Ep. 162 – Blank Spaces In Your Content Calendar are GOOD? 🤯 ===> GUEST: Jess Cook, Head of Content at Island (Former Barbie Collector?!?)

Foreign welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. We are here for do this, not that.

And we have a special guest.

And I don't know if that ever happened to anybody, but I've been following this person for a long time, consuming her content and I'm like, we need her on the show because she's really smart and I'm fired up. So we have Jess Cook. Who's Jess Cook?

She didn't tell you who she is, but she is the head of content and communication for a company called island, which if you don't know island, they have this wild, like, browser for enterprises security stuff. It is mind blowing. But beyond that, she's also the host of this amazing podcast called that's Marketing Baby.

But even more than that, she is a content machine. And today we're going to be talking about repurposing content and content calendars. It's going to be amazing. Jess, welcome to the show.

Jay, I'm so excited to be here.

Thank you so much for having me because likewise, I've been following you, listening to your show, getting all of the email, subject line.com mojo going on for a very long time. So thank you for having me.

I appreciate that. So, all right, before we get into repurposing content and all this content stuff, how did Jess become Jess, what is your deal?

Okay, one minute.

And like you said, I'm currently heading head of content and comms at island, which is a very fast paced growing company in the exciting world of enterprise browsers.

Wait a minute, I gotta go back for a second. I've never encountered somebody. So I need to know a little bit about it. That had to work on the marketing for toilet paper.

Yeah.

So, like, what is that meeting? Like? You sit around be like, okay, we can't say like crap, but we could say like, like, what is that meeting? Like, I need to know.

Oh, Lord. So, yeah, it's weird to try and talk about that topic in a professional setting because you are.

You're trying to, like, talk about your experience of using toilet paper. Right. But, like, you don't really want to talk about it with your coworker. We did some really fun stuff, though.

So we did this crazy program called the Roll Pole. And we did this giant nationwide digital kind of polling mechanism where we asked people, do you roll over or under?

Digital marketing was one of, I think like the first banner ads that you could vote right inside the banner. Like, we did a lot of retargeting. Like, retarget targeting was a new thing.

So, yeah, it was a pretty groundbreaking campaign and a lot of fun to work on.

That is amazing. I am not mature enough to work on a campaign for toilet paper. I just would be fired after one day. So I'm living vicariously through you.

All right, let's get on to though.

Now you're in B2B land and your jam is which I want to listen to this episode because I need to learn from it is first content, like calendars, social content calendars, content calendars. Take me through what is a content calendar, why do we need one and what do we do?

Yeah, so I really believe in that saying. That's like, you fall to the level of your systems. Right. Or the other way you can rise to the level of your systems.

And I think in every sense of the word, the content calendar is like one of the most foundational systems for a content marketer.

Knowing what you're going to publish when and being able to give visibility to people who aren't necessarily into content and marketing in the day to day is so important just for, you know, career growth and, and, and, you know, general visibility of like, your purpose in the company and what you're doing and, and what you're shipping and why you're working on it just feels really, really important to me. So one of the first things I did when I started at island was created a content calendar.

It's nothing super fancy, I built it in Monday, but some sort of mechanism to be able to plot out what is going live in all of our owned channels.

So what blog posts are being published, when what LinkedIn content is going live, what it's repurposed from, you know, who is the author, any kind of tasks that fall beneath it. But the really big thing that comes out of it is that calendar, right?

Being able to send that to the leadership every week and say, here's what's going live next week. Here's a quick synopsis.

If you want a little more detail, you can jump right in here and they can take a look and they can see, you know, what's going live coming soon.

So it just is a really important mechanism when you're trying to build that culture of content, especially in a company, if you're one of the first marketers or you're the first content marketer, where people are still trying to get the idea of, like, what is content here? What's it doing for us? How often are we publishing? What are we even saying? What's our messaging? It's a really great way to help build that.

