Latest / Content, Briefly / SimpleTexting: How Nathan Ellering tackled his first 90 days on the job

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SimpleTexting: How Nathan Ellering tackled his first 90 days on the job · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [upbeat music] I've sort of gone from, like, a little fearful to sort of pessimistic to now hopeful that there's actually a world where content comes out of this better than ever. I agree.
• 0:11
  I think the world is in for better content because there's going to be bad content for this little bit. Yeah.
• 0:17
  Those who try harder are going to win, and this is just going to push us there faster than what we've been pushed in years, to be honest, in content marketing and SEO. [upbeat music] Hey, everyone.
• 0:31
  Thanks for tuning in for another episode. So I put out a call in the Slack group for suggestions for new podcast guests.
• 0:37
  I'm starting to tap out my own personal network, and I'm looking for more ideas, and got a recommendation for Nathan Ellering from a woman named Dani Henion.
• 0:46
  So Dani, thank you so much for connecting us because this was an awesome episode. I'm so glad I had the chance to meet and get to know Nathan a little bit.
• 0:53
  So Nathan is the head of content and SEO at a company called Simple Texting.
• 0:56
  The product actually is somewhat similar to Message Desk, which we talked about a few episodes ago, but the conversation was completely different, which to me actually was a takeaway of its own.
• 1:06
  Just that two businesses could have a relatively similar product and have such different experiences marketing that product.
• 1:12
  So we talked about a number of things, including how Nathan is approaching his first ninety days on the job. He just finished up his first three-ish months or so. We talked about the technical aspect of SEO a little bit.
• 1:22
  We talked about how he and his team are publishing about forty articles a month and how they may actually scale that up in the coming months.
• 1:28
  We talked about his thoughts on AI, how his team is using it now, and some of the potentially really positive things that may actually come out of this for the content marketing industry. Really an interesting episode.
• 1:39
  I think you'll really enjoy this conversation with Nathan Ellering. Also, speaking of Slack, just a quick reminder to check out our new and improved Slack group. We have shrunk the group down.
• 1:49
  There's ten paid channels now. There's really cool conversations happening related to content strategy, people management, team management, hiring, SEO, tools, et cetera.
• 1:59
  There's a lot of really good stuff going on there. It's only twenty bucks a month. If you sign up for an annual account, you get a month free. You can go to superpath.co/community if you wanna check that out.
• 2:07
  Thanks so much. Enjoy this episode. [upbeat music] Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here with another episode of Content Briefly for you. Really looking forward to chatting with Nathan Ellering today.
• 2:19
  He's the head of content and SEO at Simple Texting.
• 2:23
  This is our first time meeting, so we're gonna get to know each other kind of in real time here, and I have obviously a whole list of things to ask you, but maybe we can just start with a quick intro.
• 2:30
  Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and about your background in content marketing? Yeah. Thanks for having me, Jimmy. It's nice to meet you too. Excited for this conversation.
• 2:37
  So my background has been in content marketing for a long time, working at Simple Texting. I'm, I'm a newbie here, actually.
• 2:46
  I'm going on four months here at the company in this role, but before that I was at CoSchedule, where I worked my way up from content marketing lead through head of demand generation to the head of marketing, where I led up all of the marketing teams there, product marketing, email marketing, automation, design.
• 3:02
  We had customer service that I was managing, so a lot of different experience with marketing, and I decided to move to Simple Texting because I just love content and SEO, and it seemed like a really great fit for me, the company, and the role.
• 3:15
  Yeah. Love it. Could you talk a little bit about the business and the product itself? Like, what does the product do, and who's it for? Yeah. So Simple Texting is text marketing software.
• 3:24
  It helps businesses send anything from mass texts to text people one-on-one, so those individual conversations.
• 3:31
  We see use cases for marketing, texting team members, so internal comms a little bit, recruiting new team members, and a lot more. There are tons of use cases for text messaging at, at a business. Very cool.
• 3:43
  So you mentioned a, a minute ago that you're relatively new there.
• 3:45
  One of the most popular blog posts on our site is a guest post written by a content marketer about their first ninety days leading up a new content operation at the company they work at.
• 3:55
  And I find that this topic actually comes up quite a bit in our Slack community where folks are getting ready to start or have recently started a new role, and they're trying to figure out, "How do I get off on the right foot?
• 4:06
  What questions should I be asking? Who should I be talking to?" In my own experience doing things like this, you often need a little bit of time. It's almost like an archeological dig, particularly on a blog.
