Episode 37: Boosting B2B Leads with Content Strategy & Navigating AI Risks | Jeff Coyle

In this episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Steve Goldhaber sits in with Jeff Coyle, co-founder, and chief strategy officer of MarketMuse with 25 years of experience in content strategy, lead generation, and search engine optimization.

They discuss how to increase leads for product lines with content strategies, the importance of evaluating strengths and weaknesses before allocating a budget for campaigns, the misuse and risks of AI in content creation, Jeff's first job in marketing, and embracing failure and change.

Listen as he shares his insights on the topics covered. Tune in to learn more!​

Connect with Jeff Coyle and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.

Transcript

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.)

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Steve Goldhaber: Hey everybody, welcome back to Studio 26 and the Interesting B2B Marketers Podcast. I'm joined by Jeff today. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff Coyle: Oh, thanks for having me, Steve. Look forward to the discussion.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, awesome. And I have to note, for the loyal viewers here, those who have been watching on video, not just audio, but you'll notice a very different background behind me and that's because I'm in my new office.

We had just renovated a home. We've been doing this for about... Eight or nine months now. So we moved in and my new office shocker is not built yet. We're about a month behind on that. So it'll be interesting as we do more shows, you'll see that the office slowly come to life. So anyway, Jeff, give us a quick 60-second overview of who you are and your experiences that you've had as a marketer so far.

Jeff Coyle: Awesome. Well, and oddly enough, I'm in a temporary spot. People typically watch my webinar series or anything. I have these beautiful posters and music stuff all over the wall. I am in an interim space for many reasons we won't get into right now. But I'm Jeff Coyle. I'm the co founder and chief strategy officer for MarketMuse.

I've been in the content strategy, leap gen, search engine optimization. And I even building products in information retrieval and search engines for about 25 years. I worked initially at a company called knowledge storm. We were sold to a company. If you're a B2B marketer, you probably know them tech target, where I worked for many years as their in house leading the.

Content strategy search team, as well as part of the product management team. I created Market Muse and as a co founder about now, eight years ago, as amazing as that is to solve a lot of problems that content teams have, content strategists have, and search engine optimization team have about making decisions with content and then executing successfully.

Steve Goldhaber: Awesome. You and I have very similar backgrounds, so it's either going to be a great conversation or horrible. Sometimes the people with totally different backgrounds, I'm like, we need to talk. I have no idea what you just said, but anyway. We're going to jump into the first case. This one has to do with things that all B2B marketers love and hate.

It's the budgeting process and how you make decisions around what you should do with that in factored into it. So anyway, take it away. Case number one.

Jeff Coyle: Sure thing. This is a story of basically a team who a lot of B2B marketing, especially in the B2B tech orgs, they typically get at the beginning of the year, they get their budget allocation, right?

And it's usually uniform across product lines, and also they'll typically get their KPIs that they're looking to influence. So we need to increase leads X amount this year or some sort of traffic number, depending on how much they attribute successfully. Well, this example is where a company, there's a B2B technology company.

They have two product lines, two main product lines, and they were in the networking and in that type of space. And the two product lines, basically the goal was increased leads by 30% for each of those product lines. And they were like, Oh, gosh, how, how exactly do we do that? And the goal was that they needed to spread that out with paid and organic search.

And the organic search component was a big chunk of where the lead flow was going to supposed to be expected. So what were they looking to looking for? You know, solutions like, you know, mark of news, what I do, the big change for me was being willing to look at them and say, Hey, this isn't going to work.

And the reason why that's not going to work is because you don't have existing equivalent existing authority on both of those product lines because every product line associates with a collection of concepts and each one of those concepts, your site, your brand, your entity has a different existing power.

Imagine it as. Power and momentum built up through the content that you've created through the public relations efforts, through the, you know, the existing mo the momentum that the content has. And so going back and saying, well, when I look at the breadth and the depth of coverage and the quality of coverage you have.

