For B2B SaaS outfits in post-conversion circumstances, the same roadblocks and challenges that made the road to conversion so tumultuous can, if properly navigated, be leveraged to nurture retention.

Due to the nature of the B2B SaaS industry and the terms of their contracts, retention is a determination that is made over the course of months, or even years — rather than days or hours. With traditional B2C SaaS companies, churn can be inspired by something as simple as a poorly timed email, or seeing a recurring charge reminder on financial statements. With B2B SaaS, however, once a commitment is made, there is no opportunity for churn until the contract terms have ended.

This doesn’t mean, however, that customers can be forgotten during their contract period; it’s actually the opposite. For each day, week, month that a customer is under contract, they are just as much being nurtured – just as they would be a new customer – for renewal at the end of their contract. Afterall, retention is far cheaper than acquisition. To accomplish this, there are 3 core strategies that can be followed in order to build trust, retain relationships, and – as always – develop customers into advocates.

• Product-led retention
• Community-led retention
• Content-led retention

While true that, at their core, B2B SaaS companies are selling a service — the reality is that success is built upon building and selling ecosystems. Customers will be interacting and relying upon your service from day-to-day, but it’s the additional touch points that will add to the experience in order to provide the value add and sense of inclusivity, and to a point exclusivity, that will encourage retention with customers.

Let’s dive in.

Product-led Retention for B2B SaaS

Product-led growth as a mechanism for conversions has become a staple of nearly all B2B SaaS growth strategies — with many organizations thinking that the product is finished when conversions occur. This is wrong. Product, like most things in a successful business, is a working solution that can – and should – be constantly monitored & optimized both for future current and future customers.

It’s important to remember that, no matter how long a customer has been buying your services, each customer at time of renewal is a prospect once again. This is a helpful mentality for two reasons:

1. It provides insights that can be leveraged to improve product for existing customers
2. It provides insights that can be leveraged for guiding future customers through the customer journey

In the same way that we, as consumers for B2C brands or even traditional media like movies or television, expect something new with each passing season, or each new iteration of a product offering — businesses expect new from their SaaS providers. By adding features, optimizing existing features, and otherwise improving the user experience, B2B SaaS projects are able to provide additional value to potentially upsell existing customers, if not simply retain them.

Perhaps one of the greatest examples of this in the modern B2B SaaS space has been Figma and their community-driven approach to product which ultimately led to their recent Adobe acquisition.

While community has been a massive keystone to their success, the company has always understood taking a product-first approach to retaining their audience. Through their various platforms, they allow not only the suggestion – but implementation – of new features as dictated by the community. New features, plugins, and other forms of upgrades are not saved just for annual releases and updates, but rolled out in real time at the pace of the customers that rely on them. 

In turn, they are able to nurture retention in ways that their (now parent) company has struggled with for years with their users loyally returning from project to project, gig to gig, and even as freelancers or independents.

Community-led Retention for B2B SaaS

While it’s not realistic to expect that a B2B SaaS business will be able to provide solutions to every particular piece of customer feedback that is given -— keeping an open dialogue with customers can be the difference between churn and retention. While it is true that there is no saving the fallout from potential bugs or flaws of a particular B2B SaaS offering, often times these flaws can be overcome just through the development of relationships with customers through representatives who give them a voice, as well as the understanding and acknowledgment that something is being done about it. 

With the advent of GPT3 & other AI-driven customer service solutions, it’s easy for those utilizing a B2B SaaS service to feel as though they’re abandoned in a post-conversion world. This doesn’t, however, mean that each customer needs a rep, or that chat-driven customer services tools aren’t a viable option for fielding inquiries and resolving issues with customers.

While having a robust team of reps is absolutely preferable to AI, having a community-driven approach to resolving issues and aiding in retention — with many businesses adopting message boards, Slack channels, Discord servers & subreddits, these are a few of the many means for retaining customers.

In addition to acting as a repository for questions that customers can refer to if they run into a problem that someone has potentially had in the past, there is an immense value to bringing like-minded people together with the intention of building & nurturing relationships that will become a part of the consideration process when the contract renewal comes around.

Exclusivity can also have an appeal within industries where these communities and platforms welcome prominent figures for organizations that utilize their services. The community then becomes an additional benefit to the price of the service since it also produces access & interactions with other professionals that can catalyze the growth of those other businesses in the community.

If we were to look at WeWork as an example, while the business itself is essentially just a provider of coworking space, the model itself has been optimized for retention through its focus on community & nurturing interactions & access among members. Upon first sign-up, members might be only looking for an affordable and flexible workspace, but upon time of renewal they may find themselves citing the people they’ve met and professional connections they’ve made to help grow their business as reason for staying & renewing.

Content-led Retention for B2B SaaS

Extending off of the concept of exclusivity, content can be leveraged for both exclusivity and retention for those customers who we’ve successfully converted. This can be leveraged in a number of ways that elegantly mesh with both product & community to help in developing an ecosystem for those utilizing your services to optimize for retention.

Similarly to how communities can be utilized to help alleviate and address issues & feedback loops with customers, so can content. By monitoring and engaging in the communities that we’ve developed for our businesses, we can likewise translate the feedback and insights that we’ve captured from these channels into content — and do so in a way that lends to the sense of inclusivity.

Through tutorials, members-only newsletters, seminars, lunch & learns, retreats, guides, or other forms of content that is engineered and sent exclusively to customers, the reasoning for renewal can be as simple as that the customer feels engaged.

Similar to the other mechanisms for retention, value-add should always be at the forefront of the content efforts as they are presented to the communities for your B2B SaaS project. Are new features rolling out? Sending free preview content to customers who are approaching renewal can be a lever for driving renewal. Collaborating with a prominent user for your service? Capture the interaction and send it out as a customer-wide newsletter to nurture a sense of belonging and community to encourage folks to stick around when their time for renewal comes around.

As with any content strategy, it’s important to observe and understand your content pillars and the goals that you are seeking to achieve with this strategy to inform your content decisions. Each piece of content, whether it’s a newsletter, social media channel, explainer video, or otherwise, should be produced & distributed with the exclusive purpose of nurturing loyalty & retention.

B2B SaaS Retention

For B2B SaaS companies, the mechanism for growth tend to be fairly paralleled to the mechanisms for retention — with some minor shifts in their implementation. Initiatives of content, product, & community don’t meet the end of their roads just because a prospect becomes a client, they must continue in order to keep the customer satisfied and – most importantly – heard once they have crossed the threshold of conversion.

With high conversion costs, particularly due to the nature of B2B SaaS, implementing and optimizing these practices become imperative to long-term & sustained success as high churn can drastically eat away at revenue, or worse, drive up prices for existing customers due to associated conversion costs.

Ultimately, in building a B2B SaaS company, we must also build a B2B SaaS community that helps to nurture an ecosystem where customers find value in order to keep retention rates high and support advocacy.

The post B2B SaaS Retention – A Modern How-To Guide From an Expert appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

As with any time of great change, there comes a requirement to make great adjustments, and observations of these shifts in order to not only stay relevant but outpace the ripples and ride the crest of the wave into the future. And in keeping with our impeccable history of staying ahead of the curve and the first on any number of waves, we’ve compiled a few key ripples to keep an eye on in 2023 as they develop into waves.

TL;DR

1. Sustainable startups
2. The new VC
3. Earned > Paid
4. AI infiltrates martech
5. Social commerce becomes commerce
6. Enter the metaverse
7. Brands embrace Web3
8. Creator economy boom
9. Visual search

Sustainability startups are big money

While fast fashion and mass consumption may have defined the 2010s and the Instagram era of media, sustainability has been setting the stage for the new decade. While largely motivated by the potential impending doom of all of humanity, GenZ has been a major proponent in the shift towards green products with a collective predisposition towards sustainability, accountability, and transparency — both in media and consumer goods.

In 2020 alone, the sustainable investments had amassed themselves to a staggering $35.3T according to the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance (GSIA), which at the time accounted for 36% of all professionally managed assets globally. This number for many was not simply evidence of the shift in consumer preferences, but in investment practices, as investors turned their gaze towards sustainable products in recognition that there was not only a market for them but that it was growing substantially YOY.

From a consumer behavior perspective, we have witnessed that buyers are increasingly willing to spend more for better quality products at the expense of quantity — if they know that the product is made sustainably, and where the costs are coming from. In response, while legacy brands are heeding this signal to make shifts in their production, new coming brands & legacies alike are also seeking opportunities to cut corners, and capitalize on shrinkflation by charging more for less product while making attempts to greenwash & make false claims as to their environmental contributions and efforts.

The newly minted conscious consumers in GenZ and beyond, however, have adopted substantial practices both through research and social validation to not only hold brands accountable, but themselves, and many brands have been caught – and at times canceled – attempting to greenwash their products for the sake of quick profits.

This wave of sustainability has spurred not only the reimagining of the products we consume from day to day, like our washcloths, beauty products, clothes, and other forms of consumables, but our energy, infrastructure, and other forms of services. In keeping with the trends of eco-conscious consumerism, the shift to green is being seen rippling through nearly every industry as consumers turn away from anything that’s not – at a baseline – carbon neutral.

VC but without the venture

If the current interest rates & the number of layoffs from the otherwise bulletproof social & tech giants are any indications, the economy may not be doing swell at the moment — despite the recent – and record-breaking – black Friday numbers and the value of venture capital growing exponentially in recent years. That said, the venture capital sector is definitely going to be putting the squeeze on their money which will undoubtedly have ripple effects across numerous industries.

The days of exorbitant valuations may be over for the foreseeable future, and as cash becomes more scarce, teams will become slimmer, ad dollars will become more difficult to come by, and efficiencies will need to come from new spaces in marketing stacks. For marketers & their teams specifically, this means testing less, extrapolating more, and doing more with less.

Don’t get us wrong, testing will still very much be a thing, but while prior you may have had the budget to test 70x iterations of a single ad to be definitively sure of where inefficiencies were in your ad stack, now the budget may only allow for 10. And while many marketers may have become accustomed to having an analyst, designer, writer, and strategist on their team for each account they get assigned — the new reality may mean managing without in many cases.

This may be seen as an intimidating prospect for many, but ultimately these dips in the market tend to leave in higher levels of innovation as both investors and talent alike are far more scrutinous with where their time, energy, and capital are going.

As a direct byproduct of this, the concentration of effort & talent tends to churn higher success rates in projects than in the high-churn environment we’ve been in where new funding is fairly easy to access and valuations are being handed out generously.

