2. 25,000 customers
and counting
INTERCOM - THE STORY SO FAR
$241 Million
IN FUNDING
2011
FOUNDED
600+
EMPLOYEES
$1-50M ARR in 3 years
REVENUE GROWTH
Making internet
business personal
5 offices globally
SAN FRANCISCO, DUBLIN,
CHICAGO, LONDON,
& SYDNEY
Good afternoon, delighted to be here today. As mentioned I'm John from Intercom.
And today I wanted to talk to you about how Content was the main source of leads that helped Intercom grow from $1m to $50m in ARR in just 3 years.
I’m going to tell you why I think content marketing is a busted flush
I’m going to share the main lessons we learned along the way - as well as the mistakes we made so you don’t have to
And I want to leave you with 5 reasons to invest so that you can go back to your CEO, your agency, your client and make the case for content
We're a software company, founded 7 years ago by 4 Irish guys in San Francisco.
We have had some success since then - here's the vanity metrics.
That is all fantastic - particularly the number of customers around the world who use our software to grow their businesses faster.
One thing we have done though is invest heavily in creating engaging editorial content - it’s been the leading source of leads which has driven our growth - which is why I’m here today
Bit of context for you.
Don’t like the term content marketing. Not saying that to be provocative. I'm sharing it because I wrote this post last year - and well, you know, Google.
Stopped using the term content marketing internally.
Changed all our job titles to reflect that - so instead of content marketing managers we have editors, senior editors and lead editors.
Why? And why did we think this was important to share with other marketers?
Because content marketing has become totally devalued and is all about hacks and tricks with no focus on quality content
I’m talking about this kind of stuff
How to write just one long form piece of content and turn it into 48 tweets, 36 Facebook posts, 24 LinkedIn Pulse articles, 6 blog posts, 2 white papers, an infographic and an e-book. I’m all for recycling content but come on?
This is what we’re competing with. In on-demand world of Netflix, podcasts and the Kindle
Start by creating something that people want to read, watch or listen to. Everything else follows on from this.
But look for advice online and what you find is almost entirely the other way around. It's all about promoting and distributing your content with very little about how you’re going to create it in the first place.
That's my first takeaway for you - great content is great marketing. It’s not some kind of luxury.
Because if you prioritise marketing first you just end up with low quality content which no one will want to read, watch or listen to
And that doesn’t do anyone any favors.
There’s 3 pillars to our content strategy:
This is Inside Intercom, our blog which has been published since the day the company was founded.
Now we publish up to 7 long form articles a week on our blog. We generate north of 200,000 page views a month, from at least 100,000 visitors to the blog every month.
The other major pillar of our content strategy is our podcast, which every week features interviews with people we admire in the industry, gets over 40,000 listens a month.
Our product is all about enabling conversations between businesses and their customers - so the podcast also focuses on conversations with industry figures we admire. I’ll talk some more shortly about how you can bake your product philosophy into your content
And finally our books - ebooks and also since earlier this year print - have been downloaded over 300,000 times. These are our main form of gated content — we ask people for an email address and then follow up with them to see if we can persuade them to try our product.
We’ve also branched into audio books and are working on other new formats in audio and video.
Don’t get carried away with publishing things that get traffic but have little to do with your product or service
Not about specific product features or how to’s - that has to be constantly updated.
Anyway that’s product education’s job, not content marketing.
See the world through the lens of your product
This is what you see when you log in - a list of your users and site visitors, and the things they have done on your site and app
If you’re not a customer, you probably know us because of that little blue messenger on the bottom right
That product is how we give life to the the things we believe about business.
Sounds a bit philosophical right, but bear with me.
This is our Smart Campaigns feature which is where you can actually make sure the right message, goes to the right user, at the right time
And this are just some of the blog posts we’ve written about that believe in targeted messaging
Which ensures that when people who’ve read that content become customers they stick around for a long time - because they’ve already bought into the philosophy behind the product.
And having seen the demand for those articles is why we went on to write and publish Intercom on Customer Engagement - a book that’s been downloaded 10s of 1,000s of times.
Terrible paraphrasing of Peter Drucker
Growing page views is important because it means you’re growing the top of the funnel - you’re attracting more potential customers. But become too focused on pageviews and the temptation will be to create clickbait - which is only a valid strategy if your selling ads. Not content marketing - publishing.
Search is huge - particularly now that social traffic is so problematic - but I think we can all spot a site that’s been overly optimised - looks great, seems to answer your need, but afterwards you’re left feeling hungry for more - that’s why we call it Happy Meal content
And then there’s leads which you can pass on to your sales team. The traditional approach is to have gated content but over-index for lead generation and you find yourself putting spreadsheet templates and other low value content, behind a form with endless fields where you ask for their mother’s maiden name, their bank account and their telex no. No one likes that.
Which brings me to my next lesson.
???
That works great for startups, I hear you say, where there’s definitely a culture of sharing information. but even if you’re running a hotel, there’s things you know about your industry - like the best time to check in or tips for a better stay - that you can turn into content that can make you stand out from the competition.
