Business
Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More! My guest today is Tommy Walker and he started Shopify Plus blog and after that, he became the Global Editor-in-Chief will QuickBooks. Now, he's a consultant and is sharing his knowledge that he gained over the past 15 years with other brands. Oh my God, Tommy. So happy to have you! Tommy Walker: Thanks so much for having me, Pam. It's great to be on here. Pam Didner: All right. Talk to us. Talk to us about your experience in Shopify. I mean, obviously it was a small mom and pop shop and to start with and you were employee number 14 and you got handed their blog post or whatever you want to call it. And became a content marketing machine. Can you share that experience with us in terms of the journey that you went through and, you know, the knowledge that you gain and the insight that you can share with our listeners. Tommy Walker: For sure. Absolutely. So, um, I was employee number 14 at Shopify Plus, um, and when I had… Pam Didner: OK. What are the differences between the two? Tommy Walker: So that was a great, that's a great question. At the time, there really wasn't too much of a difference. Um, and we had to figure that out. The difference now is very clear. Uh, Shopify Plus is basically Shopify plus a whole bunch of other stuff, right? For enterprises and high growth startups, which is great. Shopify is a little bit more of the standard merchant, right. People who are looking to get into e-commerce and we were looking at the more experienced e-commerce side of the house. So, yeah. How did I get there? I was the editor in chief at a website called Conversion XL at the time and was recruited over into Shopify. Craig Miller their CMO at the time had asked, “Hey, would you be interested in running the Shopify plus blog?” And I said, “yeah, that's great.” So I got over there and I was asking people, “Hey, what is the difference between Shopify and Shopify Plus? And they were like, “well, from a feature set, there's not really a huge difference. We have, you know, dedicated customer service and a more customizable checkout.” And that was pretty much it. And I said, “well, what about from a voice and tone perspective?” And they were like, “Well, we don't really know.” And this was at the time I was running the blog, which was the most frequent publishing arm of the entire company. We were the putting most stuff out into the market. Pam Didner: So how often do you guys publish at that time? Tommy Walker: Uh, at the time we were publishing three times a week. So every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And the way that that calendar worked every Friday, we were publishing a new case study. I tried to leverage the size of the part of the company to our advantage because we had much more direct access to our customers. So we were able to kind of tell these stories and make these case studies every week, which was really great. It was a great part of the calendar. Pam Didner: So how do you determine the editorial in general? What topics did you chose and also, do you actually have editorial meetings with your writers? How does that collaboration and communication go? Tommy Walker: With the picking the subjects it was kind of a combination of a few different things. Obviously you look at the search side of things, but that wasn't really a huge concern of mine, to be honest with you. The main thing that I was looking at at the time, and I still kind of look at this depending on where I am, what I'm looking at is taking an observation as I'm going through my own e-commerce experience, as I'm like buying stuff and kind of realizing like, “Hey, what part of this process, where is the friction here? Where am I seeing opportunities that these particular sites can do be better?” Making note of that and continuing to go about that. As I'm looking at a broader calendar though, uh, I'm starting to look at the year, right? I come from an acting background. I was an actor for 10 years. A lot of what we had done there was about learning subtext and creating story structure and looking at all of these different things to make a good performance. And the way I look at this computer screen that you and I are talking on right now, it's not very different than TV screens or movie screens of the past. Right? All of this is performance to a certain extent. So when I was looking at structuring my content calendar, I would break the year up into a four-act structure, right. Where we can say we're all heading into the very end of the year, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, like that's the big, that's the biggest… Pam Didner: That’s a big deal for Shopify and how I build up that momentum to that specific month or that season. Tommy Walker: Right. So that's kind of how I was looking at the calendar, was telling the story over the course of four quarters and then breaking that down by each month to basically say here is how we can make the perfect website all the way up until the end, and then really get that story, make it really pop. Pam Didner: So do you followed that four act structure every single year? I mean, would the story kind of repeat itself or you are kind of talking about it from a different