How to Stand Out in a Saturated Market with a Customer-First Content Strategy

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This is a podcast episode titled, How to Stand Out in a Saturated Market with a Customer-First Content Strategy. The summary for this episode is: <p>Are you ready to join the SEO revolution, but not sure how to get started? In this episode, we dive deep into content strategy with Morgan Cooper, Head of Marketing and Customer Success at Ocurate. You’ll learn how to align sales and marketing, focus on customer pain points, avoid vanity metrics, and more.</p><p>---------</p><p><strong>Quote</strong></p><p>“We were writing what we thought to be the content that our customer wanted. In all honesty, there were very few interviews with our customers prior to drafting that content. When we didn't get the traction we were hoping for, it was like, ‘Well, why not?’ And of course, we were not writing about where customers were at or what they cared about.”</p><p> ---------</p><p><strong>Key</strong> <strong>Takeaways</strong></p><ul><li>The customer’s online buying journey is not linear, so content for content’s sake is no longer enough. You need a content strategy to move customers through the funnel.<br /> </li><li>Holding Sales and Marketing accountable to a revenue number takes you away from focusing on vanity metrics, and instead ties directly into efforts impacting the pipeline.<br /> </li><li>Talk to your customers, always! </li></ul><p><strong>Time</strong> <strong>Stamps</strong>:</p><p>* (:55) How Morgan became Head of Marketing and Customer Success at Ocurate</p><p>* (3:56) What are SEO strategies used in Saas?</p><p>* (7:36) How to learn your customer’s pain points</p><p>* (14:26) How to align Sales and Marketing to avoid vanity metrics </p><p>* (17:51) Staying authentic in your marketing</p><p>* (20:35) Marketing tools for your content strategy </p><p>* (27:20) Rapid-fire questions </p><p>--------</p><p><strong>Sponsor</strong></p><p>This podcast is brought to you by <a href="https://www.demandjump.com/">DemandJump</a>. Tired of wasting time creating content that doesn’t rank? With DemandJump you know the exact content to create to increase 1st-page rankings and drive outcomes. Get started for free today at <a href="https://www.demandjump.com/">DemandJump.com</a>.</p><p>--------</p><p><strong>Links</strong></p><ul><li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/morganrcooper/">Connect with Morgan on LinkedIn</a></li><li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherday2/">Connect with Christopher on LinkedIn</a></li><li><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-m-brock/">Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn</a></li><li>Learn more about <a href="https://www.ocurate.com/">Ocurate</a></li><li>Learn more about <a href="https://www.demandjump.com/">DemandJump</a></li></ul>
How to align sales & marketing to avoid vanity metrics
02:07 MIN

Speaker 1: Welcome to Page One Or Bust, your ultimate guide to getting on page one of search engines. In this episode, we're talking to the Head of Customer Success at Ocurate, a startup that uses AI to predict customer lifetime value to increase gross profits. You'll hear from Morgan Cooper who dives deep into content strategy creation. She shares advice that will help you get started, like how to focus on customer pain points, avoid vanity metrics and more. But before we get into it, here's a brief word from today's sponsor. Page One Or Bust is brought to you by DemandJump. Get insights, drive outcomes with DemandJump. Get started creating content that ranks at demandjump. com today. And now, here are your co- hosts Christopher Day and Ryan Brock.

Christopher Day: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Page One Or Bust. This is your co- host, Christopher Day. And as always, I'm joined by my co- host, Ryan Brock, the Chief Content Officer at DemandJump. You ready to roll, Ryan?

Ryan Brock: I'm ready to roll. Let's do this. I'm excited for this one.

Christopher Day: Yeah, it's going to be a blast. Joining us today is Morgan Cooper. How are you doing, Morgan?

Morgan Cooper: I am doing well. How are you guys?

Christopher Day: Doing wonderful, never been better. Today is the best day of my life so far. All right. Today, we are talking to a marketing and customer success leader, which I think is going to be an interesting angle as we talk about today's topic, but a marketing and customer success leader in the SaaS sector. So we're going to be talking about why it's important more than ever to rank on page one in order to stand out in a saturated field, plus Morgan is just starting out on her SXO journey. So search, experience, optimization journey, leveraging pillar- based marketing just like many people that are listening out there right now. She had a lot of questions before taking that first step and we're going to dive deep into those questions to get you some answers. Today is all about getting started with pillar- based marketing. So let's get started. Morgan, tell us a little bit about your career journey and how you got into to marketing and how it led you to your current role at Ocurate.