Back in the day it’s fair to say we were all about the pageviews. Like all startups Intercom began publishing content as a way to attract an audience who might be in the market for our product - so it was all about growing the readership really. This is the blog back in 2014
It was generating maybe 60-70,000 page views a month - because we weren’t trying to be over self promotional and were instead sharing things that would be of interest to our target market.
But thinking like this is core to how we made publishing not just one of the main sources of leads for Intercom's business but the customers we attract through our content are the most loyal and often the most valuable.
What's really interesting was that they'd got there without any formal sales or marketing. For the first 2.5 years Intercom didn't have anyone on staff who's job title suggested they were going to try and get people to buy the product.
But here’s the big caveat. There was a reason the previous slide talked about sharing your organisation’s knowledge. Because as I learned the hard way customers don’t care what people in marketing think.
I learned that the hard way. My own background was as a journalist - I covered the tech industry for a long time for people like The Irish Times. Intercom was my first marketing job, my first job in the tech industry.
So three months in I'm sitting in front of a MacBook in a room full of super-smart engineers, designers, pro suffering from the worst case of imposter syndrome anyone's ever experienced. But realising you are not the smartest person in the room also has value.
As marketers we have other skills. Customers want to hear from the people who have the deep domain knowledge - and I really believe this applies in B2C as much as B2B.
At Intercom that also meant that the value of publishing was being hammered home by the people at the top. They weren't just saying we need to do content - and we've all heard CEOs say we need to "do content" - does that phrase drive everyone else made when they hear it "do content"? No this came from the top - they weren't expecting others to do iy, they were creating it themselves, and clearly understood the value in doing so.
Des wrote 93 of our first 100 blog posts.
There's a dirty secret about publishing and content in general. Actually I'm not sure it's a secret. But getting your stuff out there into the hands/eyes/earbuds of other people is a buzz.
That little ego boost is of course caused by the release of Dopamine in the brain and can be effectively harnessed if you want people in your organisation to start contributing content.
How much traffic a post has got?
Who shared it? Anyone “famous”?
Where is it being discussed?
Leaderboards for the month/quarter
Call out rivalries
Make sure everyone has a good experience
Project Dopamine
But just don’t get carried away chasing pageviews. The game is not about producing popular content - it also has to attract people who are in your target market.
Zendesk example
This is a trend I've seen a lot in the last 2 years. This idea that just because you produce popular content
Not just realistic but one that's going to have the maximum impact. Coming straight from working on a daily newspaper I was as guilty of this as anyone
One article/podcast/video a week for 12 weeks will have far more impact and generate a lot more traffic than 3 videos a week for 4 weeks - and it's the same if not less effort.
Pretty early on Des did something else that put a huge discipline on himself and the rest of the company which didn't seem obvious at the time.
RSS feed to newsletter. Enforced a regular cadence
The tools to create content are so cheap now - you can started for free right? Well, if you believe your time is free go for it. But personally I have a mortgage and kids so I don’t work for free.
Content is not something that you should be doing in your spare time when the "real work" is done. If you're going to do this as a marketing tactic you have to resource it and invest in it the same way you do anything else in your business. At Intercom that meant people actually added creating blog posts to their personal and team goals.
Well I was amazed at how many people in the tech industry said to me when I was joining Intercom, "How do you guys find the time to create such amazing content?". Actually the exact same place we find the time to write code, design the product, invoice our customers etc.
This one often gets misunderstood - having an opinion doesn’t mean that you are angry or contrarian.
But it does mean you’re not creating saccharine content that everyone in your industry agrees with and which can be read in a 100 other places.
Geoffrey, one of the editors on the content team, loves to share this graph. It’s pretty self-explanatory. But the point I’d stress to you is, if you are not creating quality content you’re not going to get the opportunity to sell, to include those Calls To Action so move on to some other tactic.
Second last lesson last lesson -
What if I tole you, you can generate up to one third extra traffic for the same amount of work by focussing on timeless, evergreen content
How many of you have heard of the concept of Evergreen content? It’s the reason we don’t put any dates on articles. That was a very deliberate decision.
Timeless themes - “How to file a good bug”
That advice is valid months and even years from now.
Unlike any other form of marketing - which eventually start to deliver diminishing returns
Tomasz Tunguz ran the numbers to prove this.
100 views for each blog first day.
Then something interesting happens…
Evergreen blog grows faster - because posts “decay” more slowly. Believe me - I’ve seen what happens to stories in the archive at major national publishers
Evergreen blog gets bigger - after a year - 3x the audience because older posts still performing
Easier to manage - not running a news operation. Focusing on what you know. We’re able to use a Trello board for our editorial calendar.
While I didn't have a deep appreciation of podcasts I knew the following
- People listen to them on commutes - average commute time in cities like Dublin and San Francisco about 30 minutes. Nobody wants 180 minutes of unstructured chat - especially not for work.
