Outsourcing Thought Leadership Content Is Hard But Not Impossible: Here's How to Do It
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Welcome to office hours with John Collins, a content marketing legend who was the Former Director at Intercom and Former Head of Content and Communications at Ramp.
On today's office hours, John talks about coming to B2B SaaS from journalism and his content initiatives at Intercom. He talks about:
Watch the office hours replay below.
Jimmy Daly:
Okay, we're good. All right. Now we'll dive in. All right, John, you're a legend in the content marketing space. I've always looked up to, you always admired your work. You've done some amazing things at Intercom and Ramp, you're consulting now. I have so many questions about all these things. I also wanna let people know if you have questions for John, leave them in the chat. I'll be happy to cue them up. I think the first, first place I would love to start, so you, you came to B2B Sass content marketing from journalism, which I think is Yeah, I see, like, I sort of see the, the line, you know, like I see how it impacted the work that you guys did at Intercom. And I wonder, I remember I interviewed Jeffrey Keating a few years back, probably five years back about Intercom stuff and just learning about how you guys ran things pretty amazing. I thought. How, like, and I assume this came from you, this really strong emphasis on subject matter expertise, right? Like the content team was serving as a, as facilitators for subject matter expertise as opposed to just content creators. Is that accurate? And can you kind of talk about that a little bit? Yeah,
John Collins:
Yeah. No, so a hundred percent not to be provocative at the beginning, but you know, no one really cares what marketers think. , you know, but not to be facetious, but, you know, we were, particularly in the early days at Intercom, we mostly were selling to like founders and like product people at like early stage startups are, are relatively early stage startups. And so, you know, I think to, to, to really speak to them in, in a way that they, like it would resonate with them. It, it needed to come from the subject matter experts. So we used all sorts of ways to make sure we got like the, the deep insights that those people had into, into product building. Because ba basically someone, you know, the, the person who was responsible for the product had to make the decision to integrate Intercom.
Which for, for people who dunno, is like customer communications tool, but you integrate it deeply with your, your own product. And so you had to ba basically speak to those people, you know, give them I suppose like knowledge that like felt, you know, you were adding something to the conversation. It's like, you know, I used to always kinda joke that, you know product people would, you know, read your 2000 word post about like how you do your process. You know, as later as Intercom started to sell to, to sales people, it was like, give gimme your, you your waste of my time with the headline. Give gimme what you got straight away. You know, support people were just like delighted that anyone was, was, was writing for them and, and, and like, you know, really appreciated any kinda empathy you could show for, for their task.
So like, it was really all about like that that strategy of drawing the subject matter experts, it was really driven by who we were, right? And really trying to get a deep understanding of who those people were. I mean you wrote that post at Animals about Your blog is not publication. And, you know I think it was kinda saying, you know, we did run a publication, but I think it worked because of that audience that we were trying to sell to that like it community, it was people who were gonna like, you know, if they learned anything about product building from Intercom, they would then, you know, definitely consider us when they had an opportunity to use us as a product to communicate with their customers. That's not gonna work in, in every instance. And actually, I agree with you, I think most people's content marketing is far better to think of it as a library rather than a publication.
But, you know, we had that buy in from the top. You know, one of the co-founders of Intercom Des Trainer, he famously wrote the first 93 of 100 blog posts on Inside Intercom. Owen, who's the ceo, just really got like the potential of it they'd like seen, seen, you know, it worked for HubSpot, for base comp for folks like that. And so they, they really, you know, gave us the space and put the investment into it to, to run a publication. So yeah, it was, it was really, really powerful. And we made sure that publication was, you know, written mostly by the, the subject matter experts of the company rather than like the content marketers. And, you know, whether that meant totally ghost writing something, whether it meant like interviewing someone and just writing that up as their own byline piece. You know, some people are great. Like you literally get them in a room and whiteboard and then, you know, one of team would create a or podcast basis just figuring whatever it was matter.
Jimmy Daly:
That's so interesting because I don't think, I don't think a content marketer could have ever pulled that off, like someone with a content marketing background. I mean, like, I feel like it, it, I assume that your journalism background played a pretty significant role in that, you know, and it was a harder way to do it too, right? I mean, it's it's harder to execute, at least, I imagine. Yeah.
John Collins:
I mean, yeah. And I think the one thing I think that I, I always said to people about it was, you know, cause people always go like they, they want the, like, what should I do? Tell me what to do. And I'm like, well, this worked for us. And I think one of the, one of the reasons it worked for us was it stood out. Definitely, you know, if you think about it at the time you like had, like a lot of the, the content marketing that people looked up to at the time was things like HubSpot and which was very, very search orientated. It was a lot of it was like, it was, it was a volume play. It was like, do a lot of keyword research, make sure you hit a lot of those keyword. And it worked amazingly for them.
Like, I'm not saying in any judgmental way. And so it was like, well, hey, we're this like we were a 60 person company, you know, four Irish founders set up in San Francisco in 2011. How many like startups were founded in San Francisco in 11? You know, and you're trying to stand out from the noise. And so I think that sort of philosophy of like a, a publication that like publishes subject matter experts from around the company, it was, it was pretty unique for us. And, and then we really just sort of, you know, as we show that worked and we started to get more traction, it was like, okay, how do we double down in this? Like, let's do books, but like, let's do books that like feel like, you know, they're 40,000 words. So like got, even just down to little details like an ISSN number, you know, like that they were registered books with a barcode.
