My Content Was a Dud Until I Cracked This Code

I've been working with hypergrowth startups for nearly 7 years. When I started, I was the sole marketer in the region, responsible for everything from content marketing to demand generation and performance marketing. I vividly remember diving headfirst into content without a clear plan, pumping out blog posts like there was no tomorrow. I was chasing clicks, and hoping something would stick. But, let's be real—it rarely works that way.

I guess there were 2 reasons it wasn't working:-

1. There was no strategy. It was like building a house without a blueprint and ending up with a wonky structure that's more likely to collapse than stand tall.
2. My blogs/stories were flat. I was picking up trends, focusing on the problem, and providing a solution, without having a character. A good story always starts with a character, just like marketing starts with a customer. In the absence of a character, your stories end up resonating with absolutely no one, let alone your target audience.

After a lot of trial and error, countless articles, and working with some excellent content agencies, I finally figured out how to create content that truly connects, engages, and converts. Now, I'm ready to share my key ingredients for putting down a successful content marketing strategy.

1. Define your ICPs and tailor your content to meet their needs

As content creators, we pour our heart and soul into producing the best possible material for our audience. From informative blog posts to entertaining videos, we strive to create content that resonates with our viewers and builds a loyal following. However, no matter how great our content is, if we're not distributing it to the right people, it's not going to have the impact we want. This is where understanding our target audience comes in. By getting to know our viewers and their preferences, we can tailor our content distribution strategies to reach them more effectively.

For example, at Thunes, we cater to more than one ICP. We target banks, MTOs, PSPs, and marketplaces, etc. and each one of them has its own unique needs and challenges. It's important to dig deeper into each of these ICPs, understand their pain points, and create content that addresses their issues. This targeted approach ensures your content resonates with the right people. The next step is to identify where they are in their buying journey and who is on their buying committee, then tailor content to target different people involved in that buying journey.

2. B2B Content Planning and Creation: 5 Opportunities to Consider

1. SEO: You want to create content that answers questions that your audience would have to decide whether they should be buying your product.
2. Sales Enablement Content: will allow you to facilitate and nurture a relationship & a dialog with a prospect once they've demonstrated interest in your product or offer. Arming yourself and your sales team with these one-pagers, pitch decks, tutorials, guides, case studies, etc. will help you move your leads to opportunities.
3. Blogging or Podcasting: Blogging or podcasting is the best way to connect closer with your audience, especially if your blog posts are rooted in the keyword that your audience is typing into google or covering topics that they are likely to share. Invite customers, partners, and industry leaders to share their views and opinions and establish authority in your domain.
4. Social Media: Embrace social media. For us, LinkedIn has proved to be a great tool. Create snackable content that educates, entertains, or engages your audience in quick, snappy ways. Develop a strong presence on relevant social media platforms to build brand awareness and drive traffic to your content. P.S. Focus on a couple of platforms where your audience is likely to be and work on mastering those.
5. Embrace Communities: There are tons of communities on platforms such as Slack, LinkedIn, Telegram, WhatsApp, Reddit etc. Find communities where your audience spends time, and add value by contributing to those. This will elevate your brand and help you connect with your prospects.

3. Foster Thought Leadership

There are multiple ways of doing this, but this is what worked best for me.

• Empower Experts: Product managers can distill complex topics into accessible insights, making them ideal contributors for thought leadership content.
• Involve Leadership: Engage your leadership team in your thought leadership journey. Their insights and perspectives can attract attention and foster trust.
• Leverage Customer Stories: Turn your customers into advocates by showcasing their success stories through testimonials and case studies.
• Utilize Commercial Teams: Your commercial teams can help localize content by sharing local nuances and insights, putting a new spin on your stories.

4. Maintain a Content Calendar

Don't just frantically write articles and blog pieces. Be intentional!

Define your content pillars, your audience, and what content would resonate with different people in the buying journey. Develop a consistent monthly content calendar to maintain regular engagement. Plan content around key industry events, product launches, and seasonal trends to build anticipation and keep your audience engaged over time.

5. Repurpose Content

Maximize the value of your content by repurposing it across different formats and channels. A single blog post can be transformed into a podcast episode, an infographic, a social media post, a webinar, and a lot more. This approach ensures your message reaches a wider audience and reinforces key points.

6. Optimize Content Distribution

Ensure that your content is distributed in a way that resonates with your viewers and meets their preferences. Adapt your content distribution strategy to match the channels where your audience spends their time, optimizing the format and timing for maximum impact.

For example, our audience is very active on LinkedIn, so we focus our distribution efforts on that channel. Whether it's performance marketing ads, pieces of content, or participation in relevant groups or communities, we keep LinkedIn at the forefront.

Additionally, optimize the timing of your content by posting when your audience is most active. For eg: If it's a press release we're amplifying, we're likely to do it on Mondays. If we want to publish content targeting our European prospects, we would like to post it around 6 pm SGT.

Measure the success of your content and adjust your strategy accordingly. By monitoring engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and comments, you can identify what's working and what's not, making changes to improve your content distribution efforts.

7. Regular Audits and Measuring the Impact

If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.

Set KPIs to evaluate the success of your content marketing efforts. Here are 7 essential metrics and KPIs to evaluate content performance:

1. Website Analytics: Analyze user engagement and traffic sources using metrics like bounce rates, page views, and conversion rates.
2. Social Media Metrics: Monitor engagement metrics such as likes, shares, and click-through rates to understand audience preferences.
3. Conversion Tracking: Track leads and conversions from landing pages and contact forms to identify effective content.
4. SEO Performance: Monitor keyword performance and organic search traffic to assess content visibility and backlink quality.
5. Sales Conversion Rates: Analyze content's role in moving prospects through the buyer's journey towards conversion.
6. Brand Awareness Metrics: Track brand mentions and social media followers to assess content's impact on brand visibility
7. Email Campaign Analytics: Scrutinize open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to refine email content and targeting.

These strategies have been invaluable in achieving long-term success in a hypergrowth environment. They ensured that my content initiatives were strategically aligned with broader marketing and organizational goals. By streamlining the content creation process, I maintained consistency in messaging and branding across all channels. Additionally, these strategies provided a scalable framework for expanding my content marketing efforts as the business evolved.

I'd love to hear your hacks and tactics for content marketing—feel free to share them in the comments below!