Simon Dell (00:01)
⁓ Welcome to another episode of the CEMO Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Simon Dell, and I am the CEO of CEMO, spelled C-E-M-O-H.com. If you want to find out more about us, we are Australia's largest fractional marketing network. Something annoyingly is beeping in the background there, which is my smoke alarm, but hopefully we'll stop doing that in a minute.

Otherwise, poor Rachel, our editor, is going to be editing out smoke alarm beeps all the way through this episode. ⁓ sorry about that, Rachel, for when you're listening to this later. Now, we're gonna talk about content today, and we're gonna talk with one of our simos, Kelly Dimkowska. Did I get that right? Because I know we've tried, I've tried that before in episodes, and I think I got that one right, didn't I?

Kelly Dimkovska (00:48)
You did, you succeeded. Well done, Simon.

Simon Dell (00:52)
⁓ hooray for that. yeah, it is slowly dulling down up there. So, well, just, just so everyone's very, you know, I'm not, the house isn't burning down or anything like that. So please don't worry about that. ⁓ Kelly, tell us, ⁓ tell us a bit about you, your career, your background. and, ⁓ you have a kind of specialist industry knowledge, don't you?

Kelly Dimkovska (01:17)
Yes, I do. So I suppose my very brief overview is I've been in digital marketing now for about 16 years and just over 12 of that has been specializing in the healthcare sector specifically. So I've worked both in-house and in agencies and recently, last year, I stepped out and

Open my own business, ⁓ being a fractional chief marketing officer, mainly specialising in the healthcare sector.

Simon Dell (01:48)
Excellent. Now we're to talk about content today and we've had a few of these conversations in the last couple of months. and, and I don't think it's, I don't think it's fair to say everyone has a different opinion. I think there's, there's some, there's some general opinions around content, but I think the interesting thing is there's, there's kind of nuances depending on industry and things like that. ⁓ and just to start off your industry from a medical health industry.

Very, very, I would imagine it's a very regulated business when it comes to marketing.

Kelly Dimkovska (02:22)
100 % yeah, if you're a regulated health service ⁓ or sort of in the pharma or med device sectors and yes, extremely regulated and something that compliance should never be taken lightly I suppose.

Simon Dell (02:38)
So does, mean, obviously that I can imagine that makes it harder, but then sometimes I guess it doesn't make it harder because, you are sort of really confined into what messaging you can share to a degree. So I guess that's my first question is that, does that make the industry harder to work in or easier to work in?

Kelly Dimkovska (03:01)
For some industries, it's nearly impossible. So if you're looking at, I suppose, take the example of medicinal cannabis and the marketing of that is you simply cannot market outwardly to a B2C audience. ⁓ So in some respects, it's almost impossible to reach your target audience.

Simon Dell (03:25)
Mmm.

Kelly Dimkovska (03:29)
So, but then there's other industries which are just very highly regulated. You've got the cosmetic services, anything sort of either non-cosmetic surgery or cosmetic surgery. There are a lot of guidelines around before and afters, testimonials, all that sort of thing. Then you have sort of other ⁓ sectors within the healthcare sectors, which are sort of a little bit less regulated, but nonetheless, you'd have to comply with all of the up.

guidelines. yeah, I suppose it depends which industry and how heavily under scrutiny it is at the moment.

Simon Dell (04:06)
One of the things I've noticed in the last 10 years, I think every marketer has noticed is that, you know, back in the early days of social media and those sort of things, content was like just something that most businesses just sort of wanted to plug on to the, to the end of their marketing strategy. was a, not necessarily, well, it probably was at the start was an afterthought. But there's an argument now that it's a, it's, it's potentially it's a key, key growth driver.

Kelly Dimkovska (04:28)
Hmm.

Simon Dell (04:36)
And some would argue it should be the center point of a marketing strategy. What are your, what are your thoughts on that?

Kelly Dimkovska (04:45)
I think it should be part of every marketing strategy. I think the channels that you decide to invest in, so whether that be Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, whatever that might be, I think that really comes down to whether you're after a B2B audience or a B2C audience, a mixture of both. But also, I think it really comes down to what the client ⁓ or the business is actually comfortable in creating to

⁓ You could be told that short form video is something that you should be doing a lot of, but if you're really bad at it, perhaps you should just be looking at the things you're really strong and passionate about. So I think it all comes down to a few different factors and that's when I'm ever creating a content strategy for clients, that's definitely one of the key things we talk about.

