Bottom-of-Funnel First: The Smarter Content Strategy with Selma Chauvin

00:03 Hello and welcome to another episode of marketing for marketers. The series where we interview some of the brightest minds marketing to unpack the strategies that actually drive pipeline. Now my guest today is Selma Chauvin, a marketing and growth leader known for flipping the traditional content model on its head, starting with bottom of the funnel signals. Selma helps team scale smarter by focusing on what their buyers actually want, not just what looks good on the content calendar. So Selma welcome.

00:29 I'm quite interested to chat about bottom of funnel because we're going through a bit of a bottom of funnel sprint, let's say at the minute. So I'm excited to chat, learn and take away some of the learnings and start working on them tomorrow, basically. Thank you for having me and I hope it will be useful for you too then. I'm sure it will based on the questions that we've got lined up. I'm sure it will be very, very useful. So I'd imagine everyone watching or listening knows what bottom of funnel is, but let's start with an obvious question. What does it mean to build?

00:59 a strategy from bottom of the funnel up. Traditionally, what you would do as a marketing person is that you try to build an audience. So you will take a pain, then you will go from all the way from telling what the pain is about, educating people on this pain, explaining why they need the solution and why the best solution is yours. That sounds pretty familiar. What I suggest to do is the opposite, to talk first to people that already know they have a pain, already are looking for a solution and try to solve that problem.

01:27 and then go and reverse the funnel and build content one step at a time. We believe that no one is ready to buy our solution yet. The truth is usually on a specific market, there are already people that know, they have a plan, they haven't waited for you to know that. And they can even be more specific than whatever you could say and tell. So let me tell you a story that is once you join a company, they expect results to come soon. If you tell them, I will need three months to build an audience, start shooting them in.

01:56 and maybe in three months you'll start to see results in your pipeline, I hope your probation period is longer than that. Let's say that this way. What I recommend the opposite way is to show results since day one. If you start by producing really bottom of a funnel pieces of content, shooting them to people, if you start to have that discussion, you will still figure out that some people are ready to buy. And that will help you with two things. First of all, you will first bring customers in.

02:24 So that will help people to think that what you're saying is true. And the other thing is that you will also try your ideas. Think about that. You have built that whole educational material, you've built that whole funnel up. And at the end, three months after, you realize that you don't have any leads coming in or you don't have any new customers running in because the pain you were trying to solve was pretty optional for your target at the end.

02:48 I guess it's pretty well known the 95-5 rule. So 5 % of your market are in market at any one time, give or take, leaving 95 % of people who either are unaware or just not ready to buy. So what you're saying is by focusing on the 5%, you're going to have quicker results and it's going to buy you time to then move up the funnel as you progress. Yeah. And another thing is that, think about that. Tomorrow you're sick.

03:18 You can't produce a piece of content that comes next in your natural program. So there is a gap there and people are stuck in the funnel with you. If you do it the other way around, you already have the next piece ready. Every time you produce something new, you have something else to send them to after that piece of content or after that message. And again, you might think you need 10 new customers this year or 100, but you don't know. Think about it. For example, you need 100 new customers this year. Let's make it simple. With that first pain point, with that first bottom of a funnel piece of content for that pain point,

03:48 you already observed that 20 % are already interested in. And then you can think about, should I go up and educate people more on that pain because I see that's something that is super important because a lot of people are already ready to buy? Or would you be like, okay, that's enough on that pain because I'm pretty sure that no one else has that pain, I move on to another one and I will do the same approach again. After six months, do you think you will have better results by eating these 5 % on three or four different pains?

04:15 Or do you think you will have better results by building an entire funnel? I don't have the answer for you because that's going to really depend on your market, your pains, how educated your target is, but you have to give it a try. And you won't know if you do that the other way around. Okay. So you spoke about building the 5%. So give us some examples of what a mature bottom of the funnel build looks like. So I will tell you a story of what happened when I joined my last company that works for you.

04:45 So when I joined there, I was the first marketing person and I had to build a team while showing up results. Because of course they were not giving me money as any startup. They would don't give money if they don't show the results. So you have to prove first and hire them. What happened there is that I had no idea what channels would work, what messaging would work because I was pretty new and that there was no marketing before. So what I've done was like, okay, I'm building five acquisition funnels. That's all. So five different tactics. I will use three messages.

