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A Recently Discovered Interview on Building Content-Driven Audiences

After looking through my Google Drive, I found this interview between me and Dan Bruce of FunnelCake that was never published. It’s been 2+ years and I no longer work at Mattermark (they were acquired twice since then), but I thought this interview was fun and should be shared.

I did this interview in early 2017 at the height of the (in my eyes and based on the metrics) widely read Mattermark Daily newsletter, a product I helped build under the umbrella of Mattermark. Both Mattermark and the Mattermark Daily aren’t what they used to be, at least in terms of popularity and engagement, yet even so, I’m super proud of what I did there and how a newsletter could become an important thing within the startup ecosystem.

Some of the references, numbers, and dates you’ll read are old and I have zero insight into how things are going now, but here’s my take on things:

Today I’m talking with Nick Frost, Marketing Manager and Newsletter Editor at Mattermark, and the curator of my two favorite newsletters. Welcome, Nick!

Great to be here. Thanks.

To start out, talk a little bit about Mattermark and your role with the company.

It’s been an interesting ride since I joined the company in September of 2014. It all started when Mattermark acquired a company I was running called StartupList, and with that acquisition I essentially became Mattermark’s first Marketing hire.

From day one, right after I filled out my benefit paperwork, I started penning The Mattermark Daily. At first I was a little apprehensive because I was like, “How do I this? How do I curate a newsletter? What are my sources? What’s the format? How do I send it?”

I got over that pretty quickly and have continued to add more responsibilities to my role. Currently, my main role is still to curate our newsletters, but now we have two:

1. The Mattermark Daily
2. Raise the Bar

I also run our social media accounts including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. On top of that, I manage our content marketing initiatives in terms of content production, managing guest writers, as well as event planning and contributing to our ad buying strategy.

A lot of people, when they hear about Mattermark or see us online or talk to us in some way, they think we’re some sort of newsletter company, because The Mattermark Daily has its own magnetism and gravity to it. It fills a lot of space in our brand, but really we’re a data company that is building tools to empower salespeople to find quality leads, improve prospecting, and better understand who their best-fit customers are.

So when you started at Mattermark, The Mattermark Daily newsletter existed and you took it over and grew it into what it is today, correct?

Yeah, I was actually a big fan and reader of The Mattermark Daily before I joined so I was pretty excited to have the opportunity to take it over.

In a way, The Mattermark Daily was the first product by Mattermark. Our CEO, Danielle Morrill, started the newsletter as a way to collect emails so that subscribers could be notified about new Mattermark news and features.

It was run fairly sporadically from when it started in July 2013, to when I took it over in September of 2014, since Mattermark was growing quickly. It had some good traction, but it was more of a side project for Danielle since she had so many other things going on. So, when I came on I was able to take control of it and put some serious focus on growing it.

So, you’ve been spearheading a newer project with Mattermark — we brought up the name earlier — Raise the Bar. Why did you start this project and how is it different than The Mattermark Daily?

It was an interesting idea that I had late last year (2016). Looking through some of our newsletter metrics, it became apparent that most readers were more interested in the startup operator section of the Mattermark Daily Newsletter than the rest.

With that information, I decided to break out a portion of The Mattermark Daily startup operator section, where we would feature Sales and Marketing Operations content and turned that into its own newsletter.

It’s been interesting to rebuild a new list of sources and think about:

• Where to find valuable content
• What’s the best format going to be
• How should we structure it
• What’s the voice going to be
• How does it all work together

The main value that Raise the Bar has now is that subscribers rank very high, (higher than The Mattermark Daily,) on our internal lead scoring system. That shows me that Raise the Bar subscribers are more closely in line with those who could actually become Mattermark customers, which was part of the business value of branching out in the first place.

So I’m going to ask you to gloat a little bit here, since you’ve done a tremendous job at growing the audiences for different programs and campaigns at Mattermark. Can you give us an idea of some of the growth numbers you’ve influenced over your time at Mattermark?

