We need you to grow our company, find customers, convert them. Oh, and our marketing budget is zero? Oh sure… Let me just abracadabra the customers to our unknown brand then. The nature of early-stage startups is the extremely low budget which is counter-balanced with young blood energy and hustle power. The quickest way to test your product is to buy traffic through paid channels. Create a landing page – buy traffic and see if people buy. Why would you even bother with writing blog posts?

Yo, if you’re into content calendars and not hating your life, grab this content planner and make it your own ? – Notion or plain ol’ Google Sheet

Content marketing is like investing in a portfolio that guarantees compound interest over time. Only if you do it right. But it’s much more than that. Apart from getting traffic, customers, money, and women, you will also enjoy:

• Customer trust
• Return Traffic
• Free Leads

“Are you telling me, I just have to write a couple of posts and I’ll get rich.” No, I’m sorry sunshine, nothing comes that easy. But, if you write the best posts that are relevant to your clients, give away something valuable and respect basic rules of SEO and marketing funnel, and you effectively distribute it, you will eventually get an upper hand and beat your competition. The bad thing though, it will take you a while to see results.

Worst thing? It’s haaaaard.

That’s what she said… (sorry).

Content Marketing is the main inbound channel which means your readers and future prospect find you. And what doesn’t sound better than that — you just create something and people show up at your front door? If only the universe knew I was single, and potential dates would start knocking on my door, asking me out for a croissant and expensive coffees. I wish.

Content Marketing, like all things in life, returns what you put into it. Quality, care, and really neat CRO (conversion rate optimization) mechanisms.

Opposite to PPC channels like Google or Facebook Ads for example, it takes a while to see results and it’s quite difficult to measure the ROI (return on investment).

So why should you bother?

Because just like an amazing relationship it keeps on giving and giving with time.

And it’s one of the only ways to win the game in the long run. You keep going to return to the restaurants, cafe shops, and peanut butter dealers, who you trust, and know you can get the best information and product.

Saying all that, you will need to find a sweet spot between:

• An amazing and relevant content
• Hit the right keywords for that SEO juicy optimization
• Effective distribution strategy
• The right and logical customer journey

Saying all that, you definitely will see small wins in your journey even in the short term. One expertly written article which just hits the spot will bring you leads from the get-go and will keep bringing leads for weeks, months, even years to come.

It’s one of the rare cases where “build it and they will come” works. (Although you still need let people know that you’ve built something).

If you think about it carefully, every broader marketing search in Google (or Bing, DuckDuckGo) returns either Hubspot results, eery SEO-related search returns Ahrefs or MOZ and social media search shows Buffer in your SERP results (search engine results page)

So let me say it again: a successful content marketing strategy is a consistent mix of valuable SEO-optimized content that is relevant to your target audience. The approach will turn your cold traffic into email subscribers and with synergetic use of other channels qualify them and turn those sweet sweet MQLs (marketing qualified leads) to customers.

Before we start, I believe that content marketing is an essential piece for B2B and SaaS companies, but not as relevant to e-commerce. Why?

Two reasons:

1. If you’re selling something that doesn’t cost a lot, you don’t need a lot of convincing. Just making sure your visuals and product claims tell the right story to the right person and that’s it.
2. If your average ticket sale is north of $300, your customers need some convincing. You better start creating that trust with your content. B2B sales often start at five figures.

 

Or let’s say it this way…

The bigger the price point your product has, the more important content marketing is. Click To Tweet

For example, at Grow + Scale, we are only working with B2B companies because we know their customers need to pick the right solution the first time. All the questions and objections need to be ticked off (or broken down). If you don’t have a recognizable and reputable brand yet, you have to earn that trust with content.

To answer what good content marketing is, let’s look at what isn’t.

HOW DOES BAD CONTENT MARKETING LOOK LIKE?

Are you using google search? Are you frustrated when you get stupid, unhelpful results for your search intent?

