Audit Content + Identify Gaps
We continue our deep-dive into the essentials of ad campaign planning and strategy.
In this episode, James and Andy tackle the crucial step of conducting a paid media content audit.
Learn how to audit your existing content, identify gaps, and ensure that your content fits your sales motion while being optimized for the right channels.
What You’ll Learn:
1) How to keep your content clear, concise, and tailored for specific audiences.
2) Tips on categorizing your content to address pain points, handle objections, provide product education, and showcase social proof.
3) Ways to balance different content types so they hit home with your target audience, whether it’s the champion or other key decision-makers.
4) Handy tips for adapting and repurposing content across various channels to get the most out of it.
Podcast Transcript
What’s up everybody. Welcome back for another episode of digital banter live. Continuing on our six part series around ad campaign design and planning today, we’re moving beyond kind of the two foundational pillars that we talked about in previous episodes, goal setting and audience definition and segmentation and creation and moving on to a third pillar of foundation.
One that is in my opinion, easily overlooked. Uh, by many businesses out there and that’s around the content and creative associated with the campaigns. Now, why do we consider this a foundational pillar? Because there’s misnomers out there. Historically, [00:01:00] when we look at paid media or PPC or whatever you call it these days around, you know, the levers that you can pull that you can do, and there’s a lot of oversight given to the fact that your campaigns are only as good as the pieces that you’re putting into that.
And the content and creative that goes into it is one of the largest pieces out there, especially in B2B. This is the most fun thing that we’re probably going to get to talk about. I mean, I feel like everybody looks at the paid media guys as technical lever pullers, because we used to be associated with SEO people and we’re trying to move away from that association.
So that’s where we have the opportunity to get a lot more creative. So today. We’re going to tell you guys what your content actually needs to look like without telling you it sucks. But let’s kick this off by creating some conflict in our typical story arc and kind of address kind of the elephant [00:02:00] in the room when it comes to content in the B2B world, because in our 15 plus years of digital, we’ve seen a lot and a lot of things continue to happen when it comes to making common mistakes.
And. I don’t know, James, do you want to talk a little bit about what those common mistakes are and I’ll jump in here a little bit to add my flavor. So first thing first is when you’re building out a content strategy. As a whole. So, right. You have content that’s going to be distributed on organic social through email.
Your sales team is going to be creating content. Your, I mean, all of the, there are hundreds of different distribution channels. Right. And I think that there’s this, there’s this mentality of. All right. Paid media is an afterthought, right? So we’ve invested all this money in content creation, and now we just want to use paid ads to get in front of the right people, [00:03:00] but the, that content isn’t built to be distributed by paid define content quick, because I think there’s going to be people on this thing on this recording, whether they’re listening to it or watching it live, that are going to automatically assume what content is.
So let’s write the ship as far as defining what it is, you know, like eBooks and white papers and downloadable assets. No, I, I mean, this is, this gets content is, uh, it’s funny. Content is one of those words that I actually hate because content. Just sounds like, honestly, the first problem that we have that you’re just like creating content for the sake of like creating content.
Right? Like you’re, you feel like you need to have information on your products. You come up with a bunch of stuff and content. The word itself just sounds not like, not that it serves the [00:04:00] purpose that you want it to, right? Like, Um, I don’t know how to surround the Merriam Webster version and definition.
What’s the James Kravitz definition of content, James Kravitz. I mean, it is, uh, anything that is delivering your message to your audience. I mean, it can be in our case, we’re talking more about like ad creative landing pages and, uh, I mean, content that is going to bring value to your audience. So, I mean, it could be anything from.
The videos that you’re running to, I mean, we, the, I joked about downloadable content, like, yeah, that is still, still a thing is still being used and it still works. Um, so, uh, the content definition thing is definitely very vague, but we’re, we’re talking about creative. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about creative and actual physical content.
