Is Content the Engine Behind Growth?

Kim Kanary (00:02) the right content accelerates the buyer journey. Ben Ard (00:30) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Kim. Kim, welcome to the show. Kim Kanary (00:35) Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here. Ben Ard (00:37) Yeah, Kim, I'm excited. This is going to be a fun subject that I think most, if not all marketers kind of feel the pain of this area. But before we dive into the subject, let's get to know you. If you don't mind sharing a little bit about your background and everything for the audience to get to know you. Kim Kanary (00:53) Sure. So my background really spans both B2B and B2C marketing. And I've actually worked for a pretty diverse range of industries. I started my career in PR and crisis communications and just kind of evolved and broadened into full marketing oversight roles. But I've worked in retail. e-commerce, manufacturing, across everything from jewelry to home improvement. So I think that diverse background helps me bring kind of a unique lens to what I'm doing. And I'm actually super passionate about data and analytics improving the value. So I'm excited about this topic as well. Ben Ard (01:32) Yeah. And that's a perfect segue into it. So obviously this podcast is all about content. And often when we look at B2B businesses, the marketing team understands the value of content, but they may struggle sometimes to justify it to everyone else. And they also themselves need to know what the value of the content is. So when we're looking at it, sometimes there's a gap between the way we actually use content. And how it actually used and how we track things like that. How do you kind of look at that gap and what are your thoughts and kind of the, areas we should pay attention to. Kim Kanary (02:05) Yeah, great question. So I think most companies understand that content is necessary, but it's also ultimately viewed as a cost center rather than a revenue lever. And so I'd like to actually shift that thought process because there's some interesting things when you start to really kind of step back and think. So we'll spend millions and millions of dollars on our media plan, right? We view that it's strategic, it's driving the business, but then content is viewed as this cost center. very, you it's more of a tactical execution type of thing. But there's tons and tons of studies out there by Nielsen and Google and others that show your content can actually have anywhere from like a 50 to an 80 % impact on your campaign performance, especially in the digital space. And so at the end of the day, your content is super important because it's gonna help your media to perform better for the business and drive better business results. And then when you think about... You might be surprised, some people might be surprised, like, whoa, 50 to 80 % for content, we spent so much time on targeting and optimization and what platforms and all these other things and your content is that significant? But when you think about it, we're at the end of the day, we're marketing to humans, Whether you're B2B or B2C and the average American is exposed to up to 10,000 ads per day. Now our brain can literally only consciously register maybe a hundred of them and of that maybe a dozen actually stick. So the more your content resonates, the stronger your content is, the more powerful your media is going to be and hopefully the quicker you're going to get that message to actually resonate with your target audience. So it's super important to close that gap, really start viewing content as that potential revenue lever, but have the right measurement in place to do so. Ben Ard (03:55) I love that. So the magic words measurement that you use right there. How do you measure the impact of content? Do you have any tips and tricks or metrics that you like to look at in any way, shape or form that you would recommend for businesses? Kim Kanary (04:08) Absolutely. I think first and foremost, it's going to vary for each business, but ultimately you need to tie your content to business outcomes. Just like you would your media plan or other things, you really need to map back to business outcomes rather than we tend to focus on more of what I'll call vanity metrics in the content space. So thinking about things like pipeline influence and deal velocity and win rates, obviously different metrics if you're more on the B2C side, but starting to think about those kind of metrics and mapping your content back to those is a huge starting point. So, and I would say you have to start somewhere. So figure out one or two or three, don't feel like you have to have 20 different metrics. Find a couple that are going to be powerful and impactful and resonate with your executive team or your board or whomever and start there. But I would also say continue up the maturity curve. So once you've kind of mastered those, I'll call them basics. I mean, at the end of the day, they're not basic. It is challenging. But I'll kind of call those the basics and map them up the maturity curve to more advanced analytics. So if you can get to a point of being able to leverage like a media mix modeling or multi-touch attribution or both, even better. just media mix modeling if people aren't familiar, it really helps you to take an apples to apples view of all your tactics across traditional and digital spaces. And the amazing thing about MediaMix Modeling is it's a top-down statistical analysis, but it helps you map basically which channels drove what reps. and you can look at incrementality, can do forecasting. It's amazing. It's a powerful, powerful tool. But the great thing for content teams is that you can actually track which content marketing and brand storytelling drove even outside of paid media. So super powerful if you can get there. Another option is multi-touch attribution. I tend to like to use both to be honest with you, but either and or both are amazing. Multi-touch