How Gong makes $244m with "boring" content

Author

Perrin Carrell
January 14, 2024

Helloooo content connoisseurs.

It’s Perrin from Content Bites.

Ever had content change your life? I wish I was exaggerating when I say I have. And it was content that should have been boring. Today, we’re going to talk about how “boring” content contributes to Gong’s $244m marketing machine.

  • Appetizers: Links from Ahrefs, Copyblogger, SparkToro, and more…

  • Main Course: How Gong makes $244m with “boring” content

Let’s dig in.

Appetizers: Content about content 🤯

  • I Tested Premium AI Prompts To See if They’re Worth It. They’re Not. (link)

  • 12 Outstanding Copywriting Examples That Generate Sales (link)

  • 5 Steps to Create an Outstanding Marketing Plan (link)

  • Why the Worst Search Marketers Start Content Strategy with “SEO Keywords” (link)

  • B2B content marketing: Ultimate strategy guide for 2024 (link)

Main Course: How Gong generates $244m with “boring” content

Today, I’d like to tell you how a piece of content quite literally changed my life. 

This is about a company called Gong.io’s content.

I found Gong’s content because, at the time, I was building a sales system from scratch for my content agency. 

I had never done that before. 

I had questions. LOTS of questions lol. 

But, for whatever reason, the landscape of sales blogs is a dystopian wonderland of empty bullsh*t. 

Every sales blog seemed to be one of those blogs – and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about – that feels like it was created by a marketing team that heard you “...should be blogging” and that “every business needs a blog” but really didn’t understand why. Or how. Or why the hell anyone would ever read a blog. 

As a potential customer with an acute pain point in search of content to help me solve real problems… it was tremendously frustrating. 

I was frustrated right up until I found Gong. 

Gong is a SaaS product in a category called revenue intelligence. 

I had no idea what revenue intelligence even meant, but it basically means taking as much sales & CRM data as possible & crunching the numbers for insights.

Why are some sales closing but not others? Which sales are most likely to close? What are the best reps doing differently? Where do our best sales prospects come from?

That kind of thing. 

I didn’t need all that, really. 

But I was looking for practical answers to the very real sales questions I was had, like:

  • “What in the living hell do I say in a cold email?”, and

  • “What in the living hell do I say in sales calls?”

This was the first piece of content from Gong I ever read: This (Surprising) Cold Email CTA Will Help You Book a Lot More Meetings. 

At first glance, it felt to me like a typical sales blog fluff piece. 

When I dug in, I found something very different. 

To save you some reading, let me just summarize it for you. 

Gong had crunched data from as many of their customers’ cold emails as they had permission for and compared three of the main types of CTAs that you might slap on the end of a cold email:

  • Specific CTAs (e.g. “Can we chat next Tuesday at noon?”)

  • Open-ended CTAs that ask for a meeting but no specific time (e.g. “Want to jump on the phone to chat about it?”)

  • Interest-based CTAs (e.g. “Are you guys thinking about X at all this year?”)

Then, they used their own data to provide a concrete answer. 

This was the answer…

Interest-based CTAs work best in cold emails. 

They’re lower stakes, so they generate more responses, and therefor lead to more sales. 

Cool insight.

But here’s the even cooler thing…

Based on their information, I changed all the CTAs in our cold emails from more of an open-ended CTA asking for a meeting to a purely interest based CTA.

I did it only because of content I’d read on Gong.io’s website.

The result?

I booked twice as many sales meetings. 

At the time, to me, that was the difference between my business living and dying. 

And had I not come across that SINGLE piece of content, literally I might have gone out of business. 

That was one of the first times I can remember that a piece of content had so meaningfully changed the trajectory of my business. 

Let me break down a bit more what Gong actually does.

Quick disclaimer here: Gong generates revenue in a lot of different ways. They buy ads. They have a sales team. They’re a full blown org with 1,400 employees, so of course they’re doing other stuff. I’m not saying all of their revenue comes from content marketing.

But a substantial portion of it does come from content marketing, and they do it in a really interesting way. And, in my analysis, it also contributes heavily to their $244m in annual revenue. 

Another disclaimer (sorry): The title says their content is boring. It’s not. It’d be a lot more accurate to say their content should be boring. The difference is that they use it in a way that is super not boring. 

K. Onto the actual content. 

Gong’s content breathes with data. 