approach. Um, that is a story. Does the story, uh, , stall, you know, because it's exactly the same four acts? Tommy Walker: Uh, it can, it can, but the way I think about it is you've got one year and you've got that first sort of origin story, if you will. Right. And this was what I was looking at when we were there, cause at the time Shopify Plus primarily for people who felt like they were outgrowing Shopify as a product. Right? So what we were looking at at that time was like, you know, if to use a video game reference, it's what happens when Mario gets the power up mushroom for the first time, right? The world is completely different. People are moving out of their garages to do shifts. Into 3PLs so third-party logistics. They are starting to bring on employees, all sorts of new things like that. So we're dealing with that. And then knowing that that stuff is going to get picked up by Google or have its own natural discovery process, the next year, we can start to look at that as more of the sequel, if you will. And then start thinking about it like that year over year. Pam Didner: You’re constantly going back to evaluate your past content? So it's not like you finish writing a blog post, you just like publish it, then you move on to the next one. You publish it and you move on to the next one. I think you constantly go back evaluating what has been published. And they either try to create a SQL or possibly, maybe I'm just like—maybe I’m putting words in your mouth--like go back and update and refresh it. Tommy Walker: I'm, actually I'll give you an example. So, at the beginning of the month, we would write a piece that would say, you know, “how to build the perfect webpage.” Right. And we'd go, here's navigation, here's a hero image. Here's a, you know how to write a great headline, right? And we'd break down the entire page in that. The following week, we would follow that up “How to make the perfect navigation” and then just focus specifically on that. Pam Didner: So very, very specific--I hate using the one narrow--but very specific topic. One very specific topic at a time, but it is a narrative it's very intentional in terms of what specific topic that you want to talk about. So how long did you plan your editorial? Did you plan that one quarter ahead or did you play in that whole year or how does that work? Tommy Walker: So I would plan it for the whole year, right. At least the loose themes that we would want to do for the full year. So, you know, uh, first quarter is this, second quarter, is that so forth and so, on. And we always have to build in room for flexibility, but yeah, we would try to plan loosely the entire year and then kind of break it down quarter to quarter and then month to month and then eventually week to week. Pam Didner: Yeah. So you do actually have something at a very high level, but like you said, very loosely, but you have some ideas and then every single quarter, every single month you hone into that. So how often do you change that news structure of your annual. editorial narrative? I mean, did you set it up and then you kind of just follow that or do you change it like in the middle of the year and then completely, sometimes you have to restructure it due to the new product launches or new features that's being added, you know, Shopify went IPO, I don't know, you know, something big things happened. So what is, how do you make that balance? Tommy Walker: So the way that I try to think about it and the try the way I think about it now, even now that I'm not at Shopify is that yeah. You have to anticipate that product marketing is going to come up with something that they want and they're going to want it two weeks before they, it comes out and yeah, yeah, Pam Didner: Yeah, all the time it was like, “oh, are we going to have a product launch? You know, but this has got to be a secret.” You will not know that product launch until like two days before. Tommy Walker: “Can we have a blog post?” (laughs) So, so knowing that that's gonna happen, try to have, you know, when I build out my freelance team have somebody that can write quickly. And have somebody who's really good at that. Um, but to answer the question yeah it's, it's about building in knowing that things are going to go sideways or, you know, things are going to change in the industry or things like that. There are always going to be constants, but then you have to also think about where that flexibility needs to be. So not always so rigid, but you try your best to stay on topic, um, and hit those points that you already know are gonna come up. Pam Didner: Got it. So how big is your freelance team if you will? Tommy Walker: Sure. So I always had to 2-10 people and the reason for that is, uh, I wanted to plan my calendar out. I always want to have at least a month worth of articles in the hopper, just in case product marketing comes up or there's a drought and somebody gets sick or any of that. Right. So I always have at least one week planned out and I want to have at least two people for each rotating week. So the more people you have, obviously the, the better you can go about it. Pam Didner: Does that mean you need a huge amount of money to budget this? Tommy Walker: Fortunately at