Apr 16, 2018
Looking for an easy way to get more mileage out of your marketing content? Try content repurposing.
In this week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, AIIM VP of Marketing Tony Paille shares how his approach to repurposing the content that the organization is creating has enabled AIIM's small marketing team to dramatically grow visits and leads - all while saving time and effort.
Listen to the podcast to learn more about AIIM's content repurposing strategy, or read the transcript below.
Kathleen Booth (host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success Podcast. My name is Kathleen Booth and I am your host. Today, my guest is Tony Paille, the VP of Marketing at AIIM, which is the Association for Intelligent Information Management. Welcome, Tony.
Tony: Thank you so much for having me.
Kathleen: I'm excited you're here, and I'm
excited to talk to you about AIIM's marketing. Tell our listeners a
little bit about yourself and about the association.
Tony: Sure, sure. My name is Tony and I'm the
VP of marketing at AIIM. We are an association servicing the
information management industry. We're based in Silver Spring, but
I am actually located in Boston, so I get to work from home, which
is really nice. My dog certainly enjoys all the face time she gets
with me. My specialty is inbound marketing and inbound
marketing for associations.
Kathleen: Awesome. I think it's very ironic
that you work for a company based in Maryland but you work out of
your home in New England, and I work for a company based out of New
England from my home in Maryland.
Tony: Oh. Isn't that too funny?
Kathleen: Yeah, and I, too, have dogs. So who
knows what will happen in the background during this podcast
interview?
Tony: Yeah, yeah. They'll be barking at each
other.
Kathleen: I know. Inevitably, I feel like the
mailman comes right as I'm recording and my dogs go ballistic on
me. But we'll see. We'll roll with the punches. It's all good.
Tony: I love it.
Kathleen: One of the reasons I was excited to
talk to you, and I did not actually tell you this when we first
met, is that I started my career working for a trade
association.
Tony: Oh, wow.
Kathleen: Yeah. It was many, many moons ago
in Washington, DC, and it was ... At the time, it was called the
Environmental Technology Export Council, and our members were
businesses that exported environmental technologies. So I have this
background and experience in trade associations, but I haven't
really been living in that world recently, and it has changed so
much.
That was one of the first things that you talked about when we
connected. Before we get into the marketing stuff, can you just
address a little bit how the world of trade associations is
changing and some of the trends you're seeing? Because I think that
really provides some important context to this conversation.
Tony: Yeah, definitely. For the folks out
there that don't know what a trade association is, almost every
industry has one. You probably have heard of some of the big ones
from the marketers out there: the American Marketing Association
... There's the National Rifle Association, American Heart
Association, etc.
I think a lot of it started in the '40s and they were really prosperous all the way through the '80s. When you were in a trade, you can't get all of the really narrow, niche information that you need to know to do your job and really advance your career through college. You had to have education beyond that, and each industry would have its own association that would provide that kind of educational material. A lot of the associations would go beyond that and many of them would do lobbying or advocating on behalf of the industry. It sort of became a badge of honor, almost, to be a member of your specific trade association. It was something that people were proud of.
Over time, with the proliferation of information by way of the internet, it's so easy to learn new things that you don't have to go to an association anymore. Associations thrived on membership, and over time, membership for associations pretty much across the board were dwindling, so they had to really shift what their focus was. The good ones, I think, focused a lot on training. A lot of associations offered online and in-person training courses, certifications, things that you really couldn't just get from a place like Lynda.com or Coursera or any of these other moocs.
Even that is really starting to change because it's so easy,
really, to host a webinar and really affordable to do that. So
you're seeing education coming from all sorts of places. Software
companies offer training, and consultants offer training through
their websites. It's so easy to do that, so you're seeing a lot of
pivoting again, which really makes the association world very
dynamic right now.
Kathleen: Yeah. It's a fascinating trend. In
fact, it's funny that you mentioned all the different types of
companies that are now offering education and training because,
actually, here at IMPACT we just launched an education division in
the last two months. So it's something that we're going through as
well. One of the things that I find so wonderful about
associations, at least the good ones, is that they do tend to be
prolific content creators.
