In our second of three mini-episodes laying out your roadmap to content strategy success, agency owner Kari Olivier of Jute Creative and digital strategist Jeremy Solly move on from the strategy phase to implementation. Today’s question: how do you balance a disciplined content strategy with test-and-learn that might open new avenues?
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Voiceover: Jutecast, by Jute Creative. We’re curious by nature, and we love to share what we’ve learned.
Kari Olivier: (Can opening + pouring sound effect) Sorry. It's a Friday. We're drinking Dear Mom Oregon Rosé. We are. We're drinking...
Jeremy Solly: It's Friday.
Kari Olivier: ... it from a can because it's Friday, and it's cute, and we're in Portland, Oregon.
Kari Olivier: I'm Kari Olivier from Jute Creative. We served up some nice food for thought on the big picture of content strategy in our last episode of the Jute Cast, but now we're ready to sit down, have a drink, and dive into the meat of this critical topic. I'm joined once again today by digital marketing expert, Jeremy Solly.
Kari Olivier: So Jeremy, here's a sobering thought to kick us off. You might remember from the last time we spoke that only about a third of B2B marketers actually think they're doing a good job with their content strategy.
Jeremy Solly: Ouch. Yeah.
Kari Olivier: All right, so let's break it down. Let's build a marketing avatar. Let's call her Mary the Marketer. We've all worked with Mary. We know her. She's got a budget. Of course, she's got a very aggressive timeline. She's got stakeholders to please and metrics to meet or even exceed. And her agency has provided her with a ton of research, so she knows about her audience. She also knows she needs content. Oh, and she's got a content strategy. But she needs content.
Jeremy Solly: She's halfway there, right?
Kari Olivier: Right, she's halfway there. She needs content.
Jeremy Solly: Yeah.
Kari Olivier: So Jeremy, what does Mary do next?
Jeremy Solly: So she's got the guidelines, right? She's got a true north in terms of here's my content strategy, right?
Kari Olivier: Right.
Jeremy Solly: Here's my audience that I'm using with that, right?
Kari Olivier: Right.
Jeremy Solly: And I think, as she has those things defined, really starting to put the plan together of what is it that that audience... What are the trigger points? What do they need to hear? And how can I kind of meld the storyline together between where that consumer is at and bringing them into what our value-prop is either for our brand or for this product or a little bit of both, right? Actually, this is one thing that I think about a lot, is this concept of an audience of one. So I think we all too often get kind of caught up in we have this audience; there's hundreds of thousands of people in them or whatever. But what I start to think about is this who's the one person that represents that audience? And if I can make a piece of content that resonates with that one person, odds are it'll resonate with 10 more and a hundred more and beyond that.
Jeremy Solly: And so what I would actually say is think about that audience of one. Try to custom that content that's marrying your product or brand narrative to that one person and then start with that as a brick. Say this is the brick, the foundation of the content that we're going to build, and try to drive this person to become a customer or to engage with our brand.
Kari Olivier: Right. Right, that's the whole point. It's not to talk to ourselves. It's to engage our customer.
Jeremy Solly: Right.
Kari Olivier: All right, well, let's keep talking about Mary, because I want to see what she does next.
Jeremy Solly: Okay, let's do it.
Kari Olivier: If your research tells you we're drinking... Sorry, it's a Friday. We're drinking Dear Mom Oregon Rosé. We are. We're drinking...
Jeremy Solly: It's Friday.
Kari Olivier: ... it from a can because it's Friday, and it's cute, and we're in Portland, Oregon. So we're drinking this, so let's say you and I are in the marketing team of Dear Mom Oregon Rosé.
Jeremy Solly: Yeah.
Kari Olivier: Research was done. It was discovered that the only people that drink Dear Mom Oregon Rosé are hipsters from Oregon, and they're reading Portland Monthly.
Jeremy Solly: Accurate, accurate.
Kari Olivier: Right, accurate, totally true. So that's our research. So we're going to want to boil that down to one person, because you kind of can't please all the people all the time.
Jeremy Solly: No.
Kari Olivier: So you're going to boil down the research to the lowest... It's that one person.
Jeremy Solly: It's that one person.
Kari Olivier: So Jeremy, who drinks the Dear Mom Oregon Rosé, what can I create from a content standpoint that's going to make him drive over to the...
Jeremy Solly: New Seasons.
Kari Olivier: ... New Seasons on Belmont and buy another case of it?
Jeremy Solly: Right.
Kari Olivier: Right?
Jeremy Solly: If you are thinking about your audience of one and you're thinking about that content that gets them to the straightest path, you start by investing in kind of what that brick of content is going to be. Okay, our hypothesis is that they're going to read Portland Monthly, so we're going to do a sponsored article in Portland Monthly or a layout or an ad. Or maybe they're all watching YouTube, and so we're going to do some YouTube videos that are going to drive people to the website or somewhere.
