Latest / Content, Briefly / BentoBox: Hannah Geise on checking every content box

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BentoBox: Hannah Geise on checking every content box · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  I feel like we have a great team. I love my team. I love working with them every day.
• 0:04
  I think we are good at figuring out our priorities and making space for the things that do move the needle and dropping things that we feel like don't move the needle.
• 0:15
  [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today I'm talking to Hannah Gies. She's the senior content manager at a company called BentoBox.
• 0:24
  BentoBox does basically restaurant technology, so it helps restaurants streamline operations, marketing, and point of sale. We talk all about that. There are many features within this kind of suite of products.
• 0:36
  We talk all about how Hannah goes about making sure that there's content for all those different things, how she works with sales and growth and customer success.
• 0:44
  There's just so many cool stories that they're able to tell on their blog because of the kind of journeys of these entrepreneurs starting restaurants. Anyways, lots, lots there to talk about, a lot of really good stuff.
• 0:54
  One other thing we talk about is tech meeting the real world. Like, for a lot of B2B SaaS companies, they're supporting other B2B SaaS companies.
• 1:00
  But because BentoBox is serving restaurants, the technology actually, you know, has this kind of very real world impact, changes the way people run their businesses in a very physical sense, gets people in the door at restaurants.
• 1:11
  So we of course talk about all that stuff too. I was really impressed with the content operation that Hannah talked us through. They're covering all their bases. I like the way they measure stuff.
• 1:20
  We talk about their quarterly planning. So much good stuff. This is a very efficient and dense episode, and just rich with good information. Hannah, thank you so much for your time.
• 1:28
  I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do too. Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here today with Hannah Gies. She's the senior content manager at a company called BentoBox.
• 1:38
  This is our first time meeting, so I have lots and lots of questions for you, Hannah. Uh, but maybe first, would you mind giving us an introduction of yourself?
• 1:44
  Tell us a little bit about who you are and some of the work you've been up to for the past couple years. Yeah. So my name is Hannah Gies.
• 1:51
  I'm a senior content manager at BentoBox, like you mentioned, which is a restaurant technology company. A little bit more of my background.
• 1:59
  So my first job out of college was as the social media lead for Sartori Cheese, which is a Wisconsin-based cheese company. Cool.
• 2:08
  And then about 10 years ago I decided to move to the Boston area, which is where I'm currently still based, and I worked for an early-stage B2B food tech startup called Spoiler Alert, and that was focused on food waste prevention.
• 2:23
  From there, I worked as a writer covering Boston's food and restaurant scene at bostenchefs.com for about three years.
• 2:31
  And then right before coming to BentoBox, um, I worked in entrepreneurship in the startup space as a marketing manager for the Harvard Innovation Labs. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
• 2:43
  I'm not familiar with the Harvard Innovation Labs, but it sounds really cool. Yeah. So basically it's a entrepreneurship ecosystem for Harvard-founded startups.
• 2:52
  So that can include anyone at Harvard College through all the different grad schools.
• 2:57
  I think maybe a fun fact or something that a lot of people might not know is that there are actually 13 Harvard schools, so there's Harvard College, which is the undergrad, and then there's 12 graduate schools as well.
• 3:08
  Oh, wow. I did not realize that. Yeah. That's very cool. And would you give us the kind of 30,000-foot view of BentoBox? You mentioned it's a restaurant technology.
• 3:19
  Would you talk a little bit about what the product is and then who your customers are? Sure. So BentoBox is restaurant technology company. We were founded in 2013, so we've been around for a little over 10 years.
• 3:31
  And our origin story is essentially that our founder, Crystal Mobeni, was working with restaurants as a web designer and was starting to kind of notice that the existing technology that restaurants were using were actually driving more of a wedge between the guests and the restaurants.
• 3:48
  So BentoBox was essentially founded to help bridge that gap, and the way that we are trying to do that is through four different areas.
• 3:55
  So we wanna help restaurants build their online presence, diversify their revenue streams, better engage with their diners, and be more efficient.
• 4:04
  And so the way that we do that is by providing restaurants with customized restaurant websites that are branded to their color palette, their logo.
• 4:13
  We also have online ordering to help them manage takeout and delivery orders.
• 4:17
  We have reservations and digital wait list platforms, events management tools for things like restaurant buyouts, private events, and then e-commerce stores for restaurants that are looking to sell merch online and gift cards.
