The Core of Any Good Content Strategy

NextView Venture‘s Jay Acunzo explains how content offers should be the one thing your entire content strategy revolves around, and shares his tips for creating and marketing them effectively.

 
Think for a second about the all the crazy obstacles a startup needs to overcome to successfully execute a content marketing strategy: You need to think up enough ideas to sustain your publishing, while staying true to your company’s message and product, generate not just views but conversions, and stand out online in an era when all of humanity is more distracted and over-stimulated than ever before.
No big deal.
Now before I trigger a panic attack, here’s something to help you breathe easier: At the core of any good content playbook is one single piece of content you can create to generate both more content and better distribution and marketing: a content offer.

What’s a Content Offer?

In brief, a content offer is a resource that (1) addresses the biggest pain point of your target buyer and (2) directly achieves a stated marketing goal.
For example, if your current goal is to generate more leads, and your buyers are digital marketers, you might create a guide to better blogging that you gate behind an info capture form that visitors must complete to access the PDF. This guide achieves the above criteria by addressing a huge pain point among digital marketers — blogging effectively — while simultaneously achieving your marketing objective by driving leads.
Offers can come in many different formats, not just eBooks — though those are certainly among the most popular types. Prior to joining NextView Ventures, for example, I led the blogging and content production team at HubSpot, where our offers spanned ebooks, white papers, one-page checklists, workbooks you can complete, templates to execute work quicker, collections of assets like website icons, and much more. Each offer had the same goal: Solve our buyers’ problems and generate an action to help our business.

Where Do Offers Fit in the Content Playbook?

This is easiest explained in a visual. (The concept below is from NextView Ventures’ Content Marketing for Startups Growth Guide, which is a step-by-step blueprint supplemented with startup-friendly hacks and entrepreneur interviews.)
Picture the entire content marketing process as a wheel, with the offer at the center:

Before creating anything, decide on your goal and how you’ll measure it. Why are you creating content? Are you being strategic? It’s temping to just sprint ahead and publish a bunch of stuff and measure views, but your business model is much different than that of a publisher. If ESPN.com generates just 100 views over the course of an entire day, sure, everybody’s getting fired. But if you drive 100 views and a) they’re all the right views, and b) they all take a measurable action you care about, then you’ve done something right.
Note that different types of content behave differently, which is why you need to establish clear goals and KPIs first before creating anything. If you’re aiming for general exposure, don’t write a guide that sits behind a form — that extra effort it takes readers to download the PDF will stifle your exposure. On the flip side, if your goal is to build an email list, then a gated PDF makes more sense. An infographic would be off-limits here though, unless you create both pieces — a graphic to drive views to a page, where a visitor can then find that PDF, download it, and join that email list in doing so.

An Entire Strategy From a Single Piece of Content

These content offers generally take a bit longer than your average piece of content to create, and rightfully so — when done right they directly hit one of your goals and directly address a huge need for your audience. But that extra time and effort also means you need to get more mileage out of that one piece, as well. With this “wheel” approach to content marketing, however, that’s exactly the point. In fact, every single step you take after the production of your content offer will be geared toward both supporting and capitalizing on your investment.

Step 1: Blog and “Atomize” Your Offer

Content marketing is about consistency, not individual pieces “going viral” (if you want to have a prayer of driving business results through content then ditch any belief you have in viral content right now). So the first step in establishing this wheel approach is to write blog posts and create smaller pieces of content all around the offer, i.e. “atomize” it with the offer as the topical nucleus tying it all together.
In doing so, your core content offer should make all your brainstorming and subsequent production much, much easier, too. Your central topic, your research, and even some of the actual writing are all right there in the offer.
For example, with my guide on content marketing for startups, I could come up with a seemingly unending list of blog content and other pieces quite easily, simply by taking mental tangents off of the guide: interviews with startups doing content well; lists of tips and tricks for startups practicing content marketing; excerpts of the chapters in the guide; deeper dives into certain concepts introduced in the PDF (which is exactly what I’m doing right here in this very blog post); SlideShares featuring thought leaders’ quotes on the subject; small, fun graphics to share on social; reporting on news relating to the topic of the guide; and on and on.
What once was a difficult task of brainstorming ideas from scratch now becomes much easier, and it’s all based on something that, again, solves a major problem for your audience. My editorial calendar is now full for weeks, even months, all based on that single piece. And, even better, every created piece can lead a reader right into downloading or consuming my content offer, which helps me prove the ROI of my marketing. Therefore, every single piece I create around the offer should link to the main piece and encourage readers to consume it.

