 So, I want to point out an uncomfortable reality that we face as content marketers. And that is that nobody really cares about our blogs. Now hear me out, okay? I promise it's really not as insulting as it sounds. Our customers, of course, care that we solve problems for us. That's the essence of marketing, right? Find a need and fill it. Sometimes we're solving problems via our products and sometimes via our written content. That does matter to people. That's what Foster's Trust builds brand advocacy. What people don't care about is our blogs, i.e., these engines of content that we've created with the intention of engaging our audiences. Because with relatively few exceptions, our audiences are not that interested in being engaged by us. They're not coming to our sites, to our blogs, to peruse. And yet, historically, that's how we've thought about our content calendars. That's how we've organized our newsletters, our blogs, home pages. And that is why nearly every corporate blog falls flat. And if you stick with me, I'll give you the other perspective for B2B and B2C businesses to make sure your blog isn't one of them. So the key problem, I think, at play here is that marketers tend to conflate content marketing with blogging. They're not the same thing. And we do our customers, our industry, and ourselves, our businesses a disservice when we conflate the two. I think this problematic perspective is evidenced in the sort of recent trend of brand journalism. So when I'm speaking about brand journalism, I mean this highly editorial journalism adjacent content engine that looks really fun to work on, honestly gets a lot of industry accolades, but most of the time, these publications shut down, don't work, fade out into existence. So a somewhat famous example of this is Casper's now defunct blog called Van Winkles. Van Winkles launched as a media hub surrounding sleep. And this was sort of Casper's, one of Casper's many attempts to be more than just a mattress maker in the eyes of the world as a brand. They really want to be a brand about sleep. They don't just want to be a mattress company, they want to be a sleep brand. Van Winkles was a big part of that, and Van Winkles was really high-quality content. At first glance, it looks like a salacious brand play, but about a year after it launched, it shut down. Now the person in charge of this project told Digidae once it shut down, generally speaking, being an independent brand publication is not going to work. But at the end of the day, brands are performance marketers. If you don't deliver business results, they will let you go. Now what's kind of funny to me is the Casper doesn't actually seem to have learned this lesson because they currently have another iteration of the same strategy of brand journalism called Woolly Magazine. Woolly is a print magazine that you can actually purchase from Casper, and they've got an online edition. And like Van Winkles before it, it's really high-quality content. As a piece of media, Woolly is impressive. But impressive media, high-quality content, those aren't the same thing as effective marketing. What Casper is essentially doing with Woolly Magazine and what they were doing with Van Winkles before it is shouting about themselves. In a beautifully written way, sure, but this is nonetheless insular thinking to indulge Casper's own brand whims instead of being customer-centric content. And if it's not customer-centric, it's not going to work. 2018's most impactful marketers don't get caught up in this all-we-attempting distraction of a highly editorial journalism-adjacent content engine. They think about content in much simpler terms. But content is just another way to solve problems for customers. And when you think about it in that perspective, you're not writing a blog, right? You're not writing to engage or entertain. You're writing a library of resources to solve problems for your customers. So here's a real-world personal example for you at Tortuga. We make travel backpacks. About a year ago, we redesigned our blog. This is what it looked like before. We didn't just give it a fresh coat of paint to feel more modern, although I think you'll agree with me based on this slide that we really needed one. Here's, it's better. We were really rethinking our brand from the ground up and applying design thinking to every aspect of Tortuga. So we started by redesigning our physical product line, our travel backpacks and accessories. Then we went to our online store and redesigned that. And when we got to the blog, we had an identity crisis. And that's because we realized over the past couple of years since I had joined the team, we had slowly and somewhat unintentionally morphed away from writing a blog. Instead, we were writing this library of resources. And that required an entirely different approach, not just in the content that we published, but also in the way that we organized our site, our home page. So I'll get into more of the site organization later. But first, I want to give you a B2B example as well. So a few years ago, I was consulting working with a company called RJ Matrix, it's an analytics platform. I was working, I was running the paid side of things and working with the content team, and we were trying to develop a holistic content strategy for lead acquisition and lead nurturing. What we realized was that our blog wasn't working. It was, it was a traditional blog. Every post was sort of meant to engage. And theoretically, it would have worked in the mid funnel, but it didn't, certainly wasn't driving paid leads, even when we would convert it into white papers, lead magnets, et cetera. And it wasn't working in the organic side of things either. What was working, coupled with our microsites, was our annual benchmark report. And I think the reason for this is that the benchmark report answered the finite set of problems that RJ Matrix customers wanted RJ Matrix to solve for them. That's it, it's really simple. The benchmark report allowed people to figure out, okay, so I have all this data that I'm running through this demo of this new tool. I can now see my average churn rate. I can see my LTV. Are those numbers good? Is my turn too high? The benchmark report helped people understand where they stood and where they could improve. So what we did is we completely pivoted away from writing blog posts and instead focused on our one big thing, our one finite set of problems that we could solve for our customers. And Janessa Lance, who headed the content arm of the strategy, nicknamed this the barbell approach. So on one side of your barbell, this is your one big thing. This is your focus. This is where you start. You don't start with the channels. You start with the finite set of problems that you're going to solve. On the other side, you figure out how that finite set of problems applies to different