Like literally we would, someone would put a, like a one person would work on it for a quarter, not one person, but like, it was like, you know, whether it was like two weeks of my time and four weeks of Jeffrey's time, but like it, and a designer four weeks. You know, we put a lot of work into that to kind of like, again, stand out and sort of say we're gonna produce high value books that like, you know, at the time, again, a lot of, I think a lot of pub, you know, stuff was like, let's do a 10 page PDF and gate it. And it was just how do we, how do we stand out from the noise? Yeah, totally. A good,
Jimmy Daly:
Yeah. Yeah. I think I read Intercom starting up on my Kindle. I think you, I think you published an Eub version. Yep. And I think maybe there was even some of those books became became audio books, but sort of released in podcast format too, right?
John Collins:
Yeah. So that, again, just a big philosophy I always have is like content is, and particularly the kind of content we created Intercom is expensive to make. So just trying to think about like, are there ways to get that into different formats or like repurpose it and resize it and re dice it. So first off, again, just going back to the, like, trying to make them feel like proper books rather than like, we didn't even call them eBooks actually, that was a big thing. We had a rule internally we, that's never, never referred them as eBooks. Cause I think eBooks particularly less so maybe now, but like, you know, in 20 14, 20 15, they, they were kinda seen as a bit lower value and there was a lot of free eBooks out there. So we always call the books. We made sure they were always available in for your Kindle, for your, your Apple device or just plain all PDF if you wanted.
But just give people the choice and and what you'd expect as well if you bought a book from like any of the big, big publishers as well. Yeah. but then, yeah, we subsequently decided to do them as audio books. And we had a successful podcast, so it was like, just let's chunk them up as like episodic books. And then Intercom starting up. We actually printed them. I printed 10,000 of them. Kind of was like a asked as trainer for forgiveness rather than permission, but like, it was like, there were gonna be about like 11 or $12 per piece if we published like, I think like yeah, 2000 of them. And I was like, oh, we can get them like $6 a piece if we go big . So but we, they were
Jimmy Daly:
And you shipped them to people, like people ordered them and you shipped individual books out?
John Collins:
Yeah, we sold them, like, basically I think it was like, I can't remember exactly the pricing of the time, but it was like 10 bucks and then like shipping, depending on where you were, like we were just about breaking even on them, like barely breaking even on them. But we would like visitors to the office, we would give them to, the sales team would go out in sales calls, they'd bring books. I love that. Our conferences, you know, so it, it was a huge part of our marketing probably for about 18 months. So actually when you think about it, like the, the unit charge was, was pretty low and it was just, again, it's, it stood out at the time. I think like, there, there are plenty of people who've done books at this stage. I, other people have done like books before We, we didn't invent it, but certainly tried to stand out from like maybe our peers in, in B2B at the time.
Jimmy Daly:
Yeah. Wow. That's so interesting. I'm picturing like your office just like full of books and like orders come in, you're like putting an envelope 'em out. But I like, was it they were drop shipped I assume?
John Collins:
Yeah, we, we worked like actually we, we worked initially we had a bit of an issue actually with with the printer. The printer had a, a service where they actually would would ship them. To be honest, it was a bit hit and miss and like that was a huge thing for us. Like it had to be perfect, you know, like, cause it was, our brand reputation was on the line. So actually we, we found a company that did fulfillment in, in Austin, Texas that ship all kinds of merchant swag for, for tech companies. And they did a great job. I mean that thing just ran itself in the background and it said it was roughly cost neutral. We were probably like, sometimes, depending on what territory we were in, we were losing money, shipping your book. But other people, we were making like maybe a few cents. So it was, you know, it all worked out at the end. I think it definitely delivered a lot more value than it cost.
Jimmy Daly:
So. Interesting. We'll link to that stuff cuz I want people to be able to see it in in real life. You know, the reason that I wrote the, the blog post about you know, your blog is not a publication, it was because I was so tired of on sales calls, people saying like, like at animals, people say like, oh, you know, we would like to be the intercom for human resources. We would like to be the intercom for whatever. And it was kind of a frustrating conversation to have because you can, like, you can't be . I I promise you you can't be. Yeah. You know, you know, like, and part of the argument that we made was like, okay, Intercom, I probably raised a hundred plus million dollars. You know, content team is, I don't know, 10 people, 12 people. I probably they, they've made a serious commitment to this serious commitment. You can't just, you know, do like thought leadershipy style content and say it's intercom for X. But it sounds like, I'm imagining you probably got some of that too, saying like, oh, can you help us do this? Like, we wanna do the same thing that intercom's done for our business.
John Collins:
Yeah, totally. And like as I, I kind alluded to at the beginning, like, it, it, it was depended on the market we were in. Why, why it was successful. Also like Intercom didn't try and be like brilliant at all parts of marketing straight away. I mean, I would say like, product marketing was really strong. We were really strong at like doing product launches. We had like really, you know, good thoughtful positioning in terms of the product, all that stuff you'd expect from product marketing. We were great at events and events were huge, huge partner for for content. Like we, we sort of thought of like events as like live content. So we worked very closely with, with the events team. But you know, things like PR and like brand marketing and stuff were like, you know, followed much later, you know, in many ways, like content was our brand marketing for a long time.
