Digital Marketing Archives - Freelance B2B Ghostwriter

The Leadership Decision Your Competitors Haven’t Made Yet

in Digital Marketing/by Kathleen Allardyce

Most leaders in tech, and others with complex sales cycles, believe they’re losing deals in the sales conversation. But they’re wrong.

The deal was lost long before anyone picked up the phone. It was lost during the research phase when a buyer was quietly building a shortlist, forming opinions about vendors, and deciding who understood their problem well enough to deserve a conversation. B2B buyers today complete roughly 80% of their purchasing journey before they ever contact a vendor. By the time they reach out, most of them already know who they’re leaning toward.

If your company wasn’t part of that research phase, you probably weren’t on the shortlist. And if you weren’t on the shortlist, no amount of great sales work closes the gap.

That’s a leadership problem. And it has a leadership solution.

The Decision Is Made Before You Get the Call

Buyers who don’t know you exist during the research phase don’t put you on the short list. Buyers who aren’t sure they can trust you move on to someone they’re more comfortable with.

This isn’t a new dynamic, but it’s getting more pronounced. Prospects search, compare, and form opinions entirely on their own. They read. They evaluate. They ask colleagues. By the time they contact a vendor, they’ve already done the work of narrowing the field.

The businesses that win these deals are usually the ones prospects learned from first. They’re the companies whose content showed up when a buyer was trying to understand a problem, not trying to evaluate a vendor. That’s a meaningful difference. A buyer in the research phase is open. A buyer evaluating vendors is already suspicious.

Getting in front of buyers while they’re still open is the whole game.

Many Leaders Don’t Set a Strategy to Reach Buyers While They’re Open

Most B2B marketing is built around the seller. Blog posts that describe what the company does. Service pages that list features. Content that assumes the buyer is already convinced they need what you sell.

Early- and mid-stage buyers aren’t ready for that. They’re trying to understand the problem, figure out their options, and identify which vendors know what they’re talking about. If your content doesn’t meet them there, they move on.

Many leaders fall back on newsletters. A newsletter has its place because it keeps existing contacts warm. But it’s passive. There’s no structured learning arc. There’s no destination. A cold prospect has no reason to opt in to something that broadcasts your content on your schedule. Newsletters serve the people who already know you. They don’t reach the people who don’t.

The result is a pipeline that depends on buyers finding you through search or referral, then hoping the timing is right. That’s not a strategy. It’s luck dressed up as marketing.

The Leadership Move: Educate Before You Sell

An Educational Email Course, or EEC, is a free, 5-day email series built around one specific topic your prospect is already thinking about. Each email teaches them something genuinely useful — a clear explanation of a problem they’re facing, options they should know about, insight that helps them make a smarter decision.

Prospects opt in because the topic solves a real, current problem. They’re not doing you a favor. They’re signing up because they want what you’re offering.

Each email in the course builds on the last. By the end, the prospect knows what you do, understands why they need it, and has already formed a relationship with your company before they’ve spoken to a single person on your team. They haven’t been pushed toward a sale. They’ve reached their own conclusion.

There’s a behavioral principle at work here worth understanding. When someone opts into a course, they make a small commitment. Research in behavioral psychology shows that small initial commitments increase the likelihood of continued engagement. Each email that arrives is a gentle nudge to keep going — and each lesson completed builds momentum. An email that takes five minutes to read feels manageable. A prospect who finishes five of them has spent meaningful time with your thinking, your approach, and your expertise.

That’s a very different starting point for a sales conversation.

What This Does for Your Pipeline

The numbers are telling. EECs generate high opt-in rates from the landing page. Gated content like the white paper or report behind a registration form, sees abandonment rates of up to 80 percent. The prospect who abandons a gated form isn’t warming up to you. The prospect who completes a five-day course is.

Prospects who finish your EEC arrive at the sales conversation already familiar with your expertise, and already further along in their decision. They know how you think. They’ve decided you understand their problems. They show up ready to talk, not ready to be convinced you’re worth their time.

That’s how you get on the shortlist before your competition even knows the buyer exists.

The Decision You Have to Make

Every week without an EEC is a week buyers are researching, forming opinions, and building shortlists that may or may not include you. The research is happening whether you’re part of it or not.

Once an EEC is live, it works continuously. Prospects opt in, move through the course at their own pace, and arrive at the sales conversation with your credibility already established. Your pipeline warms up while you focus on running your business.

The question isn’t whether to educate your buyers. They’re already educating themselves. The question is whether you’re the one doing it — or whether you’re leaving that job to someone else.

Leaders who wait for buyers to find them are playing defense. The EEC is an offensive move. You’re shaping the buyer’s understanding of the problem before your competitors get a chance to.

That’s not a marketing tactic. That’s a leadership decision.

If you want to beef up your pipeline, find out more about how an EEC can help. Contact me today!

Kathleen Allardyce

Kathleen Allardyce is the founder of Getting It Write, Inc., a B2B content and marketing consultancy specializing in Educational Email Courses for companies with complex sales cycles. If your pipeline feels harder to fill than it should be, let’s talk.

How Do You Measure the ROI for Your Marketing?

in Digital Marketing/by Kathleen Allardyce

An Educational Email Course with high opt-in rates looks like a win.
But opt-ins alone don’t tell you if it’s working.

Opt-in rates show your topic resonated. That matters. But the real question is whether EEC subscribers are turning into sales conversations. To answer that, you need to watch three things.

