Episode 32: Why Content Creation is Important for SMEs (And How to Do It)

Are you struggling to create valuable content for your business? In this episode of The SME Growth Podcast, Dave Parry and Richard Buckle dive into the world of content leveraging and share their most valuable lesson. They discuss the factors that contribute to capturing attention, such as trustworthiness, usefulness, and engagement. Learn more about the long-term benefits of content-driven inbound marketing and how it can generate three times more leads than outbound marketing. Don't miss out on this insightful conversation that highlights the potential impact of effective content leveraging on business growth.

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Please note: Whilst all transcripts are double checked for accuracy, they are transcribed via Otter.AI so may contain errors.

David Parry 00:29

Hello, again, everybody. This is the SME Growth Podcast from Wellmeadow. And we're here to talk this week about content leveraging. So lots of content on content leveraging. So stay tuned for that. I'm Dave Parry. And with me as ever, you won't be disappointed to know but Richard is back. You weren't here last week. We had another Richard. Yes. But very confusing.

Richard Buckle 01:08

Yes. This is Richard Buckle. Last week I was in the Rose Garden. very cultured. Right. Same. Some of some of you may have seen my video of that on Instagram

David Parry 01:24

Did you spend a lot of money on roses? I got away quite lightly to it was a birthday trip. I believe 

Richard Buckle 01:31

Yes. My wife roses are on trend this year, apparently. So I was making content about roses. Oh, there we go. Good segue there into the

David Parry 01:41

so if David Austin Roses wishes to take advantage of our services, we've got a head start there, then we we know what we're talking about. 

Richard Buckle 01:48

we're talking about? Well, at least my wife does. I'm becoming an expert.

David Parry 01:54

So we wanted to talk today about content, leveraging content creation, all in the context of trying to help companies in their growth journeys to get more content out there. Yeah. So I suppose like any good discussion on a topic, we need a definition to kick things off. What do we mean by content?

Richard Buckle 02:13

What do we mean by content? Well, you put me on the spot, and I was talking about was content. Yeah. Well, I suppose content is anything that you're that you're creating that is going to add value to your audience, isn't it?

David Parry 02:26

A very broad term, isn't it? Yeah. So you could just call it all the stuff we put out there,

Richard Buckle 02:31

stuff we do. But I think yeah, I guess narrowing it down, it's around, it's around creating something that your audience value. So whether it's so so again, this is back to you know, previous discussions we've had around buyer personas and things like that, if your buyer personas, people that just want to be entertained, and laughing will make some funny TikToks make some funny stuff. Now. You know, we all like that kind of content. Does it help you win work win leads help your business as a maybe in some very narrow cases, maybe it does. But content is going to be specific to your particular business case. So if it's around, you know, people want white papers or ebooks you got that's what you got to produce. If people want to see something on TikTok, then you that's what you've got to produce. So you've got to target it. Now, that's not to say that those different bits of content are mutually exclusive. A lot of those bits of content can support each other. So shorts, reels, tiktoks, whatever could support an ebook, which in turn could support an email, piece of content

David Parry 03:34

We are talking here, a majority about the digital world. So we could have as what's content, you know, which is more physical, but in a digital context, like is everything from the ebooks or the shorts and the reels and you know, the video based stuff could be the audio based stuff, it could be blogs that support it, it could be LinkedIn posts, Facebook posts, whatever, even emails that you send out to people the footer of an email, you know, all these things come under the general banner of content.

Richard Buckle 04:01

And it's gonna Yeah, and I always say that, you know, content is context specific. So you've got to understand your context in terms of okay, what's the channel? Who's your audience? Yeah. What's your message and make content appropriately?

David Parry 04:15

So why is it important? Why is having lots of the right type of content in the right context? Why is that important for businesses looking to drive more attention more leads more conversations?

