In this episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Steve Goldhaber is joined by Vanessa Hartung. Vanessa is a seasoned content marketer who has spent her career mastering the intricacies of B2B SaaS marketing.
During this conversation, Steve and Vanessa delve into:
Connect with Vanessa Hartung and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn to continue the conversation and gain further insights.
In this episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Steve Goldhaber is joined by Vanessa Hartung. Vanessa is a seasoned content marketer who has spent her career mastering the intricacies of B2B SaaS marketing.
During this conversation, Steve and Vanessa delve into:
Connect with Vanessa Hartung and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn to continue the conversation and gain further insights.
Disclaimer: The transcription of our podcast episodes has been generated by a third-party AI tool. While we strive for accuracy, we cannot guarantee that all typos, errors, or misinterpretations have been corrected. So, if you come across any blunders, don't blame us. Blame the robots. (Just kidding, don't blame them either. They're doing their best.)
Steve Goldhaber: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Studio 26. I'm. Steve, I am the host of podcast and excited today because I've got Vanessa with me. Vanessa, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Steve. Alright, cool. We're gonna jump into who you are. So in 60 seconds, give us your background.
Vanessa Hartung: I am a, let's say, a career content marketer. I've been living within the SaaS B2B space since I kick things off and I'm just loving, you know, the adapting, adapting to the field, and what's changing in the content marketing world.
Steve Goldhaber: All right. Awesome. This is the bread and butter of the podcast. We're, we're combining tech and SaaS and good old content marketing.
So you're in good hands here. Perfect. Alright, we're gonna jump into case studies. The first one is all about creating an owned community. So excited to hear more about this one. Take it away. Mm-hmm.
Vanessa Hartung: Yeah. So we wanted to take a different approach in terms of, you know, how we, our content, how we distributed it.
I think, you know, it's no surprise in that whatever platform it is you're hosting on, really, they have, let's say, their best interests in mind rather than trying to continue to. Keep up with the changing algorithms of, you know, hosting a community within one of these platforms. We thought, go it on our own.
So it's full control. We can create a great experience and platform community that our target audience is gonna wanna keep coming back to.
Steve Goldhaber: I like that. I, ironically, this morning, I just got done writing a letter to my clients about LinkedIn algorithm changes. So it's, it's funny how you live in a world of an own community where you don't have to worry about those things.
So give us, give us the context. Around like the business problem. So besides getting off, you know, what we call rented social channels into own social channels, uh, what else was going on in the business that you said, yeah, this is a good decision to kinda create our own community?
Vanessa Hartung: Yeah, so one of our targeted buyers really needed a lot of education related content.
So there are. In a role where they're looking to up level, and of course by one of the ways of they can leverage some technology like ours. But that wasn't the main focus. It was all about really just educating them on how to be the experts in their role and get that strategic seat at the table. And for some of them, that meant really starting from scratch.
Incoming inbound keywords, you know, to our site. It was related to how do I do this in my role? So we figured, let's grab that low hanging fruit, create a space where they can come, that they can just learn. There's no promotions, no product clubs from our end and, you know, serve up the content and a format that they're comfortable with.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So how was it in getting people aligned internally to say, yep, this is the right decision. Take us through that process.
Vanessa Hartung: Yes, so the biggest hurdle definitely was pitching the need for a microsite that was outside of our, you know, primary website. And I'm sure you know, driving traffic, the company website, pretty important, pretty up there.
So, By saying, Hey, we wanna create this unique destination for them to go to before they're ready to engage directly with our brand. And with our website was a bit of a stall. We had to definitely have some meetings and conversations around that, what the benefits would be, course, making sure that we're not cannibalizing each other's sites and you know, really creating it, you know, a space where it's easy for them to.
Just Sasha on over to our, our corporate website. Yeah. Once we're ready to start engaging with us directly.
Steve Goldhaber: And how long did that take? And I'm gonna, this should be a new game show element of the podcast where listeners can guess the number of days it takes to make this decision. And it's gonna be different for every company, but, but tell us how long that took
Vanessa Hartung: For us, it took about a quarter.
Okay. Yep. So a lot of days, so hopefully no one was numbers there. I wish I was that impressive. It's like a bit of doing.
