Gong’s Simple Formula for Great Content

Udi and his team at Gong have a simple, three-part formula for great content:

Relevant: write something for a very specific persona. Who is Gong’s persona? Their #1target persona is their buyer, the Head of Sales. There are also several supporting personas - directors of sales, sales enablement, sales ops, and so on.

Example: “This will help *you* book a lot more meetings” is a post that speaks directly to sales leaders; it’s clear who this is meant to be relevant to.

Interesting: this principle is relatively self-explanatory.

Protip: to communicate that your content is interesting (and drive better performance for your posts) put your target reader in the title. “How CFOs Do X.”

Immediately applicable: why should I care about this *now*? Solve a question that your persona is dealing with today.

Example: in the Covid era, the Gong team was asking, “how do I get past the CFO?” So the team wrote a “How to get past the CFO cheat sheet” on the premise that other sales and marketing leaders were thinking about this. The content was a hit.

When it comes to various content formats, for Gong, less is more. LinkedIn posts, 5-minute articles, one- or two-pagers, or maybe a 5-page ebook at most. Most weekly blogs are7-minute reads with 2-4 charts (if longer, the post is split in two.)

Going Deeper on Content Strategy & Mechanics

Should I produce timely content or timeless content?

The answer for Gong is both. They do a long-term planning exercise, with a quarterlycontent calendar. Some of these are longform pieces that take weeks or months or toproduce. The long-term planning cycle tends to lead to content ideas that are“timeless”. But, your team has to be agile and respond to what your audience cares about rightnow. And in the Covid era, Gong had to be triply agile. So several timeless piecespivoted to be about, say, working from home -- making them both timely and timeless.

How is content produced at Gong?

In general, Gong produces one serious piece of content per week. Social is more fun and frequent.

First, data scientists mine Gong customer calls for ideas. (Note: Gong has a data scientist who reports into marketing!). Gong has the unfair advantage of millions of different customer calls. The data scient is tasked with finding nuggets that can turned into great content.

Then, the ideas are handed to Going’s writer. Gong has for a long time only had a single writer (although more recently that headcount has doubled to two.) Importantly, everyone who has held the post had a background in sales. Edi believes great writers must understand what they’re writing about. Can you name a single great content marketing company who uses outsourced writers?

How is content distributed at Gong?

Posts are first published to Gong’s LinkedIn because that’s where the audience is. Next, the piece is syndicated to their hosted blog, Gong Labs, for SEO. LinkedIn is terrible for SEO.

The best posts/topics are repurposed into webinars (because “you need to meet people where they are”) One of the more successful webinars, for example, had 3,000 registrations with 10-15 slides, cut into 2-3 different formats. Tip: don’t call them webinars, call them “virtual live events”—focus on “edutainment.”

How did Gong define its brand?

First, Udi’s team looked at hundreds of websites. Every brand looked the same... wide header, product features, customer testimonials... boring.

If you want to play the same game and be better, you have to be 10x better to stand out. That’s hard. Instead, you can be different. It’s easier to be different.

Going chose to stand out by being different; fun and goofy, which was largely unheard of for a B2B brand. And they didn’t worry about being taken seriously, because you will be taken seriously if the product works.

Gong started with a brand dog mascot -- and actually auditioned seven different dogs! -- before choosing their mascot. They had people inexplicably with smoking chemistry beakers. Instead of safe colors, they went with BOLD colors like pink & purple.

They also went authentic... Gong has no stock photography on its website; everyone is a professionally photographed, paid actor. The result?

Bonus Round: Org Structure, Out of Home & More

What does a marketing team look like at Gong’s scale?

Gong’s marketing team is a small but might group of 14 people:

  • Two thirds are demand generation: 2 content marketers, 2 marketing operations, 1 events, 1 Account Based Marketer, and 1 digital marketer
  • One third are product marketing / category creation: 2 product marketers, and 1 customer marketer, who market to existing customers for renewal, upsell, case study, etc.
Out of home is underutilized by startups, especially B2B.

One reason OOH is underutilized? Marketers are always asked, “how do you measure the success of OOH?” Udi believes you can’t really measure it. But the hard impact and the soft impact will become obvious.

For example, during Dreamforce 2019, Gong took over a full BART station. Over the course of the next quarter, every candidate mentioned seeing an OOH Gong ad during their interviews. On top of the customer impact, you’re building an employer brand--and giving candidates confidence they’re joining a real company. It also had the side benefit of raising team morale.

One other tactic: Gong did an OOH campaign recognizing some of the top-performing team members, with “employee of the year” style billboards. Some employees were even shot with family members. Gong put these up all over the city, which accomplished multiple goals at once: a compelling campaign for customer acquisition, building an employer brand, building employee morale, and building the Gong brand.

One final idea: Gong used Wrapify to wrap cars during Dreamforce, hijacking Dreamforce foot traffic and avoiding $2M booth spend -- while still getting incredible brand awareness.