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I'm dead set AGAINST content recycling. Or at least, the way recycling, as I've observed, is typically approached: ⚠️ Blindly chopping a 2000-word blog into 10 social posts ⚠️ Spraying identical copy across platforms ⚠️ Completely ignoring platform differences and audience preferences Real content recycling isn't about mindless duplication. It's about making your best content work harder – so you don't have to. Here's what nobody tells you about recycling: ♻️ Your best compound opportunities aren't in viral spikes - they're hidden in evergreen content that keeps pulling steady traffic months later ♻️ Each platform has a content 'dialect' - and speaking it naturally beats any templated approach to reformatting ♻️ Your recycling workflow should work backwards: plan how you'll redistribute content before you even create it ♻️ Align recycled content with team goals and track the real impact. Like - what happened when you included webinar highlights in a sales follow-up email? And here's your chance to learn how to do this: Tune into Steffen Hedebrandt's session at Full Circle 2024. He'll be showing you how the Dreamdata team recycles their content to 'do more with less'. He'll share real-time learnings from their experiments, and give you a content recycling framework you can put to work right away! ---------- Come join us at Full Circle to learn with B2B marketers who've been in the trenches - no fluff, just real experiences and hard-earned insights. Details: Full Circle | Nov 20-21, 2024 9AM EST onwards | Online Get your free invite below! 🎟️

Messaging on most B2B website homepages doesn't fall flat because it's a word salad. Or because it lacks creativity. It's because it's disconnected from the rest of their content strategy. Think about it: That punchy homepage headline is supposed to be the distillate of your entire value proposition. And that same core message needs to be reinforced with every blog post, podcast episode, or newsletter. Why? Because consistency is key to building a strong brand. When your homepage, blog, and social media all vibe on the same note, you're not just creating content. You're creating a cohesive narrative; that ONE thing you want your audiences to remember about your brand. But more often than not that homepage message doesn't actually carry through to all the other content IPs. Here's how you can bridge that gap so your content reflects what your homepage promises: → Audit your core message: What does your homepage say about your brand? Now, does your content reflect that? Example: Ahrefs' homepage promises "Your digital marketing strategy backed by real, actionable data." This is the cornerstone of all the content they deliver: to help SEO-obsessed marketers get better at growing traffic and using data to take smarter decisions. → Create content pillars: Break down your core message into 3-5 main themes. These become your content pillars, guiding everything you produce. Example: Buffer's homepage touts "affordable, intuitive marketing tools for ambitious people and teams." Their content consistently addresses: - Social media strategy - Small business growth - Social marketing on a budget. And their open blogs and case studies consistently speak to small businesses and teams. → Align your CTAs: The action you want visitors to take on your homepage should be echoed across all your content. Your homepage CTA is "Start your free trial." But your tweets say "Learn more," and your webinars finish with "Book a demo." See the problem? While some situational CTAs may vary, broadly you need to create a clear, familiar path to engagement. → Use consistent language: The tone and key phrases from your homepage should flavour all your content. Example: Walnut's playful voice and dry humour are unmistakable, from their homepage to their #weareprospects video. "You’d be nuts not to choose us" isn't just a tagline; it's a brand personality. → Test & iterate: Use your content as a testing ground. Which messages resonate most? Use these insights to continually refine your homepage. Remember, your homepage isn't just a standalone piece or a finishing line. It's the gravitational centre your content orbits around. So, here's a challenge: Take a hard look at your homepage. Then review your last 5 pieces of content. Do they feel like they're part of the same story? If not, it might be time for a realignment.

The biggest casualty in the B2B marketing turf-wars is often your content strategy. Whichever way you slice it - regardless of what you call your teams, or how they’re structured - all good marketing needs to address three fundamental questions: → 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗻𝘂𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝟵𝟱% 𝗼𝗳 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗮𝘂𝗱𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻'𝘁 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝘆 𝘆𝗲𝘁? → 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝟱% 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝘆? → 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘄 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗲𝘅𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀? And your content strategy is the answer to these questions - in action. But here's the catch: the 95-5 rule describes your audience, not 𝗵𝗼𝘄 you should allocate your content efforts. When marketing teams operate in silos, they often pull content strategy in competing directions. Or, as Erik Jacobson said, "most B2B companies completely ignore the 95%" and end up over-indexing on the 5% and existing customers become an after-thought. Why? Because activation content's quick, measurable wins often overshadow the long-term value of brand and customer content. More so when resources are tight. But this short-sightedness results in: → Invisibility to most of your potential market → Zero mindshare & trust when prospects do enter the buying cycle → Feast-or-famine lead gen, higher CAC and churn A successful content strategy is built on a content mix serving 𝗔𝗟𝗟 segments, not one at the cost of another. Here’s an approach you could use as a starting point for your content mix: ➡️ Foundational brand content (50-70% of your efforts): • Serves all segments • Focus: thought leadership, industry insights, storytelling • Examples: blog posts, webinars, podcasts ➡️ Targeted activation content (20-30% of your efforts): • Primarily for the 5%, but can nudge the 95% • Focus: product specifics, use cases, value propositions • Examples: product pages, comparisons ➡️ Customer success content (15-20% of your efforts): • For existing customers, also showcases value to prospects • Focus: product usage, customer stories • Examples: user guides, customer spotlights There aren't any magic ratios here, though. These percentages can and should be adjusted continually based on: ^ Sales cycle length ^ Market position ^ Product complexity ^ Company stage/revenue ^ Current business goals Binet & Field's research built upon by The B2B Institute (linked below) make for a seminal read on finding this 'balance'. Ultimately, whatever ratios you do arrive at for yourself, your content strategy should prepare the ground and be ready for the harvest.