What we can also predict from this new cycle of bootstrapping is…

A focus on earned media

The content economy in 2023 is going to come in full focus as an extension of the squeeze in finance & VC sectors — leaving teams to lean more deeply into content, earned media, and organic tactics as an alternative to paid. This may come as a delight to audiences and communities who will likely get to reap the benefits of having more time and effort spent by brands to woo and entertain them, though the brands themselves may begin to feel the pressures of having to have their content perform now more than ever.

While content has very much become pay to play, with the mixture of earned and paid media leaning heavily on the paid side of things in recent years as the shift of social continued its journey of going from a place to keep up with friends to a place to discover new brands and products. However, as TikTok leads the surge for the transformation of social media from discovery to consumption, paid is becoming – once again – supplementary to earned.

As algorithms continue to make their transformation in order to allow users to find & consume relevant content, the focus building teams will likely shift towards being creator first with others supporting those leading content. This may be seen as a stark contrast to what has come to be expected with the make-up of brand & marketing teams, but with the aforementioned shift in budgets, the justification of having paid media teams being a heavy focus of building outfits may no longer exist in the coming year.

This of course will all be supplemented by…

AI, like Chat GPT, continues the conversation

GPT 3 is pretty great, we all know that — even if we didn’t. The reality of 2022, which will undoubtedly build momentum through 2023 and beyond, is that AI is here to stay and it’s becoming not just helpful but necessary to stay competitive; particularly as teams are pairing down. With the projected landscape, the implementation and utilization of AI tools into Martech stacks will likely become synonymous with survival, as they will be needed to supplement the workloads of smaller teams in order to continue to produce the same results that investors have come to expect — despite the lighter budgets.

The above may read as though we’re saying, “AI is replacing jobs.” and that couldn’t be further from the truth. The jobs that are likely to be lost moving into 2023 as a result of the economic squeeze wouldn’t have been saved with or without AI, they are just allowing the teams that exist moving forward to do more under the same circumstances.

It still stands to be seen whether or not AI takes a more prominent seat at the design table, as the “creations” that have been churned out of available tools thus far are predictably gimmicky and those latching on to the work and trying to leverage it artistically have been largely opportunistic — if not worse. That isn’t to say, however, that this could all change very quickly, as the same sentiments had been said about AI writing in years prior.

If a prediction were to be made, it’s that AI writing tools will likely continue to learn and require less of a lift from their human counterparts in the coming year, though it’s improbable that we’ll be reading full books, screenplays, or blog posts that are entirely AI written. But their utility will remain the same in that they can lessen the lift necessary for creative teams, particularly those under additional stress, and enable them to keep cadences while not sacrificing quality with fewer resources.

It will be interesting to see, however, whether or not AI design follows this same path and acts as a jump-off point for designers who can iterate faster and take out a lot of the “sketching” work that is typically necessary to ideate a concept. This seems like the most probable path forward for designers to be able to use AI tools to create 15 iterations of “the letter A as the Eiffel tower” in order to save themselves the time needed to create those concepts, and then do as any good creative director would and edit & refine the ideas.

What is most intriguing, and possibly scary as well, is the mass adoption event that will follow and that impact on the creative industry. In the same way that 99% (arbitrary made-up statistic) of the population has a rudimentary understanding of Figma, Photoshop, or other forms of photo editing or design software, we will likely see that same level of understanding of these AI tools. What happens then? Genuinely asking. We’ve already seen social media figures rise to prominence for deep-faking Tom Cruise, what’s the next iteration?

Social commerce continues its takeover

Social commerce is changing the way people shop much in the same way that e-commerce changed at the onset of the internet and the conception of Amazon in the 90s. And much in the same way that people and brands once doubted whether users would order clothes, food, and other forms of consumables and subscriptions online, social commerce is poised to prove doubters wrong and usher in a new way of purchasing.

Just as we witnessed TikTok reshape how brands and individuals interact and approach content, they are too changing the way we shop — leveraging the community-driven focus that they’ve cultivated to integrate shopping directly into the social experience. This isn’t to say, however, that they’re alone in the landscape, as the Meta platforms, Youtube, and Pinterest – all save for LinkedIn – have adopted the practice of creating shoppable experiences on their platforms. Beyond just social platforms, e-commerce platforms themselves are making attempts to reverse engineer the content-driven shopping experience by embedding content into their e-commerce pages & making attempts to meet users halfway through content integrations.

What’s to come is undoubtedly a further blur of the line between commerce, content, and community. This will be particularly helpful as brands tighten their budgets as it will remove barriers and boundaries to check out in the shopping journey on these platforms. Social shopping stands to streamline the customer journey to as few steps as discovery & validation through content, and moving users directly to purchase — potentially without ever leaving the content feed.

There should be notable mention of live streaming implementation that’s been slowly creeping into the TikTok feature stack. While it’s been there for some time, the monetization strategy hasn’t been much more than the typical user tipping systems that have become prevalent on platforms like Twitch & Youtube — where users can buy stickers and other forms of onscreen mentions, with the proceeds going to the creator during the stream.

What will likely be seen as this continues to take shape is that rather than content being used as a static validation for users to move to purchase, the content will be featured during live streams with creators showing off product – in real-time – with opportunity for users to purchase as such. This new integration will help users become more directly engaged with content, and aid in creators building trust by allowing users to be “in the room” with them (so to speak) while products are being used and tested — no editing magic, just pure content.

The Metaverse ‘gits gud’

If you happened to be at a relative’s house for thanksgiving and someone happened to pull out a VR headset for your relatives to test out — that’s not an accident. And while the narrative around Meta’s push towards the metaverse is being framed heavily around the amount of money being spent (often phrased as wasted) on building the metaverse, the reality is that in order for mass adoption to happen, the technology needs to be accessible.

Your aunt, uncle, grandparents, parents, or other forms of relatives owning a Meta Quest 2 is a sign that, despite the headlines, Zuckerberg’s push is working. The technology that once needed sensors mounted on walls, wires attached to your head, and an entire room dedicated to being used, can now fit within a box, is wireless, costs the same amount as a Nintendo Switch, less than a PS5 or Xbox Series X, and is actually readily available for purchase.

Doubt it all you want, but the numbers don’t lie with the Meta Quest 2 has sold 14.8 million units since its launch in 2020. While this is a paltry number as compared to the Nintendo Switch’s 114.3 million units, it’s not insubstantial when standing next to the PS5’s 25 million, or the Xbox X’s 17.16 million.

Ultimately, Meta hardware is becoming as commonplace in households as the legacy gaming consoles, which means that as the peripherals become more prevalent, so will the development for them, and in turn, so will the use cases for them. What was once a niche piece of hardware for those early adopters of new tech, is poised to become another staple piece of equipment that will likely be found in every household.

As a result, brands will flock to leverage this new platform for engagement and discovery — developing new experiences and social shopping opportunities. In the same way that experiential marketing was the “thing” throughout the past decade, with the “Museum of (insert brand product here)” becoming the innovative means for brands to reach new audiences and create lasting imprints on communities, virtual experiences will be the new and innovative opportunity for brands to experiment and dazzle users — all from their own living rooms.

Web3 maximalists will continue the push (& brands will continue to experiment)

With a similar sentiment and reasoning behind the logic for the future growth of the metaverse, we foresee a similar continuation of growth & mainstream adoption for the Web3 space. Yes, it’s true, FTX had a bad year and there have been some unsavory things that have happened within Web3 in recent history, however, that’s just evidence that things are going well — hear us out.

It’s true, FTX lost $8B – with a b – dollars in recent history. That definitely happened. Though, we would argue that the fact that they had $8B, to begin with, shows just how far crypto has come, and just how deeply integrated it has become in modern society. There have been numerous other trends, fads, and other forms of fly-by-night trends that have infiltrated mainstream society, and many, if not most of them have never had $8B to lose. Sure, fidget spinners had a few months of multimillion-dollar returns, but last we checked a single fidget spinner broker has never lost $8B and still left a single fidget spinner behind worth $327.1B.

This is besides the point, however, as brands will likely be making the strongest push with Web3 & the advancement of digital ownership of both branded collectibles and items.

With SWOOSH recently launching, ADIDAS having run through a handful of NFT collaborations this past year, and numerous other titans of industry dipping their toes – or whole feet – into blockchain, it’s only natural that we’ll see others following suit.

The momentum of Web3 will undoubtedly be aided by the momentum of the metaverse, with the two acting as support systems for one another, and digital identities becoming an increasingly important piece of our social status. We’ve witnessed the same happen in traditional gaming spheres, with digital wearables and other forms of virtual cosmetics. This may be hard to imagine now with the current state of the metaverse, or at least Zuckerberg’s vision of it, but as hardware improves and becomes more commonplace, the drive for digital identity will surely follow.

Redefining the creator economy

Until this point, the term ‘creator economy’ has been in reference to the exchange of content for awareness — this too is experiencing a shift in definition. With the growth of the economy, the relationship between brand and creator has been experiencing a shift, and capital has been flowing more directly toward the creators themselves — with many creators leaning heavily into building their own brands. The results of which are that these creators are leaning into the impact that they are capable of and re-investing their own money back into the brands that they’ve been building relationships with – turning sponsorships into partnerships – and venturing out into projects all their own.

No one exemplifies the spirit of this new era for content creators than MrBeast, a Youtuber who built a media empire that started with playing Minecraft and has grown into producing massive challenges, often giving away tens, if not hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars in the process. And while his collaborations have allowed him to work with a who’s who of brands and other creators, he has also founded his own businesses with Feastables, his own brand of chocolate bars, MrBeast Burger, a chain of burger restaurants, as well as his own merch brand which often is released in limited quantities and quickly sells out.

This isn’t to say that MrBeast is a typical example of what is possible for creators leveraging their influence with the brands that they work with, but he has written the guide on what creators should aspire to and do when they are presented with opportunities.

In the same way as the startup boom of the past decade or so has taught the freelance and solopreneur lot about negotiating equity and leveraging ownership with the companies they’re lending talent to, we are similarly witnessing the same occurrence beginning to bud in the creator communities. In the climate of authenticity, ownership & personal stake in a project that you are promoting can be a great lever for building trust by signaling that a creator believes so deeply in a product that they’re actively supporting it to secure its future.

The battle for search rages on

TikTok has undoubtedly been gaining momentum since the beginning of this decade following some lowkey growth during its infancy years. And in the same way that most didn’t foresee the impact that the short-form video platform would have on commerce, even fewer could have predicted the impact it would have on search.