And the impact of in this case user generated content through via their support forum via their customer portal which gave insights post purchase the forgotten part of the funnel post purchase troubleshooting champion development who cares that's all boring we don't need those things well those things were very powerful for the one product line right where the other one they weren't it was it was a little bit thinner.

And so when I went back to the lead and said, well, here's the thing you're going to have to create for this one product line to put points on the board that we estimated based on percentage conversion rates that we estimated, we would increase 30%. You're going to have to create and update about three X, the amount of content as the other product line.

Right. And they were like, that doesn't compute, right? We thought we were going to put in the same amount and come out of the bottom. And that changed everything for this business. They were like, wait a second, we can't just put in a dollar and get a predictable dollar out with content. We have to make decisions based on quick wins, based on where we have strengths.

We have to use some parts of our site. We might not have traditionally thought we needed to use. And what they made the decision to do hilariously enough in this case is invest only in the easy one for the first half of the year to see if this. Content strategy dynamic works and not, you know, spend that three X amount, but go and revisit it after time.

What this also did was it, is it really changed the way that they allocate budget for content marketing campaigns, being willing to look in the mirror first, you know, conduct that often bad word of a, an inventory and, you know, and evaluate where strengths and weaknesses were would actually yield, you know, tremendous.

Significant outcomes and the hit rate on the content really, really matters. And so where we were looking at historical hit rates for them of, you know, less than 10% so they were creating content and less than 10% of those content items were having a yield as far as traffic or conversions. And so what they did was they invested in some conversion rate optimization.

Techniques the one product line and invested in making great decisions on what they should create what that led to was in that first six months hitting the 30% gold, which was awesome and then saying, okay, well, this thing works. Let's invest in the other product line, but let's invest that, you know, three X four X actually and keep investing in the one that's working.

The big takeaway is if you're getting uniform growth projections per product line. The amount you put in is likely going to have to be different for each one to get the same outcomes and that your existing successes and your percentage, your batting average, for example, should always be influencing that budget.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I'm going to jump in to what you just talked about for a second, which is CRO. It's a world that fascinates me and I've always embraced it, yet I won't take it so far where, like, if you work with someone who is just all CRO, you get it to a point where the brand just starts to like, Oh, my God, like this is too confusing and I'm asked, I'm being asked to do so many things.

So, like, tell us about that balance between yes, these are really healthy CRO things to implement. And then where's that line where you just, you can't take it incredibly too far.

Jeff Coyle: So, the most orchestrated CRO practices really, really focus on, I think the diagnosis that maybe things aren't working very well is that the CRO team views their landing pages as being separate from other content.

That's the hugest strike that I, whereas a more effective, you know, a team that isn't siloed in that way will look to entrance pages as being, you know, funnel dependent or journey dependent conversion strategy. So if you have an early stage awareness. Content item, realistic expectation of what we call wayfinding.

So clicking on other stuff on the page is one goal. It doesn't have to be an immediate conversion. And if you do get an immediate conversion, it needs to be to a funnels, a funnel appropriate conversion. So it might be a targeted download for one Oh one or early stage. That isn't going to be a lead that's converting today, depending on your buyer journey, but pathing someone into the middle of the funnel, pathing someone to That next step can also pivot to industry specific, showing them that, you know, them with content that isn't going to generate a lot of entrance track.

So the three things that I look at for CRO are, are you lead crazy, which I'll call it, and I've generated 100 million leads, I believe, at last count, you know, even before market news. So if you're a lead crazy, and I've been lead crazy my days, right, and that's blinding everything else. Or are you calculating.

Click throughs and weight finding, which clarify and qualify as being as valuable. And my easiest example is you landed on your guide and you clicked on an industry specific secondary. That's as good as a download of a 101 white paper. And in that, you've shown them that you know them, you've. Self identified.

Now get on to your CRO practices, personalization. Software I use, Mutiny is a great example. Mutiny HQ for that. Looking at your lead scoring, predictive lead scoring. That's when real CRO happens. It's a combination of personalization, predictive, and understanding that wayfinding can be as powerful as a lead form.