• 4:16
  Like, you start to uncover layers, and you can see like, "Oh, this was, like, when the founder tried content marketing when the company was, like, two weeks old," and then here's sort of, like, the first agency they brought on, and, you know.
• 4:25
  So you sort of uncover all the stuff that's happened, and you kinda have to take inventory. What do you have? What are you working with? Now what? How are you gonna move the whole thing forward?
• 4:33
  So I would just be curious, like, what have the first ninety-ish days on the job been like, and what kind of things have you been working on?
• 4:39
  Uh, Simple Texting has been around since 2010, so they have a very mature blog. Mm-hmm. They have a mature website. They've got tons of different solution pages, uh, feature pages. They've got industry pages.
• 4:52
  All of these things ranked for at least some terms, so it's been very interesting to walk into something that's already doing decently well.
• 4:59
  They kinda brought me in because there's been more competition in the market, and that caused a lot of volatility in the SERP rankings.
• 5:07
  So what they were doing has been working, and it, you know, it's been doing a really good job for them, but they're looking for something that's maybe a little bit more long-term state.
• 5:16
  Might not be able to look similar to what it looks right now to compete in the same market.
• 5:20
  So just knowing what they're wanting for the future state, my first days have been kind of like, "Well, what is the competition doing? How are we doing based on that?"
• 5:30
  So I've been looking at essentially the quality of content, which is a really lame way of putting it. I actually started to call it internally just, "What about the competitiveness of our content?"
• 5:40
  That seems to be more what that really should be. How do you actually define quality?
• 5:44
  Well, quality beats the competition, so looking at our competitiveness there, we've defined ways that we can outrank the competition, publish better content, more valuable content for our readers.
• 5:56
  So we've been looking at standards of performance there. That's one thing. Another thing has just been, I know in the past they published lots and lots of content.
• 6:04
  So for example, in a given month, they could publish twenty or more pieces of content. The volume that we had been recently publishing wasn't as high as it once was.
• 6:14
  So not only were we looking at the competitiveness of our content, but the velocity or scale at which we were publishing, too.
• 6:21
  So I was really looking into those patterns to see if there were any trends, and then I started looking into what is the actual content that we are publishing that is actually generating results for us?
• 6:31
  So my key metric is customer count. If we can increase new customers from organic search, that typically means revenue is increasing as long as we can retain those customers or expand their use.
• 6:43
  So from an inbound marketing perspective or top of the funnel, it makes sense for me to focus there. So I was looking at patterns. What pages do we have that convert the most customers today?
• 6:54
  So what content influences the most paid conversions? From there, it becomes what keywords might our audience be searching for to discover that stuff? How do people discover the pages that convert well?
• 7:04
  And then I looked at what trendsDoes that content share? From here, I basically defined a proactive and reactive strategy for the things that already exist, right?
• 7:15
  So I don't wanna just come in and, and try a whole bunch of new innovative things without first looking at the things that are working well and making sure that we are continuing to rank well for those.
• 7:26
  So I just have a short list of pages that I wanna make sure that we keep updated every single quarter so that they never drop in rankings.
• 7:34
  Because if we don't drop in rankings, then there's less volatility with the paid conversions, and I don't need to worry about that as much.
• 7:40
  So then I can worry about the new innovative things while just knowing that, you know, the not so flashy stuff is still going to generate results for us.
• 7:48
  Yeah, I love that, especially I find when a new person comes in or a new team comes in to run a content program, it's so important to keep whatever is good working, because the new and innovative stuff you wanna do is probably gonna take a little time to get up and running.
• 8:03
  So it's like you can't just wait for that. You have to kind of lean on the work of the team that was in there prior. And I recall...
• 8:10
  I've told this story on the podcast before, I think, but many years ago, I really admired the Help Scout blog.
• 8:15
  Still do, but they were in some ways kind of a pioneer in the B2B content space, and it was run by a guy named Greg Ciotti, and I had the chance to talk to him a few times, and they were doing all kinds of cool things.
• 8:24
  And he basically told me that SEO pays the bills. So he's like, "As long as I'm getting SEO traffic and it's going up a little bit each month, I have a lot of freedom to try other things."
• 8:35
  And those other things over time became like the hallmarks, the things that Help Scout became really well known for, which I thought was kind of a cool way to put it.
• 8:42
  It's like you gotta please the stakeholders a- and that stuff is good for the business, but like if you want the forward-thinking stuff, the innovative stuff, you can't just wait on everything else.
• 8:51
  Yeah, I totally can resonate with that. Speaking of SEO, I wanted to ask you about your job title, because we've had folks on this podcast with titles like head of content and brand, for example. Hmm.
