Today I have a brand new article for you called Building Your B2B Content Machine.

Below I share how we created a system that gets 1.27 million content impressions per month within our target market from digital ads, warm email, and outbound prospecting.

If you like data-driven, fresh growth content likes and this you’re not yet a SaasRise member, apply to join us here. We welcome all SaaS founders and CEOs with $1M-$100M in ARR to join our SaaS growth mastermind community.

Now, let’s jump right in to the good stuff…

Building Your B2B Content Machine

Want to know the B2B marketing strategy we used to bootstrap SaasRise from $0 to $3M in ARR over the last 12 months?

It’s all about creating quality content – and distributing it to the people in our target market (SaaS Founders and CEOs) using ads and email. 

We don’t do affiliate programs, SEO, tradeshows, events, or anything else (yet). 

Just lots of content creation + ads + outbound email. 

I measure our success by two critical KPIs…

1. Content Impressions Per Month

2. New Members Acquired Per Month (aka customers)

I’ve found that the more high quality, data-driven, actionable content I produce and distribute to our target market, the faster we grow. 

I spend three hours per week writing/creating great content (Mondays 10am to 1pm) and then my team distributes it via email, ads, and LinkedIn. 

Today I wrote this article — and now it’s in the hands of our 280,000 newsletter subscribers.

Because of the content machine we’ve built over the last year, we’re now adding 40 new members per month for SaasRise and are up to 400 members total (all CEOs/Founders of $1M-$100M revenue software firms).

You can create a similar content machine inside your company. The below video and detailed written explanation will share how…

Video: How to Create Your B2B Content Machine

Our Actual Content Machine Results for October 2024

Each month, I track the total number of marketing impressions we get within our target market. Here’s our actual content KPI sheet tracker.

In October 2024 (last month) we had 1,269,988 content impressions within our target market of SaaS CEOs and Founders (there are about 500,000 people globally in our TAM, so many people in our TAM are seeing our content multiple times).

Start by tracking your total content impressions each month.

Here’s how we’ve grown our total content impressions per month over the last six months. We now have a Content Marketing Machine that is driving 1.27M impressions per month and growing.

To get total content impressions, we simply add together the number of ad impressions, email impressions (aka opens), LinkedIn Impressions, and website impressions (aka views) + video impressions. 

How many content impressions did you get last month? Take a moment and calculate it now.

Of late, we’ve been putting more of a focus on creating more email content (2x per week) and driving video views of our SaaS Growth Course (which we send out free samples of via our email newsletter).

Since we moved from a 1x a 2x per week email frequency, we’ve increased our new members added per month from 25 to 40.

The key lesson: you need to create a system that sends out great content to your list every 3 days (not every 30 days like most companies do!).

Because of this content machine, we’ll add over 40 new SaasRise members during November 2024 and pass 400 total SaasRise community members this month.

How We Get These Results

How did we achieve this level of content distribution only 14 months after launching?

We have three secrets that allow us to create lots of content AND distribute it to lots of people in our TAM.

1. My first secret is that I spend 3 hours per week (Mondays 10am to 1pm) creating content – and then my team distributes it throughout the week on all the channels (email, ads, LinkedIn, etc.).
   

2. We have four people on our team – and 3 of them help with content creation or distributon…

Ryan (CEO) - Writes the content
David (Head of Growth) - creates ads promoting the content and optimizes them
Lee (Head of Sales) - posts the content on LinkedIn

3. My third secret is that we invested a lot (about $40k so far) in getting good quality lead data for our TAM and building our ABM list – getting the contact info for every one of the 500,000 SaaS CEOs and Founders in the world using Instantly, ListKit, Apollo, Seamless, and many others tools – and then sending value-add cold outbound campaigns to them using Instantly. Creating lots of great content without ALSO building a BIG list of people to distribute it to doesn’t make sense.

We built an Account Based Marketing lead list using Instantly, Apollo, ListKit, and Seamless  – and then ran email and digital ad campaigns to our exact target audience – making our brand omnipresent within our ICP – and using our own SaaS Growth System process (that we often talk about within the SaasRise community).

Our guiding philosophy behind our marketing? There’s no sense in simply waiting for your target audience to find you. Go out and find them – and then start building trust with your audience by sending high value content.

Want to learn more? Let’s break down how we’ve done it – channel by channel. 

How We Scaled Our Ad Impressions

For ads we do retargeting ads, matched audience ads, search ads, lookalike ads, and boosted posts. For an overview of the ad types we like to use, see this blog post on making ads profitable.

Let’s break down our 605,628 ad impressions during October 2024 by type:

• Retargeting Impressions: 355,021 impressions

• Matched Audience Impressions: 180,540 impressions

• Boosted Post Impressions: 62,580 impressions

• Lookalike Impressions: 6,543 impressions

• Paid Search Impressions: 1,327 impressions

And we can further breakdown our October 2024 ad impressions by ad network:

• Meta - 383,673 impressions

• Google Display - 96,064 impressions

• Google Search - 1,327 impressions

• LinkedIn - 63,992 impressions

• Adroll - 60,572 impressions

As you can see, most of our impressions are on Meta, followed by Google, LinkedIn, and Adroll. You can see our full weekly ad results tracker here (Yes, we open source nearly everything).

