Is Content Your Revenue Lever?

Jennifer Halsey (00:02) And that's really the beginning of, I think, where content can start to make a difference is in those stages where someone is trying to figure out how to justify the purchase that they want to make from your company. They're trying to figure out once they do get that purchase, how are they going to manage it? How are they going to staff it? How are they going to maintain it? And so the content that we produce should speak to those concerns at that time in their journey, right? Ben Ard (00:53) Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Jennifer. Jennifer, welcome to the show. Jennifer Halsey (00:58) Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited. Ben Ard (01:01) Yeah, Jennifer, this is going to be a fun conversation. I'm excited to dive into your experience and everything you've done with content. But before we get into the subject for the day, if you don't mind sharing for the audience, just a little bit about yourself, who you are, what your background is, all that kind of fun stuff. Let's let the audience kind of get to know you. Jennifer Halsey (01:18) Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Jennifer Halsey. I work for Dragos, which is an industrial cybersecurity company. Prior to joining Dragos, I was the leader of marketing at the International Society of Automation, ISA, and ISA is a technical society for engineers and automation professionals. And so I spent about 17 years of my career there. Prior to that, I was with an advertising and PR firm. So I've got a lot of experience in all kinds of different marketing functions. I've done communications, I've done brand management, I've done demand generation, I've done industry marketing, customer marketing, product marketing, all the things. So across all of those things, I think content is really the common denominator. Getting into more of a content strategy role is kind of my favorite thing that I've done over the course of my career. And I'm fortunate that Dragos is ready to sort of embrace that sort of, that kind of role. So to me, I think about content as the fuel for all of the other functions in marketing. So you might think that in a software company, product marketing is the core function and it's certainly an important one. But unless you've set up the pain that people have and helped them to realize what can solve that pain, you can have the best product marketing and it won't have an impact. So to me, content is where you tie all of that together and really support your prospects and your customers through their own journey. And that's what enables the rest of marketing to shine. Ben Ard (02:58) I love that. That's amazing. Amazing background, amazing experience. And a lot of what we're going to talk about today is focused on your background and what you're currently doing. So this is going to be fun. So kind of a working title for the audience that we're talking about is chaos to clarity, building a content strategy function from scratch. So when you came to Dracos, you kind of noticed that maybe there was some content strategy that needed to be built out. What did that look like? And what's kind of the process look like so far for you to kind of build from, like you said, chaos to clarity, like how is that process going and how's that build out going? Jennifer Halsey (03:34) Yeah, so I'm right at the beginning of it, which is super exciting. Dragos has a ton of extremely high performing technical folks on our team. We have so much expertise and over the years, these folks have created some extremely compelling content, some thought leadership that has truly changed the industry that we represent. But it's difficult to find and it's difficult to put your hands on it at the moment that you need it in a sales conversation or with a prospect or whatnot. So that was the first thing I noticed is just the findability of our content needs some help. And then the second thing I noticed is that it's fragmented in its messaging. So sometimes with those really high performing technical teams, you end up admiring the details in your content. right? And you end up kind of circling back and forth over the problem that people are facing. And it's difficult sometimes to authentically connect that to the solution that you provide. So helping to figure out what are those messaging pillars that resonate with our prospects and customers because it truly meets them where they are and having that authentic voice about how to solve those problems. that doesn't ignore the selling component of what we're doing, right? So we can't just say, here are all the problems that you're facing and we know it's terrible and here's how to solve those problems and never mention that Dragos has the solutions to solve those problems. And I think you can do that in an authentic way. I just think you have to be careful about the content that you produce and when you use that content throughout the buying cycle, the eventual customer lifecycle. Ben Ard (05:24) Yeah, 100%. So you identified some of the gaps. How's the process going for resolving those? Jennifer Halsey (05:28) Yeah, and there are some gaps. Right, exactly. so at Dragos today, I would call it content chaos because we have hundreds of pieces of content and a lot of those are still very valuable. Might need some updating, but they're all, I would say 80 % of them are still resonating with people. We just can't put our hands on them and we don't have them organized into the timing of when you would want to leverage that piece of content. So when I came to Drago, I was hired to do industry marketing. Then I moved over into integrated product marketing, which was really thinking about how we bring our campaigns together to A, communicate about the problems folks are facing, B, communicate about the solutions that they will need to apply to those problems, and then C, connecting that to what we sell. So thinking through that journey as a step in integrated marketing, was really important for me because I started to see how all of these things could be used throughout those stages. And typically marketing kind of focuses on the top of the funnel, right? And getting folks through to the point of handing them off to a BDR or a sales rep. And that's really the beginning of, I think, where content can start to make a difference is in those stages where someone is trying to figure out how to justify the purchase that they want to make from your company. They're trying to figure out once they do get that purchase, how are they going to manage it? How are they going to staff it? How are they going to maintain it? And so the content that we produce should speak to those concerns at that time in their journey, right? Because it's not sensible to put that upfront. You know, you don't want to talk about how they're going to implement something before you even sell them on the fact that they have a problem. and that their current solutions can't solve that problem. So once you