Morgan Cooper: Yeah. So gosh, I mean I wanted to be a marketer since my junior year in high school and Ryan and I both went to the University of Indianapolis, this was where we crossed paths to begin with. But got my degree in marketing, segued out into the not- for- profit space because I was going to change the free world. Realized it's a space that you get burnout in pretty quickly so I segued to corporate America and realized there you don't really have much of a voice, you just execute, which then really led me into tech and startup life. And I had my first dip in as employee number two at a startup here in Indi and I've honestly never looked back. I did one stint where I ran my own agency for two years during COVID life and have now found myself as Head of Marketing in CS at Ocurate.

Ryan Brock: That is the world's fastest little update there. We just glazed over quite a bit, I'm sure. But yeah, I also want to add that fun fact about Morgan and I, we got married on the same day, not to each other mind you, but we got married on the exact same day and also, she and my wife have the exact same wedding ring. So we are very much products of our time that we got married. We could be in a retro video about what it was like to get married in 2010.

Morgan Cooper: Fact. Yeah, wedding buddies.

Christopher Day: That's awesome.

Morgan Cooper: If we ever forget our anniversary, we can just nudge each other like, " Hey."

Ryan Brock: Who said I forgot my anniversary? I remember it.

Christopher Day: Let's ask Ryan right now, Morgan. What was the date, Ryan? You're on the clock.

Ryan Brock: It's May 22nd 2010.

Christopher Day: We're going to hope that's right.

Ryan Brock: Is that right Morgan?

Morgan Cooper: So we got married on May 15th, so are we not wedding buddies and we're just wedding ring buddies?

Ryan Brock: Oh, we're not. We're a week apart.

Morgan Cooper: We're close. We were in the same-

Ryan Brock: I thought it was the same date.

Morgan Cooper: We're in the same stress window of during those two weeks, it was just get to the finish line.

Ryan Brock: Well the fact that yours is the 15th does confirm that mine was the 22nd, assuming we both got married on a Saturday, right?

Morgan Cooper: Yeah.

Ryan Brock: So go us.

Christopher Day: I love it. All right. So Morgan, talk just a little bit about so when you got started, you were in the nonprofit sector and in a major way to the SaaS world and SaaS startup. What were some of the old methods that you saw people executing that you tried to execute originally to try to stand out from the pack or in the crowd?

Morgan Cooper: Right. So I mean at that time, it was really a lot of... I mean granted it was still in mid- stages of keyword stuffing and just putting out as much content as you could. It didn't matter if it was fluffy or factual. There was a lot of the pay to play, right? I mean throw money at it and you're going to drive something in, it might not be the best fit, but traffic's traffic. And obviously, I mean over time there was that big evolution, right? Everyone had a blog and everybody grew and built their blog and the hope was that you produce something fruitful that would drive in your ICP, and if you put enough money towards that, you would hopefully see some positive end on the output from your funnel and you'd be able to get some of those deals in and convert. But I think here especially, I mean it's evolved vastly from that and it's no longer enough. I mean there's much as what we're shifting into with podcasting, right? It's content for just content's sake is no longer enough. You can't just pump out a blog and cross your fingers and be like, " Yeah, we did it." It's really what is your strategy? And I don't think many people really queued up and really thought about their execution on the content that they were creating, right? It was like, " Okay, let's put it on social. Let's maybe do a press release. Let's put it up obviously on the blog." And from there, we checked all the boxes, let's hope it gets where it needs to or that let's hope that it ranks and eventually brings in something. So I think there's a lot of just hope and a lot of let's write this and hope for the best with no actual control on that execution and what you would get back.

Ryan Brock: You said something that has my mind reeling, a thought that I've never had before. You said just write a bunch of content as much as you could, keyword stuff and it was pay to play. Do you mean in addition to digital advertising play to pay, you were doing that scattershot content? Or are you interpreting that approach to developing content itself as being pay to play?