So let me ask a very basic thing, so somebody who's gonna be listening, they don't have a content calendar. Like, ooh, I really wanna make one. And now they're staring at a blank screen with all these squares on a calendar, right?

And maybe they're color coding the blog versus the LinkedIn post versus whatever. I don't know if that's how you do it.

Yes, it is.

And I know this is so super pathetic, but I'm. If you're like a marketing manager that's taking on this responsibility, do you want to have every day to have something.

Is it bad if one of your squares is like an empty white square? Do you like, freak out over that?

I love an empty white square.

Why? I feel like it's a bad thing.

No, not a bad thing. So here's kind of my. My principle. I like to. I've kind of like a 2, 2 way street on creating a content calendar.

I like to look back first at the content that has been created that is out there that I can use right now, right? What can I go back to? A blog post, a white paper, a video, an interview that I can cut up and use.

And I'm talking pretty specifically in social right now, because that's kind of the monster that always needs to be fed, right?

And I'm trying to take some of that repurposed evergreen type content and I'm trying to plot that probably twice a week on the calendar and then I leave two to three blank spaces because what inevitably happens is, oh my gosh, a new feature is coming out next week, we need to announce it. And if you have all five of your little squares for the week filled, where are you going to put that? Right?

So I like to plan ahead enough with repurposed content from, you know, the past or something you're currently working on, but leave some space for the more timely things. And to do that, you kind of have to look ahead as much as possible possible.

So you're looking ahead to what events are we sponsoring, what events are we going to be at, where are we going to have a booth, when are our webinars coming out, when are our features going to be released? You know, looking at that roadmap. So you're looking back to find content you can get ahead and fill a calendar with, let's say a month ahead.

Just getting let you know if you're starting out now, one piece of content on that calendar from repurposed content. If you have a pretty good program in place, let's try with two, right? Let's start with two a week.

And then you're looking ahead at the things you're going to have to inevitably promote that maybe someone hasn't specifically told you you need to yet, but you know it's coming and you're leaving space for that. Sometimes I'll even put a hold, right? Like I know we're going to be at Black Hat that first week of August.

I have four spaces on my content calendar to promote what we're doing at Black Hat, you know, behind the scenes videos and things like that. I don't know what we're going to capture until we get there, but I know I'm going to want the space for it. I don't want to forget.

So that's kind of my.

My process is like two posts that are, you know, mini lessons, things you're going to educate on, that you can pull and repurpose and leave some space for that timely, relevant stuff that is always going to pop up.

So you said the word repurpose a few times and I want to talk about that for a minute because I think that there, I think that people make the mistake of thinking that, oh, I can't post this again or use this again because everybody's seen it, we've posted three times or some version of it three times and it's just redundant and whatever. Is that a myth? Is that totally just made up in our heads because we're too close to it?

Totally made up. At any given moment, between 1 and 3% of your audience will see a piece of content you post inorganic.

And I think that's important to remember because you could post the exact same post or re squizzle the hook just a little bit a week later, three days later, and no one will know.

And I think the thing that, that you get kind of whether you mean to or not out of repurposing that way is you are saying the same message over and over.

And that's really important because you know, it takes 12 kind of exposures to, to those messages to really understand what is this company about, what do they do, who are they for?

And so if you are trying to create brand new content all the time and you're never repurposing, you're, you're going to have a hard time really hitting home that message to, you know, the 1 to 3% of people who are going to see that. So don't be afraid to put something out there multiple times.

One of my favorite little things to do is go back three months ago and look at the top performing posts and, and repost them again and I might go back and make a couple of changes in, you know, the, the copy. If I really feel like hey, that that could have been just a touch stronger or oh, you know what, we have some new information.

I'm just going to update this little bit here with that information, but for the most part I'm reposting kind of the same thing. Because if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Yeah. And you want to become a thought leader in particular buckets. Right.

If you're trying to be known for everything, you're gonna be known for nothing and repurposing all day long. And the other thing you mentioned is evergreen. Do you go back to your content and kind of remove stuff that's not evergreen?

