203 - Hashing Out The Perfect Content Strategy Visual Framework With Erin Balsa (Haus of Bold)

Hi, so I wanted to just give a quick background on this episode. It's a little bit different. I tried this new thing on the podcast where I shared my screen and sort of had a back and forth session with my guest. And I know, I know podcasts are audio, not visual, but I think it still worked out well because we end up describing the thing we're looking at with really great detail so that the listener can visualize it. So you can probably more easily visualize it. So sharing it with you, you know, it's new. It's this thing I haven't done before. I always like to try new things. So check out this episode and let me know what you think. If you're at an early stage startup, you're in the right place. We should be able to get our startups over the hump and without guessing or throwing spaghetti. Marketing is an important part of your go-to-market strategy, but you need to understand the why behind the what in order to get clarity, make the right decisions, and get results. Welcome to Season 4, where I'll be asking why in order to help bring more clarity to the messy world of early-stage startup marketing. Erin Balza, welcome to the show. Erin is the founder of House of Bold, where she builds and executes content marketing strategies for B2B SaaS startups that sell complex enterprise-ready solutions. Okay, so we know each other. We're both Novatic advisors. That's kind of how we know each other. Although, I don't know. I think I saw you on LinkedIn with your content before the Novatic thing. yeah i'm not sure i can't remember which came first the chicken or the egg right the nevatic or the linkedin personal branding yeah that's right i know we both have a similar business growth mindset because i just saw that in your one of your newsletters maybe the most recent one called leading thoughts where you talked about your business i love how you're just very open about it like what's going well what didn't go as well and so in there you mentioned your business sort of how you approach work life. And there are three main things and they match up with me pretty well. Like, does this activity bring in a significant amount of revenue? That's number one. Does this activity bring me a significant amount of joy? That's number two. And let's not forget, does this activity keep my kids healthy and happy? And I think those are really like the main ones, except you left out husband. Not every activity has to meet all three criteria. It's just something that I get a lot of invites to podcasts. I get a lot of people who reach out and ask for my career advice and I can't say yes to everything. So when I'm deciding what to say yes to, and of course client work, right? So you get a lot of people who want you to do quick. projects or maybe just like a writing gig and I can't say yes to everything. So I try to ask myself for the client work. Typically, I want it to drive revenue and joy. I don't want to make revenue at the expense of joy. If I feel like the client is going to be a huge pain in the ass, I'm not going to do it. And I have gotten pretty good at recognizing those red flags over time. And then when it comes to the other things like the fun things like this or the fun things like coaching people and helping people. I don't make money on these things, but I do it because it brings me joy. I like to give back. I like to deepen my professional relationships with folks that have podcasts or other folks who are marketing leaders looking to transition to be a solopreneur and they want to pick my brain. And for those kinds of people, I typically do a pay what you can. I don't do everything for free. And it's not because I'm greedy because some people, they're not marketing leaders. They might be a newbie or a freelancer. I offer pay what you can even if it's $20 because they have skin in the game. They're actually going to show up to the call. They're going to come prepared with questions. They're not going to waste my time. And then I feel like I really am making the best use of my time and helping people and giving back. And then my kids are, of course, the driving force behind what I've been doing in my business over the last year plus, which is really trying to. maximize my effective hourly rate while reducing and minimizing the hours I'm working. I'm not always trying to increase the revenue while also decreasing the hours. Sometimes I'm perfectly fine keeping the revenue steady or even letting the revenue drop a little bit as long as I'm drastically decreasing my hours worked because what I'm getting. overall is a lot of life satisfaction, a lot of time with my kids. That's for me right now in my season of rest, the most important thing. That is so important and congratulations on baby number three. Thanks. Child number three, baby Julian. He is so cute. So you're a mom of three and we were just chatting how like sleep, what is that? Right? Because when you got a new baby and then you also moved overseas, you're in England. How do you like England? Are you like in the outskirts of London? Where are you living? Yeah, we're living in a city called Milton Keynes, which is a 35. minute train ride from London. We live about a five minute walk from the train station and city center so it's super convenient. So I'll be able to pop down to London. I know there's a lot of marketing get-ups, gatherings that are going on and I plan to go to as many as I can. That's amazing. How long are you planning to stay there? Like forever? Are you never coming back to the US? That's amazing. Yeah. So I'm such a New England girl. I love it. I've lived overseas a few times. I've lived in different states