3. #SDSummit
Marketers are under more pressure than ever before.
BUT WE LACK INFRASTRUCTURE
TO CREATE, TAILOR AND CONTROL
CONTENT EXPERIENCES.
4. #SDSummit
THE STATUS QUO
Limited ability to optimize -
sacrificing conversation and
engagement
PAINFUL
PROCESSES
NOT
SCALABLE
HOMOGENOUS
EXPERIENCE
LIMITED
CONTENT ROI
Long redesigns, project
management and IT
bottlenecks
Difficult to create multiple
experiences for other use cases.
Spending major dollars to send
people to the same experience.
5. #SDSummit
EVOLVE & ADAPT
Gain the control to manage and
optimize experiences for your
goals.
BECOME
AGILE
SCALE YOUR
CONTENT
CUSTOMIZE
EXPERIENCES
GAIN
CONTROL
Move quickly and avoid
cumbersome processes and
bottlenecks.
Leverage content marketing
across the entire buyer journey.
Tailor experiences for different use
cases, buyers and audience
segments.
23. What kind of tech?
Intranet? Sharepoint?
Custom-built content
gallery for wordpress?
Sales enablement tool?
24. #SDSummit
Content gallery
for our website
Why Uberflip?
Sales
enablement tool
Better solution for
landing pages
Replacing our
Wordpress blog
Integration with
our tech stack,
especially
Marketo
Great metrics
26. #SDSummit
Adding content to
Uberflip, organizing,
tagging
Rollout
Marketo plumbing & forms Other integrations
Migrating
the blog
Training the
Marketing team Cutover
Training the
Sales team
1 2 3
4 5 6 7
49. #SDSummit
First 6 months – By the Numbers
11,300 24,300 2,660
400+
customized sales
streams created by our
SDR and Sales teams
130%
unique visitors
to the hub
page views
of content
Flipbook views
(PDFs)
content pieces
in the hub
MQL target
achievement
last 2 Q’s
700+
Allocadia is a start-up company based up in Vancouver, currently about 90 employees.
And as for what Allocadia does…
We see that there are two sides to a marketer’s job … run and do.
The Do side of marketing is what this conference is mostly about — tactics and strategies to help you attract acquire and retain customers. And that’s what Marketo helps you with.
But there’s also the Run side… that’s where Allocadia focuses.
All together we call the run side Marketing Performance Management, or MPM
We are building the category of MPM, and also becoming the leaders in it.
So like I said, we market to marketers, and typically these are our buying teams.
So it’s obviously a B2B sale. We sell into the enterprise with about a 6 months average sales cycle.
We have a small marketing team, but reasonably large content library… certainly enough to have a pain around how best to serve it up.
Content is especially important to us. Why?
-- it touches nearly everything we do in marketing; with the possible exception of live events, all of our marketing channels revolve around content.
-- and content plays a big role in the sales cycle, too. We’re trying to build a new category…so we have to educate the market before selling, and we primarily use content to do that.
Our marketing tech Stack…Marketo is at the centre of what we call the “Do” side.
And as you can see, Uberflip is right there in our “content creation & delivery” category.
Back in Summer 2016, the Allocadia marketing team is experiencing some pains.
In my mind, there are two different kinds of pains.
You’ve got acute business pains, the kind that make you stop everything and put out those fires. And then there are the kind of business pains that aren’t quite so obvious. On the surface, they don’t seem all that painful. But they can actually be pretty insidious.
But they build upon each other, and when you really sit down to analyze these pains, you have a real barrier to growth. And that second type of pain is what led us to seek out a technology like Uberflip.
I would say without a doubt that these pains were a barrier to our sales growth. And that’s why we had to do something about it.
First… is the way we were serving up content on our website.
This was our Resource page.
A stock part of the wordpress theme we were using at the time.
It was pretty limited… the only way to control which things were shown on the page was by manipulating the date manually in wordpress.
You could filter based on type, but that was it.
But nobody ever comes to your website to say hmmm, “what eBooks do you have”.
So this was a big problem, because tons of our content was just dying on the vine. And as the person creating all this stuff, that made me sad.
Second, our landing pages.
Like a lot of B2B organizations, we use landing pages as a lead gen tool, gating our high value pieces of content like ebooks and webinar recordings.
But we found they were a source of friction.
Super typical.
We sent visitors to a separate page off our normal website, built and hosted by Marketo, with a Marketo form.
The pains here are that even with a killer set of templates and tokens, which we do have, it still takes time to build this stuff. Creating artwork, setting up the page, creating tons of variants etc.
