How Does Your Content Reach the 95 Percent Who Are Not Buying Yet?

Ryan Radcliff (00:02) every single week I'm handwriting a newsletter to these people. you you might look at that in the age of AI and you might think that that's inefficient, but that's the real connection right now. That's the kind of moat that you just can't go by and you just can't go automate with a Benjamin Ard (00:43) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Ryan. Ryan, welcome to the show. Yeah. Ryan, this is gonna be fun. I am just itching to ask questions, but before we get there and we can talk about the subject, let's get to know you. Let's get to know your background, work history, all that kind of fun stuff so the audience knows you. Ryan Radcliff (00:49) Thanks for having me. It's going to be great. Yeah, absolutely. So right now I work at product marketing at SupportLogic. I've been there for three years and I lead that group and we're a small team, but we do really amazing things at the company. The company was founded by our CEO, Krishna Rajah, on this concept that for companies to really grow and maintain their customer relationships, they've got to be able to act on every... conversation that's happening with those customers, right? So I love working in that area on that product, but my background really starts as an engineer and then coming out of engineering school and then not wanting to do engineering anymore, but not really sure what I want to do. And at that time, I really wish someone had told me about product marketing as a role, because it took me a number of years of being in technical writing and being an analyst for a little while until I really found that space. And what I love about that space is helping sales win and helping cut down friction and really crafting a story that a company must have. Right. think it's so important and we're going to get into talking about this, that it's so important to identify a problem and to have a point of view on a problem. And as your product grows and changes, it's really about talking about that, that problem and that, that issue that really resonates with an audience. And so. That's what's so exciting about product marketing is you get to craft that story, then you get to bring it into sales enablement and technical content and all the different things that we build and all the different assets we build to communicate that and to really get people to understand what you do. So yeah, but I'm very thankful for my technical writing background because it really helped me shortcut my ability to write and to really be in this space because writing is so important and now... in this era of AI, editing is so important, right? Because so much of what we're doing is secondhand. And so having that editing eye is super important because it's got to connect with people with what you're making. Benjamin Ard (02:57) I love that. That's amazing. Well, Ryan, what we decided to talk about today, and I think the audience is going to love this, how to build content programming that sticks with the 95%. Now, for anyone in the audience who is listening, who doesn't quite understand what it means to market for the 95%, how would you explain that? What does that actually mean in reality? Ryan Radcliff (03:18) Yeah, so it's not a term that I created. This is a term that's out, right? So what I love about this term is that most people are not in market today for what you're trying to sell them, right? So that's why we call it 95%. So you can just accept the reality that most people are not buying from you this week. But what's great about that is that if you accept that, then you have the ability to create helpful content for people. And I just love that term as an umbrella term, helpful, right? You're gonna help them with their current job. You're gonna help them kind of understand that you align with the same pains that they feel. You're gonna help them take a break maybe and get entertained for a moment. But I think that it all eventually boils down to the word helpful. And that's what I love about marketing to people that are out of market is that you are there to create a brand affinity. for people so that when they are looking for a solution or when they have realized that you align with them, that you are the clear ultimate choice. And I think a really important part of marketing to the 95 % is doing it in a super consistent way. That's one of my favorite things is that marketing in the B2B space is not about flashy things or, you Random acts of marketing. I think the way that you combat random acts of marketing is to be extremely consistent with the things that you do. And I do this in a number of ways that I'm sure we're gonna get into. Benjamin Ard (04:45) Yeah, I love it. So let's follow this train of thought. This extremely consistent for different people that'll mean different things, you know, obviously consistency can ebb and flow and things like that. But in practice, tactically, what does that look like for your team? What have you built to build that extreme consistency? Ryan Radcliff (05:02) So it's funny, know, we're a startup, we're a very small team and I'm a huge fan of doing things that can be done by very few people. Doing things where you don't need to pass the baton between five people to get something out, right? If me and one other person can get something done every, like