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There are many ways to position a brand in a marketplace. You can compete on price or personality, values, location or, if you’re lucky, the uniqueness of your product or service offering. Or you can choose an expertise-based positioning strategy. 

Expertise builds trust. It encourages loyalty. It allows you to charge a premium because it shows you’re wiser and sharper than the next brand – and you can prove it. If members of your team have mastered certain disciplines and subjects, why would you try to compete on price?

This strategy is also a strong choice because it’s difficult to emulate. You can’t fake expertise, or not for long anyway. Only a few brands have what it takes to even qualify – and fewer know how to translate the expertise within their business into marketing strategy.

In this mini series on communicating expertise, I’m going to be looking at what it takes to build brand authority. I’m also going to look at the marketing challenges that stand in the path of every expert-led organisation. But before that, I need to clarify what an expert actually is.

TL:DR

What is an expert? The difference between skill, knowledge and language

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines an expert as someone with a special skill or knowledge representing mastery of a particular subject.

Already we’ve got two different nuances here – skill vs knowledge. A skill is related to something you can do, so an example of a skilled expert might be a master carpenter or senior software engineer. Then you have the more knowledge-based experts, like university professors or management consultants.

There’s a third type of expertise too: interactional expertise, which surgeon and author Dr Roger Kneebone describes in his book, Expert, as the “ability to speak the language of experts whose work you cannot do.”

An example of a profession that takes interactional expertise to its highest point is journalism, since journalists write expertly about many subjects in which they themselves are not experts. I’d like to suggest that the best copywriters and content marketers fall into this category too.

What does it take to become an expert?

Of course, having some level of knowledge or skill doesn’t automatically make you an expert. You have to work for it. That said, the moment you can call yourself an expert is also not a clearly defined milestone. It’s an ongoing and evolving process. So how do you become an expert?

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularised the ‘10,000 hour rule’, which essentially says that to become an expert at something you need to put in 10,000 hours of practice or study. This is actually an over-simplification of the work of psychologist K Anders Ericsson but it makes an important point, which is that there is a degree of time needed to become an expert. You may be born with talent but you won’t be an expert until you’ve put in the time, not to mention effort.

Dr Kneebone describes this evolution as the Apprentice-Journeyman-Master pathway. As an apprentice you’re putting in the time under someone else’s tuition or guidance. Next, you become a journeyman and, archaic term aside, this is where things start to shift. You move from supervised to independent practice, you start to take responsibility, develop your own style, and you learn to improvise. 

Only then, once you’ve spent a significant period of time in this journeyman stage, do you finally step into being a Master. This is where you actually begin redefining your field of expertise, building on it and adding to the knowledge base, pioneering new things, even passing it on – in other words, teaching.

As you can see, there is no way to shortcut expertise. Even those born with extraordinary abilities – from Mozart to Serena Williams, Marie Curie to Bill Gates – all need to put in the time and effort required to claim the title of expert. Likewise, there’s no point building a brand positioning or marketing strategy around expertise unless you or your team has spent years accumulating it.

How do people perceive expertise?

Let’s assume for the moment that there is a genuine level of expertise within your business – it may lie with the founder, the CTO, the product development team or a handful of consultants. Now the question is: can you prove it? Because what is there and what people see are often two vastly different things.

When you’re scoping out a business to see if they’re experts – let’s imagine you’re an SME looking for an ESG consultant, armed with nothing more than a handful of names from Google or LinkedIn – there are a few boxes you’re going to expect them to be able to tick as a baseline…

Understanding

First, you’ll want to know that they understand you – your sector, your challenges, your goals. If you’re a multinational FMCG brand, you’re likely to discount the consultancy that has specialised in SMEs or the hospitality sector.

Clarity

You’ll also want to get some clarity around the problems you’re facing. Some help digging below your surface level symptoms to uncover what’s really going on. A bit of guidance and even empathy goes a long way here and also helps to show they actually understand you.

Insight

You’ll also want your expert to be able to give you insights – to show you what you don’t know. An expert will educate you, give you the data, the trends. What is it you should be focusing your attention on? What questions should you be asking?

Solutions

Where you have a problem, you’ll expect them to be able to show you what solutions are available – not just what they can do for you as a service provider, but all the possibilities. What are the pros and cons of each? What are the cost implications?

Recommendations

And you’ll expect them to be able to give you some recommendations. Again, this is not about them pushing their solution but about them really understanding you and showing that they care about you getting the right outcome, even if that isn’t working with them.

The differentiator… Evidence

And then finally – and this is most crucial – you’ll want them to be able to back up everything they say. You’re about to spend a lot of money and take a big risk. You need to know they can walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

How to establish expertise using content

Now bear in mind that a lot of these points above are going to be part of the service that is ultimately delivered to you. By the end of your engagement with whichever ESG consultancy you choose, they should have hit each of these marks.

But remember, we’re talking about choosing the firm in the first place. You haven’t worked with them yet – you haven’t even booked your free, no obligation consultation – you’ve just got a handful of names. 

So how can they show you that they understand you more than the next brand, that they have deep insights into your problem and can navigate you through the possible solutions? That they have experience and get results and that they actually care?

That’s where content comes in. And that’s what the next blog in this series is all about: How to build your brand authority with expertise-based content.

If you need support to put together a content strategy that will help you build authority, visibility and trust, get in touch to see how I can help.

The Authority Project.

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It’s been a long time since anyone really needed to sell the benefits of creating content for marketing purposes. In fact, if anything, it’s so popular that there’s far too much content out there these days. Blog posts, whitepapers, social posts, podcasts, videos, reels… The challenge now is not creating content but creating content that gets results.

The problem is that all too often, the focus is on the deliverables. There’s a pressure to create something tangible, to see results as soon as possible. But to rush the thinking in order to accelerate the doing is ultimately to position yourself as the hare in that old children’s tale. 

Winning comes from taking the tortoise’s approach. Here’s what that entails when it comes to content, and why it’s better for business in the long run.

TL:DR

You need to understand what your content is for

This is a really important question and one you need to be able to answer clearly rather than in general terms. The word strategic is bandied about far too much in business circles but in this case it’s appropriate. Strategic means, in a nutshell, instrumental in achieving the aims of a wider, longer-term plan. 

I’m not just talking about a marketing plan here but the broader business aims that take into account your sales team’s goals, your product team’s pipeline, and the ambitions your C-suite have. These go beyond lead generation and closing deals. 

For instance, if you’re a service-based company, one of your wider goals might include:

If you’re a product-based company, one of your wider goals might be to:

When your content strategy is aligned to a specific wider goal like one of these, it enables you to switch gears from the generic good practices of marketing – generate leads, build community, support the sales funnel, etc. 

Instead you can drive the most important priorities of your organisation. And you can do it in every content decision, from the type of content you produce and what topics you cover to where you share it and how often you release it.

What is your audience interested in?

As important as it is to know what you’re trying to achieve with your content, it’s even more important to understand what your audience is trying to achieve. 