Shopify, I wasn't restricted by budget. (Pam laughs) Pam Didner: Aha! (laughs) Tommy Walker: It's just, yeah. Uh, you know, throwing dollar bills out there. Um, but at QuickBooks I had a very strict budget that I had to follow. Um, and fortunately I had to, I got to make my own budget. So I would get to break it down by technology and authors and promotion and all of that. And, and yeah, I mean, that's something I consult on now too, is how you make that budgeting work and have the right amount of people. And the way that I like to think about this is the more money you're willing to spend--and this is going to be true across the board, right--but the more money you're willing to spend, the less time you're going to have to spend in revision. However, if you have the right deputy editor, which I've always had included with this stuff, they're going to have a more consistent salary and they'll be able to do some of those more consistent edits so you can balance it out. And you'll always have your lead writer. And this happens with a lot of editorial staff on, you know, newspapers and magazines. You have your lead author, and then you have other people that you work with that might need a little bit more massaging. But the idea is if you really get solid with the edit, you can help those people who need more, attention need a little bit more love to bring them up to a certain point where your not having to spend so much time in editorial. And what's always been important to me is making it so they become more valuable out to the rest of the market. Right. So I might not have to pay them as much, they're getting paid more, but there's a lot other places. But there's still loyalty internally because that relationship between author and editor is, I believe like it's, it's a very close bond and it has to be respected because as an editor, you're the first person that sees any of this work. Right. Pam Didner: So Tommy, did you do any other formats of content, such as a case study or podcast or a video? Tommy Walker: Yeah. Um, so we did case studies. We did the case study every week. And I'll talk about that a little bit more in a second, um, how we approach that, but we definitely did a lot of video, too. Pam Didner: You do write a video script yourself, or you have someone else to do? Tommy Walker: I was more in the creative development side of the script. If that makes sense more concepting. Now, because a lot of the, the video stuff we did was more live capturing--like it was more. With the merchant. There wasn't a lot of scripting that had to happen, but I did have to work with the people over in the agencies that I was working. To pull out certain narratives that we wanted to kind of talk about. So yeah. Pam Didner: What are some of the key objectives? What are some of the key messages that needs to come out and also is the closing? I think that very important, any kind of the video, or even podcasts from my perspective tend to be the opening and closing. Tommy Walker: Yeah. And like, what do we want to get for B roll? And, you know, let's like that type of thing where what's the, what's the background that's going on here? And with our case study, case studies were really important to me, especially in those early days, because we had access to customers, which as I started working for larger companies realized there are way more layers between you and the customer. Pam Didner: Oh yes. Tommy Walker: There was a whole team that I had to go through, uh, at, at one of the other positions to gain access to customers. It was a crazy process. Pam Didner: I am not surprised. (both laugh) Been there, done it, seen it. Yeah, all of it! Tommy Walker: Yeah, but fortunately, because Shopify Plus at the time was so small, we had direct access to our customers. And one of the things I noticed when I was doing my market research, before we, before we even wrote a single line of text was a lot of the competitors out there--and this isn't just in this space, this is any company really--it was always this problem solution. Results right. Company X works with company Y and see Z results. And that has its place. But at the time we were trying to differentiate. So what I was always looking at, and I, and I worked with this excellent author, Nick Winkler, give him a shout out. He was an Emmy award winner, which was great. He was able to pull out these really excellent stories from people. But what we did is instead of looking at problem solution results, I said what led to the problem? Obviously we know that you're a customer because we're doing a case study here and we know that you're going to have some amazing results because we have a bias, right? We're only going to show you the excellent results. But what led to the problem and what we found when we started to dig into some of these more personal stories, I wanted to treat them more like Rolling Stone interviews. So we would find out from one of my favorite cases was the problem was, was that the guy’s server room was on fire and that meant he needed to go to a cloud-based solution and because he went to the cloud-based solution, didn't have to worry about server rooms catching on fire. (Pam laughs) Cool. But what was interesting about this guy's story