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This article is the third in our Brand Roundtable series, based on a conversation between experts with rich experience of creating and curating brands from startup to scaleup, and from idea to acquisition. Here they interrogate what brand actually is and why we underestimate its influence. 

Whether you’re curating a legacy brand or engineering a new one with a new team, it’s important to know what you’re working with. So how should we define brand? How does it influence people in your organisation and outside? And what about the different types – customer brand, employer brand, investor-facing brand? 

We took these questions to our roundtable contributors, who shed the light of their expertise on the issue:

Brand is culture, values and public perception

Brand could arguably be defined as the public part of your organisation, product or service, but as Tristan explains, that goes far beyond visual identity, market positioning and PR statements:

“Brand is a customer’s interpretation of everything that builds up your business,” he says. “It might include the logo, the website, that time they spoke with you, something they saw online, the product they tried – all of this combines into brand perception.”

Nick expands on this: “It’s not just about the branding per se. It’s also about behaviour – how the company behaves, and how people behave to bring the brand to life.”

Culture and values play a crucial role in the brand, since they are effectively the ecosystem that defines how the company behaves and speaks, internally and externally. As Abeed makes clear, this is increasingly important for every stakeholder.

“Culture and values are what customers buy into,” he says. “They’re what talent buys into, and they’re what investors buy into. I’ve seen them play a bigger and bigger part in every M&A transaction.”

However, there’s a difference between the culture and values you choose and the culture and values that are ascribed to you. The measure of brand could be what customers or employees say about you when you’re not in the room, and, as Caroline points out, that is often defined by how you deal with problems and trials when they arise.

“The manifestation of a brand is holistic over all touchpoints,” she says. “If your product runs into a problem, it’s how you deal with that issue, and your values either rescue the situation or cause it to fall even more.”

The different types of brand

Consumer brand (B2C)

Consumer brand is what your customers and potential customers perceive. Nick says that here brand often depends on performance, consistency and meeting customer expectations e.g. if I open this can of Heinz beans, will I get exactly what I expect and nothing less? 

That said, culture and values are also becoming important for consumer products. 

“These days people can research more easily than ever,” says Caroline. “UK customers can see what people in Finland feel about a particular product or see how a company has acted through its history. So the values and ethics of a business are coming way more into play.”

More and more consumer products encourage people to make a values- or personal identity-based choice rather than a safe issue, especially as sustainability and social issues become more deal-breaking. Think Patagonia, Vans or Snag Tights vs Ben Sherman or M&S. 

When asked about B2C companies that are nailing their brand, a number of our roundtable contributors highlighted brands disrupting the market this way:  

“I don’t know what it is but we’re being talked about a lot more.” If I could measure that quality in metrics it would surpass anything and everything.

Caroline Macdonald, CEO and PR and marketing specialist at OggaDoon

Client brand (B2B)

In the B2B environment, brand plays a similar role but the emphasis is different. 

“The B2B environment is really a people’s business,” says Lauren. “People sell to people and buy from people. It’s also interesting how much more personal B2B business has become in recent years  – there’s more space for showing empathy, valuing the voice of the customer and sharing personal employee stories.”

Even with B2B products, such as SaaS, the team behind it matters more than with a typical consumer product. That’s often because, in the B2B world, the expertise behind the product feeds greatly into a customer’s perception of it.

Tristan recommends Weavr as an example of a B2B company with a strong brand with laser targeted positioning. They take every opportunity to promote their team’s embedded finance expertise through interviews, events and articles, and the company is emerging as an authority in their market. 

RH&Co has been working with the team over the last couple of years to create this expert-led content, and it’s been fascinating to have a frontrow seat to Weavr’s success.

Employee brand 

Faye defines brand as “a company’s story, the journey they’ve gone through and where they’re trying to get to.” 

When it comes to employee brand, it’s about creating a story – grounded in your culture and values –  that talent will want to be a part of. That’s not just a concern for larger businesses with aggressive hiring strategies, it’s an issue for any company that wants to attract values-led talent.

Among his roles, Abeed lectures at universities and says, “A lot of the graduates I see would sacrifice £10,000 or £15,000 in salary if it means they can go and work for a business that aligns with their sense of purpose.”

Investor brand 

Investors know that brand will have very real effects on consumers, clients and employees. And they know that will translate into the company’s cost per hire (CPH), their cost of acquisition (CAC) and customer lifetime value (LTV). So they’ll be on the lookout for companies with a compelling story and the culture and values to back it up. And when it comes to acquisition targets, they’ll be looking for alignment here. 

They’ll also be looking for governance. A company’s brand might be scrappy and irreverent in classic startup style, but Lauren and Abeed say they also need to grow up so that they can have bigger conversations in traditional boardrooms and with traditional businesses. 

For more thoughts on investor-facing brand, make sure you read our last roundtable discussion on the subject – how brand influences investors.

Peer-to-peer brand (P2P)

Brands can have an influence that goes far beyond products and services. If you curate a brand well, with the right values and culture at the core, it won’t just attract customers,  investors and employees… it’ll draw other attention as well. 

When Covid hit, Ultrahaptics turned their attention to their verticals – to create more focused messaging around XR, touchless experiences, and automotives. You could say they were focusing on their consumer and client brand. 

“Later we realised we needed to come back to our corporate story,” says Faye. “Because we’re not just our three verticals – we’re so much more. That’s why we’re headed back to CES. It’s not an event that addresses our verticals but it’s our chance to show who we are and where we’re going.”

When people see a brand improving their community or industry in a way they want to emulate, that’s powerful influence. If you can build this kind of reputation, it’ll have a domino effect on your how people perceive your company – investors, customers and talent. And it might ensure you leave your industry in a better state than when you entered it.  

Brand is often intangible but its effects are concrete 

Considering how broad the subject of brand is, you might wonder whether it’s worth dissecting at all. If you can’t point to brand and say ‘there it is’, how do you begin to address it? That said, the reward of effective brand building is very easy to see. 

“Brand enhances the value of the business as a whole,” says Lauren. “It affects your ability to attract talent, customers, investors, leadership and so on. Brand is an intangible asset, but it’s so vital.”

A few years ago Caroline and Nick were collaborating to promote the work of the Engine Shed in Bristol, and about four or five months after they began working together, Nick turned to Caroline and said something that stuck with her: “I don’t know what it is but we’re being talked about a lot more.”

Caroline replied, “If I could measure that quality in metrics it would surpass anything and everything.”

That’s the reward of building a strong brand. Brand has culture and values at its core, is built through company and employee behaviours, is made recognisable by its visual and articulated identity – and then word of mouth amplifies it beyond what a marketing or sales campaign could ever achieve alone. 

And as you move towards that goal, you might find yourself saying, as Nick did, “I don’t know what it is, but we are being talked about a lot more.”

For more insight into brand, see our roundtable discussion on how much should brand evolve and how brand influences investors. Or stay tuned for more conversations from our brand roundtable. 

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This is the second article in our Brand Roundtable series, based on a conversation between experts with rich experience of creating and curating brands from startup to scaleup, and from idea to acquisition. Here they unpack the ways in which brand can influence investors.