Design was another area we we invested in. Huge. But, you know, we weren't trying to do all things at all times. And I actually think that's a, that's something I see at the moment with, with a lot of marketing teams is like, they're trying to do everything outta the gate day one. And actually I think it's like, you know, we, we, we saw content and saw the potential or certainly actually to be fair, it does own saw the potential when they hired me and like I bought into that vision. But yeah, I think that's, that, that's a big part of it. You know, and as I say, like we, I really kind of like spent the first year really trying to understand the, the buyers and like whether it was going to like conferences, you know, like early days 60 person startup.
It was like literally like, Hey, we need people for stand. And I was like, yep, I'll be there. I'll go a conference. Cause I just wanted to eyeball the people who are gonna be buying intercom and like how do you talk, like what do they look like? Where do they hang out? Like where do they read stuff, you know, and just spending time with them and you know, I know that's obviously in a post world's different, but just really, and again, this is probably little bit informed by the, the product team at Intercom, this idea of almost falling in love with the problem. Like fall in love with the, like your, your customer and finding out like what are their problems? And then I think you figure out like what's the content strategy that's that's gonna reach those people, that's gonna help those people.
Jimmy Daly:
I, I love that fall in love the customer. Cuz I feel like a lot of content marketers fall in love with content marketing. You know, like they they sort of like come into this world and start learning about it and they, they fall in love with the process of the writing or the research or the optimizing and there's like important skills, like no question about it. You have to, you have to learn how to do those things. It's all in service of this customer.
John Collins:
Yeah. There's a lot of cookie cutter content marketing. It's like, hey, you know, okay, you set up a blog, you do a podcast to do books. But sometimes I don't think there's like enough time spent trying to really understand it. Like, will like, I dunno, maybe sell to like finance teams? Will they read a book? Like do they want a book? Is that how they consume content? Is like, is that the best way to deliver it? You know, all all that kind of stuff. And I think the only way to do that is to, I get on sales calls or like obviously things like gong nowadays you don't even have to get on sales calls. You can just like watch Yeah. What a cool sales teams calls. Yeah. You know just whatever way you can just try and get as much a sense of like the world that like your, your customers and your potential customers in. And, and then from there I think you start to get great ways of like, how, how do I reach them?
Jimmy Daly:
Yeah, I would, I would, I think I would point to Intercom as an example of a company with content culture. And like, I, what I mean by that is basically like top down, buy in on content. You know, the founders did it themselves. They were like clearly invested in it. Like it sets the team up for success if they're in this environment where everybody wants them to win and kind of believes in them and all that. Is that true? Is that a thing? Yeah,
John Collins:
Totally. I actually was talking to someone earlier today and I shared this story so hopefully Des who's the co-founder of Intercom sharing it with a larger group. But between when I sort of like signed my contract to join Intercom and to actually join us, like my notice period I met him for, for a coffee and he was like, I really can't wait for you to join, you know, and he was like, you know, there's so much stuff like I wanna take off my plate. And he was like, he showed me, he actually had set up an RSS feed from the blog to, I think it was campaign monitor he was using as the email to all the time. But literally every Wednesday at five 30 an email would go out to people who had subscribed with the new blog posts that had been added to the, the blog. But it meant that he was forced to write at least one post or source a post. That's,
Jimmy Daly: That's so interesting.
John Collins:
I someone said, you know, you literally, he had, he had sort of changed his his legs to the chair and forcing him up to do it. But it, it forced that discipline and I think that's a huge thing for something like the kinda strategy we had Intercom regularity of, of, of publishing and turning open people's inboxes and adding some value, like giving something I'm of use every week. You know, and sometimes those post, I think that would admit it, you know, like there could be light, you know, it could be just like, Hey, here's like one of my favorite books and here's what I learned from it. But equally, he was turning out like really high value stuff about things he'd learned about building software. Cause they had a consultancy business before that as well. So he'd had, you know, he knew a lot about building product. It wasn't just from his experience at Intercom.
Jimmy Daly:
Yeah, yeah. There was a post, I think it was Desert wrote it like early on about I think it was about the death of mobile apps.
John Collins:
Yeah. Jimmy Daly:
Does that ring a bell? That like blew up?
John Collins:
Yeah, that was that was Paul Adams. Oh, okay. Or head of products. Paul used to write these super in depth like 2000, 4,000 word posts. The other one he did was like basically deep dive on how the product team was organized at, at, in intercom. Like right down to like what meetings they had, how they made decisions, what like, how they did their road process. And that stuff was huge because like every, every other product team in, in South, like people are always looking for that kinda information. And I suppose, you know, there was some level of success at Intercom that stage. Like we got to maybe Series C at that point. And so, you know, people, people looked up to that content.
Jimmy Daly:
Yeah, that's so interest. I remember reading the, the mobile apps post and just being like, I'm not a product person. I don't even like really get all this stuff, but I'm just like fascinated that it's like real, that like this person is explaining this thing that they know a ton about and all the problems. I was like, this is really good content , you know?
