How to Adapt & Repurpose Content for Ads
Join us on Digital Banter as we dive into the next phase of our campaign planning series: making great content for paid media. We’ll cover how to adapt and repurpose your existing content for ads, and explore the latest trends and strategies on LinkedIn, Google, Meta, and more.
What You’ll Learn:
1) How to transform your current content into effective paid ad campaigns.
2) The latest insights and successful strategies across ad channels.
Don’t miss this episode as we break down how to make your content work for you in paid ad campaigns and drive results.
Podcast Transcript
What’s up everybody. Welcome back to digital banter. James. That was some pretty good music today. That, that was different. I don’t think I’ve heard that one before. So props to you, Ian, for, for finding a good one. That one. Anyway, we are back again and hammering through our six part series around ad campaign planning, strategy, and design.
Today, we are talking about strategizing content for the purposes. Of paid media and advertising and specifically how to adapt and repurpose content for paid media distribution. So for those of you that have been following along with us so far on this [00:01:00] gauntlet and journey of, of the series, we’ve come a long way from our foundational pillars, we set our goals.
Based on our business models, align them to our sales teams and created something that’s actually realistic and achievable. Uh, we’ve defined who our audiences are, understood what they care about, where they hang out and have segmented between our champions and our buyers committee. And lastly, if, if you tuned in last week during last week’s episode, we’ve audited our existing content and mapped it out to those target audiences.
And also the presumptive ad channels that we’re going to be advertising on. So now we need to know, now we know what we need to create and what we can repurpose, which begs the question, James, what does repurposing content actually? All right. So repurposing content is what it sounds like. We’re going to take some of the content that you already have and you created that [00:02:00] likely when you created it, you weren’t quite sure exactly how you were going to distribute it.
And rebuild it in a way that is built for paid media distribution. So going into some of the foundational things that we talked about last week. There are three main things that we were looking for when repurposing content. Uh, number one is clear and concise messaging. I think this is something that is, should be in place across any content.
So probably isn’t as important for repositioning, but the next two are. Crucial for any sort of paid media campaign. One is speaks to a specific audience and not everyone. A lot of times when we create content, we create it in a very, uh, broad, vague, we kind of keep it in a, in a way where it speaks to everyone.
In paid media, we are serving this content, and so you can be [00:03:00] very specific who you’re talking to. You can say, Hey, HR managers, this is how blah, blah, blah. You don’t have to kind of keep it vague to include everybody in the buyer’s committee. And then the last piece, which is probably, uh, I guess the most crucial for any paid media campaign.
When we want to Have diverse actually designed for the channel. So again, when you created it, you weren’t necessarily thinking of distribution. Um, and you want to take the content that you’ve created, pair it into, you know, what are the different ad formats that we’re using? What is the landing page that we’re using and, uh, build it specifically for paid media.
So I did put together a couple of examples of what this looks like. So last week I pulled up a bunch of vague examples where they were just talking about digital transformation and saving time and money and, uh, you know, uh, the normal vague B2B stuff. So [00:04:00] these ads here, the one, the first thing you’ll notice is that they are more specific.
So the ad on the left, who are they talking to? Project managers, uh, three reasons why Google Docs is the wrong tool for project managers. Not three reasons why Google Docs is the wrong tool. That all the way on the right for Notion. How I organize my UX projects. And I believe in the top copy there, it also calls out people who are UX.
Um, I don’t think the whole copy is there, but anyways, they’re talking to a very specific person, which makes this immediately relatable. Um, the content is also specific, very clear. I mean, I think, you know, exactly what you’re getting with each of the 3 messages here. Um, And the formats are also like built for the channel.
Um, notion is doing something like when you’re running paid social, you want your ads to feel more social. They’re taking advantage of the, um, [00:05:00] I’ll call it fake influencer videos. Uh, they actually tend to perform pretty, pretty, really well. Um, Lavender using some data and imagery that also always works.
Well, um, downloadable content. They’re putting a demo. Anyways, all of this stuff works really well here. But I think the main thing to call out here is how they are have a very specific message to a very specific audience. And it’s not vague and it’s clear. And you’re going to get, as a result, you’re going to get higher click through rates, more traffic to the website, more demos, more trials, and so on.
That’s the big thing that you’re pointing out. James is when so many organizations, and it’s not just B2B, it’s across the full gamut, consider content strategy and the creation process of content. They. Typically don’t think about the distribution mechanisms on the backside of things. And what you get is this broad based message that is so watered down that you lose sight of the actual [00:06:00] audiences that you’re trying to engage with.