• 9:02
  You know, and sometimes it's like head of content and X, so there's like this Venn diagram of content and another thing. SEO is almost always part of the content lead role in some capacity, right?
• 9:13
  But it does differ in the sense that for some companies, SEO means keyword research, blog posts, try to rank for stuff. For others, SEO means something much more technical.
• 9:24
  It's about site structure and page speed and pruning and things like that. So I'm just curious, is there any of that in your role, particularly as you're getting going?
• 9:32
  Like, is there an audit or kind of any other, like, technical issues that you're looking into? Yeah.
• 9:37
  For me, I did look at some of the technical stuff when I started, but to back up to that main question, like my title, head of content and SEO, my role is really about the content, the writing of it, the creation of it, the publishing of it, at least right now.
• 9:53
  I think the SEO part, though, is like, hey, let's keep an eye on the industry, what's new, what's changing with algorithms.
• 10:01
  How do we have someone who's keeping an eye on those things and at least can communicate that a change is happening or they're planning this change so that we don't get caught flat-footed?
• 10:10
  I won't be the guy that says, "I know everything to do with technical SEO," but know enough to facilitate those conversations to make sure that if something is that important, I know that I have the influence to suggest that we prioritize it for the right people who are way smarter [chuckles] than me in those areas.
• 10:28
  Got it. That makes sense. And, you know, for many SaaS companies, the sites are actually relatively simple.
• 10:33
  Technical SEO may be more important for a company, I don't know, Home Depot, for example, where you have like 100,000 SKUs and probably millions of pages and content doesn't mean anything to them.
• 10:42
  It's really all about the technical stuff, which is sort of a far end of the same spectrum. But that's interesting, and I feel like makes a ton of sense.
• 10:49
  I am also curious, going back to the title thing, so you were at CoSchedule for about eight years. You led all marketing there.
• 10:55
  Do you find yourself in the new role where you're focused on content and SEO being like, "Hey, we should be doing this over here or this over here," or is it refreshing to just focus on something a little more narrow?
• 11:05
  That's a great question. So I wanted to move because of the narrow focus, and I've really enjoyed actually getting back into the weeds of things.
• 11:14
  When I started at CoSchedule, it was in content marketing and just the natural progression of the company toward the end, I got back into it, and that really rekindled the love for it. But yeah, there's...
• 11:24
  My boss is the head of marketing.
• 11:27
  He manages all of the different marketing teams at Simple Texting, and he's wicked smart, knows what he's doing, and my peers, who are the other respective leaders of the subteams, also wicked smart.
• 11:38
  So it's fun to be in the weeds and to know that those other areas are really well taken care of, and if I do have an idea, I can just pitch it and they can run with it or not.
• 11:49
  But I know that there's the right people covering the right things.
• 11:53
  You know, you know where you were, and you know how things were done, but it's been really fun to try something new and different, especially after being somewhere for eight and a half years.
• 12:01
  That's pretty much unheard of these days. So it's fun to be a newbie again. Yeah, yeah. That's like a lifetime in SaaS years. Yeah. [chuckles] Really cool, though.
• 12:09
  And being surrounded by other high level, very skilled marketers focusing on their own discipline probably makes your life a lot easier and maybe more fun to just really hone in on something you really care about. Yeah.
• 12:19
  Their enthusiasm is pretty contagious too. So, for example, our head of demand generation, Suhani, she just is killing it.
• 12:27
  She's so good and talented, and so that really is making me wanna be just as good in my area, like how can we make our results shine like Suhani?
• 12:36
  So it's like, I, I wouldn't call it competition, more like, if she is doing that well, we should be doing that well too. And so it's, it's really a fun culture to be a part of. That's really cool.
• 12:46
  You know, speaking of the other teams, I'm curious about the org structure. Could you give us just like a quick rundown of how at least the marketing department is organized and some of the roles on the team? Yeah.
• 12:55
  So the way that the different teams are set up is we have our head of marketing, then we have a demand generation team, a brand creative team, and then the content and, and SEO team.So demand generation, the different functions there are, basically they're there to build out new growth channels.
• 13:13
  Simple Texting's always done really well with organic SEO, but they don't wanna keep all the eggs in one basket, so to say.
• 13:20
  They wanna branch out and make sure that they're diversifying the way that they're attracting new customers to the product.
• 13:26
  So demand gen's really focused on those new channels, uh, getting ads going, working with influencers. We've got the performance marketing data analysis is there, and then also web development is on that team.
• 13:38
  Our brand creative team is somewhat newer. This team is being formed right now to work on positioning, brand perception. They're basically working on a brand refresh right now, which is really exciting.
