Is Your Content Valuable Enough to Sell?

Kelsey Smith (00:02) we're promoting their brand as well. So therefore it makes it a lot easier for them to agree because it's not just, me toot my own horn, let me show what you have done and what impact you've had on your industry as well. And let's go together Ben Ard (00:41) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Kelsey. Kelsey, welcome to the show. Kelsey Smith (00:47) Thank you, I'm glad to be here. Ben Ard (00:48) Yeah, Kelsey, this is going to be fun. I'm excited for marketers. And I was just telling you before we went recording, I'm excited for marketers to listen to this episode so they can take it to everyone else in their business and say, give me resources. This is what I want to do. But before we dive into that, let's get to know you. Tell us about your work history and background and all that kind of fun stuff. Kelsey Smith (01:10) Thank you. My name is Kelsey Smith. I'm the Director of Digital Marketing here at FranConnect. FranConnect is a franchise management software company, but that's not really where I started my journey with marketing. I started at Blockbuster and we had physical stores. There really wasn't a digital space at the time. And content and everything that we did there was done at a store level. I learned a lot of different ways of what to do and what not to do, obviously with the outcome of how Blockbuster ended, but... you know, along the way I was able to really understand, you know, marketing and what resonated with the customer. You know, fast forward 15 years, now we're in the digital space and, you know, I'm looking at different ways that I can leverage content to be able to help drive business, but in a non-traditional way. Ben Ard (01:54) I love it. And I'm excited for this conversation. For any listeners that may be on the younger end of the spectrum, at least compared to me, quick definition, Blockbuster was a movie rental place where you got VHS tapes and then DVDs. I remember it vividly, but for anyone who wasn't born or around for the Blockbusters, they were on every corner. Friday night, you went to the Blockbuster to see what movie you could get and all that fun stuff. It was a good time. ⁓ Kelsey, so what we're going to dive into today is talking about content and that customer stories are a much better way of doing content versus just product led content. Now, the first question that's coming to my mind, and I'm sure for everyone listening is why, why do you think that? Why is that better? Kelsey Smith (02:42) So everybody in this space, whether it is a physical product you're selling in a store, a software, they're always trying to pitch features. Everything that, my product is so much better than why, and this is what my product does for you. And it's all product-led, but it's company saying, this is why it's so great. You should buy it. I pivoted several years ago and said, I'm not gonna go out and just tell people what my product is. I want them to hear it for themselves. know, one of the biggest things in the industry is you've got, you know, sites like G2 and Captera. These are review sites. People go there because they want to be able to look at what a product can do for them, not just be feature punched all over and over of here's everything I can give you. and here's the price tag behind it. You know, so that came to me with... I'm gonna go build relationships with our customers. I'm gonna go and understand what problem did they have that even brought them to us? Why did they even come and talk to us? And then at the end of the day, how did I solve it? And not with just here's a product, let's go solve your problem. What impact did it have to your business? And that is where customer stories really just became very valuable. Because now it's future customers hearing from current customers. not what we sell, but what impact did we have to their business? And especially if it's one of their competitors, you know, in the food space, everybody's competing for the same customer. They want what their competitor has. And if this is what is driving their business and they're seeing a unit level increase of $5 per customer per visit, well, then now they want it too. So that customer success story benefits me because now these other customers are coming to me for Ben Ard (04:27) I love that. That's amazing. So when you get those stories, is this typically in like video format? Is this written? Like, how are you getting the best stories and telling those properly? Kelsey Smith (04:37) We like to do video. I want to put them in front of a camera. want to just have a conversation just like me and you are having today. I want to have a conversation with my customer. know, why did you come to us? Put it on video. We put it on our website because there is no way for me to be able to fudge that. You know, I can't go and be manipulating the words and doing those things. This is you're carrying it from the mouth of our customer. We go to the customer site. You know, we make it easy for them. I don't mind traveling. I'll go to their customer, you know, to their site and we'll have a conversation. I just want to know what impact did we have? And then sometimes it's not good, but that now allows me to learn what do I need to fix in this relationship with the customer? So it's not just about what I can do with this content. It also builds that relationship stronger on how can I fix an issue before they get to the point of churn? So it's a twofold aspect, these customer stories and fact finding for us on What do we need to do better to be able to make customers happy? Ben Ard (05:34) that. Okay. So when you're talking and you're doing video formats, you know, obviously we have like zoom recordings, you can go on site, like what's kind of the setup? Like we're not sponsored by any like video recording companies or that kind of stuff, but I do like to get tactical. How are you doing? I mean, you just whipping out the iPhone or do you have like a nice setup for this kind of stuff? What's the go to? Kelsey Smith (05:56) It's so I have, it's twofold. Sometimes