Steve Goldhaber: All right, so you get buy in to do this, you have to figure out now the old tech story, which is do we build it? Do we create it on our own? Like tell us about how you actually built the community.
Vanessa Hartung: Yeah. So we were able to, you know, leverage our, our in-house talent to set that up for us, you know, working with our designers to make sure, again, UI is, you know, impeccable for the experience that we were looking to deliver and was able to, you know, really draw on our team at hand to collectively build that for us, which also helped us, you know, maintain that control in terms of where we're gonna point people back to our own properties.
Yeah, back to our, you know, main brand website. So we definitely needed that. Visibility, make sure all the etms are in place and we've got all the right tracking to make sure that that's actually happening. So we've benefited from keeping that internal.
Steve Goldhaber: Okay. So now this thing is built, is it purely content?
Is it other type of functional, you know, content? What are you giving to that community? What are they there to do?
Vanessa Hartung: Yeah, so it's primarily content. We've got the site itself kind of broken up into a. We'll say the classic crawl, walk, run type framework, Jess. Um, so then that also gives us some amazing insights into where our target audience is sitting.
Are they just starting? Are they that middle ground or do they see themselves as more of that expert level? So we've got some additional insights for our personas there. And there's also, you know, some mention of any related event, but again, steering clear of any of those pure promotional, Hey, come join.
This demo that we've got set up and just really focused on, you know, here's just some educational content that you can consume at your leisure, and of course a variety of content, infographics, eBooks, videos. Yep. Organic.
Steve Goldhaber: So I'm sure at some point you had to make this decision around, you know, in the world of communities, there are some that is just, hey, you're just, you're logged into our, our owned world and we know what you're consuming.
The other is the Let's have a party and let everyone talk to each other. We're just the host of that party. Where did you fall on that spectrum?
Vanessa Hartung: Definitely on the first one. So while you know there is the ability for people to comment, we found that particularly for our target audience, they didn't want to, we'll say, error their dirty laundry in terms of what they were looking at, what they were consuming.
So, We didn't see as much of that interaction. So our target then was to just focus on providing them with the right content at the right time.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Okay. And then, so let's fast forward. You've implemented this, you've got now the data to understand, you know, what traffic is being driven to the main site.
How are you converting on that? Give us like the business performance, look at how this actually did.
Vanessa Hartung: Yes. So we were able to attribute essentially a. I'm trying to think of the number off the top of my head. It was about a 30% increase of people coming from the. Own community page over to our website. And then in terms of overall to the community page, we were tracking, you know, around 5,000 every two weeks.
So we saw really, really great uptick and now we're just starting to sort of dig into the metrics. This is a bit newer, so we're starting to dig into see exactly how much revenue we were able to influence initiative.
Steve Goldhaber: Okay. Awesome. That's the magic part of any marketing initiative is right, is the, tying it back to the revenue.
I have a tactical question now, and you kind of alluded to this before when you talked about the website being off platform from the brand building that domain authority, like was it a newly purchased U R L or had it been around? So I'm just trying to, the reason I asked the question is the, that's the biggest fear of like, Hey, we got this great new U R L, but like no one has ever heard of it.
And I say no one. Google has never heard of it. So how did you navigate that?
Vanessa Hartung: Yeah, so yeah, we definitely went with net new U R L, so we focused a lot on our promotion, so leveraging all of those channels to get the word out there, as well as enabling our sales team. So when they would engage with prospects, then they could arm them also with a link.
And then also we have a few, few advocates. Are really championing for us, they're also contributing some content to that website so they're able to say, Hey, come check out what I wrote here. So they're able to leverage their personal brand on their end and amplify that. And then we of course benefit from all those that are looking to learn from their experience.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right, cool. I like, I like the case study. Makes sense. Let's go jump into case study number two and I. I actually like this case study because so often as marketers, there's an unwritten rule amongst case studies, which is, we did this thing, it was amazing. It worked. It was so fantastic. Everyone loved the marketing team, and this is not that case study.
This is a crash and burn case study as it relates to a brain campaign. So I'm excited. I'm excited for the raw, authentic version of this one. Take it away.