is more of like that bottoms up approach. So it's looking at every single touch point a customer takes. So whether that's a LinkedIn ad, a webinar and sales email, it takes all of that into account. And it'll say, you know, for example, the white paper that was downloaded, the case study that was viewed and the video that was demoed all contributed to the sale before that final sales call where the deal closed. So I think anything that you can do to, tie back to business metrics and, again, start simple and just continue up that maturity curve because the more precisely you can measure, the more influence you're going to have and ultimately, hopefully, the more resources you get to amplify your content and continue to further leverage it. Ben Ard (07:04) I love that. And I love that you brought up media mix modeling. I think a lot of B2B businesses kind of look at this as a B2C tactic, but really there's so many use cases and B2B, especially when it comes to content that we kind of skip over it. And I love the call to action there. You can try multi-touch and media mix. Like you can mix and match these, but first, last and multi-touch are not the only methodologies for tracking. And the top down approach kind of cuts through a lot of the noise that people kind of get held up on, especially if you don't have like a really strong operations side. It's kind of nice to go top down as opposed to bottom up because things kind of get muddied. And then also with cookies and all sorts of stuff like multi-touch can get more confusing things like that. So I love the call out. I think it's something a lot of businesses should really look into. So when we're looking at it, any chance you could share any examples where content is clearly tied to business results, even if it wasn't like in a traditional way, like any examples or thoughts there. Kim Kanary (08:07) Yeah, actually two quickly come to mind. One is a little bit more B to C oriented, but it translates because all of these things, so I'll give a B to C and a B to B example if that's okay. Because at the end of the day, there's kind of two in these examples, very different paths to ultimately the same outcome, which is that. the right content accelerates the buyer journey. So going back a few years, I worked for Signet Jewelers, it's a parent company of K, Jared Zales, all the big jewelry stores. And at the time, the company, and they still are super strong in the traditional linear television space. But at that time, they were really just leaning into digital and that was becoming more important to the business. And so we had this beautiful content that was produced for television commercials, beautiful, polished, know, all of that, good investments put into it. And so a lot of people in the organization said, well, why don't we just use that in the digital space? So we decided to test it. We took our TV spots and leveraged them in a digital campaign. But then we also worked with influencers to create truly digitally native content. And we leveraged that as well. And then we actually, again, this was on the B2C side. So we were able to leverage a conversion lift study because we really wanted to understand that incrementality of either and or hopefully both of these different campaign types and so the results were amazing. Validating for some, eye-opening for others I would say, but we found that the influencer created content which only represented about 7 % of the total impressions. actually drove a 10.4 % lift in revenue per household and a 12 % lift in response rate, which outperformed those same measures on the TV spots. And so it was a really pivotal moment for the business because people were really starting to see that digital requires digitally native content. And you know, as a marketer that you have to kind of shift your content to tailor to the mindset of the user because I mean, let's be honest our our mindset our mode is Different depending on where we are and what we're doing. So your content has to be tailored to that as well So that's that's one example and then more recently on the b2b side. I think this is a really Common challenge so I wanted to share an example here, which is we found that our sales teams basically had all different kinds of approaches to when they were dealing with prospects. So they had their own approach for email, they had their own pitch decks, they were all different, they weren't necessarily aligned with brand voice, but worse, everybody's nodding their heads like, yes, I feel the pain. But yeah, we obviously also then you have quality issues as well as far as the type of messaging and the Ben Ard (10:59) Every marketer is nodding their head right now with you. Kim Kanary (11:14) quality of the content that's being shared with these prospects. So we actually implemented a sales enablement program. We leveraged HubSpot for this, but there's lots of tools that can be used. And marketing created a library of templates, snippets, sequences that the reps could use directly in their outreach. And everything was aligned to the buyer journey to make it even easier. So we had... upper funnel, like awareness focused emails, had more of the mid funnel product guides, and then for those lower funnel opportunities like ROI calculators, that type of thing. And then of course, leveraging automation meant that the sales team could just basically kind of quickly pull what they needed for wherever that prospect was on the journey. And they didn't have to reinvent the wheel every time. So it also made them faster and more efficient and it controlled the messaging and provided consistency and all. that and we saw once they started consistently using it, literally the impact was immediate. We saw deals closed several weeks faster and win rates were several points higher compared to the sales teams that weren't leveraging the marketing approved content. And so that was huge right there. But then even better, both