Content

Content That
that Converts
Converts

Digital Marketing Strategy

that Drives Sales Growth

©SOMAmetrics 2021
 Table of Contents
Executive Summary
First Thing First – What we Know about Buyers
Three Fundamental Buyer Types 7
Gain Maximization Vs Loss Prevention 10
Aspirational Identities 10
Adding Them all Up 12

Marketing in the Era of the Digital Buyer

Challenges that Growth Marketers Face 14
Technology: Both the Problem and the Solution 16
Marketers Have a New Mandate: Drive Growth 17

Why Content Coverts

What We Mean by “Conversion” 19
What the Research Tells Us 19

Marketing Strategy in the Digital Era 21

Creating Compelling Content That Converts
The Anatomy of Compelling Content 26
Defining the Audience 26
Researching the Audience’s Environment 27
Storytelling From the Point of View of the
Audience 28
Design as Visual Storytelling 28
Getting the “Hand Raise” 30
Add it All Up: It’s Expensive 30
The Creative Content River 32
Next Steps 34
About SOMAmetrics 35
 Executive Summary

In his 1996 essay titled “Content Is King”, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates discussed
the potential for the internet to give rise to an unprecedented amount of interactive
content that would have a huge impact on how companies generate revenue.1 This essay
turned out to be prophetic—all marketers are well-aware that content continues to reign
supreme today.

As Gates predicted, content is the key ingredient for a

successful marketing strategy in the digital era. No matter
what you’re selling, the easiest and fastest way to reach
your customers is through digital content.

This is partially because opportunities to reach potential customers through in-person

events or phone calls are few and far between in today’s digital world. Instead of relying
on these outdated pathways to generate leads, content is the best way to reach potential
buyers where they’re already searching for solutions.

To complicate matters, marketers have a new mandate from CEOs: Drive revenue
growth. Creating content for the sake of simply increasing clicks is not enough to deliver
on this new goal. To be successful, content creation must be motivated by the goal of
converting prospects to sales by creating Conversation Ready Leads (CRLs).

As the name suggests, CRLs are ready to reach out and start a conversation with sales.
Executive Summary
 They have done their research, read your content, considered
their options, and have placed your company on the shortlist
of vendors they will contact. This is the key metric to track
as you build a marketing strategy that is focused on driving
revenue growth.

The metrics of the past—like Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), for example—
formulated marketing activities as a cost center rather than a revenue generator,
which is counterproductive to marketers’ new mandate of driving growth. Instead
of tracking the marketing activities that generate cost, marketers should focus on
metrics that prove their value to their company and build their strategies around
those metrics.

In this paper, we will explain how to accomplish

that by creating content that converts prospects
into sales. We start with the basics by detailing
what we know about buyers—their priorities,
buying habits, and goals. With this foundational
knowledge, we then discuss the new challenges
marketers face in the digital era and the rationale
behind their growth mandate.

Next, we discuss why content converts to sales and how to design a content strategy
based on that information. We then provide you with an actionable marketing
strategy to increase your CRLs in the digital era. Then, we outline the process of
creating high-quality content that will convert readers to sales.

Executive Summary
Finally, we discuss the issue of cost. Creating high-quality content in-house is expensive
and requires a long-term commitment to hiring full-time employees, which is too much
for most marketing budgets.

We introduce a solution to this issue: the Creative

Content River™, a subscription-based content creation
service that cuts your costs and increases your growth.

Subscribe

Read on to discover how reframing your approach to content creation can accelerate
your growth rate.

Executive Summary
Content That Converts

First Thing First

– What we Know
about Buyers
Content that Converts

Three Fundamental
Buyer Types
The first thing to know about B2B buying habits is that they will inevitably be
influenced by the habits of the individuals making these purchasing decisions—and
not all buyers are the same. Depending on a variety of factors, like their background
and life experiences, different people have vastly different buying habits. Most people
fall into one of the three categories below. 2

In a B2C context, we have the following types of buyers:

1
Spendthrifts
This group of consumers doesn’t need a lot of convincing to make
a purchase. They are willing to make purchases without much
thought, compared to other buyers. They don’t feel the need to
save and often make purchases impulsively.