Are they stuck on a problem and need help exploring it and discovering what solutions are available? Are they completely unaware that disaster is round the corner and therefore in need of a wake up call? Are they a bit hazy about a trending topic and looking for a well articulated overview so they can sound smart in their next board meeting?

You may already have customer or client personas but the chances are these have not been developed with a view to content creation. So go back to them and think about what your audience might engage with. 

Better still, dig into the data and see what they are already engaging with. What are they commenting on or reacting to on LinkedIn? Which of your blog posts or emails are getting the most views or opens?

How are people going to find your content?

Much as we’d all love to create content that goes viral, spreading by word of mouth because of its sheer brilliance, the reality is that’s highly unlikely to happen in all but a very small handful of cases.

There are three main ways to get your content in front of people. First, you can share it where they are – social media, YouTube, conferences etc. In this case, your content needs to be eye catching and engaging, hooking your audience quickly. It’s likely to be shorter and more visual, enticing them to take the next step, whether that’s clicking through to a longer form piece of content, visiting a website or making a buy decision.

You can also catch people in search mode. This is where SEO and AI search comes in, which means doing work on SEO / AI search strategy. Yes, more strategy. Because plucking a few keywords out of the air isn’t enough to drive results. You need to understand everything from search volume to search intent – and that’s before you get into the technical side.

Finally, you can send your content to people, having built up your email and contacts database. From the simplest of newsletters to personalised relationship-building emails to nurture sequences designed to convert for a specific product or service, there are many ways to use the contact details you’ve collected to deliver the right content exactly when it’s needed.

What do you want your audience to do next?

It’s totally acceptable to count someone reading, watching or listening to your content as a win. They are now aware of your brand, and have hopefully formed at least an initial impression of it as being helpful or disruptive or fun or whatever it is that you’re trying to establish.

But ideally, you want them to take action after engaging with your content. What that action is will depend on where they are in their buyer journey. If they’re near the top of the funnel, getting them to engage with a second piece of content could be enough. Or you might want them to download or sign up to something so that you have their contact details, or follow your account on social media so you can stay in front of them.

As you move down the funnel you may want to direct them to case studies, product or service pages, or blog posts that hone in on the features and benefits of what you offer. And finally you’ll have sales collateral, which should also form part of your content plan, where the CTAs will focus on starting a free trial, booking a demo, contacting the sales team or making a purchase.

Campaign-thinking

Ultimately what you’ll need to do is to string the different pieces of content you’re creating together to create a campaign that includes the ‘how they get to it’ and ‘what they do afterwards’ bits, linking the whole thing back to those business objectives. Without this, you’re not going to get the results you need.

I remember once, at the agency, when one of our clients asked us to create a case study for them. I pushed back and told them no. Because creating a case study wouldn’t have been enough. To achieve the wider goals they had in mind, we needed to design a campaign that would maximise the number of people reaching the case study by creating an awareness journey – not only a case study but two related blog posts and a series of LinkedIn posts, which would educate and nudge a readership towards a place where they cared to read it all. 

The LinkedIn posts worked their magic, generating click-through rates that were well above industry averages. And as a result, Hotjar analysis of the case study showed that engagement with those that reached it was very high – 61% of visitors read to the halfway point, with 50% staying engaged until the ‘outcomes’ section near the bottom of the page. 

If you need a content strategy that doesn’t rely on churning out more and more but actually gets results, get in touch today.

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Sell the sizzle, not the sausage. It’s a (somewhat) useful shortcut that sums up the importance of focusing on benefits over features. But have marketers become too obsessed with pushing benefits? Are we risking becoming the fluff merchants that the rest of the world often dismisses us as?

The truth is that when you’re buying a sausage, you may well be enticed by visions of summer barbecues and happy families. But actually, you almost certainly do want to know whether it’s 65% pork or 85%. You want to know if it’s Lincolnshire or Cumberland. You may want to know if the ingredients are locally sourced, or organic, or gluten free.

All of these are features, and they’re all important.

The same goes for service-based businesses, or those in the B2B space. It’s all very well to promise that your offering will save people time, money or effort (or all three) but everyone else is promising the same thing. If you want to get people to part with their cash, you need to be able to talk about how you’re going to do this. Otherwise, you’re just churning out that marketing fluff.

TL:DR

Why are features important?

Buyers – of sausages and of software – are increasingly sophisticated. We have access to so much more information today than we ever have. We’ve seen marketing done well. And we’re not going to be fobbed off with vague promises any more (if, indeed, we ever were).

There’s too much marketing out there that tries to engage people in this kind of conversation:

“Hi Mx Prospect, did you know we can help increase your team’s productivity?”

“Sounds great, how?”

“By improving efficiency!”

“Yes, but how?”

“Streamlining processes! Boosting morale!”

“Sigh…”

We’re not saying you need to ditch the benefits messaging. Benefits help your audience understand how the features you’re selling will change their lives for the better. But without features to back them up, they’re too vague to get real results.

When to talk about features vs benefits

When it comes to features vs benefits, it’s important to think about the ‘when’. To keep running with a simple analogy, if your reader isn’t in the market for a sausage, then going on about the quality of your ingredients or the fact that they’re locally sourced isn’t really going to be that helpful. They’re not hungry, they don’t care.

At this early stage of the buyer journey, you do need to focus on the benefits. Paint a picture of a sunny garden, bbq crackling away, music blaring, a couple of beers and the sizzle of sauces on the grill. Better yet, go a step further and hint at the stresses of life slipping away, or key relationships being strengthened at that outdoor gathering (these are the real benefits, after all).

Now your audience is interested. Now you can talk about the features of your particular gluten free, locally sourced, 95% organic hand-reared pork sausage.

This concept is brilliantly summed up in Watertight Marketing by Bryony Thomas. She talks about the ‘logic sandwich’, which starts and ends with emotion but contains a healthy portion of meaty facts in the middle. (Whether you’re a marketer or founder, if you haven’t read the book, you really must.)

A quick note about the difference between sausages and software

It’s also worth pointing out that there’s a pretty big difference between buying a packet of sausages and a new piece of software for a multinational organisation. Not least the amount the buyer is going to be spending.

In the latter case, the buyer journey is going to be an awful lot longer and more complex, with a far greater need to go beyond the fluff. Shouting about how you bring products to market faster, increase sales efficiency, or save time on back office admin won’t get more than someone’s initial attention.

What are you going to do next? How will you help your audience to become increasingly interested, to evaluate and even trial your offering? You’ll need to dig deep into the features at some point and, if you don’t, you’ll lose their attention.

By all means tie those features back to the benefits they deliver – gluten free sausage ingredients that mean little Susan doesn’t feel left out at the family BBQ, or sustainably sourced pork that’s better for the environment – but don’t focus on the benefits at the expense of the features. Educate people on how one impacts the other. Give them the tools to make a good decision for themselves. 

In short, sell the sizzle but don’t forget to be clear about what makes your particular brand of sausage better than the next manufacturer’s. Tell people how you’re going to deliver the benefits you promise and you’ll take your marketing beyond the fluff.

