NOTE: Characters in these comic strips are not based on real people. Any resemblance is accidental.
Welcome to the first edition of the Content Heroes (AMA) series featuring the incredible Joe Michalowski. Joe is a one-man content marketing army at Mosaic.Tech. Above all else, he's a wonderful human being I had the pleasure of chatting with. Before he joined Mosaic full-time, he helped them from the agency side at Animalz, one of the most famous content marketing agencies in the world. Today, Joe runs not one, but two podcasts – The Role Forward for Mosaic, and his own Content Head podcast, where he shares ideas that help content marketers succeed in "do more with less" environments. You can find Joe:
on LinkedIn
on his Content Head podcast
Background Context
Mosaic is a Strategic Finance Platform for agile planning, real-time financial reporting, and better decision-making.
Mosaic is a Series C-stage B2B SaaS company of 118 people.
Their marketing team consists of 5 people: 1 content marketer (Joe), 1 product marketer, 2 growth marketers, and 1 designer.
Joe has an SEO agency that helps him out.
You talk about "Candy Bar Content" and "Building Block Content" in your podcast. How do you define these?
When I started doing content work for Mosaic from the agency side, all we did was written content. The truth is, we couldn't do anything with it. Candy Bar Content is the content we made in a moment and it's done. We published it and now it lives there. The best we can do with it is put a link out to it somewhere, get a couple of days out of it, and then it dies. My best example of Candy Bar Content was when I got an interview with the CFO of Dropbox. He was a small investor early in the company. This was a big name for us, and at the time, we (the company) had no name, so it was great. I had an hour-long interview with him and got all this great insight. I never published the recording. I just turned it into one narrative-style article that you might see on Forbes. I felt proud of it, but we only got a bunch of page views, and then it was over. Sustainable Building Block Content is the content that naturally turns into other things. For that, I wish I had started the podcast sooner and turned the interview into a podcast episode, which turned into the article, which turned into LinkedIn content. When I started, I didn't have a plan for that. I didn't even know how to do it. Now I'm always thinking about how I could create one thing that will turn into others, and not just “I made this video and now there are 10 clips." It's all about weaving different videos and content pieces together. If I did a podcast episode about X, I can grab a quote from it 6 months later when I'm writing an article. It goes beyond the immediate “What are the 3 LinkedIn posts I can get out of this article?” mindset.
How did you land on your "Building Block Content" approach? Was it something you planned as soon as you joined Mosaic, or did it come from trial and error?
I got hired at Mosaic because I did a great job for them from the agency side at Animalz. Naively, I thought I was just getting hired to run the blog. All of my experience was from the agency side. I didn't have any experience running webinars, a podcast, or building out a multi-channel strategy. I was just the writer guy. I figured if I'm doing 4 articles at Animalz, I'll get hired at Mosaic and I'll do 8 or even more. Very quickly, there was an appetite in the team to expand. We would have a meeting, and the team asks if we should do a podcast, and I'm like “Yeah, why not?” When they ask who'll do it, I say I'll do it. Later someone asks the same thing about webinars, and then I go figure out webinars. That's how I started picking up other channels. It was definitely trial and error. A lot of diving in head-first on things that come up in passing, and then backing my way into a more cohesive strategy as I learn more.
Mosaic has a lot of content that goes beyond what's usually a content marketer's job — for example, product videos. How much of the content do you personally cover?
I've written a few case studies when we didn't have so many to do, but I am luckily not required to do the case studies as well as those product videos that you mentioned because I'm not a finance guy. Don't put me on the platform to do finance things. That's not a good idea for anybody! Another thing I don't do are templates, which I organize, but they're pretty heavy-duty financial models, and I can’t do that. But I've written every e-book we've ever done. I do the podcast, the blog, and the content side of webinars. As for the webinars, I don't manage the calendar, but if the team asks me what the webinar topic should be, I end up hosting it and doing all the content for that.
The B2B marketing bubble on LinkedIn loves to crap on gated content, yet you do a lot of gated content yourself. What's the biggest misconception B2B marketers have about gated content?