2
Average Spenders

This group is in the middle of the road. They think through their
buying decisions and purchase what seems appropriate. For
this reason, they need more convincing than spendthrifts to
make a purchase and can be influenced by facts and emotional
messaging.

What We Know about Buyers 7

3
Content that Converts

Frugalists
Frugalists would rather save than spend. They avoid the pain
of spending their money by keeping it in a savings account
for as long as possible. This group is less likely to respond to
marketing messages, preferring to decide for themselves what
they think a product should be worth.

In a B2B context, we have their parallel counter-types, but from a

business perspective:

Visionaries (or Early Adaptors)

Are constantly looking for a significant competitive

advantage, a capability that does not exist yet, a “game
changer” that nobody else has. Improvements have to
be in order of magnitude (5X, 10X). Cost is not the priority.
They are willing to accept projected ROI. Perceived gain
always outweighs risk in the buying decision.

Pragmatists (or Early Majority)

Take pride in being rational, practical, and objective in

their decision-making process. They accept change
as inevitable but do not precipitate it, and they don’t
believe in “game changers.” They look for demonstrable
incremental improvements, case studies, and quantifiable
ROI. Cost is not the primary concern, but it is factored in
the ROI calculation.

What We Know about Buyers 8

Content that Converts

Conservatives (or Late Majority)

Hate to change unless forced to so due to regulation,
customer demands, obsolete products, etc. They do not
believe that things get better. In fact, they really believe
that things are getting worse, more complicated, harder
to use, and expensive. Cost and brand are everything. They
typically buy the cheapest of something they already use
all the time.

Who is your buyer?

All three of these buyer types will

react to your marketing messages
differently, which means that it is
valuable to understand which buyer
type is most prevalent in your target
market.

What We Know about Buyers 9

Content that Converts

Gain Maximization Vs
Loss Prevention
To add another layer of complexity to our understanding of buyers,
we must make the distinction between buyers who prioritize
maximizing gains and buyers who prioritize minimizing loss.
These are two fundamentally different approaches to purchasing.

For B2B buyers who seek to maximize their gain, their greatest fear is missing out on
something that could have increased their company’s growth rate. They are quick
to adopt new products and technologies and are keen to stay at the forefront of
innovation in their respective fields. Think “Visionary Buyers”

B2B buyers who prioritize loss prevention, on the other hand, are more cautious
when it comes to purchasing new products. They fear wasting resources on anything
with an uncertain return on investment (ROI), which means they will take more
time to thoroughly research and vet a solution before deciding whether or not to
purchase. Think “Conservative Buyers”.

Pragmatists are somewhere in between, trying to make “logical” tradeoffs between

gains and losses, in the hopes of maximizing gains while minimizing losses
simultaneously.

Aspirational Identities
The final thing to keep in mind is that buyers are people, too—they aspire to improve,
which we call their “aspirational identities”. With this in mind, it makes sense
that they will be more responsive to a product that can help them achieve their
aspirational identities.

What We Know about Buyers 10

Content that Converts

Aspirational identities include achievement, competence, networking, security,

autonomy, and being nurturing. Each person may have more than one, but typically,
there is one that is strongest.

In a B2B context, roles can give us some indication. For instance CEOs or those in
Head of Sales roles tend to be very achievement oriented, while those in HR tend to
be more nurturing, and those in Finance/Accounting tend to be more competency
and security minded.

Connect
John Doe
Job Role: CEO of a B2B Company
Specific identities include: achievement,
networking, and autonomy.

Whether it’s a pay raise, a promotion at work, or even just the confidence boost
of purchasing the best possible product for their company’s needs, buyers are
motivated on some level to seek opportunities for personal and professional
growth. These growth pathways will lead them to achieve the aspirational vision of
themselves they have in their minds.

On the other hand, buyers are also motivated to purchase the right product out of
fear of the consequences of choosing the wrong product. Making a bad purchase
decision can have negative consequences for them in the workplace, and will
negatively impact their progress toward achieving their aspirational identity.

