Key elements of a better approach to content marketing
You can do better.
When I survey the landscape of content marketing, I see a lot of dull content, conformity, and an absence of evidence for the current approach.
Admit it: you’re just doing what everyone else does when it comes to your approach to content marketing. You don’t really know whether it’s effective. You’re chasing keywords and SEO, mimicking the “challenge-solution-results” format of everyone else’s case studies, and basically following the standard content marketing playbook.
The problem with this conformity is that there’s no evidence this approach is the best way to do things. How do I know this? Well, according to a 2022 survey of B2B content marketers by the Content Marketing Institute, only 36% of you have a very good or excellent ability to demonstrate content marketing ROI.
If you’re not able to measure ROI, you have no evidence for whether what you’re doing is working. You’re just crowd following.
As you might guess then, the first step in building a better approach to content marketing is this:
Measure your ROI
An analytics platform that tells you page views isn’t enough. Page views don’t necessarily equal sales.
With all the potential channels your customers travel through and all the touchpoints they have with your content before they decide to contact you, you need a multi-touch revenue attribution model, like this one from Dreamdata. Something that can track the buyer journey, even if takes multiple years and multiple phone calls and demos.
As this article explains, this software will help you identify your most effective content and how much revenue it’s driving.
Take a look at what their platform can show you:
A screenshot of Dreamdata’s platform showing revenue information
Platforms like Dreamdata may be expensive, but they can help you prove the value of your efforts, which can help you advocate for a bigger budget.
Create content that delivers an experience
Once you can track how new content drives revenue, you can begin to experiment with your content. Rather than simply writing the same way every other B2B company does, you can write interactive, engaging pieces that show rather than tell.
Demo your SaaS platform in your content
If you’re a SaaS company, chances are you spend a lot of time in your current content telling your readers about your platform’s features and benefits. And if your prospect wants to actually see those features and benefits in action, they have to sign up for a demo or book a call.
But guess what? People don’t like to shop that way. Do you want the sales person bothering you when you’re trying out a couch in the showroom? Or looking at a car? No, you want to be left alone (at least to start), so that you can think by yourself and test things out. Then, once you think you like something, then you want to talk to sales.
SaaS customers are no different. They too want to be left alone too when they first try your solution out. They don’t want you looking over their shoulder or breathing down their metaphorical necks while they’re trying to explore your platform and see how it operates.
So, how you can let them test things out in your content, away from your interruptions?
While you may not want to go as far as letting them log into the site to play with dummy data, you can record short videos that show how particular features work within the platform. This at least allows the customer to see the platform in action.
Done-for-you service providers: tell customer stories that deliver vicarious experiences
If what you provide to your customer is not a platform but a done-for-you service, you can let your prospects experience working with you by instead relaying a story about another customer’s experience.
That customer story would also include photos and videos to illustrate key aspects of that customer’s experience.
The vicarious experience your prospects have by reading this story will help them decide whether you’re the right fit.
Make your content interactive and personalized
Photos and videos are a definite step in the right direction, but they still make for a passive reading experience. You could also create interactive assets that provide different information based on the reader’s responses to questions.
Perhaps, for example, you’re a SaaS company whose platform enables chatbots to operate on your customers’ website, and you have multiple types of customers, such as healthcare companies and financial institutions. You want your content to tell you healthcare prospects that you’re chatbots are HIPAA compliant, while you want to tell your banking prospects about some advantage of your chatbots that is especially relevant to banks.
If that’s the case, check out Ion Interactive’s ability to create choose-your-own-content ebooks that display different content based on your readers’ inputs to questions:
Don’t want to spend your marketing money on expensive marketing software?
If you don’t want to spend money on expensive tools like Ion Interactive or even on multi-touch attribution software, there is a fallback position. There is a special effect you can deploy for free.
It’s better writing. That’s right. If your content can’t be interactive and if you want to simply put something out there without measuring its relative contribution to ROI, you can still beat out the competition by producing content that makes for a more engaging read.
To do that, you need to give your freelancers latitude to structure your ideas into something compelling.
I can certainly help you do just that.
Feel free to fill out the below form and let me know what you’re after, whether it’s better writing, interactive content, clarity on your content’s ROI, or some combination of these things.
