Latest / Content, Briefly / OnBoard: Josh Palmer's "Do, Delegate or Delete" Approach to Content

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OnBoard: Josh Palmer's "Do, Delegate or Delete" Approach to Content · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  You wanna be able to set something up and then find your replacement in that, in that role and kind of move on to the next bigger thing and continue scaling your operation or scaling your growth.
• 0:10
  [upbeat music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, we're talking to Josh Palmer. He heads up content at a company called Onboard, which is a SaaS product for board management.
• 0:22
  Basically, you're a non-profit, a SaaS company, a higher education, whatever, you use this software to communicate with your board. When I first saw this, I was like, "Why do people need this?"
• 0:30
  But in learning more about it, there's a whole world of stuff that goes into being on a board, to being an effective board member, for companies to get the most out of their boards.
• 0:38
  There's lots of regulatory and compliance stuff, data sensitivity, all this. So anyways, there's a ton here. He's built a really interesting content platform over the last couple of years.
• 0:47
  Frankly, one of my main takeaways from this episode is that Josh is a very experienced content marketer running a mature program.
• 0:53
  He's got about eighteen years of experience, and listening to him talk about building this program is sort of a look into what it takes to become a very senior content marketer who a company would hire to run a big program like this.
• 1:07
  He talks about all the soft skills. He talks about data analysis. He talks about hiring, about bringing on agencies to increase output.
• 1:15
  He talks about scaling back some of the things they had to do last year to deal with budget cuts. So there's a ton of really good stuff in here. I thought Josh was a great guest.
• 1:22
  I really enjoyed this conversation, and I think you will too. Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here today with my friend Josh Palmer, head of content at Onboard. We've known each other for a long time.
• 1:34
  We were just catching up kind of pre-recording. Maybe we'll dive into some of that too. But first, before we get into Onboard, your role, the team, all that good stuff, Josh, could you introduce yourself?
• 1:43
  Tell us a little bit about you and some of the work you've been up to for the past few years. Yeah. Hey, Jimmy. Great to be here on the show with you. Just a really great opportunity.
• 1:51
  But yeah, I'm head of content at Onboard. I've been with the firm for about three years now. It's my first content leadership role.
• 1:57
  Prior to that, I was a content marketer for a SaaS company here in Indianapolis called Zylo.
• 2:02
  Prior to that, I worked for a healthcare company, and prior to that, I spent about more than a decade working for a B2C consumer website.
• 2:08
  So yeah, long time in, in content marketing, even before it was kind of known as content marketing, so to speak. Yeah. That's awesome. You know, one of my early content jobs, we didn't call it content marketing.
• 2:17
  We called it custom publishing, and it was actually print magazines, which the agency that I worked for published on behalf of mostly associations, like the American Dentist Association or something like that.
• 2:29
  It's the same thing, you know what I mean? It's all content marketing. I always like chatting with people who did content before that's what everybody else called it. Yeah.
• 2:36
  Literally, my first job was staff reporter for a print magazine for a brand called Angie's List that specialized in- Oh, yeah... home improvement.
• 2:43
  And the whole reason for being for the magazine was the, uh, US postal requirements.
• 2:46
  If you had advertising in your magazines, you had to have at least fifty percent editorial content, so we created editorial content to support our advertising strategy. That's interesting. Yeah.
• 2:55
  I mean, in the, in the early twenty tens when content marketing kind of took off online, that was just a really easy transition for me. So yeah, I came up in that kind of brand journalism world in the same way.
• 3:05
  That's so interesting. That's really cool. How about Onboard? Can you tell us about the company, the product, the customer? Like, just give us the rundown of the company. Yeah.
• 3:13
  Onboard is a really interesting space to be in, primarily because we cater to boards. We started off as a pure collaboration software company.
• 3:20
  In the early two thousands, we were what I would call employee intranet for credit unions. We're a product called Ensemble.
• 3:26
  Our co-founder and, uh, CEO, Tarun Chadha, was actually a business student at, um, Purdue University, and he entered an entrepreneurship contest.
• 3:35
  And to, to kind of give you an idea of, like, how early this was in the, the state of the internet, Yahoo was the, the biggest internet site at that time [laughs] Yeah. Yeah.
• 3:43
  But he had this idea that, you know, Yahoo's great. It's got your ticker, your news, your, your sports. What if we could create that for companies and they could, you know, have employee collaboration there?
• 3:53
  So he entered this entrepreneurship contest, got third place, I think seven thousand dollars in seed money. He started this business that we now know as Onboard.
• 4:01
  So fast-forward ten years from there to approximately about twenty eleven, our first customer, who actually was our first investor as well, said, "You know, you guys are doing a great job in collaboration software, but we've got this really unique problem in that board governance, boards of directors, board meetings, the collaboration, the content, it's an overload of information.
• 4:19
  It's privy information. It's confidential information. We'd like to see you kind of apply that same rigor to board collaboration."
• 4:26
  So we came up with Onboard, and that product quickly overtook our existing solution in terms of popularity.
• 4:32
  I wasn't with the organization at the time by any means, I didn't join until '21, but quickly figured out that there was a gigantic total addressable market for board collaboration software.
• 4:42
  If you're not familiar with board-led organizations, they're much more common than you think.
• 4:46
  So anything from your, your small community or, or neighborhood mom-and-pop nonprofit shop, as we call, you know, a five or six-person board maybe serving a very specific cause in a very specific region.
• 4:57
  We got our starts in credit unions and banks, so that was a next logical step for us in the board collaboration space as well.
• 5:03
  And since then, we've expanded into a number of different verticals with the same product, but just slightly tweaked for each vertical's needs. So higher education, trade associations, like you mentioned earlier.
• 5:14
  If you think about public and private corporations, private equity, VC portfolio companies that hold a lot of different companies and need some kind of standard for their board collaboration.
• 5:24
  And then even startups and tech, there's the board profile for those organizations is so important to their next step, whether it's a merger, an acquisition, a transition to an IPO.
• 5:33
  So just a lot of greenfield in our space and, and just a really kind of unique space in terms of ideal customer profile and then just industry by industry.