And it all becomes an afterthought rather than being part of the process. That doesn’t mean that all content is a great fit for. Paid media and not all ad formats are either a good idea. So I think let’s, let’s kind of segue this James, then into a lot of the common mistakes that we see and run into when it comes to content creation and figuring out what’s a good fit for paid and what’s not.
Yeah. I think one of the most difficult things is trying to figure out where to start. Um, you know, we talk, we’re talking about content specifically. And, you know, sometimes we have the debate of ungated versus gated content. And then you get into this analysis of the content that’s on the website and like, what you’ll come and get is like, Oh, well, we have a blog post on that.
Right. Um, and it’s like, so I’ve rarely seen it where I’ve rarely seen success. In paid media where [00:07:00] you are just promoting a blog post. Um, I think that generally speaking, if you’re promoting a, an asset, it needs to have more value than just kind of a 500 to a thousand word blog post. People don’t want to click through to your website to actually read the content.
They want to have the content in front of them on the social channels. So like, I’ll say like, that’s just something that I haven’t seen very much success with. Think about it though for a second. I’m just going to jump in here because this goes back to the point that you made and I just made is why it was the blog post created.
It was probably created for organic. And SEO purposes, therefore it’s not structured in a way that is meant for paid as it exists. And this is where like talk about repurposing content, content. If you have a blog and you have multiple blog posts that followed in the same thing, you can build that into some of a larger value add assets, such as an ebook, whether you decide to get it or not [00:08:00] that we’ve talked about that last time, as far as like the infrastructure that needs to be in place, but like, it needs to be.
a higher value piece of content for a blog post for somebody to, you know, actually click through to it. Um, I mean, the other thing is like, if you don’t have that is try to, you know, we’re talking about, you can either go bigger with it, right? So a big piece, a hero piece of content or go smaller with it.
Uh, an infographic, a visual, um, You know, some like in demand, Jen, a lot, we talk about taking some of the stuff from the content and bringing it forward facing in the ad itself. Right? So if there’s 10 key learnings, five, five key learnings in this blog post, like bring that forward in your ad copy, because what’s going to happen, like all of these social channels, they’re built for people to stay on the platform and not necessarily click through to your website.
So if you’re the content of your blog is so good. You want to bring that message forward [00:09:00] into the actual ad itself, because then you’re going to expose more of your target market to the message that you’re trying to deliver. Um, so that’s two ways you can repurpose a blog post. Let’s see the next one.
That is kind of the common mistake I see is just like promoting sales decks and sales guides as downloadable assets. Um, I mean, we’ll get into, Kind of our framework for how we approach content, like where this should fit in the funnel. Generally speaking, like people know when they’re getting sold to, and if you are promoting a sales side or sales, like at this point, like somebody is ready for.
A demo or a trial or to talk to sales. They don’t need to see like some sort of guide. If you, again, if you want to tell them something, tell them something within the actual ad itself, not push them to a down, a downloadable sales guide. Again, this is like [00:10:00] one of those common pieces of content that everybody has.
And they’re just like, Oh, well, what can we do with it? Oh, let’s throw some money behind. Do you put like, uh, tech specs or like data sheets in this bucket or do you consider them outside of this? Like sales guides is kind of nebulous. It can be. I mean, I think that’s like some good, what we talk about our content buckets, like common objections.
Right. So like, if, if there are, it has to be like a very well known thing. Right. So like, you know, if you’re selling, Some sort of marketing software. Does it integrate with HubSpot Salesforce Marketo? Right. And just being able to bring some of that stuff forward facing, I think is helpful. But if you’re like getting into like super technical nuances, I think at that point, um, you know, you can either link to it on your web.
I think that’s more about transparency on the website rather than transparency via advertising. Um, all right, and then the last 1 that I have on my list, as far as [00:11:00] like, common things that everybody has that needs to be reworked or repurpose is. Hero videos. I think like anytime a CMO comes in, right, what do they do?
They redo the website and create a hero video. Um, and those hero videos, they just like, they don’t work for ads because they are a generic view of the product. They don’t speak to a specific audience. Typically the messaging is more. High level and big. And any of those three check marks that we had above, it just typically doesn’t fit it.
Usually the format is longer than the 30 to 60 second video that works on most social channels. Um, depending on what ad types you’re running, you might want to go vertical. You might want to make sure that your message is compact within the first five seconds. Again, making sure that the video is actually built for the video format that it’s supposed to be in.
