What content marketing strategy do you follow to attract top tier users?
What users are “top tier” in your situation? Is it about users who are looking to buy the most expensive / enterprise plan that you’re offering? Or is it about attracting users that are ideal fit for your product, will have the highest NPS and will spread the word the most?
If you’re after ideal-fit users, to attract them we usually start with understanding user pain points in our area in detail, with specific focus on the language they use to describe the problems they have. This is ideally done through user interviews, with both customers and non-customers. You might want to interview users with different backgrounds / job titles.
We then come up with content ideas for each of the pain points. Sometimes ideas are inspired by content distribution opportunities — for example, we might see that there is a lot of SEO demand for particular related keywords, and we would think about how to weave together our ICP pain points with the SEO opportunity. Or maybe there is no SEO demand, but we see certain LinkedIn influencers posting about this topic a lot, and their thinking aligns with our product.
We then organise those ideas, prioritise them, and execute on the top priorities. After that comes distribution - SEO, organic social, paid social, via conferences and presentations, YouTube organic, YouTube ads, Reddit, niche Slack/Discord communities, etc etc.
And then track the impact of the content, through self-attribution and programmatic attribution, and iterate on future plans. That’s at a high level.
An example for a specialized database for storing location data. Picking a technical example so that this is a bit more detailed than, say, a time tracking app example.
The ideal user might be a software engineer who needs to implement location-based features in their application, like embedded maps perhaps, or location-based search. Ideal == perhaps all the best customers you have so far have someone like this on the team, and they get the value you’re offering and recommend your product to others.
The pain points they might have, as it applies to location data:
storing location data in a “regular” database requires additional work
I, as a software engineer, don’t know the future challenges of storing lots of location data
I am worried that my system for location data might be slow in the future, when we add lots of users to our application
I am anxious about building my own solution as it might take a long time
We would then try and produce content about each of these pain points. For example:
How to store location data in a regular database step by step - and heads up, it’s a lot of work (with examples)
Here is the list of future challenges you might encounter when storing lots of location data
Here is how to ensure that you build a fast location data system
How to choose whether to build your own solution, or to take one off the shelf (and by the way, have a look at our solution - maybe it’s a fit)
Perhaps there is good search volume around the speed aspects, for example “database query caching”. We would make sure that some of the content is designed for SEO distribution for that keyword. Some of these don’t have SEO volume, so we would rely on paid social or organic social distribution.
We would then score the ideas, produce the ones that we believe are most important right now, and measure impact on acquiring the right users.
Example on how to organise this in a Google Sheet:
If you are specifically looking for users for your most expensive plans, the above process is relevant, but the focus might be on identifying the narrow slice of pain points that indicate that the prospect would buy your most expensive plan. Perhaps they have a large team. Or there is a lot of urgency. Or there is another reason why your Enterprise plan will help them better than your other plans.
And then creating content focused on that more narrow segment.
Another avenue, common with PLG companies, is companies wouldn’t necessarily buy Enterprise solutions out of the gate, but they might perhaps use a more standard plan for a while, but then become a good fit for the Enterprise plan later on when their business grows or their use case becomes more complex.
A good way to use content in such situations is to create content about these more complex use cases, and how your other customers solve for them with your Enterprise plan, and periodically send that info to users on other plans, for example in your customer email newsletter.
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