Also, just from a user experience perspective… it’s very much a different experience than the rest of our site. And folks can’t really see what they’re getting, except for the picture of the fake book.
And finally, the delivery of the asset is awkward too – once I fill out the form (and by the way I have to fill it out for each and every new thing I publication I want to download), I get taken to a thank you page… (and by the way that’s typically just the same URL with thank-you , pretty easy to guess) and on that page, I have to download a PDF, which again is separate from the website that brought me here in the first place.
And third, we had a pain around how to serve up content internally.
This was actually the biggest, hardest to solve pain: how best to get content into the right hands of our sales team, at the right time. In a way that’s relevant to them.
The best way I can sum it up was, there was a disconnect between sales and marketing on content.
We found that as the amount of content we were producing grew, it wasn’t at all obvious to the sales team where to find it, when to use it, how to use it, etc.
But to find our stuff, they had to either wade through that resources page that I showed you and then go to a form on a Marketo landing page, just like a prospect would do… or find a random loose PDF on a folder on our shared drives… or find it in our internal wiki, which as you can see is really not designed for quick, painless discovery of content.
It took me a while to realize the seriousness of this problem. I was a marketing guy, and I was producing a lot of this stuff. So to me it seemed painfully obvious what content we had, were to find it, and how it should be used.
But salespeople have a stressful job. They need quick, ready, access to our content. We can’t expect them to retain a mental map of all the content we have. It has to be just as well presented to our internal customers as it does to our external ones.
This pain sounds like such a small thing. But it’s huge. I’ve never not seen this problem at any organization I’ve been at.
As a content creator, I always thought making content was all I had to do. But it isn’t, that’s just one part of the story.
The content experience matters.
We really didn’t have a business pain around lack of content… we just needed our content to do more. We needed to squeeze more juice out of it.
Which kind of tech would make the biggest difference?
Was tech even the answer?
These were the 6 most important things to us. Uberflip checked all my boxes.
So what exactly is Uberflip?
It’s a gallery, a method of serving up content, a CMS, and also a simple page creator. And it helps you measure the effectiveness of your content.
It’s really hard to express all these things at once until you see it.
It’s a bit of a swiss army knife for content.
But after going through a few demos and asking TONS of questions to Uberflip sales team, I was satisfied that it could do what it said, and solve the pains I hoped it could solve.
These were the 7 steps that we went through to get up and running on Uberflip.
I did this all largely solo, with some help from our marketing ops team, in about 2.5 months, very part time, in addition to my normal job.
The uberflip team was a great help, like really fantastic.
Example of how your Marketo plumbing has to change…. Adjusting your flow steps and smart lists and all that jazz
Everything we did previously with Marketo pages and forms, we were able to replicate with the Uberflip way of doing things.
All very plug and play.
From the perspective of Marketo and GA, Uberflip just becomes part of your website.
So here I’ll give you a tour of how things work for us now, after implementing Uberflip.
With Uberflip, we were able to get more value out of our existing content in a whole bunch of ways, some small, some large, but they basically fall into 3 categories
Demand Gen, Sales Enablement, ABM
With Uberflip, we were able to get more value out of our existing content in a whole bunch of ways, some small, some large, but they basically fall into 3 categories
Demand Gen, Sales Enablement, ABM
Demand Gen Juice: our resource centre: content.allocadia.com
Organized, categorized all these different ways. Topic, type, audience, and more.
We can pick what to feature, not just the newest thing
Header is styled to fit in with website
Killer search feature, for the first time a single search looks at all of our content, including the blog and eBooks, and all of its contents
Just looks better… looks like Pinterest. We can also embed these tiles on our website, or even in email.
The Blog…
We migrated the blog. Now Uberflip operates it instead of wordpress.
Here’s a zoom in on the categories we have set up… the same content can be shown under multiple categories.
It seems like such a simple thing, but it’s made such a big difference.
Visitors can find what they’re looking for so much more easily, and we have super granular control over what’s shown where.
But equally importantly, so can salespeople!
So now I’ll show you some of my favorite things about the way Uberflip works.
This is how I felt after moving over to Uberflip from a really limiting setup in Wordpress.
For example, Uberflip adds this little box in the bottom of each post to guide people to the next article…
Or a “more resources” area at the bottom of the page, featuring more items from the same category.
Having one piece of content featured, bigger than all the rest
You can subtly add calls to action amongst your content
Demand Gen Juice: a sample landing page
No more separate pages to be created and maintained. The “gate” just floats overtop of the asset.