Simon Dell (05:37)
That's a really interesting point because I literally had that conversation last week with the prospect client and they'd said to me, what content should we be producing? And I said, look, you can go to the nth degree in content strategies and talk about subject matter and channels and all those kinds of things. But by and large, think it's very much or largely dictated by what you just said there is what content can you produce. It's no point in over-

Kelly Dimkovska (06:04)
Mm.

Simon Dell (06:07)
is creating these complex strategies if there's nobody in the business that's prepared to sit in front of a camera, for example.

Kelly Dimkovska (06:14)
⁓ 100%. And I think also it even comes down to even copywriting and in many ways if you're just going to be I think pumping out content which is really just from AI and it's not really designed or written for humans in mind then in my mind it's just wasted time and energy on content and I think it

Additional to that if we are just talking about things say like blog articles as well

Again, if it's not optimized for answer engines, if it's not optimized for search engines, then I feel like it's just three or four hours you're flushing down the toilet. So I think it's really, really important that if you are going to invest in a content strategy that you follow best practice and you're not just using AI to pump out a whole lot of content, which is just not going to serve a purpose at all at the end of the day.

Simon Dell (07:12)
Yeah, I mean that that sort of to me, there's those core questions is what can you produce? ⁓ And I think the other big question is why are you producing it? ⁓ You know, and as you said, if it's for if it's for Google or search engine or if it's for large language models, then that's fine, you know, but produce it with that in mind if you're doing it to because to become a celebrity on LinkedIn, then then so be it. And a good example of this is the ⁓

Kelly Dimkovska (07:21)
Mm-hmm.

Simon Dell (07:40)
you know, we'll take this content here and, you know, transfer it, transform it into a blog potentially, or use the video itself to put onto your profile on the website so that when people find Kelly on the CMO website, it's not just a blank wall of text that they're looking at with your achievements. They can sit there and go, hey, you can almost do a 20, 30 minute interview by watching your...

your podcast. So I think there's some big questions to sort start at when to start with before you go off and start doing anything. What are some of the sort of problems that you've inherited when you've gone into work in businesses or you're there for your first few months? What are the sort of content problems that you see?

Kelly Dimkovska (08:35)
Lots. So yeah, lots. A lot of it recently has actually been what I touched on earlier, which is literally content creation these days is just so easy with the use of AI tools. is literally people just thinking they can put up an article on their website and for some reason it's going to be picked up.

Simon Dell (08:37)
You

Kelly Dimkovska (09:00)
or it's gonna be relevant. So much of it is not. We've got simple things like, know, headings like H1, H2 tags missing, no internal linking, no external linking, no sort of FAQ sections or author sections or, you know, table of contents or all of those things that are needed in order to help these days to show up and search.

I think the other thing is not being really clear on actually a point you touched on is, but why are they creating this content piece? If you are not sure on why ⁓ you are creating the content and there's no clear call to action or the next step that a user should take, then you haven't really added value or guided them onto the next step in the stage or the user journey. ⁓

even calling out the industry as I suppose, know, working with businesses where they say, look, their industry is X and then you go in and you look at all of their content and not much is that industry mentioned and yet they're very, very clear on the ICP. So it's just these little things. People, when they're reading content, they don't need to know it's for them. And the other big part of it, which I actually talk a lot in my 101,

mentoring session is the so what factor. What have you added to someone's life, but for them investing three to four minutes in reading your content, what have you given them? What have they walked away with? Is it, I already knew that, that's added no value to my life, or hey, that one sentence has really changed the way I've thought about something. That's the so what factor, and that's something you should always be aiming for with every piece of content you create.

Simon Dell (10:53)
I love that because there's a graph that I often use and again I used it with a prospect client last week about the difference between ⁓ saying something in content but then it's like a step. You say something and then it's say something that people listen to and you know it's a bit hard to describe for me to describe the actual graph but at the other end of the spectrum is saying something that convinces people to buy.

So, know, one, one part, as you just said, you know, you've got content, has it added anything to anybody's life or have you just said something for the sake of saying something? Whereas at the other end of the spectrum is saying something that convinces somebody to buy. That's a, that's powerful. The capacity and the ability as a marketer to convince people to buy by just

Kelly Dimkovska (11:19)
Mmm.