1. Open and click rates across all 5 emails
Consistent or improving open rates as the sequence progresses mean your content is delivering on the opt-in promise. Declining rates after email 1 or 2 are a signal to fix the content. Click rates on links and CTAs show active engagement — not just passive receipt.

2. Conversion from subscriber to sales conversation
Track how many EEC subscribers take a next step: booking a call, replying with a question, or filling out a contact form. This is what ties the EEC directly to your pipeline. Even a modest conversion rate adds up fast when your opt-in volume is high.

3. Quality of leads entering your pipeline
Are EEC-sourced prospects better qualified than leads from other channels? Buyers who complete a 5-email course already understand what you do and why it matters. That shortens the sales conversation and improves your close rate. Track deal velocity and close rates for EEC leads vs. everything else.
Opt-ins tell you the door is open. These three metrics tell you if prospects are walking through it.

What metrics are you tracking for your marketing?
Drop a comment or get in touch.

Kathleen Allardyce

Newsletter vs. EEC: Don’t Make This B2B Lead Gen Mistake

in Digital Marketing/by Kathleen Allardyce

One of the most common mistakes I see in B2B lead generation: Confusing a newsletter with an Educational Email Course.

Both are email. Both reach prospects. The confusion is understandable. But for tech firms and MSPs with long sales cycles, treating them as the same thing is costing you leads.

A newsletter keeps existing contacts warm. It broadcasts content on your schedule, to whoever happens to be on your list. Useful for staying top of mind — but passive. There’s no learning arc, no destination, and no real reason for a cold prospect to sign up.

An Educational Email Course is built differently. It’s a 5-email sequence on one specific topic your prospect is already thinking about. They opt in because the topic solves a problem they have right now. Each email builds on the last. Opt-in rates run higher because prospects see immediate value in signing up.

More importantly, by the time the course ends, you’ve demonstrated your expertise and started building trust. Your buyer is already forming an opinion about you before you’ve had a single sales conversation.

That matters when your buyers take months to make a vendor decision.

If you’re an MSP, tech firm or are challenged by a complex sales cycle, get in touch. Let’s talk about what an Educational Email Course could do for your lead generation.

Kathleen Allardyce

Why Buyers Do 80% of Their Research Before Contacting You — and What That Means for Your Marketing

in Digital Marketing, Educational Email Courses/by Kathleen Allardyce

Research on B2B buyer behavior has been telling the same story for over a decade, and the numbers keep moving in the same direction for self-directed research. In 2015, CEB (now Gartner) found that buyers completed 57% of their journey before contacting a vendor. Forrester updated that figure to 70% in 2019. Today, Gartner data shows that B2B buyers spend only 17% of their total buying time in direct contact with potential vendors — meaning roughly 80% of the journey is self-directed.

If you sell any solution with a long and complex sales cycle, those numbers should change how you think about your marketing. By the time a prospect reaches out, they may already have a short list of vendors. You might not be on it.

Here’s what’s happening — and what to do about it.

What Does the Self-Directed Research Look Like?

Your prospects aren’t sitting around waiting for a sales call to start learning. They’re searching, reading reviews, comparing providers, and forming opinions long before anyone from your company knows they exist.

By the time a buyer contacts a vendor, they’ve typically already done three things:

Identified the problem they’re trying to solve
Narrowed down the type of solution they need
Developed a short list of companies worth talking to

The prospect who finally emails you isn’t at the beginning of their process. They’re close to the end. Think about what that means for your pipeline.

A prospect spends weeks or months educating themselves, gets comfortable with the landscape, and decides which vendors seem credible. Buyers create a shortlist before contacting any vendors, and 95% of the time, the winning vendor was already on that initial list of vendors. If you weren’t visible during that research phase, you’re not on that list.

Why Buyers Prefer to Research On Their Own

Buyers don’t trust vendors to give them objective information. That’s not criticism, it’s just how purchasing decisions work. They’d rather find answers through their own research than rely on a sales rep who has an obvious stake in the outcome.

This is especially true for companies buying critical solutions. These aren’t impulse purchases. A buyer needs to understand what the problem is, what kinds of solutions exist, how providers differ, and whether the investment makes sense. Studies reveal that 87% of B2B buyers prefer to research product information on their own before speaking with a sales representative.

The takeaway here is important. Buyers want to be educated. They just want to do it themselves, at their own pace, without pressure. That’s a marketing opportunity for you, not an obstacle to your sales process.

What This Means for Your Marketing

If buyers are doing their research without you, your marketing needs to show up in that research. Your website and your content are your sales team during the first 80% of the buyer’s journey. A salesperson who isn’t in the room can’t build a relationship. Content can.

There are three things your marketing must do during that self-directed research phase. It must get found, which means showing up when buyers search for the problems you solve. It must build trust, which means giving buyers something genuinely useful, not just promotional material. And it must keep buyers moving toward you, so that when they’re ready to contact a vendor, you’re already on their list.

Content that doesn’t appear when buyers are searching, or that doesn’t answer the questions they’re asking, leaves you invisible to your best prospects.

The Content Gaps That Leave You Off the Shortlist

Many companies publish content about themselves. Their services. Their team. Their certifications. That kind of content has its place, but it doesn’t help a buyer who is still figuring out what they need.

A buyer in the early stages of their journey isn’t ready for a pitch. They need education. They’re asking questions like: What do we need? What are our options? If your content doesn’t address those questions in the buyer’s own language, you’re not part of their research.

