How many of you are struggling to get results from content marketing?
It's hard. There is so much competition. How can we make sure our content stands out from an ever-increasing crowd.
Well, one software company that managed to grow quickly through blogging was Groove, who provide customer support software. One of the brains behind that strategy was Len Markidan, who is now the CMO at Podia.
We talk to Len about:
- How the first blog Groove had failed to get any traction, and how Len used customer research to make the next iteration a success, generating 90% of Groove's leads.
- How Len used something called "The Inner Circle" to make their content marketing so successful and how you can replicate it.
- Why Len has had to adapt his approach to content marketing for Podia because they're in such a competitive space, and how remote work is helping Podia to hire amazing world-class talent.
Happy Growing!
Time Stamped Notes
[3:00 ] - Len gives us the rundown of what the marketing team at Podia is responsible for.
[6:00] - The blogs at Groove eventually accounted for 90% of their leads. However, initially, blogging didn't work for Groove. They completely changed their approach to blogging after taking two months out to do customer research on what problems they should be writing about.
[9:05] - The Groove team had a very public goal of using blogging to get to 100k in ARR. Having such a public goal created a sense of accountability for the team to hit it. Eventually, they had to change that goal to $500k in ARR and then to 10mil in ARR.
[11:05] - Although Groove provided teams with customer support software, that's not what they exclusively covered on the blog. Not every company was ready to invest customer support software, but they all needed help with how to grow a business. Groove expanded their blog content to be about those topics.
[13:40] - Groove did a couple of things great when it came to blogging that helped them to accelerate their growth:
a. A lot of the content Groove created around entrepreneurship and what it takes to grow a business was based on their experiences. It made the content more authentic and transparent. People valued that.
b. Groove created something called "the inner circle" to improve the quality of the content, and get distribution for it.
The inner-circle was a small group of 30 experts who gave Groove early feedback on the content before it was published. Those experts not only helped to shape the content to ensure it was excellent quality, but they also shared it with their networks when it got published.
[17:10] - To get experts working with them, Groove reached out to each one personally and gave compelling reasons why they would value their input and advice. There was no monetary transaction; the experts were glad to provide help.
[20:15] - Groove's had so much success with their blog; they launched a second one that was more specific to customer support. It helped them get more coverage for mid-funnel and bottom-of-funnel topics.
[26:45] - Since moving to Podia, Len has had to change his content marketing approach a little because it's a more saturated space content-wise. His team has invested in a lot more long-form content and covering topics in a lot more depth.
[29:10 ] - Remote work has helped Podia to hire world-class talent because it's an attractive option for people who don't want to move to the core cities for work.
– Len on Twitter / LinkedIn
– Kieran on Twitter / LinkedIn / Medium
– Scott on Twitter / Linked / Medium
Topics: content marketing, Podcast, Leader