• 5:41
  So for a content marketer, it's a lot of shots on goal for a lot of different industries, which is something really interesting for me to do, so... Yeah, that's great.
• 5:49
  It's very interesting, I think, when a SaaS product can offer basically the same solution across many different industries. That opens up, like you said, a lot of cool opportunities from a marketing perspective.
• 5:59
  Are board members saying to their organizations, like, "Hey, we need a better way to communicate," or is it typically someone on a leadership team at that business or nonprofit or whatever saying, like, "I can't send this sensitive financial data in an email.
• 6:12
  Like, hey, let me find something else"?Yeah.
• 6:14
  So the way that our kind of ICP works, three ICP or customer profiles or kind of prospect profiles that we have is certainly the board director, but the most common is actually the board administrator.
• 6:24
  They're typically spending multiple hours per week preparing for a board meeting when there is a board meeting, and the cadence for those meetings is different sector by sector.
• 6:32
  You know, higher education, board of alumnis or trustees or visitors w- depending on what you call it, they might meet quarterly, but their committees are meeting monthly. So those are 12 meetings per year, if not more.
• 6:43
  They could be on a bi-weekly schedule. And then those board meetings take a lot of prep time. There's a lot of late coming information. There's a lot of just organization and communication.
• 6:53
  Those boards of directors aren't typically always full-time employees that are inside the organization. They may be independent directors that are coming from outside of the organization.
• 7:01
  So again, confidentiality and data security and data privacy are really important there.
• 7:06
  But we've found in our own data, we do a, a pre-survey call with every prospect that we talk to, and I just found this information recently, and it was really interesting, was that 67% of our prospects aren't using a competing solution or another solution to do this work.
• 7:22
  They're using email- Oh, wow. That's interesting. Yeah. And it's the, the demographic of our customers really comes into play there too.
• 7:28
  So if you think about who is the most senior, most tenured person in the organization professionally or just within a higher education system, for example, the people typically stay there for a very long time.
• 7:39
  So the demographic certainly skews a bit older in terms of experience, and we call them seasoned board members. We don't ever say older board members. A little less technologically savvy.
• 7:49
  They're not digital natives like, say, you and I would be just at our age range or our generation.
• 7:54
  So there is still a lot of manual process, whether that's kind of the digital duct tape of, uh, email and PDF like you mentioned. Another 14% of those prospects are actually still printing out their board books.
• 8:05
  So if you think about information security- Oh, wow...
• 8:07
  and a 200-page board book sitting in somebody's car seat as they're going to the board meeting or, or getting left on a train or a plane or something like that, that's the most sensitive strategic information for most organizations.
• 8:20
  There's business plans, strategies, acquisition targets, those types of things in those board books. So what we offer and what we tell our customers is like, "It's a new age.
• 8:28
  You're doing almost everything digitally," certainly since the advent of the iPad in the early 2010s, and then certainly with the advent of the pandemic when everybody had to move to a more digital profile for their meetings.
• 8:37
  They couldn't be in person.
• 8:39
  So we had a real kind of acceleration factor there in, in the pandemic just because we did offer a way to collaborate and meet in a digital format that preserved and kept that confidentiality in, in a secure way.
• 8:49
  Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. And I wonder, I imagine actually all meetings would benefit from this level of preparation [laughs] not just board meetings. What is contained within the product?
• 8:58
  I mean, is there, like, a video conferencing element? Is it primarily about, like, a place to store documents? Is there, like, messaging back and forth type of stuff too? Yeah. I need to give you a demo. Yeah.
• 9:07
  [laughs] So yeah, there, there's certainly collaboration, voting and approvals. Those are important for things like loan committees at credit unions and banks.
• 9:14
  So if you're meeting at once a week to approve your small credit union or community bank's loans for that week, great way to record and archive that information.
• 9:22
  Meeting minutes, agendas, those are always really big, and we offer different kind of features and functionality around that.
• 9:27
  Time tracking to make sure you're meeting the expectation of the agenda and the time boxes that you've put on different subjects. And we do some really cool things with the board book.
• 9:35
  That's one of the primary things is putting the board book in a centralized location and then having certain permissions.
• 9:41
  You don't want everybody that's in that board meeting to, to look at maybe last quarter's finances or the upcoming financial report.
• 9:47
  You know, there might be a contributor in that meeting that that information is not germane to their role.
• 9:52
  So you can set the permissions and the access in the actual board book, those 2 or 300-page documents of presentations.
• 9:58
  And then you can actually, in an anonymous way, we have a feature where you can actually analyze which pages or sections of the board book have received the most attention on the pre-read.
• 10:06
  Most board materials go out anywhere from 2 to, to 14 days before the actual board meeting in order to, to let the directors and the board members have enough time to prepare and come with a really well-informed point of view.
• 10:17
  So if you are the admin or the executive director of the board and you said, "I'm really not sure what the agenda should be.
• 10:22
  I know we need to talk about these 10 topics, but I'm not sure which of these topics is gonna require the most amount of conversation," you can actually see a heat map of where people have looked at the board book or spent the most time on that.
• 10:33
  And then everything else that's involved in board governance, it gets really... It goes in a lot of different directions very quickly.
• 10:38
  So skills tracking, board composition tracking, nomination and governance, those types of things.
• 10:43
  But in a high level, most people are really primarily concerned with, like you said, the security aspect, collaborations aspect of having everything in a centralized location, and then just being able to have that meeting in a digital format and not worry about last-minute changes.
• 10:57
  Instead of having to update a PDF and send it back out, you know, the third or fourth or fifth email that's update, 'cause there's always late-breaking information, just with a click of a button you can update that and it updates in real time to all those directors and members.
• 11:08
  So... Really cool. Really interesting product. It's just cool to, like, come across one that I hadn't done anything about.
• 11:13
  Now it's like I realize there's this whole world of board management which I've never really given any thought to. But quite a pressing problem really.
• 11:21
  That's what makes it a really interesting space, too, and like I mentioned that, that most people are tenured professionals by the time they get to become the board director, the board member or even contributor on OnBoard.
• 11:30
  So most people don't have that in their career path until later in life.
