Category Content Marketing

Should gated content be part of our marketing strategy?

by LIZ CHRISTO for Dear Stage 2 DEAR STAGE 2: Are we gating content this year? ~Asking for a friend DEAR ASKING FOR A FRIEND: To gate or not to gate, that is the question. I called on a friend, Margaret Kelsey, to help tackle this question. You might know her from her work at Invision, Appcues, and OpenView or as the co-host of new marketing podcast, Don’t Say Content. Who better to weigh in on this pressing content question? Unfortunately, we can’t give you a one-size-fits-all reply here. BUT, it’s worth noting that 62% of B2B marketers are employing gated content as one pillar in…

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SaaS content marketing: From 0 to 500k visitors a month

by Omid G for marketermilk I grew a SaaS company’s SEO traffic from 25k visitors/month to 500k visitors/month from content marketing. That’s a 1,900% increase. I’m going to lay out exactly how I did it in this post so you don’t have to go through years of struggling to figure it out like I did. This will be one of those articles that you read and refer to often. We are about to go over what content to create, how to create it, how to think about distribution, how to track ROI, how to find outsourced writers, and more. I…

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You’re Not Alone—The “Do More With Less” Trend Has Hit Content Marketers Hard

by Jimmy Daly for superpath Between the macro economy and generative A.I., content marketers have been thrown for a real loop over the past year or so. Things changed and fast. Here’s our monthly job board revenue for the last two years. It’s a small sample size, but I believe it represents some larger trends in SaaS. Revenue—and, by proxy, the number of open roles—peaked in January 2022. Then it fell off a cliff. A historically good job market turned into a historically bad one within just a few months. ‍ Profitwell founder Patrick Campbell recently shared an analysis of the SaaS market over…

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AN 8-POINT WEBSITE CHECKLIST FOR EFFECTIVE B2B CONTENT MARKETING

by Matt Bell for The Framework Your company’s website is one of its most important assets when it comes to effective content marketing. You own it. You control the content. You can direct visitors to the parts that are most relevant for them. And yet, many B2B companies still treat their website as little more than a digital catalog. Some practically reproduce the catalog format, with an index-like homepage and subpages dedicated to product lines and spec sheets. Is that what your audience wants to find? All of them, all the time? Those are rhetorical questions, of course. As I’ve…

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Content Marketing During a Downturn: Here’s What the Conventional Wisdom Gets Wrong

By Sharla Moody for Contently Recession. Downturn. Economic uncertainty. When these words start to appear, conventional wisdom tells businesses to cut their marketing budgets. It turns out that advice is dead wrong. As multiple researchers have found over decades of studies, stopping your marketing efforts during tough times is a mistake. Data shows that proactive marketing “pays off” during recessions—for brands across industries, including the likes of Toyota, Amazon, Coca-Cola, etc. As two marketing professors put it in a 2020 Harvard Business Review article: “Firms that maintain their marketing spend while reallocating it to suit the context … fare better than firms that cut their marketing…

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How To Write Like a Journalist (And Why It Matters in Marketing)

By Kyle Covino for Brafton.com The importance of good journalism can’t be overstated. Journalism is an art: It’s not just telling a story, it’s about helping the reader read it through to the end. Perhaps above all, it should produce positive results in society. To quote Andrew Vacss: “Journalism is what maintains democracy. It’s the force for progressive social change.” A free, democratic society is impossible without accurate and ethical journalism. But the qualities that make up this art can be extended to many other forms of writing — notably marketing — in a big way. How’s that? Read on to find…

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8 WAYS TO SELF-DESTRUCT YOUR B2B CONTENT MARKETING

by Message Up A lot is written about how to succeed at content marketing. It’s a complicated thing to get right and there’s a how-to guide for every element. Marketing leaders and their supporting casts do their best to implement a practical subset of this advice, within inevitable resource constraints. Many of them do a really good job, getting a lot of things right. Until they don’t. Like the racing driver who is on a personal best lap, only to wreck at the penultimate corner, they make mistakes that undermine everything they’ve worked so hard to construct. In this week’s…

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5 PRIME SOURCES FOR B2B CONTENT

by Message Up You recognize that content marketing is mission critical for your B2B business, and you’re committed to making it happen. You’ve done your homework and prioritized a list of themes and topics on which your team is going to publish. All well and good, but how are you going to create the content itself? More precisely, where are you going to find the inspiration, ideas, and insights that will make it relevant and engaging? Here are five tips on where to look. But First, Back to Identifying B2B Content Topics Before we dive into the sources, let’s rewind…

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Employee-Driven Content: A 4-step Framework on How to Get Started

by JASON BRADWELL for B2B Byte You’ve got to invest in more content. “Damn Jason, what is this - 2005? We’ve been creating content for years!” …to which my response would be… “Sure. But when did you last create good content?” If the recent phenomenon that is ChatGPT has taught us anything, it’s that we are on the precipice of a huge acceleration in the publication of mediocre marketing collateral. Particularly on blogs. Volume is no longer the aim of the game. Dialling in on doing less that says more must become the new normal. And a great way to do this is by investing in employee-driven content. Here’s a…

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The 6 Risks of AI Content

by Ryan Law for Animalz There are already plenty of use cases for generative AI in marketing. Industry and article research. Getting to first draft faster. Creating content briefs. Brainstorming titles and headers, angles, and introductions. Programmatic SEO, at a scale and sophistication previously hard to imagine. Repurposing content from one format to another. Personalizing ABM campaigns. These use cases have risks associated with them. There is the risk of factual inaccuracy and hallucination. Risk of copyright infringement and legal challenges. Risk of Google penalization. Risk of mediocrity and pumping out a ton of content that doesn’t help the bottom line.…

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