Ben Ard (00:27)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Taylor. Taylor, welcome to the show.
Taylor Whetstone (00:32)
Thank you. Bye.
Ben Ard (00:33)
Taylor, I'm excited to have you here. This is gonna be a fun, good conversation from a little bit different perspective than I think people are used to on the podcast and I'm excited for it. So to catch people up to speed on who you are and what you do, tell us a little bit about your background, work history, all that kind of fun stuff.
Taylor Whetstone (00:50)
Yeah, of course. So hi, it's nice to meet you all. I've been in marketing ops for the past seven years of my career. Most of my career has been around the startup environment. So always doing more with less, scaling fast, and I've had much smaller teams than probably enterprise mid-market companies are used to.
In the past, I've been working in a typical environments of either like lead management, automation flows, overall that streamlining that process between marketing to sales.
Ben Ard (01:19)
I love it. This is one of those areas that I think is picking up steam as well. Like I am surprised it took so long for us to get there to say, Hey, even at a small business, we need people on the operational side to help make sure everything's moving well. Cause as soon as we have bad data in the system or people don't have access to the right tools, all of a sudden, it doesn't matter how many people you have. They are not very effective at what they do if they don't have the resources they need. So.
I love marketing operations. think it's really, really cool. What we're going to talk about today though, is content from marketing ops perspective. And really it was so cool, Taylor, you had mentioned before we started recording, you found an interesting article and it sounded like you reposted it about this perspective about content that you really aligned to. Do you mind sharing what that was?
Taylor Whetstone (02:09)
Yeah, yeah, of course. So yes, I reposted it on my LinkedIn if you're interested in reading the full article and seeing the full source of who it's from. But the main sentiment behind that was knowing who you're building your content for. Before you just create a report, generate like a webinar topic, it was more or less identifying the actual human being that's gonna be digesting that content.
I found that super interesting because working for, I work for Augury today, which is dealing with a lot of manufacturing and it's split between like a plant manager aspect and a corporate. So there's two different, very two different personas that speak two different languages completely. And when we're generating like reports or webinar topics, it's really important to understand that like a plant manager cares about totally different things. They, mean,
overall want to eliminate downtime within their own individual plant, but they more or less just want to look like have that be able to go home and not be called in and not have a ton of like breakage within their systems. And like Augury's whole solution is around like predictive maintenance and under like giving those.
overall like alerts a lot faster so that they can predict when a machine's going to fail and then they can fix that before the actual failure happens. So that's more like the plant persona and how we can like tailor our content more specifically to them. But just like what I found like the most interesting was if we generate a report with a ton of different metrics and try to force it down the throats of a plant manager and like a corporate
sea level exec, it's not going to really land with the plant manager versus maybe the sea level exec will care about those things more often than not.
Ben Ard (03:54)
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So when you're on the operational side, it seems like, and I've been in this position where people are like, great, we have this content. Let's push it to anyone and everyone that we can. How have you on the operational side really segmented the database? How have you found good ways to do that? And what do you feel like individuals should do for internal communications to kind of maybe push back a little bit sometimes and say,
Hey, here are the segments that we can send to. Maybe we should write different messages for these groups. How you kind of handle that and how have you managed the segmentation as well?
Taylor Whetstone (04:28)
Yeah. So I think one of the biggest things is like setting goals ahead of time before we're even building out the content as like, yes, we have very, certain subset of people that are going to live into like a plant manager. Segment within our database, meaning like they have the right titles and the right company fit for our product. And knowing that that's the pool we're going to be reaching out to is going to tell us how much time and effort like
From a content perspective, we need to spend on that. If it's such a small subset, then it's kind of going to let us know early on that there's other, like, it's not, the bang's not worth the, or what is it, the bang is not worth the buck or something like that.
Ben Ard (05:06)
the biggest bang for the buck.
Taylor Whetstone (05:07)
Yeah, it's not the biggest bang for the buck. Sorry, I all over the place with these analogies, but yes, ⁓ it's not worth our time, so to speak. But if there's a pretty good sample size from not even just plant managers, but the people who work there from an engineering perspective, we can try to build out the content more effectively to speak to those people who have boots on the ground, who are there in the manufacturing plant. And at the same time, that goal
Ben Ard (05:12)
They're awesome.
Taylor Whetstone (05:32)
changes between those two different like the people who are there versus the people who are going to be working from the corporation perspective and that's probably the most important aspect is what we want them to do. Do we want them to communicate up to the sea level people or do we want them to actually be booking a call with us and some of the times yes we do want like a plant manager to book a call with us because that's what's going to start building our buying group so to speak so that we can get the right people.
into the decision making process for making that ultimate purchase. that's part of how I try to visualize is we have a certain sample size and how can we build the content and how much content to build based upon the group of people. If we have a huge group of people, we need to probably maybe scale from a webinar and also a report situation.
