For many businesses going abroad is a challenge. Antti Pietilä, CEO of marketing automation software company Loyalistic, and his guest Jos Schuurmans, founder of digital marketing consultancy company Cluetail, talk about how reaching the international audience can be made easier by using content marketing.
This blog is based on my answer on Quora.
For small and medium-sized businesses, typical pitfalls are often quite different than those of larger businesses, especially in business-to-business operations.
In such SMB B2B context, content is often produced by substance experts, not professional content writers, as such a content requires deep expertise. At the same time, smaller organisations seldom have budget for a full time content creator who is both professional in the subject as well as in content production, and such skills are almost impossible to find from freelancers or agencies. Sure, not all B2B content requires an expert, but most do. As experts are often well educated, learning to write is a lot easier than turning a writer into an expert.
If your content team consists of substance experts, not professional content writers, the pitfalls are as follows.
We just got back a couple of weeks ago from SaaStock 2018 in Dublin, Ireland where we had a chance to listen dozens of keynotes from world's leading Software-as-a-Service leaders, thinkers, doers and financiers, and share thoughts with fellow entrepreneurs, marketers and CTOs.
Should you be interested, if SaaS is not your line of business? Very much so. If you want to see the future of B2B sales, marketing and growth, there it is.
If SaaS is your line of business, you can skip straight into what were the key take-aways, was it worth it, and are we going back in 2019?
For the last 20 years, I have been working with leading companies in both B2C and B2B in sales and marketing: consulting, designing tech solutions etc. I have read over 500 business books, wrote over 200 blog posts about customer loyalty and worked with the best consultants, tech and agencies in that space.
Then a few years ago when we started building our own product, I wanted to learn everything I could about how to succeed in SaaS business.
As the founder and chairman of The Finnish Software Industry and Entrepreneur Association's (Ohjelmistoyrittäjät ry) SaaS club, I have followed quite many Software-as-a-Service companies and entrepreneurs over the last 8 years, seen many to succeed, and many more who haven’t. So what are the biggest mistakes I have seen? This post is based on my answer to that question on Quora.
Although the question was about SaaS companies, my answer may be relevant to you as well even if you are not in SaaS business.
Oh boy, the amount of mistakes a SaaS company can and will make are numerous. The really successful ones must have made thousands of mistakes, and navigated through them the most to get to the top. The faster you grow, the more mistakes you are likely to make, as decisions have to be done at high speed with very limited information. It's a small wonder they even survive.
But one might argue these are not mistakes, but experiments, and the purpose of a startup is to learn fast. To learn fast, you have to experiment a lot and fail fast.
However, let's forget the variety of mistakes and zoom into the the topic of biggest mistakes. And these mistakes are made early on while the foundation is layed.
Potential customers won't make the action you desire unless you ask them to.
That means that every piece of content or marketing material should have a clear call-to-action (CTA in short), a desired action you want a customer to make.
But what kind of CTA, where, how many and what are dos and don'ts of CTAs... That's what I will cover in this post, so read on!