week after week after week, that's the kind of system that won't fail, right? That's the kind of system that won't rely on. great feats of program management and, you know, keeping everybody's vacation calendars and making sure that not one of those links drops the ball, right? And then you lose a week because that consistency is so important and we do it in a multitude of ways. We do a weekly newsletter, which was a suggestion from the CEO and I kind of took it and ran with it. I love it because what we're doing is we're taking all the content that we've made. and now we've got a distribution channel for it, right? It's not just sitting on YouTube or it's not just sitting on our website. What we're doing now is we're going out to our 10,000 folks that are subscribed to our newsletter and every single week I'm handwriting a newsletter to these people. And you you might look at that in the age of AI and you might think that that's inefficient, but that's the real connection right now. That's the kind of moat that you just can't go by and you just can't go automate with a I've got 10,000 people reading this thing every week and they're not opting out and they're opening, of course not everyone's opening it, but we're getting a really solid open rate with these emails. And what we're doing in these emails, and I think this is an important part of doing any kind of consistent program is you have to establish early what the point of this program is. And so the point of our email program, was to just give people valuable information for them. like tips for the product that they're already using or taking the podcasts that our CCO does and putting podcast episodes in there that are just all about customer leadership and support leadership and just tips from the industry. She gets together with another leader in the industry and they just talk about what they've learned. And so it's just... valuable insights that are hitting their inbox. It's not a pitch. But at the end, something that is sort of the CTA is that I'm available every Friday for a completely open live demo. And that's another thing that we do every single Friday. And what I love about that and something that I think is so important is it takes very little lift. Like it's just an email form on our website and someone puts their email in and then I get an email and I add them to my Friday demo. So, you know, there's not a long form. So there's friction down. It's every Friday on my calendar, super easy. It takes one person's effort. It takes a half hour of my time. I didn't have to have a marketing ops person like set up a system. We've been through all, we had versions of it work, you know, and now we're just down to let's make it simple. We're going to dive into a zoom call. And what I love about that is it's that personal connection, right? Because Benjamin Ard (07:52) You Yeah. Ryan Radcliff (08:04) That's huge. I love that cliche phrase that people are going to remember how you make them feel more than what actually happens on the call. And I think all those pieces of personality are, they're almost like the special sauce right now in this like avalanche of, and I'm sure you get a ton of emails too, of just these kind of AI generated emails that people send out. So yeah, thanks. Benjamin Ard (08:09) Yep. Yeah, I love that. So you've taken this to like a whole new level. You have this really cool example and level pun intended. You went and created a video game project. Ryan Radcliff (08:37) Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Benjamin Ard (08:39) Talk us through that, like where did this creative idea come from? How did it work? Tell us the story. This sounds so fascinating to me. Ryan Radcliff (08:46) Totally, so I think I'm gonna talk about the concept and how we came up with it, but what I'm gonna try to share with the listeners is what it took to get this idea made. Because I think that can be so hard for creative ideas, right? To blast through and actually end up at the finish line and end up at a conference. So what this idea is, if you go to SupportLogic's YouTube, we've got these video game animations that take popular old school video games and they kind of repurpose them to be about our products. It's like we're kind of building like an analogy. So like, for example, we have a tool for training your agents and we use Mario and Mario kind of goes through a series of moments where he gets trained to be a better agent. And we have another one that talks all about finding the churn signals that are from your customers that are hiding in your support cases. And we use Space Invaders. And the Space Invadership kind of goes through and finds the signals and shoots out the signals. And so it's kind of a fun retro way of learning about what our product does. And the reason why I went after that was I knew a little bit about our base. I knew that customer support people are great with computers. And typically folks that are great with computers, that are in tech, that are working in support, they probably at some point played video games, right? I feel like it's a pretty fair assumption that they've probably been involved in video games in some way. And of course I can't make an infographic of video games from the last 20 years because they're so crazy now, like with the animation and everything, but I knew that we could reasonably do some old school