Richard Buckle 04:27

I think that attention reading is important. So attention spans are shortening. We've got you know, things like Instagram and Tiktok. And just everything life is busier now than it was years ago. And so I think something like the average attention span is around something like eight seconds or something. There's some study that's been done by Microsoft or someone

David Parry 04:47

even that sounds quite long really when you think about eight seconds passing become them often. Yeah. So 

Richard Buckle 04:52

if you just think back to like, Okay, if you're scrolling through something online, or just researching something now, yeah, how, how quickly do you pass over things. And if you don't see what you want immediate, yeah, if

David Parry 05:03

I, if I'm googling something that I know very little about, I'll get the Google results, I'll hold the CTRL button down. As I click the various links, I've got loads of new tabs opening, and then I don't spend eight seconds on each tab, very quickly decide, am I hanging around on this tab or not? No exit at the top that tabs go on forever. Go on to the next one. Find the one I want

Richard Buckle 05:19

last thing that yesterday for looking for some acoustic foam for this podcast. And yeah, it's interesting, if you kind of almost, you know, almost have that out of body experience. But you're looking at a website, and immediately you're making a judgement, right? So you're thinking like, Does this resonate with me? Does this look like a company I want to deal with? Does this look like the right kind of imagery? The right kind of tone? 

David Parry 05:40

It's interesting, if you break it down, what are we looking for? When we make that snap judgement in less than eight seconds? Four seconds, whatever it is? Certainly, can I trust? Does it look interesting? Is it trustworthy? Enough that what I'm reading, I'm gonna make a decision based make a decision based on that? Is this something that I can use as useful? Not just is it entertaining? In which case, great, I'll watch it and move on? Or is it entertaining and use was it captured my attention in an actionable sort of way? So I guess we're looking at all of those sorts of things. Is it? Is it gonna engage me? Yeah. So

Richard Buckle 06:10

I think that's important that and get I always think about it three different things. So does it is it going to educate me? Is it going to engage me? And is it going to entertain me an element, you know, maybe it's not equal pie on that. But there's some element of those 

David Parry 06:25

I think it goes back to the principle concept to the BBC for those old enough to know to educate, entertain and inform. So it's the same sort of it's still media, isn't it? We're trying to capture attention and do something with it to go

Richard Buckle 06:35

back even further. Aristotle with Lagace pathos, ethos, bit of culture there,

David Parry 06:44

So remember, we were talking about this the other day, there were a few stats floating around that you'd looked up? 

Richard Buckle 06:48

I have looked them up been written down? You've written it down for me,

David Parry 06:53

giving all our secrets away,

Richard Buckle 06:55

so yeah, so I guess there's a couple of those where content marketing, on average generates three times lead the number of leads as outbound. ,

David Parry 07:07

Yeah now, when I saw that one, I thought about that, and actually, that does sort of ring true with me, if I'm thinking does that just pass the smell test? And if I look at the emails I get, which are very what we would call outbound in nature, very shouty, you know, we've got a new employee, we've won an award, we've got a new machine, we've got a new product got special offer, I tend to pass over that, because that's just more of something else I wasn't interested in. But as soon as I get an in an email that tells me something I didn't know. Or I might educate myself by reading it. That's, that's inbound, is it?

Richard Buckle 07:36

Yeah, I mean, I think I think that's that is you, that probably needs some parameters around it to say over what time period. So for example, if you were to say, right, let's just do an email campaign or do a load of ad campaigns, now you are going to generate leads off that. Yeah. But that's, that's the fire that needs constantly fueling. So you've got to keep doing that all the time.

David Parry 07:56

I wonder if though, it gets a different type of audience engaging. So if you sent out the special offer, we'll do everything you want, for half the price, any type of offer, you're gonna get some response. But maybe those customers don't stick around for too long, maybe they don't even convert as well to customers at all. They're just nosy, or

Richard Buckle 08:13

we've seen that recently with a client with Instagram, who had a lot of big Instagram following and

David Parry 08:19

Their CRM is full of followers that never do anything

Richard Buckle 08:22

They're never ever going to buy. I think what, what the timeline for something more content driven inbound is probably, you know, maybe six to 12 months before you're gonna start to see the results. But then those results are evergreen, because you've got that contents going to live there forever. Maybe it needs a quick refresh not

David Parry 08:39

Well, here's a stat for you. And I didn't write this one down. But you mentioned it to me the other day, that client that we've been doing this sort of work for for coming up for three years now that we're just talking about, we reckon the total value of inquiries they've had is over 100 times the investment they'd put into marketing. And that's a conservative estimate. That's just what we've managed to nail down as inquiries, where there's some length that we can spot you don't know about the stuff that isn't being measured. That's pretty impressive, right? If I said you do, do you want a lot of RFQs requests for quote, come in for value, then I'll give you 100 times what it's gonna cost you to get it. Most people buy that. 

