Why you should be your own client

A decade ago, I realised that it would be impossible for me to produce all of the content. I had a content agency on my desk, so we embedded it. We ran ‘Immediate future’ socials called ‘If social.  We run If Social as a client with a budget timeline. 

I think it's worth recognising where we're at in business development.  When we think about business development we easily section it into outbound and inbound, but we're just not a world of telephones anymore. We are an ecosystem of business development, both outbound and inbound.

We engage in outbound marketing, such as advertising, direct mail, and email marketing. On the other end, we've done trade shows, which are more outreach and outbound. Whenever I talk to clients about social commerce, we're already on the edge of generating new business. We will create reports and content to get them interested in us. We run ABM campaigns, which is Account Based Marketing,paid advertisement, and we build lists. 

"Sopro" is our preferred software; we download the "Sopro" lists, upload them to LinkedIn, and remarket them. 

Social media has created multiple touchpoints for our target audience, whether it's outbound or inbound.

In my experience, if you are talking to any global drinks brands, you will not see sales for two years because all the network agencies are in place.  The strategy should be to slide in under the radar. Your road is quite long but you also need to account for the short journeys and referrals. 

It's about having multiple touch points on your website and in the organisation and that is where there is complexity in what we do.

How do we measure success ?

We have fortnightly meetings, where we check our progress and measure it.

Every member of staff except for our finance officer writes a blog. It effectively means you're writing a blog once every four to six weeks. We post blogs Monday to Thursday, we don't post on Fridays, because nobody ever reads a frickin blog on a Friday. 

How do we utilise our content?

The formula we use is campaign leads, then reports, and finally in paid social campaigns. 

So we're able to share the workload which also requires you to have a plan because otherwise people wander off. 

If prospects don't know what our vision is, they don't know what we're talking about.  

Here is what we believe to be true: ‘you have to be your audience first’. When we're looking at planning, it's social, social first formatting, which means you have to think thumb stopping. 

My current services might talk about the latest design strategy or what's going on on Tik Tok.  We have this diversity of content, which then goes out through our social channels, and our personal channels, when it comes to socials we are a very noisy agency. 

Why should your organisation follow a content plan?

We incorporated more posts on strategy into our content pillar during the past year as we did a lot of B2B work. As a second follow up with prospects, I wanted to be able to re-use that content. For example, we discussed targeting food brands. Having done food research, our team has put it into a blog and talked to food companies. My message consists of something along the lines of "have you seen this latest thing? Don't forget it's barbecue season in May". 

The blog posts are rotated each day, and one team member is charged with posting them daily on social media. The blog has to be written by 10 o'clock, then the design team puts together the images, and the whole thing goes live. 

When we started doing live shows, for instance, at the start of the pandemic, we built out a process. In this process, a teaser was sent out prior to the show. Therefore, it is really useful in business development to have a process we don't like since we tend to think on our feet.

You can squeeze the pips out of content if you put together a simple process over how you handle it; that's what we do.

 As well as email marketing to the food industry, because that's our target market, I will write a brief teaser  detailing what we are going to discuss and questions I plan to ask and share ahead of time. In the past, we used Zoom, but now we use LinkedIn, as well as the Stream Yard because we can make use of it more effectively. The show will be about 40 minutes of me talking to him about social media challenges. Once it's finished, I send the video to my creative team. In the next two to three weeks, they will produce audio snippets, full videos with subtitles, and podcasts of the audio. The podcast will appear online, and the videos will be released simultaneously.

One of my staff members listens to the audio and writes a blog post. This means I'm getting more than a month's worth of content from a single conversation. The joy is that during that month, and during the follow-up, I'll have a lot of information to send to people who I'm trying to convince to work with us.

How do we educate our staff?

We give everybody who joins us indoctrination into the ‘Immediate Future’ marketing brand. We talk about our content pillars, how we speak, what our tone of voice is, and our philosophy. 

 We have three buckets of paid social advertisement: these are people who are going to be interested in social media, the ABM, and people we are targeting with email.

This results in phenomenal open rates of 28 to 45% because people are used to seeing our name.

Content creation and management can be used as a new form of lead generation but it is up to your organisation to decide the best strategies going forward.

ABM is not commonly known to those that don't work b2b Tech, where it's just kind of gone pervasive for the last couple of years so we do it in two ways. 

One, which is not technically ABM, but anyway, the first way is traditional ABM, we work with anyone but we target only four sectors. In those four sectors are picked somewhere between three and five organisations that I want to work with in the next year, or we as a leadership team will pick them and  we get to know them really well. So that's using the LinkedIn crystal known as  Sales Navigator, we'll profile the company, work out what they're interested in, we'll start to serve them things that we think might be useful, invite them to things that will trigger them. If they're chatty, one creative person would be invited into a creative event.

If they're numbers driven, we might talk to them about metrics and measurements. It's a very focused thing. And they tend to be the clients we're going for.

What we do

What we do is we look at clusters, we say, right, this is all the people we're targeting in the food and drinks industry.

We pull their emails, and then we go back in. we're now targeting this audience through social too.What we do is start to create content, deeper content that fits them.For the food industry, we've done reports on gbbo on the barbecue, on food trends, that kind of stuff. What happens is we start to push out more of this content and of course live. 

There's two elements to that, because that's the way we work in b2b. When we were targeting big companies, if you were to get VW on a global basis, you were not going to get it overnight. If you want to be on that pitch list, you've got to be memorable, you've got to be up the backsides not about bottoms today better. We have every single decision maker in that process, which means that you need to be kinda there waving at them through social. Waving at them through email, waving at them through your live sessions, inviting them to events and sending them reports. You want to be there so that when the pitch time comes, you're in the right place. It's about understanding the psychological triggers I need in place to make everything else easier.

The top of the funnel is looking at showing the solution to a pain point, the middle of the funnel is consideration and tends to be credibility. That's why we got a little slice going look at we did this, we won their stuff. That's the credibility bit in the middle. That will also be why my signature says I'm the top 25 Digital innovator nominated block. I do that not because I have a big head but because I need to prove credibility at the point I come through on the stories. The story gets them in through the front door. 

We write in the way we talk so that we sound like we're halfway through a conversation. That allows us to take that same story down further. And then when you get to the end game of that, that part where you're beginning to pitch. Now what we do is we're looking at stories that get very close to the date much closer to the detail. Often they will be reports for instance, that are broken out or bits of insight.