The content marketing tactics proven to work for UK B2B firms

Business-to-business firms can save themselves a lot of time and money by taking note of some recent content marketing research. The survey asked UK firms about their experiences with different content marketing tactics.  

The research findings appear to have identified those tactics most effective in driving new business.  Small businesses can save themselves a lot of hassle by taking advantage of these findings.  Here’s a quick look at the results.

The content marketing tactics considered to be most effective

The diagram below shows the tactics found to be most effective amongst a sample of UK firms, in rank order.  Case studies and research reports top the list followed by a string of other tactics: 

Surprisingly, the research does not refer to corporate blogs as a technique and yet blogs are considered a valuable tactic in other studies.  It’s possible that UK firms have yet to embrace the potential of corporate blogs.

Also, online articles (on own web sites and external sites) appear to rank lower than other studies suggest.

If you are a B2B firm wondering how to drive online performance using content marketing, you might want to start with the top tactics from this research. Take a look at this post for ideas on generating new case studies.

About the respondent sample

You should review the findings above in the light of some limitations regarding the sample. 

Respondents came from subscribers to the Content Marketing Institute and the Direct Marketing Institute in the UK.  As such, they are likely to have a keener interest in trying different marketing tactics and have higher than average content marketing budgets. The sample consisted of 190 respondents as follows:

* 67% - B2B
* 18% - B2C
* 15% - Other (public sector / not-for-profit)

Breakdown by employee size:
* 50% had up to 99 employees
* 21% between 100 and 999 employees
* 29% more than 1000 employees

Industry profile:
* 46% marketing, media, publishing, online services
* 8% consulting and business services
* 5% banking, accountancy and financial services
* 5% software
* 36% other

Whilst the respondent profile may not match your business, the research is still useful as these respondents have probably put the greatest effort into understanding what content marketing techniques work best in the UK.  It acts as a good start point for firms trying to decide where to invest their content marketing budgets for maximum effect. Get your marketing team busy conducting surveys and writing-up customer case studies!

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It's time to take business blogging seriously

Many small firms are turning to business blogging as part of their lead generation process.  Not only do blogs allow complete control over the editorial content, but business blogging can also produce sales leads up to 60% cheaper than traditional marketing activities.  

Image credit: Bigstock

In the US and, in all likelihood, in Europe too, small firms are turning to the creation of blog content to help generate new business. Heidi Cohen outlines some of the key reasons why business blogging is now such an important marketing tool.  Businesses that are quick to understand the benefits will be better positioned to reap the rewards as industries in general embrace new digital marketing techniques.  Let’s look at the benefits.

A media platform you control

Unlike press releases which are exposed to the whims of editors, with blogs you have full control over the content that is published. Provided your blog is well written and not an overt sales pitch, you'll be able to create marketing messages and calls-to-action exactly as you want them.  And, as blogs have the option for readers to leave comments, you also have a great way to interact with and influence your customers too.  

It means you can actually demonstrate things like customer responsiveness, integrity and industry competence. In fact, your corporate blog can very much determine a major part of the customer experience and, being social in nature, word-of-mouth about a good experience can travel fast.

Integral to your search and social media strategy

The way most blogging platforms are created means you can write content that search engines will utilise for search queries. The more your blog site and content is set up for SEO, the higher your search rank and the greater the probability that your blog content will be found by the target group you are aiming at.

The social nature of blogs is a key ingredient that businesses need to understand too. The blog itself can highlight your industry expertise, customer ethos or corporate personality. Your task then is to extend your audience reach through other social media platforms.  Linkedin, Google-Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and others, effectively become your advertising medium.  

By building-up a following, you'll be able to drive traffic back to your website. If you make that experience meaningful to your business audience, word will spread quickly to others. Compared to traditional print publications, business blogs are a much cheaper and more targeted way to reach your audience.

Content that drives lead generation

With complete editorial control over your content, you are able to exploit links to other related content too. So long as you have aligned your web content to the right buyer persona / stage, you can create content that systematically moves visitors along the sales lead funnel process.

That's not something you’ve been able to do so comprehensively in the past. As Heidi Cohen highlights, your blog archive is effectively a content management system.  Each item can have links that help your audience navigate towards sales engagement. What’s more, as most blog platforms have some form of analytics package, you can track, monitor and enhance performance to make the whole process very effective.

It's time to take blogging seriously

As the digital marketing landscape evolves, more and more small firms are recognising the potential of the corporate blog on business performance.  Not only can they generate leads up to 60 per cent cheaper than traditional tactics, but with careful planning, business blogs can become part of the lead generation process itself, helping you to nurture and qualify new sales opportunities.  Being dismissive of corporate blogs could be a very costly mistake!

Business blogging is fast becoming an integral and cost effective part of the marketing toolkit.  If you can’t find the time yourself to create blogs, consider making it part of an employee’s job description. Alternatively, hire a marketing copywriter to write them for you.  Once you have established an initial archive of material, you’ll be able to exploit the “linkability” of your content to generate high quality leads more consistently.

