I cofounded Morning Brew in 2015. Since then, the content landscape has transformed into an even more competitive arena. The cost of paid acquisition has skyrocketed. Content differentiation has become harder than ever, especially when AI can write generic posts in seconds.
The result is a sea of sameness — 101-level blog posts, cringy trade show booths, outreach emails offering free AirPods if you listen to a pitch, and aggressive marketing drip campaigns.
So, how can you stand out in a world of limited attention and high demand? Marketing teams need to build trust and provide their audience content with real value. You can make that happen with an ICP-focused content demand engine.
I’ll explain the exact process we run at my new business, storyarb, to build audience, establish trust, and drive demand for high-growth B2B businesses.
How to Craft a Content Demand Engine
Step 1: Define your market of one.
Start by asking yourself, who is your market of one? This is similar to your ideal customer profile (ICP), but even more specific. Envision a real, individual person who needs the product or service that your company offers. Then ask:
- What are their needs?
- What challenges do they face?
- How can you provide them with something truly valuable?
As the chairman of storyarb, my market of one is Bruno Estrella, head of marketing at software company Clay. When I write our content, I think about what topics would be interesting to Bruno and what he needs to know to advance in his role.
Step 2: Find the smartest people in your industry.
Once you’ve worked to understand your market of one, it’s time to start thinking about who that person might want to learn from. Ask yourself, who are the smartest people in your industry? Who are the subject matter experts, or SMEs, whose advice would be most valuable to potential customers?
If you’re not sure where to get started, I’ve found that there are four common types of SMEs:
- Current employees.
- Current customers.
- Prospects.
- Industry thought leaders.
Of these types of SMEs, current employees and customers are generally the easiest to work with, while prospects and in-demand industry thought leaders may be trickier to access. That said, all four can provide helpful insights that can serve as the backbone of your content offerings.
Once I have a list of SMEs, I begin outreach and schedule recurring interviews. I ask these experts what’s at the top of their minds and any helpful how-tos that other marketers should know. I gather quotes and paraphrase their top tips, which leads to the next step.
Step 3: Create your content.
I’ve already heard from experts in my field, gathering helpful advice that my audience can’t get anywhere else. Now, it’s time to maximize. I turn each SME conversation into a long-form piece of content. Ideally, this will be a playbook that readers can emulate to drive success in their business.
To drive demand for my playbook, I tease the content in our weekly newsletter. I can even follow up with the same SME for newsletter-exclusive insights. Then, I move to social. Posts can be shared by your company’s official social media channels and the relevant executives’ personal channels.
The content creation stage of your demand engine takes the most time and requires the most creativity. You’re in search of substantial insights that you can turn into several pieces of content.
Everything short form — from newsletter mentions to social posts — should tease these learnings and point to the long-form content on your website. When readers get to your site, they will have gotten so much value from the content that they’ll check out the product-related pages of your site and convert into pipeline.
Importantly, I’ve found that you don’t need a lot of infrastructure to get started. At the most basic level, you just need a blog, a way to capture email signups, a newsletter, and social media accounts.
What Great Content Actually Looks Like
Once you’ve set up this basic infrastructure — as well as some analytic tools to help you map your content development efforts to actual leads — you can get started. In this section, I’ll share the three types of content that power any content demand engine.
The Long-Form Playbook
The long-form playbook is your anchor. Drawing heavily on insights and quotes from the SME you’ve interviewed, I recommend structuring this piece of content as follows:
- Section one: A brief description of a specific goal or challenge that the SME faced.
- Section two: An overview of how they’ve overcome a challenge or accomplished a goal.
- Section three: The process. This is where you can share the SME’s step-by-step path to success, including detailed information about how they execute their game plan.
- Section four: The result. What was the outcome after they finished the process you just described?
- Section five: Key learnings. This is the meat of your playbook. It’s where you share the non-obvious, timeless learnings that the SME took away from their experience. It’s also helpful to highlight the takeaways that readers can apply to their own goals and challenges.
Different industries may benefit from different kinds of content, or from greater focus on certain sections. That said, I’ve found that sticking to this general structure helps me make content that will be interesting and relevant to my market of one.
The Editorial Newsletter
The next part of the content demand engine is an editorial newsletter. Importantly, this is not a marketing drip campaign. This newsletter is designed to add value for your ICP — not just to pitch a product. I recommend sending your newsletter weekly or biweekly and including the following content in each edition.
