Spend Way More Time Promoting Your B2B Content

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Mark Evans: Hello. My name is Mark Evans, and I'd like to welcome you to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers small doses of insight, tools, and tips from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches. By small doses, it's conversations that are fifteen minutes or less. Think of marketing spark as a snack rather than a meal. On today's show, I'm talking with Dev Basu, the chief experience officer with Powered by Search, which helps b to b SaaS and tech companies grow monthly recurring revenue, book more demos, and drive trials with content, SEO, and paid acquisition. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Dev Basu: Thanks for having me, Mark.

Mark Evans: This, it goes without saying, is a very interesting marketing landscape. COVID has, in many ways, changed the rules of engagement. A lot of brands are doubling down on content and things like webinars and ebooks. And I'm really interested from an SEO perspective. What are you seeing? Are companies approaching SEO differently?

Dev Basu: It's a great question. I see that there's usually three camps of companies related to COVID nineteen. We did a webinar on this particular topic and identified there were fear focused companies that basically pulled back a lot of different marketing activities. They first cut their paid ad spend, and then they pulled back on SEO as well. There's ones who are unfocused who basically continued with their publication schedule around their editorial calendar and pulled back ads. And then the strategy focused ones realized that even though there's a slump in demand where effectively commercial intent oriented queries, like, basically people looking to buy software, that started to go down for a number of different cloud cloud based companies. The strategy focused ones really said, this is now the time to double down, look back at our systems, improve our workflows, and then really start ramping this up because it's not gonna last forever and the demand will come back.

Mark Evans: In your estimation, of those three groups, the strategies group, like, how big was that, and how hard do you think it was for them to embrace that approach? Because when the world is about to end or at least go into what people thought was the apocalypse, it's easy to pull back. It's easy to play it safe and not push forward. Was it 10%, 20%?

Dev Basu: So it's a really interesting question. We did a poll with a number of other consultants and agencies. The ones that saw about a 20% drop in revenue, really that came from that fear focused and unfocused group. The strategy focused group is somewhere between 2030%. And I mentioned that range because a number of cloud based companies obviously have seen a huge surge in demand, and their stock prices have effectively doubled in the last hundred and eighty days here. Part of it was if you had more demand than you can handle, you had to have your engines firing on all cylinders. And then there's the other group that basically had to wait and see where especially in b to b SaaS where deal cycles started getting a bit longer. That's where that lower end of the 20% basically comes from where they said, hey. We need to continue investing in marketing initiatives and activities. And SEO is one of those long term plays. It's not something that you really think of as a quarterly, you know, turn it on and turn it off type of of thing. They invested heavily in it.

Mark Evans: It's an interesting strategic approach because if you think it in terms of the long run and how you can establish a competitive advantage, pushing forward when a lot of companies are pushing back makes a lot of sense. The entrepreneurs that you've talked to, what's been their overall thinking in terms of how they approach marketing? Do they have a particular attitude? Do they have a particular strategic focus? What separated them from other companies that have pulled back?

Dev Basu: So the ones that really pulled back saw their their play playing field in the market as renting the market, which is, you know, usually what we think of from a a paid perspective. Once you turn an ad off, it stops working for you. The ones that really believed in their product and the value that they bring to the market, even though they saw their audience, their market being scared just like they were, I think they had the courage really to put a a flag in the ground and say, we're gonna be here to help our audience through this thing. And that, you know, showed up and just like you're saying in webinars and ebooks and terms of content to help their customers through COVID nineteen. But at the same time, they said, look. Longer term, you know, a good 60% of our demand generation comes from organic search. So it it would be foolish to turn this off. It's it's always been there for us. And one of the things that my clients and I often talk about is how their best best performing content was actually content that they published a year or even two years ago. And so the efforts that they're investing in today are really gonna pay off a year from today and become their best performing content to date then.

Mark Evans: Before we dive into the SEO world, one of the things I wanted to ask you is I spend a lot of time focused on brand positioning. Have you seen a discernible difference in the brands that fall into the strategic camp in terms of the strength of their brand positioning versus weaker brands? My take is that companies with compelling brand positioning, they'll do well because people are distracted. They're multitasking. They're doing more with less or the same. And so if you don't stand out from the crowd, if your positioning isn't bang on, then that's gonna put you

Dev Basu: at a competitive disadvantage. You're 100% right about that. We did another webinar through COVID called the messaging pivot, and our core thesis is that all SaaS companies effectively sell three things. They're selling speed, certainty, and insight. And in boom times, whereas if you're selling those things, you're basically talking about selling automation. And if it's certainty, it's about productivity. And if it's about insight, it's about better decision making. All of those things were not things that customers cared about when, you know, it's an existential sort of crisis. And so the ones that really did well are the ones who pivoted their message on those same value drivers to you know, from automation to effectiveness, from better decision making to making the right decisions right now, and from productivity to just how do I keep the lights on.