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Marketing copywriting for business professionals short of time

It’s your web content that will convert leads into orders, no matter what lead generation tactic you use. Here’s why.

Firms allocate big chunks of their marketing budget to lead generation activities yet still fall short of their lead conversion targets.  That’s because many fail to provide the right type of web content for when prospective customers come to short-list firms.  It’s a relatively simple problem to fix.

For many firms today, the top priority continues to be lead generation.  Businesses of all sizes still resort to outbound telemarketing: calling existing customers and old prospects to identify firms that have immanent sales potential.  This approach works, but it can be expensive.

Increasingly, firms are having success with social media platforms like Linkedin. Others are generating a good volume of leads from their web site.  Their investment in SEO is generating plenty of traffic and many firms are converting this into high quality business.  

But getting on the front page of search results is limited to those have all the SEO tactics and back-links in place as well as a strong social media presence. For most firms, it’s pre-emptive outbound activities that will continue to be important for lead generation. But it’s important to remember that this is just the first step in the process.  Almost certainly, once you have reached out to your customer or prospect, they will visit your website before they place an order.  


Web content is fundamental to your lead conversion

As part of their “due diligence” process, prospective buyers will explore your web site to look for information that justifies placing their business with you.  They’re not just looking for details about how well your business is funded or how long you’ve been trading. They are also looking for evidence that your business is competent at helping them solve their problem.  In short, you need to provide web content that meets the information needs of potential buyers at each stage of what can be a complex buying process.  

A typical buying sequence might look like this:

You need to be aware of the sequence as it applies to your industry and ensure that the content on your website fulfils the needs of each type of visitor when they come looking for information.

The Content Marketing Institute published some valuable research in 2012 outlining what content formats work best for B2B firms.  You can see from the following chart the extent to which web-enabled content plays such a prominent role:

You need to fully understand the buying sequence for your industry and target audience.  This means being very clear about your target audience profile or, to use the latest buzzword, buyer “persona”.

For example, IDG identified the specific content formats preferred by IT decision makers.  They found that for the Problem / Need stage, IT decision makers looked for case studies and blogs that talked about problems similar to their own.  They are essentially looking to see how other firms solved the problem they were experiencing themselves.  

In the Requirements Definition stage, these IT decision makers looked for “How to…” content as well as whitepapers, articles and blogs to help them understand the range of possible solutions.  Read more about the content preferred by IT decision makers here.

So, no matter what initial lead generation tactics you deploy, you’re unlikely to see many of these leads convert into orders unless you can satisfy the information needs of your prospective customers with suitable web content first. Your content needs to be well written to persuade potential customers that your firm should be on the short-list: an overt sales pitch is more likely to hinder your success.  It is professionally written content, carefully targeted, that will bring you the most success.

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Freelance marketing content writing for overstretched marketing professionals

Evidence that a content marketing strategy can boost performance in any industry

A recent case study suggests that the impact of carefully targeted content on business performance can be significant.  Getting the content marketing strategy correctly defined is the first key step to take.  And it’s not just for larger enterprises: small businesses can benefit too. 


Some small business owners feel that content marketing can’t be applied to their business.  They claim their industry is mundane or even “boring”.  Some have a tarnished public images.  Unless you’re a large enterprise that can afford a well-funded PR programme, the feeling amongst many smaller firms is that content marketing can be a waste of time.

However, the experience of Simply Business suggests that content marketing can deliver impressive results even in an industry like insurance, where products are largely commoditized and reputation has suffered somewhat following the financial crisis.

Lucjan Zaborowski revealed how he applied some key content marketing rules to increase web traffic to the Simply Business site by 25%, achieve outstanding SER, and improve the conversion rate too.  Whilst Simply Business may be more of a medium sized enterprise, this approach can work for smaller firms as well.

It’s all about marketing content

The first of Lucjan’s steps was the generation of new ideas that reflected the company’s mission.  For most small businesses, the concept of a mission statement was only ever considered when the original start-up business plan was created.  The term has probably been pushed aside in the fight to get new orders flowing and generally survive.  

The term “content marketing” could well go the same way; it’s something of a buzzword.  However, if you think of it as "...marketing your content..." (articles, brochures, case studies, blogs, etc.) it starts to have greater meaning.  What’s really important is that small firms truly get to understand how they can:

• Solve the problems experienced by their customers
• Differentiate themselves against competitors

With a clear awareness of these aspects, you, as a small business owner, will be able to formulate how you want to position your business in the market and document a few key messages to use in PR and other public facing communications.  Consider engaging an external marketing professional if you struggle to make progress in this area.

Developing a realistic content marketing strategy

Lucjan’s next step was to identify useful content. Simply Business applied three criteria to ensure the content marketing strategy they created was right for their audience.  The criteria encompassed:

• Applicability – is the content relevant to the needs of the audience
• Usefulness – in addition to relevance, is the content something practical that the audience can use?
• Consistency - ensuring content adheres to consistent messaging and tone of voice

This comes back to understanding your audience.  What are your customer pain points?  How do they go about looking for solutions to problems? It’s really important to understand what information they are looking for at each stage of the buying cycle.  It’s not as difficult as it sounds as this article highlights.  One of the first things to do is identify the different stages of the buying cycle as they apply to your industry.  A typical example could look like this:

In a nutshell, you need to categorise your audience by job description and build a profile of what information they are looking for at each stage of the buying process. Some call this building a "Persona".

