Original Research as a Content Marketing Asset - with Becky Lawlor, Redpoint Content

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of Benchmarkit, and your host of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Becky Lawlor, the founder and CEO of Redpoint Content. Today, we'll be covering four main topics with Becky. First, how content marketing has evolved over the past two to five years. The role of research in a content marketing strategy. Third, the challenges and opportunities associated with developing research-based content.
And fourth, external or internal resources. When to use each. Becky, would you mind taking a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast?

**Becky Lawlor** (1:16)
Sure. So I started actually as a freelance writer doing content marketing in the B2B tech space a little over a decade ago. And I've worked with a lot of big brands from Adobe, IBM and Samsung down to startups. I actually worked with Workfront back when they were at Tech or at Task before they became big.
So I've been in the space for a long time. And through that process, I really became enamored by original research because I felt like it offered such significant value in the content marketing space. And so I eventually founded an agency and began to offer kind of an end-to-end research service that ties into the content marketing.

**Ray Rike** (1:58)
What a great experience, big companies, small companies, evolving companies. But let's double-click, first of all, on how you've seen the role of content marketing evolve over the past, the longer horizon, over the past three to five years, because you've been doing it for almost 10
And then I'm going to follow up with, have you seen it change in the last 12 to 18 months? But how have you seen content marketing evolve over the past few years?

**Becky Lawlor** (2:23)
Yeah, so I think at a longer horizon, like three to five years out, I think the way it's evolved is just, there's greater awareness and acceptance, especially I think, B2B, SaaS, it's kind of become a little bit of a table stakes marketing endeavor. I feel like if you really need to do it and there's just more understanding in the organization that it does deliver value and it is bringing in leads, brand awareness and all of the things that you need to get the word out and get pipeline.

**Ray Rike** (2:57)
Well, I agree. Content marketing has been a great kind of say, very trendy over the last three to five years. But in 2021, it was the more content, the more we can invest, the faster we'll grow. But over the last 12 to 18 months, we've had a more cautious capital environment. Efficiency trumps growth. So have you seen the role of content change much because of the new economic reality?

**Becky Lawlor** (3:23)
Yeah, well, I actually think there's two. There's the economic reality and then there's been the introduction of ChatGPT or just generative AI in general. I think both of those are having an impact on content marketing. On the one side, the AI piece is sort of this like, oh, can we just expand our quantity because AI can do it or ChatGPT can do it for us. I think there's still a lot of experimentation going on and people are finding what they thought they could maybe just farm out to AI isn't quite panning out.
On the economic side, I think where the change has been is, and I think this also ties into AI, there's more of a focus if you can't afford to do quantity, then you should really focus on quality, which I would say you should have been doing all along, but I think there's been a shift in the marketplace of understanding that if you don't have as much money to invest, you really got to think really carefully and wisely and make sure that the quality you're producing is there. And I think that ties into AI with so much content flooding the marketplace now, the more quality it is, it's going to stand out from that AI kind of generated content and again, be able to deliver greater value back because the whole point is to get engagement.

**Ray Rike** (4:35)
Interesting. So you think today AI is more about increasing velocity, being able to generate more content with the same number of fewer people, but the qualitative aspect, my personal experience is it does suffer. So content marketers, will we spend more time on high quality and original content versus mass produced, right?