Mm.

Simon Dell (11:46)
the content that you're producing or saying or whatever it is that you're saying, those are where I think, you know, the in-demand marketers, the good marketers can really make their mark in a business.

Kelly Dimkovska (11:59)
I always when I ever I do a content strategy a large part of that is number one I map out the industry or the target audience or the ICP that they're going after and then I actually map it with a service. So what service are we actually trying to print? So we've got the blog article, we've got the pillar for who we're targeting the ICP and then we've got the right what service are we actually promoting through this?

and what internal linking are we then going off to different services pages. So it's connecting it all together to have a broader purpose. And I think HubSpot really talks about the pillar pages and the importance of a pillar page. having your topic and then all the supporting information, it be blog articles, newsletters, whatever it might be.

pointing back to this main topic to create this pillar page or this topic cluster. And that is a lot of work in itself, just doing a strategy around that, but the payoff is massive. Payoff is massive.

Simon Dell (13:09)
Yeah. Well,

let's, let's talk about that payoff because I guess there's some of the challenges that I also see is, is if you're a, if you're a CEO and you don't understand marketing or you're not familiar with all the component parts of marketing, content marketing, all those kinds of things, there might be a tendency for you to sort of push that all of your, all of your content has to be producing leads. has to be converting, you know, to your point, you know,

It's good to say, this content gave something back or people were better off once they consume this. But I think one of the dangers at the other end is that, you know, the CEOs or the business leaders are too...

too caught up on content leading to sales. Do you think they should be? Do you think we should be sitting there going, hey, we did all this content, look how many sales we've got. Do you think there is a, you can draw a straight line from a series of short videos to actually making more sales?

Kelly Dimkovska (14:15)
I think over time, I think ⁓ every piece of content you create, are strengthening your organic, I suppose, reach on search results pages. in terms of, do I think organic, I suppose, social media is going to get you a massive return? ⁓

I would say no. So reach these days is just so low. Like we're talking about every organic post you're doing on Meta generally. So it's about one to 2 % on Facebook is actually gonna see your organic content. And with Instagram, can go up to sort of around about that 7%.

Also LinkedIn, so LinkedIn from a company page, a post from a company page is still only one to two percent in terms of reach, whereas from a personal page you're seeing more of that 10 to 15 percent. So there is definitely value I think to creating organic social media posts, but I always think of them as a little bit like a window dressing. So if somebody is sort of

researching or has already come across your content or your brand or whatever it might be doing, they will often go and check out your social media profile and just have a little bit of a flick through. Are these guys active? Are they delivering value? Is there a risk engaging this business? And if you have a presence that lowers the risk factor for them, it's the social proof.

So I think I always look at it as a window dressing and I'd always support anything like that with paid campaign to reach out, to burst out of your, I suppose your organic reach and actually reach new users. So it's a supporting factor, I think, not a conversion driver.

Simon Dell (16:24)
Yeah, no, I 100 % agree and on a sort of side note as well, I can't stress how important it is when you're looking for employees.

you know, for a big business that has a switched on social media presence, even a small business, right? When you're trying to recruit, when you want new people to join your team, they go and check these things as well. You know, they want to see who they're working with.

Kelly Dimkovska (16:52)
Absolutely. Yep,

absolutely. And actually that's something I probably should have mentioned. But yes, from my times of, ⁓ you know, my years of working in marketing agencies and actually having actually a heavy role in the recruitment of our specialist team. Absolutely. The comments that I'd often get from people going, we've checked out your social media and we feel like, I feel like this is kind of could be a good fit for me.

So absolutely, there's huge value in that.

Simon Dell (17:22)
Yeah.

Yeah. And I think it's again, industry by industry, you know, ⁓ channel by channel. ⁓ But I often, you know, from a buying perspective, I often think one of the most underrepresented, underrepresented did represent industries who should be doing more on those socials or some of the trades, because I think

employing someone to work in your house or work in your business, be an electrician or plumber or a gardener or a landscaper, whatever it is, that actually has a presence beyond just their website and a phone number. As you said, it's a trust thing, isn't it? The more content you see, the more you trust them, the more likely you are potentially to pick up the phone and talk to them.

