Veracode's 5 Best Practices for Developing Content that Drives Results

Editor's Notes

• #3: C4D Our goal is to make this a true marketing case study and showcase Veracode’s content marketing strategy as a best practice and model for all of you to apply, but before I pass it over to Jessica I want to quickly explain who Content4Demand is and how we partner with our clients.
• #4: Jessica But first let me tell you a little bit about myself – which may be the most uninteresting part of the presentation ;) The majority of my background is in corporate communications and public relations for technology companies. After managing Corp Comm at Veracode for 2 years I shifted direction to be part of the demand generation team. So while my background is unique I think it is ideal for content marketing as content sits between these two worlds. We came at content marketing from a narrow
• #5: Jessica
• #6: Jessica or C4D
• #7: C4D
• #8: C4D – There’s been a consistent buzz in the B2B marketing world that buyers are overwhelmed with the amount of content available and I agree with that wholeheartedly, but despite that the reality is that B2B buyers still HEAVILY rely on content. 97% of marketers are saying they want the same amount or MORE content to help them make their business decisions.
• #9: C4D – what’s changing is
• #10: C4D – what recommendations would you make to improve the quality of the content created/provided by B2B vendors. Buyers don’t want the content you produce to be all about you and your products. They need it to be about them, their pain points and the information they need to justify a buying decision. This can’t be done without a solid understanding of who your buyers are and what motivates them.
• #11: C4D – How many of us in the room are honest asking ourselves if we should create perscritptive, predictive or conversational content when we are planning a campaign. We really should be. Veracode’s marketing leadership has a philospophy of Don’t talk at your audience, talk with them. Veracode is doing nice job of using combinations of content (benchmarketing and conversational contetnt) that has been proven to resonate with their target audience. The reality is this kind of a question should be one of the starting points for campaign development and the answers are found in your buyer personas and buyer or campaign messaging requirements.
• #12: C4D – I’m guessing a lot more of us start a content project here. “I’ll create an infographic.” It might tell your story well, but is the format you chosen what your buyer’s need? What are your buyer’s format preferences, where are their content watering holes and more importantly how does that vary across their buying stages? The reality is you need a strategic mix of formats that are proven to convert with your audience at the various stages of their buyers journey. Blogs are an overlooked category These are all questions we need to continue to ask ourselves before we can truly take up the name of a “buyer-focused” marketer.
• #13: C4D – To flip the lens a little bit and talk about the changes that we marketers are going through…We know that campaign and content measurement continues to climb up as a top priority for B2B marketers
• #14: C4D – However, only 46% of marketers are actively measuring campaign effectiveness.
• #15: C4D – I’d be willing to wager that a lot of us in the room are starting to see changes in the marketing scorecards our organizations develop. Long gone are the days where we could simply tout an open rate and volume of leads generated. We’ve seen a lot of organizations rebrand marketing as a revenue generating department. An exciting, yet challenging concept.
• #16: C4D – Finally, I wanted to leave you with some of the 2017 demand gen priorities of your peers. A lot of these same priorities and themes you’ll see touched on heavily in Jessica’s case study: 1) the importance of measurement, and how you improve conversion rates and lead quality over quantity through the creation of buyer-focused campaigns and breaking down the silos in marketing.
• #17: DANA
• #18: Our marketing programs team has a set of 5 core campaigns, and our content marketing program was designed to support these campaigns by creating content that could be used for demand generation. These campaigns are persona based, focusing on the AppSec Managers, Software Developers, and Customers – and as a result our content was also persona based. Our Mission was to create content that was both educational as well as informative enough that in some cases people would give up their name and email address (gasp) to get the content. To do this we created a variety of heavy and light content that was then used by our campaign and demand generation teams for webinars and other activities. And our goal was to be collaborative and to not create content in a vacuum. This was our second attempt at a content process and the original process was not exactly collaborative. It was basically me and one other person coming up with ideas and then writing. I mean the content was stellar, but it wasn’t the best way to be part of what I call the marketing web.
• #19: It was a three step process. In the first step the content team would use the messaging briefs created by the campaigns team to create a proposed flow of content for the next month.
