cf #68: behind the scenes of a ‘VP of Content’ selection process

You are reading contentfolks—a fortnightly blend of sticky notes, big content ideas, and small practical examples. Thank you for being here! ~fio

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Hey there 👋

Back at the end of June, I went through the selection process for a VP of Content Marketing at Red Stag Fulfillment. I made it through several rounds before deciding to withdraw my application, but I did ask their CMO (hi, Paul!) if he was cool with me publishing the answers I’d submitted at the third step.

If you, like me, are curious to see behind the scenes of how folks apply to and get jobs, you might find this part of the process interesting 😉

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9 questions about (mostly) content marketing

After step 1 (submitting my CV + LinkedIn profile) and step 2 (passing a 30-minute screening assessment), step 3 was a content-focused questionnaire:

Honestly, I did think that 60-to-90 minutes was a significant upfront investment of time and energy. So I justified it as follows:

• I would use these questions as personal prompts to take stock of (and maybe even update) my position on all things content marketing

• I would ask the Red Stag team if I could republish my answers, because create once, repurpose forever is a useful content principle to live by

It took me about ~75 minutes to finish the task, after which I made it to the in-person interview round. Below are the questions 9 + the answers I submitted.

1. Name at least 5 of the books that have made the biggest impact on your thinking and decision-making.

2. Name at least 3 current leaders, influencers, or sources of content which most affect your thinking and/or where you get information.

3. Please share a link to the best piece of content marketing you have ever come across, and briefly explain why you love it.

4. Please share a link to the best piece of content marketing you have ever personally contributed to, and briefly explain your role in it.

5. Please describe the most significant experience where you have personally contributed to the financial performance of a business through content marketing.

6. What do you think of the art and science of marketing, and where do your strengths lie within that?

7. You are offered an 80% chance of $50,000, or a guaranteed payment of $35,000. How would you respond, and why?

8. Please describe the most important investment you made in yourself at least 10 years ago or more, and tell us about the benefit you’ve realized from it.

9. Please share one contrarian belief you hold about content marketing, and why you take this position.

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1. Name at least 5 of the books that have made the biggest impact on your thinking and decision-making.

To be honest, I’d rather consume specific blog posts, guides, podcast episodes, or newsletters by strategists and practitioners whose work and knowledge evolve faster than the publishing industry allows for.
This said, the first books that came to mind were:

• Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

• Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

• Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

• Jonathan and Melissa Nightingale, Unmanageable: Leadership Lessons from an Impossible Year

• Carol Fisher Saller, The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (Or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself)

2. Name at least 3 current leaders, influencers, or sources of content which most affect your thinking and/or where you get information.

• Amanda Natividad and Rand Fishkin at SparkToro → their blog posts + webinars are a must-have to stay on top of all things (content) marketing

• Tracey Wallace → former content marketing coach and current content friend of mine, whose weekly Contentment newsletter is a go-to for anyone building or managing a highly effective content team

3. Please share a link to the best piece of content marketing you have ever come across, and briefly explain why you love it.

It depends on what we mean by best → to me, content marketing excellence exists at the intersection of being audience-focused, having memorable brand codes, offering an original take, and generating obvious business impact.

With that in mind, I’ll mention Wistia’s 2018 One, Ten, One Hundred—a smart and entertaining documentary video series made by a video-based SaaS company to showcase its product and answer the “how much does it cost to produce an amazing video?” question.

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4. Please share a link to the best piece of content marketing you have ever personally contributed to, and briefly explain your role in it.

Once again, if we define best as something with a clear audience focus, memorable brand codes, an original take, and the ability to generate obvious business impact, I’ll single out this 5-day virtual event ‘with a twist’ that drove 10k+ visitors to our site, expanded our share of voice, and was excellent for long-term brand building as the talks could be (and indeed were) endlessly repurposed.

I came up with the idea with my content partner Louis and acted as the event’s project manager. I wrote landing page copy and email flows, and later turned the content into an optimised written hub and distributed it via our newsletter and social channels.

5. Please describe the most significant experience where you have personally contributed to the financial performance of a business through content marketing.

As Hotjar’s Senior Editor I built and managed an editorial team of 15 freelancers, 1 full-time in-house writer, and 2 virtual assistants. We focused on producing product-led, SEO-distributed content that both generated and captured demand:

• Our work grew non-paid traffic 10x from ~20k to ~200k/month, placing Hotjar #1 in the SERP for a significant number of business-critical keywords (including, at the time, heatmaps, user research, market research, and user personas)

• We grew first-touch MQLs from 0 to ~1k/month within the first two years and had a measurable influence on customer retention and ARPU

• We established Hotjar as an authoritative thought leader in its space, driving practitioner conversations and interest by showcasing a unique, transparent brand personality that was unafraid of controversial takes (e.g. “You are doing market research wrong” or “You can build good user personas without leaving your desk”)

• Though this often sounds like an intangible nice-to-have, we measured the business impact of our activities by asking people where or how they had heard about the product, and consistently found our content to be one of the top drivers (another main one being word of mouth).