Common gaps include: no content that addresses the buyer’s pain points directly, no content that explains the problem before pitching the solution, and nothing that answers the most basic question a new prospect has “Do I actually need this?”

How to Show Up in The Buyer’s Research Before They Know They Need You

The fix starts with thinking like your buyer, not like a marketer.

Map the questions your prospects are asking. They try to understand the problem. They’re searching for things like “Why is our network so slow?” or “How can I get more leads from our website?” Publish content that answers those questions directly. That’s how you get found before a buyer knows they need you.

Educational content formats are worth serious consideration for businesses with complex sales cycles. An educational email course (EEC) is a unique tool that makes you stand out from the crowd. It lets a prospect learn at their own pace while staying in your ecosystem. It’s the closest thing to a reference check they can do on their own, at any time of day, without asking anyone’s permission.

By the time they finish the course, they know what you do, they’ve seen evidence that you know your subject, and they’ve been building a relationship with your company for days. They’ve moved down the sales funnel before you even know they’re there.

The Data Is a Roadmap, Not A Warning

The research has been consistent for a decade. Buyers are doing more research on their own, consulting more sources, and contacting companies on their vendor shortlist. Companies that understand this and build their marketing around it earn a spot on that shortlist before competitors ever know the buyer exists.

Your prospects are researching on their own right now. The only question is whether you have the tools to help them find and establish a relationship with you when they do.

If you want to beef up your pipeline, find out more about how an EEC can help. Let’s talk.

#leadgeneration #leadnuturing #eductionalemailcourse #marketing

Kathleen Allardyce

Stop Gating Your Best Content — Here’s What to Do Instead

in Digital Marketing, Educational Email Courses/by Kathleen Allardyce

You put a lot of work into that white paper. You’re proud of it. And then you hide it behind a form.

That’s the gated content play. Fill out your name, email, company, and job title and then, maybe, we’ll give you something useful. It sounds like a reasonable trade. In practice, it drives away the very buyers you’re trying to reach.

If you’re selling something complex such as managed IT services, cybersecurity solutions, technology platforms, or any product or service that requires a high level of trust, your prospects don’t trust you when they land on your website. They’re researching. They’re cautious. Asking them to hand over their contact information before they’ve seen anything of value is asking for commitment before you’ve earned it. Most of them will just leave.

There’s a better way to fill your pipeline.

Why Gated Content Usually Backfires

Here’s what gated content does: it filters out everyone who isn’t yet ready to hear from you.

That sounds like a feature. It isn’t. The prospects who won’t fill out a form aren’t uninterested; they’re early in the buying process. They’re doing research. They’re trying to figure out if your company understands their problems before they let you into their inbox. Putting a gate in front of your best thinking tells them you don’t.

Research shows that B2B buyers complete more than half of their research before they ever contact a vendor. That means your content is doing sales work long before your sales team gets involved. If your best material is locked up, buyers make their decisions without it and often without you.

The Content Marketing Institute’s research tells a similar story. 75% of B2B marketers use case studies and customer stories, but only 53% say that content produces strong results. Gating is part of the problem. When your best proof is hidden, it can’t do the job.

What to Ungate First

Not everything deserves to be free. Detailed buyer’s guides, comprehensive benchmarking reports, or tools that take real effort to produce can reasonably sit behind a form, provided it’s genuinely exceptional. If a prospect would pay for it, it might be worth gating.

Everything else should be open.

That includes your blog posts and articles, your case studies, your customer success stories, and your educational content. These are the pieces that demonstrate you understand your prospect’s problems. They build credibility. They move buyers forward. Putting a gate in front of them doesn’t capture leads, it stops leads from forming in the first place.

Think about the pain points your prospective buyer is experiencing and the goals they are trying to achieve. That’s what your content should address, openly and without friction. A buyer who reads three of your articles and comes away feeling educated is far more likely to reach out than one who bounced off a registration form.

A Better Model: The Educational Email Course

Removing gates doesn’t mean giving up on lead capture. It means earning the opt-in instead of demanding it.

One of the most effective ways to do that is with an Educational Email Course, or EEC. A well-built EEC is a 5-day email sequence that gives your prospects a real learning experience. It is something that helps them solve a problem they’re already thinking about. You’re delivering genuine value before asking for anything in return.

The results back this up. EECs generate opt-in rates in the range of 30–40% or higher. Compare that to a typical gated content form, which can see abandonment rates of up to 80%.

Why does the EEC work so well? Because the exchange is honest. You’re not saying “give us your information and hope we have something useful.” You’re saying “here’s what you’ll learn, here’s why it matters to you, and here’s what you’ll walk away knowing.” That’s a proposition a skeptical prospect can evaluate.

For MSPs and tech firms, an EEC works especially well because your buyers need to be educated before they can be sold. Managed services, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure aren’t impulse purchases. Your prospects need to understand the risks they’re carrying, the options available to them, and why your approach is worth considering. A 5-day course is exactly the right format for that conversation.

What Happens When You Open It Up

When you stop gating and start educating, a few things shift.

Your content starts showing up in search results and getting shared. Buyers who would have bounced off a registration form now read your thinking, follow your LinkedIn page, and show up at the bottom of the funnel already familiar with your company.

Your email list grows faster, because the people joining it want to hear from you. They opted in for something specific and valuable, not because they had no choice.

And your sales conversations get easier. Prospects who’ve read your content or gone through your email course already know how you think. They’ve already decided you understand their problems. That’s a very different starting point than a cold inquiry from someone who filled out a gated form six months ago and forgot why.

