Stacy Shelley00:02 — Be more than a reference, like be an actual resource. Make them think about stuff, challenge how they currently think about their issues. A word I don't really like or a phrase I don't really like, but it's more important than ever, I think, now to actually be a thought leader in your space. And have your content be more about that than search traffic.
Benjamin Ard00:47 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Stacy. Stacy, welcome to the show.
Stacy Shelley00:53 — Great to be here, Ben.
Benjamin Ard00:54 — Yeah, Stacy, I'm excited. This is a subject and a storyline that I think a lot of marketers are trying to figure out where they fit into all of this and what they can do. But before we dive into today's subject, Stacy, let's get to know you. Let's let the audience get to know your background, work history, all that kind of fun stuff to set the stage.
Stacy Shelley01:12 — Sure, yeah, so I've been doing cybersecurity marketing for about 20 years now. Started back in the early days of cybersecurity in the early 2000s, post-antivirus, but before it really became a cottage industry unto its own. I've led marketing for a couple of startups. As part of that, some of those really successful, getting up into the couple hundred millions in ARR, as well as some that had really strong exits earlier on. The whole career has been focused on that B2B cybersecurity space. So take any opinions I have with a bit of a grain of salt — it's a bit of a tough market to do marketing in because the audience, they're security people, they have trust issues, and they're really smart. So some of the marketing stuff that works really, really well in other spaces and other markets just doesn't translate. Yeah, if something I say pisses you off or makes you question, just understand where I'm coming from with it.
Benjamin Ard02:10 — I love it. That's awesome. Very cool. Well, Stacy, you wrote a really cool article on LinkedIn and we're going to kind of base a lot of today's conversation on this subject. But what you talked about is this concept that content has shifted from the traditional SEO. And I love the term that you have here, content mills, into something different as AI and search have fundamentally changed how people look for information. So let's start back in the yesteryear before AI. Where did this term content mills come from? What are we talking about here? And how is that influenced by the day and age of Googling and SEO?
Stacy Shelley02:43 — Yeah, there was a long stretch where you were really chasing search traffic. And I think to a large degree organizations still need to be chasing search traffic. I think the model has shifted a bit in that regard. But we all saw it. We all lived it, right? Where years ago, search was great. Started getting worse about 15 years ago. Started getting kind of useless 10 years ago, five years ago, pretty much completely useless. Opened the door for AI to some degree there, because when you go search stuff on Google or Bing or whatever your preferred search engine would be, if it was a popular topic, you'd have a million results that all said the same thing on the first few pages. And most of those were not trustworthy sources. So getting your answer, which has always been the purpose of search — I'm looking for an answer to something — had it gotten better in the last 20 years? It's gotten worse. And a lot of the content that we as marketers produce contributed to that situation.
Benjamin Ard03:55 — I love that. So why, you know, the content mill concept, we're talking about certain content. Obviously we're both believers in content marketing and what it does for a business. So what was the old form of content influenced by search and how is AI kind of transitioning what we need to do differently today?
Stacy Shelley04:08 — Yeah, I'll start with kind of the old way, which for a lot of organizations was really based on chasing what I would call lowest common denominator traffic. It's your high volume, basic search information type of traffic. Because that's where the volume was. Especially in B2B, where like sometimes in B2B you may be marketing a product or a solution where you go into Google Search Console and you look up keywords that are really super relevant to your product or to your market, and you don't get any results back. Because maybe your product's really early in the market, and only 10 people are searching for that every month, or only a couple hundred search results every month. But then you've got this really tantalizing topic, a couple of steps beyond that, that's got thousands and thousands of search hits for it every month. It's really tempting to go try to optimize around that because it gives you the traffic, right? There was a time when that was one of the biggest KPIs within marketing teams. How's the website doing? The main measurement was how much traffic that website's generating. And I think we're past those days as companies.
When you think about the lowest common denominator topics, I think this is something you hinted at a little bit. There's topics — these are the ones that are just really easy and cheap to produce. You're largely reassembling or regurgitating stuff that's already been produced by other people. You're not creating anything new. You're not creating anything novel. You're just trying to out-algorithm your opponent. You're trying to win the search battle with fundamentally the same information, just presenting it in the way that the search engines find to be more friendly as a way to claw your way up those search rankings. So yeah, I mean, there were a lot of teams back in the heyday that were operating based off of that mentality. Like, need more traffic? Trying to get more search volume? What keywords are really popular right now? Does it really have to be relevant to what your company does? Not really. Do you have to have anything particularly insightful to say about that topic? Not really. Just go assemble the content and try to game the system. And that's led to some of the problems we have.