When it comes to brand, how much do investors care about? The question might seem moot to some. Surely they’re not interested in what font you choose for your typography, or the colour palette of your product packaging – and do they really mind what brand tone of voice you use? Surely it’s all about having good CAC, LTV and burn rates? 

Well, if you didn’t catch it already, it’s worth checking our first roundtable article on how much should brand evolve in the startup to scaleup journey? From our conversation there, it was clear that brand is about far more than visuals and marketing – once you reduce it down to the essentials, it reveals the essence, heart and potential of a company. 

So yes: investors do care about brand. But how much are they influenced by it? And how can you curate your brand to reassure and resonate with them?

We put this to our virtual table of brand and startup/scaleup experts:

Angel, VC and seed investors are looking at your brand holistically

“Brand is everything that a company wants to portray – everything they want to look, feel and sound like,” says Faye. “If you do brand well any employee, partner or customer will be able to tell your story to anyone else.”

That story is crucial in the early stages of seeking investment. In the past we’ve interviewed both angel and venture capital investors, and one thing they agree on is that the founding team doesn’t just need to have a good plan, they need a story they can buy into – even if, in the case of VCs, that’s a story backed up by financial forecasts.

Lauren, an angel investor herself, says, “Businesses attract investors when they spend time articulating a strong narrative which helps the investor understand their vision – and they resonate with the founder.”

For every way in which founders can strengthen a brand in early funding rounds, they can weaken it later on. Not all founders are a good fit for C-suite roles in a scaling company, particularly if they don’t have experience of running a larger organisation. 

There’s one company Lauren’s invested in that had a particularly strong brand. It spoke to her partly through the founder’s attitude, partly through the visual experience, and partly through the core messaging.

“The business’s first product is a multi-vitamin designed to boost brain productivity. The founder has been careful about how he’s brought together science, psychology and nutritional experts into the conversation,” Lauren explains. 

“The brand focuses not only on a single product to improve your health but rather a holistic approach which is represented in the brand. It encourages customers to find better mental health through a variety of approaches.”

That overarching perception is important. Investors might not care about the brand typography or the styling of a social post but they will care about the brand as a whole. 

Caroline’s PR and digital marketing agency OggaDoon has helped cyber, proptech, healthtech and eco-focused companies build towards this point, and gain the right kind of recognition – including in the crowdfunding space.

“You can’t look at the brand narrowly, you’ve got to be holistic,” she says. “Whichever areas you’re not so interested in or cause you pain, you’ve got to give most attention – because investors are savvy to all of it.”

To outgrow early-stage investment, be taller than your founders

The part that the founders’ personal brand plays in the early stages of investment can’t be understated. Nick has helped take a number of startups and entrepreneurs through the first few miles of their journey, and has seen the pull a founding team can have time and again.

“The expertise and the profile and the credibility of the founder is a real value,” he says. “So you really want to make use of that to grow the business and get investment – especially when the business is mission-driven.”

When it comes to angel and seed funding, investors are usually putting their faith more in the team – their perceived expertise, values and vision – than in the product. After all, until the product finds product-market fit, it might pivot completely.

“Particularly with B2C companies, investors will look more at engagement metrics. Effectively everything that can measure the attention on your brand. That is difficult to measure, but there are technologies that are making this possible.”

Abeed Janmohamed, M&A advisor and founder of Volando

Abeed brings his perspective as a growth consultant: “Early funding rounds are decided on a few key points – the people have a very clear vision, a presence in the room, and a direction of travel that is as clear as it can be at the early stage. And culture and values is probably the most important part of it all.”

However in later funding rounds the founders’ value can flip if the brand becomes too dependent on them. For every way in which founders can strengthen a brand in early funding rounds, they can weaken it later on. Not all founders are a good fit for C-suite roles in a scaling company, especially if they don’t have experience of running a larger organisation. 

“Often investors will say, ‘For the next stage, we need a different person leading this business’,” says Nick. “And if the business is too dependent on the founder’s personal brand, it becomes toxic and value-diminishing, and a smart investor probably won’t invest.”

How investors will measure brand

In the later rounds, gathering hard metrics becomes a rightfully obsessive part of investment preparation. So you might be forgiven for thinking that brand has a softer role to play in the conversation. However, the brand might be more measurable than you think, and certainly when it comes to employee brand.

Abeed has been an adviser in many M&A transactions and says, “Glassdoor used to be a bit like TripAdvisor for potential employees but today it’s often a defining factor in M&A transactions. People ultimately buy people, and if a company’s rating doesn’t reach a certain threshold, some buyers won’t look at it because the integration risk is too high.”

There are other metrics besides Glassdoor, and even if they aren’t quite as deal-breaking, they can still tip the balance. 

“Especially with B2C companies, investors will look more at engagement metrics,” says Abeed. “Effectively everything that can measure the attention on your brand. That is difficult to measure, but there are technologies that are making this possible.”

When Caroline helps companies going for investment raises, whether that’s with Kickstarter or multimillion pound investors, she tells them to prepare anecdotal and auxiliary evidence alongside their hard metrics.

“This could be evidence of what people are saying about you on social media or on employee feedback forms,” says Caroline. “An investor can look at these if they’re really interested in you, and it’ll add strength and colour to your brand – but you’ve got to do the work for them.”

Brand is not just an outward projection, it’s in dialogue with the people who choose to work with you – whether they are employees or clients. When you can evidence what they think, it can provide a more concrete manifesto of what your organisation stands for. 

Lauren says, “Particularly in the B2B or enterprise space, businesses should put eyes and ears across their sales cycles to listen closely to what their customers are saying. This qualitative feedback gives a business a good sense of how the brand resonates in the market.”

Investors won’t read the intangible – so write it down

Your investor brand is a culture-values issue that starts at the heart of the organisation, involves key stakeholders, and results in communication and, crucially, written assets.

“If you don’t write this stuff down it reflects back on you – particularly when it comes to M&A,” says Abeed. “There are a number of people that will say, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve got a set of values.’ But when I say – ‘Great, where is it?’ – it’s not written down or it’s buried in a PowerPoint somewhere.”

That’s not only an embarrassing situation to be in. If you don’t have an adviser like Abeed who can rescue you at the last minute, you risk damaging your company’s future.

“You might have been building a business for 10 years and finally you’ve got someone excited to buy you,’ Abeed says. “But if they then ask for X, Y, and Z and it’s not there or not there quick enough, the value of that deal gets eroded.”

For more insight into building a brand that draws investment, make sure you catch our last conversation on the startup to scaleup journey – how brand should evolve. Or stay tuned for more conversations from our brand roundtable. 

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We’re kicking off our Brand Roundtable series, based on a conversation between experts with rich experience of creating and curating brands from startup to scaleup, and from idea to acquisition. Here they answer a question: in a constantly changing business, how should brand evolve?

Nowhere outside the world of startups and scaleups do businesses change so intensely. Over time, products launch and iterate, teams reshuffle and multiply, and, as research by EPFL university reveals, 73% pivot to a different market.

