Where does a B2B tech company start with content marketing? – In Conversation

Here are Filament founders Nick Horton and Jeremy Balius, discussing the question “Where does a B2B tech company start with content marketing?”

Topics covered include:

• Content enables having different conversations with different prospects at different phases of their buying journey
• Using content to uncover whether a prospect is researching solutions to a business challenge versus actively looking to purchase
• Identifying a prospect’s buying process
• How to gather data when search volumes are lower
• The need for content and sales to be people-centred
• The power of a comprehensive content plan
• Account-based marketing and content
• A successful content marketing campaign in action
• How SEO content can deliver outsized outcomes
• And so much more!

Click play to watch the discussion or read the transcript below.

Jeremy: Hey, Nick. We’re continually talking to business leaders about content, they’re looking at their content marketing. They know that they need to be putting more content to market, that is valuable, that’s attracting prospects. That’s nurturing them and qualifying leads and potentially enabling their sales process.

But what we are often seeing is that they just don’t know where to start. What are your thoughts on this? Where do we start?

Nick: Before I answer that, it would be good just to set the scene in terms of what do we mean by content for the, for this discussion and for the engagements that we have with our our clients and prospects and what we’re talking about is the creation of.

Written material, it might be a blog post that might be an infographic. It might be a white paper or a case study, but any sort of material that seeks to provide more information to a prospect about our our clients or our partners, capabilities, their solutions, anytime that someone wants to a business is looking.

To engage with another business, that’ll be because they have a business challenge or a problem that they need to solve. And then they go out and they look for potential partners who can or potential solutions. And then they think about who are the partners that can provide that solution. And then they focus in on The ability to implement the pricing, the support etc.

And so what content gives us the ability to do is start a lot of different conversations with different prospects at different phases of their buying journey. So if prospect has decided that they need to implement an ERP system because their current system is not in the cloud or is not scaling with their business needs.

The first thing I want to do is go out and look at what are the options that are available. What are, do I need to go with a traditional vendor? Are there some new vendors? What are the difference between cloud based and on premises options? And when you first start that journey, you’re just looking for the options that are out there.

And so the type of content that’s going to appeal in that scenario might be a thought leadership blog post, which talks about, how the market or the landscape’s changing and here are the new options or comparison pages where we say here’s this solution compared to that solution or infographics, which might look at how do you drive more efficiency from, five ways to drive more efficiency from your ERP system.

Then as you decide on the type of solution that you want to that you want to acquire to solve your business challenge, then you’re going to be looking at who are the partners or the vendors that are out there that you can transact with that’s going to provide a good solution. And so then the content need changes, the types of conversations you want to have change.

So then you’re looking at. White papers where you’re able to demonstrate that you have a great depth of knowledge about a topic or a or the solution that you’re offering, you might look at case studies where you say, here’s how we’ve solved a similar problem for someone in for someone else in your industry or webinars where you’re publishing you’re publishing content through that means so.

Content just gives us the ability or the way that I like to think about it is the ability to start lots of different conversations with buyers at different phases of their journey. And so if you’re a new client and you haven’t really had a content strategy, then where I tend to start is. Try to understand better what is the buyer journey that they’re seeing?

How quickly do we get from someone realizing that they have a business challenge that they need to have solved to actually purchasing? What are the types of questions that they’re asking salespeople when they interact with them? Because that gives them a good, that gives us a good insight into the, the types of conversations that we want to have digitally through.

Through content. And do they have a pipeline process or a a stage process where they’re able to identify the different needs of prospects at different stages. And so we baseline against that, what’s working for you at the moment. And then we start to. Build content or start, give us the ability to start conversations to replace some of those sales conversations with digital conversations.

So typically where we start is at the top of the funnel because we need to be always attracting more prospects. So what are the content, what is the types of content that we can start to publish that’s going to just start to engage prospects, get them to visit our website, get them to come and learn more about.

Our solutions that we offer or learn more about our ability to offer solutions. And so that’ll be typically how I’ll map out a content plan. Let’s start at the top of funnel. Let’s start to get some leads coming in. Then let’s focus on the middle of the funnel. Once we understand more about those leads.

