#general
Thread
> "Content is a long-term investment."
I've heard it said (and said it myself) hundreds of times. And I think it's true. But what can SaaS companies do to decrease the time between that investment and the payoff?
• Accelerate their creation and publishing pace?
• Do more repurposing of content?
• Publish few posts, but try to make them incredible?
• Over-index on distribution?
I've been thinking about these questions lately as I consider the right structure and offer for my business. There's a probably a sense where the "right" answer involves all (or most) of the above...but what say you? I'd love to hear some expert takes.
@Jakub Rudnik @Brendan Hufford I feel like you two might have some interesting thoughts on this given what I've seen you post on LI in the past. Care to chime in?
Half of that thinking is people incentivized to not own how it does something for the business.
Other half of that thinking is, like you said, true.
The thing that’s missing is purpose.
If it has no purpose…
more of it does nothing.
And that’s a lot of what we see out there.
Podcast that sucks turned into a million clips, and a blog and emails and all this other stuff.
Then none of it does… anything.
I wonder if “how do we decrease the time to ROI” is the right question to be asking.
What's the right question @Brendan Hufford?
For some personal context, my small team and I have been writing blog posts for SaaS CX companies for years. And while I think we write good stuff, that's all we've been—the writers. I'm trying to think through things like positioning, how we create value (and can bring more of it), and how to measure that value.
Just minor stuff, really.
I think it depends on a variety of things especially the type of content.
Think TOF—probably yes.
For BOF, no—unless you’re bad at talking about how the product or service benefits your consumers.
In general I would say yes, because if you stop creating content it’ll get stale. You have to repurpose, share new insights, and remain a thought leader, etc…
Isn’t this part of the greater “demand gen versus demand creation” conversation?
The right question perhaps is: how do we strike the right balance between demand gen and demand creation given the following variables:
-Cash flow
-Talent resources
-Budget
-Market cycle
-Market trends
-Audience
I think a lot of content people are great creators, but not great distributors.
The strategy is often: Publish > Wait for search engines
SEO is one distribution channel. How can you leverage others at scale?
Here's a random example: What if you interviewed the top 10 experts in your industry and asked them what they'd do in the same hypothetical situation (that your buyers are likely experiencing)...
Then you compile those interviews into a few different formats (summit, ebook, podcast, whatever) and incentivize the thought leaders to share with their audiences. Maybe give them a 10% kickback on any deal that closes.
The increase in distribution and ROI gets accelerated when you put as much effort into distribution as you do in to actual quality content creation.
Content is indeed a long-term investment, but you can definitely see short-term gains depending on what "content" means at your org. Depending on your category and the nature of your product, the top-of-funnel content might also be super interesting for use at the bottom of the funnel, or even for existing customers.
The long-term thing is, of course, pretty true for SEO content relying primarily on organic search traffic, but good content that's effectively distributed externally and internally (to empower everyone on your sales and marketing teams) becomes the fuel for full-funnel motions. In terms of ROI, that's:
• Shorter deal cycles
• Increased conversion rates (look at the influence of content mid- and down-funnel, not just at the top)
• Cheaper cost per MQL for paid campaigns
• Again, depending on your category and the nature of your content, you can impact customer retention or even product usage and feature adoption.