Talk about big reduction of effort … all we have to do to create a landing page is upload the PDF and apply one of these forms.
Totally reducing the load on your marketing ops function. So simple, even a content person can set it up.
On form completion, the visitor still has control over what to do with the publication; they can read it using Uberflip’s fancy in-line viewer, or download it. Filling out a form gives the user an all-access pass to all of our content — this is far superior to gating each asset separately. Once the person is known to Marketo, there is no reason to ask for their contact information again.
This is a special content galleries, fantastic for specific demand gen campaigns.So these ones are publicly accessible, but they’ve got a special campaign header and just feature a small selection of stuff. Like a microsite.
--
A big part of sales enablement juice was just the resource centre I already showed you… as useful for Salespeople as it is for a prospect.
No need for a separate internal gallery for salespeople. They can find it just like a member of the public can. And since those forms are a one-and-done all-access pass, they’re not going to get annoyed by everything being gated. They just fill in the form once and that’s it.
Sales Streams… this is where we take sales enablement to the next level.
you can spin up these mini galleries of content
you get that simple URL
nothing inside here is gated
no distractions, non-overwhelming
highly customized, the content is chosen for the person
very personal, you have a custom message from the sales rep
It’s now SOP with our sales team to follow up on their conversations with a customized bundle of content. So they just got off the phone with a prospect, that person is specifically interested in products X and Y, so that’s what they include.
And the URL stays the same, content can be added over time.
Or you could use these for internal purposes too, whenever you need to bundle up some content for a particular purpose.
New employee orientation, releasing a new product, etc.
We’ve even used them at the executive level as a leave-behind for meetings.
It’s a lot better than a bunch of loose PDFs.
And in this particular one, we’re also including customer quotes in the mix.
These sales streams become a powerful tool in the hands of our SDR team, too. That’s how we get some ABM Juice.
This is a real screenshot, it was the Sales Stream our SDR Mick used to start a conversation with the CMO of a large potato chip company, which led to a six figure opportunity.
You can crank out production of these things according to how your ABM strategy works.
Super selective cherry picking of content for your top tier, maybe even custom content.
Then maybe for your next tier down, maybe you develop templates by industry and just clone them.
Together, our Sales and SDR teams have created over 700 of these for prospects over the last 6 months.
These sales streams have become one of the main pillars of our ABM strategy.
Here’s a tip one of our Ops pros figured out to give our SDR team more visibility…
Just make sure the team always puts a common word in when they’re defining the URL of their streams. Like for example “customer-name-selections”
Then every morning Marketo sends a report on pages that contain the word selections, so the team can see which of their Streams got viewed the day before.
Even if the person you’ve sent it to isn’t yet in your Marketo database.
These numbers are just so you can get a sense of the scale of what we’re doing.
I can't offer a specific comparison to the previous method because it was really hard to measure our content in isolation. Once you send someone to a pDF to download, that's it... you can't tell whether they read it or not, you just kind of say here it is.
Whereas you get all kinds of great metrics with uberflip, even at the individual item level.
But just anecdotally, this is definitely an improvement for us.
I mentioned the problem of content going to waste… now so much more of our content is going to a good home!
Assuming you’re going to use technology to tackle this set of business pains like we did… Stop the presses if you have to. If you’re a content marketing manager looking to bring it a system like this, consider that your existing body of content might be OK, you just need to squeeze more juice out of it. And if, like me, you’re also the person actually setting up the system, ask for permission to stop making content for a couple months as you implement this instead.
Document your documents. Every piece of content, it’s former URL, its new URL, any 301 redirects, etc. Get extremely tight on tagging, categories, etc. Trust me, it’ll help you later. There are a lot of moving parts.
Sell to sales. Your marketing team will love it, that’s an easy sell. Sales team: show them super tangible examples using their real faces and aspirational prospect names (Luke / AirBnB). Train them live. I told them it was coming, teased it, then held a session to train them. Follow up with them all the time. Check in on what they’re building and how their prospects are responding.
Enlist your SDR team… keen for a tool, grateful for a focal point in their reach-out efforts. Train them separately because their needs are slightly different. Then pick one or two SDR Uberflip champions and show the rest of the team how it’s done. Use them as a trojan horse.
#1 recommendation:
You probably don’t have a not-enough-content problem. You may have the wrong content, but it’s probably about having more accessible content. A better content experience.
This matters almost as much as the content itself. You probably have enough content. Just squeeze more juice out of it.