 But seeing this many badass women on a marketing conference stage in one day, I feel the same way I did when they were doing all those flips and fight scenes on Wonder Woman. This is the coolest girl boss for the win. So I am Heather Fizziak. I'm director of organic search at VML. It's a big global digital ad agency headquartered in Kansas City. And today we're going to talk about how agencies, especially the big, giant, creative beast agencies, can build data-driven content systems. And although the research that went into this is centered around the big agency environment, I believe that these learnings can apply no matter what size agency you work at. So from anchor to asset, let's rock and roll. So a little bit of backstory. I started at VML in mid-2014, and I mostly worked at small, medium-sized agencies. I did a very brief stint at a big agency. And they were the largest agency in Kansas City by a margin, but they had 2,600 employees in 29 offices around the world. So this was like the big leagues for me. And I remember the first day I walked into VML, the walls were literally lined with hundreds and hundreds of creative awards. We're talking canned gold lions and webbies and addies and other awards I can't pronounce. And they were on the ad age agency A list, top 10, two years running, they were on the Forrester Leaders list. I mean, they've got creative achievement written all over them. It was completely intimidating. And they were working on these giant brands. These are amazing brands to work on. We had Bridgestone, we had Wendy's, we had Electrolux, we had Express. And not only did these brands have big budgets, they had big complexity and big visibility into every marketing and budget decision they made. It was fast-paced. It was a lot of moving pieces. It was like I was chugging from this fire hose of creativity. And I was completely out of my element. I do not have a creative bone in my body. My job is a technical field. I still explain to people that what I do is get stuff found on the internet. I feel like they made some kind of clerical error when they hired me. But they did. They hired me to take over this one-person SEO practice that got brought in after the fact to do some retroactive technical cleanup if they got brought in at all. So I had my work cut out for me to make a name for search in a creative agency. So I already quit my other job. So I figured I should buckle down and do the one thing I knew how to do. I started optimizing. And you guys, it kind of worked. So the first two years we got 80% revenue growth both years in a row. This year we're pacing for another 40, 50%. And we did a great job of becoming a part of VML's DNA. And we did it by becoming easy to understand, seamless to integrate, and most importantly, impossible to ignore. We built this dream team. I call this my dream team slide. Peace by peace. We were scrappy and lean like a startup. We did this PR road show inside and outside the agency to educate people on what it is that we do. We inserted ourselves into conversations where we were not asked to be, but we knew we could help. We started putting out points of view, thought leadership pieces. We started selling projects or partnerships instead of projects. It was a complete mentality shift at this agency. We even won a little award for our global search work on Hills Pet Nutrition. That little award was a big deal to us. It was almost like this meteoric growth was too good to be true. And that's because it was. We hit the ceiling. We made these massive promises to these amazing clients that search was a good investment for them to ship their dollars to. That we could help their customers through search. That we could get them real, measurable, tangible results. Our word is everything. So we were getting some small wins, you know, the technical, the SEO 101 basics. But we know that this only takes clients so far. We knew we had gone about as far as we could go with that. But we were facing some tough questions. Are the partnerships we sold to these clients worth it? Technical SEO, easy. Check it off a list. We started building great relationships with developers. Nailed it. On page SEO, you got it. I will optimize your title tags and my descriptions all day. Content, these big international enterprise brands have a shockingly low amount of content on their sites. So this is a huge opportunity, right? Crap. We consistently struggled to get content for our clients' websites and to convince people that this was a priority. The best we could hope for was some thin, weak blog content or some fluffy content from a questionable influencer that we might get asked to optimize after the fact. But what baffled me is that we knew content marketing budgets were growing. According to this PQ Media Study, content marketing is going to grow to $313 billion with a B dollars by 2019. Or this study from the Content Marketing Institute, I believe, shows that 39% of B to B marketers believe their content budgets are going to increase next year. Where I did my own research for an executive research project, and 72% of respondents said that they believed that their clients' budgets were going to increase for content at least slightly, if not dramatically. So if the demand for content is there, and the money exists, why can't my word-winning creative shop create content for some of the best brands in the world? We sucked at it. Again and again, we would cross off these technical SEO items, and we would hit a wall with getting copy, and our ability to get results stopped in its tracks. It wasn't getting scoped in as a dependency. We couldn't get the resources. Whatever the case, there was always some obstacle between us and getting words on a client's website. But we had to figure this out. If we don't figure this out, we can't get the results we promised our clients. We lose our scopes, and people could lose their