Before I joined IMPACT, I had my own marketing agency and we had several associations that were clients. Some of them are still with us now at IMPACT, and I like working with them because I've always been in the inbound marketing world, and in inbound marketing it's all about content. Very often when you work with companies, you have to pull and squeeze the content out of them, and it's always a struggle because they're busy and distracted and doing other things, whereas with associations, creating content is really part of the mission.
So it becomes less about how are we going to create it and more
what are we going to do with it? So I think, in many ways,
associations are just fantastic candidates for an inbound marketing
approach.
Tony: Yeah, definitely. I would just say that
we were doing inbound marketing before it was cool. But the truth
is we were doing it before we even knew we were really doing
it.
Kathleen: In your marketing capacity at AIIM,
what is the approach you're taking there with your audience?
Tony: We have a research branch, in the vein
of a Gartner or Forrester, but just much more
narrow, more niche. We really focused just on enterprise content
management. That way, we were able to create a lot of research and
research papers that no one was really creating. So we were the
only show in town.
We've been able to take that research and really expand on the
amount of content we create and the different types of content we
create. So what started as just research papers went to webinars
and infographics and e-books and blog posts, podcasts, and
everything else.
Kathleen: So you're dipping your toes into
many different types of content. Are you seeing really great
traction from any particular format that you're creating?
Tony: I would say it depends on what the
goals are. I would say that e-books probably draw in the most
traffic. I think that the biggest e-book that we did last year got
4,500 downloads and almost 900 new contacts, and lead
generation is really the name of the game when it comes to
inbound marketing.
But when it comes to nurturing a contact or an existing lead on
to becoming a paying customer, there's nothing better for us than
webinars. Webinars have
been really great, especially for our training offerings.
Kathleen: Now, when you talk about e-books,
can you give me some examples of the types of e-books you're
creating? Because there's just such an incredible variety of
content that we call e-books out there. Some are really kind of
crummy, check-the-box, basic documents. Others are more like
in-depth research reports. What is it that you're creating that's
working so well for you?
Tony: We try to create different types of
e-books for different buyer
personas and different points in the buyer's journey, so we have
some really great top-of-the-funnel
assets with names like 14 Steps to Successful Software
Implementation or ECM Implementation,
or Taxonomy 101, things like that
that are lighter in nature, really fun, and definitely for someone
that might not know what problem they even have, let alone how to
solve it.
But for people that are already in the thick of it, they have an
ECM implementation ... For the folks that don't know, ECM is a type
of software, enterprise content management software. For those
people, that's where we do 20, 30-page, really detailed research
papers. So we try to run the gamut because different stages of the
buyer's journey are going to be looking for different types of
content.
Kathleen: That makes sense. I'd love to learn
a little bit more about your audience because when you say
"enterprise content management" does that translate into you
targeting large enterprises, and if so, who is the buyer within
that enterprise that you're going after?
Tony: That's a really great question. In our
space, in information management, it's mostly records managers. As
records are becoming digitized or digitalized, you're seeing IT and
information systems playing a larger role, but it's still a lot of
records managers. And records managers tend to work for any sort of
company that has sensitive information, so our audience is a lot of
government — federal, state, local — banking, finance, insurance,
healthcare, pharmaceuticals, things like that where they're dealing
with a lot of very private information, a lot of personal
information.
Those folks have to be able to store this information and
retrieve it but also be able to shut it down to people that
shouldn't be looking at it, don't have access to it. That's really
the audience that we play in.
Kathleen: Fair to say that a lot of them are
highly regulated?
Tony: Absolutely. Yes, very highly
regulated.
Kathleen: Okay. Do those individuals that
you're targeting have continuing education requirements, or is it
simply that to do their job well they really need to proactively
stay up to date on this stuff?
Tony: It depends, I would say. There are a
lot of industries and companies that do require a certain amount of
education. For the most part, what you're starting to see is
records managers have dwindling resources. That department doesn't
get, really, the respect that it deserves for the amount of
authority that they really have. So a lot of these records managers
use this training and these certifications and designations as a
way to say, "This is the expertise that I have." It's something
that they wear on their chest and say, "This is why I deserve to be
in this conversation and part of this project."