What We Know about Buyers 11

Content that Converts

Adding Them all Up

Taken together, these facets of buyers’ behavior and motivations for purchasing a
product form the groundwork for an effective B2B marketing strategy. These are the
key elements to remember as you design a strategy for reaching buyers on a logical
and emotional level to convince them to purchase your product.

For instance, in the tech world, startups should market more to visionaries, while
established first should go after the pragmatists since they have more data to
demonstrate efficacy of their products. Those that have been in business a long time
can also sell to conservatives, since this group has heard of their name by now and is
comfortable buying from them.

While it might be tempting to think of buyers as motivated purely by rational

considerations, the reality is that these underlying emotional and psychological
biases play an important role in the decision-making process.
Keep this in mind as we discuss marketing strategies in today’s era
of rapid digital transformation.

What We Know about Buyers 12

 Content That Converts

Marketing in the Era

of the Digital Buyer
Content that Converts

Across the board, most industries require marketing services—from the biggest
tech companies in the world to the locally-owned restaurants in your area, most
businesses rely on marketing in some way. But marketing is constantly evolving—in
today’s digital world, marketing strategies are expected to drive business growth,
which presents new challenges.

Challenges that Growth

Marketers Face
While they may serve different industries, marketers in various roles face many of
the same challenges. Marketers face increasing pressure to demonstrate the efficacy
of their strategies in terms of key performance indicators (KPIs) such as bringing
new prospects to sales and increasing customer retention. This is a challenge for
3

marketers who are used to measuring their performance with other metrics, such as
clicks or open rates.

Plus, to implement a successful growth marketing strategy, marketers must be well-

versed in a range of areas. These include social media, content development, data
4

analytics, SEO, media buying, sales support, and many more—all falling under the
umbrella of “marketing strategies.” With so many competing priorities, marketers
must decide which activities will most effectively serve their goals and continuously
develop their expertise in those areas, either by learning or hiring to fill knowledge
gaps. 5

Some challenges facing marketers were accelerated by the effects of the COVID-19
pandemic, such as stay-at-home mandates. With more people working from home,
marketers had to speed up the digital transformation that has been underway for
years. They increased their use of new marketing technologies to accomplish this,
6

but these technologies come with their own challenges, as we will discuss in-depth
in the next section.

With all of that said, not all marketers have the same
experiences—different roles come with different expectations.

the Era of the Digital Buyer 14

Content that Converts

Next, we will discuss the unique challenges that face certain

marketing roles.

Heads of Marketing
To successfully lead a department and inform its
strategy, marketing department heads must develop
specialized knowledge in a variety of areas. While
5

knowledge is valuable for any marketer, it is particularly

important for department heads as they lead initiatives
and make business decisions. They must draw on their
knowledge to develop strategies that foster growth and
accelerate digital transformation, even with a limited
budget.

Marketing department heads must constantly improve

customer experience and personalization, identify and
acquire the right technologies, and prove the ROI of their
strategies, all while speeding up the time-to-market. 6

Successful department heads are prepared to meet

these challenges, even as they increase over time.

Product Marketing Managers

As you can tell from the title, product

marketers work at the intersection of product
development, sales, and marketing, a unique
position that comes with its own difficulties.
Product marketers struggle with organizational
alignment—they must anticipate uncertainty
regarding which department is responsible for
deliverables at various phases of the process.
7

When it comes to product marketing, managers

have to build a strategy that engages prospects
and converts them into customers. To achieve
this goal, they must constantly build their
knowledge of the latest technologies and trends
in buyer behavior, which is time-consuming.3

the Era of the Digital Buyer 15

Content that Converts
Channel Marketing Managers

Many marketing departments increased

investment in new channels in response to
the COVID-19 pandemic, which presents a
challenge for channel marketing managers. 8

On one hand, with access to more channels,

channel marketing managers can expand their
reach to more potential customers. But this
also increases pressure on these individuals to
deliver growth across an increasing variety of
platforms, which can be challenging. With a
wealth of data available across various channels,
successful channel marketing managers must
use that data effectively to positively impact
business outcomes. 9

Technology: Both the

Problem and the Solution
Emerging marketing technologies have been hailed as the fastest, easiest way
to maximize productivity and deliver on your marketing goals. However, with
technology evolving and changing constantly, the pressure is on for marketers to
acquire the latest technologies and use them effectively and get ahead quicker than
the competition.