With such change on a business, product and team level, it’s no surprise that brand, too, must evolve. The catch here is that consistency is a cornerstone of brand narrative. Change too much, too often, and you risk a disconnect with customers, employees and investors. Evolve too little, and you risk the same.

So where do you draw the line? How much should a brand evolve on the startup and scaleup journey? We opened up this question to a virtual table of brand and startup/scaleup experts:

Begin with audience before product

Faye describes brand as “a company’s story: the journey the business has gone through and the place they’re trying to get to.” And with businesses on the startup to scaleup journey, that narrative is constantly on the move. 

At the start, however, that journey is determined almost exclusively by the founders. Their history informs their vision, mission, and values. These then form the reason why the business exists, and what it could be for customers, team and the wider world – in other words, the brand. The product itself, if there is one, is secondary.

Problems can emerge when this hierarchy is flipped. Caroline says, “When I’ve worked with pre-startups, startups and early post-startups, there’s often a lot of focus on the engineering or the product – because that’s usually in the founding team’s comfort zone.

“But you have to consider brand from the start, because otherwise you haven’t got the initial awareness. You can have a fabulous idea but unless you present it in a way that’s going to mean something to your target market, you’re not going to progress much further.”

When a business is dependent on a founder, management-wise or brand-wise, it can be a red flag for investors. Even if a company has no plans to replace a founder, it will be seen as a risk.

This is certainly what investors will be interested in, even early angel investors and seed funders. Abeed sheds light on this: “Some products are essentially solutions looking for a problem,” he says. “Everyone talks about product-market fit but I like to flip it the other way – market-product fit is what investors will be looking at.”

Growing from a minimum viable brand

Although brand is the bedrock of a new startup, this doesn’t mean you should go ‘all in’ on it before you’ve validated your product or service. Instead, Tristan says you just need to have your ‘table stakes’.

In the early stages, he says, you need three things:

This forms a kind of ‘minimum viable brand’ which, like a minimum viable product, you can iterate as you go.

“Startups work by iterating and pivoting,” says Tristan. “Your target audience might change, or your product might, so your brand needs to be a bit reactive – and might have to change fundamentally.“

At RH&Co, this was a challenge we had to address when working with Housecure before the launch of their proptech platform. They needed a brand that could outgrow the product they were currently creating, so they settled for a strapline that spoke to their ambition as well as their launch offering: Stress-free property transactions. Broad enough so they had room to manoeuvre without needing to rebuild their brand capital from scratch if they did so.

Financially, Lauren says to be mindful what you spend on brand at this point – you don’t want to dash to TV for your hero moment if your product is still finding its feet and there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to deliver on key features.

Instead, in the early stages, most of your spend will go towards the thinking behind the brand – the messaging, the audience, the problem-solution fit – and beginning to have a conversation with your audience.

“The hero moment can come later,” says Lauren, “once you can convert that publicity into a promise you can deliver on.”

Scaling and reaching new audiences

Little advice applies forever in startups and scaleups, however. You can start quite scrappy but at some point in your growth journey you’re going to need to move beyond a minimum viable brand. The original vision, mission and values might still apply but they’ve likely matured, along with the audience and the arenas you’re playing in. 

“There’s often a tipping point when you hit product-market fit,” says Tristan. “The brand you started with might not be good enough to scale with. Or if you’re hitting new target audiences, you might need to clean up the brand for them.”

At this stage you might need to think more internationally about the brand that potential investors and employees see. Your customer audience also might become split into more nuanced personas, in turn requiring more nuanced communication. This is the time to revisit vision, mission and values, and invest more intentionally in the visual branding, the employer value proposition, the brand narrative and voice, and up-to-the-minute messaging.

Future-proofing your brand for investment and growth

Towards the beginning of a startup’s life, the founders have a, well, foundational role to play in shaping the brand. But as the business builds, team member by team member, financial year by financial year, the role of the founders should evolve like everything else. 

Nick experienced this first hand when he was growing Bristol’s innovation hub, Engine Shed. If the founders stay as the crux of the brand for too long, Nick says, it begins to get risky. 

“The profile of the founder is an asset,” says Nick. “But a growing venture needs to manage this well. There were times when Engine Shed seemed to be more about me than about the place, and it was fine to use that for a while, but there comes a point where you need to wind that back so that the business isn’t completely dependent on you.”

When a business is dependent on a founder, management-wise or brand-wise, it can be a red flag for investors. Even if a company has no plans to replace a founder, it will be seen as a risk. To future proof your brand, it has to live beyond the people who first dreamt of it.  

Future-proofing a startup or scaleup brand is impossible to achieve entirely. Markets can become volatile, audience attitudes change, and competition can disrupt your approach. But at a minimum, your brand should be future-proofed in line with your five-year business plan. 

“Whether I’m advising B2C or B2B companies, I tell people to think about where they want to be in five years’ time,” says Abeed. “If it is in more than one country, for instance, the brand needs to translate across cultures. So they need to build the business and the framework for that point, and not just for what they can see right in front of them.”

For more insight into building a startup or scaleup brand, see our thoughts on brand building, lead generation and the 95-5 rule. Or stay tuned for more conversations from our brand roundtable. 

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Why do so many marketers think of completely different things when they think of story? And why do so many get confused and miss the point? Our #EditorInResidence, Sam Whitlock, untangles the knot and shows you how brand narratives, anecdotes and tales can help you resonate with an audience.

Let’s start with the inevitable anecdote…

Approximately four and half years ago, I was dead set on joining a copywriting agency. No one was hiring in Bristol or anywhere near it, so I had to send some speculative applications. And because I was basically emailing people to pay me to write, these emails had to be damn well crafted, right?

How did the speculative email I sent to Rin Hamburgh & Co begin?

The first line started thus:

To the team at [name of RH&Co competitor]…

I was off to a flying start.

It was a copy-paste email with word-tweaks. I had sent something similar to another dozen agencies but the only email with an error on it – with one crucial word-tweak missing – was sent to RH&Co and addressed to someone else.

I noticed the error the moment I sent it, and I wrote the application off as a loss.

In the next week, only one of the dozen agencies got back to me. Rin wanted to have a chat. And a little while later, I found myself working as a copywriter at RH&Co, which was then barely a year-old company.

It was like getting away with murder but perhaps without the same level of blood guilt. Didn’t they notice I addressed my application to the wrong company?

A few months go by… I’m at some entrepreneurial award event or other, with the RH&Co gang – there were just four of us back then – and Rin turns to me, wine in hand, and says, “So… you know you wrote the wrong company name on your first email to us?”

There was a moment… and then we both burst out laughing.

In her words, all that mattered to her was that my application was “well-written”, so she decided to give me a chance – and a ribbing months later.

End of anecdote

What’s the purpose of me telling you that story? To show that we don’t take ourselves too seriously at RH&Co? To show that we value good writing over perfection? To show that we’re human?

If we made that anecdote into a video, we’d probably be unlikely to end it with a RH&Co logo and our strapline: You don’t need many words, just the right ones. Unless we were being very ironic.