• 11:35
  So there's this really interesting thirst for information, and that's one thing that has really been kind of the keystone of our content marketing strategy or our SEO strategy is that we know there are people, maybe they're joining for nonprofit for the first time.
• 11:47
  Maybe they've been appointed to a higher ed board for the first time. They wanna do well. It's a professional step up for them.
• 11:53
  But the boardroom for most people, I would say 99% of people, is kind of this closed door thing where you don't know what the expectations are.
• 12:00
  You know it's a very high-level professional kind of a strategic meeting that's important to the company, but most people don't know what goes on behind those closed doors. Makes sense.
• 12:08
  You know, as I start thinking about, like, how you market a product like this, the first thing I notice on the website is the primary call to action is to start a free trial. Mm-hmm.
• 12:16
  Does that indicate that OnBoard has adopted a-... product-led growth motion. I, 'cause I find that sometimes it means that, and the company's actually oriented all of its marketing around product-led growth. Yeah.
• 12:28
  But then sometimes you discover more and you learn actually there's, there's actually a lot more nuance underneath that free trial button. Yeah. Free trial is interesting for us.
• 12:37
  Obviously, it pays off in spades for us to show the ease of use and the simplicity and the user experience that we have behind kind of the curtain, so to speak.
• 12:44
  One thing not to detriment or, or badmouth free trial, but one thing that we find is that time boxing that free trial is kind of a challenge, because from the marketing point of view, we want that qualified account to come in after that free trial within an, an expected timeline.
• 12:57
  But for many of these orgs, it takes just a lot of time to orient to a new program, to a new piece of technology. So those free trials kind of extend a little bit longer than we'd like.
• 13:06
  But yeah, it-- to the point earlier that the majority of our prospects are coming off a, kind of a manual, maybe digital, but it's a very manual process with a Google Share Drive or Office SharePoint or something like that.
• 13:17
  For them to see that and actually get their hands on it is a really important touchstone for our marketing program.
• 13:22
  Free trial is a, is a great call to action for us, but we also have a lot of activity around our, our demo. We get a lot of thought leadership leads. We get a lot of just word of mouth.
• 13:31
  Probably our, our biggest primary channel right now has become the website in organic SEO, so. I'm glad you brought that up. That was the next thing I wanted to ask you about.
• 13:39
  So imagine your content marketing program is a pie. How do you slice it up?
• 13:44
  Like, how much of the effort goes into driving organic traffic versus fleshing out the bottom of the funnel versus the other things like webinars or other events?
• 13:54
  Like, could you kind of paint, even if it's in broad strokes, like a kind of a picture of the components of your content program? Yeah, absolutely. So everybody knows kind of the...
• 14:01
  Most content marketers are probably familiar with that upside, the pyramid of content marketing effort and, and frequency and cadence.
• 14:07
  Usually typically at the bottom is your, you know, social media posts making two or three posts about your content or your business a day. The next step of that foundation is certainly our SEO program.
• 14:16
  I would say SEO, organic content, blog posting, that consumes probably the most budget and resource for our business.
• 14:23
  I came into the business, we were in '21, March of '21, and I was really lucky because we were undergoing a creative rebrand that was gonna be timed right when I entered the business.
• 14:31
  So I had this really great opportunity to say, "Hey, not only are we gonna rebrand the creative and the just the overall design and look, feel of the brand, but we're also gonna take a pivot into content marketing."
• 14:41
  And I'd mentioned this, we have been a, a founder-led kind of grassroots, just bootstrapped organization for the majority of our lifespan.
• 14:48
  So they had never had a dedicated content marketer who knew what an SEO strategy could unlock for them. So that was kind of one of the hypothesis that led to me being hired.
• 14:56
  You know, that was part of the interview process, like, "Hey, you guys have some great content. It looks like you got some great marketing, but you're not activating with SEO."
• 15:03
  I think when I came on, there was about 15,000 visitors to the website per year, largely driven by paid media and branded search.
• 15:10
  So I just saw that as a huge opportunity, and we've, over the last two or three years, have really developed a robust SEO content program. We can sell into any of those eight verticals that I mentioned earlier.
• 15:21
  We can brand content or, or deliver content that's specific to that vertical or can be universal. So right now, just our, our strategy in general, we post about 200 new pieces of blog content per year. Oh, wow.
• 15:31
  That's a lot. Yeah. And I can get into the specifics of how that workflow works. I don't know if you're ready for that, but I can kind of lay it out in terms of like what happens when.
• 15:38
  I didn't know if you wanted to get into that now. Yeah.
• 15:41
  L- yeah, let's do that, 'cause yeah, the next thing I wanna ask you about is like, yeah, workflow and team structure and-- but sometimes these things are all so interrelated that we might as well just unpack it.
• 15:49
  'Cause I am curious, like, how do you come up with the topics? Who writes it? You know, what does that workflow look like? Any cool automations powering it? So yeah, feel free to just dive into all that. Yeah. Yeah.
• 16:00
  So when I joined, you know, two, three year- or three years ago now, content marketer of one, I, I know everybody's really familiar with the stress and then kind of opportunity to that position relates.
• 16:08
  As I said, I, I joined with a hypothesis that I could really unlock an SEO growth strategy for the business, but it soon became apparent, you know, you, you can't write that many blogs.
• 16:16
  You can't write 200 blogs yourself. You can, but that's gonna be the only thing you're gonna be doing, and I have probably six other areas of content that I consider really important and critical to the business.
• 16:25
  But on the SEO front, so in the first year, I hired just a pure content marketer. I'd said, you know, a former employee or a former colleague at another business.
• 16:32
  Indianapolis is a really small tech town in terms of community, so it's really easy to kind of pick people from other places and say, "Hey, I've got this new opportunity for you."
• 16:40
  So he joined, and his primary goal was just content production. I want you writing at least five blogs a day or five blogs per week, and we're gonna try to get up to 100 blogs per year, right?
• 16:49
  We hit that in that first year, saw really great growth.
• 16:53
  And the content topics were, you know, how we picked those were a mix of keyword opportunity via Semrush or Google Trends or just what we were hearing in the market as feedback from our customers about what was important.