Let me ask you this – how many times was “4213 ways to cook eggs” or “100 things you should be doing” actually helped you out? My guess… probably not many times. The issue with those articles is, they have been written to satisfy the content trends i.e. use a number, make the articles really long. But most of these articles give as much value to the customers as powdered sugar. You’ll just get fat, lazy, and annoyed for wasting your time. Great anti-commercial.

Let me throw up some other cases from my “grinds my gears” bag fanny pack

• Content without research
• Publishing without a plan
• No actual metrics to measure
• No strategy
• Not communicating with sales, customer success, and/or your own clients
• Inconsistency
• Stupid over-analyzed titles and content that is just wasting time (oh wait, we mentioned this one)
• Content that is too broad
• Confusing next steps

I could go on all day, and I bet you are aggressively nodding your head, because you see it every day out there. Maybe you’re getting pitched by virtual assistants with their SEO backlink quests for guest posts where the content falls into those categories. “No, KAREN, I’m not interested in your bullshit article and your infographic”.

Alright, lets rather look at how to start with a decent content strategy.

Research the shit out of your own customers

First things first: you need to know who your customers are and who is vying for their attention as well. You’ve probably heard about “buyer personas” and I know, you might be glazing your eyes over already, but this is the FIRST STEP YOU NEED TO TAKE.

HOWEVER!!!

Rather than saying “everyone is my customer” or guess whether it’s “Mother Molly” or “SEO Simon”, I’d recommend looking at your existing customers and build your case there.

You absolutely need to know who you are serving and what kind of problems they are having. Because that’s what it’s all about. You are put on this earth as an entrepreneur, marketer, or salesperson to solve those issues and make their lives better. It’s wonderful to be marketer when you look through that lens.

The first thing that you should do is look into your CRM (Customer Relationship Manager). Your history of sales is the first logical step to see who the best customers for your thang are. No matter if you work as an in-house marketer or agency, you need to work closely with sales or better yet, talking with your clients by yourself.

What you’re looking in CRM are the biggest accounts, short cycles (sales will/should  tell you that), and clients who have been with you the longest and who is most engaged. Throw that data around or export EVERYTHANG into a vanilla spreadsheet. Take a look at your first ten or twenty companies and start looking for patterns.

Hers’ how you can find that data:

• Biggest accounts – filter your list by deal value
• Short sales cycles – calculate the days between the leads first touchpoint and the date they became a customer
• Longest relationship – fairly self-explanatory. Might want to get them on the phone anyway to check the satisfaction (good opportunity for an upsell or idea for product roadmap)
• Most engaging – Filter by the number of sessions, page views, or marketing actions taken. This filter will naturally coincide with the customers account. If it doesn’t gives those leads a call, because clearly they like you but something is holding them back.

NOICE! You should have a beautiful spreadsheet and tons of ideas. If you’re already going “OMG this is awesome, why haven’t I’ve done this before… then yeah, I know :D. Amazing feeling, right?

Once you have this, you should already have plenty of ideas who to go for.

But if you you’re still a bit confused on what you’re looking for help yourself with these questions?

Q) How big are those companies and from which verticals (# of employees, revenue, industry) – Clearbit is a super useful tool for that.
Q) Who are the key people of those accounts (what’s their official job title, how long have they been at the company, what’s their work history like, what are they reading and in which group you can find them? – Just try to find everything you can about them. If you haven’t talked with them then start with LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. Put their names in Google and search for interviews or content they have produced.
Q) What were their trigger points and objections? If you’re talking with them on the phone, ask them why they picked you, what was their result and who were they looking for their problem. If you’ve done a good job, your customer will gladly tell you more. In the end, you did make their lives better, right?

This is a good start to start getting really useful information. I SHIT YOU NOT, in your content strategy process, THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP so don’t skip it. Limit yourself to about 15 to 20 accounts and looks for patterns there. Sometimes I go a little overboard and overanalyze this stuff. I like to find out:

• What articles has the customer read
• How many form submissions did he or she take to convert
• Are there essential pieces of content that most of our the clients took? (major hint, insert those actions in your email nurturing sequences)

Now, let’s collect some qualitative data. These are stuck in the heads of frontline soldiers – your sales peeps. Discover pains, objections, scripts, triggers, and create an ugly note of it.