Kathleen: I imagine, too, that there is a
case to be made within an organization that if you are not devoting
the resources and expertise necessary to records management,
especially if you're highly regulated, there is a substantial
financial liability there. I mean, I know with HIPPA or other kind
of compliance regimes that the penalties can be very, very
large.
Tony: And it's becoming even more so,
especially over in Europe. This spring in May, they're launching a
whole new compliance regulation initiative, the GDPR. With
that, it becomes huge fines, and it's not just for companies in
Europe. If you're an American company that is storing information
on European Union citizens, then you're subject to those fines as
well, and there are very steep fines involved.
I think the sad thing is that a lot of American companies have
sort of taken the stance that they only care after they get fined,
not necessarily before. So they're not taking these proactive
steps, which is really where records managers are so important in
any given organization, to be able to try to influence management
in that way.
Kathleen: It's so interesting that you bring
up GDPR, because it's sort of a joke within my company. Everyone's
like, "Oh, Kathleen's talking about GDPR again," because I've been
a broken record on that. But what I have observed is exactly what
you said, which is that a lot of people are aware it's coming. I
mean, some are not aware, but a lot of people are aware it's coming
but don't seem to feel any sense of urgency to do anything about
it.
If you fall subject to those fines, it's a very expensive thing
to have ignored, and it's coming fast. So I have a feeling there's
going to be a little flurry around ... What is it, May? I don't
remember what day it is in May, but whenever that regulation comes
into effect, I have a feeling there's going to be a flurry of
last-minute changes being made within people's databases and what
their data hygiene practice is.
Tony: Yeah. I think, especially as marketers,
I think we can really be the catalyst there. I think more and more,
especially in smaller organizations, marketing are sort of seen as
the keepers of their database. So compliance is our problem, too,
even though sometimes we like to pretend that it isn't. So if
you're working at an organization and you haven't even heard of
GDPR yet, look it up and try to talk to your CEO or your CMO if
you're not your CMO, and try to make some changes there because it
could be very costly for you in the future.
Kathleen: Yeah, and I would just add that
even if you are not selling anything to customers in Europe, you
still have to look and see if anybody European is in your database,
because if they're in there, it doesn't matter if you asked them to
be in there or wanted them to be in there. They're in there, and
that means you are subject to this.
Anyway, moving on from GDPR. It's an interesting topic and I will try to put some links in the show notes for that for folks that are interested (click here for an article that provides a great overview of GDPR).
When we first started talking, what fascinated me about what
you're doing with AIIM is you are really looking at inbound
marketing as an opportunity to overcome some of the broader
challenges facing trade associations and their strategies for
remaining relevant today. Tell us a little bit more about
that.
Tony: I would love to. My first exposure to
inbound came at HubSpot's INBOUND conference in
... I want to say it was 2015, and I considered myself a bit of a
hotshot. I went into that conference and realized how much I don't
know. That was a really eye-opening experience for us, and we were
a small marketing team, like many associations are. Many small
businesses are as well.
We were doing a lot of content marketing and content creation but not really leveraging it as well as we could. I mentioned that associations are in a weird point now where they're struggling, and a lot of them, my company included, we sort of pivoted to offer training. And that was a boom for us. That was a smashing success. For almost a decade, we made millions and millions of dollars off training, but we started to see those revenues dry up or slow, and it became harder to hit our targets.
That's when we really became exposed to this whole inbound marketing methodology. So we were able to really look at the content we were creating, and one thing that was really important to our success was that ... I mentioned these research papers that we were creating, and we were creating this original research that nobody else had and nobody was doing. And we were creating one e-book out of it or one research paper out of it when we could turn that into a larger number of assets.
Just as an example, we took a section of that e-book and kind of reworked it and posted it to our blog, and now we're getting SEO value from that. We were able to take some of the key findings and present them in a graphical way and create an infographic out of that. We were able to take the general findings from that paper and turn it into a webinar.
We did some math, and this isn't the exact right numbers, but the research and coming up with the idea and organizing the information and surveying our audience, that took 80 percent of the effort. Actually sitting down and writing the paper and slapping a design over it took 20 percent of the effort. So any time we were creating one piece of content, we were doing 100 percent of the work instead of repurposing that 80 percent up front and just adding 20 percent for each additional asset.