Morgan Cooper: A little bit of both because I mean you had people that were paying to play to get highlighted in certain publications or getting their content up and out to hopefully get back links and drive it back in. And then you also had the people that were pushing it out and maybe linking, having content on the landing pages and pushing out pay to play on that front from their ad spend or their other buckets of budget that they could try and drive people in. So I guess I could view it as a little bit of both. For us, it was never as much on the ad spend side. It was if we paid to play, it was for other distribution channels where we were pumping in money and saying, " Okay, we're writing this piece of content. We're trying to keep it product agnostic and we're trying to hone in, but we're just going to push it out and see what we can get." And I think that's where PR also got a bad wrap too because people use them as the execution channel and we're expecting apples to apples. " I give you this, I pay you this, I expect 20 leads." And then when they circled around for PR, it's like well that didn't do anything. And so they were using channels focusing on the wrong metrics for the purpose of what they are.

Ryan Brock: You've just totally changed the way I think about that period in time, honestly, just in that one little offhanded statement, because I always think about paid versus organic, right? But I never have thought about how when you don't know what you're doing when you're guessing and you're just like, " I'm going to just develop as much content as possible and hope that 1% of it sticks." You really are just flexing your wallet there. You're just paying to play. You're not actually doing any research, you're not trying to align to your customer. Well it almost feels full circle in some ways. But yeah, that's an interesting take. I never thought of it that way.

Christopher Day: Well was there a moment in time, Morgan, back in the day where you're like, " This seems really difficult and there has to be a better way?" When did you realize that something's got to change?

Morgan Cooper: Yeah. I would say I mean honestly, the first startup I was at, and so I'm dating myself now because it's been at least six or seven years, which isn't long, but long enough. And for us, we were writing what we thought to be the content that our customer wanted. And in all honesty, there were very few interviews with our customer prior to drafting that content. And if you think about that now, that's absurd and absolutely idiotic. But I mean that was our approach. And granted, we had quality writers. While all of that is good, the customer, depending on what stage of the journey they're in or where they're at, we weren't taking that into account as effectively. And I think that started to open the door of when we didn't get the traction we were hoping, it's like, " Well why not?" And of course, I mean the obvious inaudible moment is we're not writing to where they're at or what they care about.

Christopher Day: Morgan, that is so powerful. So that's what we've had to resort to as humans, right? As marketers. We've had to resort to writing what we care about with whatever service or widget or product or whatever we've built or tried to sell because we don't know. I don't know what you're thinking right now. I can see you, right? We have a video feed going on. I can see you and we're talking on this podcast, Page One Or Bust. But I don't really know what you're thinking. You might be thinking, " I can't wait to go buy some new golf balls because I'm going to go golfing tonight or whatever." Who knows? And a lot of folks will survey customers, right? And so a lot of times when you interview customers, they still won't tell you the actual truth because maybe they're afraid to for some reason, right? And it's just human nature like, " I'm going to say I care about this because I think that's what they want me to say," as opposed to, " Gosh, what if we could remove all doubt?" And if we knew what was in a person's brain that came down their arms through their fingertips onto a keyboard into the internet and understood those words at scale around any given topic of what we're trying to sell, well then that would be paradise.

Morgan Cooper: Yeah. I mean that is nirvana and that's honestly, I mean for me personally, that's how I've evolved how I approach content. And it's not enough to survey anymore because surveys can be misleading. You can get high quantity replies, which is great, and you can bucket topics that people are interested in, but it's when you have the conversations to direct that I can then feed off of what you're saying and I can dig a little deeper because then once you start to get into, " Okay, what was your problem? Well why was that a problem? Why was that important to you? What avenue did you go to start solving this?" And you start to dip into those areas and space and you can tie that too. I mean we all go to Google and say, " How do I do X? Or what is the best way to do Y?" And so tying that into how we draft and how we write our content and strategize on it, that's been the new way, it all stems from personal conversations to get to that sixth level of depth because the second and third level have quickly turned. I mean I think what we're all familiar with, it turns into that fluff and where you try and be as broad in general to reach the masses, but is it important to reach the masses if 500 people see it, if I could go to the sixth level deep, have 10 people see it, but two of those people are prime set up to be my customer.

