As the VP of Content Marketing, Joey is in charge of developing and implementing customized content marketing strategies for clients in a variety of industries. Some of his client have included: Marriott, American Express, Land O’Lakes and AOL.com. Joey’s work has been published in 10Best.com, SouthernLiving.com, Clemson Tiger Insider, GSA Business, mMode Magazine, Tigernet.com and the Upstart Crow.

Press play below and start listening to Joey Hall share his valuable content marketing strategy 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/EnVeritas-Group

Beginning of Transcript

Jeff Zelaya: Welcome to B2B Content Marketing Leaders. My name is Jeff and I’m her with Joey Hall from EnVeritas Group. Joey, welcome.

Joey Hall: Thank you Jeff. Glad to be here.

Jeff Zelaya: So Joey, before we begin, just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and your role at EnVeritas.

Joey Hall

Joey Hall: Sure. I’m the VP of Content Marketing at EnVeritas Group. We’re located in Greenville, South Carolina. As the VP of Content Marketing, that means I essentially oversee the operations which is strategy, project execution, et cetera for our North-America-based clients. We have teams that work across all various industries, hospitality, higher education, manufacturing, healthcare, staffing, travel information, retail, just a variety of different things. Our project can vary from large scale website content production down to blog creation and management for multinational staffing firms and with many of our higher ed and B to B clients, we often get involved in doing some strategic planning with them and multichannel content production as natural parts of our relationships with them. I’m a Clemson University graduate and I’ve been working with EnVeritas Group since we were founded back in – well, that’s a little bit up for debate, around 2008.

Jeff Zelaya: Now Joey, since that time, I’ve seen a lot of growth at the agency. Just awards and a lot of recognition you guys have been receiving and something that’s always highlighted is how you guys really excel especially in building, like you were saying, that marketing strategy, creating it from scratch, or from just a basic strategy to a more advanced way of looking at content marketing. So could you walk us through your process of what is it like building a content strategy from scratch or someone bringing – a company bringing something to you and you review it and you’re like, hey, we got to build this out and start from a fresh, a new start? So can you walk us through that process of what it’s like to build that type of strategy?

Joey Hall: Sure. The first part or the last thing that you talked about there, the – having the wherewithal to essentially tell a client that they needed to throw the baby out with the bathwater, that’s something that came with our building our confidence level over the years as an agency. But it’s something that we definitely sit down and talk to our clients very candidly about now, because we want to make sure that whatever we work on for them is successful.

For me professionally, and this is what I instruct our team to do, when we’re sitting down and working on producing a strategy for a client, I want to know who we’re producing that strategy for. It’s not the client. It’s the end user. I want to know as much about those people as I can. I want to know what their pain points are. I want to know what they’re looking for, what information they need, how they look for that information, what they do when they find it and what does the client ultimately want those end users to do. The more that we can understand the audience, their needs, their info consumption patterns, their online tendencies, then the chances are we could build a better and more informed content strategy that addresses those challenges. So for me, everything is audience-focused. It’s audience first, audience always. If we lose sight of that, then we’re not building a strategy.

Jeff Zelaya: Totally agree. I’ve interviewed some of the leading B to B content marketers and that’s something that is a recurring theme. Know as much about the audience as possible. Know them better than they know themselves and that’s how you could start generating that content strategy …

Joey Hall: Absolutely. The days of brands standing on the mountaintop and just shouting out, self-focused descriptions of this is who we are, this is what we are, that’s long past now. Those days are dead and gone. Now, you’ve got to communicate with the audience and communicating. In a lot of cases – I will probably talk about this later, but this is a big pet peeve of mine, but communicating means that we first have to listen and understand.

Jeff Zelaya: Excellent. Joey, there’s also a lot of communication that happens internally, especially with your client base, multinational organizations, a lot of moving part from social to content creation to website development and just so much stuff going on. How do you find that these companies stay organized and how – internally, how do you stay organized with all your team and all different pieces of the project that they’re working on? Any recommendations for staying organized or tools that you recommend these companies use to just make sure that they’re managing their process correctly?

