iconiContent is Aaron Orendorff
Ann Handley
Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author and Founder of MarketingProfs
B2B content exists for a single purpose: the funnel, the whole funnel, and nothing but the funnel.
Strategy goes beyond writing and editing to permeate your brand with a persuasive, clear, and authentic message: yours. How you tell your story — as well as where, when, and to whom — is just as important as your story.
After all, your audience doesn’t care about you. They care about themselves. That holds true across verticals and channels — from SaaS products to agency services.
(Note: to honor privacy, clients and companies associated with those results cannot be publicly identified. Anonymized dashboards may be provided prior to the start of new engagements after NDAs have been enacted.)
Morgan Brown
VP of Growth at Shopify and Author of Hacking Growth
Nothing like a good buzzword to get the mouth watering and the mind swimming.
For all its hype, content marketing is built on a simple principle: add value to your audience’s lives and add it for free.
Product-agnostic media — articles, podcasts, newsletters, landing pages, videos, etc. — that serves the heads, hands, and heart of a brand’s target market.
Persuasion experts call it reciprocity. Regular humans call it goodwill, trust, and karma.
By targeting your audience, identifying their (not your) genuine needs, and then meeting those needs. Real help on real topics for real people.
What stops most businesses from engaging in effective content marketing is (1) a lack of outside perspective — thinking like sellers instead of customers — and (2) time — crafting readable, engaging, SEO-friendly content is hard, consuming work.
But here’s the thing: in truth, those two barriers are really just symptoms of a deeper disease … and a higher calling.
The power of content resides not in its direct ability to sell, although it can. Truly great content — the kind that drives leads into and through your funnel — galvanizes an audience through a consistent story well told.
One with people not products at its center.
That might sound a bit theological, but it’s the most visceral way to write copy and create content about your audience instead of you. Self-centeredness is a plague: branded content that screams branded.
At the opposite extreme is content for the sake of content — feeding the beast for no greater purpose than, “We’re supposed to make content, right?”
Business results come from content that above all rescues its audience from their fears, struggles, and pains.
Brian Clark
Copyblogger Founder & CEO
Want to get started? Outstanding! But first …
My team and I normally have room to take on one new client a month — sometimes not even that. What’s more, one-off jobs are productivity killers.
It takes time to get to know, set baselines, and then deliver results on your content marketing goals.
Please reach out if you are comfortable with:
(Oh, and yes … I do C-level ghostwriting that’s already appeared on publications like Harvard Business Review, Wired, and Internet Retailer. But don’t tell anyone.)
Plus, I also do “vanity” ranking — just ask Google about accounting for ecommerce. or go search for the benefits of hawthorn berries in tea and the best recipe.