• #20: In step two we would get together with the campaigns team to present our content plan and make changes. The idea was to make changes based on feedback, but ultimately that did not happen.
• #21: The final step was communicating the content plan and timeline to the entire team by putting in JIRA tickets for the work that needed to be done. We’d also share a spreadsheet of content that included when each piece would publish. It was a flawless plan that included every member of the marketing team. – or so we thought. More on that in a moment.
• #22: This is an example of a content map. We still use this template today and it helps us understand how content flows together for each campaign. It starts with the convert content – this is the piece that will be gated and used for demand generation purposes. It could be research, it could be a guidebook or even an analyst report we purchased. To drive this content we created a series of awareness based content that was used to attract and engage the audience. This content would have a call to action to the gated content. The exclusive content is where this plan deviated from the traditional model. We then created content that was given to our BDRs to use when following up with a lead that downloaded the gated content. They only way a prospect could get this content was from the BDR so this created a valuable touchpoint for the BDR. Step four of course was creating the content and we did that with a combination of in house writers/content marketers and by working with Content4Demand.
• #23: For example: C4D helped create an infographic that lead to…
• #24: Lead to
• #25: And then BDRs could follow up with…
• #26: This was all working out. TO the best of our reporting, in 2016 our content touched 462 accounts, helped generate $64 million in opportunities and was a part of 178 closed won deals.
• #27: We were also able to increase the number of our by 624%. To be fair and honest, we started with a really low number – but I’ll take the victory.
• #28: Once we got to step three, it was sort of like we let our content spread its wings and fly. It was on its own to make it in the cold, cruel world. We knew how we intended it to be used. We nurtured it, created it with our partners like Vervaine Design or with Content4Demand and wrote blogs, but we had no control or idea how it would be used. We’d have content that we created ourselves or with our partners that we knew was strong, but wasn’t getting the results we expected. When we measured the success of a piece of content compared to other content we created the comparison wasn’t apples to apples. This is because some content was promoted heavily by social media, PR, demand generation and nurture programs while others maybe got one tweet. We were creating content that wasn’t being used. It flew away and then perched on our blog or resources section and if we were lucky someone would stumble upon it. Once the content was done, there were a couple of cases (especially with the interactive content C4D helped us created) where the ops team needed additional information on how to publish on our website. We also had some trouble tracking and integrating with our sales systems. (SV: Jessica, can you rephrase it so interactive content doesn’t sound so difficult)
• #29: It’s not typical for Marketers to look at Software Development and say – YES! That’s the way I’m going to do it. However, in the case of DevOps it made a lot of sense. You see, Veracode provides software security tools that find vulnerabilities – the bugs hackers use to infiltrate software –in the software developers are building. Because developers use our software, a lot of the content we were writing was about this new trend in software development called DevOps and how security could become part of the DevOps process. This meant our content team was familiar with the subject matter. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but simply put – DevOps is a process of producing software that brings software development teams and software operations teams together. The idea is that software was once developed and handed over to the ops team to run and mange. It was developed without consideration for how it would be deployed or operated. In DevOps you have a continuous loop of planning that is more collaborative. And this is the model we wished to emulate.
• #30: So, if you look at marketing and break up the teams the way we break up a software development team you have Architecture – Campaign Team Development – content team Operations – PR, Social Media, Demand Generation, Nurture This thinking changed our planning process slightly.
• #31: We started by identifying the main themes for each piece of content. Each campaign had 3 to 4 main themes which then had 4-5 main stories. These stories are what our content topics would be focused on. So for example, one of our new campaigns for 2017 was to “to lead transformation of application security” basically thought leadership.
• #32: Once we had those all mapped out with the campaign managers we then set up a series of what I called our MarketingDevOps meetings. And though our content maps were meant for each quarter we meet monthly. We start by discussing the next quarters content theme and from there the content map/timeline. Then we go over how the content will be used for PR, social, demand gen and nurture programs. Once we have that information our marketing ops team let’s us know what information and resources they need to get the content posted on time. It is at this time we would discuss any changes to topics, format etc. For example, there have been instances when we planned for a blog post but our PR manager asked that we hold off publishing because the content would make for great contributed article and she wanted to pitch it out first.
