Actionable Marketing Podcast - AMP 228: How CoSchedule Markets Multiple Product Lines (and How You Can Make Major Pivots With Confidence) With Nathan Ellering From CoSchedule

AMP 228: How CoSchedule Markets Multiple Product Lines (and How You Can Make Major Pivots With Confidence) With Nathan Ellering From CoSchedule

03/30/21 • 32 min

CoSchedule started as an editorial calendar WordPress plugin created by an agency that co-founders, Garrett Moon and Justin Walsh, ran called Todaymade. Since then, CoSchedule has grown. Not only has the core content calendar gone through a lot of changes, but so has the company.

Today’s guest is Nathan Ellering, Head of Marketing at CoSchedule, which now offers multiple different product lines under one brand name. Nathan explains how CoSchedule made pivots and tackled some risks and challenges. His advice will help you navigate from being one company that makes one product and expand to one company that makes four products.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Product Positioning: How to funnel people in and say the right things
Marketing Automation: Where to build out those funnels and nurture people
Marketing Design: Make sure everything published is visually built and modern
Customer Service: Incorporate customer service much more with marketing
History of CoSchedule: How core marketing calendar software evolved
Company Philosophy: Start where you're at with a smaller test product
Marketing Work Management Software: Organize everything in one place
Content Calendars: Meet deadlines and manage work effectively, efficiently
Agile Marketing Tools: Hire product to finish work, deliver projects, prove value
Current Products: Marketing Calendar/Suite, Headline Analyzer, Headline Studio
Academy: Marketing education platform for marketers to understand, build skills
Mission Statement: CoSchedule wants to help every marketer do amazing work
CoSchedule Experience: Get the right messaging to get them into a product
True Tenants of Agile: Where to ship, measure, learn, iterate, and begin
Testing Culture: Launch something new with other people’s market research

Links:

Quotes from Nathan Ellering:

“We're aiming to create experiences that help out people who really are being marketed to...from a customer service perspective. That's been really fun so far.”

”We were working a lot with bloggers and we discovered many years ago that marketers are starting to turn to blogging as a great way to do content marketing.”

“We identified the need that they had to just organize everything in one place. We say those words all the time. They really resonate with people.”

“We want every experience at CoSchedule to be a positive one and one that lasts a lifetime of you being a marketer.”

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Product Positioning: How to funnel people in and say the right things
Marketing Automation: Where to build out those funnels and nurture people
Marketing Design: Make sure everything published is visually built and modern
Customer Service: Incorporate customer service much more with marketing
History of CoSchedule: How core marketing calendar software evolved
Company Philosophy: Start where you're at with a smaller test product
Marketing Work Management Software: Organize everything in one place
Content Calendars: Meet deadlines and manage work effectively, efficiently
Agile Marketing Tools: Hire product to finish work, deliver projects, prove value
Current Products: Marketing Calendar/Suite, Headline Analyzer, Headline Studio
Academy: Marketing education platform for marketers to understand, build skills
Mission Statement: CoSchedule wants to help every marketer do amazing work
CoSchedule Experience: Get the right messaging to get them into a product
True Tenants of Agile: Where to ship, measure, learn, iterate, and begin
Testing Culture: Launch something new with other people’s market research

Links:

Quotes from Nathan Ellering:

“We're aiming to create experiences that help out people who really are being marketed to...from a customer service perspective. That's been really fun so far.”

”We were working a lot with bloggers and we discovered many years ago that marketers are starting to turn to blogging as a great way to do content marketing.”

“We identified the need that they had to just organize everything in one place. We say those words all the time. They really resonate with people.”

“We want every experience at CoSchedule to be a positive one and one that lasts a lifetime of you being a marketer.”

Previous Episode

AMP 227: What’s Broken With Content Distribution (And How It Might Get Fixed) With Jonathan Gandolf From The Juice

Why are marketers good at content production, but not so great at content distribution? They are judged based on how much work they get done, rather than the actual results that they produce. Also, content promotion with traditional channels is harder to do.

Today’s guest is Jonathan Gandolf from The Juice. He talks about a better way for content marketers to produce and distribute value. Curation is actually more powerful than creation.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

The Juice: A startup that aspires to be the Spotify of B2B content
Beta Program: Marketers distribute curated content and consumers discover it
Content Distribution: Same channels, same audience equals diminishing returns
Keyword Salad: Who are we creating content for? Algorithms or humans?
Talk to Consumers: Understand why quality content is not producing returns
The Right Content: Prospects want solutions to problems, not more content
B2B Buyer’s Journey: Map out funnel and map content to it
Down the Drain: 59% content isn’t read, 23% budget applied to content creation
Forms: Don’t expect good things from content consumers with such deliverables
Safe Space: Create platform to be anonymous, no contact, or generate leads
Marketers: Slow down and curate content for consumers at right time and place

Links:

Quotes from Jonathan Gandolf:

”What ends up happening is we create really compelling content, but then we end up going to the same channels and the same audience over and over and over again.”

“You hit this law of diminishing returns. You’re getting less returns out of that same audience. The only way to get more returns is to create more content. You end up on this hamster wheel of content creation.”

“Nobody, right now, is looking for more content. They’re just looking for the right content.”

“Curation is actually more powerful than creation.”

Next Episode

AMP 229: Creating ROI-Driven B2B Content Marketing Strategies That Work With Brad Smith From Wordable and Codeless

Too often, content marketing strategies follow one of two paths: Keyword driven or driven based on what the writer thinks makes an interesting topic. The path to success is somewhere in between those two strategies.

Today’s guest is Brad Smith from Wordable, Codeless, and uSERP. He talks about how to create data-backed and ROI-driven content strategies that blend both approaches for maximum results.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Problems: Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) are incredibly competitive
Affiliate Space: 70% of revenue comes from two or three keywords
Temporary Approach: Create great content to find an audience
Referral Traffic: Completely relying on what other people find interesting
Ads: Companies turn to other channels that are less profitable, more competitive
Game Plan: What components/expectations will move content and keywords?
Marketers don’t need more or better ideas—but test and execute them better
Decision-Making Process: Do it or be grounded in reality to produce best results
Wordable: Format, optimize, upload, and publish content in minutes for clients

Links:

Quotes from Brad Smith:

“If you’re relatively small, relatively new, not well-funded, don’t have a name for yourself or brand yet, that kind of excludes like 70 percent of the good stuff from a keyword perspective that you’d want to write for, ultimately, that’s going to bring in ROI.”

“When you’re following this method of let’s just create ‘good’ content, you’re completely 100 percent relying on what other people find interesting.”

“Social things are going to be a lot more beneficial shorter term. Over the long term, it’s just about scale.”

“The whole ranking thing is like the chicken and the egg. I can’t rank for big keywords until I’m big, but I’m not going to be big until I rank for some keywords.”

“Marketers don’t need more ideas. They don’t need better ideas. They just need to execute better, and executing better comes from processes and boring systems and operations.”