If you need help teasing out the features and benefits of your products or services and articulating them in a way that your audience will engage with, take a look at my brand strategy services or get in touch.

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What’s more important for B2B businesses: brand building or lead generation? 

Naturally if you ask a PR agency, they’ll say brand building and if you ask a performance marketing agency, they’ll say the opposite. Some will say you need both, but what does that mean for your marketing plan’s time and budget? What does it look like in terms of ratios? 60:40? 80:20? 50:50?

The answer will depend on many factors: your audience, your market, your growth stage, and the nature of your product or service. If you were looking for exact percentages, I’m afraid you won’t find them here or anywhere else (unless that place is trying to sell you PR or lead generation). 

Instead let me give you some food for thought on what your priorities might be. But first, some definitions…

TL:DR

What is lead generation?

I don’t really need to define lead generation, since it’s pretty self explanatory. Lead generation generates leads.

It’s the world of Google search ads, social media ads, banner ads on websites, landing pages – anything that can push people over the line to make a purchase then and there, or at least give some contact details so you can follow up with email campaigns or direct sales outreach later.

It’s also worth talking about growth marketing here. This is a relatively new term that encompasses a data driven, experiment-based, performance model that essentially prioritises lead gen. It experiments to find the optimum spend for different marketing channels, so that new businesses can acquire as many customers as possible for as little cost as possible.

What is brand building?

Brand building is a bit more nuanced in terms of what it is and does. 

Strictly speaking, anything that your business does to get noticed for the right reasons can be considered brand building. This makes it something that goes beyond the marketing department and into the remit of product design, customer service and even some aspects of HR.

Lead generation and brand building definitely overlap, especially when it comes to content. But there are tactics that lean more towards brand building than led gen, such as:

Ultimately brand building should shift how people think and feel about and towards a brand for the better.

Which one gets results?

It’s pretty easy to measure how effective lead gen or growth marketing tactics are and to prove their effectiveness.

You host a webinar and get 100 emails for your sales team to follow up on. You put money behind a LinkedIn campaign and get a dozen demo requests. These numbers can be tied fairly easily to the bottom line.

There’s a catch though – not all leads convert. Many companies throw loads of money at lead gen and see middling results. Either because they don’t get quality leads or they don’t have the content they need to nurture those leads once they get them. So it’s not as simple as more lead gen spend = more sales.

With brand building, attribution is far less obvious. It’s unlikely that a football-loving Head of Procurement will see your brand’s logo on their team’s strip and immediately feel the urge to do business with you.

But what if your team sponsorship builds a positive feeling towards your brand in that Head of Procurement’s thoughts? And what if later they’re trying to choose between you and a close competitor? It may well be what pushes them over the line. You’ll never be 100% sure though.

The 95-5 rule of B2B marketing

The problem with B2B marketing is that only 5% of your target audience is likely to be actively looking to buy at any given time. The other 95% may well be interested in the future but not yet. This is the 95-5 rule, which came out of a recent study by Professor John Dawes and the B2B Institute.

It’s not like selling haircuts or manicures, where a pay-per-click campaign can quickly redirect someone searching for ‘manicures in Bristol’ to make a booking at your new salon. B2B buying decisions often involve an audience that doesn’t understand what you do, a product that they won’t need for two years, or a service with such a high price tag that people will conduct serious research before they commit to any kind of decision.

That means it’s potentially more important for your B2B marketing activities to build a positive impression of your brand rather than just attempt to generate a lead then and there. That way you’ll be able to engage the 95% as well as the 5%. And done right, you won’t just create a positive impression, you’ll create trust.

Long term vs short term marketing

Brand building will introduce you to a wider audience so that when they’re searching for solutions in one-to-five years, you at least make the shortlist. 

But sometimes, you can’t wait that long. You need your product launch in three months time to hit the ground running; you need cash flow to cover the costs of your new hires, or you need to get in front of your early adopters so you can begin to build brand momentum. Here lead generation is your friend.

Once you have that traction, brand building can help sustain it. For many B2B businesses, referral partners are an important source of leads. Brand building fuels the conversation with these key contacts, creating brand advocates from people and businesses that lie outside of your direct target audience. 

Brand building can also increase customer lifetime value. You’re far more likely to renew your contract with your design agency if they’ve just won a prestigious award, for example. You’re also more likely to recommend them to others in your network. 

Creating a balanced marketing plan

So, back to our original question – how do you decide where to allocate the most time and budget when creating your marketing plan? 

Well, as Peter Drucker said, “Long-term results cannot be achieved by piling short-term results on short-term results.”

If your company is in its early growth stage, you probably need to prioritise short term results so you can get some momentum going, keep the bills paid, and sprint to the next funding round. Lead gen might do you wonders, and stop you from getting distracted by vanity metrics. Your blog can play a vital role in attracting and nurturing those leads too.  

But if your organisation is struggling to qualify leads, catch the attention of bigger clients, or needs to stand out as an authority in your field, you’ll want to focus more on brand building. 

For the best results, try to do both, dialling one or the other up a notch as the needs of the business evolve. Taking the long term view of a brand marketer and combining it with the results-focused mindset of a lead gen marketer plus growth marketing’s experimental approach is a powerful strategy that will take you far.

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There comes a time as a business when you look back on your blog and realise that you’ve created an awful lot of content. Dozens, maybe even hundreds of posts. And you find yourself wondering whether you still need them all. Are they relevant? Do people read them? Have they become outdated? That’s when it’s time to do a blog audit.

A blog audit is a kind of spring clean that allows you to look at what you’ve got, assess it against set criteria, and – in a nutshell – figure out what’s working, what isn’t, and what you can do about it. Here’s how we go about it.

TL:DR

Step 01: Define your blog audit goals

Although there are overlaps between them, there are actually quite distinct reasons why you might be performing a blog audit. 

For example, if you have a very search driven strategy (SEO or AI search) then you may want to audit your content against keywords that are currently important to your business. This should, among other things, identify where you can update posts to help them perform better.

Sustainability is an increasingly important consideration for businesses and content adds a surprising chunk to your carbon footprint. For this reason, you might set a goal of reducing your content by a certain percentage. In this case, the goal of your audit is to identify the least useful posts so they can be culled.

What I’m focusing on in today’s blog, however, is the process I use with my expert-led clients. Their content strategy is usually centred on high-quality content that builds authority and supports the customer journey. Search tends to play more of a supporting role.

In this case, the content audit process is more about being able to:

You’ll want to include performance metrics to help you in your assessment. But in this post I’m going to be going beyond that and looking at some of the more subjective factors you need to consider in your decision-making process, especially when it comes to future opportunities.

Ultimately we’re aiming for a Keep, Cut or Change analysis that allows us to action our blog audit in the most effective way. We’ll also ideally want a Create list to help with future content creation.

Step 02: Work out what you’ve got

Hopefully you have an editorial calendar where you’ve been logging your blog posts as you go. This could be as simple as a spreadsheet of titles and publication dates. If not, you’ll need to start your blog audit by creating one.