Christopher Day: Yeah. Developing content right now feels like a game of extremes, right? We have an extreme amount of data in which we can generalize our audiences to an extreme level, but then we also in that data can get extremely specific and start looking at those long tail questions people are asking online and saying, " Look, yeah, maybe only 10 people ask this question every month, but I want to be there when those 10 people ask that question versus the 500,000 that search for that two word short tail keyword." But yeah, I mean that experience of both generalizing and data, but then anchoring that in real world experience and conversation. When I talk about this, I call it the campfire approach to content where it's thinking about one person that you know and their exact immediate context in the moment where they read that blog of yours that just got them so excited they had to buy from you. If you can recreate that magic, even if you're using that broad general data on search behavior, it allows you to anchor yourself and say, " I don't care to be all things to all people." I want that one person who's actually going to say, " This is what I need," and they're going to buy because you've solved their problem right now. And it's fun. It's fun going for my brain anyway. I would hate always doing investigative journalism, always having to talk to a subject matter expert for everything I write. We're always having to write fluff, but being able to go back and forth, it's engaging for my brain anyway.

Morgan Cooper: Well it's a mindset shift because when we talk and tie it to metrics, right, it's very easy for the volume and to say you've gotten the 200, the 500, all of the traffic makes you feel good, right? It's like, " Okay, a lot of people saw this, a whether or not they're a fit or not," and that's a different conversation then to have, especially with leadership, and I'm sure marketers will have this. It's like the marketers are always talking up the chain to leadership and talking about the results and whatever OKRs you've got set up. It's tough to transition that to say, " Hey, we might only get 10, 15, 20 hits on this." But if it is that rich and that helpful that, to your point, it's moving enough that I'm like, " Oh God, I can't live without this," if that drives in leads, it's a no- brainer. But again, I mean it's that trade off of okay, how do we justify the compensation for content? Paying for content and paying for that type of content if the volume is lower, but when you look at conversions, they're higher. And I mean that takes time and that is really giving content. That's where the marketers, you have to buy enough time and not saying like, " Hey, 6, 9, 12 months down the road," which we know all will happen organically when it comes, and you grow and you keep that stake in the ground, but it's like what could we see potentially in the next three months and giving us those three months for it to start to get a little bit of a groundswell?

Christopher Day: And that's why we think in terms of not just the value of that one article, but the value of the network.

Morgan Cooper: Yeah.

Christopher Day: Right. You want to be on page one for that one term that you want to rank for. You're placing value not in any individual article on that network, but you're saying as a marketer, it's my job to understand that people move all around this network asking specific questions of varying levels of particularity. And if I'm going to do my job, that means my content needs to look like that and I need to build that content out. And we found luckily that if you do that, if you think about it and say, " I'm going to build 20 pieces of content that all relate and connect to each other, drop them all at once," I mean that's pillar- based marketing and that gets you those in ranking results in six weeks, not six months. And that's what leaders are looking for, which is why this just is so magical.

Ryan Brock: How did you settle on this new thought process, Morgan, this new thought process strategy as you think about go to market? So what those overall goals were, I think you just mentioned a moment ago, I love how you're thinking, right? Remember the old impressions, everybody wants to talk about impressions. " Oh, we drove this many impressions." Okay, well what the hell happened? How much cash do we have in the bank? Or how many customers did that drive? But how did you settle on a new strategy? Or how did you shift? What are the steps that you took to get you from how people used to do things to there's got to be a better way in developing and embracing a new strategy?

Morgan Cooper: Yeah. So I think it all starts with... I mean one for us as an organization is having sales and marketing being held accountable to a revenue number, right? One tied revenue number of what do we need to get? And so then it quickly takes you away from just the impressions and the vanity metrics because then it ties directly into what efforts are we making that is tying into pipeline? And knowing too that as we've evolved here and as the internet has become such a robust thing and word of mouth becomes so much more strong, realizing that the path as a whole, I mean the buyer's journey isn't linear. And so I mean Ryan, you talk about having 12 different pieces, that's huge and crucial because all three of us are going to go at something with potentially just even if it's a minutiae of a little bit different, we could phrase the question a little bit differently and that could result in us getting driven to a completely different space in Google or a different result in a different piece of content. And so I guess understanding that and then tying it into okay, how do we center our efforts around that pillar or those buckets of keywords? And what does that look like? And then knowing that okay, well if we're going to do this, then how do we tie that back into what leads come in? Yes, I do care about traffic.

Ryan Brock: Yeah.

Morgan Cooper: But also, okay, is there engagement? Are people sharing it on socials? Is it impactful enough? And hence, it ties back to how we execute on it. It's no longer enough just to yes, you want to write the pillar pieces and you want to write the 12 pieces of content, but how are you getting that out in front of the audience that cares about it? But I guess that's really what stemmed the shift was just knowing, one, having tied in rooted efforts because much in the beginning of my career, I mean I was not long out of my first role, it was very much so how many follows can we get? How many likes? How many of this? But again, if that doesn't result in-

Ryan Brock: Vanity.