I’ll tell you what it’s not: a lead gen narrative or an advert. It’s not an analogy and nor is it a precursor to a pitch that everyone needs an editor (although they do). And in case you were wondering, I don’t have any tech to sell that will stop you from making dumb mistakes in your emails.

What it is, is a story. And many brands have forgotten what that means.

The myths of storytelling

In the marketing and business world, almost everyone has a take on storytelling. Usually people speak of story as some kind of blend of common sense and neuroscience, and they sometimes elevate marketing to something bordering on mysticism.

Here are some of the lines you can stumble across out there.

Depending on who is making the case, they’ll usually throw in the thought that we’ve been telling stories since the dawn of time – back in the good old days of sitting around campfires, eating wild berries and looking for inspiration to hunt the next mammoth. 

Someone will probably say this means stories are the primordial way to do inbound marketing. Eventually someone, either a marketing guru or an ex-producer from the BBC, lays down their ace: Stories make us human.

Which is all fine and well. But then marketers draw the wrong conclusions…

Great delivery with no self-disclosure and people still won’t feel connected to you. Too much self-disclosure without the right delivery and you’ll simply sound like you’re oversharing. 

Brand narrative and storytelling are not the same

Many marketers talk about story but usually they’re talking about something else entirely.

They often talk about:

Which sounds like solid marketing practice, you’d probably agree. 

All the same though, this sounds pretty different to the kind of stories I grew up reading. In fact, I think they’re describing a different beast altogether. 

Brand narrative. 

Marketers, brand builders and consultants frequently use the term brand narrative interchangeably with story, and it gets pretty confusing.

Now, before we move on… let’s agree that brand narrative is essential for brand building. It’s core to both your consumer value proposition and your employee value proposition. If you do brand narrative really, really, really well, it can even help you disrupt a market or, as some leadership consultants tell us, transform the culture of an organisation.

But… contrary to what people on the internet might tell you, this is not the kind of storytelling that ‘makes us human.’ It’s not the kind of tale that traces its roots to the pre-neolithic age, and it doesn’t work neuroscientific-magic on the brain (at least not the kind people usually cite). 

While brand narrative is an important part of clarifying and communicating your message, no consumer or business audience worth their salt is going to lower their guard enough to let brand narrative impact their heart and soul.

Here’s why.

Stories are the property of humans, not brands

The Cambridge Dictionary definition of a story is “a description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events.” And as far as I can deduce there’s two types of ‘descriptions of events’ that fall into quite a different category to brand narrative.

  1. A human account

The first type of story – a human account – is someone’s personal, true experience of events. This is what fuels many journalistic ‘stories’ and feature articles. These are the kind of personal stories that friends exchange when they haven’t caught up in a while, or that pass down through familial generations, or that CEOs publish in memoirs. 

This type of story is powerful because it’s real. It gives an audience a glimpse of a lived experience, which in this post-modern era can often speak louder than statistics.

A human account is made more or less powerful by two factors: 

Great delivery with no self-disclosure and people still won’t feel connected to you. Too much self-disclosure without the right delivery and you’ll simply sound like you’re oversharing. 

Say the right things at the right time, like a comedian who has honed their routine, and you’ll achieve higher levels of ‘interpersonal neural synchrony’ – associated with quality communication and leadership in a group.

A brand is not a person to feel socially connected to, a brand cannot self-disclose anything that’s not good PR, and audiences are fully aware that most of the time, when a brand starts telling a story of tension, they are being sold to, subtly or not. 

  1. A story of tension

The second type of story is characterised by friction, uncertainty, and a sense that something hangs in the balance.

This is the preoccupation of novels, bio-pics, and stage magicians like Michael Weber, who first said “whoever tells the best story wins.” It’s the kind of story that has characters or players, and a conflict that propels its audience forward to find a sense of catharsis. 

A story of tension is the kind of tale that works magic on the brain. A narrative with a dramatic arc can actually release oxytocin, the same chemical that is released when your brain tells you ‘this person can be trusted.’ It’s why we can, time and time again, feel so deeply and empathetically for the fictional characters we get to know.

Really, this is the domain of art, media and entertainment, not marketing, PR and business growth. For a tale of tension to work, there needs to be a sense that something could go wrong… not a sense that a product could be revealed. 

Some companies do pull it off though. For instance, Xbox’s docuseries Power On takes you blow by blow through the good, the bad, and the ugly history of the company in a startlingly unfiltered fashion. Likewise, Salesforce’s The Shift pulls back the curtain on a few high growth companies as they try not to crash on the hairpin bends of market change. 

Here’s the thing: stories of tension are always, always, always about people. Or an animal, alien or anthropomorphic creature that an audience projects personhood onto. They’re not about ideas or products or even putting a hypothetical customer at the heart of the story (great for brand narratives, rubbish for tension), and so we come to a sticky point. 

Why brands fail at storytelling

Maybe stories do make us human but no one is going to mistake your brand for a human. 

A brand is not a person to feel socially connected to, a brand cannot self-disclose anything that’s not good PR, and audiences are fully aware that most of the time, when a brand starts telling a story of tension, they are being sold to, subtly or not. 

The 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer UK report reveals that 60% of people believe businesses only make commitments to support their marketing efforts, and their perception of the arc of your story is going to be similar. 

The presence of brand will likely create a halo effect that reduces the ability of an audience to get lost in the story and be affected by it.

But not all is lost! 

The same Edelman report shows that trust in people (including technical experts and subject authorities) is high, and that has major implications.

There’s an opportunity here for:

Individuals have the most trust right now, and they’re also the ones who sit at the heart of effective stories. They can present real lived experiences and true tales of tension, and if you can put these in front of your audience’s eyes, you’re far more likely to see emotional resonance and dramatic results.

That’s not to say you can’t give the straight sell or the brand narrative drip feed, and it doesn’t mean you can’t throw your logo and strapline up at the end of a high budget ad. All these things still have their place… but if you want to see the kind of audience connection that marketers have been trying to create with stories for years, you need to pull back a second.

Behind your brand are people. They’re the ones with a story your audience might want to listen to… it’s up to your brand to not get in the way.

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Sell the sizzle, not the sausage. It’s a (somewhat) useful shortcut that sums up the importance of focusing on benefits over features. But have marketers become too obsessed with pushing benefits? Are we risking becoming the fluff merchants that the rest of the world often dismisses us as?

The truth is that when you’re buying a sausage, you almost certainly do want to know whether it’s 65% pork or 85%. You want to know if it’s Lincolnshire or Cumberland. You may want to know if the ingredients are locally sourced, or organic, or gluten free.

All of these are features, and they’re all important.

The same goes for service-based businesses, or those in the B2B space. It’s all very well to promise that your offering will save people time, money or effort (or all three) but everyone else is promising the same thing.

If you want to get people to part with their cash, you need to be able to talk about how you’re going to do this. Otherwise, you’re just churning out that marketing fluff.

If your reader isn’t in the market for a sausage, then going on about the quality of your ingredients or the fact that they’re locally sourced isn’t really going to be that helpful.