• 17:04
  Our co-founder and CEO, Tarun Chadha, is also very interested in where we rank on Google. We have a kind of a competitive mindset against our near peer competitors.
• 17:13
  There was certainly thought leadership topics that we wanted to address. There was kind of just big brand ideas that we wanted to express as well.
• 17:19
  But what is really kind of critically unique and important, and I, I've seen this in other spaces as well, is that we just had a huge TAM, not only in sales opportunities, but content opportunities as well.
• 17:31
  If you think about how big and broad a, a topic board governance or board meetings is, you know, I've been doing this for two years and we've probably barely scratched the surface in terms of topics.
• 17:40
  You go into compliance, regulatory factors, data confidentiality, cybersecurity, legal compliance, and the regulations that are required of publicly traded companies, Delaware Court of Chancery outcomes there.
• 17:52
  There's always some news coming out of Delaware about different corporations and how their boards and their directors and their shareholders are interacting.
• 17:59
  We're recording this in early '24, but everybody's probably now familiar with the Musk compensation package headline that broke recently. There's just a lot of things to talk about.
• 18:08
  I mean, just go to the committee level of a public corporation, compensation committee, advisory committee, non-gov committee.
• 18:14
  It's just, there's a litany of topics, so I feel really fortunate to be able to be in this space and just have that many shots on goal in terms of, of content.So just taking the kind of a linear chronological perspective here.
• 18:26
  So we saw some early success with that, and my next hypothesis was, "Hey, we're spending a lot of time on this. This is an engine. It takes a specialist to run this engine. I wanna hire an SEO strategist."
• 18:37
  So we went out and recruited a really great guy that had digital SEO agency background, so he knew how to do the work for a lot of different people, and he was interested in getting out of agency life.
• 18:45
  And you're probably familiar with some of the stresses there of to have many, many bosses and divide your time and book your time and, and record your time accurately.
• 18:52
  He wanted to go into a, a one-brand shop, and we were at, at the right place and time for him. Similar to when I came in of just like, "Hey, there's an opportunity here." So that guy is Tyler. He's on my team.
• 19:02
  He's just like a gangbusters guy in terms of workflow, automation, strategic blueprints, repeatable scalable blueprints. So now he spends-- He's been with us for two years.
• 19:13
  He spends the majority of his time seeking out keyword opportunities across those eight verticals and just in general universal kind of board governance topics. He writes the content briefs.
• 19:23
  You, Jimmy, turned me on to a great service called Verblio, so we use Verblio to get kind of our primary content.
• 19:29
  And Tyler and I, we're really well aligned and, you know, this is, you know, advice I'd give to any content marketer who's pursuing an SEO program.
• 19:35
  The more time you put into that brief, the more detail you put into that brief, the higher quality the outcome is on the other end.
• 19:41
  If you give somebody just four kind of general bullet points and you're expecting a really great detailed article, you're not gonna get it.
• 19:47
  But if you kind of outline every single thing that you wanna talk about and where the keywords should be and what the flow of the narrative in that SEO blog should be, you're gonna have a much better outcome and much fewer revisions.
• 19:57
  So from there, once we go through Verblio, and that's the, the highest quality or highest quantity of our content, a really cost-effective program, I highly recommend it to anybody else.
• 20:05
  You know, he goes into our pure content marketer. He's got a great editorial background, so he's a really great proofreader and he comes from a journalism background.
• 20:13
  He's the person responsible for that publishing on the website and making sure that we get five blogs per week or two hundred pieces of content per year.
• 20:20
  We've scaled up his production capacity because, again, even that's a tall order and we have other expectations for his role as well with an editorial creative agency, uh, here in town called Red Pen.
• 20:30
  Happens to be some former journalists and editors that have gotten into content marketing, understand what B2B SaaS needs in terms of content marketing and the editorial quality control.
• 20:39
  He manages an editorial review process. He splits up posting his content or their content. They have access into our WordPress system. They can publish on demand. We basically kind of ship it across the board there.
• 20:51
  Yeah, that's how we've met our kind of editorial quotas in terms of SEO content. Very cool. And then how about other types of content?
• 20:57
  Are there-- Are you dripping out other stuff, the case studies, you know, that type of thing? Or is that... You know, I find some companies sort of are always slowly dripping that stuff out.
• 21:07
  Others every, yeah, maybe six months say, "Okay, time to, you know, add some news to our bottom of the funnel library." Yeah, absolutely.
• 21:16
  So yeah, you know, SEO and, and getting the visitor to the website is job one, and typically we see that's a lot of other-- our prospects' first impression of the brand.
• 21:24
  But yeah, we do a lot of thought leadership content, customer success or spotlights, whatever case studies, whatever you wanna call them, are really important to us, especially in those industry specific roles.
• 21:32
  If you think about a lot of our industries are very highly regional, so not only do they wanna see somebody who's maybe in healthcare or trade association-- Well, trade associations are typically more national, but a credit union or bank, they wanna know, "Is my neighbor down the street, the guy at the, the other credit union down the street using the same piece of technology?
• 21:49
  Or how have they evolved their board governance profile using technology?" So those case studies are really important. We try to track those twelve, fourteen, fifteen per year.
• 21:58
  I was really lucky when I came on, there was a really big backlog, so I was able to get about twenty-four done in the first year, and I spent a lot of time doing that [chuckles]. That's great.
• 22:05
  Yeah, yeah, that is very time consuming. Yeah.
• 22:07
  But I come from that brand journalist background, which is very interview heavy and, you know, most people know the case study template, the problem, the solution, the outcome.
• 22:15
  But for a buyer or somebody who's not in content marketing, that's a really powerful piece to say, "Hey, Jimmy and Josh both use Verblio, and they've had great outcomes with it."
• 22:24
  That's a shortcut for most people to know- It's huge... that it's worth kind of a second look or to go to that next stage in the, that middle of the funnel kind of journey, if you will.
• 22:32
  And then bottom of the funnel as well, like, uh, you know, we do a lot of competitor comparison sheets. We compare ourselves against email and PDF to say, "Hey, these are all the things you're missing out on."
• 22:40
  I also stood up in the second year, kind of the second year hypothesis for my role is that we've got some great thought leadership.