With its focus on social validation as a cornerstone of its content and community standards, it’s unsurprising that so many have flocked to TikTok to find answers to their most burning questions. Pair this with the fact that Google has been losing trust with users with its easy-to-game algorithm – often leading to search results being unhelpful – and that the most favorable real estate of the search results page often being given to ads, and it’s no surprise that TikTok has been given favor — not even mentioning the ease of access of being able to find & absorb answers in under 10 seconds.

Google, unsurprisingly, isn’t just laying down and giving away their hard-earned search traffic and we will likely see this battle continue on through 2023. While video search, often in the form of snippets of Youtube videos, has been something that Google has been optimizing and giving preference to – in the same way that they prioritize featured snippets – we will likely see the same continue to happen with the way they serve up video search results.

Google has already made mention of, and in some cases began rolling out, the indexing of TikTok results as a part of their comprehensive search results offering. Though the battle that they face goes beyond just offering additional search result options, and their success lies directly in their ability to woo younger audiences and prove themselves as a valid source of information. Merely indexing TikTok videos won’t do much for them to stop the bleeding of users if they can’t cause some bleeding on the side of TikTok as well.

As we’ve seen in the past year, Google has indirectly clapped back by rolling out Shorts on Youtube, likely as a way to build their own arsenal of short-form content for their video platform. With a robust community of creators (remember MrBeast) and 2.6 billion users – over twice of TikTok – Google has a formidable tool at its disposal to turn around the battle over search. Further integrations of their video content into search results, paired with a potentially optimized shopping experience (the current Google shopping situation isn’t great) and Google can be the golden child of search once again.

2023 is go

For as unpredictable as 2022 has been – and for that matter 2021 & 2020 – we feel as though we have a pretty decent grasp on where things are going to going for 2023. It’s undoubtedly true that Ye & Elon will have a few surprises for us all in the coming months, and we apologize for the foggy glass on our crystal ball in that regard. If you would like to book some of our time, and have a personal reading for your brand from our crystal ball — we’re always open to sharing predictions.

The post <strong>9 Marketing Trends We Will See in 2023</strong> appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

1. Specialized demographics
2. Difficult targeting
3. Higher price points
4. Specialized products
5. Multi-step approval process

Ultimately, the usual suspsects of growth are in play with brands relying upon SEO (with a companion PPC strategy), content, sales reps, and email in order to both be discovered by users and drive them down the funnel. The nuance comes, as it tends to do, from the way in which these tools are used – and in this case, whom they are used for.

For B2B SaaS projects the unique challenge lies int he fact that while with B2C businesses the customer or end user is an individual who has a set budget and is typically the sole decision maker for making purchases, that isn’t necessarily true of B2B products. For B2B, the customer is not an indidivudal, but fractured to be an amalgam of those controlling and approving spending, those controlling and approving the discovery and decision making, and those who are the end user, with each of these touch points potentially influencing different stages of the process — which requires an understanding of not just the tools being implemented, but the target, their goals, and the solutions being provided.

For each of the traditional growth tools previously mentioned, we’ll explore both how they can be – and in some cases have been – implemented into your growth stacks, while outlining which persona they will be targeting within an organization, what stage of the loop that individual may be in, and the goal for that particular tactic. This will give both a comprehensive view of the possible iterations of a B2B SaaS strategy for growth, but the various ways in which these tactics can interplay & complement one another.

Determining cross-functional pain points

With B2B SaaS businesses, there are – as previously mentioned – likely a number of layers of approvals and validation that need to be cleared prior to adoption and conversion. What this means for strategies is that, there are additional considerations that need to be taken into consideration when addressing pain points in your strategy and making decisions as to who is being targeted with each of your tactics.

For example, if we were to build a strategy for a payroll software service the messaging would vary greatly depending on who is being targeted within an audience, what problems they are trying to solve, and what goals they are looking to achieve.

Let’s break down the pain points of each user:

As we can see from the above, there are certain pain points that overlap, but there are also distinct narratives forming for the content offerings that would be a part of our growth strategy as they pertain to each persona. While both end user and payroll manager may respond positively to messaging that is specific to simple & easy payments, their motivations and goals aren’t necessarily the same — and so the messaging would vary as we target them each individually in our communications.

The SaaS User Journeys

Once we’ve determined the pain points and motivations of our different personas within an organization – and by extension our content narratives – we can now determine the appropriate channels for discovery for each of these personas. In these instances, we look at the organization itself as the user being driven down the funnel, with the individual personas acting as the various stages of the funnel in the user journey.

As we’ll explore moving forward, and as we can see here, the user journey is optimized to cater directly to the persona within the organization at each step of the journey, and these steps can – and should be – rearranged and adjusted in a multitude of ways. A truly comprehensive and exhaustive growth strategy will have mechanisms in place to capture users of each persona, at each step of the user journey, in order to ensure that no users are ever lost in their journey and conversions are captured as efficiently as possible.

While the above journey begins with the end user, it could just as easily begin with the accounting manager being targeted with paid media, proposing the solution to the end user, who then advocate to the payroll manager. Ultimately, the focus and goal is to nurture and cater to the user – in this case the organization – from as many conceivable iterations as possible to ensure comprehensive optimizations within the journey.

Developing your B2B SaaS strategy

Now that we understand the various interactions of the user journey for organizations as they pertain to B2B SaaS organizations, we can now better understand the different levers and mechanisms for developing a growth strategy. These tactics, as with most strategies, are typically implemented in chorus with each other in order to create comprehensive frameworks to drive users from discovery to conversion.

Understanding how these mechanisms work will allow you to not only implement these tactics into your B2B SaaS strategy, but do so in a way that is targeted and optimized by understanding which persona you’ll be optimizing them for and where they are in the journey.

SEO

SEO is an incredible mechanism for not only discovery, but for crafting content that specifically addresses pain points for the various personas within an organization at each step of the user journey. Through the development of either specialized landing pages or targeted blog content, you can build content that is not only engineered to answer the questions your users may have, but address their pain points, and do so in a way so that they find your information when actively seeking it out.

While there are some nuances that need to be considered in the development of your content, some SEO best practices that should always be implemented when developing content for search should be followed — here’s a quick checklist for reference:

For these strategies, however, optimizing for your audience is going to be the crucial piece in the development of your content. This is because if you’re optimizing content for search, but for the persona and the answers or solutions that they are seeking. Building a landing page for the end user versus the manager versus the decision maker will yield vastly different results and require that the piece itself is engineered in different ways all the way down to the focus keyphrase.

Once again using the payroll system as an example, an end user may search for answers as to why their direct deposit has gotten delayed, leading them to find a landing page for the payroll software company that describes the reliability of their system, as well as other solutions that they provide. While this content may also be relevant to the manager, they may also be searching for solutions to the issues that they’re having with their current system which are causing the delays to their direct deposit payments — creating opportunities for the landing page to address these solutions and the ease of use for payroll managers to use their software. And finally, for the decision makers, the page would be engineered specifically to their needs and interests in order to address cost, scalability and other potential concerns that that persona may have.

Taking these a step further, the landing pages or blog posts can also be engineered to stage in the user journey that the persona is in. If it’s a first touch point, the content can be broader in order to answer more questions to help to drive the user through the journey. The content can then be refined further as part of a broader SEO strategy in order to have specific pages or blog posts that provide more comprehensive information that is specific to each product feature or solution that the service provides.

Content

With content making the meteoric rise in prominence that it has in past years, particularly with the advent of brands as a personality and social advocacy, there has never been as much opportunity for B2B brands to leverage content for growth as there is today. This was mainly due to the fact that targeting through content, specifically on social, was an abstract concept and one that was difficult to execute — if for no other reason than there wasn’t typically a defined set of criteria that professionals fit into.

Again using our payroll SaaS company as our example to build upon, if we were to look at our 3 personas, it would be fairly difficult to determine exactly who those individuals were for targeting through social in the same way that we were able to target them through their pain points and keyphrase inquiries — with the exception of LinkedIn or other career driven platforms. The shift, however, that we’re experiencing is in the development of niches within specific industries, or for specific roles within industries, allowing brands to create content that caters directly to specific roles or functions within an industry, and also to leverage UGC by aligning with those prominent figures within their industries who use their service.

Developing your content mix

In the same way that landing pages and blog content were developed and engineered to cater specifically to our different professional personas, the same can be done with organic content in order to create a content mix. With organic content, however, the main difference is that there are nuances and fluctuations in the content, voice & tone, and delivery that need to be addressed and accounted for for each platform and persona in order to be accommodating to them.

This is where understanding your personas is particularly important, as this understanding will help immensely in the development of your strategy and content mix. If the decision makers are understood to be more active on LinkedIn and engage more in more robust content that is specifically engineered to help them progress their skill set, then the content offering being developed needs to take these specifications into account. Likewise, if the end user is most active on TikTok and responds more directly to UGC or educational content, then the same considerations must be made when developing your content mix in order to meet the personas not only where they are in regard to the social landscape, but as well as in their careers and development journey.

Finding your voice & personality as brand

As the lines between brand and persona begin to blur, and interactions between brand and user become more common, finding and refining your brand voice has become more important than ever in the modern media landscape. Though the concept of having a direct interaction with a payroll software company on Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok may seem as though it would be a foreign experience — the reality is quite the opposite. As brands lean more heavily into the space of content, and engagement becomes one fo the key metrics of success, we are experiencing and witnessing more and more the interaction of B2B brands and end user in the public media space.

As a byproduct of this shift happening, content mix becomes an easier hurdle to overcome — as it allows broader appeal of content across channels. Though the subject matter of a particular B2B service may be dense, or require a certain level of expertise, by adopting a personality for your brand, or incorporating memes into your content mix, there becomes opportunity to achieve a broad appeal and lessen the lift of refining your discovery strategies.

This is not to say, however, that by adopting personality into your strategy a brand is completely free of having to consider their target audiences & personas — as these content pieces are still necessary for moving users through the journey. It does, however, make it a simpler task to lead a brand from being unknown, to being known.

Previously, while a brand might be known as the payroll service that posts solely about tax documents and payment processing, there now becomes opportunity to be a meme page. The content, by extension, then becomes more universally understandable and appealing, because it presents what would otherwise be dense information in a simple and easy to understand format. The requirement of solving for painpoints, or answering questions, however, does not disappear completely — but shifts to be presented in a more digestable way.

Cold email isn’t dead

If you work for a business, then it’s very likely that your inbox is something of a minefield of cold emails from different services, pitching solutions, and suggesting that you “hop on a quick call” to discuss how you might work together. This is a wonderful example of how NOT to approach email as a mechanism for B2B SaaS growth.

