Content marketing has become a de facto part of most companies' growth plans. But are audiences getting burned out by content? And what's the role of content marketing in a product-led world.
Luckily to help answer these questions, we got to hang out with Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at Pendo, and one of the reasons content marketing became so successful in B2B.
We talk to Joe about:
- The constant battle between gating and ungating content. How do companies get this, right? And how do you know what content is good enough to put a form in front of.
- What are the three most common types of content that have the best chance of succeeding with your audience?
- How Joe has changed his approach to content and now approaches it more like a product leader vs. a marketing leader.
Happy Growing
[4:15] - Joe gives us an intro to Pendo. They provide software that provides companies with the data to understand, track, and analyze how people are using their products. It also provides features that help you get more engagement with your product. They have 380 employees, with revenue growth of 4200% in the past three years.
[7:55] - Content marketing programs should have content that has a myriad of different goals and purposes. It can help grow your brand, create demand, and moves people through your funnel.
[11:10] - There is constant friction between the want to give content away for free to reach a broader audience and the business goals of needing to create demand. When deciding to gate content behind a form, you need to ensure the quality of content is high because there is so much competition for audience attention.
[12:45] - The content you gate behind a form needs to of high enough quality that someone is willing to give you their details to download it. How good the content needs to be is dependent upon the industry.
[14:50] - It's easier to ungate content and place longer-term bets if you're beating your demand plan and aren't under pressure each month to find new demand to hit short-term goals.
[16:45] - Joe gives an example of how ebooks can still work to generate demand. Pendo created an ebook that influenced $3 million in sales opportunities. He also talks through a free interactive tool that Pendo made as an example of how you need to invest more in the content you create.
[20:50]- There are a couple of content formats that Joe feels will have a shot at being successful. Content that gives people a fresh perspective on a topic, idea, or themselves. Content that contains unique data. And content that helps answers your personas' questions.
[24:00] - When Joe was doing content at Eloqua, he loved the content he created and expected everyone else in the company to feel the same way and distribute it. Now he approaches content like a product leader. He falls in love with the problem and figures out the best solutions for it.
[28:45] - Pendo is adopting a product-led motion in their go-to-market. They started by having growth live in marketing. But they realized that for it to be successful, they need a pod of people from different functions.
[31:45] - Joe talks about what he see's his role is in helping to make the product-led approach successful at Pendo.
[34:35] - Joe thinks a product-led approach helps to reframe marketing's relationship with sales, in that it helps marketers generate demand for the sales team that are genuinely interested in the product.
– Joe on LinkedIn / Twitter
– Kieran on Twitter / LinkedIn / Medium
– Scott on Twitter / Linked / Medium
Topics: content marketing, Podcast, Leader
