Growing via Library & Publication Content
A story of how the typical college library works like search engines. And Edward Ford on how driving growth for Supermetrics required more than library-like content.
Do you still remember your college days?
I remember mine vividly. For context, I studied Mechanical Engineering. You may argue, but according to AmberStudent, prominent mechanical engineering colleges have an acceptance rate as low as 4%–5%. This makes it one of the hardest courses to even get into, let alone study and come out with flying colors, as I did. Don’t fret, though. Today’s not for my college biography. I’m sharing this to set the context for what I’d share next, especially how it relates to effective B2B content marketing execution.
Week-in, week-out, lecturers reigned tough assignments on us. If it wasn’t something in Engineering Maths, it’d be in Strength of Materials, Heat and Mass Transfer, Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics, you name them. And when they did, if a lecturer recommended any resource, I often went straight to the bookstore and bought the book, so my friends could come over to solve the problem at my crib😊. Some of those books —the ones I still cherish so much— are on my shelf today:
But in most cases, lecturers didn’t recommend any resources. When this happened, there was only one place you could find my peers and I, looking for resources to further understand and solve those tough problems:
The library.
Today’s Library Is Different
It’s funny in hindsight.
Often, we didn’t know a book was on the rack until we searched the catalog for something with the information we sought. Only then would we notice a certain book we’d been omitting, mark the author a life-saver, and go on to buy their book, if it helped us to solve the problem we had.
Again, you may ask: If this isn’t your college days’ biography, what then is it, Victor? Well, think for a bit, and you’ll see that it bears similarities with Google Search, YouTube, and every other place we now default to searching for info. These search engines do a wonderful digital cataloging job. They can catalog vast amounts of various information types a physical catalog could only dream of holding. Additionally, they’ve also become the gateway to discovering the bookstores.
But it still follows a pattern similar to how we discovered and bought books in college. Some authors use specific titles and descriptions when writing their books. These made it easy to discover their books when searched with the catalog in a library. It’s like the typical search engine-optimized B2B content marketing pieces. You don’t know they are there unless you query the search engines with the titles and descriptions used to index them.
Which brings me to Supermetrics.
The Finnish-based B2B SaaS primarily created such library-like content before Edward Ford, now Global Demand Gen Director, joined their Demand Gen marketing team. As Edward shared with me in our Growing with Content podcast episode, the search volumes for such content weren’t much.
But it grew Supermetrics in the early stages. Especially, when their main target was those using Google to search for use case-based information on the problems their product solved. They were basically trying to capture demand from operators looking for info on solving hands-on problems.
Edward Ford acknowledged this:
Capturing existing demand through organic search drove initial growth and unlocked new funding rounds for Supermetrics. Injecting new capital, as with most VC-backed SaaS startups, came with new, more audacious growth goals. And with that came the need to increase their average account value (ACV) and go upmarket. It was no longer enough for Supermetrics to create how-to guides people only discovered when they queried Google in search of information on solving a specific problem.
They now needed to reach decision-makers deciding what problems should be solved. This relates to the second way we discovered and bought books in my college days. As I’ve mentioned, lecturers often recommended what book we should buy to tackle our engineering assignments. And in many, if not all, cases we just went straight to the bookstore and bought such books.
In retrospect, here’s how I think it happened.
Our lecturers had come to trust the authors of such books. Newer books may have had better insights on the topics they taught. But since they probably didn’t know they existed —because most lecturers aren’t in the library scanning catalogs for new books with new info on topics they already know, they recommended what they knew.
Likewise, if a startup wants to reach decision-makers, creating library-like content mostly discovered through SEO isn’t always the best route. Supermetrics, as Edward shared with me, realized this.
According to him:
Layering on Publication Content
Picture a lecturer who mostly gets information from people and companies they willingly subscribed to hear from and through peer recommendations. Also, assume you’re a new startup whose product features are a solution to the assignments they give to students.
What would be an optimal way to make them aware of your product to increase the chances they’ll recommend your solution to students? Say this hypothetical lecturer was like the typical one I had in college. In that case, the likelihood of going to our college library in search of a new book on a topic they already know is slim. So using catchy titles and descriptions to file a book in our college library won’t make much difference.
It’s similar to startups trying to reach B2B decision-makers.
As Edward and his team at Supermetrics realized, they needed to layer on ‘publication’ content to reach decision-makers. Unlike library-like content primarily optimized for organic search discovery, this one is different. It takes more of a thought leadership approach. It is distributed for discovery on the channels and places decision-makers hang out, not necessarily when they search. More importantly, its aim isn’t to show how to solve a problem, but why the problem should be rethought, approached, and solved differently.