To complicate this issue, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies have
cut their marketing budgets to help keep their businesses afloat during these
challenging times. According to Gartner, nearly 60% of marketing technology leaders
expected moderate to severe cuts to their marketing technology (Martech) budgets
in 2020. 10

With artificial intelligence tools and the automation of certain marketing activities
increasing in popularity, marketers employ these technologies to ensure that their
companies stay competitive. However, marketers only use 58% of the full breadth of
their Martech stack’s capabilities. So, even as demands for technological innovation
10

have increased in volume, marketers struggle to implement these technologies

effectively.

the Era of the Digital Buyer 16

Content that Converts

On the surface, emerging technologies promise to simplify and expedite marketing

practices. In reality, they pose new challenges for marketers in terms of acquisition
and implementation.

Marketers Have a New

Mandate: Drive Growth
As we pointed out earlier, it is increasingly important for marketers to demonstrate
the ROI of their strategies and their impact on business outcomes. To be considered
successful today, marketing must demonstrably drive business growth.

According to a recent McKinsey survey, 83% of CEOs expect

marketing to be a major driver of business growth. 11

It’s no longer enough to simply generate leads or track metrics that aren’t necessarily
correlated with business growth—today’s marketers have to focus on growth-related
metrics and outcomes.

Fortunately, the accelerated digital transformation during COVID-19 has made

data about the effectiveness of marketing practices more accessible. With buyers
spending more time researching products online, they generate more readily
available data that marketers can use to evaluate their strategies. With that data,
marketers can architect strategies that drive revenue growth. And those strategies
start with content.

the Era of the Digital Buyer 17

Content That Converts

Why Content
Coverts

18
Content that Converts

What We Mean by
“Conversion”
A “conversion” occurs when a visitor to your company’s website completes an action.
Depending on their company’s goals, marketers might define this differently—some
marketers consider a conversion to have occurred when a prospect fills out a contact
information form or signs up for a service.12

In this paper, we take it a step further than that. We consider a “conversion” to

mean that a potential customer has learned enough about a company to start a
conversation with a sales representative. Filling out a form is only the starting point.
To deliver on their new growth mandate, marketers must align their goals with
sales—which starts with conversions.

What the Research

Tells Us
How does this work in practice? What makes content convert to sales? What is the
secret recipe for high conversion rates? These are the fundamental questions on
every marketer’s mind in the digital era.

Based on the increasingly important role content plays in the decision-making

process, these are the right questions for marketers to ask. A survey of B2B
executives found that 67% of respondents reported relying more on content in 2020
than they did in the past to inform purchasing decisions. 13

Plus, 77% of buyers reported spending more time researching purchases in 2020. 14

These statistics make sense in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic—without

opportunities for in-person sales interactions, buyers are looking for other ways to
inform themselves about products. As the majority of buyers spend more time with
vendor content, content becomes even more important to decision-making.

Why Content Coverts 19

Content that Converts

This means that informative and high-quality content is the key to increasing
conversion rates. Buyers want to see B2B vendors demonstrate their understanding
of their industry through their content.

To achieve this, one survey reports that 47% of executives

recommend that B2B vendors should use more data and research
to support their content. 13

It just makes sense—well-researched content that accurately represents the

challenges facing buyers today will provide valuable information to support the
decision-making process.

Beyond industry needs, buyers also want to see that vendors can address their
specific needs before they contact sales. For this reason, 76% of buyers expect more
personalized attention from providers based on their specific needs. In terms of
14

content creation, this means that marketers must deepen their understanding of
their customers’ needs and build their content strategy around that understanding.

Why Content Coverts 20

Content That Converts

Marketing Strategy
in the Digital Era

21
Content that Converts

At this point, we’ve established that marketers must deliver growth in the digital
era and that they can accomplish this through high-quality content. Now it’s time
to architect a strategy to put this knowledge in motion. Below, we provide three
actionable steps toward building a marketing strategy that delivers revenue growth.