Steve Goldhaber: What else about the first case do you want to share?

Jeff Coyle: One thing that actually dovetails well, Steve, with what you had mentioned is they really leaned into repurposing for this. And so one of my favorite tactics is repurposing. And why does that connect to CRO? Well, repurposing practices can get you to make, get the most out of large scale content investments.

So let's say I spent a ton of money on a white paper. It's this beast, it cost 50, 000. Why? I don't know. Some people still spend 50, 000 on white paper. A lot of times, how does that manifest on the website? One landing page that we optimize, right? Okay. That's, you know, cuckoo bananas, right? So what we need to be thinking about is all the different ways people can find this white paper and be satisfied by that experience.

And so that connects to CRO because they might come in, maybe it's a CRM white paper. They're coming in via CRM 101. They're coming in via CRM for financial services companies. They're also maybe, maybe it'd be a match for somebody who was a CRM for a music store. You know, I don't know the exact thing, but when they land on that, if they're happy, it means we have a lot of entrance paths.

We can give to this one item. The same thing goes for user generated content. Maybe there's a great thread in a forum or a content for customers. How many ways can we allow them to enter where we maybe we hook them in different ways and where they land is the same thing. That's a big, big way. Get the most out of those larger scale investments.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I love repurposing. I think what you just described is such a great way to, you know. Verticalization focusing on industries, I'm amazed by the power of just changing out visuals and writing headlines that speak to industries. And, you know, when I was a young foolish marketer, as they say, I wouldn't have thought that way.

I'm like, there's no way that just a headline speaking to an audience with a picture showing it can't be that easy. And I think when you're trying to earn someone's attention, it is that easy because they ultimately, you know, the role of marketing is for them to go, Oh my God, this company gets me. They know who I am now.

You've got attention, which is what you, you know, that's what you're trying to earn as a marketer. Okay, let's jump into case study. Number two, this has to do with, uh, were you working with the team and you're trying to get them to think about a new approach, you know, trying to turn the not hold on to just what they've always done in the past.

Jeff Coyle: Well, and this is a fun one because it's recent in my brain and it dovetails with the other crazy right now, which is AI crazy. And this is coming from a person who built. A large language model platform and launched it a couple of years ago, equivalent or even better than, you know, open AI is GBT solution.

The market wasn't ready for it failed terribly, pulled it out, relaunching it in the next few months, but I've been around the block with natural language processing and I am a huge, huge advocate for AI using it, integrating it. I'm actually working on a piece called the extinction of the if then statement, things like that, which, you know, changing the way business logic works.

But what that doesn't mean is that you should be aiming to take humans out of the loop and think of content as a unit cost or a commodity, you know, the same thing that you shouldn't take an entire campaign and look at costs and divide it by the number of leads and say, that's how we evaluate this is 30, 32 CPL.

Oh, you ever seen that before? Right. And it's the perception that there's a. Time value. So, I mean, if you're a content business and this is, you know, how do you amortize content and this is a financial concept, right? It's not a one time cost. If you're booking, if you're a content business and you're amortizing your content with a one time cost, you need to call me and I'll throw you to somebody who to do your finances better.

And so the, why would you think about that as payload? Why would you think about it as a one time cost, as in how much does content cost 1, right? 100? Well, first of all, it doesn't. There's a cost to maintain. There's a cost to, you know, to investors, opportunity costs. And so when I hear of teams, you know, who are saying here's how much content costs and they're really, really looking to shred up the cost of actually writing the page, they're missing the point.

When I look at the teams that are thinking about content as payload, Yeah. As in a unit cost, just like a lead cost, they're missing the point. So what we're seeing in this democratization of AI that's been brought in 2013, 2023 is a gosh, time flies. It is that the payload people thinking about the X, the end of that content creation life cycle as the payload that they're creating and not thinking about that entire journey, the journey that content has and the journey it has after it publishes, right?