• 13:48
  And then the content team, our job is to win organic search traffic and convert that traffic into paying customers, at least right now.
• 13:56
  In the future, we're gonna get into other different sorts of content, like we were talking about.
• 14:00
  As long as we can get SEO squared away, getting us higher results every month, then we can focus on maybe we do webinars, maybe we do some newsletters, maybe we do some things that aren't actually focused on keywords at all, like strategy br-breakdowns.
• 14:14
  Like, how did this company do X with texting, for example, and I think that stuff's gonna be really valuable. That's the fun stuff. That's cool.
• 14:21
  You just made me think of this website from years ago, maybe it still exists, actually, called User Onboarding.
• 14:26
  Sam Hulick was the guy that created it, and basically he would just create these slide decks that were, like, 100 or 150 slides long, and it would be a series of screenshots of him signing up for a product, going through the onboarding, and then his commentary on whether it was good or not.
• 14:39
  It was awesome, and the site went, like, semi-viral, at least, like, within the constraints of B2B SaaS, and I never saw it copied. I just felt like this is such an obvious content play for a brand.
• 14:51
  Doesn't have to be an onboarding tool. I mean, maybe you can't, because he sort of occupied that space, but for other companies, the content was fantastic. It was ac- also, like, relatively easy to make.
• 15:00
  Anyways, sort of a side note. And then one quick follow-up for you. You mentioned there's web development on the demand gen team. That's not product related.
• 15:06
  That's developer resources to enable marketing, to build landing pages, track users, things like that. You're right. So that's a, a marketing resource to help with basically web pages.
• 15:16
  For example, on the content team, when I started, I had been doing a lot of knowledge hubs or knowledge bases at CoSchedule. Those were working out really well for us there, so it was an obvious thing to test out here.
• 15:28
  We had our marketing developer help us get something up and running really fast. So yeah, that resource is great for helping with projects like that.
• 15:37
  I mentioned too, we're working on a brand refresh, so the whole website's being kind of re- redone from the ground up, and having a designer and developer together working on the marketing team has been really helpful for getting that project not just underway, but off the ground and actually into implementation.
• 15:55
  When a marketing team has developer resources, it's like the world is your oyster. [laughs] Yeah. You can do so many things.
• 16:01
  You know, I have fought for developer resources at every job I've ever had, and they're usually pretty difficult to come by.
• 16:07
  So I feel like it says quite a lot about how seriously Simple Texting takes this investment in marketing, because really there are so many technical limitations to marketing, and when you can unlock that, it unlocks a whole world of new things you can do.
• 16:19
  Yeah, I agree. It was really fun to come here and have that dedicated resource.
• 16:23
  We, we also, when I was at CoSchedule, had that too, and I agree, that's probably one thing that set CoSchedule apart, was our ability to come up with an idea and execute on it.
• 16:34
  Like, our free tools were examples of that. Like, Headline Analyzer was built in, like, a day or two, and that takes those resources to be available for that.
• 16:43
  And for example, that Headline Analyzer was the best thing that that company's ever done to build backlinks.
• 16:48
  That's interesting you say that, because free tools are one of those things that, like, you could imagine it could fit into the playbook for any SaaS growth plan, and I think the reason it doesn't is because the engineering resource is difficult to come by.
• 16:59
  Like, that's the biggest thing. It's not that you can't come up with the idea or that you don't think it will generate leads. It's like, well, who's gonna do it? It's expensive to bring on an agency.
• 17:06
  The folks who are working on the product probably don't have tons of extra time on their hands to do other things, so it has to come from probably the top down to make sure that it actually comes to life. Yeah, I agree.
• 17:17
  At CoSchedule, we came up with Headline Analyzer within a week. We had just done the research on what's a good headline, how do we create this tool, and the traffic spike immediately after that was crazy.
• 17:29
  So then we were like, "Well, let's just double down on this." So we came up with Email Subject Line Tester, which followed a similar format.
• 17:35
  There was a social media optimizer, which helped write social media messages, and this is all before AI was as popular as it is now. All those tools worked really well for their time.
• 17:45
  But yes, I agree that if you think of, like, a blog post, reading a blog post is valuable, free tools are way more valuable.
• 17:52
  And with content, I think it's the companies that do what others won't or do what others can't, they're the ones that are successful. I love that.
• 18:01
  And also, I feel like sometimes tools deliver on a search intent so much better, and the searcher may not even know that's what they were looking for.
