Why Marketers Should Be Mentors to Create Long Term Growth
Are you neglecting an important part of your marketing funnel?
You may be under pressure to to create content that will help close more sales immediately, but there is huge value to investing in content that has a longer lifespan.
In this podcast, I talk to Nick Oswald, founder of BitesizeBio about the longer term strategy of mentoring your prospects with your content marketing.
You’ll learn:
The benefit of creating content for “the whole scientist”
How being a mentor will win you a friend for life
How to create a marketing annuity that pays out for years
The hidden value of older content
Why you should always get transcripts of your webinars
This was a fun interview. Nick and I ended up each claiming to have lost more soccer games than the other. (I’m pretty sure it’s me.)
About My Guest
Nick has a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology, He’s worked as a researcher at a couple of startups and as the editorial manager for the journal, Neuroendocrinology. He is currently the Managing Director of the company he founded, BitesizeBio, an online magazine and community for cell and molecular biologists.
The Transcript
This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.
Chris: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the podcast. Today, my guest is Nick Oswald. Nick has a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology, and he’s been a researcher at a couple of startups. Also been the editorial manager for the journal Neuroendocrinology, and is currently the Managing Director of the company he founded, BitesizeBio. BitesizeBio is an online magazine and community for cell and molecular biologists. And what we are going to talk about today is content marketing in the context of an online magazine, and that community. So Nick, welcome to the podcast.
Nick: Thanks, Chris. Nice to be here.
Chris: I’m a little curious. You’re a biologist who has created a media company. Tell me a little bit about that.
Nick: Well, it’s kind of an evolution which is probably fitting from being a biologist. I started in the lab obviously, and I just found myself more drawn towards . . . I realized I wasn’t a great scientist in sort of the green fingers sense, and I found myself more drawn towards teaching people in the lab, and help people to overcome the problems they were facing in the lab and stuff. I became kind of that in the company that I was working for. That was the role I took on. I started at that time, it was about 2007, and this new media kind of popped up — blogs. So I just started writing, and I discovered that I really loved writing, and I loved writing about things that I thought could help people and apparently people liked what I was writing, and it just all snowballed from there. Three years later, I started as a kind of business in its own right, and not long after that it became my full time job. So it’s just kind of evolved from there, and it’s been a crazy ride so far, but it’s good fun.
Chris: Yeah, it sounds like it. That’s a unique path into marketing from biology. I mean there are people who move from biology into marketing. But through blogging, you were the first person I heard of. So tell me about who is your target audience for BitesizeBio?
Nick: So the target audience I had in mind when I started this was, kind of, people in their PhD studies essentially. So the people that have just come out of sort of textbook learning, if you like, and have suddenly landed in the lab, and they have this whole new learning curve to climb up. And the aim of BitesizeBio is to help these people to acquire that hands-on knowledge that you can only get by trial and error, or from a good mentor. And the way that we do that is we pool lots of . . . we have about 300 people so far, 300 lab-based scientists so far, who have written for us. What we encourage them to do is to extract the real experience-based knowledge that they have, crystallize it into articles and webinars and so on, and make that available for these people to read.
In that sense, BitesizeBio grows into kind of the missing manual for the lab, if you like. That’s sometimes the way that we look at it. And we find that by targeting the early stage people, the Ph.D students essentially, it still attracts an audience well into kind of post-doc and beyond. There’s only so much you can learn on the job yourself. There’s always something you can learn from other people.
Chris: Right, because there’s a lot of post-docs, for example, in my experience, they do their PhD in one area, and then they transition in many case to another area, where they’re starting over with a whole new set of techniques, right?
Nick: Yeah.
Chris: And those are the ones that they’re going to carry on to the lab, when they start their own lab, or they go to a company and now they have a new set of expertise, and presumably in a position to start buying and making buying decisions on things, right?
Chris: Sure, yeah.
The reason you started writing at all, what you said, was helping scientists in their day-to-day experience in the lab. I remember and maybe you do, but back in my day, protocols passed around on copy paper, and so on. There’s only so far that that can go. And there was no web, but there was no resource where you could share more broadly.
Nick: Yeah.
Chris: And so I want to focus on that. That’s really the essence of what today’s podcast is about is getting companies to think beyond how their own products help scientists, is what other content can they produce or participate in? And can they build a community or either join yours or build a community of their own, with content that is simply helpful for their target audience?