John Collins:
Absolutely.
Jimmy Daly:
Were there ever did you forget pushback? Was there ever like a campaign that was like a step too far? You know, that was like a vision that was like too, too big that leadership was like, whoa, John, slow down a minute.
John Collins:
Well I think there was definitely some, some some pretty crazy stuff we did on particularly on, on the more on the event side. And like we did World Tours and, you know, wanted to do, we did a live product launch in, in in program Graham Theater in, in San Francisco. And I think sometimes, oh wow, probably probably got ahead of ourselves a little bit. But I mean my partner on that, on, on that, like the ahead of the events team, Megan, she just did, did some amazing stuff that pushed the company forward and I think just really, you know, some people were uncomfortable, but, you know, it it really, our brand was way, I think, you know, for the size of the company at the time, like our, our brand in the market was, was way, way bigger as a result.
But I mean, I think there was always you know, a philosophy at at Intercom of like, you know, going back to first principles. So there was always like, we rarely did stuff that like we hadn't kind of protested internally and people have asked like, and why and why and why and like, what's that gonna do for the business? So there's probably way more stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor that I don't even remember at this point ever saw the light of the day than stuff that, yeah, I mean I think the one, the one thing I suppose like we never really cracked at Intercom, I tried a couple of times internally was video. Like we never figured out like what was, what was the video version of like the Intercom blog have been like you could, we have given those product lessons you know, in some kind of video format. Like that would probably look like a series of Loom videos these days. Maybe we like do product tear downs or something, who knows? I dunno. But like that was definitely something I think probably just because of the, the skills that were on the team internally yeah. That we didn't, we didn't we didn't ever crack.
Jimmy Daly:
Hmm. How about hiring? I'm curious how you built the team because not remote, right? You had teams in Dublin, in San Francisco and also like, it's slightly different skill. You're not looking for content creators, you're looking for this, I don't, I don't know exactly how you describe it, but a facilitator,
John Collins:
We, we editors we call them, and actually we, like, for a long time for, for a period we actually changed every job title to like editor like senior editor or like just, you know, content editor. But purely because like we wanted, wanted to make sure that people were clear that this was the job was much more like working with subject matter experts, you know, trying to get their, their, their views out on the blog rather than maybe you know, the more rounded content marketer, which you know, I think you, you kind of talked about. But hiring because we needed to work with subject matter experts. We, I was based in Dublin INCOM in Dublin and San Francisco from, from day one. But then I knew I needed, I needed people in San Francisco cause they're like, half the company was there, so I was gonna need people to work with matter experts there.
So I mean, it, it was tough. Again, like I kinda said we had like maybe you know, I dunno, like probably a couple hundred venture back startups in same founded in the same year in 2011, and then there was more and more coming down the line and you're like this kind of like, you know, Intercom developing a bit of a brand, but like not all known. So I spent just a lot of time in, in San Francisco just having coffee meetings like, hey, like someone knows someone at Slack who works in content, just like, I dunno if I even wanna hire this person necessarily, but like, I certainly wanna go and meet them and have coffee and just talk about what's going on and just network like crazy every time I was in San Francisco. And so I actually found that, you know, building out a team was, was something that I, I really enjoyed.
Finding great people you know, hiring them and and mentoring them. Yeah, I mean Fiona Lee, who I hired to, to, to run the content team in San Francisco for me, like I subsequently hired to work with me in, in in ramp when I moved there. You know, I just met some fantastic people and they weren't always like from the obvious, like, oh, they've done content for x number of years in this role, like, or done content marketing. So for instance, Fiona had done, like, worked in Google and done support content. She was like working@caring.com at that point and was doing like much more kinda an SEO focus strategy, but like I really saw that she could like, could come in and help us grow a team and like grow that kind of editorial machine that we were, we were building in, in San Francisco offices.
Jimmy Daly:
Intercom, you know, I actually applied for an intercom content role at one point, probably 2015, maybe 2016. And I actually, I had a call with a, I guess probably a recruiter and, and my whole thing was like, maybe they'll let me be remote . And they like, they, they were very clear, no, it's not, this is a Dublin based role. And I was like, okay. And they're like, do you wanna kinda
John Collins: This process? I think I remember like, I think I remember that conversation. I was like, eh, this guy's pretty good, but do we wanna have remote
Jimmy Daly:
? So funny. Well, my wife and I, like, we both have Irish heritage somewhere down the line, so we were like, you live in doubt. Like that could be cool. I, we talked about it for like 10 minutes before we were like, eh, that's probably not gonna work. And obviously didn't happen. But I, I did find that to be just sort of, I, I mean I actually, at the time I was like, oh, remote's the greatest thing in the world. I would never go back to an office. Like nowadays I'm like, I would do anything to go to an office. I, I'd love to go work with some people in person, you know? Yeah. I am curious about the transition to ramp. You know, how, what, when, where, why, you know, like ramp for context spend management tool. I mean, is that, I'm generalizing a little bit, is that more or less
John Collins:
Accurate corporate cards, which is probably the way that a lot of people would know them and see people use RAM card. But yeah, have a whole kinda suite of kinda expense and spend management software, whether it's like paying your bills you know, putting, you know budgets, giving teams budgets and allowing to manage them themselves. Way we talked about it was like, we basically wanna like look after all your non spend. So yeah, they, they were on a tear. They're like New York based FinTech company. And yeah, I, I went in there just in 2021 like second marketing hire, sorry, third marketing, hire and just like sort of built out the content and comms function there. But it was a very, very different strategy and, and approach than, than Intercom. You know, like I think there was always like, even though we never called it community as such, but like we knew we were kinda building this like community around the, the content we built that people were gonna continue to consume it over time and like, you know, it wouldn't always be like a really quick conversion path.
