How to Build a Powerful B2B Content Moat

Success in B2B content marketing (or marketing in general) comes from a deep understanding of customer needs, goals, pain points, and buying triggers rather than trying to emulate larger companies. How can B2B content marketers be more strategic and have success with limited resources? What approach can they use that will work consistently over time?

That’s why we’re talking to conversion content marketing expert and B2B copywriter Jessica Malnik (Founder, JM Content Group) about how marketers can build a content moat that creates lasting results for B2B brands. During our conversation, Jessica talked about the importance of the content moat framework and why she thinks the current B2B content marketing playbook is broken. She also highlighted the pitfalls that B2B content marketers should avoid, what the content moat consists of, and how content marketers can use AI ethically.

https://youtu.be/NBTuqNj8708

Topics discussed in episode

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• [1:45] Why the current B2B content marketing playbook is broken
  
• [4:15] Why the “Content moat framework” is important
  
• [6:10] How to not run out of ideas for writing content
  
• [7:23] Some pitfalls to avoid:
  
  • 
    
  • Focusing too much on volume
    
  • Using the “Spray and pray” approach 
    
  • Not using content positioning
    
  • Hiring junior content marketers who rely on Googling instead of interviewing internal and external stakeholders
    
  
  
  
• [11:28] How to not drown in research while building the right strategy
  
• [15:57] How to handle pushback on research and strategy for content marketing
  
• [18:56] When content marketing is not the right strategy
  
• [20:11] The 3 components of the “Content moat framework”: Insights, Community, Content Efficiency
  
• [21:45] What ‘community’ means in the context of the content marketing framework
  
• [23:56] Jessica’s take on using AI ethically for content
  
• [29:44] Actionable tips:
  
  • 
    
  • Do content positioning
    
  • AI is a tool, so start using it
    
  • Don’t compete on volume
    
  
  
  

Companies and links mentioned

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• Jessica Malnik on LinkedIn 
  
• Jessica Malnik website 
  
• Claude 
  
• ChatGPT 
  
• Andy Crestodina at Orbit Media 
  
• Marketing AI institute 
  

SPEAKERS

Jessica Malnik, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp  00:01

Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on the Mission, and I’m your host Christian Klepp. Today I’m going to be talking to Jessica Malnik. She’s the founder and chief conversion content marketer at the JM content group. She works with B2B SaaS and professional service firms to build a marketing moat that compounds over time via her signature content moat framework. She’s also been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Next Web, Wynter, Social Media Examiner, SEMrush, HubSpot, SX, SW and MSN UK, among others. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. Okay, so here we are. Jessica Malnik, welcome to the show.

Jessica Malnik  00:45

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me, Christian.

Christian Klepp  00:47

Great to have you on. And you know, I really enjoyed the previous conversation that we had, and that really told me, like, Oh, wow. Okay, this is gonna be this conversation is gonna be dynamite. So no pressure, but let’s dive in to today’s topic, because it’s so pertinent for B2B content marketers out there. And let me see if I phrase this the right way, but like you’ve been on your own professional mission all this time, right with B2B SaaS and professional firms, and that mission is around how to build a content moat that creates lasting results for B2B brands. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them. Okay. So question number one is, why do you believe that your framework is so important? And number two is, why do you think that the current B2B content marketing playbook is broken?

Jessica Malnik  01:45

Yeah, okay, I’m gonna start with the second question. These are excellent questions right away, Christian, but the first one is, I think a I feel like everyone always says, Hey, there’s a current playbook. I’m like, actually, I don’t actually think there was ever a playbook. And if you were trying to listen to, quote, unquote, a playbook, just by its definition, if you’re just trying to repeat what’s already been done, you’re probably 9.5 out of 10 times going to get worse results, or more mediocre results, than if you’re trying to actually understand, let’s just say, the playbook of your customers. What are your customers care about? What are their goals? What are their pain points? What are kind of the buying triggers? What are the emotions behind it? Create your strategy based on all of that. Don’t create it off of what your competitors doing, or some quote, unquote playbook that you know, HubSpot used and grew, and they’re an amazing company, but like, for my own example, most of my clients are, like, early or mid stage companies. They don’t have the luxury of the size of the marketing team or the size of the marketing budget of HubSpot. If you try to replicate what HubSpot is doing, or monday.com is doing more recently with your budget, you’re just setting yourself up for failure, and instead, there’s just better ways to kind of go about getting the results that you need without having to look towards bigger companies that have just, quite frankly, just a larger brands, larger budgets and larger teams than you’re going to have. Why do you want to try to compete with someone with 100 person marketing team, when you have a team of five,

