Creating Content That Changes Perspectives

To make your prospects aware of who you are and what you do, you must develop content that allows you to be clear about what you stand for and communicate that in a consistent and credible manner.

In other words, you need to develop your unique points of view to shape people's minds in the desired direction. You want your content to be opinionated to drive your company's story and, as a result, product adoption.

You need to:

1. Deeply understand your target audience

2. Develop your points of view & content

3. Define how to measure success & KPIs

Remember that you need to define your company's positioning before developing any content.

We'll now go over each step individually below. 👇

1) Deeply understand your target audience

As a first step, get in touch with your customers, ideal prospects, and internal and external thought leaders and enquire about their roles, challenges, and aspirations.

You must gather these insights to understand how they see the world. Only then will you know whether any viewpoints or content you create will resonate with them.

You want to learn more about:

1. Their work responsibilities, priorities, and challenges

2. Where do they spend their time, where can you find them, and who are their influencers

3. Environmental changes that prompt them to consider your category and any perceived barriers to purchase

4. Their opinion on the industry's current state and where it's heading

For each questionnaire, you can use a different framework, such as the Mom Test for product-related questions or the 5 Rings of Buying Insight for questions about the buyer's journey.

Above all, it's vital that you spend time with your audience and get to know them better. You can invite them to an interview, webinar, podcast, or any other type of event that can also be used as a marketing tool.

So go ahead and start booking those calls. :)

2) Develop your points of view

Now that you've gathered the relevant insights, you have a good understanding of who your audience is and what would resonate with them.

As a first step, please consider the different buyer's journey stages, as prospects care about different things along the way:

Let's dig into each of them to see what viewpoints and content we should create for each of them.

A) Awareness

We'll follow this three-step process to define the viewpoints and content relevant for when prospects might need you:

1) List the relevant circumstances, events, or changes:

So, all the different circumstances, events, or changes that might prompt your audience to look for your type of product.

Scalewise, for example, is a company that places fractional leaders in SaaS startups, and they listed 10 signs why anyone might need a fractional leader.

One sign was that a company might need fractional leaders when expanding into a new territory. Think of similar signs, changes, or events for your SaaS product.

2) List different viewpoints for each sign or event:

For Scalewise's example of a company expanding into a new territory, the relevant viewpoints could be:

1. Most EMEA companies fail to expand to the US because they hire the wrong person to lead the expansion.

2. You can only successfully lead an EMEA sales team if you already have significant regional experience.

Based on the insights you got at the start of the process, you should be able to pick which viewpoints to highlight for your SaaS business based on whether they resonate with your target audience.

3) Develop content pieces to back up each viewpoint:

Following Scalewise's example, for each viewpoint, we could respectively create a:

1. Survey of the challenges that EMEA companies face when hiring for their US expansion.

2. Quiz for US founders to assess if the candidates for their open VP EMEA Sales position are a good fit.

Based on the insights you gathered at the start of the process on where you can find your audience, you'll have a good idea of what content assets to create for your SaaS product.

In Scalewise's case, the survey and the quiz will allow them to drive viewpoints that align with what they stand for while also educating their prospects:

1. Survey should reveal that mishiring is one of the most common causes of a failed expansion, implying that fractional leadership is a viable option.

2. Quiz results should show that most candidates are not a good fit, and founders may need to consider other options, such as fractional leadership.

This is how content can drive a narrative that benefits your company and effectively moves the needle.

That's the process. You can use the same steps to determine which viewpoints to promote for your SaaS business and which content pieces to create for each circumstance, event, or trigger.

B) Consideration

We'll now move on to the next stage of the funnel, where you'll need to understand what your audience might think of your SaaS product and make them hesitant to buy it.

We can use the same process as before. This time, we list all the factors that prospects consider when evaluating your category or product, list a series of relevant viewpoints, and create the respective content pieces:

Using Scalewise as an example, this could result in the creation of content addressing:

• Misconceptions about fractional leadership

• The advantages of hiring a part-time senior leader over a full-time one, and so on.

• Whether Scalewise has the right revenue leaders on their platform.

C) Deliberation

Lastly, you need to show that your viewpoints are trusted and validated by the market by sharing customer success stories and your learnings from building your SaaS business.

The starting point now is your customers' and your own stories about your company's growth:

Using Scalewise as an example, this could result in the creation of:

• A video case study about how one of their customers got a fractional hire who improved their business's efficiency

• A blog post about how Scalewise discovered that fractional hires have a significant impact on productivity when they come from the same industry.

Depending on the stories you're able to gather, it's up to you to choose which parts to highlight to support a specific point of view you want to promote to the market.

3) Define how to measure success & KPIs

How do you track if we’re going in the right direction? For immediate & short-term insights, track the following:

• Content consumption metrics, e.g., if you promote a video, do people watch it until the end? If you write a white paper, do people read beyond the 2nd page?

• Positive qualitative signals, particularly prospects' reactions to your content. If they meet your ICP criteria and agree with your points of view, you're on the right track.

• Channel metrics. If you're betting on LinkedIn, this would be the no. of followers, messages, page views, and if they're your ideal prospects.

• Increase in the number of branded searches on Google.

For longer-term insights and to determine if you're actually driving demand, track the number and quality of high-intent leads, as well as the impact on pipeline volume, sales cycle, and win rates.

It's critical to understand that content marketing is not a short-term strategy. You have to realize that you're mostly going after the 97% of the market that isn't ready to buy.

Building a strong content engine is a powerful weapon that can literally change your business, but it will take some time before we see the results of our efforts.

4) What now?

You now have all you need to start creating opinionated content and driving the strategic narrative of your SaaS company.

If you'd like to bring this process to your company or learn more about it, please reach out to Nuno via LinkedIn or email, or book a free consultation call with him.