Evan Read (00:02)
Given the state of what
is happening with SEO and AI enabled search, the zero click content. What's not being indexed by those ⁓ AI overviews are when someone searches for a tool or a template, you can't get that in the AI overview. So we've been able to actually hedge against losing clicks to our site by publishing and
driving more value there for the business. So it's actually seen a ⁓ massive uptick in direct traffic to the site
Ben Ard (01:03)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Evan. Evan, welcome to the show.
Evan Read (01:08)
Thanks for having me on, Ben.
Ben Ard (01:09)
Yeah, Evan, I am extremely excited for today's conversation. But before we dive into it, help us get to know you, let the audience kind of understand your background and history. If you don't mind sharing.
Evan Read (01:20)
Sure. Well, the last eight years I spent my career building out go-to-market marketing teams at Vertical SaaS companies. I cut my teeth at a real estate startup and built their go-to-market engine, their team, demand, content, SEO, the whole nine yards. We were venture-backed, so a lot of fun there. Left that role, doing some consulting.
for other startups and logistics and healthcare and HR tech and ended up in my current role now running marketing at Quiply, which is a vertical SaaS platform for independent equipment rental businesses in the US and Canada. lots of different industries, but mostly spent my career in vertical SaaS.
Ben Ard (02:08)
I love it. And it's amazing. And what's so cool about this conversation today, you're taking content to the next level. Like you quickly shared some of this stuff and I am honestly dying to kind of dive in. So to kind of set the stage, you've taken your content and started to productize it. I think that's kind of how you introduced the concept to me. What does that mean? Like, what are you actually doing with your content? That's a little bit different now.
Evan Read (02:34)
Yeah, so, you know, like we talked about, a lot of folks have gotten used to the notion of leveraging AI to build their content, Ideation, perhaps transcription of podcast episodes and repurposing them to blog posts or short form social content. We have done that, but we've also taken
this to a new level that previously was inaccessible to early stage marketing teams, especially. We have a couple of content plays that we run in sort of an evergreen fashion. We also host our own podcast. We have expert contributors to our blog articles. We will run a webinar series.
where we bring on a business, like functional business expert guest to give a particular topic. For example, accounting for equipment rental and how to set up your books or how to run ROI analysis report. They're really focused on strategic business advice. And we found some really great initial success there in entering our market with this thought leadership component.
It's really nothing new though. What's been so exciting the last six to 12 months is we built this large repository of content. Yes, we're getting the SEO value from it. Yes, we're distributing it on social and getting our brand out there. But in our market particularly, the customers we work with are very hands-on. They don't...
respond super well to an overly academic type of environment. They want something quick and they want something useful. And so what we decided to do with the advent of these no code or AI coding tools like Bolt, like Replet, like v0, like cursor and lovable, and there's so many of them now. We've taken our
library of content and created sort of these micro SaaS products out of them. And the content informs the product. Like we're not sitting here trying to come up with how do we build like an ROI calculator for an equipment rental shop. We just pull that content from our podcast that we've already interviewed a true expert out of.
and built a product around that all using AI. And so we give this out for free. These are free resources that are in the past, I think people would actually pay for them. But that's sort of been the goal, right? It's like making our content so good that people would pay for it is like the bar that we've set. And so we've just taken this really different approach with the content that we have created and
You could see like on our blogs or other resources, even if it's really mundane like tax calculations, we're going to have some sort of interactive element or tool that accompanies like a long form guide or something like that, that we didn't need any development resources to build. AI has totally enabled our team.
to build these products. And so we've productized these different offerings. And we're actually currently working on bundling all this together and shipping it almost as a separate go-to-market motion to help sort of subsidize our customer acquisition costs for the core SaaS platform. But all this has been possible through leveraging AI to build these things that we once would.
I'd have to go and ask for budget for from our CEO or borrow resources from the engineering team. And we can keep them focused on building product while AI first marketers can take this and run with it really with very minimal or know it all ⁓ help from a technical team.
Ben Ard (06:36)
Okay, I love this concept. This is so cool. For years now, I have loved this strategy, but like you said, it's been so unapproachable because you require all these development resources, things like that. So kind of getting into the tactical side, you mentioned a lot of tools. What tools do you use that you love? How are you actually embedding in on your website? How does that kind of work? Is it in the actual article or is it in a separate resource section? How does that kind of work for you?
Evan Read (07:01)
Yeah,
it's to say the least it's a complicated structure. I'm not saying we've done this completely right, but we've done it. I think the how we've structured it is we have different templates on the side for the different types of resources and really try to make that as cut and dry as possible where we have a standard, you know,
page in the CMS that our team can easily duplicate, edit the content, things like that. When it comes to embedding sort of the tool, we use a couple of different methods. If it's a more complicated build, for example, like an inventory tracking system that we built, which our core software product does as well, but we actually have it as a free resource on the website if you don't have the product, it's a complicated build.
I'll give you example, like we wire-framed the whole thing using v0, which is fantastic for design. I necessarily deploy through there, but we will wire-frame the whole thing, get the functionality down, and then we'll actually ask it to write, after collaborating with the tool, we'll ask it to write the product requirements for that, and we'll ask it to give us ⁓ overall sort of development structure.
Ben Ard (08:00)
Mm-hmm.