TL:DR

Why are features important?

Buyers – of sausages and of software – are increasingly sophisticated. We have access to so much more information today than we ever have. We’ve seen marketing done well. And we’re not going to be fobbed off with vague promises any more (if, indeed, we ever were).

There’s too much marketing out there that tries to engage people in this kind of conversation:

“Hi Mx Prospect, did you know we can help increase your team’s productivity?”

“Sounds great, how?”

“By improving efficiency!”

“Yes, but how?”

“Streamlining processes! Boosting morale!”

“Sigh…”

We’re not saying you need to ditch the benefits messaging. Benefits help your audience understand how the features you’re selling will change their lives for the better. But without features to back them up, they’re too vague to get real results.

When to talk about features vs benefits

When it comes to features vs benefits, it’s important to think about the ‘when’. To keep running with a simple analogy, if your reader isn’t in the market for a sausage, then going on about the quality of your ingredients or the fact that they’re locally sourced isn’t really going to be that helpful. They’re not hungry, they don’t care.

At this early stage of the buyer journey, you do need to focus on the benefits. Paint a picture of a sunny garden, bbq crackling away, music blaring, a couple of beers and the sizzle of sauces on the grill. Better yet, go a step further and hint at the stresses of life slipping away, or key relationships being strengthened at that outdoor gathering (these are the real benefits, after all).

Now your audience is interested. Now you can talk about the features of your particular gluten free, locally sourced, 95% organic hand-reared pork sausage.

This concept is brilliantly summed up in Watertight Marketing by Bryony Thomas. She talks about the ‘logic sandwich’, which starts and ends with emotion but contains a healthy portion of meaty facts in the middle. (Whether you’re a marketer or founder, if you haven’t read it, you really must.)

A quick note about the difference between sausages and software

It’s also worth pointing out that there’s a pretty big difference between buying a packet of sausages and a new piece of software for your multinational organisation. Not least the amount the buyer is going to be spending.

In the latter case, the buyer journey is going to be an awful lot longer and more complex, with a far greater need to go beyond the fluff. Shouting about how you bring products to market faster, increase sales efficiency, or save time on back office admin won’t get more than someone’s initial attention.

What are you going to do next? How will you help your audience to become increasingly interested, to evaluate and even trial your offering? You’ll need to dig deep into the features at some point and, if you don’t, you’ll lose their attention.

By all means tie those features back to the benefits they deliver – gluten free sausage ingredients that mean little Susan doesn’t feel left out at the family BBQ, sustainably sourced pork that’s better for the environment – but don’t focus on the benefits at the expense of the features. Educate people on how one impacts the other. Give them the tools to make a good decision for themselves. 

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Lumina: a real life example 

The Lumina employee benefits platform does a great job of tying together logic, emotional appeal and specificity. Their home page (yes, we wrote it!) says this:

Great benefits don’t just look good, they do good.

Lumina brings together a curated selection of sustainable benefit options in one easy-access online employee platform. So you can show your employees you care about them, the planet and the people who live on it.

Here, in one fell swoop, Lumina summarises what their audience is buying (an ‘easy-access online employee platform’) and what makes it different to competitors (‘a curated selection of sustainable benefit options’). Plus they drive home the associated benefits: ‘show your employees you care about them, the planet and the people who live in it.’


In short, sell the sizzle but don’t forget to be clear about what makes your particular brand of sausage better than the next manufacturer’s. Tell people how you’re going to deliver the benefits you promise and you’ll take your marketing beyond the fluff.

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As a founder or in-house marketer, choosing which marketing tactics to focus on is no doubt something of a challenge. There are so many options! Each one has its merits. But will it be the right choice for your business? 

In today’s post we’re looking at blogging and trying to answer the question, “When is blogging most effective for business?” Because although there are many benefits of blogging for virtually any business, there are some situations that will benefit from a blog in particular.

TL:DR

When someone is making a considered purchase

If you’re buying a pint of milk, there’s a good chance you won’t think all that hard about it. You’ll nip into the nearest shop, decide between skimmed, semi skimmed or whole milk, pick the bottle size you want and that’s that. 

If, however, you’re thinking about buying a new laptop – or car seat for your newborn, or choosing a building company for an extension – you’re likely to spend much more time on the decision-making process.

“The more considered a purchase someone is making, the more effective a blog can be in providing the information they need to make a good decision.”

Ditto in the B2B world. As a marketing manager, you might spend a couple of hundred pounds on merch for an event without worrying too much about it. But if you’re taking on a new copywriting agency (or design agency or SEO agency), you’ll want to do a lot more research.

The more expensive a purchase is, or the more critical it is to get that decision right (remember the newborn’s car seat), the more considered it will be. And the more considered a purchase someone is making, the more effective a blog can be in providing the information they need to make a good decision.

If you’re selling a complex product or service

If a product or service is complex, your audience is likely to need more information in order to make a good buying decision than they would if the purchase were simpler. Blogging can be a useful way to deliver this information in bite size chunks that lead the reader along the buying journey from being stuck to making a purchase decision.

The important factor here is being clear about anything that your reader won’t understand. Explain the jargon. Explore the benefits. Look at options – which one would best suit which type of person or business? Remember, you need to be honest and provide as unbiased a view as possible in order to add genuine value.

Don’t be afraid to explain why your type of product or service may not be a good fit for someone. If they leave your blog post with a sense that you have provided good information, they may well recommend you to someone who is a good fit. The alternative is that you somehow twist their arm into choosing you and they end up unhappy, causing you more problems than the sale was worth.

For businesses with a long sales cycle

If you’re in sales in a business that has a long sales cycle, you’ll know how tricky it can be to get the balance of staying on your prospect’s radar without bugging them. The longer that sales cycle is, the easier it is for them to get distracted somewhere along the way.

A blog can not only help lead those prospects from one stage of the buyer journey to the next but can give you an excuse to proactively get in touch.

Imagine you’ve met someone at a conference. They seemed interested in one of your products or services. You chatted, exchanged business cards and connected on LinkedIn. This is not the time to go in with a hard sell. Instead, sharing a relevant blog post – perhaps one that you know will help them with a challenge they mentioned – will demonstrate both your expertise and your desire to help them.

Ideally, you’ll want to create a blog post for each stage of the buying process so that you have a series you can send at appropriate times. A good place to start if you’re looking to equip your sales team is comparison posts that weigh your product or service against competing options, and objection busters that answer key questions your prospects are likely to have.

Blogging can take anywhere from 9 to 18 months to demonstrate a real return on investment, so you need to know that you’re not going to give up or have your budget pulled after three months.

Where community building is important 

Even in industries such as fashion and lifestyle, where products may be fairly simple, relatively low cost and purchased more on a whim than through serious consideration, blogging can still be used to build a brand community. A number of brands do this very well, for example Fat Face, Fjallraven and our clients Tom & Teddy.

Community building blogs usually feel a bit more like lifestyle magazine articles. They build atmosphere, inspire their readers, make them feel that they are part of something bigger. You can also include posts that showcase how to use your product or service to full effect, or case study based articles that demonstrate how others have benefited from them.

