The obsession for subscribers in the content marketing world is pointless
subscribers

Face it: The obsession for subscribers in the content marketing world is pointless

6 min read

If you are in the SaaS content marketing world, you may or may not agree with what the title calls for. But I would request you to give me a listen. 🙂 

A lot of times, people tell me, “Yaag! We are currently getting 1000+ readership per blog post. But we should do something to capture and retain these visitors. We need to increase the percentage of returning visitors vs. new visitors.” 

And I have always wondered, why should we force it? Sometimes, we’ve gone on a spitballing spree over this. And these debates expose a common confusion between retaining customers and retaining visitors. 

The majority of people who read your content, be it a blog post or a whitepaper on your website’s resource section, aren’t your regular website visitors. Instead, they end up landing on your article or web page when they are looking to find a solution to their problem or researching on the topic. 

Let me back this up with some data. 

Research says that only 17% of visitors return to the same website to consume more content—even for  some of the most successful blogs in the SaaS world. That means these sites get 83% new visitors every month. 

What does that tell you?

The more you rely on organic, the better it is for you in the long-term.

What’s the point of growth hacking your way to get 1000 new subscribers to your blog? How many of those subscribers are likely to open the email whenever they receive a new blog post update?

So ask yourself—what’s the point of pushing pop-ups to people to subscribe to your blogs? Sadly, most of these pop-ups appear much before the visitor finishes reading a couple of lines. 

And it kills the reading experience.

subscribers

The need to come out of the content funnel mindset 

One of the primary reasons why people are obsessed with increasing content subscription is – the funnel mindset. I’m sure you’re familiar with the terms ‘top-funnel (ToFu)’, ‘mid-funnel (MoFu),’ ‘bottom-funnel (BoFu)’ content.

Often, people in the content marketing world create content for each stage of the marketing funnel. For instance, we create awareness-level content for ToFu, comparison content or case studies for MoFu, content that talks about ROI or TCO for BoFu, etc.

We think, if a visitor lands on our website to consume a piece of content, we can ask them to subscribe. And if the visitor does, we can nurture them with the next set of content pieces, and they will eventually move into the buying cycle.

That almost always never really happens. Yet, most of us in the content marketing world have bought into that narrative.

Customers these days don’t move from awareness to interest to desire to action in a linear path anymore. The movement is random.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for moving from a funnel mindset to a flywheel mindset. While flywheel has its advantages, that is not what this blog is about!

The point is – no one wants to be nurtured with one content after the other. No one wants to be a ‘prospect.’ 

The simple fact is that if someone lands on your piece of content when searching for something – all your content needs to do is deliver on the promise and earn their trust, not ask for their email address. 🙂

By collecting their email and adding them into your nurture cycle to push more content down their throat or asking your sales team to pursue them, you will only get them to unsubscribe quickly. More importantly, as a marketer, you are creating a bad experience for your potential future customers and also losing the trust of your sales team by passing on irrelevant leads.

Here’s an exciting podcast episode that talks about building content that cuts across the funnel stages.


Real-time content experience matters the most

Now let’s look at the other negative aspects of creating content funnels and taking up targets for increasing monthly blog subscribers. The moment we subscribe to this idea, we develop a tunnel vision for hitting our numbers at any cost.

How often do you see SaaS companies blog about random listicles for hitting their top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) marketing goals? You might remember reading articles like ‘10 things you should be doing on Black Friday’ even when the company has nothing to do with the retail or e-commerce domain.

Think for a moment –  why should a company produce a 2000 word article about creating GIFs, when their actual business is marketing automation?

Here’s a perfect representation by our marketoonist (by now, it’s no doubt for you all that I’m a big fan of Tom Fishburne, and many of you too are).

content marketing world

As the picture speaks for itself, it’s not just for ToFu but also across the funnel stages.

We, in the content marketing world, know it. But why is it still done?

It’s all done in the race to chase the ‘search volume’ those keywords have and get a pie of that traffic. But – is the traffic thus attracted relevant? Do they have a buying intent? 