• 18:08
  Like, just as an example, I spent some time at QuickBooks, and we had a bunch of content on 1099 versus W-2 and how an employer should classify the employees. It's like, content actually was not very helpful for that.
• 18:20
  You can provide the information. It's not that difficult to write that article, but it actually is a little difficult for the business owner to wade through the nuance of it. So we built a tool.
• 18:29
  We had a, a quiz, essentially. You'd take the quiz, and it would spit out an answer. And because it's QuickBooks, there's, like, a big legal component. There's a, a waiver and all this other stuff.
• 18:38
  But anyways, it worked extremely well. Kind of like you said with the Headline Analyzer, it's like instantly traffic went up. Instantly we started getting backlinks for it.
• 18:45
  I wasn't there long enough to find out how it drove usage into the product, but I've gotta think that it helped, because also there's, like, an email capture component to it, at least in that case.
• 18:54
  Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. Like, sometimes tools give you confidence that just reading something, you can still make a mistake or not do it right.
• 19:02
  Headline Analyzer, you could read a blog post about writing headlines, but a tool that literally just tells you, "This one sucks, and here's why." [laughs] "Oh, that's a little bit better.
• 19:10
  Your score is a little bit better." There's, like, gamification. I don't know. There's the little dopamine hits when you do better. It makes sense.
• 19:17
  So you mentioned earlier that the team at one point was publishing as many as 20 articles a month, which is quite a lot.
• 19:22
  To ideate them, to write them, to edit them, to publish them, that's a, at least one person's full-time job, and probably more than that really. At one point, they're doing tons of volume.
• 19:31
  Sounds like organic traffic's going really well. At some point they're not doing tons of volume, not as much organic traffic.
• 19:36
  And then as you're coming in, how are you thinking about cadence and volume, and are there other things you're looking at in terms of, uh- So yeah, publishing moreI think there will always be pressure for that.
• 19:47
  As content marketers, we only generate results when our work meets the market.
• 19:51
  And to use an extreme analogy, imagine that you just publish one piece of content a month that's extremely high quality, meets our competitive content standards. Now, imagine if we publish one hundred of those.
• 20:04
  What do you think would happen? So I get why the pressure is from the top down to, like, "Hey, how do we balance this?" Like, let's make sure that we're publishing as much as we can.
• 20:13
  And I, I don't think that you have to separate that. There's some, like, chatter about we shouldn't be pressured to publish as much, quality matters most, but why can't you have both? That's where I'm at.
• 20:24
  That's why I started focusing on the competitiveness and what those standards could be based on Google quality grader guidelines basically are fueling that thought.
• 20:35
  As far as, like, scaling, one of the things that we had done is they had so much content that the team was doing a lot of refreshes. Well, what does a refresh mean?
• 20:45
  That was the question, is like how much effort is going into this? We already ranked for it. This piece already existed. Is it actually doing something?
• 20:52
  So we define different, I guess, levels of effort for the different types of refreshes. So ten percent, twenty-five percent, more than fifty percent is rewritten.
• 21:01
  We targeted these keywords, for example, but this piece just isn't doing anything. Let's just rewrite the whole thing to target these keywords again.
• 21:10
  That's helped with some of that narrative too, where how much level of effort should we put into this?
• 21:15
  And then from communicating that to leadership to say, "Listen, you had a piece on this, but it didn't do anything, so it's basically like this thing's brand new." We went after the keywords.
• 21:24
  We didn't just optimize the content. So there has been some of those conversations that have happened. As far as volume goes, last month, we were up to thirty-nine pieces published.
• 21:34
  So, you know, it just becomes a matter of how do you actually scale it. So we started working with some freelancers to help with that. We started to change how we used our own team to write content.
• 21:45
  We started saying no to certain things or pushing them off. We started implementing sprints and really honed in the production process in order to scale the amount of competitive content that we were able to publish.
• 21:59
  Thirty-nine articles is quite a bit. Was it easy or difficult? And I guess what I mean by that is- [laughs]... was it pretty easy to come up with thirty-nine ideas?
• 22:06
  You know, are there enough things to cover that you could do thirty-nine articles or fifty articles every single month for a very long time? That was hard, especially being a newbie here.
• 22:16
  So there are so many pieces that already exist. I think there are close to seven hundred blog posts on the site right now, meaning most of the keywords related to anything with business and texting are already covered.
• 22:29
  So if we're ranking number four, why would we update that? That actually became kind of a challenge, which now we have a good solution for, which is really fun.
• 22:38
  But yeah, it was, it was tough to figure out what to do, and that's where I actually took a step back and started looking at those patterns.
