Description
About Call For Content
Call For Content is a solo founder B2B content marketing agency for expert-run businesses founded at the beginning of 2017. It was founded because I (Michael, the aforementioned solo founder) realized that even though I had been working with content strategy and marketing for the past 2 years, nobody knew who I was and I only had a few clients for references. When I asked other consultants what they did about this, they either replied that all their customers came from referrals or they created content to prove their expertise. I quickly realized that my fellow consultants needed help marketing themselves with content, so I decided to develop a content marketing process to serve them.
In order to differentiate ourselves from most other agencies out there, I decided we would:
- Focus on educational content backed by customer research
- Exclusively create long form content (1000+ words)
- Share everything we learn and publish our entire process in case someone can’t afford to hire us to do it for them
- Serve our market with a recurring subscription model, with at least 1 monthly offering below the $1000/month mark (we start at the $900/month, paid quarterly)
- Interview our clients for every new post to help that we don’t misrepresent them
Our clients are experts in their fields. That means that have a track record of doing something and succeeding at it. Our clients have usually been independent for several years. They own their business. They have deal sizes in the 4 and 5 figures. Some build their entire business on a few larger deals. They always sell to businesses, usually small or medium size ones. Most of our clients sell services to those businesses.
Our Vision and Content Strategy
I want to make the Call For Content blog a complete guide for any B2B consultant or coach looking to establish themselves as an authority in their niche and use that authority to generate leads.
Our target audience is business consultants or coaches that are looking to increase their authority using content. Authority leads to the ability to increase rates and recognition in their industry and target market. That recognition makes it easier to perform marketing activities like cold outreach and hopefully (but not necessarily) will help them inbound some leads from their content.
Below is an excerpt from our company process guide: The Authority Marketing Playbook. If you comment on this, I will respond. It’s the best overview of Call For Content available.
Call For Content Process V2.0
Customer Focused Content Marketing for Consultants and Executive Coaches. Our goal is to grow our client’s authority and business. We measure the quality of our content as creating quality traffic. We define quality traffic as Reads and Leads; 1) People actually consume the content we create and 2) Those readers (and others like them) become valuable leads for our client’s business. While we mainly work on digital content, the goal is the same no matter the format of our content. We value leads over reads, but both are necessary for authority generation.
About Our Clients - Who This Was Designed For
Our clients are experts in their fields. That means that have a track record of doing something and succeeding at it. Our clients have usually been independent for several years. They own their business. They have deal sizes in the 4 and 5 figures. Some build their entire business on a few larger deals. They always sell to businesses, usually small or medium size ones. Most of our clients sell services to those businesses.
SEO is Secondary
Our clients usually don’t generate leads with content when they come to us. For most of them, the majority of their work comes from networking or referrals. Some use speaking engagements and workshops, but using content to position and market themselves is generally a new strategy for them. Our clients usually have little to no traffic from search.
We use SEO to make sure our clients show up when people google them. Since most people are not finding them via search, and we're not an SEO agency, we don't keyword stuff. We focus on creating informative, shareable, authoritative content. By combining that with email capture and social media marketing, we build our clients' contact lists. As we create content and social proof over time, SEO opportunities will pop up. We take them as they come, but rarely seek them out.
Our Content Strategy - Summarized
We interview our client and their best customers to develop targeted content topics, uncover hidden influencers, and find out which communities we should be targetings. From each best customer, we create a Persona and set of Pain Points. After that, we start planning out the specific kinds of content and topics we’ll be creating. We always make an email newsletter and recommend a combination of podcasting and blogging for regular content.
To make sure people see that content, we use community outreach and paid promotions on social media. As our clients start to build some authority and audience, we begin influencer outreach for content and referral partnerships. Since we’ve targeted everything from the beginning, our clients are able to grow a valuable email list fairly quickly. This list is invaluable, as it forms the basis for us to nurture those on it and turn them into leads.
Like any good digital marketing strategy, everything we do is tracked using analytics. That means we are able to learn and become even more targeted with our messaging over time. As prospects continue to engage with our client’s brand, we score their activities and eventually initiate the first steps of the sales conversation with an offering personalized to their Pain Points.
Some Of The Content I Used to Design Our Process (and the kind of writing we’re looking for)
- Grow and Convert
- Pricenomics Content Marketing Handbook (this is a big guide, but I love their blog )
- A great video on making content people love
- Kai Davis on levels of consulting (We target, late stage 200 level on up)
- https://kaidavis.com/get-name-known-freelancer/
Tone/Style details for our blog:
- NO Mirage Content
- Conversational tone
- Post must help readers accomplish something, and/or learn from examples.
- Detailed explanations of processes
- Does not follow conventional 5 paragraph essay format
- short concise paragraphs that are easy to read
- Fully formatted sections to make posts easy to skim through
- 1st or 2nd person
About you:
- You must have a passion for content marketing and business.
- You are a storyteller.
- You can come up with story ideas with minimal guidance.
- You love learning about new topics and ideas.
- You are/have experience as a freelancer or independent consultant.