How to Turn Prose Into Pipeline
Some of our most masterful writing has driven zero leads. Some of our okay-est writing has generated thousands in new pipeline. As inconvenient as it may seem coming from a studio that offers writing and design, the truth is: How you promote matters as much as what you make.
Below are our recommendations for laying the groundwork necessary to transform prose into pipeline.
1. Plan for demand before you create
Planning for demand generation comes before content creation. At the very least, you should develop your demand plan and your content plan simultaneously. The reason is, nearly every time we’re hired to write content before any mechanisms to distribute it are in place—say, an email list, partners who’ll reshare us, or even just a LinkedIn following—there’s an uncomfortable delay before the client sees any discernible effect.
The exception here is when someone’s launching a new company or product and they simply need a content “starter kit”—a sales deck, one-pager, website, etc., and there’s no expectation of quickly generating deals.
The demand gen plan should be somewhat malleable. It should be able to change slightly to accommodate the content we create, while still providing a framework for making decisions. If the plan is too inflexible—for example, if a company has invested heavily into a certain conversational chatbot that’s not really suited to distribute the content (maybe for CFOs who don’t have time to chat)—we can run into trouble.
Success story:
Syncari’s Data Superheroes Newsletter lives several lives
Our Writer & Strategist Riviera Lev-Aviv helped the team think through truly multi-purpose content—a newsletter that featured the team’s friends and partners as data experts. Those interviewees were prompted to share with their networks, with the help of a fun graphic and teaser video. The newsletter gave Syncari permission to be in their prospects’ inboxes twice a month, and it was an owned channel they could build upon. When they hired a demand team, there was already content performance data, real engagement, and a foundation to amplify their efforts.
2. Someone other than the writer must handle promotion
This could be a demand generation team with a pipeline goal or simply a content manager who frees our writers and designers to focus on creating while they prepare for distribution. Ideally, this team is so hungry for content they can quickly find uses for anything we produce.
Without this partner, we run into a few common issues. For one, founders or heads of marketing tend to become bottlenecks for approving content. And two, if approvals aren’t the issue, publishing is. Content piles up like so many freight cars.
I have tried my hand at also being this promotional partner to keep things moving, but realized one person can’t do it all. Promotion and managing the CMS draw from an entirely different part of your brain. If you task a writer with it, there’ll be a sudden downshift in activity and they’ll wind up doing many things poorly rather than one thing spectacularly.
Success story
Loopio’s RFP Academy hits its two-month goal of 400 sign-ups in three days
Our Senior Writer & Strategist Carina Rampelt helped Loopio plan and produce an eight-week email course. Yes, the writing was exceptional. But it was a knock-out success because our prose was paired with a demand team who had the brilliant idea to collect pre-registrations. Loopio hit their two-month sign-up goal on day three.
3. It’s best when demand is responsible for measurement
Ideally, the demand or content team handles tracking and measurement. Like promotion, this draws from a different part of your brain. Whenever a client spends time in their analytics and passes ideas along to us, it becomes content rocket fuel. But if our writers have to stop what they’re doing, log into the analytics, and then switch back to their creative brain, it’s more like lamp oil.
To this same effect, when demand teams stay in close contact with us and relays thoughts from the field (and—joy—recorded sales conversations), it makes our team vastly more effective.
Un-success story
A project management tool’s wonderful ebooks languish on page 50 of Google
We proposed a full package to write the assets as well as materials to promote them, but this team just wanted the assets, which we happily obliged. When they ordered their fourth one, we asked how the first three were doing. The team checked for the first time. Some assets had only received mere hundreds of views for a search topic that should have been much higher, and the reason is no one had thought to seek backlinks or promote them. In this case, we proposed pausing the ebooks until we got the promotion figured out.
It pays to prepare
Preparation is not always fun, and sometimes painful, but it’s what turns prose into pipeline. It’s the difference between making something and making a difference in your numbers. The more you plan from promotion at the outset, the more it warms up the whole demand generation system so the moment things are proofread, they fly off the docket into ready readers’ hands.