Content That Converts: How to Build a Profitable and Predictable B2B Content Marketing Strategy

by Laura Hanly

Customers want to know who they’re dealing with, so let them know! Tell your story, highlight your team, and share your successes. Give your customers a sense of who you are, how they can relate to you and why you’ll be more fun (or effective, or fast) to work with than anyone else.

Ultimately, if you understand your audience and your offer, the messaging will fa...

Business is about people and your relationship with them. Clear communication is the most important skill you can develop to make the relationship successful.

1.Audit your most recent content (say, from the last two weeks), including all emails, blog content, social media content, press releases, and anything else you regularly publish, and create a list of consistencies and inconsistencies that emerge from comparing it all. 2.What are the themes that have emerged from this comparison? Do you think customers are getting the right message from all the content coming out of your business? 3.What kind of language does your primary customer use? What’s their style of communication, and what’s their vocabulary? Is it technical or emotive? Formal or relaxed? 4.Compare the language from your content audit with the language profile of your primary customer. Do they match up? If not, what needs to change in your

messaging to mirror the language your customers use, to create the rapport you need in your communications? If it does match up, is there anything you can improve on further?

Creating Your Recurring Content

Recurring content (such as blogging, podcasting, YouTube videos) is what comes to mind for most people when they think about content marketing. Unfortunately, many people confuse ‘publishing’ with ‘marketing’ and they end up getting completely stuck as result.

You have to make sales offers for people to convert, no matter what kind of marketing you are doing, and content is no different. You cannot avoid this and expect any marketing to work for you. Sales bring in the money, not marketing. Marketing just gets people to pay attention, so that you can offer them the sale. So: to create recurring content that will capture the attention of your market, and then leverage that attention into real sales conversions, you need to create a conversion

opportunity. In this chapter that we’re going to go deep into how you do that.

High quality front-end content (either blogs, podcasts, videos or social media updates •A front-end opt-in offer (like an email course, industry report, cheat sheet) •An email onboarding sequence •An initial sales offer •A follow-up sequence •More sales offers

Choose Your Front-End Content Themes

Think about what you want to be known for, what your unique sales proposition is, and what your customers want from you. Boil all that down into three or four broad themes that you can come back to over and over again from different perspectives. For example, if you have a business operations consultancy, your key themes might be… •How to increase throughput in production facilities •How to manage staff •How to scale operations without breaking them •How to deal with external partners

post is scheduled for distribution. This includes email distribution to your mailing list, social media scheduling, sharing with the influencers in your market, adding to forums, sending to specific contacts etc.

Your content doesn’t have to be long, it doesn’t have to have glossy post-production or be overly complicated. It does need to be interesting and useful, and it does have to be engaging and visible.

Build An Opt-In Offer

Thanks to our intensely information-rich modern lifestyle, it’s harder than ever to judge what’s right and useful. People are desperate for transparency and trust in their relationships, and that goes double for the businesses they deal with.

Make sure the asset is delivered to them immediately, via a thank-you page and/or a confirmation email.

Build an Onboarding Sequence

If you are in a highly competitive industry, and have a complex solution, then you probably need a more in-depth sequence than a business that has little competition or a simple offer.

Email one: Welcome! We’re glad you’ve joined us. Here is the thing you opted in for, and here are few more resources to

get you started, with a bit of info about us. •Email two: Common problems in the industry, and how some of our customers (who are just like you) have overcome them. •Email three: Bonus tips to deal with difficult industry things •Email four: What we do and why it’s going to be great for you •Email five: Answer FAQs in depth. PS — want to get on a call / book a demo / join a webinar? •Email six: Customer success stories and testimonials •Email seven: Book in your freecall / demo / webinar today: benefit, benefit, benefit, testimonial •Email eight: We noticed you haven’t booked your free thing yet — was it something we said?

make sure you’re positioning the subscriber to engage.

Invite them to a free webinar.

Offer them a free demo.

Invite them to a free call.

Before getting on the phone with anyone, make sure they have as much information as they need, and let them know that you encourage a critical approach in your customers, that you only want to work with people who take their business seriously, and that you’re not going to put a hard sell on them.