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Deciding whether a blog is right for your business

If you’re still reading, it’s probably because you’ve recognised one or more of the scenarios above and you’re feeling broadly more confident that blogging could add genuine value for your business. Now it’s time to look more closely at the specifics. Because to make blogging work, you have to put in the effort.

So ask yourself…

Do you have a clear strategy?

There’s no point bashing out a few hundred words and hoping they’ll stick. A blog needs to sit within a clear strategy, with a well defined audience and at least some idea of the outcomes you want it to deliver. You need to understand what part of the funnel you’re writing to, how you’re going to track results and plenty more besides.

Are the relevant people willing to get involved?

Whether you’ll be in charge of writing the blog yourself or you’ll be managing the process – for example with the support of an internal copywriter or an external freelancer or copywriting agency – you’ll probably need support from other people in your organisation.

For example, if you’re creating bottom of funnel (BOFU) blog posts that are fairly sales oriented, you’ll want input from your sales team. If you’re heading down the thought leadership route, you’ll want to talk to your subject matter experts. After all, thought leadership needs more than good writing, it needs good thinking.

If these people aren’t likely to help, you’re going to be struggling from the start. 

Have you got / set realistic expectations?

Blogging can absolutely be a great lead generation tool. But it tends not to generate instant results in the way that, for example, a Google Ads campaign might. Blogging can take anywhere from 9 to 18 months to demonstrate a real return on investment, so you need to know that you’re not going to give up or have your budget pulled after three months.

The results we’ve generated for our blogging clients

As with any marketing tactic, there’s no guarantee that a blog will generate the results you hope for. We don’t believe in promising a 10x on leads because there are just too many factors involved. But we do know that with the right strategy, blogging can make a huge impact.

Tom Riglar, Co-founder of app development agency, Morrow, has been working with us to produce thought leadership and sales blogs for the last year.

He says: “As experts, we really know our stuff but struggle to communicate that expertise to the outside world. Rin and her team have transformed the way we tell our story.

“Content marketing is a long term strategy but we’re already benefiting from an increase in the quantity and quality of leads, better brand awareness and a clearer focus on who our prospects are.”

At healthcare startup Blueheart, we used SEO blogging to increase their website traffic from 5,000 to 30,000 visitors per month within the first six months of working with them.

Camiel Roex, their Head of Growth, said: “Organic visits are the most stable part of Blueheart’s acquisition funnel… RH&Co helped us generate massive results over a span of a few weeks, and that’s just from the increase in traffic on the blog.

“We can run a full content marketer’s job in one hour a week instead of 20 hours. And we don’t have to hire someone full-time, which is important for a startup.”
If you’d like to talk more about whether blogging is right for your business – and what type of blog will generate the best results – get in touch with us today.

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What’s more important for B2B businesses: brand building or lead generation? 

Naturally if you ask a PR agency, they’ll say brand building and if you ask a performance marketing agency, they’ll say the opposite. Some will say you need both, but what does that mean for your marketing plan’s time and budget? What does it look like in terms of ratios? 60:40? 80:20? 50:50?

The answer will depend on many factors: your audience, your market, your growth stage, and the nature of your product or service. If you were looking for exact percentages, I’m afraid you won’t find them here or anywhere else (unless that place is trying to sell you PR or lead generation). 

Instead we’ll give you some food for thought on what your priorities might be. But first, some definitions…

TL:DR

What is lead generation?

We don’t really need to define lead generation, since it’s pretty self explanatory. Lead generation gets you leads.

It’s the world of Google search ads, social media ads, banner ads on websites, landing pages,   – anything that can push people over the line to make a purchase then and there – or at least give some contact details so you can follow up with email campaigns or direct sales outreach later.

It’s also worth talking about growth marketing here. This is a relatively new term that encompasses a data driven, experiment-based, performance model that essentially prioritises lead gen. It experiments to find the optimum spend for different marketing channels, so that new businesses can acquire as many customers as possible for as little cost as possible.

“Ultimately brand building should shift how people think and feel about and towards a brand for the better.”

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What is brand building?

Brand building is a bit more nuanced in terms of what it is and does. 

Strictly speaking, anything that your business does to get noticed for the right reasons can be considered brand building. This makes it something that goes beyond the marketing department and into the remit of product design, customer service and even some aspects of HR.

Lead generation and brand building definitely overlap, especially when it comes to content. But there are tactics that lean more towards brand building than led gen, such as:

Ultimately brand building should shift how people think and feel about and towards a brand for the better.

Which one gets results?

It’s pretty easy to measure how effective lead gen or growth marketing tactics are and prove their effectiveness.

You host a webinar and get 100 emails for your sales team to follow up on. You put money behind a LinkedIn campaign and get a dozen demo requests. These numbers can be tied fairly easily to the bottom line.

There’s a catch though – not all leads convert. Many companies throw loads of money at lead gen and see middling results. Either because they don’t get quality leads or they don’t have the content they need to nurture those leads once they get them. So it’s not as simple as more lead gen spend = more sales.

With brand building, attribution is far less obvious though. It’s unlikely that a football-loving Head of Procurement will see your brand’s logo on their team’s strip and immediately feel the urge to do business with you.

But what if your team sponsorship builds a positive feeling towards your brand in that Head of Procurement’s thoughts? And what if later they’re trying to choose between you and a close competitor? It may well be what pushes them over the line. You’ll never be 100% sure though.

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The 95-5 rule of B2B marketing

The problem with B2B marketing is that only 5% of your target audience is likely to be actively looking to buy at any given time. The other 95% may well be interested in the future but not yet. This is the 95-5 rule, which came out of a recent study by Professor John Dawes and the B2B Institute.

It’s not like selling haircuts or manicures, where a pay-per-click campaign can quickly redirect someone searching for ‘manicures in Bristol’ to make a booking at your new salon. B2B buying decisions often involve an audience that doesn’t understand what you do, a product that they won’t need for two years, or a service with such a high price tag that people will conduct serious research before they commit to any kind of decision.

That means it’s potentially more important for your B2B marketing activities to build a positive impression of your brand rather than just attempt to generate a lead then and there. That way you’ll be able to engage the 95% as well as the 5%. And done right, you won’t just create a positive impression, you’ll create trust.

FURTHER READING: Reinventing the buyer’s journey: introducing the RH&Co content marketing framework

Long term vs short term marketing

Brand building will introduce you to a wider audience so that when they’re searching for solutions in one-to-five years, you at least make the shortlist. 

But sometimes, you can’t wait that long. You need your product launch in three months time to hit the ground running; you need cash flow to cover the costs of your new hires, or you need to get in front of your early adopters so you can begin to build brand momentum. Here lead generation is your friend.

Once you have that traction, brand building can help sustain it. For many B2B businesses, referral partners are an important source of leads. Brand building fuels the conversation with these key contacts, creating brand advocates from people and businesses that lie outside of your direct target audience. 