What’s the difference? Do you tell me the difference then if you’re Mr. Definition guy? Okay. So [00:05:00] creative is the outward facing way in which you’re distributing the content and the message. So you could take that as visual design, video. Audio, but the actual content that’s being consumed goes beyond that, right?
It’s inclusive, not just that, but also back to kind of your initial joke. It is inclusive of the eBooks, the white papers, the, the surveys, the studies, it’s also the infographics, the snackables that are creating out of it. So it is the merging of all that. I think the main gist here that I just want to set the stage rather than going down a rabbit hole.
With is when we talk about content, we’re talking about the entire ecosystem of messaging and positioning and the outward facing of, to your point, that message that you want to have in front of the individual, whether it’s an actual physical piece of content, like an ebook or a white paper, or the creative that you’re putting into market.
All right. So I’m going to rattle through the rest of these common mistakes here. Um, now that we’ve debated on what content is [00:06:00] for a little bit, I mean, so first one, creating content for the sake of creating content, creating content without thinking about how it’s going to be distributed without thinking about what audience it’s for without any thought, right?
It’s a, Hey, we need this thing that sales needed. Like, how can we adapt this and use it for paid ads? Like, how Strategy just generally doesn’t work like that. Um, number two, making yourself the focal point rather than your audience. Uh, we will talk about like the different content themes and things that should go into a content strategy product is definitely one of them.
Product cannot be the only thing that you are focused on. Um, Third one I mentioned before content not being built specifically for the channel. Uh, there definitely can be some debates about this, uh, when it comes to like organic content, but when you are running advertising, like there are specific ad types that work better for [00:07:00] specific channels.
Um, You know, like on the organic side, like, yes, you can take your tick tock strategy, apply it to Instagram stories. And if you’re in the B2B space, like that stuff actually does work really well on LinkedIn. Uh, if you’re doing a short form video advertising, like the specs are going to be completely different for YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, um, and you need to build and design your ads to do that.
Because when you’re paying for the space, you need to make as much, make the most out of what you’re doing. Those impressions that you can, um, and when you’re just kind of repurpose something across all the platforms, you can’t do that. I mean, an extreme example is you can’t run gated content successfully on.
Facebook ads. If your audience is on Facebook ads, that requires something completely different, completely different ad types, completely different visuals, completely different tone, et cetera. So I want to jump in here before you get to the next two, which will last to the thing that stands out to me [00:08:00] and what you’re talking about is particularly when you’re talking about like organic and the comparisons against that with paid, the thing that gets overseen or lost in all of this jumble is with paid, you control who sees that message.
Organic, you don’t, and there’s varying degrees of intent and behaviors and things like that. Particularly when you think about like organic search versus paid search. Um, but the control that you have over paid means that you can be more deliberate about the content that you are putting into market. And that is the one thing when we talk about those first three common mistakes that is easily overlooked.
Sorry, James. Good. No, you’re good. Um, all right. So this one, we talked quite a bit about last week, but promoting content that doesn’t fit your sales motion. Uh, again, if you are pushing a bunch of created. Of gated content. And that’s not supporting like how your sales team operates. Like they’re not doing anything with those leads.
You’re wasting [00:09:00] your time. Um, if you don’t have any nurturing program set up, if you don’t have, uh, I mean, there’s so many different things that we could get into there, but that’s a great example of like it not fitting your sales motion. And then the number one thing, Ian, you can bring up the slide example for this one.
And we’ll talk through some of these is lack of clarity. Um, I mean, You are trying to explain like what your product does to an audience and how it benefits them. Uh, you need to explain that, right? People aren’t inspired by the generic messaging that you’re using to turn on investors. Like it just doesn’t.
You need to have clear, concise messaging that is specific to your audience. Um, I mean, here’s like three examples here of some messaging that is like extremely unclear. You should be able when reading an ad, you should understand who it’s for, what they’re trying to promote [00:10:00] and like, what is the value that’s coming out of it?