The next step is to review your existing content against the information needs of each audience profile group or persona.  Be brutally honest about how well your existing materials support the information needs of each group.  Getting external input here is highly recommended, ideally some of your customers.  The challenge is to identify gaps in the information you are making available. What content hits the sweet-spot? What needs to be tweaked? What new material needs to be created from scratch?

Find a good content writer and track your performance

Simply Business achieved some impressive results after applying this approach to content marketing.  Web traffic increased by 25% and they reached front page SER.  Conversions increased by 6% too.  That’s the final point Lucjan mentions; tracking performance.

Not only do you need to see what's working and what's not, but you also need to know when trends are changing.  The thing to remember is that search terms and buyer behaviour are never static.  

Some content will “tire” and require refreshing.  That's why it’s always worth testing different versions of content regularly.  You need to be sure your “control” is the best at driving traffic to your site and the most effective at converting enquiries into orders.  The "control" will under perform at some stage and you need to know when.

Consider using an external content writer / copywriter to help you with your content creation and testing programme.  A different pair of eyes can lead to a step change in performance by trying a new approach to the same subject.  It’s a way of breaking out of the “groupthink” that's inherent in any team or organisation established for any length of time.

Finally, the thing to remember is that Lucjan applied this process to an insurance company. This is an industry considered to have a fixed set of mundane products as well as a somewhat tarnished public reputation.  His case study implies that a well-structured content marketing strategy can be successfully applied to any industry, no matter how mundane it may first appear.

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Freelance marketing copywriting for small and medium sized businesses

How small business owners can enhance performance with the right content marketing strategy

Many solo entrepreneurs resort to doing everything themselves. Bookkeeping, selling, cleaning, buying, customer service and promotional activity. As their business grows, the demand on their time increases.  It’s at this point when small business owners should identify tasks that are better outsourced to a professional.  Content marketing is an obvious candidate.


For many small B2C firms, a Do-It-Yourself content marketing strategy is the obvious way to generate the material to attract web traffic.  But is a DIY strategy a false economy?

If you have to rely on a vehicle to keep your business running, do you take time out to service it yourself or do you use a professional?  If you’re really competent at vehicle mechanics, and enjoy it, then it may be an option you consider.  But if motor maintenance is not your thing, you will probably find a reliable mechanic instead.  You can then use the time you might have spent on servicing to look after another part of your business.  

It’s the same for content marketing.  There are times when it’s best to use a professional.  Let me explain.

A recent study highlighted the benefits B2C firms experienced after deploying different types of content to promote their business.  Take a look at the following:

The graphic above suggests that around three quarters of B2C firms have had a good experience with content marketing.  They have seen improved brand awareness, a higher search engine ranking and increased web visitor numbers.  Almost 50% are using content marketing and social media to reduce traditional advertising costs and generate new leads.

The content that seems to be getting the best results are articles, blogs, social media posts and videos.  E-newsletters and whitepapers also continue to track well.  As B2C firms plan to invest further in these techniques during the coming year, they can be assumed to reflect past success.  

The research goes on to find that some 61% of B2C firms in the survey write their own content. That’s understandable, as many small firms are on a tight budget. But a DIY strategy could be a more expensive option in the longer term.

The same research found that 79% of small firms spend up to ten hours a week on content creation.   That’s a big chunk of time if you’re a solo entrepreneur.  Consider the following:

Evidence suggests that it takes, on average, three hours to write a blog post. A carefully researched article or whitepaper takes even longer.  That means you might be able to generate two or three blog posts per week or perhaps one carefully constructed article.  But, is that enough for your on-going lead generation needs?  Research elsewhere links the frequency of blog posts to the volumes of leads generated.  So, the more you post, the greater the probability of generating leads.

All this means that the task of content creation will make increasingly more demands on your time as you strive to increase lead volumes and conversions.  It will sap your effectiveness and pull you away from other business tasks demanding your attention.

What’s to be done?

If you don’t enjoy researching, writing and generally pulling together quality content that will engage your customers, try testing the outsourced option.  Try it for three months.  Monitor the impact it has on your business performance, and stress levels!

You will be able to keep control of the style, tone and editorial content and track if search rankings and traffic levels improve.  If you brief your copywriter well, you should see an improvement in lead quality and conversion rates too. Plus, you should assess the value of your re-allocated time; time you would otherwise have spent writing content but which can now be used more productively elsewhere in your business.

If after a three month test, you don’t see a worthwhile improvement in business performance, you can try another content professional or go back to the DIY approach.  If you get it right, you will have grown your business and be better placed to drive the rest of your business forward to the next level. 