Brand building can also increase customer lifetime value. You’re far more likely to renew your contract with your design agency if they’ve just won a prestigious award, for example. You’re also more likely to recommend them to others in your network. 

At Rin Hamburgh & Co, the overwhelming majority of our business comes through referrals, recommendations and ongoing clients. If we turned off all our lead generation taps tomorrow, there might not be much difference. Intriguingly, that’s exactly what happened recently with Uber, Airbnb, P&G, eBay and a whole long list of household names who decided they were through with performance marketing.

Creating a balanced marketing plan

So, back to our original question – how do you decide where to allocate the most time and budget when creating your marketing plan? 

Well, as Peter Drucker said, “Long-term results cannot be achieved by piling short-term results on short-term results.”

If your company is in its early growth stage, you probably need to prioritise short term results so you can get some momentum going, keep the bills paid, and sprint to the next funding round. Lead gen might do you wonders, and stop you from getting distracted by vanity metrics. Your blog can play a vital role in attracting and nurturing those leads too.  

But if your organisation is struggling to qualify leads, catch the attention of bigger clients, or needs to stand out as an authority in your field, you’ll want to focus more on brand building. 

For the best results, try to do both, dialling one or the other up a notch as the needs of the business evolve. Taking the long term view of a brand marketer and combining it with the results-focused mindset of a lead gen marketer plus growth marketing’s experimental approach is a powerful strategy that will take you far.


For more insights into how to split your marketing budget, check out the business benefits of blogging – and how to sell them to your boss.

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As a marketing manager, you know that creating and maintaining a good, effective blog for a business isn’t easy. It takes time, thought, skill and budget. You also know that the business benefits of blogging absolutely outweigh the costs – but getting your boss on board is another matter.

Here’s a refresher to help you state your case – with metrics you can track to help demonstrate the return your blog will be able to generate for the business.

TL:DR

1) Driving traffic to your website

There are many places we can create and host content these days, from social media to publishing platforms like Medium. These all have their advantages but there’s a key problem – you’re not in control of those platforms. As Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, says: “Don’t build your content on rented land.”

Because your blog sits on your website, you’re in control. It also makes it a great tool for attracting visitors. This can be done in different ways (e.g. via search, social media, or direct outreach) and is useful for a number of reasons, not least of which is that the more people you attract to your site, the more people you are likely to convert in some way.

What to track: Look at which page your website visitors land on first. If the percentage arriving through your blog increases, you know it’s doing its job attracting people to your site. You can also set up Google Search Console to show you which blogs are attracting the most visits from different keywords.

2) Improving your website’s SEO

Even if your primary means of attracting people to your blog is via social media, publishing blog content on your website will improve your site’s SEO in a number of ways:

What to track: There are lots of ways to judge how successful your content is for SEO, from where you rank for a given keyword to the volume of organic traffic you get.

3) Creating a source of content for your social media channels

A blog is foundational content, giving you something you can share and repurpose to engage with your audience across your social channels.

Think about this article, for example. It wouldn’t take all that much work to turn it into a series of social posts, each featuring one benefit. This could take the form of a visual carousel on Instagram, for example.

You can draw out and share a single quote or statistic, use the premise of the blog to pose a question for your audience, or link it to a sales message. And you can mix up the formatting too, recording the key message in audio or video form.

What to track: To showcase how your blog supports your social strategy, you could track how much time you spend creating social content, as well as engagement levels.

“Blogging isn’t just about generating lots of attention at the top of the funnel – it’s also about helping to close the deal once your audience is further along their buyer journey.”

4) Converting traffic to leads

According to DemandMetric, companies that blog get an average of 67% more leads than those that don’t. Wherever a particular blog post is positioned in terms of the buyer journey, it can help your audience move one step along with an appropriate call to action.

If your audience is still unclear about their problem – what the RH&Co blogging framework calls ‘in the dark’ – you would start with softer CTAs encouraging them to read another post, sign up to a newsletter or follow you on social media.

Later, you might suggest that they download a piece of even more valuable content in return for their email address. And by the time you get to the ‘almost ready’ stage, you can step your CTA up and recommend that your reader books a demo, contacts your team or buys your product.

What to track: Think about which metrics are most important to you. This could include newsletter sign ups, lead magnet downloads, demos booked and so one.

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5) Supporting your sales team

Blogging isn’t just about generating lots of attention at the top of the funnel – it’s also about helping to close the deal once your audience is further along their buyer journey.

Bottom of funnel content includes objection busters and process posts. As an example, we have a post titled How can you blog for my business if you’re not an expert in my subject?. We know this has helped several marketing managers get buy-in from their boss in order to bring us in to work with them.

Bottom of the funnel content can be shared on social media but it’s particularly effective when used proactively by your sales team to help convert leads into sales.

What to track: It’s rare that a blog post will close a deal in isolation so your best bet here is to get qualitative feedback from your sales team. They’ll be able to tell you whether they’re getting good results from the content they’re sharing.

6) Establishing expertise

The best way to convince someone of a business’s expertise is to demonstrate it. A blog is a platform on which to showcase the knowledge your subject matter experts have.

Blogs that help establish expertise include educational and problem-solving ‘how to’ posts – backed by real life examples and insights from subject matter experts that add weight to your writing – and opinion-filled thought leadership. Over time, creating this kind of original blog content will establish your brand’s expert reputation, building trust with your audience.

What to track: This is a much harder one as a) it’s just not that easy to quantify expertise and b) it’s a longer term strategy. Some indicators of expertise, however, could include press coverage, invitations for speaking engagements, and backlinks (which in turn is great for SEO).

7) Attracting talent

This one might not be on your radar but it’s a super powerful benefit, especially in competitive employment markets like tech. 

If you’re on a recruitment drive, your blog can be a great tool for broadcasting your company culture and values – and how they play out in real terms. This not only makes you more attractive to the right people, but can weed out the wrong ones before you get started on the CV sifting.

What to track: This is another tricky one to get definitive numbers for but, if you link culture posts to CTAs directing the reader to a careers page or job advert, you can set click throughs as a KPI. That said, don’t dismiss the qualitative data – several of our clients have had candidates referencing the blogs we’ve created for them in interviews, so listen out for that. 

One final business benefit of blogging

The great thing about blogging is that it has a cumulative effect. It won’t quickly go out of date like a social post, or need to have more money ploughed into it to keep it generating results like PPC. 

Once you’ve pressed publish, it’s there for good. And as you publish your 10th blog, you will still be getting traffic from your first, with no additional effort.

Of course, generating this kind of value does rest on being committed to blogging as a long term strategy. You may get some results from publishing a handful of posts and then stopping but blogging isn’t a quick fix.

Online marketing guru Neil Patel says you need to give it at least 6 to 9 months, while Joe Pulizzi – who founded the Content Marketing Institute – writes in his book, Content Inc, that it’s more like 12 to 18 months.

So when you’re presenting your marketing strategy and looking for sign off on a budget for blogging, be sure to set the right expectations. But have confidence too. Blogging is a hugely powerful tool that will generate demonstrable results in time.

