Inbound Marketing

Original research analysing the content marketing strategies used by 500 of the world’s biggest SaaS companies, including performance benchmarks to help you understand how your own content is performing.

Content creation represents a key activity for most marketing professionals. The playbook is pretty well understood — create compelling content and use it as a means to generate leads and to attract new business.

However, the reality is that in most instances the execution is poor, meaning that content fails to deliver on its potential.

In this excellent blog by Pawel Grabowski he describes what techniques you need to consider to convert readers of your blog into users of your SaaS application

It takes a TON of energy to get the content marketing wheel moving; months or even years of effort, without much in the way of a return on your investment. But once you get the wheel moving and things really start to pick up speed, the momentum of the thing is massive. The power of the whole operation becomes almost unstoppable. This is Content Marketing — the long game. It can take years to see the fruits of your hard labor.

This article gives some great insights into measuring the effectiveness of content. At ChartMogul they focus on engagement as a key metric viewing content as primarily a brand building exercise. It is also clear that they also view it as a long term commitment something that is not always compatible with more pressing short term demands of CEO’s and Sales leads looking for a more immediate return. Alan

One Harvard Business Review report showed that your chances of qualifying new leads drop 400 percent when it takes longer than five minutes to follow up with them.

Smith argues that gated content is no longer as effective as it once was. This is undoubtedly true - but I would argue is also the case with most B2B marketing techniques we use. We are all competing for attention. Yet this is a scarce resource and it is getting harder to cut through the noise. He is in effect arguing for a broader B2B based marketing strategy some of which includes brand exercises which have largely been neglected in a world where measuring the effectiveness of campaigns comes down to KPI’s. Alan

This is a popular piece of advice when it comes to blogging, content, and inbound marketing — and we knew this going in — but it’s way different when you actually feel it first hand, and worth mentioning again since we live in a world of marketing hacks and tricks.

A marketing persona is a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience. For content marketing purposes, you need personas to help you deliver content that will be most relevant and useful to your audience.

While some people cringe at the thought of this, others have a variety of tools and strategies in place for achieving success. There is no denying the fact that keyword research is part of an advanced SEO strategy. Even so, that doesn’t mean the process has to be long, drawn out or costly.

If you don’t promote, you’re going to end up wasting a lot of the hard work that goes into the content of your awesome web site. On top of that, people won’t be able to take action on the advice provided in your blog posts!

Millions of blogs are ready to accept a helpful and in-depth guest article. No matter how knowledgeable a blogger you are, readers may not take you seriously if you go about it all by yourself.

At a board meeting last week, one of the VPs of Marketing I’m lucky to work with presented a brilliantly simple way of explaining the evolution of a startup’s marketing tactics. I’ve drawn a diagram of the idea above, which borrows heavily from McKinsey’s 3 horizons.

As your startup scales, customer segmentation can become an important tool for the entire company, just like it was for Best Buy. Personas anchor product design and development, marketing and sales, and even customer success to tangible user archetypes. Personas define the company’s strategy of which customers to pursue and which not to.

If I were asked to create a content marketing strategy for a person or a business from scratch, I would craft a strategy with three dimensions: customer segments, customer lifecycle stage and content type.