Christian Klepp  03:23

I love that answer. And I think it reminds me of something that I saw on LinkedIn. It might have been like two years ago now, where people are always talking about, I want to be like Gary Vaynerchuk, or one of those types of people, right? And, and the one thing about that is like, okay, it’s like you said, if you think that you can get to that Gary Vaynerchuk level within such a short time with very limited resources, then you’re setting yourself up for failure. I mean, the one thing that a lot of these guys don’t think about is that, yes, Gary Vaynerchuk is famous and he’s popular and he’s wildly successful. He also happens to have this massive team behind him that’s doing all of this work, right? And I believe that was your point. But let’s go back to the first question. Why do you believe that this content moat framework is so important?

Jessica Malnik  04:15

Yeah, I feel like time and time again, and like, my background, like originally came from the journalism world, very quickly, kind of fell into social media marketing, which is my foray into content marketing, and then copywriting as well. And really, like, started to hone in the fundamentals of marketing and fundamentals of copywriting. But like, the reason why, I think kind of, and then I’ve honed this framework over the last five years working very closely of a bunch of different clients. I think the reason why it works is because A, you’re no longer having to compete on volume, and you’re now just kind of competing much more about you know. Do we know, understand our customers? Do we understand our audience and figuring out ways to, like, you know, do more with less, which is a big theme now across the board. And also being super consistent and just super disciplined about building out evergreen assets that are going to work for you today, tomorrow and even two years from now. Let’s figure out the assets are going to work as hard as you do. And instead of what a lot of teams do, which is you publish it once, and then it just collects digital dust and it’s never really working for you. I kind of say what’s the opposite of that? You don’t necessarily need as much volume at this point. You don’t have to play the game of publishing once a day, or even, you know, two or three times a week. You can publish way less and have a much bigger impact.

Christian Klepp  05:38

That’s a really good point. And I think it also goes back to something that I experienced with a client like years ago. And I’m not sure what your experience is, and I’d love to get your thoughts on it, but I’ve worked with some teams that don’t do this kind of work upfront, that you’re referring to right, this kind of framework, this kind of planning and research and strategy, and what tends to happen, eight times out of 10 is they run out of ideas. They run out of things to write about, right? What’s your experience been?

Jessica Malnik  06:10

That’s an interesting perspective. I always kind of think if you’re running out of ideas of what to write about that generate, or what to produce content about, whether it’s audio, video, text, and I just don’t think there’s a very large margin. White text is still probably the most important asset, and should be the foundation that I could maybe get into. But I think, like, if you’re running out of ideas, it just tells me you’re not talking to enough customers, and you don’t understand your audience well enough. Generally speaking, that’s like, if ever I’m thinking I don’t know what to write about, I’m like, Okay, well, I just need to go interview a couple customers, maybe do a test case study or two, or talk, listen to sales calls, listen to support girls. Every single time I do that, I will come up with a list of 10, 15, 50 new ideas to write about. Whereas, you know, and that’s also a way to just make sure that you’re creating content that’s going to have a much higher chance of resonating versus, you know, just using the same tools that everyone else uses.

Christian Klepp  07:05

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. I’m gonna move us on to the next question. Okay, we’ve highlighted some of these, like common mistakes and what have you. But what are on this topic of building that content moat? What are some of these pitfalls that B2B content marketers need to avoid, and what should they be doing instead?