What are the. How are they what are the needs that they have when they’re looking to choose a supplier and then develop content that gives us the ability to have conversations around that. And then finally, looking at the bottom of the funnel, when someone is ready to buy, what other information do they need?

Do they need to have information about implementation? Do they need to have information about the the support that we offer or the pricing options that are available to us or how the ROI return that they should expect to see from the purchase. And so the contents needs change during the funnel and we try and make sure that we’re addressing the needs of.

Buyers all the way through that journey. Sorry, a long winded answer, but it’s very much about, let’s start at the top of the funnel. Let’s start to attract people. And then let’s work on the content needs as we progress leads through that process.

Jeremy: That all makes sense to me. Where within that process are we understanding how to then define what that journey is.

It’s one thing to start at the top of funnel and to say, how are your prospects researching Against their problems or pain points and that’s often that alone is often not understood in B to B that there are actual humans out there trying to find solutions in some way, whether they’re searching online or whether they’re going out and looking for recommendations or whether they’re looking at a comparison type pages to understand what to do.

What’s available to them, or there’s just a wider brand awareness that proceeds where they know that there’s a particular brand that dominates the market, that they need something like that. But then when they go to research, they’re also looking for alternative solutions. There is that process of how are we going to present ourselves to even attract those Searchers.?

What happens next? How are we then trying to elicit or or, I love how you put it, how are we trying to use content to create conversations? Content as a conversation I think is such an elegant phrase, but can we unpack that a little bit more? In terms of relationship building or brand awareness raising.

What does that mean?

Nick: I think if we’re, again, just assuming we’re looking at a blank slate scenario, then to me, there’s two approaches that we take. We take a qualitative approach and a quantitative approach. And so with the quantitative approach, what we, what data do we have available?

What is the analytics that’s operating on your website tell you about the journey that. Website visitors are making at the moment as they try and gather information from your website. What do we see about when we first get someone that fills in a lead form on your website, we gather their details what is, what.

The interactions that we have with them before they’re ready to sign. So what does the data tell us? And obviously as we start to publish more content and start to be more systematic about the about qualifying and nurturing leads through this process, we gather more data and we can use that to make more decisions.

But regardless of that, at the start, there will always be data points that we can look at that is going to help us build out that content plan. Then on the qualitative side that’s about understanding from salespeople or even new customers. If you can if you can get in touch with them, what are, when a salesperson someone fills it fills in the lead form and an SDR or a salesperson.

Calls up that lead straight away. What is the conversation they have with them? Then what insights are we getting from those first contacts? How many meetings does it take for the salesperson to have with the prospect before they’re willing to sign or before they’re willing to receive a you go into a proof of concept or receive a formal proposal because there’s.

There’s going to be a lot of data that’s in the sales person’s mind or in the sales team’s institutional memory that we can really tap into to understand the buying process. And, all content is giving us the ability to do is really amplify that buying process digitally so that we can scale it up more so that we can be producing more and better quality leads to the sales team.

And so understanding the sales conversations that we’re having that are happening already is a great source of data. And then again, as I say, if it’s possible having conversations with recently signed customers to say, what was the problem you were trying to solve? What were the other solutions that you looked at?

What else what else was a factor in your decision making? Why did you choose? Our client as opposed to the other options that are available. And so there’s great sources of data there. The other thing that and Jeremy, I credit you with this. This is something that we’ve started doing ourselves and we’re really encouraging all of our clients to do.

Is when we have a form on the website, actually have a Either a free form field or a drop down box just that says something like, how did you hear about us? Because the actual, the traditional attribution is becoming more and more difficult. And also, if someone comes to you from a brand name search on a search engine that may not necessarily be because they.

They just know about you as a company and know about all your capabilities. It might be because they saw an ad on a social media network or someone spoke to them, a colleague or friend spoke to them about how our client had solved a similar problem. By gathering that data. Oh, it was a personal referral.

Oh, I saw a social ad. Oh, I went to a conference and you were presenting by gathering that data, which we don’t get from purely digital attribution. That also helps inform where leads are coming from. And what are the, what is the journey that they have before they are willing to give us their, provide us with their details.