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Fixed price copywriting and ghost blog writing offers for small business

How B2B Marketing Managers can create a successful content marketing strategy

Many overstretched B2B marketing professionals are being tasked with implementing a content marketing strategy but are unsure where to begin.  It all starts with a systematic understanding of your prospects’ information needs. Once you have this, it’s much easier to generate quality content quickly and speedily.

B2B firms across all industry sectors are recognising the importance of content marketing.  For many brand and product managers, it’s something of a new area – an additional task that has been added to their To-Do list. Understandably, they just want to know how to write content quickly and easily.

Whilst it’s possible to get to a stage where you can churn out quality content that gets results, time after time, you’ll need to develop a deep understanding of your customers first.

According to Peter O’Neill at Forrester, B2B firms are only finding content marketing useful for the lead nurturing stage of the sales process.  This may be because that’s where most content creation is currently targeted.  What Peter goes on to talk about is the tendency for many B2B organisations to remain internally focussed.  It’s a problem that many firms suffer from, particularly in larger organisations.  

It’s understandable that everyone within an organisation orients towards accelerating opportunities through the sales funnel.  However, for professional marketers to succeed, they have to become empathetic, look externally, and really understand what’s motivating prospects and customers.

An effective content marketing strategy will look at each stage of the buying cycle and prompt the creation of material that meets the information needs of the participants involved.  The buying cycle model may be broadly the same for each industry, but your company needs to develop content that’s unique, not only to counter competitor activity, but also to play to your strengths.

The sequence of steps involved in a typical B2B buying process might look like this, reading from left to right:

You need to understand, for each industry sector you target, who is involved at each stage and what they are looking for.  

So, for example, if you’re selling a software product that solves a problem in call centres, it’s likely that the first person involved will be responsible for operational management in some way.  In the “Need” stage, you should aim to understand not only what problems they are likely to be experiencing, but what the consequences of those pain points are.  

For the “Technical Requirements” stage, the operational manager may start to involve an IT decision maker. Between them, evidence suggests they will be looking for blogs and case studies that appear to align with their own problem, as well as articles and whitepapers on related trends.  By the time your prospect has advanced to the “Short-List Selection” stage, they may well have included department heads, budget holders, technical specialists and even someone from the procurement team in the process too.

This highlights the importance of understanding the different types of target audiences, or “Personas” you need to address.  Each will have different information needs at each separate stage in the buying process.  That’s not to say you need an individual item of content for each persona in each step; you just need to ensure their information needs are met at each point in the process.

You should take a structured approach.  Aim to create what amounts to a stakeholder matrix that identifies, by industry and by stage, the job description and title of each person involved, their information needs, and any known constraints, motivations or preferences.  You could start with a simple template like the one below and adapt it to suit your needs as you gather a more detailed understanding of your prospects.

To capture this information, you’ll need to gather input from Sales and Service Desk teams, personal interviews, research, as well as your own experience from testing and analytics.

This will identify who is involved and what information needs they have.  You can then use this as the basis of the brief to create unique and relevant content that aligns with the needs of your prospects.  It’s at this content crafting stage that you’ll need to interweave your key messages and competitive positioning.

Once you have this detailed level of understanding about your prospects/customers, you’ll be in a better position to generate a continuous stream of compelling content. And you should see dividends quickly.  Adam Sutton highlights in his blog an impressive example of a B2B firm that adopted a similar approach and increased lead volumes by 124%.

Having established some core content for each stage/persona, you’ll then be in a position to test different variants and discover how subtle changes to content will accelerate prospects along the buying cycle faster.

The challenge for marketing professionals is finding the time to dedicate to the task of content marketing and building-up the archive of content.  Brand and product managers not only have to administer the content marketing strategy, but the majority are also expected to create quality content too. Forrester indicates that 58% of B2B firms still generate their content using in-house resources. 

If you consider that it takes on average three hours to create an effective blog post, let alone a compelling article, the scale of the content creation challenge starts to become apparent.  What’s more, the time you make available for content marketing also has to compete with your normal day-to-day routine of meetings and interruptions.  

That’s why, with content marketing increasing in importance, it’s likely that many marketing and product managers will look to professional copywriters in the future to help them generate the content they need to succeed.  After all, it’s content that drives leads and ultimately sales orders, so getting it wrong could be a career inhibitor!

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Freelance copywriting and ghost blogging for overstretched marketing professionals

The content that will make a long term improvement to your online conversion rates

For many B2B and B2C firms, improving web traffic and online conversion rates is a key focus of attention. However, studies suggest that too much emphasis is placed on generating social media “likes” when more sustainable alternatives exist.  This post looks at some of the options.

Including some form of endorsement on your website can have a significant impact on web conversion rates.  If your customers are end-user consumers, then star rating widgets and mini reviews/feedback pages can be really important.  

Indeed, it has been said that 70% of consumers look at product reviews and site popularity before deciding to buy. So, if you’re a consumer oriented business, including social media icons on your site is a must, provided your site is popular.

If your audience is not prone to declaring its preferences, or you are a B2B businesses for example, evidence suggests it’s better not to show any social icons on your site at all. It’s argued that your conversion rate could actually suffer if you use social icons that have low participation scores (“likes”).

