As the Senior Content Manager at Radius, Lisa is in charge of running all content marketing operations and for building the Radius Marketing Intelligence brand. Radius recently raised $54.7 Million in funding and content marketing is a priority for the growing team. Prior to Radius Lisa worked at InsideView where she was able to increase the monthly traffic to the InsideView’s blog by 225% in 6 months.

Hear Lisa Fugere share valuable data driven content marketing insights and press play now. The show sheet for today’s podcast is available at: http://www.triblio.com/blog/Radius

Beginning of Transcript

Lisa Fugere: So I’m the Senior Content Manager at Radius and my team is responsible for all the brand and thought leadership content that we make. So that includes the Radius blog, marketing videos and ebooks and cheat sheets, et cetera and social media as well.

Jeff Zelaya: Lisa, over the past year or so, your company has grown. I mean I saw the announcement of the funding and you guys are adding people and more clients and happy experiences with your platform. I know – I could almost bet that your awesome job of content has a lot to do with that. So can you give us some examples of how content is helping fuel the growth that Radius is experiencing right now?

Lisa Fugere

Lisa Fugere: When I joined the team almost two years ago, we had like 10 blog articles and no content strategy, no ebooks. It was like a start of a blog and a website and no audience or anything. So as we’ve grown every part of our marketing department, content has been a part of it. So you can’t really grow an events marketing program without ebooks or case studies or data sheets to hand out at events. You can’t go grow a customer marketing program without customer success guides and case studies and the same goes for demand generation and [0:01:45] [Indiscernible]. So as we’ve developed all these different areas of our marketing team, we’ve needed content and very different types of content with different goals and the biggest one I think is just growing our brand and content has been a crucial part of helping the market understand who Radius is, what we’re all about and helping our customers.

Jeff Zelaya: I noticed that you’re a leader in the space Lisa. You seem to be ahead of most of the other marketers that are out there and I’m just wondering. How do you stay up-to-date with this ever-changing field of content marketing? How do you stay almost above and beyond what other marketers are doing? What’s your secret to being on the edge?

Lisa Fugere: Read a lot of better marketers’ content. So I’m just looking at all the – there are so many content marketers that are doing a great job. The great thing about content marketing is that we’re all out there writing about what we’re doing and it’s such a transparent field, because everything is online in the B to B space. So the examples of good content are really easy to find and that’s kind of how I learned what other people are doing and how some of the leaders are guiding the rest of the field.

Jeff Zelaya: And it’s a recurring advice that we get on the show where the leaders are saying, “We read. We read,†and you’re right. Readers are leaders. They consume that content and are able to get those ideas and see things that others don’t and make those assessments and make the right moves that put them as leaders in their field. So that’s a great, great advice for anyone that’s listening. Read. Become a reader and a connoisseur of content and you will become better in the space. Speaking of good stuff, there’s also some bad stuff out there, like companies that are making mistakes and that aren’t really doing marketing as well as they could be doing. What are some of the most obvious or the most common mistakes that you see organizations in the B to B space doing with their marketing?

Lisa Fugere: I think the biggest mistake I see is that people produce bad content, bad writing, cheap videos, and bad design. I think that this has – I’ve seen this trend for the entire span of my career in content marketing and it really grew when around two years ago HubSpot perpetuated the, I guess, content marketing truth that the more content you’ve had, the more traffic you got to your site and the more your audience would grow. They released this article that talked about how they never really reached the point of diminishing returns where they were creating too much content. So everybody started creating all of this content and it was just this trend and now there’s just so much content and you start doing the math and when you’re starting to grow a brand, you think, “OK. I only have so much time and I need more content. So I’m just going to like really quickly write a bunch of articles, and they’re probably going to get seen by 50 or so people.â€

Now you just end up with hordes of poorly-crafted content and I think you lose a lot of brand value when people associate your brand with bad content. I think there are ways to create good content quickly and what we learned at Radius is that creating scalable formulas and having some kind of a system really helps prevent bad content from being created and the need to have more and more out there, so that you can just have some kind of an outline premade. You don’t have to do all of the fore thinking that goes into the creation of a piece of content. So you can say I have this campaign or this project and it’s the same format, just a different topics or a different thought leader or a different idea that you’re talking about and that helps to alleviate the issue of bad content.

Jeff Zelaya: You hit it on the head. I’ve seen such a misnomer with folks just trying to crank out quantity content instead of quality content and I think we’re at the point now – there’s so much noise out there that just quantity is not enough. But quality is what really makes it stand out and of course you guys have been doing a really good job of that. So when you’re looking at your content and trying to figure out what is quality, like what performed, what did well, what are the metrics that you’re zoning in on and keeping track of to really figure out your – how successful this content is?