So that, that would be, that’s very much the approach that, we typically take a look at the qualitative data and look at the quantitative data. But one thing that you started to touch on that I’m really interested to explore more, Jeremy, is just thinking about what, when we’re talking about content and when we’re starting conversations how do we know what to talk about?

How do we so the process that I’ve been talking about gives us some of the answers, but I think there’s also some other data sources and some other research that we can do that will help inform that and might be for SEO purposes, but it might also be for general content purposes. So it’d be great if you could, share some insights about keyword research and the role that plays and how to do that most effectively when you’re thinking about the creation of a content plan.

Jeremy: The point that I wanted to pull out from what you were just talking about first is, and I’m glad you raised this sort of experiential point of view in being based in Australia and being focused on B2B technology. The data sets tend to be pretty small oftentimes, where it comparatively to our North American clients or comparatively to, to B2C type scenarios or SAS scenarios the actual pool of prospects isn’t even that that large.

And so looking at a website to glean, lead source attribution gives us some point of reference, but often statistically it’s too small to definitively say, this is what’s happening. And and I think that’s where we need to rely on these other. Sources of information or insight to help craft.

How are we going to build these journeys? I’m thinking about clients who are focused on selling technology solutions or cloud solutions into government. Or into critical industries that tends to be a really popular one this year. There are only certain amounts of people that are within the prospect businesses who are the decision makers or who are the internal influencers or internal champions.

We can count them. There’s on a, the spreadsheet of the total amount in Australia is not big. And so your decision making process has to rely on a whole range of other influences. And you were talking about a self attribution, which I think is becoming increasingly powerful.

There’s obvious issues with that. And I take. I can’t take credit for that. That comes from people I follow online. But there’s recency bias. People are thinking about the most recent way that they’ve heard about you. There’s problems with scaling it because if you’re attracting a decent amount of inflow there you might need to rely on AI to sift through the types of responses that you’re getting because you can’t manually anymore.

But to take that one step further and where you were leading me with the answer is going and looking at based on how you are presenting yourself to market and the particular organizational priorities you have, the products or services that you’re

Simply take to market looking to understand how are people online searching for these solutions may not necessarily be the way that you are talking about yourself or presenting yourself. And looking at, keywords, which is the the normal term for this or the most common term, I should say.

And the phrases that are used to answer questions or ask questions gives you some insight of the the types of search volumes that exist in your territory or your region or your country or your state, or even right down to your zip code. And using that to base. Your decisions around your content strategy it might be the types of content that you want to push to market in order to attract searchers or in order to elicit responses from.

From prospects that are already within your awareness or your CRM or net new whom you just want to attract in some way there’s data sets around that and what we’re starting to really get get our clients excited about is trying to understand how do they compete in that space. If they’re engaging us for wider.

SEO comprehensive SEO services, then there’s a whole range of tactics and strategies that we deployed to support that. But if it’s content only, we need to then look at topical authority and content clusters and how do we group. Keywords together that attract enough search volume to warrant your investment and your effort to to reach prospects and attract them.

And a lot of times that. Decision making process is so different to how they’ve thought about content in the past, because as you’ll know, everyone’s used to, we need a solutions page. We need a brochure, we need an announcement EDM and we need a media release. That’s their go to market. But the taking this sort of data led, content led approach means that we need to look further and wider across the content solutions available to you and address these wider keywords, whether inclusive of long tail keywords, which might be more specific questions that we can.

We can cover off and compete on because they might have a lower difficulty. The the types of content and the types of questions we want to answer are radically different to where tech marketers or business leaders thought the content would go. But you’ve been at the coalface and you’re the one having these actual conversations with with our clients.

What is that process? What is that aha moment as you’re presenting the data, as you’re talking to them through the approach that we want to take with them, what happens in their thinking that makes them realize we need to invest in this because this is the real deal.

Nick: Yeah, I think it’s there’s always a couple of factors there, but first of all is really starting, just thinking about putting the conversation in terms of that by journey and, emphasizing that what we’re trying to do is simply scale up the process that’s working well for them.

But it’s people centered and we want to not replace that people centered process. We want to enhance that people center process by allowing it to scale through a digital means, which means the creation of content. So moving the conversations away from a salesperson conversation to a digital conversation through a blog or through a infographic or a checklist or a white paper, whatever it may be.