• 22:45
  Patterns really helped me understand where we should focus so that we could scale.
• 22:50
  So I basically looked at some of those top-performing pieces that we had for conversions, and I was trying to just identify are there certain topics or categories or types that worked.
• 23:00
  And for example, I found that text to vote was one of our top pieces, so people are just searching for text to vote, like, probably polls. So it's like, oh, if that's a thing, what else do people do for text to?
• 23:12
  And so it's become, like, text to join, text to subscribe, text to win, text to apply for HR use cases.
• 23:19
  We looked at those patterns, and those basically presented options for us of content to either refresh if there was already pieces on it or to write new.
• 23:28
  So we actually published several new pieces that just matched those categories in hopes of landing more traffic that's really highly likely to convert for us.
• 23:38
  I particularly like what you said about you're relatively new still at the company, so there's definitely a learning curve.
• 23:42
  You also-- you just kinda reminded me of a company that I got to work with a little bit a few years ago called TrueWork.
• 23:47
  They do employment verification for banks and lenders, and they did this really cool content play where they created a bunch of pages for employment verification companies.
• 23:57
  So like Target employment verification, Walmart employment verification, and then somebody wants to buy a car, and the lender is, like, trying to verify their employment.
• 24:04
  That's what was coming up in search, and then it's like, "Oh, TrueWork can, can do this for you."
• 24:08
  So I feel like sort of like what you're saying with, like, text to vote, text to anything, for a lot of companies, I think there's not an infinite number of those, but maybe there's a hundred or fifty, you know, which are, like, relatively easy content wins if you sort of build out a little section of the site and cross your T's and dot your I's from an SEO perspective, which is sometimes more meaningful and actually easier than just writing more blog posts.
• 24:27
  Yeah, I like that TrueWork example. I'm gonna check that out. I wrote it down.
• 24:31
  Yeah, for us with text to join, text to win, text to vote, a trend that we saw is, well, we might be on page one for those, so they haven't been refreshed recently because they didn't drop far enough.
• 24:44
  Like, why refresh something that's still on page one?
• 24:46
  Well, we just decided that even if it's on page one, like, that first SERP gets about forty percent of the clicks, and then, you know, the third is down to just ten percent of the clicks for that volume.
• 24:59
  So we started updating things that were on page one, just maybe middle, and we found that because it was ranking well, it was really easy for us to start to capture those, the very top number one ranking.
• 25:11
  So there is value in looking at things that are already performing well and just touching them, making sure they're still providing value for that reader, and in our experience, Google will reward you for that too.
• 25:22
  Are there any tools that you use to gain efficiency for any of this stuff, whether it's for identifying pieces to refresh, the actual refresh process itself, content calendars, I mean, maybe you use CoSchedule, keyword research, or just anything else kind of in the content stack that you find really valuable?
• 25:37
  Yeah. Uh, this is probably still just me being new, but I looked at Google Analytics to begin with the patterns.
• 25:43
  So I know the shift to Google Analytics 4 has all happened, so it was a really nice crash course for me to get in there. Yeah. [laughs] We had a really, really well set up instance of this page gave us X trials.
• 25:55
  This page gave us X paid upgrades. Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah. So it was easy to identify those patterns. I would say if, if you can set up Google Analytics to do that, that makes everyone's life so much easier.
• 26:08
  So those patterns wereReally easy for me to see with Google Analytics four. After that, I used SEMrush to basically search for related things.
• 26:18
  So those text to example, I used SEMrush then to try just a lot of different words, text to whatever other verb. I would use Google Search just to search for those things and see what would pop up.
• 26:31
  But between those tools, that's really what I use to identify what works today, and then where might be gaps that we could fill that are similar in structure that could help us win some new searches.
• 26:43
  We can't just maintain what already existed. Our traffic will never increase if we do that. We have to add new too. You know, I'm really glad that you mentioned GA4 because this has been a hot topic.
• 26:54
  [laughs] I mean, as you well know, and the transition, I think, has, for good reason, been somewhat painful for a lot of teams.
• 27:01
  As an individual, I hardly ever use Google Analytics just because of the nature of the business. Like, it doesn't really matter that much to me.
• 27:08
  If I were leading a content team, I would want a crash course on GA4 immediately.
• 27:12
  I would want to understand that product inside out, upside down, because your ability to understand the data, wrangle it as needed, and then use it for all the purposes that you have it to advocate for resources, to steer the strategy, all these things is so, so important.
• 27:27
  And so I actually find myself a little bit concerned when I see chatter on Twitter about content marketers hating GA4 'cause I'm like, "This is your best friend." It's not that difficult to learn a new SaaS tool, right?