But you know, if you think about like a finance tool like that, you know, people are gonna, like, they're gonna be frustrated with the current solution and they're, they're literally gonna start looking for something else. So like, it was much more about search from day one and SEO strategy, strategy and a lot of customer evidence like getting, making sure that like we were showing the success of that customers were having, having with ramp and a certain amount of like, kind of editorial and kind of like really making it clear, like how ramp approached things differently than say like Brexit or other competitors. Like really sort of getting our, our philosophy out there of, of like how we were approaching things. Like for instance, we went heavily on the fact that like, we don't have points or multipliers. We gave you cash back and just really went strong on trying to get that across all the time.
Jimmy Daly:
Yeah, Superpath is a customer actually. It's really, it's a cool tool. It's really, it's really helpful. Yeah. that's interesting. Were there like what you just described, was that all obvious, like when you walked in the door, or I guess I'm curious about like, the feeling out period. Yeah. Like what's the, you, you're hired, like, there's obviously like you're, you're one of the best content marketers ever. Like, you're gonna come up with something that's great. But like, you know, I feel like it takes a little bit of time to get your feet under you and figure out like, this new customer, this new market, what's your strategy? What are your, do you have new constraints to work with potentially?
John Collins:
Yeah, no, it was like, I mean, there was, there was also things that weren't, like some of that was apparent from, from the outside. Some of it was not. I mean, like one of the things that, that, that's really interesting, and I actually was speaking to someone today this cause they've got a similar setup, but you know, you're the person who is the buyer is not the person who's gonna make sure your tool is successful. And so, you know, in, in the instance today with someone who's like a technical tool that, like they sell to CTOs, but they've gotta get the developers to implement it and really like get on side with it equally at ramp you, you sold generally to like a founder or a CFO or a head of finance or something like that. But if you think about it, it was actually like the accounting team, like the day to day accounting team who were gonna have to like move bills or various other things from like their existing solution to ramp. So we used to talk about this idea of, of share of Wallace, but you'd get in there and like you'd roughly know what their like car spending or their bill payments in the year is and how much of that have you got at any, any given time. But it was also from a content perspective, it was like, you know, two very different audiences there. Like a head of finance, a founder of a company is gonna have very different, like different kind of content they're gonna want or consume versus like an accountant or a controller or, you know, someone who's actually at the, the cold face of, of finance every day. So those kinda things were, were really, really interesting. The other thing I suppose that those different at RAMP and which I think is gonna become more of a, a thing is that like I I oversaw content and, and communications which was effectively yeah, public relations.
And I just think the way the, the media landscape is going that you're just gonna see a lot more of that then just makes a lot more sense. That like, if you have a team that's internally creating good content, if you can like give that content to, to the media and, and sort of, you know, basically the media's never been so under resource as it is now, and yet they need to do more and more. So if you can give them whether it's like data points and, you know, like we started doing a, a quarterly benchmark report about like, the spending patterns on, on Wrap. Like literally what are like 10,000 US businesses spending their money on? Like, what, what's going up, what's going down? You know, we did did like in summer of 2021, we did a big report about back to the office, like our people actually going back to the office.
How much, like how much are we seeing this in terms of our spend? It was very interesting. You could literally, I think that was like a two week period in March 2021 where suddenly you saw like spending on facilities and like office cleaning and things like that went through the roof. Cause it was obviously like people were like, oh, no one's been in the office for a year. We like, get the office going again. Equally you saw spending on things like people had a lot of stuff like, you know I was gonna say delivery, which is the Irish service, but DoorDash and services like that where, you know, obviously they've been letting their team get like maybe lunch once a week at home or whatever. Suddenly that like spending in those categories started to decline. But again, just thinking about like, is there stories in your product? Like is there data points in your product that you can, you can then use for like content in terms of traditional content marketing, but also like get get that stuff out to the media and, and get, get press for for it as well, which I That's cool. I love that more of that. Yeah,
Jimmy Daly:
I love that. I feel like Covid forced that a little bit too. Like I recall in like spring 2020, like still at animals and talking with a lot of our customers and realizing that most of these companies content is their only real direct line of communication to anybody, you know, whether it's a customer to the media, to anybody. And I feel like that probably some companies really leaned into that and, and realize that content has maybe this larger role to play which I think is generally good because like these are, these people are well clipped to do it anyways. I'm curious about building a team there. So you, you probably don't know this, you hired, you hired a woman that I went to college with. Stephanie Gordon.
John Collins:
Yeah. Stephanie.