05:14 and I will use them on these five tactics and see what works. So in parallel, I defined three, I would say, pain pillars. And again, we know that everybody in the B2B world, or even the B2C world that is ready to buy a solution, has a pain that falls into one of these three categories. Or they have a productivity issue, error issue, not enough time, whatever you want to put in. Or they have a people issue, collaboration, relationship with customers, churn, whatever you want falls into that category. Or they want to be ready for the future.

05:43 For example, they know AI will be a big thing, so they want to be part of that. No matter what you do, it always falls in. So the easiest is to pick one of the pain you think people might have in all of these categories. And when I say think, it's ask your sales rep what the people tell them in the meeting. And if you are lucky enough, take a tool that will help you to record these meetings and listen to that and analyze them. Once you have these pains, then you try them on the different channels that you've built. For example, events.

06:11 digital paid on Google, example, whatever, pick three or four of them. And then do a really specific piece of content that will be a trigger. What I used to do was our solution in an Excel spreadsheet. For example, you are a solution that is selling, I don't know, solution for finance teams. Provide them a finance report in an Excel spreadsheet that will have the main capabilities that your solution will provide. Why would you do so?

06:39 Because first of all, if they use your document, they don't have a solution yet. And second, they will be used to use that document in the way you want them to shape up their mind when it will come time to buy your solution. Because they will already be used to the same column and the same information put in. If you put that as a piece of content and have your sales rep calling right after, that works. Because they have a pain. They are trying to solve the pain in a way that is not the best way possible.

07:07 But that is the exact target that you're ready to buy.

07:11 That helps. Okay. Can you give us, I'm thinking from a content point of view, give us some example titles of pieces. That's probably one of the easiest ways for people to contextualize what we're talking about. So it could be, example, you reporting dashboard, or it could be, that is if you have a productivity issue, it could be a document that will be an Excel spreadsheet on, you know, automating the way you get your data in.

07:41 Again, reporting is an easy to go thing, usually. So it could be you report for that. Another thing could be, again, AI thinking, your script, your prompt to have this data. Another example could be, I don't know, what are, a competitive analysis of what are, these are the five tools that are leading that market. If you have a problem, you have to buy one of them. Of course, you're this first.

08:10 And you know how to rank them based on what your strengths and your weaknesses are. But that's it. This type of content, something immediately actionable, something that's for the person that will use it at the end. And that really shows that they are not equipped. Now I was going to ask where is the best place to start for a marketer, but I think you touched on it. Would you say the best place to start is by speaking to sales? Yes, because they know. And that's an issue that I see a lot in the marketing words that we think we know.

08:38 because we're in charge of product marketing. So of course we build it. So we know, they have. But there is a secondary pain that we haven't observed that is actually going big and going fast. So the best way is, again, if you don't want to join sales calls because you're not familiar with that, just listen to the recordings. And that is useful. So what we do here is that we do analysis. So basically we try to pick what are the keywords that are said during most of the conversations. And that helps us to design the pain that

09:08 we can observe the real ones. Obviously with all of the AI fashion fad craze that's going on at the minute, I've seen some interesting agent ideas and one of them we're actually exploring at the minute in that we're at the briefing stage and the scoping stage for it where we basically build a agent that is able to digest all of the sales called transcripts that are going on. And then it will do a deep analysis and basically give us blog topic ideas that fall into one of

09:38 10 like pain point categories or something. And then each, I think we're going to do it bi-weekly. It will send us a report just saying based on your site map and the current gaps, this is what we think you should write next. And we're going to test that out, which we think would be interesting until obviously we've exhausted bottom of the funnel. And maybe we'll do an agent that focuses on middle of funnel. Have you had any experience using an AI agent to do the same thing that you're talking about? Yeah, we've done the same thing here in my current company.

10:08 to build the positioning and these pillars and so the main paint we wanted to focus on. And we also use that to identify if they were like tendencies, know, like patterns we could see. For example, is a vertical always having the same issue? Do we see differences? If we can bucket them per vertical, can we also bucket them by job title, for example? Does everyone with the same job title have the same issue?

10:31 But what AI doesn't do and what I recommend to do on the top is to do that also internal discovery that is asking your product guys and your exec and your sales reps what they think the bans are and compare the answers. Because it's kind of a self-predictory thing that is if the sales rep is not asking the question well enough, you don't have the answer in the call. So it's also understand to understand bias that they're using to grab information.