• 27:38
  Like, there's tons of documentation, there's webinars, there's all these things. Like, take advantage of it because your ability to wrangle data is so, so important. And one other thing that I...
• 27:46
  not so much for senior folks, more for like junior to, like, mid-level content folks I always recommend, too, you gotta be comfortable in a spreadsheet because you'll find limitations in analytics, and you've gotta be able to export that data, get it into a spreadsheet, write some formulas, make a pivot table, and extract from this massive amount of data some things that you can actually use.
• 28:04
  Otherwise, you are at the whim of someone else who can do it, and that, that's not a good position to be in. Yeah, I agree, especially, you know, think of me stepping into this role. Content is data.
• 28:14
  Everything out there is data that is already published, so understanding how things have performed, for better or worse, should direct future strategy. And I agree, like, yeah, I was looking at these tools.
• 28:27
  Another one was Google Search Console.
• 28:29
  I, I forgot to mention that, but I was looking at these things, and I, for myself, just took a spreadsheet, I opened it, and started plugging things in there, and that was w- how I actually identified the patterns, right?
• 28:40
  First thing is you just kinda plug and play with data. You throw it in there. It's raw a little bit, but then you start to notice things. But yes, I agree on spreadsheets. Gotta have some chops there. And you know what?
• 28:51
  I think that working in a spreadsheet is as much fun, if not more fun, than writing. Like, I love writing, and many content marketers do, but it's kinda the same thing.
• 28:59
  Rather than a total blank slate, you have a bunch of data, you know, and you're sort of querying it, seeing how to make sense of it.
• 29:04
  You know, it's kinda the same, at least I think, sorta the same logic that I would apply to writing of, like, got an idea. Beat it up a little bit. Does it still make sense, right?
• 29:12
  Like, what if you look at it from this angle, you know? Does that tell you something different? And so anyways, that's a whole, just a whole nother thing.
• 29:18
  But maybe to stay on the data point for a minute, I would be curious what metrics you care about. Like, you mentioned driving customer sign-ups earlier. That's, like, the gold standard.
• 29:27
  Are there other things you're looking at that you feel are at least strongly correlated with successful content strategy? So yeah, the customer count is number one right now.
• 29:36
  I always think about leading and lagging indicators. Like customer count, if I only focus on that, I'm not focused on the right things of what organic search can do for us.
• 29:44
  So the leading indicators are search rankings, traffic, just landing that traffic, which pages are converting trials, and then upgrades. So I kinda look at the funnel of that.
• 29:56
  And again, one keyword or one page can only do so much.
• 29:59
  Some of this is the sum of all of its parts, but I look at those leading indicators and basically know the score is going to take care of itself if I do all of these sorts of things effectively. Got it. Love it.
• 30:11
  I feel like I should ask you about AI. I'm always a little hesitant to go down this rabbit hole because so often the answer is we don't really know what's gonna happen.
• 30:21
  But one thing we are finding is that a lot of content leads are finding cool ways to use AI in w- stuff I haven't thought of, right? And so maybe there's inspiration to be gained from things you've found.
• 30:30
  And then in addition to that, do you have thoughts about how we think AI will be affecting particularly search over the next six or maybe 12 months? Yeah. My team's definitely been using A- [chuckles] AI.
• 30:41
  They're, they're having fun with it. We write a lot of content that could be considered very similar for multiple different blog posts. There's just different intentions behind it.
• 30:50
  So for example, we would write a blog post about text message coupons because that's just what someone searches for to try to find a tool that can send text message coupons.
• 31:01
  Well, a different search would be text message discounts.
• 31:04
  You can kinda see how those two pieces would be very similar, but Google sees them as different, and so we're providing sl- a slightly different angle but similar content.
• 31:14
  So we've been using AI to basically write the thing one time and then differentiate those things enough.
• 31:19
  We do use original examples in each and, and separate them that way, but there are certain sections like how to send a discount text, how to send a coupon text. That stuff's the same because it's the same product.
• 31:31
  So we've been using AI to basically rewrite or redraft those. AI has been helpful for me personally with headline ideas. It's kinda good just to like, "Hey, write, write this for me."
• 31:41
  We used it for editing and cleaning up sentences. Like, if you type a really raw sentence, sometimes it'll spit something back or at least give you an idea of what might sound better.
• 31:50
  Like, "Hey, this is a, a very long run-on sentence. It's 40 words. Make it 20." Sometimes it's helpful. Sometimes it's junk, just hit and miss.
