SaaS Breakthrough – Featuring Ed Shelley

About Ed Shelley :

Ed is Director of Content at ChartMogul – a software built to help people build a better subscription business, through data. Ed was the company’s first full time employee and joined as a content focused person.

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Show Notes:
03:22
Joining the Team at ChartMogul
04:06
Evolving Product with Same DNA
05:03
Graduating Target Customer with Features
06:05
Changing Marketing from Targeting One Persona to Different Personas
"Pretty much every different part of a SaaS business started to have this story where they could use their data to answer questions. And that changed quite a lot of things for us on the marketing side because we were then able to kind of move from the fairly like restricted domain that we were publishing around to kind of a broader view that targeted all of these different personas."
09:09
First Investors Advice: Hire First a Content Focused Person
10:05
Content Marketing Process and Building Momentum
"Honestly the first six to 12 months were really just a big long grind of iterating on the ideation process. The production content production putting things out there measuring the results looking at the engagement that it was getting and then coming back and doing more and just kind of optimizing that entire process."
11:33
The Library Of Content that Keeps Paying Back
12:39
Focus on Metrics Around Engagement
"What I've learned is to really focus on metrics that are kind of focused around engagement. So understanding what people engage with is I think a really strong signal for what is the like the right kind of content to focus on for your audience."
15:00
Wins: Downloadables and Pretty Large Analysis Posts
17:53
Guiding Principles: Got To Be Useful for People
"If you're not being useful, like if you're not putting stuff out there that it truly makes people's lives better or makes people's jobs easier. I don't think there's much space for what you're doing. It's the only like sustainable strategy for content marketing at least today is to really add something new. I'm sure you can rehash of bunch of other things that exist out there but unless you're adding something new on top of it and making it either easier to consume, you're simplifying it or you are making some additional insights available like you've really got to just be useful for people."
18:49
Strategies for Syndication for Content Generation
20:46
Email Marketing and the "SaaS Roundup"
23:01
Make it Personal, Real and Useful
"You don't have to follow what every else is doing there. I think the important thing is that you make it personal, you make it real and you kind of make it useful. Like I was saying the useful thing is really key."
23:14
Balancing Content Identities
25:34
2018: A Year for People to Double Down on Quality
29:00
ROI: Embracing Content Marketing as a Branding Play
32:24
Marketing Advice for Early Stage SaaS: Think Long Game, Engagement and Role Model
"Number one it's a long game. You need at least like six months before you really start to see results. Number two focus on engagement. Like everything is about engagement for us. Number three I think if you're struggling, find a role model like find a company that you think is doing an amazing job you like you can imitate certain aspects of their strategy and everybody has a company that they love to kind of read about or they think is doing an amazing job."
33:43
Vital Marketing Skills: Listening
34:30
Best Resource for Marketing: Read What VCs Say
Resources:
Connect with Ed:
https://twitter.com/Mr_Ed
Learn more about ChartMogul:
https://chartmogul.com/
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