Getting quality backlinks is like earning recommendations from authoritative people. Recommendations from authoritative people (read websites) don’t come easy, and it requires some heavy lifting at your end in terms of effort, time, or cost. 

For instance, you can commission an industry research report that gets covered by journalists and bloggers across the globe. This approach could be a cost-intensive way but is worth it. 

Another way can be contributing expert opinions through HARO or as a Forbes council member. If you want to become a Forbes council member, your business needs to have a minimum annual revenue of $1 Million. Whereas signing up for HARO can keep your inbox buzzing with emails. Content marketing agencies can come to your rescue in these cases.

As a content marketing agency, we have helped many clients get quality website backlinks. This activity, in turn, increased their authority and brought them more traffic and leads from search engines.

In this article, I will share how we got quality backlinks for our clients. But before we jump in, let’s look at the traits of quality backlinks.

Not All Backlinks Are Equal

You might be thinking, “Great, let’s create as many backlinks as we can, in any way possible,” right? Not so fast.

The quality of backlinks matters more than their quantity. A single quality backlink can be more potent than 1,000 low-quality backlinks. Therefore, your focus should be on building backlinks from websites in your niche that have a high “authority” score, meaning that they’re considered trustworthy, reliable and valuable in the eyes of search engines.

Traits of Quality Backlinks

#1 – They Come From Trusted, Authoritative Websites

While building the backlink profile for your website, it is vital to focus on receiving backlinks from websites with a high authority score. For example, a backlink from HubSpot will be more authoritative in search engines’ eyes than from 10 random blogs.

Additionally, the referring website must have a good volume of organic traffic. Tools like Semrush, which helps to conduct keyword research and find online ranking data, will show whether the traffic shows even distribution across the website’s pages, another vital consideration.

Finally, your list of potential referring websites must show consistent growth over a long period.

#2 – They Include Your Target Keyword in the Link’s Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in the hyperlink. In an industry study by Ahrefs of the anchor texts of backlinks to 384,614 web pages, there was a correlation between keyword-rich anchor text and higher rankings for that keyword.

#3 – The Linking Website is Topically Related to Yours

If you’re operating in the SaaS space, it will be more beneficial to build backlinks from websites in the same industry that publish content around similar topics. Again, the similarity in context will aid you a lot.

Remain vigilant and never resort to deploying illicit means to build backlinks or receive referrals from websites that publish content on porn and gambling. Going down this route puts you at grave risk of being penalised by search engines.

#4 – The Link is a “Dofollow” Link

Dofollow Links

When your website receives a dofollow link, it is a signal from the referring website to search engines like Google that the link is organic, and they’re vouching for the accuracy of the content on the linked URL.

Nofollow Links

Nofollow links are less valuable since they ask search engines like Google to ignore the particular link. These signal to search engines that they needn’t follow the specific linked URL. Links from these sources tend to be “nofollow”:

• Blog comments,
• Press releases,
• Paid advertisements

Google and other search engines ignore links with the “nofollow” tag. In other words, these links do not count for search engine ranking algorithms.

#5 – They Follow The Right Ratio

As SEO Chatter explains, “The main difference between referring domains and backlinks is that referring domains are the websites your backlinks are coming from while backlinks are the actual links on sites that are linking to your web pages. A referring domain can have one or more backlinks to a website.”

While building your website’s backlink profile, work towards maintaining the ratio between linked domains and referring domains around 1:1. A ratio tilted towards the referring domain is even better.

#6 – They Are Natural Links

As an SEO specialist for your website, strive to maintain that your backlinks are not paid-for posts and that the anchor text is unbranded and devoid of spam. It is a common observation that the quality of the backlink is disregarded by prioritising making a quick buck.

You can watch this video where team Concurate discusses its learnings on choosing the right website for building backlinks.

Pro tip: If you need 30 standout SaaS growth hacks to attain double the growth for your SaaS business, fill out the form below!

10 Actionable Examples of Creating Quality Backlinks

To aid your understanding, we will show you practical examples of how Concurate has created quality backlinks for its clients across different industries.

#1 – Create High-Quality Content

One of the most straightforward ways of getting backlinks is to create top-quality content. Your north star should be to create linkable content that other websites can use and link back to your site. It can be a report, a video, a survey, or anything that others will consider a highly-prized piece of content.

Concurate’s client GreyB holds an envious advantage of glimpsing into the future. GreyB is an innovation research firm that performs custom analysis on patents, research papers, and market reports to drive business insights.

So if an organisation, say Samsung, wants an understanding of evolving business trends, such as 5G, to gain a competitive advantage over companies like Huawei, they naturally turn to GreyB. It so happens that GreyB has indeed created industry-acclaimed reports, such as this one on 5G. Content such as this has generated citations in industry-relevant blogs and publications.

#2 – Publish Guest Posts

Guest posting is a dependable way to get backlinks for your website and is a tried and tested approach. You can consider reaching out to websites in your industry and niche that accept guest submissions and submit posts. Some websites usually offer contributor accounts, or a “write for us” section where select people can write articles and get featured on the website. You can link your site in the author’s bio section or within the text content.

Concurate has contributed to industry-relevant blogs, such as The Future Shapers, to help its client, Triangle IP, receive quality backlinks.

#3 – Contribute to Already Ranking Listicles

People entering search queries along the lines of “best tools for [pain-point]” are savvy potential customers who know what they’re looking to buy. They are likely to be educated about the functionalities that will suit their needs. Winning a spot in listicles on review websites comparing different products is expected to help you gain traction and receive high-quality backlinks.

Concurate has helped its client PQAI receive mentions on such pieces of content from reliable and authoritative websites.

#4 – Contribute Opinions or Ideas As Experts

A fantastic way to gain visibility as a thought leader in your industry is to consider contributing to renowned business councils and outlets such as Forbes and HARO.

Forbes Councils

Forbes Councils is an invitation-only, professional organization where top CEOs and entrepreneurs build professional skills and gain connections and visibility on Forbes.

You can consider getting invited and contributing to such councils. For example, you’ll contribute to a paragraph or a quote for a content piece as an expert opinion.

Concurate has helped GreyB’s senior leaders gain admission and contribute to the Forbes Business Council.

HARO

Help a Report Out is a leading PR platform where journalists and content creators meet industry experts who share their insights and opinions. The best and the most relevant answers to the journalists’ queries get published in their articles.

Using HARO, Concurate helped its client, IP Toolworks, feature on a major technology website, tech.co.

By giving interviews and contributing at such mediums, you can expect to gain high-quality dofollow backlinks for your website.

#5 – Participate in Industry Conferences

You stand to gain a lot by attending industry conferences. From a purely virtual standpoint, your business stands to gain authoritative links around your attendance, contributions and more.

Concurate has helped its client, Triangle IP, participate in renowned conferences such as JURIX 2020, an international conference on legal knowledge and information systems.​

#6 – Sponsor Notable Events

You stand a chance to gain vital recognition by being a pivotal sponsor of renowned events such as industry conferences. In addition, referrals on events’ websites are likely to help you receive highly authoritative backlinks for your website.

Concurate has helped its client, ScanWriter, sponsor industry conferences such as the ACFE Global Fraud Conference.

#7 – Engage in the Comments Section

Finally, you can consider generating “nofollow” backlinks for your website by engaging with content pieces on blogs and publications.

Concurate has represented its clients by engaging with content from thought leaders such as Steve Blank. This has helped Concurate receive backlinks from such personalities’ personal blogs and websites.

#8 – Getting Listed in Directories

By getting your business listed on reputable directories and peer-to-peer review sites such as G2, you can manage to convert high-quality directory backlinks into favourable search engine rankings.

A notably beneficial aspect of business directories is that they’re quite popular amongst consumers. So, by getting yourself published within such listings, you’re not just building directory backlinks – you’re also getting to showcase your business in front of a wide audience base.

Concurate has helped its client, Triangle IP, get listed on the reputed peer-to-peer review website, G2, amongst other such directories.

#9 – Appear on Podcasts

You can build backlinks by appearing on podcasts. In this approach, you, as a business owner, pitch yourself as a guest on industry podcasts and receive links from the episode’s page.

This approach is a great way to build more backlinks and generate interest in your brand. By talking about valuable content and sharing it with a wide audience, you stand to gain higher exposure and potentially receive more backlinks than just from the episode’s introduction.

Concurate has helped its client and founder of Triangle IP, Thomas Franklin, appear on leading industry-relevant podcasts such as the Reinventing Professionals podcast.

#10 – Give Interviews

Online interviews are a straightforward way to build your website’s backlink profile. However, it requires a lot of time and effort since you’re first required to establish yourself as an accomplished figure in your business or sector to receive the right interview invites.

Concurate has helped its client and founder of Triangle IP, Thomas Franklin, give interviews on quality outlets such as ideamensch, an interview platform for entrepreneurs to share their stories.

What You Can Do Next

We are a content marketing agency that brings business, not just website traffic. We curate the best content as per your company’s requirements and philosophy because we believe in the power of meaningful information.

Let’s turn your website traffic into paying customers by taking your blog to the next level. Do you want to connect over a short call to gain higher authority for your website? Block our calendar today! We’d be happy to help you develop a content marketing strategy for your business.

If you wish to read more goodness, subscribe to our newsletter.

We send value to your inbox only once in 15 days.

Are you facing a dilemma with no leads, conversions, and minimal return on investment? Look no further if you’re still searching for a content marketing agency for your LegalTech organisation that says, “This is how you’ll grow if you hire us.”

Concurate Works Differently | Our Strategy

In-depth Research

#1 – Understanding Your Company’s Products and Services

The team at Concurate aims to get a holistic understanding of your LegalTech organisation at the start of the engagement. We learn about your customers’ top priorities at work and understand the challenges that come their way. For instance, are they looking to safeguard their prized intellectual property? Additionally, we attempt to discover the use case for your product/service.

