For all the great business growth that content can enable, many content marketing problems are super-common and endemic to IaaS (infrastructure), SaaS (software), and FinTech companies.
If you've ever heard the expressions "content is king" or "without content, the Internet would be empty," you know just how powerful and important content can be for attracting the right people, in the right places, at the right time, and for the right reasons.
Here are eight content marketing problems and mistakes that you need to avoid (like the plague):
1) Hiring a content marketing expert after the website is designed/redesigned.
When a product expert, UI UX designer, or CMS developer creates the website strategy in a vacuum, rather than involving a content strategist focused on buyer personas, buyer's journey stages, jobs to be done, and conversion goals, the website typically only caters to those in the final ~30% of their buyer's journey and comes across as tone-deaf to most prospects in the first 70% of the research process.
2) A blog post is finished when you click the schedule or publish button.
Unless you have the luxury of blogging for an IaaS, SaaS, or FinTech website that already has massive cross-channel reach, content marketers should plan on spending at least as much time promoting a blog post as they did writing the blog posts.
These promotional efforts may include internal linking, external linking (outreach), sharing on various social media channels, and including blog posts in email nurturing workflows and newsletters. Sometimes, promoting a blog post using paid search and paid social channels even makes sense.
3) A blog post should read like a news release or sales pitch.
Nothing is further from reality. Most blogging investments should focus on the awareness stage of the buyer's journey when an anonymous website visitor is trying to solve a problem or achieve a goal.
At this stage, the person could care less about how newsworthy your company is or how wonderful your IaaS, SaaS, or FinTech products are. That only happens later on in the decision stage of the buyer's journey.
While there can be a limited use case for including some news and product announcements on your blog, most blog content should be helpful, educational advice demonstrating your thought leadership.
You're striving for the blog post to cause the visitor to have a deep, visceral emotional reaction similar to, "Wow! This blog post is amazing. I've been looking for a resource like this for hours, days, and weeks. Who the heck wrote this? And what else does this person have to say?"
4) Webinars should be planned and evaluated like late-night infomercials.
Big-time false!
Webinars you create and host for one or more target buyer personas should educate and build trust.
Launching high-pressure, cheesy sales pitches will almost certainly lose credibility and alienate your webinar attendees.
While webinars will almost always have a call to action (CTA) to help you evaluate the success and monitor your average session time. If the typical attendee attended 53 minutes of your one-hour webinar, you're likely delivering great value.
Alternatively, if half the audience left ten minutes in because of a high-pressure sales pitch, you must return to the drawing board.
5) Every website page is a landing page capable of receiving expensive traffic from paid search and paid social.
Friends don't let friends invest in pay-per-click advertising until they have premium content and offers that promote well-optimized conversion paths (call to action, form, landing page, and thank you page).
While the phrase "landing page" can be used in different contexts, a landing page's primary job is to convert an anonymous website visitor into a known lead for most content marketing campaigns.
To do so, you need to engage in a proportional value exchange. In a B2B context, your prospect essentially trades their business card information for the content asset on the other side of the landing page,
Typically a downloadable eBook, a live or on-demand webinar, a free consultation, or something similar.
6) You can be successful in SEO, social, and email without content.
In today's hyper-competitive global marketplace, where many niches are already incredibly saturated with great content, you cannot win visibility battles on search, social, or email unless you have remarkable, highly relevant content.
What determines relevance? Relevancy is usually about creating content for the intersection of a buyer persona and a buyer's journey stage. The better you do at creating content offers for each of your core buyer personas and buyer's journey stages, the more successful your lead generation and lead nurturing campaigns will be.
7) Marketing teams can and should create content by themselves.
The most effective content marketers lean heavily into input from internal and external subject matter experts.
Wondering where to start with your content strategy? Talk with sales and customer success team members to learn what questions they find themselves answering repeatedly. Then interview customers and prospects to learn about their goals, plans, challenges, and what they crave most from a company like yours.
8) Freelancer writers can create great content with zero input from your company.
To set your IaaS, Saas, or FinTech company up for success with your content marketing investments, make sure you provide your freelance writers with
- Buyer personas
- Buyer's journey stage mapping
- Content briefs that outline conversion goals
You'll also do way better if you can provide your freelancer writers with raw source materials from internal subject experts (for example, webinars or podcast recordings).
And hire freelancer writers used to create content to support content marketing or inbound marketing campaigns.
What's the biggest content marketing mistake you see being made at IaaS, SaaS, and fintech companies? Let me know in the comments section below.
And if you're serious about using content marketing to power growth at your SaaS, FinTech, or IaaS company, enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.
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