But again, I think the two things that are just common misses in a lot of these videos is the messaging isn’t clear and [00:12:00] concise, and it doesn’t speak to a specific audience where you can take that video, reedit it, tailor it to speak to that specific audience in a more clear and concise way. Your hero video is still good.
You can leave it on your homepage. Your homepage serves a lot of different purposes where advertising really only serves one purpose. My mistakes are less content type focus and more about the actual value or lack thereof that gets created within the content. I mean, the big thing that I always speak to our clients about is, does it have a good hook?
Is it actually valuable if it’s consumed? Is it unique or does it have the same point of view and same noise that exists out there in the market and doesn’t really break through the noise? And. In addition, like when we think about the process of creating content, are there timelines built in that allow you to do the repurposing, the creation of assets that support this maybe [00:13:00] hero piece, or is it just, you know, content operating in a silo and an ebook being handed over to your paid team to now go and do whatever you got to do with it.
Um, I think the other thing too is when we talk about valuable, we’re not just also talking to valuable to the end consumer or reader, but also like, is it actually built in a way where it’s going to get consumed? Gartner reports, Forrester reports. You guys hear me harp on those guys all the time. There’s 30 to 40 page documents that nobody’s going to read.
Literally nobody is going to read. Because of how people consume content today. So if you’re putting money behind that and you’re driving a bunch of leads, but nobody’s actually consuming the content. What’s the point of it, right? What’s the purpose? What’s the actual value that is creating for the consumer and for the business that that’s, those are the common mistakes I see.
Like, if you have a very generic title that doesn’t really give a good compelling hook that to be quite frankly, is like click [00:14:00] baity, you’re not going to get them as much success out of it. You gotta, you turd so much click baity. It’s uh, Well, it’s so funny. Like, I don’t know. There’s so much like everybody on LinkedIn talks about like a good hook and having a good hook.
And like, there’s definitely a fine line between a good hook and clickbait. Right? Just like there’s a fine line between AI created content and human related content. I feel like people know the difference between them. And you definitely need to it. Make sure that you are on the right side of that line.
The big thing too, I think, I mean, I don’t want to go like on a pedestal or go down a complete rabbit hole here is, but when content is created in a vacuum and hand it over to, let’s say the demand gen team in this case, like, is the demand gen team actually reading the content or are they just taking it and going with it nine times out of 10, I’ve seen the, the, the instances where they’re just [00:15:00] taking it, running with it.
And then we get it and we read it. We’re like, What the hell are you actually trying to say? This is just a bunch of bullshit fluff that means nothing to anybody. Great. You do this, this and this, or, you know, you’re the leading whatever you want to call it. And the tangible benefits are some broad savings of AP costs or something like that.
It means nothing again. It is great. Like I will say, it is very, very rare that people read. The like internal teams read the, I mean, that’s something that I stress with our team whenever we’re writing ads for an ebook or any piece of content is to like actually read it. I mean, we have a framework that we use where we essentially read it and call out in the ad itself.
Like here are three things that you’re going to learn in this, whatever. And it’s just like an ad format that works pretty well versus the state of HR ebook. States changed every year. People need [00:16:00] reviews. People like the state of, I mean, listen, there’s, sometimes there’s good value in that stuff, but I’m not going to go to a brand for that.
I’m going to go to like an industry publication or someone. Yeah. We’re going to go to somebody that actually is an objective, unbiased opinion. Exactly. Correct. Like G2, you know, right. Those reviews. Anyway, let’s get back on track. When we think about now taking those common mistakes and trying to address them in a solution oriented mindset, not everybody’s going to be able to change the process that exists, but what we can start to do is think about how can we take the process, massage it a little bit so it’s not as bad going forward.
But also think about how do we take the existing content that is now in place and start to repurpose it, create something, to James point, that is more clear, concise, targeted to our audiences. So James, why [00:17:00] don’t we talk about kind of our message segmentation framework to set that off. Yeah, sounds good.
You want to bring that up?
All right. So last week, we talked about the 4 buckets, essentially the 4 different angles that we want to come at from a messaging perspective, pain point related content, common objections, product, education and social. Well, we didn’t necessarily talk about is. How that fits in the customer journey and kind of how that, how that works with our audience segmentation.