jobs. Content marketing seems so simple, especially the way we talk about it in this industry. But in the agency world, it was the one thing that threatened to kill my team. I cannot go back to my boss, to my clients, to my CEO, to the people I hired, and tell them, well, we can't figure out content. I guess we should all pack it up and go home. This is what keeps me up at night. I have this world-class SEO team, and we can't deliver results because we can't deliver content. Give me a break. Unacceptable. So we started a research, and one comforting and yet alarming fact is that we were not alone. In fact, agencies everywhere reported having trouble with almost every part of the content marketing workflow. None of us had it figured out. Here's a study from ad age. Top problems, creating quality, engaging content, lack of budget, lack of time. Content marketing institute, content creation again, strategy development, prioritization, my own research, client maturity about content, selling the value, proving the ROI, working in silos, bad scoping, and others. More and more and more. Different studies, different methodologies, different numbers, but the story remains the same. We have big content problems to solve for. And if there is a problem, I am an engineer at heart. I'm going to solve it. Thanks, Vanilla. So we can't solve the world in a day. Let's focus on a couple of items here. First, proving the value of content so you can get the investment and the buy-in that you need to move forward in the agency world. Creating a process that is flexible and adaptable enough for the agency environment and sourcing that content so you can create it affordably well and at scale. A couple of assumptions about agencies. We live for chaos. We are fueled by creativity and chaos and process and rigid structure is often seen as the trade-off to that brilliant creativity. There's never, ever, ever a one-size-fits-all approach in the agency world for every agency or every client. There's just too much unpredictability. There's always some exception to the rule. And we know that content formats are going to continue to evolve and change. Cindy just said that the URL may not even be necessary next year. Who knows? But we're seeing this just in the three years I've been at VML. We're putting search technology in cars. We're putting in wearable devices. We need a system that's flexible enough to adapt to the new forms of technology. And we found four main problems in the research, and the first was territorialism. So in the agency world, where everybody's vying for a seat at the table, and everybody wants to get a bigger piece of the budget pretty much. And so it creates territorialism, which then begets winners and losers inside the agency. But ultimately, the biggest loser is the client. So everyone thinks they own content, especially creative, but our research shows that not all content belongs in the creative department. So we'll talk about how to overcome that. Next was ownership. Everyone thinks they own content and has an opinion, but truthfully, no one department owns content. So what happens is everybody ends up going rogue and doing their content marketing in silos, so we need some sort of ownership to see this process through and connect the dots. Speaking of process, the next problem is there is no process. So I sat down with a dozen subject matter experts in different disciplines, and I interviewed them for 60 to 90 minutes each, and I asked them, what is content to you? What does it work like in your discipline? How do you know if it's working? Where do you come in? What does the perfect system look like? And I compared the data on the commonalities and the anomalies so we could develop a process that works for agencies and not just for search. Last sourcing, we need to be able to create high quality content affordably and at scale, but without sacrificing the creativity that an agency is known for. So proving the value, let's dive in. This was my Eureka moment. So not everyone actually agrees on what content means. Looking back, this seems so simple and obvious, but to me this was mind blowing. Creative thinks about content completely differently than digital does. There is a fundamental misalignment in definition. So if you ask 100 different marketers, which I did, to define content in their own words, you will get 100 different definitions, which I did. So this is the top 25 words that came up in the content marketer definitions. And these are good, right? These are pretty solid words. They're not wrong. They're pretty great. But the problem is every definition from one to the next varied so widely that there was no consistency and understanding of what it meant. That's a big deal. So as I dug down deeper, I found that the true dichotomy lies between campaign and continuous. So Creative thinks of these big burst campaigns. It's a big effort crammed into one massive short term campaign. And digital thinks of continuous content for the consumptive audience. And they think about it as new and improved copy and multimedia that's continually released over time. That is a huge difference in understanding. No wonder we're having a hard time bringing content to life. We're speaking different languages. So we had to get serious about defining this inside and outside the agency. Here's how it breaks down. So campaign thinks about aspirational as this push marketing, inspiring people to action with big short bursts, creative campaigns, it's memorable. They create a fabulous message, they push it out to the world, and they hope you like it. We can't do that in the digital world. We have to flip that thinking on its head and do the pull marketing style. We need to actually do the effort to understand what it is the consumer needs or wants. And we have to fulfill it. It's not about what they want to do. It's about what the consumers want to accomplish