Better Content Marketing Approach for B2B Consultants. Organic. Search. Social. Hope. Relationships w/Audience. Owners.
Traditional B2C Content Marketing Approach
Organic Search Social
Hope
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Sales
New Clients
Better Content Marketing Approach for B2B Consultants
Relationships w/Audience Owners
Teaching to Content Borrowed Marketing Audience
Email Marketing
Note: 2-way street here
Sales
New Clients
Welcome to This Micronar! •
15m of content, 45m of open-ended Q&A/discussion
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Stay as long as you like, leave when you want
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I’m using Google Hangouts to allow full peer-to-peer interaction & embracing the 15-person limit
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No recording available later—this is 100% a live event
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No open loop/special offer to incentivize you to stay. Here are the slides: http://bit.ly/cmforconsultants
Traditional B2C Content Marketing Approach
Organic Search Social
Hope
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Sales
New Clients
Better Content Marketing Approach for B2B Consultants
Relationships w/Audience Owners
Teaching to Content Borrowed Marketing Audience
Email Marketing
Note: 2-way street here
Sales
New Clients
Why Care? •
The B2C content marketing approach has become conventional wisdom •
http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-contentmarketing/
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http://priceonomics.com/the-content-marketing-handbook/
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It goes on and on…
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I’ve tried the B2C approach (http://mycontentsherpa.com). It blows chunks and made me a miserable person for 4 months.
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Since then, I’ve found something that works better…
What’s Different? •
Content marketing moves from mouth of funnel to mid-funnel (not 100% true cause teaching is a form of content marketing, but bear with me as I unfold this…)
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No reliance on organic and social as traffic drivers (you stop chasing the blue tigers)
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Proportions of funnel change: lower volume, higher conversions
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Role of content marketing changes completely: attract clicks > build trust effectively
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Trust is built up more rapidly, often making the sales process as easy as checking for fit and scheduling
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Content becomes much easier to produce
BTW, over time, organic and social will start to bring you leads
Relationships w/Audience Owners
Teaching to Content Borrowed Marketing Audience
Email Marketing
Sales
New Clients
Organic Search and Social
(but relying on those channels is a terrible way to “prime the pump” at first)
Trust:
+10
+30
+60
Content Marketing
Email Marketing
Sales
+30
+30
+10
Organic Search Social
Hope
Trust: Relationships w/Audience Owners
+30
Teaching to Content Borrowed Marketing Audience
Email Marketing
Sales
New Clients
New Clients
Let’s examine each step of this funnel
Step 1 Relationships w/Audience Owners
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
Teaching to Content Borrowed Marketing Audience
Email Marketing
Step 5
Sales
New Clients
Funnel Step 1: Relationships w/Audience Owners •
Don’t build this part of your funnel until after you have some “poker chips” to play with.
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This is step 1 in your funnel but step 4 in how you should build things.
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I’ll come back to this later…
Funnel Step 2: Teaching to Borrowed Audience •
Audience-building is mega-hard, so borrow someone else’s.
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Audience owners have a problem you can solve: quality content to feed their audience members & experts to put up on a stage at events.
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IOW, they need experts who can teach. Coincidentally, this is quite good for you!
Funnel Step 3: Content Marketing •
Demonstrate your expertise to potential clients in a way that they're naturally incentivized to pay attention to.
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Pick one painful, urgent, or costly problem to solve (or P&L sheet-level benefit to create), divide it up into consumable topics, optionally divide it into business vs. tech tracks, and you have a content plan.
Enough planning…
Build It!
Examples •
https://lesschurn.io/saas-churn-university/
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https://www.sendwithus.com/resources/guide/
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http://adespresso.com/academy/guides/facebookads-beginner/
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http://elementalselenium.com
Funnel Step 4: Email Marketing •
Put your ideals on a fucking shelf for a minute. Doing it right means feeling like a spammer for a few months.
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Consistency + bold personality can work (the info marketer goto tactic), but quality + helpfulness is the best. Use automation to backfill consistency.
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ABIE = Always Be Inviting Engagement. Engagement = taking micro-actions. Just getting a reply to an automated email is a huge accomplishment.
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The “30-day club” vs. the long tail
Funnel Step 5: Sales •
Often just a matter of “taking the order”: confirming fit, scheduling, etc.
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This is generally where case studies & white papers start to become very valuable.
Funnel Step 1 Revisited: Relationships w/Audience Owners •
Now that you have something of value, it’s much easier to build relationships with audience owners. •
Show up, participate, and share
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Reach out as a peer, set up win-win JV partnerships
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Be consistent and persistent
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Respect the ladder of authority
Funnel Step 2 Revisited: Teaching to Borrowed Audience •
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Now that you have a freaking primo content marketing asset, you can repurpose it into high-fidelity teaching events: •
Podcast guesting
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Webinars (or micronars like this one)
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IRL teaching (Chamber of Commerce, etc.)
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MeetUp and conf talks
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Lunch & Learns you host at your office
CTA for your teaching event is… your content marketing asset! Vanity domain names like http://positioningcrashcourse.com are 💰
Build In This Order 1.Content Marketing Asset 2.Email Marketing 3.Sales Collateral 4.Relationships with Audience Owners 5.Educational Event Content
Resources •
https://doubleyouraudience.com/traffic-manual/
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http://devshopleads.com (in progress)
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http://theworldismyoffice.com/let-me-walk-you-stepby-step-through-my-business-model/ (an example of what I think you should avoid: trying to use content to drive mouth-of-funnel traffic)
