EPISODE SUMMARY
In today’s episode of SaaS-Story in the Making, founder and CEO of Ardent Growth Skyler Reeves graces us with his top-notch strategies on using content marketing to drive growth with host Matt Wolach.
Through his long marketing career, Reeves has developed a great understanding of every little thing about creating content that generates leads to get people to your product and solution. His content intelligence consultancy uses business intelligence to develop evergreen content for B2B SaaS companies. So, don’t go to market until you watch this.
PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE
Podcast: SaaS-Story in the Making
Episode: Episode No. 184, “How Content Marketing Drives Continuous Growth”
Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS sales coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor
Guest: Skyler Reeves, CEO & Founder of Ardent Growth
TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE
Figure Out Your Buyer Persona to Resonate
Resonating with your ideal buyers is the primary goal of content marketing. With this comes the data that the most impactful content out there are those written, created, and shot by people your buyers identify with, and in this case, SaaS experts. No matter the channel you’re promoting in, whether it’s your website’s blog or your brand’s YouTube channel, as long as your approach addresses a problem that someone has, that’s very specific to them, and then not just a problem, but who they are, you’re well on your way. This is the type of content that makes more impact on the saturated market of SaaS.
Understand What Your Successful Competitors Are Doing
Without a doubt, software leaders should look into their competitors. Content marketing doesn’t stop at figuring out your buyer persona and producing content that truly resonates with them. That is just the tip of the iceberg. The next step you want to do is to take advantage of business intelligence and take a peek into what your competitors are doing. They’ll help you figure out how to compare yourselves in your content.
However, Reeves raised a caveat here that one should not be content to just copy what their competitor does. You should be able to understand how they’re able to grow their SaaS using content marketing to the core. Whether that’s for SEO, YouTube, or everything else, you want to take it with a grain of salt because what works with them might not always work for your SaaS. But if you raise the bar and your level of content marketing according to what the successful competitors are doing, then that’s the only time you will be able to truly compete and rank with them.
Align the Content to the Business Strategy
One of the biggest mistakes that Reeves saw software companies are making is the lack of content strategy, or worse, not aligning their content with their business strategy. When asked about it, he said, “The biggest one is when they actually are executing content, and the content is not deep and unique enough. And it’s very – it’s very bland. It doesn’t do anything for the brand. It doesn’t do anything to help you stand out against the crowd and the prospective buyers.”
A lot of business intelligence in content marketing includes examining and accounting for the cost of product content and the ROI once you release it out there to market. Always look at the value of traffic and conversion rate that your content is bringing. Aim to have your highest impact items with the lowest effort first. After all, the content itself is a subset of the marketing strategy, which is a subset of the overarching business strategy.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Content Marketing Is a Form of Acquisition
In almost every form of acquisition that you can get for your clients, content marketing is the only one you can actually say has compounding returns over time. Paid acquisition is linear, and it just keeps getting more and more expensive. Email marketing is effective, but it’s not compounding, and it’s usually driven through either some form of paid acquisition or through some sort of organic channel, whether that’s on social or through search.
But content in itself, whenever you create it, and you get it out there to give you some brand visibility, you can get it ranking. Over time, the amount of effort you have to put into it just begins to count. It can be an acquisition, therefore staying challenged but content marketing brings compounding growth. That’s the best one to invest in.
Bottom-of-Funnel Content Drives Prospects to Take Action
Because BOF content is written, produced, and curated by marketers who seem like they’ve been in their prospect’s own shoes.
Reeves reiterated that the reason for this is that because “they [would] feel like they deeply understand my problems, whether it’s a product expert, some sales team, someone from customer support, whatever you can, you can just tell and as alike, as a buyer, right? Like someone who makes that buying decision.” That’s the kind of content that’s going to convince ideal prospects to do something.
Content Strategy & Planning Are Widely Different
Confusing strategy for planning and confusing planning for tactics. Not really knowing in advance, like what you’re going to do in the future with your content, is a recipe for disaster. So it doesn’t mean strategies can’t change what you, you know, the strategy is the overarching idea. The strategy is the blueprint that architects the plan. The content strategy is mainly based on the business and marketing strategy, and content planning is part of the preparation for the execution of content.
A lot of SaaS founders do this and they’re working with others because they don’t have enough resources internally on their content team. They’re working with a lot of freelancers or contractors, and then not giving them enough direction or enough exposure to product experts, sales SDRs, customer service reps, internally to help inform them. Not having that content plan for your marketing is almost similar to driving blind. Your team is kept in the dark and not going in the same direction.
TOP QUOTES
Skyler Reeves
[19:46] “Find a really good person to manage content operations. Figure out what you know. Define your business strategy. Don’t pay attention to traffic pay attention to conversions right to things.”
[20:00] “To actually have a business impact, don’t fall down the fallacy of, you know, will convert on through email.”
[20:14] “Hire a good person [and] get them in place. And make sure that any writers that are creating that content are having conversations with the founder.”
[20:47] “Don’t just throw content at the wall to see what sticks.”
Matt Wolach
[06:55] “Figure out who your best persona is, and direct content towards them.”
[09:09] “Direct your content towards somebody who already may be feeling the problems [you’re] feeling like they need a solution, and try and get them.”
[18:41] “When I see a piece that you can tell has been well researched, you can tell has data behind it, you can tell that they know what they’re talking about. That’s super powerful.”
LEARN MORE
To learn more about Skyler Reeves and Ardent Growth, visit https://ardentgrowth.com/.
You can also find Skyler Reeves on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/skylerreeves/.
For more about how host Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com/.