Evergreen meaning that it's content that you could put out there that's good today, tomorrow, a month from now, six months from now, it's evergreen. Do you, do you have some sort of audit systems like okay, we can't repurpose this because it was a report from a year ago.

Like do you constantly look at that?

I'm not constantly looking at it, but it is something that I'm absolutely keeping in mind. So for instance, there's an article that's on my radar right now, that came out over a year ago with a feature launch.

And so the information was great at that moment of feature launch, but it's been heavily updated since then. The feature itself, the market has gotten smarter about this particular feature.

And so it's on my radar that I now need to go back and I probably need to update that or do a part two. Right. That. Hey, we talked about this at launch. It's come a long way. The market has come a long way. We've all learned a lot.

Here's kind of where it's at now.

So I think it's really important to go back and find those pieces that are still performing for you, because we are getting some really nice search traffic from that particular piece. But the thing that worries me is it's old information. Right.

So I do need to do some sort of Update or part 2 on that to keep it fresh and keep it relevant for people.

Yeah. And I think that's important because I think that outdated content is more hurtful to your brand than Evergreen, than anything. Right.

It makes you look like you're not paying attention. You don't care that you're behind the times. So you really want to be very careful.

Careful of any dated content that you're putting out there that if it's old. So something else I noticed is that I know you're running all sorts of stuff over at island and Island's LinkedIn page.

I've seen, like this exponential growth in people following that page in the last six months. Oh, is there something that.

Is there some sort of secret magic you're doing to get the company page of where you're working to see that kind of growth?

We've had. We did have a pretty big fundraising announcement in April that helped.

From January to April. I feel like you guys were growing.

Yeah, we are, I think. So. It comes down to a few things. One is consistency. We are.

Again, I'm making sure we're posting at least two to three kind of educational pieces there because we're a category creator. Not everyone even knows what an enterprise browser is yet. And so we're doing a lot of education of what it is. What does it do?

What problems can you solve with it? Right.

At the same time, we have a really great kind of PR arm at island, and so there's a lot of earned and paid press going on in the background that is also kind of pushing people to want to learn more about us. And we're promoting those things in LinkedIn as well. We are Also doing things like we're getting our customers on podcasts.

So there's kind of two levels to getting, you know, podcast appearances. One is you get people from your company on, right? They talk about the product, they talk about its origin story, why they created it.

But if you get a customer on a podcast and they.

They talk about you for just a few minutes, while they also talk about all of the interesting, innovative things they're doing to their peers, it steps it up another level, right? It becomes less of a sales pitch and becomes more of a testimonial, a proof point that someone smart is using this, right?

And so by association, we become smart. So that's another piece.

We've been doing a lot of kind of unscalable brand awareness things that I think are driving people to want to follow us in LinkedIn as well.

Let me ask you one other question about LinkedIn and we didn't talk about this before, but I'm curious, is there a culture in your company that you try to get everybody that works at the company to engage with the content that you're putting out there? Is there like an intentional thing saying, hey, when we post, we want you to like and comment to help circulate?

Or is that like taboo and we shouldn't be playing that game?

We absolutely do that. And it's funny because when I first started, my manager was always kind of posting like, hey, this new post went out, go ahead and like it.

And we've come to a point, now we don't even need to ask.

People are in the company are like so enthusiastic about this product and our customers as well, that they're just liking it, promoting it, reposting it. We get a lot of internal love on the page. And so, no, I don't think that's taboo.

I think what it shows is that the people in the company truly believe in what we're doing, and that's really exciting. And it just kind of continues to grow the eyeballs of people that actually, that actually see the content.

We also have a number of people in the company who have their own LinkedIn presence and are growing their own personal brands. And that always helps, right? Our CEO has a great following and so, you know, he's posting and getting eyeballs on island just from what he's saying.

We have a number of people on the sales team doing the same, some of our engineers. So, yeah, it's kind of a nice, well rounded way to just get eyeballs back to one space.