As with any other content, understanding the persona and catering directly to them is the most important aspect of a successful email strategy since trust & advocacy are such large parts of the conversion process. While with SEO & our other content tactics there are considerations made for where in the journey a specific persona is, this information is of the utmost importance for email — as improper targeting can sully trust & throttle advocacy.

Ultimately, the same is true for email as the other levers — in that you should be leading with the solution you’re offering. However, ensuring that you’re reaching the “right person” is key here. For as many emails that are sent as part of a B2B SaaS strategy that begin with “I’m not sure if you’re the right person” just as many are ended with that very same email as they indicate lack of research, lack of understanding of their target audience, and most importantly do not lead with their value proposition.

While it is absolutely true that an improperly targeted email may just get lost in an inbox, there are numerous potential ripple effects that arise as an extension of improper targeting.

As we can see from the above, mistargeting can be incredibly detrimental to the future engagement within an organization either from organically burying potential for future advocacy, or by having an entire domain blacklisted — preventing future communications from ever being seen.

Email, however, can be an incredibly effective means for growth if leveraged properly & paired with our other growth mechanisms.

For cold emails specifically, there is a slightly higher lift involved in determining who it is that you should be targeting, how & when you should be targeting them, and in what way you should be approaching your messaging to avoid being viewed as “pushy” or “too salesy”. Particularly in the realm of B2B Saas, the most likely target for email is typically the manager, as they will likely be tasked with finding solutions, researching them, and determining efficacy internally prior to moving the process forward to the decision makers. It’s unlikely that the end users will be viable targets, as they will not typically be out seeking solutions, in the same way that the decision makers wouldn’t be — and so are not healthy targets for cold email outreach.

Doing email right

The most effective means of email campaigns, however, is by crafting your messaging around existing intent and the understanding of your audience and where they are coming from through pairing these campaigns with other content.

This can be accomplished by developing campaigns that are tied directly to your various content pieces or landing pages that are triggered once a user has signed up for a form on a particular page, or perform a certain action. This not only removes the possibility of mistargeting the user, but validates that the user is already interested in the service you are providing and that your targeting is in alignment with the persona. By creating these campaigns, we are able to organically move the user through the journey, and do so without the additional lift of a sales person or other representative doing any manual work.

As seen above, our email campaigns can be developed specific to the persona to further address their inquiries, while adding touch points to the user journey. In doing so, we not only position ourselves in a way that keeps the brand & service top of mind, as they will now receive regular updates to help keep the lead warm, but also continue the education and conversion optimization process as the campaign is sent.

Human interactions

While marketing and sales are often seen as two separate entities, the reality is that the two act in tandem and should be optimized and developed in tandem of one another. In the case of B2B SaaS, there is a fairly common practice of not only having a representative provide insights for the managers or decision makers prior to conversion in order to answer questions and help guide them through their journey, but also act as a continuing mechanism for advocacy after conversion.

In the same way that we discussed with email, integrating sales reps into your growth strategy can be an incredibly effective way of controlling the user journey and helping to control narratives and process. This can be done in place of, or addition to, the triggering of an email campaign when actions are taken upon discovery of your landing pages or blog content — either creating a pathway for users to schedule a meeting with a sales rep or trigger an email to a sales rep that prompts their direct outreach once there is confirmed intent from the action taken.

By inserting themselves into the process, sales representatives can perform a similar role to content creators in that they can advocate for the product, and act as a trusted resource in the conversion process. Through direct interaction with the persona, there becomes opportunity to directly answer questions, focus on solutions, and of course push towards a product-led solution that can help users move through the journey.

Ad Channels

Targeting ads for B2B SaaS projects can be a tricky process for the same way that developing a content mix is for such businesses. While CPG or other consumer facing brands may have broad demographics that they can target and then refine over time based on the performance of their ads, B2B SaaS faces the challenge of targeting individuals within organizations who not only hold different roles across different functions at different seniority levels.

There are, however, a few ways to work around these things in order better target audiences and have higher conversions for your project — let’s get into it.

LinkedIn:

If for no other reason than being a social network for professionals, LinkedIn is one of the most efficient platforms for advertising any B2B business — SaaS included. Beyond that, however, the targeting options that are available within LinkedIns ad manager are supremely useful to use as a jumpoff point to begin building & refining your audiences and gaining insights into who your most valuable audiences are, and run some incredibly refined experiments if you really want to.

In addition to locations, LinkedIn allows users to refine their targeting by audience attributes such as company, job experience, education, demographics, interests and traits — though for the purpose of this exercise we’ll focus specifically on company & job experience.

Building an audience:

Starting with company, ad targeting can be refined by category, industry, name, revenue, size, and a number of others if you wanted to drill down really deep; which we will in a bit.

To start though, using the personas of the users within a company that we developed, or the parameters that we’ve set for the companies that would be potential customers of our service, we can already create some fairly stringent criteria to build upon. This criteria can be both speculative, based on predictions and modeling as you prepare to go to market, or quantitative based on existing customer profiles for the businesses that you have already worked with.

Let’s say, for example, that we already have 100 customers, 10 of which we’ve seen move up their subscription tier in the past 6 months and our goal is to find new customers like them. By distilling the specific information about them as to how much they’ve grown during that period, their revenue, industry, etc, we can create a model for targeting similar customers & businesses with our LinkedIn ads.

For a speculative model, we can project certain things based off of the business itself, the function of the service, and a few other pieces of information in order to create the parameters for our ads. If our service costs $50k/month with our lowest tier allowing 100 licenses and being specific to the design industry, that immediately refines our targeting based off of just that information alone since we wouldn’t necessarily be targeting businesses making $1M/year in revenue since it would cost them 60% of their revenue just to pay for the subscription and likely also likely dont have 100 employees for the licenses.

Moving to matched audiences:

The second fold of why LinkedIn targeting is such a gem for B2B SaaS is that it can replicate success as much as it can refine it — particularly through matched audiences. Matched audiences can range from retargeted users to lookalikes based off of uploaded contact lists. And being a professional network, and also a social media platform, there is a fairly organic funnel from lead to organic connection, which provides incredible insights into contact and other information that is not typically available through other marketing & ad platforms (though we’ll get to them in a bit).

So as you syphon off leads into conversions based off of your initial targeting, which you refine as you role out your ad strategy, you generate a highly optimized list that can then be churned back into the LInkedIn ad platform as a matched audience for new ad deployment. These new matched audience targets will then be based off of not just speculative or modeled parameters, but real people who have already not only experienced your ads and product, but have converted — making them an incredibly valuable targeting resource.

Moving on to Meta

It’s a bold move deploying B2B ads out into the wild because, as we’ve discussed, there isn’t often a defined demographic for individual job titles, or industries, or companies. That is – at least – not before you have a highly targeted audience to use for your ads.

While it is true that Facebook & Instagram have over 1B monthly active users combined, which is a massive difference when compared to LinkedIns not-unsubstantial 310M, the reality is that advertising on Meta platforms prior to optimizing your audiences is going to be incredibly wasteful and you’ll likely see unsatisfactory conversion rates.

That said, once you’ve been running your LInkedIn campaigns for some time, have refined your targeting, and built a healthy matched audience, then it’s absolutely fine to begin pushing out ad creative outside of the confines of the professional network that is LinkedIn. Some concessions, however, should be made in the altering of the creative in order to match the platform, and also meet the audiences where they are in their days.

While the focus of the creative shouldn’t necessarily waiver from solving the pain points of the audience, it should be recognized that if you’re meeting them on social media, it’s likely that they’re there to try to escape from work in some way — or at least take a break. By leaning too heavily into the focus on the job aspect of your ad, regardless of your targeting, you run the risk of potentially losing interest from your audience by violating their space and losing them forever.

TikTok & maybe Twitter again someday

Brands, particularly in the B2B space, have been hesitant to rush to TikTok since there is more opportunity for social validation and UGC driven content and conversions on the platform, or running UGC as ads, than there is for straight up ads — and we get it. For the demographics present on TikTok – aging up as they may be – the reality is that the decision makers are likely not there yet, though if they are they are more susceptible to content than ads at this point in the lifecycle.

And while it stands to be seen exactly where Twitter will land, the reality is that most major advertisers, agencies, brands, and advisers, are pulling ad-spend there while things shake out and the dust settles. This may mean an incredibly low CPC for the immediate future, but it’s a shaky ground for brand safety in the current climate — particularly for public facing brands like those in the B2B sector who rely heavily upon professional relationships.

Product as growth

Product, specifically for B2B SaaS brands, is an incredibly effective tool for conversions and growth as it provides users direct experience with the solution that is being offered and does so in a way that doesn’t require additional resources, scheduling or interactions with sales representatives (though it should be an option) or other manner of moving parts. Ultimately, the decision to make any new software decision across an entire organization or team is a substantial one and – as discussed – one that often requires the input and advocacy of each persona in their own capacity. The integration of a new software product to not just workflows, but other current software stacks and skill sets can often make or break decisions for adoption — making product-led growth an incredibly useful tool for growth.

Once again, understanding what and when to make an offer is a crucial detail to build out as you develop your strategy — knowing which persona to target and make the offer to, and at what point in the user journey to make it.

Making an offer to the wrong person, at the wrong stage of the journey can turn users off to a product if they find themselves lost or unfamiliar with what it is a product is offering upon receiving an offer, while sending an offer to the wrong persona can equally disrupt the journey by leading to a dead-end in the decision making process if they’re not properly equipped to move the process forward.

While there is something to be said about users having the freedom to poke around and get a feel for a product before getting too deep into a journey, it is also incredibly important to nurture the user on their journey and build them to the point where it makes sense to begin testing and seeing if the product suits their needs.

This is the groundwork that we’ve previously discussed through content, SEO, email and sales — a foundation building practice that is used to build and educate the personas as they continue on their journey.

If properly optimized and leveraged, by the time the user reaches a sales person or product offer, they will have likely already removed most barriers to conversion across teams, budget, and otherwise. This just leaves testing and training as the last remaining barrier to overcome.

Product offers for B2B SaaS are equal parts collaboration with the sales team, organic communities, and testing on the side of the users — allowing a balance between experience the product in a hands on environment, while having access to the representatives or community in order answer questions and overcome obstacles.

This part of the process serves multiple purposes for the users in validating their decisions to convert by allowing real time implementation of the product, ensuring that it acts as it’s supposed to, that it justifies the cost that’s being asked, and of course integrates with current workflows — or at least doesn’t require unreasonable learning curves for adjusted workflows.

