Last week, i said this week’s issue would be a guide to scaling your brand personality.
But writing it i realized making that a whole issue would be a stretch.

So i made it a LI post. it’s linked at the bottom of the issue.

Now let’s get down to business.

You should be using your customer research to build your whole marketing plan.

And 99.99% of the time your marketing plan should start with written content.

Obviously, going from customer research → content is not exactly an easy thing to do.

And yes, despite the influx of AI in search and the frequent pronouncements that “company blogs are dead!”

They are very much not because
a) people still use Google
b) those LLM’s are training on blog posts and Reddit posts

Someone’s stuff is going to show up on search, it might as well be yours.

What channel should i do?

If you’re a B2B SaaS company, choose one of these 2 distribution → content channels as your starting point.

• SEO → Blog or Video

• Community → LinkedIn, Slack communities, or Reddit

The one you choose really depends on:

1. How quickly you need sales (faster in communities than SEO)

2. Which one you’re more comfortable with (if you have zero LinkedIn experience, it will probably be easier for you to start with writing blog posts than writing and engaging and building an audience)

You need to create a content conga line that proves to your audience you know what you’re talking about and you’re here to help.

Blog or community posts are the best way to start the music. 🎶

5 steps for a content plan you don’t hate having to use

1. Do audience research for your main topics

Look at the questions, pain points, and rants from your customer research (ahem, the customer research database we talked about!).

If you don’t have a whole lot of customer research that will answer those questions than do audience research to supplement 💊 .

1. look at reviews of your competitors for questions that still aren’t answered

2. use Reddit to find pain point topics (Gummysearch is crucial for this!)

2. Create your content plan based on awareness

There are 5 stages of awareness.

1. Unaware → General topic information
   “Your intro guide to product marketing for SaaS startups (when you’re not a marketer)”

2. Problem aware → “Why your lack of customer research is causing your churn”

3. Solution aware → “How to nail your customer research so your marketing works”

4. Product/Service aware → Proof as case studies “DropEvent increased MRR by 32% because of customer research”

5. Most aware → same as Product/Service aware

List those topics out in an awareness format, like this ⤵️

you can duplicate that table btw - here’s the link to a Google Sheet.

You need content that hits all 5 for your main topics.

Cap yourself at 20 of these posts.
That’s roughly 5 big topics.

After that you can get to the more “boring” posts like comparisons and “vs” ones

Here’s what mine looks like right now.
Needless to say, i’ve got work to do to fill in those gaps.

3. Do basic keyword research for those topics

I shall not reinvent the wheel here.

1. Go to Ahrefs (or SemRush)

2. put in phrases that you found in your topics list

3. sort KW’s by traffic and difficulty

4. save a master group of KW’s match your topic and audience that are in the 500-2,000 searches and below 32 KD

5. save smaller groups of those KW’s for phrases

4. Setup your workflow for success

📁 Use a single database for ALL of your content and ideas
Create templates within the database for each content type that has a standard outline and how-to guide included.

Put your ideas in there as you think of them so it’s easy to flesh them into full posts.

We use this calendar template (free in Notion). Only took a few tweaks to customize.

📆 Choose a day/wk you’re going to post
Stick to it.
If you can schedule your content (yes for blogs, no for Reddit), than setup a low-cost tool for that.

I use Scheduled.so for LinkedIn posts.

🥉 Work in a 3-day format

• Day 1: collect info and throw into doc (set 30min timer)

• Day 2: string idea into a coherent flow (30min timer), note where you need images or infographics (15min)

• Day 3: finalize to the format, QA, schedule to publish

If you’re posting in communities, lurk for a week or two before you start posting
Learn to read the room.

5. Build your calendar based on ✨ reality ✨

You are one person (or a very overworked team).

There’s only so much you can put out there.

• For Blogs - Getting one piece of content out a week is a win

• For Communities - Aim to post 2x/week

🤖 Once you have your system in place, you can automate more steps
And eventually scale up and delegate.

Content is a long game, don’t flame out trying to publish an infinite amount of posts in a month.

⏱️ My biggest “aha!”: don’t start consistently posting until you have 3 pieces of content ready to publish.

Ideally covering a full column (why → how → proof) so you hit every awareness stage.

That way you aren’t struggling to hit your cadence while you sort through your brand new SOP.

Look at you! With a manageable content calendar. 👏 

Breath a sigh of relief and go get a little treat. 🍪

I did it! now how do I repurpose content?

Great question, i’ll cover that next week. 😉

And finally,

If your brain can’t think of things to talk about, even after you do the customer research and lurk awhile mayyyyybe you shouldn’t be the one handling content in the long term.

Content is not for the faint of heart and spray-and-pray’d of attention spans.

Believe it not, I really freaking love doing this or else i wouldn’t have pulled an near-allnighter to write this newsletter about it. (yes, really!)

Did it for Jeremy at DropEvent and traffic increased by 20% MoM. (the team and I did his foundations work and website too).

If you want to talk through the what to post, how to post it and where - i’ve got you.

Pull up on my calendar. 

Cheers!
I’ll see you next week.

Sophia 💜👩🏽‍💻 (just Sophia, Aelia is on her Anne of Green Gables moment in Chitrāl! 💚 )

P. S. here’s that promised brand personality that sticks LI post link. 🙂
Powered by a large breve latte from Cafe Stella ☕ (with whipped cream!)