Also, keep in mind, that your product or customers might change. Keep talking with your sales team or directly with customers.

In most cases, it’s as simple as that – listen to your clients, because they will tell you what they need.  Just shut up and listen… If it works in your personal relationship, it should work in marketing as well. If your girlfriend is on a diet, you wouldn’t take her to the Cheesecake Factory, right? (Unless you’re an evil, evil man.)

2. The SEO pissing match

I’ll be honest, SEO is not my primary lens for content but it does carries a lot of weight. Actually, I take that back. SEO IS super important. But I do want to say that finding and creating the right thing your customer needs should carry more importance than hitting your SEO keyword sweet point.

Your content needs to add value. That's way more important than satisfying search algorithms. Click To Tweet

When it comes to SEO though, you should put on your science hat and go to work. You need to know who your competitors are in the space (and don’t delude yourself saying, you so unique that you don’t have competition. If that’s the truth, then maybe you’re solving a problem that doesn’t exist. Don’t believe your mom you’re the best and special and please smack yourself with the hand of reality.

Researching your competition will give you information on the content types out there, what opportunities are available that either hasn’t been leveraged yet, and who links to that content.

I don’t want to waste too much time, so please take a look at Ghost Recon Playbook on this website. Some of the tools are outdated (Nacho Analytics doesn’t exist anymore) but the process and the principles are still there.

When it comes to SEO keyword (kw) research just do your best. There are a lot of free guides and YouTube videos on how to do it. Basically what you’re looking for are keywords with:

• High search volume – how many people are already searching for these keywords
• Low keyword difficulty – how hard it is to rank for the keyword
• Searchers intent – how close is that keyword to your goals

As classic as it could be. Save this list of words. It will come in handy soon.

Here’s how my list usually looks like after an hour or two (yes, I love conditional formatting so much <3)

SEO Research Mini Case Study

Here’s a really good example of why keyword research matters. I’ve been looking for a good content opportunity for an extended reality company. Most of XR developers (XR is an umbrella term for augmented, virtual and mixed reality) are using one of two game engines to build their augmented or virtual projects: Unity3D or Unreal Engine 4.

I’ve found out on Ahrefs, there’s a huge content gap in this area. The basic rule of high traffic and low kw’s difficulty applies.

This were my options:

Keyword	Monthly Search Volume	Keyword Difficulty
Unreal vs Unity	3,000	5
Unity vs unreal	5,900	8
Unreal engine vs unity	2,500	8
Unity vs unreal engine	1,100	8
Unity or unreal	700	8
Unreal or unity	150	3

As you can see from the results, the number of monthly searches per keywords that essentially describe the same thing is ranging wildly.
Give a guess for which keyword combination my content was written and produced.

Yup, “unity vs unreal” is the best choice.

As soon as we published the article for that keyword, we started ranking within a week. Within two weeks we jumped to 9th place on Google US despite the terrible domain authority of the website we are expecting to climb with time (because our content is better and more relevant for the company’s target market.

This one content piece became the third most read article on the page in about a month.

We also did a helluva good job on nailing down nailing the right community with distribution.

 

Your Content Marketing Strategy

Start building up that content strategy, dawg!

With content marketing as with sales, there is a funnel — a digital pathway your readers go through until they are ready to be sold to. In content marketing the funnel is hidden in plain sight.

I’m sure you’ve been met with certain-kind predominantly South-Asian “agencies” which found their way into your inbox or LinkedIn offering anything from development, SEO with “first place on Google” promise to taking care of your firstborn child. Apart from obvious shadiness you’re not taking that awesome deal, because you don’t know anything about their reputation, their quality, and how are they like to work with. They just shoved their offer down your gullet hoping you’ll get their incredible and super affordable deal.

The same goes for your content. When fresh corpses… I mean cold traffic comes to your website to read up on you or check what you are all about, don’t tell them how awesome you are just yet. Your landing  page should tell them they came to the right place (by being clear in your copy).