Richard Buckle 09:17

And I think it's one of those things that does take it takes time to create the content, but also takes time for it to kind of propagate. And so you've got, if you imagine it, that you've got a couple of pieces of content out in the world, it's going to be very hard for people to find that. If you've got 100, then you've got more chance. If you've got 1000, you've got 10 times chances aren't you know, so over time, it takes time to build the content. But once it's out there things like an ebook, things like all the social posts, blog posts, everything over time, the cumulative effect of this, isn't you I think you do them reach a tipping point where it's, this is now starting to work and there's enough content out there for people to think this is legitimate, 

David Parry 09:55

I guess it's the way we used to think about getting first page of Google searchers. Now is a major step up. Isn't there a difference between being 11th or 10th? On Google ranking? You know, maybe you could argue that still important, but there are lots of other channels as well, where people find out about stuff 

Richard Buckle 10:10

I think as well There's another stat that we came across today that says 67% of b2b customers start their journey online. So again, this is why it's important to have this online presence to have this online content. Because if people are now searching for it, and I just think, you know, I'm amazed at 67%. I mean, that's kind of everything is less. I mean, maybe I suppose if you're in an industry where you know, you know, Fred, or Stan or whatever 

David Parry 10:36

Or repeat purchases, I think the other stat you mentioned was the 90% of b2b buyers looking for a new supplier use online. And looking for informative content. There's a survey done wasn't about how many of them really rely a lot on useful content, case studies and some of the applicable visual infographics to help understand a problem or understand someone's

Richard Buckle 10:58

60% of b2b buyers will rely on content like that practical content that shows them.

David Parry 11:03

And that's the problem, isn't it? Because companies aren't very good on the whole of producing that type of content. Yeah. And we've seen it time and time again, but companies out there that maybe have very good internal marketing teams, but they're so busy, and they generally commenting on, you know, someone's won a new award, or they've been to an exhibition, and they've got very little material to go on. They're doing their best they can but with relatively little input, so having to recirculate stuff, 

Richard Buckle 11:28

it all comes back to trust, isn't it really, you're creating this content to show you've got credibility to show that you can talk about your subject area in with a level of expertise, and and to almost start that process of building that relationship, isn't it? And this is where I think a lot of companies perhaps haven't caught up with the culture, where the culture now is very much kind of, you know, everyone has their kind of influence or their people they go to online to, you know, what do they think about this? What do they think about this? Who is

David Parry 11:55

What do Dave and Rich think on the SME Growth Podcast? Let's dial in

Richard Buckle 11:58

We're a trusted news source. Well, we had that this morning. I got my news from Instagram. You got yours from the times, and it was the same story. Yep. Case proven.

David Parry 12:08

I'm old. I did at least look at the digital version of the times. I didn't unfold and get my servants to iron it for me. For the listeners not watching the video that was nearly a nearly ruined micrphone there. The other good thing I've had just relates to something you said just now as well about trusted sources and that tipping point. Because one of the clients I was talking to the other day said that they the SME podcast came up as a suggestion for him automatically not suggesting it auto played after he was listening to another podcast, which is quite unrelated, but it was in the business field. In listen to the most recent episode of that and it ticked over and started playing out one, I think it was the one on recruiting veterans with Richard, the one before. So that's good to hear as well. Clearly, we're reaching a point with this. Yeah. Back to our 1000 listeners

Richard Buckle 13:00

It's why you gotta keep plugging away with it. But I think this is why, you know, if we move it on to say, Well, why do why do we see this disconnect, then where we've got a culture, maybe perceived or of content creation, everybody wants to be content creator, now everybody wants to do stuff. And yet we have this kind of lag, sometimes in the SME world of businesses saying, how do we, you know, we don't we don't have time we we don't have the people maybe. And that I think ends up in it becoming a very ad hoc approach to content creation.

David Parry 13:30

It's almost a 123 of major reasons, isn't it? I think number one is not realising that is a problem, not being aware enough that they need to be producing an awful lot more content that the amount you need to produce is probably 10x. What even most old school business leaders would expect. Then when they get that and realise they do they say, Well, we're in real time. And then they say, well, even if I had the time to talk somebody, we haven't got the resources and expertise to leverage it and get it out there.