Vanessa Hartung: Yeah, so we were tasked with, of course, creating some more brand awareness. So this was. A company that had been a little bit off of the grid and they wanted to draw some attention, make that big splash.
So we even worked collaboratively with an agency as well to help support us and, and achieve those goals, and didn't quite pan out the way we thought that it would.
Steve Goldhaber: All right, so give, what was the, give us some business context here. What was going on? You know, you mentioned lack of awareness, but what was, what was happening?
Are they, were they a mature company? Were they launching a new product?
Vanessa Hartung: So, I would say not fully mature, but on their way there. And there was no new product launch, but we did have some new messaging that we wanted to get on to market that, you know, internally, we had done some research to develop that.
Seemed that it would resonate with our target audience again to, you know, get them coming back to us, get that brand recognition and that muscle memory. But, oh, did we miss the mark on that? So, unfortunately there was, as we learned after the fact, doing some post-analysis that alignment internally in terms of how to talk to our targets, the roles that they were in.
As aligned as we initially thought. So really we started off on the wrong foot, unbeknownst to us until we, the point where we put it out in market.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So the research that you had done was more about like internal research as opposed to actual customer facing?
Vanessa Hartung: Correct. Yes. It was very hard for us to get connected with customers and yeah, heat was on to get it, get it out there, right, get it done.
So, uh, That was, uh, definitely again, another misstep on our end for not bringing in the voice of our customers.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I, you know, that's a theme that I've seen throughout my career and usually, you know, there's two or three teams internally that all have a shared vision in theory, about the customer. What I always try to do is have it so that the customer breaks the tie.
So whenever there's like a, hey, there's two different things that we're deciding, whether it's messaging or product naming, whatever it could be be like, Hey, great, two different ideas. Let's have the customer break the tie. That's a cultural, like you need to just culturally be there at a company, because sometimes sales doesn't wanna have that conversation with marketing folks, or they're just saying, trust me, I, I know.
So is that something that this, this company kind of. Did actually embrace the failure and that they, they were like, this is the reason why it didn't work.
Vanessa Hartung: It was a, let's say, a tough conversation to have that and, and bring that forward. Luckily it has resulted in, you know, for, you know, future campaigns that we've been working on and, and brand narratives that we're making sure to bake that in as a step.
And, you know, the marketing team is really driving that, championing that, making sure that step is happening. So moving, you know, have moved in a good direction since that instance, but very hard lesson. Yeah, I'd say
Steve Goldhaber: it's hard. I mean, 'cause most marketers get the challenge of I need to get this done. And as soon as a marketer raises their hand and says, you know what?
What if we add some market research to this market? Research is perceived as like, how dare you slow this project down. Don't you bring up market research? That's a three to six week initiative, and you're asking me to spend more money and or even, you know, and I shouldn't say, I say three to six weeks.
The other thing too is like, know that you can do market research in a day. Like you can, you can say, Hey, can I talk to four customers? Very informal. I just wanna get on the phone with them. Or, Hey, we've created a concept of something. Can I just let you react to it? I wish there was more research like that because I feel like most marketers are in that trap of traditional research, which is, you know, and I'm not knocking it, it's just it takes a while and it, and it takes money to do it right.
But I think the companies that can really just say, Hey, I've got three customers who really love us. They're great at giving feedback. Let me just do this down and dirty. That can at least give you that directional guidance. And, and, you know, the outcome of that could be, Hey, all right, we're willing to gamble.
These three customers said, It appeared directionally correct or otherwise, it's like, hey, no one agreed of these three customers. Now we actually have to do some research 'cause we don't know. Alright. Anything else about the second case study that you wanna share?
Vanessa Hartung: Well, I can share some of the areas where it fell down.
Steve Goldhaber: We're just gonna look, this is a traffic. Rec we're gonna, we're gonna examine the rec from multiple angles. Go ahead.
Vanessa Hartung: Let's take a look. Let's say hopefully, you know, others will, will learn from this, uh, as we have. So, you know, one of the challenges that we ran into was really creating also that global entity.
And we leveraged a, let's say like a brand sponsor, a, you know, a brand representative identity that triggered. Not one, but two of our audiences. So again, was very telling in terms of the way that, you know, that brand person spoke. So we thought it would be a great idea for them to have an accent, did not resonate with two of our major audiences.