A Simple Test

Before you gate any piece of content, ask one question: would a prospect who’s never heard of us find this genuinely useful, or are we using the gate to create the illusion of value?

If the content is strong, put it out in the open. Let it work. Let it reach the buyers who are quietly researching right now, months before they’ll ever talk to your sales team.

Gate only what’s truly exceptional. And for everything else, build an EEC that earns the opt-in by delivering value first.

That’s how you fill a pipeline with people who want to hear from you.

If you want to beef up your pipeline, find out more about how an EEC can help. Let’s chat.

#LeadGeneration #EducationalEmailCourses #LeadNuturing

Kathleen Allardyce

Why MSP Lead Generation Tactics Stall — and What Actually Moves the Needle

in Digital Marketing, Educational Email Courses/by Kathleen Allardyce

Here’s a number that should make every MSP owner uncomfortable: according to Datto’s 2025 Global State of the MSP Report, 67% of MSPs cite lead generation as their single biggest growth challenge. That means two out of every three managed service providers are fighting the exact same battle and many of them are losing it the same way.

The problem usually isn’t effort. MSPs work hard. They invest in social media, email marketing, cold outreach, online ads, collecting referrals, and show up at industry events. Yet pipelines stay thin, sales cycles drag on forever, and growth feels unpredictable.

So what’s going wrong? And more importantly, what does work?

The Tactics That Stall (and Why They Stall)

Most lead generation tactics fail MSPs for one core reason: they’re designed for a transactional sale, and managed services is anything but transactional. When a business hands over management of its IT infrastructure, cybersecurity, or cloud environment, it’s making a high-trust, long-term commitment. That kind of decision doesn’t get made because of a cold email or a Google ad.

Consider some of the most used tactics:

Cold outreach (email and phone): Buyers are inundated with generic pitches. Calling 2,000 prospects a month might yield five to fifteen qualified appointments, but it’s a grind that’s difficult to sustain and nearly impossible to scale.
Referrals: Great when they happen, but dangerously unpredictable as a growth strategy. The MSPs who thrive treat referrals as a bonus, not a plan.
Paid ads (PPC/LinkedIn): This tactic is expensive and competitive. Twenty or more sponsored MSP ads show up in every local search result, which means visibility alone doesn’t win the business.
Generic content marketing: Blog posts, emails, and social media that focus on technology instead of business outcomes get ignored by the decision-makers MSPs need to reach.

None of these tactics are inherently wrong. The problem is relying on any one of them or using them in isolation without a system designed to build trust over time.

The Real Problem: Your Prospects Are Researching Without You

Here’s what’s happening while you’re trying to get meetings: your prospects are doing their own research. According to Gartner, a sales rep has roughly 5% of a B2B buyer’s attention during their entire buying journey. The other 95% of the time, buyers are online — comparing providers, reading articles, watching videos, and forming opinions about who they want to work with.

If your MSP isn’t present and helpful during that 95%, someone else is. The MSPs who win are the ones who become a trusted resource before the sales conversation ever starts.

Education Moves the Needle

Many successful MSPs share a common approach: they lead with education, not a pitch. Instead of trying to convince prospects to take a meeting, they give prospects something genuinely useful first — and let that value build the relationship. This shift matters for several reasons:

It builds trust before the ask. Buyers who receive genuine help from a provider before the sales conversation are far more likely to see that provider as a credible partner rather than another vendor.
It shortens the sales cycle. A prospect who has already learned from you arrives at the sales conversation educated, engaged, and pre-sold on your expertise.
It works on autopilot. Unlike cold outreach that requires constant manual effort, educational content can be structured to reach and nurture new prospects automatically, around the clock.

The channel that does this most effectively? Email. Not mass email blasts, but structured, sequenced educational content delivered to an opted-in audience. These are people who have already raised their hand and said they want to learn from you.

Why Educational Email Courses Change the Equation

An Educational Email Course (EEC) is a structured sequence of lessons — typically five emails delivered over five days — sent directly to a prospect’s inbox. Each lesson covers a topic your target client genuinely wants to understand: cybersecurity risks, cloud migration decisions, compliance requirements, IT budgeting, or whatever challenge is most relevant to your market.

The format works because it aligns with how people make decisions. Opt-in rates for EECs run around 30–40%, compared to roughly 5% for a standard newsletter. Prospects opt-in because they see immediate, concrete value. And unlike a webinar they must schedule or a video of an educational webinar that takes a big part of their day, an EEC arrives in the inbox they’re already checking, in bite-sized lessons that take minutes to read.

Over five days, a well-built EEC does something no cold email sequence can:

It teaches your prospect something useful, making you the expert in the room before you ever meet.
It keeps your MSP top-of-mind across five separate touchpoints without being pushy.
It builds a trust relationship that makes the sales conversation a natural next step rather than a cold ask.
It runs automatically, delivering value to every new prospect without requiring additional time from your team.

For MSPs selling complex, high-trust services with long sales cycles, this matters a lot. The EEC bridges the gap between a cold prospect and a sales-ready lead. It builds trust, which is something most approaches skip.

The Big Picture

Most MSP lead generation stalls because it’s built around making a sale rather than earning trust. Cold outreach interrupts. Ads compete. Generic content gets ignored. None of these moves a cautious, research-driven buyer closer to a decision.