So again, this is where, as we’re repurposing content or even like creating new content, understanding where this actually falls. So one of the things we talked about last week was all messaging needs to be focused on the champion before you worry about the rest of the buyers committee. [00:18:00] So again, we were talking about, um, having content that is built for a specific audience.
Like the first audience that you should be focused on is the champion in whatever your deal is. Typically it’s going to be the end user because that’s the first person. Who you have to bring from unaware to aware, which is the hardest part of advertising, but also the most valuable piece of advertising.
Once you get somebody in your funnel in your system, you have their debt, their data like you can nurture and come at different angles from then on out. So we start with, uh, just some basic psychology. Uh, this is a quote that I’ve done a thousand times, but people buy on emotion and justify with logic.
Okay. And that also is kind of the order in which we want to deliver content. So the first thing is you want to have a message that resonates with somebody emotionally and from a content type perspective, like [00:19:00] resonating with somebody emotionally doesn’t necessarily say, like, oh, we’re tugging on their heartstrings or anything like that.
It can be. You know, you’re entertaining somebody or you’re giving them some sort of aha moment, or you’re offering them, uh, some sort of content that is an added value. Right. So at this point, like you’re not necessarily looking to sell the product. You’re trying to create a product association by adding value.
You add value based on understanding, like. their pain points and their concerns. Um, pain points doesn’t necessarily mean like, um, I mean, generally in B2B, it is going to be work related pain points. So, um, there’s something that the example I was a lot of software, what does it replace or replaces a spreadsheet and a spreadsheet that takes a long time in their current state.
For them to do, right. I’m tracking the performance of 70 different [00:20:00] campaigns at the same time. I’m going in a spreadsheet and it takes me an hour every day. Right. And like talking it like you giving them guidelines or a checklist or something that is going to make that process a lot easier for them or help them become better at it by understanding, uh, essentially a different way or a better way to approach it.
Like that’s where a type of piece of content that adds value. At this point, we’re not saying. Here’s added value. And here’s our software. That’s where we kind of can go in later on when we jump to the logic piece and the product. Product education, right? That’s product education is where we want to really tie the pain points to specific product.
But there should be some sort of, um, I guess, brand barking that takes place in this section. So first thing, emotional response. Next thing people justify with logic. So again, this is where the other three pieces of content come into place. What are the common objections? What are [00:21:00] the common integrations?
What are the, uh, what is the price point? You need to know the price before you can bring it to your, to your Boss, um, product education, tying those pain points back to actual videos. Again, one of the other things here too, is like, um, the most common reason people don’t move forward with software. Cause everything is difficult to use the fear of, um, fear of change necessarily is what you’re trying to solve here.
And then the last one, social proof, making sure that other people who are in a similar position to you. I’m going to say that there because, um, As the champion in the group, somebody who is similar to you is different than somebody who is similar to their boss. So, like, the, the things that you’re looking for in social proof, the messaging will be slightly different.
So, honestly, all of that is just to convince somebody that the product that the product is something they need. Um, then. You know, if it is a more complex buyer’s journey, you [00:22:00] can worry about the rest of the buyer’s committee. Um, the rest of the buyer’s committee, you don’t really have to worry about that emotional piece as much on a wide, because hopefully your champion is the one who’s, uh, kind of touting that for you.
Um, and for them, for the, the buyer’s committee, you really just have to worry about the common objections, product education, making sure that it makes sense. That it’s something that fits within the workflow. Somebody who’s can look across departmental and see if there’s any added value there. Um, the common objections are definitely going to be a lot of different because I’ll tell you what, most people who are the champions of the deal, they don’t really give a crap about price.
They just want their problems solved, but the, uh, everybody else probably cares about price. Um, social proof, like they might care actually, if you’re on the Gardner quadrant or not, because if You know, and a senior level, you have to have some level of validation that you’re not investing in [00:23:00] just some startup.
That’s going to disappear in 3 months. Um, so the level of validation is also a lot different all during this process. You can really just be pushing the champion in the deal to whatever your bottom of funnel call to action is a trial, a demo. Hey, Ian, before you turn that off, can you go back to the slide of the three examples of ads that James shared before?
So if we look at these three, I think it’s interesting to kind of point out where these three fall within that messaging framework. I mean, the lavender one to me is definitely pain point. Right. You’ve got emails with under 50 words. You have, you have replies. So you have the pain point of having to craft an outbound message or emails and then getting literally no response.