This Hubspot guide goes into details about how to pull page data using a web crawler. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that complex, especially since most of us aren’t dealing with thousands of posts. And even if you do automatically generate your starting point, you’ll want to add subjective insights of your own.

If you blog across a number of key categories, make sure you include these details in the log. You might have other labels you want to include in your list too. For example, the author of each post or the audience segment you’re aiming at, if you have distinct ones. As a simple example, if you’re a recruitment agency, you might have client-focused posts and candidate-focused ones.

Adding these layers of information means you can begin to spot patterns and gaps. If you compare this sort of information to your performance metrics (e.g. visitor numbers, dwell time or conversion), you might notice that you get high traffic to certain blog types, or great engagement and conversions from others.

BUT don’t go overboard on detail here until you’ve had a look at the next step…

Step 03: Time for an initial content prune

The first thing to do once you’ve created your log is to discard any blog posts that simply aren’t necessary anymore. Perhaps you no longer offer a particular service, so you don’t need any posts that are focused on that offering. Mark these as Cut.

These posts might still be performing well in terms of generating traffic. But if they’re drawing the wrong crowd, then you’re skewing your numbers and clouding the truth of how well your blog is performing. And content pruning can actually be great for your website’s overall SEO, so you won’t lose out.

Before you hit delete though, press pause. The content that you’re ditching may not be worthy of a space on your blog but are there any elements you can salvage? Much like an old dress that can be repurposed into a child’s T-shirt, your soon-to-be-discarded blog might have nuggets you can still use across social media.

This sifting process will take time, it’s true – but less time than it takes to create original content. 

Step 04: Work out which blog posts are not performing

Posts that aren’t performing well can potentially also be added to the Cut list. For many businesses, blog performance will be about organic search traffic. This will require you to consult your analytics. Find out what’s driving the most visitors, what has the most backlinks and so on.

Social engagement metrics can be helpful here too. For example, thought leadership may not perform well for search but could generate a huge amount of engagement on LinkedIn. Pull this information from Google Analytics and add it to your log.

But remember that it’s not just about quantity, it’s also about quality, so consider what ‘performing well’ means to you. For example, a bottom of funnel post might not be generating loads of organic search traffic but your sales team might find it invaluable during their nurture, follow up or closing process. 

Again, pause before you dismiss a post entirely. Just because it’s not performing well, doesn’t mean it’s terminal. Could you nurse the post back to health? More on this in the next step of your blog audit.

Step 05: Map your content against your customer journey

By now you should have a list of blog posts that are either still relevant and useful or could be with an update. The next step is to identify any gaps you might have. I’ve found that the best way to do this is to map each post against your customer journey.

A simple top / middle / bottom of funnel approach can be very useful here. But I like to add a layer of additional insight using my content marketing framework, a tool I originally designed to use with our clients at RH&Co. It looks in more detail at key stages in the customer journey from your reader’s perspective, helping you to understand what type of content to produce and what the goal should be.

What you might find when you do this mapping exercise is that you have plenty of top of funnel content but you’re a bit sparse in the middle. Or you’ve got loads of educational middle of funnel content but nothing at the bottom to actually drive conversion or support your sales team.

It’s worth noting that you may need to create a buyer journey for each distinct product or service you offer. I call these strands of content ‘buyer journey blog chains’.

As I mentioned above, there may also be some posts that fit well into your customer journey but need work before they can be considered truly valuable. It may be that your audience has shifted so you now want to be talking to HRDs rather than CEOs. Or legislation has changed, making certain references out of date but easily fixable. Mark these as Change.

Step 06: Identify and make plans for the gaps

This customer mapping process should highlight which of your current blog posts are serving a valuable purpose and can be labelled Keep. You should also be able to see which ones you need to Change in order to strengthen them or bring them up to date.

From here you’ll be able to see where your gaps are, giving you an excellent starting point for deciding what topics and titles you can schedule for the future. If there are lots of gaps, plug the most important ones first. This will differ depending on your business and priorities.

A good place to start the prioritisation process is to look back at what’s working and see whether this can be replicated in some way. Which posts drive the highest number of visitors? Which are the strongest when it comes to converting? 

Remember that conversion will mean different things at different stages of the buyer journey – you’re unlikely to get a ‘book demo’ action from a top of funnel post but you might get a sign up for your newsletter.

You can even go as far as finding out what these high performing posts have in common, such as word count or post structure. Pperhaps your audience is really into long form content or numbered lists of tips. This will give you even more direction when it comes to creating new blog content.

Step 07: Create a blog audit maintenance schedule

As you can see, doing a blog audit isn’t a quick or an easy job. So use the experience to create a process you can follow in the future, noting what works and what doesn’t. Then make sure you come back to it from time to time – how often will usually depend on how frequently you’re posting – and do a little refresh.

By keeping on top of your maintenance schedule, you’ll ensure that your blog is always as valuable and effective as it can be. You’ll know what content you still need to create and you’ll be able to quickly see when anything needs updating.

You’ll also be able to rest easy knowing that the time, effort and budget you’ve dedicated to the blog is well invested and continuing to give you the return on investment you need.

If you’re stuck and need some support to get your back catalogue of blogs in order and create a plan for the future, get in touch to find out more about how I can help.

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There are many excellent reasons why businesses should add blogging to their marketing mix. But in the end, what you really want from any marketing channel is leads, right? 

Now I’m going to caveat this post by saying something really important: content marketing is about the long game. If you try it out for a month and compare it to, say, paid advertising, that’s a bit of an unfair match.

However, just because blogging leans slightly more towards the brand building side of marketing than the pure growth marketing side, that doesn’t mean it can’t generate leads. If you’re strategic about it.

So here are five strategies to get your blog delivering more leads into your pipeline.

TL:DR

1. Pick that low-hanging fruit

There are a bunch of people out there who want to buy your products, use your services, donate to your cause or in some other way do the thing you want them to do. They just need help to get across the finish line.

Imagine, for example, that you’re the CMO of a rapidly scaling SaaS company. Your platform offers a way to shortcut a key process for your customer – but your competitor is saying the same thing.

That’s where a ‘How we…’ post comes in handy. By giving your audience a glimpse behind the curtain – showing them how your expertise works rather than simply telling them you have it – you earn a greater degree of trust. Trust that makes spending money with you that much easier.

And that’s just one example of a sales-led blog post. You could also write a post that breaks down your approach to pricing and showcases where the value lies for your audience compared to other options on the market. Or you could answer a key objection. Or bring the results you offer to life with a case-led narrative piece.

Sales-driven blog content isn’t about the hard sell. It’s about facilitating great decision making. By the end of a great sales post, you can legitimately suggest that your reader gets in touch, books a demo or even taps ‘buy now’, because you’ve helped them see why that’s the right choice for them.

2. Keep the not-ready-yet audience on your radar

No matter what you’re offering and no matter who you’re offering it to, there’s no way that everyone in your target audience will be ready to buy at the exact moment they read your blog. This is particularly true in B2B marketing where studies show that 95% of your audience is out-of-market.