Ben Ard (06:23)
Yeah. So what I love that you're talking about is often content does follow goals. And I think this is something we've under talked about. I don't think that's a real phrase, but I'm going to go with it. We haven't discussed enough on the podcast is typically actions will follow the goals or the incentives that the business gives to its employees. And typically for a marketing team or a group of individuals that are asked to write content, it is to generate leads and interest with their, you ICP.
However, I think it's interesting you're talking about it. I think that adding the persona into the goals may actually benefit everyone involved. So saying we want X number of leads from this kind of buyer or this kind of persona. And maybe even like in this use case of a dual kind of persona, dual audience, we want two different goals. want X amount of leads from this audience and from this audience. And then all of sudden the content team is thinking,
Okay. Well, how do I get more of these plant managers to sign up for demos versus how do I get the corporate individuals to sign up for, you know, these demos? Wait a minute. Maybe I should actually approach this differently. Maybe I should write two different pieces of content so I can get different hand raisers because the sales team also wants this kind of a demo versus this demo or this persona, things like that. It's interesting. I have never been in an organization where they focused on.
the persona inside the goal from your experience and the operational side, do you feel like we should maybe consider putting the persona in the actual goal itself?
Taylor Whetstone (07:52)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think we're all working towards the same outcome in the organization and that's to generate revenue, whether you're in a content team or in a sales team. So. And the end of the day, I don't think the content teams have that visibility into what we're working with from a persona persona perspective within the database. They don't have visibility into how we do the handoff really between marketing and sales. And that's a huge gap. I think.
and helping our teams effectively be able to one, generate content that's going to scale long-term. So that's like, I totally align that we need to start like with content having a much higher visibility or the content teams having a higher visibility into like what, what we have already and the overall goal outcome we want for that individual human being or group of human beings that fit that persona.
Ben Ard (08:40)
Yeah, I love that. So when you're segmenting a database to send this different kind of content to and all that, do you have like a persona or how do you break it down just for anyone that's in content to say, okay, I'm writing content and you know, I'm going to talk to operations in these groups and they're going to distribute this content through all the different mediums. How do you segment your database?
And maybe that will help some content people like, maybe those are some levers I never thought about including in my content or writing to the specific areas. How do you personally segment?
Taylor Whetstone (09:11)
Yeah, so I'm sure most ⁓ companies do this as well, but there's like battle cards in a way that I find super useful, which is like identifying that person and then what they care about overall and just a few other tidbits of information about like what their responsibilities are at that organization. And the way I split it very heavily between corporate and plant, they're
To me, that's like night and day on how you should be speaking to those two different subsets of people. But a lot of it goes into their overall, not only their seniority, which is part of their job title, but their function. So engineers versus leadership are gonna be two different people as well. But overall, they're working in the same environment. So it's almost like you can try to group them, so to speak, with your content more effectively than you could try to group somebody.
that is a plan, like an engineer with somebody who is like a C level exec, right? You're not going to try to group them into a piece of content that's going to fit both of their needs. So that's kind of like how I, mean, job title based upon function and seniority is how I split it within my segmentation. And then you can just kind of plug and play as you need and build those audiences depending on overall like content needs as well.
Ben Ard (10:23)
I like it. So you talked about the lead management side. I think that's often also a side that we don't talk that much about when you're collecting leads, whether it's, you know, the, terms that everyone has different definitions for the MQL SQL demo request, content requests, whatever it is, when you are handing those off to a sales org, how are you handing off the content that they consumed? Have you found a good way to kind of show that history? know a lot of people struggle with that.
Some people have it figured out. I'm curious about your perspective in how you educate someone on the sales team about that person's journey, especially as it relates to the content that they're interacting with.
Taylor Whetstone (11:00)
Yeah, we just took a much higher role in educating our sales team on the content. And like a recent example is the total economic impact report that we're trying to, we're going to be pushing out really soon and that they, created a high spot page. We've done enablement with them. They have their own outreach sequencing. like emails that they, that we've helped them build content for so that we can.
get this report that we've built out in front of the right people so they feel fully more or less comfortable with the content, understand its goal, its aspects, those key metrics that also are called out within that report as well and be able to share that effectively with those personas that they come into contact with, which this individual report is more or less applicable to the corporate side. So those corporate
Job titles are also outlined within the high spot page. They know exactly who's going to actually want to read this and find the most value out of it.
Ben Ard (11:58)
I like that. So how did you educate? It's like, what did the training process for like helping the sales team understand here are the resources, like you said, high spot pages, things like that. Here's the content itself. Here's who it's for. Were those in-person meetings or those emails, Slack messages? How would you like effectively communicate about the content?
