The Marketing Blueprint for Effectively Scaling Your Brand

A version of this content also appears on The Articulate Collective

Gone are the days when you needed to dump tons of budget into online advertising, event partnerships and five-figure monthly PR firm retainers and acquire abundant resources to grow a brand.

I've built my business thesis on the idea that B2B companies can build brand equity and engage with their (typically niche) audience by publishing unique, original content that cannot be found anywhere else, filling a void within that niche.

In other words, the playbook is now about owned media rather than paid or earned media.

Best of all, as Robert Mighall recently argued, this new playbook requires less overhead and capital and can be (and should be) executed from the inception of your business.

Want to see how it’s done? I’ll walk you through the tactical execution of efficiently and cost-effectively scaling your brand in today’s market environment.

Generate Brand Equity & Establishing Thought Leadership from the Beginning

The best piece of advice I can give is DON’T WAIT!

It’s common practice to be head down in product development, leaving marketing as an afterthought.

While general wisdom tells you this makes sense (no product, no company), you end up delaying your company's growth by not refining your messaging, and establishing an audience and distribution from the beginning.

Even while your product is still being developed, you should already find and attract your core audience and build valuable brand equity by publishing content.

This will open the door for discussions with prospective clients, partners, and not to be overlooked, talent.

A corporate and employer brand with an inspiring vision is critical even at this early stage, and can become both an enabler and differentiator in all competitive contexts.

When you are ready to fully go to market, you will already have established distribution channels and brand positioning, accelerating your sales pipeline and talent acquisition.

This will also make any PR and media outreach campaigns more successful.

As I explain here, owned media, earned media and paid media feed into one another. In this case, the traction from owned media boosted the earned media campaign at launch.

If you wait to build an audience through content marketing, your initial go-to-market strategy will not be as impactful, stalling the entire trajectory of your company.

Connect with Your Audience & Satisfy Content Gaps

Give your audience the content they crave. One of the core tenets of my communications philosophy is that traditional media massively underserves long-tail audiences.

Chances are this is the case within your industry; the content available is a mile wide but only an inch deep.

This puts you in a unique position to fill the content void of its niche audience.

One of your first tasks is to connect with both internal and external experts in your industry to learn topics and themes to cover and identify content gaps in your space.

Then it is all about consistently publishing and collecting feedback from your audience to fine-tune content and find future inspiration.

The more you publish, the better you get at producing content, so it’s best to get your reps in early and often.

Start working on your creative storytelling muscle from the beginning, so when you’re ready to launch at scale, you’ll have a fortified brand message.

In other words, work on your craft in the preliminary rounds, so that when you get to the championship rounds, you’ll be in peak form.

Content Development: Evergreen & Educational Content, Headlines & Consumability

Not only is knowing WHAT content to produce crucial to success but also HOW to produce it.

I always advise focusing on two primary types of content, often fusing them — educational and evergreen.

Educational

What is considered common sense knowledge is often useful information for someone else, especially in technical fields. There is a bit of “I don’t know, but I’m too afraid to ask” thinking — use this to your advantage.

In my experience, this is some of the best-performing content you can produce. People want to learn, especially if it helps them improve themselves.

What’s great about this type of content is — that apart from maybe needing some occasional updating depending on the medium and topic — it’s evergreen, so its value will compound over time.

Evergreen

Evergreen content remains relevant as opposed to trending content, which is a hot topic today but gone tomorrow.

Prioritize consistently publishing evergreen content to create a compound effect over time.

This is an effective SEO strategy and a big traffic driver.

Think of it like a high-yield content savings account. The longer you wait and the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it.

Double down on evergreen content by targeting different personas and stages in your sales funnel.

Your content strategy should be about more than just lead generation, it should support sales at various points in the customer journey, especially if you have a long sales cycle.

Headlines

Headlines SHOULD NEVER be an afterthought. Focusing on headlines is a large part of keyword strategy.

You must balance piquing the reader's interest, brevity, keyword optimization and being true to the content. The onus should be on keywords, headlines are not the place to get too creative.

A good practice is to write your headline ideas after finishing your content. Make this an iterative process until you land on the best headline. A lot of effort should be put into headline development.

It’s a shame when hours are poured into a piece of content that no one sees because the headline was written in two minutes.

It’s also important to understand the first 60 words in your content get indexed by search engines, so you’ll want to include your keywords here (without being obnoxious about it).

If you’re looking for assistance, you can use headline analyzer tools such as the ones provided by Advanced Marketing Institute or Sharethrough.

Consumability

Once you draw in users, it’s about keeping them engaged.

The average attention span of an adult is a mere 8.25 seconds.

This is why structure plays an important role.

Content must be easy for your audience to consume. This is where chunking comes into play.

The idea behind chunking is to break up your content into small consumable pieces, making it easy for the reader to scan and read.

It’s best to vary your content with applicable items such as images, videos, pull quotes and bulleted lists, along with bolding or highlighting noteworthy information.

It’s important that proper formatting is applied to headings, subheadings, lists, spacing, etc. To nail this, spend a lot of time on the UX and design of your content hub (including building multiple iterations).

This not only helps your audience consume your content but also makes it easier for search engines to index your content, furthering your organic search optimization.

Get the Experts Involved

Once you have your topics and keywords and a strong structure, the next order of business is extracting knowledge and information. This is a common obstacle for content marketing initiatives.

Create a culture of learning, sharing and publishing content. If you’re looking for inspiration, consider these content culture pillars.

If content creation only involves the marketing team, chances are it will lack substance and depth.

Not only should your in-house domain experts be involved with content — giving insights, sharing ideas and creating content — you should also deploy an outreach program to get outside industry thought leaders involved with your content.

By presenting the expertise and opinions of outside professionals, you become the voice of your industry, giving yourself an extra layer of credibility compared to if you only published content from your employees.

This also extends your reach because contributors will be keen to share the content they were involved in, creating a significant network effect.

Getting outside contributions to your content will accelerate the growth of your brand and allow you to scale your efforts efficiently.

And people will be happy to contribute because they are provided a platform to share their thoughts and promote themselves and their projects.

This is a true win-win scenario.

What You’ll Achieve

If executed early and effectively, your marketing efforts can culminate in success in a relatively short period.

Seven to eight figures of enterprise value can be captured through an effective content marketing strategy, which includes (but is certainly not limited to):

• Marketing qualified leads that convert into deals

• Getting free and exclusive access to events, podcasts and other platforms where tickets/access otherwise would cost thousands of dollars.

• Getting content redistributed on leading trade publications (and in some cases mainstream media) equates 5 to 6 (or sometimes even &) figures in brand exposure value.

• Owned media success (content published on your own platform) enhances paid media campaigns (saving you thousands of ad dollars).

Brand building through content is also fundamental in building relationships with key stakeholders:

• Sales prospects (potential Advisory and Software customers)

• Recruiting and employee retention (i.e.corporate branding)

• Fundraising (i.e. investor relations)

• Partnerships and Acquisitions

Combining outbound sales with a strong brand is fundamental to achieving commercial success. More often than not, prospects will already be familiar with your company because of your content initiatives, which open the door for sales and create a strong foundation for discussions.

Beyond fulfilling commercial objectives, you will fill a knowledge gap in your niche with much-needed content, allowing you to give back to your network.