Joey Hall: Sure. This is going to sound trite. But I think the most important tool that we use is our experience and our brain power. What we typically find is that the organization or the processes that we set up on our side to handle production of content are usually a vast improvement over what our clients have existing. That’s just a natural byproduct of we’ve been there and done that. We’ve done things the wrong way. We’ve done things the right way and we just have a good feel for how things need to be set up in order to handle production. As an agency that doesn’t exactly specialize in one industry or a singular type of content production, we can rely on any number of tools depending on the type of – and requirements of a given project. We developed our own CMS, which we call a “content life cycle management system†that allows us to scale up on projects as needed and involve as many contributors as needed across the world.

Our development team can use that core system to build a customized CMS for every client, every project that we work on. So we have like a unique and customized environment for each project. With some engagements, we use tools like Basecamp and Dropbox to help facilitate file sharing and keep things organized with the client. We also find that that’s a really great method for delivering content to clients that aren’t ready to have us go direct to publishing for them and it’s so much better than trying to email things back and forth, because as you all know, email was never intended to be a document delivery system. We also utilize things like Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, Moz Analytics. We use those things to help us stay informed and make smart, strategic decisions and report on our activities. Social-media-focused projects of course rely on whatever the network’s end suite analytics tools are as well as third party tools like HootSuite and we were increasingly with our clients working on social media projects, because we find that with a lot of larger organizations, social media is something that they just don’t have the bandwidth to take on themselves.

Jeff Zelaya: I’m very envious of the kind of clients that you work with because it seems to be a lot of hospitality, travel, tourism, and I think that’s always a fun industry to work in, because it’s – you’re talking about things that are fun, that are full of joy and relaxation. Are there any other clients that you would like to add to the EnVeritas list one day? Any clients that would be ideal for you guys to work with?

Joey Hall: Yeah, I love this question and I had a lot of fun trying to think about how I would answer it. Of course the company response is that I love all of our clients and would love to have more work from all of them.

Jeff Zelaya: Good answer.

Joey Hall: Our marketing director would have a good blurb to be able to pull out for us. That said, to be honest, I would love to work with a brand that’s not afraid to put itself out there and push the boundaries a bit even at the risk of failure or offending the public. Those are challenges, not problems for content marketers in my mind. Brands like Coca-Cola and BMW spring to mind. Secretly, I’ve always had a deep-rooted desire to be involved with something like those Terry Tate storylines from Reebok, if you remember those, and I have a great deal of respect for that Cadbury team 10 years ago or whenever it was, who decided to let a guy in a cheap gorilla suit sit down and bang the drum kit while In the Air Tonight played in the background. That’s still one of my favorite viral videos. That kind of stuff is unforgettable. It’s awesome and it would be an honor to be a part of something that’s unforgettable like that.

Jeff Zelaya: You mentioned a lot of great examples of content that really stood out, right? That made an impression on you. Even years later, you still remember these pieces of content. How do you do that in this day and age where there’s so much of it? Every single day, there are tons of content being produced. Are there any secrets or tips or strategies that we need to know in how to make sure that our content makes an impression on the people that are consuming it?

Joey Hall: Sure. I mean there’s – like you said, there’s a lot of content out there and a lot of it is good. A lot of it is bad. The water, the content water, is only getting deeper. I can’t imagine what things are going to be like five years from now or ten years from now. To be honest, the only way that you can make your content stand out is to make sure that the content is always audience-focused and truly authentic. Otherwise, people are going to sniff out the ruse or whatever agenda you’re trying to push at them and they’re going to bounce on to something better.

Jeff Zelaya: You can’t always make your content stand out with everyone, but you could make it stand out with the people that matter. That’s very valuable to a brand.

Joey Hall: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Jeff Zelaya: Impressions is something that I always think of when we’re measuring how successful a campaign or a content piece is. How do you guys look at the success for your content? How do you measure the success? Any specific metrics that you look at?