Step 1: Grab Attention

Before you can start moving your prospects toward contacting sales, the first step is
to reach those prospects in the first place. This is where your advertising messages
come into play. Most likely, potential buyers are encountering your company for the
first time through your advertisements—and it’s important to make a good first
impression.

The traditional form of advertising is one that displays a pre-formatted ad to a

targeted audience over some media. We call this form “passive” advertising since it
shows the ad in the hopes that someday, when the prospect has a need, he or she
remembers the brand (due to repeated impressions) and takes action. Or, if we are
lucky enough to to catch the prospect who has a need today, he or she actually acts
on that advertising (which is highly unlikely)

The other advertising strategy is intention-based—the ad is displayed when the

prospect is searching for information on a similar topic. This is how Google Ads and
YouTube ads work.

This form of advertising is more effective at getting Conversation Ready Leads in

the present time frame because it catches them at the time they are intending to
explore a new option.

However, both types of ads have their strengths and weaknesses. Traditional ads
as in LinkedIn ads have more options to target the audience more precisely—both
demographic and professional data. Google Ads dont provide much in the way
of targeting the audience, at least not to the same extent. However, as we have
indicated above, Google Ads enable you to “catch the prospect in the moment”.

The ideal ad strategy is to combine both and use them where their strengths are: use
traditional ads for long term brand building, and Google Ads/YouTube ads for current
quarter CRL conversions.

Marketing Strategy 22
Content that Converts

Step 2: Acquire
The goal of your advertising messages is to drive potential customers to landing
pages, where they can enter their contact information to receive content, thereby
giving you the opportunity to continue to market to them and someday, convert
them into a CRL.

However, just because they click on your ads doesn’t mean they will fill out a form,
much less become a CRL. There is lots to do still.

If the message on the landing page turns out to be different from what they
expected, visitors will leave without filling out the form to download the content—
which ends up lowering your conversion rate while increasing your costs. It is critical
to make sure your landing pages are consistent with your ads, and that your mobile
landing pages are highly optimized for mobile conversion. Remember, many of your
prospects search on their mobile devices—if they click, go to your landing pages, and
find it too confusing or too much, they will abandon and you will pay for the click
without getting any benefit.

Your focus should be on conversions, not clicks.

This is something B2C marketers understand completely, while many B2B marketers
are still catching up. With fewer clicks that lead to more conversions, your cost per
conversion lowers—which is a good thing.

Step 3: Convert
Once your prospects have made it to your landing page and shared their email
addresses with you, your job is far from over. To get the most out of your leads, you
have to separate the promising leads from the rest and nurture them effectively. This
will encourage them to start a conversation with sales.

But your leads will not always be upfront about their personal information, preferring
to protect their true identities out of fear of a barrage of irrelevant emails flooding
their inboxes. With this in mind, there are three potential “buckets” for your leads to
go into:

23
Content that Converts

These are exactly the right leads we want. Send them the
next nurture email so they are on the content experience
Bucket 1 path we designed for them.

These are not the right leads—we know that. Let them
download their white paper and…the workflow stops
Bucket 2 there.

We don’t know whether they should be in Bucket 1 or 2,

because we don’t have definitive information.
Bucket 3

Bucket 3 includes those who provided vague information about their role, such
as simply “VP” or “Manager”, leaving us wondering which department they serve.
Marketers should use automated strategies to address this issue and let the
prospects further self-identify.

The goal of this strategy is for marketers to take full accountability for delivering
prospects who are ready to start a conversation with sales—also known as
Conversation Ready Leads (CRLs). By taking on the full responsibility for this phase of
the process, marketers forecast their contribution to revenue growth, and deliver on
this commitment.

Marketing Strategy 24
 Content That Converts

Creating Compelling
Content That
Converts

25
Content that Converts

The Anatomy of
Compelling Content
With so much content out there, how do you ensure that yours stands out and
successfully converts readers into customers? Creating content that converts is
all about understanding your audience and their needs, and incorporating that
knowledge at every step of the way. To make it easy for you, we will go through each
stage of the process of creating compelling content below.