10:55 I might have to, we'll have to pick it up offline, but I might have to take a look at your agent and how you've built it or at least the way in which it's structured. Cause yeah, we're going through, I said, we're going through that like ideation briefing stage of the minute of how we believe it will work, what tools we'll use for it. Um, and then I'm sure at some point there'll be a few days spent on refining the prompt and what it is. So we'll have to catch up offline about that. um, with this bottom of funnel content, what mistakes do you.

11:23 see quite a lot where is it that they move out of bottom of funnel too quickly? Is it that they do too much of the same? What sort of mistakes do you see? The first one is that some people do not understand what bottom of funnel means. They think that because it's product related, it's bottom of

11:42 And you have to explain that it's really that concept of it's something that is actionable right now, or that will give them the will to enter into a sales discussion right after digesting that piece of content. And it's not that easy for people to understand that concept. It's a product sheet. It's enough. Not quite after reading a product sheet, do you want to join the discussion with the sales rep? You might miss one additional step there. So that was the main thing I would say. The other one is...

12:10 Again, people tend to be perfectionists and that's a nightmare. And that's a really marketing thing. is you want your campaign to look good on the slide. So you want to show that you put a lot of efforts in and that it's perfect. You have 10 steps in and so on. Whether the thing is iterate quickly, build something super scrappy. Try it. See if it works. Do you see traction? Yes. Build another one that looks kind of similar. See the traction remains. Build another one. Whether they want to stick to the plan and build something perfect. They have

12:40 design from day one, whether you should just think about this is what I need to produce on day one and then I will see what I will produce next based on the results of this one. It's not that simple at that because again, you also have to plan, but your plan has to give you enough flexibility to change your mind anytime without affecting performance. And that's not that easy. Interesting. Okay. My mind's going. That's why I've got like a thinking face on. So how do you...

13:09 You kind of touched on it in terms of the signals you're looking for in terms of doubling down on content that you believe is working. can you walk us through how you would determine what your market actually wants to consume? So I would say first, don't try to complex. Just go and look what works for competition. It's super easy to see what content was promoted twice on their LinkedIn account, for example. Use your social listening skills for that because

13:35 Traditionally, what you try first is what doesn't cost a lot of money. So they will try first on social media, for example, analyze that, see what they push, see what they push more than once. That means it works for them. So start with that. So it works for you too. And once you've done that, you are able to understand why it works for you, what discussions you have based on that. And so what you have to build next. Now in terms of shaping the content roadmap. So let's assume we've already done the first three, six months of new enroll.

14:05 How do you then use sales with an ongoing feedback loop to shape the roadmap? So basically, it depends on what conversion number you want to work on. It's not especially a sales issue sometimes, because actually what you have to do is have a look at your conversion funnel and see what conversion rate is different from standards. For example, if your issue is between an SAL and SQL stage. So basically, you're able to take a lot of meetings, but they do not convert into opportunities.

14:36 Your issue will be super different that if you don't convert from MQL to Medix, meaning that you might not attract the right type of persons. So first of all, understand why and what is the exact problem in your funnel. So again, the conversion rate you want to change. And then ask questions based on that conversion rate only. Because what you do if you go to sales, they will always say, oh, no, I don't know. The main issues are super basic. So they will just quote that. Or they will just say, no, the leads were not good quality.

15:03 But if you ask them super specifically, is, what in your mind, why do you think these meetings do not convert into opportunities? Or they're not mature enough, so we grab them too early in the funnel. Or they're not just the right type of people, so you think that our solutions won't fit their needs, so maybe we need to rewrite the copy. You know, that's the same question, but at the end, you might have three or four different answers and so three or four different ways to shape the content. But you really have to focus your question on the exact stage you want to solve.

15:33 In terms of, we spoke about measuring showing impact in that first few months, which is often one of the, I guess, highest pressure periods of time, especially if you're the first marketer, like you said. So how do you go about connecting bottom of funnel content to pipeline performance? Like what does your attribution or reporting look like? So it's a usual conversion funnel that is, I don't know, for example, you want to achieve one million of revenue.

16:00 this is the amount of opportunities you might need and the value per opportunity that you might need. And this is the only metric that I do really pay attention to. And then the rest is like, I do the way I want to ensure that this is achieved. And the way I do that internally is to spot again, where would I get more opportunities with the less amount of efforts tomorrow, next month, and also next year? Because again, you all know that at...