Steps 2-4: Distribution

That “smaller” content from Step 1 is great for driving traffic to your core offer, as well as furthering thought leadership and growing audience. It helps you rank on search, get shared on social, build a blog subscriber list, and more. But the offer, itself also needs to be actively and strategically promoted. In other words, don’t just create content about your offer while using your other marketing channels to push product demos, discounts, and me-first calls-to-action. These are low-probability events that, while important, might be reaching people who aren’t yet ready to buy. You need to get your content out into the world to find relevant buyers, so the remaining steps in establishing a successful approach focuses on just that: distribution.
Marketing your content is an enormous topic unto itself, and since this post is about creating a content offer, I’ll instead disclose my all-time favorite, sneaky hack to distribute your offer:
“Trojan horse” emails
A funny pattern emerges if you email valuable content (such as a content offer) to an existing list in your database: You reach new people. That’s because when people receive something valuable they forward it to others who may also need solutions and knowledge. By comparison, nobody will forward a sales demo request. But when you provide value instead of asking for it the dynamic changes.
The trick is finding ways you can email your list your offer — creating more opportunities for them to forward it — more than once, without hitting them over the head with it and coming off as too pushy. You can actually game this system of forwarding a little bit with what I call a “Trojan horse” email.
For example, let’s say I created the Marketer’s Guide to SEO, placed it behind a lead-gen form (per my marketing goal) and emailed that to my list. Some contacts will forward that to their friends with similar needs, thus generating new leads for my business. But I’ve now exhausted this major resource. Sending it a second time just because I need more leads will only make me feel spammy to my contacts, who I still need to nurture into customers and can’t lose.
So instead, I might write a blog post about the most critical Google algorithm updates and send the entire thing to my list. Now here’s the trick — at the bottom, I also include a nice big call-to-action to grab the Marketer’s Guide to SEO. The existing list will ignore it, since they’ve seen it. But if they forward that blog post to new people? It becomes a lead-generating guide that the new recipient will see as a brand new, value-adding resource that solves a major problem. They can then convert. The blog post triggered my existing list to forward new value, while the entire thing — the blog post AND the guide — are new and valuable to the person on the other end.

(As for the other steps, there’s more context in the guide, but suffice it to say that reaching out to publishers, influencers, and other organizations with a resource in hand, rather than a pitch, makes for a much easier sell. Thus, even when it comes to outreach, that original content offer makes your playbook that much easier.)

The “Oh By The Way” Moment

Creating content can be difficult for a number of reasons outlined above, but starting with a content offer can make the rest of your approach flow more naturally. And, speaking of flow, you also want your offer and all your content marketing to plug neatly into your product or service. After all, you’re not a publisher: You can’t settle for views; you need those views to turn into customers or users.
Great content marketing aims to serve your audience in a way that’s very similar to your product or service — it just does so through a different medium. Because of this relationship, there exists this “oh by the way” moment to your content. Essentially, your audience will consume your offer to solve a problem or think and feel a certain way. And that’s great, but — oh by the way — the very BEST way to solve that problem and feel that way is actually to buy your product or service.
All together, it looks like this (note that it’s entirely from THEIR perspective, too):

Keep in Mind: You’re not a publisher. Your business model is different. It’s not enough to create a bunch of “stuff” and generate as many views as you can. As a startup content marketer, you’re tasked with connecting all the dots, from the very first touch between your content and a visitor, all the way down the funnel, and right into the usage or purchase of your product or service. And while all these moving parts may seem daunting and unmanageable, if you start with a content offer, not only do you stand to win, your audiences does too.
For the exact steps to take as a startup practicing content marketing, plus more hacks to move faster, check out this Growth Guide from NextView Ventures, a leading seed-stage VC firm in Boston.
Photo by: Karen Kleis