#2 – Evaluating Competitors and Current Performance

As the next step in our research, we learn what customers are attempting to find in your industry. From our previous example, are they trying to discover and access standard legal templates or looking to troubleshoot litigations that arise? Our priority is to find and understand the standout feature or benefit that prospects want. The team also learns about the competitive landscape. What are the competing products and organisations operating in the space? Finally, the team audits your current content marketing strategy, understands what’s working and isn’t, and charts the way forward.

#3 – Understanding Your Customer’s Goals and Pain Points

Concurate works to get an understanding of your ideal customer profile. Are you looking to serve individuals, startups, or enterprises? What job profile will you benefit from using your product? Through our research and interviews, we find the top benefits customers get from using your services. We also attempt to find out the core problem customers were trying to resolve when they came across your LegalTech product or service.

#4 – Finding Out Why Your Visitors Aren’t Converting

In our interviews with outbound marketing teams like customer success and sales, it is our earnest attempt to find the tell-tale situations or scenarios that jump out and signal whether the lead will close (or will never close). Along the way, we aim to know and understand which products or services come up in sales conversations and if there are any specific ones that prospects often switch from.

Produce Highly Researched Company-Specific Content

Concurate’s content marketing strategy follows the Pain Point SEO philosophy, aiming to target long-tail keywords on search engines, having comparatively low search volume but high buying intent. The benefits of this approach are that it resonates with knowledgeable customers who know what they want and directly addresses their pain points. The result is more sales-qualified leads, signups, and new customers.

Driving Right Fit Traffic through Paid and Organic Channels

Your content marketing efforts do not end with ideation and creation. An important unmissable aspect is distributing and showcasing the content to the right audience on the right platforms. The team at Concurate works to optimise the search engine rankings, distribution of content on social media platforms, and designing and publishing lead magnets on syndication platforms to attract the right audience for your FinTech organisation. Additionally, Concurate helps to land influential executives in your organisation to pen guest posts on premier publications and garner quality citations from reputed sites.

Measuring Results, Generating Insights and Reporting on Results

It’s vital to gather data, derive insights and attribute results to specific efforts. At Concurate, we pride ourselves on providing transparent reports on how our content marketing efforts result in increased traffic, website engagement, an increase in the number of leads, signups achieved and customers onboarded.

Our Approach

Concurate follows the approach of Attract, Retain, Capture and Convert while ideation and creating content pieces. This approach dictates how the content gets promoted through different channels. This example comes from our client, Triangle IP. The TIP Tool by Triangle IP is an intuitive drag and drop tool that helps you manage the end-to-end IP lifecycle from ideas to patents. The vision behind TIP Tool’s creation is the democratisation of patents. Usually, the patent process is not transparent, and many organisations do not have enterprise-wide innovation capture systems and processes. The TIP tool is here to change that.

Content Ideation

Designing a lead magnet as a downloadable resource. Inspired from a common pain point in the Intellectual Property (IP) industry.

Content Creation

We created the downloadable resource in the form of a template. In this case, an Invention Disclosure Form (IDF). In addition, we embedded the Invention Disclosure Form in an accompanying article.

#1 – Attract

This is the reason why people ended up on your website. Since your content piece promised to deliver upon something they were searching for.

Source: Google

#2 – Retain

You don’t want the website visitors to bounce back just after reading one article on your website.

Things that can help retain the visitor to your website are – helpful articles in the same category, templates, product tours, use cases, guides and more. In addition, we need to make sure that it’s super intuitive for the visitors to navigate different website sections.

Moreover, understanding website visitors’ behaviour through some analytics tool like Google Analytics can give great pointers. For example, the tool tells where the visitors enter your website, which pages they browse, where they exit and more.

Representative Google Analytics Dashboard

#3 – Capture

Next up, we attempt to capture the highly relevant and qualified contact information of prospective customers for our client.

Source: Triangle IP

#4 – Convert

Finally, we attempt to give a walkthrough of the product and schedule live or virtual product demonstrations to help our client clinch more deals.

Source: Triangle IP

Content Promotion

Let’s look at how this valuable content got promoted to the right audience.

#1 – Search Engine Optimisation

Searching for “invention disclosure form sample download” gives you Triangle IP as the first search result. How about that? If your content signals expertise, authority and trustworthiness, you can organically reach the right audience without paying in the form of an arm or a leg.

#2 – Social Media

Next, we published the content on platforms such as LinkedIn to ensure that the content piece reached the right audience.

Source: LinkedIn

#3 – Content Republishing

It’s also vital to cross-post content on platforms where your target audience resides or learns about industry information.

Source: The Future Shapers

#4 – Guest Posts

We ensure that our clients appear on industry-relevant podcasts and blogs for interviews and allied activities.

Source: Idea Mensch

Pro tip: If you need 30 standout SaaS growth hacks to attain double the growth for your SaaS business, fill out the form below!

LegalTech Case Studies: How Concurate Converted Clients For Triangle IP and IP Toolworks

Content Ideation

The Principles

#1 –  Being More Strategic In What Keywords We Target

As explained previously, Concurate focuses on Pain Point SEO instead of Volume Driven SEO. In such a case, we went after keywords such as “download [use case] sample” and so on. The psychological intent behind these search queries is precise, with a clear buying intention.

#2 – Creating Conversion-focused Content For Each Keyword Targeted

The consequence of this approach is that the content pieces become easier to write. As a result, it resonates more with the target audience and is easier to promote. The articles also rank higher for long-tail search phrases.

Source: Google

Understanding Customers’ Intentions and Pain Points

#1 – What Challenges Are Customers Trying to Solve?

The focus over here is to probe and discover the anxieties, difficulties, wants, and aspirations of target consumers.

#2 – What Challenges Do The Customers Have Before Buying?

Knowing the specific challenges that, say, individual inventors face in the case of Triangle IP,  helps Concurate conduct keyword research. This activity comes after determining the target consumers’ main pain points and goals.

#3 – Why Did Customers Choose Our Client Over Other Alternatives?

With this step, Concurate attempts to understand the significant benefits of opting for our clients compared to competitors and other free alternatives that prospects may be employing.

#4 – Develop Customer Persona

Finally, Concurate attempts to create an ideal client avatar (individual inventor, patent attorney, etc.) that captures the client team’s shared thoughts and drives future marketing endeavours.

Creating a target persona aims to narrow down the best customers. So who are your “best” customers? Typically, your “best customers” offer quick sales cycles, high average deal size, long retention rate, and minimal support headaches.

Content Creation

#1 – Scalable

At Concurate, we attempt to create scalable content. Scalability means that after expending initial efforts to develop scripts and templates, we publish content that enhances our clients’ expertise, authority and trustworthiness. For example, we created multiple “patent portfolio statistics” content pieces for our client, Triangle IP.

Source: Triangle IP

#2 – Alternatives/Comparisons/Case Studies

It helps to offer prospects information on how your tool operates along multiple criteria against competing products and services. Additionally, as part of our “Retain” approach to content creation, we publish educational case studies such as this one for our client, IP Toolworks.

Source: IP Toolworks

#3 – Buying Intent Focused

The intention to target buying-intent-focused keywords is that we’re attempting to attract, capture and convert savvy and educated consumers who know the exact problem they’re looking to solve. So, for example, we created multiple pieces of content around “type 101 rejections” for our client IP Toolworks. Significantly, our article ranks at the top of Google search results.

Source: Google

Content Promotion

Here are some more examples of how we have successfully promoted relevant content for our clients

#1 – Search Engine Optimisation

If a user enters the search query “top [tool] alternatives”, they’re more likely to have a buying intent and a clear understanding of what works and doesn’t work for their business use case.

Our content piece titled “Top 5 IdeaScale Alternatives You Must Know in 2022” successfully ranks our client at the top of Google search results.

Source: Google

#2 – Social Media

Creating “scalable” content, as we mentioned earlier, makes for easy publishing on social media channels as well. We publish on platforms like LinkedIn, where our client’s target audience spends their time.

Source: LinkedIn

What You Should Do Now

We are a content marketing agency that brings business, not just website traffic. We curate the best content as per your company’s requirements and philosophy because we believe in the power of meaningful information.
Let’s turn your content into customers and take your LegalTech blog to the next level. Let’s connect over a short call if you’re ready to outshine your competition. Block our calendar today! We’d be happy to help you develop a content marketing strategy for your business.

If you wish to read more goodness, subscribe to our newsletter.

We send value to your inbox only once in 15 days.

When we say the following, “Bigger budgets mean better results,” “It’s impossible to compete on backlinks and domain ratings,” and “SEO” doesn’t work,” does it feel like we’re pulling words out of your mouth?

If you follow the conventional approach of executing your organization’s FinTech content marketing strategy, you’re most likely to receive disappointing results.

Let’s bust these myths.

Common Misconceptions

#1 – Bigger Budgets Mean Better Results

Simply throwing more money across widespread channels like social media, pay-per-click advertising, influencer collaborations, and volume-driven type of content piece creation will get mixed results best. This is not the case if you execute content marketing with a buyer’s intention-driven approach. You can still be the David to the traditional Goliaths.

#2 – Impossible to Compete on Backlinks and Domain Ratings

Even if you’re going against financial services giants like Robinhood and Revolut, you can still compete on search engine result page (SERP) rankings. How? By producing blog posts content which builds expertise, authority and trustworthiness in Google parlance. You must create content that resonates with savvy buyers and addresses what they’re looking to resolve. This approach will require manual backlinking from authoritative destinations. Creating valuable content helps win these battles.

#3 – “SEO” doesn’t work

There’s a lot to Search Engine Optimisation than trying to rank for volume-driven keywords. You must consider facets such as on-page SEO, like content structure, relevance and value, headlines, tags, etc.

You must also work on off-page SEO by curating quality citations from renowned websites to add authority scores to your domains.

Additionally, optimising technical SEO along the lines of a mobile-friendly website, easiness for search engines to crawl and index your website, and more.