Assuming all goes well during the product offering, the journey is finally complete once the offer ends and the subscription is renewed as the user has seen the value, has been properly educated in the service being provided, and has validated these things across all the personas necessary to make the final decision for adoption.

The post-adoption journey

While this may be the end of the adoption process, the journey and relationship have a nuanced future where the B2B SaaS brand and end user continue their relationship in order to nurture growth as new product features are offered, the end user grows & potentially expands their membership, and advocacy is encouraged on behalf of the end user.

This helps not only feed back users into the loop to help continue growth as both brands grow & expand, but to help create feedback opportunities to optimize the existing growth strategy based on the insights provided by the end user.

These tools are all you’ll need to build your B2B growth strategy, though if you ever feel as though you need a partner, we’re always available to lend some assistance.

The post The B2B SaaS Growth Guide appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

While many didn’t realize it at the time, these two occurrences paved the path forward for brands and advertisers to assert dominance over Instagram feeds, while simultaneously leaving many users scrambling to navigate the newly formed landscape. Curiously, the universal shift social platforms have been making over the past 6 years – away from showing users content created by friends and family – has also brought forward the age of community. And while users have become inundated with content from brands and content creators as algorithms prioritize discovery, there has also come a paradigm shift in the strategies that those leveraging social for growth have to implement to succeed.

As we move forward in an age of consumption and discovery, our focus must move away from the prioritization of mechanisms that drive vanity metrics — as they are typically most easy to game and obfuscate. This is likely due to the fact that, as we learn more about how social media works and users learn more about how they’re being targeted, there is a universal shift towards metrics that are, for all intents and purposes, difficult to spoof and hold the most value.

It is primarily this reason that has driven strategies of the modern age of community to take a more vested interest in engagement over nearly every other metric. Ultimately, likes can be bought and traffic can be manipulated in any number of ways, but comments – while possible to be faked – are at least difficult to fake well. The same can be said for shares, stitches, duets, and other forms of true interaction as we move towards interaction above all else in our social strategies.

TL;DR: 

1. The shift away from vanity metrics 
2. The shift in algorithms 
3. The shift in transparency & authenticity 
4. The shift in pace
5. The shift in content 
6. The shift in access & engagement

The shift away from vanity metrics

The hashtag #likeforlikes has 372M posts on Instagram as of today, which – if you couldn’t tell – is a hashtag that accounts used in order to trade likes with those who are also using the same hashtag. The way that it works is fairly self-explanatory, you post, you go through and like a bunch of posts, and others go through and do the same. The outcome? Your post gets more likes, their posts get more likes, and if you happen to catch the eye of someone who’s interested in your content you might get a new follower or some actual engagement.

Let’s compare metrics then and now:

As we can see from the above, the shift now is significantly moving away from metrics that can be faked, either through bots or other trickery and towards metrics that have to be substantiated by human interaction.

The shift in algorithms

For one, the algorithms for modern social platforms are engineered significantly differently than they once were during the period of chronological scrolling, and even for periods shortly thereafter. It used to be that discovery, and the way to ‘game’ the algorithm, was accomplished by posting at specific times – because that was when your demographics were online – and then that would get pushed to a certain number of your followers, which would then be pushed out further depending on the number of likes it got within a certain period of time immediately after posting, and how much your account was also interacting with other accounts during that period of time — while also being entirely dependent on the angle of the sun.

If this sounds convoluted, it’s because it is. And while the modern algorithms for discovery are arguably more obfuscated and less understood, there is a far higher focus on content and audience than there is on trying to game the algorithm in order to get visibility — leading to less focus on vanity metrics as a byproduct.

This is likely because social algorithms are still convoluted, and it’s still unclear how they make the choices as to who sees your content, when, and why — the reality is that algorithms are working for creators now, not against them. As social media earned its place in the modern media landscape, those creating the algorithms realized that while brands are willing to pay for visibility and impressions, having the algorithms actively work against users to throttle their visibility was discouraging to both brands and users alike. And if you’re discouraging all users, then that’s no good for anyone since if there aren’t any users and there aren’t any advertisers, there isn’t any money.

Ultimately, the shift in the algorithm was made to benefit everyone. No more testing post times, no more gaming hashtags, just focusing on content; who doesn’t love that?

Since the shift took place, the role of social media managers & content creators became less about scheduling posts and optimizing hashtags, and more about understanding what their audiences were interested in, how they like their content to be delivered, and how they can best be engaged. As a result, both content & interactions have become more genuine due to the creative process shifting the focus away from making a line go up in order to satisfy the desire for vanity metrics, and move it towards catering directly to audiences in order to nurture community.

The shift in transparency & authenticity

The relationships between advertisers, audiences, and platforms were experiencing an immense amount of growing pains during the same period that TikTok entered the equation and began making the push towards community. While content, generally speaking, during the period prior to 2016 was very much editorialized, there were still a number of things that were undecided in regard to disclosure, transparency, and ethics, when it came to brands leveraging social.

In the years and months leading up to 2016 and the beginning of the paradigm shift that we are experiencing the culmination of today, there was very little in the way of industry standards in regard to how or when it was necessary to mention that content was paid for, or even where the line between advertising and advertorial was.

This may seem like something of a trivial matter today, as it is generally accepted today that product featured in content is likely being paid for in some way, and most consumers have a basic understanding of what affiliate marketing is, what brand partnerships are, and what to expect from the content creators that they follow. But at the time, this wasn’t the case, and the idea that influencers weren’t actually in love with the 3rd hyaluronic facial serum of the week was something of a foreign concept and difficult for many users to grasp onto.

Enter #ad and sponsored posts.

The introduction of brands & influencers having the opportunity to mark their posts as ‘sponsored’, and the advent of the use of #ad may have been the first signal that the influencer was about to meet an (arguably) untimely demise – RIP.

The outcome, however, was a marked improvement over the predecessor. As users failed to process that influencers were getting paid to do little more than look pretty and have an extravagant lifestyle and that 90% of their feeds were little more than the modern equivalent of product placement, there was a rapid exodus for users’ tolerance for “branded content” and a new demand for more transparency when money was exchanging hands.

Interestingly enough, the result we’re witnessing in the modern social landscape is leaning into the brand-creator dynamic and further blurring the lines between organic content and that which may, or may not, have outside financial influence involved in them.

The difference, however, and the reasoning behind the success for many brands leveraging creators in their community strategies, is that brand and creator alike are focused now more on the substance of their business relationships, rather than the volume. Similar to the old adage of, “Give a person a fish, they’ll eat for a day. Teach a person to fish and they’ll never go hungry.” The modern approach to partnerships is focused on long-term, sustainable relationships with significant substance.

For creators, knowing that vanity metrics are no longer relevant, the focus of their community-building efforts is focused primarily on trust, and maintaining genuine relationships with audiences. The same mentality and approach are simultaneously being applied to the brands that creators align with, and creators that brands align with. Having individuals that communities trust has proven far more effective with modern audiences to drive LTV as compared to the previous iteration of having an influencer a day promoting product in hopes that one of the bots that follow them might accidentally buy some face serum.

Give a brand content, they’ll sell for a day. Teach a brand to partner with a creator, and they’ll sell for life.

The shift in pace

The term, content economy, gets thrown around quite a bit; and for good reason. The speed at which the modern content ecosystem moves is as rapid and kinetic as the crypto market. While this may be an intimidating prospect for many, it is one of the greatest benefits for modern social strategies as it is not only incredibly forgiving as compared to the previous ecosystem where brands and creators were often limited to once-a-day posting.

As mentioned, the current algorithm is shrouded in mystery, and no one really knows how it works, what makes it tick, or how to game it in any way – and that’s fine.

What is important to note, and the biggest benefit to the current demands of the media landscape is the ability to test and iterate more rapidly than ever — and do so without worrying about whether or not you posted at the right time of day.

With trends changing daily, and many adopting posting 2-3x per day as a best practice for their social strategies, with a great deal of content being easily repurposed across channels, the increase in cadence is often found as more insightful, higher performing, and often requiring a lower lift than previous strategic iterations.

Taking into consideration Instagram and Meta alone and their plethora of different content types, post sizes, tools, filters, and all sorts of other variables, and the work to maintain a regular cadence becomes fairly overwhelming. Though it used to be that you could get away with posting a single static image a day and then taking a rest, it’s then became expected – if not necessary – to post a carousel of 5+ posts, a story to accompany the post, a reel, create a cover for that reel, and then, of course, repurpose that content in any way possible.

Despite there being the need to record 3x videos a day not, the lift has become significantly lower by way of not having to create more static assets as an extension of this content. It may not seem logical, but TikTok has actually made recording video a more efficient means of creating content than having to sit and design static images.

The shift in content

Memes as we know them today were born in the early stages of the internet, typically being relegated to message boards or other dark-social locations beyond the eye line of the average internet user. And while the traditional perception of what a meme is has entered the zeitgeist of popular culture, memes have infiltrated media far further than many acknowledge, and they have become a major – if not the most prominent – component of modern social strategies.

The beauty of memes, and why they have become such a major piece of the social media infrastructure, is that they only need to be created once and then can be recreated nearly infinitely. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the foundation on which all of TikTok is built upon. Call it virality, call it trends, call it communal content, the reality is that each new video that goes viral and spawns thousands, if not millions, of copycats, is a meme.

The shift in strategies as we’ve witnessed today, however, is that content creation is less so today about creating new ideas – as it was in the early days of content – and more so about finding ways to partake in current content events in your own way — shaping the content to fit the voice & interests of your community. For every viral sound that emerges on TikTok (of which there are many) the creator or brand is challenged to interpret that content for their audience, incorporate interesting information into the trend, or otherwise shape the trend to appeal to their community.

This takes an immense amount of pressure off of creative teams to be repeatedly generating new concepts or being tasked with ideation and allows them to rely on the community for these processes and focus on keeping up on current sounds. And while it may be perceived as allocating the effort to having to have a unique perspective or take in the sea of replicas of the original video, the reality is that the video created for your audience isn’t competing directly with the thousands of others since they themselves are being created specifically for their own audiences — once again aiding the sense of community and lessening the need for competition.

The shift in access and engagement

It’s true that most brands or creators will have individuals, if not entire teams, managing their social media — though this is not to say that the level of accessibility in today’s community-driven landscape is not unprecedented. In the same way that engagement is held in high regard as a metric to measure the efficacy of a brand or creator, their outward engagement is similarly a metric for the measurement of the quality of their account. Unlike in previous years, and previous iterations of social media – where things were very individual-centric – the current focus on community encourages a great deal of bidirectional communication.