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Recently, we wrote a blog post on why content is still king, despite it being 25 years since Bill Gates first penned the essay that inspired the saying. Sure, marketing is a fast moving industry powered by one technological advance after another. But the fundamentals that make content such a valuable tool in any marketer’s arsenal remain the same.

What has changed, as we discussed, is the competition. According to Hubspot, 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing, with 24% planning on increasing their spend in this area. Visit the Worldometers website and check out how many blog posts have been published today alone.

So as a marketer or business owner, how can you create content that stands out today, in 2022 and beyond? 

Be genuinely valuable

This is the cornerstone of content marketing and what makes it different from advertising or any other type of marketing. It’s about giving your audience something they want or need, whether that be a thought provoking insight, a way to solve a problem, or help choosing between two similar products.

Yes, content needs to ultimately deliver a return for your business but you can’t have that in your mind when you conceive it. You have to put yourself in the shoes of your audience. What do they need? What are they trying to achieve? What are they struggling with? What will reassure them?

Be unique 

What is it that you can say to your audience that is different to what your competitor might say? How can you weigh into the debate and add your voice, your experience, your knowledge, your expertise?

There is a place for foundational content that covers the basics. But even this needs to bring something unique, even if it’s just the voice or personality you bring to the content that makes it distinctive to your brand.

Be strategic

Don’t just write about stuff you think is interesting. As we’ve already said, your starting point needs to be what your audience thinks is interesting. But you need to go beyond even that, first understanding where they are in their awareness or buyer journey.

Are they literally in the process of making a choice between you and a competitor, or are they still not even really sure of what their problem is? You need to understand this so you can serve their most pressing need, and also decide what you want them to do next and then give them instructions in a well crafted CTA.

Be joined up

Producing content in and of itself is not especially helpful. You need to set it within a broader content strategy that considers a) where your audience is coming from and b) where they’re going next.

Have you thought about SEO or your social sharing strategy? Will you be delivering content via an email list or as part of an outreach programme? Do you have the next piece of content ready to feed your audience once they’ve consumed the first piece? Remember, this is a journey, a trail of breadcrumbs rather than a single transaction.

Be consistent

If you think you can pop out the occasional blog post or video and then sit back and let the leads roll in, you’re going to be very disappointed. Content isn’t a quick fix, it’s a strategic channel that needs you to stick with it long enough for you to see the results.

It takes at least 6-9 months for content marketing to start delivering significant results, according to SEO and digital marketer Neil Patel, while Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, says it’s more like 12 to 18 months.

If you can get all of these factors right, you will be well on your way to creating content that your audience genuinely loves. And if they love it, you will pretty much inevitably see that love translate onto your bottom line.

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Every business owner and marketing manager knows that content marketing is a powerful way to build brand awareness, establish credibility, reach potential customers and clients, and ultimately increase leads and sales. What they frequently don’t know is how often they should be creating and sharing content in order to get results.

In a sense, the answer is easy: as often as possible. After all, the more times you can appear on someone’s radar, the more chances you have of convincing them that you’re worth doing business with. 

Not everyone will be ready to buy your product or service the moment they first have contact with you. Even once they enquire, statistics show that 63% will still take at least 3 months to make a purchase. So creating regular, strategic content keeps them moving along the buyer journey and helps you stay front of mind so that when the time comes, it’s you they turn to. 

But since “as much as possible” is not an especially helpful answer, we’ve broken down some of the elements you need to consider when setting your own particular content goals. By the end of this post you should be more confident in creating a content schedule that will work for you.

TL:DR

What do you have capacity for?

Are you a sole business owner wearing all the hats? A lone marketing manager juggling all the channels for an SME? Or part of a team of 30 content creators? The answer will have a big impact on how much content you can realistically produce.

Quality original content takes time and effort to create. It’s likely to take you several hours to write a well researched, high value blog post, for example, not to mention the time it takes to source images, upload it to your website and so on.

If you’re using a professional to help you create that content then you will be limited by your budget. But don’t forget that your time has an associated cost too, not just in terms of what you’re paid but the value you could be adding elsewhere in the business if you weren’t creating content.

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Don’t prioritise quantity over quality

Some people get so fixated on quantity that they lose their focus on quality. There’s no point doing a Facebook Live every single day if you haven’t really got anything to say. Far better to do one once a week and really add value for your audience.

Likewise, don’t spread yourself too thin when it comes to content types and channels. If you’re trying to write articles for LinkedIn, take photos for Instagram, prepare talks for Clubhouse and think of witty soundbites for Snapchat all at the same time, you’re going to burn out quickly.

Plus, does your audience really need all of that? And are they really on all of those channels? Choose one or two content types or channels to focus on, experiment to see where you get the best results and keep iterating so that you direct your attention to the most successful ones.

There’s a difference between “create” and “share”

We use the phrase “create and share” a lot but it really should be “create or share”. Because not all content that you share needs to be created by you. Think about when you read an interesting article in the news or watch a great TED talk and then share the link on your social channels. That’s you getting your brand out there without having to create anything from scratch, except for a few words to caption the post.

These low effort content wins are actually incredibly powerful because they help develop a rounded image of your brand. Rather than constantly pushing your own agenda, by sharing news and views from other businesses and people (ideally tagging them when you do), you’re both adding value and showing you’re connected with your industry or your city. 

You can do this from a company page as much as from an individual one. The main thing is to think about what your audience will find valuable, and then go and source it. Does your audience enjoy humorous memes or inspirational quote cards? Would they appreciate being updated on the latest industry research? Go find it for them! 

Rocks, gravel, sand – an analogy

Now let’s bring that all together. Think about your capacity as a vase. Work out how many rocks you can fit in there. The rocks are what we at RH&Co like to call foundation content. This might be your blog, for example, or a YouTube channel, or a newsletter, or a podcast. You’ll put the greatest effort into making sure whatever you choose is super high quality and packed with original thought. 

Next, you want to start adding gravel. This gravel is the repurposed content that can be chipped off the rocks you created. Snippets and quotes and top tips, which can be produced without a huge amount of extra effort. One ‘10 top tips’ blog post can easily generate 10 individual social media posts, for example. Or you might draw out an interesting quote or statistic from a video and share it as a visual. 

And then you can add the sand to fill the gaps. This might be low-effort original content such as a micro post on Facebook or a quick Instagram reel. Or it might be that curated content that you can share without having to input much of your own beyond a couple of introductory lines.

Prioritise original content that will last

Creating content is a great way of getting in front of your audience, adding value, developing your brand reputation and showcasing your expertise. The more you can do, the better – but be realistic about what your capacity is.

Prioritise a manageable amount of foundational content and make sure it’s exceptional quality. As a sole business owner you may only be able to do this once a fortnight – any less and you’re just not to get momentum. Once a week is better, if you can, and if you have the budget or in-house resources then you might consider more.

Then repurpose as much as you can, add low-effort original content and curated content from other sources. It shouldn’t be hard to get 3-5 posts out each week this way. Remember to keep it regular, and don’t give up too easily. It can take six to 18 months to get a content marketing strategy delivering consistent high results. But the results will come.

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