And so having that discussion about we’re trying to. Enhance your existing go to market process that we’re looking at ways that we can drive more efficiency from your go to market or your commercial spend and that the net result will be more leads going to the sales team and better quality leads going to the sales team then.

That tends to be the light bulb moment. And also one thing, and because I see this often as this can be quite an adversarial attitude or a lack of respect, if you like, between sales and marketing on the B2B side. And so I’m always really careful to emphasize that this is a team effort, that we’re all working to the same goal.

But we have different roles to play in achieving that goal. And if we’re clear about What those roles are and who has responsibility for those roles. Then we can see how we work together to create a great buyer’s journey, which is going to result in more sales. But it was also going to mean that we’re going to need to invest more and.

Probably in the marketing side, especially in the creation of content and thinking about what those nurture journeys or nurture sequences are going to be like as we move people through the process and so it is going to take the investment, but that’s going to drive efficiency for that business, more success for the sales team.

And hopefully as well, and this is a longer term outcome, but as we learn from the sales team about what are the. Best types of leads, then we can build our process around trying to attract more of those types of leads. So that’s going to mean your deal size is increasing or your time to sign is decreasing.

And there’s a lot of positives that come out of the process. So yeah, so that’s typically how I tend to have that conversation. I’m really interested to understand more about the different types of content and By that, I don’t mean a, a case study versus a blog post, but we do develop content for different purposes, don’t we?

So we might have SEO content, we might have a lead generation or nurture content. We might have content for an ABM campaign. And so we’re looking at, we do have different. Kind of categories of content, is maybe the best way to think about it. What are those categories and how are they different?

Jeremy: So all content needs purpose. None of no marketing activity should happen for its own sake or because it’s on a checklist, we’re, we’ve always been adamant that anything that is done needs to be fulfilling a role in a larger machine or a larger process. And so anything that is published should be done.

With a, with a goal of achieving something at a different stage in that and that buyers journey or that sales cycle as you were pointing out. You were talking about top of funnel content earlier and how that tends to be addressing early stage questions that people are researching online or gathering material about.

Thanks a lot. Different types of content that fulfils a function at mid funnel where they are already starting to compile the actual solutions that they might wait against each other or to look to understand what integrates better into their existing tech stack and then bottom of the funnel where they’re looking for the actual conversations with with individual reps or they’re looking for case studies that relate to their industry or their company type.

So there’s that categorization of content against the different stages within that funnel. But as we know, with wider demand generation and the way that people are researching online it’s no longer a clean binary linear. Funnel as such and people are coming in and out at different stages wherever they are.

And content needs to be readily available at any point that to fill, to fulfill whatever is being searched on. But there’s a shift that I’ve been going on in my own thinking and that we are going on as a company is that we’re also evolving the content to address what the search intent is as well by the searchers prospects.

Target audiences and in what ways is their search informational and they’re just looking for information versus commercial or transactional where they’re looking to actually arrive at a a solutions page and. And we can craft the content and be hyper specific around the keyword usage and the structure and and the layout of the content so as to better address the actual intent of the searchers.

And I think that’s pretty powerful to to build out in a wider content plan, because it means that we are utilizing readily available data to address. The framework and the thrust of the content that we are putting out there. And we’re not just publishing content because we’re trying to just vocalize the key differentiators and be done with it, but it’s actually, competing online as well as addressing the intent of the searcher so as to better appeal to them and therefore be better awarded by search engines as well. Is that making sense? We’re still on this journey of getting our clients to think about it in this way. But I think this is the framework that we’re heading in.

Nick: Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s interesting. And Yeah. As you were talking about that as well, I was thinking about, this whole concept of inbound marketing, which is based really around content and has been championed by a number of different platforms. And it’s interesting how that’s evolved because I think that tended to ignore organic and focus too much on what you’re able to control.

So it’s really interesting to hear, what, content can evolve so that we’re actually able to maybe address Both or serve both an inbound strategy, which is, all about publishing lots of interesting information on your website and people will come and find it and then want to engage with you as well as integrating an organic or intent led aspect to the content so that we’re really understanding the questions that people are asking the search engines.