Jessica Malnik  07:23

Yeah, I feel like one of the bigger pitfalls is just focusing too much on output or volume. It’s easy to do because, you know, hey, if you need to measure something, and measuring for content marketing is hard, there’s definitely things you can be doing. And I definitely lean much more heavily towards okay. What are things that are actually going to help build up more qualified leads, either through a system conversions or straight up from that content being kind of that last source. But yeah, so quality of, you know, basically just doing too much quantity is a major pitfall. Another one is basically like spreading and praying and getting to the point where you’re like, hey, like, we don’t really know, so we’re just gonna post a whole bunch of things out there. And I feel like the biggest one in my experience is like content positioning. I think it’s probably the most underrated aspect of content marketing in general. Like we always talk about brand positioning, we talked about messaging, but each individual asset you create, whether it’s a social post, an email, a case study, a long form piece of content, a white paper, or whatever it should be, like you should have positioning there as well, and that’s how you can differentiate your own brand. So like, if you’re writing about this topic, it should feel like it’s from your brand and not be something that could be on your competitor’s website and will feel exact same. And I think a lot of brands, if they’re really honest with themselves, are just creating 10x copycat content. And what really, really, really resonates is like actually thinking, doing the hard work up front of figuring out, what are their content positioning, what is their point of view, and how can we make sure that, like, it’s very clear why we’re talking about this topic.

Christian Klepp  09:00

Yeah, exactly, yeah. In terms of the copycat content, I do agree with that. I mean, you tend to see a lot of like that, for lack of a better description, vanilla content out there. A part of that may be AI, and we’re going to touch that in a second. I think the other part, unless I’m completely off, is they just don’t do enough research so they just see what the competitors are doing, and they try to come up with a slightly different version of it, and then they just pepper it with some little like elements of differentiation. But it’s not really that differentiated, is it? Like…

Jessica Malnik  09:35

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like another really big issue of that is, and this is no fault to the people on the team who are doing this, because I feel like this is very common, and I’ve been guilty of this as well, particularly early on in my content marketing career, is you hire a junior person, a junior content marketing manager who’s in their first role, maybe you have a couple of very green freelance writers who don’t know the industry very well, so they’re relying on having to mostly Google their way around. And that can work out okay, if you have a 101 level content, but if you’re trying to reach out to people who like, really understand their topics like you can’t…. you’re kind of setting up your team to fail. If you’re just trying to Google your way around how to like write about that topic. You really need to lean into interviews, internal, external, you know, to make sure that you’re actually writing things that are going to resonate. Because yeah, and that just does not work as well in my experience, when it comes to thinking besides 101 level content.

Christian Klepp  10:39

Absolutely, absolutely, moving on to the next topic, which is about market research and strategy, which are so important, especially if you want to build up that moat, and you want to build a… you want to come up and develop this plan for content that will hopefully give you enough ideas of what to write about for the for the next couple of months, or perhaps even for the whole year, my question is, because it can get really overwhelming, right? Because, I mean, we’ve all been through that exercise where you just get, you just drown in this incredible amount of research. What are some tips that you can give marketers out there to help filter through all that overwhelm, like, what are some of the things that they should be focusing on in their research? So they go in there with an intention, and from there they can build the right strategy.

Jessica Malnik  11:28

Yeah, I love it. I actually helped, actually produced a small course for thinking around this very idea. So look at that. There are some, there’s some good tips in there. However, some other things I always like to emphasize there is, like, you can drown in research. You can drown in creating the perfect strategy. There’s no such thing as a perfect strategy. The best strategy is the one that you can consistently and I would try to fit for with all my clients. I want to make sure you have a strategy within one to two months. It’s not going to be perfect, but I want to have it be 80 to 90% of the way there, and then, like you know, from there, we are going to learn so much by starting to ship on that. And then, you know, we can execute it. We can change. We can make tweaks every single month. Or I used to recommend every quarter, let’s tweak it. This worked well, let’s double down on this. This maybe didn’t go so well, okay, let’s not do that this quarter. So that’s one of the ways to just make sure that you are constantly don’t get into what I call procraster planning, where you spend all of your time on research and all of your time building out the perfect strategy, and then you never trip anything. And guess what? You’re not going to have results if you don’t trip anything at all. So that’s part of it is just knowing what good enough looks like, and get it that to 80-90% of the way there. That’s how you can actually start to get results. And then this head taking, and I have to think in terms of experiments, and just in general.