16:27 At point in time, what you do is not working anymore, but it's time for you to shift your mind. You're wasting a few months. So what I do there is that I use a metric that is called the cost of an additional lead or the cost of an additional opportunity. Usually when you use a tactic, you do your math by doing what is the average. For example, I don't know the average CPL, the average cost for opportunity, whatever. What I do is what is the cost of the extra opportunity that I put on the top? And once this cost is too high,

16:56 then I know that I have to change and move to new tactic or to a new pain and start to build a funnel again. In a previous company, so again, when I joined, marketing was originating maybe 20%, like the website and demo requests that was generating maybe 20 % of pipeline. And a year after, my team, so I had a team with them, was generating 80 % of the pipeline. And we've done that by that exact tactic. That is, okay, if we want to reach that amount of money, where should the opportunities come from?

17:25 We try with the pain, we push that pain as much as we can. Once we have that type of person in the market that's ready to buy, we're like, okay, how hard was that to attract these people? How expensive it is at the end of the test? If it's too expensive already, we know that when we go through education, that will be a pain. So we move on to another topic. If we realize that it's kind of easy to attract these people and that again, we think education is not that hard, we continue and build the the wall funnel up.

17:52 That's what we don't, for example, identify that productivity is always an issue in the SaaS industry. That's always an issue that works all the time. So we took the time to build that whole funnel up for the other ones. Basic campaigns, basic bottom of funnel campaigns were enough to compliment the amount of opportunities I was needing to achieve the goal for the year. So that's how we done. So tell me more about the cost of additional lead. how

18:19 When, how are you giving an accurate cost specifically to that problem that you're focusing on? So again, we have to keep it simple. So of course that won't be perfect. Of course you can raise lots of questions, but it's okay. So again, do the basic math, my budget divided by the amount of opportunities I need to have in, or the amount of pipeline or whatever metric you want that is super business related. That gives you the money you can spend to grab one opportunity.

18:46 If you want to be a bit more specific, you get out of your budget, your brand investment, the tools investment, and you just keep your performance, dedicated money, and then you do the math. We don't care. Imagine at the end of the day, you're like, okay, I can spend 1000 euros per opportunity. That's my max. I will test a pain and a tactic. For example, I will test real search on productivity and try a few pieces of content that are super bottom-up funnel. And then I will check, am I able to grab these guys for less than a

19:15 1k per opportunity once the leads go through the funnel. What we observe is that the first ones, it may be 500 euros the opportunities, roughly 50 euros a click or a lead or whatever you want to use as a metric. don't care. Keep that in mind that is how much money do you need to acquire that pipeline. Once this is done and you have the data for the five persons, you're like, how close am I to the 1k? Am I already above that 1k? If you're above that 1k, that means that

19:44 tactic and the pain don't work together. And then you have to try the other pains with the same tactic and see is that costly for all the pains? So the tactic might not be the right one now at this exact moment, because you can't spend more than one K for opportunity. If tomorrow the company expands or maybe you go up market, maybe the deal will have a lefty that is higher or whatever, then you will be able to go up. But at this specific moment, you can't afford to spend that amount of money. So the tactic is removed.

20:12 Or you might have a tactic that will work well for a pain, but not for another one. And then you keep it, but for that pain only. A good example is that Google search, for example, is often considered as super expensive, but it's expensive because people use that for tons of different topics. It works super well for competitors' campaigns, for example, or for a really again bottom of funnel questions before. So once you know that, you know what tactic and what pain you have to use together to ensure that you get some results.

20:42 Does it help? Yeah, no, it does. Obviously, again, I'm processing in the background. So the bit I'm failing to connect is that how are you just saying, right, sir, we're to focus on this pain point for however long. There's no sort of deadline on it or there's no campaign start and campaign end date. So you're focusing on a problem. You're producing loads of different types of content on that particular problem statement. And then when you talk about the tactics, what do you mean by tactic?

