Building bridges with holistic content planning

Full session transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT

OmniX2021_Session_Ashley
Faus

Tue,
7/27 2:32PM • 27:49

SUMMARY
KEYWORDS

marketers,
people, content, tool, agile, journey, audience, question,
playground, scrum, jira, product, assets, create, marketing,
holistically, strategic, land, documentation, support

00:05

Hi,
everyone. I’m Ashley, and I’m thrilled to be here at omni channel x.
Today we’re going to talk about the new rules of content strategy for
audience everywhere. So I want to start with a bit of an odd
question, but I’m hoping you’ll indulge me.

00:18

And
that is,

00:20

what
is the best piece of playground equipment, you can pop your answers
into the chat, you could shout it out. If you’ve got a pet or a
roommate, you could just think it in your head. But what is the best
piece of playground equipment? Now when I asked this question in
person, I tend to get a lot of different answers, I get the slide or
the swings or the merry go round, I’ve been get a couple of sarcastic
people who shout out the park bench. And what this tells me is that
there’s not just one best piece of playground equipment, there’s no
consensus, there’s not a right answer. Now, you may be asking, why am
I asking you about the best piece of playground equipment at a
professional conference? We’re going to get there. But for now, let’s
pretend that I put you on that merry go round spun around, you fell
off, hit your head. And we’re now in a place where we’re talking
about the linear funnel, rough ride, I know. But I promise I’m going
to bring it back out. Now, most of the marketers in the audience are
familiar with this model. But it may not be as familiar to people
from other disciplines. So let’s talk through it. At its core, it’s
three phases, awareness, consideration and decision. And what a lot
of marketers do is they whip out their editorial calendar and they
say, I’m going to create two pieces of content per phase, that six
pieces of content, I’ll publish once per month,

01:40

I
now have six

01:41

months
of content strategy, right? I six months of content strategy. Now,
you’re all shaking your heads and saying it’s a bit more complicated
than that. And of course, you’re right. So these are the Google
results for the linear funnel. And you’ll notice there’s some
complicated stuff, we’ve got like multiple phases, we’ve got it going
in and out, like, clearly, we need a different model. So being a
smart crew, we came up with the looping decision journey. And at its
core, its four phases, awareness, consideration, purchase, at some
sort of upsell, cross sell or retention phase. And somehow that’s
going to put you back into the same kind of awareness consideration
purchase loop. Not quite sure what you just go back to the top. But
let’s say that’s how it’s supposed to work, you’re gonna add two
additional pieces of content, that’s eight pieces of content, still,
once per month,

02:37

I
now have eight

02:39

months
of content strategy, right? Good job marketer. And of course, you’re
all shaking your head saying it’s way more complicated than that. And
of course, you are correct. So there’s a lot of stuff going on here.
But I have to say, and these Google results, the most disconcerting
image is that one for me down in the bottom right of the screen, the
Mobius? How many of you have been stuck in the infinite loop of sales
and marketing content? It’s terrifying. So it’s not a linear funnel,
and it’s not a looping decision journey. What is it? So I decided
that we needed a new model. And I got really excited, because one of
the things that you notice about both of those is they kind of ignore
what happens once someone makes a purchase. The linear journal
completely says, Hey, not my problem, once you actually buy and the
looping decision journey, hands it off to some other team. So what if
we were to connect those, and I got excited, because I thought, this
piece of equipment, what we call a jungle gym in the United States,
I’ve solved it, it’s got some connection points, and you kind of have
the ability to go around this piece of equipment. But the problem is,
there’s only one objective with the jungle gym. And that’s to get to
the very top. And so it’s still me, forcing you to go on a journey
that I want you to go on. Which brings us back to the playground,
what’s the right way to play on the playground? What’s the best
order? Is it to go slides and then swing and then merry go round? Is
it to skip the slide altogether? And what about the people sitting on
the park bench? Are they using the playground in the wrong way?

04:19

Of
course not.

04:21

So
we need to think about treating this journey as a playground. Now as
a marketer, I would say we need to treat the buyer journey as a
playground. As sales or customer success, you might say we need to
treat the customer journey as a playground. And if you’re a UX or
design, you might say we need to treat the user journey as a
playground.