The resilient manufacturer ebook. I mean, if I work in the manufacturing space, like resilient to what, like resilient, like, what am I trying to learn from this? Who knows? but you can use agility and adaptability to do it, to strengthen that resilience. Yeah. So great. Like that, that means absolutely nothing to me.
It’s just different word salad for time and money. Right. Pretty much. Um, I mean, look at this next one. Like, what will your manufacturing business look like in 2023? Again, like so vague, like the, you’re, you’re taking an entire industry of manual, and I feel like the big problem is behind this, like the, the targeting that you can use for these ads can be so niche and you have such a generic message.
Like. There’s just this huge gap where you can have a very specific message for a very specific person. Like, what will your [00:11:00] manufacturing business look like in 2023? Like, okay, what type of manufacturing is it? Like textiles, is it metal? Is it like, again, you can go so much more granular there. Is it any big thing missing there?
AI, I can complain about this for days. Everything’s enabled by AI. I have it like, what does that actually mean? So clarity specific to an audience and the message you’re trying to deliver because you can target at a very niche level, which when we think about clarity, right, it comes back to identifying something that we talked about in episode one of the series, not just goals and target setting and alignment, but like defining what the purpose of advertising truly is.
So I’m going to go back to you, James Miriam Webster, and tell me what the definition and purpose of advertising is. I’ve got a slide for this one. So this is going to be a big, [00:12:00] all right. The purpose of advertising has a lot of different purposes, right? You just, cause I mean, we could go through the whole awareness, interest decision, action model, and how to influence people along the way, but there’s really two things that you are trying to do one, I’ll tell you this.
We’re not trying to create. Demand for something, I’ll kind of explain what demand generation is here because demand already exists in the market and it’s more around. Making them aware. So the first thing that you want to do is you want to make them want whatever you have. That’s really what the demand generation segment of any strategy is.
It’s about pairing the problems that people have and having them understand that there’s a solution, the solution, the problems that they have are the demand that’s in the market. You’re not, if you were actually [00:13:00] creating demand, you would be creating problems for people that you would then go solve. And that’s.
That’s not necessarily how it works. So step one is you want to make them want it. Step two is convincing them. They need it. This is everything that you’re doing to push them over, to make the decision to actually act and do something about the problems that they have. I mean, this is going to change depending on like what your sales cycle is and kind of how, how, what product you have.
But again, it’s two, two fold. You want to make them want the product you have. All of your messaging here is a lot more emotion based and then convincing them they need it. That’s a lot more like logical case study, social proof, that type of stuff. Okay. Once you argue though, that there is a level of demand being created on behalf of whatever you’re selling though, to resolve that problem.
[00:14:00] Creating demand. I mean, the, the, the demand already exists in the market though. Like, cause you, you would be creating problems if you are actually creating demand, demand is fueled by problems. Okay. So let me, let me say that a different way then, because I hear where you’re going with this then, um, you, instead of creating demand, you’re creating awareness and you’re creating awareness around the problems that already exist in the market.
But someone. On the buyer side of things may be aware of those problems or it’s kind of just subconscious and it hasn’t bubbled to the surface yet. Absolutely. All right. So you’re on the same page. Yeah. And that’s sort of like, I mean, that’s, so what you define there is also like the hardest piece of advertising is bringing somebody from unaware to aware and then you can kind of, the rest is, you know, Saying in front of them from there.
Yeah. And the biggest thing too, going back to that bell curve is to your [00:15:00] point, there’s demand that exists in the market and you can capture the demand that exists today. I don’t want to go down the whole framework rabbit wall on this one either. But the problem is with that, you only have a finite market to capture unless you’re creating a backfill of new customers and new desires and new problems solved.
That’s how you grow a business. That’s how you go from startup to IPO. That’s how you go from 1 million to a hundred million plus. Um, but how do we do that? Then James kind of going and continuing the conversation with the through line today around content with good content. That’s a good fit for paid media along that journey.
All right. I kind of rattled through these before, but there are. Three things to focus on when building out a content strategy for paid media. One clear and concise messaging. Don’t do the vague stuff. I gave the examples before. Maybe I should have thrown some good examples in there. If you have want good examples, reach out.