Your reader might not have the budget right now. Or they might have just bought something similar. Perhaps they need internal sign off, or they just want to think about it a bit more.

But if your blog has engaged them sufficiently, you can capitalise on your success by prompting them to do something.

You might ask them to follow you on social media, for example, or sign up for your newsletter so that you can continue to deliver useful content into their inbox. Or you could sweeten the deal with a lead magnet and create a nurture series to help move the process forward.

This might not be as immediately exciting to you as getting a reader to call your sales team but by creating a way to stay in touch, you can continue to market to them until they are ready.

Whatever the case, don’t rely on the reader’s initiative. When they’re ready to buy, they probably won’t find their way back to your brand just because they read your blog a year ago. So create a tentative connection now that you can build on later.

3. Create ‘buyer journey blog chains’

Imagine your reader is at the very beginning of their buyer journey. They’re in the dark, not knowing they have a problem or, if they do, they’re only vaguely aware of the full extent of that problem or what’s causing it. You can change that. This is where you create content that helps them to explore the problem, validates what they’re feeling and shows them what the real issue is.

They won’t be ready to buy after reading. But they will be able to learn about the various solutions that can tackle their newly defined problem. After which they might be interested in exploring one solution in particular. And once they’ve reached that point, they might want to know the details of what you offer, including your process and pricing.

Creating chains of interlinked blog content like this is a great way to guide your potential customer or client along the buyer journey until they become a lead. It also helps the reader to hop off the trail if they’re not a good fit for you.

In a blog chain, you’ll adjust your CTA as your reader progresses. The earlier posts encourage further reading, lead magnet downloads or newsletter signups, and the later posts can get more sales-led.

Incidentally, this technique works just as well for any sort of content, whether that’s video, audio, webinar or something else. It’s all about the chain that leads your audience from one piece of content to the next until they’re ready to buy.

4. Combine your blogging efforts with other channels

Good blog content is foundational. It shouldn’t sit on your website in isolation, with the vague hope that people will stumble across it. It needs to work with the other channels you’re investing in – and even feed those channels.

The best way to get your blog generating leads is to ensure as many people as possible see it. And that means sitting it within a much wider strategy that includes, for example, social media, SEO, paid advertising, PR and so on.

If you’re using more than one marketing partner, make sure there’s enough communication between them. There’s no point having your PR or SEO agency going off in one direction and your blogging agency heading off in another.

Get your sales team involved too so that they make the most of the content you’re producing. It’s far nicer for a prospect to be sent a helpful blog post than to be hassled with a vague and ineffective, “Just wondering whether you need any help with X…”

5. Serve the robots, as well as the humans

If your sales machine relies on a high volume of input then one of the best and cheapest ways to generate the leads you need from your blog is to combine it with a well thought out organic search strategy.

This does not mean that you pick a few low cost, low competition keywords and stuff them willy nilly into a badly thought out post written by a barely literate stranger you found on Fivr. Not unless you’re happy to sacrifice your long term brand image for an initial flurry of visitors that offer nothing more than vanity metrics.

The search engines – both traditional and AI – are only going to become more human-like in their approach to judging the value of blog content over time, whereas people are unlikely to become more machine-like. So your flesh-and-blood audience still needs to be your first priority.

But there’s no reason why you can’t serve both robot and human. That’s how my team at RH&Co helped one client generate 150,000 impressions and 7,000 clicks to their website within the first six months after they launched their land buying platform. It’s also why another client’s internal content creator said our approach to SEO optimisation was so well disguised that their posts “just feel like solid, well-researched, empathetically-written articles.”

How to build lead generation into your blogging strategy

As with any marketing channel, blogging needs to be a strategic activity with a clear plan that is outlined at the start and checked on regularly. That plan needs to be based on the needs of your audience, it needs to sit within a wider marketing strategy and it needs to have clear goals from the outset.

You’ll need to set your expectations properly too, giving the blog at least 9 months and more likely 12 or even 18 months to deliver regular and reliable leads, especially if you’ve got a long sales cycle.

Blogging isn’t a lead gen silver bullet. In fact I’d argue that there is no such thing. But with the right strategy and a great team to deliver the best quality content, blogging can absolutely generate leads effectively and consistently for any business.

Want to help your blog start generating leads? Check out my content strategy services or get in touch for a chat.

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Every marketer has their favourite way of describing the stages of the buyer journey. Some stick with E St Elmo Lewis’s original AIDA model: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. Others simplify it to Awareness, Consideration and Decision. Still others prefer an ‘awareness journey’: problem aware, solution aware, most aware and so on.

All are helpful to a degree, especially when planning your broader marketing strategy and channel mix. But if you try to apply them to generating topic ideas for your content marketing plan they’re not always so effective.

That’s why I developed my own framework, based on the process we used at RH&Co to create editorial calendars for our clients. In this post, I’m looking at the five key stages your customer or client is likely to go through and the type of content you should be aiming to create at each one.

TL:DR

Stage 01: In the dark

In stage one, your reader is either not aware of their problem or not clear on their real problem. 

For example, they might not realise that their app’s security is at risk because they haven’t got a maintenance schedule in place. Or they might know that they’re having stomach problems but not realise they have a wheat intolerance.

Goal

At this stage your goal needs to be to educate your audience and raise their awareness, identifying and exploring the problem until they’re really clear on what it is. 

This audience type is right at the beginning of their journey, so this is not the time to rush them towards a sale. Instead, get them to the point where they feel confident about researching solutions.

Content

You could start with a piece of content about the wider issues facing your reader’s industry or share your opinion on why a particular problem is worth addressing. 

You could also highlight the warning signs that might indicate a certain problem is looming or challenge them to think about an issue in a new way.

Stage 02: Stuck

Now your audience is clear that there’s a problem – but they have no idea what to do about it. 

In the example above, your reader may be panicking about the security risk facing their new app or feeling relieved that their stomach pain has a genuine source. But how do you improve app security or deal with wheat intolerance?

Goal

The goal in this stage should be to add real value, introducing the variety of solutions that are available. It’s important not to focus too heavily on your own solution just yet – sell now and you’ll look self interested rather than genuinely helpful.

Your reader wants the facts laid out for them so that they can make an independent, informed decision about what’s right for them, without feeling pressured.

Content 

This is where ‘how to’ content comes into its own. You can keep this content fairly broad, or start to narrow it down a little – although keep some ideas back for the next stage (you’ll see what we mean in a moment).

It’s also helpful to dig beneath the problems your reader is facing and help them understand why they’re having them. After all, it’s hard to fix something if you don’t know what’s causing it. And as humans, we’re naturally curious too.

Stage 03: Searching

Searching is like part two of Stuck. Now the reader is relatively clear on their problem and knows solutions exist. So the next step is for them to work out which of those solutions is best for them.

Is it getting a consultant in, training the in-house team or hiring a new specialist to ensure your app stays on top form? Does it mean cutting out wheat, taking a probiotic supplement or trying reiki?