Benjamin Ard06:28 — So now that we have AI, I love this concept where AI is taking away the search traffic that everyone was fighting for, for those really exciting keywords that had tens of thousands of searches, that drove traffic, that led the KPIs, the badge of honor — we have millions of hits on our website, all that kind of fun stuff. AI is kind of taking that away. So if it's a generic answer, all that kind of fun stuff, AI is going to take care of it. So what kind of content should we focus on now? And then on top of that, how do you actually get eyeballs on that kind of content? What do we need to actually be doing with our content instead of this basic AI searchable content that has now replaced the old high traffic keywords?
Stacy Shelley07:14 — Yeah, I think fundamentally you have to go back to putting people first in your content. Like really be in tune with your core audience, which coming from startup land, sometimes that's a big question mark — is who really is your core audience. There are pressures in all kinds of directions. Like startups want to be able to hit a big audience because that means their addressable market feels really, really big. But is it really? Right? For most startups, the answer is really no. It's not really. Your best customers do fit a certain profile. They have certain attributes. They fit certain demographics. And they have their own communities. So knowing that audience really well, knowing that community really well — you want to have content that shares a perspective with them that they'll appreciate. Right? It's not just reference content, but it's content that's going to help them understand key issues in more depth than you would get from a Wikipedia or what they're going to get out of a gen AI tool.
Be more than a reference, like be an actual resource. Make them think about stuff, challenge how they currently think about their issues. A word I don't really like or a phrase I don't really like, but it's more important than ever, I think, now to actually be a thought leader in your space. And have your content be more about that than search traffic.
Benjamin Ard08:30 — Yeah, love that. So thought leadership, having a unique perspective, having a story to tell. I also loved what you said — focusing on people, making them the center of your story as opposed to generic information. Couple questions to follow up there. I think we can all agree that's the kind of content we want to consume. Now that SEO has shifted, how do we get eyeballs on that kind of content though?
Stacy Shelley08:48 — That's a really good question. I think you have to be a part of that community. I don't think you have to like go try to be the viral creator out in space. But I do think you have to come from a position where people see that you can relate to them. It can't just be your own website. To me, the website's purpose is entirely — not entirely shifted, it's always been there, but it's a much more narrow mission, I think, for your company website today than it was in the past. So you have to reach them outside of your website. You have to connect with them through other channels — social media, community activities, community platforms, Slacks, Discords, wherever your people, your audience goes to learn and to get information. That's where you need to show up. You need to be present in those spaces.
Benjamin Ard09:41 — Okay, I really love this. So rather than using SEO to drive all the traffic to your website, you're going to where people are at. You're not expecting them to come to you. You need to go to them, engage, participate, create content, meaningful interaction, be a part of the community. So with that, I want to double click on what you said about the website. What does the website turn into now that it's not just this heaping pile of generic information for the most part? What does it need to become?
Stacy Shelley10:08 — Yeah, I think you used a phrase, traffic acquisition, that I think is fundamental to this. Sure, your website is still there to support traffic acquisition. I don't believe that's the primary function going forward. Less about traffic acquisition, more about making an unforgettable first impression or second impression or third impression with your target audience. And you can assume, I think in today's world, because they're getting their foundational, just basic info about solution categories, about the problems that they're dealing with — you still need to be able to speak to those. But they're not going to be going to any vendor website for most of that information. By the time that they're on your domain, that they're on your website, chances are they're there to learn about you. They're not there to learn about some other topic. So focus your website really on explaining to them, here's what you're for them. Here's what you do, how you do it, why it's great. It doesn't mean you still want to make them the center. Like you don't want to revert back to the classic thing that you run into in sales and marketing, which is you're only talking about yourself. You're not really connecting, right? But you do need to understand it.
People coming to your website are much more qualified I think than they were in the past. They've done a little bit of research generally. They've always been hitting your website, right? The website's always been a part of their journey to engage with you. The difference now is you have the opportunity to make your website much more catered to that portion of your traffic than the traffic that's much earlier stage, because you're not getting as much of that early stage traffic. Years ago when Google tweaked the search algorithms and everybody saw their traffic drop overnight and we're scrambling to figure out how do we deal with this, I was kind of looking at that like, I think that hurts us mostly on that higher volume, the really low interest. Not so much the traffic that's really there to learn about us and that's going to be in market for our stuff.
