We've published one hundred articles in one hundred weeks.
That's approximately 85,000 words.
Those articles were supported by at least one, if not two, supporting posts, which will take our word count to well over 100,000.
And that's not vanity content of self-indulgent personal branding posts. This is meaningful content that adds value, talks to a market challenge, and gives something to the user to take away and act on.
But word count means nothing if your content doesn't connect with your audience.
Let's also be really clear. This also wasn't a marketing tactic. Yes, we've deployed a content marketing tactic, but the goal was to actually to connect content into our sales engine.
You might be saying, "so what" right now. But the reason for sharing this is to show how important content is in the sales funnel. Whether thats Top, Middle of Bottom. Content is a key part of authority building, as well as the way you use it to handle objections, educate, inform, and move opportunities through the funnel.
Content in the sales funnel
So, using content in your sales funnel immediately sounds like it's a marketing activity rather than a sales activity.
True. Content is, at its heart, a marketing tactic. And it's inherently an inbound tactic too.
From a marketing standpoint, it's harder to control who is reading your content. You're dependent on the LinkedIn algorithm to serve your content to the right people, if at all. Or you're dependent on someone visiting your website or any other platform you may have posted it on.
And that traffic is a lovely by-product of creating content.
But what we want is control. So, we need to turn it into a sales tactic by using it differently.
And that's where the difference between inbound and outbound comes in, as well as the difference between what we can and can't control. As overall results in your engine come from both aspects.
Because getting sales working holistically means you have to do it all, unfortunately. But with content, you get a really good mix of both sides of the equation and, overall, a lot of bang for your buck when it comes to return on investment.
Making content work in the funnel.
Ok, so this bit is really simple.
Using content in a marketing context means putting it out there on a distribution channel to be found.
Using content in a sales context means using it proactively and intelligently on a one-to-one basis with your prospects. Using the right piece of content for the right reason at the right time to nurture, nudge and create action.
Simple right?
So breaking that down to the most simple action in sales. You've listened to a prospect's problems, you've identified their problems, and you take the content directly to them as part of your follow-up.
We keep a library in Notion that is tagged, classified and searchable, so each time we need to find something useful, we have a really simple process for finding something that will fit the needs of that particular prospect.
At its core, it's that simple.
Yes, you can, and we do use more sophisticated triggers to make use of the content in a more elaborate way, but even if you did this in a consistent and structured way, you would see a significant difference over time in the momentum and movement of opportunities through the stages of your sales.
How do I know?
Well, it's what we do.
So let's put that into context.
What did we do in the last 100 weeks?
Well, we've been busy.
Our 100 articles were posted every week without fail on my LinkedIn profile, the company's LinkedIn profile, our website and Medium.
To go alongside that, we created 100 text-based posts and sometimes also created a visual carousel of our content and a supporting video.
Over time, we dropped the visual carousels as they looked good in the feed and the profiles.
The hypothesis was that this was a straightforward and digestible way for our readers to consume content, but it never really felt like we got the feedback on the content we expected. They naturally had a slightly higher production time.
In terms of planning, to start with, we set out a quarterly content plan but allowed ourselves to flex what we were writing about to flex based on what we were hearing in the market.
At best, in each quarter, we stuck to the plan and created/posted the content we intended 50% of the time. In most parts, we used that plan and backbone of potential content as a safety to give us confidence we were organised. Still, in reality, we were creating content on the fly based on the challenges we heard in the market and what felt post-poignant and impactful every week.
One really useful element of publishing content in this way is the Newsletter function on LinkedIn.
We've published the latest 86 articles out of our 100 as newsletters. This means that each time we publish a newsletter, each one of our subscribers gets it emailed to them, which is a brilliant broadcast mechanic.
It's also a great trigger to create engagement around and aim to grow your subscriber base.
How we're creating content.
And yeah, you heard that right, we're creating content each week.
We're not batching content or relying heavily on AI to squirt out 100 articles of dross that then got scheduled 100 weeks ago.
We're a real-time content production engine that produces article posts and videos every Monday.
You might think this is total madness, but I believe it's given us a real edge to dial into the facts that will be useful for our readers.
This dynamic production process also meant we could write content specifically for objections in our sales engine. At times, we wrote articles specifically for one prospect, which then became our weekly article.
We did this around 15 times. One of note was the Demand generation myths article, which was geared specifically to answer the objections of one board member for one opportunity. But it also served as a great addition to our library.
Emerging channels
What we've learned from these last 100 weeks has helped us create a base of understanding of what our audience wants and where they want to access our content.
What's clear, which won't be a surprise, is that our audience is on LinkedIn. But as we evolve our own business strategy and better define who our secondary and tertiary audiences are, we're better understanding where else our content needs to be.
For example, we've just taken our first toe dip onto YouTube. To start with, we're focused on
Shorts, repurposing the short and snappy videos we created for LinkedIn. However, there is a broader strategy that will take shape next year.
The other emerging channel we're excited about accessing next year is Substack.
We're not on that channel yet, but we're really interested in seeing how that can support distribution and access to our content. Especially since Medium as a channel is a bit of a flop.
Content distribution - The results
Well, we're pretty happy with the results.
Although LinkedIn's analytics and reporting engine is frankly rubbish, so we can only go back 365 days, the stats below are an encouraging base we can build on next year.
If you break that down into real terms, you can see the impact of bringing the content into the sales engine has.
As you'll see below, at the point of publishing this article on the 10th of December 2024, we only had 1,371 newsletter subscribers.
If we've had 27,972 article/newsletter views, that means, on average, each weekly article/newsletter edition is getting 538 views or reads.
That's potentially a 40% views or reads rate per subscriber.
But the reality is, as we know, the algorithm isn't going to be serving the newsletter to every subscriber.
Yes, every subscriber gets the newsletter emailed to them at the point of publishing it. It's a super handy little trick, thanks to LinkedIn for that mechanism.
But the reality is not every one of our subscribers is going to read it each week.
So this highlights the impact on readership and, therefore, prospect engagement, bringing content into the sales funnel can actually have.
I mean 27,972 eyeballs on our thinking in the last 365 days. That's not a bad start.
But if you extrapolate that out over 100 weeks, it's probably closer to 50,000 eyeballs.
Content in the sales funnel - The results
So, does content actually help you close deals?
The short answer? Yes.
In the last 6 months alone, the newsletter on its own has generated 21 opportunities with businesses and their leaders I didn't know before they contacted me.
But that's a marketing outcome. They're technically inbound at that point.
Looking at the stats in CRM, I would attribute half of our closes in 2024 alone have been accelerated by the strategic placement of content in the sales funnel all the way from the Top of the Funnel down to the Bottom of the Funnel close.
I would hand on heart say that using our content in the funnel has dramatically accelerated the sale stage movement across the funnel to maintain a fast-paced momentum to drive deals forward.
This is why we're doubling down on our content again in 2025 as a sales tool.
Reflecting on 100 weeks.
The big question is whether these stats are what we expected.
Well, stats they're better than expected. But the outcome is as expected. Content deployed as a proactive sales tool has had a huge impact on our sales performance this year.
We've seen it in our pipeline and in our clients' pipelines, who have managed to maintain reasonable consistency.
But that's the hard bit. It's the consistency of creating this content and taking it to market.
It's not easy. Certainly not at the start. But it gets easier, and dare I say fun, the deeper you get into it, especially when you can react so quickly to a market change or emerging challenge and be out there with an opinion and social proof in a flash.