• 22:47
  Our C-suite team and our exec team have some really great things and some really great points of view in board management, board governance, just organizational leadership.
• 22:55
  Let's get some of those points of view and maybe even tap into their networks because they're very well aligned to other executives or consultants and agencies in the board consultant space.
• 23:05
  Let's create some content and present a webinar at least once per month that is a hundred percent free of sales.
• 23:11
  We're not gonna ask you to do a demo, or we might have a small ask and just a little survey, like, "Would you like to know more information?"
• 23:16
  But we're gonna present information on this topic that we know people are really interested in. We're gonna facilitate. I host our Atlas webinars or call them our Atlas Leadership Series webinars.
• 23:25
  We try to bring in people who are, you know, authors of board governance books or maybe, you know, specific nonprofit consultants or higher ed consultants, anybody who just has a governance profile that might be kind of indicative of leadership experience or expertise, and let's have them teach on a topic.
• 23:41
  And that could be something really specific like, "Hey, board evaluations are really important," or, "Here's how you write an annual report at the end of the year."
• 23:47
  Like I said, a lot of people are entering the board management or board governance space for the first time, so they find that really valuable.
• 23:53
  And then all the way up to like really higher level topics of like, you know, here's how the board chair at a public company should develop relationships with their directors. So I kinda call that the soft sell.
• 24:02
  It's softer information. It's a little bit more ambiguous.
• 24:04
  It's not as kind of descriptive or instructive, but those discussions and those interactions I've had with those thought leaders, that's kind of the most aha momentContent that we tend to generate.
• 24:14
  We've also dipped our toe a little bit as late of last year in podcasts, just kind of taking that same format. Like, let's just have a conversation with somebody that does board governance.
• 24:21
  Let's get a different point of view in here that might be contrarian to the status quo.
• 24:26
  So I've really enjoyed those conversations, and I'm not sure if you feel the same way, but podcasting is kind of like, I don't know, it's the perfect medium for that interview format. Absolutely.
• 24:35
  So much good stuff there.
• 24:36
  Little thing you mentioned that I really like, and I'll just call out for listeners, is you have internal subject matter experts with strong opinions, and what I thought you were gonna say is, "So we bring in ghostwriters to help them kind of package up those thoughts and publish them."
• 24:50
  In my experience, that's a great idea that rarely works because it's just so difficult to get, you know, a CEO or someone whose, like, day job is not content, and then pair them with a writer.
• 25:01
  Typically, what happens is, like, the content just gets nitpicked to death, and it's, like, not fun for anybody.
• 25:05
  But what you did say was that you put them on webinars, which I love, because then you just let them talk and you don't have to take their voice, opinions, et cetera, and package it into something.
• 25:15
  You can just give them a platform to go. Yeah.
• 25:18
  To be fair, our webinar format is typically more outside experts 'cause we want that outside credibility coming through into our forum and giving that information, and it kind of lessens the salesmanship aspect.
• 25:27
  In terms of, like, executive thought leadership, that's something that I have an individual contributor role in.
• 25:33
  I think it's extremely important, especially if you're in a content leadership position, to have access into that executive suite, to be able to learn the CEO's voice or the CMO's voice, to be able to interview them, to kind of set up the framework for them where if that works for you, and then understand their point of view and be able to even ghostwrite or speak in their language, so to speak.
• 25:52
  Our founder, Puroon Chadha, has just a really-- His cadence, his speech style, his writing style is really unique, so that's something fun for me that I can kind of replicate and clean up a little bit for him.
• 26:02
  But yeah, that's like, for me, that's job one when I've... So I've been at four different places over my eighteen-year career.
• 26:09
  Job one for me, especially if you're gonna be in that leadership role of even if you're a content team of one, is that you have to get in and know what the origin story for the business is, especially if it's a founder-led business.
• 26:19
  There's always a great human, authentic story of how it got started.
• 26:23
  You and I were talking earlier, two thousand and three, Puroon Chadha on the campus of Purdue University in West Lafayette won a business entrepreneurship competition, and our first customer gave us the seed money to get this highly scalable SaaS company now started.
• 26:37
  I love that story. That's something you can tell in an elevator or to your, your friend at a cocktail party or whatever.
• 26:43
  So that's always job one for me is to understand, you know, what is the unique kind of human story here, and then to build that trust with the leadership. You know, I'm not coming in just to write blogs for you.
• 26:52
  I wanna tell the brand story and the company story and get people kind of engaged on that human, authentic level.
• 26:57
  Sometimes that sounds trite, but having a strong relationship with the C-suite and then, like you mentioned, those internal subject matter experts.
• 27:05
  And I really credit just a, a strong kind of journalism background, even if it was brand journalism to start.
• 27:09
  I was trained by somebody who worked in kind of like a big print magazine life and published books and, and had a really strong opinion about what, like, what journalism and high quality kind of content and interview-based content should be.
• 27:21
  So I, I feel really lucky to have that experience because now I can apply it.
• 27:24
  I can go and, and talk to a CEO or CFO and turn their thoughts and their point of view into something that's great for the business in terms of the bottom line, so. Yeah. I love that.
• 27:34
  Sounds like a very robust program, which leads me to the next thing I wanted to ask you about, which is your job and your day-to-day.
• 27:41
  So you mentioned some individual contributor responsibilities, at least two employees, and maybe there's more that are on your team, two agencies, and so this is somewhat representative.
• 27:53
  A very senior content marketer operating a robust program.
• 27:56
  There's a lot of balls in the air, and oftentimes it's your job not so much to be the content expert, but to be the overseer of the program and make sure it is all moving in the right direction, which is a lot different than things you may have done earlier in your career, where it's really about great writing or finding a good freelancer or some of those, like, sort of tactical steps that have probably led you to where you are today.
• 28:18
  Yeah. Just to give you kind of a deeper look into our team. So I manage six different people. That includes, like I mentioned, our SEO strategist, our content producer for onboard.
• 28:28
  We have a sister product called eScribe, which is public meeting management, so we have a pure content marketer for that role as well. I also oversee the design creative services and brand element of our content team.
• 28:39
  Just something I have a lot of experience in, just based on just luck really, to be honest.