Most people don’t realize that Meta works great for B2B marketing – but it does (for retargeting, lookalike, and matched audience ads) and clicks/leads are much lower cost than on LinkedIn.

Overall, we spent $10,054 last month to get those 605k ad impressions, working out to a $16.60 CPM and $2.47 per click. Not bad!

We create various types of ads, including:

1. Testimonial Ads - Go to your standard landing page

2. Blog Content Ads - Go to a written piece of content that has a CTA within it

3. Case Study Download Ads - Go to a page where user can download a case study

4. Free Trial Ad - Go to a page where users can start a free account or free trial

5. Demo Ads - Go to a page where users can book a demo or sales call

6. PDF Report Ads - Go to a page where users can download a valuable PDF report

7. Founder Video Ads - Go to your standard landing page

You can see more of the ads we run in the Meta Ads Library, LinkedIn Ads Library, and Google Ads Library. 

How We Scaled Our Email Opens

We use two different types of email to generate applications for SaasRise – warm email and cold email. We use BeeHiiv for warm email and Instantly for cold prospecting email. 

Here’s a breakdown of how many warm vs. cold email opens we sent in October 2024.

• Warm Newsletter Opens (BeeHiiv) - 538,527 (out of 1.54M sent, a 35% open rate)

• Cold Sequence Opens (Instantly) - 10,100 (out of 27,200 sent, a 37% open rate)

We have a warm BeeHiiv email list of 281,000 subscribers and sent to them 6x in October. We’re moving now to a 8x per month frequency. As long as the content is GREAT and valuable, the more sending the better. 

We’ve also found that B2B outbound prospecting (aka cold emails) has been very effective for engaging new leads at the top of our funnel and scaling up the warm email list (those who engage with the content and open our reports/PDFs become warm leads). Here’s a good tutorial on how to do cold prospecting emails. 

You can use this process map slide below to turn cold leads into warm leads. In essence, you get your cold leads from Instantly, Apollo, ListKit, etc. and then send them valuable content and if the lead engages with the content repeatedly, they become a warm lead and can go into your CRM tool / Marketing Automation for additional follow-up. 

How We Scaled Our LinkedIn Impressions 

We’re in the early stages of building up our LinkedIn content machine. 

We post 2-3x per week and spend $35 per day boosting these posts to our matched audience of SaaS CEOs/Founders. You can see below we’ve gotten 257,960 impressions in the last 90 days, reaching 47,512 members in our TAM. 

For examples, you can see the ads and boosted posts we do on LinkedIn here.

We also have a LinkedIn newsletter called SaaS Growth Weekly that is published weekly to our 1,350 subscribers and is generating around 2,300 impressions per month.

In Conclusion: How to Create Your Content Machine

So to recap – here’s how to create a content machine within your company that generates continual high quality B2B leads. 

1. Build a list of everyone in your target audience (using the tools above or any lead prospecting platform)

2. Send automated outbound email sequences (we use Instantly for that) and then show matched audiences ads on Meta, LinkedIn, Google, and Adroll to those same people.

3. Layer on search ads, retargeting ads, lookalike ads, and review site ads.

4. Spend 2-3 hours per week creating either video content or written content (whichever is easier for you). If it’s video – get it transcribed and turned into written content as well.

5. Have your team distribute your content on every channel (ads, LinkedIn, warm email, cold email, etc.).

Within 2-3 months – if you actually produce great content that’s worth watching and reading (that’s the key!) – everyone in your target market will know your brand and understand the problem your software solves. 

Between our targeted ads, emails, and LinkedIn posts we’re now getting about 1.2 million impressions per month within our target market – all for $16,711 per month in sales and marketing spend ($10k on ad spend, $3k for the outbound system, and $3k for an SDR to follow-up on new member applications).

Yes, doing tradeshows, SEO, PLG, and affiliate marketing helps – but NOTHING replaces actually going out and proactively educating and building trust with your target market with great content (videos, case studies, PDFs, webinars, articles, etc.) and then AFTER you’ve built trust, inviting that audience to your main CTA of a trial, freemium, free consultation, audit, discovery call, demo, etc. 

Building your outbound content marketing system first (leads list + email sequence + ads) to supercharge your growth within 90 days – and then work on the slower and longer payback investments like inbound marketing.

I hope you enjoyed this post! See you next week with more great content.

-Ryan

P.S. - If you liked this post, our full 26 module “SaaS Growth Course” is free for SaasRise members inside the community. You can apply to join us here and then start a two-week free trial. Once you’re in — it’s free for SaasRise members.

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