What does move the needle is showing up in your prospect’s inbox with something genuinely useful — a structured, expert-led course that answers the questions they’re already asking and positions your MSP as the obvious choice by the time they’re ready to buy.

If your pipeline is a bit thin, an Educational Email Course might be the shift that makes a change.

Want to explore what an EEC could look like for your MSP or tech firm? Let’s Chat.

#MSPMarketing #LeadGeneration #EducationalEmailCourses #LeadNuturing

Kathleen Allardyce

Why Educational Email Courses Are the Most Effective Way to Fill Your Sales Funnel

in Digital Marketing, Educational Email Courses/by Kathleen Allardyce

According to Gartner, your sales force has roughly 5% of a customer’s time while they’re completing their B2B buyer journey. What are they doing the rest of the time? Doing their own research. Your potential customers are scouring the internet trying to make sense of all the information they find online and offline.

There are more ways for buyers to research online today than ever before. Video courses, podcasts, YouTube tutorials, webinars, ebooks — the options are practically infinite.

So what if the challenge of reaching your target audience isn’t the content — it’s the delivery? What if the format is getting in the way of participation?

Here’s why Educational Email Courses (EECs) are being used more than ever, why they work, and why you should be using them.

What Is An Educational Email Course?

An educational email course is a structured sequence of lessons delivered directly to someone’s inbox over a set period of time. Instead of logging into a platform, watching a video, or downloading a PDF, the student simply opens an email.

Lessons are spaced out — typically one per day or every few days — so learners absorb content gradually rather than binge-consuming and forgetting it. The format is simple, but the results are powerful. Unlike traditional marketing content, there’s no new software to learn, no dashboard to navigate, and no subscription wall. It meets people exactly where they already spend their time: their inbox.

The Psychology Behind Why They Work

Educational email courses aren’t just convenient — they’re engineered for learning in a way most formats aren’t. Here’s what the psychology tells us.

Spaced repetition drives retention

One of the most well-established findings in cognitive science is the “spacing effect” — we remember information far better when it’s spread across multiple sessions rather than consumed all at once. Email courses deliver content on a schedule, which means spaced repetition is baked right in. Learners don’t just read information once; they return to it again and again over days or weeks, reinforcing what they’ve absorbed.

Small commitments create big follow-through

When someone signs up for an email course, they make a micro-commitment. It’s a small act, but it’s a meaningful one. Research in behavioral psychology shows that small initial commitments increase the likelihood of continued engagement. Each email that arrives is a gentle reminder of that commitment — a nudge to stay on the learning path.

Momentum is everything

Concentrating on a video can feel like climbing a mountain. An email that takes 5 minutes to read feels like something you can actually do today. That distinction matters more than it sounds. Email courses chunk learning into small wins, and small wins create momentum. Each completed lesson reinforces a sense of progress, which motivates the next one.

A decision-maker’s inbox is one of the most important spaces available. An email course lives in the inbox and uses it for genuine outreach.

Benefits For Your Target Market

An EEC . . .

Fits any schedule – Bite-sized lessons take minutes, not hours. No blocks of time needed.
Reduces overwhelm – Structured pacing removes the paralysis of needing an uninterrupted block of time.
Can be read anywhere – No app, no Wi-Fi dependency, no screen fatigue from long videos.
Is easy to revisit – Have you ever tried to find a topic in a video presentation? Every EEC lesson is available in the inbox — searchable and always accessible.

Benefits For Creators And Businesses

If you’re building a brand, a business, or an audience, an email course is one of the highest-leverage things you can create. Here’s why:

Converts to paid offers – A subscriber who finishes your free course is primed to buy what comes next. It’s a tool to move your prospects through your funnel.
Builds your list – Every signup is a permission-based subscriber you own — not rented from a social platform. Robust opt-in; EEC opt-ins run around 30-40% vs 5% for newsletters.
Establishes authority – Teaching 5 lessons on a topic signals expertise more than any bio ever could.
Runs on autopilot – Write it once, and it delivers value to new subscribers automatically, forever.

And unlike social media content, email isn’t subject to algorithm changes that affect who sees it. Your lesson lands in the inbox of every single subscriber — not 3% of your followers.

Next Steps

In a world of infinite content and short attention spans, the educational email course is a quiet anomaly: a format that people actually finish, that builds genuine trust, and that keeps working long after you create it.

Whether you’re a creator, a business, or an educator — if you have knowledge worth sharing, an email course is one of the most powerful ways to share it. It’s not the flashiest format. But it might just be the most effective one.

If you want to explore the benefit an EEC can have for your company, contact us, send an InMail in LinkedIn, or check my LinkedIn contact information for other alternatives.

#LeadNurturing #EmailCourses #EducationalEmailCourses

Kathleen Allardyce

9 Ways to Make Your B2B Content Marketing Convert

in Content Marketing, Digital Marketing/by Kathleen Allardyce

Content marketing is a big issue these days for B2B marketers. The vast majority of them are using content marketing, but they’re not always getting the return they want.

The Content Marketing Institute published their 15^th Annual B2B Content Marketing report. It identifies interesting statistics highlighting some of the issues. For example, 92% of those who participated in the study said they use short articles and blog posts, but only 43% said that content produced the best results. The same holds true for case studies and customer stories: 75% use them, but only 53% said that content produced the best results. Evidently, the content isn’t as effective as it could be.

As for the challenges that B2B marketers are facing, creating content that prompts action was a challenge for 55% of respondents, 43% said they had a challenge differentiating their content, and 40% cited creating the right content for their audience was challenging. The survey respondents were also challenged by organizational issues I won’t address here such as a lack of resources, getting access to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and aligning sales and marketing to develop strategies.