Richard Buckle 13:56

I think some of that as well, I think you see this fear this hesitancy? hesitancy to start now? Is anyone going to watch it? Is anyone going to look at it is anyone going to engage with this content, and so you get that kind of, you can get a lot of negativity around well,

David Parry 14:10

There is a slow start to inbound, if there is a cumulative effect after three years where you've been doing it for a long time, got so much stuff out there, that it's all coming in quite nicely, but the first three months, six months, you're putting a lot more effort into generating than getting back. So you've got to hold the hold the line really, you know, keep the faith and it comes in

Richard Buckle 14:29

Wayne's World 2, isn't it where if you book them, they will come, on the festival, I can see this cultural reference has been lost on Dave

David Parry 14:40

Okay, so we've seen a variety of approaches, you know, ignoring the problem you said about before, you know, not being aware of it even?

Richard Buckle 14:47

Yeah, I just didn't come back on the ad hoc approach. You've got to be systematic about this. And I think a lot of companies do ad hoc marketing. Often times when you know cash or sales dropping right now we've got do some marketing, turn up the wick totally the wrong time, unless you can do something that's going to turn around very quickly. If you've got a product or service that you can turn around quickly, then that's fine. If you've got long sales cycles, then, you know, this is something you need to be systematically discipline with. And it is hard. I mean, we, you know, struggle. There's other things we could be doing with our time now and doing this. Yeah. But because, you know, faithful to our listeners

David Parry 15:23

And I can smell that chocolate cake, which I'm desperate to tuck into it

Richard Buckle 15:28

Building our tribe, as they say. So you've got to be disciplined

David Parry 15:33

The other thing that disappointed me heard about company the other day that didn't want to invest so much anymore in doing this sort of activity that lead gen content creation stuff, because they're already busy enough and they have enough leads. What do you think, well, that's fine now. But if I come back in six months, 12 months time, and the froth has gone out the market, you know, the economists are talking about the bank, or the government having to trigger a recession, just to take the heat out of this inflation problem we've got, well, if it's six months, 12 months time you're sending Oh, hang on, it's not quite so frothy. Now I need some more leads coming in all the time to done that was 12 months ago. And it's the old adage about if you're a want an oak tree, your best time to plant the acorn was 30 years ago. Yeah. Second best time is today. And that's where you've got to have visionary business leaders who understand that there's a long lag between the effort you put in and the rewards you reap.

Richard Buckle 16:21

It is such Yeah, I was watching them. Gladiator the other day, got the need to do a refresh on that. Rewatch, and rewatch

David Parry 16:29

Are they not remaking one of them?

Richard Buckle 16:31

They remastered it 20 years 20/25 years old or something?

David Parry 16:35

I thought they were gonna actually remake it

Richard Buckle 16:37

Gladiator 2: The Return, everybody dies at the end.

David Parry 16:43

Okay, the afterlife.

Richard Buckle 16:45

But yeah, you know, where he's running through the woods, you know, hold the line type of thing. And I think some of this is a whole line thing. It's very hard to show straight away what the return is, I need strong leadership. And it's, and it's like, no, we're setting a course here. And we're gonna, we're gonna see it through. And, and it's not blind faith with this. But that's why you need the numbers around the data. So what's working? But but it is something that is a discipline, and it requires that kind of gumption to, to keep going with it.

David Parry 17:15

Okay, so is there a better way of doing this, then you want something a bit more systematic? You've reached awareness of it, but you still got those other barriers of not having enough time, certainly from those experts that need to produce the material for the marketers to do something, and you maybe haven't got enough of a team in your marketing department? So is there a better way?

Richard Buckle 17:32

Well, it's funny, you should say that Dave, it turns out there is.

David Parry 17:37

Thank goodness for that.

Richard Buckle 17:38

No. So I mean, we're, we're, you know, this is supposed disclaimer, this is what we do. But we've always been quite happy to share our processes. Because, you know it's easy to copy if someone wants to do We used to do a lot of exec level recruitment, and we've got a whole ebook on the website, which details our process in too much detail. But it's designed for people to, you know, if you want a 5000 word ebook on how to design a recruitment process, go to the website and check it out.

