Allyson Havener, VP of Marketing, TrustRadius:
We do our marketing planning in six-months-or-so sprints, if you will. When I think about it, I think about, again, what is the message that we want to put into the market? What are these key themes that we want to put out into the market? What are the pieces of content that are going to support that? Then I think about distribution channels.
Everything I do from a marketing perspective is in an integrated fashion. I call it our integrated marketing strategy. This report was created long before I came to TrustRadius, but we did it in a very different way than we’ve done it in the past. In the past, it was just one gated piece of content, and they used it for demand gen. It was living in a silo.
I thought, “This is our opportunity to really insert this thought leadership into the market and then have everything we do really ladder into it and use the data to solidify what we’re trying to say and really build credibility with the B2B marketers,” which is who we sell to. When we built out the report and we started working with Content4Demand, it started right away.
You can’t just have a report and then not think about the entire content strategy from the report. Don’t let it live in a silo and say, “Great, we have this piece of content. Let’s gate it and let’s put some paid media behind it. Okay, we’re done.” It really should be like, “Here’s the story that we’re trying to tell.” The report is just a part of that.
The other thing that we did is [used all these graphics] in social. It fed our entire organic social strategy, and it continues to. It fed our entire blog strategy. We built entire email cadences off the report. It all starts with your core message that you’re trying to put onto the market, that story arc, how the report supports that. Then your content strategy should be at the same time as the ideation for the report. Because, again, if you’re not creating that story that you want to push in all your other channels, then there’s not really a point to doing it. Think about it like that. It should be an entire integrated marketing strategy.
Alexis Carroll, Content Strategist:
Feeding the beast of social media and blogs can be exhausting. If you know up front that you’re going to be producing content for that, then it actually takes some of the stress off of the entire marketing department.
When we’re working on ideation for reports, I usually want to think through what else we want to accomplish. What kind of people are we reaching and what kind of content is going to best speak to that? Now, after you’re done with the report, you may go back to that ideation and say, “You know what? We could also be creating a webinar with this. We could also be adding in different levels,” but I think that having that planning at the beginning and having the buy-in from everybody in leadership that that’s what you’re going to do with this report helps get a lot more flexibility and resources put to it on the front end.
Allyson Havener:
Alexis, I remember when we were talking about this, this is not only demand-gen assets. I’ve been talking a lot about the demand-gen side of the house, but we use this in our PR. We are pitching this to media. We’re using it for SEO and backlinks. Try not to live in just that one-dimensional world of, “This report is going to do X, Y and Z.” It just expanded our entire marketing strategy and really fed it from PR all the way to bottom-funnel demand-gen content.
One of the things that we did that I thought was really creative from my team is we created a blog format out of it. This is where we got our SEO, the backlinks and just the overall awareness of the report, and then we had a downloadable asset as well that then was the demand-gen and lead-gen component.
It doesn’t have to just be the PDF or the interactive PDF or whatever. We opened it up as well. You get the best of both worlds from an awareness standpoint. You want the eyeballs on it—as many eyeballs as you can, but then you can also have that lead-gen component as well. The possibilities are endless. Opening up your frame of reference and not just putting it into one bucket is really important, as well.
Brenda Caine, VP of Content Strategy:
I’m starting to see that this is several campaigns in a box, not just one. That’s such a good point that you don’t have to limit it just to your demand-gen campaigns or a specific campaign. You can use it all over your business to really support the story that you’re trying to tell.