Though this is most prominently displayed by creators and brands commenting directly on pieces of content that mention them, or otherwise engaging in pieces of media that are relevant to the brand – either directly or semantically – the practice goes deeper. It’s no longer acceptable, or accepted practice, to leave messages on read as it once was. Though it’s true that it’s not always possible to respond to every message, every comment, and every message a brand has, with social listening becoming more and more prevalent as a tool for community engagement, it’s significantly easier for brands to maintain awareness of where they are part of the conversation, and better guide the conversation when it is happening.

While there is some additional tact and emotional maturity necessary for navigating these new obligations of community-driven social strategies, in that there is a need to know when to engage in conversations, when not to, and more importantly — how.

It’s no longer enough to just control the narrative of a brand, on brand-controlled channels, where there is total control over what is being said. The conversation is now happening in real-time, on different platforms, with different individuals, other brands, and without filters. Navigating this as a brand has become an incredibly delicate task, though, with a focus on community and uplifting and supporting those within it, it can be incredibly fulfilling and, of course, engaging.

That said, this creates immense opportunities for brands as they sequester their communities to dark social. In creating and driving members of communities to private channels – whether on Slack, Facebook, Discord, or otherwise – brands and creators can create space of not only incomparable contact with audiences but incomparable insights — and vice versa for those within the community themselves. Though it would have been unheard of maybe even just a few years ago to have creators, CEOs, heads of community, and those who would otherwise not be reachable in traditional media operations interacting directly with those who have become members of their communities, it is not just a reality today — it’s the norm.

The continuing shift

While there are innumerous factors that contribute to the current state of community in social media, and by extension the strategies that dictate how both brands and creators build their platforms, the current trajectory is far from complete. As content becomes more rapid in pacing, accessibility becomes less intimidating, and platforms become more fluid, the concept of platforms will likely only further blur as connectivity becomes increasingly seamless.

For brands and creators, this means further blurring the lines between content and advertising, attention and conversion, and where the narratives start and end. As the conversation continues to defy structure, those at the helm of those interactions must not only be able to think quickly but do so empathetically and with the brand’s best interests in mind. While understanding the shift in strategies is the first step towards leveraging the modern take on social, we are always available if you ever need some guidance.

The post The Evolution of Social Strategy in the Age of Community appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

While true that all strategies will have components of each of the 3 elements present in them by nature of modern best practices requiring a content strategy, a community, and ideally a product, in order to operate and grow a brand, it’s also true that one of the 3 tends to take priority over the others. This isn’t to say that a brand focusing on community has an insignificant product; quite the opposite, it’s likely that any robust community is forming around a robust product — though the community, in this case, is a lever to support the growth of the product.

Confused? It’s less complicated than it may sound. We’ve gone ahead and broken down a quick growth stack for each sequencing of product, community, and content in order to illustrate the interconnectivity of these growth levers. In doing so, we are able to offer simple infrastructures for businesses of any type to be able to refer to and apply to their own marketing stacks as they determine their pathways to growth. 

But first, let’s get a quick crash course in each of the individual approaches to better understand them individually before we look at how they play together. 

Community-led growth

Advocacy and social validation are at the core of growth in the modern marketplace of accountability and trust. For businesses looking to leverage these things to boost their business, there’s a certain level of grassroots effort that’s necessary. In the same way that politicians go around shaking hands and kissing proverbial babies, for community-led growth businesses have to be out on the streets of the internet, chatting with folks, interacting with other brands, and building relationships.

These relationships become the backbone of the growth of the business as the relationships are the foundation of advocacy – and by extension conversions. By engaging with communities, brands have direct insights into the pain points and motivations of their audience, which they can then apply to their business, which then encourages them to invite others to the community. The loop expands with the addition of new community members, who then provide new insights, and so the growth cycle continues – potentially exponentially, depending on the product or brand offering.

Product-led growth

Building growth as a mechanism of your product can be tricky, particularly in the early stages of development since you need users to build users – we’ll get to that in a bit. Ultimately, the goal for a growth strategy driven by your product is to lessen the friction between users trying your product and then immediately proving your value. 

While this is typically seen in the wild with promo codes and referral programs, newer models have become significantly savvier by focusing on giving product away, sometimes permanently, and building features behind paywalls. 

Content-led growth

Content is queen and organic discovery is, while competitive, a supreme approach to not only growth but advocacy. By understanding users, their interests, needs, and knowledge gaps, content strategies can be custom-built to serve users who are actively seeking out information about your brand offering, or even the brand itself, allowing first touch points to be made further down the funnel.

In our trust-based economy, building authority for the subject matter as it directly relates to your industry or product is paramount to success. By building your content strategy around those topics brands are able to position themselves in a way that quickly builds trust by becoming the voice of authority for their industry or vertical. 

The breakdowns

Now that we’ve covered the foundations of the three main growth strategies, we can help to frame them better as they stack with each other. While one of the three will act as the foundation of the overall strategy, the other two act as support mechanisms for purposes of lead generation, or otherwise moving users down the funnel.

Ultimately, the three in tandem work as the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel with the main component of the strategy acting as lead generation, the middle as a way to warm the lead, and then finally the bottom as the conversion mechanism. Thinking of these components in these terms allows a simple framework to not only build a strategy off of but to keep top of mind as the strategy is executed to ensure each part of the process is being leveraged properly.

Since we’ve already discussed the top-of-funnel mechanisms of each of these strategies, we’ll focus primarily on the middle and bottom-funnel. 

Community – content – product

Content – Middle-funnel

Content as a main support for building community is possibly the most common strategy in the modern marketing landscape. This isn’t surprising considering the two go hand-in-hand so organically and help to drive users to engage with brands, each other, and inevitably the product.

If we were to look at the funnel through the lens of the user journey, we can establish already that they’ve engaged in the community in some way, whether through social channels, dark-social channels, or brand advocates. Through these community interactions, they’ve grown to understand the brand, become familiar with the offering to a degree, and are otherwise primed for the next step in their journey. 

Through community engagement, if the next step of the journey is to drive users to your website or social channels, then content then becomes the supporting mechanism for those users to continue to nurture their progress through to conversion.

As opposed to the stacks where content is the lead mechanism for discovery, as a supporting mechanism the focus of the content for this model should focus primarily on answering questions, informing users of the benefits of the brand, and otherwise building upon the work that the community has already begun nurturing. 

The beauty of having content in a direct supporting role to the community is that not only can you leverage content directly from advocates in the form of UGC to use in your content strategy, immediately bridging the gap between the two, but also use the insights from the community itself to form your content strategy. By engaging with users, building relationships with creators, and supporting the community aspect of your initial strategy, you can make absolutely sure that the answers users are looking for, pain points they’re experiencing, and other forms of concerns and preferences are accounted for in your content to help drive them on through to…

Product – Bottom-Funnel

In the same way that we leveraged community to inform content, we’ll be doing the same with both content and community to help refine product and build conversion opportunities once users have reached the product stage of your growth strategy.

By prioritizing community and content, the same feedback, interactions, and insights can help to shape our conversion strategies at the product level. If our insights and social listening have told us that users find competitor products or services too expensive, or that they find it hard to commit to a new product without first testing it, then we can shape our product offering directly to this feedback in order to ensure that once users reach the product, our conversion journey is catered directly to them.

Similarly, we can close the loop on the process by using the same feedback and insights to optimize the product itself. While many see conversion as the end of the funnel, the reality is that the funnel will ideally continue with advocacy from users that we’ve converted. By taking user feedback, and directly implementing it into our product offering, we are likely to not only retain users but convert them into advocates, which feeds directly back to the community at the top of this particular funnel. 

Community – product – content

Product – Middle-funnel

Once again, we’re beginning with a community in place and using product to move users down-funnel to content as a mechanism for conversion. While this may seem like it’s a bit backward since, well, we already have users using the product — isn’t that enough? Not necessarily. 

As we witnessed with product closing the loop in the previous iteration of our strategy, the same will be true for this and all subsequent iterations. Product, in this case, is still being used to convert users, but also to help move them through to content to then feedback through to the community to start the cycle and nurture growth. 

For this particular orientation, we have a robust community in place that is sharing in the process of educating the users about our product and advocating for others to use it themselves. Naturally, this is an incredibly fertile ecosystem for reward systems to help not only encourage users from the community to advocate and drive new users to sign up, join, or buy, but also to say thank you for helping to build this wonderful thing we’re developing together.

Brands ranging from Lyft to Airbnb have leveraged this stack in order to achieve remarkable growth. While it does require a bit of up-front capital to execute since, well, you’ll be giving credit or cash to both the referrer and the referee, if being leveraged with a truly dedicated community the return can be fantastic.

Despite being a few years late to the party that Uber had started with quite the bang, Lyft arrived on the scene and was giving away free rides to not only users but their friends that they got to sign up. Not surprisingly, users were eager to see what the competition had to offer and was happy to share with their communities after seeing that the service was comparable, if not identical to Uber. 

Beyond just free product giveaways, gamification can be introduced to the process to then encourage…

Content – Bottom-funnel

You’ve built a robust community and have them converting and advocating for you through the robust reward program that you’ve built into your product. But how do you then get new users who may not be positioned to utilize your rewards program to partake in the community through content? 

While brands like Figma & Notion have the distinct advantage of having products that are specifically for creating things that can easily be shared as content, not every brand is so lucky. Thankfully, gamification is a technique that most brands can leverage in this type of growth stack in order to get users involved, and most importantly, create content. 

This serves two purposes. The first naturally is conversions. As we follow users on their journey from community, where they are educated on the product and given the referral code to bring them on through to product, gamifying the process makes the process sticky and converts users from freemium-bouncers to paid subscribers. Secondly, by sharing UGC with their own communities in order to flex their achievements through the gamification system, they then begin a new loop to help keep the growth cycle going — this time without referral bonuses. 

Content – community – product

Community – Middle-funnel

Content and community tend to form something of a chicken or the egg relationship in many instances for brands. This is particularly true in the age of content creators and their impact on community development as brands must not align themselves with niche communities in order to build trust. While this initially took the form of collaborating with external content creators in order to reach their immediate communities, brands are beginning to adopt and align themselves with internal creators to represent the brands themselves.

In the case of community as a direct support mechanism to a content-led strategy, the creators act as the discovery lever through any number of ways — organic search, social media discovery, etc. Upon discovery, the user will find themselves among a robust and supportive community of people who are not only welcoming but actively advocating for the brand as they’ve likely cycled through the loop themselves already. 

