Early on at Referral SaaSquatch, we realised there was a lack of rich content about customer referral programs. We quickly set about filling this gap with blog articles, posters, and guides. This led to strong organic search rankings, consistent monthly traffic, and increasing brand awareness.

You probably already know that when content marketing is done right, it establishes expertise, brand, and relationships with your potential clients all while collecting a large list of emails.

Unfortunately, this is where content marketing typically stops (for both me and you).

Clearly you want to generate brand awareness and capture leads, it’s just that content marketing doesn’t have to stop there. In fact, without creating any more original content you can improve every stage of the sales process from awareness to closing deals.

Develop Brand Affinity not Brand Awareness

When you think of brand marketing you probably think of TV spots, billboards, and branded pens. These increase the chance of someone seeing your brand and maybe at the point of purchase they will pick your product because it’s more familiar.

But unless you’re a major consumer brand or making a few hundred million dollars a year, don’t spend all that money and time just to get people to see your brand!

You want to get people to interact with your brand and like it even before they have used your product or service.

Create Interactive Content

“Broadly, interactive content is calculators, quizzes, free tools, and other things of that nature that users can interact with – instead of just read.” source Matt Gratt – Buzzstream
People like infographics. They’re visually appealing and make it easy to learn about trends and stats. However, at the end they still have to do all the thinking for themselves and most people would like to avoid this if possible.

Calculators

Calculators, unlike infographics, help people avoid heavy mental lifting. They make it easy to answer specific questions and provide actionable next steps. Those next steps may even be to use your product or service.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to find some crazy new problem to help your audience solve before you build a calculator. Chances are, you’ve probably already written a blog article or created an infographic that helps customers with a key questions related to your product.

One example of a calculator that was wildly successful was the XE currency calculator. Before google automatically did currency conversions, there was no easy way to find out how much one dollar was worth in another currency.

XE built a very simple calculator that answered exactly this question. Quickly they became the de facto online solution for calculating currency conversion. Further, since people trusted the XE calculator, it was logical they would trust XE to do actual foreign exchange too.

Pretty simple right? A few things to keep in mind are:

• Solve the key question people are asking themselves before they use your product.
• Keep it simple. You don’t need to do a lot, you just need to answer a real question.
• Make it embeddable and shareable. If someone likes your calculator you want them to spread your brand far and wide.

Analysis Tools

Analysis tools are more complex, and can take more time to build, but since they solve more advanced problems, they can create stronger brand affinity and walk potential clients further towards a purchase decision.

A prime example of an analysis tool is Neil Patel’s Quick Sprout tool. The tool helps people answer questions about how to increase their webpage’s traffic and what their competitors traffic is like.

Source: Quicksprout.com

Since Neil Patel sells consulting services to help with the very problem his tool solves you might think it hurts his business. The reality is the exact opposite. The tool helps to outline the problem’s you are having, and if you don’t want to solve them, or don’t know how to solve them, Neil can help you out.

Drive engagement, deliver value at all costs
The number 1 reason your free or trial users don’t convert is because they don’t really engage with your product. Lincoln Murphy provides some great insight into why free trials fail, I suggest you check it out.

Content marketing is all about engaging users. So it makes sense that content marketing would be a great way to engage users as they’re evaluating your product.

Rich Content

If Content is King, Rich Content is the Emperor (tweet this). Audio and video content can establish a much deeper relationship with the potential consumer. It’s more memorable than text, easy to consume on multiple platforms and incredibly easy to share.

The key is to learn where to cut corners. You probably already have blog articles that detail much of the broader value of your service and how to capitalize on it. You can easily repurpose that content into another medium like audio or video.

Once users have signed up to your product, why not send them a video course all about your industry? You can include generic and specific advice about your product too if you want.

Also, there is nothing stopping you from using this same content to further develop brand affinity. You can reach new consumers by leveraging distribution networks for your content like the Apple Store/Google Play, Youtube, Udemy, or Soundcloud.

Lots of people think that rich media takes a lot of effort. The truth is that for all the gains you get from producing video/audio content, you don’t have to invest that much more into your campaign than a blog article.

A few tips:

• Re-use popular blog articles as the basis for rich media wherever possible.
• Use rich media for both onboarding and developing brand affinity.
• Keep it short, engaging, and relevant to the value your product provides.

Conclusion

A strong, rich content marketing growth strategy can help with awareness to activation and even retention. You can reuse existing content to create logical, engaging, and unique content that helps potential clients move smoothly from one stage of the sales process to the next.

Look for ways to reuse content and create engaging content such as:

• Calculators
• Analysis Tools
• Quizzes
• Video Course
• Email Courses
• Certifications

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