When I joined back in 2014, The Mattermark Daily was sitting right around 12,000 subscribers and was being sent twice a week on average. Currently, I have it sending Monday through Thursday plus a weekend summary edition. With the extra content and publishing frequency, the newsletter has grown to over 150,000 subscribers.

Raise the Bar, as I mentioned just launched (6 months), and it’s gone from zero to just over 15,000 subscribers. Obviously, that’s a lot smaller than the Mattermark Daily, but the audience quality is really high and is shown in the open and click rates:

• Mattermark Daily: 31% open rate, 25% CTR
• Raise the Bar: 52% open rate, 31% CTR

Since you asked me to gloat, I’d also like to talk about our social media (specifically Twitter,) since it’s such a big part of the Mattermark brand. When I joined the team, Mattermark’s Twitter was sitting around 7,000 followers and has now grown to over 33,000 on one account (and was Verified), but we actually have two accounts going:

1. @Mattermark (33,400+ followers)
2. @MattermarkDaily (12,000+ followers)

I started The Mattermark Daily account myself, without permission I should add, but it’s become a core part of our community and has really taken on it’s own vision and voice. You can’t send out 30 links a day in a newsletter, so this account is a great avenue to send out great content I come across but doesn’t make it into the newsletter. Now that we have Raise The Bar as a newsletter, the Twitter content has expanded into sharing sales and marketing content vs. just content from investors and startup operators.

The Mattermark handle is our main channel to put our product updates, company news, and to cross-promote the Mattermark Daily and Raise The Bar newsletters.

Across the two Twitter handles there’s lot’s of sharing, lot’s of posts, lot’s of engagement, as well as a lot of web visits created on a consistent monthly basis. We average around 15,000 website visits from Twitter alone on a monthly basis.

Beyond having valuable content to share, what do you need in order to build and continuously grow an audience?

In my mind, there’s three main things you need to do in order to build an audience.

Build trust with the audience

1. I was pretty lucky as a marketer, to come to a company that already had a brand, awareness, and an audience. A lot of marketers being hired to new companies are tasked with building that from scratch at the early stages of a company.
2. Our product is inherently driven by data and driven by the ecosystem, so that puts us in a great place to talk about it and be in the conversation to continue building on that established trust. I think frequency and consistency are two big ones when it comes to growing an audience and remaining relevant to the community/ audience. Before I started, there weren’t a lot of either of those, especially on social media. We do a much better job now at inserting ourselves in conversations, targeting keywords, and being proactive.

Deliver relevant content at a set frequency that provides context and insights

1. From there, the inherent format of our newsletters and content is aimed at being valuable and trusted information sources for the community at large. For us, part of being “relevant” is surfacing content from employees vs only the investors or founders. Employees have their own areas of expertise and perspectives, so it’s always exciting to feature them, if possible.

Be a part of the community

1. Since the early days of Mattermark and the Mattermark Daily, we’ve invited the startup community to contribute to our newsletters as a way for them to get broader distribution to our growing audience. With roughly 15–20 content suggestions sent to our inbox every day, we get to build a rapport with investors, startup founders, consultants, journalists, students, and others in the community. This simple process has led us to be involved in various startup events, panels, podcasts, guest pieces, research studies, and more.

Once you have that audience built up and they love you, that’s only half the battle, right? How do you get that audience into the funnel and closer to buying?

There’s a lot of things that we’ve tried, and a lot of them were not what I would call successful. We’ve tested some ad campaigns and similar things, and it worked to an extent but didn’t necessarily lead to more customers.

I think that it comes down to making sure you’re creating content for different levels of the funnel. We can have a post that is top-of-funnel related like “Here are 25 terms that you should know about VC’s.” Sure, that’s great to get some reads and shares, but then we need to make sure we have a post to follow that up that can lead them further down the funnel.

That’s where it starts, with sharing, “Here are interesting things you can do with our products.” Then, there’s also educational pieces in there, “Here’s a case study of how ‘X Company’ used our product to close more deals.” And, “Here’s a specific way to slice and dice this data.” Those follow the top, middle, and bottom-of-the-funnel best practices. Along that journey for a reader, we’re monitoring analytics and adjusting based on engagement.