And then we’ve got that engaging content to really serve out the the inbound side of the business or the inbound side of the strategy. I think it’s really interesting as well. And another another topic or another marketing. Strategy that we see clients wanting to adopt, especially in the, the top end of the B2B space is this whole concept of account based marketing and that then has a different impact on content because rather than trying to address questions that are being asked or start conversations, you’re looking at within a target account, there’s going to be lots of different people within that account who are going to have some form of influence On the purchase, it might be a direct influence.

And in our market, it might be an I. T. Director or CIO, CTO, a technical decision maker. Who’s looking for a technology solution, but it might also equally be a finance person who’s looking to understand and the economic return or the efficiency gains out of the solution or a procurement person who’s trying to understand, is this a company that we want to do business with from a terms perspective from a support perspective or from a ESG perspective, which we’re hearing about as well.

Or it might be an executive that has an influence in this, the decision making it might be the marketing team that is looking to create opportunities to promote joint activities with the vendor, there’s a whole range of different decision makers or different influences within the process as well as the decision maker.

And so we need to be creating content For all of those audiences as well, don’t we? So how do you go about that? How do you start to do you create individual content for each? Do you adapt a core piece of content to start to work on different touch points? What would be your approach in a IBM scenario for a content plan or a content strategy?

Jeremy: I think it would depend on where a company is at on in its own ABM journey. We’re often talking to sales leaders who would love to adopt a ABM strategy, but in reality, they’re still just calling whomever at SDR side. Or this is a topic that’s being introduced by marketing as a valuable strategy.

But it’s potentially not necessarily well understood and many companies are possibly even doing ABM without maybe perhaps having formalized it. Or they’re not necessarily tracking it. And, I’m thinking of our clients or of companies that we’re aware of where they’re tracking their deals at company level and within their CRM, they might have some contacts against that but really they’re thinking about their sale as with.

The organization and they might have a particular decision maker that they try to identify and then go all in on just that person or within the formal or possibly informal buying committee that they identify. So depending on where they’re at, I think would inform. The answer about how do we start?

I think everybody understands the concept that each role within a committee or within a decision making group, each role has its own pain points and has. Their own concerns. And they’re also motivated by different things. Their KPIs look very different. The on a, personal level, the amount of stress that they carry probably looks different.

Their day to day looks different. So I think everyone understands that. But then when we start looking at can content talk to them individually? The answer is yes. The hard part is we’ve never done this, on the, on, on. On the company side. So it would then be about at what point would we then take our solutions or the gen general or generic demand gen type content that we’ve been publishing and personalize it on mass for roles that are in finance or that are within it or potentially even below decision making level because The CIO is not the one who’s actually searching.

They’ve got that delegated to somebody else to go compile the best practice solutions in the market and to come back with all of the information that they’ve requested. And so how do you address that internal influencer type?

Nick: It’s possible because that person’s going to look like the CEO, aren’t they?

They’re gathering the information for the CEO’s decision making process. And to you, they’re going to look like the CIO because they’re asking the same questions that the CIO would ask.

Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. And and with that then comes oftentimes concerns about how much is required to do anything about this.

And I think there’s often a misunderstanding about how one can leverage content or core content and leverage it out into multiple different to address different end users or different audiences. Repositioned the core of it in a way that addresses those individuals in a more personal or personable way.

So I guess depending on how many people are involved and in addition to that also, How long a usual decision process might take, we’re often in scenarios where the sales cycle can be 12 plus months. Up to 24 months. And is it worthwhile then having content that is drip fit out over time to stay front of mind?

Because three plus months might elapse between contact points between sales and then there is there are opportunities to, to address the different roles within that committee. In that time period to continually either be front of mine or to cement a brand presence or to continue your differentiation messaging over that time, but it’s so different because we are accustomed to the traditional marketing does something upfront and we don’t know what that is, but they’re doing something.

And then we just get these leads that we follow up divorced from that. And ABM is that flipped, it’s the, here is every company. In this country or in this vertical that we would like to work with because they match all of these different qualification criteria. Great. You can get an analyst to compile that, but then identifying who are the individuals within that individual company.