With the common misconceptions addressed, let us focus on the common (read: unsatisfactory) tactics deployed to carry out content marketing.

Common Content Marketing Tactics

#1 – Playing A Content Volume Game

“Let’s just create more content.” This approach means FinTech companies produce maximum content to rank for as many keywords. As a result, you’re competing for keywords that garner more clicks, do not likely have a medium-to-high buying intent, and are extremely difficult to rank.

#2 – Focusing on Traffic

We are with you when we say that traffic is essential.

But more traffic does not always equal more conversions! Consider this. Targeting a smaller percentage of high-buying intent search terms is better than a minuscule portion of many low-buying intent search queries.

#3 – Beginner Level Content

It counts as a frustrating experience for the user when they are savvy about the search terms they’re using yet, end up landing on content pages that provide surface-level knowledge in an attempt to grab anyone and everyone.

This brings us to the usual services you’re likely to avail yourself of from most content marketing agencies.

Standard Agencies Offer

#1 – Content That Doesn’t Speak to Savvy Customers

While finance as an industry has a broad appeal, FinTech companies like yours in specialised niches will have recurring and potential customers with advanced knowledge of the space. Unfortunately, due to their lack of experience, typical content marketing agencies inadvertently curate “fluff” pieces that won’t spark readers’ interest or nudge them to share details or close the deal.

#2 – Freelance Writers Who Don’t Understand The Industry

We speak from experience when we say it is a hard pill to swallow assigning technical pieces to content writers without specific financial expertise. So at Concurate, we ensure that writers have diverse backgrounds in the FinTech industry – patent attorneys or corporate lawyers.

#3 – Unwilling to be Accountable for Results

Typical content marketing agencies will offer you standard “x content pieces per month” packages. However, they will hesitate to explain in plain language how their content marketing efforts directly contribute to engagement, leads, signups or sales.

#4 – Lack of Systematic Distribution & Promotion Process

Content marketing requires a systematic approach for distributing your valuable content and building brand awareness. Simply blasting across social media channels and email mailing lists won’t do the trick. Instead, your promotion process will entail ranking organically via search engine optimisation, organic distribution to your network, syndicating content on platforms where your target audience resides, doing paid promotions, and manually building backlinks. This targeted approach is lacking in typical content marketing agencies.

Usual Results

The results are no leads, conversions, and return on investment. So you’ll be looking for a content marketing agency for your FinTech organisation that says, “This is how you’ll grow if you hire us.”

Our Strategy

In-depth Research

#1 – Understanding Your Company’s Products and Services

At Concurate, we aim to get a holistic understanding of your FinTech organisation at the start of our engagement. We try to learn your customers’ top priorities at work and understand their challenges. Additionally, we attempt to discover the use case(s) for your product/service.

#2 – Evaluating Competitors and Current Performance

As a next step, we learn what existing customers find especially appealing in the space. First, we aim to understand the one feature/benefit customers want. Next, we learn about the competitive landscape. Finally, we audit the current content marketing strategy, understand what’s working and what isn’t and chart the way forward.

#3 – Understanding Your Customer’s Goals and Pain Points

To gauge an understanding of your customers, we work on finding the top benefits they get from using your services. Aside from the primary benefits, we also attempt to narrow down on the problem customers were trying to solve when they initially came across your product or service.

#4 – Finding Out Why Your Visitors Aren’t Converting

In our interviews with customer success experts, we try to find out if there are any tell-tale situations or scenarios that whenever they see it, they know the lead will close (or the lead will never close). We also attempt to find what other products or services come up in sales conversations and if there are any products or services that prospects often switch from.

Produce Highly Researched Company-Specific Content

Concurate aims to ideate, create and distribute content that addresses your potentially best customers’ pain points. This philosophy, also known as Pain Point SEO, aims to target long-tail keywords on search engines, having comparatively low search volume but high buying intent.

The benefit of this approach is that content that resonates with savvy customers, builds trust, and directly addresses their pain points is an easy sell. The result is more sales-qualified leads, signups and new customers.

Driving Right Fit Traffic through Paid and Organic Channels

As you’ll discover in this piece, ideating and creating content is 2/3^rd of the battle. Another aspect is distributing and showcasing the content to the right audience on the right platforms. Concurate works to optimise the SEO, distribute social media content, and curate lead magnets on syndication platforms to attract the right audience for your FinTech organisation. Additionally, Concurate helps to land influential executives in your organisation to pen guest posts on premier publications and garner quality citations from reputed sites.

Measuring Results, Generating Insights and Reporting on Results

An organisation must gather data and derive insights to attribute results to specific efforts. At Concurate, we pride ourselves on providing transparency on how our content marketing efforts result in increased traffic, website engagement, an increase in the number of leads, signups achieved and customers onboarded.

Pro tip: If you need 30 standout SaaS growth hacks to attain double the growth for your SaaS business, fill out the form below!

FinTech Content Marketing Case Study: How Concurate Converted Clients For ScanWriter

About ScanWriter

ScanWriter is a data entry automation and visualisation tool to assist financial fraud investigations. It’s a US-based homegrown software trusted by many district attorneys, forensic accountants, and fraud investigators working in the public sector across the USA. ScanWriter takes pride in offering 100% accuracy, exceptionally high processing speeds, audit trail, automatic visualisation of financial models like ‘flow of funds’, 24×7 customer support, and more. Team ScanWriter is committed to serving the anti-fraud professionals across the United States to their best level.

Content Ideation

The Principles

#1 –  Being More Strategic In What Keywords We Target

As explained previously, Concurate focuses on Pain Point SEO instead of Volume Driven SEO. In such a case, we went after keywords such as “financial investigation software”, “[Competitor] alternatives”, and so on. The psychological intent behind these search queries is highly targeted with a clear buying intention.

#2 – Creating Conversion-focused Content For Each Keyword Targeted

The consequence of this approach is that the post becomes easier to write. As a result, the content piece resonates more with the target audience and is easier to promote! The posts also rank higher for long-tail search phrases (proof upcoming).

Understanding Customers’ Intentions and Pain Points

#1 – What Challenges Are Customers Trying to Solve?

The intention is to probe and discover anxieties, difficulties, wants, and aspirations while performing fraud investigations.

#2 – What Challenges Do The Customers Have Before Buying?

Knowing the specific challenges that fraud investigators face helps conduct keyword research. This activity comes after determining the main pain points and goals.

#3 – Why Did Customers Choose ScanWriter Over Other Alternatives?

With this step, Concurate attempts to understand the significant benefits of ScanWriter compared to competitors and other free alternatives that investigators may be employing.

#4 – Develop Customer Persona

Finally, Concurate attempts to create an ideal client avatar (fraud investigator, forensic accountant, etc.) that captures the ScanWriter team’s shared thoughts and drives future marketing endeavours.

Creating a target persona aims to narrow down the best customers. So what do “best” customers look like? Typically, you’ll encounter quick sales cycles, high average deal size, long retention rate, and minimal support headaches.

Customer Interviews

Here’s an inside look into our questioning with ScanWriter’s customers to enhance the product’s value and build new features:

• What’s your job title?
• What made you adopt ScanWriter?
• Are you facing any issue(s) with using ScanWriter?
  • Tell us more about these issue(s)?
  • When did you discover these issue(s)?
  • How did you find out about these issue(s)?
• How often do you use ScanWriter: Daily, case-by-case?
• Who all in your team use ScanWriter?
• Can you use prominent X, Y, and Z feature(s)?
  • Do you need help with the significant X feature?
• What’s the most helpful feature of ScanWriter?
• What’s the most crucial benefit of using ScanWriter?
• How many [use case] do you [activity] in a typical batch?

While learning about specific use cases and pain points, the team probes further:

• Did you know about the X feature? We can hook you up with a product specialist to help improve your workflow based on what you just shared by walking through how the X feature works.
• Where are you using ScanWriter? Virtual or at the office? How do you collaborate?
• Anyone else you think will benefit from using this tool?
• Which job titles should we approach to try using ScanWriter?
• Which allied industries can we target to try using ScanWriter based on your experience?
• Would you be open to a case study on how you benefit from using ScanWriter?
• If I skipped anything, would you like to share anything else?

Content Creation

Bottom of the Funnel Content

We create content around comparatively low-volume, long-tail keywords with high buying intent. This targets educating savvy prospects who know precisely what they’re looking for. An example is a “[Use case] software” article.

(Source: ScanWriter)

Content Promotion

Search Engine Optimisation

Creating educational content that is authoritative and trustworthy helps land clients like ScanWriter on Page 1 (might we add, rank 1) of Google search results!

(Source: Google)

Social Media

Concurate works on distributing content via social media platforms such as LinkedIn. With the right hashtags and audience targeting, clients receive quality sales-qualified leads.

(Source: LinkedIn)

Content Syndication

Establishing a presence on platforms where your target audience consumes information about your industry is vital. Providing valuable content in resources such as White Papers will help increase leads and attract quality prospects.

(Source: Fraud Magazine)

Guest Posting

Guest posting on leading, prominent industry publications helps lend credibility to your brand. At Concurate, we help clients establish their presence.

(Source: Forbes)

What You Should Do Now

We are a content marketing agency that brings business, not just website traffic. We curate the best content as per your company’s requirements and philosophy because we believe in the power of meaningful information.
Let’s turn your content into customers and take your FinTech blog to the next level. If you’re ready to outshine your competition at content marketing, let’s connect over a short call. Block our calendar today! We’d be happy to help you develop a content marketing strategy that works for your business.

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Let’s consider a scenario where you’re a new SaaS startup in the CRM (customer relationship management) space. As the business owner, founder or marketing manager, you might feel spooked at the prospect of competing with the big-name players. You ideally want to rank higher on industry-standard keywords, like “CRM software”.

