Remarkable Content with Ian Faison Real Housewives: B2B Marketing Lessons from the Popular TV Franchise with Content Marketing Manager at Quora, Shelagh Dolan
Your content can go so much further than you even know.
A single video or podcast can turn into blog and Instagram posts, tweets, clips, TikTok videos, newsletters, and more.
But tackling all of that on a small marketing team can feel enormous. So this is where you divide and conquer across platforms and channels.
That’s one of the things the Real Housewives do really well. And what we’re chatting about today with the help of special guest, Content Marketing Manager at Quora, Shelagh Dolan.
Together, we talk about slicing and dicing your content, identifying and catering to untapped audiences, and putting underperforming content “on pause.”
About our guest, Shelagh Dolan
Shelagh Dolan is Content Marketing Manager at Quora. She joined the company in June of 2022 and leads content strategy for its advertising division, Quora for Business. She has over a decade of experience building content strategies for global B2B brands, aligning content with sales objectives, and driving business growth. Prior to Quora, Shelagh served as Director of Content Marketing at eMarketer and Senior Content Marketing Manager at Business Insider.
About Quora
Quora is a Q&A platform with over 400 million monthly unique visitors that empowers people to share and grow the world’s knowledge. The vast majority of human knowledge is still not on the internet. Most of it is trapped in the form of experience in people’s heads, or buried in books and papers that only experts can access. Founded in 2009, Quora is working to democratize access to knowledge of all kinds—so if someone out there knows something, anyone else can learn it. In February of 2023, Quora launched its second product, Poe, a platform that lets people ask questions, get instant answers, and have back-and-forth conversations with a wide variety of AI-powered bots.
About the Real Housewives
The Real Housewives is a reality TV show franchise about the lives of affluent women, and it usually centers around a specific city or area. The first show was The Real Housewives of Orange County, which aired in 2006. It was originally called Behind the Gates, but Bravo decided to change the name based on the popularity of the Desperate Housewives and The OC at the time to The Real Housewives of Orange County. There are now 11 U.S.-based versions including The Real Housewives of New York City, Atlanta, New Jersey, D.C., etc. And 21 international versions, as well as a bunch of spinoffs, including Vanderpump Rules.
What B2B Companies Can Learn From Real Housewives:
- Slice and dice your content. Create shareable pieces that project members will want to share on their own channels. It’s how you divide and conquer across platforms, and make promotion a lighter lift for everyone involved. And you get more juice out of the ‘parent’ content. In the Real Housewives, Shelagh says, ‘You have the show itself. Then Andy Cohen is doing Watch What Happens Live, where he's discussing the episode that just happened. Then on top of that, each cast member is their own brand ambassador. They do a social media post about it, reminding people to watch. They're also often live posting during the show. You combine that with the multitude of podcasts, blogs, meme accounts dedicated to recapping these episodes. It's really just like a content machine and it just keeps on giving.”
- Identify and cater to untapped audiences. Appeal to a wider range of people by identifying a new target audience and catering to them. The Real Housewives did this by creating a show that starred women in the age range of their target demographic. Meredith said, “There are about five to seven women in [the Real Housewives] and they're usually in their 30s to 60s. An executive with NBC Universal said that often, women in that age group are overlooked, and so they really wanted to appeal to that demographic, and it would be a new audience for them. So they were drawing in people that they weren't already attracting to their content.”
- Put underperforming content “on pause”. Be unflinchingly honest about the content that’s getting poor engagement. Use that data to inform your next move and make adjustments as needed. Shelagh says, “[Bravo will] have the hard conversations if viewership is falling off. They definitely monitor qualitatively the social media discussions happening around individuals as well as seasons overall. And they will call someone and fire them if it's not working out and bring someone new on. There's been a few people that - they call it ‘putting on pause.’ They put them on pause, which is a nice way of saying, ‘please don't come back,’ and maybe there'll be something in the future.”
Quotes
*”Sometimes you have to make the tough call. Like, ‘This person isn't good in the content and we need to bring somebody else in who might be more junior. Or maybe we have to platform this person because they are important strategically to our company.” - Ian Faison
*”[I realized that] I'm doing random acts of marketing. So let's see how we can get this to be more structured. So really bringing order to processes and following kind of like how the housewives have a recurring schedule. Like, let's get these cornerstone pieces of content, identify what they are and put them to a timeline.” - Shelagh Dolan
*”What has helped me be successful in different roles is building relationships with cross functional team members and really aligning myself with subject matter experts in the company. This was my first role in ad tech. So really getting up to speed on the market and what matters most and building good relationships with our customer success reps who talk to our clients every day is important.” - Shelagh Dolan
Time Stamps
[0:55] Meet Shelagh Dolan, Content Marketing Manager at Quora
[1:45] Why are we talking about the Real Housewives?
[3:36] What does Shelagh’s work at Quora entail?
[5:16] Learn more about Quora
[7:28] What is the Real Housewives about?
[14:42] What makes the Real Housewives remarkable?
[25:04] What are marketing lessons we can take from the Real Housewives?
[39:41] What’s Shelagh’s content strategy?
[46:53] How does Shelagh prove the ROI of content?
Links
Connect with Shelagh on LinkedIn
About Remarkable!
Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both non-fiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com.
In today’s episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Jess Avellino, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK.
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