David Parry 18:08

We've done similar on on this process as well. So and this process

Richard Buckle 18:12

Because it's not so much the process anymore kind of a process, it's really about a lot of the thinking around it. But I think, you know, back to that kind of a process, that approach to developing content, whether you outsource it, or whether you build it into your own business, is the way that you can really kind of start to make strides with

David Parry 18:31

Yeah. And if you're oversized, either large enough, or marketing, is that critical that you want the in house team to do that. Absolutely great. There's clearly benefits in being able to do that. The cons for a smaller firm, is that scaling down the team, you can't just have one person who's expert in everything. To get a critical mass of expertise on a team, you need 3456 People

Richard Buckle 18:52

It's an interesting point, I suppose, isn't it? It's, you know, years ago, maybe you could have got away with one person on a marketing team. Because you just got to make an ad for the local newspaper or something. Whereas now because we're moving into more digital, technologically driven pieces of content, you need someone who can design stuff for you know, ebook, layout, InDesign, Photoshop, someone who can do a video, someone who can do podcasts, that's 

David Parry 19:21

It's a lot more technical, isn't it, you need the arty. the creatives. But you've got to be quite adept at a lot of the software these days, and the amount of different packages of software that our team uses. I couldn't use them all.

Richard Buckle 19:30

And then even like, then you start to just create, the more content you create, the more data you're going to create. So what you can do with the data, you can have a data analyst who's going to look at that

David Parry 19:39

We said before one of our campaigns can produce a terabyte of data, just in the initial phases.

Richard Buckle 19:44

Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm talking about data in terms of the actual lead gen. As well, yeah. So you know, I guess even Yeah, but back to that point, you need a whole infrastructure around how do you even manage all these files that are here which and all that and someone's got Think about all of these things. So the whole complexity of content creation, just from the number of people, you need, the number of the equipment, data it generates, the information it generates, all of that is too much for one person.

David Parry 20:12

So if you need that team of, say, four or five people choose your number to get that balance of the skills you need between the creatives, the technical and everything else, then, of course, if you've got the capacity or the will to do it internally, that's great. If not, then other agencies exist, but that's how we've set ourselves up to help.

Richard Buckle 20:27

But I think part of the process is to say, right. The expertise always lies in the business. So I think oftentimes, it can be dormant people need, you know, needs to be brought to the surface a little bit. But it's, it's, you need to have a process that says, How do we capture the expertise and the essence of this business? Without it taking a huge amount of time, because that is always the barrier, the people who've got the knowledge in their heads are normally the busiest people within SME, yeah, they're either the owners there, or the experts there. They've got 100 Other things to do. And I'm sure lots of listeners will relate to this, you know, when you have a bit of a marketing directors, right, we're gonna get everyone to write a blog once a week or something, and it just never happens. Yeah, it's never happened. If you get one out of them that you don't get the second and then it's all in none of it's joined up, because you've got some person that wants to write about this or this.

David Parry 21:19

And the temptation is always to be too salesy. So you're not getting the tone of voice, right. And it's gonna be a different tone of voice for everybody knows, I think. So we've developed this process, really to address these concerns. And you're right there that that's one of the two main objections I always hear when I tried to get business owners to think more seriously about it. One is that time thing, there's only a few people in this business with the expertise to write that stuff. And the other one is we couldn't possibly get anybody else to do it, because they don't understand our language, our tone of voice or whatever. Yeah, so we came up with this approach, which, you know, we're cutting straight to the chase is video lead, it's the idea is to capture that expert, in a very efficient way, capture their views, their message, their language, their tone of voice, their phrases, their familiarity with the subject, capture that on video first, but then turn that into the hundreds of pieces of content, you need to be able to proliferate through this process. Yeah, that's the essence of it.

Richard Buckle 22:11

That's the essence of it. And then I think once you've got that, once you've got that time, I mean, you want to think through before you start videoing what it is you want to achieve out of it. Yeah. And then think through Okay, so what information do we want? What questions do we need? What what do we want to get out of this person's time? Who are you talking to? What's the audience? Is there anything you want to bring in from like, maybe a ESG, or CSR? type of angle? And you want to comment from them on sustainability? Or do you want to talk about, I don't know, whatever issue there is the

David Parry 22:44

environmental sustainability and governance or corporate social responsibility,

Richard Buckle 22:47

I was trying to be cool.

David Parry 22:49

Not all of our listeners are as as an acronym up as you

Richard Buckle 22:54

So yeah, remembering a meeting once having to explain what a KPI was

David Parry 22:59

a key performance indicator

Richard Buckle 23:03

Glossary of every tip at the end. So I guess, if I talk through, like, what the what the steps are? To give people some practical tips on this. So yeah, the first bit is a plan. So you've got to, obviously, logistics of organising who you're going to interview who you're going to talk to, but also okay, what questions you're going to ask, try and get as much as possible. So really think through your questions, rather than and then, in terms of what what kind of content do you need, you want to make sure that you're not running on to, you know, one question leads into a half hour answer that's gonna be really hard to edit. So there's a bit of discipline involved in thinking well, okay, what, how do we break this down?