Those are the teams. Who are struggling right now because you got people coming in. Maybe they're coming from different groups. They don't know a lot about the process and they're going, Hey, there's this thing. It makes content appear like magic trick. Invest in that because it seems like it's a whole lot easier and it's going to have better returns in isolation.

The disasters that that's creating right now are significant. The most important one though, is that it's similar to the previous case study that we talked about, but it's the number of content items you need to create and the number of content items you need to update. And how many of them are successful?

I reference that as content efficiency. So in this use case, there was a team who had been previously focused on content efficiency, right? They in through middle to end of 2022 had driven that number up from about 8%. By the way, the average in B2B marketing teams and publishers that I work with is about 10% when they start working with me.

They had taken that up to about 30 to 35% and we're just crushing. That means they were. Every three items they create, at least one was producing meaningful organic search return on investment. Okay. That changes everything for the business. It makes it so that when they can go to their superiors and get budget, they're like, yeah, one out of every three articles we create like clockwork because of these practices wins, right?

Yeah. It used to be a black box. We didn't know, right. Everybody, unfortunately in this org believed that it was still kind of a black box. And they were like, we can generate 50 articles, you know, a minute out of this thing. Why are we doing that? Why are we still spending, you know, the equivalent of thousands of dollars per page?

Because we train this team to actually be realistic and pack in all those costs. So the number looks big, you know, I always, a lot of times I'll talk to somebody and say, how much does content cost? They're like, I don't know, 500. I'm like, well, you're 10% efficient. So it's actually about 5, 000 and you're missing opportunity costs and update costs probably about 10, 000 per effective page.

Well, this, this company, they started reporting that to everybody. So they were saying 2, all in effective cost per page. Well, then people are reading time magazine. And they're like, wait, it's like content can be free. Maybe we should do that. So how do we, how do you coach out of that has been this journey and it's been tough, but just to tell you the truth, there's been a, the practices we've enabled with them are, it's kind of fun because what we're talking about is support content using generated.

Content for support, always including a expert user in the loop so they can make sure there's a personal story, make sure that there's real a fact checking process, right? And the fun output of this is they were able to say, no, we didn't just go crazy and post 50 items where we used to publish one. But we have doubled our outputs and kept our 30% rate up, right?

If we had done the one for 50, it would be rolling the dice. Quality is going to go down. Who knows the business could crater. We did this smart. We integrated natural language generation processes, like large language models. Which would be the equivalent of, you know, that GBT or something equivalent. And we've done it smartly because we're thinking about this from the ideation phase and prioritization phase.

First, that has to be right. Then the content needs to be as good or better than our competitors. It needs to exhibit expertise. Show that we have experience and then we can execute better if we can do that, while also increasing volume, it's like breaking the triangle, the quality, the performance, and the time, and that's what everybody should be thinking about, because I'm sure everybody's got the knock on their shoulder going, yo, can we implement AI and like take down your costs and lower your budgets?

The answer to that question, especially should be only if you want our website to crash and burn and die and our brand to be ruined, will we do this? With a focus only on the payload. And if you keep that steady, you're going to win. So many people are losing right now. I'm watching tech ticking time bombs in B2B tech and publishing.

And it's because they're not thinking critically about that specific use case.

Steve Goldhaber: So I'm going to jump and I'm going to embrace the time bomb and I'm going to try to figure out. Why a time bomb exists as it relates to NLP here. So, you know, there's the good way to use AI in my mind. So meaning like, okay, we're writing a headline.

We know exactly who we're talking to. We know the insight we're trying to connect with. I've written a headline that does what it needs to do. Right. But I'm like, there's probably a better way to do it. Let's generate 10 other headlines and you know, I will be the judge of if that one beats my headline.

That in my mind is a good use. So going back to the time bomb, what are the bad uses where someone is just unknowingly goes in and wreck something?

Jeff Coyle: Well, testing is great, right? Doing processes that are so everybody should be doing process inventories right now. Because the world's changing and you can't keep up.

I'm sorry. I can barely keep up with this stuff. And I'm like in, I'm in the weeds. I'm in the biz, like as much as any human could be. So the best thing you can do is take a process inventory. Where are you doing manual labor? There's probably a solution for that. It's probably not the thing you have access to.