Lisa Fugere: So we track different metrics for different types of content. So currently, one of our main goals for the entire marketing team is to drive a lot of traffic back to the Radius website and then convert users from there, because our brand is growing and it’s not like every single person in the world knows who Radius is or what our product is. So if we were to create a bunch of Facebook ads and encourage people to sign up for demos and trials, they would be like, “Who’s Radius and why would I do that?†So we need to get them to come back to our site, learn about us and then sign up for a trial or a demo. So we track traffic for a lot of stuff currently, time on page, bounce rate. We’re also going to launch a newsletter for – well, we’re starting in 2015. So we’re going to be tracking sign-ups for that. Then on social media, we track conversation rate, amplification rate and engagement rate pretty much mostly.

Jeff Zelaya: Now Lisa, of course on your team, you’re not the only one – for a while, you were one of the only ones producing content for Radius and now you’re adding team members and growing. When you’re adding team members, what are the skills that you look for in the awesome content marketers? Are there skills that you see that they all share in common? What should I be looking for when bringing on and growing my content marketing team?

Lisa Fugere: The number one quality that I look for in content marketing candidates is an appreciation for marketing. A lot of times you get people that are really good writers, that think that content marketing is a great way to make some money in a field that’s very hard to make money in. So there’s the part about having writing skills being necessary. But it’s also not sufficient and so I just – I look for people that are interested in content marketing and in B to B marketing and that have a passion for marketing specifically.

Jeff Zelaya: You can’t fake passion. I mean that really shows through and you’re right. When they have enough passion and love for their field, they’re going to be in it all time. Maybe they lack a certain skill, right? But they will – with that passion, it will help grow them. They would be willing to practice more and write more and learn more because they love it so much. So you’re right. That’s one skill that I think really makes a good kind of marketer stand out.

Lisa Fugere: If you’re a great writer, it’s like you can write about anything but you’re going to get bored eventually and all you’re going to do is write and hope it gets out there. But somebody that understands marketing a little better is going to be able to say, “OK. I also want to play around with different promotion tactics and not just focus on the written part of content marketing.â€

Jeff Zelaya: Lisa, the Radius product is really focused around marketing intelligence. For those marketers that are new or those that maybe know a little bit about it, can you explain more about what is marketing intelligence and how does that help marketers out in improving or executing their campaigns?

Lisa Fugere: So marketing intelligence is all about finding the right audience so that you can tailor your marketing messages and so that you can reach your total address of the market and it’s really important for content marketers because the world online is very large and as we all figure out, you have to find ways to segment your audience so that you’re writing something that’s tailored to the people that had – that you intend to read it. So marketing intelligence can help content marketers find the right audiences for their content.

Jeff Zelaya: Yeah, audience is key. I mean if you’re writing content and it’s not getting to the – it could be as awesome content as you could make it. If it’s not getting to the right people, it doesn’t really matter. So that’s always the focus, making sure that you’re speaking to the right group of people and Radius can help you accomplish that. The last question I have for you Lisa, as we go into this new year, 2015, and the content marketing game continues to change and the platform and industry evolves, what are the top trends that you think will emerge out of this year? So let’s think – let’s fast forward. Let’s pretend it’s the 31st of December 2015. What will we be talking about that was a hit for the year in terms of content marketing strategies or tactics and initiatives that were a success?

Lisa Fugere: I think a couple of things are likely to happen. I think one is that – as I was talking about, the perpetuation of bad content being a mistake content marketers are making. I think there’s going to be a bit of a reversal because of the volume that – of content that’s out there. Marketers have to stand out and be a little more creative. So I think we’re going to see better content, more videos, more thoughtful targeted content and I think also as organic reach on social networks continues to diminish, marketers are going to spend a lot more time advertising and they’re going to advertise their content because it’s a lot cheaper to do it on social media than anywhere else. So as marketers continue to grow their advertising programs, they’re also going to focus on better targeting and so that’s going to be I think a big trend because you have the opportunity on social media ad networks to specific exactly which audiences you want to reach. So better targeting kind of is a result of more advertising I think.

Jeff Zelaya: Yeah. So as advertising options expand and we are able to focus better in on our demographic, our target, there’s just so much more – so many possibilities open up and especially to make advertising, native advertising really powerful.

End of Transcript

The post Lisa Fugere, Content Marketing Manager at Radius appeared first on B2B Marketing Leaders Podcast.