David Parry 23:46

Just out of interest, how much detail do you go into, and sharing it with the person you're going to be videoing beforehand? Are they having to put a lot of work in upfront as well to come up with?

Richard Buckle 23:54

No, I think we always really try and say they're normally busy people anyway. Right? That's why this whole approach we're having to take this approach. Yeah, but I think if we can do at least, you know, a good couple of drafts of questions before he goes to them, then that helps. Sometimes it does, it is beneficial to us a bit of AI just to research the project a little bit,

David Parry 24:15

or just conventional Googling around

Richard Buckle 24:17

Yeah. So So those coming up with those questions,

David Parry 24:21

And not be too detailed on it, I think is another trick, isn't it? If you try to almost write the script beforehand, it's going to be wooden and not free flowing. 

Richard Buckle 24:29

Yeah, I think there's I mean, there's different things here if you want some things. If you want someone saying something specifically, you need to give them a script, give them a quote, give me a quote and just ask them to say it and don't be afraid to say why let's do that again. Because that wasn't right. And you know, those sorts of things. But if you want something that, you know, it's very hard to get people to read a script without feeling very wooden.

David Parry 24:50

Well, you don't get the passion. Do you know if someone is really deeply expert in a subject and passionate about it and wants to share that? You can't fake that. You get my camera on in the flow and you Just ask that right question and they're off.

Richard Buckle 25:03

So So key things in planning know who you're talking to. So who your buyer personas work out, okay, what's the end result of his content? Where's it going? Get your questions nailed down and work through. And you know, don't leave that till the day before to make sure you've got everything sorted on that. All your practicalities around what you need kit? Location, which is another big thing around. Okay, what what do you want this to look like? You know? Is it just someone at the desk? Or do you need something that fits your style?

David Parry 25:31

Is news reader style, it something with a nice background? Is it two people talking to one another? Or even a group discussion broader? Are you doing lots of cutaways to B roll stuff to give it context, or as an example? Yeah, we had screen recordings, because it was a softwarey type product. So as the person was talking about it, you could see a mouse being moved around some

Richard Buckle 25:53

Permissions you need to get depending on what you want to film, who's going to feel what people say

David Parry 25:57

Weather. We want B roll of external shots of a company, the first day when it's raining, so we had to go back.

Richard Buckle 26:04

So there's, there's a whole lot of stuff there around just planning and being organised with it. So then, then what we tend to say is, if you can give us an hour or so with each person that you're talking to, we can run through all those questions normally takes no. Not many people are kind of media trained within an SME world that most people don't like being on camera. It's, it's a bit nerving Unless you're Rich.

David Parry 26:32

Post, that's gonna definitely have that little twinkle coming at your eye.

Richard Buckle 26:38

But yeah, I mean, but we're used to it, we're doing this every week and have been for a while though, you know, I can get up. So it's one of those but so you've got to kind of break, you've got to, you know if your interview are interviewing someone in your business, and you've got to find a way of trying to relax them into it, get them talking, build a bit of rapport, do the shoot. And then once you've got all of that, hopefully, if you've planned out everything that you want to get from it, you've got now all your information. It's a case of going through and saying, right, how do we create a whole lot of content out of this from shorts, reels, Instagram posts, maybe combining it into an ebook? So structure your questions into a way that is, you know, chapter headings and subject headings.

David Parry 27:20

The fact sheet could be FAQs. Yeah, just your imagination can run while you've got the content, then

Richard Buckle 27:26

you've got the content. And it may need a bit of supplemental information. But you've got the bulk of it there. Yeah. So and then once you've got that you can you know, then think about, Okay, what's your campaign structure behind that? So how do we want to promote this? Is it something that we're you know, we're going to take the video, create an ebook, create a whole load of video information around it, but we're going to push it out and LinkedIn, track that back, you know, push it out with other social channels. 