I hope I'm not confusing everybody with all these numbers. But
essentially, we were able to create a larger number of pieces of
content way faster by repurposing that initial research up
front.
Kathleen: You know, that is so fantastic
because I do think as marketers, we fall into the trap quite often
of working harder and not smarter. I talk to a lot of marketers
because that's who my audience is. When I do persona research on my
audience, one of the things I always ask is, "What is your biggest
pain point?" and every one of them says, "Time." It manifests
differently. Some people say, "I wish I had more time to work out,"
or, "I wish I had that 25th hour in the day to get more work done,"
or, "I wish I had more time to continually educate myself."
But it comes down to we feel overloaded and overwhelmed, and I think sometimes we do it to ourselves. This is a great example where you spend a ton of time creating an awesome piece of thought-leadership content, and then you throw it up there and it's kind of like, "Okay. Now moving on to the next thing," when there are so many ways that you can use it and repurpose it.
Do you have an example of something that you have repurposed in
a lot of different ways? Because I think sometimes it's helpful to
understand exactly how this plays out.
Tony: Yeah, absolutely. We created a great
e-book last year called The Impact of SharePoint 2016. In our
space, Microsoft has an offering called SharePoint, and it is an
ECM system, but it wasn't born that way. And then it evolved into a
more traditional piece of software. It was very disruptive in our
industry, so it was kind of a hot topic back in 2016.
We created this e-book, and it was about 25 pages. It did really well. It performed well. It probably got about 3,000 downloads and 500 new contacts for us, so it's a higher-performing asset. Back in the day, we would have said, "All right. That's it. Let's move on to that next thing." It's so easy to look at the next item on your to-do list. Instead, we said, "How can we get more out of this?" And we created an article.
The very first thing we did was create that blog post, and we
created ... The name of the blog post was The Problem With SharePoint:
Technology or People? and we took some of the findings
from that research and lifted a lot of the copy straight from the
paper and kind of reworked it into an article that would make sense
for people top of the funnel that are asking these questions: is it
SharePoint that's the problem, or is it our implementation of
SharePoint?
Kathleen: Great.
Tony: And then from there, again, we created
an infographic. So that was very
numbers-based, and we took all these numbers that we found by way
of surveying our audience, and that was a huge success for us. Our
audience loves infographics so much. I think a lot of companies
keep those as open assets. We can slap an infographic behind a form
and people are happy to give us their contact information. It's
something, I think, kind of unique to our audience.
Kathleen: Nice. What kind of traction did the
blog and the infographic get?
Tony: The blog got ... Let's see. It got 782
views, and the e-book ... I said that. The infographic got 371
downloads and 66 new contacts, and of 66 new contacts, four of them
ended up becoming customers.
Kathleen: That is really interesting. To
pause there for a second, if I'm remembering these numbers
correctly, how many new contacts did you say the original e-book
got?
Tony: I said it got about 400.
Kathleen: Okay. And the blog got a lot of
visitors. The infographic got 66 new contacts?
Tony: Yes. That's correct.
Kathleen: That's great. I mean, that's huge,
and you didn't have to put a lot of effort into creating it, I
imagine. Especially if somebody was a smaller marketing team,
there's probably people out there on Fiverr or, you know, one of these freelance
platforms that could probably do it for you because you're not
starting from scratch. You really just need a designer who can do
some data visualization.
Tony: If you haven't heard of Canva.com, we love it as a marketing team. We don't
have a whole lot of design ability in-house, and Canva works a lot
like Photoshop does except it's free and it's just through your web
browser. It's a pared down version, so it's very drag and drop, and
it becomes very easy to create these infographics with almost no
design expertise and without having a lot of graphics created ahead
of time.
Kathleen: I love Canva. I actually use it.
When I first started my podcast, the header images I put on the
show notes used to be created by my graphic designer in Adobe
Illustrator. She wanted me to start taking them over and I was
like, "I don't know how to use Illustrator." So she created a
template in Canva, and now little old me can go in there and work
with the images and edit them and everything. It's awesome for
amateur designers.