• 4:32
  That's really cool. So does this span everything from like mom and pop deli to, like, you know, maybe a franchise with potentially hundreds of locations?
• 4:41
  Yeah, so we work with everything from full service restaurants like fine dining.
• 4:46
  We work with a lot of hospitality groups, sort of that neighborhood spot like you mentioned, things like pizzerias, and then we also do quick service and counter service concepts like bakeries and coffee shops.
• 4:58
  Who's the target buyer? Is it the owner? Is it a GM? Is there some other persona inside a restaurant or restaurant group that tends to be the technology person? Yeah, I think it depends on the type of product.
• 5:10
  So in general, I would say restaurant owner, general manager.
• 5:14
  For more specific tools that we have, things like our reservations, digital wait list, events management, probably a director of events, someone who is managing catering orders, private buyout events, things like that.
• 5:28
  And then we also have a fair amount of marketing tools, things like automated email marketing, SMS marketing- Nice... loyalty programs.
• 5:36
  So a director of marketing in a hospitality group or a larger restaurant would probably be interested in stuff like that. Very cool. It seems like there's a hospitality through line in your career. Definitely, yep.
• 5:49
  Do you find that you've just been building on that from one job to the next?
• 5:52
  'Cause you mentioned, like, food waste startup, which I think is really interesting, writing for more of like a media style publication and then now doing this. Like, is there...
• 6:00
  That you're basically building on that subject matter expertise and then kind of flexing the muscles in different ways?Yeah, I have always really been interested in food and restaurants.
• 6:08
  Most of my career has been centered around that in one way or another, apart from the experience at Harvard Innovation Labs, which was definitely more entrepreneurship and startup-focused.
• 6:18
  But I've always been interested in the hospitality scene. Personally, I love going out to restaurants, and that's just an area where I'm really interested in learning more about and really passionate about. That's cool.
• 6:31
  I always think it's cool when software meets the real world. You know, like in so many cases, software meets more software. You know, or like software companies meet other software companies.
• 6:40
  So to have software powering something happening in the real world is different and cool. Maybe it's not that different. I guess we just don't explore it all that much on this podcast. Mm-hmm.
• 6:48
  I want to ask you about your content strategy. You know, often the way that I kind of get a quick glance at a company's content strategy is I hover over the Resources tab in their navigation. Mm-hmm.
• 6:58
  And that tells you quite a bit about what's going on from a content perspective. So I see some longer form stuff, case studies, tools and templates, which I'm curious about, webinars, blog.
• 7:07
  Would you mind just giving us an overview? It doesn't have to be super specific, but at least an overview of what content looks like at BentoBox and what channels and content types are a priority for you. Yeah.
• 7:18
  So our content strategy is categorized into four buckets. We have brand content, SEO content, acquisition and gated content, and customer content. So I can kind of dig in maybe to- Yeah, I love it... more.
• 7:33
  So brand content is a vertical that my colleague Lenny DiFranco owns, and that includes a lot of thought leadership pieces, opinion pieces, feature stories.
• 7:43
  So we're doing interviews with prominent chefs and other well-known restaurant professionals.
• 7:49
  A few pieces that he's worked on in the past few months have been a deeper look into why lawsuits are on the rise for restaurant websites, what it's like bartending the night before Thanksgiving.
• 8:00
  He did a really good piece that talked to three worker-owned restaurants and the staff that works there, a look at kind of the rise of non-alcoholic cocktail programs in restaurants. Yeah, yeah.
• 8:11
  So things like that- That's really cool... is [audio cuts out] writing. Um, so that is a vertical that Lenny completely owns. SEO is the vertical that I completely own.
• 8:20
  So I'm working on content that's ranging from top of funnel keywords to bottom of funnel keywords, and that can be anything from on the top of funnel side, things like a beginner's guide to Facebook ads for restaurants, which is a piece that I had published back in January.
• 8:37
  Basically, real examples from restaurants of the actual ads that they're running, ideas on how to promote things in ads, and then step-by-step instructions on how to actually set up a Facebook ad.
• 8:49
  And then at the bottom of funnel, we're trying to rank for keywords like restaurant kiosks.
• 8:54
  That's a piece that I had published recently as well that is essentially a buying guide for restaurants looking at adding a kiosk to their restaurant. So those two we completely own separately.
• 9:07
  And then with acquisition and gated content, we both contribute to that category, so that looks like e-books. We do a lot of data-driven reports as well.