Goal

This is where you start to explore each solution in depth, giving more facts such as advantages and disadvantages of each, and some idea of how to begin making the right choice. 

Again, it’s really important to be honest rather than try to skew the reader towards your own offering. That only leads to unhappy clients and customers. If you’re a poor fit for each other, it’s best get them out of the funnel now so you can concentrate on the better prospects.

Content

As I mentioned in the Stuck stage, you can use ‘how to’ content here as well. Only this time it will be more niche, focusing less on ‘how to reduce bloating’, for example, and more on ‘how to choose the right probiotic for wheat intolerance’.

You can also hone your angle to focus specifically on factors that will affect your reader’s choice, such as price, as well as comparing different options like for like.

Stage 04: Almost ready

By now your reader has not only settled on a solution but they’re considering your business – probably alongside others – in order to make the very best choice.

The non-technical founder who didn’t realise that they had a security risk is now convinced that they do, and that they need a consultant – why should they choose you? Your wheat intolerant buyer is set on taking a probiotic every day but do they get your brand or a cheaper competitor option?

Goal

This is where you provide the granular details that allow your reader to make their decision to spend money with you – or at the very least to get in touch to talk to your sales team.

The emotion we want to stimulate now is certainty, and that is best done with facts rather than hype. Although the marketer’s missive is usually ‘benefits over features’, you need to dig into features here.

Content

Content for the ‘almost ready’ stage needs to contain plenty of detail – prices, processes and anything else your reader might want to know about you.

Here you can create objection busting content to support your sales team with the questions and challenges they face most often, and even try to put off anyone who is a poor fit by writing about why they shouldn’t buy your product or use your service.

Stage 05: Onboarding

So far we’ve used content within a marketing context and as a support for the sales process. It’s worked, and your reader has made a commitment to buy from you or use your services. Brilliant. But you’re not done yet.

Now we need to look at how content can support the onboarding process so that your customer or client is happy and more likely to stay or buy again.

Goal

The goal of onboarding content is to tackle ‘buyer’s remorse’, which can happen after you’ve made a purchase decision. That’s where your new customer or client thinks, “Was this really the right decision?” or “Did I get the best deal?” or even simply “Do I really need this?”

Instead, you want them to feel happy with their decision, not just about the product or service but you as a brand. You want them to feel as taken care of now they’re doing business with you as when you were courting them.

Content

Onboarding content will either make a new customer or client’s experience easier or enhance it in some way.

Going back to my original examples, the firm who has employed a consultancy to address their cyber security concerns might appreciate a guide to how to prepare for their first discovery session. The person looking to take probiotics as a way to support their gut health might also appreciate gut-friendly recipes or a four week meal plan.

Bonus: reputation-building content for any stage

Of course, there is some content that doesn’t quite fit neatly into any of these stages but is very much worth including because it can be enormously effective.

I call this reputation-building content and it can engage people wherever they are on their journey or even if they’re not in the market for what you’re selling at all. 

Goal

As the name suggests, reputation-building content is all about establishing your brand’s reputation, for example as a thought leader, innovator or expert voice.

By doing this, you catch people’s interest and create a secure brand position that will pay dividends when people do begin their buyer journey, and you’ll also build connections within your industry and with the wider public.

Content

This is the most difficult type of content for your competitors to copy because it is based on your unique IP, experience or perspective as a business.

It can include opinions and angles on current topics, use case studies to demonstrate real life examples, and give glimpses behind the scenes into your culture, values and ways of working.

How to use my content framework

In an ideal world, you would fill every stage of your content framework with well researched, highly valuable and engaging copy – preferably with a strand for each separate product or service you offer, or each industry vertical or client persona group you serve.

The reality is that you’ll need to start somewhere, so think about your main challenges and the quick wins you want to gain.

Perhaps your sales team needs a boost with bottom of funnel ‘almost ready’ content. Or maybe you’re working with an SEO strategist and want to catch people’s attention while they’re (quite literally) in the searching phase.

If you’re an expert-led business – in other words, your goal is to position your brand as an authority in a given subject area – then you need to start working on that reputation-building content.

If you need support creating a content strategy or are looking for a fractional content lead to get a project up and running, get in touch to see how I can help.

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If you say you’re good at what you do, people might be a little sceptical. If someone who has used your business says you’re good at what you do (i.e. gives you a testimonial), that’s more convincing. And if you set that endorsement within a wider context that lays out what exactly was achieved (i.e. a case study), you’re onto a real winner.

We all know that storytelling is a powerful way to engage people. The human race has been using stories – to entertain, to teach, to persuade – since the dawn of time. Good stories use the ‘show, don’t tell’ method of communication to bypass our conscious mind and tap into something much more primitive.

That’s why case studies are so effective. Or rather, why they can be so effective – if they’re done well. This is a guide for business owners and marketers who want to create genuinely effective case studies that get results.

TL:DR

How to pick the right subject for your case study

Naturally when it comes to choosing the right subject for a case study, you want an example where you can show that you delivered excellent results. You’ll also need to make sure that the customer or client in question is happy to put their name to it and, ideally, get actively involved (more on that later).

Beyond this, the main thing to think about is whether the example you’re considering is a good reflection of your ideal customer, client or project. The point of a case study is to attract more of the same sort of work, so if a job wasn’t all that profitable, for example, then don’t feature it, even if the results were good.

The best case studies are the ones that highlight a particular benefit you want to promote, which are in a sector you’re planning to pursue, or have some other feature that makes them a beacon for the kinds of work that you most want to do.

Transformation and benefits – the absolute essentials

The most important element of a case study is the transformation. You want to start out by showing the reader the situation your customer or client was in when they first engaged with your business.

Ideally, this will be a problem that they recognise themselves. Something that makes them think, “Yes, this is exactly what I’m struggling with!” Something that will compel them to keep reading because they want to know what the solution is.

Then, you want to finish with the positive difference that working with you or using your product had on their lives. That contrast – the transformation – is the foundation that every case study should be built on.

Just be sure that you’re not limiting your transformation to the practicalities. We need to go beyond features here, and focus on benefits.

For example, if you designed a new piece of software that achieves a key admin task in half the time of the manual process, that’s great. But make sure that you also talk about how customer experience has improved thanks to the faster service, and employees are happier now that they’re not spending half their day doing tedious admin tasks.

Taking it to the next level

Now that you’ve got the foundations in place, you want to start building up layers of evidence that support your case study.

Hard facts

Any empirical facts that you can include will add weight to your assertions. In the example above, don’t just talk about customer experience improving – tell the reader that the client’s average Trustpilot score has increased from 4.2 to 4.8. Or that their staff turnover is down 15% on the previous year.

Direct quotes

Direct quotes are another useful way to back up your assertions, especially if your case study doesn’t naturally lend itself to tangible numbers. 

The brand work I do for my clients is a good example. The results of each project flow through every part of the marketing plan and are hard to quantify. But my clients are never-the-less happy:

For example, a senior director at Pegasus Group recently said, “Rin has a way of getting under the bonnet of what really matters – not just internally, but to the people we’re trying to reach. She asks the right questions, challenges our consultants to think beyond their own expertise, and translates complex conversations into clear, compelling messaging that clients actually respond to.”