get them to that point, then it's like, okay, let's talk about what this could look like and how you're gonna be successful with this investment. And that's the piece of the content map that we really haven't dug into in a marketing sense. We've got a great customer experience team and they're phenomenal at what they do, but I think we can help them to... tie those initial messages about the problems people are facing into the technical day-to-day of like, here's the use case and here's the tutorial and how you can do this in our platform. And I think you really do have to connect those two things so that people feel like they got what they wanted in the beginning. ⁓ and that they can see how to show value for that investment and go back to their leadership for expansion and advocacy and all those good things that we wanna see coming out of our customer base. Ben Ard (08:20) I love that. That's amazing. I love the definition about how content is impacting every part of the customer journey. It does so much and that's what consumers crave. They're actively trying to answer questions through content. And if we can't provide that, there's a giant gap. So I love that you're kind of noticing that at all of the different stages. Jennifer Halsey (08:40) absolutely. you know, content is one of those words, right? Like marketing, where you have to define what it means in the context that you're working within, because you could consider content to be everything, right? Like anything that you communicate is technically content. So you really have to take the time to kind of be specific around what you're looking to achieve with a certain stage of the user journey. and then figuring out what are those formats that you want to put that content into that are going to be accessible and easy for them to consume, but not cheat them on the detail that matters. And especially in our field, or at least in my industry, you're marketing to people who truly understand these solutions and have the ability to go really deep on the technical detail. And they want to trust you, and they want to believe that you understand in a comprehensive way what they're looking at every day and that you understand your product in a comprehensive way. So marketing for, you know, a technical organization who specializes in something as deep as cybersecurity is not an easy feat. And the way that we build that trust is ultimately through our content. Ben Ard (09:53) I love that. That's amazing. Well, before we got recording, you sent me some interesting notes. And one of them is you have this framework of six strategic outcomes that really resonate with the entire organization to see the value of content. How did you get this? What is this framework? I'd love for the audience to learn about it because I have reading through it and I feel like there's a lot of value and a lot of lessons learned here from all of your experience. Jennifer Halsey (10:19) Yeah, so this is part of that defining what content really means as you move through the different stages, not only of your buyer journey, but also the different segments of your company, right? And how they can contribute and benefit from the content that you're producing. So what I started with was a giant list, like giant, like 150 lines in Excel of like, Here are all the things that I would love in five years for the Dragos content strategy function to impact. Then I sorted those into business outcomes. So it might not be perfect, but I sorted them into these six major pillars of what I think we can impact with a strong content strategy if we resource it properly over time. And I am hopeful that those outcome driven conversations are gonna really resonate across the organization because one of the challenges of being in marketing in a company like ours is that you don't come in with, I guess, credibility inherently, right? There's a certain amount of distrust of marketers because Ben Ard (11:33) Mm-hmm. Jennifer Halsey (11:33) Folks who are really intelligent in technical sense don't want to be marketed to. They don't want to feel like that's something that they have to block out or that they have to kind of sift through to find the truth. So there's kind of an inherent distrust of marketing as a function and then of marketers in general, right? So the first thing that you really need to do in a role like this is to build that trust and build that rapport. And I'm fortunate to not. have to just take day one at Dragos and build a content strategy. I don't even think that would be possible. I've been here four years. I've proven that I can deliver value to these individual business units. And that lays the foundation for kind of trusting that I'm looking at this holistically and this isn't just like another marketing request. This isn't another marketing wants me to deal with this or whatever. Ben Ard (12:26) you Jennifer Halsey (12:29) It's no, it's like, how do we take all of the goodness and the value that you personally are bringing to the business? How do I amplify that through our content so that our prospects, customers, community can feel that impact in a way that matters to them and in a way that drives results for our business? Ben Ard (12:48) What I love about that phrase, I've never heard it so eloquently said that your content amplifies the things that you're already doing. And honestly, like I think that's a fantastic explanation of what content can do for a business. If you're building an amazing product, it amplifies the ability to tell that story. If you're solving problems for businesses, it amplifies that. If you have internal stories of amazing employees doing cutting edge work, content amplifies all of it. So it really, I love that you grouped them into these categories. Here are the orgs. Here's how we make it and plaque, but really that overarching story is everything you're doing. I'm here to just to amplify it through the content. And I think that's such a cool message. Jennifer Halsey (13:31) Yeah, can be served up what they're wondering about, what they're thinking about at the moment that they're wondering and thinking about it. We live in a just-in-time kind of society and marketing is no exception to that. And so, you know, we have to think about not just kind of coming out one day with a giant library of content because no one can absorb that. So it has to be, how do I amplify the right things at the right time, through the right formats to move the business forward? And even more importantly, to build that rapport and trust and bring value to our customers. If our customers or our prospects open up a white paper and they read through it and they don't find something that they can immediately apply in their business, regardless of whether they're a purchaser of a Drago's product, Ben Ard (13:54) Yep. Jennifer Halsey (14:22) then we haven't done our job from a content perspective. We want every piece of content to deliver some lasting value to the people that are consuming it, regardless of whether