In this episode of ‘How I Work’, Josh talks with Ken Marshall, Chief Growth Officer and Managing Partner at RevenueZen. Ken’s shares his perspectives on why SEO and Content Strategy are so important – especially for SaaS companies.
He identifies some of the finer points of SEO that he believes Saas marketers need to pay attention to. Ken also talks about common pain points he’s seen SaaS companies run into and makes recommendations for overcoming them. Lastly, you’ll hear about the tools and data sources that Ken believes all SaaS marketers should have in their toolbox.
Tune in to hear Ken and Josh geek out on all things SEO and Content Strategy.
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TRANSCRIPTION
Josh Becerra: Hey, everybody. This is Josh Becerra from Augurian. This is episode 11 of How I Work. I’m here with Ken Marshall, chief growth officer, and managing partner at RevenueZen, a company that provides content marketing lead generation services. Thanks for being here, Ken.
Ken Marshall: Yes, man. My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
Josh: I wanted to kick this off by going back a little bit in time, ask you about how you even got into digital marketing in the first place, and then the path you took that’s now led to RevenueZen.
Ken: Yes, absolutely, which we were talking about it on our first conversation before this, but I actually went to university to be a salesperson. I thought that’s what I wanted to do. I get through school, I’m in a sales competition from Herman Miller and I go toward the office. Great company, but I got the sense like that wouldn’t really be for me. I went and spoke with a career counselor, I guess. They were like, “Hey, you’ve seen your kid, you should see this whole digital marketing program thing.” She had no clue what it was.
It took me one information architecture class, and it blows your mind that somebody can manipulate the search engine, that it’s not wizards and magic behind the scenes. I was pretty hooked from there. I worked at a few agencies. I got my hands dirty, got my feet wet, but I realized, at some point, I could do a better job. At least I knew I cared a lot to not say anything about the agencies, but I just knew that I had a certain level of QA that I think is missing and transparency from the SEO industry in particular. Then four years ago, that’s when I started Doorbell. As you mentioned recently, about a month ago actually, signed on with RevenueZen as the chief growth officer to take us up into the right.
Josh: Well, it’s an awesome story that you just got moved from one thing to another at one point when you were young and you’re just like, “Oh, this is for me. This is where I need to be.” I think that’s awesome. You mentioned SEO and I know you’re heavily steeped in SEO and content strategy, especially from a data and paid structure perspective. This How I Work blog is all about its all for SaaS marketers. What are some of the finer points of SEO and content strategy that you think SaaS marketers, in particular, need to pay attention to?
Ken: I think there’s a few repeatable sort of north stars that I consider that I think can be repeatable across B2B SaaS products, B2C, P2P, whatever the case. I think the most important thing is to understand whoever your ICP is, whoever your target customer is. They’ve got this set of problems that makes their life awful every day. You’ve got your XYZ widget that you invented or reinvented, but that XYZ widget, that’s not actually their solution. Their desired solution.
Their desired solution is to reduce the QA engineers a lot of costs because of the lack of efficiency, right? You’re actually selling them that use case. I think helping the companies like Reverse Engineer, those use cases, those buckets of solution, use case, feature sets, that’s where the real magic is of SEO and a good content strategy. Then mapping that to each stage of that user’s buying journey once they landed on your site, that seems to just be lost when we speak to prospects in the beginning. They’re like, “Okay, so we just write some blog posts, right?”
Josh: What are our keywords?
Ken: Yes. Again, the tactics are there. Anybody can go do query research or something or competitive analysis, but mapping that to how users are actually going to go through discovery, learn about a solution, decide that you’re the right solution, and then convert to a demo or contact, that’s the magic.
For the entire transcription, please visit:
https://augurian.com/blog/how-i-work-ep-11-with-ken-marshall/
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