You know the answer. And I won’t necessarily blame the content marketing world or fraternity for this. 

If that’s the target given to them, that’s what they would end up doing.

But that said, creating the right objectives can be a tricky game. It is tempting and easy to focus on the tactics since these hacks appear to be driving the numbers, and it looks as if the flywheel is moving. 

I always ask, “If I achieve these subscription numbers, will we as a company hit the objective? Will that improve conversions?” 

Understanding content consumption

A study conducted by Sirius Decisions revealed that 70% of content created by B2B companies goes unused, sitting as blog posts, or in sales portals and website resource sections.

content marketing world

So it’s evident that the role of content marketing needs to go way beyond creation and distribution. We need to find a way to improve the content experience – be it blog posts or branded content assets such as whitepapers, ebooks, video, etc.  

Content experience is measured by how easy or difficult it is for a website visitor to access your content, how useful it is to them, how they engage with the content, and the action they take after consuming the content.

The last thing you want is to interrupt the reader’s experience and push them to sign up for your content. If they see value in your content, they will sign up in their own volition.

Here’s an interesting case study:

Gerry McGovern discovered that 3 million out of 10 million pieces of Microsoft’s content were never accessed or read. Those are staggering numbers. It made Microsoft take steps towards phasing out irrelevant content. They went about determining the tasks that people were looking to complete when the prospects visited Microsoft’s website. 

In other words, they tried to map the right pieces to the right touch points in the customer journey. The case in point –  you need to know what your prospects or customers want at any given point in time.

Great content comes from being intentional

In January 2019, while mentoring a software startup in the Netherlands, I came up with the GAME Model for revenue marketing, which I’ve covered in ‘The Revenue Marketing Book.’ While I don’t want to deviate and discuss the GAME model right now, I’ll say that it drove us to understand two fundamental things:

  1. Following the ‘why us’ from our customers. (So that we could continue to provide value)
  2. Understanding the customer’s business model.

We went and met our client’s top 10 customers and tried to understand the ground reality of why they signed up. We sat down with the customer support, sales, and customer success teams and analyzed all the customer wins and customers lost during the current and previous years. 

Doing this with 10 customers gave us a pattern – an understanding of how our customers think, work, and, more importantly, what would be of value to them at the stage.

These two exercises helped us to relook and tweak the Ideal Customer Persona (ICP) and make the marketing message more relevant. 

And it had a direct impact on the kind of content we produced. We realized that the companies where content marketing is hugely successful are ones that write for their customers and not prospects.

And that helped us shorten our sales cycles. 

So, the point is – once you understand your customers, it’s easy to translate that knowledge into your content strategy and become more intentional in your marketing.

Once you know what moves the needle, embrace that essence into every piece of communication across the customer journey.

Being intentional with your content means:

  • You’re very in tune with your customers’ wants and needs
  • You’re in tune with why your customers prefer you
  • You have taken into account the day-to-day responsibilities and goals of your users and decision-makers in your customer organization
  • Everything you do and say resonates with your audience and makes an impact
  • You are not just looking at your numbers but also the effect on customer organization and your company’s objectives
  • You aren’t like an ostrich that has its head buried in the sand of blog subscription goals. Your marketing also contributes to related functions and organizational goals.

Being intentional helps you move from hitting vanity metrics to contributing to organizational revenue. 

Finally, ask yourself a simple Shakespeare inspired question – What’s in a subscription?

Game on!

Yaag is among the top 100 global martech influencers, a TEDx speaker, podcaster and a best-selling author. With 10+ years of experience in B2B marketing, he loves everything martech, marketing and startups.

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3 Responses
  1. Yaag you are so right! As content marketers we are trained to follow our virtual visitors around at close quarters, trying to get them to read more, sign up, or make a sale. It’s time for a new angle.

    1. Thanks Sara! I’m glad you agree, and yes we need to make use of the visitor’s time on page to build trust and better experience by offering what they actually came to the web page for. That’s far more helpful than throwing a pop-up on the face 🙂

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