I have a secret to tell you.
You might want to sit down. Some of you are going to feel like your entire life is a lie when I tell you this secret.
I’m sorry to do that to you, but we can talk it through and get past it.
You don’t need to do more content marketing.
I know, I know.
It goes against what every content marketing expert says.
Heck, it goes against everything we’ve done at Spin Sucks.
I am the QUEEN of content and have worked tirelessly for years—more than 10 years—to build brand cachet and thought leadership and awareness so we can reach our eight-figure goals in the business.
But, as it turns out, the dirty little secret is NONE of those things have sold for us.
It’s often quite shocking.
I rested on our content laurels for far too long. It’s comfortable for me and I enjoy doing it.
But it has not allowed us to grow and scale as I would like.
And now I’m here to tell you don’t need to keep up with it all.
#AllTheThings
Every content expert out there will disagree with me.
They’ll tell you you need:
- A book or two ✔️
- International speaking gigs ✔️
- First page Google results for all of your priority keywords ✔️
- A membership community ✔️
- A big presence on all of the social networks, particularly Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram ✔️
- Video—lots and lots of video ✔️
- A podcast ✔️
- eBooks and other small items for people to buy ✔️
- Multiple online courses ✔️
- A certification created with your professional organization ✔️
That’s all you need! With all of this, you will succeed.
Or will you?
You Need Just One Piece of Content
As it turns out, not so much.
It’s all great for awareness and building thought leadership and even crafting the ever elusive brand cachet—and those things count for something, for sure.
But it does not work in tandem with measurable business goals.
This is “cross your fingers” marketing.
To take control of your marketing, don’t need a blog, a podcast, or tons of content.
All you need? Lead magnets.
For instance, we have a client who has a 95-page eBook (because, like us, they thought they needed ALL THE CONTENT).
What they’ve found is it’s way too much information, particularly when someone is just learning about them or wants to learn more.
So, rather than send out the gigantic eBook, they have taken pieces of it and delivered that instead.
Voila! Easy lead magnets.
Lead Magnets
To generate leads, you have to have lead magnets, a landing page, and a traffic source.
To create lead magnets, you should do the following:
- Choose one specific segment. It can be based on title (chief marketing officers or chief of corporate communications), industry (food, fashion, SaaS, manufacturing, whatever you specialize in), or specialty (media relations, crisis communications, reputation management).
- Identify one specific problem. It can be the question prospects ask you in meetings nearly every time, the questions your sales team needs your help creating content around, or something specific to a communications program.
- Identify one specific solution. What is it that you do better than anyone else? What solutions do you go back to time and again for your clients? How does your organization win new customers? Choose one of those solutions and go with that.
Then you will take your problem and solution that you’ve created for your one segment and create the content.
It should be nothing larger than a toolkit or a resource list.
For example, a list of blog post ideas works really well if your audience is bloggers.
Don’t make it more complicated than that. Your goal is to make it as easy as possible for your prospects to actually read, watch, or listen to the content.
A 95-page eBook is too overwhelming so start very, very small. #ALLTHETHINGS is too overwhelming. Resist the temptation.
Landing Pages
Landing pages, for most of you, aren’t going to be anything new.
If you don’t already have content behind a landing page, you’re going to want to make that a priority.
If your site is on WordPress, you can use Unbounce, OptimizePress, or LeadPages (which is what we use).
All three are fairly inexpensive and can be installed with a plugin.
No need for a designer…any old communications professional can do it.
There are two things you want to be sure are included in your landing page:
- Contact information and one quick question that allows you to segment; and
- Tell people what they are going to get (Hint: This is your lead magnets).
In the second part, be very specific. You have this problem? This content will help you solve it.
Traffic Sources
There are two parts to using traffic sources to distribute your content and bring more qualified leads to your site.
The first is what’s called a content upgrade.
Occasionally you’ll see that in the middle of a blog post. It’ll say, “want more?” and drive you to a landing page to download more in-depth content (cough, your lead magnets, cough).
So, go into your analytics and sort by highest traffic posts.
You can add content upgrades to those.
The second part of distributing your content is to test some advertising.
We prefer Facebook advertising because it’s cost-efficient and it’s highly targeted. Even for B2B. I would start there.
You can always do LinkedIn, but it’s more expensive and doesn’t work as well (right now).
Putting It All Together
We have a one page quarterly plan that we use with clients. I’ll use that as an example.
The actual template is going to be my lead magnet and I’ll write a blog post that describes what it is and how to use it.
For my target audience, I’ll choose entrepreneurs and agency owners.
The problem I am solving for you is making it super, duper easy to plan for your quarter and hold yourself accountable to results.
I’m going to put that bad boy behind a landing page that I build in LeadPages (as easy as creating a blog post).
The traffic sources I’m going to use are:
- Our social networks;
- Our monthly newsletter; and
- Some sponsored content on Facebook.
Now I have to create only one piece of content and one landing page—and suddenly we start generating qualified leads.
The kind that matter when I look at the ROI of time against results.
As a business owner, that makes me very, very happy…and I’ve also saved a significant amount of time because I no longer have to produce #ALLTHETHINGS.
What do you think?