If I say I’m going to add value, there’s no reason for you to believe me. If someone else says it, it’s far more convincing.

Other formats

You can also build on your case study by using a range of formats. If your customer or client is willing to give you quotes to include, why not ask them to record a video so you have a visual testimonial to share?

Or if you have lots of great facts and figures, turn them into infographics. These are easy to share, quick to process and perfect for a time-poor audience that wants to engage quickly with your content.

Even written case studies can be packaged up in different ways. You can have a long version on your website and create shorter PDFs for your sales team to send out. Or create a carousel of key points for use on LinkedIn.

How to interview a client for a case study

If you want to use first person quotes for your case study, you’ll need to think about how to get the information you want from them. Simply asking them to write a few lines or paragraphs about their experience with you is going to get mixed results at best.

At the very least, make sure to email over a list of questions that encourages them to explore the aspects you want to focus on. For example, ask them to describe the problem that they were facing when they came to you, so you have the base for your transformation story. 

If you particularly want to highlight an aspect of your product or service, make sure one of the questions leads to that. Perhaps you know that your machinery operates much more quietly than most. Be sure to ask, “How has using X impacted on noise levels at your site?”

The best scenario, however, is to actually ask your questions live. That way you can use follow up questions to explore interesting lines that emerge as you talk. Often the best and most useful nuggets of information come from pursuing what was originally a throwaway comment.

If it doesn’t feel natural to conduct an interview like this in-house – and it’s true that it can be a bit awkward to ask people to say nice things about you to your face – you can use someone else to do it for you, whether that be a freelancer, consultant or agency.

How to make your case studies more engaging

You can create the most powerful and well written case study in the world but if it isn’t easy to read, most people are going to give up after a couple of lines. Structuring an engaging case study is very much like structuring an engaging blog post.

Subheads

Use subhead to stop the ‘scary wall of text’ effect, which is a sure fire way to put off a busy reader. Subheads can be functional, clearly showcasing what each section contains e.g. The Challenge, The Solution, The Result. Or they can be more conceptual, drawing out elements of the story.

Images

Another way to break up solid text is by using images. Some case studies will naturally lend themselves to imagery – for example, if you run an event business, you can use photographs taken at the event you’re highlighting. But more generic brand images can also work to create interest on the page, or you can create CTA graphics like the ones I use in blog posts like this.

If your case study contains data, you can represent this visually too. It doesn’t have to be a full infographic; a graph or pie chart can be enough to lift a page that would otherwise look dull or impenetrable.

Pull quotes

This refers to a single line or short paragraph of text that is highlighted in a different font size and / or colour to help it stand out from the rest of the copy. Like graphics, these provide ‘entry points’ into the page, stopping your reader from scrolling and hooking their interest so that they read more.

How to get more eyes on your case studies

Of course, in order for your readers to engage with your case studies, they first need to know that they exist. That’s why it’s important that you make them as easy to find as possible.

Optimise them for search

A byproduct of formatting your case study well with images and subheads is that you will add great SEO value. For images, make sure you’ve included the right keywords in both the image files and the alt text. Other areas to focus on include meta descriptions and the case study URL itself.

Make them prominent on your website

If you have a decent selection of case studies, you should have a dedicated spot on your website where your visitors can go and look through them. This should be easy to find via the menu on your website.

But don’t stop there. Use a panel on your homepage to showcase highlights and include a strong call to action to lead people through to the case study page. You can include relevant highlights on product, services and industry / sector pages too.

Share them on social media

There are lots of different ways to share your case studies on social media. Don’t just push them out once and then forget about it. Draw out different elements of the story, share testimonial quotes and hard facts, ask questions to find out what struggles your audience is facing. And remember to tag the company and individual(s) involved so that you increase your reach.

Use them in your emails

If you’ve got a newsletter, you can use it as a platform to share new case studies as you publish them. But there are more powerful ways to use case studies in emails too.

If you use lead magnets, for example, make sure to use case studies within your nurture sequences. You can also use them within direct sales emails as a way to help overcome objections and move leads through the buying journey.

Effective case studies – a conclusion

To be effective, a case study needs to do five things.

  1. Be easy to find, be that on social, via search or for visitors coming to your website.
  2. Be easy to read. Forget an offputting wall of text. Use images, subheads and pull quotes to create entry points for your reader.
  3. Be built around a foundation of transformation that highlights the end benefits of your products and services. 
  4. Speak to your ideal audience, drawing in clients who will benefit your business (and vice versa) and putting off anyone who wouldn’t be a good fit.
  5. Stand out from the crowd and be memorable. Use infographics or video to make an impression, and facts and testimonial quotes to back up your assertions.


If you can get your case study firing on all five cylinders, it can be an incredibly powerful tool in your marketing and sales toolkit.

If you’re looking for support to create a case study strategy or need support from a fractional content lead to ensure the project gets off the ground, get in touch to see how I can help.

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Creating original content is one of the most powerful ways to establish your expertise as a brand and help build your reputation online. The challenge is that it takes time, effort and probably budget to do it well. Which is why it’s important to repurpose that content so you can share it in lots of different ways and increase the ROI you’re getting. 

Repurposing content in different forms also means you’ll catch a larger audience, because everyone has a different way they like to consume information, whether that’s through visuals, the written word, audio and so one.

The first step is to decide what your foundational content is. Are you going to focus on blogging, on video, on podcasts? Perhaps you’ll invest in white papers or webinars. You may well end up using all of them, but it’s hard to do lots of things really well, especially if your budget is restricted. Better to have one as your base and build off that.

For the purposes of this article, let’s take the humble blog as a starting point. Blogs are hosted on your website, making them part of your ‘own’ rather than ‘rented’ marketing space, and can easily be repurposed in lots of different ways.

Here’s how I’d recommend squeezing the most value you can from each post, to ensure that you’re reaching as many people as possible.

TL:DR

1) Write a valuable, strategically informed blog post

Step one is to create the original piece of content, in this case your blog post. At this stage, don’t think too hard about how it might be repurposed. You want to focus on making it the best blog possible, with a headline designed to engage your audience or perform well from an search perspective (both SEO and AI), formatting that makes reading it as easy as possible, and most importantly, as much value as you can possibly include. By doing this, your blog will start adding value from the moment it is published.

2) Share it on social media – more than once

Before I move onto repurposing per se, make sure you’re sharing your post as it is on social media – ideally more than once. Your first share can be a straightforward one, introducing the topic and encouraging people to click through and read it by selling the benefits of the post. You can also use questions, stats and quotes pulled from the blog itself to vary the social sharing copy and encourage more engagements and views.

