TUC #007: How do you prioritize content channels?

Here's what we're talking about this month:

🙋‍♀️ Q&A: How do you choose which content channels to invest in?
✅ To-Do List: What kind of stuff I'm doing and why
💼 Jobs: Product marketing

🙋‍♀️ Q&A: How do you choose which content channels to invest in at VEED?

(Submitted via LinkedIn by Tanaaz Khan)

The short of it is this:

⚡️	Prioritize channels that fit our ideal customer profile
⚡️	Double down on channels that have proven their value against our content, marketing, and business goals
⚡️	Balance these first two points against the resources available for to realistically tackle a channel

But this is a massive oversimplification in my attempt to package my almost 4-year journey with the company in one Q&A.

I might need to do a deeper dive as a follow-up because the story is more than a 2 or 5 minute read.

Here's the 2-minute answer.

What I knew before joining VEED full-time (and they were my client):

Sabba, VEED’s founder, learned about SEO and seen the value it brought us traffic-wise through the landing pages, content, and tools VEED built
We were 100% bootstrapped as a 7-person team so we had to reinvest the bulk of that into what we knew worked (SEO)
We know other channels have potential but we can’t do it all

After I went full-time...

I had to drop some channels and focus on the ones that’d drive the most meaningful results in the long term.

As a two-person team, Alec (our video team lead) and I couldn’t do it all. We decided to go all-in on YouTube and blogs while the growth team worked on landing pages.

Now that the company has grown and we're no longer bootstrapped we finally have a marketing department, a proper budget, deeper audience insights, more sophisticated product insights, and more people to help our content “grow up”.

At the end of the day there are technically 500,000 things that could be good for your content.

But you can’t do it all. At least not well enough to keep your job or your client. So that’s when I ask myself the questions below that tie back into my TL;DR above.

Are our customers present and interested in this channel?
Has the channel proven its value before?
Do we have the resources to run it?

Chances are your customers have a wide array of interests so you'll be able to tick off the interest box.

It's the final two points, proven value and resourcing, where it gets trickier. Especially resourcing.

The question then shifts from which channels to prioritize to when should you prioritize them?

For example, VEED's customers are interested in TikTok.

But TikTok requires original content made by someone who understands the nature of the platform. We couldn't hire a dedicated TikTok creator in the early days without someone else on board overseeing social as a whole if we wanted to crack TikTok for VEED.

We tried but it didn't work out.

So, until recently, this remained a blocker for prioritizing this channel that we knew has value for us. Thankfully, we now have the budget to hire a short form content creator 👀

Here's one more thing to consider in your journey of prioritizing channels.

You'll likely face lots of pushes to do it all by well-meaning people in the company who don't know how much work goes into "just posting" on another channel. Don't get upset though.

When you don't work in the world of content it all looks simple on the outside. It's all just a few words on the page, a Canva template, and hitting 'publish' a few times a week right?

Hell to the no...

Now is when you put on your educator hat 🧢

Besides learning how to prioritize, the skill that'll help set you up for success is improved communication. More specifically, learning how to educate others as you frame a no as the smart decision (and the win it is for everyone involved).

For example, instead of just saying no and leaving it at that, you could frame things like:

"We're going to achieve A, B, C by doing X because [plug your smart reasons why]. Once we have the [resourcing, interest, and/or validation, etc] we can explore doing Y and Z "

Sometimes people aren't receptive until they hear themselves explain things themselves. I'd approach this next tip with caution wording-wise. You can also ask someone a how questions in return if they're not receptive to the above.

"How am I supposed to [thing the person wants you to do]?"

If done right, this can help the other person see the holes in their own logic as they try to make sense of something that will never work out.

📖

Suggested Reading: I learned this last question from reading Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss.

It's an excellent book by one of the FBI's former lead crisis and kidnapping negotiators. It's one of those books that will not only teach you loads about negotiation skills but also is well written so it wont bore you to death 🤣

✅ To-Do List

The theme to my priorities this quarter is giving VEED’s content its long overdue ✨glow up✨

I didn’t have the resources before to do obvious things like setting up email capture forms or a simple-but-actually-not-that-simple navigation menu for our blog. I thought some things were simple to design or develop probably the same way people thought content was so simple 🙃 oopsies.

Now that I have a budget to work with and a data team in the company, here are the themes of what I’m prioritizing this quarter:

Blog Redesign (Plus overall content/workflow improvements)

Improve the experience to improve the content’s efficacy
- Blog redesign (4 to 7-week-long project)

New categories like customer stories, guides by internal SMEs, day in the life of a VEED employee, and more

Introduce new distribution channels like email and social
- Feature blogs in monthly newsletter to our most active users
- Turn (some) blogs into content for LinkedIn or Instagram

Improve Content Data & Analytics
I recently learned ~8.8% of our readership dives into the product after reading. Here are two metrics I’m looking into measuring to better explore this and make it a north star for our content.

⭐	Content to Product (% of readership entering our product after having visited a content page)
📈	Visits to Clicks (a sort of engagement rate metric tracking how many readers engaged with internal links)

B2B Content
Work with our awesome newly hired B2B marketer, Jonathan, to figure out the topics we need to cover and how to best cover them.

💼 Jobs at VEED

All roles are full-time and fully remote.

Check out the marketing roles at VEED here in between newsletters in see anything new that may have popped up.

Anonymous 2-Minute Content Quality Check Survey

My nightmare is delivering a content turd to your inbox. This 100% anonymous survey helps make my newsletter valuable for you so...

It continues to earn its spot in your inbox
I make every word and every minute of reading time count

2-Minute Quality Check Reader Survey

Thank you for reading this far and thank you in advance if you choose to drop your two cents in this quick survey 🙏