I’ll send them to you. [00:16:00] Um, number two speaks to a specific audience and not everyone. I mean, the, the great thing about paid media. Is like you said, you have the ability to be specific and niche with your targeting. So the content that you create can be specific and niche to your audience. Now, of course, like anything else, you have to weigh out how specific you get versus like the audience size and the impact of that audience.
Like, trust me, I’ve given the recommendation that we need to make things more broad before. Um, but you should spark specific, you know, you’ve, Spent a lot of time on those ICP persona decks and you have your audience segmentation and product marketing did a really good job with that stuff. Like you need to actually use it and create content that’s specific to those personas.
Hint, listen to episode two of the series. If you want to talk, if you want to listen more about audiences. Yeah. Uh, number three. Diverse ad formats that are designed specifically for the channel. Uh, video is not just video. [00:17:00] Like, the videos that work well on LinkedIn are different than the videos that work well on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
Um, You know, and I think that that’s where, I mean, we could, I mean, we should do like another episode where we dive like really deep into like what creatives work well on specific channels and give examples and stuff like that. But I think the, the main thing with any sort of paid media is like, you have to come at people from different angles because you don’t necessarily know the type of content that is going to resonate.
There are best practices for like. Each channel and we can talk about some of the ad formats that don’t necessarily work that they offer. Um, but even like, so there’s the actual content format. I’m calling it content content format itself. And then there are the different angles in which that content should come from.
So. Before you get to that though, I think one thing to point out that [00:18:00] just kind of was a spark in my mind is merging together those two last bullets around speaking to a specific audience and diversifying formats that are designed for the channel into a fourth bullet. And it’s. Diversity that’s designed for the audience.
And what I mean by that is people consume content in different manners, right? They have a finite attention span and those vary across your audience set. So diversity from a perspective of video versus audio versus written word, also diversity as relates to how frequent. They are on that platform and how targetable they are on that platform.
Great example there would be LinkedIn. And you brought this up on our last episode, James, about how understanding the consumption habits of your audience segment is going to dictate your media selection and your media channel plan. Well, if I’m not hanging out on LinkedIn, besides just hopping on here and there to check out status updates or [00:19:00] update my job status, I need to be given a reason to come onto that platform.
So when I say designing for the audience, we need to keep those consumption and behavior habits in the back of our mind and use ad types, like. Uh, and content that solicits a response and prompts them to use that platform a little bit more deliberately. Message ads is a great example there where you’re going to get a mobile notification on your phone about somebody sent me a message.
It kind of forces you to open that unless you’re going to have 500 unread messages. And the OCD in me thinks most people have that same level of attention that they don’t want to have those notifications on their phone. Pretty much. Not all of us, uh, spend our, all of our days on LinkedIn. Some of us, uh, just go there to job hop every three months or whatever people do these days.
So what are the angles that we need to be looking at from a content diversity perspective then James? All right, Ian, you can bring up our next [00:20:00] slide for this one. All right. So let me start with, there are definitely more angles that you can come at. Um, these are the four that we have found to be the most successful and kind of resonate with audiences the best.
And don’t worry, we gave you an opportunity to talk about your problem, your product. So the four different angles are the one that you should always start with is pain points. Um, now I think one of the things that. A lot of advertisers and marketers do is they want to map those pain points right back to our product right away.
Right. It’s like pain points product. Like that’s good. Like you’re going to have the opportunity to do that. But when you are bringing somebody from that unaware stage to aware, like you don’t have to jump into the product right away, so I kind of differentiate. Pain point content from product education content in the way [00:21:00] where content around people’s pain points should be one more emotional, and it should be something that offers value.
So in the product content, you’re kind of like when you start mapping pain points to product, like you start kind of taking away. Right away where, you know, some of the stuff at the top of the funnel, like you want to offer value, you know, I’ll give the example of like eBooks, webinars, white papers, this type of stuff, but it’s, you know, content that actually is going to make some in the B2B space that is going to make somebody better at their job.