Um, you’ve got the CODA one around the three reasons why Google docs is the wrong tool for PM. I feel like that could fit in a couple of things. I think it could fit in pain points, right? The, the [00:24:00] pain of having to go through the monotonous process of managing a You know, again, Google docs is your only tool set, but I also feel like you could fit closely within product education as a natural segue out of that.
I don’t know, James, what do you think about that one? Yeah, I think that that one is, uh, is definitely more on the pain point side. I feel like anytime you’re talking about a spreadsheet, it’s a pain point. I don’t know, maybe that’s just me and my, my past life with my current life with spreadsheets. There could be a level of common objection that gets wrapped into that, especially for, let’s say James is the champion, uh, and bringing this to me.
It’s like, why, why do I need to pay for a tool? We have Google docs, like him having this as part of his arsenal for that conversation is important for him to try to push through that conversation to me and ultimately get through to. Possibly investing in a tool that’s going to make his life easier.
Yeah, you have to prove that a problem is worth [00:25:00] solving. I mean, let’s be honest. So one of the things in the market that is happening as we speak, I mean, I don’t know if you guys saw the markets on Monday, Friday and Monday, but there’s a little bit of a crash again. Well, no, why? Because earnings came out and a lot of these AI tech companies aren’t showing the revenue that were expected of them, because you know, They’re using AI to solve problems that aren’t necessarily worth solving.
And like, you know, who’s, who’s making those decisions is whether or not the problem is worth solving. Usually it’s the buyer’s committee and not like, not necessarily the champion. Cause your champion is more likely to chase shiny objects and your, uh, buyer’s committee is more likely to lay all the cards on the table and bring you back to reality.
Um, so the last thing I’ll just mention on this, Examples of ads is the notion one, which is definitely product education and how it’s configured, but the way in which they are [00:26:00] addressing that in a unique way, that is visual that, but visual, not in the way of like, Oh, here’s a screenshot of the product.
And now you’re just going to say something, but you don’t necessarily back it up. Telling the story from the perspective of an actual UX person can go a long way in conveying what that product does, not just at a high level, but more importantly, at a personal level. And I think that that’s one big thing here is thinking about distribution channels and creating a message and a format that tells the story you want to tell.
But in a way that breaks through the noise, like I was saying before. Now, in theory, you can turn that off Ian. Um, in theory, then, um, you can turn off the screen share altogether Ian. Um, in theory, then when we go back to that initial content audit, we have an idea of, again, we definitely know who our audience is.
We’ve got an idea of the content that exists. And therefore we have a good starting point for the [00:27:00] channels in which we’re going to be advertising on. But that doesn’t mean that. Those are the only things that are possible. And that’s where it comes back to how channels advertising channels in this case, alters the content and the look and the feel and the way that content is put into market, right?
James. Correct. So in theory, this, I feel like we might debate about this a little bit, but in theory. The way that the program should work is that your audience comes first in who you’re targeting, right? Because any sort of message you craft is specific to that audience. Uh, the content is crafted based off of the pain points, common objections, all those four pieces.
Um, for that specific audience. And then the last piece is the channel, the different ad types, the visuals and so on. So there [00:28:00] is definitely a bit of a chicken in the egg game between, uh, whether or not you should be audience channel content or. Uh, audience content channel. Um, so it is kind of diving into that a little bit more.
Right? So one of the first things that we talked about in audience research is understanding where your audience communes and consumes content, right? Which is determining what the channel and the channel. is really what is going to tell you what, um, like what your, what your final format needs to be, right?
Because there are certain ad types that work better on LinkedIn ads or certain ad types that work better on YouTube ads. And I’ll tell you what, a video on YouTube is not the same video that you’re going to be using on LinkedIn, right? So that channel does determine. And in theory, like that is, I don’t know that that is determined earlier on, but I think the, the [00:29:00] core thing that you do have to understand is you can almost look at the four, the four types of content as like pillars, because you’re going to need to create those pillars, uh, pain points, common objections, product education, social proof, and then have common messaging themes across what those pillars are.
And then you can start to take a look at What are the channels that they need to be on? Um, you know, whether you do the channels first or second, I don’t think really matters. Um, but you do need to make sure that you have common messaging themes no matter what channels you’re on. My argument there for, and I’m the one that said audience content channels specifically, or my argument there is if you focus too much on channels before content, you lose sight.
You can lose sight of filling the gaps that exist within your current content strategy because you’re overly focused on. The types of ads you need to create rather than the content you need to [00:30:00] create to address those four buckets of content. Yeah. I mean, in theory, you’re also not looking at paid media as your only distribution channel.