21:12 So it's how you promote. there is a fine promotion, right? Fine. there, because that's the bit I wasn't connecting how you were getting costs, uh, because I was just thinking purely organic, right? So fine. So how are you looking, like, how are you getting the costs specific to that problem? Or are you assuming that the only activity you're working on during that period is one problem? Therefore any cost in that period is just that problem. No, you can track, for example, if you go back to my Google search example, you can have

21:41 campaigns running for one per pane. And so you can compare the cost of all the pain. So all the things you put there are related to one of these pains. And the good thing of that, to go back to your campaigns question before I forget, is that there is no campaign anymore. So you have these pillars, you have to build all the time. The only thing that you don't know yet is how fast you will go and in what order, because you wait for the market to tell you. Because again, you want to go to the most effective first. But at the end of a certain amount of time, let's say a year, for example,

22:10 all your pillars will be completely built because you need all these leads to come in. The only difference by shaping your mind will be that you will get results from day one because you will start with the bottom everywhere. Then you will be like, okay, that's not too expensive. So I have to go more educational to lower that cost. And then you will build that extra layer and the layer above and so on. And after a year, you will have your pillars running and your only work would be to have a look and reshape.

22:38 each other pillar saying that piece of content is not working anymore. There is a major update there. This one, I see a lot of traction. I might do one or two other definitions of that. Maybe I want to have a more specific approach on the vertical and jug one or whatever, because I see that this piece of content is working well. And because of that, there is no such thing as campaigns anymore with a date and an end date. You just have these pillars ever always running. And most of your attention, you know that these campaigns after a year, that's supposed to do 50 % of your targets no matter what. This is how you know that it's successful is that

23:07 Just on its own, 50 % of your goal is reached. So that gives you lot of time to think about more specific campaigns. And that's when you are able to start ABM-oriented campaigns, because you already have your basic content and you know it works. You just have to reshape that for a specific purpose for a specific audience, but you have a strong basis. And that works both ways, that you will be able to try new stuff. When it works, you incorporate that in your pillars. When it doesn't, just throw that to the bin and you start again. And you don't need a super large skill to have that, because at end of the day,

23:37 I'm not sure people do really absorb dozens and dozens of pieces of content. If you have two or three that are really great, that would be enough. Well, yeah, that's interesting you finished on that point there, because I was going to say, what is your advice on quantity versus quality? Because I saw a piece a few years back, maybe a few years, couple of years back when Bundy.com basically hired a hundred plus copywriters, like freelancers, and then they just produced

24:06 like a thousand blogs in a year or something like that. And that was their strategy to just completely dominate search for their particular problems. So what is your advice on quantity versus quality specific to this Bartmah funnel? Like per problem, is it three that you're said three is fine as long as they're good? So I would say it depends. If you're in the blue ocean. So let's say you don't have competition and your goal is to really build

24:36 education on the market. It's worth it to have tons of different pieces of content, even if they're not great. Why? Because actually you need to know what works. And as no one else is doing it, remember what I told you, is that do what competition is doing. What if you don't have competitors or not strong enough competitors? You have to try. So give it a try. Google approach. You test 10 different things and you just keep one at the end. The only one that is working and you throw the other one to the bin. It's okay. So that's what you do first. But that is the Blue Ocean approach. Again, as you said, take it all.

25:06 Because again, it's easier to rank high on SEO, it's easier to get out of traction when you're the first one. But what if you're not? I would go the other way around. That is, if you enter a market where others have already produced content, then people will be able to compare what you do to what others are doing. And what you don't want to see is that people being disappointed by what you do and ending up at another one, like going on another website because they haven't found what they're looking for with you. So then you have to shift your approach.

25:33 And again, that applies at a company scale. That is basically when you're a company and you're bloatian, but it works as well for new products or a new feature or whatever. First of all, do basic content, innovate the market. That's fine. Produce a lot. Once others are coming in, just keep what works. Good advice, good advice. Okay then. So can you give us, you've given some examples without naming any like specific...

26:01 pieces that you did. So are you able to tell us a story about a particular success that you had, your current company, previous company, whichever it is, like paint a picture of exactly how you did it for a particular paint or company. So my previous company maybe, so it was a natural software. And the thing is that we launched a new product that was called the People Review. It was new for us, but it was not new for the other ones.

26:30 I would say people review is basically, you know that right? The moment of the year where you have older people, you define who is the talent, who needs a raise, who you think you should get rid of, all these kinds of stuff. And that's a problem because every HR is trying to do that. It's super fancy for an HR person, but none of them is doing that properly because they don't have the right tools. And even if they do have, it's super complex because you have to put that the same place, training, promotions. don't know, like PIP, performance review plans, whatever.

26:58 And so it's complex to have all the dimensions led by only one team, one H4 team. So we launched a product as anyone else. And what we decided to do is basically to explain how, again, productivity angle, because that was the one that worked the best for us. So basically how you do that. So what we did first is a template. People review template, super scrappy. So the way we were doing that was that there were tabs with all their needs. And the last tab was basically, do you want to upgrade? Go and contact us. We have the same thing, but in a software and super easier to use.