Like, do you have different, um, I don’t know if I was to just take this playbook here and give it away, right? Like that’s, that’s the type of content that I am. Talking about because it brings, you’re basically giving value to that person right away. It’s a lot more memorable than just kind of blasting somebody with.
pain point product solution. [00:22:00] Um, and then when we talk about kind of the emotional state of the user, people buy an emotion, justify with logic. Like you can, you really want to lay into the emotional piece with this type of copy. The next three pieces are more around the justification. So I’ll talk about product education.
Then I’ve quoted this a lot of times at this point, but the number one reason why people choose not to move forward with a software product is because they don’t know how to use the product. It’s the fear of change. Um, so I’ll actually give a shout out right now. I, I am not sponsored. Apparently Clay doesn’t sponsor anybody, but like, um, And people are talking about it anyways, but clay has like this company clay right now, they have a system where they have a lot of people who are essentially creating templates within their software and like sharing those templates with people.
So it’s created this [00:23:00] very shareable piece of content. And, uh, what they’re really focusing on is like, Teaching people all the different ways that they can use the product to solve their problems and kind of showing how easy it can be to use. Um, and that’s where you have to show the, those two points when you’re creating product level content, you need to show that this is easy to use.
It’s a low barrier to entry. And it’s solving the problem that they have, because, you know, one of the, you have to answer the question of like, is the product, the problem worth solving? Like we we’ve talked about before, how demand is essentially like problems in the market, but you have to make the user decide whether or not.
There’s value in solving that problem, right? Like if you’re doing some sort of reporting and it takes you eight hours in a spreadsheet, but the tool costs [00:24:00] 10, 000 a month, like, no, your time spent to the company, like paying you eight, eight, I would have, whatever your salary is to spend eight hours on that spreadsheet is probably cheaper than 10 K a month for a software.
So you have to have that understanding too. I will argue that. You said low barrier to entry as one of those talking points. I mean, not everything has a low barrier to entry. There’s plenty of enterprise solutions that have a very high barrier to entry and it’s just moving them through that longer life cycle.
And so they have to have a hair, they have to have a very high value at that point though. But that’s, that’s, that’s, you know, you’re switching from HubSpot to Salesforce, you know, that’s the, the one thing that I want to hone in on when it comes to product education, or really what you sell education, not just product, because in theory, everybody sells a product or a solution or whatever you want to call it, but clearly articulating what [00:25:00] you do and what you is the core component to education.
In B2B, we, you, we’ve harped on clarity being a core common mistake. That’s the thing that moves somebody over the hump. What do you do? And clearly articulating that beyond just the ancillary fluffy benefits, uh, saving time and money. You know, if you have great integrations and they’re a core piece of this audience set and their needs push them define what you’re actually getting.
If I buy from you. What is the product? What is the service? What are the bullets related to that? Don’t rely on some salesperson to try and do that over the phone because nine times out of 10, nobody’s ever going to get to that point of the sales stage because they don’t have that information in front of them.
You don’t have to give it all away, but at least define and say what you do. That is the biggest missing piece. I think in so many B2B brands [00:26:00] solutions and solutions. Um, I mean, so. You talked about making it clear what you do. Another thing, make it clear what you don’t do. Jumping into some of like the common objections thing, right?
I mean, I’m a big proponent of transparent pricing, transparency around integrations. I mean, in the tech space, like integrations is fucking huge. Like we have gone, I’m going to, I use this example. We shopped around for all these different reporting softwares that aggregate the data from all the advertising platforms.
Some of them don’t have LinkedIn data. Right. Like, I’m sorry, we’re a B2B marketer. I never would have called you. I never would have had the demo. I never would have done anything. If it was clear to me that like you didn’t integrate with LinkedIn, you’re not going to, and, and, and those are like, I don’t know, game changers.