This user journey shines a light on the importance of engagement in regard to content with community as an extension — and why the two work so closely together in many cases. The community aspect of having comments, shares, and engagement for content acts directly as a tool for social validation and an opportunity for users discovering content to also move more quickly down-funnel by feeling as though they’re a part of something. 

If we were to look at two user journeys we’ll see how the same experience can have drastically different outcomes:

As we can witness in journey 2, community engagement as an extension of content can, and often is, a deciding factor in a user journey and moving beyond discovery. By socially validating a user’s journey towards conversion, the user themselves feels validated and is quickly moved on to the product leg of the journey. 

Product – Bottom-funnel

Product as a bottom-funnel conversion method for a community-led strategy can often take a bit of a different shape than the traditional referral code or affiliate-driven strategies we’ve previously discussed — though there are admittedly a number of similarities.

Ultimately, the goal for product-led conversions is to get users to, well, convert. But in this particular instance, we have a robust community that is working in tandem with our content-focused strategy; something we can use to our advantage.

While gatekeeping can often be a fairly discouraging emotion in marketing, in this instance it can be incredibly compelling. It may seem counterintuitive to not allow people to use your product or service or to limit those who have access to it when typically the goal for any new venture is to drive as many conversions as possible, but as the pies de resistance of this particular stack, it can be incredibly effective.

By locking the offering behind the community itself, particularly in an instance where the community is the secondary driver supporting the content discovery system, it creates an allure that is irresistible to users once they’ve been driven down the funnel. Allowing users to make the decision as to who gets in, and who doesn’t, not only creates a sense of ownership and empowerment within the community, but pride for the product offering or brand, and responsibility as an extension of advocacy. 

This was put beautifully displayed recently when Pinterest launched their new Shuffles feature which was, you guessed it, invite-only. Almost as immediately as it had been announced, communities across Pinterest, Reddit, Instagram, and all forms of other social media were buzzing with people clamoring over invite codes. And, just like in the early days of Gmail, as soon as someone got their hands on an invite they were just as eager to use it as they were to brag to their friends and toss a pittance to their friends. 

Closing the loop once again, by turning new users into advocates, there creates a sense of duty for those who finally get that highly sought-after invite to return to the top-of-funnel to the content that brought them into the loop to begin with and contribute themselves by engaging.

Content – product – community

Product – Middle-funnel

Product as a support for content can be tricky, as it faces the difficulties of not having the previously mentioned benefit of having the social validation support that the community lends to the process. That’s not to say that it’s an impossibility, or that there aren’t instances where it’s the best stack to go with — it’s just different.

The instances where this particular stack does tend to thrive is when the content being offered takes the form of a free asset or add-on or something that compliments the product itself. This is because the offering to convert coming earlier in the stack acts as the social validation itself.

If, for instance, our content were a tutorial about how to perform a particular task, but the ask is that the user tries the tool or product we’re looking to convert on. The content then has an offer of a free download or trial of a paired down or limited version of the product we’re looking to convert on — giving the user enough to understand the product, but not enough to fully experience the full functionality or benefit.

This product offering is likely enough to warm users enough to get them to sign on for the partial commitment, but also not likely enough to lead them to a full conversion.

That is, not without the support of the community.

Community – Bottom-funnel

For this stack, social validation comes two-fold — once with the product offering in the previous step, and then again further down the funnel from the community.

As mentioned, the product offering gives users a taste of what it is that the brand offers after being educated by the content and warmed a bit in the process. However, there still needs to be that solid push to conversion to ensure that warm leads don’t cool too quickly and conversions don’t get lost in the process.

Community, in this case, acts as the supporting mechanism to help drive users from the initial taste that they were given, and on through to the full commitment.

On this journey, once the users have had a taste they are likely to seek out to see whether or not they should take the plunge for the full product – and what better way for that to happen than through the support of the community? Users seeking validation will likely set out on their own to find accounts and experiences from others who, similar to them, were at one point faced with the decision of whether or not to convert. 

When seeking these answers, ideally these users will be faced with accounts of those who did, in fact, convert and are singing the praises and sharing their positive experiences.

These accounts and experiences become the lynchpin to converting users into new members of the community as they throw their full support behind the product. And, similar to the other iterations of these stacks, they are likely to once again close the loop by sharing their own experiences for future users to use as their validation as they follow the same paths. 

This is likely best reflected by the free-to-play model that has been prevalent in online gaming in recent years, particularly with mammoth games like Fortnite, Fall Guys, Rocket League, and other live service games. While these games may span various genres, the thing they have in common is that they’re all free(ish) and all have incredibly robust communities behind them. 

Initially, users are enticed to download the game to try it for free, often with features or game modes locked behind a paywall. Upon discovering that they enjoy the game, they seek out the community to validate their desire to purchase. Upon discovery of the community, they are driven through to purchase — often with new seasons requiring repeat purchases periodically throughout the year. 

Product-led growth

Product as the lead mechanism for growth can be incredibly challenging as there is often an immediate ask for what would otherwise be a cold lead for the brand. This is, in particular, a major factor in why product-led growth strategies often rely so heavily on an offer to warm users and get them on their platform. 

We’ve since this become particularly true as brands and marketers prepare for the shift to what may eventually become a cookieless future and become more and more reliant upon zero-party data. 

With the inundation that many users experience with offers, distrust of giving away their data, and rising skepticism over ads and otherwise unproven brands, there needs to be an exchange of value for users to be willing to try a product – even for free.

Content-community – Middle-bottom funnel

To avoid redundancies and to illustrate the unique positioning that product-led growth offers, and an arguable efficiency with this sequencing of our marketing stack, we’ve combined content & community as the middle-bottom funnel mechanisms for product.

While we’ve discussed extensively that they tend to work in tandem in many instances of these marketing tacks, for product-led growth, they truly do serve simultaneously as a mechanism for growth, with the growth loop cycling between the two as the community supports the content and vice-versa.

This is particularly true with the advent of not just the creator economy, but also the rise of dark-social and non-indexed communities where the content and the community become one in the same entity. 

Take, for example, a brand that is launching a digital product with a proposed exchange of a discounted membership for the creation of the users’ account. Upon creating the account the user is driven to not only use the product but prompted to join the brand Discord server. 

Once the user has landed, they are faced with both prongs of this mechanism. There’s the content, being shared regularly on the Discord server with users sharing their experiences & insights into the product, and simultaneously the community of those who are sharing their experiences, those engaging with the experiences, and those advocating.

Stacking up

Every marketing stack is a bit different, as each brand or product has a specific use case, a specific audience, and a difference in how that audience needs and wants to be presented with the solution that the brand is offering. 

While traditionally marketers have pushed a single-pronged approach to most marketing practices, the reality is that these practices are all necessary in the modern marketing landscape — stacking neatly with one another in order to provide a comprehensive strategy.

These breakdowns should be all you need to start building your strategic stack as you prepare your brand for launch. Though, if you ever feel lost or that the stack is too lofty, we’re always here to assist.

The post Product-led Growth vs. Community-led Growth vs. Content-led Growth: Choosing the Best Path for Growth appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.

As a group of content creators who are able to churn out new ideas with surgical precision, we’ve learned that diagnosing and understanding just what it is that “bad” content is is the first step towards preventing it in the future. So while we may not consider this a guide or fail-safe method to creating impeccable content, we will call it something of a cautionary tale of what has been done, and what to be aware of to prevent yourself from doing, in the production of content to keep that quality up.

Because ultimately, whatever the case may be, no matter who you are, what you do, or what your job title is, there’s no excuse for not having a fundamental understanding of how to make content that’s, at the very least, sort of good. And from our experiences, the best approach to creating good content is through understanding and being able to avoid the pitfalls of bad content.

Let’s get into it.

Being Too Salesy

While, yes, a great deal of modern content is created to promote a brand or sell a product by way of building audiences or developing community — there’s still no place for a hard sale in your content. The reality is that, despite the function of social media shifting, it’s still content; not ads.

When consuming content, users are looking for answers, entertainment, or engagement with their social networks. Breaking that immersion of engagement by throwing in a hard sale, or a piece of content that is more ad than advertorial, and you’re well on your way to a bounce rate that would make a Meta Ponzi scheme blush, or worse an unsubscribe.

The good news though is there’s one simple trick that can help you avoid being too salesy with your content – don’t do it.

The best way to approach good content, that wins audiences, develops trust and builds community is to essentially dance around the product. Choose a feature of the product, find a topic that relates to that feature, and make your content about that. Repeating this process is the fundamental component of building a brand as a subject matter expert or trusted source.

Should You Ask Questions In Headlines?

While this is a relatively recent law of journalism, freshly minted in 2009, it’s been a fairly strict rule of content for decades if not centuries.

The mentality behind this rule is fairly simple and straightforward in that, assertions are more impactful than questions. For example, if we were to be writing an essay about, let’s say, pigs flying. If we title our piece, “Can pigs fly?” It’s assumed that the answer is no because “Pigs can fly!” would be a far more compelling title for your content piece.

While modern best SEO practices may suggest structuring your content hierarchy around answering the top-asked questions for a specific keyphrase, typically populating your headers with said questions, it’s not a formula for great content. Rather than doing that though, and in keeping up with best practices to avoid bad content, one could better structure their headlines by providing brief, actionable, and insightful overviews of what the reader can expect within each section.

Just make sure they don’t end with a question mark, okay?

Not giving enough info

Once someone is on your page or has landed on your feed, you have two goals:

1. Keep them there
2. Convert

The fastest way to fail at both of them is by not providing the person who’s there the information that they were promised they’d find in the first place.

While the general benchmark for content is to keep it around a 60-70 on the Flesch Kinkaid readability scale (which is about grade 9 for the US) that doesn’t mean we need to be dumbing things down for our audiences, or worse leaving things out. Ultimately, it’s our jobs as content creators to craft the best species possible in order to ensure that not only is it accessible, but satiating.

If we’re looking at our content strategies, and by extension our content, as a gathering (community anyone?) then we need our content to be hospitable to all of our guests to ensure that people both show up and also leave satisfied. Our headlines are our invitations, and each section of our piece of content, whether verbal or visual, acts as another component of our soiree.

If we’re not serving up enough activities to engage our guests, they’ll lose interest and seek engagement elsewhere. If there’s not enough sustenance to our content, they’ll leave early in search of a meal. It’s important to run through the itinerary of our content from the perspective o the audience, what their needs and interests are, and what their idea of a perfect party might look like. And, of course, it’s always better to over-plan than leave people wanting.