Tony: Yeah. It's the best.
Kathleen: You can't break too much in there,
either.
Tony: Yeah. That's what I love about it.
Kathleen: So you've done this successfully
with several different pieces of content. Am I right on that?
Tony: Yes. You are.
Kathleen: When you now start new campaigns or
you're going to create a new piece of content, do you sit and think
"how many different ways are we going to spin this off," or are you
waiting until it's done and then looking at that final form and
thinking about repurposing opportunities?
Tony: We try to plan everything out in
advance. It's so hard to do that. We're sometimes our own worst
enemy, so more often than not, it works the other way where we
create the asset and then we see, all right, how many different
ways can we whack this up?
Kathleen: Any tips or advice for somebody who
is sitting here thinking, "Well, I just spent a ton of time
creating an e-book," or, "I just spent a ton of time creating some
other offer. I'm going to now repurpose it because that sounds like
a great approach"? Lessons learned that you can share?
Tony: I would say look for quick wins.
Everybody knows their own skills or what they have in-house, so try
to do the things that you're comfortable with first. Those are the
things that are going to take less time, and really, that's the
whole point of this, is to try to do things as quickly and easily
as possible.
Here's an example. We do about 30 webinars a year. And it's so
easy to just take that replay, and you take just the slides from it
and you post that to SlideShare. You take the
recording of it and you put it on YouTube. So you've taken that one webinar, which has
a shorter shelf life, and you're able to repurpose every single
webinar into two additional assets with longer shelf life than what
that original webinar may have had.
Kathleen: I imagine that if you're doing
something written like an e-book, thinking about repurposing before
you start it could help a lot because, for example, if you're going
to create en infographic ... You mentioned you had a lot of numbers
and so it lent itself well to that. If you knew you wanted to do an
infographic, then it would probably make sense to have a chapter in
that e-book or to incorporate different stats, something that was
very heavily data-focused as opposed to all narrative.
Tony: Yeah. We try to approach our content
creation for e-books by modularizing it. If you know you're
creating different chapters, each chapter could be a blog post. We
know that we will try to create an infographic out of it, so having
numbers and percentages, and even ahead of that, asking questions
in the survey that we do and the research that we do, that will
start to tell a story and lend itself well to that infographic.
So it becomes easier as you go along and you start to think
about it through that lens of, "I'm definitely going to repurpose
something here. How can I set myself up for success?"
Kathleen: How big is your marketing team at
AIIM?
Tony: When we first started, it was just two
people and it was really hard to accomplish a lot of this stuff. I
mentioned that we were seeing some struggles from a revenue
standpoint, but over the last five years, we've been able to
continue to grow and grow and grow by way of our inbound marketing
efforts, and now we're up to five people on our marketing team. So
we're definitely seeing some ROI on the whole inbound
methodology.
Kathleen: That's great. When you were first
getting started repurposing, I imagine the team was a little bit
smaller. Any other tips besides things like Canva that helped you
go fast with a tiny team?
Tony: I would say that the greatest thing
that you can do outside of repurposing, which I'm a huge fan of, is
automation. Automate as much as you can. Create these
little workflows,
especially for tasks that you do regularly. As an example, being a
membership association, we know that every month we want to send
out renewal messages. That becomes a very easy thing, and if you're
using a marketing automation tool like HubSpot, you can just set up a workflow that will
send that out to the folks that it has to go to so you don't have
to do that manually anymore by way of Outlook or just manual pushes
through your software.
But other things, too. Some easy ones are creating
a re-engagement
campaign for folks that haven't been opening your emails
and try to get them to engage with you again instead of just
treating them like everybody else. That's a quick one that you can
do. It doesn't take a whole lot of effort, but now that's just
something that you don't have to worry about and it's just always
running in the background.
Kathleen: That makes sense. If there are
things you can automate, do that because that's just buying you
more time to work on the things you can't automate.
Other than infographics and SlideShares and putting webinars on
YouTube, any other content formats that you've played around with
that have lent themselves well to repurposing?
