Working your Content Strategy with a Growth Mentor
Let’s learn Dana’s story about how she shaped Glimpse.ai’s content strategy to improve retention and increase their market presence!
Dana is the Head of Growth at Glimpse.ai, an AI research company focused on natural language generation.
Previously, they have focused mainly on improving their core offerings and making user experience as frictionless and intuitive as possible for one of their products: Article Forge. Without going too far in depth, Article Forge is an AI writer that can produce entire long-form articles from a keyword input.
Recently, their team has made major improvements to their core technology so now Dana is building out their content strategy to improve retention and increase their market presence.
The challenges behind her GrowthMentor sessions
Dana had been developing this strategy from the ground up and had based most of her hypotheses on her own research.
Dana StasielukSo, first and foremost, I wanted to find a sounding board to make sure I was on the right track.
As she mentions, “I had questions about virtually every aspect of the process, but I wanted to keep my conversation focused. So, I started with questions about content designed to educate people already in our funnel to help improve retention.”
More she specifically, she wanted to discuss:
- How to make sure the content they are creating best addresses their target audiences’ desired outcomes
- How to best distribute this content to people in different stages of their funnel
Desired Outcomes and Goals
When Dana submitted her initial call request, she was looking for:
- Their target audiences’ desired outcomes and how they can be naturally incorporated into the content they are creating
- The best ways to distribute this content to reach their target audiences in different stages of the funnel
Dana StasielukMy primary goal was to talk through my existing content and distribution ideas to make sure I was focusing on the highest impact topics and strategies.
As she notes, “A secondary goal was to talk through some heuristics to make sure I am consistently focusing on the highest impact content tasks and strategies”.
Being Mentored by Beth Carter
As Dana describes, “To be completely honest, I have had conversations around content strategy with a few different mentors and have even attended a few GrowthMentor workshops”.
But one of the sessions that played a major role in her content strategy journey was with Beth Carter.
Beth focuses on helping pre-Product Market Fit companies figure out their Growth Model through a Customer-Led approach. She works with deep Jobs-To-Be-Done interviews, creates value propositions, draws growth models, customer journeys, and customer lifecycles, and specializes in organic growth and content marketing.
Dana initially found Beth’s profile by searching but chose her because her tooltip descriptions of her different expertise resonated with her.
Beth seemed very collaborative and the way she described her different areas of expertise were focused on helping people talk through and solve their problems (their desired outcomes).
Soon after Dana contacted Beth, they ended up messaging about the importance of customer interviews, the Jobs To Be Done framework, and how they can help inform an impactful content strategy. Their call was already adding value to Dana’s challenges!
Dana StasielukIf you are not familiar with the framework, I would highly recommend reading Clayton Christensen’s book: Competing Against Luck. In short, it helps us focus on our target audiences’ desired outcomes when developing products.
Content Strategy along the Stages of Customers’ Journey
Dana was seriously looking forward to this call and she was not disappointed.
As Dana describes, “Right away, Beth understood our product and my current content strategy. Beth never missed a beat as we talked through what I had been working on, my current hypotheses, the content topics I wanted to focus on, and my plans for distribution.
Throughout our conversation, Beth offered insightful suggestions about how to approach our content strategy from the mind of our customers at different stages of their journeys”.
Dana StasielukArguably more importantly, Beth gave me great advice about how to approach content distribution along the different points in our customers journeys’ as well.
Takeaways about Content Distribution
One of the most valuable outcomes from talking with any mentor is a new heuristic or way to approach something that can help someone work through processes in the future.
Beth gave Dana multiple new ways to think about content strategy throughout their customers’ journeys.
For one, content distribution strategies should be thought out before deciding on content topics instead of after. This not only helps prioritize different content topics based on potential impact, it also helps shape the content itself to resonate with audiences in different circumstances.
Dana StasielukTo truly reach your target audience, you can’t only think about what information your audience needs, but how, when, and where they will get it.
“This helps inform the tone, style, and even structure of the content so it can speak to your audience at different points along their customer journeys”.
Interested in learning more about content marketing?