So, what else can you do if you’re a small business looking to increase web traffic and conversions?  One answer is to generate content such as product reviews, case studies and customer testimonials.  These are obviously time consuming to create but offer a more enduring benefit.  Here’s why they represent a better option than social icons for improving your conversion rates: 

1 The Story Factor:

Well written content is more akin to storytelling, and there is strong evidence to suggest that a good story can be highly persuasive in the sales process.

2 Crowd Support:

A carefully crafted review, case study or testimonial can make use of “crowd-power”.  By implying, positively rather than negatively, that peers are already acting on the information being presented, the reader feels more comfortable about acting (deciding to buy) themselves.

3 Flexibility:

Written content allows you to include supporting assets like images, videos and hero endorsements.  They can also be easily tailored to meet the information needs of different groups of people in the buying process.

All-in-all, B2B and B2C firms are better advised to focus on creating strong, powerful articles, reviews, case studies and customer testimonials rather than rely on chasing social “likes” to increase web traffic and conversions.

That’s not to say that social media doesn’t have a role to play.  Social platforms should be used to promote the availability of written content, along with SEO, PR, email and other traditional tactics.

The key success factor in all this concerns the quality of the copywriting involved.  Articles, case studies and testimonials need to be written in a way that really engages your target audience.  Each item of content must consistently highlight your competitive advantage, key messages, and provide a compelling call-to-action.

If you’re serious about improving your online performance, then these points are too important to ignore.  If you don’t have the time or skills in-house to write these articles and case studies, consider outsourcing the task to a professional.  You’ll see the benefit through improved web conversion rates!

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Freelance copywriting for small and medium sized businesses

Key tips to help you win more business from large enterprises

Understanding how decision makers in large companies decide on a short-list of candidate vendors can be a big advantage for a small or medium sized firm.  This article explains the content they find most valuable, how important they find social media, and even when they want to be contacted.  Your window of opportunity is just six days!

Large enterprises (LE) represent an attractive sales target for small and medium sized businesses.  A recent study by IDG looked at how IT decision makers in LE’s go about making purchasing decisions.  The findings offer small firms a real opportunity to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right proposition.

IDG asked 1025 decision makers what type of information they found most valuable when searching online to solve a problem or when looking for a new product or service.  Here’s what they found:

Articles, reviews and case studies came top of the list, with brochures and other content likely to be on your website not far behind.  So, content is king if you want to attract the interest of large enterprise buyers.

Interestingly, IDG also found that IT decision makers appear ready to be contacted by a prospective vendor after they have downloaded two or more items from a web site.  Not only that, but they would prefer to be contacted within six days of making an additional download.  

This represents a clear signal of interest that all firms will want to be aware of.  No doubt, as a small business owner, you will want to have this trigger embedded within your internal lead management process.  But how?

In truth, this is a real dilemma for many firms.  Unless you use some form of marketing automation system, you will need to “gate” or put a form in front of the download process.  The details on the form will identify who is downloading.  Consequently, using the form, you can track when a prospective buyer has downloaded more items from your website.  

However, expert opinion suggests that putting any form filling in front of a download will significantly reduce the number of people that actually go on to make the download.  Instead, they will find other web sites where access to articles and case studies are unencumbered.  You will effectively loose that prospect.

The answer is to do the following:

• Make your downloadable content free to access.
• Write your content in such a way that it compels serious prospects to complete a form linked within the content itself.

This will require a little creativity: perhaps a small promotion or access to a no-obligation ROI tool, etc.  The skill of the copywriter is the key ingredient.  Consider using a professional copywriter to create or edit your content if you don’t have these skills in-house.

How IT Decision Makers use Social Networks

The IDG study also identified the extent to which IT decision makers turned to social networks as part of their quest for information.  Not only do they use social platforms for networking and career enhancement, but many use them to discover, share and discuss technical information and seek answers to problems.

Linkedin was used by 72% of the IT decision makers surveyed, but the main purpose was for career progression.  When they wanted to find technical information, the top three platforms they turned to were:

• Twitter (59%)
• Google Plus (54%)
• Facebook (50%)

At least that was the case in May 2012 when the study was undertaken.  Interestingly, IDG also identified what decision makers claimed to use social media (including Linkedin) for.  Here’s what they found:

• 73% - to engage with a technical vendor
• 44% - to stay up to date with industry trends
• 38% - to find reviews and recommendations
• 35% - to find information to aid decision making

Clearly, if you are targeting IT decision makers, it’s important that you are visible on social media and that you can interlink content between your web site and social platforms.  As social media becomes more generally accepted, it’s likely that prospective buyers across all industries will use these platforms to find potential suppliers.  Some will use social platforms as much as they will use a Google search.  Indeed, having a presence on social media platforms is likely to improve your search engine ranking.

Many firms are not yet ready to fully embrace social media.  However, if you want to sell to large organisations, you need to ensure that your sales and marketing content is organised and freely available for when prospects come looking.  Having professionally written articles, case studies, blogs and product literature will go a long way in positively influencing your prospects and help to get your business on the short list.