“I’m sorry Attentive AI. What do you do and why should I care?”

Ahhh, CRM in GSuite – I understand that.

Show your readers from the content perspective that you are a legitimate company that is capable of solving their problem in the most effective and smooth manner. Show off your expertise by educating them through broad high-level topics. Let them discover themselves that you know your shit and are aware of the problems they are facing. This type of content is called top-of-the-funnel content (TOFU).

I’m getting ahead of myself. This clandestine content funnel is represented by three stages:

• Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) a.k.a Awareness Stage
• Middle-of-funnel (MOFU ) a.k.a Consideration Stage
• Bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) a.k.a DECISION stage

 

Some marketing pricks may want to look clever and add more stages with spicy jargon but who cares… nobody likes a smartass. This is enough.

Your content strategy needs to achieve a smooth transition between those stages. Your reader has to know:

• If they are at the right place
• that he or she can trust you
• believe that you and/or your products are the one to solve their problems and help them bring home the bacon/lettuce/cheddar and relate with your clients.

With the right content marketing you will achieve all three. Strive for a healthy balance and representation for each of those stages. Update the pieces, write new actionable ones in SEO optimized manner, and measure the performance across time, and you my handsome friend, are on a good way to achieve something worthy.

TOFU – Top of the funnel Stage

Great content is all about quality, timing and relevance. Click To Tweet

Just by writing these articles won’t persuade readers to just come to your page and joyfully penetrate your inbox. That’s not the role of this stage.

In TOFU you need to show how well you understand the industry, it’s market and processes. Content made for this phase is broader, top-level overview where you as a company have the chance to show your awareness and expertise. This segment is also where you should offer the most value. Most of the content out there is TOFU-oriented and your job is to create better content than anything that is already out there.

TOFU is the first type of content your readers are going to see — it needs to be better than anything out there.

The content types are usually ultimate guides on specific branch of the industry or one of the processes. Because your clients find TOFU content through organic channels, this is where you incorporate your heavy-hitting SEO keywords. The titles of articles like “Ultimate Guide to” are mouth-watering but be careful. Deliver what you promise.

Don’t be like those beautiful women on dating apps – they look great, have an amazing smile, but when you meet them in person they suddenly put on 20 lbs and are quick to tell you they want a career as an instagram model.

Treat these type of articles as definitive resources your clients always wanted to have. I shouldn’t have to tell you have to produce it (although I will show you how to check it before you publish it) because you already know. You did the work already.

How do you know your TOFU content you or your writers team produce is the best content?

• Because you did your homework and research the hell of your market
• Because you researched your competition and saved the best articles that were already written for your most juicy keywords
• Because you keep talking with departments as well as your customers. You use those findings in your next written pieces
• Because your article is the most updated with latest stats
• Because you have a consistent playbook and SEO optimize every content piece and include keywords in title, slug, meta-descriptions, alt-texts etc..
• Because you’re going to give something valuable away to earn the trust

Long-form content like definitive guides, white papers, industry market research overviews work great as the top of the funnel content.

If you’re smart you’re going to give something valuable away. A PDF book is the easy and most simple solution that will earn you a name and an email from your future client (But it has to be really good and relevant!) I’ll show you later, because I’m going to give something awesome away in exchange for your name and email.

Examples of great TOFU content:

• Backlinko (almost everything on his website is TOFU content)
  The Definitive Guide to SEO
• Hubspot
  SaaS Sales: The Ultimate Guide
• Yoga Journal
  A Beginner’s Guide to Meditation

Right, you’ve got some great pieces of outstanding content. What do you offer your reader next? You’ve already showed your awareness of industry problems in the previous stage — now is the time to connect your company or your product to the solutions to those problems.

MOFU

You’ve proved yourself as someone who knows the issues by taking them out of the shadows, address them and show potential solutions.

Now it’s time to associate yourself (brand and/or product) with more narrower, niche articles and present how you or your product solves them. If before you were using call to actions just to build your email list (which is awesome, because email is super effective way to nurture your subscribers) this is where you’re going to use call-to-actions to qualify your visitors. Are they here just for the free stuff or are they ready to make the next step?