Correct. Right. You’re, you’re building content that fits all these four. But, and this is why we’re, why the title of this episode is more about repurposing content because you’re taking a larger content strategy, which hopefully has these four pillars dissecting it and bringing it down to it. Being able to be used specifically for paid ads, but that’s also why our content audit template and framework addresses both content category, theme, et cetera, the messaging that goes with it and channel in the same thing.
You can’t do them in isolation because then you’re going to get. Bogged down in so many nuances that you’re never going to move forward. So when we think about what those content buckets are and the types of content that they roll up to, right? So the buckets for reminders purposes, as James had in the messaging framework, right, we have product education, we’ve got social [00:31:00] proof, pain points, and common objections.
What are your favorite examples of content that kind of roll up to those four buckets, James? All right. We’ll try to do them one at a time. Maybe you can add a couple here too. So we’ll talk about. Uh, I should probably talk about pain points first. Um, so one of my favorite things that a lot of software companies are doing right now, I talked about like creating like a larger content piece and.
I also said before how people don’t trust content that’s put out by brands, right? For an industry level report, but a lot of software pulls in proprietary information, right? Are you a reporting tool, like a paid media reporting tool? You know what you have access to? Hundreds of different advertisers and you can get benchmarks.
They industry follow up. Like you, you have proprietary data that you can use to create these reports. But I think. What’s important here is making sure that with what [00:32:00] you’re putting together, the data is proprietary and not something that they can get from somewhere else, right? You’re not building an industry report.
That’s literally the same thing as the Forrester one, which is made up, right? You’re saying, like, hey, based on our clients and what we our customers and what we see, um, Here’s some information that’s super valuable to you. And it’s a great way to, to add value in, I guess, like pretty much any B2B transaction, because you can say essentially what different companies are doing.
I mean, you’re almost like leaning into the social proof part here. Um, and giving them. Information that’s valuable to them again. You know, a great example there, a great example there is when we talked to Natalie from Nevada class year and there, I forget the exact title of it, but they basically take all their internal data when it comes to interactive demos and puts together basically a state of a state of the industry report around that, but it is kind of hitting those various points of Uh, [00:33:00] pain points, but also showcasing product education and common objections at the same time.
So it’s a great, that’s a great example, actually. And you can like with that one too, like how many people like, are these one of the questions you have when moving to an interactive demo? It’s like, okay, are my customers actually going to use this? How are they going to use it? What’s the level of engagement that they’re going to get?
There’s so much that goes into that. Um, talk about hockey, hockey stack and what they’re doing and they pull it like, you know, you want to know what your MQL to SQL conversion rate should be like, they have a benchmark across 200 B2B companies that you’re not going to get from somewhere else. Like, those are the types of examples of how you can add value via content.
Um, where was I? I was on pain points. Um, all right. I think that was pretty much my favorite one on pain points. So I’ll, it’s funny. Hang on before we move on from pain points, like. The thing you mentioned was just long form content. Long form content is not the only way to hit a pain point. Oh, you can take any of those things I just said [00:34:00] and also put them into short form content.
Yeah. Okay. I just want to make that clear. Is like, what are they like? What are we doing right now with this podcast? We’re creating long form content and breaking it down into snackable pieces. So again, if you have those pillars of content types, like this is the thing that we’re talking about. Here’s the hero piece.
And here are all the things we can make. 10 videos for LinkedIn ads. We can take 10 videos for YouTube ads. We can so on and so forth. Thank you. Okay. Yeah. Just to clarify the hero piece can be the long form content. And then all of the opportunities that come out of that with snackables creates your full distribution strategy for addressing and pushing through that messaging that falls within that pain point bucket, I guess, like, I guess small hack, you can say a lot of times, it’s easier to start with a large hero piece of content to do the snackables.
Absolutely. Yeah, it’s just backups into. Um, [00:35:00] but I think the other thing too is like, don’t, don’t get hung up on the nuances of having to figure out what that hero piece is. When you can just approach this of understanding what the pain points are of your audience and putting together relatively quick and easy, quick and dirty videos, quick and dirty social graphics that speak to those deliberately with, you know, a clear, CTA on the backside of things.
Like it doesn’t have to be that hero piece because too many people are going to hear this and get fixated on, Oh, we need to create some long form piece of content that nobody’s probably going to read. This is true. All right. Next bucket, jumping to product education. Oh, wow. What’s the first thing that I have listed here?