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Freelance business copywriting and blog ghost writing for SMEs

How firms are using blogs to develop a steady stream of quality sales leads, month after month

Most leads generated from corporate blogs each month come from old blog posts.  This archive of blogs helps firms to build a regular, consistent level of sales leads that are of high quality and very cost effective.  Businesses new to blogging just have to invest in building up their library of blog material in order to achieve the same benefits.

The corporate blog is having a transformational impact on the lead generation process of many companies.  Research has already shown that sales leads from blogs and social media are 60% cheaper to generate than those from sources like telemarketing and trade shows.

Evidence now exists suggesting that corporate blogs can be very effective in providing a consistent level of high quality leads over a prolonged period of time.  A sample of blog-using organisations has revealed some impressive observations:

This presents firms with a tremendous opportunity to transform their lead generation process for the better.  By investing in good quality content that’s relevant to your audience, you can start to even out the peaks and troughs in lead generation that are so often experienced by sales teams across the country.  Furthermore, this steady stream of leads can be produced at half the cost than has traditionally been the case. 

Generating leads from blogs takes time.  You need to start today

With the bulk of blog leads coming from old posts, it’s important to build up a library of blog material.  Clearly, this takes time and money.  It has been estimated that it takes, on average, three hours to write a single blog post, so you need to have the resources available to devote to blog creation.  If your existing headcount doesn’t have the bandwidth or skill set required, consider outsourcing the task to an external copywriter.

Make sure you create blog posts that are of high quality, and relevant to your customers.  This is not the place for your sales pitch.  Instead, you should inform how products and services like yours solve problems.  Additionally, you could comment on the implications of a new item of industry news, or perhaps illustrate how your customer could save money or improve efficiency by following certain guidelines or actions.

You could use your existing marketing content as the basis for creating blog posts.  By writing a post that focuses on one of the benefits of a product, you can then include a link within the post that goes to your website where your sales brochure can be downloaded.  That’s how your web traffic can increase.  If you have created your landing pages appropriately, you’ll also be able to drive visitors to other pages on your site and ask for readers to follow you on Twitter and other social media platforms.

It’s this interconnected capability of digital media like blogging, social media and the web, that’s transforming lead generation strategies.  New digital channels like these are moving away from being seen as experimental.  Indeed, for many industries, digital lead generation techniques are now viewed as mainstream.  

For firms yet to fully embrace corporate blogging, the key is to start building up that archive of blog material as soon as possible.  Then start promoting on your website as well as on Twitter and social media platforms.  Collectively, as your library of blog posts increases, you should see a corresponding increase in the volume of quality sales leads, month after month.

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Freelance copywriting and blog ghost writing for SMEs

How SMEs can improve success rates selling to large enterprises

Understanding the information that prospective buyers look for at each stage of the buying cycle can help firms correctly structure their content creation strategies. SMEs can now plan the content required that will help them win margin rich orders from large enterprises.

Respected publisher IDG undertook some analysis of the way IT decision makers in large enterprises used the web when they wanted to buy new products and services.  That analysis offers some really valuable insights into the way large enterprises buy in general.  It means you can now organise your sales and marketing content in a way that will attract and engage these buyers and influencers.  

In short, by following a few simple guidelines, you can significantly improve your chances of making sales to firms with larger than average cheque books!

The IDG analysis tracked the information decision makers looked for at each stage of the buying cycle.  The cycle as such is usually depicted as a five step sequential process. It starts with identification of the problem, moves on to evaluation and selection, until a purchase decision is reached.  Typically, the process looks like this:

IDG tracked 1025 decision makers to identify what materials they looked for in each buying stage.  The findings suggest that some content can be used across a number of different stages.  

This means you don’t need to create lots of articles, whitepapers and case studies to address each individual stage, at least not to begin with.  Instead, just ensure that the content you do create serves the information needs of your web visitors at each stage of the buying cycle.  Here’s a summary of what prospects are looking for based upon the IDG analysis:

Need:

• Articles and whitepapers on trends, strategies and different technologies
• Case studies and blogs of real examples.

Your prospects are looking to relate their own situation to one that might have been experienced by someone else. By comparing symptoms, your prospect goes through a sense-making exercise – trying to determine if his/her problem is a common one, whether there is an easy solution or if their situation is something more complex and unique.  At the end of this stage, prospects will have defined the nature of the business problem/need.

Technical requirements:

Having rationalised the problem/need, if your prospect is serious about resolving the problem, their attention will turn to understanding the different options available for a fix.  They will be looking for:

• “How to…” content
• Relevant whitepapers, articles and blogs
• Case studies and interviews with firms that have had similar problems.

Prospects will be looking to develop a deeper understanding of the problem, options and related consequences.  In this stage, they will begin formulating a short list of the different solutions that seem worth exploring in more detail.