• 28:43
  [chuckles] I spent a lot of time in creative services and working to get magazines out on time, and in my time at Angie's List, spent a lot of time on brand. We have two designers on our team.
• 28:52
  That's supported by freelance as well to increase the scale. And then our website backend operations specialist, Nick, he does a great job. He's been with the business for ten years.
• 29:00
  He's grown through his role into this website specialist, where if there's anything that involves digital, whether that's AV production, producing interviews or videos, those types of things, he's responsible for it, and he controls the whole backend of the website in, in concert with our SEO strategist to make sure that the front end technical stuff is optimized for Google and other search engines.
• 29:21
  One thing that I've noticed throughout that kind of like leadership career is that certainly the six kind of things that I'm primarily responsible for and was kind of the hypothesis for me being hired in this position were brand, content, underneath content since SEO growth engine, thought leadership.
• 29:36
  Thought leadership feeds into the PR angle, creative design, and brand support services, so we're kind of a, a creative agency within the business itself, both on the content creative design side and digital side as well.
• 29:47
  And then sales assets, those are the other big stakeholders in our world, making sure that those demand gen assets that lead to a converted lead or those mid-funnel things like product comparisons or, or one-sheeters or data sheets, that those are all kept up to date.
• 30:01
  My team grew to six people at the beginning of this year, and that's really for me where the scales tipped from individual contributor with kind of a, a small management role, 'cause I let my team on a long leash.
• 30:12
  I trust them to get their work done. If they have needs in terms of like resource or support or just prioritizing different requests, that's my job to help them manage the flow.
• 30:22
  But luckily, my team is much more organized than I am in a lot of ways.
• 30:25
  But that's been kind of one of the strangestLately, things that's kind of in my leadership profile is that I'm still a player coach, but I'm much more of a coach than a player than I used to be.
• 30:35
  And for me, it's a really kind of odd position because I feel like I have less control on the end product unless I kind of stick my finger in it and say, "Hey, I want, I want this to change," or everything has to be reviewed by me.
• 30:46
  There's really a weird balance that you have to strike where you have to teach people the quality control and the expectations that you have, then kind of let them go perform their job and their duties as you hired them to do.
• 30:57
  It can be kind of a, an uncomfortable feeling not to have that kind of end-to-end view of the work product when you are like a lone content marketer or a single individual contributor. Yeah. Totally.
• 31:07
  It's very, very different role. Could you point to one skill or maybe two that you rely on heavily today?
• 31:15
  You know, whereas 10 years ago, maybe the skill you rely on is, like, asking the right questions to an SME so you can write your article.
• 31:23
  You know, but now in a leadership role, I assume you're kind of relying more on the, on the softer skills.
• 31:28
  Anyways, long build-up, but yeah, is there a skill or two you would point to that really make your day-to-day life a lot easier? Yeah. I mean, communication is the biggest one.
• 31:37
  I started off as kind of a very introverted content marketer, and then, uh, somehow the pandemic, I unlocked my extroversion.
• 31:43
  The other skill I think would be really important is, you know, I hate these kind of business idioms, but the do delegate or delete.
• 31:49
  You only have so much time in the day, and especially if you're leading a team, you can scale up your capabilities and your output much more quickly by delegating, whether that's delegating to a, a vendor or a freelancer or an outside resource, delegating to individual team members, or deleting.
• 32:04
  We're not gonna do that. My spirit animal is Mr. Meeseeks from "Rick and Morty" 'cause he, he always says, "Can do."
• 32:11
  And that was always kind of my, my downfall, especially as I was kind of coming up through the ranks, is like I would say yes to everything.
• 32:17
  But I think one of the most important skills of a manager and a leader, especially in content, is like, "No, we're not gonna do that. That's not gonna have the return that we expect.
• 32:24
  I know this because X, Y, Z or the performance metrics don't indicate that this is a, something we should pursue for much longer.
• 32:32
  I hear you C-suite executive, I know that you, you want this thing, but my experience and my expertise tells me and the, and the numbers tell me that this is not something that's sustainable or scalable like the way we want."
• 32:42
  The other skill I think is really super important is, is curiosity. That's, I mean, any interviewer or content marketer is probably just naturally curious.
• 32:50
  Like, you wanna ingest all the information, then put it out in a way that is consumable, scannable, and then Google reacts to well. I don't see as many people take the opportunity to learn the business.
• 33:00
  How does content marketing help customer success? How does a good brand help sales? Where does sales interact with marketing, and how can that relationship im- be improved?
• 33:11
  What are those stories that are within the business that we haven't told yet? Even the people stories, employer brand, those types of things.
• 33:18
  When you uncover something like one of our employees used to be a producer on a, I think it was the, one of the MTV naked dating shows- [laughs]...
• 33:26
  we're gonna do, we're gonna do an employee profile on him- [laughs] Yeah... 'cause that's such a funny story to talk about that. So things like that I think are really interesting.
• 33:33
  And then the other kind of like my, I wouldn't call it my super skill, but I've learned this skill over time, is that kind of the best data that you have to weave into a content narrative for your brand is typically your internal data.
• 33:45
  You heard me mention that prospect survey. That is just a goldmine of data that is proprietary to us. Nobody else has that information. So that gives us an edge on the competition.
• 33:54
  My last two or three roles I've introduced or took over an annual survey of here's the people in your industry, here's what they're saying about this problem or this challenge or this solution.
• 34:04
  Here's a scientific analytic survey maybe completed by a third party so we have more credibility.
• 34:10
  But that's something we can go to market with and keep evergreen for the rest of the year and have stats that support our story that we're telling with our content marketing throughout the year.
• 34:17
  So those are just a couple things that I've learned over, over my kind of the last 10 years of my career probably. That's so good. That's so good.
• 34:24
  That last couple minutes, if we had to reduce the podcast just to that, it would still be great. [laughs] Awesome. You know, like the do delegate or delete really resonates with me.
• 34:32
  Like, I'm just getting back from a paternity leave. Oh my God.
• 34:34
  And I had set it up so that, you know, all the fundamental things would continue happening while I was gone, but it did mean that a lot of things just didn't happen, and it turned out it's fine.