While your intentions are well-founded, here’s the kicker: how do you rank higher than your established competitors like Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.? You question how a small enterprise such as yours can beat them at content marketing, considering they have huge budgets and a well-oiled content creation marketing machine churning out 30+ blog post content pieces a month. How do you outrank the competition on search engines and gain visibility?
How do you optimise your content marketing strategy if you’re a small to medium-sized SaaS business? The typical keywords that you might consider writing pieces of content around will have high difficulty levels. Additionally, you’ll be fighting for places against the domains of competitors having a higher number of references as well as higher “authority”. As you can tell, it will take inordinate amounts of time and money to crack the code and “rank” higher.

The Usual Content Marketing Strategy

Marketing managers and business heads usually focus on high-volume queries in the hopes that higher visibility will eventually lead to flow down the funnel and convert some leads. There is a problem with this approach, though. While these keywords/queries have a lot more people searching for them, they necessarily do not have a high buying intent. These keywords are not aiming to take away the pain of the prospects. Key learning is this: Highest Volume of Traffic ≠ Highest Volume of Conversions. We propose a different strategy centred around pain points and high buying intent.

Buying Intent Keywords SEO Strategy

What Is Buying Intent Keywords SEO Strategy?

In this strategy, you should consider adopting a mindset that turns the usual way of conducting business on its head. What is usually followed is to focus on keywords with the highest volume and ease to rank for. You’ll benefit from shifting your focus from increasing traffic to increasing leads and signups for your product.

The Winning Formula

To make your journey easier and inexpensive, target keywords by deploying the following three facets:

#1 – High Search Volume

These are keywords that people are searching for in droves. Say, “HubSpot”, “HubSpot alternatives”, etc.

#2 – Low Keyword Difficulty

Considering you’re competing with HubSpot and Salesforce in the CRM space, keywords like “‘Your Product’ vs HubSpot” and “‘Your Product’ vs Salesforce” will tend to have lower keyword difficulty.

#3 – High Intent Keywords

Essentially, you’re attacking keywords and topics that discuss solutions to the problem which the searcher is trying to solve.

This approach will help you create the kind of content pieces and target keywords that better match the buyer’s intent as they pass through the buyer’s funnel. This approach will help you better differentiate and outrank even the most formidable of competitors on search engine result pages.

Pro tip: If you need 30 standout SaaS growth hacks to attain double the growth for your SaaS business, fill out the form below!

Questions To Identify Buying Intent Keywords

In order to ideate and identify buying intent keywords, your best course of action is to have an in-depth understanding of your prospects and customers. This approach will help you accomplish your goals because while the rest of the competition is focused on traffic, you’ll be able to assist and help your prospects and customers through well-researched pieces.

Here are some questions to ask your clients and customers to help you identify high-intent keywords to target:

#1 – What Problem Is Your Tool Trying To Solve?

This question will help you to target the right keywords when someone is researching for solutions that your product is aiming to solve.

#2 – What Alternatives Are Prospects Currently Searching For?

This question will help you to identify who your customers consider as your competitors and alternatives.

#3 – How Would Prospects Describe Your Product To Someone Who Knows Nothing About It?

This question will help you to target the right keywords when someone is describing your product. This can help you to even target keywords such as the personas you’re catering to.

#4 – What Are The Top Benefits Your Product Offers?

This question will help you target the right keywords for different use cases and the benefits your customers can expect to gain from using your product.

#5 – How Will Prospects Search For Your Product?

This question will help you to target the right keywords when someone is searching for your product.

With our bases covered, let’s find out which content pieces will work best for your objectives.

Types of Content Pieces That Work

Long-tail marketing “refers to the large number of products that sell in small quantities, as contrasted with the small number of best-selling products.” By going after long-tail high buying intent keywords, you’re able to beat out high-volume low buying intent keywords.

In order to better illustrate our point, we’ll be giving you actionable examples from the work Concurate has carried out for its client, Triangle IP.

#1 – Comparison Pieces

This way, you’re comparing your product to your top competitors. By creating a content piece comparing Triangle IP’s flagship product with competitors like Salesforce and Jira was able to rank first on the search engine result page by using this approach.

#2 – Best Products Lists

Using this approach, you provide prospects and customers with a ready-reckoner list of the best products in the category that they’re searching for. A content piece covering the best tools in Triangle IP’s industry was able to rank third on the search engine result page by using this approach.

#3 – Alternatives Tools Lists

This content piece helps your prospects and customers look for alternatives to your competitors’ products. A content piece covering the top alternatives to one of Triangle IP’s competitors was able to rank second on the search engine result page using this approach.

#4 – Use Cases Pieces

By creating such pieces, you guide customers and prospects on solving a business problem they’re facing while also pitching your product as a potential solution. A content piece covering the essential features of products in Triangle IP’s domain was able to rank second on the search engine result page using this approach.

Takeaways

You should consider prioritising producing these pieces of content aimed at high buying intent before going after keywords and search queries that are catered towards bringing in a high volume of traffic. In summary, these are the steps that will benefit you to get the most ROI for your SaaS from your content marketing efforts:

• Shifting your focus from increasing traffic to increasing leads and signups for your product.
• Targeting keywords with high search volume, low keyword difficulty and high buying intent.
• Gathering an in-depth understanding of your prospects and customers to ideate and identify buying intent keywords.
• Creating pieces that compare, list options, share alternatives, and guide customers in their buying journey.

About Us

We are a content marketing agency that brings business, not just website traffic. We believe in creating useful and meaningful content relevant to your target audience. This content helps your target audience find you instead of you chasing them.

If your organisation wants to explore content marketing to bring you more business, let’s connect over a short call. Block our calendar today!

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Content marketing is really like a first date. If all you do is talk about yourself, there won’t be a second date.

David Beebe, former head of content, Marriott

Content Marketing comes in many different shapes and forms. As HubSpot remarks, there are about 12 types of content marketing in a marketer’s arsenal. Case studies, eBooks, whitepapers, and yes, even memes!

But while that is a step in the right direction, what content is the best fit for the growth stage your enterprise is experiencing will differ from case to case. Something that will work for an established industry giant will be an ill-fit for an upcoming company still in its infancy.

Simply stating content marketing comes in a dozen-odd “types” will also be a disservice. Instead, we need to explore the different formats of content marketing. This will require you to understand which format will help achieve a particular goal for your enterprise.

So, without further ado, let’s explore the appropriate route for your organisation.

Growth Stages and Relevant Formats of Content Marketing

Growth Stages

At the outset, let’s have a clear understanding of the different stages your enterprise will experience.

#1 – Childhood

Childhood will be the stage in which an organisation is innovating how a problem is tackled in the industry. We’ll further explore an example of Calendly which helps you schedule meetings professionally and efficiently in a post-CoVID world.

#2 – Adolescence

Adolescence is when an enterprise is part of a breakaway group preferred by the early adopters and early-majority of consumers. An example that we’ll explore further is Teachable, which helps you teach audiences globally by personalising content as per your brand’s unique positioning.

#3 – Adult

The adult is the stage in which an enterprise is part of a breakaway group preferred by the late majority and laggards of consumers. Examples include Adobe, Mailchimp, etc.

Formats

What content marketing options you have available to yourself for the different growth stages vary. There are essentially three formats out there:

#1 – Product-Focused

Your content will revolve around talking about what benefits consumers are receiving from using your product in this format. Examples include publishing case studies to increase brand value and thought leadership, issuing how-to guides to educate and support consumers, and sharing customer stories to generate revenue.

#2 – SEO

SEO-friendly content helps you attain domain authority and rank higher on search engine result pages. Examples include publishing informational articles on topical issues to increase brand value, sharing error-resolution content like Shopify does to educate and support consumers, and sharing different integrations your product can incorporate to generate revenue.

#3 – Original Content

This secret sauce helps you stand apart on the playing field. Original content draws in your target audience and keeps them hooked, courtesy of its inherent value. Examples include personal storytelling and tapping into industry networks to share insights and wins. These help to increase brand value and educate, and support customers. You can also share data studies that your enterprise has conducted and specific concepts you have invented like Drift did, which helps educate and support consumers and build thought leadership. Finally, you can share the results of surveys you have overseen and the actionable insights gathered from them that help increases brand value and amplify your voice.

Formats and Types of Content for your SaaS Company

Stage/Format	Product Focused	SEO	Original Content
Childhood	Customer Stories, Case Studies		Personal Storytelling, Network-based Content
Adolescence	How-to Guides, Product Updates	Informational	Data Studies, “Invented” Concepts
Adult	Product ROI Reports	Errors	Surveys

Let’s look at the examples of types of content you can publish depending upon your company’s chosen formats and relevant growth stage.

Pro tip: If you need 30 standout SaaS growth hacks to attain double the growth for your SaaS business, fill out the form below!

#1 – Childhood

Product-Focused

Customer Stories

This type of content helps you share what efficiencies your product offers to organisations in different industries. Calendly’s power lies in scheduling meetings. Take a look at how it showed its customer’s success story in this well-crafted piece.

Case Studies

A case study helps you extensively share rich information about how your company helped even an industry giant. For example, take a look at this example by Drift and how it helped Adobe build engagement across its heavily trafficked website.

Original Content

Personal Storytelling

In this approach, you guide your target audience by illustrating what worked (and didn’t work) out for you while tackling specific business situations. In an example closer to home, Concurate brainstormed and designed a lead magnet for Triangle IP and presented the results in a blog post.

Network-based Content

In this approach, you conduct honest conversations with people in your industry and discuss insights and different ways of doing things. ScanWriter helps tackle the challenges of modern fraud with cutting-edge technology. We help them host a podcast called The Future of Fraud Investigation as their marketing partner.

#2 – Adolescence

You can incorporate the strategies from the Childhood stage (except original content) over here. Let’s now discuss Adolescence stage-specific strategies.

Product-Focused

How-to Guides

This type of content hits closer to home about your core product offering. Teachable is one of the best choices for making courses online. Take a look at this blog post by Teachable on creating an online course. It gives them an advantage in sharing their ideas without the audience doubting their credentials.