Morgan Cooper: Right, if that doesn't result in the people that are bringing us in the dollars, what does it matter and what am I accomplishing?

Ryan Brock: What I love about this approach is it also transforms what you do on the bottom half of that journey too, right? You're talking about well, it's going to change the way that we think about engagements and the value we place behind them, right? But then it's also well if I'm taking the time to build this pillar and I can map my customer's unique journey through that pillar, they started with this question and they decided to go dig deeper here and then they got here, and now they're requesting information from me here, well the way that I meet them is going to be a little bit different than how I meet some random stranger off the internet who like to post on my Facebook profile. I know something about you. I know a little bit about what makes you tick or at least what pain you're feeling right now. And to me, that's always been really exciting when I can build an email cadence that takes into account someone's journey through our organic content, for example, and say, " I know something about you, so I'm not going to waste your time. I'm going to focus on the thing that I know you care about." This is where we start seeing that organic traffic driver, that strategy start applying to just every interaction we have down the funnel and then just a better experience for everybody. And that's what makes me feel genuine as a marketer, right? And I think that's something, Morgan, you've talked about is very important to you as well.

Morgan Cooper: It's all about being authentic self and tying who we are as individuals, right? And I want to represent the brand, but I think we've seen it go so wrong where brands rely too heavy on one body, one face, one person, and then what if that person leaves? And while it's like you want that voice and you want that representation and that ownership, it's like what can you build across? And you have multitudes of subject experts in your companies. And I think where we went on a rally probably about a year or two ago where everyone's like, " Evangelize, become the thought leader of your organization," that can quickly backfire if it's not spread amongst three to five people because you have subject matter experts across the board, they're not all going to leave at the same time. But what impact does it have on you negatively if the one person you put all your stake into is no longer there?

Christopher Day: Yeah.

Morgan Cooper: And that ties into just me, I want to be my authentic self and I want to represent the brand. But I mean our strategy is right now of execution and of drafting and our writing. It's bringing along our machine learning lead. So our head there, obviously our CEO, even our head of sales because he's had the conversations and he can even speak to it from an angle. And so creating more of a unified front on the content, not everything has to be authored by me. I do not have to be the absolute brilliant mind. We have plenty of those.

Christopher Day: I want to go back to just for a quick moment to something you said earlier, it's not linear. That is one of the most powerful statements in mind shifts with modern marketing is the customer journey online is not linear. And many of the things that we've had access to as marketers historically were linear and not necessarily because tools or people were not building good tools or whatever, but we didn't have the computational power, we didn't have database structures, et cetera, to think about these problems and how to solve them in a better way.

Ryan Brock: You see a billboard, you call a number, that's it. I mean it is a linear experience. Yeah.

Christopher Day: And so in the real world, it's certainly not linear, right? And as you mentioned earlier, right, you and I, if we're both buying a coffee cup, what we're going to think about in terms of a coffee cup that we want is going to be different, right, because we're human and we're just different. And so I just think it's such a powerful statement, right, that the journey is not linear.

Ryan Brock: I think what you like to say that always hits home with me when we're talking about the network of data as DemandJump understands it and as we're trying to parse this is it's more of a spiderweb than a funnel, right? We're all used to speaking in funnel language, but the journey is not a funnel, it's a spiderweb. And no two spiderwebs are the same. There's just an endless infinite amount of intersecting, overlapping spiderwebs, all these topics that we have to care about. And understanding all of that is really the beginning of understanding what you need to do next.

Morgan Cooper: I love that. That is very, very true and very relevant to the world we are in.

Christopher Day: So then how'd you go about it? So what tools and tech did you choose to start building your strategy to lead you down that path then? How'd you build an ecosystem to attack this new strategy?

Morgan Cooper: Yeah. So I mean we are still in the beginning phases of it. So as of right now, I mean we are using tools like Semrush, DemandJump is on the foray, so no product pitch, but there's definitely value to it there. And that's on our roadmap here as we get going. But at this point, it is also framing, we're still learning from our customers, right? And still really honing in. And while we've had success, each of our customers has a little nuance in why they've purchased us and what they're solving. So really streamlining and doing a lot of messaging exercises and making sure we've hit that home to, again, tie into what pillars do we go after first to make sure that we are... I hate the term low- hanging fruit, Ryan, I think you and I talked about this with the fact that it's like everyone's going after the low- hanging fruit, but going after the ones that it is a guarantee of where we see ourselves fitting and then expanding off of that.

