Category: Marketing Strategy

How to Effectively Outsource Product Marketing Content

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This article was originally published on MarketingProfs

First off, yes, product marketing content can be outsourced effectively. From whitepapers to sales enablement, there are freelance contractors (like me) that are capable of understanding your highly complex product and creating that key content to help drive revenue.

Wait, why not just hire another product marketer? 

1) It’s cheaper and 2) It produces more content. The fact is that most product marketers get pulled into so many meetings and deliverables with engineering and product management that writing always seems to fall to the wayside. That leaves demand generation and sales teams frustrated waiting for content.

A good product marketing contractor can focus on your content needs without the interruptions of in-house product marketers and create spectacular content. You just need to manage them effectively. Read on to get my advice on how to work with contractors like myself for a mutually beneficial engagement.

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How to Easily Generate a Year’s Worth of Ideas for Blog and Social Posts

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Does every time you need to write a new blog post or put out a social post feel like you’re trying to pull ideas out of an empty well? If so, you’re not alone. That said, writing marketing content does not need to be this difficult. The key is to come up with long term campaign ideas just once a year so that you can remove the painful process of frequent ideation while saving yourself a ton of time. In this article I’ll provide ideas and concepts that you can use to take the headache out of generating blog and social media content.

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Why Tech Startups Should Never Hire a Social Media Marketer

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I work with a lot of B2B tech startups helping them to get their go-to-market messaging and marketing strategy figured out. I never cease to be shocked when CEOs ask me about hiring a social media marketer as a freelance or full time role. Somehow social media has become the hope of these founders. That a young college grad will come in and get their message out in social media and their target buyers will just flock to their website. 

Unfortunately, this is absolutely the wrong approach. I’m not saying that social media isn’t worth your time, but I am saying there is a much more effective way that will save you money and get you better results.

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How to Craft ‘Compelling Reason to Buy’ Messaging

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Originally published in MarketingProfs on 4/8/20

What is a Compelling Reason to Buy

A Compelling Reason to Buy is NOT an elevator pitch (although it should be). Sales knows an elevator pitch as explaining what the product does. A Compelling Reason to Buy explains the benefit to the target audience that they will realize with your product. And just as the name implies, it is a much more compelling way to capture interest.

The concepts behind a Compelling Reason to Buy can be found in Geoffrey Moore’s product development and marketing standard, Crossing the Chasm. In working with companies from startups that need go-to-market messaging to enterprises that have lost their focus, I’ve simplified the concepts to create an easy exercise that I use with clients. This exercise ensures that any messaging I create is going to help capture the attention of the target audience.

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Why ABM is the Best Growth Strategy for B2B Startups

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You might have a board member that swears by the “dialing for dollars” approach or a former enterprise executive that wants to go big with broad inbound marketing. But the reality for any startup or emerging technology is a harsh one – very little budget and very little runway. You’ve got to take on a strategy that makes efficient use of spend and can be counted on for success. Enter ABM — Account Based Marketing.

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Why Auditing is the Most Important Job of Content Leaders (And How to Do It)

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As a content lead, you care about the quality of content that your team is releasing to the wild. You likely spend a great deal of your time planning content strategy and brainstorming themes. You make sure that everyone knows their role in the orchestration of the content engine. But is auditing a part of your role? If you truly want to improve content performance, you may need to take a closer look at your content—and I don’t mean your assets.

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How Marketing Can Get the Most Out of The Gig Economy

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If you’re a marketing leader, you are likely struggling with more on your ‘to do’ list than your team can handle. Part of that is lack of resources relative to your objectives, but the other factor is inefficiency of internal resources. And while I’m sure most of you work hard to be as efficient as possible, studies show that most corporate employees spend over half their time in meetings and managing email. It’s just part of corporate life no matter how much we attempt to protect our teams from it. So what can marketing leaders do?

The answer is to embrace the gig economy. In this post I’ll do my best to explain what the gig economy can do for marketers and how to take advantage of this growing opportunity.

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How To Fix The Most Common Content Marketing Mistakes

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Content marketing has done wonders for demand generation. If done correctly, it can organically engage, educate and bring target buyers into your pipeline. However, as marketing departments established content marketing groups and processes, often times key concepts slipped through the cracks. This is particularly prevalent in larger organizations I work with where aspects of content marketing are handled across multiple departments.

After working with many companies on their content marketing, here is my list of the five most common content marketing mistakes I see and tactical advice for how to fix them.

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Don’t Make Product Marketers Write—Make Them Outline

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Product marketers. They are the golden goose of software companies. This mythical combination of technical product knowledge and writing prowess. Marketing is depending on them for a steady stream of whitepapers (a.k.a. golden eggs) so they can generate demand for the business. It sounds wonderful, but alas, it is really more of a fairy tale.

The Reality of What Product Marketing Does

According to Pragmatic Marketing’s Annual Survey, on average product marketers work 46 hours per week and 53% of that time is spent in meetings and managing email. Another 20% is spent supporting development efforts and 15% is spent helping sales with existing customer deals or prospects. That leaves a measly 9% of their time spent creating and reviewing marketing materials. Not a lot of golden eggs can be created in 4 fragmented hours a week.

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It’s Time to Socialize Social

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Here we are more than a decade past when B2B companies started using social media as a promotional channel and we still haven’t figured out the best way to manage it. Looking forward, our approach needs to be about enabling all marketers in the process to add their expertise in order to create relevant social posts that your target audience wants to click through. To sum it up—we need to socialize social.

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