04:44

Now
the problem is with

04:46

this
mindset is that we’re still shifting this journey and calling this
person different things based on the team or the asset type that my
team creates. We can’t even come to an agreement on share. language
about who the heck we’re talking to. So first, I would propose that
we agree that we need to treat the audience journeys as a playground
that people can enter and exit as they desire. They can go in any
order, and they can engage in content the wrong way. So what does it
look like to engage with content the wrong way, the playground
designers expect you to go down the slides. My three year old nephew
wants to go up the slides every time, and our audience wants to do
the same thing. Let’s take pricing as an example. Pricing is
traditionally considered a bottom of funnel or purchase level

05:35

discussion.

05:37

But
when my boss came to me and said, Ashley, I think we need to buy this
tool to solve this problem. Can you let me know how much budget we
need? I gotta go ask for budget. So how much should I ask for?

05:49

I
have no idea.

05:51

So
I started Googling around. And I come upon some of the big players in
the space. And I reached out to them and I say, Hey, could you give
me a ballpark? So I can go secure budget for this many licenses at
this service level? And they came back to me and said, well, you need
to download this white paper, actually, have you attended this
webinar, you know, what you need to do, you need to book a demo.

06:12

I
don’t even have budget.

06:14

I’m
not even in the awareness phase, because I don’t have budget. Now,
that may sound a little confusing, clearly, you’re aware if you’re
googling around. But from a marketing and sales standpoint, we don’t
count these people until they’ve officially raised their hand by
filling out a form and entering our funnel. And on the product or
support or documentation side of the house. We don’t count these
people until they actually log into the tool for the first time. And
so we completely ignore someone who may be looking to secure a budget
because they haven’t gone all the way through our funnel. Now, on the
flip side of that I secured budget, I get on the phone with a sales
rep and I say, Hey, I’m bought in on the problem. I’m bought in that
a tool like yours is going to solve it. So tell me why I need to buy
your tool. And they wanted to go all the way up to the top of their
deck and say, Well, let me let me first frame up the problem. I’m
like, I’m bought in, sell me your product. And they struggled to drop
me all the way down to the bottom of the funnel, before they worked
through all the other phases. So if we’re not just mapping content,
each phase of the funnel, how are we building our content. So I want
to introduce a narrative framework that’s based on content depth.
First, we talked about the conceptual depth. This is the what and the
why of the idea. This is to help your audience frame up the problem
space. Next is the strategic depth. And this is the process tools and
key knowledge components that must be in place to make the conceptual
idea of reality. This is helping them to think about the solution
space and think about what success means and the criteria for
success. Now, I want to be clear, this is not just the tool or
service or solution that you provide. It’s helping them think
holistically

08:00

about
all possible

08:01

solutions.

08:03

And
finally, the tactical depth. Now a lot of people like to spend time
here because it’s super straightforward. It’s prescriptive. It’s the
nitty gritty where the rubber meets the road. Now you might be
thinking, isn’t this just a linear journey, you’ll learn about the Y
you learn about the how and then you put it into practice. But what
we’ll see as we go through the case study, that’s not true. You could
jump from tactical all the way up to conceptual, you could jump
between strategic, conceptual and tactical levels. So you need to
create these pieces of content to be able to stand on their own and
serve the user intent, no matter where they land as their first step.
Next, we need to think holistically about our distribution. So our
assets, are these written, are they video? Are they audio? Are they
long form? Are they short from the interactive, but they live? Are
they pre recorded? Right, think holistically about the different
assets you could create. Now, what tends to happen is the blog team
says it’s a blog, the support team says it’s a support ticket. The
documentation team says it’s a very specific tutorial. And each team
defaults to thinking that their asset that they execute is the only
asset that the person needs. So open up that mindset talk amongst
your teammates to realize that

