Content led growth
How did Omniscient Digital start? People say opening an agency exposes you to constant pain; is that true?
Back in 2015, I was working at an agency and got a job at HubSpot, and I’ve always had this idea that I wanted to start my own business. I didn’t know what kind of business, but I learned that I could get paid writing articles. And eventually that turned into consulting for marketing campaigns. But that was not scalable.
I was selling my time, and it was a lot to manage because my role at HubSpot was also growing. That’s when I met my friend Alex, who also worked at HubSpot. And it was one of those things where you meet and you just get along right away. Eventually we were both at the Growth Marketing Conference that Vasil Azarov was hosting. We met someone who told us how much they were paying an agency for content marketing and that’s when we figured we could do it better. We have backgrounds in SEO and content. We work at HubSpot. We know the playbook. HubSpot teaches everything. But most people don’t know how to put it into practice. And that’s when the idea of partnering up came together. We do what people in B2B software companies need help with, which is content strategy.
We got a couple clients to start, and then eventually we brought on Allie as our Head of Content, and she’s a kick ass content person. She is one of the smartest people that we’ve ever worked with. She started building out an editorial process to scale up how we build content strategy and deliver high quality content to clients.
The joke is, you start an agency because you’re a masochist. But we have a couple of principles. The first is, “this should be fun.” We’re building a business on the side in addition to our demanding day jobs. We should enjoy working with our clients. We should enjoy working with each other. We should enjoy the work and the process of building a company. And if at some point we don’t, we should ask ourselves why that’s the case.
What’s your approach to picking the right content strategy for B2B companies, between the possibilities to go deep on a specific topic or to produce a large amount of high level information for generic keywords?
We call it the content maturity model. So if HubSpot were restarting today as a new business, the strategy that they used 15 years ago wouldn’t work because the martech industry is such a saturated market. When you look at basic terms like “what is content marketing” or “how to do SEO” or “how to do email marketing”, there are dozens or hundreds of companies writing the same thing.
Whenever someone wants to rank for a keyword, they go to Google, look what ranks for that keyword and write something similar and maybe make it a little longer, maybe a little better. But it’s not differentiated. The big companies that have high domain authority and have been in the game for a while can write anything and start ranking position one, two or three the next day. That’s what happens at HubSpot. They have the benefit of all the work they did for 15 years.
For smaller startups without the same domain authority, the goal is to put out more thought leadership content. One of the trends with companies big and small is moving more towards thought leadership, and you can combine it with an SEO strategy.
We call it the SEO sandwich. You look for keywords that have search volume, then write content based on your unique point of view on the industry and your products. And then at the end do some optimization, but the SEO part doesn’t dictate what you write. If you hear a company saying something different than what everyone says and it resonates with you, you’re probably going to remember and work with that company. This technique requires small companies to put more time and resources into high quality content that stands out, not just churning out cheap content.
How do you sell the idea of content marketing to companies looking for short term return with their strategies?
We actually don’t sell them on that. If we feel like we need to prove the value of content, then we’re not going to work with that person because they’re probably months or years away from understanding how content marketing works. We talk to people who say: “we’ve tried to do content marketing for a year now and are not seeing any results; but we know that it’s what we’re supposed to do.” Or someone who has done content marketing programs in the past and came to a new company and wants to set it up again.
We know that there are a lot of people just getting started with content, but those are people that we would have to spend a lot of time trying to convince to do content and wait six months to see results.
For folks we work with who want to see results more quickly, we recommend starting with middle and bottom of the funnel content with low-to-moderate search volume. Going directly for keywords with the most traffic and high competition doesn’t work short term because of how competitive it is.
What's the future of automation and AI for content in general as you look at it?
Interestingly enough we are working with Jasper.ai, a company moving towards writing entire books with AI. It helps us get basic content ideas and actually achieves impressive results. I believe there’s a time and place for that sort of tool. There will definitely always be a space for high quality content which humans will have to write.
If you want to create basic content, like the cheaper SEO content that’s written in large volumes, automation helps. Especially if you’re a team of one and you need to get content out fast. Now, in terms of thinking about content with a unique thought leadership and a voice, AI is not going to be able to write that.
If we talk about content process automation, that’s a whole different thing. We just set up some jobs that turn a couple rows in a spreadsheet into a content brief in a second. Whereas before it would take 30 to 45 minutes to create that same brief. So when we start talking about automation – it is mostly helpful in automating the process of content creation.
Tommy Walker, who used to edit at Shopify and Intuit, has a whole Content Operations course where he shows all the automations he’s doing using Airtable – it’s a really interesting time for content marketers and program managers for content right now because so much of it can be automated. You still need the human touch to it, but it’s much less manual.
For instance with Airtable you can flip a switch so that when you assign a document to review, the client automatically receives the notification that it’s ready to review. And there’s even automations to go from a Google Doc to publish in WordPress and insert images magically. If you have websites or have done marketing, uploading a piece of content from a Google Doc to the CMS and formatting and uploading everything takes way too much time – that’s one of the big wins in content operations.