Kari Olivier: But you're not guessing about these things. You really...
Jeremy Solly: But we're not guessing. We have a very real hypothesis.
Kari Olivier: Right.
Jeremy Solly: And so that's the thing, is if you invest in that one piece that drives somebody to buy more rosé, all of a sudden, you're like, "Well, that was our one piece. Now, how do we create a Facebook post off of that, and how do we create an Instagram story series off of that?" And so you already have that swim lane of this is the content we're going to create. Now let's be just absolutely crazy creative within that swim lane. And so then you're on path with the strategy. If you're staying within that swim lane, while you can still be creative, it doesn't wander you away from the strategy you've set, right?
Kari Olivier: So mostly this Mary who we've been speaking of, she's working on the marketing team for Dear Mom. She's got Jeremy in her sights. The types of things that would get her off strategy, someone else on her team saying, "Forget Portland Monthly. Forget YouTube. We want you to try out Willamette Weekly, whatever. I'm joking. Whatever. Or try out-
Jeremy Solly: We love Willamette Weekly. Don't worry.
Kari Olivier: Yeah. Try out the Spokane... We think Spokane, Washington, is the next market for Dear Mom. But all the data, all the research is saying no, so that's a difficult...
Jeremy Solly: Yeah.
Kari Olivier: I'm holding you accountable, though, Jeremy...
Jeremy Solly: No, it is, yeah.
Kari Olivier: ... for the tactics of how Mary's going to say, "But no, but no," or how she stays... She's got her true north. So keep going.
Jeremy Solly: Well, and so here's a good one. I'm going to throw digital under the bus for a second. Like, everybody's going digital, and the shiny object is digital. You may want to try a more traditional marketing tactic of doing in-store displays or something like that, right?
Kari Olivier: Yes.
Jeremy Solly: This is totally outside of my wheelhouse. But again, staying true to the content strategy, staying true to the audience and to the product, you need to make very hard decisions of, yes, these are the things we're going to do and, no, these are the other formats we are not going to do. And so those are the things, I think, that can sidetrack content strategy when there's so many different formats at our fingertips, right?
Kari Olivier: Right.
Jeremy Solly: We can go buy an ad right now on my phone for Facebook to advertise anything we want at this moment. In the next 30 seconds on this podcast, we could launch an ad if we wanted to, right?
Kari Olivier: Yes, we could.
Jeremy Solly: With all of that at our fingertips now, it is our responsibility to be more disciplined and rigorous. Yeah.
Kari Olivier: Yep, because if a tree falls in the forest and no one sees it, did it really fall?
Jeremy Solly: Yeah, did it fall? Yeah.
Kari Olivier: Yep. So what do you, to that end, feel about a test-and-learn strategy for digital?
Jeremy Solly: Sure.
Kari Olivier: What's your point of view on that? I know I get asked that a lot by my clients.
Jeremy Solly: I don't want this to fly into the face of what I was just talking about, but I actually think that is a lot of the promise with…
Kari Olivier: In digital, sometimes you... Yeah, with digital.
Jeremy Solly: Well, especially with digital, but I would say with almost all marketing now, we should take a much more curious approach to it and a test-and-learn approach.
Kari Olivier: So you balance your discipline.
Jeremy Solly: Right.
Kari Olivier: You balance your discipline and your rigor toward your North Star with a bit of curiosity about testing and learning...
Jeremy Solly: 100%
Kari Olivier: ... new formats.
Jeremy Solly: And you can leverage those shiny objects a little bit of like, well, this doesn't 100% fit with that North Star, but it kind of like 30 or 40%, so maybe we set aside X percentage of the budget and go ahead and test that in this, and maybe it'll work or maybe it won't, or maybe it'll blow up all of our hypothesis, and it'll set us in a bit of a new direction. But then how do you reapply that content strategy lens and make sure that you're not getting away from your brand or whatever.
Kari Olivier: Yeah, so that's part of the rigor: applying that critical eye to where you are deviating from your content strategy.
Jeremy Solly: Right.
Kari Olivier: First you need to know what your strategy is.
Jeremy Solly: Yeah.
Kari Olivier: And that's where your audience of one comes in. And then you can intelligently and intentionally diverge from it.
Jeremy Solly: Yeah.
Kari Olivier: But only fully knowing that you are.
Jeremy Solly: You're doing it intentionally, right? Like, yeah, intentionally.
Kari Olivier: Yeah, as long as you know you're doing it.
Jeremy Solly: Yeah. Coming back to that kind of precious conversation around marketing is we set the content strategy, but it will always evolve, just like our brands evolve over time, our messaging platforms evolve over time. And I guess the hard part is knowing the moments and times when a content strategy might need to evolve or the narrative has evolved. Or you wouldn't want to blindly continue the same marketing campaign year over year because it was part of the content strategy, and you might be missing a whole audience of consumers, right?