The content in this phase are in-depth answers on particular subject (“How to X with Y”, “Why is XYZ so Important for ZZZ”, Interview with expert “major job title and name in the Industry”). You’re already narrowing down the content to bring it closer to what your product is for. Narrower and more specific titles and articles are great because you will show the readers how to solve them with your help. It’s better to have have something like “How to Create a Dynamic Scene in with Light and Shadow” than “Setting a Light Scene”.

Readers who already bought-in with your quality guides are interested in solving specific problems. Because you have been talking with sales and with your clients, you know exactly which questions arise most often. You’re going to take the sweet spot between keyword SEO optimization and solving these pain points.

SEO will bring organic traffic overtime, while you serve the answers to your previous clients and the email subscribers on your list. It’s also one of the prime reasons to run a newsletter — you’re keeping the list warm while you’re progressively offering solutions to most common problems.

Call-to-action in MOFU is different as well. Usually at this stage the readers are ready to take the next step like signing up for workshops/webinars, short value-filled email courses or downloading a blueprint or program syllabus.

Make sure to use contextual call-to-actions for each piece of content. If it makes sense to invite them to “designing scenes with shadows workshop” do that, but if a content upgrade makes more sense, do that one.

The people that take action in the MOFU phase are already being vetted for hawtness (that’s completely made up term). You will see whether the readers are MQLs (marketing qualified leads) or SQLs (sales qualified leads) depending on call-to-action in your articles (and throughout your marketing strategy). An “Introduction to Lighting”  is probably MQL while “Advanced Course to Shadow Mapping” is SQL.

Your job here is to feed the leads into the mouths of sales. Keep on checking with them how qualified those leads are and make adjustments to your content and conversions mechanisms (which is just a fancy way of saying CTA).

BOFU

Ah, the final phase. The endgame.

Well, yes and no. Bottom-of-the-funnel is here to tip the users over the edge. The pricier your product is, the more assurance, trust needs to have to buy into your solutions. Yes, your product is excellent and the best one out there, but even if you say you’re the funniest and handsomest person on your Tinder profile, you would still have to prove it somehow.

It’s completely different when your friends say that you’re pretty and fun than if you say so. For that reason the perfect content pieces in the BOFU phase are case studies, testimonials and use-cases from your customers. Think about those “before and after” gym’s and personal trainers use in their promotional material. They work, because you see the results of someone who (used to) look just like you achieving the result you want.

“How Debbie lost stubborn belly fat despite the 60-hour work week in three months.”

Debbie, a 34-year old, marketing manager was always struggling with X, and no matter how she tried bla bla bla.

Well, there are thousands of Rachels, Meghan’s and Helen’s out there who are also in managerial positions and slammed with work who are struggling, just like Debbie did.

The same goes for your hottest clients. If you’re targeting  manufacturing companies, create BOFU content that shows how you solved the challenge of XYZ with a tangible result.

The simple headline formula would be something like:

“How did [Dope Company] increased/saved [result] with [Solution/Process] in [Time Period]”

You can play with the structure however you want. Sometimes just mentioning a well known brand earns enough credibility for users to enter the sales gauntlet. For instance if you helped Tesla speed up production by 10%, chances are everyone who is in the same manufacturing stage as Tesla would want to talk to you.

At this stage don’t even bother about SEO much, since you’ve already identified, captured, and lead the right users up to this stage. The goal, as previously mentioned is to remove the final frictions before clicking that “register for a demo” or “schedule a call” action with you.

The CTAs are direct. Use chatbots that connects them with sales team and buttons that lead them straight to your reps.

The Right Content Balance

Every B2B company should strive to have a healthy balance of these content with contextual call-to-actions at the right spots. For example ebook download at TOFU, webinar invite at MOFU and direct CTA in BOFU.

Content Marketing is the perfect companion with email marketing channel as well. Email sequences work wonders when used in a logical way and serve the same purpose as the content funnel online — a pathway from the unknown and blurry beginnings to clarity.