Interactive demos. I think that that’s probably, uh, was it everybody says right now in the SAS space, okay, show me the product. That’s what they want to see. I heard one of our clients complaining the other day, they were, uh, they were talking [00:36:00] to Marketto measure. And he was like, why is it so difficult for me to just get a demo of the product?
Um, and that’s just a talk to somebody. So what can you do before somebody talks to somebody, you can have the interactive demos. Those seem to be doing really well across anybody who’s using them. Um, Demo. If you don’t want to invest in that, do a demo video, a shorter version of that. So, um, you know, the non custom version of the demo, I mean, that’s something you can also gate and I’ve seen success with that too.
Um, and then, so those are kind of two, I don’t know, give your email type things, like usually you give your email for an interactive demo, you give your email for a demo video. You can ungate those anyways, different conversation. Um, the other thing that I’ve seen a lot of success with is like these quick how to videos, right?
So this is where you’re getting over the fact of like, Oh, this seems like super complex. Um, I think like a good example of [00:37:00] this right now is clay. So clay, I mean, they’re not really do, I guess they are promoting some of this stuff via paid, but, um, they’re doing all these like short little tutorials and templates and all this stuff of like how other, Like there’s a lot of clay agent, they have a whole influencer thing going, but what they’re doing is they’re building templates and showing people how to use the templates.
So essentially showing them how easy the product is to use. Um, and you can do that for anything. Like, I think another thing is if you like put like a time limit on it, like see how to do X task in 30 seconds or less, because then you’re also showing that, Hey, that thing that takes you like four hours to do every Monday morning, like watch me do it in 30 seconds.
Um, I think it, it really helps people get over the hump of, uh, whether or not it makes sense to.
The big thing here is what do you do? That’s clear and concise output that has to come under product education. And I [00:38:00] cannot vent enough about the lack of clarity that exists in B2B, particularly. When you move up to larger organizations that may or may not sell solutions, what is this? What is the solution?
What does it do? And clearly articulating that to the person that might be interesting. I should say, yeah, we solve this problem by doing this for these people. It’s not even what does, it’s not even what problem do we solve? Literally. What do you do? Like you saw, you sell some invoice automation product.
Great. Well, what the hell are you actually automating? What are you doing? What does the product or solution do? So that way I know and can feel confident that when I reach out, I’m not wasting my time. Yeah. I think there’s a lot of people that focus too much on problem based [00:39:00] messaging rather than, I mean, you have to match the problems to the features at some point, but it does need to be very, like, if you were to sum your product into one thing, like, what do you do and it can’t be everything and it can’t be some vague word like signals.
I mean, that’s a huge, I don’t know that whole market right now with like intense signals and blah, blah. I feel like they, it’s, it’s. So they need to break that down. If they want to break into some less savvy audiences. Why signals is just a great buzzword that everybody latches onto. Yeah. They’re just leveraging signals.
James. It sounds sus is what it sounds right. Like, Oh, signals. All right. What are you doing next? Common objective, pain points, pain points. We already did social proof. Okay. This one’s super easy. Uh, basic, super basic, easy thing. You want social proof [00:40:00] screenshots of reviews. I can’t tell you like everybody, hopefully everybody’s seen them at this point, cause it is definitely a trend, but ads that are literally just a.
Screenshot of this person’s Google review. It’s a great easy way. You don’t have to worry about getting. So I’ll give you the 2 examples. There’s testimonials and like these testimonial mashup videos, like, Those work really well. Of course, it’s not easy to get one of your customers to shoot a video for you.
It’s like, that’s not easy to do, but it’s pretty easy to take a written testimonial, screenshot it, put some of your branding around it and use it as an ad. Um, so those are like two quick wins from the social proof side. I think there’s also a lot of like partnership stuff there that is also good. Like if you can.
Like this is where if you are like co creating content with any sort of partner that adds validity to your brand and what you’re saying, you know, there, there’s value in that too. Common objections. [00:41:00] Uh, all right. What are the three things? Uh, common integrations for tech software is, Like I’ve talked about this one before something that you can definitely bring up upfront pricing.
Uh, again, another thing I’m a big proponent of. It’s okay to have like starting at, if you do have a somewhat complex product, but, um, you’re going to weed out a lot of people right away and have Uh, less MQLs and more SQLs if you are just upfront with your pricing. Um, and like I said before, I think a lot of like the testimonial reviews, partner stuff does also help cover some of those common objections.