09:17

actually,

09:18

a
tutorial could be exactly what they need when they’re looking for an
answer and support. Right. Next, your channels. So this is a mix of
paid, owned and earned channels. And it could be a place to both host
and share content. And finally metrics. And I want to be clear, all
assets and all channels do not need to meet all metrics all the time.
You’re going to struggle to optimize for reach, engagement, and CTR
with the same asset in all the channels at all times. So how do we
think about strategically mapping our metrics to both the channels
and And assets that we create. So what does this look like in the
real world? Let’s take an example. What does it mean to be healthy
and fit? Now most people would agree. It’s some combination of diet
and exercise. But you’re going to answer that question very
differently. If you’re Runner’s world versus Muscle and Fitness
versus yoga journal. I personally prefer bodybuilding workout. So
let’s dig in and answer this question as if we’re Muscle and Fitness
magazine. At a conceptual level, you would say you’re healthy and
fit. If you have a high protein diet, and big strong muscles. At the
strategic level, you might talk about the value of compound lifts, or
how to have good form of lifting. And you might talk about the
differences between fast and slow digesting protein. And at the
tactical level, this is your 10 tips to build bigger biceps or five
chicken dinner recipes to make for the for dinner this week. So if we
map this to our strategic framework for the narrative and
distribution, you would be able to fill out a table that looks
something like this, you have your top line narrative about what it
means to be healthy and fit. And then you have your topics mapped to
their different depths. And what you’ll notice is that you could have
multiple asset types and multiple channels to address each of these
pain points. So for example, on the compound lifts, you may decide,
hey, I’m going to make a strategic video that I placed on Facebook.
Or you may say, I’m going to make a conceptual video that I placed on
Vimeo and YouTube. Same thing, you could drop all the way down to the
tactical level and say these five exercises for bigger biceps might
become an infographic on Pinterest, or a video that goes on Instagram
stories. So how do we apply this from a business perspective? I want
to walk you through and Atlassian case study that maps our agile
practices and products to a variety of different assets and channels
across

11:55

multiple
teams.

11:58

So
what is the right journey? I get this question a lot. And as we think
about mapping our assets, of course, like most people, we started
with the linear funnel. And we said at a high level, we want people
to learn about agile practices. It’s very important that people work
collaboratively. They work in an agile way. They’re nimble and
flexible. So we created an asset that really focuses on how do you
implement agile practices. And then at the strategic level, we said,
Hey, you can drop down and see agile in action. And so it’s a mix of
strategic content and a little bit of tactical content to say, hey,
look at a tutorial. You could do this with any product, you could do
it with post it notes, you can do it with various tools, but we’re
going to show you how to do it in JIRA, which is our tool. And then
you can download a free account. And so you can start to practice
agile, you can start to create backlogs boards and sprints in the
tool for free. And finally, you decide that you know what I bought in
on agile and bought in on JIRA, I’m going to buy in with my credit
card. And I’ve put some green arrows across and you can see they get
darker as you go to represent how close you are to getting the money.
And this is great, right? They purchased the tool, we won, we got the
money. And you’ll see it took a couple of steps here. But finally at
the very end, we got the money. This is the right journey. But what
if there was a journey where you get the money first, where they
start by buying and using the tool? Now you may be asking, cool, we
won, we got the money, right? Like, I don’t understand why we need to
continue talking about whatever happens over here. But the reality
is, we know that people still need to learn once they get into the
product, they’re still gonna have questions, and they may still need
to know about the conceptual level and strategic level about agile
practices, artifacts and ceremonies. So in that case, we show that
we’ve got the green arrow, we got the money first.

13:53

But
then when

13:54

you
go to the product, the first thing it asks is do you want to use
Scrum or Kanban? I don’t know. I don’t know the difference between
Scrum and Kanban. So you need to pop all the way back up to
understand how Scrum and Kanban fit into agile. Then you start to say
great, I’ve learned about Scrum. How do I do it with this tool. And
so you drop down into a tutorial that shows you how to do Scrum with
JIRA. And then finally, you come back to the tool that you already
own. And you start to practice with this tool. You may be saying how
are they going to end up buying the tool? If they don’t know about
agile or they haven’t practiced? Well, how often does it purchase a
tool and tell everyone that this is the new tool that they’re using?
frequently?

14:39

So
this actually

14:40

happened
for one of our customers, she showed up at a training for some new
tool that it had purchased. And it turns out that she needed to learn
agile practices. So she visited the Agile microsite from this based
on this training for tools that she had no input or decision in
buying and then Last, let’s talk about a time where maybe you see
agile in action, you attend something on project management. And they
showcase using agile in JIRA. And you think to yourself, Hmm, maybe I
should learn more about agile. And so you start googling around, or
you go directly to the site, and you learn more about agile
practices. And then you say, Man, this seems really cool. I think I’m
going to buy this tool. And then once you purchase this tool, then
you come back in and you start practicing it and inviting your
teammates. So in all of these cases, these journeys end up with a
purchase. But they also end up with a lot of high level education and
strategic level education. So how are we going to create enough
assets and enough connection points between those assets to satisfy
any of the journeys that our audience might go on. So as you can see
here, it’s a lot of assets and a lot of connection points. So we have
an agile microsite. We have a product tour, we have a number of
tutorials, we have YouTube, we have social,