Product Updates

In this type of content, you share new features that your company has launched – the latest technology you offer, how the updated design and experience helps customers get more out of your product. Take a look at this product update example from Loom, an asynchronous video-sharing platform.

SEO

Informational

Cryptocurrencies are the new-age solutions for sending and receiving money. So it makes sense to tie up the concept in content pieces that revolve around the same. Stripe, a payment processing software company, shared this article on how it is making payouts happen globally using its software. In addition to providing information about changes happening in the industry, it helps Stripe rank well on search engine result pages.

Original Content

“Invented” Concepts

Drift is an online chatbot service created with the mindset that customers want to have a conversation and not just be at the other end of a sales pitch. So they coined the term “conversational marketing,” which helped the brand scale new heights. We noted this in a previous article – Drift Marketing Strategy.

Data Storytelling and Data Studies

In this approach, your content creation will follow a storytelling approach of analyses that your business conducted across multiple factors. Concurate is a boutique content marketing agency helping medium-size SaaS businesses. As part of our work, we try to understand the best practices followed by different SaaS businesses worldwide. Whether it be Grammarly, Drift, or Shopify – we work on distilling their content marketing strategies into medium form content and explain it to our target audience.

#3 – Adult

You can incorporate the strategies from the Adolescence stage (except original content from the Childhood stage) over here. Let’s now discuss Adult stage-specific strategies.

Product-Focused

Product ROI Reports

In this type of content, you can share the potential returns on investment businesses receive from using your products and services. For example, look at this study commissioned by Adobe which revealed that organisations experienced benefits of $32.5 million over three years and an ROI of 250% by using Adobe Experience Cloud.

SEO

Errors

Mailchimp, as stated by Wikipedia, is a marketing automation platform and email marketing service for managing mailing lists and creating email marketing campaigns to send to customers. However, they understand that customers would sometimes like to tinker with technology. So, in an SEO-friendly article, they walked the customer through some common HTML mistakes that are made while sending emails. This article helps customers from making mistakes and provides a ready-reckoner piece that helps establish domain authority for Mailchimp.

Original Content

Survey

In this approach, you present a status report of how complex problems are tackled in your industry or businesses utilising your service. Your organisation achieves this by requesting specific insights through surveys. For example, popular graphic design firm Canva released a survey’s results. It showcased how different non-profits utilised Canva’s design tools to prepare their data reports. In addition, it allowed Canva to showcase that by utilising its tools, an organisation can present data-heavy content in an accessible, user-friendly, and engaging manner.

Parting Thoughts

We hope this piece provides you with actionable insights on creating standout content based on the growth stage of your SaaS company.

Concurate is a content marketing agency that brings business, not just website traffic. We curate the best original content as per your company’s requirements. If you need any help with content marketing strategy, book a call here!

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Thought leadership is the ultimate business currency.

Jack Ossa

The thought leadership approach is one of the best ways to build trust among your audience. Once you earn the trust by sharing your opinions and experience, massive brand awareness and exponential business growth follow.  

LinkedIn, company blog, email newsletter- any platform can build thought leadership. However, there is one platform that is especially suited for it.

Yes! Twitter it is. 

With 217M active daily users, Twitter is a dwarf compared to giants like Facebook and YouTube. However, Twitter’s user base comprises many influencers, journalists, star entrepreneurs, and other “elites.” They are looking for new ideas, powerful stories, and bold initiatives. By sharing your subject matter expertise on Twitter, engaging in meaningful conversations, and collaborating with other influencers, you can increase your influence.

But what is the best way to establish your thought leadership on Twitter if you are starting? What are the best practices? How do you stand out and find your writing voice? 

In this article, we will answer your questions by analyzing the strategies of 6 thought leaders on Twitter.

What is Thought Leadership

Before we move on to the nitty-gritty of thought leadership on Twitter, let’s ponder a fundamental question: What is this “thought leadership”? 

Thought leadership is sharing one’s own experience, opinion, and views on subjects they have expertise in. If you are a part of a community or industry, you probably have some hands-on experience and strong opinions. You want to express those before the right audience in different content formats. The goal is here to assist others in learning and gaining new perspectives.

A thought leader is also a great conversation opener. (S)he might start discussions and help participants gain new perspectives in the process. Think of this as collaborative communication. One party (the thought leader) starts insightful conversations, and readers enrich their opinions.  
At the same time, the audience doesn’t follow a thought leader just for the content only. They want to hear your voice, connect emotionally, and feel enriched with knowledge. So, a dash of original personality must be there.

6 Twitter Thought Leaders You can Learn From

Here are 6 Twitter thought leaders you should grow ideas from. Please note that each of them has a distinct approach. Therefore, you may not need to try all of their ideas. Instead, apply whichever you feel is better for you.

S. No.	Name	No. of Tweets	No. of Followers	Area of Thought Leadership	Frequency of Posting	Why do people follow him/her?
1	Mark Manson	7,692	337k	Self-Help	10-12 tweets/week	Polarizing opinion, unique voice
2	Ryan Holiday	16,400	472.6k	Stoicism	12-14 tweets/week	Niche approach
3	Ankur Warikoo	19,800	405.1k	Life, Startups, Financial Advice	14-16 tweets/week	Story-based thought leadership
4	Rand Fishkin	67,400	459k	Marketing, Politics	20-24 tweets/ week	Relatability, empathy
5	Shaan Puri	11,700	283.8k	Web3, Entrepreneurship	15-16 tweets/week	Contribution to community
6	Sahil Bloom	35,400	589.3k	Life, Investments, Entrepreneurship	40-50 tweets/ week	Expertise, storytelling

#1 – Mark Manson

Mark Manson is a best-selling author, veteran blogger, and well known for giving practical “tough love” life advice. His book “The Art of Not Giving A F*ck” is famous worldwide. He has over 328k followers on Twitter and an active Twitter community.

In short, he is a great example to learn from. 

So without further ado, let’s start from the bio. First, it is crisp and clear. You will know what he does right off the bat. Also, a hint of his writing voice is present in his 26-word long bio. Such strong language may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it unmistakably oozes originality. 
Mark’s tweets also reflect his hard-hitting style. He doesn’t bother much about popular opinion. Instead, he communicates what the right approach is in his opinion. Such a powerful combination of directness and thoughtfulness compels users to join.

From the number of likes, retweets, and replies, it’s evident that Mark’s audience loves to engage with those chunks of wisdom.

A good thought leadership content mix should have occasionally curated and promotional posts. For example, Mark occasionally shares links to his interviews or blog posts to promote himself as a credible authority. 

However, these promotional posts are carefully chosen. Such interviews/ collaborations cover interesting topics to Mark’s audience, no matter who the creator is.

Last but not least, Mark stays congruent. You will see bold language, a “not pulling any punches” attitude, and occasional flirting with controversy all over Mark’s profile. 

This is crucial. Many would-be thought leaders don’t prioritize congruency. If your content, personality, and opinions aren’t congruent, you might come across as “too rehearsed.”

Takeaway: Mark is a rebel in the self-help industry. Unlike mainstream self-help advice, he inspires others to accept negative emotions first. And his content supports his perspectives. 

This is the biggest takeaway here: having strong perspectives and opinions. Then, use your content to communicate and argue in favor of those opinions. It is an excellent approach for building thought leadership on any platform. 

Also, you must know what value you bring to your audience. You should point out which discussions and topics they want to hear from you. Your entire thought leadership content should be around those ideas. Even if you retweet others’ content, stick to the same subjects.  
Also, show your true personality. Share your passions, stories, enthusiasm, and vulnerabilities. Often individual quirks make thought leaders more relatable and give them a distinguishable voice.

#2 – Ryan Holiday

The previous section disclosed the importance of having strong opinions as a thought leader. However, sometimes you can take another route by carving a niche for yourself. You can focus your full attention on only a handful of topics that your audience desperately wants to know about. 

Ryan Holiday is an excellent example of a thought leader who went niche. If you don’t know him already, he is a best-selling author, a bookstore owner, and the host of the podcast “The Daily Stoic.” His name is counted among the most well-known advocates of stoicism worldwide. On Twitter, he has a massive following. 

The personal development niche is too broad. So instead of spreading himself thin, Ryan decided to be the “go-to guy” on stoicism philosophy. In this way, he attracts followers who are curious about stoicism or serious about embracing this philosophy. 

Ryan frequently tweets about different aspects of stoicism and its application. Nuggets of wisdom from philosophers of antiquity and modern thinkers are also his tweets’ most common subjects.  

Ryan, too, developed a distinct writing style of his own. He often takes a topic and breaks it down into actionable tips. However, unlike some other thought leaders, he doesn’t emphasize storytelling. 

Storytelling is just a medium to convey your value. Since Ryan has already picked his area of expertise, he doesn’t need to try hard to offer the wisdom his followers seek.     

Being a prolific blogger and author, Ryan always had a growing loyal reader base who values his content. And many of his readers have discovered him on Twitter. 

He invites his Twitter readers to join his newsletter to offer more than just tweets. 

Ryan has pinned a tweet with a link to his newsletter so that his Twitter followers can get more content inspired by the teaching of philosophers like Marcus Aurelius. 

Currently, 472k subscribers wait for their daily dose of philosophical wisdom to arrive in their emails.

More collaborations with fellow thought leaders open more doors and increase credibility. That’s why Ryan actively promotes his partnerships. Here is an example:

Austin Kleon, another best-selling author, is a thought leader in his own right. Ryan builds his authority up by associating with leaders like Austin.

Takeaway: Carve out a niche. This helps you build thought leadership by being an expert on only a few topics and catering to a niche audience. For example, Ryan’s primary expertise is stoicism, and he is known for his knowledge. However, he doesn’t deviate much from stoicism.      
Also, you don’t need to try videos, infographics, or ten other different content formats to be a trusted thought leader. As long as you provide immense value to your audience, even a minimal approach can suffice. But we also think being a good storyteller also pays dividends.