Consistent Content

How much someone appreciates you if you only give a damn once in a while. That someone in content world are search algorithms of the big G and his lesser known rogue brothers (Bing, duckduckgo, Yahoo! and other misfits). But mostly Google

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Search Engine Market Share

I’m not entirely sure what the best frequency of new content is and I wouldn’t take that as a main priority either — I’d rather have one amazing content per month than daily bs. However, if you’ve done keyword research properly you should content to write for days. Combining SEO-centered articles with pain-oriented topics your customers (and sales) are bringing up, you should never ran out of content.

However, it’s easy to fall off the wagon, if you don’t have a proper organization and schedule.

That’s where the editorial calendar comes in handy.

On the editorial calendar I’m scheduling up content based on content phase, right timing, main keyword and responsible writer (along with hawtness level). I’m far away from being a time-nazi, because I’d rather wait an extra day or two to have a better content in case one of the writers dogs got sick.

As the content upgrade for this delicious article, I’m sharing my own editorial calendar I’ve made in Notion. I particularly like Notion because I can switch between different views. On Master View I’ve got all data points a piece of content may have. One click, and I can change the view to the Kanban board where I can see in which stage upcoming piece of content while Calendar view gives me cool visuals on which day the content is going out.

Anyhoo… you’re welcome to take my template and make it your own.

 

Or if you’re old school Google Sheet, bucko, here’s the spreadsheet version below

THE STRUCTURE OF YOUR ARTICLES

You already know how awful it is when you’re looking for information and all you get is fluff without substance. When looking at content you have to adhere to a couple of rules:

• Always provide a complete answer
• Always have the better answer than anyone else
• Have a structure
• Make it technically sound as possible
• Make it as easy to read as possible

Providing a complete answer

It’s not enough to just hit the SEO keyword in a paragraph, clap your hands together, put your shades on and lollygag into the sunset. Because you know what kind of pains your clients are dealing with, you have to completely answer those. When I say complete, I mean you’re not partially touching the objection but providing an argument that confirms your statement.

If you claim something in a sentence, that sentence needs to be proven either by a statistical reference, a quote from a professional, or if this is your original idea, an explanation why. Writing about something without proof is basically gossip which will may be counter productive.

Always have the better answer than anyone else

When I say your content needs to be the best, I mean it. Because if someone else already has better content on the specific topic, why would you even read yours if your competitor has better-looking, more reliable sources, and nicer packaged information?

The real trick is to look at what’s already out there for your topic and keywords. In google search type in the keywords or questions your clients are using and check the top five results that appear. The quicker way is using a SEO tool like Ahrefs where you can check other ranking keywords and monthly searches as well.

Analyze the top five results for the content that has been written and figure out why is Google serving those results in the first page.

Is it length? Pictures? Lots of backlinks?

Your job is to gather all those findings and create a resource that is better than all of those together. Your content will have have more content, better research and most up-to-date information.

Have a Structure

Don’t want to waste too much time here. Use the proven AIDA formula if you’re pushing for lead gen, while for more TOFU oriented content have a common structure like

Intro + Hypothesis

Main Idea + Arguments

Main Idea + Arguments

Main Idea + Arguments

Conclusion + Summary

Make it technically sound as possible

To double check your existing content before you published (or when you’re updating your existing content) use content analysis tools like Clearscope or Topic. These tools look at the common algorithms of the top results for your keyword and suggest certain words to include in your most complete content resource. It takes away the guesswork and helps you streamline the quality on a faster scale.

The bad part? They’re expensive AF.

For the recent content that I produced for an AR/VR  company, we’ve hit number three spot for the keyword HTC vs Oculus within three days of publishing. The search term has the opportunity to bring in few thousands of organic content which justifies extra work and resources.

Make it as easy to read as possible

Lastly, make your content easy to consume. The table of contents, good design practices and visuals invite readers to spend the time on your website. The good part of this notion is, you only have to figure it out once. When you have your style nailed, you just replicate your articles.

Don’t forget that user experience also relates to page speed and valuable takeaways.