Defining the Audience

The first step of creating content that converts is to define who, exactly, this content
is for. This is where buyer personas come into play.

From Marketing Michelle to Sales Simon, these catchy—and often

alliterative!—titles describe the ideal customers for a specific
company.

The buyer persona is an important tool to help companies focus on their target
customers and understand them better. The best way to develop your buyer
15

persona is through a combination of research, interviews, and surveys of your

customers and prospects to collect data on your target market. 15

Creating Compelling Content 26

Content that Converts

Using that data, you can start to identify things that your customers and prospects
have in common, and build personas based on those commonalities.

Researching the
Audience’s Environment
Now that you have a solid understanding of your personas as individuals, it’s time to
turn to the business side of things. To successfully create a buyer persona, you should
research the pain points of your target market’s industry. Even if these challenges
don’t directly align with your company’s offerings, they’re still an important aspect of
your buyer persona—this information can inform how you approach your marketing
campaigns. 16

To start, marketers can inform themselves of their buyers’ industries by conducting

independent research online. Reading up on the latest industry reports, surveys, and
content will give you a good idea of the general challenges facing that industry.

To better understand their individual challenges, you should be

asking your customers questions like: 16

• What are your biggest pain points?

• What roadblocks are hindering your success?
• What problems is your company trying to solve?

In a B2B context, to create a truly useful buyer persona, you have to understand
both their individual aspirational identities, and their role identities—and create
one integrated and complete persona profile. It must describe the person and the
challenges he/she faces in a professional capacity and what solving that challenge
means for that persona—again both personally and professionally.

Creating Compelling Content 27

Content that Converts

Storytelling From the

Point of View of the
Audience
At this point, you’ve developed your buyer personas and the value of your product is
crystal clear—to you as a marketer, at least. Now you have to translate that value to
your audience.

The whole point of your marketing efforts is to reach customers and convince them
to buy your product. To do this, you must explain the big idea of your product in a
way that is both informative and engaging to readers.

It is important to understand that, at least in the beginning, prospective buyers

don’t care about a vendor’s products. They only care about their own problem and
finding a solution for it. All storytelling has to happen from the prospective buyer’s
perspective—which is why it is critical to understand them first.

Design as Visual
Storytelling
Let’s talk about the visual impact of
your content. Design is not just about
making
content look nice (even though that’s a
plus!)—it can also be a useful storytelling
tool. Visual storytelling is an established
marketing strategy that can involve
charts, graphics, photos, and videos to
convey a story to an audience. 17

Creating Compelling Content 28

Content that Converts

In conjunction with the story you’re telling through the copy of your content, visual
elements can serve to further illustrate or emphasize a point. Take infographics, for
example. As the fourth most popular form of content marketing, B2B marketers’ use
of infographics has been on the rise in recent years. This is most likely because of
18

their ability to effectively communicate information in an aesthetically appealing and

easily shareable way, which is the goal of all content.

But creating well-designed content is more than adding individual visual elements
to act as decoration—it’s about the impact of the content altogether. Marketers
should be aware of how all of the visual elements come together to help tell the
story.

For example, choosing the right images is crucial

to visual storytelling.
Ask yourself:
• What emotion does each image convey?
• Does this suit the big idea of the paper?
• Does it help move the story along?

The white space between words is another

important factor—
• how dense is the text?
• Is it easily readable?

All of these design choices must be made with

thoughtful intention to maximize your content’s
impact on readers.

Creating Compelling Content 29

Content that Converts

Getting the “Hand Raise”

No matter how well-researched and impeccably designed it is, content can only
take a prospect so far. You can only address your prospects’ pain points to a certain
extent through your content alone—the end goal is to encourage members of your
audience to want to know more about your product, and eventually to contact sales
for a demo or more in depth, customized conversation.