ones. And so that was the idea of like, let's get those old sounds. And then what's also kind of funny about B2B marketing is that you are allowed for some reason to infringe on copyrights a little bit. Like you can make one of my favorite examples is a company called audience plus was making these songs that were tributes to emo songs. And you can make a full tribute to a, a song. can make a tribute to a video game that exists and you can kind of get away with it because the audience is small and it's just a piece of content, right? It's a parody really. So maybe that's why it's okay. But anyway, so I had this idea about the video games. But what I knew I needed to do was storyboard it. And I think that's a key thing is realizing that everybody who was gonna have to sign off on this was going to need to be able to visualize it and not just have me pitch it to them. So that's where Figma really helped me. Being able to jump into Figma, make a storyboard, kind of show what my process was. Of course, bring in pictures of space invaders in Mario. Benjamin Ard (11:19) Hmm. Ryan Radcliff (11:27) and really show that story. So it wasn't me trying to get these ideas into their heads. They were able to see it on the screen. And that was a big moment for me, was realizing that like, you need to bake it as much as you can before it actually goes into production, right? So we have an incredible animator. have a creative designer that we work with and she took this idea and completely made these videos, which was really cool. The part I got to do was make the storyboard and really like lay out all the steps and make sure, and this is something my mentor and my CMO talks about all the time, is that making sure that the story is right before you go to production. Because it gets really tough once you've got that final video, if the story isn't quite right, then things get kind of weird with animation. thank you. So we did a few of these and they did okay. Benjamin Ard (11:56) Hmm. I love that, yeah. Ryan Radcliff (12:19) Like they, you know, they weren't like these big, huge viral things that we were hoping they would be, you you make this content and you hope they resonate, but there's kind of a nice happy ending with this story. And that about a year or so after we did these, we got invited to Gainsight's conference, Pulse, in St. Louis, I believe it was. It was kind of their homecoming conference. This was about a year and a half ago. Benjamin Ard (12:41) Mm-hmm. Ryan Radcliff (12:42) they had a real retro theme that year because they were kind of going back home to st. Louis and They invited us to the conference and they had this booth idea that had these like video game screens and This con this this option for renting video games. And so we took the infographics we already built we we Dressed up these booth Objects like the video games. We put them on the screens. We rented the old games and I mean, it looked like a concept that we had spent six months on. And it took us very little time because we happened to have those. And so the experience we were able to provide at the conference was super cool. And it was kind of like the apex, the cherry on top of that whole concept of making those. Benjamin Ard (13:25) I love that. That's so cool. So with the 95 % tying that into the video game, the video game, I'm guessing, was just helpful content. It wasn't pitching the product or things like that. How do you feel like it kind of brought that awareness to the business? And what do think it did for like the sentiment towards the business? Ryan Radcliff (13:31) Mm-hmm. It's funny. what I think it did, what we tried to do with the video game, infographic videos was just show people maybe problems they hadn't thought of, right? Like, Hey, you know, you're training your support agents one way, but what if you could automate this or what if you could take the insights that could be found in your support cases? And what if you could spread those to customer success and to the product team? and sort of like just introducing ideas. And so they were not, I wouldn't say they were 100 % entertainment. They were definitely talking about the problems that we address. And then the CTA of all of these was kind of showing how we help companies achieve things. there was a bit of a pitch in there. But what I thought was nice was that it was a, it was like a fun version of entertainment, right? It was like, it was just something a little different. And I love when companies do that. I love when they kind of show a little bit of personality and, you know, it's something that's a little bit, you know, off the normal kind of vanilla B2B path that so many things are. mean, case studies are an amazing asset and we have great case studies and blogs are great and these things, but it's, it's when you can get something really colorful and something a little different for a, for a startup of a hundred people. I think that's huge to be able to try to stand out. Benjamin Ard (15:01) Yeah, I love that. So a little bit of a curveball when you look at this. Did you guys ever want to make them playable? Like, what was that process? Like, how did you know where to stop and where that all ended? And are you still making these? Was it just a campaign? What does that look like? Ryan Radcliff (15:05) Yeah. Yeah, it was just a campaign. And that was funny. That's a question that