So, what can B2B marketers do to make their content attract and convert visitors into prospects? Here are nine things that will make a difference in your conversion numbers.

1. Identify Topics that Resonate with Your Prospects

That may sound like it should be easy and obvious, but it’s not. That’s why so many marketers have a challenge creating the right content. You can look at your competitors and see what they’re talking about or look at the topics being covered at industry conferences. You can also look at your buyer personas. Think about the pain points your prospective buyer is experiencing and the goals they are trying to achieve.

Another great resource is your sales team. They talk to prospects and customers every day. Ask them to help you identify the questions that prospects are asking, the issues that prospects are confused about, and the issues about which they are misinformed.

Think about your customers’ journey. In general, buyers go through three stages in their journey to making a buying decision:

Problem Awareness
Solution Consideration
Decision

These stages are intended to give you a context for understanding the process most customers use. There is usually overlap between the stages. You should ensure that your content addresses each of those stages.

Let’s use a very simple example of Peter, an executive who has built his dream website but it’s not generating leads like he thought it would. Here’s what his customer journey might look like.

Stages of a Customer’s Journey	Communication
Problem Awareness – The buyer has identified a problem and they’re working to understand more about why they’re experiencing the problem and then researching potential solutions. For example, Peter might search online for “Why isn’t my website generating leads?” or “How can I make my website generate leads?”	Overviews that describe a significant challenge and explore possible solutions. Easy to consume content such as blog/social media posts, infographics, and thought leadership articles. You want to establish your business as an authority with the expertise required to move forward into the Consideration stage. Be sure to offer subscriptions to your content stream.
Solution Consideration – The buyer has completed some initial research and has narrowed down the possible solutions that fit their situation. Let’s say that based on what he learned in the Awareness stage, he’s decided that he needs to increase traffic to get more exposure to potential buyers. He might start searching for things such as “How to increase traffic to a website?” Let’s assume that based on his research in this stage, he’s decided he needs to hire an SEO firm. He’s also identified three vendors that have good reputations.	Offer educational content like case studies, eBooks, white papers, comparison guides, and demonstrations.
Decision – The buyer has narrowed down vendors that can help them solve their problem and they’ll decide based on their research in this stage. Peter is now focused on evaluating vendors who can provide the services he seeks.	Focus on the details with items such as pricing pages, buyer guides, case studies, vendor comparisons, customer reviews, and free trials.

2. Bring Your Own Perspective

You can write useful and engaging content based on internet research, and that’s how a lot of writing is done. Whether you’re working with a writer or using AI, you’re going to get content that is a marriage of information that is already on the internet. You won’t be accused of plagiarism, and if your writers are really good, they will create content that is very well received.

If you want to differentiate your content and make it stand out far above the rest, however, you’ll need to put a bit of effort into making it unique to your company. That typically requires gathering information from subject matter experts (SMEs). And getting time from SMEs was listed in the Content Marketing Institute report referenced earlier as one of the challenges you face.

You’ll need to work within your organization to educate SMEs and executives about the importance of your being able to tap the expertise that exists internally. You can make that job easier if you find ways to streamline the process for the SMEs so that working with you doesn’t become a significant drain on their time. Here are some tips for achieving that goal.

Make sure you identify the best SME to interview. You may want to get a high-level perspective from a high-level executive, but you might waste a lot of time and annoy the executive by insisting that they participate. Always be open to talking to the person the executive assigns to the task.
Provide a short set of questions to the SME before your meeting with them. The questions should be specific. You can always ask additional questions as you discuss the questions during an interview. Let the SME know that you don’t expect them to write responses to the questions. You’re just giving them a chance to be prepared to discuss them during the interview. Many times, I find that SMEs will just jot down some notes, which makes them much more comfortable during the interview.
Stick to the time and duration of the interview. If the interview is going well and it seems that there’s more to discuss, you should stop just before the stated time limit and ask the SME if they’d like to go past the stated timeframe or set another appointment to complete the discussion. My clients appreciate it when I am careful with their time.

3. Deliver on Your Promise

Make sure that your content covers what you’re selling in the title. It’s easy to come up with a snappy title, but if you don’t follow through with the content that follows, people will lose trust. For example, if the title describes the “Complete Guide to XX,” then it better be complete. A few hints won’t work.

You can build trust with your audience by providing valuable content, information that is actionable, and insight that isn’t found on every other website.

4. Share Personal/Company Experiences

When Google analyzes content, it looks for EEAT. That stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. One thing that contributes to the EEAT value of your content is when you share personal or company experiences. This has two benefits.

Sharing helps your content rank in the search engines.
Sharing gives you an opportunity to link the content to your brand.

If you’re writing content in first person, it’s easy to share some of your personal experiences related to the topic. If you’re writing in third person, you can always write “We have found that” or “Company Name’s experience has been that.”

5. Make it Personal

You want your communications to sound as if you were talking to your readers. Avoid using industry jargon. If a one syllable word will suffice, don’t use a three-syllable word. No one cares if you know big words. Where appropriate, use the word “you.” Make your reader see themselves in the story you’re telling.

But, make sure you’re talking like your audience talks. If you’re writing about a technical topic, but your readers are non-technical people, then make sure they understand you. Translating complex topics into clearly understood content can be a challenge, but it’s worth the effort.