• 34:43
  So, [chuckles] like it's okay. Yeah. You know? So the-- Now it has me thinking- Right... like, well, what, what, what do we just not have to do that would, you know, free up time and energy for other things? Yeah.
• 34:53
  That's why I love using contractors, vendors, freelancers, not only from the cost investment and return standpoint is that, you know, it, it costs much more to hire a full-time equivalent employee than it does to, to have a vendor or a service provide you with that scalability.
• 35:08
  But also the ability to turn off the funnel or the faucet when you need to. Yeah. Unfortunately, it-- like a lot of people there was...
• 35:14
  We faced some budget headwinds at the end of or at the beginning of '23, and so we had to do some really drastic cost reductions, and I was in the unfortunate position to have to rather than renew a statement of work with a vendor that I really liked, you know, say, "Hey, we're gonna put a pause on this.
• 35:27
  You know, we wanna continue the relationship. Here's the constraints that I'm in right now. If and when we don't have those constraints, I'm gonna come back to you first. But for right now I need to pause."
• 35:35
  And keeping those relationships open has been just a huge opportunity. You leave that bridge unburned, so to speak, you can always cross it again. Yeah. Yeah.
• 35:42
  But yeah, the other part too, you know, I hate all these business adages. Like the business book is always like, "Oh, this is Billy. He was at XYZ." [laughs] "Here's the challenge," and it's always this made up story.
• 35:51
  Something I learned from a leader that I took a lot of kind of leadership lessons from early in my career was hire slow, she said fire fast, which I don't necessarily agree with.
• 36:00
  But spend a lot of time on hiring people 'cause you're, you're not only making an investment in the resource and the capital that you're, you're providing their salary and their health insurance, those types of things, but you're gonna have to on-ramp them to your way of thinking.
• 36:11
  So if there's somebody that's already kind of oriented to the same style of thinking and the same method and workflow that you use, that is such a better hire.
• 36:18
  And looking for that person and singling that person out rather than just saying, "I need to get somebody in the seat right now," it makes such a huge difference in building what are typically small teams for content marketing.
• 36:27
  I don't know of any other content marketing team in my area that's more than six people.
• 36:31
  So I feel like I have a really big team in terms of content marketing, but they're all really solid individual contributors and performers.Yeah, just an observation.
• 36:39
  Content teams are shrinking and have been for a while now. Wow. Twenty twenty-three shrunk them a lot. And it doesn't mean that there's less content being produced.
• 36:47
  It primarily means, kind of to your point, that more companies are keeping that leaner internal team and then relying more on contractors and agencies to flex up and down as needed.
• 36:57
  And I can understand, like, a lot of companies are just hesitant to take on more payroll, long-term contracts with vendors. Like, they don't want that right now, you know? Yeah.
• 37:06
  J-just an observation and just kind of like a, a macro trend I'm seeing. Yeah.
• 37:10
  I would agree with you, and I, I think the other macro trend, and I think this is one of the great things about the Superpath community, is you can say, "Hey, are you seeing this?
• 37:17
  You're the same kind of profile position that I am, at the same kind of scale-up or, or, you know, mid-growth company, and I am... Are you feeling the same pressures?" During the pandemic, field marketing went away.
• 37:27
  There were no events. There were no in-person events. Most people didn't have a really strong webinar playbook at that time. They had to develop them very quickly, and not everybody did it well.
• 37:35
  So the, all that budget, and event marketing is a huge budget. In my hypothesis, all that budget went to content marketing because that's a remote service.
• 37:43
  That was a way to continue to get leads through the website, those types of things. All that went to search engine marketing and content marketing.
• 37:50
  And when events came back on, that pendulum kind of swung the other way, which is really important. I know a lot of people that felt the sting of kind of that downsizing you mentioned, so. Yeah.
• 37:58
  Things are changing for sure. Not all good and not all bad, but there's a lot happening right now. Yeah.
• 38:03
  And there's, like, the convincing, you know, I have to do this on a regular basis of, we can't have low quality AI do this job. Um, you, you- Yeah. You gotta fight that battle. And there's some great AI tools. I love AI.
• 38:15
  I use it as a kind of a support tool, not a dependency to, to create content, but for kind of more of a feedback mechanism of, "Hey, give me kind of a, a starting point to tell this story," or, "How can I clean up this thing to be more active in, in voice and, and more specific to this industry?"
• 38:29
  But in my view, if it's the primary kind of output is AI, is that it's never gonna work. It might be scalable, but it's never gonna be kind of that human authenticity, which coincidentally is Google's looking for.
• 38:41
  So, [chuckles] it's humans telling Google, "Hey, we're human and authentic." You can't do that with a robot, so. [chuckles] Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting.
• 38:49
  Earlier in our conversation when we were talking about ICP, you were throwing out some stats about, like, you know, X percent of our users do this and that, which makes me think that Onboard is a data-driven organization, and like clearly has done the work to understand who these customers are, what are their problems, et cetera.
• 39:06
  And I'm imagining that you apply that same type of thinking to measuring content effectiveness. Are you a dashboard guy or a North Star guy? Meaning like, do you have, like, 25 metrics that you monitor each month?
• 39:19
  Or do you feel like there's one or two numbers that are, like, very strongly indicative of whether this is working or not? Yeah. We are a highly metrics and, and data analytics-driven organization.
• 39:29
  As I mentioned, we started in Purdue, and a lot of the early recruiting we did was actually software engineers, traditional electrical engineers who have just really strong data mindset and a lot of computer science majors.
• 39:41
  Our co-founder and CEO, Purum, was a, as an engineer before he turned his sights into entrepreneurship.
• 39:46
  We have a great demand gen lead, Mo, who I call our marketing engineer because he puts an, kind of a scientific engineering rigor to all of our demand gen programs.
• 39:54
  We know what every conversion metric is at every level of the funnel. We have a, a very super well-defined funnel with very tight SLAs and definitions of, is this a converted lead? Is this a sales accepted lead?
• 40:06
  Is this a book meeting? That kind of rigor is really hard to stand up, and we've only really done it in the last two years.