Just keep that in mind. So a lot of people are putting, you know, square pegs into round holes with the AI they have access to when there's actually something being built or that already exists that could actually do the task. So what are they doing? They're going, Oh, it doesn't do this. If you've seen people gawking about, you know, this doesn't do math problems, there's there's there's solutions for that, right?

So whether it be the if then statement, you know, how do you qualify leads? If you qualify leads with if then statements. Good luck. Good luck, bro. You've got, you've got to step up. There's a lot of better ways of doing that. If you do your churn analysis with, you know, one piece of product knowledge, right?

So every type of use case can be considered. So the time bombs are where we're creating. The first one, the most obvious one is content makes its way to our website without a human review, right? At whatever scale slope. Okay, would you hire somebody at an outsourced person you've never met to publish on your website direct without human review?

Why would you do it here, right? How much trust does that person have to build to where you don't provide a copy edit, right? A lot, most likely. But why are you doing it here? So what we're seeing is that that's happening. We're also seeing dramatic fluctuations in volume of production and no meaningful associations or woven together exhibitions of expertise and experience.

So imagine all those things could come to a head what we're going to start to see in the time bomb that's happening is faking authenticity is going to be penalized at a way in a way that is an outsized loss is coming. The truck's coming. We're already seeing it happen in small doses. But if you're putting out content that doesn't exhibit expertise, the hammer will come.

We've already started to see it where you're publishing content. That actually provides bad advice or in fact, or nonfactual information. The catastrophic impact on your business is top notch. I mean, there's one example. I'm not going to, I'm going to pretend I'm going to make something up. So I don't like docs who they were, but they were telling you, I'm just going to make this up in business to business terms.

They were telling you an equation for a very, very commonly known mathematical. And financial review item, the big old equation on the middle of the article was wrong. Imagine what that does to the psyche of a potential reader, the PR impacts. I mean, it'd be like having, you know, tablature for a, you know, the most popular song.

And then when someone picks up the guitar and starts playing, I'm like, that's not the right song, right? I mean, crazy, right? And so the, that's a big time bomb, the impact that that has to your business. You could also be in a situation where you're providing advice that. Is inconsistent with the advice you've previously given on your site.

Very commonly happening right now because people believe they should have awareness consideration purchase. That's it. So a lot of that middle of the funnel content that's coming out now where it's being generated doesn't actually have a voice. It's doing comparison without real experience. And if you want to understand where the time bomb comes with comparison without experience, type in Google product reviews updates.

Okay. Google over the last couple of years has cracked down on product reviews that aren't real. If you didn't actually taste all the dog food. That you review and you made up the fact that you're appropriate, you have an appropriate expertise to compare those six dog foods together, right? And you made that article, right?

And that can be vetted out and that can be programmatically vetted out. The fact that you're going to compare features, functionality, use cases, opportunities with your B2B tech. Yeah. And what if that don't vet out? Guess what? The time bomb is real. It's happening. Publishers are going to get beat down first.

B2B techs getting beat down second. Publishers are already starting to have their lunches eaten where they've taken humans out of the loop.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So in that scenario, is it my tech versus your tech meeting? Is a platform like Google going to rely on their AI to sniff out this stuff or no, it can't be done.

There has to be some human review at a platform to penalize someone for doing that with not authentic or factual content.

Jeff Coyle: No one knows the answer to that question. My perception is that it's a internal challenge to determine whether generated content versus authentic content versus factual content.

All of those things have to be determined. To be priorities what we've already started to see is a heavy hand at enforcement where the end result is certainly going to be some sort of composite I mean I know that's kind of a wiffy answer but one has to expect that if something isn't perfect if it's not an easy answer right then it will go through a wave of enforcement quality is a great example Google's first.