online. And we either fulfill it or we don't. So creative, of course, has very high standards for creativity. But for digital content, it can't just be creative for the sake of being creative. It actually has to serve a purpose and we need a balance of both for brands. Creative tends to think of single stream. They tend to design campaigns around one or just a select few channels, wherever the media dollars and platform partnerships take them. But in digital, we think about how to adapt a story to live in many different channels. And it'll live on long after the media dollars stop. And last, it can be very costly to develop a campaign in the creative world where it launches and lasts for a very short piece of time for one piece of content. But in continuous content, we need a lot more content, so we need to be faster. We need to be leaner, more agile, less expensive. Very different skill sets. So now that we've defined content clearly, so we can use this inside the agency and with our clients, how are we going to educate our clients so they know that this is the right thing to do? Pro tip, clicks don't mean shit. Pardon my French. And sorry to the French people that I just call that French. Money talks. Money talks. So website traffic is not and has never been enough to convince enterprise brands that they need to invest in continuous content. They have way bigger fish to fry. They're thinking about profit margin and shareholder value and market share. And yet SEOs are so prone to promising rankings and traffic. The website is the least of their concerns. That was a really tough pill for me to swallow that search was not the center of the universe. So we created a few tools to help clients understand the value of what we do and how we can bring content marketing to life for them. Why it's so important? So first tool, this is a super rough content maturity model. And so it ranges down the bottom left from reactive, very ad hoc with little thought to the management and consequences of the content that they're publishing, if they publish any at all. All the way to completely strategic, fully integrated. Content is a part of their DNA. Thinking about how their efforts are going to come to life through content is their default state. I would say that most of our clients probably start in that tactical space. They're creating some content, they're doing a pretty good job, but it's in silos and they're not connecting the dots. So we use this as a tool to educate them on where they fall in the spectrum and what it's going to take to get to the next iterative step in the process. Here's another tool, growing base versus buying spikes. This is obviously completely fake data. But it does a really beautiful job of distilling down in a digestible way. The difference between the value that campaign and continuous brings to the table. So smart campaigns, they get these huge spikes in visibility, right? You get this big increase and then it drops to nothing. And then you get this big increase and it drops to nothing when the media dollars stop. And again, and again. Maybe win some awards. Now, in the foreground, you got the black part here, I'm sorry, in the background, the blue with campaign and continuous. This shows how the continuous digital content creation can support those campaigns, you get similar spikes when the campaigns launch. And then afterward, it dips down too because the media dollars have stopped and that hasn't influenced, but it doesn't drop to zero. And then the next campaign, it spikes again and then it drops, but it doesn't drop to zero, it actually drops less than before. And so on and so forth. And what you end up is with this orange line for trajectory that shows how you're continually evolving that brand over time and capturing more real estate and traffic than you ever did before. Basically, it makes the spikes more spiky, the dips less dippy, you get it. And it keeps brands relevant even when the media dollars stop. That's a good tool. This is what I call atrophy versus growth. Left axis growth, bottom axis time. So hopefully we have real data of the progress we've been able to make for a client so far using that technical and on-page SEO 101 basics. Real data show a little bit of growth. Maybe we see a little bit more coming from the efforts we've already done. But we know we've reached that point where we have to start creating content to expand their footprint online. Well, that's where that orange line could take you. We try to put realistic projections together. If you create the content we're recommending, we think we can get you here in year one, year two, year three. But the important part, I find sometimes that telling clients how content can benefit them does not work as well as scaring them with, if you don't do this, you're going to lose or miss X. So we just oppose that with what happens if they don't create content or if they don't invest in continual content creation and search optimization. It could potentially stay flat or it could even atrophy at X rate per year. That would scare me. Okay, one more tool for you. A channel ROI comparison. So there was this really good Avinash post in the last couple of weeks. I don't know if anybody follows him, but he asked us to challenge ourselves with this very hard question. Is the time and the money and the effort that we are putting into these channels proportionate to the profit or the impact that it has on the other end? It's a tough question to ask and it's a tough question to answer. But this tool does that in a very basic way. So you can choose whatever channels you like, whatever metrics you like that you can get data for, but for the sake of simplicity, I went with paid and organic search here. The gray bars are the content budget that we recommend to the client in year one, year two, year three. And it's all inclusive. Those are made up numbers. Please don't