Jimmy Daly:
Yep. People don't, people really don't know this University of Delaware has a great track record of turning out excellent content marketers, Greg Citi, university of Delaware alum. But I'm curious how you built that team because it's a different role, right? I mean, or I guess is it it, was it a different role? Were these people creating more content? Were they, you know, what, what was their life like?
John Collins:
Probably a little bit more traditional content marketers. I think a big thing for us as well was we kind of felt like we needed probably a little bit more subject matter expertise on the content team rather than like the content team being the facilitators or bringing that subject matter expertise in from around, around the company. So actually, you know, Stephanie definitely has specialized a lot more in sort of like finance content. You know, so I think that that was, that was, was definitely it. I think something, yeah, we, we, we were using a lot more agencies. I mean the, the thing is like just the growth at, at in terms of the business meant, you know, there was a kind of a pressure to, to deliver quickly. So like the, the way to ramp up quickly obviously is, is sorry to use the word ramp to talk about ramp, but the way you ramp up quickly is, is, is to use agencies. So it was a little bit more of, of that as well, like the team there was, was managing freelancers and contractors and agencies a lot more than we ever did at a, at intercom and sort of being yeah, being that sort of like bringing that, that ramp voice and that ramp stamp to, to what those folks were doing and making sure it seemed like coherent to, to people who are on the receiving end of it.
Jimmy Daly:
Yeah, that's interesting. We actually, we have, we made a course at one point about vendor management because I feel like it's emerged as a really important skill. It's just, it's just the easiest way to scale your output, but to your point, you have to make it work. It, it's, it's really not the agency's responsibility ultimately to make it work. Yeah. It's your responsibility. I think whoever the point of contact is. Yeah,
John Collins:
It's something I've seen and and it happened at ramp. There was some agencies hired before the, say they had someone in seat. So for instance, there was an SEO agency that was hired, but there was no one really to manage that SEO agency and to really think about like, what are the keywords and are they going after the right stuff? And so it just, it didn't work out because you do need, like, whether it's that, like there's a content person or even an in-house SEO person, whoever, but somebody who can closely manage that agency, you know? Yeah. If you don't, you know, if if you aren't doing that, you're not gonna get the value at the agency. You know, it's not a substitute for having people in house. It's really like, think about it as a way to augment the people you have in house.
Jimmy Daly:
Right. Do you think about content cadence a lot? Like do, I guess when I think about content strategy, the first thing I think of is like budget and then cadence. Like how much, you know, and may, maybe this might just be personal bias, but I'm like, okay, I think like a piece of content costs X so with this budget, you know, we can do y number of pieces per month and like maybe that's not the right place to start. But I am curious like yeah, you know, like in both of these cases creating a lot of content, do you feel the cadence is important? Are there, are there peaks and valleys to it? Like where times you're publishing more and going harder, do you believe more in like that even cadence, like you mentioned with Des of like the, the Wednesday email going out? Yeah. Whether there's an article in it or not,
John Collins:
I think it's like, I, I always kind of use the word regularity as, as much as sort of cadence. And it's like, you know when we got into doing podcasts at at at acom, this was like a lesson that just, it was stunning to me. But so we decided to do a podcast, which, you know, at the time was like, Ooh, should we do a branded podcast and will will people even listen to brand podcast? This was 2015, obviously now, you know, it's a no brainer. Like, I think nearly every startup, probably more startups doing podcasts than blogs these days, right? But we said we'd be scrappy, we'd just try and get 10 episodes out just see if there was an audience. Like would people even listen to sort of you know, like similar content to the blog book?
Would people even want to consume it like as, as a podcast? And so we just got like 10 episodes out just to see was there like an audience? As a result, we were being scrappy. We didn't really, we just literally kind of like put episodes out when they were ready. And we saw enough to kind of go double them. But actually someone who was selling me a a or wanted to talk to me about selling a a tool said to me you know, just stick to a day and a ti as slow as you can to a time and literally get, get it out every time. Like, we went Thursday, five 30 double in time and it was like, you could see it in the, the, the listenership once we went on a, on a regular cadence, it was like listenership started to take off.
And then when we went once every two weeks to every week it was the same thing. So yeah, I think it's, it's just like get get into a cadence that that is realistic and deliverable. And, you know, yeah, yeah, even simple stuff. I used to talk to like, like I'm sure anyone who who's listened to this doesn't need to be told this, but like, you know, you used to see that thing of people that would like start a, a blog in particular with like a fit of enthusiasm and they're like, you know, publishing three times a week and you know, literally it, they'd run out steam after six weeks that created 18 posts, but if you published 18 posts once a week, you know, over 18 weeks, I guarantee you those exact same posts would have you, you'd build an audience much more effectively. You know, you'd start get, cause as we all know, like it's like a quarter or two of like, probably pretty static low growth, and then suddenly it starts, starts to take off. I mean, every every content marketing project or team I've worked on has had the same sort of shape of graph. So yeah, I think it's cadence regularly. Call it what you want, but yeah, I think there's a lot to be, a lot to be said for figuring that out rather than and, and just sticking to it. And you know, obviously as I say, takes maybe two or three, two quarters probably to see, see the results, but you will start to see early feedback, which means, you know, it's not a case of like, let's just stick to this blindly for, for six months and see what happens. But yeah, I think it's, it's, it's vital to figure out what that, what, what the cadence you can deliver is, right? Whether it's like just literally sitting down and going, how much money do we have have versus how much does each content piece cost to produce.