David Parry 27:49

Now, interestingly, I was having a discussion this week with someone who's quite interested in this process, and is looking to maybe engage us to do it. But they don't want to do it on HubSpot, which is our natural environment. And that's fine, we can produce a huge zip file or a hard drive with all the content that you need. But I can't emphasise enough how much easier it is to have a platform, whether it be HubSpot, Salesforce or on one of the many others to be able to put this content onto into in a structured way then you can time delay, everything you need, all the responses can be automated, you can set it all up at the beginning while you're in that mode. And then you can almost turn your back on it and it will happen you still want to be monitoring it but it will do its thing over the next what, three, four months, more even 

Richard Buckle 28:29

Yeah, you've got I think you've you've really got to have, if you're going to create a campaign around this that's got hundreds of bits of content coming off, you've got to have some marketing automation

David Parry 28:39

More than just a folder somewhere. And a reminder in a calendar, all you need to do a bit more on 

Richard Buckle 28:42

So you're going to create this huge net of all this content that all of it is going to point. So it's almost like creating a funnel here, that you're saying well, or, yeah, so that you've got all this content spread out maybe 100/200 pieces of like social post content, there's all of its pointing back into a landing page or a pillar page that's got the main bulk of the asset that you've interviewed the expert on. All of that, then you're going to you're going to want some kind of gated content, because you're gonna want to get the email address from person so you can start nurturing that lead. Well, that that could create a huge amount of work for you to then say, how are we going to follow up with this, someone's downloaded the asset, you want to then nurture them through maybe a drip campaign or something. So you're sending them an email every couple of days once they've downloaded the ebook and so much before 

David Parry 29:25

And that's before you get into A/B testing a landing page could be tested and nurture emails could be A/B tested.

Richard Buckle 29:30

So so having marketing automation alongside this is, is pretty critical, I'd say. Because otherwise you're just going to be inundated with responding to emails and sending. So

David Parry 29:41

it's gonna be interesting for us to do a campaign like this. without us having that control of putting it through HubSpot. We'll have to keep a close eye on that because they don't want to make sure it works, right. 

Richard Buckle 29:50

Yeah, absolutely.

David Parry 29:53

Okay, good. So they're the four or five steps you've talked about that we go through. You've done a lot of that before, haven't we? We've mentioned HubSpot. That's where we tend to park all this stuff. Yeah, maybe worth a quick mention as well that at the tail end of that process, when the leads start coming in, there needs to be some thought put into how we're going to try and convert those leads as well. I know that then is tend to be the handover point between marketing and sales, you get something called a marketing qualified lead, and you hand it over. But then there's a whole new world, which is probably the subject of another podcast of how we take and nurture those leads and build an opportunity do the qualification and

Richard Buckle 30:30

maybe a follow on podcast from this one, because, yeah, so maybe, maybe to close out. So the most recent one of these we did for a client generated close to 80 leads within a couple of weeks.

David Parry 30:41

Yeah and and that was from Jay, he gave us a great testimonial to that effect, and said that it's still producing leads every week ever since you know, it's the gift that keeps giving 

Richard Buckle 30:50

but then it's okay. So now, what do you do with them? So you've got them? And now what now what do you do?

David Parry 30:56

Make sure the follow up is there by a human after the automation triggers it? Good. Okay, well, that's a bit of a tour de force then on content leveraging, and really a call to arms for everybody running a small business looking to grow, think enough ahead, think 12 months ahead or more, hold the line, keep the face produce that content. And if you haven't got the internal resources to do it, then leverage what you can using external agencies like ourselves or others, to make sure that you're experts get their thoughts down, and it's turned into stuff that will work.

Richard Buckle 31:26

Because if you're not doing it, somebody else will.

David Parry 31:30

Exactly. Good. I think that means it's now time for us to tuck into our cake! I'm just gonna show that on the camera. Again, for anybody else who's hungry, we got one of these to come by the office, you can see that the left it will be long gone. So thank you again for listening and watching to The SME Growth Podcast from Wellmeadow. It's one of a series of weekly podcasts we do on various topics to help you run your business. And we've had a few guests recently on some good subjects and we've got some more lined up over the next few weeks. So hope you come back and enjoy some of those as ever. I asked you to subscribe and like our podcasts wherever you find them but also tell anybody you know in in business and otherwise, what we're doing and just help to spread the word and we'd be very grateful. Good luck with your business.

Further Resources

In this episode, we mentioned our free resources available for SMEs, including our ebooks on recruitment and inbound marketing.

We also have a number of blogs to help you learn more about content creation. Check out our blogs: Creating a Content Strategy , Getting the Most From Your Content and What is Evergreen Content?