Should I Be Building a Company Directory? — Jordan Koene // Searchmetrics

Quotes

• “In our MarTech podcast website, most of our content is our episodic content, its the podcast episodes where weve written show notes and quotes and we have some category pages for that as well. You and I talked online about also building a company directory creating a pagefor the 7,000 or 8,000 companies in the MarTech space.” -Ben

• “The core of any strategy is finding ways to connect your core assets/offerings to the search audience.” -Jordan

• “While you can move to a new category successfully, you have to be mindful of how youre doing it and what the value is. What is the value of the content or the substance that youre providing to the user and is it really reflective of what your site is truly about.” -Jordan

• “So were not really moving to a new category but we might have a new product offering. The people that are interested in the MarTech podcast are still the same people that are going to be interested in written MarTech content and maybe the written content has a bigger audience. The goal is to build a web property that serves as an aggregation point for this community so we can actually have people join the interactive portion of our community.” -Ben

• “Im thinking of the MarTech community website as a user acquisition channel that will hopefully drive people to understand that there is this community they can apply to be a member of and then interact with their peers.” -Ben

• “The written version of the audio content is supplemental. People only come to the website because theyve listened to the content and its not really that they are finding content.” -Ben

• “There are tens of thousands of people that listen to the MarTech podcast, were going to tell them in the podcast, come join our community and there are other people that are looking for MarTech content that are not podcast listeners and I want to capture that user base.” -Ben

• “There are 7,000 companies and weve done a little research on the company and I know that theres about 30,000 executives, director level or above, at those companies. So, theres 30,000 marketing leaders and theres something like 200,000 marketing operators lower than a director level. So I looked at the TAM just in terms of headcount, not revenue, as like 300,000 potential people.” -Ben

• “The other piece you havent thought about is how many customers those companies are touching. Theyre obviously connected to the MarTech community because theyre using those technologies and that number probably is a hundred fold bigger.” -Jordan

• “The problem I have is when Im in Searchmetrics, doing my keyword discovery, Im looking for the search volume for the keyword MarTech and its 25 hundred searches. It is not a ton of search volume. So how do I create content that is going to attract this 300,000+ person audience when only 25 hundred people actually looked to the keyword MarTech?” -Ben

• “The first thing you want to look at is what are the other directories doing and not doing. Are there things that I could provide that other directory providers are not doing. Could I provide insights that they dont have. So one of the unique things is how you started down this journey.” -Jordan

• “So you started down this journey by saying, hey theres roughly number of executives and theres X number of employees associated with these companies. Is there some kind of value add to connect that data piece with that profile of that company. Thats one possible unique positioning that you could put into the marketplace.” -Jordan

• “The reality is, getting the basics of this directory set up isnt going to do you much. What we need to start thinking about is, what are the components of your brand and your knowledge and information thatwe can use to differentiate these directory pages.” -Jordan

• “One of the ideas I have for you is, you mentioned categories. So you got category data about all these different businesses. Now, can we feature certain shows or episodes that took place from the MarTech podcast on these pages that are relevant to that category, relevant to that company and then that adds a new appeal to this particular page.” -Jordan

• “So whenever I have a podcast episode, we have that tag of who the speaker is and who the company is so whenever Im on the Hubspot page within my directory itll show all the people that Ive interviewed within Hubspot.” -Ben

• “Then you also mentioned the category page. Im gonna take all of these CRM-related content and put it in the categorypage so now Im starting to interject links to my content but to me that is internal linking exercise. Its not necessarily bringing unique content on to those pages.” -Ben

• “The differentiator is, are you creating enough substantive value on this page by providing users with a summary or highlight of that episode to keep them engaged and willing to use that directory page about that company.” -Jordan

• “The reason this is a great starting place is youre taking assets that you already have and you already know are useful because tens of thousands of people have listened to this episodes and youre connecting them with this directory experience.” -Jordan

• “Thats an interesting point. The company profiles can serve as personal directories as well.” -Ben

• “The funny thing is that if you really look at these pages side by side, youre not going to see a ton of differentiation but when it comes down to the value creation, youre able to set yourself apart from everyone else.” -Jordan

• “You need to learn if you are actually creating value. So what I usually suggest in this situation is, Lets start small. See if were actually able to create enough value with a sample set and understand how users are engaging, understand if were able to acquire new users, see if were able to create different modifiers on the page to see if people are willing to engage like voting for these businesses or ranking podcasts that show up on the page. So enagement in the content and are we able to produce that.” -Jordan

• “I agree with you. These investments are difficult and theyre hard to make whethere you have a big company or a small company. These are tough decisions to make, big content investments into your website, identifying test scenarios, that fit your business is super critical because you dont want to make this investment as 7,000 page and come to find out that theyre useless and worthless and you have to deprecate them 6 months later.” -Jordan

• “Honestly, Im going in. Were doing this. Im gonna go build the directory and Im gonna do the whole damn thing and its going to cost 10,000 dollars coming out of my pocket and I just want to build a company directory because I think its a useful asset for the business. If youre going to talk about the MarTech community, you need to have individual pages for each of those company in the industry and well find a way to make them useful and valuable.” -Ben

• “Then when you get to the more robust type content is really where you get into the unique type asset, things like, can I get user-generated content on these profile pages. Can I get leverage and competitive research-based content about these companies. This startsto become a little bit trickier because sometimes you yourself have to manufacture or produce this content, or create rules or different criteria that say this company is a competitor of this company or you could get a community to engage.” -Jordan

• “Oneof the areas that I always love to encourage especially with heavy, business-focused, B2B environment is to really think about that thought leadership positioning. I really believe this kind of content performs incredibly well in these settings where you are acquiring the business audience to engage with you.” -Jordan