Evaluation:

Each option identified will be quickly assessed for suitability.  Those felt to be most appropriate to your prospect’s specific circumstances will be investigated further.  They will search for:

• Product tests and reviews as well as industry news coverage
• Product demonstrations and literature
• “How to” content, whitepapers, articles, case studies and blogs
• Expert assessments
• Buyers guides and peer comment

Prospects will mentally start drawing-up a short list of preferred solutions.  The experience in gathering and reading through literature will influence which vendors are likely to be shortlisted for the next stage.

Short-list selection:

At this point in the process, decision makers are starting to take a more formal approach to information capture. Buyers look for:

• Product tests and reviews
• Product descriptions and technical details
• Expert research, reviews and interviews
• Supporting independent technical and industry commentary
• Buyers guides

Prospects are now building an objective comparison of options and identification of risks.  Price and other associated costs will come into play as preliminary business cases are formulated.

Recommend and decide:

Prospects are now looking to finalise a robust business case that suits their needs.  Bias may have already been introduced based on the experiences with candidate vendor web sites and downloadable materials.  They will be looking for:

• ROI tools
• Supporting case studies and testimonials
• Expert commentary
• Up to date product descriptions, roadmaps and technical information
• Most recent product tests and reviews
• Articles and whitepapers about future trends

Prospects at this stage are looking to justify the investment they want to make to internal stakeholders.  Given that personal reputations can be affected if large investments go wrong, prospects are looking to include content that is highly trustworthy and reliable, or offers a low risk exit option.

What comes out of this analysis is the need for you to create high quality, relevant content that meets the needs of buyers at each stage of the purchase process.  You can directly influence the creation of articles, whitepapers, case studies, blogs, ROI tools and product literature.  Just be sure that each item addresses the needs of prospective buyers wherever they are in the buying process.  Your ability to influence review writers and experts is a much harder task, and often requires a large dose of luck!

Given this knowledge, you should be able to review your sales and marketing literature and make plans to re-align existing content to each stage of the buying cycle.  You need to identify any gaps in your library and get them filled with suitable content.  Make this a priority for your marketing team or outsource the task to a professional copywriter.

The trick then is to test and keep the content up to date.  Testing is important as you’ll want to ensure that each item of content created is as effective as it can be in winning new business.  Simple A/B testing over time will help you to ensure this is the case.  

Keeping content refreshed is important too.  You need to continually look at what competitors are producing and ensure your content minimises weaknesses whilst playing to your strengths.  Good copywriting will again be a key ingredient in bringing you success.

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Freelance copywriting and ghost blog writing tailored to SMEs

How you can generate an on-going stream of customer testimonials and win more business

Firms know that good customer endorsements can help to close orders.  The problem for many firms is how to create really powerful case studies, time after time.  By taking a simple, structured, approach to the process, you can create a regular stream of testimonials that will help you accelerate sales opportunities and improve conversion rates.

Whilst customer testimonials can close deals, finding good ones on a regular basis is often a problem.  You need a regular stream of new endorsements and case studies to keep moving forward. Many “age” and can give out the wrong perception if used too often or for too long.

Here’s a framework you can use to create a structured approach to generate an on-going flow of customer endorsements and testimonials.  It identifies activities that can be rich sources of candidates to help promote your business.

Let’s take a brief look at each source.

Customer Service

How you engage and handle inbound customer contacts sets the tone of the relationship from the outset.  Customer experience really is the first, and easiest, source for capturing positive comments about your business.  Resolving enquiries and solving problems will have customers warming towards you.  Ask customers if they would be prepared to let you feature their query within your FAQ facilities.  

Then use social media to post about the query and publicly thank your customer for their support in letting them be quoted.  The social publicity will reinforce positive emotions towards your business.  Then consider motivating your customer service team to suggest candidates for case studies each week.  We’ll talk more about this in a moment.

End-User Training

This source obviously only works if you have a relevant product or service.  Many products can provide a multiplicity of benefits but users need to become experts in order to reap the rewards.  

Investing time to train and support a few key users until they reach expert status, will result in a really useful source of on-going potential endorsements:

• By becoming experts, these users acquire a rare skill set that is valuable within the firm in which they work.  
• They will be sought-out by their colleagues which fuels their internal expert status.
• As experts, they are able to promote your product / service deeper into the organisation.  This protects their own position, helps your customer organisation, and widens the body of support in favour of your offering.

Maintaining a regular dialogue with these experts will provide you with many opportunities to identify how your product is adding greater value and so become an ideal source of future endorsements, case studies, and other testimonial stories.

User Forums:

This too is an option that may only be suitable for certain types of product or service.  Forums can be closed, private or restricted in nature or open to all.  Like any discussion group, you will need to invest time to moderate and engage. However, in doing so, you’ll have the opportunity to identify what customers like most about your offering. You may even be able to capture customer quotes that you can use in marketing material to support your competitive advantage.

You’ll also hear directly about customer dislikes, giving you the opportunity to respond.  It’s better to manage any negative trends as they emerge rather than let them get out of control.  Often, once customers understand why a feature is the way it is, many users accept it and so it becomes less of an issue.  

More to the point, you can use this forum to ask for ideas on what customers would like to see on the development roadmap – setting-up future orders!  Again, by monitoring user forums, you’ll be able to identify customers that you can approach separately as a candidate for a testimonial.