Jimmy Daly:
You mentioned something I wanted to just touch on quickly. One of, you're right, and I feel like that's like a, it's like an accepted consensus that content marketing takes a while, but people are also quite impatient and not Yeah. Not always willing to wait. And so like, I think what you pointed out was that there should be some fe like it's not that it's just like nobody and then lots of people there, there's signals and I wonder if those signals are more anecdotal, you know, somebody saying, Hey, this is, I really liked this, you know, or like, maybe you pick up a, a mentions or a link in a, in a place that's like fairly meaningful. Like it, even if it doesn't send floods of people your direction, it's like, oh, okay, that's good. Like, we're making some progress here.
John Collins:
Exactly. You shouldn't have to like, have really complicated like metrics or KPIs or like, you should just be able to eyeball it and see like, we're getting qualitative feedback. Oh look, this person who's an influencer in the space has like, shared our article. Or, you know, the CEO like bumped into some conference and said, oh, I saw, you know, that blog post you guys put out, or, you know, like you just, you'll get that signal. And I, I actually think sometimes people like over-engineered to begin with and then it's like as a result they kind of lose their nerve and, and, you know, can things before before it has a chance to really, really perform.
Jimmy Daly:
Yeah, that's interesting. We do have we've got like five minutes left. I wanna be respectful of your time. We got a question here from Ryan. He says, does John have any tips on how to start building an audience through all channels, content, social, email, et cetera? I would add to that, is it the same audience? Like are you reaching the same people in different ways or do you think of those different channels as reaching potentially different sets of people?
John Collins:
I think it's I don't know if there are different sets, but I mean, obviously you go through all those channels cuz like, you just have to be respectful that some people are gonna wanna consume you in, in in different ways. And it kinda goes back to the way I thought about the podcast. It was like, did it open a new audience or did it open to like people at a different time? You know, like, hey, I'm at the gym and so, you know, I can't sit down and read like a 1200 word intercom blog post, but I can definitely listen to a podcast. So, and you're just giving people that choice of like, Hey, if you wanna consume this stuff in a different way, we've got a for do of to like, just do all the stuff that doesn't scale. You know, like you know, I think like ramp, I remember when we launched our, our podcast, I was like, okay, there's 250 people in this company and we do not have 250 likes on Apple podcasts.
What, you know, and I used kind of a word the Irish people use a lot. You know, I was like, this is crazy. You know, you kind of have to be like, get everyone behind it, you know? We like, were very like, content's something that people can get behind. And as you said, like some, oftentimes it's the only sort of like channel that people have some sort of like communicate outside the, the, the company or it's like certainly the most visible one. And so it's like really just ed the whole company behind it, like in, in the early days. You know, and I think just like have all those different touch points so that people like if they are on your content channels or sorry, on your social channels that they like, can get back to your, your blogs and then there's like an opportunity to subscribe, make it easy for them to like share, share that content, whether it's like, you know, sign up for newsletter, make it easy for them to share it with a friend. Just really, really, it is a bit of a startup cliche, but just do the like, stuff that doesn't scale right in the beginning, you know, like every single subscriber or reader you can get is, is a huge win. And get, try and get everyone in the company behind you. You know, if there's, even if there's only 10 people in the company when you, when you join to do content, you know, that's, that's, that's a network that's 10 times larger than your network. So really, really, really tap into that. And yeah, it's, it's tougher now. Like there's not, like, you know, there used to be sort of like, you go, oh, well we're selling into HR and like there's this HR community over here that like, if we just spend time there, we can, you know most of these communities are fragmented notes. It's, it's quite hard to find one place where you can distribute your content to really start, build an audience. But I, what I, what I have done it more laterally is just try and like figure out like, what are those fragmented communities? And, and like, maybe you target two or three at a time you know, and see which one's working. If, if it doesn't, if you're finding something doesn't work, move on quickly and like, you know, every month you, you're, you're, you're trying new ones to, to get your content out in. Also just I think close the loop in a big way as well between like if, you know, if someone shares, you know, you're starting out, someone shares your content social, make sure that like yeah, they come back to them like, you know, from the official, the brand handle or whatever, you know, really just, you know, make it clear to people that like, you know, whether, as I say, they're internal, you know we used to even have league tables of like, you know the most red blog posts every month and the most red authors on Inside Intercom and try and get like some friendly internal competition going, like, just get people excited about it.
But yeah, that was a, that was huge for us that that sort of internal one we, we call it Project Dopamine at Intercom, which was just like making sure people get that shot at DOPA when they've gone to the effort of creating content with you that they know how it's the benefit of the company and benefits their career as well internally.
Jimmy Daly:
Yeah. Would you, we have, we have for one more question, John. I know we're, we're basically up on time here. Sure. Yeah. So if you can ask, can you go deeper on how you prioritize and dedicate resources for content across audiences? The example being CFO versus accountant and quantifying the differences and the impact. That's interesting.