• 9:17
  And our goal for this vertical is to capture leads and then nurture them through either our blog newsletter or through an email nurture series that we have set up.
• 9:28
  I work on, I think you mentioned, there's reports and guides in tools and templates, so those are the pieces I work on. And then Lenny does all of our data-driven reports.
• 9:38
  A few that he has published recently are our Diner Journey report, which is basically how diners discover restaurants online.
• 9:47
  We also published a restaurant tipping report last year, and we also do an end of year trend report at the end of each year that covers all the things we saw happening in hospitality and then make some predictions for the year ahead.
• 10:01
  That's very well-rounded and very professional. As you were talking through that, I was actually looking through the site, looking through the blog and the tools and templates. Yeah. It all looks really good.
• 10:10
  And from what you just described, it sounds like you have a very good understanding of all the places where potential customers could use support from content, and you're covering all of those.
• 10:21
  What is the customer acquisition look like? Are you driving people to a trial, to demos? Is there a sales team? Or like could you tell us a little bit more about like how people actually convert? Yeah.
• 10:30
  So we are driving to book a demo. So there's the sign-up page on our website, and that's the end goal is to have someone fill out that form, book a demo, and then be connected with someone on our sales team. Got it.
• 10:43
  Okay, cool. And who creates all the content? Are you doing most of this in-house, doing some of it yourself? Do you have freelancers, agencies? Lenny and I do both of-- We tag team it together.
• 10:53
  We do occasionally work with freelancers, and we don't have any active ones right now, but it is an in-house content team between the two of us. Nice. Very cool. Very cool.
• 11:02
  Um, just taking a quick look at the case study section of the site, which looks amazing. Like the whole website actually looks amazing. One of the first things I notice actually is that there's a lot of photography.
• 11:13
  I feel like your target persona makes that, you know, very like sort of an obvious choice. Like just as an example, like if you run an email marketing startup, like what type of photography do you use?
• 11:23
  Like people at laptops, you know? But there's so much like cool visuals you can bring in because restaurants are unique spaces, and there's lots of people involved.
• 11:29
  And then I'm also thinking the types of customer stories you can tell must be incredible.
• 11:35
  Like the people who are starting and running restaurants have, I'm guessing, really, really cool and sometimes profound stories to tell. Are you pulling that type of stuff into the content regularly? Yeah, definitely.
• 11:45
  We try as much as possible to include customer examples in all of the content that we're writing. You mentioned case studies specifically, so my colleague Lenny owns case studies, and that's his wheelhouse.
• 11:56
  But in terms of how we integrate customers into our content, I think for me, from an SEO perspective, the idea of kind of following SEO best practices in terms of E-A-T. I know some people say double eat.
• 12:09
  [chuckles] But-To me, the experience, the expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, a lot of that I think comes into play with the examples we can use from our customers on what they're doing, how they're promoting their restaurant, different examples of visuals that they have on their website.
• 12:29
  So we try very hard to include a lot of customer examples in all the content as well as expert quotes. So I would say we have really deep roots in the food industry across our entire team.
• 12:39
  So on our brand team, I've obviously worked in food and in hospitality coverage for bostanchefs.com.
• 12:47
  We also have the head of brand as well as our manager of content and community have both previously worked for Bon Appétit, so they have really great contacts in the industry.
• 12:58
  Colby Kingston, who is our social media manager, she grew up in family-owned restaurants working for them. She previously also ran social for a restaurant group.
• 13:07
  And then Lenny DiFranco, who's my content counterpart, he has previously also worked for a lot of restaurant technology companies.
• 13:14
  So I think that also helps having a lot of contacts to tap into and deep-rooted knowledge in the industry. Yeah. That's incredible. Because you mentioned community, can I ask you a little bit about that?
• 13:26
  Like what does- Yeah... the community look like for BentoBox? Yeah. We have a brand manager who sits on our brand team and oversees content and community.
• 13:36
  I think she's done a great job of making sure the connection between content, social, and community outreach is really, really strong.
• 13:44
  We do a lot of partnerships with various organizations in the hospitality space as part of our community efforts.
• 13:51
  And then I think we do a great job of also highlighting our community on our content as well as our social channels. So it's something that's very important to BentoBox.
• 14:01
  It's one of our brand pillars is staying connected to the community, and it's nice to see it show up in all those different verticals. Yeah. That's really cool. That's really cool.
• 14:10
  I wanted to ask you more of a macro question about the restaurant space.