Case Studies:

This needs to be an on-going sales and marketing activity.  The stream of candidates should be structured rather than ad hoc.  Sales teams should be obliged to provide at least one candidate name each quarter which can supplement the feeds from the sources mentioned above.  

A dedicated resource should be assigned to the task of project managing and implementing the production of all case studies and testimonials.  This will help to ensure consistency and high standards throughout the process.  This is often outsourced but many firms have an in-house resource with this task specifically defined in the job description.  

Don’t forget to plan for presenting case studies using the full range of media; PR, video, web articles, blogs as well as the one-off case study PDF itself. 

Product Development:

This is where the most powerful testimonials are often created.  It requires identifying customers that you can work with to build and test prototypes of new products or services.  Obviously, it needs excellent stakeholder management.  Customers need to expect that the first few iterations will be flawed.  It’s their experience of working with you to resolve all the niggles that generates a really successful testimonial.  

The customer contacts involved become personally and emotionally involved in the process.  It’s this bond that helps lead to true advocacy.  Capturing the whole process in an extended case study is just one way to portray the experience.  The same content can then be used during speaker opportunities at events as well as promoting using the usual channels like PR, blogs, etc. 

Generating testimonials does take time and effort but the costs involved will be recovered many times over in helping to accelerate existing opportunities and closing more business.  The bottom line benefits are too many to risk leaving as an ad hoc process.  Make a point of following a simple structured approach to the process of creating testimonials and reap the rewards from additional business.

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Freelance copywriting for articles, case studies and business blogs.

Reduce the cost of your sales leads and gain an extra three hours per week

Digital marketing techniques are having a profound impact on small business performance.  Now you can publish blogs that generate new sales leads at a lower cost per lead than traditional techniques, and free-up more time to run your business.


Small businesses are responding to the challenging economic climate by consciously reviewing the techniques they use to generate new business.  The trend is away from traditional techniques like exhibitions and outbound calling and more towards blogging and social media.  What’s more, this change appears to be having a positive impact on profit margins too!

Savings of up to 60%
Research published by Hubspot in 2012 reveals small firms are reallocating up to 21% of their marketing budget towards blogging and social media.  These firms are finding that digital techniques can generate new business at a lower cost per lead.  Some 52% of respondents felt blogs produced leads at a lower cost than traditional techniques whilst 45% claimed the same for social media.

Aligning blogs and social media to “Inbound” marketing, and tactics such as trade shows and telemarketing to “Outbound” marketing, Hubspot calculated the average cost per lead based on respondent input.  

They found that the average outbound cost per lead came to $346 whereas the value for inbound leads was $135 – a massive 60% difference!  Given the current economic environment, it’s no wonder small firms are re-allocating marketing budget towards blogging and social media.

Hubspot also asked respondents to rank blogging and the main social media channels in order of lead generation importance.  

All channels scored 60% or more in terms of their usefulness in generating new leads.  Even more revealing was that 25% said blogging was “critical” in terms of importance and a further 34% ranked blogging as “important” as shown in the diagram below.

Chart 1: Importance of blogging and social media to new lead generation activities:

The hidden costs of social media and blogs
Whilst digital techniques are proving to be more cost effective than traditional lead generation methods, they still have associated costs that can have a big impact on small business performance.

The sheer time and effort required to maintain a social media presence or create a quality blog is proving too much for many small business owners.  Research elsewhere indicates that it takes three or more hours to create a single blog post.  If you wanted to create and publish, say, three posts a week, you’d need to find an extra day on top of your already busy schedule.

You may be like a number of small business owners who want to spend less time managing social media and blogging; a third of SME’s feel this way.  Understandably, you need to devote more time to running your business.  However, if you stop publishing blogs you’ll be back to relying on traditional lead generation techniques and the consequent impact on your bottom line. 


The opportunity cost of your time
As the owner of a small business you’ll be stretched trying to cover all the different aspects of your business.  This makes you best qualified to act as thought leader.  You’ll also be ideally placed to interpret an item of industry news and highlight the implications for your audience.
  
However, if you don’t enjoy writing or don’t feel you have the right style or approach, you will end up spending longer than is necessary on the task of blog writing; that’s wasted time that could be invested more productively elsewhere in your business. 

What’s more, the material you publish is going to directly impact how your business brand is perceived by existing customers and prospects alike.  The content has to be relevant and engaging, yet still include a subtle call-to-action. Plus, your audience will view typos and mistakes as badly as those found in a glossy sales brochure; blogging and social media for businesses demands higher standards than for personal use.

Unless you enjoy writing and creating charts, graphs, etc., you may be better off handing the task over to someone in your business able to focus fully on the job, or outsource the task to a professional.  You’ll then be able to stay in control of the message by reviewing and influencing content before it’s published. 

If you were to allocate the task of publishing just one blog post a week to someone else, not only would you be generating leads at a lower cost than traditional methods, but you would have an extra three hours a week to devote to running other parts of your business!


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Ghost blog writing and outsourced marketing for small businesses