You know, machine learning technology, evaluating quality is, you know, came out in the late 2000s, early 2010, 11 most prominently executing in 12 and it just took time. It took time to evaluate. How do we want to evaluate this? Do we use humans to train evaluations to what things can we automate? Do we have to have a human in the loop to validate these observations?

You know, it took time on that. So what we should expect is that this is going to take time. There's going to be mistakes. And you don't want to be the person made an example of and you want to look at look at those examples that are already being made. One of them just went out of business last week.

Steve Goldhaber: No, I think I'm going to pull my thoughts together in the leveraging my son.

My son's nine is really ended. You know, baseball, football, basketball cards, and that's an industry that is just, you know, you don't know what you have in front of you, and there's not common understanding of is this card good or not? And then that created this whole other business, which is a grading service.

So, like, there's all these companies that They're experts. You submit your card and they grade it. So they'll say, you know, here's the smoothness of it. Here's the corners. This is the way it was printed and it gets a rating. And where I'm going with this is there's a huge opportunity for a third party company to come in and essentially grade content and offer some certification on it.

So it's almost like a little bit of like how consumer reports. Does it, or, you know, JD powers, although JD powers is very commercially driven, but I feel like that could be a really interesting area is a new company that just says we grade the content and, you know, submit it to us. We're going to charge you whatever, a hundred, 200 bucks.

And we will grade it on. Yes, this is fact check. This is authentic and you get a seal and that seal as a marketer. You put that up in the upper left hand part of your webpage and that's how you start the experience out. I feel like we're not there yet because AI, even though the people in the business know it's, it's easy to create content.

It's, it's not proliferated like it will be in a year or two. That's what I think when you need some type of a lens through it. So the customer just sees it and goes, all right, I can digest this because I do think we're going to live in this world of like fake and real and you're going to need to flag this is real and

Jeff Coyle: You can trust it because you can still get by.

And by the way, I have a couple of domains and entire business plan for one of the things you might have just said. Nice. And it's, it's happening. You know, we, we grade content from a lens of quality and comprehensiveness. And then at the site topic site section level, which is the way the Google evaluates authoritativeness, we have a topical authority metric.

So you can actually understand where you have personalized competitive advantage. Yeah, so we can evaluate does this site have a competitive advantage and how high quality is this article at the page level because it's a topic page level quality that needs to be evaluated because a page about cookies isn't about kitty cats, right?

So you actually, it's, it's a, from a math equation, it's a M N. Oh, and then big O M N, which is like all word page combos multiplied together. It's a super huge problem to evaluate a content item for quality. And so that's a, a nut that hasn't been cracked perfectly. The best person who has done it is, is certainly Google.

And they've been doing it for over 10 years. You must know I am creating content plans, literally on trading card. Quality and storage, honestly, like in the past month, I've created content plans for all those ratings. So I know way too much about the stuff you were just describing, but yes, it is ripe for that.

There's going to be big changes related to this. The key is differentiating what is generated versus what is authentic versus what exhibits expertise. Versus factual. The problem is that square is a fuzzy world right now. And because those four things are actually four different areas of competency, it's going to be a hard thing.

What people are going to solve for originality, but it can be original and bad people are going to generate, it can be generated in good, right? So there's, there's a big problem there and it hasn't been called. And that's what the rest of the rest of the story for this year is going to be. What I have seen is, and I'll mention this to you is sites.

Get ahead of it. Have a great way of tracking the audit trail on your content item. Why not? If you are proud of that content item, present the audit trail. This was created in 16 by Johnny Smith. It was updated in 17 by, you know, Janie Smith. We used technology to evaluate it and improve it in 2018. It was then audited for currency and appropriate intent in 2022.

Yeah, the audit trail, show it to the user. If it was medically reviewed at that time, you show that audit trail to the user. Guess what can be real hard to get slapped. Um, you're already seeing this happen. There's a few companies who have published really comprehensive audit trails on their articles and they're willing to publish that they use technology post the software they use.

Yeah, that is, that's part of the future.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that's interesting. I do. I am a big believer in the evergreen philosophy of content. I do think that every brand should have several pieces of content that, for lack of a better description, that are like a Wikipedia page, right? The good thing about Wikipedia is it's probably changing every day.

