Content Marketing Challenges Faced by SaaS Companies and How to Overcome Them
We organized this book to help you complete content tasks that you might perform quarterly and annually in addition to providing a reference that you can use daily or anytime you are called on to create content. As a result, our book functions equally in both the workplace and the classroom. CM is a relatively new term and still a nascent profession, and its role in and value to organizations is still not widely understood or cohesively implemented. Many of the
tasks associated with effective CM are also tasks most everyone performs every day, including writing, speaking, and collaborating, so we may not associate them with requiring unique skill. After all, you write daily; what additional value would a content “specialist” bring to your organization? Therefore, before we relay the fundamentals of CM in the following
chapters, we want to dispel six myths relatedThe buyer journey has changed, and the strategies that were effective yesterday are less effective (and, in some cases, nearly obsolete) today. Technology has transformed whole industries, shifting the control of content delivery and consumption away from traditional publishers and empowering the individual user to choose what, when and how to consume. In her first book, Smart Marketing
For Engineers An Inbound Marketing
Guide to Reaching Technical Audiences, Rebecca explained the challenge modern business leaders and marketers faceOver the last 20 years, companies have transformed how they market to consumers. Before internet search engines, as crazy as it sounds, buyers actually used their phones and called companies to ask questions as part of their product research. In
turn, companies produced expensive educational content such as glossy print brochures and product catalogs they mailed to prospects that served as the cornerstone of their marketing efforts to drive awareness and consideration. Seemingly overnight, as early internet adoption grew, buyers started relying on company websites as their primary source of information.
marked the beginning of the digital transformation of marketing as a discipline with massive investments made in a company’s website powered by new, original content published by marketing teams with support from subject matter experts including product information, videos, corporate news, and in-depth educational resources such as white papers. While the sources that buyers value may have shifted from analog to digital, the reason they seek
Content remains the same
Consumers need high-quality information they can trust to help them make the best purchase decision to meet their needs. To meet them where they are, companies have had to pivot not only marketing spend but also marketing mindset. Where they used to control who received their catalog – the only way to get it was if you were on the company’s mailing list or you
called them to request a copy be mailed to you – today, customers don’t wait for, or want, a 1,000-page annual product catalog to come in the mail. They go to their favorite search engine and trusted websites to search for the exact information they want, when they want it. They control, at their fingertips, what they read and research by scrolling and clicking through
content they find relevant, interesting, and trustworthy. In this post-COVID-19 era, even analog lead-generating marketing tactics that remain popular and valuable, such as trade shows and in-person meetings, are losing their value given that many have been canceled, and attendance has not returned to pre-COVID levels. The pandemic hammered the last nail in the coffin of companies who relied on outdated and expensive means of marketing. Sales and marketing teams who do not evolve with CM as a core focus will miss the opportunity to
Connect with their potential buyers
where they are, struggle to compete, and risk failing all together. Digital CM strategies and their use of evolving technology have the potential to reach a larger audience for less money, delivering a greater return on investment (ROI) that’s more efficient and provides a better experience for the consumer since they can find information when and where they want it.How many results did you get from your last Google search? Despite the hundreds of
thousands or millions of search results, did you advance past page two of those results? If you’re like the majority of web users, the answer is no. Studies have shown that the vast majority of clicks on Google occur on the first page, and, in one that studied mobile usage, in all the results on the first page, 28.5% of clicks happen on the first resulNow, let’s just think
about the sphere of your company and target market. Consider the amount of content your company generates on its products and services and then add that to the amount of content your competitors generate on their products and services. How does your company’s content rank on those search engine results? What’s unique or more interesting about your content to encourage users to click on yours instead of your competitor’s? The internet doubles in size
Conclusion
every two years, resulting in a 50-fold growth of content and data from 2011 to 2020 (Jones, 2019). Creating quality content is vital but no longer enough. The chances are small that you will grow awareness and trust at scale if your content does not rank high in your user’s search; if your content is not trustworthy and uniquely valuable; or if your content is not immediately and sufficiently appealing enough to motivate the prospect to click in, open, and r
ead more. Your prospective buyers will always have unlimited and growing content choices, so your content strategy can never be static, and your content quality cannot just be good. CM is core to how companies build awareness and trust in our modern customer-controlled marketplace. You need an agile, fluid content strategy with high content-quality standards executed on a consistent basis, and that only begins with an ambitious and clear visionThe third myth assumes you don’t do content marketing. By this, we mean you assume CM is not
part of your daily job duties. The reality is that, to some extent, everyone in a company is doing content marketing. Let’s take the role of an engineer for instance. In higher education, curricula for STEM degrees are packed with math and science courses (in part for accreditation reasons), which leaves little focus for strengthening interpersonal or writing skills. In fact, STEM majors identify little association between the quality of their verbal