freak out. It's all inclusive, right? It's the research, the writing, the editing, the publication, the optimization. Everything's in there. Maybe it stays the same. Maybe it increases. I don't know. You do the math. Year one, year two, year three. So from that, the black line, we're gonna estimate our potential traffic growth. Yes, I know the search landscape is changing. Yes, I know this is impossible to be perfect. But we think about things like the volume of content we're planning to create. We think about the search volume potential, the competition. And we do our best to come up with realistic conservative traffic estimates. From there, we calculate the estimated organic cost per click based on their investment. From the growth, we're gonna get them. And here's the fun part. We get the same cost per click data from our Google ad words wrap. We get historical data going back as far as we can for that specific client on how much the cost per clicks have gone, costs per click, see if I know, have gone up year to year. And then we use that to project how the paid search cost per click is gonna increase in the subsequent three years. Well, right away, before I've even started investing in content, I see the gap is huge. These are also not real numbers. Please do not tweet these out as if it's like perfect math. The gap is huge, but here's what's really interesting. Paid search costs for the same result are going up, up, up. Where organic search costs are going down, down, down. I'm a client, you got my attention. You're telling me I can get the same results or better with less money? I'm listening. Now, I do not mean to diss on my paid media friends because I think there's a place for both. I think they serve different purposes at different times. But if I'm a client, I wanna know how my money is working. Now, again, clicks is not necessarily the best metric. Think about goal conversions, e-commerce revenue, whatever. You could run this for any channel, any metric and SEO and content is not always gonna win. All of these charts and graphs I will put in a link at the end so you have a base template to work from. Okay, cool, we sold content, right? How are we gonna build a system to actually bring that to life in that complicated agency environment? So I mentioned I interviewed all those subject matter experts in the different disciplines, what they care about, pain points, perfect system. And I did that to truly understand what they needed from content, not what I thought they needed or I thought the agency needed. And this stuff was so critical to get the buy-in from those people I interviewed in their departments to facilitate the change management that it's gonna take to put this in plain, a 3,000-person agency. So in the agency world, it starts with a brief, figure out what we're even doing here, channel inputs, keyword research, et cetera. You build a content playbook to define the strategy that everybody's gonna align to. You create a content calendar for the who, what, when, where of what content's gonna get created. It goes to production and then it gets published, approved, amplified. It seems so, so simple now that it's on paper. And at the risk of ruining a perfectly simple flywheel, this is what it looks like when you double-click down into that in the agency world. The agency brief step has audience personas, brand research, competitive analysis. The channel inputs stage could have seven or more inputs by itself, keyword research, social listening data, PR threats and opportunities. User experience data, web analytics, behavioral analysis and so on and so forth and so on and so forth. My point is not that this is the perfect agency flywheel for everyone. My point is you need to go figure this out in your own agency. Most people don't take the time to sit down with them and ask. So in addition to this perfect flywheel, at the top you see that editor in chief role, there's your ownership. So this person may not be a practitioner of each of these individual disciplines, but we learned that we may need to create a role like this to oversee the process, understand and bring in the right stakeholders at the right time and make sure we're connecting the dots and delivering on what we promised for our clients. So one size does not fit all. Do the interviews in your own agency. I will share the questions that I asked in my own. Warning, there's like 40. You might be surprised what you find. Y'all are probably saying, yo, Heather, this shit looks hard. Yeah, brah. It's hard. Yeah, is it actionable? Totally. And it's probably going to get smoother and easier as time goes on. Is it easy? Hell no. Hell no. If you want easy, you're in the wrong job. But most of those things that you saw on that flywheel, they're happening right now in agencies today in silos. And it is wasting your client's money. And it is getting worse results. And it is getting fewer results, because no one's taking the time to do this right. Some stuff is just hard. That seems to be the theme of Moscon so far. Some shit is just hard. You have a responsibility to put in the time, use your brain, and build something better for your clients. Real talk, not every agency is going to have these resources. I get it. And Ian had a great talk on Monday about small, scrappy agencies where people wear multiple hats. Go rewatch that. I get it. And not every client's going to have these budgets to cover that many resources. I get that too. But any pieces you can add into that flywheel make it a stronger content strategy. And this is a good skeleton of a process that you can adapt for your agency's reality. So make it yours. All right, sourcing content. All right, it's a classic make versus by decision. Any MBAs? Yeah. Make versus by decision. Do we create it or do we outsource it? Well, first, we're going to consider some pros and cons of a couple different sources. I'll give