• 14:15
  You know, I used to work for QuickBooks, so this is pre-COVID, but I was working for QuickBooks SMB audience, and we had the opportunity to talk to lots of customers, and it was really cool.
• 14:22
  And one thing that I was always struck by is how little technology most SMBs use. For restaurants specifically, I'm gonna guess that COVID forced them to take tech more seriously. Yeah.
• 14:35
  Like, everybody wants takeout, you know.
• 14:36
  Like, DoorDash and Uber Eats squeeze these restaurants, and I would assume that many of them were like, "Okay, we need to figure out a way for our restaurant to, like, have a better POS, and we need to be able to handle takeout orders."
• 14:49
  That probably gets you thinking, "Oh, there's so many other things technology could do to make our lives easier." Is that an oversimplified outsider perspective, or has this- [laughs]...
• 14:56
  really evolved over the last couple of years? No, I think you hit the nail on the head.
• 15:00
  I think definitely during COVID there was a drastic shift to embracing technology more out of necessity than maybe people were prepared to do.
• 15:10
  So restaurants definitely very quickly had to get on board with implementing online ordering systems, making it really user-friendly for diners to interact with their technology.
• 15:21
  And I don't know that they had the time to do all the research needed to make the right choices for them. They just sort of had to figure out very quickly how to get something up and running. So- Yeah...
• 15:32
  I think that was probably a good turning point in terms of people embracing the technology in the space and understanding the value of how it can help them.
• 15:41
  But I do think, you know, four years later, here we are, and restaurants are really interested in learning more about the exact tools that they need.
• 15:49
  I think they're getting really smart about how to implement very strategic things into their restaurant to help them grow.
• 15:56
  But I think you are exactly right that it was definitely a turning point when COVID happened, and they were sort of pushed in that direction. Yeah, yeah.
• 16:04
  Speaking from my own very small personal experience, it does seem like more restaurants are thinking about things like customer retention, which- Mm-hmm... SaaS companies are basically obsessed with, you know.
• 16:15
  But, like- Yeah. [laughs]... I have started getting emails from our local coffee shop, like, you know, letting me know about the rewards program and get your 10th coffee free and come- Yeah...
• 16:23
  in on this day for this special. And, like, it's great actually. You know, like, because it's this software meeting the real world thing, like, gets me out of the house.
• 16:31
  And there's something more altruistic too about, you know, it feels good to support a local business. You know, it's like I'm generally happy to get those emails. Yeah. Definitely.
• 16:41
  When I look at the products section of the site, so I'm hovering [laughs] over the products tab. You know, kind of as you mentioned, there's quite a few things going on within the software itself.
• 16:50
  It's really like a suite of products from stuff happening, you know, at the counter, back office, marketing stuff. From a content perspective, there's a lot of entry points for a customer.
• 17:01
  So as you think about SEO, I'm assuming you want an entry point or like a pillar page or a landing page or whatever for the potential customer that is searching for any number of these things.
• 17:14
  Can you talk a little bit about that? Like, do you have a list of, like, kind of very high priority keywords that you wanna rank for that lead people directly to each of these features? Yeah.
• 17:24
  I would say in terms of the balance between are we directing people to blog content, are we directing people to product pages, that's something that's part of an ongoing conversation with our demand and growth team about the right mix there.
• 17:38
  In terms of the blog content that we're focusing on, I sort of keep a running list of keywords that I want to rank for, and then we're tapping into competitor analysis to see, you know, what are competitors ranking for?
• 17:51
  What are we not ranking for that we do need to rank for? Where is there opportunity for us to rank where people haven't sort of gone into that keyword space quite yet?
• 18:00
  But I like to keep a running list just to have a backlog of something to tap into when we do our content planning. So we do quarterly content planning.
• 18:10
  Our next one is actually next week, so we'll be planning out for the summer.
• 18:14
  And it's always just helpful, I think, to have that as a resource to reference back to when we're going into those brainstorm sessions.I would love to know more about the quarterly content planning process.
• 18:25
  As specific as you're willing to be, like, what do you bring into that meeting? Do you have a list of keywords, ideas you pull from other places, refreshes that need to be addressed, other things?
• 18:34
  And then how do you actually go through the process of prioritizing what's gonna actually be written or updated? Yep.
• 18:40
  When we're coming to those quarterly planning meetings, I would say the three main questions we're keeping in mind are, what are the upcoming holidays and cultural moments we wanna consider that are gonna impact restaurants?