If you don’t have those certain things, right. You know, you’re wasting salespeople’s time, you’re wasting potential customers time, and then you’re going to try to sell them on it [00:27:00] anyways, even though like for us and any other B2B marketing agency, like 50 percent of your advertising spend is on LinkedIn.
Like you got to have some of that stuff up front. Um, Pricing integrations are probably the two biggest things with common objections, but I mean, this is where you talk to sales. Like, what are the, what are the reasons that you’re losing deals? And is it something that people should know before they reach out to you?
Right? I think that that’s the stuff that you can kind of get ahead of. You can prequalify people. You can Even adjust your ad targeting to handle some of that stuff, right? Like, I don’t know, I’m going to exclude people who are in all of these Marketo groups because our tool doesn’t integrate with Marketo.
Like there are things that you can do to make your campaigns better by handling some of these objections ahead of time. And then the last one on the list is social proof. I think this is huge. Uh, these are your case studies. This is [00:28:00] proving that other people who are similar to your customers have had success with your product.
Um, you know, there’s a lot of talk around people like going into communities and asking peers for advice. Like you can really get in charge of that stuff by showing off some of your reviews and showing off, uh, case studies about how people have had success with your product. Um, you know, case studies are at this point, probably a component when analyzing like any sort of, any sort of software, any sort of agency, any sort of, you Professional services.
Um, people want to see the proof that you’ve done it before. Uh, and I think that’s a huge one in like the startup space too, because. Oh, Hey, this cool new thing came out. Is it just a shiny object or is somebody actually had success with it before? Um, and if you can help them answer that question, you’ll probably get your time to close to be a little bit quicker.
Where do you think the majority of B2B content falls content in? In current [00:29:00] state? Where, where do most of brands focus their energy right now on content? Within product. Content, for sure. It’s definitely product, content. I don’t know. I’d argue on that one. Talk about your product, just like highlighting the features of your product.
Uh, social proof, I would say is probably bigger than product. Let’s talk about me. Let’s talk about all the awards I won. Let’s talk about my Gartner magic quadrant. Let’s talk about the market scape award that I won, but it’s really just a commissioned, uh, press release that I paid for to get out there as an ebook.
Yeah. Let’s talk about how great I am, but not it’s between the, it’s between those two. Oh, okay. So yeah, people have a twofold strategy. They, they talk about themselves and their product, and then they try to show how great they are as a company. Not necessarily have the great terrorist product. Like that’s the, the miss on both of those and the miss in all of that is.
Relating value back to the actual audience that you’re marketing. Yeah. So again, if you’re creating [00:30:00] content, creating product content, you need to create the product content that ties back to the pain point, not the, here’s the feature. Like you need to explain like, what does that feature do? And as how is it helpful to them?
And then on the social proof side, it is more around like, The bullshit awards rather than I, what I feel like specific case studies and like specific reviews, right? If, I mean, you can pull G2 reviews, clutch reviews, like that’s, that stuff is. Real to an extent. Um, I think it’s helpful. I think it’s more meaningful when you pull it out and show it as a review, then if you pull it out and show it as a industry award, I mean, any book, I hope, I hope, I hope anybody out there understands at this point that if you get any sort of award in almost any industry, like the company paid to get that award, aren’t we at, [00:31:00] we’re at, we are a clutch.
Agents, what are, what is our clutch award? I don’t even know what the fuck it is. We didn’t pay for it. Don’t give me shit about that. We didn’t pay for clutch. Oh, sure. But. Come on. I can be, I can, I can be transparent around the, oh, the awards here because it is, is what it is. I mean, sure. I mean, you pay to play in any respect.
I wasn’t necessarily going down the route of like awards as a bucket. I’m talking a little bit more about relying on content that you are paying to have created by a third party on your behalf as the crux of your content strategy. And does that mean that we’re saying all of your content is shit if that’s it?