Introduction
I always like to say that this section of the newsletter is like a mental warm-up. I usually start with a statistic, a fun fact, or a news headline that’s relevant to my ICP, followed by one or two sentences of commentary. The introduction creates a slippery slope that gets the reader to keep going, so you want to start strong.
What’s on Deck
After the introduction, I like to include a quick table of contents previewing the stories to come. This doesn’t have to be super detailed — just include enough of a preview that the reader knows what to expect.
The First Story
Your first story is the anchor of your newsletter. Here, you’ll want to create a newsletter-native version of your long-form playbook. For example, if your long-form playbook is a 1,200-word article, you might turn it into a 300-word summary designed for your newsletter.
Then, at the end of the story, you can link to the full playbook in case readers want to go deeper. Now, you’re using your newsletter as a mechanism to drive traffic back to your site, while still offering a smooth, cohesive experience for readers who only have time for the newsletter version.
Curation of Insightful Posts
After the first story, I include a curated list of four or five insightful posts from the previous week that I think could be of value to the ICP. This can be as simple as a bulleted list.
Marketing for Internal Content
So far, everything in the newsletter has been exclusively focused on adding value. Now, you get to promote something that’s happening internally within your company. This should still be something that you think would be of value to your audience, but it can be a little more promotional than the rest of the newsletter.
Conclusion
Finally, at the very bottom of the newsletter, you can include a call-to-action — something like “book a meeting” or “schedule a demo.”
Again, just as with your long-form playbook, your newsletter should be adapted to fit the unique needs of your ICP. For example, in some industries, readers may be interested in more links to additional posts. In others, you may only want to include one or two posts in your curation list.
To learn more about what works best for your brand, experiment with different options and iterate based on the results.
Social Media
Finally, you can use your newsletter and playbook to create eight to ten pieces of social media content. If you’re not sure where to start, here’s a breakdown that I’ve found works well:
- Four company posts taken directly from the playbook.
- One company post promoting the newsletter.
- Three posts from executives focusing on different parts of the content.
In addition, you can also explore opportunities for cross-promotion with the subject matter expert featured in your content. For instance, your SME might be willing to post a link to your playbook from their LinkedIn or let you tag them in your company posts.
In many cases, collaborations like these can be a real win-win, offering both you and your SMEs access to a broader audience.
Best Practices for Building Your Content Demand Engine
So, we’ve gotten through the basics. But how can you take your content demand engine to the next level? Here are some of my favorite best practices to keep in mind when developing your own demand engine.
Focus on value, not on selling.
If you believe in the product or service your company offers, you’ll want to sell it to people. But when it comes to creating content that builds trust, you have to think value first.
When you craft content, you need to ask what problem you’re trying to solve. Is your playbook offering insightful, novel recommendations? Or is it just a thinly-veiled sales pitch? Proactively analyzing each and every piece of content in this way helps me craft resources that are truly valuable to my audience.
Make sure sales and marketing work in tandem.
All too often, marketers will get a great idea for a new content play … but they forget to loop in sales. That leads to inconsistencies across the customer journey, as prospects end up hearing different messages from different people across the organization.
To address this, I’ve found that it’s helpful to focus marketing efforts on sales enablement. Rather than operating in a vacuum, your content demand engine should be designed with sales needs in mind. In addition, sales and marketing teams should work together to analyze the performance of different content initiatives. Both teams can then adapt and iterate accordingly.
Get creative.
Finally, don’t be afraid to get creative. While it may be tempting to just stick to a single approach or standard operating procedure, truly great ideas only emerge when you’re willing to take risks and try new things.
For example, once you’ve gotten the hang of creating content for long-form playbooks, newsletters, and social media posts, consider branching out into other formats. One option is to take the subject matter expert interviews that you’ve been doing in private and turn them into webinars.
Exploring these creative strategies can be a great way to create new content from conversations you’re already having and attract new audiences to your brand.
Great Content Surfaces Net New Knowledge
Creating a successful content demand engine isn’t just about creating individual resources, like a playbook or newsletter. It’s about surfacing net new knowledge. Great content marketers act as curators, unearthing and sharing deep, relevant insights with the people who need them the most.
