Putting Content Marketing in the Right Context
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the power of content marketing. It has been one of the most effective ways to generate leads, build brand awareness, generate sales, and reach out to your target audience through content. However, to reach these goals, your content marketing strategy needs to be well thought-out and planned.
Haley Fraser, Director of Marketing, Brand & Content at Pixlee TurnTo talks to Rishabh Shekhar, Co-founder & COO at Pepper Content about her journey in content marketing, her work at a company that deals with user-generated content, AI content, and lot more.
Here are some excerpts.
1. Please introduce yourself.
I am currently the director of content and brand at Pixlee TurnTo. We help brands discover and use user-generated content, ratings and reviews, and influencer marketing.
I've been in content marketing for the last 10 years. I began my career in social media marketing and gravitated toward long-form content. In my career, I've overseen the full funnel of content marketing – from actual content strategy to execution and everything in between.
2. According to you, what has been the tectonic shift in the KPIs that content marketers looked at ten years ago and now?
Even in the B2B SaaS space, KPIs have changed quite a bit. I started in the B2C space, so many of the metrics I measured back then were the top-of-the-funnel metrics like impressions, engagements, clicks, conversions, and direct revenue attributed to social.
Now, in the SaaS space, there's more emphasis on content being relevant to the audience. The focus is on software metrics like time on page, SEO impact, pipeline attribution, and some deeper metrics too.
3. What do you think has been the impact of AI-generated content?
When I think about the industry in general and what is next in terms of AI content versus user user-generated or other types of content, I think AI will have a place in many content conversations. It's really how a lot of marketers can achieve scale.
4. What is your current content marketing stack, and what is an ideal content marketing stack according to you?
My organization is focused on search, ranking, Google SEO, etc. We're focused on making sure we're doing right by the new Google changes and aligning with keyword volume. So, we use Semrush to ensure we're tracking the right keywords and constantly growing in that direction.
Google Analytics and site metric tools are also really helpful. My ideal stack would include something that can also connect to Salesforce and show pipeline attribution to display how the content influences deals at different stages in the pipeline.
5. How have you structured your team?
A good scalable way of looking at content marketing is having a balance of in-house writers and freelancers. So, we work with a broad network of content contributors and subject matter experts across different industries. We also have an in-house content marketer who serves as quality control and editor for outsourced content.
My ideal team is a little bit of content marketing, social media, brand, and community within the same bucket. Since all this floats in a circular loop, having it all rolling in the same team can be powerful.
6. What is the current biggest challenge for modern content marketers?
It's keeping up with the volume of content, staying relevant, and keeping up with changing trends to ensure you're keeping your audience engaged. You have to produce a lot of content, and producing a lot of good content takes time.
Many content marketers also struggle with finding the right mix of content.