MEASURING the Effectiveness

A lot of SEO and content agencies will just look through a one-dimensional lens — is the organic traffic growing? That’s not enough if you’re in B2B. Organic traffic doesn’t automatically equal more revenue.

You don’t need more traffic, you need the right traffic. Click To Tweet

You could have thousands of people clicking on your website through clickbaity titles where you’d have a 0.02% conversion rate of mostly unqualified folk. It’s much better to have 100 people that are really into  lightning and shadows instead and enjoy the double-figure conversion rate on your website.

And you will have the right audience depending on how well you know your people and how effective you are serving them.

Because we need to be accountable for our work, even in content, we need checkpoints to see whether we’re dong a good job.

Live by the Sword

Your company survives based on how  well your sales is doing. You may have  the ugliest website where the content is written in comic sans font, your design is made with 1990s Microsoft Paint and your product coded with BASIC or Brainfuck (yeah, actual name of a coding language) but if your sales is doing consistently well, you’re company is safe (for the time being).

That’s why even for the content marketing choose metric choose metrics that are connected with revenue.

The four main metric to look at are:

• Growth of organic traffic
• Number of qualified leads
  • (and its conversion rate)
• Rankings for spiciest keywords

You can consolidate all information (except keyword rankings) in Google Analytics, or if you’re more comfortable type of gentleman / gentlewoman in Google Data Studio.

The more people who go through the funnel, who get converted and vetted, the more work sales team has. Make them happy with quality leads because they make are the reason the company  gets that sweet sweet revenue.

Conversion number and conversion rates can be found in Google Analytics if you’ve set up goals however, it’s even more detailed if you find that information in CRM.

And of course, you need to be in touch with them at all times to make sure you produce the content for the right persona which also tremendously help sales during sales conversations.

Keep talking to your audience, keep talking with the other departments and you would never run out of content ideas to produce.

 

DISTRIBUTION

Some say content is king, other say the distribution is the main OG of content marketing. It’s both.

You can have the best stuff but if no-one knows about it, it doesn’t help you much. For TOFU content you eventually will get organic traffic but if your customer base is very narrow you’ll have to find them on your own. Sometimes even with… gasp, paid ads.

But before I get there, let’s talk about what you can do once you publish an article. I’ve heard this proud statement that you should focus 20% of time for production and 80% on distribution.

Distribution is a pain when you’re starting out. Why would anyone give two fucks about you if there’s no immediate return?

The good part of it, you already own a couple of distribution channels.

Your social media and email. Yeah, social is ok, but I’m yet to see a company that succeeds with purely social.

1. Email on the other hand is amazing. Your internal clients want to hear what’s going on in your market, what are you working on, and how to get better with your content. They should be the first to know about you.
2. Secondly, find the communities that are highly engaged with the type of content you’re producing. For instance, the growth studies I’ve written many moons ago, were consistently on top of Growthhackers community. Developers usually look for information in stack overflow or hacker news.One of the articles we shared on Hackernews, got 2,000+ visits within two days, because it was such a great channel-content fit.Reddit works really well, if you’re approaching it from informal way with the goal to deliver value.Facebook Groups that you’re contributing are also amazing way to get feedback.
3. Paid promotion — this is the new arena, I’m testing with positive results. Since you know for who you’re writing, you should be able to bring the article towards those faces faster than relying on organic traffic. And the fastest way is by paid channels.5$ per day for your 1 – 2% lookalike audience of your website visitors is a small price to pay to bring the article to hundreds or thousands new readers and potential customers. As I’ve mentioned, I’m testing this out and I’m saying encouraging results.

 

There’s a lot I haven’t mentioned in this article, like how to find the best writers, how to manage them, what kind of on-page conversion tools I’m using and where, and how to deliver effective reports to your shareholders. Happy to answer those questions if you email me.

If you’re looking to find someone who can do all these things above, at Grow + Scale we have the capacities to lovingly virtually embrace (let’s respect the physical distancing) one or two new companies in 2020. Use the button below to start the convo.

Let’s Talk Content

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