Nick: Yeah, I think a good analogy for that is the way when I started off BitesizeBio, there was a lot of science blogs around, and just by luck or whatever, I decided very early on to do the opposite of what they were doing. These guys were talking about themselves, and what they thought, and what they wanted to tell the world and stuff like that. I didn’t talk about myself. I talked about what I thought could help people. It’s an analogy with people. There’s a balance between talking about yourself as a company, what products you make and what services you can offer and so on, but at the same time talking about what can just help people. And in that way, you gain fans and kudos and all that good stuff that helps just drive a natural audience to what you are doing.
Chris: Right, and there’s always a time for talking about yourself, but as you point out, it’s not how you build an audience. One challenge companies may have is, if you’re continually talking about yourself, no one really cares yet about what you have to offer because you haven’t done anything for them. There’s an opportunity to create content that is helpful for them. So scientists, they can come to your site; not only do they learn about different techniques, for example, and things that’ll directly help them in a lab, but you’ve gone even further than that, right? You have a whole other section of content that has nothing to do with experiments, right?
Nick: Yeah, or to do with anything that… our sort of unofficial tag line is “things that help people in the lab and beyond”. So it’s anything helping people in their career selection or an admin in the lab, or anything like that. Anything that can help a scientist, that’s what we write about.
Chris: Yeah, I was just pointing that out because that’s a bit of a stretch to think about. What else do they need that has nothing to do with what they’re going to do on the bench, but how can we help them in their career? Now you’ve become a resource for many of the things that a young scientist and a post-doc is looking for as their career is in that critical phase of getting a degree, finding a post-doc, working with other people, getting grants, and setting up your own lab and getting a job.
Nick: Yeah.
Chris: And a set of content that, by its nature, will keep them coming back.
Nick: Yeah, and there are a couple of ways to look at that. In terms of what BitesizeBio does in terms of what a company can do to make friends and influence people, if you like, is that we just set ourselves out to be a mentor, to do what a mentor would do, and that’s not just telling people stuff that is at the sharp end of what they can do, but coming right back and helping them to lay foundations. So that’s something that anyone can do in their marketing. That’s what we’ve done that has built what we have so far.
Chris: Right, so you combine helpful information from, let’s say, two primary sources. Other scientists who have experience, they are mentoring. And vendors who can provide a range of content types from here’s how you do this type of experiment to here’s how our product performs in this type of experiment. And that’s helpful for companies to think about. What is the range of things that we need to do to attract and hold an audience? And so you’ve provided a channel for doing that. What are your thoughts on . . . of course, a company might choose to make its own channel like that, but they have to bring people in. There are other channels besides yours where they can distribute that same content, but I guess talk a little bit about getting marketers to be more mentors.
Nick: I guess the foundation for that comes from realizing that if you have a bunch of in-house scientists who are experts in their own right, the resource that are perfecting your product or whatever they do, perform the services, but they also have a wealth of experience in their own right. And so you can create a corporate voice that includes that, that sort of mines that experience, if you like, and makes it available for people who are your potential customers. And in that way you can create a rounded set of content so that you make a friend and then sell them something.
One company that used to do that really well, I remember from my PhD was New England Biolabs. They made their manual; so that was pre-internet as well, just in the beginning of the internet. And they made a manual that was packed with all sorts of information that you may or may not need to do experiments. And as a molecular biologist, that was gold dust. I still have a lot of affection for them as a company because they influenced me at that early stage. And then we always bought their stuff because you were familiar with them. So that’s an example of what you can do on paper, but you can also do it in a channel like BitesizeBio, or your own blog or whatever. Just get more rounded in the content that you are producing. So that you are thinking about the whole scientist rather than just what you can sell them.
Chris: Right. Going as far back as I was in the lab many, many years ago, I don’t remember any catalogs, but the NEB catalog stood out. As “Wow, that thing is beautiful”, and it’s packed with information beyond everything you could learn about restriction enzymes and all the other things that they were producing. Also just as on the side, remember calculating the gram cost of a Lambda vector which was I think for a gram was in the millions of dollars per gram even though you’d only need nanograms of it, of course.
Nick: Yeah.