And then how are we getting on the radar of them? And how are we using then content to elicit some form of interest or intent to build trust such that A salesperson or multiple salespeople are forming different relationships or multiple relationships with multiple people within the company. It’s such a different approach from what they’re used to.

I think the starting point would be to unpack those sales cycles, those timeframes, the rhythms, the types of people, and then. And then coming up with the ideas around the different pain points and potentially even going out and talking to existing clients about why did they sign with you in the first place and what was that process and and using customer quality customer data to then inform your decision making as well.

That’s probably where I’d start. It’s a long, it’s a, there’s a lot of steps in there, but it’s such a broad topic that you have to unpack the meaning as you have been as well to understand what do you mean by ABM and where are you at and how can we achieve meaningful metrics and build upon that over time.

Nick: Yeah. And I think sometimes as well, there’s a tendency to think that you need to create the perfect strategy, but actually what you need to do often is just start publishing content. Just put that first blog post up, see what the interactions are like run that first white paper. And sometimes just taking the first step is the hardest point.

And once you’ve started doing that, then it becomes easier and easier. Building that out over time. I’d really be interested in, to close this off. Just think about some of the successes we’ve seen around a content and straight lead strategy. And I’m thinking in particular of a white paper that you work with a client on that was really pitched at addressing the needs of Boards and so like you, if you don’t mind just to, to talk a bit about how that came about and what the results were, because that was a super impressive campaign.

Jeremy: Thank you. This is an interesting one because it I think even changed our own thinking as well in, in terms of how we can come up with compelling concepts that are meaningful and relevant.

In B2B and at the same time exciting and that’s uncommon. People are unused to B2B marketing, let alone B2B tech marketing as having this type of influence. And so when we were brought in to come up with, A campaign strategy to take a particular solution to market.

We were thinking really hard about the perspective and users and the company types and really what it came down to as. Security legislation was changing at that time in Australia. The risk that was being vocalized in the market really had to do with the risk that individual board members were taking on.

as a result of being directors within a company. And I think this is a really important topic that every business, let alone every technology business should take very seriously. In how they are talking to their prospects and clients, because that’s a real risk. Something happening in your business as a director.

Potentially puts your house on the line. Let’s get brutally pragmatic about this. Your house could be at risk as a result of something happening in this business. And and I’m obviously talking generally, but the campaign that we came up with as a result was. How do you, as a board member, mitigate the various security risks that you might be facing?

And how do you, as a board, as a collective board, then take your compliance frameworks and structures? And push them down through your leadership team into the business to infuse a DNA within your culture that is security minded. And that is ensuring that best practice is taking place and that the various checklists and guidelines that were being published by the federal government were being adopted into policy frameworks and one step further being And implemented and embedded into process that idea alone wound up not only being successful in the campaign itself.

The campaign did really well. But what we found even more fascinating is that it. It shifted the mindset within the client company as well to the point where six, 12 months down the track, we are still hearing from them that campaign shifted their target audience mindset or their prospect mindset that, you know what, actually we’ve only ever been.

Talking to the I. T. Manager before when in reality we want to be having the strategic conversation at board level and be trusted by the board directors as understanding their risk and therefore our relationship deepens with this company and therefore. Pragmatically, the client lifetime value would ostensibly increase because it means that you’re going to be engaged for longer periods of time as a result of those the board buy in and not just a IT manager buy in.

So it was fascinating to watch that take place because as we were just trying to make. Good decisions at the time of the campaign thinking in ways that would make sense. That would be compelling. And little did we know that we were transforming this cloud company from the core.

Nick: Yeah. Yeah.

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. That’s such a great example. I, That particular content campaign, I always refer back to because it was just such a great way to show how content can really lead that commercial process and start a completely different type of conversation and do that successfully reflecting for myself.

We the content campaign that I’ve worked on personally that I always think about is with a cloud solution provider partner and they were launching a new vendor service around managing remote workforces and providing tools and capabilities for that. And as part of the launch planning.

There was a whole lot of launch activities that we were supporting on, but content was a key part of that. And we proposed a content cluster approach. And what we meant by that was that we would set up a pillar page that really contained. Everything that you’d need to know about the two solutions that were being that were being launched.