It was almost a noise reduction for us, if you want to think about it that way, and allowed us to just focus more on those signals, actual buying behavior signals, than worry — hey, did this blog post we put out get, is it in our top 10 views for the last year or not? We don't really care about that anymore.
Benjamin Ard12:30 — Very cool. Yeah, I love this concept of the awareness stage of the funnel isn't really happening on our website anymore. That's where we need to go out and engage and share content on other platforms where the audience is at. By the time they get to our website, it's a lot less people, but they're in a completely different frame of mind. And I love how you talked about we can tell a different story because we know where they're at in the journey. They're looking at us. They're not looking for generic information. They're not reading some generic article about what's the power of such and such a category. It's about, okay, what do I do? Like, what does this company do? What's their story? Is it aligned with me, things of that nature. So I think that's really cool. And you talked about, hey, it's not about the blog posts — what are the top 10 traffic sources on the website and how do we put more time and energy into those? But marketers do love metrics, and this will be our final question because we're almost running out of time. What should we measure on now that the awareness and all that kind of stuff has shifted? Traffic numbers are probably down a little bit. How do you measure successful content? What are you actually looking at to know that you're hitting the mark?
Stacy Shelley13:24 — Yeah, that's a really good question. I think to some degree it's come full circle where back before search ruled the roost, there was a lot more focus on branding and building your reputation in the market. A lot of that stuff just isn't directly measurable. Like you have to look really far down from a macro marketing perspective and just look at, okay, what's pipeline look like? What's conversion on that look like? How much pipeline is being generated by these different channels and how are they influencing pipeline? I think that's the world we're back to to a degree now. I think you can't be as obsessed about an individual piece of content. You have to be thinking more strategically about the narrative that you're driving out into the market, how effective you are getting that narrative out. You can still look at data and be like, okay, yeah, this got a lot of hits or this got a lot of interest or activity. But I don't think that can be your end-all be-all metric. Like I think at the end of the day, it still has to come back to, are you generating pipeline? Are you generating revenue?
I do think there's something to be said about — and this is something that I've done at a few of the companies I worked for — about being able to track traffic and interest from the people in the accounts that you feel like are in your ICP. I'll use another buzzword with ABM in that. But these days you do have the ability to pretty easily have metrics that are reflective of your real target. For one of my previous companies, we didn't really care like, hey, did this blog post do a lot of numbers, right? We did care about, okay, how many of the accounts were we targeting? Did we associate traffic to that blog post? That mattered a lot to us because what we would do is track across — we had a list of about 5,000 accounts that were our universe.
Benjamin Ard15:26 — Yeah.
Stacy Shelley15:30 — That was the traffic we cared about. So every scrap of associated traffic we could get from that. And what we saw was, we're not getting traffic from search from these accounts. These enterprises aren't using Google to find us. They're not using Google to find any of our competitors. They're consuming research reports. And then they're coming to us long after they first ran into us. But that's just not their research and buying motion. So I think that's gonna be a little bit different for every company that you talk to, every situation that you're in. But I feel pretty confident saying there are many metrics you could be leaning on that are much more meaningful than raw traffic to a post or to a page.
And at the end of the day, if you're judging yourself off of that, you know — I mean, traffic's just noise if it doesn't convert.
Benjamin Ard16:13 — True, very true. And I like the theme here, even with the content — you're putting the people back into the content. I also love that you're talking about the metrics being about the people. This is our, I love how you said, this is our universe. This is our world, these accounts, and is the content getting in front of these people? Are they engaging with it? That's all that matters. Who cares if someone in a country that we don't service and an industry we don't care about looks at our content, great. But what I care about is, am I creating people-driven content and is it being consumed by the right people? And so I love that you've shifted that across the board. I'm going to the people, I'm creating people-led content, things like that. So I love the message. I love the direction. I love how much that changes in everything. This is super cool. Love it. Stacy though, we have run out of time. These episodes are short and sweet so people can get back to their daily grind. But Stacy, for anyone who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Stacy Shelley17:15 — Yeah, just searching up on LinkedIn, Stacy Shelley. Follow me, I'm happy to share stuff with you. Reach out, connect.
Benjamin Ard17:22 — Love it. For anyone listening, go to the show notes regardless of what platform you're listening on. We will have Stacy's LinkedIn profile right there. Go ahead and click on the button, connect with Stacy, say I came from the podcast, all that kind of fun stuff. Stacy, again, thank you so much for the time and insights today. This has been amazing. Really do appreciate it.
Stacy Shelley17:40 — Great time, Ben.