Educational content pieces are often forgotten about, but need to be added to the mix of content as you’re trying to work through the funnel.

You mentioned that there’s probably a few things you wouldn’t try again. Do you mind expanding on any of those?

Well, one of the biggest things I’ve learned over the past couple of years is that paid advertising as a way to get in front of an audience should be an add-on tactic. We shouldn’t publish a list of interesting data points that you should learn about and then immediately do a paid campaign on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. We need to see what the engagement with that post is:

• Do people find it interesting?
• Is it collecting leads?
• Are readers creating trial accounts or signing up based off of this piece of content?

If there are those positive metrics there, then that’s the signal that says, “Okay. We should get this in front of a broader audience through these various channels.”

How do you treat the audience that enters the funnel from The Mattermark Daily/Raise the Bar different from audiences that enter from a different source?

One thing is that newsletter subscribers don’t receive any drip campaigns. We don’t want to be saying, “Hey! Try our product. Do this. Do that. Here’s how to do a search,” or anything like that with them. If a lead is coming through a call to action that is formulated on a blog post, or if they’re downloading a list of interesting data points that we’re providing, then they’ll get that trial drip campaign.

It’s almost like B2C and B2B. The newsletter subscribers, they’re consumer users of Mattermark. Then emails that come through trial account creation forms, those are more of the B2B users. They’re both on the path to (hopefully) becoming a customer, but they’ll take different pathways to getting there.

One thing I notice from your content is that it’s sent from you, Nick Frost, rather than a company entity … Why have you decided to go that route?

This was something I was also apprehensive about at the beginning. The Mattermark Daily has such a large audience and high quality standard, it was a little scary to put my name on it.

I think having that real name, Nick Frost, show up in your mailbox rather than Mattermark or something similar can go a long way with building a relationship with the audience. Then, it’s not just another brand filling up your inbox, it’s me.

Then you have to think that some people in the audience are involved in Mattermark trials and buying the product, so they’re going to be receiving email campaigns from a Mattermark account, and so I don’t want those drip campaigns getting mixed up with the newsletters.

On the metrics side, it didn’t cut down open rates, it actually increased it by a few percentage points for Mattermark Daily. Raise the Bar actually comes from my work email: Nick@Mattermark.com (now unused). I’m testing this out, and the reason is so readers can reach out to me directly from that email and respond with any questions or feedback they have.

It comes down to building trust and relationships with readers and subscribers versus being another promotional email.

Now I’d like to grab a few of your favorite resources.

A must-follow on social media:

Let me hop on Twitter and take a look.

I think someone that’s consistently great on many different channels is Shane Parrish. He created the Farnam Street Blog and writes a fantastic newsletter as well.

He’s not marketing specific or anything like that. He’s really about education, learning, and taking a deeper dive into topics like: psychology, how businesses work, what’s going on with the other parts of the world, etc. He has a diverse set of topics that he covers, so you’re always going to learn something from him.

Favorite podcast?

I recently downloaded this new podcast app that’s pretty awesome called “Breaker” that you should definitely check out.

One of my favorite podcasts to listen to is “How I Built This.” I believe it’s by NPR. They recently had an episode by the creator of The Power Rangers, Haim Saban. I don’t want to spoil anything, but it’s worth listening to.

What book are you currently reading?

One that I’m reading right now, I don’t know if it’s my favorite, but it’s definitely interesting and is called Sapiens.

It’s about the history of the Homo sapiens. It’s not business related, but it’s pretty eye opening.

To end off … What is your favorite 90’s dance song?

Well, I really like Daft Punk, so I think they’re song “Around the World” is the one I’d have to pick.

Released in 1997, so you’re good. Great answer.

Once again, this is an older interview, but I hope you find it useful in developing your content-driven (newsletters?) marketing channels.

Any applause, shares, and/ or feedback is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading! @TheNickFrost