Leveraging internal expertise
Our collaboration with Mixmax was very successful because we were able to leverage their internal experts.
Selling to salespeople, Mixmax’s AEs are their own ICP. We got to know their daily pain points, frustrations, challenges and goals, and they also provided Mixmax’s unique insights into the content we created.
This allowed us to write as if we were a part of their internal team—as the relationship grew and our dedicated team spent more time with the Mixmax team, we became their growth marketing manager’s right hand for organic.
The content helped readers self-qualify because their real pain points were always present in the content. Additionally, the insights we got from the sales team allowed us to go above and beyond in providing actionable insights they could use to do their jobs better.
This was the reason we saw reading times of an average of 10 minutes, and sometimes even longer.
Identifying the right tone of voice
Mixmax’s growth marketing manager, Andrea Skarica, knew that to succeed in organic sales tech, we had to do more than provide value. People in revenue create some of the best content in the B2B world, and it’s often very funny and entertaining (think Gong).
So we worked closely together to tie down the right tone of voice and make sure the content we created was both valuable and entertaining.
Content strategy
Our goals were to educate, create demand, and capture it, so we focused on mid-funnel and bottom-funnel keywords—and we built up from easier keywords to more difficult ones.
Since the goal was to drive more business, we focused on keywords we’d be able to rank for fastest rather than those with the highest search volume. Generally, we don’t believe in search volume as a metric for selecting keywords anyway. In our experience, high-intent B2B keywords tend to have smaller search volume, but convert much higher and rank faster.
The more we can get clicks, the more data Google gets about the user experience and your perceived E-A-T (expertise, authority, trustworthiness).
If you focus only on the “dream” keywords at first, you risk taking many more months to rank for them, and many more months waiting for clicks and for Google to understand what your website is about.
We wanted the fastest path to impact, so we stacked long-tail keywords and focused on moving quickly, even with a long-term goal in mind.
We mixed up the content between high-purchase intent (but less sexy) content, like competitor comparison pages or tools listicles, and higher-funnel educational content that our ICP wanted to read.
