Crafting Effective Content for SaaS Target Audiences
Strategic Content Marketing offers a comprehensive guide to planning, creating, implementing, and analyzing an effective content marketing strategy in practice. Each chapter marries established theory with modern practice, illustrating concepts with real-world case studies and examples alongside interviews with prominent content marketers, including a foreword by Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and often referred to as
Father of Content Marketing. Chapter objectives and summaries structure learning, while reflective questions and activities aid comprehension. On reading, students will understandThis comprehensive text is perfect core and recommended reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students studying content marketing, inbound marketing, marketing communications, digital and social media marketing, and public relations. In
practice, the book is also highly valuable for practicing professionals studying for professional qualifications and looking to develop their skills. Online resources include instructor teaching slides, four-color images and templates, and chapter test bank questions. Dan Farkas is a Lecturer in Strategic Communication at Ohio State University, US. Dan has taught courses on research methods, strategy, content creation, crisis communication, analytics, and
Measurement also advises chapters
of the Public Relations Student Society of America. In Dan’s 12 years of advising, his chapters have earned national recognition including Chapter of the Year, Student-Run Firm of the Year, Pacesetter, and Star Chapter. For this mentorship, Dan is one of only 20 people to have earned the Walt Seifert Award for Outstanding Service to PRSA. A nationally sought keynote speaker on emerging marketing,Dan is also a business owner who helped clients receive
media coverage from ESPN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, NPR, and the Associated Press. Dan has earned more than 20 awards for his work in television news, which appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and SI.com. He currently hosts the Strategic Communicator podcast through the Marketing Podcast Network. Rebecca Geier has worked for over 30 years with technical professionals to develop their brands and tell their company’s
stories to target audiences. She has worked in corporate marketing settings, founded and served as CEO of her own inbound and content B2B marketing agency, and has served as Chief Marketing Officer of two SaaS startups in the chemical and AI software industries. She has uniquely worked alongside engineers and scientists to develop specific, measurable content strategies and persuaded those who previously believed content marketing doesn’t
Work for skeptical technical audiences
Named by The Wall Street Journal editors among America’s Most Innovative Entrepreneurs, Rebecca has dedicated her time to researching the modern, digital buying journey and published annual reports that are read by tens of thousands of B2B business leaders around the world. Based on her research and decades of practice, in 2016, she published her first
book, Smart Marketing for Engineers: An Inbound Marketing Guide to Reaching Technical Audiences. She has served as the keynote speaker on the topic of inbound and content marketing globally, including serving for many years as a featured speaker at the premier annual event for content marketers, Content Marketing World.When I discovered that Rebecca and Dan were working on a textbook for the practice of content marketing, I simply
had to get involved. Let me tell you why. When I first began in marketing over 20 years ago, everything was about interruption. Put more simply, every company I worked with wanted to distract people from the content they were engaged in to tell consumers about the amazing products and services the company had. The internet, in its infancy, actually made the problem worse. Marketing professionals thought that more channels meant more ways to
Spam consumers about why they
were o incredible. The entire ordeal left me disgusted. Then I found content marketing (then called many things, like custom publishing, custom media, and branded content). Content marketing was the idea that a brand could send valuable and compelling information to a targeted group of people consistently over time, building a loyal and trusted audience in the
process. Once we earn that trust, then we gain the privilege of selling them our products and services. Because they trust us and love our content, they buy (and do they ever). I thought this was too good to be true an actual marketing practice that worked by first delivering value to customers (not pushing product)? I found my religion, and I went out to tell the world. Only it didn’t work. Every chief marketing officer I talked to wanted immediate results, and
were totally enamored with ads of every kind (from 30-second spots to pay per click). But slowly, things started to change. Google’s importance in how buyers made decisions was a critical start. To make it to number one on Google for a keyword result, you had to have amazing content, and Google preferred content from credible sites that delivered valuable and regular information (think media sites). Then social media came around. When a brand
Conclusion
pitched a product on any social media channel, it only hurt the brand. Brand marketers began to realize that to make any kind of impact on social, they had to create valuable and consistent content. Without fai, every new channel that developed and grew needed the same formula, from e-newsletters to videos to podcasts. In order to get any kind of attention, the brand had to create compelling content on a regular basis about something that was truly
unique and valuable so over a long period of time (just like a media company). Marketers began to learn that quick fixes and blasts of content were useless. They finally realized that they lost whatever control they thought they had. Buyers were now in complete control of their own buyers’ journey.The name of the game in gathering attention is now about building audiences and audience building cannot happen without a long-term content marketing
strategy. As so, here we are, with this book in your hands or in your ears. Content marketing, as a discipline and a practice, won the battle because it is the correct way to market. Now, don’t get me wrong; advertising is still the biggest game in town. Advertising is the sun while content marketing is barely Pluto (not even a planet). But the Truth is out there. Content marketing provides a better, more human way to market. This book holds the key to the
