Hey there,
This week, I talked to Xenia Muntean, the founder of Planable.
Planable is an early-stage startup that is using content marketing to win customers like Social Chain, Mini and the United Nations.
In the episode, we deep dive into what makes their content marketing strategy a success.
I just posted this on Twitter here—if you want to support the podcast, please give us a RT.
Here’s what we covered:
How do you win insanely cool clients like Social Chain?
Build a product around your customer's feedback—a very useful product.
Invest in creating content that serves the customer
What's an example of the content you create?
A couple of months ago we launched our series of 6 Holiday Kits (PDF guides) to help marketers prepare and plan for the holiday season. This campaign brought us 600+leads and thousands of visits. This just illustrates the power of giving value to your audience through content.
We often do this—creating useful kits, designs, coupons and other resources to serve our audience.
How do you turn those into customers?
We serve them well, we keep in contact with them, and we hope they consider us and remember us when they're in need.
It's very hard to measure content success. The attribution is very hard. But you have to trust in the process.
Occasionally, we will reach out to a downloader personally if we think our product would really fit them well. But we don't work leads in a traditional sales way.
It's a long term game. My best expectation is for them to check out other content and keep engaging, we don't have a specific conversion rate from download to customer.
What made your content campaign a success?
We aim to make it original and actually valuable. Not just a long blog packaged into a kit, but a resource that is really useable in the wild.
We also partnered with other vendors to create something great and leverage their audience—but as an early-stage company this was hard and we can't count on it as a growth channel.
What does your other content strategy look like?
It used to be all about brand. Now we have greater alignment with our product (using our product in a very subtle way as part of the 'how-to') and leverage SEO to drive more leads, too.
Always, we do a lot of research and make sure it's highly valuable.
What's your most controversial marketing opinion?
A recent one I heard is a disagreement with repurposing content. Lots of people repurpose content endlessly. You get better results by creating content designed for a channel specifically, people shouldn't be blindly repurposing content.
P.s. If you think I deserve it, you can ‘buy me a beer’ right here (i.e. donate £5 to keep the podcast running)