According to Edward, it could be a podcast, webinar or video series, or newsletter. Whatever it is, however, it should be crafted to make decision-makers think of trends and how their company should approach solving problems in a way that ties-in your brand’s point of view and product’s unique value.
Essentially, you’re not teaching them how to do something. You want them to rethink how they do things in a way that puts an approach more easily achieved with your product in the mix. Like the lecturers who knew about certain books enough to recommend them to my college peers to solve the assignments they gave us, publication-like content does the same.
It helps your startup get top-down buy-in.
As Edward Ford shared, done well, publication-like content is the rare opportunity for startups to build owned audiences of decision-makers. Because once it resonates, decision-makers will not only subscribe for more, but they’ll share it with peers who could end up subscribing, too.
As a result, you earn the express permission to further earn their mindshare and reach people in their network if they share your pieces. Most importantly, the chances of your startup being the solution they recommend to their direct reports when they decide to solve problems —the way you’ve taught them how to think about solving such problems— are way higher.
And to the most interesting part.
The likelihood that such direct reports —as my peers and I did when a lecturer recommended a book to us— will go straight to signing up for a trial or booking sales calls to explore using your product goes up, too.
Attaining such results through publication-like content is why thought leadership is a core of our Studio’s Product-Led Storytelling approach:
As illustrated, our goal with this content type is using stories target buyers can relate with to help B2B SaaS startups craft and distribute deep insights at the intersection of their brand’s point of view and ideal customer needs. At the same time, we subtly weave in their products in a way that articulates its unique value and how it is different from competing products.
The Product-Led Storytelling Video Course
For the very first time, and in this upcoming step-by-step video course, I’m breaking down the foundations for:
Strategizing,
Crafting, and
Distributing…
…story-driven, product-led content (aka, Product-Led Storytelling, PLS) that engages readers, earns mindshare, and builds you an audience of prospective customers. Want to be among the first to access the course? Join dozens of other SaaS Founders, Writers, and B2B Marketers on the waitlist.
Back to Edward Ford, though.
I learned a lot listening to him sharing details on how he and his Global Demand Gen team at Supermetrics do publication-like content through a podcast. Specifically, how they involved their C-Suite in the process and how they organically distribute what they produce to ensure it reaches the right decision-makers at target companies.
In other words, he shared step-by-step details on how to layer publication-like thought leadership into your more traditional, library-like B2B content marketing execution:
Edward shared so much more👇
Crafted in VEC Studio
Why is AI in B2B Marketing All the Rave?
To give you a clue, Salesforce, pioneer of the B2B SaaS business model, now positions itself as ‘the #1 AI CRM.’ Intercom, a leading customer service SaaS, have recently revamped their entire website. They now claim to be ‘the only complete AI-first customer service platform.’ Their arch rival, Drift, now starts its underlying value proposition statement as ‘...an AI-powered buyer engagement platform…”
It’s not just known B2B SaaS behemoths.
According to TechCrunch, despite widespread decline in startup investing, funding for AI tools surged in the past year. Capital toward generative AI startups alone surged almost 8x from 2022 to 2023, reaching over US$25.2 billion by the end of December 2023. Even Y Combinator (YC), the famous Silicon Valley-based accelerator, seems to now prefer incubating AI ventures. For instance, it accepted about 86 AI startups in its Winter 2024 Batch, nearly double the number of such startups accepted a year prior.
My point?
The AI rave is everywhere you turn.
And more so for marketing-related purposes. Because if you unpack what’s driving this trend, Large Language Models (LLMs) made popular by the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude 2, and others, are at the forefront.
Through APIs or open source, any marketing technology (MarTech) can plug into the generative AI capabilities of these models. Hence, the widespread promise of accelerated automation of marketing tasks. Chief of this is auto-generating marketing content from a few prompts. Sounds honest on paper. But Phyllis Davidson, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester, noted why B2B Marketers eager to adopt these tools for such a promise should do it with a grain of salt.
According to Phyllis:
In other words, AI tools’ can help you to auto-generate content at scale. But they won’t necessarily help you to achieve your business goals. As Phyllis observed, tools are integrating LLMs and AI to unlock new revenue streams for themselves. And to appeal more to investors by moving their business into the trending category.
It follows that if you must use them, you should also put your own interest first. How you do this is by identifying areas where using AI tools actually makes your B2B SaaS content writing more effective.
Effective Use of AI in B2B Content Marketing
Jason Foster said it best:
Per Jason’s advice, I took some steps back to examine areas where using AI can be effective for B2B content marketing.
Such areas are…
Brainstorming & Keywords Research
Digging Out Content Creation Insights from Existing Data
Co-Writing & Editing Guardrails, and
Predictive Content Recommendations
For a detailed walkthrough on effectively using AI in B2B content marketing in the areas outlined above…
Thanks so much for reading.
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