27:28 So we used that. And the fun fact is that we also lost some meetings because people were thinking this is a product. And we were giving that for free because it was really well done. The goal again was to be the intermediate step between having nothing and not being happy with what you have and having a competent solution. So we started with that. We also started by doing some customer interviews. So basically we had customer meetings, 10 of them in a room for half a day talking about what they see, what they paint or because productivity is super vague as a theme.

27:58 And based on that morning, so basically three hours of 10 people speaking together, we build five or six different pieces of content using their exact words and sentences, using their name when they were allowing us to do so, or anonymizing them saying a big actor of the retail industry was saying that. And these pieces of content were really like a pain and how they dealt with the pain and what they would love to do next. And usually that was us. So that template.

28:24 plus these five or six kind of use cases driven by customers by vertical. That was exactly the only thing we use for people review. Three months later, over one deal, over two deals, so half of our deals were including requests for people review. Just with that. And we haven't done much because the whole thing was this was not an easy to go product. So not the product people might start with when you're on a tour team and we add others.

28:53 So we just did that and we had to think about, should we educate people more on that? We were like, no, because at that specific moment, they are already meeting a sales rep. So we don't need to create educational content to get us an appointment with the sales rep. And we created more content for sales rep, like for example, some videos that people could use internally to explain to others what it was all about. See? So again, what that whole strategy is made of is just...

29:19 ensuring that you can save time for what works in the funnel and stop thinking about it from a marketing perspective, a sales perspective is just like, okay, we want to generate as many opportunities as we can and opportunities that we can sign. So what is missing? And at this stage, it wasn't marketing educational content. That was really small pieces of content. Again, one minute video, one minute demo, highlighting something cool as a feature that one of our customers told us that was a really cool feature to show. that's all. Interesting.

29:48 This will be a cheeky question, I guess. Are you able to give us, well, you might not have it to hand, but I'm sure you'll know the answer. Or I don't know, your top three performing content pieces, you don't have to give us the numbers, but your top three best performing bottom of funnel pieces today. So yeah. And I will tell you do that. Like one of the three, it's three different formats. And they would suggest that everyone is doing that. The first one is a prompt. So make it super complex.

30:18 to ensure that people will be happy with the results they get. Pick a pane and do a prompt. The prompt we had was for choosing a new tool. How do I know if my tool is not enough and I have to choose a new tool? That was our prompt. The other one is to use reporting and do an Excel spreadsheet that looks like the reporting feature of your tool. If you don't have that, something that looks as similar as your tool as you can.

30:43 I've seen some companies doing, for example, that were doing market research, for example, they would just be like, put your industry, put your department or put whatever you want, and then we'll give you a snapshot of what's coming. For example, the company that is helping you to find the best salary for some people, it was just like, put your title and we'll give you the salary that we think is useful. So it's a snapshot of your tool. Reporting if you can, or anything that is high volume. So basic analysis.

31:13 basic data that you can use from your customer base, whatever. And so that's one, that's two. And the third one is a use case, but a really specific problem that someone solved and how they solved them. For example, we had, so the one that performed the best was how an HR person solved a data breach issue by using a solution. And they had a data breach because they had like HR documents all over the place and having the tool prevents you from doing so. Are you able to...

31:41 share example links with me after and then we can include that in the description. Yeah, I will. Perfect. Perfect. Okay. Good. Okay. So do you have any stories or history of sales and marketing disagreeing with you on the content priorities? I'm sure you do. Yeah. Especially if you tag your content with bread somewhere in there because you know that again, and that's what I love now in the CRO's revenue.

32:09 and I'm able to bring them all together at the same table because sales want to do the business for next month. But marketing is already thinking about business for next year. And my role is basically to ensure that they speak a common language so we can do both business for next year and next month. And so, yeah, so everything that is considered as brands. For example, if we organize a webinar with a content that will be super educational, is super top of the funnel, I don't know, like why analytics matter for a marketing person. Sales reps will hate that.

32:38 because they would be like, yeah, but what do we do with the leads? And the way I resolved it is to explain to them that this is not for them. These leads are just not for them. And two ways to do so. First of all, that was coring. Everything we do is cored if it's, let's say, top of a funnel, middle of a funnel, bottom of a funnel. And you have different sets of points that you can earn for all of these interactions with all these pieces of content. So if it's super high intents, like for example, close with demo request.