Christian Klepp  12:52

It almost sounds to a certain degree like SaaS, where you’re not supposed to wait for the perfect product until you launch it, you build it, you launch it, you collect the feedback, right? Or you start with the beta testing, then you get the feedback, and you iterate, and you put the next version out, and so on and so forth. And I’d imagine, if I understood what you were saying correctly in this content mode, it’s a similar approach to a certain extent.

Jessica Malnik  13:22

Yeah, absolutely. It’s about, you know, building on every green assets that work harder for you. But it’s also about just thinking in terms of experiments. And I feel like one of my own, maybe insecurities, is I don’t necessarily, you know, I can’t be like, Hey, here’s this web, here’s the strategy I built over, you know, you know, three months, and suddenly it led to 100x results. More often than not. It’s like, Hey, these are results that are compounding over time. They start off slow, but hey, fast forward a year or two years or three from now, now you’re starting to look at those 50x returns, but it’s, you know, not immediate. Like, it’s much more about like, you know, thoughtful, methodical, building out something that’s going to be consistent and give you everlasting success, instead of chasing virality, which I feel like a lot of marketing, is like chasing the viral effects. And I’m the first one to say I’m probably not the right person to work with if you just want to create viral content. I’ve certainly created some of it, sometimes directly and sometimes by accident, but like, it’s much more about, I feel like the results that actually last, and when you’re getting the right types of qualified leads, or when you’re really focusing in on consistency, and you’re, you know, looking to get 1x 2x 3x better every single month.

Christian Klepp  14:34

You made me giggle there for a second, because, um, you reminded me of a client I was working with a couple of years ago, and one of the things that they mentioned in their brief was we want to launch a viral video. And I said, with all due respect, you don’t get to decide if the video is viral or not, right? And they kept insisting on it. And I. I think I can say with great confidence that we turned that business down. We told them that we’re afraid we can’t help you with this, and we never looked back, and we don’t regret it, because, sure enough, they gave it to somebody else, and it actually it didn’t work. But I wanted to go back to what you’ve been saying in the past couple of minutes, and I totally agree with this approach, but I’m sure you’ve dealt with this before, right? How do you deal with clients that push back on the whole notion of, okay, why are you spending so much time on all this research and strategy, we don’t need it. Just jump straight into the execution and just produce the content, because we need to show results. We need to justify the ROI. And I’m sure you’ve heard that at some point, right? How do you how do you deal with that kind of pushback?

Jessica Malnik  15:57

Yeah, I mean, that’s such a great question, and definitely something I get all the time. It’s definitely a push and pull. And I’m going to give the classic marketing answer. It depends on how you approach it, I would say, in my experience, how I tend to approach it… And I try to figure out, okay, what is the minimal viable amount of research that I’m going to need to feel confident that I can execute at a reasonably high level, it won’t be perfection. And then I tried at the onset with, Okay, what’s the underlying goal here? Like, what are they looking for? and what do they expect in terms of timeline? And I try to kind of meet somewhere in that middle when it comes to all of this, and the other side of that, as well as it’s I also kind of sussed out if they’re looking for, like, absolutely immediate results, and they need content marketing to be producing results in a week or two. You laugh. But that, you know, occasional I see them and actually, you know, I don’t have content marketing, and especially not SEO, even though SEO and content marketing should 100% be different, you don’t. They’re not one in the same. I will die on that hill. But if you’re looking for results from content marketing within two or three weeks, maybe not the right strategy for you, it does, you know, you can certainly get really good momentum within, you know, a quarter. But if you need something like immediately, and you’re not willing to invest a huge amount of budget and a huge amount of research, there are other strategies, like cold email, cold calling and/or paid ads that will get your results faster. Granted, they all have pretty big pros and cons, but so does content marketing, right? I don’t know, did I answer your question?