Christopher Day: And as you make that decision on pillars, so you look at what variations of pillars. So let's just use coffee cup as an example, so if we're going to sell coffee cups, well maybe we're going to sell thermos coffee cups, or maybe we're going to sell ceramic at coffee cups, or maybe we're going to sell whatever kind of coffee cup, tall coffee cup, short coffee cup, so do you look at lots of different types of pillars, variations of pillars around a central thing to decide where you want to enter the market?

Morgan Cooper: Yes. So as of right now, and so our example, a big piece of our product is predicting customer lifetime value, right? But I mean everyone uses the hammer nail analogy in the picture frame, are you buying the hole in the wall? Are you buying the aesthetic of, " Hey, I got to hang a pretty picture on my wall and it makes me feel good?" So what we're finding is customers aren't going out to solve or solve a problem around customer lifetime value, but there is something to be said about better understanding your customer to better and more accurately target them. Obviously and a way you can do that is modeling out customer lifetime value. So we're trying to connect those dots to fully understand where people are in their search realms. But it does start with the one and then branching off into seeing what pieces. And then two, dipping into... I mean our buyers right now, we have a little bit of a variety on our buyer front. So then testing in the waters of is it more technical and that analytical content that's bringing people in? Is it more of the informational wow factor, educating the marketer type? And so at that point, we're able to get a little bit more of entertaining into it. And then also, I mean from leadership, who cares about the fact of just the overall wellness of their business, they're coming at a different angle as well. So we're dipping into those approaches initially here as we get started to really see what traction we can get, and that's going to dictate our next steps.

Ryan Brock: All right. So I'm just going to say it, what inaudible said at the start of the call, it's very clear to me at this point, the fact that you come from marketing and customer success is very evident in your response there, right? You're thinking about this not just like a marketer. Most marketers are like, " Oh, we could do a survey. Cool, okay." You're like, " No, we have to talk to the people. We have to know them and learn them." With that in mind, knowing that's your unique perspective and that maybe a lot of people don't have that perspective, what would you say makes the pillar- based marketing, this pillar approach to thinking about content and how you drive your content creation decisions and drive your entire marketing strategy, how does it align with your best practices that you've learned in customer success? And has it been an easy strategy for you to lean into because of your customer success background? Or you find those things are at odds? Or how do they fit together?

Morgan Cooper: When you think about resource, I mean it can be at odds if you have limited resource and you really have to hone in on what's important in the moment. But I mean I view content as how I view I guess even PR, technical execution. PR, I don't expect leads, I expect relationships. But I use PR and if we get placement, I'm using that to fuel the sales team, I'm using it to fuel marketing and nurturing and I've used it... Obviously it benefits to upsell and cross sell customers just based on success or things we put out. Content's much the same of finding from the very first touch of your customer, right? I mean marketing can no longer, it is you have to view the whole customer journey. It's not linear. You can ruin a relationship post, you can ruin a relationship presale. So really being conscious of every touch point is building up into this relationship and is that investment. And so content overlays into that much the same. If I cue you up and solve all of your problems up front and you feel really confident in me pre- buying and then you purchase, and then you get little to no content post- purchase that helps you along that journey and continues that has you now technically, you have a tool that's equipping you a little better and helping you make better decisions or making things more efficient, whatever it might be, if you don't get content on the back end of that to continue that, you're going to engage less and you still might use the tool, but I'm no longer educating you. And I think we all crave where we get away from the fluff, we are beings that we want to learn, we want to get better. I want to be the best marketer I can possibly be. You guys want to be the best writers you can be. You're the best leader you can be in those fronts and we want things that enrich us. But it's being thoughtful in that. And the only way you can be thoughtful in that is one, it's like you can interview or talk to somebody as you're learning from them presale and you can figure out what the ticks are and what their flags are. But then you've got to reciprocate that. And I think for my CS perspective comes in, you can have those same conversations post sale after they've implemented and done and evolved themselves and their responses and their needs and their wants are going to be different.

Ryan Brock: Mm-hmm.