16:01

we
have

16:02

a
community, we have a lot of different ways for people to engage. But
what I want you to focus on is the connection points between each of
these things, because this is how we bring our teams together, and
our content together to create a seamless journey for our audience.
So let’s dig into a couple of these different assets and see how
they’re used throughout the journey. First, the Agile coach. So a few
years ago, the team created this microsite. And it’s primarily
focused on long form written content. And it’s optimized from an SEO
perspective. Then they use this content as the basis for the script
for YouTube series of short videos that lives on YouTube. And these
two things are crosslinked. So you’ll see there’s Scrum in the
sidebar and the Agile coach. And then there’s also what is Scrum on
YouTube. And then in the description of that video, there’s learn
more about Scrum, which takes you to the Agile microsite. And then
we’ve also embedded that video into the long form article. So no
matter how you land on it, you have the ability to choose to read or
watch to learn about Scrum. Now, we also say great, you agree your
body and you want to try Scrum? How the heck do you do this with a
tool. And we have the option for you to go and learn about it with
JIRA Software, and the opportunity for you to open a free account so
that you can practice you have both of those paths. So let’s say you
choose the tutorial, you learn more about how to do this specifically
with the tool. And then there’s a link in the sidebar that says hey,
go see how you can do this with JIRA, get your own account. Once you
land on the landing page, yes, it’s more sales. It’s more marketing.
It’s explaining the features and the benefits. But throughout this
page, we have the ability to up level back up to the conceptual or
strategic levels. If you’re not sure what Scrum is, you have the
ability to go and learn about Scrum. So no matter how you land on any
of these pages, you have the ability to get to the conceptual
strategic or tactical depth that’s associated with it. Now, this
probably looks pretty optimized from a marketing standpoint, you’re
like, yeah, this is what marketers do. But what about support? What
about content design? Well, we noticed something interesting. Our
support documentation and our onboarding information is available
publicly on

18:18

the
internet,

18:19

which
means that it shows up in search results. And so we noticed there’s a
lot of people who are landing in our documentation as their first
step. Why? It’s because all of the keywords managing epics in a scrum
project are very specifically tailored to the question. But what this
means when someone lands in documentation is that they’ve probably
arrived there with a very specific question about how to do this in a
tool versus asking generically what is Scrum, they’re still at that
education or learning 10 at the conceptual or strategic level. But
they could land here from in product help. They could land here from
organic search, they could land here from an email that they’ve
received. And so we had to start talking really closely with our
technical writing support and content design teams to make sure that
those journeys and those user intents were very closely tied
together. So that if you are asking, generally what is Scrum, we land
you on purely educational tool agnostic content. If you’re asking
about how to do Scrum, in JIRA, we want to make sure that you get the
specific detailed information that you need from that documentation.
We also looked at our product demos. Now, again, demos are
traditionally considered a bottom of funnel conversation or something
that potentially the marketing team owns. But in our case, we partner
very closely with product engineering and design to create these
videos. So instead of using voiceover actors or marketers, we have
the person who influenced

19:51

designed

19:52

or
made the feature as the person who’s explaining it. And then we pair
that content with an Ask me anything in our community. So product
design, engineering, create these specific videos from an authentic
voice. And they share these on YouTube. And then we embed that into
our community with the opportunity for people to ask questions
directly of the product engineering or design person. And you’re
getting authentic answers, enthusiastic answers from people who are
closest to these features and products. We also do this on social
media. So previously, we’ve been talking mostly about owned channels,
but social is where our audience is hanging out. They’re giving us
feedback there. Again, they don’t want to open a support ticket,

20:37

they
want to just shout

20:38

out
to the world, I have a problem. And so when we launched a big update
to our flagship product JIRA, we actually created an entire program
partnering with a social care team that’s primarily focused on
support, but also bringing in product engineering, marketing and
design folks to answer these questions. And so as you can see,