However, getting your audience to convert from passive readers into active
prospects is a process that requires subtlety. Buyers don’t like feeling like they’re
being sold a product as they consume content, with 43% of respondents to a recent
content preferences survey advising vendors to curb their sales messages. 13

Instead, to drive growth, vendors should focus on creating trust—in your competency
and integrity. First be of service and value, then ask for the meeting. That is how
sellers stand out from the pack in digitally crowded market space.

Add it All Up: It’s

Expensive
There’s one crucial element of the content creation
process that we haven’t discussed yet: cost.
Creating high-quality content doesn’t come cheap.

Creating Compelling Content 30

Content that Converts

To summarize, there are several steps involved in content creation, including

researching your target market and their industries, writing and proofreading the
copy, creating designs, and finalizing the content as a whole for distribution.

To accomplish all of this in-house, you’ll need a minimum of three full-time

employees—a Senior Writer/Content Manager, a Junior Writer, and a Graphic
Designer—apart from digital marketers or marketing program managers. Each of
these employees presents a long-term cost to your company, which all adds up to
more than the typical marketing budget can handle.

So how do marketers keep up with their content needs without spending through
all their budget on just content creation? More importantly, how can they show
results quickly so they can show they are a revenue generator, and not a cost-center?

Creating Compelling Content 31

Content that Converts

The Creative
Content River
At this point, we’ve established the central
conflict of this paper: Marketers need high-
quality content to convert prospects to sales
in the digital era, but creating that content is
both expensive and time-consuming. Most
marketing budgets aren’t adequate enough
to hire the full-time employees necessary to
create all the content needed.

How do growth-minded marketers reconcile this conflict?

The reality is that marketers don’t have to generate content in-house. All of the
elements of content creation—including researching, writing, designing, and
proofreading—can be fulfilled by a trusted partner company. Simply subscribe to
the level of content creation you need and manage deliverables using Service Level
Agreements (SLAs).

You might already subscribe to a variety of services, like a music streaming platform,
for example. Subscriptions are valuable in part because they are flexible—if you don’t
need them anymore, you can cancel at any time. But subscription-based content
creation takes it a step further in terms of customizability. Companies can subscribe
to receive the amount of content they need, and nothing more.

A subscription model for content creation enables you to spend more time on your
company’s core strategic functions. The ROI is clear—a subscription will save you
55% to 58% of the cost of a team of full-time employees, as well as 6 to 12 hours each
week you would have spent managing and motivating the team. With the time and
money you save using a subscription service, you can devote more resources to the
competitive differentiators that will drive your company’s growth.

With all the extra time and resources you’ve freed up, you can focus on building a
strong core team of marketers that know how to grow demand. Your core team can
then use subscription-based content to feed their marketing campaigns.

The Creative Content River 32

Content that Converts

To put this game-changing strategy into action, the Creative Content River™ is the
ideal solution for any company seeking to maximize growth through its marketing
strategies. SOMAmetrics has assembled a strong team of researchers, writers,
editors, designers, project managers, email and social media marketers, and SEO/
web specialists who are prepared to dive into your industry and create high-quality
content on a schedule that works for you.

We start by fully understanding the key persona we will be targeting, developing

these personas in detail, and defining the content experience for these personas.
Then, we deliver a wide variety of content weekly to feed our clients’ demand
generation programs. Our contracts are month-to-month and clients can cancel
anytime with a 30-days written notice, although most of our clients are with us for an
average of two years.

The Creative Content River™ is ideal for any company looking to transform their
marketing department into a revenue generator. With access to a wealth of
compelling content that converts, you can accelerate your marketing cadence and
reach more customers than ever before at the lowest marketing spend.

Next, we will provide you with three easy steps to get started with
the Creative Content River.™

The Creative Content River 33

Content that Converts

Next Steps
Here are three easy steps you can take to try out the Creative
Content River™.

1 2 3
Look for a project you Let’s outline a two-month as Take our 20% Welcome
haven’t started yet— that a trial project, with a set of Aboard discount to
you have been meaning deliverables that will get you lower your risk. That’s a
to get to, but never found going on this project. When 20% discount for each of
time or resources to get you are ready, please click those two trial months.
going. Or, a project where here to schedule a time for
you feel you are falling us to discuss.
behind and could use
some help getting back on
track.