Evan Read (08:13)
take screenshots of the UI and move all that over into Replet is what we build on mostly. It's for what I found gets it right out of the gate a lot faster than some of the other tools. And so we'll take that, we'll rebuild the whole thing in Replet. It's deployed through Replet in a few clicks, set up a database, pull in all that, it to our CRM, which is
Ben Ard (08:27)
Mm-hmm.
Evan Read (08:40)
extremely easy to do as a non-technical person and take that code, we'll get an iframe or HTML embed code and pop it into the section on the website and all those sort of just run autonomously and it's 25 bucks a month for us to have a replit account so it's pretty awesome.
Ben Ard (09:01)
That's incredible. So what have you, so I want to kind of talk about some of the results you've seen from this and obviously you're not going to share anything proprietary, but maybe talking through qualitative results. What have some of like your, your audience actually said about these tools and some of the reactions, you know, what is it also done for like website interaction conversion rates? You know, why would a marketer actually want to invest in this besides the fact that it's fricking awesome, but like why should someone do something like this?
Evan Read (09:29)
I think it's helped us in a couple of areas. One, we've built sort of a distribution moat and more defensibility.
Given the state of what
is happening with SEO and AI enabled search, the zero click content. What's not being indexed by those ⁓ AI overviews are when someone searches for a tool or a template, you can't get that in the AI overview. So we've been able to actually hedge against losing clicks to our site by publishing and
driving more value there for the business. So it's actually seen a ⁓ massive uptick in direct traffic to the site
from search engines specifically as our other content like informational style content and blogs and podcast episodes and things like that have seen an increase in impressions but clicks have come down. So that's one area. The other area is sort of like a
sort of a digital PR mode. So in our industry specifically, were not a ton of educational resources built. If I look at a company like Service Titan or Jobber, right? They're not our same market, but their market acts very similar to ours, sort of adjacent. They've built this giant distribution mode
from a PR perspective and backlink perspective. So you're getting all these like this momentum with different industry resources linking back to the site, helping us increase our overall domain rating, things like that. in addition to that, you start to, as a SaaS company, you wanna position your product and your brand as the sort of starting point, right?
I think about one of the first companies I saw that did this really well, which was CoSchedule. don't know if you remember that. CoSchedule's blog back in the day, like 10 years ago, was absolutely phenomenal. You could go on there, you download all these templates, and it's a huge driver for their revenue. so, by doing this, we're becoming that for our industry. The market is...
Ben Ard (11:23)
Hmm
Evan Read (11:43)
Our market is extremely fragmented. have the incumbent rental softwares that have been around for 30 years that haven't updated their code base and they're dying out. They have become the go-to name because they've been in the market for so long. But if you go and look at sort of like their content and what they're producing, it's all very promotional, product-focused, not exactly helping the industry.
Then you have the flip side of the coin, which is like the embedded associations and almost every vertical I've worked in, you know, this is the case where you have some sort of professional association or associations, you have membership groups, you have maybe some coaches and consultants that have exited this type of business and now they're selling information products, know, that kind of thing. And, you know, for the equipment rental market specifically,
We have some associations, we have some coaches, but nobody's actually putting the good stuff out there. And so there's a real opportunity in the market for us to sort of, you know, they say about artistry, right? Great artist steel. We're not inventing anything new here, but just executing it in a way that is hyper efficient and leverages a lot of the resources that are available.
All that combined has really built a lot of value from an enterprise perspective. come through, it's so funny. We'll actually have some of our customers that have signed up with us that have used our software for a long time. And every once in a while, I'll find like a broken link or they'll find a broken link or something on the website and they'll message into our support, hey, can I get this resource? So it's funny that
we have our existing customers actually asking for the content that we're using to acquire new customers. And so that's been, it's happened a couple of times. It's just been awesome. we've increased from a revenue perspective, we've increased our sort of organic inbound source revenue from this motion, like two or 300 % year over year doing this. And yeah, there's some investment there from a time perspective.
Ben Ard (13:25)
Yep.
Evan Read (13:48)
and you have to get the initial structure of the site right and develop that, design that. But once you get the framework down, running this thing and scaling it doesn't come with the same cost that it used to. And so, you know, we've been able to really like get a lot of attention. see all the time like people will mention our brand on Facebook or LinkedIn. They'll share our resources in Facebook groups. So you get all these like positive intent signals.
that it's working and just some great direct customer feedback too. And we've gotten anecdotes from customers where it's like, yeah, I used your tool for like a year and a half before I decided I was going to upgrade to the full software. that's like music to my ears, right? That's telling me like, okay, we need to keep doubling down on this and really drive as much value for the market as we can through this. So we've had both really good like,
quantitative data and qualitative to prove to us that this is a worthwhile investment.
Ben Ard (14:48)
Evan, this is amazing. I love the strategy. I love what you're doing. I love how you thought about how can we provide more value? How can we not just run away from this SEO situation, but really embrace it and drive additional traffic? I love the mindset. Thank you for sharing. This is going to be one of the coolest episodes for people to listen to. I'm so excited for it. Evan, for anyone who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Evan Read (15:14)
Best way to do it is through LinkedIn. Yep, Evan Reid on LinkedIn. Yep.
Ben Ard (15:16)
Perfect.
Love it. We will link to Evan's profile inside the show notes below. So anyone looking to connect with Evan, scroll down, click on his name, connect with him there. Evan, thank you, thank you, thank you. I really do appreciate the insights today.
Evan Read (15:29)
Thank you, Ben.