3) Summarise it in your newsletter

Your email list is made up of people who are at least moderately interested in what you have to say, so don’t deny them the chance to read your post. There are several ways you can share posts via email:

4) Turn it into a press release

If your blog post has a strong news hook, original research, controversial opinion or anything else that might be of interest to a journalist, why not repurpose it as a press release? Make sure to understand the publication you’re pitching to and what you’re hoping to gain. For example, do you want to write a similar piece for them or do you want to go on their expert contact list? Many online publications have submission guidelines that will help you understand how best to approach them.

5) Film a video

I’ve already talked about doing one thing well rather than lots of things poorly, but there’s no reason why a well written blog post shouldn’t help you create a video. Unlike foundational brand videos, which are worth getting a professional for, video blogs can be filmed with a decent laptop or smartphone.

Again, there are several ways to tackle this. You could go through all of the points from your blog post in one longer video. You could chop it up into different sections e.g. if you have 5 tips, you could film one video for each and make a series. Or you can use video as a teaser, for example sharing just one tip and encouraging people to click through to the blog for more.

6) Use your post as a chapter in a download

Once you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ll have a collection of posts around several key topics. This is a great opportunity to create a download. These add value for the reader by giving them one place to find all the information they need on the topic. They can be useful tools for your sales team to use as part of any outreach campaigns.

7) Record a podcast series

Another way to repurpose a whole collection of blog posts is to record a podcast series. Once again, you can do this in different ways. The most straightforward would be to simply record audio versions of each post for people who don’t have the time to read and prefer to consume their content on the go. But you might also prefer to be a little more free flowing and conversational, using the key points in each post as a starting point rather than a script. Or why not get a guest on to discuss each blog to get a variety of views?

8) Create an animation

This isn’t a cheap or easy option so I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for every post you write. But if there’s a particular piece of pillar content that is foundational to your content strategy, animation is a powerful way of getting – and keeping – people’s attention.

9) Put together a presentation

Next time you’re asked to give a presentation at a conference or other industry event, don’t stress about what you’re going to talk about. Dive into your blog and you’ll find plenty of inspiration. Chances are that many of your posts are a talk in themselves, containing an introduction, several main points, and a conclusion. All you have to do is create the slides.

10) Design an infographic

Depending on the information included in your post, it might lend itself nicely to an infographic format. These may be old school but they’re still really useful for sharing on social media and for image search. Remember, you don’t want to include all the words from your post in the infographic – it needs to be primarily visual, so take the core concepts and use text sparingly.

11) Send it to a prospect

Some blog posts naturally fit within your sales process. For example, you might have a buyer’s guide designed to help your audience make the right choice of product or service. Do put these posts on your website, but don’t leave them there. Send them directly to prospects too. You might do this at the same time as sending a proposal, for example, or as a follow up that feels a little more valuable than “Have you had a chance to consider our proposal?”

While all of these repurposing techniques take a level of input in terms of time and effort, they should ultimately take the knowledge you put into your blog – the research, the concepting, even some of the phrasing – and give it different forms. 

By doing this, you get the most business value out of the expertise you put into your post. And you reach more people, both by using different content forms that appeal to different people, and by simply showing up more times in people’s digital landscape.

The Authority Project.

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The idea that people don’t act in an entirely rational way is nothing new. Even the most dispassionate of us are emotional creatures at our core. Which means that we make decisions as much by our feelings and perceptions as by our cognitive deliberation.

What does this have to do with business? Well, if you want to sell then you need to understand why people buy. And that means understanding the feelings and perceptions, as well as the rational choices, that drive their decisions.

In order to do this, it is helpful to take a look at the idea of emotional capital. Emotional capital exists in a number of areas, but in this article we’re talking about external emotional capital.

TL:DR

What is external emotional capital?

In his book Emotional Capitalists, corporate psychologist Martyn Newman PhD defines external emotional capital as “the value of the feelings and perceptions held by the customer and the external stakeholder towards your business.”

He adds: “The only way to create real profit is to attract the emotional rather than the rational customer by appealing to his or her feelings and imagination.”

Notice that Newman talks about feelings and perceptions. People will have feelings about your business: “I like that brand, I can trust them”. And they will have perceptions. These are more about the stories they use to rationalise those feelings: “They care about the environment, they are experts in their field.”

From here, we can reverse engineer the idea of emotional capital in the context of content marketing. What stories can you tell about your business that will create the right perceptions in your audience? What feelings can you evoke that will create positive emotional capital, drive brand loyalty and ultimately increase sales?

How do you want people to feel about your brand?

The first step in your emotional capital strategy is to define what kind of capital you want to build. How do you want your audience to feel when they come into contact with your brand? What do you want them to perceive about your business?

For example, you might want people to believe that your brand is environmentally conscious, fair, good value and fun. To feel happy and inspired whenever they interact with it. Or perhaps you want them to decide you’re a luxury brand that champions innovation and invites customers into an exclusive club, creating desire in those who are not yet customers and a sense of personal satisfaction in those who are.

The same works in the B2B space. You might want people to see you as pioneering and trailblazing, and feel inspired and excited by your brand. Or to think of you as a quietly confident teacher or encouraging coach, evoking feelings of reassurance, encouragement and safety.

Perhaps you are in an industry where many brands are perceived negatively, such as recruitment, law or car sales. Here people might see organisations as greedy, self-seeking or even dishonest, leaving customers and clients feeling irritated or frustrated. This can be a useful starting point for building a brand that is in direct opposition to this stereotype.

How content can build emotional capital

You can’t create emotional capital with a one-off event. You have to build it over every touchpoint that your audience has with your business. This ranges your core messaging to the functionality of your website to how polite your reception staff are.

So, where does content fit in? Well, content is perfectly suited to meet the “show don’t tell” requirement of building emotional capital. Rather than telling your audience how they should perceive you – your values, your expertise, your personality – you can demonstrate the relevant elements that will allow them to come to the right conclusions for themselves.

Just look at the Hubspot blog, packed full of insights written in a straightforward and encouraging tone. It’s easy to see why people feel that Hubspot as a brand knows what they’re talking about. That they’re experts, they’re helpful, they have their finger on the pulse. We can trust them.

To take a B2C example, Lego publish a free magazine. The activities and ideas inside underline the perception that Lego is a fun brand that cares about creating and developing young minds. It’s encouraging and exciting. They want us to have fun!

Using content to serve your audience

Content allows you to add value, to be helpful, to serve the needs of your audience and thereby create positive emotions. An example might be a swimwear company publishing a “what to pack for your beach holiday” checklist, or a leadership consultancy practice hosting a webinar about developing emotional intelligence at work.

On the flipside you can use a blog post to address your audience’s concerns about working with you, a buyer’s guide to help them avoid a poor product choice (and with it buyer’s regret), or a series of tutorials to help them navigate the challenges of getting to grips with your system. All will steer them away from negative emotions and perceptions.

This isn’t a quick fix exercise. Content marketing is a long game, as is building emotional capital. You can’t force people to feel or believe anything. But with a consistent approach that is both authentic and strategic, and by measuring and iterating continuously, it is possible to build emotional capital that will serve your brand well.

If you want to build a brand that people will connect with emotionally as well as cognitively, get in touch.

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