So that was another element where I'd love to, you know, hone back in on what, on what you said, Steve, in terms of getting that customer feedback and understanding if we had, you know, brought it to. Customer base before we push it out into market. Something that definitely could have been avoided and would've saved us from, you know, trying to do a little bit more of by positive spin, following it to get us back in, uh, you know, brand saver town.
We'll say
Steve Goldhaber: brand favorite town. I like that. I want to go to brand favorite town. Alright, cool. I appreciate your humility in sharing that case study. I, it was a good one. I, I love to talk about failures. I'm a big believer in doing like a. Know project or campaign postmortems, and we sometimes skip the postmortems for all the things that go well and we just focus on the bad.
So this was another postmortem? Yep. That was probably conducted. All right. Case study number three. Now we're gonna go into the world of a website we rebrand. So give us some context for kind of this company and what was going on.
Vanessa Hartung: Well run. So with this company, it was a newer company, not a lot of recognition.
Their very first website was stood up by. One of the founders, teenagers in their basement kind of approach, you know, put it together with that shoestring and bubble gum, and we were, you know, brought in brand new marketing team and of course, website being one of those prime properties for marketing. We said, Hey, let's start here.
This is also gonna help as a great foundation for us to get some initial insights and, and research on our target audience as well. So we took on, uh, the challenge of rebuilding and redesigning our entire website.
Steve Goldhaber: All right, so this was kinda like a phase two enhancement. Tell us about your approach. Like, again, I'm always fascinated with like the, you do it at in-house, you're doing it outside.
Are you doing it like hybrid? How, how did you kind of figure out how you guys were gonna actually build it?
Vanessa Hartung: So this one was a hybrid approach. So because we were still, you know, smaller marketing team, we didn't have all the, you know, Cooks in the kitchen that we needed to make a great meal. So we had to pull on some external support for that.
And this was one where we also work very, very closely with the C E O directly. You know, I've done a few website rebrands in my day. I mean, who hasn't, if we were working in marketing, it's seems to be a common project that we all take on and. This was an instance where there was a direct line of sight from the executive team as well.
So just, well little sprinkle added pressure in there,
Steve Goldhaber: but good for alignment. I, I love working with executives who, like, they will make a decision pretty fast. That's the one thing that, um, where that's good. But I agree with you. It's, it's a little more high stakes when the c e o is personally involved.
Alright, so how did you lead this website? Meaning like, some are very like, Hey, we've got this new brand thing. So the brand needs to like be reflected in the new site. Others are completely user-centric, you know, like where, what are they coming to the website for? We have to solve all these problems. Some are just product information depositories.
Right. So how did you figure out like how you were gonna redesign the site?
Vanessa Hartung: Yeah, so for this one we took. Completely user-focused approach to it. You know, luckily we had a C E O who was very open to, you know, our recommendations in terms of how we move forward and as excited as we were internally for the new branding, at the end of the day, doesn't have a huge impact on our users and people visiting the website.
They're just coming to the website to do the things that they need to do, and so we wanted to really focus on that, make the user experience. Super seamless and we were able to, you know, build out a journey that we could then test, see where people drop off, see how far they get, and tweak and refine accordingly.
We also were able to leverage a ton of, you know, heat maps and metrics like that. Hotjar is a tool that we use very often, and so that gave us a lot of really great insights in terms of. Again, where are people clicking? Are they clicking on things that really aren't clickable and should we make them clickable?
You know, what are they trying to do here? So it was really, you know, almost like that, you know, dances with wolves. We were in there, we were feeling it, we were, you know, really walking a mile in their shoes to, to understand exactly how they needed to traverse our website. And that really truly paid off at the end of the day.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. So let's talk tech platform for a little bit. When was that decision made? Is this like all the way upfront where it's like, no, no, no, we're using the same platform, we're just gonna refresh it. Like how did you guys approach the, the tech stack here?
Vanessa Hartung: Yeah, so that was a conversation upfront. We laid all of our cards on the tables, took at the different platforms that were available to us, or again, there was also the option of just truly building from scratch versus using, you know, any kind of templates or anything like that.