they end up purchasing something. And I think that has to be the root of where you start, because people can see through it if it's just self-serving, you know? But on the other side of that, you know, we're not in the business of just rambling on about topics for no reason. We want to connect it to what we sell and we want to solve these problems with our technology. So you have to straddle that line between authenticity and moving deals forward. Ben Ard (15:01) I love that. That makes perfect sense. Now we're running out of time. We're close to the end here. So before we end though, what is kind of the implementation that you're doing? Like your own roadmap for turning what you started out with into what you're hoping to build and into what does that kind of timeline look like? Cause I think it's so helpful for people to say, okay, cool. I agree with all of this. What are some tactical steps I can take towards trying to get to this kind of a system? Jennifer Halsey (15:27) Sure. So first of all, think centering on those for us, it's six pillars that I'm building out for how content strategy can impact the business. One is revenue acceleration and sales enablement. The second is customer success and lifetime value. The third is market leadership brand authority. And then we have operational excellence and scalability and customer experience and engagement. and then strategic intelligence and ecosystem growth. So we can make notes for your readers and your viewers and your listeners on all of that. But essentially what I'm trying to do is take each one of those outcomes and identify a couple of quick wins. I think you've got to start by almost proving your ability to deliver what you're saying in this framework by showing a few quick wins right off the bat. And then that gets you the buy-in to kind of earn the right to be strategic. You you got to kind of solve the immediate problems that people have, look around the teams, see where they're bleeding, you know, and then bring your bandaid, put it on there and help them to get past that immediate need so that they're willing to sit down with you and participate in the more strategic long-term. conversations that you're going to need to have in order to make this successful. So I'm thinking about this in phases. And phase one is go through those outcomes, come up with one or two quick wins that you can get for those teams so that you can prove how this will help them in the long term. So take that as phase one, get those quick wins, and then come back and say, OK, we talked. a month ago, we talked two weeks ago, and I was able to deliver you this, this, and this. How did that work? Did that help you? Did that drive value? And then how do you want to approach the next phase for what I can do for you in the problems that you're trying to solve? So that then they're in it, you know, and they're ready to kind of go on this journey with you because while I'm sort of a one-man band in this content strategy function, content is never a one person job, right? It's essentially the job of probably more than half of your organization in some way or another. So you got to bring them along. And then phase three is to sort of get those foundations built of like, do you have a content matrix? Have you organized your content into stage of journey? Have you looked at tagging it with like different industries, different personas, different... topics that you want to kind of anchor around. So you kind of have to build the unsexy parts and it sucks to be honest. It's not the kind of work that you're going to want to do if you're in a content strategy role because you can be like, what is strategic about this? You know, I'm buried in like this minutiae. But until you do that, you first of all, you can't surface it to people to make it valuable to them until you have it organized. And second of all, you can't see your gaps, right? And you can't assess the priorities of those gaps. So you really do have to take some time to build out those foundational pieces and organize that content. And then you'll start to get a better feel for what your roadmap needs to look like for the actual creation and distribution of content. So it's a tough line to walk, right? You don't want to spend so much time building systems that you're kind of in a hole building these things in a vacuum. And then you come out and you're like, look, I have this perfect thing. And everyone's like, I don't even know what that is, let alone how it's going to help me. So you've got to spend that time upfront, getting those quick wins and then build your foundation and go back and say, now we can scale. You know, we've shown you what this can do, what this... can really bring you. And now I've built out the foundation so that it's scalable. And that's kind of where I'm at right now is trying to spend time on both of those things, the quick wins and the foundation. Ben Ard (19:40) Love it. Well, Jennifer, this has been amazing. You are fighting the good fight of eliminating content chaos and moving to the clarity. I love the framework. I love how you tie it to the outcomes. I love how you're focusing on quick wins, getting the buy-in, looking at the long-term version, the organizational kind of tidying up of everything and really just the approach and the value that content brings. This has been amazing. Thank you for sharing these insights today. Jennifer Halsey (20:09) Yeah, absolutely. Anytime. And I'd love to come back in six months and tell you how we're doing with it. And hopefully I'll be able to say we've grown, we've gotten the alignment around the business and people are passionate about contributing to the strategy that we're building. Ben Ard (20:26) Absolutely, I would love to do that. Jennifer, for anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you? Jennifer Halsey (20:32) Awesome. Yeah. Connect with me on LinkedIn. ⁓ I'm there and send me a message and I'm more than happy to kind of sit down and show you what we're building here. I think, you know, it's not competitive. It's, you're in a, a much different business than I am. And therefore these principles can sometimes carry over. And I've learned so much from peers over the years. And I think that's super important that we act as a community and that we share with each other. I'm a member of the Cyber Marketing Society and I love it. I love the sharing that we do in that org. And I'm probably predisposed to that from coming from ISA, because that's really what that organization was built around is the ability for people to come together. even in competitive situations and try to solve bigger problems that are going to ultimately impact everyone's ability to be successful. Ben Ard (21:26) love it. For everyone listening, will link to Jennifer's LinkedIn profile in the show notes below regardless of what platform you're on. Jennifer, thank you, thank you, thank you. Really do appreciate the time and insights today. Jennifer Halsey (21:38) Thank you, Ben. It's been super fun.