Joey Hall: I have kind of a unique perspective on that. So you can go into search rankings. You can focus on page view and purchase metrics and macro conversions and all of that. The issue is that those are just numbers. I’ve seen poor metrics thrown up in presentation slides before and cast in a way that when the dog and pony show was all over, you would think that you were looking at something that was award-winning. I think that’s kind of the trick with metrics. One company’s metric is not important to another company. So to me, the thing that’s most important is that you figure out what’s most important to your audience and whatever is most important to your audience should be most important to your brand. Your brand’s content should make it possible and easier for the brand to meet that need and then whatever that need is, however you measure it, those are the metrics that matter most to your company.

So to me, the idea, the question of metric is, “What’s important to your audience? What’s important to your company? Then how do you measure it?â€Â I think a good example of that – and it may be a little colloquial – is I help do our marketing campaigns at my church. At our church, our most important metric is people coming in the door on Sunday. So for us, the most important – the one metric that we have, the one that we can judge ourselves against is not something that we can track online. It’s tracked by the greeters with the littler clickers as people come in through the doors. That’s something that – that’s hard to record on. But it’s there and it’s an important metric.

Jeff Zelaya: A very unique answer to this question, but an answer that I really love, because you’re putting yourself in that person’s shoes, in understanding, OK, this is what matters. This is what really matters. Then as an agency, you’re working to impact what matters the most to them. So I absolutely adore your answer.

Joey Hall: Yeah. There’s not a cookie cutter answer. I mean every organization should be unique and every company should be unique. If you’re trying to judge yourself based on what competitor A, B and C are doing and how they measure stuff, then you might not be going on the right path. You might not be focused on what your audience is focused on.

Jeff Zelaya: And speaking of unique, I know over the time that you’ve been in EnVeritas, you’ve had the opportunity to work with really talented content marketers and marketers and mangers. You’ve seen a lot of successful, really successful people. Maybe they’re your clients or your colleagues. Are there any skills or attributes that the most successful content marketers seem to share and if so, could you share that with us? I’m interested in knowing …

Joey Hall: Yeah. Again, I hope that this is not too trite of an answer for you. But I think that we have to be able to listen first and if we can’t listen to what our clients have to say, if we’re an agency and we can’t listen to what our clients have to say, if we go in with our pre-established program of this is what we’re going to do for you, then I think that we are failing the clients right out of the gate. We’ve got to listen to the clients. We’ve got to listen to the client’s end users. We have to listen – if we’re marketing in-house for somebody, we’ve got to listen to our customers and to me, listening means not just that we’re seeing what they have to say. Listening means that we’re paying attention to what they say and that that information becomes important to us. We let that information recommend the actions that we take and how we are going to communicate with them going forward. So for me, it all starts with listening. My wife would be absolutely thrilled that I said that.

Jeff Zelaya: Yeah, I agree. It’s something that we talk a lot about. But yes, listening and listening and listening, such an important thing whether you’re in marketing, in sales. I think in any profession, having great listening skills is going to make you just that much more successful. Besides listening, how else do you stay up-to-date with all the changes that are happening in this fast-paced marketing world?

Joey Hall: Well, I am a recovering English major and part of the recovery that I’ve never been able to outlast is that I’m a voracious reader. So when I have time at work, when I have time at home, I’m always reading blogs, books, articles, things like that, just to try to stay abreast on everything, because things move so fast in this day and age that just because you’re up to speed today doesn’t mean that you’re going to be up to speed on Friday. I attend several conferences every year. I really like going to SMX for one. Our internal team here in the office in Greenville, we also designate one day per month for – assign people to present on different content-related topics. So it’s usually something breaking news-wise, like a Google algorithm change or something trending like the most recent social media disaster from airline X. For me, those meetings, they’re informal in format but they’re great times to catch up on news, because like I said, you can’t stay abreast of everything.

There are good times. You just sit and talk with other people and hear what their takes are on things that are relevant to our field and hear what their perspectives are on the things that are important to us, because they’re the ones that are in the trenches. They have a really good feel for what works and what doesn’t. It’s great to have the entire team involved in meetings like that. I think – at one point, over the course of the year, everybody in our company presents at least one time at those monthly meetings. Like I said, it’s a great time. It’s a great learning environment.

End of Transcript

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