Lessons - How to do Content Marketing Properly, Kyle Turk, VP Marketing at Keynote

Hi, it's Scott here. On these lessons, episodes of my podcast, I'll be selecting my favorite lessons from various guests and episodes of success story. Today, you're going to hear from Kyle Turk, Vice President of Marketing at Keynote Search Group. Now, Keynote Group is an industry-leading executive search and recruitment firm. To help mid-market businesses and organizations find, fit, and achieve peak performance of new hires. Now, Kyle is an award-winning entrepreneurial marketing leader. He has over a decade of experience building brand, creating content, driving revenue, acquiring clients. He has a 40 under 40 recipient. He's been awarded the Marketing Leader of the Year Award from Ranset, Canada, and the Best Performance in Marketing Award in the Best Auto of Business Awards in 2016. So he's been creating incredible marketing campaigns for a significant period of time. Today, we're going to talk about content marketing, and he's going to speak about content marketing from the perspective of how do I use it for a services-based business. He speaks about it because he uses it for Keynote Search Group. But ultimately, these content marketing tips can be used for any service-based business to attract the clients you want and stay top of mind so that when they're ready to buy, they think of you. So from that standpoint, what I found to be very successful is using a content marketing strategy where we'll produce thought leadership pieces, even if it's content about our company, being in the community. I find the content marketing strategy creating webinars, how-to guide, blog, videos, just anything to really engage an audience and pull them in to want to work and learn more about us and learn more from an education standpoint as opposed to pushing out advertising thing higher up, we're really good at executive search kind of thing. So I think it's more of that pulling in the audience in the key decision makers that we're targeting as opposed to pushing out our messaging. You find that, and I agree with you, I think that is the way that you have to differentiate yourself just in terms of general marketing strategy because I find that too many people are just pushing stuff out, but the truly successful ones are those thought leaders, right? And the conversations, for example, that I don't know how your sales force works and maybe you can shed a little light on that and how they work in terms of your inbound lead, your lead funnel. But I think that if you push out content that positions you as a thought leader as a subject matter expert at the very least, it's going to make the conversations when your sales force engages with your target customer much easier, much easier to convert, all these things are just easier, as opposed to you push content out there, and now your sales force is bombarding people and cold calling them, which is something that you do have to do anyways, but I think that if you, like you said, your content marketing strategy, it makes everything a little bit warmer than then, yeah. Yeah, we actually don't do any cold calling. What we do, we'll engage with our leads that would be warm leads because they've already engaged with our brand, but being in that professional services market, a lot of the new business we'll get is referral based, it's word of mouth. So what we kind of focus on, and that's why the content marketing strategy works the well is when somebody recommends us to another potential client, the first thing that clients going to do is they're going to Google us or they're going to go to our website, right? Yeah. You want to make sure that as soon as that happens, we're supporting that interest by ensuring where, you know, we're seen as experts, they can see, build trust with our brand right away. So it's a lot of supporting that sort of word of mouth, and then because the sales cycle is basically, it could be years, it could be weeks, it could be month, because it's a service that comes up when the need arises, so when the need for a new executive arises, that's when we want to make sure we're top of mind. So if they've been engaging with our brand by tuning in to our webinar, attending our events even, hearing our speakers in the community, then they know when they need to hire, they're thinking keynote right away, and that's sort of where our marketing strategy wants to, the end goal is to position us as the top of mind firm to use for executive search.