Content Creation for Businesses Serious About Growth

We live in an age where consumers are more savvy than ever and trust in organisations is diminishing.  Your marketing content is one of the primary ways in which you can establish trust and credibility with your target audience.

Businesses looking to grow need a repeatable and scalable model to attract potential customers into their eco-system.  Having content that attracts your target audience, whether that's technical eBooks or TikTok videos, is mission critical to lead generation.

Many B2B companies have a sales cycle that could last weeks or months.  Therefore, once you've attracted a lead, you need content to keep them engaged and nurtured as they move through the funnel. Think about creating content that is relevant to where your leads are in their buyer journey. This helps marketing and sales teams fulfil their respective roles in converting leads to customers.

We start by working out the basics. What is the current strategy and what are the objectives? What are the competitors doing? Where are the gaps? What are your prospects are looking for and not getting? How do we produce content that is 10x better than anyone else?

We will review your brand guidelines so understand your style and tone of voice and agree how the final output should look.

We work with you to identify and define the target buyer personas (or audiences) to make sure we understand who the content is aimed at, and then agree what the key messaging is.

We agree the baseline level of your current measures and goals for how they will improve over time.

Depending on the type of content we are creating, we will storyboard the videos and develop shot lists for b-roll to help make the content more engaging.

We will work with you to develop a list of subject areas that the content will cover. This is then broken down into questions that we will ask your experts to get their insights.

Finally, we manage the logistics to plan out when, where and how we are going to shoot your content.

On the day of the video shoot, our videographers and producers will turn up on location with professional equipment ready to create great content. Unless otherwise specified, all equipment hire is included as part of the package.

If we are managing the expert interview process, we will usually spend a bit of time with the interviewees to help prepare them. As well as the interview footage, we capture appropriate B-roll and photography to help you tell your the story in an engaging way.

If your content involves producing more of a story (potentially using actors), we will be on hand to manage and direct things as part of the shoot.

Following the video shoot we will create the final version of the video project in line with the agreed storyboard.

We manage all the backups of the data, organise the footage, source audio/music, and can produce graphics to support key points of discussion/explanation. We typically include two revisions of longer form content. This will be managed through professional online software where you can add comments to the videos, compare previous versions, and collaborate with our editors.

If required, we will take the video content we created, break it down into "Shorts". These "Short" videos can then be used to promote your business on various social media platforms (e.g. LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, etc.). Specific content will be made for each platform taking into consideration buyer personas and platform specific factors (e.g. aspect ratios, etc.).

eBooks

As part of a wider campaign, we will often help you use the content from the expert video interviews to produce a downloadable asset such as an eBook.

By using the video content to produce the eBook, we can get expert insights and create a piece of content that offers real value to your leads, prospects, and customers. We would often recommend placing this content behind a form in order to capture contact information (email, name, phone) in exchange for the eBook. This way, your content is helping you drive your lead generation activities.

Using the expert interview videos, we can start with the end in mind and make sure we are getting the majority of the information required for the eBook as part of that process.

We can manage all aspects of the eBook production from concept, copy, artwork, and layout.

Blogs & Social Media Content 

Your expert content (captured on video) can also be turned into blogs and social media content.

If we have created an eBook, we will typically produce 8-12 blogs with supporting content. These are SEO optimised to help promoted your website via organic traffic. Each blog will point to the eBook asset with clear CTAs (calls to action) helping to drive lead generation.

We can use the social media to promote video shorts, eBook, and specific blogs.

We can provide your in-house team with the assets or for HubSpot customers on a professional subscription level (or above) we can help manage the social media distribution.

We can help you establish a set of brand guidelines or update an existing brand book. 

Often overlooked, having brand guidelines can save a huge amount of time when it comes to creating marketing materials as styles have been agreed.

It also helps to add consistency to all your marketing and promotional material. This helps build brand recognition and increase trust in your business.

We can help you create professional, on-brand marketing material.

We've worked with businesses to make sure their social media presence is consistent across the various channels.

This can include banners, thumbnails, profiles, etc. It can also cross over into the way that content is produced.

The first part of our process is to understand your vision and strategy. This doesn’t have to be days sat in a stuffy room. But we need to know where you want to get to and how you’re going to get there. We can also work through how you plan on achieving the vision (the strategy) as part of the session.

Once the vision and strategy are understood, we need to work out some some of the foundational principles for growing your business. We will help you construct buyer personas, which are semi-fictionalised versions of your ideal customer. Getting these right is very important as they will influence the marketing efforts moving forward. We will also look at the buyer journey. These are the steps that your customers take as they look to make a purchase from you.