a few times, but I'm a New England girl. So, you know, my heart is with fall and pumpkins and crisp leaves and New England architecture. And I think that I will definitely get back there. But for now, we're here and I am here to support my husband's career. And I'm being as flexible as I possibly can. Yeah. Enjoying the ride. amazing that's all you can do yeah so really you know aaron i really respect your content expertise and so when i was working on i actually started working on like a visual like some kind of a diagram because i found that early stage startups approach their content strategy in all these different ways it's all over the place and i haven't seen any cool easy simple easy to use visual diagrams that would help folks to build this out something easy something simple like there's a lot of great information out there like you need to have a unique point of view and you need to have pillar content and distribute chop up your pillar content distribute snippets on marketing channels and blah blah blah stuff like that I think it's helpful, but I'm a very visual person. And so when I work with my clients, I want to share something visual. I want to share the frameworks and approaches in a visual way. For example. I've got something called the mass method, marketing as a system. And it's the systematic approach that I developed and I wanted to make sure that it's available for all to see on my website. And so I built that out and then I wrote an in-depth article on LinkedIn about it. And so it helps me, it helps my clients. And now I really just want to focus on content strategy. And I put together a content strategy canvas. And so I think. I've never done this before. Like share my screen on a podcast. But since I can post video, you know, when I post this podcast episode, I think that's exactly what I'm going to do. So what do you think? Should we dive in? 100%. And if folks aren't able to look at the video footage or the photographs, we'll try to be as descriptive as possible while we're kind of looking at this framework. All right. So I'm going to share my screen. And Erin, you tell me if you can see it. Can you see it? I can see it. It's super small. So I'm wondering if there's some way we can zoom in. How's that? I have my glasses on, but still. How's that? That's much better. Much better. Okay. So I put together this content strategy canvas. That's what I'm calling it. And at the very top, top two main rows are the things that I consider to be really important. Original thinking, that's basically what is your unique point of view. original research, which can come from internal proprietary information. It could come from your podcast, having high quality conversations and a lot of them, right? That's data too. It could be a report. And so I put these two at the very top. I think they're the most important. And underneath those two rows, I put four other buckets. So the first one is ideas and questions that come from customers and prospects. the second bucket is buyer goals or buyer motivations and that actually comes from john bonini i would say this is kind of tied to like how people think about top of funnel middle of funnel bottom of funnel content except it's not company focused it's more buyer focused so motivations that a buyer has like inspiration education right give me a recommendation Tell me how to exit execution. Tell me how to execute on something. So, you know, those are the main buyer goals. The third bucket is marketing channels, which I go through this with my clients. We prioritize. There are so many things you could be doing, so many channels you could be working within. But what are the top one or two that you can focus on? And finally, the content formats. So different formats across those channels because it could be written, could be audio. could be video could be infographic you know gif like there are tons of formats right decks for sure carousels depending on what channel we're talking about so i feel like it's like a forest gump moment we're like shrimp gumbo shrimp sandwiches shrimp po boys yes so I tried to keep it simple, Erin. And then of course you worked on something. This took me like, I'm like, okay, I'm going to talk to people. I'm going to think about it. I'm going to put this together. And of course you whipped something up in 20 minutes this morning or today. Right before this call, 20 minutes ago. And I'm like, man, I can do this. I can get this on paper so we can have something also similarly scrappy and hand drawn to kind of like riff off of with each other. I thought that would be kind of fun. That's awesome. Did you look at this drawing? You did, right? You saw mine and you were like, she's missing a ton of stuff, right? So no, no, no. So first reaction is like, it's super simple, but I understand why, because you are working as like a fractional, like head of marketing, right? So you're really broad contents, not your number one priority, main focus. It's something you do. in a larger ecosystem of all these really important things you're doing like messaging and positioning and this and that. And maybe some of the companies you're working with, maybe they don't have a content team or a ton of capacity to really understand. I know that certain heads of fractional heads of marketing like yourself. might work with organizations that are so early they don't have a marketing team yet. So they are trying to communicate this with the CEO, the founder, people who don't have a deep background in marketing. So I think in a lot of ways, keeping it as simple as possible is really good when you're communicating with any senior executive and anyone who doesn't have like a deep background in marketing. Whereas