Like if you can have somebody else speak on your behalf about those common objections, it brings validity to what you’re saying, like. Um, you know, if I think of like six cents versus demand base, like if you can have somebody give, uh, an [00:42:00] honest testimonial around why they chose six cents over demand base, that’s going to have a lot more value than you saying we’re six cents and we’re better than demand based because of X, Y, Z reasons, where would you put, um, experience, for example, Let’s say there’s two ways to look at that on the professional services side of things for us as an agency.
Right. Somebody comes to us in healthcare and they ask, do you have experience in healthcare? Does that, and then the other side of that is let’s say. You were saying this before, kind of like size of business and punching up your weight. Let’s say, uh, Facebook goes for a new, like, uh, hardware build, but you know, they want to vet out and make sure that they’re talking to people that legitimately can handle that size of work.
Do you put that under objections or social proof or where, how do you, how do you approach that? I mean, this stuff can merge. I mean, at this, at this [00:43:00] point, what are we talking? We’re talking about justification. So it’s at that same. Stage of the customer journey. And it’s okay once you’re in that stage of stuff starts to mash together.
I think the, the other thing too, when we think about like common objections and how to think through that, if during your initial audience research process, especially like the primary research where you’re doing stakeholder interviews, customer interviews, things like that, if one of the outputs can be kind of like, A checklist of what somebody is going to consider as part of that buying decision.
You’ve automatically created the problem solution, that content mapping that you can do with common objections. Don’t you think that’s like, uh, Hey, here’s the buying checklist for buying our products. I don’t know. I just feel like that’s, uh, not, but it’s, it’s manipulated in a way on the brand side of things because they’re more so looking like, [00:44:00] do they have an existing tech stack or are we replacing it?
Are they, uh, a CTO that has a centralized headquarters or are they dispersed remotely teamed? Like it goes back to that, like, uh, kind of, uh, a semi ICP version of it, but I’m talking more so about like. On the customer side of things, what are the true punch list items that determine whether or not a solution or a product aligns to what they actually need?
I mean, I feel like that would be awesome. If you like, again, using that demand based six cents, if you had a customer say like, Hey, I mean, everybody’s seen like everybody’s put together pros and cons, like buying spreadsheets before, like when making a decision, if a customer actually shared that with you, like if you have a good enough customer and they put it together and you could show that almost as like a, Hey, here’s how this company came about choosing us over this person.
That’d be cool. You don’t even need to do that. You can, I mean, just [00:45:00] making sure that in your customer research or stakeholder research phase, one of the questions that you ask is what are the three priority items that will determine whether you buy a product or not? There you go. And then you just look for the commonalities across the audience set.
Yeah. So price integrations and experience. I don’t know, like you got to be a little bit like, I feel like experience is. not, it’s not that big ri going to be though. I thin
And what you sell in a, in a true SAS perspective, I don’t think experience matters as much, but when you look at things, let’s say maybe, maybe like HR tech is a good example there. When you talk about the size of their customers, that can be, I don’t know, small boutique agencies like us [00:46:00] up to. You know, gigantic organizations that are billion dollars strong and across multiple countries.
No, but I think it’s going to, like, I, again, I think what’s going to happen is there’s going to be an AI boom and an AI fall. And then there’s going to be a lot more of a focus on making sure that there is some sort of longevity in the tools that people are investing in. Fair enough. So on that note.
We’ve gone through a lot today. We’ve talked about how to repurpose content from a couple different angles, a couple different categories and buckets, but we’re only scratching the surface. Ultimately, when it comes to that, because everything comes back to who your audience is, your unique business and the value that you hopefully drive and deliver to them.
James, any closing thoughts before we kind of wrap up? I mean, I think one of the things The, you said just then is like, it gets a lot more granular than this. And I think that that’s where it can start to become a [00:47:00] little bit of a headache once you start to dive into like different ad types and how are we formatting it to different ad types?
Like it can get overwhelming really, really quickly. Um, and I think that with that, as long as you stick to those four content pillars. And then you think about, essentially think about the different ways that you can alter and change that content before you start actually creating it. And I think that’ll give you a lot more leeway in your campaigns and your ability to adapt as you, as you kind of launch things.
And don’t treat paid as an afterthought. Simple as that. So on that note, we’ll catch you guys next week. We’re going to talk about messaging and creating clear and persuasive ad copy. So tune in next week, but in the meantime, like subscribe, check out dragon three 60, which will catch you guys next [00:48:00] week.