Betterworks’ John Schneider: Proprietary Content Cuts Through the Noise

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On the surface, John Schneider, CMO at Betterworks, appears to be a product marketing guy. He honed his craft at Jive Software—first as senior director of product marketing and later as VP. He then moved on to Intapp, where he led the product marketing function as the company went public.

With the cloud computing revolution lowering the barrier to entry in most technology categories, John says that product marketing is more important than ever.

“The demand to constantly change and evolve go-to-market strategy is greater now than it was 10 or 15 years ago,” John explains. “The product marketer is at the tip of that arrow. In any highly competitive market, it's the desired skill.”

But don’t let his enthusiasm fool you into thinking John has a one-track mind. While he’s niched down in product marketing, he retains a deep respect for other disciplines like demand generation and brand marketing. Perhaps that explains why, when he took over as CMO at Betterworks, John staked his first big bet on an ambitious and high effort piece of proprietary content.

I caught up with John to discuss why Betterworks needed an original research asset to cut through the noise of regular content marketing, and what other marketers can learn from his success.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Betterworks is nearly a decade old. It’s a large and secure company. What were they hoping to achieve by recruiting you?

My specialization is helping organizations transform, whether that’s going through an IPO like Intapp or selling back to the capital markets like Jive Software. I'm always there for the transformative moment.

Doug Dennerline, Betterworks’ CEO, explained that the company had grown from OKR software. (John Doerr, who introduced the world to OKRs, is the largest investor in the company.) The nature of the OKR methodology is that it asks the organization for continuous input and involvement from employees and managers. It also acknowledges that goals change and that you should be stretching.

As time went on, the software evolved. It started offering things like development plans, performance recognition, and 360 feedback. Suddenly, Betterworks fell into the bigger category of talent management. What's fascinating about that is that it changes the target market to CHROs, Chief People Officers, and others who care about the broader workforce performance and engagement equation.

Betterworks had already proven that it can sell into the enterprise B2B space, but the market position was stuck in the past. That hooked me. It was a difficult challenge. How do you evolve from a well-understood position to a completely new position in the market?

As for conditions on the ground, there was not a CMO in place at the time and hadn't been for about half a year. The marketing team was not as well-nourished relative to (marketing performance) expectations.

I had some strong priorities coming in. One was to build a world-class marketing organization that could evolve the positioning and generate awareness in the market. At the same time, we needed to build the mechanics of the organization to create world-class content and demand generation. I knew I was getting into both the functional build-out as well as the positioning work.

What does it take to build a world-class content function in such a competitive market?

When I joined, I knew that I had to do something different. I looked at the content we were producing. It wasn't aligned to where we were going; it was still stuck where we had been. Some of it was on the verge of not being current. The new and different approach was to think about content from a more enduring perspective and to be more impactful.

Within my first month, we commissioned a research study of over 2,000 knowledge workers in the US and UK. We wanted to dive into the Great Resignation, look at the real sources of churn, and give pragmatic advice to human resources professionals. It was ambitious, especially given it was only my third week when we started the process. 

It was hard to do. I knew that the current content engine wasn’t working as well as it could. There might have been some quick fixes, but I wanted to do something bigger. I took one big bet on a new type of asset that wasn’t in the company’s typical vernacular.

We just deployed the report and it's been well received. At over 30 pages, I call it a “hero asset.” It's something designed to give us legs for three to four months. I’m very happy we did that. We got some of the biggest influencers in the industry to acknowledge the report.

We started using new muscles that had never been used before. The exciting part from a content marketing perspective is that we’re talking about that next big piece.

Some marketing leaders approach content development iteratively. They’ll test an idea in a Tweet and if it works, they’ll write a blog. If the blog performs well, they’ll produce an eBook. Why did you jump straight to the large, expensive, and risky asset straight away?

The smaller content was already out there, and it wasn't keeping people on our site. People might access it, but it wasn't living up to the expectation of the modern buyer’s journey. I knew I needed something proprietary. In a competitive space, where our point of view is competing against many competitors and our buyers are seeing tons of messages, I needed something where we could say, “Betterworks has learned…” That was the hypothesis.

With the rise of AI writing tools like GPT-3, many are predicting a tidal wave of basic content. If technology creates a new baseline for content, will it become more important to create proprietary hero assets?

I think it's increasingly important. But to qualify that, I don't think you have to constantly produce proprietary content. There's also multiple forms of proprietary information. Some of the bigger ones are harder to execute. For example, can we share the dynamics of the workforce as measured by our product without breaking any privacy rules?

From a content marketing perspective, there are a lot of traditional assets that don't require proprietary information, especially in the middle of the funnel. You’re talking about articles like “Five Steps to Success.” But even in those areas, because they come from product marketing, you can even look for opportunities.

For example, are you talking to your solution engineering team? They have frameworks for how they create the value case for the customer to buy the software. Can you turn that into a more proprietary marketing engine? Answer these five questions and we can tell you where you land on the value spectrum.

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