Taylor Whetstone (12:18)
Yeah, so there's an initial kickoff call with ⁓ the SDRs, which you can also call them BDRs. It depends where you are. And then there's also AEs, account executives, who may find this as informative to share within their demo calls. initial kickoff call is about 30 minutes going over just the high level pieces of the article that they can more or less quote.
within their sequencing. And then there's a working session just with SDRs. That's going to be like how you set up your sequence and then who it should be with, and then how we can monitor overall results as a team. having that deadline is also super important. At the end of the month, let's check in and see the results because it's so easy to just like set up a play. But.
coming back to it and actually analyzing the overall results is something that's not as it's overlooked, so to speak, because we know if you don't have a clear deadline, we're like, we'll just it's still going right like we don't we don't want to pull results until we know at the end what the outcome is. So that's part of like we do two different calls, one that's more hands on one that's more like an overview.
Ben Ard (13:21)
Very cool. I love that. And how are you measuring everything? I know that measuring success with those kinds of content-based campaigns is difficult. Do you set really hard goals? Are you just comparing them to other campaigns? What does that look like?
Taylor Whetstone (13:35)
Yeah, so we are, I mean, more or less, I am trying to set like a foundation of our KPIs for this campaign, which is around this report at the center and the heart of it. And our main goal is not to generate net new leads from this report, right? Like it's more or less like we want to progress our pipeline, what we have already running through the funnel. that the main, if that's your main objective, which it is.
Then our KPI that we have is a tier one and a tier two, the tier one being we want to generate meetings and conversations. The tier two is like, want that to lead to an opportunity. But something that's always overlooked that I'm trying to really bring home here is like, how much money are we putting into this? And is it equaling ROI? Because we're activating tons of channels to promote this. We are doing like content syndication. We are doing
We're activating sales, we're activating our own marketing emails, paid social, and we're putting tons of money into it. Is it actually equating to these quality meetings and opportunities that will make us ROI positive and equal a successful campaign, so to speak? So that's what I've been doing is outlining all the channels. We have, course, our tier one, tier two goals, but then we also are going to be looking at those.
surface level metrics like impressions, how long are they sitting on the site digesting that content, and then form fills, which we're trying to keep as much as we can on gated these days. That's a very, controversial topic, right? Should things be gated? Should things not be gated? People don't like filling out forms, but how else do you get them in your CRM? So part of it's on gated.
Ben Ard (15:06)
We actually
have had podcast episodes where we've had a guest say, un-gate everything. And we've had a guest who literally was advocating for gating everything. So it's for sure still something people are trying to figure out.
Taylor Whetstone (15:16)
Yeah.
As a marketing ops person and working in operations, I'll always be like, I want to gate everything because that's just the easiest way to track an activity. But if you're thinking about like the user experience, it's really not like it's a blogger. And I think that you should only be like gating like a calculator or like something really. That took like a high level, so to speak, but they have case studies blogs.
Everything else from ebooks shouldn't probably be gated and trust the overall process that they'll request a demo when they're ready, when they've educated themselves.
Ben Ard (15:57)
Yep. and I think every industry is different. I think we have to accept that just like every persona is different. We need to write different content. And my personal philosophy is everyone makes the assumption that the user wants content ungated. And I think as an individual, that's what I want as well. But if you don't know the answer, feel free to run a test.
Taylor Whetstone (16:17)
Baby does.
Ben Ard (16:17)
And get your answer.
And then as anyone brings it up, you can say, Hey, here are the results. If you believe that the test wasn't good enough, we can run another one. But usually having some data for the conversation goes a long ways. So I liked that perspective. Well, Taylor, we have run out of time. These conversations go by so quick. I love your perspective on how we should write for different individuals. Be focused on focusing on the person first.
Taylor Whetstone (16:29)
Always.
Ben Ard (16:41)
before we actually write content. I also love how much effort you're putting into educating the rest of the organization about the content that's come out, who it's for, what it's going to do, the goals around the content here, the KPIs, here's the actual cost that went into this. And was it worth it? Should we repeat this action or should we, you know, learn and differentiate so many cool things that I think our audience needed to hear.
For anyone who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Taylor Whetstone (17:12)
I would recommend LinkedIn. That's my go-to place. I mean, my name is the same thing as the link, so feel free to connect with me.
Ben Ard (17:19)
Love it. Anyone listening, just scroll down to the show notes and we will link to both Taylor's profile on LinkedIn and the article that she mentioned. And you'll be able to go to either of those and connect with Taylor through that. Again, Taylor, thank you for the insights and the time today. I really appreciate it.
Taylor Whetstone (17:35)
Thank you. I had a great time.
