Featured Uberflip Hub: hub.schellmanco.com
As a Content Experience Explorer (EXPY) Award nominee, Steve is recognized as a marketer who takes the concept of content experience from beyond buzzword, to proving its impact on revenue. By focusing on the content experience for prospects and customers, Steve has proven to be an innovator who, with experience, talent, and skill, has advanced the practice of content marketing. Read on below to learn the hard-won insights of how he's improving the way content is experienced.
Putting the Content Experience First
At Schellman & Company, we don’t consider ourselves as a startup firm, but we are in the startup sense when it comes to the marketing lifecycle. Therefore, my role is really a jack of all trades when it comes to the content experience. We are touching all aspects of lead generation, customer experience, education, advocacy, and sales.
Using the Content Experience to Establish Meaningful Relationships
We listen to the patterns of actual questions our leads are asking on sales calls or via webinars and then develop our content strategy around that. This allows us to build the content we foresee that prospects will be asking for and the topics we know we need to educate them on before they even get on a call with us. And then when they do get on a call with us, we now are able to have more meaningful conversations further down the sales funnel.
Creating Amazing Content Experiences Along the Entire Journey
We believe in empowerment and advocacy at our firm. We have moved away from outbound sales to inbound sales with a content creation strategy. In a professional services firm, we aren’t selling widgets, but we are selling our experience, expertise, and technical capability. Therefore, we have empowered every single one of our employees, whether in the field or back office operations, to author a technical piece.
We then take that content, perform our Q/A review and have an external magazine or publication publish it, post it to our blog, turn into a presentation or e-book, or all of the above. Our sales team has full access to creating and delivering sales leave behind pages and we consistently are finding better and easier ways for those in our organization to share and champion our content.
Future Explorations in Content Experience
Most recently, we have started including personalized video messages in our follow-up emails and Sales Streams when trying to re-engage qualified prospects.
In the future, we’re planning content experiences that focus on:
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Video: Both professional presentations as well as less polished segments, but that are more personalized and impromptu. We’re placing a high priority on service based videos, vlogs, and teasers for our whitepapers, with a video introduction.
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Research driven content: Using our client base and sending them out surveys to publish more data driven information.
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Conversational content: Though this may be nothing new in general, it certainly is effective in our world of auditing.
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Cartoon Strips: Creating a custom cartoon that talks about the lives of our auditors and the “funny” things they see during their day to day. This is A good way for some social interactions to make light of an often-stuffy scene in our industry.