When did content become an afterthought? Think about it: - How do people find you? Content. - How do they decide to buy? Content. - How do they fall in love with your brand? Yup. Content. Why is it, then, that every time someone says 'content', it conjures up a 'bottom of the barrel job description' as Tobias Liebsch called it? [I'm not even going to open up the can of worms that is 'content marketing'.] Because we've engineered our marketing in silos. And we treat content as a function of those silos, rather than the connective engine it should be. As a result: - Product marketing teams define value props, but these fail without the right feature pages or customer stories [content]. - Demand gen teams run outreach campaigns, but without value-adding nurture sequences [content], leads slip away. - Brand teams aim for consistency, but if brand guidelines aren't applied to everyday content, the story never connects. The content engine is the linchpin of any marketing strategy and should be treated as such. → Integrate, don't isolate: Content should be the glue between product knowledge, market insights, and brand voice. → Map the journey: Every piece of content should move your customer forward, from awareness to advocacy. Content is not a siloed, ad-hoc task to just churn out something, anything. Businesses that understand this have earned the right to win in our attention economy.

SaaS product pages have one job: to convert visitors into customers. Not to be SEO sandboxes. When you over-optimise product pages for SEO, you get: 👎 Diluted messaging: Your unique value prop gets buried under generic catchphrases. Suddenly, you sound like every other SaaS company out there. 👎 Poor user experience: CTAs and links become afterthoughts, buried within confusing layouts and keyword-dense paragraphs. Load times? Glacial. 👎 Misaligned intent: Visitors bounce because they wanted solutions, not a keyword-riddled novella. Traffic =/= conversions. In short, this keyword soup is a surefire way to tank your conversion rates. So, what's the alternative? Optimise other pages and sections on your website to drive search traffic. Then guide those visitors to your conversion-focused product pages. Which other pages/sections, you ask? 1. Solutions pages: Design dedicated pages for each vertical or use case to target niche keywords. → Add related case studies and testimonials. → Use industry-specific schema markup. 2. Educational content: Create a content hub around key industry problems to build topical authority. → Target long-tail keywords from sales and support calls. → Dish out unique data-driven insights captured from your own platform/product (think "State of Customer Onboarding 2024"). 3. FAQ section: Build a dedicated space for common Q&As to appear in featured snippets and “People Also Ask” boxes. → Address real, meaty questions. "How does your API handle rate limiting?" > "What does API mean?" → Update regularly based on support tickets and sales objections. Finally, strategically link each of these pages/section to relevant product pages. Remember: Your SEO efforts need to go where they can work their magic without compromising conversions. FOCUS your product pages on clear value props and strong CTAs. CHANNEL your SEO energies into solutions pages, educational content, and FAQs. That'll help you strike a better balance between search visibility and conversion on your SaaS website. Have you tried other ways to balance this out? What results did you see?