mine is a little more in the weeds, even though I tried to simplify it as much as I could because I typically work with companies who they don't have a content team, but they want to build one. They want to build their content marketing acumen, and I'm working with a marketing leader. Someone that gets content, they might not get it to the same depth that I get it because I've been working in content for 12 years, but they are going to understand these different concepts. That's why they're a little bit more in depth. But since I wanted to keep this as podcast friendly as possible, I really stripped it. down to something that I think is kind of scrappy. Great. We love scrappy. Yeah. So talk me through it because I'm looking at it. I'm sharing it. And do I start at the top? I don't start at the middle, right? Start at the top. No, no. So here's the thing about content strategy. It can be in so many different formats. In the past, I've played around with formats. I've tried different things with different teams, different companies. So the most simple, a deck. is really easy. You can have a couple of slides. Those are really good for presenting at marketing meetings, content team meetings. Really good if you're trying to communicate just the real need to know information to the higher ups. Now, if you are going to want to get more in the weeds, I've even experimented with using tools like Mural and Miro, and you can really like zoom in, zoom out. You can link out. I always have like a nice appendix at the end of my content strategy, which links out to. any kind of document anyone would ever need access to to produce content. I think it all belongs housed in the central strategy. Here, what you're looking at is just top to bottom. It doesn't mean that I'm going to be using a Google Doc and I'm going to be scrolling down. This might be a deck. It might be something else that your team prefers to use. It could be in Notion. It really honestly doesn't matter the format. It's whatever fits the culture. of your organization and the people who are going to be looking at this and using this. Let's pretend that we're looking at this in a deck. The first slide I always like to do is the content team's mission. This is something I started doing when I was back at the predictive index where I became really passionate about mission and vision. I got to see really how important mission and vision is not only at the organization level, but at the team level. It's really important for the content. team and the people doing the work every day to feel like they're contributing to the larger mission of the organization. They're not just like wasting their day looking at the clock, writing these pointless blogs because someone told them to, and they just got to hit word count. No, they need to understand that they're actually doing really important work. And more and more BNB organizations are understanding the value of good content, right? So the mission would be something that is to really, A, number one, first and foremost, excite the people doing the work, let them know that they are contributing to the organization's success and vision. Number two, just show senior leadership that you're aligned. You're not just some tactical function who's making pretty words in the blog. You're actually thinking strategically. A mission, I like to keep it broad. What that means is you're probably going to have some few different personas. You want the mission to be something that any persona can align with. So like back when I worked at my last company, for example, the mission would be we want to help business leaders solve their problems with talent optimization. And it didn't matter if we were talking to an executive leader or an HR manager or any of the different personas we spoke to. That was relevant because they're all facing business problems and we could help them solve those problems with a new approach by using this discipline of talent optimization. So that is where I like to begin. Amazing. Questions on that? No. That makes sense. You need a mission. Like, why do we exist? You know, I actually do this in the marketing foundation deck when I'm putting together everything related to why do we exist? Who are we for? What are we building for them? And the why do we exist is one of the really like cornerstones because everything, if you're not excited about existing, then nothing else matters. The rest of it doesn't what you're building, who you're for, the problem you're solving, right? Why you exist like the mission the vision I think that ties in with the work that I do as well. So personas makes sense, right? You've got your people with the pocketbook with the wallet, you've got your champions, you've got your, you know, there's like a lot of people in the ecosystem. And so I'm looking at this, and I'm seeing, okay, you've got your different personas, 5% are in market, maybe even 2% are in market. And most people are not in market. And so now we're starting to think about, okay, keep going into the third row. What are we looking at here? Let me just dive back into personas just to explain a little bit more to the listeners. So what I have here is three circles, A, B and C. Those are, you know, let's say you have five personas. I don't know. Let's pretend we have three today. So one is, you know, leader Laura, who's an executive. One is, you know, I don't know, someone who works in human resources and let's say C is something else. What I have here, which Anna was just talking about, it really stems from the fact that I work with sales-led companies. I'm not just trying to get a huge volume of traffic to the site so that I can get as many people as possible into a free trial