If you love the Creative Content River™—as we know you will—

then we will continue with the service until you cancel. We will just
invoice you the standard rate after your two-month trial is over.

I truly hope you found this paper useful.

I would love to hear your feedback and thoughts at eskinder@somametrics.com.

Wishing you all the best,

Eskinder Assefa
CEO | SOMAmetrics

Next Steps 34
Additional Resources
Additional Resources

Fixing a Broken B2B Sales Model

The solution is not more outbound calls and emails, but smarter
marketing that works.

Fundamentals of B2B Sales that

Don’t Change
The fundamentals of B2B sales have not changed. Customers continue to
want to minimize risks and maximize gains. The way we sell, however, is going
contrary to this principle, turning off buyers. It’s time to realign with buyers.

Creative Content River

Create decision-enabling content that converts. Information is what buyers want
before making any buying decision. Digital content is how they consume the
information they want to make the right decisions. Here is how you build the
content experience journey for them.

High Growth Lead Generation

Playbook
This playbook will show you how to build highly-effective demand generation
and lead generation engines that deliver high quality leads that convert and
drive sales growth.

35
Content that Converts

About SOMAmetrics
SOMAmetrics designs and executes its proven 7-step high quality lead generation
programs to deliver more leads that close faster and at higher rates.

We have worked with nearly a hundred companies, from startups to Fortune 500
companies, spanning a number of industries including Healthcare, Financial Services,
Education, Local and State Government, Data Center Services, Manufacturing, SaaS, and
more.

Our deep experience enables us to learn our clients'

selling environment quickly and deliver world class
digital marketing and lead generation services faster
and cheaper than what it costs our clients to do in
house.
We obtain superior results because we are deeply committed to the Principle of SOMA,
“Sales Optimization and Marketing Accountability”.

The key to optimizing Sales is to make Marketing accountable for consistently delivering
high quality leads that close faster and at higher rates so that Sales can consistently hit
revenue targets.

Our Creative Content River™ and Digital Marketing Services enable our clients to focus
on developing effective strategies, while leaving the execution to us—a partnership that
improves performance while reducing costs for our clients.

The Big Idea of the Creative Content River 36

 Endnotes
1 https://medium.com/@HeathEvans/content-is-king-essay-by-bill-gates-1996-
df74552f80d9
2 https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/other/buyer-types/
3 https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/analysts-answer-what-challenges-
will-product-marketers-face-in-2020/#:~:text=The%20biggest%20challenge%20
that%20product,technology%20purchase%20and%20implementation%20decisions.
4 https://www.talentidgroup.com/top-5-challenges-marketing-managers-face/
5 https://www.leadspace.com/challenges-for-the-director-of-strategic-marketing/
6 https://www.languagewire.com/en/blog/marketing-challenges
7 https://www.bostonproducts.org/blog/2015/09/03/6-product-marketing-challenges
8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/shamahyder/2020/05/05/these-are-the-biggest-
marketing-challenges-facing-brands-in-the-age-of-covid-19/?sh=1a2c97751265
9 https://go.forrester.com/blogs/channel-marketing-pain-points/
10 https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-11-11-gartner-says-
nearly-60--of-marketing-leaders-expect-m
11 https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/
marketings-moment-is-now-the-c-suite-partnership-to-deliver-on-growth
12 https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/conversion-rate-optimization-guide
13 http://e61c88871f1fbaa6388d-c1e3bb10b0333d7ff7aa972d61f8c669.r29.cf1.rackcdn.
com/DGR_DG121_SURV_ContentPref_March_2020_Final.pdf
14 http://e61c88871f1fbaa6388d-c1e3bb10b0333d7ff7aa972d61f8c669.r29.cf1.rackcdn.
com/DGR_DG129_SURV_B2BBuyers_Jun_2020_Final.pdf
15 https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/conversion-rate-optimization-guide
16 https://blog.hootsuite.com/buyer-persona/
17 https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2020/03/visual-storytelling-examples/
18 https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/visual-content-marketing-strategy