The Secrets to Building High-Impact Content Teams from John Collins (Ex-Intercom, Ramp)

??? In a world where content marketing is often reduced to SEO hacks and generic blog posts, John Collins (Ex-Intercom, Ramp) dared to be different.

Jimmy Daly of Superpath recently hosted John Collins on the Content Briefly Podcast. John’s deep insights on building content teams, which he has done twice, first at Intercom and then at Ramp , impressed me greatly. Not to say, his content strategy at Intercom is very similar to how we think about content at Blume.

Here’s how John approached content at Intercom. Remember this is 2014-15 and Intercom wasn’t the 800-pound Gorilla it is now.

What you create depends on who reads it

John: “…in the early days at Intercom, we mostly were selling to founders and product people at early stage startups or relatively early stage startups. And so I think to really speak to them in a way that they like, it would resonate with them. It needed to come from the subject matter experts. So we used all sorts of ways to make sure we got the deep insights that those people had into product building.”

So John built a team that spoke to subject matter experts in Intercom (and later outside) to distill insights into long-form posts. He unpacks this further by comparing selling to salespeople vs selling to customer support teams.

“…as later as Intercom started to sell to salespeople, it was like, give me, give me your, you know, you’re wasting my time with the headline. Give me, give me what you’ve got. Straight away, you know, support people were just like delighted that anyone was writing for them and like, you know, really appreciated any kind of empathy you could show for their task.”

Creating for search vs. creating for readers

The role models for content success then were Hubspot and Buffer, which had these long tentpole SEO-optimized posts. Realizing that they cannot play and win in this game, they changed their playground (remember the strategy advice from Roger Martin ? Your winning aspiration and where you choose to play, is more important to your success than how you play).

“ a lot of the content marketing that people looked up to at the time was things like HubSpot and buffer, which was very, very search orientated. It was a lot of, it was like, it was, it was a volume play. It was like, do a lot of keyword research, make sure you hit a lot of those keywords and it works amazingly for them.”

“And you’re trying to stand out from the noise. And so I think that sort of philosophy of, like, a publication that, like, publishes subject matter experts from around the company, it was, it was pretty unique for us.”

The book doesn’t need to make money for you to make money (h/t to Eric Jorgenson for this quote)

He decided that instead of going for 10-page ebooks and info products, which were (and still are) a big chunk of content coming from SaaS companies, they will print actual books. And while the commercials of book printing and logistics ensured that the book was hardly profitable, the ROI came from the signaling it provided and how it helped them open more doors.

“Like basically, I think it was like, I can’t remember exactly the pricing at the time, but it was like $ 10 and then like shipping depending on where you were. Like we were just about breaking even on them. Like barely breaking even on them. But we would like visitors to the office, we’d give them to the sales team, we’d go out sales calls, bring books, conferences, you know. So it was a huge part of our marketing program for about 18 months.”

Why it worked at Intercom

He explains that it worked at Intercom as the company had a content culture. Even before he joined, Intercom’s founder Des Trainer, wrote 93 of the first 100 blog posts on the blog. For content marketing to thrive in any company, there has to be a top-down endorsement, given that content marketing cannot be strongly tied back to revenue ROI.

Building content teams

John contrasts the way he built teams at Intercom vs Ramp.

At Intercom, they were channelizing insights from experts into their content. So they didn’t go for the traditional content writers.

“for a long time, for a period, we actually changed every job title to, like, editor. Like senior editor or like just, yeah, content editor. But purely because like, we wanted, wanted to make sure that people were clear that this was the job was much more like working with subject matter experts, you know, trying to get their, their views out on the blog.”

On the other had, at Ramp, they created content for search as the core insight was that their users were already searching to solve for this painpoint. So he built a team which had more subject-matter expertise in-house so that they can hit a certain content throughput, rather than rely only on someone else’s knowledge.

“you know, people are going to, like, they’re going to be frustrated with the current solution and they’re literally going to start looking for something else. So, like, it was much more about searching from day one, an SEO strategy and a lot of customer evidence, like getting, making sure that we were showing the success that customers were having with ramp and a certain amount of editorial and really making it clear how ramp approach things differently than, say, Brex or other competitors.”

“Probably a little bit more traditional content marketers. I think a big thing for us as well was we kind of felt like we needed probably a little bit more subject matter expertise on the content team, rather than like, the content team being the facilitators of bringing that subject matter expertise in from around the company.”

The key takeaway for me is that successful content marketing requires a clear understanding of your audience, a team that can deliver on that approach, and strong top-down endorsement.

Here's the link to the podcast: https://www.superpath.co/blog/episode-61-john-collins-part-1-intercom-ramp-and-falling-in-love-with-the-customer