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.