John Collins:
Yeah. I think like it's, it's really just making sure you're aligned with the, the kind of the company and, and, and broader marketing and go to market strategy. So for instance, like early on my time at ramp, it was very much like, let we, we need to get new customers, like let's top a funnel growth. And so it was like much more of a focus on the CFO founder stuff you know, trying to get more people aware of, of ramp. And, and actually it was comms and PR more than content. I think that really helped with that a lot. Well, it was probably the combination of, of the, of the two you know, we were, we were lucky to have sort of like raise big fundraising rounds, which grabbed a lot of attention, but like, it was really making sure that we were turning that attention into, into business.
So like making sure we could convert that, that interest. But then obviously like over time and sort of in, in, in later quarters, you know, the, the, the, the company strategy was like, okay, let's, let's think more about like, how do we, how do we get more of that share of the wallet? How do we expand when we're in these, like, we've done the land, now we need to the expand. And so at that point it was thinking about the accountant or was thinking about the person or the controller or whoever the person was who was gonna run the card program. So that was when we added added someone to look after customer ed, customer education run things like onboarding webinars and more content that would like help people get more value out of ramp once it was actually already in the business.
But yeah, and quantifying the differences in the impact, I think that's like, obviously depending on, you know, if you're going after the founder and cfo, it was like new bus, you know, it was leads, it was like, you know, are we getting people into the funnel? Are we getting people to, to sign up? Whereas for the accountant, the person who ran the car program, it was much more about share wallet, like are we expanding within those accounts? And so yeah, I mean obviously it'll be different for every, every every company, but that's the way we've kind of thought about it.
Jimmy Daly:
Got it. Really cool. Pretty sure it's getting on 6:00 PM for you, so I feel like we should wrap up, let you get on with your day, but you're consulting now.
John Collins:
Yes.
Jimmy Daly:
Which I'm, which I'm curious to know about.
John Collins:
Yeah, so yeah, I mean, like I, I've always been interested in kind of like starting new things. I'm not the kind of guy to come and like run a mature process, so you know, I've, I've, I've kind of also, I think like I had a pretty like run from like pretty full on journalism career to straight into intercom, seven year run there, saw a lot of growth year and a half around, saw a lot, lot of growth. So took a few weeks off over the summer, just needed to, to reset and recharge. And now working, working a lot on content strategy with clients. And also I think, you know, a lot of consultants come along and give you a strategy, but they don't necessarily help you to go figure out like, how we actually gonna implement this. So doing a lot of doing work as well with them on like the org design. Like what, who do you need to hire in house for this? What's gonna be going to an agency? Like are the contractors who can do some of this? And then even helping sort of like hire those agencies, contractors or even inhouse folks deliver on the strategy.
Jimmy Daly:
That's amazing. And is that geared towards the same sort, same type of company as Intercom rep, like sort of you're helping them get it, get it going from basically the ground up?
John Collins:
Yeah. I mean generally I would say that the sweet spot for me and like the first couple of clients they have, like a marketing team, they may have already started some content efforts, so like they, they, they see the potential. But yeah, I mean, if you haven't like got at least some of the basics of marketing in place, it probably doesn't make sense for, for, for me to come and work with you. Like you need to have like a sense of like who your buyer is, like what your positioning is, your messaging, all that kinda stuff. But yeah, once, once you've got those things in place like kinda roughly series A, series B in terms of venture bot companies, I would say is kinda the, the sweet spot or the one where I've been having a lot of fruitful conversations and, and actually both my, both my first clients are at that kind of stage. So excited to see where it goes.
Jimmy Daly:
That's cool. Can we send people anywhere? Do you have a personal website or is LinkedIn, Twitter, any, anywhere We should
John Collins:
Linkedin probably just check out I think what am I on LinkedIn, John Collins, Ireland. What is my profile? Oh my gosh, I should, I should know that I'll have a website yeah, John Collins LinkedIn, but I'm like slash John Collins Ireland is. Okay, cool. We'll, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jimmy Daly:
Cool. Yeah, we'll definitely link to that and we'll link to all the, the stuff that you mentioned in the notes. We put along with the recording here and just in general. Thank you, John, like, you're just such a wealth of knowledge on this. You have some amazing experience to share. So we're, we're really, oh, we have the, we have the link in the chat now.
John Collins:
Thank you very much.
Jimmy Daly:
We're just really grateful for you to come hang out, spend some time with us and yeah, thank you. Thanks for being a part of super
John Collins:
And thanks for putting together the, the community. If, if nothing else, like I, I I lurk from time to time. I've certainly learned some stuff from we, but it, nothing else. It's also a great way to keep in touch with former colleagues on Slack,
Jimmy Daly:
For sure. Oh yeah, that's actually, we find that that's like, you know, our, when we look at our analytics with, there's way more dms in public messages and I think a lot of it
John Collins:
You should you should have an alumni product where you like content team alums to keep in touch. ,
Jimmy Daly:
That's a good idea actually. I like that. . well cool. Thank you John. We'll link to all your stuff. Really appreciate it again, and have a great day. We'll talk soon. Thanks
John Collins:
Everyone for listening and yeah, all the great questions.
Jimmy Daly:
Take care.
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Cierra is the Content Marketing and Community Manager at Superpath. You can connect with her on LinkedIn here.