Tony: That's a great question. We do a lot of
events here, and one thing that we've started to learn -- we've
been doing this for about a year now -- is once the event is over,
that doesn't mean that the promotion of that event has to end,
because you know you're going to have another event down the line.
So you want to create that fear of missing out.
We've gotten really good at taking video from the event and
repurposing that either by putting it on blog posts or even sending
out feel-good, make-good emails to folks that say, "Hey, check out
this great video. This is from our last event." And people say, "Oh
man. This is pretty good content. I wish I was at that event." But
then they're also being given something for free where you're not
asking anything in return. So that's been a really big success for
us as well.
Kathleen: Those are good tips. We actually
have a conference coming up in August, so I might just steal that
idea.
Well, Tony, two questions I always ask everybody who comes on
here. I'm curious to hear your answers. The first one is when you
look out there at the world around you and you want to find a
best-practice example, company or individual, who do you think
right now is doing inbound
marketing really well?
Tony: That's a really good question. My
default response is always HubSpot. They're kind of the
kings of inbound marketing. I'm a total fanboy. But I'll try to
think of something off-script. There's this really great company
that I've become a huge fan of recently called Adelante Shoe Company, and they're based in Waltham,
Massachusets. What is special about them is they work with cobblers
in Guatemala, and every shoe is handmade by a Guatemalan cobbler in
their shop. And they're made to order.
So it's this really rich experience, and all of their cobblers are paid above fair trade, so they've really been supporting this local economy in this town in Guatemala. The content that they specialize in, it seems, is video. And they tell this really great brand story over a series of videos on their Facebook that talk about ... They go into the history of each shoemaker, kind of their own personal story, and you get to know these shoemakers.
It just creates this really great, almost cinematic story that
you're like, "Oh man. I want to buy that guy's shoes from that
person." You really build this emotional connection with their
shoemakers, and I think they've done such a great job of it. So
yeah, I would say they're probably one I've been keeping my eye on
most recently.
Kathleen: I love that example. A lot of
people have said HubSpot, and they really are the gold standard,
but it's always fun to hear about new businesses that maybe don't
have such a high profile that are killing it like that. Side note,
I actually love their name. Adelante in Spanish means "forward,"
and I'm sure that they named it that because not only are they
helping the folks that are making the shoes advance their lives,
but as you wear their shoes, you're walking forward. So that's kind
of cool. I'm going to definitely check them out as soon as I get
off the phone.
Second question. You alluded to this, especially in the field
that you're in, intelligent information management. The world of
marketing, and especially digital marketing, is changing so
quickly, and it's very technologically driven a lot of the time.
I'm really curious: what are your go-to sources of information? How
do you stay educated and stay on the cutting edge of what's
happening in the world of marketing so that you can do your job
well as a marketer?
Tony: I am a huge fan of blogs. I get most of
my education from different blogs. I would say that the thing with
blogs is that you kind of grow past them, and that's okay. That's
kind of a natural evolution. When I was first starting with inbound
marketing, I was a huge fan of the
HubSpot blog. But a couple of years in, I was like, "Okay. I
have a handle on what they're talking about," and I feel like I
sort of graduated to more niche blogs.
If I'm looking for something on SEO, I might go to the Moz
Blog. If I'm looking for something more about pay-per-click,
I'll go to WordStream. Neil
Patel, who's the founder of Kissmetrics and Crazy
Egg and a whole bunch of other companies. Those are
my favorite blogs, and that's usually my go-to for anything
marketing related.
Kathleen: Thank you for sharing those.
There's a couple of really good ones that I read as well. Well,
this has been so interesting. I appreciate you sharing a lot of
your tips and strategies with us. If somebody wants to get in touch
with you if they have a question about this repurposing approach or
anything else they heard here today, what is the best way for them
to reach out to you?
Tony: I am on LinkedIn. My name, of course, is Tony
Paille, P-A-I-L-L-E. And on
Twitter at @Tony_Paille.
Kathleen: All right. I'll put those links in
the show notes. Thank you again for joining me this week. If you
are listening and you enjoyed this interview, please do give us a
review on iTunes or Stitcher or the platform of your choice. If you
know somebody who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing
work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork, because I would love to
interview them.
That's it for this week. Thanks.