we got a lot at that conference. Because people would step up and say, oh, is this a playable thing? Because they looked amazing. Our animator just killed it with these. And I am not a programmer at all. And now in the age of base 44 and these different tools that can kind of allow people like me to program using AI. Maybe there is a future for us creating a playable version of these games, but how my team is now and what we're capable of doing making a video game was just, there's just no way, you know, it's like, yeah, programming a game sounds tough. Benjamin Ard (15:51) love that, yeah. But what I like is that you didn't let that shy you like shy you away from the idea. said, a video game would be awesome. But with the resources we have, we can't go build one, but let's build the animations. Let's do like renting the actual arcade machines that do have games. We can take this as far as we can within reality. And I love that you didn't shy away from the idea, even though. A lot of people would probably say, we can't make the game. So let's just, let's just can it and maybe one day kind of an idea. I love that you still ran with it. Ryan Radcliff (16:24) Thank you. I I love parodies. I know companies in the past have done parodies of the office for HR software and different things. And this was kind of a version of it for us. I mean, I'm a huge Spinal Tap fan and I'm a huge fan of... can't think of his name, Mel Brooks movies and stuff. you know, just taking something and kind of twisting it a little bit and using, using that IP to get attention, I think is kind of a fun thing to do. and when you're in B2B, you can, you're kind of allowed to do it, which is cool. And it's funny, we actually have a piece of content that we never released that we should go back and try to figure out how to get up because it is a big parody of something. And so, you know, I don't want to. I don't wanna give it away on here, but I'm gonna go back to the drawing board and see if I can get that thing finally put out. Benjamin Ard (17:08) Love it. Okay, one final question. Because it was interesting, we were talking about the 95 % and you talked about helpful content. I have this suspicion and I'm curious if you agree with me. The more entertaining your top of funnel content is, the more you can slip your brand and your product into the messaging. Would you agree with that or disagree with that fundamentally? For anyone looking to do advertising at the top of the funnel, Ryan Radcliff (17:14) Uh-huh. It's tough. Yeah. Benjamin Ard (17:34) How does that play out on that side? Ryan Radcliff (17:36) I think that this is, I think this is the bottom line with it. You have to align your voice with what your audience is expecting, right? And so if your voice and what your audience is expecting is, can have room for entertainment, then I think you can go down that road. But I think it can also just be okay to be helpful and to be a voice that is just helping people. I mean, I know it sounds really dramatic to use this term. but just helping people survive. Like helping people get that next job, helping people take a break from their day. I know that kind of gets into the entertainment piece of it, but if you're just helping people in some way and entertainment is one of those ways, then I think you're building something there, right? Because I know that we're building something, but I wouldn't put us in entertaining. I think we're more in a kind of career help point of view because a lot of the content that we're making for people is in just talking about leadership skills and in lessons learned. And we have a lot of people who are coming onto my CCO's podcast and being really vulnerable about what they've learned as a VP of support or a VP of customer success. so those kinds of talks, I think, are still really important. And I would love a budget for doing more entertaining content because I mean, that is the funnest stuff, right? It's like you get to just dream, you get to be creative, you get to do all that. But to really do it right is hard. so what we end up doing is we end up doing a lot of educating with our product and we end up doing a lot of kind of like career path stuff. Benjamin Ard (19:06) I love that. That's so cool. Well, Ryan, as promised, these episodes go by quick and we have run out of time. But for anyone listening to the episode that would like to connect with you, how and where can they find you online? Ryan Radcliff (19:08) Thanks. Yeah. Absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn. I think my LinkedIn handle is just my last name. That shows how long I've been on LinkedIn. I think I was like the perfect age to grab my Radcliffe handle when they became available. I also have my full name at my Gmail. I'm in that elder millennial category. So yeah, you can find me on Or you can find me on LinkedIn. Benjamin Ard (19:38) That's incredible man. You lucked out. That's amazing. For everyone listening, scroll down to the show notes. Ryan's LinkedIn profile will be linked right there so you can click on it. Connect with him there. Ryan, thank you so much for the time and insights today. It has been awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Ryan Radcliff (19:55) Yeah, Benjamin, thanks for being such a great listener. Thanks for inviting me on here. It's been fun talking about this. So yeah, would love to come back.