A Bottom Up Content Approach

I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with the Audience Ops team (and clients) lately about what types of content a brand should create first.

It’s really enticing to want to start with more creative mediums, “Oh, let’s do thought leadership pieces,” before you have some fundamentals in order.

What I’m in favor of is something I’ve started calling a bottom up approach (I’ll let you know if the name sticks), which basically means a brand should have the product marketing and proof it works nailed down before investing in top-of-funnel SEO blogs.

And my main point here is that if your content marketing objective is to draw attention to your brand by creating valuable content, you’d better have what you sell and why to buy it nailed down so the value you distribute can actually lead to conversions.

In other words, don’t write checks that can’t be cashed.

It’s why I love starting with CEO/founder-led brand narratives case studies:

You talk directly with the person who decided it should exist in the first place about why they built it AND with buyers about why they bought and results they’ve seen.

This week, Shiv Narayanan reinforced this idea twice:

Here, he provides an order that prioritizes core messaging:

1. Product Marketing
2. Sales Enablement
3. Customer Marketing
4. Nurture Content
5. Thought Leadership
6. SEO

And, in this issue of How To SaaS, he offers a framework that encourages companies focus on differentiation to prioritize GTM:

1. Invest in understanding market dynamics and customer pain points
2. Build a strategic narrative to educate the market on how to resolve those pain points
3. Create content to educate buyers on the strategic narrative at every stage of their journey
4. Leverage demand generation channels and campaigns to scale distribution to ideal buyers

Go follow Shiv. He’ll inspire you.

Issue 90 • Aug 11th 2022 •

Automation Vs. The Human Touch

Can marketing automation feel authentic, or is it hurting relationships at scale? The CMI team set up an experiment and came up with a 3-step approach to automate the mundane but prioritize the human touch:

1. Start with recently acquired customers (so, create strong onboarding flows)
2. Create ready-to-personalize messages (think of this as templated emails that require manual finessing to fit the recipient’s preferences: business, casual, or something in between)
3. Use a single source of customer truth (also known as a customer data platform where your team can actually see everything there is to see about a contact and garner insights you can’t when the info is all over the place)

Andrew Davis writes about the experiment here.

Discovered via Social Media Today.

Issue 89 • Aug 5th 2022 •

Sales-led B2B SaaS Content Types

If you’re a sales-led B2B SaaS company, Erin Balsa thinks you need to publish these 4 types of content:

1. Thought leadership content
2. Product content
3. Sales enablement content
4. Content to surprise and delight

Check out her LinkedIn post on the topic for how she defines them and why you need them.

Issue 89 • Aug 5th 2022 •

Email Acronyms And Marketing CTAs

We stumbled upon 2 legit marketing resources this week that you might want to bookmark.

• CTA Inspiration: For when you need something better than “Get Started.” They’re categorized by use case.
• Email Acronyms (aka marketing glossary): For when you have no clue what your boss meant when she said “Don’t get us stuck in the Honey Pot.” They’re alphabetized.

Issue 89 • Aug 5th 2022 •

Are You An End-To-End Marketer?

“The best marketers can take projects from vision to execution.”

Wes Kao offers 19 ways to become an end-to-end marketer in this Tweet.

Discovered via Growth Marketer Weekly.

Issue 89 • Aug 5th 2022 •

Beyond Blogging

Want to reach more people with your content? Karl Yeh suggests that instead of creating weekly blog posts, you should create several short form videos and distribute those first.

Issue 88 • Jul 28th 2022 •

Influencer Marketing Considerations

Thinking of hiring an influencer? Factors you’ll want to consider:

1. Cost. In this article, Werner Geyser breaks down 8 factors that impact influencer rates and how to find one that will work for you.
2. Authenticity. Danica Lo urges marketers to weigh the advantages of big-name influencers with the value of user-generated content from less famous, but still influential people. Which would serve your brand more?

Issue 88 • Jul 28th 2022 •

Demand Gen Reporting Advice

Allison Loehman uses a master reporting doc to measure demand generation with the following 6 pillar tabs:

• Inbound Business Performance
• Inbound Pacing
• Monthly Cohorting Analysis
• Budget Pacing
• Demand Capture Analysis
• Demand Creation Analysis

Learn how they’re organized and why in her LinkedIn post.

Issue 88 • Jul 28th 2022 •

Audit Your Content

“Most of us are so focused on publishing new content that we neglect the content we already have.”

Sound familiar? Joshua Hardwick explains how to do a content audit step-by-step here.

Issue 87 • Jul 21st 2022 •

LinkedIn Marketing Tips From LinkedIn

Newsflash: LinkedIn can be used organically for demand gen.

Here are some success tips I’ve seen shared lately:

Nick Bennet and his coworkers did a little LinkedIn experiment... and figured out they could generate revenue without talking about their company. Check out the results here.

Posting consistently is key. ​​Justin Simon explains how you can batch create content in 5 steps.

Issue 87 • Jul 21st 2022 •