• 18:53
  Are there any campaigns that our growth team is running that we can support with content? And are there any upcoming product launches or features that we can support with content?
• 19:01
  And then I would say through the lens of those three questions, we will fill in brand idea, brand content ideas of people we wanna talk to, how SEO keywords can fit into those buckets.
• 19:13
  And so that's the way I'm sort of thinking about it, rather than coming with a predetermined set of keywords, making sure it fits into one of those three areas. Yeah. Yeah.
• 19:23
  Are there any tools that you find to be especially helpful for the research, the planning, the prioritization part of this? Yeah, so we use Ahrefs for all of our keyword management, ranking position tracking.
• 19:36
  So that's a tool I'm in on a daily basis, monitoring what's going on, but then it's obviously helpful to bring that data into those planning meetings.
• 19:45
  I will say just coming prepared in terms of not only the keywords we wanna be ranking for, but then having backup data around, this is the monthly search volume for it, this is who's currently ranking on SERP.
• 20:00
  I think that is helpful for my team just to have a little bit more context when we're trying to prioritize and figure out how we wanna slot this all in. So- Yeah...
• 20:08
  I just try to make sure I'm bringing enough context that we can determine how-- where it fits in, but not so much that it's, it's overwhelming. Right. Right. You mentioned supporting the growth team.
• 20:22
  Are there other teams within the organization that you find yourself working with on a regular basis?
• 20:27
  I'm thinking like sales, customer success, et cetera, like the people who have that kind of like direct line of communication with customers. Yeah.
• 20:34
  I would say our-- So our sales team and our marketing team both report into our chief revenue officer, so I think we're connected very strongly just the way that our team is structured there. Mm-hmm.
• 20:45
  In terms of our customer success department, there's a pretty active feedback loop between customer success and specifically Lenny, my, my counterpart on content.
• 20:56
  He manages a lot of the customer content, but they're always passing along things that are coming up on customer calls, concern...
• 21:03
  Not, not necessarily concerns, but challenges people are having, things they're having a hard time understanding, and I think that's a really helpful feedback loop for us to hear in content to make sure that we are providing information about things that maybe are a little confusing or people are looking for deeper dives on it, maybe a more robust e-book that can explain things a little bit better.
• 21:23
  So that's a very powerful feedback loop that we have. Yeah. Love it. Love it. That's awesome. I just have a couple things here that I just wanna tick through.
• 21:31
  These are some of our kinda like nuts and bolts questions that we talk to everybody about. One is metrics. Are there key metrics that you personally are responsible for?
• 21:40
  And if so, how do you go about measuring and reporting on those? Yeah. So every two weeks, I go to our marketing leadership team meeting, and I report out on four specific metrics in that meeting.
• 21:53
  I do one through three position keywords, four through ten position keywords. To be clear, the number, not the exact keywords. [chuckles] Sure.
• 22:01
  And then organic search traffic that's going to the blog and the traffic value that we're generating through those keywords. So that's on a two-week basis. I go to that meeting, and I pull those directly from Ahrefs.
• 22:13
  And then on a monthly basis, we do a monthly content retro that we look at as a content team, but then is distributed to the broader marketing team. So that includes a lot more metrics than just those four.
• 22:26
  We're looking at the total number of blog posts that had been published in that month, so that's an output metric that we measure.
• 22:32
  We're also looking at the number of MQLs, SQOs, demos held, and deals from content, things like unique users. We're looking at the top 10 page views and the acquisition channel that those came from.
• 22:46
  I mentioned before we do have a blog newsletter, so that's something we're actively working on growing right now, and we track blog subscribers on a monthly basis. We also have blog CTAs sprinkled throughout blog posts.
• 22:59
  We have four categories for those, ones that go to our demo request page, gated content landing pages, on-demand webinar landing pages, and then product pages, so we're tracking the conversion rate on those CTAs.
• 23:13
  And then the last part is the email promotion of our content. So we do have a really strong relationship with our growth and demand team, which is where email sits, and
• 23:25
  we do a product updates newsletter that goes out monthly to our customers explaining the different product features that are new in BentoBox. We also do the monthly blog newsletter.
• 23:35
  And then we've also played around with these content forward email series that we've launched. Last summer was our first one.
• 23:42
  We did a summer series, a holiday series, and then a new year series, and they're basically about four or five email sends that create this series that help restaurants get prepared for really important seasons, especially around the holidays.