- Intercom the product is all about conversations with your customers and potential customers. Which gave us a real nice format for the podcast - let's just record conversations with people we admire in the industry.
- We pride ourself on producing high quality blog articles - well written, relatively few typos, original images not cliched stock photos. So we knew we were going to have to produce something that sounded good.
So what did we do? We started with a cupcake...
What? The idea of a cupcake is something Des, our co-founder came up with in a post he wrote a couple of years back. As you can see from this image, you have a few options if you want to make a wedding cake. You can try to perfect cake bases, then move on to filling, and as the wedding approaches you're working on icing. But the big day is 2 weeks away and you still haven't got feedback on a cake. That's a bit risky.
So instead, why not start with a cupcake - find out if pistachio and strawberry work as flavours together, see if there's hotspots in your oven - but most importantly get some feedback from people tasting the cupcakes.
We decided we would invest a modest amount - it was less than €2,000 - and produce 10 episodes. If the feedback was positive we'd invest more.
So we hustled and pulled favours and managed to get our first episode out - I was still the entire content team at this stage. And I was pretty proud of it. Sounded good. Seemed on brand. For all of about 30 minutes I was pretty pleased.
Then literally in the time it took to listen to our podcast, Slack, you’ve probably heard of them - you know the only B2B software product that people talk about at dinner parties - grown like a weed the last few years, dropped this 😱
Well, sadly I don’t think there aren’t any shortcuts here BUT I do think if you’re serious about content, especially in a B2B setting, you do have to figure out how to turn it into leads at some point. Here’s how we did it?
Books are where we square the circle so to speak
Long form content is where we are happy to ask for an email address
Because we think it’s a more than fair exchange - each of these can take up to 3 months to produce with input from multiple people - writers, editors, designers, illustrators.
And as I pointed out at the start - these are on topics that are going to attract relevant customers
If you don’t value what you’re creating neither will your readers
Eoghan - our CEO - really supports us producing high quality content like this - although he did say this 10 minutes before we launched our first book so there was a bit of a scramble to re-write copy
The other thing we learnt the hard way is that you have to give people choices. You’ll be amazed what you can get people to do online – if they don’t feel forced into it. We tried to force a bit of viral sharing for one of our books - just say it out loud - and it backfired. Now we give options - buy a print book, share with a friend and get a free one, or donate to charity and no sharing.
Lead attribution models are generally reward getting a business email address and either the first or last interaction with your marketing funnel. But content doesn’t really work that way.
How many people have junk email addresses they sign up to everything with? And content can be a long game - customer at a conference reading our content for 2 years but recently changed job and was implementing it.
Customers who visit marketing site and then blog - 4 x more valuable than those who just visit the marketing site
So I know you can’t really work a 2 year lead time into your marketing plan for the year, so here’s a few tips for warming up leads
Don’t assume people know or care who you are - your jumping into their inbox so always good to remind them why you thought your invited
Post GDPR assume I don’t have to say this but really if someone hasn’t bit after a few months do you really want to keep chasing them - all your doing is lowering your reputation as an email sender
Not everyone is ready to buy straight away so keep them warm with similar content
And my favourite - consider putting the important stuff in the postscript - you may have heard this before but really do skip to there.
And
So I’d like to wrap up by reminding you of the reasons why you might want to approach publishing for your brand or clients in this way
At the risk of sounding like Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross the number one reason you should be publishing content of any kind is to sell your product or service. This mightn't be a popular view with journalists but I think one of the reasons the media is in such a bad state is that they have lost sight of the fact that they are a business just like any other one.
I used to write and edit interesting things so people would buy a newspaper, or maybe a subscription to a digital edition. Now I’m writing and editing interesting things so that people will buy software.
Simon Sinek’s video has of course been viewed a gazillion times on YouTube, but he’s right - people are interested in the why of what you’re selling not the how or the what.
Content gives you the space to express that.
This one was a real revelation to me but there are people working at Intercom today – from the most senior to the most junior – who decided they want to come and work at the company because of something they read on our blog. One of our most senior designers decided to up sticks in Latvia and come to Dublin to work for us after he read a post where we talked
We're hiring on my team right now - SEO/Inbound Marketing Manager actually
Keeps employees engaged
Branding is a much abused term. Don't get me wrong - I totally believe in the value of branding to a business. It just seems that if someone drops a load of money on a tactic and it doesn't work, it gets described as "branding". You know "$10,000 on Twitter ads and we only signed up 2 customers, but don't worry it was great branding" - that kind of thing.
So I'm a bit reluctant to say that producing content is in some nebulous way "good for our brand". But it is. For us content is a classic top of the funnel tactic - attracting new readers and listeners every day who have never heard of Intercom before.
And there are all sorts of other “unintended consequences” of publishing that you might not expect
Like the fact that you might get asked to talk to a room full of marketers on a Thursday afternoon in Dublin :-)
I hope I’ve convinced you that Great Content is Great Marketing.
Party tomorrow night