• 40:11
  The spirit has always been there, but we've only really kind of perfected in the last two years, and now we're turning that into our, you know, our referral and advocacy engine so we can fuel additional growth.
• 40:21
  From a content perspective, yeah, I am all about the metrics.
• 40:23
  And again, I think that's one of the most important parts of being an effective function, a functional area within the business, is that you have to know, understand what needle you're moving for the business.
• 40:34
  Ultimately, we all wanna get that bottom line ARR number up, but how are we gonna do that? So the things that I look at at a, even a week-to-week level are, we call it our, our super intent.
• 40:45
  So you, you mentioned some of our CTAs, some of our landing pages that are CTA specific, demo, pricing, free trial.
• 40:52
  We know if there's traffic on those pages, that's what we call a super intent user, is that they're in a buying stage that's beyond just awareness. So we have a very tight performance window on that.
• 41:02
  Are we above that or what are we to goal? We track that goal percentage month to date, then quarter to date, then year to date as the year progresses. So at any certain time, we know a page is underperforming.
• 41:14
  We also have conversion metrics around the form fill. We know if our conversion drops, we wanna know why that is. Okay, looks like we changed some language on the pricing page.
• 41:23
  That influenced our impact in terms of conversion to QA or qualified account. Looks like three months ago we decided to block Gmail or non-business addresses. We saw an impact on our bottom line in terms of QAs there.
• 41:36
  Those metrics are super important to us. Website visits, especially website from organic visits obviously is kind of the main metric that we're trying to drive.
• 41:44
  As I mentioned, when I came in three years ago, we were at 15,000 visitors per month operation. We just now got to the 100,000 visitor per month mark. Nice. That's all sources. But yeah, it's a high water mark.
• 41:56
  It's awesome. It's a lot, yeah. It's a little bit of mix of kind of like that dashboard and making sure that, is that light green? Is that light blinking orange, or is that light blinking red with the weekly metrics?
• 42:07
  But then also North Star metrics of, hey, we think this snowball, so to speak, of our SEO growth engine is rolling downhill.
• 42:13
  This is the number we want to hit to say we've succeeded and we need to kind of think about the next stage.
• 42:18
  The other metric I think a lot about, and I don't know if as many content marketers think about that 'cause we're so purely kind of focused on organic SEO and organic traffic.
• 42:27
  When I came in, the majority of our traffic, that 15,000 visitors per month, was coming from paid media.
• 42:32
  So one of the hypotheses I said, you know, I've, I've proved this in other organizations, is that I want that traffic to come from organic traffic, so we can lessen our dependence on paid pay per click or, um, display ads, those types of things, and get kind of a more sustaining cost-effective source of traffic and content and organic traffic.
• 42:48
  So that's one of been my North Star metrics as well. I think when we started, we were north of 60% of our traffic volume was from paid media, which is just-Incredibly expensive. It's always competitive.
• 42:59
  Prices are always going up.
• 43:00
  You always have to deal with these kind of short-term changes in the market or your competitors now bidding for the same terms, versus organic traffic sustains based on the quality of your website and quality of your content.
• 43:11
  Evergreen pieces, and then just being able to go back and update a piece if it's underperforming or starts dropping off.
• 43:17
  My favorite animal podcast, and I'm not sure if you were on this one or not, was the, the content decay kind of curve. Oh, yeah.
• 43:24
  And getting ahead of that content decay in terms of visitors is really important and understanding what's happening on your website.
• 43:29
  So yeah, lots of weekly metrics, lots of North Star metrics, lots of planning, lots of interaction with our revenue marketing team and our operations team.
• 43:37
  So yeah, that's why I say it's so important to learn the business, because you can't do those things in a silo and expect to have the results you would if you were interfacing or engaging with those other parts of the business.
• 43:47
  Yeah. I love it. You know, as a sort of a summary of this episode, I mean, there's many interesting things that I would take away from it.
• 43:54
  One in particular, though, is that in your role as a content lead, you have to understand how to manage and grow a team, how to source and manage vendors, how to understand the company story and message that, how to work with a data team to get the numbers you need.
• 44:09
  Like, it's a really well-rounded role, and I'm calling this out for folks maybe who are a couple years behind you in their own content marketing careers, is like, these are the types of things you will need to
• 44:21
  learn and g- you know, get some real good hands-on experience with in order to be in a position like you're in today. So I think it's fantastic. It's really cool for me to see.
• 44:28
  Like, this is what it takes to run a robust content program in twenty twenty-four. Yeah. Well, thank you, Jimmy. I, it, it's, it's a huge pleasure to be here.
• 44:37
  I'm always open to if you wanna hit me up on LinkedIn or anybody who's listening now, you can find me pretty easily on LinkedIn.
• 44:42
  But yeah, I, I just feel like I've been really fortunate to have that hands-on experience in a lot of different areas and be able to kind of amalgamate that into something that's central.
• 44:50
  I always kind of lead with this, it's just like stay curious. Like, go seize an opportunity. Go, go tackle a big challenge or, or bring a new program into the business that you think is...
• 44:59
  You know, don't be afraid to have a hypothesis because sometimes those things prove out, and you can build on that success.
• 45:05
  And the biggest thing for me in, in terms of scaling operations is you wanna be able to set something up and then find your replacement in that, in that role and kind of move on to the next bigger thing and continue scaling your operation or scaling your growth that way, so.
• 45:18
  That's great advice. It's great advice. You mentioned LinkedIn. We'll put your profile URL in the show notes for folks. We'll put the onboard- Awesome... URL too.
• 45:26
  Like, I always encourage people, okay, now you've heard Josh explain the content program, go look at it. Go see what it looks like in real life, you know? So we'll include that. It's so good to catch up also.
• 45:35
  Like, we were kinda overdue for this anyway- Yeah... so thanks for taking the time. I'm glad we could do it in this format for the benefit of others too. Yeah. And thank you so much for even reaching out, man.
• 45:44
  It's, uh, like as I'm getting into podcasting and just like, like, I-- it's weird kinda getting to this later stage of your career how much more kind of personal branding and just like thought leadership kind of matter.
• 45:53
  So I, I really appreciate the opportunity. Absolutely. [outro music]