Talking above the audience

Finding your audience is so much more than just optimizing content for search, or setting the right parameters for targeting content, it’s just as much about tone and delivery as where the content itself is being delivered. This is a task that can vary drastically depending on the brand, the audience, and of course the product that the brand is offering. While some brands may have broad appeal and are looking to reach communities in a casual manner, others may be dealing with heavy subject matter or complex topics that they need to refine and package for new audiences without alienating them.

Accomplishing this is more of a process than a single-step solution as it often requires going through feedback loops with audiences. The important thing is to start from a place of inclusivity. In maintaining balance with the previous pitfall of bad content, providing all of the information is paramount to the success of your content, thus creating a balancing act of providing all of the information necessary, in an expertly manner, without the tone and messaging of the content coming across as arrogant or smug.

To best achieve this, presenting content in a concise, matter-of-fact, and conversational style is the best course of action in most scenarios where the complex subject matter is being discussed. Having a conversational tone not only makes the content more approachable and accessible, but encourages conversation and engagement with audiences to better understand where messaging is not being properly understood, or where things can be better presented for reasons of comprehension.

Making unsubstantiated claims

Out of all of the pitfalls of bad content, this one is the most egregious of them all.

See what we did there?

Abraham Lincoln once said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And while this quote from Carl Sagan often gets thrown around and misattributed to other prominent figures, it’s ultimately true.

Let’s compare these two statements:

“Composting is quite possibly the best method for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

“Food waste that winds up in landfills releases methane, a greenhouse gas with 80 times the warming power of CO2, making composting a powerful tool to fight climate change.”

While the first statement may be factually accurate, it’s not compelling because there’s nothing to validate the statement. Unless whoever is authoring this piece is a prominent or well-known climate scientist or a known entity in the scientific community, then it’s unfortunately the authors’ duty to provide support to the claims they make in their content.

To that point, the subject matter experts, the ones trusted and known within their communities, have a little secret — they typically support their claims with data. How do you think they established their authority?

Semi-related, this brings us to…

Mistaking Data for Insights

The data tells a story. This is a statement that gets thrown around quite a bit, and while we realize that we just suggested substantiating claims with data, the opposite is also true. Data alone is unfortunately not enough, and in most cases deserves some support in your content.

Using the previous example as our benchmark, if our statement were to read as “Food waste in landfills produces a greenhouse gas with 80 times the warming power of CO2.” there’s a bit lacking for the audience. While the data point is absolutely compelling and is sure to raise alarms with the reader, it may simultaneously be paralyzing if the audience doesn’t know what to do with the information. Do they stop taking out their trash? Do they give up food completely? Who knows?

If presenting data points to audiences, it’s our duty to provide the context and explanation necessary to give them meaning. In the same way, we want to avoid leaving audiences wanting more, we also don’t want to confuse them or direct them elsewhere to find their own answers by not providing them the expertly insights they need to best understand the metrics they’re being presented with.

A simple rule to follow is that if you’re going to provide a data point, you should additionally be providing context and validation along with it. Again using the previous example of:

Once again we can see that in addition to providing a data point, we can also observe in this instance that there’s context being given in order to tell the story of why the audience should care about the data point, and the validation of what the audience can do with that piece of information. Suddenly, we go from bad, bad, not good, unrelatable data, to insightful, actionable, and easy-to-understand information.

Throwing shade at the competition

While it may seem as though the easiest way to make your brand look good is to make the competition look bad, in the current climate of inclusivity, community and social validation there’s not really much room in content for speaking poorly of our peers.

Beyond just typically having the opposite effect than intended and making the brand throwing shade look bad, it’s also counterproductive to the long game of winning the hearts and minds of your audience — particularly if they’re fans of your competitors. The reality is that positively reinforcing your competitors and positioning yourself complimentarily adjacent to them will suit you best in the long run, while simultaneously creating strategic opportunities for those current advocates for your competition to then find your brand.

Lacking perspective

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.

Mark Twain

While the above quote may seem counterproductive to having perspective, it really does capture the essence of having a perspective with your content — a great deal of which is rooted in your brand.

It’s very, very, very, likely that the same ideas, data points, information, story, or whatever else it is you’re presenting in your content are far from a new discovery, and realistically a massive departure from the original. So why read it? Why listen to it? Why watch it? The answer is perspective.

While this may seem like a formidable challenge, the reality is that there is a formula that can help to distill perspective, and in the process avoid creating bad content.

Here are some simple steps:

• Audit existing content
• Outline the information already presented
• Seek out gaps in narrative across existing content
• Filter that messaging through the lens of your brand

Many feel paralyzed by the thought that everything has been done and that there are no new ideas, but the above system allows an easy pathway to ensure that your content is not only unique from what exists in the content landscape but also has a viewpoint all its own.

Lacking first-hand experience

Lack of expertise not only makes for bad content but also can be hugely detrimental to the relationship between audience and creator, as well as loss of favorability within certain algorithms on content platforms by increasing bounce rates signaling lack of authority to algorithms.

Spend enough time on the internet and you’ve likely had the experience of searching for something or seeking out a piece of information only to land on a blog, social account, or business page which claims expertise on the subject you’re exploring. You begin reading, only to realize that the content you’ve found isn’t expertly, or derived from first-hand experience, but reads, or is being told as if it’s someone describing the idea of the information you’re seeking.

It’s highly likely that this content took the opposite approach of finding perspective and just compiled an amalgam of other pieces of content in order to rank and show up to relevant audiences.

The best way to think about executing content to exemplify first-hand experience is to think of it in the same way as many do with presenting their accomplishments on resumes and in job interviews — and the same results tend to be the same in both scenarios.

If we were to choose which is the “good” candidate or the “bad” candidate from this scenario, we would likely say candidate 1 is the “bad” candidate — though it’s entirely possible that both candidates had the same amount of experience.

Why is this?

Well, candidate one gave insights into their managing abilities by speaking about their personal experiences, and how they approached the process of managing teams. This is essentially the same process that has come to be expected of good content. It’s no longer good enough to state a fact, or share a perspective, even if that perspective or fact is universally accepted, you must lead with experience to help to solidify information with audiences to make it not only understandable but relatable.

Quotes as evidence

While yes, there have been a few quotes strewn about in this piece, they’ve all been used to set a foundational perspective for a section of this piece which was then validated and elaborated upon — without strictly relying on the quote as validation for a certain opinion. This is because the practice of relying upon a quote from a specific person, or prominent figure, no matter how well-established they are in a particular field, is a form of confirmation bias.

Similar to the reasoning behind having to validate your data points, quotes require the same care, attention, and at times higher scrutiny than even opinions and theories that do not have them. This is because, like data points, it is often entirely possible to find supporting data or quotes to validate your opinion — even if it’s inaccurate.

Without even getting into the realm of misinformation that is intentionally misinforming audiences within the current content landscape, it is a common characteristic of bad content to have misinterpreted or misrepresented information — simply because the author or creator was seeking to prove a point rather than find an answer.

For example, for the above statement, we could draw the conclusion that the majority of audiences find it difficult to differentiate fact or fiction in any media or content. A quick, albeit biased, search query turns up an article from Pew Research, which contains the quote:

About two-in-three U.S. adults (64%) say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events.

Arguably, the above quote supports the claim that, indeed, people find the majority of people face confusion over basic facts in the media. Does this necessarily mean that they’re confused by influencers posting content about beauty products? Most likely not. But it can absolutely be interpreted that way if you’re creating content with the intent of proving that point, despite there not being any corollary relationship between the quote being presented and the conclusion being drawn. This then becomes your job as a content creator, or at least if you want to be a good one.

Pandering

Giving the people what they want and telling them what they want to hear are two different things, and in the era of authenticity audiences and communities will not tolerate hollow and baseless talking points for the sake of moving product. And while it may seem like pandering to harp, once again, on the importance of authenticity in content, or rather how being inauthentic is quite possibly the most egregious offense in bad content — it’s 100% true.

Here are a few of the main offenders:

Greenwashing

The environment has become one of the most compelling narratives across nearly all content channels – and likely for good reason, but we’re not really here to talk about that.

What we are here to talk about is the practice of saying one thing, and doing the other for the sole purpose of capturing an audience by being something you’re not.

The reality is, that while people do love the environment (rightfully so) not every company has to be saving it through their products and content. For sure, if you have the bandwidth or are at the very least carbon neutral then point it out, but no need to go out of your way to focus your content on something if it’s not relevant to your brand or potentially even misleading to your audience – they’ll know.

Cultural Appropriation

While code-switching is something we all do in our day-to-day lives, and as professionals, many of us have to do it through our content, it’s incredibly important to know your audience and be able to read the room.

Inclusivity is something that all brands are striving for and representation is a must-have for modern content strategies, so long as it’s done thoughtfully, and with intention, but there are still lines — with many that don’t need to be or shouldn’t be crossed. That said, it is important to make note that not every cultural event or happening is an opportunity for a sale or content activation.

This past year we saw many brands both leaning in and sitting out, for a number of holidays; and for good reason. In the same way that brands have been losing audience trust by greenwashing their brands, they’ve been losing audience trust by trying to be things they’re not or showing support in a performative way.

For pride this year, rather than the typical rainbow logos on social, we saw more conversations about not only the ways that brands were supporting the LGBTQ+ communities internally but also how they were showing support externally. This was a great way for brands directly connected to those communities to show support and do so in an authentic way.

Meanwhile, while some brands did don their rainbow logos, or were selling their multi-colored merch, many brands didn’t and weren’t — and that’s ok. In fact, that’s great! If it’s not part of your culture, embrace that. Ultimately, just don’t try to be something you’re not in your content and you’ll be fine.

Griefsploitation

If Time Magazine’s person of the year could be decided by content, it’d be “Thoughts and Prayers.”

For as unfortunate as it is that there are so many times when there is an opportunity for not just brands, but individuals, to show up and show support when there’s been a tragic event, it’s also unfortunate how often those opportunities are attempted to be exploited for the sake of content.

We’ll keep this one brief because it’s not something we condone or like to give energy to, but it also follows the same constraints as cultural appropriation and performative marketing.

Ultimately, choose wisely where you show up, and if you do so, do so in a way that is meaningful and goes beyond chiming in for visibility at an opportune time for your content to get a few extra likes.

Making everything 3000 words+

While there is something to be said about being concise, there’s an equal something to be said about being thorough. We know we’re breaking our own advice at times by creating these absolutely massive pieces, but we also like to ensure that we’ve covered all of our bases.

If you’re looking for bad content, there’s a 0% chance that you’ll find it here. If you need some assistance building good content, we got you.

The post Bad Content: What Not to Do to Win at Content Marketing appeared first on NoGood™: Growth Marketing Agency.