As you can see, we believe in content marketing. Over the last ten years or so, I used content as the basis of our highly capital-efficient demand generation machine for our enterprise martech SaaS, ion interactive. This is how we made our content marketing happen from the strategic ideas behind it, and the realities of execution.
To frame the market a bit (and draft on yesterday’s article), we marketed to marketers in the martech space of roughly 6,000 competing solutions. Nearly every segment within that space is nascent—it’s simply a matter of degrees. That means that education and credibility are key to cutting through the clutter, explaining and validating value and generating demand.
Starting with Primary Research
The first time we sponsored primary research was the most challenging. The hypothesis was that the market would bear out pains that we would be uniquely positioned to treat. The hard part was aligning with the right research partner to ask the right questions of the right people to get the right answers. If we failed, we would be out around $30,000 because the study would be useless. At that time, $30,000 was a lot of money and we didn’t want to blow it. That said, we had a culture of experimentation, were data driven and tested everything. If it was good, we would test it, and we would know if it worked.
The data was good, but the report was weak. We were excited that our hypothesis was proven, but now had a new challenge to turn that win into demand via our content marketing. This article is about leveraging a single primary asset into derived content across all stages of the buyer’s journey. Some call it content scaling, but that implies something much easier than the reality. Some call it repurposing, but that feels to me like under-selling the value of the derived assets.
Content Across the Lifecycle
Whether you prefer the buyer’s journey or the funnel analogy, we’re going to address the creation of useful content across many channels and lifecycle stages. Content Marketing Institute ran an article on ion’s content marketing scaling practices that followed one asset into 27 derived assets. Bottom line is that we used internal resources to scale facts from one $30,000-$50,000 third-party, original research report into pre- to post-funnel assets—and everywhere in between.
I’m more at home with the funnel than the journey, but my funnel starts earlier and ends later than some. My pre-funnel stage addresses virality or social sharing and happens before a user is known. And my post-funnel stage addresses post-win, customer content designed for retention, renewal and expansion. In the interest of capital efficiency, scaling one investment beyond demand-gen improves ROI that much more.
Scaling strategy depends on what you’ve got to work with. In the case of primary research, you have facts and their source (always hire a credible research provider like Demand Metric or Content Marketing Institute or even TechValidate). Assuming that your questions, sample and answers were well formulated, and that your study was well administered, you should have powerful facts. After doing a bunch of these, I found that the quality of facts was more important than the quantity.