Mark Evans: When we were talking about you doing the podcast, one of the things that struck me is the mistakes that a lot of companies make when it comes to SEO. From the outside looking in, SEO is a lot it's a combination of art and science, and a lot of companies make a mistake because they don't understand it. And they they may approach it from a position of, I'm not gonna say ignorance, but it may be a lack of knowledge. And as a result, they make a lot of mistakes. I'm interested in getting your insight into the things that companies do wrong when it goes to SEO. Do you have a list of the things that they should avoid so they can actually leverage SEO successfully?

Dev Basu: This list is something we came up with over the last ten years of working with SaaS companies. Some, you know, near and dear Canadian ones like a Clio or a TouchBistro, then of the folks in The States like a twenty four seven AI or, you know, PointClickCare, for example, that's in both both countries really. What I've what we found is that the number one thing and stage one of a SaaS website is they tend to have a lack of dedicated features pages. So if you're looking at your features pages right now and it's got a a number of little icons on it, a small headline, and a paragraph of text, Generally, that is doing a disservice to your customer's ability to find you and Google's ability to love on you and actually help rank you. So if you don't have a dedicated feature page, meaning a specific page for every single feature that you effectively have as part of your product or platform suite, that would be one of the main mistakes that we see as not really assigning, again, a stake or a flag in the ground to say, we believe in this feature so much that we actually wanted to go do a deep dive and not do it a disservice and write some content on it. Not just about what it is and how it works, but why customers love it. And also why it's competitive compared to a peer group where, you know, if you've seen somebody using CRM a and they now wanna go to CRM b, having testimonials to actually showcase how much they love this feature is something that we've seen improved conversions.

Mark Evans: That's interesting because a lot of companies follow that feature formula. They have the page. They have the icons, a little bit of text, and that and they think that's enough information. What you're saying is the more information you can give them, the more social proof that you can demonstrate, the more effective it'll be from an SEO perspective and from a customer acquisition perspective.

Dev Basu: Yeah. And, you know, we came up upon this insight actually from something quite old. So in the in the fifties, high school teacher by the name of Bernice McCarthy came up with this form this specific teaching format called format with the the number four. It's four m a t. And the idea was the brain needs to ingest information in four questions. Why, what, how, and now. Why am I here and what am I looking at? How does it actually work? And then what do you expect me to do next? If your feature page doesn't address those four questions that the brain sublimitally kind of goes through, it won't end up converting at its highest potential. And generally speaking with a headline and a paragraph, you can't answer all four of those questions in a succinct enough fashion.

Mark Evans: What other mistakes do SaaS and tech companies make when it comes to SEO?

Dev Basu: Yeah. So the other one that we really see is they end up having no comparison or alternative two pages. And it's almost a little bit like not acknowledging that this narrative of a potential customer comparing two different SaaS products is actually happening. And so what they do is they concede that ground to comparison websites like a GetApp, a g two, a Capterra. Really, what we believe they should be doing is creating comparison and an alternative two pages on their own website with a honest breakdown of the types of customers that might be a good fit for them as well as the types of customers that might be a good fit for their competitor. And this is not to do you know, it's not to cast shade on the competitor in any way, but really to attract higher LTV customers. If they if they buy for the right reasons, they'll stick around and love on that particular SaaS company longer.

Mark Evans: That's gotta be a very challenging exercise because I've you know, we've all seen the the comparison tables that appear on some websites, and you've got a whole bunch of check marks for the company's product. And then the competition has check mark, check mark, and then it's x x x. And you look at it and you go, come on. You can't be serious. I mean, that's not an honest comparison because it's slanted in one direction. If you're a company and you're gonna do that and follow best practices, how do you make sure that you're being as honest or as unbiased as possible? And and more important that you're believable. People look at you and go, okay. This company is taking a different approach to this to this technique.