Christian Klepp  17:37

You did. You did. You absolutely did. And I just like to add also, on the topic of paid ads, or paid paid anything to be for that matter, the moment you stop paying, what happens? Yeah, right.

Jessica Malnik  17:54

I count my clients all that all the time. When it comes to paid ads in general, it’s like, hey, it’s the minute you stop or the minute you saturate your market, you’re now back to square one, and you have no moat to stand on.

Christian Klepp  18:05

Yup. And I think it goes back to something you said earlier, right? Like, and this is the importance of all this research and planning, because that will also help to determine whether this is the right solution for them or not. Because it’s one thing for the client to tell you, Hey, Jessica, we need a white paper, or we need a video, or we need a new website. And then sometimes this, I call it like the diagnostics or the investigation, right? The diagnostics and the investigation will help you to determine whether that’s actually the right solution for them or not, because it might not be right. Maybe having a new website won’t solve their problem. To your point, there might be an issue with the product, right? And if there’s an issue with the product, no amount of marketing, whether it’s content or anything else, is gonna solve that.

Jessica Malnik  18:56

You bring up such a good point. And one of the biggest reasons I will DQ a prospect from working with me and or I will, is if I don’t think they have product market fit, or any path to getting to product market fit, like if you’re so early stage that you have less than five customers, please do not invest your time on content marketing unless you have a massive, massive, massive amount of capital at your disposal right now. You are wasting so much energy and so much time creating content that is probably going to change and not be relevant even a month from now, let alone a year from now. So like, I feel like, in that perspective, like you should not be doing, I feel like you shouldn’t… There are 99% of the times if you don’t, if you’re pre-revenue or you have fewer than 10 customers, content marketing isn’t the right strategy. SEO isn’t the right strategy at that point. You need sales, and you need to get enough customers to be able to find patterns.

Christian Klepp  19:54

Yep, yep. That’s absolutely right. That’s absolutely right. Break it down for us. Okay? What are these essential components that B2B marketers need to build this content moat that you are referring to? So what should they be doing differently?

Jessica Malnik  20:11

Awesome. I feel like there are three main components to my content marketing framework. I hone this over about five years of working with a lot of different brands. I feel like most brands do intuitively one of those things well, maybe two, but you need all three to be working in lockstep to be able to create a content moat that’s going to compound in every single month, your assets are going to be working just as hard, if not harder, for you than you’re working. So insights is kind of the first key, and think about as messaging and positioning of each at the strategy level and at each individual asset level, you also you also have community, which I am kind of basically calling 10x distribution. How are we making sure that our content is going to the right audience in the right channels at the right time, and then content efficiency, which is, how can we make sure that each asset that we’re producing works harder for us? So that could be, you know, updating it, you know, every couple of… anytime we have a product change, anytime we have a brand change, anytime SEO changes a little bit. It could also be newsletters. It could be repurposing it for individual social channels, repurposing it for webinars, guest posts, making each individual asset you create have multiple layers to it, so you’re not just producing it once, sharing it on social media and saying you’re done with it. So to chime in again, kind of my content moat framework has three components, insights, community and content efficiency.

Christian Klepp  21:34

Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s go to the community piece for a second here. Can you elaborate on that a little bit further, like what, what needs to be… Defined community.

Jessica Malnik  21:45

So, I mean, kind of my background is at the introduction of community and content marketing. Um, in the perfect world, you would have a branded community of your own. But there are 1,000,001 reasons why that’s generally not the recommended strategy for most of the clients I work with. I don’t recommend that. Um, there’s other ways to go about it, the way what, what I’m really thinking about when it comes to community, when it’s not your own, is, who are the super connectors and or the major influencers in our space, in our niche, you know, where do people turn to for information? What social media channels are they on? What are they searching for on Google? You know, what other resources are out there? Are there subreddits on this? That’s probably one of my favorite, favorite, favorite voices to normally get ideas, but to also understand how our customers are actually talking about this particular pain point, figuring out all of those places, and then building out strategies to make sure that our content and our marketing assets are getting into the right people and also the right platforms.