But of course, as we. Taking it on ourselves. And we were, you know, a small who might be marketing team, but you know, could use a little bit of help. So we ended up leveraging WordPress as our go-to platform to build on.
Steve Goldhaber: Alrighty. How long did it take and give us an understanding of the outcome.
Vanessa Hartung: Yes. So soup to nuts start to finish, it ended up taking us.
Eight months to rebuild, create all the content, get all the right designs in place, and then do some testing. This thankfully was an instance where we were able to share our sandbox with our customers. So we also got some insights from them that helped us tailor the site to, again, the needs of our visitors.
And really the, the ultimate, you know, outcome from it was that we saw over 5,000 visits to our. We also saw a very low bounce rate, and they would visit multiple pages every time we came. So typically new, we'd see them hit three, sometimes four pages before they would exit, which was huge for us.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's great.
All right, cool. Thanks for sharing the case study and let's go jump into q a. Tell us about your first gig in marketing.
Vanessa Hartung: Yes, so my first gig in marketing, Was as a kind of general marketing coordinator. Some people refer to me as an intern, some as a thought, I want a co-op. Um, so was really just there as you know, that we'll say the bottom of the ladder type role.
Getting my feet wet in marketing and thankfully my director at the time. He had slid an article across my desk written by Mr. Aka. Oh yeah, sure. Matching. Yeah. So he, and I'll note also that it was an article that he had printed out so that, oh, why not? Sure, right. A little bit of sense of timing. Not to date myself too much, but yeah, he split that across the desk, get content.
Good. Customers asked if I'd heard about this thing called content marketing. I definitely had not, so I just dove in, learned everything I could. One of my favorites to learn from was Marcus Sheridan, as he talked about pools and selling pools. Who would've thought that that would've been kind a linchpin for constant marketing and, and the field of it.
And once I, once I got a taste, I was hooked. That was content marketing was for me. So from there I was able to work with that same director to create their first content marketing and social media specialist role that I was able to move into. That was my first official content marketing role. And part of that, I was able to launch their first blog work, hand in hand on campaigns, build out the social media strategy, and yeah, really just learn everything that I could while I was in that role.
And it really just, you know, propelled me forward and into the career I am, uh, living and breathing today.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. All right. I like that. I like the reference to Joe. I've, I've seen Joe's work over the years that's, What do you like most about it? You know, like the marketing, there's so many different aspects of why people enjoy it.
What do you think is the one thing that you really like? This is why I just continue to, to do it.
Vanessa Hartung: Yeah. I love the the balance of creativity and psychology and really digging into the different ways that you can persuade or engage with an audience. How the type of content, the way it's written, the way it's delivered, you know, has an impact on the ultimate end result.
And I just loved learning about that and essentially, you know, doing that whole, throw the spaghetti at the wall. Let's see, see what they like, you know, and when our audience and gravitating towards, so. I just love that today it really shows up in, you know, any AB testing. I'm the first one to join in on that meeting when we're like, what are we gonna test this month?
It's continued, uh, and that passion for learning about our audiences. Yeah, just continue to my career today.
Steve Goldhaber: All right, cool. I'm gonna take the conversation negative now. I'm gonna go to a dark place because as all marketers know, There's so many things in marketing that make it really complex and inevitably it drives us crazy.
Some parts of marketing drive us crazy, so one of the things that you're just like, ah, I love marketing, but this one thing, I can't do it anymore.
Vanessa Hartung: It's gotta be the creating content for the sake of creating content. My biggest trigger in someone on the left field coming in and saying, let's do a blog series.
Why, what are we trying to do? Let's back that up. Let's not start with the tactic. Let's figure out what you're trying to do first. And you know, there's this very outdated equation of more content means more results when that is truly not case. And then we're in a bit of a scary time now with AI and everyone's able to create content so quickly that you're seeing it terms of.
Identifying the content has been written by a person or, you know, spending a lot more time on building that quality content, repurposing what's working versus just yeah, trying to spit out something new. So yeah, that's definitely, I would say the dark area for me.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I, I'm with you on that. I think the, the general assumption by non-market is if we just ask the marketers to do more activities, that is a good thing.