we just use iPhone. You know, if I'm just going to have a quick, you know, 10 minute conversation with someone, we'll record it and we'll do, you know, set it up on a, you know, I've got a ring light and we've got a little, you know, iPhone stand and because I'm just looking for blurbs, you know, a quick video, you know, I'm going to end up with probably 30, 45 seconds on my website. We'll record for 10 minutes. I'll get 30, 45 seconds, but it's still a live person. For other ones where we go through a little bit longer, you know, form video testimonials, I do use a third party. Um, it is a, you know, a company that they have, uh, videographers across the entire country. And I will deploy them to a site and they will do the edits for me. And we get professional video out of it. We do that for two reasons, because some of these more longer form ones, we also want to use it for the customer to be able to promote as well. So now they have a professionally done video that they can use in pitching, you know, cause we're in the franchise space. Ben Ard (06:43) Mm. Kelsey Smith (06:50) Obviously we sell to franchisers. They have to sell to franchisees. They need to sign up more franchisees. I am now giving them a piece of content that they can syndicate and you saying, Hey, here's why you should come and buy my franchise, you know, brand. So we do both ways. Ben Ard (07:05) Okay, I love that. So that's a cool point where rather than just asking for your customers time to promote you, making that into an opportunity to say, Hey, this is something you can utilize. This is talking about your brand, the value of your company. And then you can tell a little bit about us and the story and how we've played a role in that. But it's really cool that you're kind of getting that duality. I'm guessing that makes it like 10 times easier for people to agree to do those. Is that right? Kelsey Smith (07:32) Absolutely. When they find value beyond just being, you know, a promotion for me and it's a promotion for them, I help syndicate, you know, that video and their brand across, you know, multiple channels, even though we are getting it in video form and we use that as the base of the content. Now I can take that and break that out into a dozen other content pieces, short social clips. I can take the, you know, a script from it and we can build. just quotes that we can put onto different documents. I can create a written case study or a white paper and be able to quote back to that brand and we're promoting their brand as well. So therefore it makes it a lot easier for them to agree because it's not just, me toot my own horn, let me show what you have done and what impact you've had on your industry as well. And let's go together and share our successes. Ben Ard (08:21) Okay, I love that. So you said there was kind of a point in time where you made this shift in your mentality. Was there anything that happened in particular to kind of get you away from the product-led information and marketing and content over to this kind of content? I'm curious if there's a story there. Kelsey Smith (08:36) Well, absolutely. So once again, you know, we spend a lot of time at conferences and trade shows where, know, we wanted to get in front of people. We wanted to talk to them just like, you know, but we were in front of them and we had salespeople there and, know, the marketing team there is there to make the booth look pretty or, you know, make sure that everything functions right. And the sales guys have everything, but, know, once the prospects start coming in, let's move the marketing guys aside. We don't want you talking to the prospects because You're going to use marketing speak and you're going to over speak to customers. Sales guys are over there just pitching features. Here's why you should buy it. Let me do a demo, which is all aspect of the sales process. Not discounting any of that. Salespeople are great. They're obviously why I have a job, but it was like, okay, well, what do I do now? So I just started talking to customers. Let's just have commerce. How's the conference going? And getting to know them on a personal level, asking them about their business. You know, what do you do? How do you do it? You know, what impact do you have with your customers? And we would have 30, 45 minute conversations. They would ask me to dinner. We would go have a drink after the conference. And I ended up becoming friends with them. And I'm like, well, these are valuable points that I'm grabbing from these people. Just having a conversation. Why can't we just film it? So we started filming a couple of them and using those as just little quips on our website and social media. And then it just kind of exploded from there. let's get more and more of these video testimonials, just having conversations with people, not talking about product, talking about them and just recording it so that we always had it for record that we could go back and grab. Well, then it became, let's now turn this into a more of a professional, know, so just kind of snowballed a little bit over probably about a year period, you know, snowballed until where we was like, okay, this is our base content now because this is our source of truth. If anybody wants to question any of the, quotes that we've done or stats or anything like that, here, go watch the video and you can hear yourself from the customer. Ben Ard (10:31) I love that. So one of these interesting trends is that people are making content that is less polished, right? It is the iPhone video, things like that. Do you, have you seen a difference like the professional versus the unpolished? Are there different places for them? What's your recommendation? Yeah. Cause there are people that are so nervous to do this because they don't have like the nicest camera set up in production company. I'm kind of curious to kind of get your take on all of that. Kelsey Smith (10:47) Darius, absolutely. ⁓ Absolutely, you know, there is a use for both. So when you do have the professional, that helps you promote obviously the brand with them so they can use it because you're