Marketing on LinkedIn gets to be a bit of an echo chamber, especially if you're marketing to other marketers. But we all get the game, right? You're not going to download my e-book because you don't know where that email is going. I don't think other people think of it this way! I sell to finance people, and they don't have the same aversion to filling out a form that marketers do. The aversion to forms is a little overblown and maybe it comes from Drift, as they ran their “Forms are dead!” story. I have nothing against ungated content, but we have a really robust operations engine. Our growth person is a great marketing ops person. There's a ton of pipework in the background and automation going through — taking those email addresses, enriching the data, qualifying them, and feeding our outbound sales team. The truth is, that's our engine. We didn't have to build the strategy that way, but we have SDRs whose job is to run down these leads. Our job is to feed them. If it didn't work, we'd stop doing it, but we do just fine generating leads, getting demo requests from nurturing them, moving them down the funnel, and so on. We convert people on the website. We don't gate everything, but when we do, there's a reason behind it. It's the path we went down, and it works very well for us. For the most part, anytime you see someone say “X is dead!”, it's probably a bit overblown.
Can you tell me more about the operational side of content repurposing at Mosaic? How do you plan it? How do you prioritize what to repurpose? How much is too much repurposing? Etc.
I wish I was more deliberate about it. There’s Justin Simon — I don't know him personally, but I love all his stuff. He's the content repurposing guy. His thing is having a checklist of things you can do. That's something I don't have. My main focus is making sure that I know where we're going with content. We have a few pillars. We have SEO, that's our biggest investment. We also have podcast webinars, product videos, and things like that. For a long time, I kept a repository of everything we've ever done in my head because I've worked on it. I put that into a Notion board that's searchable, so I tagged everything and you can find it. When I'm working on the next thing, I don't prioritize it because I'm supposed to be repurposing this one podcast episode. I prioritize it because I'm writing a key content piece (e.g. a comprehensive guide to financial modeling), and I need to figure out what to do. 2 years ago, my first instinct would be to interview subject-matter experts in the company. Now I don't have to do that, because I did these 3 podcast episodes, and we did this webinar. I know I have these 4 product videos that show me how to do it in the product. I have all this, can I put the bones around it and weave all that in? Again, it's not like “I did this one podcast episode, now I will write a guide to financial modeling.” It's that I know that we touched on all these topics in all these different places. I will bring it all together. The bones are the same, and the process is the same. There is not too much repurposing. Nobody sees 99% of your content. You can repurpose the same thing a billion times, and no one will care. People just want the content to be really valuable.
Suppose I want to implement your "Building Block Content" approach. What were the biggest measurable wins you've had that could be used to make a business case for it?
I'm focused on the totality of the content numbers. I work for a bunch of finance people and they want to see how we invested. If X amount of money went into SEO, what was the return? The thing that this doesn't see is the money we spent on the podcast was very important to make sure that the money we spent on SEO worked out. They might ask if the podcast was a good investment. On the surface, you think about if anyone said they heard about you on the podcast. There are 2 customers we have signed and I know with 100% certainty the first thing they ever saw was the podcast. But that's not the measurable win I'm going for.
I've said this multiple times: I would do this podcast for Mosaic if it never got a single download, because I know that I can take anything that gets said there and make every other thing that we do at Mosaic better. The measurable wins I get are on Gong calls. People tell us they had to get a demo, they love our content, we have the best marketing, and all this stuff. I don't care if it was that one podcast clip or this other podcast clip that did it. It’s a rising tide that lifts all boats. I know that the things I've put in place work cohesively together. If my numbers are going up; whether it's organic traffic, whether it's our lead numbers, or our opportunity-generated numbers, then the stuff that we're investing in is working.
As long as those ROI numbers look right, I don't care that much about which specific thing created results. I know they’re all tied together. It's not the most concrete or specific answer, but people spend way too much time obsessing over what's the successful thing. None of it would be successful without the other things sitting there. Maybe one brought them in the door, but maybe one got them over the line. You'll never really know.
Do you use Generative AI in your content creation processes? If so, how?
I’ve been trying hard to find ways to use it, but I haven’t come across any use case that is useful enough to use the tool consistently. I’ve tried the SEO AI tools that promise to write an article based on keywords, and I ended up scrapping them entirely. The best use case people have given me is outlining SEO articles. I’ve no issues with the blank page, I just start writing stuff. Usually, the SEO agency will help out with some of the bones, so I never got that off the ground. One AI tool I really like is CastMagic. I’ve been using it for repurposing our video content. I haven’t perfected that workflow, but they’ve been the best I could find for analyzing existing videos and spitting out some good timestamps for clips, summaries, and things like that. Not perfect, but I'm trying to use it to repurpose content more traditionally, like social clips.
I'm Haris Spahic, and I make memorable content for B2B SaaS companies with a product-market fit. Let's connect on LinkedIn.
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