folks will start to see that it’s not so much about the quantity as it is about the quality. You don’t have to be blogging five or ten times a day just to blog. You should really focus on what your audience needs and being there for them at the right time.

End of Transcript

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