Break Free B2B Series: Brody Dorland on Creating Long-Lasting Content Marketing Strategy

We’re ready to release another insightful interview as a part of our Break Free B2B series, this time with Brody Dorland, co-founder of the popular content planning platform, Divvy HQ. Brody is a self-described data geek. He believes data is a crucial component of successful content marketing.

The platform that he co-created is all about bringing data, structure, and strategy into content marketing. We feel that he’s a practitioner who is uniting that data side with the creative side within B2B content marketing. That’s why we were so excited to sit down with him for a few minutes and pick his brain.

We not only spoke about what B2B content marketers can start doing to boost the success of their content marketing initiatives, but also gain insight into where B2B content marketing is headed in the future.

See the full interview below so that you don’t miss a single insight from our friend, Brody Dorland.

Break Free B2B Marketing Interview with Brody Dorland

Here are a few of our favorite moments from the interview with Brody.

Sue: So you’ve been in the content marketing industry for quite some time. Over the years, what have you seen as the biggest improvements?

Brody: I’ve really been pleasantly surprised to see the evolution of just how smart companies are getting with their strategy. Actually, this morning [at CMW 2019], they talked about the latest data from Content Marketing Institute’s, saying that 41% of marketers now have a content strategy in place, which is up from last year, which I think was 34%. So we’re making progress.

Part of the onboarding process that we go through with companies is to bake in their content strategy into our tool so that we can help them manage it going forward. The thing that we’ve seen from an evolution standpoint is that it’s getting easier for them to get that content strategy baked in. When we ask them questions, like, “Okay, what are the topics of content that you typically cover?”, they’re able to plug that in easier. When we asked, “What audiences are you targeting with your content?”, they’re able to plug that list in easier because they’ve thought about it. They have a documented content strategy in place, so it’s easier to plug into that area of our application and we can get them set up faster.

Sue: Let’s talk about something less positive. What’s not working in the industry?

Brody: I think one of the things that we still see and we preach every day, but we still see it, is the campaign mentality. There’s still a large focus on very business-focused campaigns and obviously, they need content. So, a lot of times, the same content team that is doing all of the content efforts are also going to be responsible for creating assets for this campaign. But there’s a mindset shift that needs to happen to get away from just “campaign, campaign, campaign” and filling our channels with these time-bound things.

Certainly, if there’s a good content team, they should produce results. But it’s never going to be the long-sustained content, the true content marketing play, that needs to happen within many organizations. Obviously, different channels are going to lend themselves to that—like a blog. It’s never-ending; we always need to have a solid content strategy for that. We always need to be optimizing for Google with that blog content. It’s not a campaign.

So a completely different mindset in terms of how we tackle that channel versus email, which tends to be more campaign-centric. I feel strongly that companies really need to try to continue to get out of the campaign mentality and just leverage their channels for ongoing, good content that’s going to serve their audience.

Sue: What do you think are the drivers for that? Why has that happened?

Brody: I think it just comes out of the traditional marketing world. However, the holistic content marketing world, which is non-campaign focused, continues to proliferate. It’s going to get better, but most agencies out there that still so campaign focused—that’s what they’ve been doing for decades. Getting out of that mindset, even from a logistics standpoint, is harder for an agency to do. Not to say that agencies can’t continually be involved in longer-term content marketing engagements, but it’s just it’s a different beast, a different animal than the typical world that they’ve been in for decades.

Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here are a couple interviews to whet your appetite:

• Break Free B2B Series: Clare Carr on Using Data to Drive Content Marketing Success
• Break Free B2B Series: Amisha Gandhi on Global B2B Influencer Marketing
• Break Free B2B Series: Amanda Todorovich on Creating Content that Pays Off