Part 2: The Contagious Content Challenge

Back in July of 2010, I shared an email from a reader of my book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. That same reader sent me an update last week to share what’s happened for his start-up company as he’s continued on with the strategies I share in my book. Once again [see part one], he’s graciously agreed to let me share the evolution of his content marketing project with you:

It has now been about 9 months since your book inspired our content strategy. It took a bit to get it in motion and for the first 6 months our content was educational and nurturing. In January we shifted our focus with calls to action for webinars and demos.

Here is the news:  

• Since the beginning of the year – our business is exploding.
• New, highly-qualified leads come to us every day and we are closing business.
• We are hearing from firms whom we never heard of before and would have never have reached without the content strategy.

People in the industry keep saying to me:  

• How come you don’t exhibit at the industry trade shows?
• How come you don’t have sales people on the streets in every major city? 
• How come you don’t buy ads in the industry trade journals?

Well the answer in the beginning was simple. We couldn’t afford it.  We are a start up. We were under-capitalized.  The content strategy was the only strategy we could afford in the beginning and the only one that made sense to me.  I draft content [it is an important part of my job] and then I send it off to our writer to prepare and clean it up.

And then – as you suggested – we cross push our content out to our blog, website, marketing emails and such. Now that we have it in motion and generating leads and sales – I can’t imagine spending big dollars on trade shows, ads, and lots of sales people on the street.

In the beginning we built up lots of educational and lead nurturing content and we use it over and over again.  We are now focused on building content for the sales cycle – case studies in particular.

I re-read  your book every few months and pick up new ideas.
You rock!

Okay – so I kept those last two sentences in there for me. There’s no better gratification as a writer and consultant than to know that what I’ve shared with people is useful and valuable.

But the real takeaway from this update is that he didn’t stop after he’d done a couple of things and seen results. He kept at it consistently. He kept evolving what he was doing and trying new things. He didn’t settle for a few wins – he’s kept at it helping to transform is company by using content to help them consistently get into lucrative conversations with viable prospects.

He’s also learned to create evergreen content that can be reused time and again because it holds its value, thereby increasing the ROI of his content assets. Now he’s moved on to finish supporting the entire buying process by developing evidence content such as customer stories.

Instead of being bound by that ridiculous mandate that ROI be proven inside of one quarter, he was given the latitude through incremental wins to keep working at it. As you can see, his content marketing efforts are paying off in spades. With a persistent and determined mindset, you can do the same thing.

As much as I’m thrilled with his first two updates, I can’t wait to hear from him again in about six months to see what’s happening…can you?

You can see Part 1 of The Contagious Content Challenge here.

What’s stopping you from achieving these types of rewards from content marketing?