• #33: Jessica We had a large reduction in wasted time and resources. We know the content we are producing will be used, and exactly how it will be used. Through the use of a tool called GaggleAMP we are promoting our content and extending our social reach. But because the social team knows what is coming they can be more strategic about how and when they promote content BDR team is using it more often – but this is difficult to track. We had to become comfortable with the fact that some things just can’t be tracked. And that our conversations with the BDR teams during the planning phases made us comfortable with the assumption that it was being used. What we can see is that we went from 50% of the content we created being downloaded from our internal site to 70%. Another example of that is how we promote awareness content. We can’t accurately track how that contributes to form fills.
• #34: By the end of February we were already well on track to exceed our even higher content goals.
• #35: Clearly. we have reached Content Marketing and collaboration Nirvana. And we have nothing more to learn or improve upon. Seriously though, there are areas in which we can improve. For example, making sure to include perspectives from across the pond on topics and content usage. Meeting our tight deadlines, and better tracking how the BDR team uses the exclusive content. This is still tracked anecdotally so we don’t really know what is working.
• #36: C4D – So there are way more than 5 best practices to take away from what Jessica has just shared, but as one of their content partners, we did want to underscore the top 5 lessons for all marketers to take away. So I’ll walk through those quickly now before Jessica wraps up with her case study application of the story and framework she just shared.
• #37: C4D – Jessica mentioned it at the beginning of her presentation--Veracode is successful at creating buyer-focused content because they took the time to craft buyer personas and use those as the foundation for all content pieces and campaigns. Even better, using the DevOps methodology has helped them take steps to operationalize and share those personas for the various teams across marketing and sales.
• #38: C4D – Having worked with a variety of different B2B organizations we know it’s easy to start creating content for content’s sake. And Jessica just shared a fantastic framework for how they avoid doing that and ensure they are creating content with a purpose. The best practice lies in not only how Veracode shares and gates content to move leads through the pipeline, but how each piece of content is created with that specific goal in mind.
• #39: C4D – Jessica did a fantastic job of sharing how critical measurement is to her process. And she also highlighted how easy it is to fall into the trap of inconsistent and generalized content/campaign measurement. As marketers we need to decide in advance of a content or campaign launch what the KPIs are relative to the format and goal of your content piece or campaign. Interactive formats in particular are rich with data insight on not only engagement and usage, but can be set-up to track attribution and pipeline contribution.
• #40: C4D – There’s been a lot of talk in the last decade about breaking down departmental silos. A lot of that discussion has been around marketing and sales. However, I think Veracode presents and solid application of how and why those barriers need to be broken down even with in the marketing department itself.
• #41: C4D – Finally, that inspiration for improvement can come from any where and and we as marketers have to avoid getting stuck in our ways—even when things are working well. We must push ourselves to learn new tactics and try new frameworks. Veracode’s application of the DevOps process to their marketing philosophy is an awesome example and we all need to keep our eyes and minds open to similar ideas and inspiration.
• #42: What is the SoSS report explanation. This was back at the end of 2016 but it was the pilot for our DevOps process. We used one piece of content that ran across all our campaigns.
• #43: We are did more with our most recent SoSS report his year than any other year. To start, we spent a considerable amount of time planning out the content. We used to come at the content from the direction of – what data do we have. This year we came at it from the direction of, what themes to we want to explore and that is how we went through the architecture phase. For this phase we also we worked with the campaigns team to talk about what content would be produced For the developer pulled and analyzed the data and then worked with C4D to develop the content and a series of infographics. Then we created a schedule of supporting content and worked with the “operations team” to determine what the PR stories were, and what press releases we would issue and how we would promote the report and this other content.
• #49: Leads from SoSS – 1,014 Number of Opportunities – 40 Jessica to add anecdotes about trending up over last year’s performance
• #50: 1 – the more people involved the better the outcome 2 – Questions make people think – by asking the right questions you are forcing people to be more involved in the process 3- you are not an artist and this is not your art. Work with the teams and you will see better results. - DevOps at its core goes beyond collaboration, the concept of is continuous improvement and deployment. You don’t have to be perfect now.
• #51: C4D—thank Jessica for participation and sharing Veracode’s story, recap the best practices and segue to A&A