Your offer should be presented as a story they can see themselves taking an active part in, and you yourself should be presented as a narrator they trust and find relatable.

Make Sales Offers

Being ‘uncovered’ as a fraud •Being rejected •Being found lacking in either their qualifications or what they’re offering •Being perceived as pushy, rude, or mercenary •Being unable to deliver what they are offering

they’re all rooted in the fundamental human need to be accepted by your tribe.

‘here’s what I’ve got, here’s what it will do for you, and here’s how to get it.’

Practice the language that works best to communicate all the benefits of the offer, and practice how to overcome objections by encouraging your partner to come up with as many as they can, based on what you’ve already discussed.

(The only time you should ever promise not to sell during an interaction is when you need something from the prospect other than the sale, like early market feedback. Otherwise, avoid making promises that will prevent you making money.)

make them understand that you really care about their situation and helping them to find the right solution.

The Money Is In The Follow-Up

“Here’s the offer I made you last time. Here’s the way I can make it even better for you, so you can stop wasting time and start seeing the progress you need: [insert offer here of a discount, done-for-you element, additional features, bonuses etc].”

great effect at this stage is inviting them to get back on the

phone with you and to bring their business partner along for the conversation. This way, you can answer any more questions, speak directly to the problems they’ve already shared with you, reinforce why you’re a great fit for their business, and...

Until someone specifically says, “No. I don’t want what you’re offering, and I don’t want to talk ...

People take time to make buying decisions.

Here’s the checklist to use every time you want to create powerful, high-converting, profitable content: •Make your content timely and actionable. Timely doesn’t always have to mean that it’s about some current news event (though you should always aim to capitalize on those events): it can be timely for where customers are at in the buying cycle, it can be seasonal, or it can be evergreen and always relevant. •Make the content very valuable. It should present educational, fresh information that the customer is not going to get elsewhere. Even if it’s not new material, make sure you present

it with a new angle or a better way of looking at it. Every piece of content you produce should give the customer something new to think about or act on, and set you apart from the competition as a knowledgeable, trustworthy authority. •Keep the message focused on the customer. It’s not about you – it’s always about them. Focus on what fears or problems they need to overcome, what information they need to succeed, and the steps they can take to get there. Frame everything, even if it’s about you or your products, in terms of what it will do for them. •Stick to a single message for each piece of content. In the $10,000 Case Study example earlier in the book, the message was ‘Supplement stuffing is bad, because consumers have a right to know what they’re getting’. This is a simple, focused message, whereas ‘Supplement stuffing is bad because consumers have a right to know what they’re getting, corporations are evil… buy our supplements instead’ would have created confusion about the purpose of the post and would have

prevented people from taking the desired action – which was voting with their wallets. •Don’t go for the hard sell. Most people are not going to buy from you the first time they come across your business – they don’t know you or trust you yet (you can think of it like dating… you wouldn’t marry someone you’ve only been on one date with. I hope). It’s much more effective in this situation to use the soft sell approach. Let people know where they can find your products if they’re interested, and leave it at that. This strategy is surprisingly powerful (as that $10,000 week proved). •Promote, promote, promote! If you don’t promote your content, you may as well not make it at all. People need to see it where they are at: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, their inbox, their podcast updates… put it EVERYWHERE. And don’t just do it once. Create a promotional calendar so that your content gets bumped regularly in slightly different ways to make sure it’s reaching new audiences all the time. You can use a similar spreadsheet to the one you use to plan your quarterly content, adjusted to focus on the message to be shared across each platform for each post. •Make sure you’re collecting...

Creating Your Content Assets

Sharing your expertise in a generous, transparent way like this is a powerful way to get your business in front of big clients who could change the game for you.

people are curious about the details, but they really just want the result without having to do the work themselves.

Ecommerce companies, for example, are generally better served by recurring content. Businesses with low price-point products also do better with recurring content

But if your business sells high-ticket items or services, then a content asset is a powerful demonstration of authority and credibility.

The people who are willing to read a book about your solution are often going to be the same people who are willing to pay an expert to take care of it for them — when

Step One: Clarify Your Concept