channels. So at Argemetrics, for instance, we would pull out average churn rate if we needed to have a webinar or a PR opportunity or guest blogging spot. We'd go into detail on how to calculate churn, what the average churn rate is by a couple different industries, how churn and repurchases relate to each other. So we would pull out something that might have been one paragraph in this benchmark report and turn it into a thousand word blog post or a one hour webinar. So at Tortuga, we're in the travel industry. Our finite set of problems, our one big thing, is what should you bring on your trip and how should you pack it. That's it. That's what our customers want us to help them with because we make a travel backpack. And so it stands to reason that our customers want to know what they should put inside of that travel backpack. Now, it's not quite as fun to work on problem solving as it is to write story driven content. But we have to remember that we are not in this game to wax poetic. We're in it to grow our businesses and serve our customers. And it's tough to do that when every post we write does this. This is what happens when you write something that's brand first, brand forward instead of being customer centric. This is unfortunately what happens when you write story driven content which breaks my heart a little bit as a former J school person. A resource, on the other hand, does this. This is what Google wants on its search engine results page. So what qualifies as a resource? A resource, of course, needs to answer a finite problem that your customers legitimately have. A problem that's relevant enough to your suite of products, whether physical or online, that your customers would expect you to solve that problem for them, meet people where they are, right? Beyond that, a resource is comprehensive. It's not just a name, you know? It's expert, so it's not written by someone who is just googling other posts with this same query and figuring out what other people are saying. So, for instance, we have a post about the best filtration water bottles for travel. Our writer for that post didn't just Google all the filtration water bottles on the market and then figure out which one they liked best based on the product description. They tested all of them in places like Guatemala where you definitely can't drink the water straight from the tap. So a resource is comprehensive, it's expert, it's relevant, and it solves a finite problem. When you write resource after resource after resource, your blog's performance does this. Now this is a visit to subdomain graph, but I can tell you that our revenue graphs look pretty similar. I use a first touch and mid funnel attribution model in tandem to figure out which posts are driving first ever traffic and which posts are working on our mid funnel because our products are considered purchases and we have about a 30 to 90 day time from when people first discover us from when they eventually purchase. So for us, our blog, our library of resources is really important in the mid funnel. And when we started making the shift to writing resources, so our visits kept growing, but our revenue grew at an even faster rate. So if you're gonna make the shift to writing a library of resources, what else needs to change? First and foremost, your expectations. So if you're going to blow the scope of every single post you write and write something more comprehensive, know that your team is gonna need the bandwidth and the mental energy and the time to actually do that well. Because a resource doesn't count if it's not comprehensive and if it's not expert. So give your team the time and the energy to be able to actually produce something that needs to exist in the world instead of writing some inane optimized nonsense. The second thing I would challenge you to rethink is your blog's homepage. So in a world where people are not coming to your blog to peruse, newness is somewhat irrelevant. Timeliness doesn't matter that much. In that case, a reverse chronological feed of your post is a waste of the most valuable real estate and that is your blog's homepage. Your homepage in this world is for two things. One, orienting your readers to show them who you are, what you write about, telling them the finite set of problems that you're going to solve with your written content. So telling them you're one big thing and you can see our orienting copy, what to bring and how to pack it. It's basically the TLDR of our entire library of resources. And the second, of course, is the UX side of the equation, helping people find things quickly and easily. So you can do that with navigation, which we rethought with our redesign, of course, a visible search bar. These are all things we know, but another thing that we've tried that's been effective for us is trying to take the experience of I need something based on this topic. What's the best version of that experience? Sometimes it's a search results page. If you know exactly what you need, if you're going to Morocco and you wanna know what to pack for Morocco, sure, search for that. But if you're kind of new to carry on packing and you don't really know where to start and you need to buy a bunch of stuff for your trip, then maybe a search results page is not quite the best experience. So what we've done is we've aggregated some of our most popular, most requested posts into something that looks like prose. So you see these links, like the best travel clothing, minimalist packing tips. When you click on one of those, it brings you to something that looks like a blog post, and it essentially goes into a little bit of detail about lots of different things, like the best kinds of fabrics, the benefits of quick dry, the benefits of merino wool, when to choose a poly blend over merino wool, but then it just touches on those and links to the big posts that we've written about merino wool. Same thing for the best filtration, well, I guess that's not travel clothing, the best dress shirts or the best travel pants, which by the way, the best travel pants is one of our highest revenue posts of all time and we don't make travel pants. But it's a problem relevant to our audience. It fosters trust. So I recommend trying this strategy, sort of rethinking what's the best experience if I have this problem or this set of problems? What would I actually look for on the homepage? What's my version of a start here section? So to wrap up, I really just want to challenge you to stop thinking about content marketing, like blogging, and start thinking about it like problem solving. Start being more customer centric in your keyword research and your content calendars and your homepage. So I don't know if we have time for questions, but if not, come find me any time during the conference even if you work for Casper and want to yell at me. I'll start bucking up.