There are exceptions to this rule. For example, if you’re talking to teenage girls, don’t try to use the latest buzzwords. Like, they change so fast and will probably come across sounding contrived. Lighten up your writing and don’t talk down to them, but don’t try to become them.

6. Optimize for SEO

Your readers won’t turn into customers unless you’re bringing people to your content that are interested and can relate to it. Make sure your content is SEO optimized to attract the right people. In addition, don’t write content that sounds stilted or like it was written for a search engine. Work on selecting keyword phrases that are going to attract the right people, but that can also be seamlessly woven into your writing.

7. Promote Your Site!

Some people seem to think that if they publish SEO-optimized content, the readers will come. But, unless you have an advanced website, your content won’t appear on a search for your prime keyword phrase. At least, it won’t appear high enough on the search results to attract internet searchers.

You need to promote your content. You can use social media posts to direct readers to your content. You can also promote your content in communications like newsletters.

8. Use Images

According to a recent Semrush report, articles with more than seven images get the most backlinks, an increase of more than 555% compared to articles with no images. Images are good for readers and backlinks are good for websites. So, as Semrush suggests, plan for at least three images per article. And, if you can add a video, you’ll find that at least one video generated 52% more traffic than an article without a video.

9. Don’t Gate Your Content Unless It’s Amazing

Gated content lives behind a registration form. If a visitor wants the latest report, they must complete a form and give away some amount of personal information. Smart marketers don’t ask for a lot of information. Just a name and email address will allow you to add that person to your nurture email campaigns.

If your website is a true authority—like Forester or McKinsey—you could also ask for the person’s title, number of employees, and so forth.

But, unless your content is truly gate-worthy, you’re only hurting yourself by setting it up as gated content. Think about whether you’d be better off giving your PDF away for free to generate more interest and leads.

Final Thoughts

Your website is one of the most powerful marketing tools you can use. It’s the hub of your marketing efforts to a great extent. The content you publish should be structured to convert visitors into leads, and it will help you convert leads into customers. If you want to improve your conversion rates, a professional writer can help. Let’s talk.

Kathleen Allardyce

Unlocking Success: How Case Studies Help Small Businesses Grow

in Content Marketing, Digital Marketing/by Kathleen Allardyce

Case Study: A marketing tool that helps to attract and convert prospects by describing the results of working with or buying from a business.

When small business owners talk about their marketing challenges, they cite a wide range of different issues depending on the business they’re in. But, many owners have some challenges in common expressed as things like these examples:

Getting prospects to understand what we do.
Getting prospects to understand why they need our products/services.
Explaining the benefits of our products/services.
Getting people to trust our company and do business with us.
Getting people to understand why we’re better than our competitors.
Managing prospect expectations.
Justifying the cost of our products/services.

If you have uttered one or more of those sentences lately, you’re among the small business owners who should take a hard look at using case studies in your marketing strategy.

Really? Case Studies?

Yes, small businesses benefit just as much from case studies as do larger businesses. If you’re familiar with case studies, you’ve probably run across them on the websites of medium to large companies. Under their Resources tab on the navigation, they may even have a category for case studies. And, maybe you should, too.

What is a Case Study?

Here’s a brief overview of what a case study is all about. It’s written about the experience of one of your customers. It’s typically divided into three sections.

The Problem. A description of the problems or challenges facing the customer before you hit the scene.
The Solution: A description of what you did to address the problem. You can describe the products and services you provided to the customer and how those things helped them fix their problems. It also gives you a chance to differentiate yourself from your competitors. It gives the reader an idea of how you approach your customers’ problems and what it’s like working with you.
The Result: This section is where you figure out what qualitative or quantitative results the customer experienced because of your expert assistance.

To complete a case study, you need to have the cooperation of one of your customers. And, done properly, customers really like participating. You’d be careful that the case study doesn’t paint your customer as incompetent, just as someone making an informed choice to address their problems. You can always offer an incentive. too.

A business may like having a link back to their website to help with their SEO. For either businesses or consumers, you could offer a small discount on their next purchase, a gift card, or some other token of your appreciation.

How Do You Publish a Case Study?

There are several ways to publish a case study, depending on how fancy you want to get.

Publish the case study as a blog post. You can still use the same content and publishing it as a blog post is the least amount of effort.
Publish the case study on your letterhead. You do have a version of your letterhead that you can use in Word, for example, right? You can create a Word file containing the case study and save it as a PDF file for distribution.
Publish the case study with some graphics. If you have a way to create a PDF file with graphics in it, you can create a cover page, the content pages, and an end page with information about your company. You can use stock photos to illustrate the content, create “call outs” to intersperse in the content to highlight critical information, create charts or graphs if it’s appropriate, and more.

Why Do Case Studies Work?

Small businesses can use case studies whether they’re selling to consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B).

B2C Marketing: A case study is very similar to a customer review, but you have the opportunity to give consumers much more information about your product or service.

Have you seen the research showing that 98% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses, and 49% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family? Well, it’s true. What that means is that you can use case studies to help your marketing even if you’re selling to consumers.

B2B Marketing: The DemandGen content preferences survey found that 49% of B2B buyers found case studies very helpful in making purchase decisions. In addition, other research shows that 80% of B2B buyers use case studies as part of their buying research.

So, regardless of whether you’re selling to consumers or businesses, your prospects are looking to things like case studies to make their purchasing decisions.

What Case Studies Can Do for You

Remember those marketing challenges small business owners listed at the beginning of this blog post? Case studies are the perfect way to address all of them. Here’s why.