Something's happening in real time, and I think brands should embrace that more. Okay, we're going to pause on case study number two because It'll turn into 2A, 2B, 2C, 2D. Now we're going to jump into the Q& A for the show. So tell us about your first gig in marketing. How'd you get started?

Jeff Coyle: My first gig in marketing was, my first official gig in marketing, I'd say, was at a company called Knowledge Storm.

I was an intern. I was the first intern that was brought in to build out the way that they classified white papers into a product library. I got there a month earlier from the other kids because I was on study abroad. We'd come in and One of the leads there had said, Hey, we need to do a competitive analysis for a bunch of these sites.

I spend a slate up all night and read 120 page document, put it on the CPOs desk the next day, and they made me lead intern. So that's how I got in. That's how I got into product marketing and product.

Steve Goldhaber: So did you piss all the other interns off or were you the only intern and they didn't have to worry about the fallout of making you lead intern?

Jeff Coyle: They hadn't gotten there yet because I got, my semester ended slightly early because I was on, uh, study abroad. So they hadn't even never met me when they, when they all showed up, I was already there. That's funny. And you've been at it for a while, right? Yeah, that was, that was 99, 2000. Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: What do you enjoy most about it?

I mean, is it the constant change? Is it the curiosity? Why do you like being a marketer?

Jeff Coyle: I thought my role of my life was going to be completely in product marketing, product management and information architecture. My degree is in computer science and what I, in information retrieval, like creating search engines basically.

But what I identified was that those same skills can be applied. To do marketing in a in a very efficient way so if you can create a search engine you can evaluate how to make the search engine work for you right so I think that you know the reason why I love it is because it's like putting together puzzles all day but in a socially appropriate way.

Steve Goldhaber: Now I want to know more about the inappropriate puzzles.

Jeff Coyle: Well, you know, if you tell somebody, Hey, what do you do all day? I sit around putting together puzzles. You're like, Oh, really? Okay, cool. You know, there's only a few persona where that's appropriate.

Steve Goldhaber: I do like that. You know, I do like you describe it as a puzzle because that's what gets me most excited as a marketer are problems and puzzles.

And I love working with You know, leadership that just goes, we're stuck. Here's our problem. We don't know what to do. There's nothing more exciting than figuring out how to leverage marketing to help them solve that problem. I think my experience in my career was like the bigger the company, the less problems you were actually brought.

It was kind of like we've been doing this for a long time. The new budget's out. Let's just do it again. Try not to do anything too controversial because we don't want to have to get it. Like we want a really smooth approval process, which was code for us to do the same thing, but the smaller organizations or the ones who were more entrepreneurial, even if they were larger, they could really get to the heart of the matter.

I want to dive into culture. And what are some of those things that you see in an organization that allow marketers to flourish? Like you've talked about the finance angle on content marketing and how to look at it the right way. What are the other things where you're like, Hey, if a marketer can find this type of a culture, that's where you're going to do your best work.

Jeff Coyle: Well, speaking specifically for content and like Omnichannel content and SEO, I would speak from the opposite. I would say. Thanks places. You're not going to thrive and things to watch out for if search engine optimization, for example, is considered a second class talent at your work. It's not valued. You will not be successful as a business.

The business will suffer at some point if they're spoken about as you know, at the equivalent level for. Paid social. If any of the main channels is considered a second class amongst the marketing group, those are ones to really run away for whether it is social, whether it's community management, whether it's paid or organic or content where there's separation of editorial.

With maybe post sale docs at such a level that they don't talk to one another, or they believe that one's voodoo and the other one isn't, that's another one where you're going to struggle if you are on either side for one reason or another. So I think that if I'm going into an organization and I'm going to be on influencing content, I want to see whether post sale documentation, technical documentation, community content, user generated content.

Is being viewed at the same value as marketing influenced or editorially or product marketing influenced content that's going to be required for you to have longevity and happiness if those people are or you're putting a role to inspire change and you're being hired as the change agent. Yeah, I've seen that work.