our marketing team as well as our sales teams could see which pieces of content were being leveraged in those closed one deals, and then we could lean into that and kind of double down. So super powerful where we saw that immediate impact, and then you just get better over time. It continues to refine and improve. so both very different examples, both kind of leading to the same place. And ultimately, when the content fits the context, the business results will follow. Ben Ard (13:02) I love that. That's amazing. And I love both of those examples and everything you did there. It is so cool to show the power of content. We're getting close to out of time. So one final question. After you've done all this work, you've found the right content and this is a curve ball. So I apologize. I prepped you in zero way, shape or form for this question. But once you start getting those metrics, Kim Kanary (13:17) Thank Ben Ard (13:25) How have you best found to portray that to the business to increase resources or even like double down on certain things? How have you found that you can kind of get that momentum going through those metrics and resources? Kim Kanary (13:39) Yeah, I think it starts with communicating it throughout the organization. So honestly, so many times, especially when I'm kind of acquiring a new team, when I enter a new business and there's an existing team in place, the media team doesn't even think to share metrics with the content team. So kind of starting like boots on the ground, those teams, whether they report into the same place or not, starting to speak a common language and sharing information is, the first step because then it becomes more natural, more seamlessly integrated into their day to day. also side benefit gives the media team practice translating those metrics into kind of everyday speak for people that aren't as close to them. And then it gets the content team thinking about. their content creation efforts in a different way, thinking about how to tie metrics to it. So that's kind of the first step. then I would say having partners throughout the business, making sure that your sales team understands how you're taking the pain points and the customer objections and all of those insights they have and translating them across these different platforms and helping them to understand that that consumer mindset is different in every different platform. So you may have one singular campaign message for a particular campaign, but then it's translated differently depending on if the content is in programmatic on LinkedIn, on YouTube, wherever it may be and being able to translate it into different same message but different executions. And then again having those metrics in place and so the more you start communicating the metrics that tie to business outcomes and some of those even some of those statistics like your executive team or your board or whomever may not realize the reach and frequency need, the fact that we're inundated with 10,000 messages and ads per day that our content really has to break through. So I would say just really start communicating it, have a pretty dashboard because everybody likes that, but also don't overcomplicate it. Start where you can and just continuously build on that momentum and consistency. Feel like you're a little bit of a broken record where you're kind of repeating. But always time back and don't be afraid I would say as well to show what didn't work because if everything is through rose-colored glasses they're probably gonna start to wonder where the the downside is so it's okay to show what what did and didn't work as long as you're taking lessons from from what didn't so I think that's you know that's a great great way to start getting people excited by it and starting to shift that mindset from content being a cost center to a revenue lever. Ben Ard (16:25) I love that. And I love everything about that. Sharing not only the data, but putting it in a format that people can understand. Telling the story. I once heard that if you just have charts and graphs, it's data throw up, which is a little graphic of an image. But if you tell the story, that's the analysis piece. And I love that. And then I also love that you're going through all of this and really refining it for the right people. And it's such a cool thing that you're doing right there. I think it's the perfect playbook. Kim Kanary (16:37) Hey. Ben Ard (16:51) And a hundred percent, like you have the formula for turning content into a revenue driver. And I think every marketer is trying to figure that out. So thank you, Kim, for sharing those insights. I think it's something that's a part of the journey that we're all on. And I like that you're encouraging us no matter where we're at, we can get just a little more mature and get a little further down the pipe and don't be discouraged with where we're at. think that's great. Kim, I have a feeling that there are gonna be people that wanna reach out and connect with you online after hearing this. How and where can they find you? Kim Kanary (17:22) Yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn. I'd love to connect. I'd love to hear their questions, continue the conversation, see what their ideas are. I'm sure there are people that have had experiences that they can share as well. I think at the end of the day, we're all trying to better ourselves and improve and grow our businesses. So yeah, let's chat. Let's connect on LinkedIn. Let's chat. It's Kim Canary. I the bird but with a K. So yeah, hit me up there and let's continue the conversation. Ben Ard (17:52) Love it. And anyone listening to this episode to find Kim's contact information, just scroll down to the show notes. We'll have our LinkedIn profile link right there. So you can just click on that and connect with Kim. Kim, thank you so much for the insights today. Really do appreciate it. Kim Kanary (18:07) Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.