Scaling Content Marketing

High quality content on a blog, infographics, ebooks and whitepapers are a great way to build expertise, share knowledge, mix subtle marketing messages and get highly relevant traffic back to your website. Remember, if people like what you have they are going to share it with others. So, your goal is to keep churning out awesome content to appeal to your audience.

By intelligently nurturing this audience, its possible to build a good pipeline of prospective customers who will signup and convert to customers over a period of time.

Blog

Your blog is the voice of your company, product and team. Have an active blog and update it at least 3­4 times a week.

SEO TIP: Blog in the same directory as the main site e.g www.yourcompany.com/blog instead of

A few things that you can write about:

  • Educate and inform your audience about the space you are in.
  • An article written by your CEO every month.
  • Tap into current trends and write articles around them.
  • Interview someone in your industry or a customer.
  • Lists posts like "7 reasons you should be using marketing automation software". They're useful, evergreen and not unreasonably difficult to create.
  • New announcements and feature releases.
  • A technical or a tutorial post on how you got something working. Help someone and they will remember you for a long time.
  • Once you have your blog posts here is what you can do with them:
  • Repurpose and reuse content ­ convert blog posts into infographics, slide­decks, ebooks and upload them on channels like visual.ly, slideshare, docstoc etc.
  • Actively reach out to people/companies you mention in your post. Most of them would be very happy to tweet about you and mention you in their content. Why? Because you have mentioned them. Make people feel important.
  • Reach out to other bloggers who have content similar to yours and draw their attention to your content. This is a great way to get backlinks. You can even leave your blog post link in their comments for them to check back later.

eBooks & Infographics

For ebooks prepare long­form, authoritative content that is typically 2000 words or more. Offer quality content in return for inbound marketing leads.

Here is what works for ebooks and what you can do:

  • Instructional ebooks do great. Examples: "The big guide to conversion A/B tests", or "The LinkedIn marketing guide for 2015".
  • Formatting your ebook into a micro­site with good quality navigation is a great idea to engage your readers well.
  • Convert your ebook into slide­decks and pdfs.
  • Do data driven infographics, like, "What are people really doing with their smartphones"?
  • See if you can use draw insights from your aggregate customer data which are relevant to your industry, and create infographics around these topics.
  • Help people share your infographics. You need to make sure you provide an embed code for your infographics.

Here is an example of an ebook that Brightpod worked on and is now on their website: "A simple guide to speeding up your client's website." ­ http://www.brightpod.com/work­smart.html

Newsletter

A newsletter you send is like the voice of your company. More importantly, people have given you permission to send them an email so it is your utmost responsibility to send out high quality, relevant and timely newsletters. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

Here are a few things you can do with your newsletter:

  • Use "Subscribe to our newsletter" boxes and pop­ups to get visitors to subscribe.
  • You can offer a "Free eBook" or a whitepaper to people who register for your newsletter.
  • Make sure you subscribe every user to signs up for a trial of your product to the newsletter.
  • Always keep a close watch on the number of users who are reporting spam/abuse, and make sure you stay around industry averages.
  • Mix marketing messages, if you do, very intelligently. One way is to include
  • instructional or informative videos about your product after the article excerpt you send in newsletters.
  • Use newsletters to do webinars around problems/tools relevant to your industry. Include a subtle marketing message in the webinar.
  • Guard your email list. Never spam. Bottom­line, think of your newsletter as a product.

Customer Case Studies

One the difficulties faced by young SaaS companies is generating content in a predictable and scalable way. The key to achieve scale and predictability is to figure out few tactics and follow that as a standard operating procedure. For example, the KiSSFLOW team has a dedicated person whose only job is to setup 2 interviews per week with 2 paying customers who have crossed 3 months of using KiSSFLOW and genuinely understand how things are going for them. The output of this interview is blogged as a case study Internally, the KiSSFLOW team calls this 2+2+2 model (2 interviews done, 2 interviews blogged, 2 interviews scheduled for next week) and uses it to track the content creation process.