As your customers move through the various stages of awareness, consideration, and decision, they will want different types of content. We will work with you to establish the right content, channels and messaging for each of these stages.

We will also undertake a content audit. Many businesses have much more content around them than they give themselves credit for.  It may not be in the best format but that is something that can be reasonably easily fixed. We will undertake a full content audit and work out what new content needs to be created.

At this stage we will also do a review of the sales and marketing data in order to benchmark  the current performance. Based on this we will also be able to look at developing marketing goals and KPIs for growth.

As HubSpot partners we are well positioned to help you develop your marketing and sales technology stack. You can read more about how we do that here. However, the benefits of having a robust and organised customer relationship management system cannot be understated. You want the technology to help you grow not get in the way. HubSpot is a market-leading CRM with lots of additional functionality to help you with your marketing, sales, and customer services. We will be able to help you implement a HubSpot solution if this is something that you would wish to consider.

We will also do a performance evaluation of your website.  It is possible to build a website within HubSpot (like this website). This means that you can bring your CRM data into your website. If this is something you are interested in we can give you a demo or talk you through the options.

Before we get started on lead generation activities we need to make sure that the ground work has been done.

If you want to refresh your website, this will often be one of the first things we do.  There's not much point in putting effort into sending people to a website that isn't working.  The only time we would advise this is if you are desperate for leads but this is probably an indication of more fundamental issues with your business. 

If we need to create any content in order to assist the lead generation effort, this can be prioritised. For example, we may work on creating an asset such as an e-book if we think this is something your leads would value.  Once the e-book is completed (along with a landing page, supporting blogs, social media campaign) we would start to work on lead gen activities.  This needs to be balanced with making sure you still have a flow of leads coming into your business.

Other activities that we might look at include cleaning up your data or building automated processes to help with the marketing efforts.  These are generally ongoing tasks but there is often a bit of upfront work to do.

With any lead generation project we are always going to look for quick wins. This isn't because we're lazy but they get the ball rolling whilst we're creating content for more structured campaigns. These might be things like adding calls-to-action to your blogs, quick email campaign, etc.

Once we have created the assets for the first campaign (e.g. e-book, video, etc.) and got HubSpot set up, we will begin to lead generation activities in earnest. This could include search engine optimisation PPC campaigns or other marketing activities such as social media, LinkedIn, or even things such as direct mail.

All of this activity will be planned based on the information from the initial strategy review (e.g. buyer personas).

Not everyone who fills in or form or downloads one of  your assets will want to buy straight away. In fact, the sales cycle for many B2B companies can be 3-6 months (if not longer).

You need a way to continue to nurture your leads. One way to do this is to continue to supply them with value-added content. This enables you to build trust over time. It also helps to position you as a subject matter expert that can help solve your customers challenges.

To do this well you need a regular stream of high-quality content (hosting a podcast can really help with this).  Additionally, using marketing automation such as HubSpot can also really help take on much of the workload in nurturing your leads.

We do a lot of work with sales teams who are using HubSpot. One thing we help with involves setting up sales processes to manage deals.

We also help sales teams think through how they qualify leads (using BANT for example).  Often we even take it a step back and start with marketing.  We work with marketing to define what a marketing qualified lead (MQL) is.  From here, we can help up an informal (or formal) service level agreement (SLA) with the sales team. For example, marketing agree to supply sales with x amount of MQLs each month.  Sales then evaluate these MQLs to see if they are ready to become sales qualified leads (SQL).

There are different ways to qualify SQLs but the focus is normally on establish budget, authority, need, and timing.  Once a contact or company has been identified as a SQL, discussions on specific deal opportunities begin.  By having the MQL and SQL filters in place, sales teams can save a significant amount of time not chasing up leads that won't every go anywhere.  Having more focus means that the chances of a deal being won increases as does revenue generation.

We also help sales teams use the tools in HubSpot to increase their productivity, allowing them to spend more time on converting leads to customers. 

An important part of the Growth Generator philosophy is to promote data driven decision-making.  Analysis of your marketing and sales metrics will give a good indication of where to prioritise your marketing or sales efforts.

Got loads of web traffic but no form fills - focus on lead conversion (landing page optimisation, form design, etc.).  Have loads of contacts in your CRM but need more sales - look at email nurturing campaigns. You get the idea.

Wellmeadow can help you use tools such as  HubSpot or Databox to build reports and dashboards to monitor your growth metrics.