so that some of them can convert to paid users. That's not the businesses I work with. I work with companies that have a sales team. They're thinking a lot about how are we going to deal plan. what are they going to be the different folks at the table? We're going to have a long buying cycle, a large buying team. We're going to have to identify quickly who are the people at the table? Who's the DMs? Who's the signers? Who's going to be a catalyst that's going to move the deal forward? Who's going to be a detractor? A lot of times I think, and I 100% used to think from a total marketing lens, what do our marketing created buyer personas say? As I've evolved and grown and learn. spent more time working with sales-led companies, I started to understand the value and really fleshing out your personas with the kind of personas that the sales team is talking about. They're not talking about Talent Tommy and Leader Laura. They are talking about actual personas that they see every day. And the tough thing is a lot of times these personas change. You don't always get to predict who's going to be invited to a call. So really trying to make it as easy as possible for the sales team from the get-go by having a Ashley Foss says a lot about the content playground and I really like that visual because it just goes to show it's not a clear funnel you need to have a variety of content that's going to appeal to all different people if you're not in market I'm doing my best to make you become an evangelist because you might not buy not now not ever but you're gonna hopefully refer a friend or a colleague who is in market to buy. I just want to quickly say that that I think ties back to the buyer goals and motivations and hitting people at different for different reasons like what's their motivation they might just want to be inspired right okay they're not they're not looking to execute anything they're just looking to get some inspiration or see some examples or look for some recommendations right so I think that ties well into that. And the inspire piece is actually really important with the more senior people sometimes and maybe not talking about the CMO or a C-suite executive, but some more senior people who have been in it 10, 15 years, they know the basics. They're not looking to get educated necessarily always. Sometimes they are just looking to get inspired, to think differently, think bigger. So I really can't agree with you more there. Wonderful. Okay. Let's go into the, I want to make sure we have time for everything. So let's go into the third row. where you talk about inputs drive content goals. Yeah. Yeah. So third slide or section of your document would be content goals. Again, it's nothing revolutionary. You're going to have a label for each one. You might have, for example, sales enablement might be a goal of mine. I'm wanting to enable the sales team. Why? Well. The inputs are what helped me to create my goals. So if the GTM team has a goal to decrease sales cycles by 20% year over year, okay, so how the hell are they going to do that? How am I going to help them? So that would be some things that are defining that goal or helping me to come up with that goal. And then, of course, the business objectives. So if the business is looking to grow their customer base, okay, cool. How are they going to do that? What's their key objective and how they're going to get there? Oh, they want people to adopt this new category. Okay, cool. So I know that in my content goals, I'm going to be trying to grow demand by putting out some thought leadership, really talking about this interesting take on the market and really putting out this interesting content that's going to help hopefully fuel the business objectives, fuel the GTM goals. Awesome. Yeah. creating a new category that's a lot of educational content i feel like what is this category why does it matter why should i care yeah i've had a lot of folks on the podcast just had island on the podcast and ari yablick talked about how they spent a lot of time focusing on that education piece and not at all on the product side actually because the education was way more important it's always fascinating to me all right if we covered the third section let's go to the last one Yeah. So the next piece here, people talk about pillars. I also work in pillars. So to start there, pillars for me have to be grounded in the product to different extents. So there's always a product tie-in. I'm not going to have a pillar that is like seltzer water. I'm holding a can of seltzer water. I love it. I drink a crap ton of seltzer water, but I'm not going to have a podcast about seltzer water if I'm not selling anything to do with water or nutrition or anything like that. So yes, the pillars are not going to be like, everything is like, use this kind of tool because that's product-led content. Not everything has to be that, but it has to map back to the product. So if I'm selling a sales enablement tool, I'm going to talk about sales productivity, sales coaching, sales onboarding. So those are going to drive my content pillars. Another way I think about pillars for folks that maybe aren't as in the weeds with this stuff as I am. you can think a lot about like a hub and spoke strategy. So picture like a wheel, an old fashioned wheel in the middle is the most broad topic that you can envision. So sales, team, productivity, and then the spokes are all the different subtopics like what else could you talk about that's interesting and that belongs in that category? And if you're using or if you're putting this content on your website, that can help you build some topical authority by driving, connecting the pages and linking the pages to each