Kari Olivier: Yep.
Jeremy Solly: That's where the testing and learning comes in, is like, "Well, let's test the fence over here, and let's test the fence over here. And, oh, wow, there's an opening, and a bunch of customers came in. Let's put more money towards that part of the fence." And so how do you kind of continue that evolution? That's the hard balance of it.
Kari Olivier: Well, that's where smart marketing comes in.
Jeremy Solly: Sure.
Kari Olivier: So I love what you've said, and if I can sort of recast it the way that I've heard it, because I think it's super smart. It's applying your marketing expertise across the way, because those of us who are marketers and who love marketing know that it's a moving target, and everything's always changing and that we have to apply our creativity to the lens.
Jeremy Solly: It's an instinct, right?
Kari Olivier: It's an instinct. So those of us who are in this to win it, we have a marketing gut. So someone can say, "Be rigorous. Be disciplined," but run that through the lens of your gut, and always be learning and reading and staying close to the trends. And goodness knows they're changing every second. So it's that rigor, but then that test and learn, that's a great way to mitigate those stakeholders that are always hitting you with every... You can give them a little bit of the test-and-learn pie but stay really true. But it should always ladder to the overall content strategy in a way that feels right to you and the organization.
Jeremy Solly: Yeah, totally.
Kari Olivier: It can't be Dear Mom Oregon Rosé that we're drinking... We shouldn't be advertising in the Dairy Farmer's Almanac in Iowa. I mean, that's not a good test-and-learn strategy. It should be...
Jeremy Solly: Yeah, you don't drop a bunch of direct-mail pieces in an area where your product is not being carried in the store, right?
Kari Olivier: Yes, I would say no. I would say-
Jeremy Solly: You just stay true to those things, right?
Kari Olivier: Yeah.
Jeremy Solly: But I also think that there's a part of this where I think the leadership starts to show up, and that's another interesting-
Kari Olivier: Oh, I agree. Yes.
Jeremy Solly: I mean, this a whole different part of...
Kari Olivier: The top, yeah. I love it. I love it.
Jeremy Solly: This might be a whole ‘nother podcast, but I think part of what even we were talking about when you talk about instinct and you talk about gut is people that have done marketing or even communications that are really good leaders and that have some experience, they develop that instinct. The ones that are really good at that have shown that they can make great decisions. They can stay true to the strategy or whatever, if it's a content strategy. They can help be rigorous or help that team understand what it means to be rigorous and disciplined around it, but also be open to those new possibilities, to be open to testing and learning. Or even that's where really experienced agency partners can come in and add to that, right?
Kari Olivier: And kind of guide. Yeah, add to that. Yep.
Jeremy Solly: And guide.
Kari Olivier: That's right.
Jeremy Solly: Like, you need kind of gurus through this stuff.
Kari Olivier: You do.
Jeremy Solly: They have enough experience and instinct to be able to make some hard decisions, put people on a path, try things.
Kari Olivier: That's right.
Jeremy Solly: And also be ready to kind of nudge or pivot a little bit when necessary, right?
Kari Olivier: Yeah, I would say that the ingredients of a really smart... I mean, guru is kind of-
Jeremy Solly: I hate that word. Oh.
Kari Olivier: I like calling you that just because it's fun. But really, the ingredients of a true expert in their field is somebody who's willing to admit that they're not expert in another field.
Jeremy Solly: Yeah.
Kari Olivier: They own their lane, and they can say in a meeting with a bunch of stakeholders, "I don't know a lot about that, but I sure as heck brought someone to the table who did."
Jeremy Solly: Who did, yeah.
Kari Olivier: It's someone who's pretending that they know a lot about everything I'm instantly suspect of. And also someone, like you said, that is willing to take a bit of risk even at the risk of making a mistake, because if you're solid and confident in your knowledge and expertise, mistakes don't matter so much because you can stand behind them. It's when you're really, really... So yeah.
Jeremy Solly: Right. Mistakes are just learnings, right?
Kari Olivier: They're just more opportunities to learn.
Jeremy Solly: They're just like, "Okay, cool, we did that. The input's in, and the verdict's out, and we're not going to do that again."
Kari Olivier: Exactly.
Jeremy Solly: And we'll just do something else.
Kari Olivier: In this Jutecast series, we've had the chance to feast on ideas for defining and staying true to your content strategy, and we shared a drink over marketing to your audience of one. Time for some dessert? Well, Jeremy and I do have a treat in store for our next episode. Think whipping up lots of great content, but not having to make it all from scratch. I'm Kari Olivier from Jute Creative. Thanks for listening.
Voiceover: For more ideas and tools, visit jutecreative.com