you a few quick examples. But this is from my perspective. Once again, you're going to have to use the old noggin and figure it out for yourself what you think about these sources. All right, first, let's talk about in-house creative. So in-house creative, really smart people who brainstorm in a room and make jokes until something brilliant comes out, you get really great message control. Like, it's going to be flawless every detail top to bottom of that campaign is going to be beautiful. And you're going to get more creativity than you could from any other source. It's unparalleled out of a creative agency. And then it's going to be completely custom. Every client, every campaign, everything is going to be custom end to end. Now, the downsides are they tend to think in single campaigns. And it can be really slow to execute because of how many resources and how much time goes into creating the perfect campaign. And it can be very costly to create that one piece of content. OK, what about outsourcing to a third-party content vendor? I was super skeptical of this, especially with the high creativity standards of the agency. But I've kind of come around now that we've found one or two that are pretty good. Content is their specialty. They do this all day, every day, and nothing else. They probably know what they're doing. They're really great at flexing to changes in demand. When things get heavier, when they need to back off, people don't lose their jobs. They have the resources to adapt to that, which is much harder to do in the agency. And they often have end-to-end systems where you can put all your necessary inputs in, keyword research, for example. And they route it through the team for writing and then to optimization and to legal for approvals and the client for approval all the way until it's ready to publish back at the agency again. That's useful. And it can be really fast. Speed to market, very high. Now, on the downside, it does create extra steps. Sometimes that's outside the agency. And so that does create some complexity, I get it. Profit margin might get squeezed. Might even go down to zero if the client goes direct to the outsourced vendor. Quality control can be a little tougher. And it may be a bit of a process to achieve the quality you want over time. And I would say this is lowercase-c creativity. They don't have the same institutional knowledge and understanding of the brand that you do. All right, last one, this one's kind of fun. So we're seeing a lot more artificial intelligence vendors coming on the scene to machine-generate content. And actually, Will Critchlow at Searchlove showed some examples of this in human writing versus artificial intelligence-generated writing. And people couldn't tell it apart. It is a scary place. But perks. It seems to be automated and relatively easy to use. You put stuff in, it does its magic, and out comes some content. It seems to be good at creating a campaign of multiple formats of content with the same message or project for different platforms. And it learns over time. It's going to continually get better and better and better. But it's still the early days of content via AI. And so it's limited by the inputs. It's a machine, we're humans. So if the things we put into the machine are not enough or are not the right things, we may be disappointed with what comes out the other end of that machine. And it's a machine, so it lacks human judgment. It doesn't know what's good or bad until we're giving it feedback in its feedback loop. And quality control is probably most difficult in this particular content vendor channel. So this is just a few sources, like I said, adapt for your own reality. But once we've done this exercise, sitting down and analyzing the pros and cons, we create a make versus buy decision model. So very simple. On the left axis, we may list out all of our different potential content vendor sources. And on the top, we list out different business criteria. I used a few examples here. Cost to create, control over the process, how fast it goes to market, how creative it is, which really matters to our clients. There's other possible criteria lists along the bottom, and I do include this in the link. And then I kept mine super simple. I went one for worse, 10 for best. Okay, and then I had it spit out a score. And that helped me to prioritize which sources or vendors would make the most sense to create content for our clients. Should we keep it in house or should we outsource it? So you may use this to choose which tool your agency uses permanently, or you have it in your toolkit so you can look real smart when you pull it out for different clients in different projects. So, very powerful little tool there. Big takeaways. You cannot assume that everyone views content the same way. Do the work to discover what your clients and your colleagues think content means and take the time to clearly redefine what you need content to mean. Stop winging it in silos. Build a documented process, or at least a skeleton of one, based on interviews that you have done around your agency. Get that buy-in. Understand what they need content to do and how they envision it working, and then you automatically have their buy-in because you built this process on their input with their interests in mind. And last, examine all of your potential content production sources. I think the most important point here is it may not be inside the agency sometimes. I hope that most of the time it is, but it's not always. And weight them from your perspective and determine which ones are the right sources to use for which clients and which projects. Help them make that smart make versus buy decision. And with that, special goodies. That is mozcon.vml.vmlconnect.com. User name is VML All Caps. Password, Mozcon 2017, MNC, or Capitalize. Everything I talked about is in there. Thank you very much. Party on.