other. But it's also good just to have these pillars because when you're starting again with the mission, the goals, the pillars, you have consistency. And that's a problem I see a lot with early stage startups, especially when they're letting anyone in the company guest blog. You know, we need someone to write the blog. We need to blog every day. We don't know why, but we think we need to. We have a lot of smart people here at the company. Hey, so-and-so, SME, can you write a blog? Sure. And then you have a blog on something that's completely... off base. I think the pillars are really, really important. Does it mean you can never write something different? No. If you have a cute idea and you want to experiment, for sure, just make sure that the bulk of what you do maps back to one of your pillars, which is derivative of the product. Then I also like to have an annual theme. Again, it's all going to be in line with what you are trying to do. For example, I think when you're back at PI, really was just pulled from like what we said all the time it's no secret it's all over the website we would say you know every business problem is people problem so yeah you have business problems yeah you have turnover yeah you have this and you think it's a business problem but it's a people problem and that was kind of the heart of you know a theme for a year and then in each of those pillars you're going to be kind of digging into that and getting to the heart of that that makes a lot of sense and then you did include underneath the pillars and the like getting into the specifics now hub and spoke model that you just talked about original thinking original research and then channels it looks like leading thoughts and then channels so there are some similarities but i think what i'm missing in mine is kind of like the top strategic stuff because i just jump right in to original research, original thinking, which is really important. And you probably agree as well, right? Oh, yeah. You know, all the stuff I included is important, but starting with the mission, starting with personas, which early stage startups typically have way less than larger companies that you, you know, enterprise sales led companies that you work with, or companies that sell into enterprise, sorry. And then I'm also I think one thing that i will do is include this idea of like we need to make sure that it ties back to our business objectives and go to market goals like content doesn't just stand on its own right it's not like we're doing this content thing over here guys and forget about how it actually impacts the business no it actually should and it should stem from your business objectives so that was super helpful i'm gonna stop the share and come back to our beautiful faces And it's the end of our time. I loved it. This is giving me like more to think about for my content strategy canvas. So thank you, Erin. I didn't have time to answer any question from you, but if you want to ask, I can do a bonus episode on it. Do you have any questions for me? Yeah, I would say, oh gosh, so many angles. I was thinking about what I could ask you last night. I would love to know what is the, you know, number one. improvement area that you see time and time again when you work with new startups? What's the one kind of overarching, I hate to say mistakes, let's focus on the positives improvement area, where could these companies improve and where should they start? It's like talking to our kids. That's not a mistake. That's an improvement area. You didn't fail. It's a, you know, opportunity. I love that positive language. All right. Wonderful question. Erin, thank you for spending time with me today. You're awesome, especially, you know, all the way overseas in England. I appreciate you. If anybody wants to find Erin, you can do so on LinkedIn. Follow her, Erin Balza. Check out her website, House of Bold. House is spelled H-A-U-S. I'll include that link in the show notes. And subscribe to her newsletter. It's called Leading Thoughts. So Erin, thank you. I had a blast. Thanks again. Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to this weekly episode of Modern Startup Marketing. New episodes are dropping weekly, so make sure you're following wherever you get your podcasts. You can find me on LinkedIn, search for Anna Firminov, visit my website to learn more about how I help early stage startups, go to firminovmarketing.com. And don't forget to leave a review if you're loving the show.

Happy Passover!








In my work with early stage startups, I've seen some of the ways that they approach their content strategies. Sometimes there's structure, but usually it's all over the place. It's not their fault, though. I haven't really seen any visual diagrams that would help startup founders and marketing teams build this out. Nothing too fancy, but at least some kind of easy to use, systematic approach that brings it all together. 








So I brought on Erin Balsa to help hash this out. Erin Balsa is Founder of Haus of Bold where she builds and executes content marketing strategies for B2B SaaS startups that sell complex, enterprise-ready solutions.








If you want to see the Content Strategy Canvas (https://furmanovmarketing.com/blog/content-strategy) , you can now because I wrote up an article to show you.








We also cover:



AMA: Erin asks me her burning question which I will answer in the next BONUS episode.








You can find Erin on LinkedIn: ⁠ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanemurfy/) www.linkedin.com/in/erinbalsa (https://www.linkedin.com/in/erinbalsa/) 



Haus of Bold: hausofbold.com (https://hausofbold.com/) 








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