Chris: But that was just a fun thing to think about. My gosh, there was a tube full of DNA that was worth a million bucks and you could only do one thing with it. We talked a little before, and you talked about this graphic equalizer model of content. You want to talk about that? I guess, let me tee that up for a second just for people who might not know what a graphic equalizer is, and I hope we are talking about the same thing. In an audio system, besides having a bass and treble knob, you might have that more finely divided into different frequency ranges which you could adjust to optimize the sound in your room, right?
Nick: Yeah, okay. I’ll try and explain this. When we are talking about producing content for the whole scientist and not just what you can sell them, if you think of that as a sort of series of levers that you can up the intensity of your marketing or reduce the intensity of your marketing. At the far right of the graphic equalizer, you have marketing for things that you can sell directly to them so the end of the funnel if you like. But then as you move to the left of the graphic equalizer, you have things that are less sales orientated and more kind of marketing and branding orientated, and things that aren’t going to necessarily pay off straight away, but they will just gain you a friend that will widen the funnel for you, if you like.
As we have interacted with marketers, with BitesizeBio, what I’ve seen marketers tend to do is they turn the levers, or whatever you like right to the top for the end of the funnel stuff and they barely focus on the stuff to the left. So the graphic equalizer is skewed to the treble if you use the stereo analogy. But if you think about it, if you can even turn the volume up or turn the levers up to the left hand side even a little as much as your company can bear, that’s going to bear out more fruit for you in the long run. It’s difficult to do that because you can’t get an ROI on it straight away, but the more you can skew your graphic equalizer towards the left, to the bass side or whatever, then that’s doing content marketing that’s not orientated towards direct sales. The more you can do that, the more you build a presence that is naturally going out and influencing people and pulling in fans and making people look at what you are doing and respecting you a s a mentor, then that naturally feeds people into your funnel and you actually, in the end, need less of the sharp end, the treble end. Does that make sense?
Chris: It makes complete sense to me. What I like is as you say, although you don’t get the immediate ROI from it, or it’s hard to determine the immediate ROI, it has a longer lifetime in many cases because you can create content that is going to have value for many years at that end of the funnel.
Nick: Yeah, this is the way that I look at this. And again this is our sort of innocent stumbling through this from just building this from scratch; I didn’t plan this out. Some of the content that we’ve got on BitesizeBio is kind of . . . I made an early decision to make the content as timeless as possible, as far as possible; so no news or anything like that. And some of the content that we’ve got on there is kind of six, seven years old. And it pulls in, individual articles, pull in kind of 300 unique new visitors per day individual articles. We invested the time in making that article to begin with, and then as the search engines, one of the metrics they take into account is how old the article is, and how many people have visited it in the past, or how many links there are to it in the past, and stuff. Those older articles perform really well.
One other way to look at the graphic equalizer is how a media as the content, is it timeless or is it stuff that’s going to be expired within the next six months? If you are putting content out there that is timeless, it’s going to stay there for years, it’s going to keep driving people towards your keep, building kudos for you over years and years and years and years. Those are articles that we have, there’s one that’s about the fundamentals of how ethanol precipitation works. That’s our top one, I think. That pulls in about 600 people per day, and that’s a very specific niche of people that are going to be looking that and it’s so fundamental that people will be looking at that for years and years and years to come. From that initial investment, if you like, it’s not sales orientated, so it’s not driving a particular purchase or anything like that. It’s just pulling in lots of the right people and it will keep doing that forever.
Chris: I love that example about ethanol precipitation because I don’t think that one is going away anytime soon. And I don’t even know, honestly I’ve done thousands of those, and I have a rough understanding of how it works. I don’t even know that you need to know how it works, but I’m sure even if you are just curious you’d like to know, and can attract a lot of people with that. The other thing I liked about what you said is building that foundation with this content. And one of the things that I try to do with clients at Words 2 Wow, and my audience who are busy marketers who are trying to generate more leads. They are focusing as you might have said on the right side of the graphic equalizer, the treble, and trying to dial up more sales, tools and promotional content. I’m getting them to recognize that value of the left end.