Christian Klepp  22:50

So if they don’t have to, they don’t necessarily have to create their own community. They can, so called like, for lack of a better word, piggyback off somebody else’s community, or perhaps even use a platform like LinkedIn?

Jessica Malnik  23:04

Absolutely, that’s actually what I usually recommend, is figuring out who are the influencers, and how do we start to get on their radar and get them to, you know, be bought into what we’re doing and even organically sharing it or doing partnerships. There’s so many different ways you can go about it, and it’s really going to vary based off of your industry, based off of where you are as a product, how much you want to do in terms of sweat equity versus pay to play. There’s so many different ways to go about it, but it’s really just about, you know, figuring out, how do we make sure that our content is going to the right people at the right time.

Christian Klepp  23:36

Absolutely, absolutely okay. Jessica, here comes the question, because I know we spoke at length about this in the previous conversation, but what are your thoughts on using or leveraging AI in B2B content marketing? So how can B2B content marketers use AI ethically in their work?

Jessica Malnik  23:56

Man, you had thrown the word ethical in there as well… you are using all the buzzwords. I feel like, in general, if you’re… AI is a tool. AI is a tool, just like any other marketing tool you might be using. It’s not a crutch. I think that is probably one of the two ways that people go wrong with AI. They think it’s like some magic apple, and they just tell it one little, quick little round and suddenly you’re going to get everything you need. Yeah, it doesn’t work that way. But notice, there’s no such thing as a magic tool. The other one is people who are just ignoring it and putting their head in the sand, usually out of fear. And in that case, cool, that’s kind of a self-fulfilling prosperity, in my opinion. If you are scared of it, then of course, it actually might replace you. I think on its own, AI is not going to replace a lot of marketers. I think as long as you’re figuring out ways to use it in your tools and in your own workflows, systems and processes. But like, yeah, so my own approach to AI is, okay, how can I use it and things that I’m already doing to either be more efficient? To help me level up my thinking. Help me do a little bit more with less. There’s so many different ways to do that in that scenario. So like, while I think AI writing the perfect blog post is not going to… realistically just doesn’t work, I’m going to quote something that I learned from Andy Crestodina from Orbit Media. He kind of said that AI is average ideas. I freaking love that, because if you’re just doing lazy one shot prompts, yeah, it’s gonna just spit out ideas that everyone else already has. It’s gonna tell you, because it’s trained off of what’s already been out there. So, like, if you’re using it to think for you, that is a massive mistake, in my opinion, and how you use it as a crutch. However, if you’re using in my case where it’s like, I go in, I’ll kind of do the thinking of positioning, point of view, depth, kind of have all those, like, rambling thoughts. I’ll tell that to AI, and I’ll put like, three, four or five paragraphs, and be like, hey, help me organize this rambling and something that feels coherent. Yeah, Claude and ChatGPT are great at that, but I’m also doing the thinking up front. How often that times you’ll be like, Okay, here’s this idea. Where are my logic gaps, and they have made me kind of level up my thinking. That’s one of my favorite ways right now to use AI. Another way that I really like to use it as well is for, like, the all of those really tedious things that, quite frankly, I didn’t ever enjoy in the very hard place, like creating featured images for, like the little tiny thumbnails on, you know, a blog post, or helping me level up. And I have to do like an SEO audit, and I need to write 500 meta descriptions. Guess what? I write two of them now, and I have aI help me spit out an 80% version, and then I just go in and edit it. Yeah. It saves a ton of time. There things like that.

Christian Klepp  26:50

Yeah, no, absolutely no. I agree. I mean, I’ve shared my thoughts with you in the previous conversation, and I truly believe it’s like that typical marketing answer, as you said, right? Like it depends, I do believe that there’s a place in time to use AI and to a certain degree, yes, absolutely use the tools to help make your work more efficient, perhaps to a certain degree, even faster. But I caution. Here’s my word of caution. Make your work fast. Make your work faster. Doesn’t mean cheat the system, if you know what I mean, right? It doesn’t mean, okay, get ChatGPT to write something for you. Because the other big problem that I have with some of these platforms, and I know there’s people out there that disagree with this, but what about the issue of plagiarism and writer integrity, right? And I know some people probably don’t care about that, because they’re pumping out all this content, and then it becomes a volume business rather than a quality business, to a previous point earlier on in this conversation, right? So I’m not saying that we should completely throw AI out the window, and that’s why I say we need to be able to use it ethically, right?