It's a hard job. You got to want to do it. But companies who at least understand that they may recognize that things aren't perfect, but if you're an SEO and you're like, no, no, no, we don't talk to edit, like that's not a job. I want, that's not a job I want unless I'm the person that's going to change that.

And I think that you can take that to the bank if you're a marketer and say, you know, I'm producing a channel that has. And ROI, it may not be the highest attributable ROI, but the business has made the decision to invest in this channel. It may have impacts on the other channels and it should be valued as such.

And a key trigger word, if people use the word SEO content, if they've used that word, right? Run. You must run. Run. If people believe that they shouldn't write early stage awareness content because it won't generate great leads. And run, so a lot of these triggers, if they get that everything works together, everything you publish, everything you execute, every campaign PR all works together.

And it's our, our group's job to attribute fairly. You'll have a successful career there that won't be, you know, drenched in the goo of silos. Yeah. Oh,

Steve Goldhaber: I love that. The goo of silos. That's coming out on Netflix next year. I hear the goo of silos, corporate documentary.

Jeff Coyle: There's a t shirt being made right now with that on it.

I spoke at LavaCon last year and it was on, it was like a room of technical documentation folks. And a room of middle, early funnel content folks. And basically, it was about artificial intelligence is your silo breaker. And that should be the priority. Not tripling or quadrupling the amount of content you create.

We can use this information to take everybody's inputs in and use AI to qualify the validity of these efforts. And that's my dream for a business. It's basically saying, everybody's inputs are legit. We're paying you to do a job. You know, you are giving your inputs, you know, it's not if end statements, it's about true, true impact and attribution.

And it's our job to navigate the waters of whether we're going to invest in a channel or not. And that's key. 

Steve Goldhaber: All right. Final question before we wrap up the episode, you've been doing it a while. You obviously are living the test and control dream, right? Like you embrace failure. You're not afraid of it.

You need it, right? So you're there looking back. What are some things that you. Would have done differently or things that you're just like, you know what? 10 years ago, I used to feel this way. I'm totally in a different spot. What are some things you can share with the listeners?

Jeff Coyle: I would have failed faster.

I know it's trite, but when you see something's broken, like truly broken, try to figure out why it's broken. Don't try to figure out how to fix it immediately. Take some time to get more aware of that and recognize that if you're in a position of being a change agent, life's going to be hard. You can't change certain types of people.

You have to objectively evaluate the toxicity of situations more quickly. Some people, you know, my, my dad ran a grocery store for over 40 years, right? You're taught at birth to, you know, be loyal to stay on. Maybe if you're in my kind of generation, you're like, I'm going to fight, I'm going to save this.

I'm going to, you know, some things should actually die. And that's been the hardest thing for me is to recognize that, recognize it quickly. And that goes with hires who aren't working out. I mean, and here's my test. It goes with projects that goes with, you know, human interactions. I still make this mistake all the time because you want to make it work.

But think about all the times that, you know, you let somebody go or somebody left, how many times have you said, oh yeah, they're in such a. You know, better place they're at. Oh, they're doing a better over there. It's such a high percentage, you know? So you create opportunity cost by not doing things fast and decisively.

And that's what I've learned.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I think it's a great lesson to a lesson on when to walk away. And some things you just don't have to fight for. Even though you think you can fight for them, and you might be able to turn something around and know when to walk away. Which is what we're doing now for the podcast.

How about that for a horrible segue? We got to add some sound effects in that just go like, wah, wah, wah, sad, sad trombone. All right. So Jeff, I enjoyed learning more about you and I thank you for coming on the show and thank you to all the listeners. Make sure to like and subscribe. You can find us on Spotify, iTunes, and you can also go over to the 26 Characters webpage.

That's where we take all of our historical podcasts and put them. Alright. Enjoyed having you, Jeff. Thanks again for coming on.

Jeff Coyle: Hey, thanks Steve. Not a pleasure. 

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