We don’t write blogs for the sake of it. Every blog has a takeaway for the reader. It contains tips, techniques, and ideas that readers can readily implement in their businesses. So, this document explains our strategy for top of the funnel content and how we will execute it.
Target Audience - Who do we write for?
We write for CEOs, CMOs, Heads of Growth, VPs of Marketing, VPs of Sales, and marketing managers at funded and early-stage SaaS companies. These companies should have:
- Difficulty in identifying their ideal customer personas
- Trouble achieving product market fit
- A marketing team in place (although not full-fledged)
- A fair idea of their problems
Why do we write only for funded companies and not for bootstrapped companies?
Because bootstrapped companies may not have marketing budgets. That doesn’t mean working with us will entail truckloads of money. But, we expect companies to have budgets to implement the solutions we suggest or for the services we deliver.
An example of a marketing challenge that our target companies face?
For example, a marketing team that is unable to track leads and their stage in the buying journey will need HubSpot. Setting up HubSpot needs specific expertise which we will provide. But, a HubSpot license comes at a cost + implementation expenses.
Or, another typical problem could be discovering more about their ICPs (ideal customer personas). In this case, we help them reach customers, identify the right questions to ask, narrowing down the responses to 3-4 buckets and passing it to product managers for building.
Why do we write for marketing managers?
We write for marketing managers because we want them to become our champions inside the organizations that we are targeting. Plus, they are the people on the ground doing stuff/monitoring their teams and who’re likely to have problems – for which we will have solutions via our blogs.
What is the objective of our blogs?
The objective of our blog is to write helpful content for our target audience. We want our readers to read our blogs, note down the tips and implement them in their respective organizations.
What is the long-term goal for our blogs?
We want our readers to:
- Obviously read our blogs
- Implement the actionable tips in them
- Refer it to their peers and networks
- Think about us when faced with marketing problems
- All of the above builds the momentum for our target audience to come to us to fix their marketing problems
How do we wish our target audience to perceive ourselves?
We want our people to perceive us as experts who can solve their problems. How? In 2 ways actually:
- The fact that we have the ability to understand the problems growing companies are experiencing, and
- We know the solutions that work. For example, if a company is experiencing high drop-offs from their landing pages, it could mean that their CTA is not working. Or, it could mean that their positioning needs to change. So, the solution for this is to go back to existing customers and ask them why they signed up to your product. Then, change your positioning and website copy accordingly.
What do we write about?
We write about mostly SaaS marketing themes such as copywriting, email marketing, landing pages, content marketing, product marketing, conversions, etc. More specifically, since we offer our customers these marketing services, we feel it makes sense to stick to these topics.
This spreadsheet captures our initial research on the broad topics we wish to cover as part of our blog strategy.
Here is an example of a blog that we wrote recently:
Not to-do list: #11 Marketing mistakes that stops your business from scaling and growing
What is our writing style?
Here are the tenets of our writing style:
- We strive to write original and unique content that resonates with our audience.
- We use research, numbers, statistics, percentages etc. from highly reliable sources
- We reference whatever we quote from external sources
- We believe in writing a great hook that appeals to our audience
- We ensure the blog flows seamlessly from one topic to the next
- We will structure our views in bullets or numbered bullets to enable easy reading
How do we choose blog topics?
Okay, this requires a bit of explanation.
Ideally, from our experiences in the past, we’ve noticed that the pillar and sub-pillar blog strategy works very well.
What is a pillar blog?
A pillar blog directly addresses a keyword that we are aiming to rank for. Usually, pillar blogs are detailed blogs (around ~3,500 words) and have several chapters that are either descriptive or an introduction to other blogs.
For example, for the keyword, “What is SEO?”, you’d notice Semrush’s blog ranks on the first page of Google.
If you look closely at the blog, you’d notice that:
- The URL of the blog directly accounts for the keyword “What is SEO?”
- It introduces the reader to the basic principles of SEO.
- It has several chapters on the left that explain the benefits of SEO, truths about SEO etc.
- It has several internal links to other SEO-related blogs authored by Semrush.
- It has external links to authoritative research sources as well.
- It acts as a gateway to other deeper SEO-related sub-topics.
What is a sub-pillar blog?
A sub-pillar blog is one that supports the pillar blog. In this case, Semrush’s blog on technical SEO is a sub-pillar blog. They’ve linked to it in their main blog titled “What is SEO?” Although it does not appear as a separate chapter under their Table of Contents on the left, it is still an effective way to signal to search engines about their coverage and depth of their pillar topic.
Sometimes, writers link back to the original pillar blog from the sub-pillar blog too. This helps indicate to search engines understand the content structure of the website and its blog.
What is a sub-pillar blog?What will be the call to action for our blogs?
We wanted to test two types of call to action for our blogs:
- Newsletter signup – We will encourage readers to subscribe to our newsletter to receive similar insights.
- Read other blogs – We will also encourage our readers to read other similar blogs that belong to the same genre/category.
How will we distribute these blogs?
We will distribute these blogs through multiple ways, such as (but not limited to):
- Interlinking – We will reference and interlink other similar blogs to each blog so people get a holistic perspective of a given topic.
- Newsletter – We publish a newsletter every Friday at 11 AM IST. Each of our blogs will be featured in it. So, in order to make the process seamless and easy-to-publish, every blog will have a 300-word introduction, takeaways, etc. which will be featured in our newsletter. That way, we need not write new content for the newsletter.
- Twitter – We can repurpose this blog into a Twitter thread and publish it
- LinkedIn document – We can repurpose this blog into a LinkedIn post (even take the twitter thread) and publish it from our individual profiles, company page etc.
