Our first marketing meet-up took place in Workland Vabaduse with the following workshop topic: Content Marketing & Organic Growth for B2B & SaaS Companies.
Workland member Erman Küplü from Analyzify shared his experience of reaching 1500+ clients and $500K in revenue, spending close to 0$ on marketing. During the workshop, he also analyzed the attendee's websites from a content marketing & SEO standpoint and provided actionable insights.
He has written the following highlights for those who couldn’t attend; you can also view the presentation from the following link.
Freemium Product & Gated Content
Build at least one hard-to-resist freemium offer or gated content.
You don’t have to do this - but it is a great shortcut to success in organic growth. Offer a freemium product or gated content that carries value.
We are not talking about cheap lead magnets here. You need to ensure that it helps the visitors/users and that they can’t find this elsewhere. Spend time creating it, and treat it like your product. It might be a significant asset for your company. Focus on offering something precious.
Examples:
Analyzify’s Shopify GA4 Kit. We have created an almost freemium version of our product and launched it as open-source. We created lots of content around it.
The result: The community loved it because we helped them. It brought us too many organic results (Youtube views, Google rankings, brand awareness) and many sales.Figma templates
Eg: Social media cover photo templates for e-comm storesNotion templates / Notion databases
Eg: Top 50 luxury e-comm brands - Notion CRM & Project management template for freelancers.X Calculator Tool (No-Code)
Eg: Fill the form and evaluate your SaaS startup.
You know your field the best. You will come up with some ideas. Don’t hesitate to execute and spend time. It will pay off…
Content Types & Ideas
Here are specific Content Opportunities for B2B & SaaS companies:
Integration/Partnership focused content:
Encourage your partners (or tools you are integrated with) to release content about you. See how we did it.Story-focused publications:
Many blogs are focused on stories. Share your (or your founder’s) story around. See a nice example.
Use-case-focused content:
Your product does 100s of things. You just don’t list them on your website. It is maybe a CRM software - but it also does automated e-mails, right? So why not create content on all of these use-cases. Zapier & Canva are the most famous for this topic. Read more details on this fantastic post.List other groups of solutions for your target audience:
DelightChat is a Shopify app for live chat. But they have “The Best Google Tag Manager Apps” content on their website. They list other solutions and gather relevant traffic.
Apart from these, of course, there are well-known types of content, such as:
Long-form blog posts, listicles
How-to guides
Video (+Youtube, Vimeo)
Podcast
Checklists
Whitepapers & Complete Guides
Interactive tools (quiz, calculator)
Education series (video, post, Notion)
Fifteen Ways to Organize a Blog Post or Article
I have taken this amazing work from the following book: Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content by Ann Handley
It’s a great example of how you can create different types of content on the same topic.
1. Quiz. Test Your Privacy IQ
2. Skeptic. You Don't Control Your Privacy Anymore
3. Explainer. The Online Privacy Debate in Plain English
4. Case study. How One Person Got Control Over Privacy
5. Contrarian. Why Online Privacy Concerns Are Overblown
6. How-to. Five Steps to Improving Online Privacy
6½. Quick how-to. Three Stupid-Simple Things You Can Do to Keep Your Profile Private
7. How NOT to. Five Ways You're Compromising Your Online Privacy
8. First-person. My Personal Privacy Horror Story
9. Comparison. How Privacy Protection Services Measure Up
10. Q&A. Five Common Questions About Online Privacy with Mark Zuckerberg
11. Data. Are Privacy Problems Worsening? Probably, Research Says
12. Influencers. What You Should Do Right Now to Protect Your Privacy, According to These Privacy Experts
13. Outrageous. Why Online Privacy Is an Oxymoron
14. Insider secrets. The One Thing You Need to Know About Your Online Privacy
15. Literary treatment. Online privacy haiku. Epic narrative poem. Comic book. Parable. The sky is your limit!
Why your company should be creating content
Ok, this content is taking too much time; I’ll start using shortcuts here and just list down notes :)
Your company’s knowledge is the most essential asset in your B2B Marketing journey.
If you don’t believe you are an expert, nobody will.
You spend all your time on your area of expertise.
You have seen the whole marketplace over time.
You have great experts on your team.
Learn more on The B2B Content Marketing Workbook by Velocity.
Optimizing your content
It is not enough to create great content; you should also optimize it. SEO is a whole other world. I can only point out the essential elements here. Use the resources to learn more about those.
Prioritize all of this.
Have a <H1> tag on each page and include your target keyword (learn more)
Write a unique and excellent meta title and description for each page (learn more)
Optimize all your images properly - especially the ones that are on SEO-targeted pages (learn more)
Connect your website with Google Search Console and check the data often (connection source - how to use)
Check out the SEO checklist by Ahrefs and try to fix the problems as much as you can.
Learn more on B2B Content Marketing by Backlinko.
Conclusion
I am aware this is too much to ask from busy product marketing people. But you should know that these are the basics and just the beginning. Yet, they will bring too much value.
You will be ranked nicely on Google, prospects will engage will your content, and they will trust you in advance. You will have to put in fewer sales efforts.
This is an amazing mid & long-term investment for your brand and your company. SEO & Content Marketing will keep paying off even when you don’t spend marketing dollars anymore. This can be the insurance of your company or leverage. It is a great competitive advantage.
Do it, at least the basics.
