Latest / Straight To Voicemail / Building Content That Converts with Keara Dowd, Senior Manager of Content Marketing, Clutch
Transcript
- Amanda Smith (00:00): Amanda Smith. Something I've been really thinking about lately is how do you take content and make sure that is serving different people depending on where they're at in the funnel? I have seen Kira Dowd do this at Clutch, and she is the senior manager of content marketing there. Under her leadership, the content team has really taken a strategic shift, so from SEO Driven Basics to really becoming a trusted authority across their key service areas. And the way that they have done this is they didn't just tweak their content strategy, they multiplied it. So they've used every piece of content to work smarter by slicing it up for specific audiences and repurposing it across those channels depending on where they're at. So I tapped her and asked, what is shaping their content game now and where it's headed, and here's what she had to say. Your call has been forwarded to an automatic voice message system. At the tone, please record your message. Keara Dowd (01:16): Hi, Amanda. Content has always been really central to what Clutch provides, whether that's been our directories, where businesses can come and find providers for certain projects or services that they need, or whether that's learning if they're getting the right price for their deal, or whether that's really diving into what is available in terms of services for their next project. We always have really built around educating users of our website about what they need to know when they're making some of their biggest business decisions. A lot of our audiences, small businesses, they have limited resources and limited time, and we try to make it as simple as possible for them to make the best decision for themselves and for their own bottom line. As we've really grown as a company and as we built out a lot of those core educational resources, we've been able to shift more into building our topical authority around specific industries and service areas that are really central to our business. (02:13): Whether that's developing your next website or hiring a digital marketing agency, or optimizing your SEO, we really have worked to expand a lot of our blog content and our video to be able to bring expertise to our users who are kind of coming to our website on a daily basis, needing all of the right information to be able to make, again, just kind of their best choices for us. This has also meant connecting with key influencers in the B2B space. We've been able to build really strong relationships with some of them and really put kind of their best efforts and their best expertise in front of our buyers. In addition, we've really had content play a pretty central role in our holistic SEO strategy. So whether that's making sure that our content is getting the kind of backlinks that we need to lift that kind of impact and authority, or whether it's making sure that we're developing content to support more of our brand mentions to help lift traffic, we really kind of look at each piece of that SEO puzzle and how our content can support that particular kind of metric and data point to really lift the overall authority of our website. (03:17): I'm thinking of the best example, which I think is a new initiative that we've rolled out, which has been influencer lists that we've really been perpetuating over the last couple of months. So we have published influencer lists, really rounding up some of the top most important voices in particular fields, kind of right there for our audience to be able to follow and pay attention to. We really looked at not just people who were really influential within that B2B space, but who also maybe some of our users hadn't heard from before. Bringing in those fresh voices and perspectives, it's really helped us build relationships with them to help supply future content. But also we know we've seen huge kind of traffic drivers from that as people are looking for fresh content to follow. People want to be experts in whatever their field is, whether that's digital marketing or IT development, really kind of being able to deliver all that expertise to our users. And then on the flip side of that, be able to tap them for additional content and really kind of continue to feed this machine and continue to educate our users. Amanda Smith (04:27): Thank you for listening. Want your podcast to do more? Subscribe to Genius Cuts because it's never just a podcast.