No, we’re not saying that, but how you package it and how you put it out into market. Again, going back to those things that James was talking about audience and channel wise. Makes a big difference. So how James, then do we see. And understand what our current content mix and I D and help us identify the gaps that [00:32:00] exist so that we don’t put all our eggs into a single basket of those four buckets.
All right. So Ian, bring up the content segmentation slide. All right. So I think that most marketers at some point in time have gone through a content audit, um, What is the typical content audit to a typical content audit? We’ll go through and it’ll map your content to personas and different stages of the funnel, right?
They’ll do awareness, interest, decision action. I mean, I’ve gone through tons of these at this point. And then what do you go, you go back to the client or you go back to your manager and say, Hey, we’re missing a bunch of middle of the funnel content. It’s always middle of the funnel content that’s missing.
I know why, because nobody can actually define What middle of the funnel content is people can say like, Oh, this is pushing to a demo or, Oh, this is creating awareness, but nobody really knows what happens in between. Well, I know why, because the decision, the journey that happens in between is different for every [00:33:00] single person, right?
So this is why we talked about those four different buckets and you need to have those different angles because when those are going to come into play. Is going to be different for every single person. Like one person might start with social proof. Oh, yeah. I heard about you from X, Y, Z. Uh, another person will be researching a problem they have on Google.
I don’t like, how do I spend less time? What’s an AI solution for tracking ad creative, right? Like, and trying to figure that out. So the different, the journey is going to different. For everybody, but you need to have all those covered and you need to have a solid understanding of what your distribution strategy is.
So we do a similar analysis where we’re trying to identify gaps, but we’re not trying to identify gaps in the funnel. We’re trying to identify the gaps in which the angles that you are coming from. So. Uh, this is where we do a little bit of spreadsheet [00:34:00] stuff, um, where we’re mapping content to the specific audience that we’re targeting.
Like who is the specific person? And the example here, I just used champion end user, uh, in theory, like you would have your, Personas mapped out here. So you can create content that specifically maps to each of those personas, uh, the distribution channel. So take, take a think about the piece of content and you’re saying, Hey, what is this piece of content?
Like, what is going to be the best channel to distribute this piece of content based on how this content is formatted? Um, Because the re what you’re going to find here is you’re going to be like, Oh, well, yeah, we created this piece of content, but I don’t really know what channel this is for. I’ll put my website there.
That’s a problem, right? That’s like the first thing that you need to identify. Um, I do call it funnel stages, but we split it one or two way demand creation versus demand generation. I mean, it’s if you’re setting up [00:35:00] paid media campaigns, prospecting versus retargeting. Um, you know, if it’s a demo, it is more of a demand capture piece.
If it’s a, Okay. Uh, informational, educational, inspiring pieces, more on the demand gen side content type. This is also important. Like you need to have diversity of different content types. Some people are actually ebook readers and some people are video watchers. Like you need to have Each of the different content types.
And then we map to those four goals that we talked about before pain points, social proof, product education, and what’s the one I’m missing, uh, common objections. Um, I do have a column for ungated ungated. This is kind of where you can map things to what you’re doing. Your sales model is, I think that this is a little bit more custom.
Uh, I mean, if you have like an ABM play, you can pull some of that stuff in there. Um, URL [00:36:00] landing page, wherever it lives. But your goal is to mainly identify gaps in distribution, uh, funnel stage. And content type, or sorry, I mean, content type and goals. So you’re looking for like five different gaps there.
So the thing that you’ll probably find in a lot of cases before where, Oh, we have a ton of social proof content and we have a ton of product content and we need to create. Some common objection content. Like we have nothing that handles that kind of stuff. We have, um, you know, we have no, nothing that is adding value to the pains that our customers are having.
Um, and that’s where you can identify those gaps and you can build them out. And then based on some of the audience stuff that we did last week, start taking that and tailoring it towards the channels in which you are going to distribute rather than just taking the same piece of content and putting it everywhere.
And that’s next week’s episode, where we’re going to take [00:37:00] this then and talk a little bit more about not just the gaps that we find in existence with this audit, but using these core foundational assets, thinking outside the box of how do we create other assets out of that that are built for the platform and built for the audience.