33:08 That goes to sales. That gets a lot of points. That goes directly to sales, super high quality. If it's this kind of webinar, for example, someone who attends this kind of webinar, it doesn't go to sales because there is not enough points in the score to allow them to go through the funnel. But this is marketing material that people can keep growing, actually. So by having the discussion with sales, saying, what do you think you are able to receive leads right after? After this webinar, you don't want leads? OK, we keep them.

33:36 After this demo request, you want the lead? Yes. Okay. That goes to you. And so we basically established standards and thresholds. Above them, they were happy to receive the leads and that helped because then we were able to say, okay, that piece of content that's ready to go for you. This one know that's a marketing one and no issues after that. Yeah. Very good. Very good. Okay. Let's finish off with a piece of advice then. So.

34:03 What advice would you give to a content marketer or a team that's trying to pivot away from top of funnel first thinking, trying to, what advice would you give to a team that are trying to move away from the 95 % or perhaps are questioning why they should move away from the 95 %? One advice would be stop with campaigns. I hate campaigns. You waste three months of your life doing something and you don't even know the results before the end of it.

34:33 If you start thinking into campaigns, but you start thinking into peers, then that sounds more logical. Again, people have pains. They are not sensitive to your topics. Your topic for your campaign is just a way to address a portion of the pain they have. So if you start with them, customers as a center and their pains as a center, then you will shift your mind from, what if I do an amazing, great campaign? From what can I do to solve their problem the fastest and the most effective way?

35:03 I can. And just having that mindset that is, don't create campaigns anymore and I'm happy to work on the content on this topic on Monday, completely different on Tuesday, and maybe change that all on Thursday and pick another one, that changes your mind. But that works only if your managers, your marketing leader, or even your revenue leader is able to shift their mind as well and stop asking about the results for a campaign, but start to speak with you about how do we build a pipeline?

35:31 the most effective and fast way possible. So I would say it's not really marketing thing. It's a revenue thing. One other question. I asked you for sort of three top performance pieces. I guess more recently or current day. What is your best ever performing bottom of funnel piece? I know it would be case by case relative depending on the goals and the revenue at the company, but what sticks, what jumps out in your memory of being

36:00 Either you fail. RFP document. An RFP document pre-filled with all your company's data. That is amazing because the field you choose for that RFP or the fields that you know are beneficial for you. And if you put there some fields that for some pictures that you know competitors don't have. Because RFP documents are terrible to make when you have to send an RFP to your providers, you don't want to do that. So you use templates most of the time or you do a crappy version. To evolve that.

36:28 If you can use an RFP template, first of all, you feel better as a person, you feel relieved, but then the provider was already filled in. First of all, you keep them in the loop because it's already filled in. And second, the way it's shaped will help them to win. So if you can't have that relationship before the RFP, having that piece of content is the closest you can have to ensure that you will win the RFP at the end. How is it prefilled? So for example, you will say...

36:56 Okay, these are the technical requirements. These are, it's always the same, right? These are the different features you would expect to solve this and this issue. This is, for example, we are selling social media software here. So what people are interested in is how do we do collaboration with that? How do we do publishing with that? How do we do reviews with that, whatever? And so always the same categories, always the same topics. And so you will have a column saying our brand.

37:22 And this is how we solve all these issues, this is how we are compliant and so on. This is already done. And then we leave space and over columns that will be blank for all the people they want to interview.

37:35 Yeah, I've just got loads of ideas going around in my head. So like I said, we're on a big like bottom of funnel sprint at the minute. We're starting with the obvious ones, but we're very quickly exhausting the obvious ones. So we're looking at just scaling and scaling and scaling it. So very, very interesting. OK, well, that's been a selfishly very, interesting conversation for myself. I'd imagine those listening who are interested in bottom of the funnel or building strategy from bottom of the funnel up.

38:03 will have found that extremely useful. we typically turn all of these into long form blogs as well. So this is going to be a very good long form blog for me to recap on everything. I appreciate you jumping on and sharing, I mean, 40 minutes of wisdom, I think. I hope it'll be useful. Let's see. I would be shocked if it's not useful. for those listening and watching, thank you for tuning in and we will catch you in the next episode.

38:32 Thank you. Have a good day.