• 24:00
  It sounds like you guys are crushing it. [chuckles] Is that... Like, do you feel that? Do you feel that momentum internally?
• 24:05
  Because it, it just-- I'm just getting the impression, like I, obviously I don't have tons of expertise in this world, and I don't know a ton about BentoBox, but it just seems like you're just got your list of all the things that need to happen, and you're just going through, checking them off, making sure it's what customers need, figuring out the reporting.
• 24:22
  You know, I th- I... And the reason I am flagging this is because I do find that some content teams kinda overcomplicate this stuff. Mm-hmm.
• 24:27
  You know, or they might stress out a little bit about like, "Well, if we do this, we can't do that." And it sounds like you all are taking a very calm, measured approach to just covering all your bases. Yeah.
• 24:36
  I feel like we have aGreat team. I love my team. I love working with them every day.
• 24:41
  I think we are good at figuring out our priorities and making space for the things that do move the needle and dropping things that we feel like don't move the needle.
• 24:50
  And then in terms of the metrics, I feel like there's a really-- we have a lot of support from our RevOps, um, team, which is where we get a lot of the analytics for content. Nice.
• 25:00
  So super grateful for their partnership and them supporting us with all the information that we need to kind of measure the success of our content. Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome.
• 25:09
  It, it sounds like content is completely embedded within the company rather than kind of a silo off doing its own thing. I would love to know a little bit about your day or maybe a week.
• 25:18
  Like, what does a week in your life look like, and what skills are you relying on? Yeah. I would say I am working probably on three blog posts at any given time. Mm-hmm.
• 25:28
  So whether that's in an outline stage, first draft, final draft, sort of juggling three pieces at one time as they move along through the writing process. Most of my mornings are spent typically writing.
• 25:41
  I feel like I do my best writing in the morning, so I'll try to schedule my writing time for the morning and then do my meetings in the afternoon. Doesn't always work out that way, but I try really hard- Yep...
• 25:51
  to schedule it that way. I'm in Ahrefs a lot, just tracking our progress, seeing if there's any keyword changes.
• 25:59
  I try not to get too focused in on it 'cause I think it's easy to get, um, a little obsessive over the numbers and the metrics, but it's something that I pay attention to on a weekly or twice weekly basis.
• 26:13
  We are also working through our SEO content audit, so that is a project that we have been doing since last year.
• 26:21
  We have almost 300 blog posts published on the Bento Box blog dating back to 2016, and we are working through consolidating, optimizing, just making sure we're getting the most bang for our buck out of all of those currently published pieces of content.
• 26:38
  Nice. Can you tease anything else that's coming down the line over the next six months or so? Like, what are you thinking about? Any new things you wanna try that haven't actually come to fruition yet? Yeah.
• 26:50
  So I'm feeling in terms of our on-page SEO, we have a pretty good grasp on that. It's a space that I feel really comfortable in. For me, a priority is revisiting our backlink strategy.
• 27:02
  It's something that we had talked about last year and that we've been interested in circling back to.
• 27:09
  So one thing we're playing around with right now is this idea of creating linkable assets to try to get sort of natural, organic backlinks.
• 27:19
  And one way that we're doing that is taking a lot of data from these large reports, synthesizing it down into small bulleted stats that we can kind of do in a blog post, and then trying to rank for a keyword and get backlinks organically through other websites and blogs that wanna cite us.
• 27:40
  So, for example, we published our restaurant tipping report last year, which looked at basically how diners are feeling about tipping and the tipping space these days.
• 27:50
  And a few weeks ago, I had pulled out just the best stats I felt like came out of that report, and we published this piece, which is "47 Restaurant Tipping Statistics for 2024."
• 28:02
  And so that's something that I'm interested in playing around with more around different experiments we can do with backlinking.
• 28:09
  Also looking into guest blogging, whether that means blog posts from other sources on the Bento Box blog or us going out to do guest blogs for other blogs as well. So backlinks is definitely something top of mind for me.
• 28:24
  Yeah. That totally makes sense.
• 28:25
  I'm actually looking at the tipping report right now, and if there was ever a linkable asset, this is it, particularly because the topic of tipping has kind of, like, hit the cultural zeitgeist, you know?
• 28:38
  Like, there's memes about tipping. Every restaurant's got an iPad.