#3 – Ankur Warikoo

Ankur Warikoo, the former CEO of nearby.com, is an entrepreneur, a phenomenal storyteller, and a teacher. LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook – he has hundreds of thousands of followers on every platform. Here on Twitter, he has almost 404k followers. If you are familiar with his content, you will know that he has perfected the art of story-led thought leadership. 

So what is Ankur doing right?

First, he is a thought leader who leverages storytelling to the max. He weaves his wisdom and experiences into his tweets and presents those in his distinct comforting, and warm writing voice. As a result, his tweets always feel inspiring and uplifting. 

Ankur has a preference for writing longer content. Since Twitter has a character limit, sometimes he posts threads instead of single tweets.

He is also consistent: every Friday, a thread on a new topic, goes live. (social media platforms always reward regularity)

Ankur, as mentioned in his bio, is a teacher too. He has multiple popular courses on entrepreneurship, start-ups, and time management. 

His audience is so impressed by the value they get from those courses that they often recommend them. In addition, thanks to Ankur’s consistency and content quality, his followers are often willing to try his new courses.  

As a result, when he promotes his courses on Twitter, many followers promote those via word-of-mouth marketing.

Also, Ankur retweets whenever someone has something nice to say about his work or impact. It acts as proof of the effectiveness of his teachings and, by extension, his credibility. 

Takeaway: Storytelling is a powerful way to entice your audience. It keeps them hooked and builds a separate thought leadership identity. However, the importance of providing value can not be overstated. People follow you for your expertise, so the value stream should never dry. 

Last but not least, put an effort to come across as congruent. Post consistently, have a unique voice, and match your content with your unique tone.

#4 – Rand Fishkin

There isn’t a SaaS person around who hasn’t heard of Moz. One of the most well-known SaaS companies, the brand has thrived since 2004. Folks at Moz are among the pioneers of effective SaaS content marketing. 

Rand Fishkin is the founder of Moz. He is also one of the most respected inbound marketers globally, with 458.6k Twitter followers. 

So let’s take a look at Rand’s Twitter strategy. 

Rand checks off two fundamental traits of being a brilliant thought leader. First, his tweets are insightful and eye-opening. Second, he has a distinct voice that is clear and concise.

Most of his original tweets are about marketing and SEO. However, unlike many other Twitter influencers, Rand provides clear examples to apply his tips. 
Here is one of his tweets with a “Show, don’t tell approach” approach.

Rand also utilizes others’ content by frequently retweeting. In addition, he builds a collection of curated instructive bits of content that keeps his followers informed about their topics of interest. As a result, his followers find relevant content and save themselves hours of wild goose chasing. 

It also helps Rand to solidify his status as an authority.

He also actively promotes other influencers and businesses. Such initiatives show sides of his personality: helpfulness and empathy. And people love thought leaders who are both extremely competent and empathetic.

Currently, Rand is a part of team Sparktoro, an audience research tool. He promotes his company on his Twitter profile. However, instead of talking about how fantastic the tool is, he demonstrates how it can assist his target audience. This “show, don’t tell” approach is more persuasive than any pushy marketing tactic.

Many prefer to keep their personal moments on Facebook and Instagram only. They view platforms like Twitter and Linkedin as slightly more professional and “formal”. 

Rand is certainly not one of them. Instead, Twitter is a place where he expresses his opinions and shares his family moments and personal interests. His bio even mentions her wife @Everywhereist. 

Often thought leaders come across as a bit distant on social media. By sharing his personal life occasionally, Rand makes himself look a lot more approachable.

Takeaway:  Promoting others’ works and celebrating their successes bring more opportunities and make you look empathic. Empathic leaders are easy to approach. The image of thought leaders is a little intimidating, to begin with. Taking that edge off by showing the humane side is a good idea.  

Also, re-use (retweet) other content creators’ works. If they have something interesting, share it with your audience. You will be saving your audience hours but doing the curation on their behalf.

#5 – Shaan Puri

Shaan Puri is an entrepreneur, investor, and host of one of the top 10 podcasts on Apple, My First Million. He is known for his enthusiasm and knowledge of Web3. Even Mark Zuckerberg himself referred to one of Shaan’s tweets during an interview. Among Shaan’s other accomplishments, he sold Bebo to Twitch and currently works as later’s senior director of product. He has 283k followers on Twitter. 

In Shaan’s profile, you will see that he loves being a part of Web3 and the crypto community. He gives excellent advice and encourages others to advance Web3. 

Take his recent Tweet as an example. Shaan offered 25k to Web3 programmers and content creators to work on their projects. But, of course, the real intention is to encourage Web3 creators to build something new and exciting.

It isn’t the only instance where Shaan used Twitter to organize a giveaway or raise funds. In 2020, he raised $2.5M for his “rolling fund” with a single tweet.

In an interview with Bilal Zahidi, Shaan shared how he did it. He first tweeted about his idea and appealed to investors. Then he kept on tweeting with new updates as new investors joined in. Such hype worked so well that in 10 days, Shaan had $2.5M funds.  
Like other influential figures on Twitter, Shaan also curates content from other sources. It helps his audience find stimulating discussions on the topics they care about. Not to mention, by promoting others, Shaan creates opportunities for future mutually beneficial relationships with other thought leaders. Here is an example:

Shaan’s Twitter personality is colorful and extroverted. Sometimes he is even willing to steer some controversy. For instance, he refused to discuss the Ukraine-Russia war in his @Milkroad newsletter because he felt he was not knowledgeable enough. Here is another example of his controversial take on popular topics:

However, Shaan never gets defensive towards opposing views and critical voices. Props to him for supporting free speech, even if it comes from his critics. 
Takeaway: Be a part of the community and contribute to its growth. Also, don’t be afraid to promote your ideas before others. As long as you are purpose-driven, you will receive feedback and assistance.

#6 – Sahil Bloom 

Sahil is an interesting individual. He started as a Stanford pitcher and wanted a career in sports. Then he left the field (literally) and plunged into economics & investment. Currently he is the advisor of Altamont Capital Partners, a private equity firm. He was also lucky enough to become the mentee of figures like Tim Cook and Condoleezza Rice. 

Unsurprisingly, Sahil has many interesting stories to share. On Twitter, he wrote about these along with other things he learned. Over 581k people follow him for his investment, business, and life advice. 

Sahil is a great storyteller, and this sets him apart from others. His most popular tweets always have a few pieces of his life stories.

Such stories add emotional elements and flair of credibility to tweets he publishes. But, apart from that, stories prevent those tweets from sounding very cut-and-dried.  

Yet, like every thought leader on this list, his true success comes from his knowledge. His perspectives are well-argued and thought-provoking, no matter which platform he uses. The effectiveness of his messages reinforces his thought leader status.

Sahil retweets every time anyone adds value to Sahil’s existing tweets. Do you have an extra tip on what Sahil has tweeted? Or did you make an infographic based on one of his Twitter threads? Sahil would be most likely to retweet that.

Such strategic retweeting upgrades his existing advice and connects him with other thought leaders. In the above example, he retweeted Ankur, another thought leader we covered in this article. 
Takeaway: Domain knowledge is the most crucial ingredient of successful thought leadership. Your thoughts must be relevant, in-depth, and based on sound arguments. Also, you have to communicate your ideas effectively. That’s where personal stories are powerful.

Pro tip: If you need 30 standout SaaS growth hacks to attain double the growth for your SaaS business, fill out the form below!

Best Thought Leadership Practices to Grow on Twitter

Have a Unique Voice 

Thought leadership is not simply about being well-known. The way your audience perceives you and your opinions–only these two matter. But you can’t be known for anything if you keep your genuine feelings, thoughts, and opinions hidden. 

That’s why you need to cultivate a distinct voice. 

Take inspiration from the above-mentioned thought leaders. For instance, Ankur’s tone is friendly and warm, whereas Mark’s is direct, nonsensical, but sympathetic. You need to figure out what yours would be. 

Be a Source of Knowledge

The thought leaders act as the sources of relevant knowledge. People visit their Twitter profiles to learn from their hands-on experience, engage in enriching conversations and find intriguing pieces of content. Being a source of knowledge is the “must-have” condition for becoming a thought leader. 

But how do you become a source? 

Start by speaking your mind on the topics of interest to your audience. Challenge the status quo. Argue for your opinions. And curate exciting bits of content from every corner of the internet.  

At first, the growth might feel slow. But with time, your audience would start flocking around as long as you keep providing value and be consistent. 

Every thought leader we covered in this article does a phenomenal job at being the source. Follow their Twitter profiles for a better understanding.

Help Your Community 

Thought leaders are indeed leaders. People would look up to them for guidance, and as a result, thought leaders gain a certain degree of influence. It’s on them to utilize their influence for the progress of the community/industry. 

Being proactive about community growth is as essential as your knowledge as a thought leader. Even when you are relatively new, you gain a lot of credibility by doing something for your community.

If there is a pay gap or discrimination, fight against it. If any common practice is no longer effective, talk about it. Or you could support creators as Shaan did by offering money to NFT developers. 

Long story short, thought leaders have some responsibilities. Be willing to carry those on your shoulder to gain respect and trust. 

Be a Storyteller 

Many don’t think beyond being helpful in their quest to become influencers. Instead, they just cram their messages into sentence-long tweets. Sometimes that strategy can work, to be honest.   

However, your followers would read, engage and share your tweets regularly only if there is an emotional connection. And nothing forges more deep connections than good stories. So instead of giving dry advice, share a background story with it, and your followers will remember it far longer. 

These stories can be personal or just a narrative you picked. If a tweet isn’t enough, create a thread and write about your “aha-moments,” pains, desires, and inspirations. 

Check both Ankur’s and Sahil’s tweets if you want some inspiration. Both of them are excellent storytellers.

Go Niche 

More often than not, industries/ main topics are vast. There are too many subtopics, perspectives, and ideas. 