The content I found was in a section of their website called  Gong Labs, which is where they house all of their dedicated research. 

Almost all the time, it’s in the form mentioned above: they use the immense dataset they have at their disposal (their customers’ sales activities) to pull real insights. 

A few examples from Gong Labs:

In the content, they’ll link to more detailed guides with even more data. 

For example, the last article in the list above links to a team selling cheat sheet landing page. 

The content contains great, useful data, and then links to even more data that’s even more useful. 

Outside of Gong Labs, Gong also has a regular old blog. 

The blog is a skews a lot more qualitative than Gong labs, but it pulls data from Gong labs into every post. 

For example, in an article titled These 6 Cold Email Examples Are So Good You’ll Want to Steal Them, the first thing they do is pull in graphs from Gong Labs, graphs only they could have made. 

And then they push readers to a landing page for… data-backed cold email templates. 

It’s just data data data.

Data everywhere. 

They’re not just publishing and crossing their fingers by the way.

In addition to building a great organic presence, they run paid traffic to their data-centric content. 

They don’t spend much money on Google ads, but they do spend quite a bit on Meta’s platform. 

Here’s their ad library.  

There are lots of ads like this one (screenshot), that features graphs from their data and headlines like “EVERYTHING the data actually tells us about writing irresistible sales emails finally revealed”. 

It links to a landing page that offers data from 300,000 sales emails they analyzed. 

Virtually every singe part of their content marketing starts and ends with data. 

Why it works.

Ok so they use a bunch of data. They do research and publish research. 

Publishing research is nothing new. Marketers have been using research for a long time.

But here’s the thing.

Most of the time people who publish research make it so boring. 

You know the kind I’m talking about. The typical “white paper” that, for some reason, has to be a PDF and can’t be a page on a website. 

Or it’s full of jargon. Hard to read. Not accessible.

Gong is different. 

Almost all the content in Gong Labs does the following.

It uses data no one else has access to. This does a couple of things. First, it immediately makes the data more interesting because if they have data no one else has, they might have answers no one else has. Second, it establishes them as an authority, and they’re not shy about letting you know (“...we analyzed 800k emails and…”, etc.). 

It actually answers burning questions for sales teams. Remember this content literally saved my business. The content (1) answered a question I had with (2) legitimate, useful data. I booked more sales calls and saved a struggling business. After that, where do you think is the very f*cking first place I go anytime I have any kind of sales question?

It’s immediately useful. Gong answers very simple questions with very simple answers. Don’t use this CTA; use this one instead. These subject lines don’t work; these are the ones that do work. And so on. It’s not about complicated sales systems. When I found that article, it was real, timely, and simple. I took action because of it, and I made more money.

They act like content marketers. They don’t take their audience’s attention for granted. They try to be interesting. They have a voice. They have a point of view. They have an identity. It feels like they’re working on the reader’s behalf to try to help them. 

All in all, it gets an A+ from me. 

It’s the very best you can expect from content: creating something that legitimately helps people the second they read it. 

Maybe I’m gushing, and maybe I’m biased, but as a content marketer, it’s hard to get better than that. 

How can WE do it?

Here’s what I’d say are the basic steps for rolling this out for our own campaigns:

1. Find simple, burning questions you can answer with data. 

If you’re an accounting firm, it might be data about the single most common errors across all your accounts and how to fix it. If you’re a running shoe company, it might be data about differences in warm up of elite runners vs amateurs. 

Anything simple and enlightening that would help people change their lives immediately after reading. 

2. Get data. 

If you have customers, poll them. 

If you have customer data that you have permission to use, use it. 

If you don’t have data of your own, you can get it two other ways: 

If you want to go with the former, you can hire experts in any of the following: web scraping, statistical analysis, research .

If you want to go with the latter, you can use platforms like:

3. Write content that answer a that single question. 

Use the data and tell people how to change their lives with the data. 

Make the content fun or entertaining or impactful or otherwise interesting. 

4. Use data to create bigger, related guides that solve more nuanced problems. 

If you’re an accounting company who’s just written content about the most common accounting error and how to fix it, push readers to a larger guide with the 20 most common errors & processes for fixing them. 

Ask for emails in exchange for a download. 

5. Promote. 

All your owned channels. Your paid channels where it makes sense. Etc.

That’s the issue. If you missed last week’s issue, you can read it here.

Go forth & conquer.

—Perrin

Reply

or to participate.