• 28:40
  Like, it, it's become a thing that people talk about now, and I probably-- I'm guessing there's probably not a ton of data around this, so you've put that in place, and I'd be very curious to check in 12 months from now and find out how this has been as a backlink strategy.
• 28:54
  Yeah. And I also wanted to ask you about things that have surprised you. Have there been any pieces of content that you've worked on that have delivered a surprising result?
• 29:05
  Like, as an example, like, is there anything you put out that you didn't think much of, but then actually it caught on and has produced outsized results for you?
• 29:14
  Or vice versa, has there been something that you put a ton of effort into that you were maybe disappointed with the results of? Yeah.
• 29:21
  W- we do have a lot of organic search workhorses that continue to perform pretty well for us.
• 29:27
  I will say, the one that comes to mind right now is something that was a little bit before my time, so it's not something that I specifically worked on.
• 29:33
  But we have a piece called "The 20 Best Restaurant Websites," and it is a roundup of different examples of customers and what their websites visually look like.
• 29:46
  So we update that on a yearly basis with new customers- Oh, nice... examples. Yeah.
• 29:50
  And it is one of our top-performing pieces of content on the blog, and it did so well that we actually took the same content and converted it into a gated e-book, and that is one of our most popular pieces of gated content now.
• 30:04
  So I think that was an interesting example for me, just seeing how it can work to have something perform really well, repurposing it into a different channel, and then also seeing very similar results.
• 30:14
  Like, obviously that's clicking with people and connecting with them, but I think the idea of repurposing content as much as possible in multiple channels is really important, especially if you're running a smaller content team.
• 30:26
  But that's definitely something that had felt surprising, but in a really good way. That's awesome. And how about for you personally? Like, what skills do you rely on? Like, I'm really impressed with Bento Box's content.
• 30:39
  You know, like I mentioned earlier, sort of this through line of hospitality in your career.
• 30:43
  Do you consider writing to be potentially your greatest strength, or are there other skills you've kinda layered on top of that that you feel have made you personally successful?I would say honestly, time management has been a [laughs] helpful thing for me.
• 30:55
  Oh, yeah, yeah. I use a, it's called Time Timer. It's the brand of the timer, but it is a large timer that sits on my desk, and I don't quite follow sort of a...
• 31:08
  I know that there's things like the Pomodoro Technique or, you know, more specific actual tactics that you can use.
• 31:14
  Typically, I'll just set it for about 30 minutes and then try to do some deep work on a project and then take a little bit of a break. So that's something that's been helpful for me. I also really like calendar blocking.
• 31:25
  So just blocking off the exact tasks I need to complete right on my calendar to make sure I have the time for them. And then I do have my just sort of weekly to-do list in a Google Doc that I plan out each day.
• 31:40
  On Mondays I'll plan out the entire week, and then I'll write down sort of the three to five things that I need to get done each day in the Google Doc. Nice. I love it.
• 31:49
  The, the timer, that's a piece of hardware or that's a app on your computer? It's a piece of hardware. It's like a little timer- Oh, cool... that sits on my desk.
• 31:57
  [laughs] Yeah, it's a, called Time Timer is the, the brand. Okay, cool. I'm gonna, I'm gonna look into that. That sounds like something I could use. I've tried apps and I just feel like none of them really...
• 32:06
  Like, they're all too small. They're not intrusive enough. Like, I feel like you need a clock ticking down [laughs] to take it as seriously. Right.
• 32:12
  And I do think the s- the physical separateness of it from the computer and the digital space is very helpful for me to not get distracted by other browsers, so. Yeah. That's a great idea. Cool. Hannah, so good to chat.
• 32:26
  So good to meet you. As always, I encourage people listening, go to the website, go to Bento. It's getbento.com. Go there, check it out. It's a beautiful website. The content looks great.
• 32:35
  You can kind of get a sense for how it, the content strategy that Hannah describes is actually playing out in real life, so go check it out.
• 32:41
  And even though the persona may be different than the one that you're selling to, there's always stuff to be gleaned when you hear a content marketer describe what's happening and then go see it in real life.
• 32:51
  So we'll definitely link to that for folks. And how about you personally? Where can we send people to connect with you? Yeah. I think the best place to connect with me is on LinkedIn. So I'm on LinkedIn, Hannah Guise.
• 33:01
  You can find me there. Cool. Link will be in the show notes. Hannah, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. Would love to do a catch-up with you at some point too.
• 33:09
  Thank you so much for having me on, Jimmy. Absolutely. Take care. Bye. [outro music]