One of my old colleagues used to call that, some people call it evergreen content; she called it an annuity because it pays off forever, over a long period of time. If you can create that type of content, I think there is a possibility for you. I think it’s more than a possibility that you can take a huge burden off of yourself for some basic lead generation and then move people into an educational stage where you are providing them more, not quite sales content, but middle of the funnel content, which a lot of companies miss out on and get more people to the bottom end of your funnel without doing lots and lots of extra work.
Nick: Yeah, that’s the thing. The more brave you can be in dialing up the timeless evergreen or annuity content, I like that. The more you can dial that up, the more brave you can be, then the more competitive advantage you’ll have in 5 or 10 years because your competitors are spending money to get those leads to do lead generation, whereas your content is just doing it for you.
Chris: Right. Yeah, that’s the courage part. You are not being evaluated 5 or 10 years down the road, but companies at a higher level should be thinking about that. Whoever is doing their content marketing for them or their marketing communications, about focusing on that so that will pay off down the road.
Nick: Yeah.
Chris: I think about content marketing in its ideal state and, as we’ve talked about, building that audience. A lot of what you do is around webinars, and people think of those as marketing because typically when companies are producing webinars, they are often product oriented. But you can think of webinars as media and build content into your webinars that is simply attractive to a particular audience by creating helpful content. So people would tune in to that just like they would tune into watching the news. They just want to know what’s going on. And I don’t know if I have a particular question here, but I know you published lot of webinar content. You have a webinar festival. I guess maybe talk about the range of types of content that go into those webinars.
Nick: Okay, so when we do a webinar, people who we speak to tend to think about a webinar as an event that happens live and does something live, and then that’s it. That’s because when you look at most places that hold webinars, they’ll make a recording of the webinar and then they’ll put it online for 30 days or something like that and then it’s gone, as far as I’ve seen anyway. We tend to look at it a bit differently because we think that, again to try and make the webinar as timeless as possible . . . we encourage people to make the webinar as timeless as possible so that the marketer can get juice out of it for years and years to come as long as possible.
We encourage them to balance the content in the webinar to make it, again, as brave as they want it to be, to make it as educational as possible. Some people do webinars that are entirely educational; some companies do that with us. Others will come back and say, “Its 90% educational, and 10% talking about a specific product, or something like that,” but the good thing about talking about basic educational stuff is that it lasts for a lot longer, right? So we have the webinar, and that gives the immediate sort of live interaction, the lead generation because they get the contacts afterwards and so on. Then what we do after that, is that we make the video available permanently on the website so that they can get the influence that that webinar deserves for years and years,
I think that if you are going to put all that effort into producing a great piece of content, then it should be on the web and available forever, or as long as internet is around or however you want to look at it. But then what we also do is we give the sponsor or the vendor a copy of the video and the option to have a transcript so that they can make content from that as well. So the webinar then becomes the live event that you normally associate that with and the lead generation and so on. But then it also becomes a content production exercise because they can make their own content from it and it becomes ongoing content marketing because it stays on our website forever. I think that’s how you should treat a webinar if you are going to put the effort into making one.
Chris: I agree and I like what you said there about a transcript. Every one of these podcasts shows up with a transcript when I put it on my website. And I deliver that as a pdf, but I know there are sites that will put that in as text in an HTML which has search benefits to it, right?
Nick: Sure.
Chris: It becomes searchable and just recognizing that not everybody consumes content in the same way, so I don’t expect that everybody is going to listen to my podcast. I have some favorite podcasts I listen to. And then there are some that I say, “I just want to get to the meat,” and I’ll go right to the transcript probably because I can read it faster than I can listen to it. But then for the ones who I really enjoy listening to, which is a whole other topic, I will tune in and listen while I’m walking the dog, mowing the lawn or whatever. But there are times when the written content is essential and I can imagine the same for a webinar. Sometimes people will just say, “Give me the transcript, I’ll read it on the train or whatever it is.” I really want to encourage companies to think about, when they record anything to get a transcript made, and if you’re not aware, that you can get a transcript made for a buck a minute. Whatever you are paying for a webinar, the 60 bucks for an hour-long transcript is nothing on top of it, for huge value.
Nick: Definitely, and I think there’s another way you can look at that as well. Our business is content production, downloading the brains of scientists, if you like, and to producing articles. The rate limiting step in that is getting people to come up with coherent topics and information that you can make an article from. But if you listen to any one of your webinars, you could probably come up with the kernel of five or six good articles from that. What we can encourage people to do is to take their transcript, and we can do it for them but they can do it themselves as part of their team, is that they can make briefs for five or six pieces of content that can then go out as individual articles on their website or blog or on Bitesize or wherever they want to put it. And in that sense, you are using the webinar to download the scientist’s brain of who’s doing the presentation for you.