Take digital marketing as an example. It can be split into sub-topics such as SEO, SMM, content marketing, and email marketing. Each of those subtopics can be further broken down into many micro subtopics. 

The point is that you might not have expertise in all of those. Your lack of hands-on experience might bite your back if you try to cover it all. 

So instead of spreading yourself too thin, pick a very focused topic and create thought leadership content around it. Don’t forget to be consistent and keep providing value. After some time, you will be known for your experience in the niche of your choice. 

Here Ryan Holiday is a great example to follow. He picked stoicism as his niche and stuck to it for years. As a result, he is now known as a thought leader on stoicism. 

Engage Meaningfully with Other Influencers

Twitter is where all journalists, entrepreneurs, and other thought leaders are. So naturally, you want to connect with those whose content fits your audience’s interests. 

Start by following them and reading their tweets. If you find something interesting, don’t forget to retweet. If they are asking for assistance, reach out without hesitation. They are often open to collaborating with strangers if you come across as reliable and offer the right value. For instance, when Shaan Puri called for investors, many investors responded to him. Yet, at the end of the ten days, with the help of those investors, Shaan raised $2.5M. 

Once you know them a little better, celebrate their successes. Rand Fishkin is an example to follow here. A single tweet celebrating others’ success can warm up people and open doors for future opportunities. 

Don’t be too Heavy-handed while Dealing with Critics

You will eventually encounter critics, people with opposing views, and even trolls on Twitter. 

It’s ok to confront or even block a person if they spread rumors, hate, or misinformation. But otherwise, don’t get defensive before opposing views. Of course, share your opinions and argue civilly, but any personal attack or defensive reaction is a big no-no. Instead, allow your followers to keep that conversation going.

Let’s Wrap Up

Twitter is an excellent platform for establishing yourself as a thought leader. First, however, you have to find your voice, connect with others, and prioritize long-term goals over quick wins to achieve your goal. Also, pay attention to what successful thought leaders are doing right on the platform. 

But remember, what works for others may not work for you. So be consistent and test to find your recipe for success. If you want to know how to be a thought leader on LinkedIn, here is a detailed guide.

If your organisation wants a thoughtful content marketing strategy designed by Concurate, let’s connect over a short call. Block our calendar today!

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To become original, you have to try something new, which means accepting some measure of risk.

Adam M. Grant, Originals: How Nonconformists Move the World

Being an original is a tough act. So what are you going to create today? The easier path is to reiterate the tried and tested formats. But that’s a me-too approach and doesn’t help you stand apart on the playing field.

If you’re stuck at a dead-end, struggling to come up with the right piece of content that will draw in your target audience, and keep them hooked courtesy of its inherent value, this article is for you.

There is no one size fits all approach to being an original. Content comes in different forms. Read on to find seven approaches to creating original and engaging content for your SaaS business. In addition, you will find a how-to of the methods and actionable examples in existing SaaS businesses.

The Originals

1. Survey
2. Data Storytelling and Data Studies
3. “Invented” Concepts
4. Personal Storytelling
5. Contrarian Content
6. Network-based Content
7. Trends and Events

Pro tip: If you need 30 standout SaaS growth hacks to attain double the growth for your SaaS business, fill out the form below!

#1 – Survey

About

In this type of content, you present a status report of how complex problems are tackled in your industry or by businesses utilising your service. It allows you to cast a light on prevalent trends, outlook, and how your business provides solutions. Your organisation achieves this by requesting specific insights through surveys.

Example

Canva

Popular graphic design firm Canva released a survey’s results. It showcased how different non-profits utilised Canva’s design tools to prepare their data reports. In addition, it allowed Canva to showcase that by utilising its tools, an organisation can present data-heavy content in an accessible, user-friendly, and engaging manner.

Loom

Loom is an essential tool for hybrid workplaces. It allows you to quickly create videos of your screen and camera, instantly ready to share and watch. Loom commissioned a survey of 500 software professionals on productivity in the modern workplace and prepared a report which compiled an analysis of the survey results. This also acted as a great lead magnet!

#2 – Data Storytelling and Data Studies

About

In this type of content, your content creation will follow a storytelling approach of analyses that your business conducted across multiple factors. There will be a hypothesis about a way of doing things, an investigation, and a walkthrough of the results found.

Example

Concurate

Concurate is a boutique content marketing agency helping medium-size SaaS businesses. As part of our work, we try to understand the best practices being followed by different SaaS businesses worldwide. Whether it be Grammarly, Drift, or Shopify – we work on distilling their content marketing strategies into medium form content and explain it to our target audience.

IP Toolworks

You can even follow the approach of IP Toolworks. It aims to tackle the issue of communicating knowledge to attorneys in issuing new patents. Their software enables effective searches of past communications with the patent office.

As part of their content marketing strategy, they have built up a blog section of “Know Your Examiner.” Its purpose? “Knowing which arguments worked or didn’t work with the examiner handling your case, you can draft an office action response to work in your favour.”

Creating a standard template and utilising it with every new case keeps their original content creation cycle running effortlessly. A computer program helps scale up content creation with this approach enormously.

#3 – “Invented” Concepts

About

This type of content is all about coining new terms in your field or industry and starting a conversation around a different approach to tackling persistent problems. Coining a new word is a brilliant marketing strategy and helps you stand out from the crowd.

Example

Drift

Drift is an online chatbot service created with the mindset that customers want to have a conversation and not just be at the other end of a sales pitch. So they coined the term “conversational marketing,” which helped the brand scale new heights.

Simple and relatable as it was, “Drift popularised the term conversational marketing by pushing it through content and conversation. With time, the customers started using conversational marketing as a term. It popped up as a common phrase in the marketing sector.” We noted this in a previous article – Drift Marketing Strategy.

#4 – Personal Storytelling

About

In this type of content, you guide your target audience by illustrating what worked (and didn’t work) out for you while tackling specific business situations. It gives them a deeper understanding of the situation and a first-person perspective.

Example

Triangle IP

Triangle IP’s TIP Tool^TM democratises patent mining in a transparent way for all stakeholders. It is an intuitive and engaging platform that frees enterprises from the headache of complex IP management. The TIP Tool^TM features a drag and drop interface to manage patent mining.

Concurate brainstormed and designed a lead magnet for Triangle IP and presented the results in a blog post. From a content marketer’s perspective, this provided rich insights on how to approach a similar problem for their SaaS business.

#5 – Contrarian Content

About

In this type of content, your organisation publishes content that challenges the status quo and instead shows an alternative view to tackle industry challenges.

Example

Basecamp

Basecamp is a renowned project management tool. Interestingly, Basecamp’s team is spread out across 43 cities in 10 countries worldwide! They have upended the “standard way” of conducting business for over 2 decades. Their approach to work and hiring is unconventional. They do not care for pedigree education but on the method of doing work, and it has worked for them marvelously. People always wonder how they’re able to pull it off.

Their founders host a podcast, where they talk about alternate approaches to work lives; They have published books talking about how it doesn’t have to be crazy at work and reimagining what a workplace even looks like.

You can also publish contrarian content and provide practical insights that people will not find anywhere else.

#6 – Network-based Content

About

In this type of content, you conduct honest conversations with people in your industry and discuss insights and different ways of doing things.

Example

ScanWriter

ScanWriter helps tackle the challenges of modern fraud with cutting-edge technology. It’s a powerful fraud investigation software for government auditors and fraud investigators. As marketing partners for ScanWriter, we help them host a podcast called The Future of Fraud Investigation. With each episode, they explore the inspiring and exciting stories behind fraud investigations and how technology is making investigators’ lives less complicated. The content is repurposed and distributed across social channels such as LinkedIn.

You can consider hosting prominent industry voices on your content marketing channels and become a leading voice or a change agent.

#7 – Trends and Events

About

In this type of content, your business tries to implement and relate to the latest trends in your industry. It isn’t about fads, sensations, and gimmicks but about a long-term association with the new ways of doing things.

Example

Be on the lookout for emerging trends and devour reports by leading research firms like Gartner. Research for actionable insights to incorporate them into your content marketing strategy. For example, can your business incorporate gamification or design by taking cues from Wordle – the latest worldwide sensation? IKEA executed this brilliantly in an instance of moment marketing.

Parting Thoughts

We hope this piece provides you with actionable insights on creating your standout content. Concurate is a content marketing agency that brings business, not just website traffic. We curate the best original content as per your company’s requirements. If you need any help with content marketing strategy, book a call here.

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50% of marketers use lead magnets to capture emails, 40% don’t use them, and about 10% don’t know if they are or aren’t.

HubSpot

As HubSpot rightly remarked, a lead magnet is simply something of value you give in exchange for a visitor’s contact information.

Your marketing team would surely brainstorm and come up with a number of creative lead magnet ideas to keep the lead funnel filled to the brim. But depending on your target audience, you must wonder which lead magnets will suit your needs better.

In a study conducted by GetResponse in the year 2020 of B2B and B2C marketers deploying different kinds of lead magnets, it was found that providing tools or access to something of value scored an average conversion rate of 11.8%. Upon deeper inspection, it was found that if your target audience is B2B clientele, providing a tool or access to something of value scored an average conversion rate of 13.2%.

Challenge – Bring Leads for Triangle IP’s TIP Tool

What’s Triangle IP’s TIP tool all about?

Triangle IP’s TIP Tool democratizes patent mining in a transparent way for all stakeholders. It is an intuitive and engaging platform that frees enterprises from the headache of complex IP management. The TIP Tool features a drag and drop interface to manage patent mining.

Lead Magnet Brainstorming and Execution

At the very starting point of every patent management cycle is the disclosure of an invention. A typical invention disclosure form is long, complex, and hard to navigate for innovators. Lack of engagement from innovators in the disclosure process leads to an insufficiently filled innovation pipeline. With that in mind, the team Triangle IP had designed a simple, short, and intuitive Invention Disclosure Form (IDF) as a part of their tool to capture innovation.

