CaaS to Power Your Marketing Strategy

Seerfest 2022 Session Recap

Amanda Natividad, VP of Marketing at SparkToro and Le Cordon Blue-trained chef, schooled us this year at Seerfest 2022 on how to think beyond SEO goals and create content in service of our businesses and clients.

In truth, content marketing has evolved beyond just showing on the first page of Google results -- it’s matured. There’s an opportunity for content to support each marketing function of your business in order to nurture relationships and drive sales, ultimately elevating your brand and crushing your business goals.

What is CaaS?

Content as a Service, or CaaS for short, is the strategy of utilizing content in each function of your marketing plan, instead of just for SEO. This includes, but is not limited to, events, social media, PR, product marketing, sales, and much more.

While content marketing used to be an SEO lever to pull, it’s matured through the years. The internet has evolved -- there’s more content than ever before. SEO standards are higher, especially in regulated industries like law, health, and other YMYL-affected spaces. And finally, internet citizens are savvier these days. More people are internet-literate and digital marketing-literate. Content is everywhere, so why not use it to your advantage?

Employing CaaS in Marketing Activities

We all know content marketing is an SEO fundamental. But you may be asking yourself, how does content play a role in sales? Or events? In order to utilize content in your next marketing campaign, first think about your campaign’s goal.

Public Relations

With PR, your goal is to get people to talk about you. Work with your PR team to supply industry insights that support the reason why you’re playing in the space. The content supporting this goal includes research reports, industry or product stats, and even claims.

Remember: You’re looking to generate buzz, so lead with ground-breaking facts and stats that support your value proposition.

Social Media

Social media’s goal is engagement. To support this goal, your content should inspire someone to stop scrolling and take action. This content may be in a form of a thread, post, poll, or contest.

Product Marketing

With product marketing, the goal is to get someone to engage with your product. This can be tough when it comes to the online world, but that’s where viral loops come in.

Viral Loops

A viral loop is one that feeds itself and has no distinct end. This content, with the goal to get users to engage, includes interactive tools, quizzes, and calculators. These pieces of content generate new results each time, which is key. Viral loops give users a reason to keep pushing the button, like SuperCook’s Zero-Waste Recipe Generator.

Demand Generation

The goal of demand generation is to generate leads, commonly getting people to join your email list. Your content here could be bundling existing vlog posts into an ebook that you gate on your website to generate leads. This content should be sticky enough that your audience will give away their information to get to it, such as white papers, ebooks, and templates.

Events

With events like webinars and conferences, your goal is to have a two-way conversation with your audience. That’s where Q&As, roundtables, and presentations come in. Each of these conversations can be recycled into blog posts, serving as a way to further connect with your attendees and those who couldn’t make it. Sometimes, great blog posts make the best topics for upcoming webinars.

Sales Enablement

The goal of sales is to get people to buy your product or pay for your service. While SEO may be your guiding light, sales is the compass that nudges users to buy. Content that supports sales supports customers' pain points, explaining how your product or service solves your customer’s issue. In this case, content takes the form of comparison guides and case studies.

Customer Engagement

You want your customers to maximize their utility of your product with customer engagement. Content for customer engagement generally lives in the loyalty stage of your sales funnel, making your product sticky for retention. Examples of content in this case include product tutorials, playbooks, and how-to content.

Make the most out of your SEO efforts by also supporting other marketing activities. How-to guides may have high search interest, but could also be utilized by the sales team to teach prospects how to use your product.

CaaS is Sustainable

“Once you shift your mindset to Content as a Service, you realize [you’re getting more bang for your buck]. It makes the rest of your marketing a little bit easier and you gain greater leverage with your content.” The Content as a Service mindset is sustainable because it produces content that supports each stage in the marketing funnel.

As digital marketing continues to mature and evolve, ensure your marketing activities include content as a vital step in accomplishing your goals.

Huge thank you to Amanda Natividad for presenting at this year’s Seerfest!

Key Takeaways

Content has the opportunity to support each of your marketing activities.
The CaaS mindset allows you to get more bang for your content buck by allowing you to recycle content from SEO to support other marketing activities, thus impacting each step of your marketing funnel.