giving them a tangible item that is professionally done. That's great. But not everybody can do that. But there's also a very candid statement that you can have from a less polished video. Hey, I'm going to take a five minute video. We're going to just sit here or, you know, we're walking through the conference hall and we're just taping a conversation. That's still a candid response. that you can still use on social media or quick quips on your website or landing pages. A lot of places now have HTML5 digital ads where you can do really short clips. These are very useful items for those unpolished videos because they're the real life scenario. So it's not, we're gonna make this all into marketing speak and make it look like it's a hired actor. No, this is a very candid video and here you go. You're hearing it first hand. you know, from XYZ at, you know, this brand. Ben Ard (11:58) love that. Okay, we're running out of time. So I just have a couple other quick questions. This is fascinating. I love it. Okay, when you're looking at brands that are trying to do this, what mistakes are you seeing? Like, are you seeing any common trends that people are doing that maybe they should fix or think differently about? Kelsey Smith (12:02) Yeah, absolutely. Rephrase the question. Let me think through that question a little bit. Sorry. Ben Ard (12:18) People that are looking at doing testimonials and working with customers, are you seeing any common trends that maybe aren't the greatest things they should be doing, maybe things they should fix and change? Kelsey Smith (12:30) Absolutely. So one of the things that we hear, you know, that I'm seeing in the industry and even with the professional company that we use, because they came to us and we're like, Hey, here's kind of some candid questions that we've used. You know, this is what we do on a daily basis. And we, we, all these other companies and these are kind of the, the questions are asking. And that's all about how you use your product, you know, what product are you using and why did you choose it? You know, And it's very product centric, even though you're getting a customer to say it, it's still product centric. And it's, like, you know, what feature do you like best about my product? That's not going to be the same from customer to customer. So why is that a valuable piece of content? Sounds great on video, but what we want is what impact did you have on your brain? What did you see? You grew by 12%. Where can you tie that back? And nine times out of 10, I don't have to mention anything about my product. they automatically lead back. Don't lead with your product and your questions, lead with the results that they've achieved and let them work backwards into how your product has helped them achieve that result. That now validates the product even more because you didn't mention your own product. You never once said anything, they tied it back on their. Ben Ard (13:41) I love that. Okay, very cool. So final question. I'm sure there are people listening. I'm also nodding my head. Yes. This is the right way of doing it. I love it. How do you measure success with this, especially compared to other ways of doing content marketing so that others can be equipped to say, hey, let's try this. Let's measure it. Let's see if it works and really kind of have the equipment or the tool belt to come back and have ammunition to try. going all in on customer stories, what have you seen to prove on the metric side of things? Kelsey Smith (14:10) Absolutely. So one of the things that we noticed when we started putting more and more videos on our website is that those web page traffic actually increased 10 times. So that is one metric. Obviously we're looking at traffic and then we started looking at the path. Okay, they were going to our homepage. You know, we put video testimonials on our homepage. They would go to our video testimonial page and then they were going to like three or four more pages when they weren't bouncing as fast. So one metric, you know, other, were also looking at, well, let's start doing this on social. We started seeing a higher interaction and a higher share rate. But then it was like, okay, well, these are great metrics for the marketing team because we're getting more exposure. Now I want to start deploying these in the sales process. And we started using these videos in middle of funnel. And I started measuring opportunities that were closing faster for reps who were using these video testimonial. And we were seeing a decrease in close time because they now had validation outside of just the sales rep selling. And they were able to use that as a, you know, kind of a stepping stone. So we now create a content that helped middle and bottom of the funnel and help close faster. And that was a big ROI for us. It's like, okay, now this content isn't just here's another white paper. Here's another, you know, data sheet. Here's a huge deck. You need to digest. Here's a 10 minute video or a five minute video. Watch this. then if you ask any questions. So we started deploying that we just hired an, or we just brought on another SaaS company. That's all they do is deploy videos and they use that during different stages of the sale cycle because we were able to show return on how videos work for us. Ben Ard (15:45) love it. Amazing. Kelsey, I'm all in on this strategy. I love it. I think our listeners are going to love it as well. For anyone listening that would like to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you? Kelsey Smith (15:56) Absolutely, you can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Kelsey Smith, Director of Digital Marketing at FranConnect. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or you can give me an email. It's kelsey.smith at FranConnect.com. I'd be happy to talk to you. Network, let's talk strategy. Ben Ard (16:10) Love it. For anyone listening, will link to everything in the show notes below. So scroll down and click there. Kelsey, again, thank you so much for the time and insights today. Really do appreciate it. Kelsey Smith (16:19) Thank you, Ben.