is how he found out his server room was on fire. So he was at his bachelor party and it was about three o'clock in the morning, which already gives you the sort of frame of mind that somebody at a bachelor party at three o'clock in the morning would be in, when they find out that their server room is on fire. Right. So there's like there, that adds a little bit of extra color. There adds some context. Pam Didner: Yeah. It does add a little drama to it and the peak people's interest. Tommy Walker: Yeah. Right. And like, in some of the other stories, they got really emotional because we wanted to learn their origins, right? What led them to become this entrepreneur? And we wanted to speak to that entrepreneurial spark. So there are some people who were bullied their entire life and their business was almost a direct response to being bold. Some of these came from visits across the world and seeing completely different cultures and bad situations, and then finding ways to really help in that area. So there was some really excellent stories that came out of this and they're very human stories. And at the end of the day, like that's what we, as people really want to see is that the companies that we work with are invested in the humanity of, of you, right? We want to know that you care about what's going on in my life, not to like a creepy extent, but we want to know that the product that we're putting out there is going to help in some aspects, some real aspect and not just be another number. Right. Pam Didner: Speaking of number. I mean, all those are great content. How did you measure success? Tommy Walker: That was very difficult at the time. Pam Didner: Yeah, as a B2B marketer or being in the enterprise for a long period of time, we always want to quantify the marketing success. And sometimes it's very, very hard, especially your marketing campaigns or marketing tactic is a focus on top of the funnel, because you are building that brain awareness. You try to build that emotional connection, but it's very hard to quantify that. So how do you suggest for the brands would like to do something similar to quantify the success? Because ultimately they need to have a Come to Jesus meeting with the VP of marketing, VP of sales, even the, a CEO. Tommy Walker: Um, so it's been different depending on the company that I've worked. Shopify was a very different situation because it was just getting off the ground. There wasn't a ton for attribution modeling in place. We weren't able to look at that. So the metrics that I was really looking at at the time, because I did have access to this was returned visitors. Right. Um, and return visitors have always been sort of my true north metric that I, I try to look at because in a B2B context specifically, the more return visitors you have, the more return visits you have. That corresponds really well with the consideration area. Right. I want people to spend a lot more time with me. New visitors are cool. I love new visitors, but return visitors that's really where it's at. I want to know that I'm retaining people. So that was part of it at Shopify Plus moving over to QuickBooks, I got to work with this really excellent data scientist who helped model a number of different things. Like how many visits does it take for a person to actually convert to a customer? Right. Pam Didner: What is the magic number, according to QuickBooks? Tommy Walker: Um, that's proprietary. Pam Didner: Can you give me a range? Tommy Walker: I will tell you this, when we were able to double the amounts of, uh, return visits we had from individuals within a 90 day period, we were able to half the time it took to make a sale. That's about as much as I can say, uh, when it came to that, but it's a decent amount of visits, right. You know, maybe anywhere between 15 to 30. We'll kind of give, we'll kind of give that sort of a range. Pam Didner: You were like, okay, I'm going to give you a very wide range. Why don't you guys just do a test yourself? And I agree (both laugh). Tommy Walker: Yeah, 1 and 100. Um, no, it was really between 15 and 30 is what we would find it, especially in the 90-day period. And what we found was that, when you can increase the amount of return visits for a single user, um, and increase the amount of page views per session, then you're able to reduce that time to sale, um, really in half, which is incredible. And it makes total sense when you look at it beyond the numbers perspective, right? If I'm going to spend more time with you, that's time that I'm not spending with somebody else. And that makes me far more likely to like your stuff and trust you. Pam Didner: Yeah. The next question I have is in terms of the content that you created over a period of time, do you go back and repurpose some of the content or do you reuse some of the content? Can you share some of the examples with us? Tommy Walker: Sure. So, um, I didn't mention this earlier, but when we did at, uh, one of the different formats that we had explored when I was at Shopify Plus where a series of industry reports. Right. Pam Didner: So you guys do primary research? Tommy Walker: We would compile research from other outside sources. Pam Didner: Ah, I see. So is the base, uh, it's a, is