As their marketing partner, we came up with the idea of creating the Invention Disclosure Form (IDF) as a downloadable resource on Triangle IP’s website. The development team at Triangle IP created Excel and MSWord versions of the invention disclosure form. Not just this, they added the functionality in the tool to read these forms. Once development finished their work, the ball was in our court. We had to attract the right audience to the website and capture leads from them.

In order to attract people through Google, we identified what people search for on Google. They were looking for an IDF template, IDF sample, fields in an IDF, ways to get more invention disclosures, etc. So we published a good number of articles related to IDF on Triangle IP’s website. We also published guest posts on third-party websites that catered to innovation managers.

We then created a landing page, a HubSpot form to download the IDF, and added it to the resources menu on Triangle IP’s website. We also embedded the IDF request form in multiple places in-between the IDF-related articles. The landing page for downloading the IDF is very minimalistic in design. A user can straightaway fill out the form on the landing page and receive the IDF. It is a simple 1-step process. The leads received were added to the HubSpot CRM deployed by Concurate. HubSpot provides rich details into every lead’s journey. How did they discover Triangle IP, which all articles they read, and on which page did they fill the IDF request form.

Pro tip: If you need 30 standout SaaS growth hacks to attain double the growth for your SaaS business, fill out the form below!

Here is the visual summary of the complete execution!

Result? Double the number of leads generated for Triangle IP. In a comparison of time periods before and after the integration of the IDF as a lead magnet and publishing of IDF related articles, it was found that the number of page views increased six times, the number of overall lead submissions increased by up to two times with the IDF lead magnet 25% of the total leads count.

About Us: We are a content marketing agency that brings business, not just website traffic. We curate the best content as per your company’s requirements and philosophy because we believe in the power of meaningful information.

If your organization wants a lead magnet brainstormed and designed by Concurate, let’s connect over a short call. Block our calendar today!

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B2B spending on social media has substantially increased in the past 12 months, and it will go higher.

CMO survey August 2021

Social media is, unquestionably, one of the most rewarding marketing tools being used by companies everywhere. While B2C companies may have a larger and more instantaneous reach through their engaging social media campaigns, more and more B2B companies are nailing their social media strategies.

Take the Live Test Series campaign by Volvo Trucks for example. The global truck manufacturer released a video featuring actor Jean- Claude Van Damme. The Double Impact star performs an unbelievable split while balancing on two Volvo trucks. The feature displayed was the stability of Volvo Dynamic Steering. This ‘Epic Spilt’ went viral and has been viewed 114 million times till date. Furthermore, it drove up the company sales by 24% the year the campaign was launched. Most importantly, it transformed the way a layman viewed a truck manufacturing company and made it very appealing. 

Another exemplary campaign was launched by Price Waterhouse Cooper titled #BallotBriefcase. The company decided to use its role of counting the ballots for Oscar to create a buzz around its brand. The ballot briefcase became a celebrity and PwC became the talk of the town. Moreover, the campaign created 136 times more impressions on Twitter for the company than ever before.

While these campaigns helped their companies to become an online sensation in the past, here are 5 B2B brands that currently created a stir on the social media platforms with their marketing stunts.

Pro tip: If you need 30 standout SaaS growth hacks to attain double the growth for your SaaS business, fill out the form below!

#1 #BossIt2021: Sage

The technology brand Sage championed the course of launching a B2B marketing campaign on TikTok and did a great job! The software company made its debut on social media via a contest on TikTok.

The company focussed on their clients and prospective customer pool, the small and medium sized business owners. It encouraged them to upload a creative video showcasing how they overcame the economic obstacles posed by the pandemic like a boss. Hence the #BossIt2021. (P.S. Coming out stronger from adversity is something to be definitely proud of and worth sharing)

The winning entry attracted a cash prize of up to £10,000 and some additional perks. The TikTok community loved it. #BossIt2021 received over 1 million video entries and 5.2 billion video views (and counting) in its first week. The company’s web page received thunderous traffic that viewed the promo video 27.7 million times. Additionally, Sage’s TikTok followers have largely increased.

They hit the ball out of the park with the choice of platform and the theme of the campaign. As TikTok is all about challenges and well placed contests are always rewarding. Sage empowered its customers and made them feel heard and supported. Moreover, they deservedly won Best Use Of Social Media, 2021 at B2B Marketing Awards. 

#2 #TeamEarth: Salesforce

Salesforce was an OG (first of its kind) in viral marketing

Alex Lieberman

From its inception, the software giant has been an active advocate of using business as a platform of change. To this date, it continues its commitment to sustainable business patterns, equity, and creative campaigns. 

Most recently, the world leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM)  partnered with Matthew McConaughey and unveiled a campaign #TeamEarth to inspire businesses to work towards a sustainable future together. 

In this video, we see the Interstellar actor donning an astronaut suit and staring in space when he suddenly realizes that the Earth is what needs our assistance. It is an indirect jibe at the meaning of the phrase ‘a new frontier’, which was originally aimed at Metaverse.

“#TeamEarth is a rallying cry we hope will inspire people and companies to use their platforms for change,” said Sarah Franklin, President, and Chief Marketing Officer, Salesforce. “Guided by our core values of trust, customer success, innovation, and equality, we are shining a light on how businesses and people can come together to build a better future. 

The video was uploaded on YouTube and was viewed 1.1. million times within the first two months of its launch. 

Salesforce and its dedication to its social responsibility resonated with the audience. The campaign was impactful and routed huge traffic to the Salesforce website. It was shared across other social media channels and created a thunderous buzz among the users. 

The smart move to partner with well-known personalities adds to the campaign’s attractiveness. An upcoming Salesforce collaboration is with Formula 1, which should add another feather to their marketing cap while generating excellent engagement with fans of a larger demographic.

#3 Virtual Background Contest: Zoom

Zoom Corporation exemplified the proverb ‘hitting the iron when it’s hot.’ With the onset of COVID-19 and the advent of work from home, Zoom saw a tremendous rise in the number of its users.

The video conferencing company made the most of the opportunity and instantly modernized its features. The company created tutorial films and flooded its social media with How-To training videos, as well as blogs and posts explaining its installations and uses.

However, it hit the nail on the head when it launched a virtual background contest. Therein it asked its users to upload a video/photo with the most creative background while using Zoom and in turn awarded the best three submissions every month. The prizes were worth the user’s time and effort, and the campaign was a huge success. 

Zoom exponentially grew into a million followers on Twitter and 116,000 followers on Instagram, driving up engagement substantially. Lead generation was a success as more than than 50,000 people signed up for the contest, and Zoom witnessed a huge rise in the number of new users.  The contest was a creative way to engage the users and get them involved with the company. The year the contest was launched, the annual revenue of Zoom grew to $2.6 billion from $623 million the previous year.

#4 Ask The Expert: Intuit Quickbooks

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Quickbooks is the world’s leading software for financial management and it is dedicated to helping small businesses thrive. When the pandemic hit, Quickbooks was quick to adapt their social media strategy. They concentrated on the most critical need of the businesses, reliable and timely information on a variety of topics at hand. 

Therefore, Quickbooks started a daily live-streamed video series ‘Ask The Expert’ wherein business leaders and health experts answered questions of the audience. The campaign was launched on YouTube and was made available on demand on Facebook as well as other social media platforms.

‘Ask The Expert’ reached 8 million small business owners and received more than 15 million views. The campaign, further,  increased the average engagement by 11.7 times. Additionally, Quickbooks received 31% more Youtube subscribers as a direct result of launching the campaign.

Along with being a reliable source, the series were informative and engaging. They provided genuine and useful content to their users. Hence, they became a marketing phenomena and went on to receive ‘Best Use Of Social Media’ at B2B Marketing Awards, 2020.

#5 Hey World: Upwork

“Upwork is a vibrant, expressive brand that’s contagiously optimistic about the potential of freelancers to solve big problems and drive the evolution of business,” said Michael Lemme, chief creative officer, Duncan Channon. “The ‘Hey World’ campaign has some fun, but is serious about the idea that talented freelancers can get stuff done for people who need stuff done, including some brands, artists, institutions and pop culture figures you know.”

Through this worldwide freelancing platform, you can hire a pro for any skill or job requirement. The company created a campaign around their freelancers and how they can get any job done, be it for NASA, the President, or Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.  

Upwork released a series of entertaining videos titled Hey World wherein they posed direct questions at notable figures and organizations, offering them freelancers for their assistance. For example, “Hey Mr President, need a social media strategist? Or “Hey Amazon, need help selling literally everything in the world?” If so, hire our freelancers. 

The campaign was launched on YouTube and was widely shared across various social media platforms in 2018. The total revenue of the company for 2018 increased by 25%, while the company witnessed a 22% increase in the number of core clients. 

The catchy phrases and playful animation appealed to the audience. Additionally, the quirky tone of the ad films added a fun element to the campaign. 

How did they do that? (Actionable Takeaways)

After studying the campaigns by these B2B companies we can surely say creativity has no limit. Whether it’s B2B or B2C, anyone can create buzz on social media with the right strategies and triggers.  Here are some actionable takeaways from these campaigns:

• Thrill and excite your viewer through your campaign
• Run contests with attractive gifts to engage with your audience
• Come up with social media campaigns that bring people together over a common cause
• Ride on the fan following for television shows/ iconic movies/ characters
• Know your target audience and choose the primary social media of your campaign launch accordingly.
• Create some major buzz around your brands by collaborating with well known personalities and organizations that appeal to your audience to tap into a wider audience
• Take into consideration social responsibility to drive people’s emotions and help them see your company as an empathetic human
• Create fun and original content

You may well have realized that a key ingredient for a successful online marketing campaign for any company is great content. We, at Concurate, strive to do just that. We curate the best content as per your company’s requirements and philosophy because we believe in the power of meaningful information. For any of your content marketing needs let’s connect over a short call. Block our calendar today!

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