I. Build

“To impress your offer on the mind of the reader or listener, it is necessary to put it into brief, simple language...No farfetched or obscure statement will stop them. You have got to hit them where they live: in the heart or in the head. You have got to catch their eyes or ears with something simple, something direct, something they want.” — John Caples, Tested Advertising Methods In a hyper-competitive space saturated with content, there’s one thing that will make or break your efforts: quality. We’ve come to a point in SaaS and B2B where there’s little technical differentiation between various tools. How do customers decide which to pick? Brand. In the short term, you can drive traffic and get conversions with quantity and mediocre-to-poor content, but you’ll never be able to build a brand. That’s what makes quality the first thing you should focus on from the beginning, before you try to up the quantity. In fact, the most common mistake that people make with content is scaling prematurely. As with everything in business, you need to nail it before you scale it. When you build a brand, you get direct, unattributed visitors—people coming to your site for no clear reason—and that means that your content is memorable and it’s getting people to return to your site organically. In addition, it means that your content is spreading the message about your brand through word-of-mouth. That’s a critical, early indicator of how you’ll perform over the long term with direct and search, the two most important channels for sustainable growth. If your quality isn’t up to par over the long haul, you’ll see your brand and your search traffic suffer. Given that the vast majority of long-term traffic comes from these channels, that means that if you don’t start with quality, you have no content marketing endgame. Our Simple Rule of Content Marketing is Quality + Quantity = Eyeballs. And in that order. Quality is one of those things that sounds ephemeral and out of reach. What people don’t realize is that you can get there by following a series of steps and by turning quality into a process.