Example, you’ve got an ebook, you’ve got a core piece of content. How can you create visuals out of that? Snackables, infographics, things like that. So you are still using a core aspect of one of your four content categories, but disseminating it in ways that are going to align with how your audience consumes content.
So tune in next week for that one. So, yeah. And I mean, so this evolves over time too, right? So we’re telling you to come at it from these four different angles to have like these, all these different ad types, like basically saying. Hey, start broad, learn what works and you might find through, you know, different attribution tech that you’re using through just general results that you’re [00:38:00] seeing certain things perform better than others.
So then you can start taking, and you know, this is a, right now this analysis, this gap analysis is around, do we have everything covered? You can do the same analysis to like, how does this perform? How does this look from a performance standpoint? Right? Like, you know, we’re finding that we’re getting a ton of value from pieces that look piece of content that look like this.
I don’t know, say short form video on Instagram is doing really well. We’re seeing it come up all over the place. Like how can we take some of the other content that we have earned in these These formats and push it to that format. And you need to look at that through a quantitative and qualitative view because quantitative, everything’s going to show demo or lower funnel stage attribution, but everybody knows that’s not how people buy and we’re not going to go into that right now.
So yeah, some tools are easier. I mean. It’s [00:39:00] easier to learn that on LinkedIn. Like if you’re using attribution tech, it’s easier to learn that on LinkedIn than it is on Facebook because LinkedIn pulls in account based impression data. So you can actually see impression to conversion, where Facebook, you kind of have to force somebody to click.
And anyways, I think I know the answer to this, but let’s say after you’re done with your audit, what would you say you would prioritize if you had to pick one content type? Uh, I think the, the main thing would be a pain point related to content. Uh, there’s so many different reasons for this one. This is the stage where you can have content that’s more engaging, more entertaining.
It’s typically the thing that is like missing completely from, uh, from the whole agenda. Like that’s where I would start. And most importantly, it’s what brings somebody from. Unaware to aware, uh, once [00:40:00] people are aware of their product, like the, once people are in the funnel, there are a million different things that you can do to try to convert them.
Getting them in the funnel is the hardest part. And this is the type of content that does it. It’s also the most difficult to measure. It’s the most difficult to get buy in for, uh, I mean, You’re gonna have to fight the good fight with that one. Um, but that’s where I would start.
Educational content first, because there are too many instances to count on my hands and my feet where there is a complete lack of clarity around what the B2B brand does and who they do it for. So yeah, a lot of digital transformation clients, a lot of saving time and money and digital transformation solutions, a lot of solutions, [00:41:00] AI, digital transformation solutions.
So that brings today’s episode towards a wrap. The big thing that I want to say about what we covered today specifically is three things. Number one, just because we crapped on a lot of content that exists out there today does not mean your content should be completely scrapped and thrown in the trash.
There’s absolutely winners within that. It’s just a matter of identifying them through that content audit process that we walked through just a few minutes ago. And if anybody wants that template of a content audit, just reach out to James and I were happy to share it with you guys. Number two, remember content diversity from that categorization perspective.
Do not throw all of your eggs into one basket, especially a basket that talks only about content. You and only you remember your customers, remember the audience and remember the pain points that they’re experiencing, because if you can make them the hero in that [00:42:00] story, they’re going to become lifelong customers of you.
And number three, avoid the common mistakes, especially lack of clarity. Clarity makes a difference in today’s world, especially in the B2B world. The more clarity you bring to your content, your creative and your paid ad strategy, the more likely you are to move that needle and hit that ROI that you’re looking for.
James, anything else you want to add on to today? No. Niner. Okay. All right. Well, with that, we’ll catch you next week. Tune in Tuesday again, again, as I alluded to, we’re going to be talking about the next step in this process and that’s creating content that fills those gaps. So until next time, check out dragon three 60.
like subscribe. We’ll catch you next [00:43:00] week.