the industry report that you compile based on the secondary resources that you have? Tommy Walker: Okay. Right. And what we did with these, because Shopify plus was not going to compete on features. Purposefully, we're not going to compete on features primarily because we couldn't, but we also decided that. We weren't going to, I had said we're going to compete on knowledge, right? So we would do these industry reports, which is a strategy they still use today, which makes me very happy with this. What would happen is we'd have all of that data and information, and then we could repurpose some of that into a blog post, you know, bring some of that stuff in. But the other thing that we would do is we would merchandise, if you will. We'd create trailers for the industry reports. So you have video going into that and now you're repurposing it over into a blog post. And then with the trailer, you can have these little gifts that come out of it. So there are a number of different ways that you can splice up this information. And with the industry reports themselves, there were, I think some of them had over a hundred pages worth of just pure information. And they were like— Pam Didner: How long did it take to create the industry report? Tommy Walker: Forever! Uh, several months, several months, Pam Didner: I would not be surprised. Tommy Walker: No. And we were projecting out for the next five years. Pam Didner: So the industry information. You gather, you projected the trends for the next five years? Tommy Walker: Correct. Yeah. And that was the depth that we were going into. And we were able to take our own internal knowledge, even though we weren't publishing that at the time and sort of apply that to what was going on here in, and really say that we were at the ground level on some of this stuff and bring in, you know, merchant quotes and stuff like that. And then we were able to repurpose a lot of that into other forms of content. Pam Didner: Definitely. But that requires a lot of planning and intentional effort. I want people to understand that repurposing a piece of content, it's not very simple, like, oh, okay. You pull, uh, several paragraphs from one white paper and you write a blog post. It's a very intentional effort. As of you creating a, not a piece of content, even though you are using existing content that you have. Tommy Walker: Right. And the way to think about it really is making it modular. Right. Like when you're thinking about the big piece, what are the smaller things that you can create that are modular and put that out there? Something I learned years ago is create soundbites within your content, right? Like in this is, this is totally different, but like, what are, what are some tweetables that you can put out there? And it's the same thing as like PR and you know, all of that is you get the, you put the little soundbites out there. What's the news going to pick up on? And when you're able to put that stuff in, then it becomes infinitely more shareable, but it's also, you can use it to repurpose in a number of different areas, especially if you're planning that ahead of time. Pam Didner: Being a content marketer myself, where a good period of time, especially in enterprise, it's a lot of work. And I think from editorial planning down to the content creation, or even once you create content, you have to repurpose the content is there's a lot of coordination that needs to happen within the company. And if you have a one lesson for enterprise marketers that actually trying to manage the content, what is that one lesson that you want to share? Tommy Walker: Ooh, that's a good question. Um, Content marketing is not a solo sports. It is very much a team sport and it's not just on the content team. So if you need to work with other parts of the company to get what you need done, try to understand their working cadence and how it is that you can fit into their day, so you're not bashing heads when it comes to getting stuff created. Pam Didner: I hear you. I hear try to understand how they work and their process and work with that. Tommy Walker: Exactly. Pam Didner: Very good. Hey, before I end our podcast, I would like to ask you to answer one silly question and you can pick one out of two. Number one: What is the most useless talent that you possess? The second one is, did you have a ridiculous goal in your life? Tommy Walker: (laughs) Um, yeah, the, the most useless I have a few use those talents. Um, the, the most useless talent I would say that I have is an encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel movies and movies in general, coming from the filmmaking background. Pam Didner: What about, uh, DC? You are more into the Marvel universe. Okay. Tommy Walker: The Marvel Universe. Um, but movies in general, that's just from my acting background. So, um, my wife hates watching movies with me sometimes because I'm like, did you know? Pam Didner: And you're like, shut up. Can I just enjoy the movie? Don't tell me! Tommy Walker: She, she wonders how I enjoy the movie. I'm like, “this is exactly how I enjoy the movie!” Pam Didner: Thank you so much, Tommy. So happy to have you on my show and you share a lot of insight with us and I enjoy our conversation.