Dev Basu: Yeah. So and a 100% true. Right? People have a very good bullshit radar around this. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on your podcast or not. What we do is we we run jobs to be done interviews. And the the best way of figuring this out is interviewing customers who have made a purchasing decision who are what we would call an up switcher, basically. So they've used something else in the past. You ask them why they used your platform instead, and you extract from the voice of the customer the main reasons that caused them to switch. The pricing table approach is generally lazy and not very true as you mentioned. The other thing as well from a positioning standpoint is going back to that Seth Godin quote of people like us do things like this, really giving a nod to the competitor for what they built. And one of the favorite pages on this is Intercom versus Drift. And Drift built this page where they said, look. We are the platform built by marketers for marketers. If you're not a marketer, if you're an engineering, you're in, you know, customer service or something like that, go use Intercom. They're amazing at what they do. But if you're a marketer, you're gonna love using Drift. And that was just a way of being able to segment the audience not based on the feature set, but based on what the company stood for.

Mark Evans: The other thing that I wanted to ask you about is the focus on content these days. And from my perspective, as someone who's focused on brand positioning and content marketing, I'm amazed by how much content is being pumped out. Some brands were already doing it. Content marketing was a key part of their strategic approach, but many brands who weren't using content marketing or doing it sporadically have all of a sudden decided to become publishers. What are some of the mistakes that SaaS brands are making when it comes to content, particularly when it comes to customer focused content and as important content that's SEO friendly.

Dev Basu: I think that the right recipe is to do it as one and the same. And the way here's a litmus test. If you are not ready to read your own blog posts on your site, then why would you expect your customer to? And so to hammer that home, the the decision by committee led approach of, hey. We should publish about this because a competitor talked about it, or I reckon that we saw a listicle post on BuzzFeed that might be appropriated to our b to b SaaS focus isn't the best approach. That's a spray and pray approach where, frankly, I think that hope is not the best strategy. A better way of going about it is really a research driven approach where you can segment your audience's keyword research data into what we would call a problem unaware audience, a problem aware audience, and a product aware audience. And then look at their to the topics effectively that they're searching for and then go and look at whether you've got a page for that that addresses the questions and answers that they may have. Then then then prioritize that in your editorial calendar. If you did that, then another good litmus test we use, especially for companies that are just scaling up their content marketing, is looking at what are the top 10 questions that seem to continue popping up in your demos or that your customer success team faces in a trial type of scenario. And how do you have a blog post about that? If if not, those go do those first. That's gonna be your eighty twenty.

Mark Evans: When it comes to content marketing, is there an ideal mix between content promotion and content creation? I would suggest that a lot of companies spend a lot of time creating content and very little time promoting it. What are your thoughts about that?

Dev Basu: I think it's probably like, the mistake is 90% on production and 10% on promotion. But, honestly, the times and times where we see the publish being publish button being hit and nothing happening after other than moving on to the next piece of content, it's abysmal, really. So the the right ratio is somewhere in the sixty forty range. So 60% of time being spent on research, editorial publication, and then 40% being spent on distribution. That's a realistic number. Although I we'd love to flip it to 20% being on production, 80% being on promotion. That's just not a reality in a day to day type of scenario, not something we've observed. But if you can get to sixty forty publication versus distribution, that's a pretty nice golden ratio.

Mark Evans: Any thoughts about best practices when it comes to distribution, the channels you should use, the approaches you should take?

Dev Basu: Yeah. So from an SEO standpoint, it really comes down to are you getting mentioned, shared, and linked to by relevant publications and websites within your industry? And so one of the simpler approaches is actually to help them build it with you. The way that we do it is we will when we're building content for a particular client, we'll actually do interviews and actually get other people's opinions in their industry to shape the piece of content. That way they're not being pitched on the piece of content. They are a piece of the content. That way when you publish, you just say, hey. It's published. Here's a link. And because they were a part of it, they they inherently want to share it on social channels and such and link to it as well.

Mark Evans: One final question. What is your favorite SEO tool and why?

Dev Basu: Probably hands down, it's a ahrefs.com because it allows you to figure out where the content gaps are. You pick five competitors and maybe four of the five are talking about a specific topic and there's a specific topic that they haven't dived deep enough into or that they publish content on but have not promoted, haven't got any links to. So this is a really great way of being able to focus in on areas of opportunity that are low hanging fruit. And this really it takes that whole belief that SEO takes, you know, forever or it's an undeterminable period about how long it takes on its head and says, here's the the stuff that we can do in the next quarter or two quarters and actually get wins around.

Mark Evans: Well, this has been terrific insight, Deb. Really appreciate it. I think for anyone considering SEO, your advice is something that they should consider and really start to implement in terms of their their sales and marketing strategy. So thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, please leave a review as well as subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest, or you're looking for help with b to b marketing, send an email to mark@markevans.ca. Talk to you next time.