20:58

people
really liked

20:58

it.
I like this trend of peons directly answering some questions, direct
accountability and direct feedback. Is this you answering? Answering
on your own or an official thing at Atlassian. And you’ll notice that
it’s both, you can see the official handle asked answering some
questions. But you’ll also notice there’s two atlantians, Taylor and
Claire who have chimed in to answer this person’s specific concerns.
So I’ll give you another example. That’s at the intersection of
product marketing support, sales, social, all the channels, right. So
we were working on creating feature parity among two of our editions.
And so once we reach that feature parity, someone wrote some launch
notes or release notes to say, Hey, we have this new thing.
Unfortunately, the way that they phrased it caused a bit of an uproar
in the Agile community. So story points in estimation are highly
controversial with this audience. And so it caused a kerfuffle on
social media. Well, it turns out that we actually have a long form
article about story points and estimation that speaks broadly about
this topic. But because of that kerfuffle, we recognized we need to
address this more specifically. To do that, we reached out to a
number of Agile experts in the industry, and hosted around table to
talk about where story points went wrong, how you can get them back
on track, and what are some of the best practices, we then publish
that to YouTube. And we also share that in our community so that
people can ask questions and share their specific experience using
story points and estimation. We then embedded that roundtable into
the long form article and cross link the two. So all of these things
are cross linked, you can ask the questions, you can just watch the
video, you can read more about general best practices. And of course,
all of this was shared on social media. But the cool thing is that it
wasn’t just share from the Atlassian product handles, it was also
shared by the participants in the roundtable. So one of my colleagues
was the moderator for this Roundtable. She’s also an agile expert.
And she shared this on her LinkedIn profile, tagging the other
speakers who could then share and engage as well. So you’re gonna
create all of this stuff, but how do you know if any of it is
working? So marketers in particular are particularly obsessed with
CTR, how many people clicked how many people opened how many people
referred how many people who clicked, clicked, clicked. But what we
realize is that these platforms are very greedy. So LinkedIn wants
you to stay on LinkedIn. Twitter wants you to stay on Twitter, etc.
And people are lazy. They don’t want to have to click a link, they
want to just get value in the feed. And so the platform’s prioritize
content that keeps you in the feed, and the people are interested in
engaging right where they are. So if that’s how it’s going to work,
people aren’t just going to go to your own platforms all the time.
How do we think holistically about measurement? So let’s think about
video, brand paid search, organic traffic and unpaid social. Now
these metrics may look particularly tailored to a marketing focused
audience or team. But what if you can answer your support questions
with better documentation that’s shared on YouTube? What if you could
shift a lot of that support and onboarding into social media? So of
course, as marketers, we’re going to think about average watch time,
we’re going to think about insurances. We’re going to think about
engagement in the feet. But if you’re helping people succeed, from a
product standpoint, how might you engage on these channels? And then
these metrics may look particularly tied to something like customer
success, or UX, this customer satisfaction, and its retention and
happiness. It’s not just Hey, they sucked it up and stayed here and
renewed. It’s are they getting value from the tools that you’re
providing? And again, time to resolution? as a marketer? You may
think, yeah, I mean, sure. They had an incident like that’s somebody
else’s problem. But we go back to the pricing example. What if they
could answer Pricing question immediately, because you’re
transparent, and you’re providing that information in the place where
they land, and of course usage. So are people watching the content?
Are they reading the content? Are they sharing the content? Are they
engaging with it? Are they using the features? Are they using in
product help? Are they engaging on your community? So I love this
quote from Jay akuto. It says marketing is no longer about grabbing
attention. It’s about holding it. Today’s best marketers understand.
Marketing isn’t about who arrives, it’s about who stays. And this
goes beyond just the marketers who are trying to get people into the
product or service. Because in today’s world, products have to sell
themselves. You have to have this intuitive fluid experience

25:46

to
win and re win the hearts and minds of your audience throughout their
lifecycle. And so once the free trial ends, what happens? Once they
want to upgrade to a from a free account to a standard account? How
does

25:59

that
happen? If somebody has a

26:01

problem
or an incident or question, where do they go. And so we need to think
holistically about grabbing the attention and holding the attention
to build that relationship, no matter where they are in the audience
lifecycle.

26:16

The
ideal customer journey used to be about rushing people to a purchase
as few touch points as possible to get you to buy.

26:25

But
today, we understand that the ideal customer journey is the most
seamless handoff no matter what journey or path your audience
chooses.

26:34

So
how do we build this playground journey? First, delight the audience.
focus on quality content that engages, educates and empowers. Next,
build the relationship, the long term affinity for the brand. And the
trust that you engage and build is going to be much more important in
the long run than a single transactional conversion. And finally,
influence at every touchpoint. So at this point, all content can be
considered top of funnel. It’s no longer about rushing people to a
purchase. It’s about educating and empowering. And yes, your support
documentation may show up in the search results. You may need to have
a pricing conversation sooner than you thought. So who wants to play
who’s ready to help me build this playground? Now, of course, at some
point, you have to execute on all of this. And if you’re interested
in doing that, I would love to tell you how JIRA Confluence and
Trello

27:33

can
help you do that.

27:35

Thank
you so much for joining me here at omni channel x. And I’ll open it
up for q&a.