This past week, I had some interesting conversations with prospective founder clients about their thought leadership content. Common question? "What do we write about, and how do we keep it true to my voice?" These conversations brought back a 2020 article by Katie Parrott for Animalz (linked below). In the article, Katie hat-tips to Ben Horowitz's idea of 'earned secrets' - your unique perspectives, experiences, and resources - to define five sources for thought leadership content. This answers the 'what to write about' fairly well. I'll elaborate with some examples: 1. Counter-narrative opinions: Katie reminds us of the time when Basecamp Cofounders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson published 'It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work'. It was a refreshing splash of sanity in a world drunk on hustle culture. That and a few other gems like 'Most Meetings are a Waste of Time' turned Fried & DHH into the flag-bearers of the how-not-to-build-businesses' narrative. 2. Personal narratives: Arindam Paul at Atomberg didn't become one of the foremost marketing voices in the Indian D2C ecosystem by talking about BLDC fans. Instead, he talks about his experiments and experiences of building a 0-1000M business in a space that hadn't seen any innovation for half a century! 3. Data storytelling: Over at Campfire Labs, Cassandra Naji recently published a proprietary report on the 'State of One-Person Content Teams'. She spoke to 40+ solo content marketers, churning out great nuggets for anyone in the B2B SaaS content grind, all backed by hard data. 4. Industry analysis: Christoph Janz's takes on SaaS are gifts that don't stop SaaSing. His response to 'The End of Software' tweet that went viral recently is one such example of how he distills industry perspectives and gives them his own spin. 5. Network connections: Nathan Latka at 'The Top Entrepreneurs' podcast turns his rolodex into content gold. He interviews top SaaS leaders, diving into their business numbers. These numbers power those sexy benchmarking spreadsheets shared at GetLatka as well as organic growth for Founderpath. Now for the second half the question - how can outsourced thought leadership content be authentic? Roll up your sleeves and get into the thick of it with your content partner! Whether this partner is internal or external, share your 'earned secrets' - their job is to add clarity, structure, and meat to the bones. And help you consistently show up for your audience. Thought leadership is personal - it’s your voice, your battle scars, your stories. Without your hands-on involvement, it just won’t ring true.

Outbound personalisation is in overkill mode. Every time I blink, there's a Gen-AI tool to automate and 'hyper-personalise' outreach. They're all hotter than a summer sidewalk because everyone's convinced that personalisation works. And it does. Personalised emails have higher CTRs. Personalised offers bring in higher transactions. Personalisation helps us tell the user: I hear you. I understand your problem & your context. And here’s how I can help. [That’s good marketing 101, anyway.] But with a lot of these new tools, we’ve unleashed a wave of cringe-worthy, insincere, and irrelevant outreach attempts. Because said tools often lead us right into a bunch of low-hanging hacks. Often to ridiculous ends, like so: • 𝗝𝗼𝗯 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲𝘀 → Congrats on the new job! Our tool that was irrelevant before will be just as irrelevant now. • 𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗲𝘀 → Wow, you raised $10M! Clearly, you want to blow it all on our unrelated software. • 𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘀/𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 → You won an award? Perfect! Let me pitch you something you absolutely don’t need. • 𝗔𝗹𝗺𝗮 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 → I went to Hogwarts, too! That means you’ll definitely want to buy our completely unrelated product. Personalisation is ultimately about context, relevance, and authenticity. And above all else, about delivering value. In effect, any of the examples listed above could make for genuine, authentic ways to personalise. But in this big flurry of what Yulia Olennikova calls an ‘attempt to justify’ the new $1500/pop tool or what Clark Barron calls ‘vendor hypnotisation’,  we’re forgetting the real reason we reach out to customers in the first place: to help them solve a problem. If you're not doing that, you could bring up people’s dogs, mothers, dentists, or blood groups, and it would just be more noise in an already crowded inbox. What’s the best-worst personalised email/message you’ve ever got? --- Sharing some real-life examples of personalised messages and suggestions for how we might do it differently.

We kill good content when we repurpose it. 4 things we might do instead: The usual spiel with "create once, distribute forever" looks something like this: 'Write blog → Publish blog → Create 5 LinkedIn posts, 3 tweets, 1 newsletter' And our goals with this approach look something like this: 'If the blog's a hit, I'll spray it everywhere. If it's not, I'll move on to something else.' The problem with this second-guessing approach (amongst others) is that it ruins momentum. When a content piece starts gaining traction, by the time we figure out how to repurpose it, the moment has passed. Instead, successful teams think of ways to repurpose content before it's even published. Here's how: ⭐ Step 1: Invest the time & effort to create star content pillars These are high-quality, comprehensive pieces built on deep audience research (more on building content pillars in another post). Some popular ones are podcasts, case studies, or industry reports. They're ideal for repurposing because they’re packed with information that can be sliced and diced into other formats easily. ♻️ Step 2: Plan for repurposing Think about how your content can be broken down and repurposed even before you hit publish. Map out how each piece can add value across different stages of the B2B customer journey. ⛳ Step 3: Align repurposed content with team goals Growth Team: Podcasts → Blog series to attract organic traffic and new leads. Sales Team: Case studies → Snippets in follow-up emails to address specific objections. Product Team: Industry reports → Embed highlights in onboarding demos to show how the product meets market needs. Customer Success Team: Case studies and industry reports → Share success stories in newsletters to build user engagement. 📊 Step 4: Define success metrics and track them rigorously Identify clear, measurable metrics for each repurposed content lever, aligned with team goals. The trick here is to align it with the identified team goal. For example, track downloads and lead conversion rates for market trends summaries repurposed from industry reports. To get you started with how to do this, here’s a whiteboard template with some ideas. Use it with your own teams to brainstorm your content repurposing plans. ➡ https://lnkd.in/gH_Uri9C The north star for repurposed content is not more content - it's content that works harder and smarter.