• 31:59
  But I think for micro, microcopy, those instances are better, so writing ads, headlines, title tags, and mainly I just use it for ideas. I kinda loathe to copy/paste out of there.
• 32:10
  But yeah, like, to transition that into my opinions on AI and the future of content, it's very exciting.
• 32:17
  I think this is going to push content marketing people to focus less on keywords and more on providing value to the user 'cause that's ultimately what Google cares about the most, is what page is going to provide the most value to the person using this tool.
• 32:31
  So I think with the advent of AI and it basically being able to copy anything that's already out there, the concepts of the skyscraper techniqueAre going to become obsolete soon.
• 32:41
  And maybe obsolete's a strong word, but we can't all have pages that have the exact same H2s or very similar with just different words, right? We're all writing the exact same stuff to rank for the same terms.
• 32:54
  Like, AI's gonna be able to do that better than us sooner than later, or maybe already can.
• 32:59
  So for example, if you, if you have AI write your blog outline for you, it's gonna do different words for you, but it's gonna have the same five H2s as the next person who asks AI to write that thing.
• 33:10
  It's not going to work. Google's too smart for that, and honestly, people are too smart for that.
• 33:15
  So I think that what's gonna win with content is going to become stuff that's written by actual experts, which is tough for marketers because a lot of times, unless you're marketing marketing software to marketers, you're not the expert on the topic.
• 33:29
  So that could involve ghost writing. It's gonna involve interviews, becoming more like journalists. Like, these are things that we've talked about for years, but I think AI is going to push this to actually happen.
• 33:40
  For example, if you wanna read about how to, how to send a text message as a realtor, would you rather read something written by a bot with fake examples or something that's by a real realtor who uses text messaging for their business?
• 33:54
  It might not even be for marketing. That's an assumption. They could be using it to text internal staff, and maybe that's the bigger use case for that market.
• 34:00
  So I think that's where it's gonna go is, like, we're going to have to actually talk to experts.
• 34:05
  We're gonna have to talk to our sales team, our customers, our customer support, and that content is going to start to win a lot more than anything that AI could possibly do.
• 34:15
  I'm so hopeful that AI, not just the generative AI piece, but however Google ends up incorporating this into Search, kills all the gimmicky stuff that content marketers do and also starts to shift the mindset of the CMOs who hire the content teams to do the gimmicky stuff.
• 34:31
  Because the content marketer always knows it's gimmicky, and they know that there is probably a better way to do it, and they work within whatever constraints with the, of the company and the leadership and the strategy that they're given to work on.
• 34:43
  There's this possibility of this, like, beautiful outcome where suddenly CMOs are like, "You know, the content team needs to really understand the customer and write stuff that they really care about, you know, and focus deeply on subject matter expertise," because now all of the algorithmic stuff has sort of disappeared because everyone can do it in 10 seconds with ChatGPT.
• 35:02
  So I'm hopeful. I've sort of gone from, like, a little fearful to sort of pessimistic to now hopeful that there's actually a world where content comes out of this better than ever. I agree.
• 35:11
  I think the world is in for better content because there's going to be bad content for this little bit. Yeah.
• 35:17
  Those who try harder are going to win, and this is just going to push us there faster than what we've been pushed in years, to be honest, in content marketing and SEO. That's beautiful.
• 35:28
  I think that's the clip that we're gonna share on LinkedIn afterwards. [laughs] And maybe that's a perfect place for us to wrap up, too. I wanna be respectful of your time.
• 35:35
  It's been amazing and wonderful to get to know you and to learn more about your work and some of the things you're working on at Simple Texting, so thank you, Nathan. Seriously, really appreciate you taking the time.
• 35:44
  We'll obviously link people to Simple Texting. Go check out the content, you know? It's... I think it's cool to, like, hear about it and then go see it in real life. But where else can we send people?
• 35:53
  To your personal social profiles or website or anywhere else? Yeah, definitely check out our website at Simple Texting. You can check me out on LinkedIn.
• 36:01
  You know, if you have any questions, I would definitely chat with you there. I do have a, a Medium blog which I, I've s- been keeping up with.
• 36:08
  It's been a little bit because I started at Simple Texting, so they took all my energy, but it's ellering.medium.com. Awesome. We'll link to that as well. Thanks so much, Nathan.
• 36:17
  Hope we can do a round two of this sometime, maybe when you're a year or so in and we can hear about how all this stuff developed. That would be a lot of fun. Cool. Well, thanks so much, and take care. Yeah, you too.
• 36:26
  Thanks again. Appreciate the opportunity. [outro music]