Case studies describe what you do and why your prospects need your product or service. If it’s difficult to get prospects to understand what you do, a case study can help. For one thing, a case study is your opportunity to really figure out how to describe your business. Once you have it in writing, you’ll be able to use it when you’re talking to your prospects, too.
Case studies describe the benefits of your products or services in real terms. A case study does an excellent job of describing the benefits of your offerings in real terms, based on the experience of someone that your prospects can relate to.
Case studies build trust and credibility. Real world examples of how you successfully help your customers instill confidence and show that you can deliver on your promises.
Case studies can highlight your solutions. You can showcase the unique way you go about helping your customers and show how you have solutions that set you apart in your marketplace.
Case studies point out the return on investment you offer your customers. You can describe the benefits your customer received and, in many cases, show how they turned the expense of working with you into an investment.
Case studies can improve your website’s SEO. You can optimize your case study for SEO and drive traffic to your website.

Maybe the best thing case studies do for you is they give you the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of how to present your products and services to prospects and customers.

If you want assistance with developing case studies, or want to learn how to develop case studies yourself, get in touch!

Kathleen Allardyce

What Everyone Needs to Know About Small Business Branding

in Digital Marketing/by Kathleen Allardyce

“I’m not sure what a brand is, but I don’t really need one.” I hear that sentence all the time. If you’ve ever said or thought that, you need to understand what a brand is and then decide if you need one. In this post, I’ll describe the concept of small business branding in a different way than you’ve seen in the past. I’ll explain why you need a brand, and then you can make your own decision.

How Can You Recognize a Brand?

Raise your hand if you recognize the car in the photo.

If you didn’t raise your hand, all you know is that it’s a sporty-looking car. Just looking at the car, for all you know, it could be a hybrid with a top speed of 60 miles an hour. That could be your perception just from looking at the photo.

If you did raise your hand, you know that you’re looking at an Aston Martin. And, now that the rest of you know it’s an Aston Martin, you probably have quite a different perception of the vehicle.

What do you know about Aston Martins? If you’re a car buff at all, you know that James Bond was fond of Aston Martins. So, does that fact make you feel differently about the car now that you know it isn’t a hybrid? Indeed. Why?

Because you now perceive the car to be a hot sports car, capable of making beautiful women swoon, achieving high rates of speed, completing very sharp turns, and in the hands of “Q”, launching rockets.

And, that perception is reinforced by other things you may know if you are a car buff. For example, here is a short list of famous folks who drive Aston Martins: David Beckham, Elle Macpherson, Ben Affleck, and Pierce Brosnan.

So, even if you’ve never driven an Aston Martin yourself, every perception you have of the car is consistent. It’s a hot car that anyone would love to own.

So, That’s It. That’s the Brand.

Now, look at the photo again, and point to the brand. You can’t, can you? Why? Because the brand is a perception that the company worked hard to implant in the public’s mind.

The brand is your perception of what the Aston Martin is all about. You developed that perception because everything you were exposed to concerning that car reinforced its brand.

When people ask me what the result of branding is, it can be difficult to explain. There isn’t something you can see, feel or taste. It’s not like a website or a marketing brochure. And, that is a big part of the reason why branding is often misunderstood.

When we do branding, the product is a market positioning statement and a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Just words on a page. But, the point is that you can take those words and use them to start implanting a perception in the minds of the people in your market area. You can use variations of those words everywhere: on your website, brochures, blog posts, and in an effective “elevator speech.”

The branding process gives you the opportunity to clearly identify:

your target market
your target market’s needs and pain points
how you satisfy those needs in a way that is different from your competitors

Without a Brand, You’re Just Another Face in the Crowd

Until you know what the Aston Martin’s brand is, it’s just a car.

Until you have a brand, you’re just one of many competitors trying to grab your prospects’ attention.

And, that’s why you need to do small business branding.

Supercharge your marketing and sales with an effective brand. Contact me for more information.

Kathleen Allardyce

The Decision Is Made Before You Get the Call

Many Leaders Don’t Set a Strategy to Reach Buyers While They’re Open

The Leadership Move: Educate Before You Sell

What This Does for Your Pipeline

The Decision You Have to Make

What Does the Self-Directed Research Look Like?

Why Buyers Prefer to Research On Their Own

What This Means for Your Marketing

The Content Gaps That Leave You Off the Shortlist

How to Show Up in The Buyer’s Research Before They Know They Need You

The Data Is a Roadmap, Not A Warning

Why Gated Content Usually Backfires

What to Ungate First

A Better Model: The Educational Email Course

What Happens When You Open It Up

A Simple Test

The Tactics That Stall (and Why They Stall)

The Real Problem: Your Prospects Are Researching Without You

Education Moves the Needle

Why Educational Email Courses Change the Equation

The Big Picture

1. Identify Topics that Resonate with Your Prospects

2. Bring Your Own Perspective

3. Deliver on Your Promise

4. Share Personal/Company Experiences

5. Make it Personal

6. Optimize for SEO

7. Promote Your Site!

8. Use Images

9. Don’t Gate Your Content Unless It’s Amazing

Final Thoughts

Really? Case Studies?

How Do You Publish a Case Study?

Why Do Case Studies Work?

What Case Studies Can Do for You

How Can You Recognize a Brand?

So, That’s It. That’s the Brand.

Without a Brand, You’re Just Another Face in the Crowd

Kathleen Allardyce

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