6. What do you think of the art and science of marketing, and where do your strengths lie within that?

There is definitely a science to marketing—in content, that’s particularly obvious when using SEO as a distribution method—but one will usually see enormous returns when bringing creativity and artistry into it too.

I’m the kind of marketer who will joyfully start to disrupt, add a unique spin, and unleash my creativity once I understand ~60% of the ‘thing’ I’m working on. For example, I found it much easier to be creative in my content approach a good 3 years into my decade-long career, once I felt I had properly understood the scientific fundamentals of how the content machine works.

But speaking of the role of creativity in marketing, I hope you will allow me a small rant:

I think AI content tools will be doing a lot of content folks a favour by accelerating a return to proper investment into that squishy, hard-to-measure, but deeply crucial growth element that is creativity.
For years now we’ve been stuck in this (fruitless) debate about brand vs. performance/growth marketing, with the ‘artistic’ former often losing to the ‘scientific’ latter in terms of resources, headcount, and general support. And now that leaders and execs are also expecting AI-generated content to unlock new and faster levels of growth, it looks like creative marketers may be facing early retirement...

...but what happens once the novelty wears off and all that quickly-and-easily generated content is not really doing much for the business—it’s not speaking to true jobs-to-be-done, is not building brand awareness, and is not leading to sales or conversions either (how could it, when everything looks the same as everything else)? Those same leaders and execs will have to bring in someone to fix the problem, properly fund creative brand and content teams as the strategic partner we are, and double down on creativity to build unique and distinctive assets. I cannot wait.

7. You are offered an 80% chance of $50,000, or a guaranteed payment of $35,000. How would you respond, and why?

This is a trick question, and more context is needed. If I was independently wealthy, I’d go for the 80% chance without thinking about it twice; if I was out of work and with a mortgage to pay or family to raise in this specific economy, I’d go for the safe bet.

I guess you’re asking how risk-averse I am, and in true marketer style I’m giving you an “it depends” answer.

8. Please describe the most important investment you made in yourself at least 10 years ago or more, and tell us about the benefit you’ve realized from it.

10 years ago I finished a PhD and decided to leave academia and go after a content marketing career instead.

Working as a content freelancer to support myself through graduate school, I realised I loved the fast pace of marketing, the immediacy of audience feedback, and the ability to reach and help hundreds or thousands of people at once WAY MORE than I enjoyed the sluggish pace of academia, the months it would take to get a paper peer-reviewed, the narrow scope of literary research, the limited opportunities for influence.

You asked for an important investment, but what I actually did was dis-invest in what I’d been doing for the previous 4 years and pivot towards something more nebulous and less certain, which nevertheless felt more ‘right’ than academia did. To this day, I have not regretted this decision.

9. Please share one contrarian belief you hold about content marketing, and why you take this position.

I don’t know if this counts as contrarian but I believe that not enough content marketers think like business owners. We focus on craft and deliver like tacticians, but don’t spend anywhere near enough time A) thinking about how the content we produce will solve a business challenge or impact growth moving forward, and B) communicating this information outward so everybody is aware of the value we bring and the potential in-house partnerships we can build.

I take this position mostly because I have ‘grown up’ on demand generation teams that were very in tune with the ROI of our work, so I’m used to thinking about content in relation to the larger business strategy and performance. But I also run my own side business as a content consultant, and I guess I’m forever borrowing my business owner hat whenever I’m in an in-house role.

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How YOU can use these questions

The 9 questions above are not unusual when screening for a senior role, but you don’t have to be applying for a VP job to use them as personal prompts; regardless of your current title, they can help you reflect on where you are at career-wise and what you might need to focus on next. For example:

• Does knowing that senior folks care about content’s contribution to the financial performance of a business (#5) change the way you understand your work?

• Do you have a personal definition of what ‘best’ looks like? (#3, #4)

• Do you have opinions about content marketing as an industry and a discipline—and can you defend them? (#6, #9)

• What investment can you make now (#8) whose results you’ll see in a decade?  

Hope you found this behind-the-scenes look useful 😉

1. Incidentally, a few weeks after the events of this newsletter, Paul the CMO posted on LinkedIn that “Almost 10% of applicants are giving the EXACT SAME ANSWER” to the best-content-marketing-campaign-ever question.

Can you guess it? Here are some clues:

1. It’s from a consumer company, not B2B
2. Though it’s unquestionably good content marketing, I’m convinced the actual reason it’s coming to mind so frequently for content marketers is ... it’s regularly cited as brilliant content marketing
3. No, it’s not the Hogwarts House selector quiz

The answer is in this thread 😉