Chris: Exactly, and just getting scientists to talk about something on a recording is another opportunity, even if it’s not a formal webinar. Just asking them questions and getting a transcript and starting from that. I want to put in a pitch for my own business because that’s s exactly what I do at Words 2 Wow, except they sort of do it in reverse. I get companies to think about the questions that their customers need to have answered, and then how to bundle those into a webinar, and then take those same questions and make an article out of each separate one of them, things like that. You’re really planning how to re-purpose, but even so, many companies have webinars that already exist and getting a transcript and highlighting a few key things in there would be a great start for creating five more pieces of content. Here’s what I would do. Take those five articles, you spread them out, drop them out of an airplane, whatever. People find them and the call to action in each one of those articles is go look at the webinar for a broader or deeper view of this whole thing, right?
Nick: Exactly, yeah.
Chris: I have an example I used in one of my workshops of a company that did that really well. They did a webinar, they took all the questions from a webinar, answered them in a blog post. People find the blog post, they get all the answers, I’ll go back here to see the whole webinar, and so on. You can be really creative about moving people from one piece of content to another, which I think is a place where a lot of companies fall down. They throw out a piece of content to get the names, but they are not moving someone to say, “All right, here’s what you should look at next.”
Nick: Yeah.
Chris: Enough of that. That’s my pitch. Let’s sort of wrap up. I want to think about this and maybe this is a challenging question, I don’t know. People could be building an audience on a site like yours. And you get those names and eventually you are trying to move them to do something, interact with your content or request a quote or demo or whatever. It’s also possible that they are building a content channel or an audience on their own sites. Is there a point in that funnel where it makes sense to switch over, or should they be doing the full funnel in both places?
Nick: Without being too biased, I would say there’s always a case for spreading your funnel as wide as possible. It’s always good to have a presence in as many places as you can. I suppose there are two ways you can look at how you are influencing people. You can look at your content on a channel like Bitesize which is your educational content there. You can look at it as just influence building like the stuff that . . . I don’t know. I think in the US it was General Electric and things like that, went into schools and gave educational videos that were branded in their name so that they became an influence in those kids’ heads. So you can look at that in the same way what you are doing in Bitesize; stuff that’s just branded with your name and that’s enough, or you can also have it so that alongside that content, there’s some call to action that’s permanently there, that drives people either toward your content or your products or whatever it is you want to do.
I guess you can either make it more passive or more the General Electric approach or you can make it more direct by having calls to action inside the article. That’s something we are moving towards, having permanent calls to action inside these articles and things. It’s not like your being too in your face about it but you want it to be that the reader has the option to pursue further content or influence from that company if they liked what they write in the article.
Chris: Right, yeah. I don’t have a particular answer in mind. I’m just thinking maybe companies at some point, their content gets so specific for a certain audience that maybe doesn’t have the broad appeal that some of the other content on the site like yours would have. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t go there, I mean some people would be interested and there really is no reason why you couldn’t have it in both places again.
Nick: Sure, definitely not…
Chris: I think people find them in different ways. It was just a thought I had.
Nick: Recycling content is always good, I think, isn’t it?
Chris: Yeah.
Nick: It’s cost effective.
Chris: Yeah, you want to find it in as many places as you possibly can. Well, I want to thank you for this whole discussing, it was very helpful. I guess one thing I didn’t tee you up for is that at the end of all these podcasts, generally, I have missed a few. I would like to find out what people like to do when they are not at their job, what they do for fun and relaxation.
Nick: Well, I have two kids who keep me very busy. I play soccer, not very well, do some running, not very well but I like to have a go at everything and just keep active and have fun with people.
Chris: Excellent. I have coached soccer, and very poorly. I have one of the longest streaks in league history, I’m sure. You can guess which end of the score I was on.
Nick: I think we should compare one day.
Chris: Well, thank you very much again for your time and I will hope to talk to you again soon.
Nick: Great stuff. Thanks, Chris, for having me.
Chris: You bet.