I want a, I want a piece of paper created so I can show my boss or their boss. My former roles, when I was leading digital and content for bigger companies, so much of my time was just spent meeting with people who were just like, I want all these things. And it actually led to the creation of my book called What's Your Problem?
Which was what I found myself asking everyone who just said, I need content. The more I could say, well, tell me what business problem you're trying to solve. Half of those requests just they went away. And that's the biggest problem I think with content is it is such a shiny thing that everyone just points and goes, yep.
It's not bad if I request that. So I share in your pain for the overdosing on content that isn't needed.
Vanessa Hartung: Yeah, yeah. Sounds you need to pick up your buck.
Steve Goldhaber: Alright, I'm gonna follow up on one thing you, you just referenced kind of psychology and now that's a fun part of marketing. How do you get inside your customer's mind?
Like what, what's a good way to like ask yourself questions for everyone who's listening to really kind of understand that this is ultimately it's, we're helping people with content in this example, but like it's psychological warfare, right? Like we are. Are trying to make our companies, uh, seem smarter, better, faster, whatever.
It's right. Like, how do you understand? What's going on in your customer's mind?
Vanessa Hartung: So typically where I start is any sales call recording. So, you know, a tool that I've often gone to is gong. You know, I know it's not the only one tool out there for recording, but you know, one that I come across often and leveraging their recordings and listening to the conversation, if there's video, even observing, you know, their.
Physical, you know, attributes in terms of how they react to things that are brought up can give you a pretty good line of sight in terms of their behaviors. And then also just again, spending time actually talking with some of the customers. Any events, conferences, great opportunity to just walk the floor, just chit chat with some of the other attendees, kind figure out where they're at.
Really getting to know the product and the solution that you know your company is pitching, which I think is also a step that, you know, some, you know, overlook, sometimes they just wanna, you know, hit that ground running, create that content, get it out the door. But knowing your product really in depth and why there are certain elements that have been created can help you connect those dots and again, helps you, you know, walk.
10 miles and in your customers to just really understand their role and what they're trying to achieve.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. Alright, I like that One or two more questions for you. I think one question I always enjoy asking marketers is, looking back when you started your career in marketing to where you are today, there are inevitably like one or two big things that stand out that say, ah, I was totally off on that, or I should have done that differently.
What are some things that looking back you, you would do differently?
Vanessa Hartung: One definitely would be putting, putting any actions you've identified into a queue or somewhere where it's visible, um, that people know that you're gonna be working on it so that you know, a lot of the times, especially again, early in my career, I would get requests, Hey, create this solution sheet.
And I'd say, yep, yep, I'll get to it once I have a moment. Lemme finish these other things. And then before I know it, As sales teams do. 'cause they need the onset to go and have conversations, but they just go ahead and create something and before you know it, everybody's got a copy. Yeah. It's out there.
So, and it's a lot harder to, to claw back from that we'll say so yes. Making sure that, not just saying, I've heard you, but also saying Yep. Got it. I've got it on this queue. This is the next date. I'll give you an update, and this is when I'm expecting to have this asset delivered. If it needs to be, you know, higher priority than having that conversation.
But yeah, just really digging into the needs and communicating what you're working on. And second, I would say is a little bit less tangible, but to be more confident to actually share, speak up, especially if someone comes through with something that. You don't necessarily agree with or you know that there's a better way to do it, you know, based on your experience.
You know, of course as anyone is earlier in their careers, you're a little bit gun shy to, you know, get out there. But just having that, you know, I don't wanna say blind confidence, but we'll say calculated confidence and whack when it shows up and when you bring it to meetings and how you can, you know, stack with the executives to get them saying yes around the table and getting your job done.
Steve Goldhaber: Yep. All right. Awesome. Those are great lessons. I was only hoping for one, but my goodness, you've, you've got like three in there that, that are really good. I, I can relate to those. Alright, well, I, I really enjoyed getting to know you more through the case studies and q and a. So thank you for coming on the show and thank you all to the listeners for joining us.
Uh, and again, you can listen to us on, uh, apple Podcast, Spotify. You can go to the 26 characters website where we archive all of our content. So thank you to the listeners and thank you once again. Vanessa for joining us on the show today. Thank you for having me. Alright, until next time, everyone. Take care.
Have fun. Bye-bye.