Jessica Malnik  28:09

Yeah, that was such a really great point. I would also just say in general, in terms of another thing that I think AI is great at, is I’m a pretty technical marketer, but I’m not like writing code every day. However, I’ve now been able to troubleshoot things in it with ChatGPT in particular that like, I used to have to, like, bug a developer for, and now I can just kind of ask ChatGPT and be like, walk me through how to fix this weird bug in WordPress or another one that’s good at caveat here, also from an ethical standpoint, it’s really, really good at data analysis. Just make sure you strip out any sensitive information. The amount of times I’ve had it like, be like, Hey, here’s a GA4 report, and I’ll do be like, help me find patterns here. It is so much faster than what I used to do myself, just in, you know, several hours in spreadsheets in Excel. Now I can kind of cut that down to like an hour or two, but again, caveat with any time, especially if you’re using a tool that’s not proprietary, just make sure you’re stripping out any like sensitive customer information. Don’t get yourself into like, hot water with GDPR, or like, yeah, in particular.

Christian Klepp  29:22

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so we get to the part in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and you’ve given us plenty already, but if somebody was listening to this conversation and you wanted them to walk away with three to five things around the topic of building this content moat that they can implement right away. What would they be?

Jessica Malnik  29:44

Great question. The first one is, content positioning is super underrated. The more you can do, the more work you can do up front to query, communicate, not only your own strategy, but each individual asset and like, why we’re writing about this, you know, what’s our unique point of view? So what is something… It doesn’t you can’t believe it original, because I don’t think there’s ever anything that’s 100% original. But like, what 10% of new things are we adding to this, our new our own experiences are we adding so we’re not just creating 10x copy content that you can do on AI now. Another point is, AI is a tool, not a crutch. If you’re not already using it, please start. Like you don’t have to do much with it. Like you everyone has their own comfort level, but like you’re gonna get left behind if you’re not using the latest tools to at least help you so that at least understand what it can and can’t do. And there’s so many great resources out there now, pretty great, like companies like Paul, the guy who runs mike on and like the AI Marketing Institute, I think, don’t quote me on that, has just some amazing resources to kind of get you started with AI. That’s kind of my second point. And then my third point is, you don’t have to compete on volume. And please, please, please, don’t compete on volume if you’re a team of under five people and your marketing team, which is the vast majority of the companies I work with, you cannot try to out compete HubSpot if you don’t have HubSpot’s budget and team size and also just, quite frankly, their brand awareness, you might be able to get to that point later on, but don’t try to do that when you are a team of five.

Christian Klepp  31:20

Absolutely, absolutely, try not to be the next Uber or next Apple with a with a marketing team of three to five people, right? Absolutely.

Jessica Malnik  31:30

It sounds ridiculous, but I have that conversation in some capacity a lot.

Christian Klepp  31:35

No, I believe you. I certainly believe you. Okay, just a quick recap of the things that marketers need to do. So first of all is focus on its content positioning. Number two is leverage AI the right way, at least start using the tools. And the third one is, don’t compete on volume, right? Okay, fantastic. Okay, last three questions before I let you go. So here comes the first one, a status quo in your area of expertise that you passionately disagree with, and why.

Jessica Malnik  32:13

The fastest path to mediocre marketing is editing by committee. I think we may have talked about this a little bit offline, but that is…

Christian Klepp  32:22

Not a little bit like a lot.

Jessica Malnik  32:24

The fastest path to just getting a very mediocre, watered down marketing when you have four more stakeholders all giving their direct opinions in their two cents. I can walk through like super tactically and how to like address who should be giving feedback and who shouldn’t, but that might be a different conversation.