Kelly Dimkovska (18:12)
Exactly. So it's, yeah, it's unlikely that it will be as we talk about often like first click attribution. It's not, it's normally, it's normally part of a bigger, bigger piece. So ⁓

Normally, years ago, they used to talk about the 10 touch points in order for someone to become a customer or even just, I suppose, engage or reach out to become a lead. These days, that's actually increased to about 13. So, social media is one of those touch points, as is an article, as is a video, as is a website.

as is a Google business profile, which you should be doing posts on as well. yeah, so all of this adds up ⁓ to that final outcome, which is ideally building that trust to a point where they are ready to engage with your business.

Simon Dell (19:12)
So from your perspective, if you're sitting there going, well, you know, we're using this as a supportive mechanism to grow our brand and grow our awareness and, you know, bring people through the sales funnel, the marketing funnel, whatever you want to call it, right? What are you measuring from a metrics perspective? What are you, you know, what do you think is valuable? Because we've all been lost in those vanity metrics way too many times, but what is worth actually

you know, measuring.

Kelly Dimkovska (19:44)
Yeah, so.

I suppose it depends. If we're talking about organic, is definitely in my mind, it is still in that vanity metrics area. So we are looking at reach, are looking at engagement, although these days, most people are lurkers, they don't tend to be engaged very much. So even that, like you take with a grain of salt these days, it used to be like the thing that you'd always chase is engagement, but yeah, it's just

not the way people operate these days with scrollers. And then I'd be looking at the number of, I'm really interested to see how much traffic the social media has actually generated to your website. That's a big one because if you've intrigued them enough to want to click through to your website and actually read more, I'm meaning, you know, clicking through and then not having a massive, like 100 % bounce rate, doing that clicking through.

Simon Dell (20:31)
Yeah.

Kelly Dimkovska (20:45)
and actually engaging with your website and then eventually converting from that. That's what I'm looking for. Yeah, with regards to organic, paid obviously as soon as you do anything paid then you're definitely looking at those sort of more higher conversion metrics and you're definitely looking at the industry benchmarks associated with each of those metrics. So your cost per click, cost per conversion.

And if you're not meeting those industry benchmarks, then it's all about optimizing that campaign until you are. But even those, those are very small percentages. So you need a lot, it's a numbers game in many respects. You need a lot of numbers in order for the percentages and everything to pay off.

Simon Dell (21:29)
Okay. Well, my last question for today is about building that scalable engine. you know, do we, we've talked about video, we've talked about graphics, we've talked about, ⁓ you know, blogs and short form content and all those kinds of things. I think potentially some businesses look at that and go, Christ, that's a lot of work. That's a lot of people. you know, what are you, what are your tips when it comes to potentially building some sort of.

Kelly Dimkovska (21:52)
Mm. Mm.

Simon Dell (21:58)
scalable engine that can constantly be on and constantly be producing appropriate brand led content.

Kelly Dimkovska (22:12)
Sure, so number one is you have to be clever. ⁓ Content, no doubt about it, it is time consuming ⁓ and the payoff can feel very small at times. So I always like to do a content strategy. Then for every piece of content that I create, I like to see how many other ways I can repurpose it. And you actually mentioned this earlier before.

Can I repurpose this article into a LinkedIn newsletter? Can I repurpose this article into four social media posts? Can I turn it into an infographic? Could I do a short video on it? So I like to look at if you're gonna invest in creating content, let's wring every single piece out of it that we can. And then off the back of that, is there a campaign in it?

So having a look, know, did one of your pieces of content just really take off? And then that's an indicator to you that perhaps you could look at actually investing some money into this. So that would be my biggest tip is to be super clear number one on what you're trying to achieve with it. Have a strategy and then utilize every single piece of content the best way you can to get the most value out of it. The other thing about it is you can

outsource obviously content creation. However, when you do do that, I always recommend you do very, very clear briefing to whoever you're outsourcing to make sure that they know who your ICP is, make sure they understand what the call to action is, make sure they understand the internal linkings, make sure they know best practice. The hook, like number one, think the hook.

of any social media post or any main content piece. It's so important to get that right. It's the 80-20 rule. Only 20 % will continue reading after the hook. That's more, you've got to grab them straight away. So being super clear, whoever you're outsourcing to, what your expectations are.

and having that content plan as a real, I suppose, source of truth or that they can go back to reference it for best practice.