I think it's so important these Days to create that culture of encouraging engagement. And by the way, one tip for everybody. You don't send out the link to the post from your own company. You wait 10 minutes.

Because if your own company engages with it too fast on a link that you've circulated, it will crush the algorithm. So it's 10 minutes is a secret number. But I do think it's important to have that culture of engagement because it matters. It helps. Big time.

Yeah.

All right, so let's jump into some nonsense, okay? Talk a lot about content and repurposing and whatever, but I could be wrong. But do you, like, have some sort of weird collection of, like, Barbies?

Not weird, like it's bad, but like an ex? Are you, like, an extreme, like, ebay Barbie human or something?

Okay. So when I was a kid, my mom and I had this kind of bond where she and I collected Barbies together.

And this is before ebay, so they were very valuable and they were very difficult to find. Right. It was before the Internet. And, you know, we had a lot of Barbies.

And I had ones I played with, but I had the ones she and I collected we kept in the boxes. My dad actually built me a bunch of shelves and we displayed them in our basement.

And at one point, and this sounds like a gross exaggeration, but I promise it's not. I know that I had at least 800 Barbie dolls in boxes, potentially a thousand Barbie dolls in boxes at one point.

Like a really. A lot of money. Like. Like a crazy amount of money. Right? Like retirement type money.

Some of them were. I did help pay for my wedding with a number of them.

Wow.

So, yeah, that was like our thing for a while. At this point, I have whittled down the collection to about 10 and sold the rest.

10.

10. I have my favorite 10 in a box in my own basement now. And yeah, that was hard. But, you know, it's like, where do you store a thousand Barbies?

Is it like, in your house? Like, hey, guys, let's buy a new couch, go grab one of the Barbies. Let's sell it. Is that, like, the move? Is that what you do?

Well, okay. One of the. One of the things I sold to help pay for my wedding was I had a life size Barbie. It was a mannequin.

She was 6ft tall, and they only made 10 of them. And that was a. That was a Christmas gift I received one year from my parents. And yeah, I.

You know, I grew up and we got, you know, close to the wedding, and I was like, kind of think I want to sell the Barbie mannequin and help pay for this. And. And she, she took a nice big dent out of it.

I want to be there on the Christmas day when you're like, all right, you come downstairs and there's a six foot tall mannequin. Here you go. We got you a mannequin for Christmas. And you're like, what?

Well, it's funny because she, she stood, you know, she stood like she came in multiple boxes. We had to put her together. Like. And if you were, if you didn't know she was there, you would like come around the corner and you'd be like.

Because it was like, there's a small blonde woman. Like, that's amazing.

That is unbelievable.

Yeah.

Wow. I never heard of anybody getting a mannequin for Christmas.

Yeah.

You ever see the movie Mannequin? That's a great movie.

Loved the movie Mannequin.

Yeah, Mannequin two is fair, but Mannequin's great movie. They need to bring it back. Anyway, we've covered a lot. We really have. So I want you to tell everybody how to follow. You get to find your podcast.

We're going to put it all in the show notes. But how does everyone get involved in Jess's world?

I'm on LinkedIn. I'm posting there a handful of times a week all about content marketing and growing your career in content marketing.

And like Jay mentioned at the top of the show, I have a podcast called that's Marketing baby. I co host it with my marketing bestie, Susan Winograd.

I'm on kind the content and organic side of things and she's on the paid and media side of things. So we have a really nice little yin yang in, in all the things we talk about. Yeah, those are kind of the two places that you can find me.

And, and, and yeah, come find.

Well, I gotta tell everybody. Follow Jess. Okay. I'm serious. Jess Cook on LinkedIn Listener podcast. She's amazing. We put all in the show notes.

And I can't thank you enough for being here, Jess. Appreciate you being on do this, not that.

This was a delight. Thank you, Jay.

All right, take it easy.

Bye. Bye.

You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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