Christian Klepp  32:43

I totally agree with that, because I have had the unfortunate experience of having gone through a couple of projects where there was decision by committee, death by 1000 cuts. I mean, I can throw in every analogy. Too many cooks in the kitchen, and it just gets watered down. Everybody throws in their opinions. Everybody suddenly becomes a copywriter, or a conversion copywriter, and then at the end of it, more often than not, at least in my experience, what I found jokes aside is that if you have so many people getting involved with the editing of the content. What then happens is the content becomes more inside out, rather than outside in. Right?

Jessica Malnik  33:31

You are so incredibly right, like the voice of the customer gets completely lost in my experience as well.

Christian Klepp  33:37

Yeah, because especially if you get the people involved that are more on the technical side. So they may or may not have that, you know, they may or may not be customer facing, but even if they are, they’re very focused on the operational aspect of the business, right? And we’re not blaming them for that. That’s just the nature of the beast, right? That that said, That doesn’t help for the cost for content marketing, right? Okay, and here comes the bonus question, if you had the opportunity to learn a new skill, what would that skill be? And why.

Jessica Malnik  34:10

That is a good question. I would probably say, like, the one that I’ve kind of dabbled in a little bit, and if I had, you know, completely, like, you know, unlimited amounts of time it would be learning how to code, like, fully, oh, I can read a decent amount of like code. I can, like, make some small fixes on, like, a WordPress or a web flow site. But I feel like if I could learn how to code enough to, like, build my own, like, SaaS product, that would be interesting. I feel like there’s definitely some ways around that now, with no code and low code tools out there that are so much better, and even ChatGPT and Claude can help out of town with this as well. But yeah, feeling having the foundational like things like what computer science is and how to code is probably that one skill. Yeah.

Christian Klepp  35:00

Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Um, I correct me if I’m wrong, but I think isn’t that Wix is, like, unique selling proposition that you can build websites without coding. So they have this whole, like, drag and drop spiel. Might be them.

Jessica Malnik  35:14

I don’t know. I maybe, like I in general, I probably wouldn’t recommend using Wix if you want SEO.

Christian Klepp  35:20

True. True.

Jessica Malnik  35:23

But yeah. I mean, I think there’s definitely a lot of ways there’s, I mean, I there’s a lot you can do. You don’t need to know how to code, but I feel like, for myself, like, you know, I if I one day I want to, like, launch my own SaaS product, like, knowing how to code, like, the right way, I feel like would be, yeah, yeah, no. I mean, I can certainly, like, you know, tackle me around it, around it with, like, no code and low code tools that I do know how to use, but yeah.

Christian Klepp  35:48

Yeah, yeah, no, without a doubt, without a doubt. Fantastic. Jessica, this has been such a great conversation as expected. So thanks so much for coming on and for sharing your experience and expertise with the listeners. So please, a quick intro to yourself and how folks out there can get in touch with you.

Jessica Malnik  36:04

Yeah, thank you again for having me Christian. So a very quick intro about myself. I am Jessica Malnik. I am a conversion content marketer and copywriter who works mostly with kind of B2B SaaS and professional service firms. I like to say I’m kind of a solopreneur with a tiny team. Fancy way of saying you don’t have account managers, you don’t have separate strategies. I am that own thing, but I do have a small team that helps me out with research and administrative processes. And you can find me pretty much on my website, jessicamalnik.com, I also have my own podcast and newsletter over at the remoteworktribe.com and I’m on LinkedIn. I’m still gonna call it Twitter, even though I know it’s X, and threads as well. It’s kind of my three main platforms.

Christian Klepp  36:48

Yes, it’s just one of those rebrands, probably a story for another time, or probably even another podcast interview, but it’s just one of those rebrands that I still can’t wrap my head around, and it’s still so hard for a lot of people to say X, right?

Jessica Malnik  37:04

I know I should be saying X, but it’s still gonna feel like Twitter to me.

Christian Klepp  37:08

Absolutely, absolutely so Jessica, once again, thanks so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon.

Jessica Malnik  37:14

Awesome. Thank you again.