Simon Dell (24:34)
I was gonna say that was gonna be the last question, but I did actually think of another one as well, because I think it's one of those that are quite sensitive in that sort of small to medium sized businesses is the idea of this founder led content, right? I tend to find that the companies that have the best social media presence are where they have a ⁓ founder.

CEO, whatever, who is very active and happy to be in front of the camera and those kind of things. Now, I don't want everyone who listens to this as a founder suddenly go, ⁓ shit, I'm useless, I need to get better at that. Maybe they do, but also I understand that some people just don't wanna do that, don't wanna be in front of the camera. And we also see that when you get people like the famous video from a couple of weeks ago of...

the McDonald's CEO trying to eat a hamburger, right? Some people should just, should not be on camera. But if you're, sorry, you missed, I'll go and have a look. It's the most awkward, it's the most awkward CEO video you'll ever watch. it's, and anyone who gets a chance, go and watch the CEO, McDonald's CEO eating one of his own hamburgers. He just manages to make it look like the worst thing in the world that he could possibly be eating. Anyway. ⁓

Kelly Dimkovska (25:33)
I missed that one.

Simon Dell (25:56)
If you're a CEO and you've got that enthusiasm for being in front of a camera or writing blogs, do you think that perhaps puts you a little bit further ahead of the game?

Kelly Dimkovska (26:10)
Yeah, and I think the data points to that too, Simon. Like when I was talking earlier, know, one to two percent of company posts on LinkedIn are actually viewed ⁓ by, sorry, one to two percent reach on company content. Whereas when you are posting from your personal page and it's found a lead content and it's original, it's your face, your voice, ⁓ your thoughts.

people connect with that better and we can see from the data that then jumps up to 10 to 15 percent reach. So I think people buy from people and if you are comfortable ⁓ you know getting in front of the camera it would always be beneficial to have the face have all the faces that have your team involved too. What are your specialists you know bringing your specialists and what are their thoughts on the the latest ⁓ you know Google ⁓ you know update.

you know, getting them talking about that. So I think just people, think these days. ⁓ But yeah, certainly, certainly the data suggests that that's the way you should, you should be going and you can balance that up with, with, with other content as well. But I think the majority should be of a person at least.

Simon Dell (27:27)
It's amazing as well. ⁓ One of our mutual contacts, Jess or Monnier, who works for me, hates being on the camera, hates it, but she just presents so well. She just presents so well when there's a camera in front of her and she's talking about something that she's passionate about. And I think that's the key. think people will present well when they're talking about something that they have a passion about.

Kelly Dimkovska (27:37)
Make sure.

Mm.

Simon Dell (27:53)
⁓ If you're asking them to talk about things that they're not confident about, ⁓ but you put someone in the front like Jess and you ask her to talk about design and colors and branding and things like that, you get great content. to that sort of mind, get the people in the business, in your business talking about things that they're knowledgeable about that excite them ⁓ and you'll get much better content. You'll get great content.

You put them in front of a camera and ask them to be, talk about something that they don't know about or they're not confident, you're get shit content. So that's sort of my final note for today. Your final comment today, any sort of singular last tips that you wanna give people out there?

Kelly Dimkovska (28:38)
Well, I just wanted to tag on the back of yours there, Simon, to get my last word on this. I think it's not so much necessarily where people, it is where they feel that they have the knowledge, but I think the real passion comes when they feel like they can deliver value and offer value to people by speaking about whatever they're speaking about. So I think that's really important for people is to feel like they're adding value.

Simon Dell (29:02)
Yeah, great comment. ⁓ Look, if anybody's interested in working with Kelly, you can find her on our website. There is a little button on there. You can start talking to her straight away if you go to the website. And knowing Kelly, she will respond very quickly as well. if you do find, if you do watch this video, jump onto the CMO website, search for Kelly, you'll find her. There's a contact Kelly button on there. ⁓ Click on that and she'll have a conversation with you about.

how she can help. ⁓ She obviously mentions that she's got a strong background in medical and health and all those kinds of things. But I think a lot of your skills are very transferable to other industries and things like that as well. So a wealth of knowledge there. So thank you very much for your time today. And thank you very much for your insights and ⁓ wish you well in the moving forward.

Kelly Dimkovska (29:59)
Thanks, Simon. Talk to you later.