Everything you’d need to know about those solutions in a very long form page. And then we’d support those by individual blog posts that would take different aspects of the solution or of the use of the solution or the pricing or the, the ROI or the the support, whatever it may be.

And also actually including some different different audience groups in there as well and publish that as a whole. And so the idea was that we were using the pillar page to to target the main keyword to demonstrate our absolute authority around that particular solution around that topic.

And then using the whole, the rest of the cluster to show that we’re able to go after those longer tail keywords and show that we’ve got a complete solution that we’ve thought about all aspects of it, that we’re really able to provide that. And the client trusted us to implement that approach.

We published two pillar pages, and I think. Six or eight support blogs for each each content cluster. So there was a significant amount of content that needed to be created and published, but the end results was stupendous. The, first of all, the launch campaign was recognized. Within the vendor as being the best in class.

And this is the the gold standard approach to take when launching these solutions to market. Additionally our client was went from basically nowhere in search to very rapidly getting on the front page. So the first 10 search listings and was actually competing against the vendor around those couple of core keyword terms are related to the two solutions that we launched.

And so that I really love that example because it shows that a content strategy can be a core part of not only an ongoing demand generation or go to market, but, or but actually be a key part of a product launch of a product go to market and can produce fantastic results.

Obviously, with that. With the impact of all of the launch activity, plus the organic rankings that we’re able to get the lead flow that was generated for those two solutions into the client was phenomenal. And then they were super impressed where she entered it into an award from same Russian and won an award for that as best content campaign as well.

But I think the results for the client was what. Was the best part of that campaign because it really demonstrated, as I say, that a content lead campaign can be such a key part of a launch or as a go to market,

Jeremy: People are often mortified by the volume that was published in that.

Do you remember the actual word count across that campaign?

Nick: Look, it was five figures. It was over 10, 000 words.

Jeremy: It was way more than that. It was 50, 000.

Nick: Yeah. 50, 000. Yeah. Yeah. Well done. You remember that better than I did, but yeah, that was, it was a lot of work and a lot of heavy lifting.

But yeah, as you say, I mean that, that really produced the results.

Jeremy: The concept of topical authority is so important. I think what you were really highlighting in that story is that this was more than just a go to market to, as I was pointing out earlier, Putting a media release together and having a solutions page.

This is, this was about taking the comprehensive approach across all of the different lead sources and acquisition channels that you might gain prospects from and addressing all of those at the same time. And so this sort of comprehensive content approach is very different to how people are thinking or have been thinking And in the way that you were highlighting that the content was able to compete against vendors, let’s call a spade that is so hard because these vendors are sitting on multinational levels of content.

They’re sitting on domain authorities that’s higher than what any. Medium, mid tier size business could ever achieve there’s sitting on probably a nearly a decade of content that’s been hitting search engines over time is so radically difficult to compete and to have achieved that within the timeframe of that campaign is is phenomenally challenging.

Thank you. Assuring that these are strategies that deliver results that can achieve that can achieve outcomes that are technically speaking out of reach because because you are competing directly with your vendor. itself. And and so I think, the merit of having gone to those lengths in that campaign and that’s not even touching on all the other aspects of the campaign that you didn’t cover off, the volume of video content that came with it and the EDM nurture streams and everything else that happened.

The results do speak for themselves but it is so new that it does require. People to invest and not just invest the budget, but invest from a commitment perspective and say, I’m in, let’s do this. I’m going to watch this unfold because I’m going to trust this process. And and thankfully we have clients that have trusted us and the results did speak for themselves.

So well done to you on leading that.

Nick: Yep. And you can check out the case study on our website, of course.

Jeremy: That’s right. This has all been fascinating. I think this is a great topic. Let’s come back and talk about authority in the future. Whether it’s topical authority, whether it’s domain authority and how that influences online.

But today’s just been such a great snapshot and talking about how do we think about content? How do we start with content? How do we structure content? That’s taken us down a couple of different rabbit holes. But I think all in all, that’s given us a lot of clarity around how can we shift our thinking around the importance of content and what it can do for us.

Nick: Yeah. Thank you very much. It’s been an excellent conversation.