Morgan Cooper: And I don't think companies take that into account which is why we're seeing this huge... What? Three, five years ago, CS blew up. Everybody was hiring customer success managers and it started as an evolution from support to, well, support, but okay, now we want to lead you, we want to level set and guide your expectations and we want to know what those are and we want to handhold you through them. Content has a huge hand in that of regularly-

Ryan Brock: Absolutely.

Morgan Cooper: If you can't handhold somebody and have a white love one- to- one meeting with someone every week, what I do have is content I can queue up to you every week and say, " Okay, what value do you get from this? Are you learning? Am I missing the mark?" And I mean really then it does come full circle of keeping somebody in, keeping them engaged, keeping them invested, and then you additionally learn more. And there's obviously a whole bunch of tracks, we can go down to that of what you learned then of people and their needs and how it could help your product and the course. But just from the content marketing and CS side, there's a lot of weight that can be had there.

Christopher Day: This has been amazing, Morgan. We're going to move into some rapid fire questions. Are you ready?

Morgan Cooper: All right. I'm ready.

Christopher Day: All right. Any marketing myths that you've busted along the way in your journey?

Morgan Cooper: Marketing myths. Ugh, that you don't need to talk to the customer. People will say just the gut check, we've busted that over and it still sits in companies. But yeah, talk to your customer. Talk to your customer always.

Christopher Day: I love it. So true. I love it. What's the last thing you searched for?

Morgan Cooper: Oh, industrial spaces for a pole vault club.

Christopher Day: That is awesome. I love it. Are you a pole vaulter?

Morgan Cooper: I was.

Christopher Day: Oh, I love it. I pole vaulted for three months my senior of high school and I barely been in the pole. inaudible and I loved it. Okay, that's a whole nother story we have to talk about someday.

Morgan Cooper: We could circle back.

Christopher Day: Yeah, absolutely. Can we extend this podcast by an hour?

Ryan Brock: You guys are on your own there.

Christopher Day: All right. What are the top three marketing tools you can't live without?

Morgan Cooper: Oh, right now?

Christopher Day: Or customer success, either marketing or customer success.

Morgan Cooper: So right now in my day- to- day, the biggest ones for us are obviously Google Analytics. I am heavy into outreach. We're using our sales team to understand our messaging a lot more cleanly. And hot jar, we've done some tweaks to our website so understanding what people are hovering on.

Christopher Day: What's the best piece of advice for a go- to- market leader or a marketing or a customer success leader?

Morgan Cooper: Always be testing.

Christopher Day: Oh, I like it.

Morgan Cooper: I mean-

Ryan Brock: ABTs.

Morgan Cooper: Yeah. I mean you'll hear it a lot of people hold off because they immediately assume something won't work or they don't get buy- in from leadership. And as a marketer, if I'm going to test it, how can you tell me no? It will have a result and we'll know which way to go.

Ryan Brock: Or you'll waste months of time.

Morgan Cooper: Amen.

Ryan Brock: On something that's a total dead end because you didn't test it in the first place, there's no reason to bite the whole thing off at once.

Christopher Day: Right, Morgan, this has been absolutely amazing. How can people learn more about you or find you or where you are at Ocurate?

Morgan Cooper: Yeah. So obviously, I've got my LinkedIn. You can search for Morgan Cooper. And then Ocurate, we are at ocurate. com.

Christopher Day: Awesome. This has been an amazing podcast session, Morgan, thoroughly enjoyed it. I know our listeners are going to love it.

Ryan Brock: Such a unique perspective.

Christopher Day: Yeah, that's right. Your perspective is amazing. And with that, everyone, thank you for joining Page One Or Bust and we'll look forward to seeing you on the next podcast. Have a great day.

Ryan Brock: See you later, folks.

Speaker 1: Page One Or Bust is brought to you by DemandJump. Know the exact content to create to increase first page rankings and drive outcomes with DemandJump. Get started for free today at demandjump. com.

DESCRIPTION

Are you ready to join the SEO revolution, but not sure how to get started? In this episode, we dive deep into content strategy with Morgan Cooper, Head of Marketing and Customer Success at Ocurate. You’ll learn how to align sales and marketing, focus on customer pain points, avoid vanity metrics, and more.

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Got a topic idea? Hot take? Guest pitch? We’d love to hear from you! Reach out to us at PageOne@DemandJump.com.