This is very much a FOMO you should not ignore …
For startups, SMEs and, quite frankly, any business, it’s understandable to think about the value of content in terms of lead generation.
If you’re spending time or money creating it, you want to know it’s contributing to the business. So, we look at enquiries, website visits, booked calls and opportunities we can connect back to marketing.
All reasonable things to measure. The problem comes when lead generation becomes the main test of whether content has any value at all.
Most people who come across your business today aren’t about to buy from you. Some won’t need what you sell for six months, a year or sometimes longer. Some may never become customers themselves.
They can still be of enormous value to your business.
They may recommend you, return as a previous client, apply for a job, introduce you to someone, invite you to contribute to an event, choose to partner with you or put your name forward when an opportunity comes up.
A lot can happen between somebody seeing your content and somebody becoming a “lead”. Trust plays a much bigger part in that than we sometimes give it credit for.
What happens before somebody is ready to buy?
B2B leads rarely arrive because someone saw a single LinkedIn post and immediately decided they needed your services. Wouldn’t that be lovely!
There is usually a period before that. Someone sees your name, then comes across it again. They start to understand what your business does and what you are about. They might read an article that helps them see how you approach a problem, or a post that gives them a sense of the experience behind the company.
At some point, your business stops being completely unfamiliar.
The B2B Institute’s 95:5 rule is a helpful way to think about this. The principle is that most potential B2B buyers are out of market at any given time, with only a small proportion actively looking to buy. The exact buying cycle varies from market to market, but the important point is that most of the people you want to reach simply aren’t ready today.
If we judge content mainly by the leads it creates now, we risk designing our marketing around the small part of the audience that happens to be in a buying window.
We also miss what is happening with everybody else. They are becoming familiar with the business, understanding what it knows and forming a view about whether it seems credible.
That work is much harder to see in analytics, but it can make a later decision considerably easier.
Trust changes business decisions
Trust can sound like one of those marketing buzzwords that everybody agrees is important, but nobody quite knows what to do with.
Part of the problem is that it’s easier to count an enquiry than a change in perception. Nobody fills in a form to tell you that they now have slightly more confidence in your judgement, or what you do, than they did three months ago.
Yet confidence affects an enormous number of business decisions.
Imagine somebody comparing two businesses offering broadly similar services. They know very little about one. With the other, they have read a few articles, seen one of its leaders explain how they approach the work and come across examples that suggest the company understands them and the problems they are dealing with.
That doesn’t guarantee the second business wins. Price, fit, timing and plenty of other factors will play a part. But one company has given that person far more to base a decision on.
The same applies to outreach. A message from a completely unfamiliar business starts from zero. If the recipient already recognises the name or has encountered some of its thinking before, the conversation begins with a little more context. Which makes cold a little less cold.
Trust matters to referrals too. Recommending someone carries a degree of personal risk because you are putting your own judgement behind that introduction. Knowing how a business works, what its people know and what they stand for can make somebody far more comfortable putting their name forward.
Seen in that context, trust isn’t a vague or fluffy brand benefit that is completely unaligned from commercial activity. Quite the opposite, in fact, as it influences whether people feel confident enough to take the next step.
Customers aren’t the only people making those decisions
A lead-generation view of content also tends to assume that the audience we care about is made up almost entirely of potential customers. Which, in our view, is a big mistake.
Decades in business have shown me that they depend on far more relationships than that.
A potential employee may look at the people leading a company before deciding whether they can imagine working there. Yes, the job description can explain the role, but it’s the way leaders communicate that can reveal something about how the organisation thinks and what matters to it.
Investors and funders have numbers, forecasts and presentations to assess, but they are also forming a view of the experience and credibility of the people behind those numbers.
Partners and suppliers are deciding whether they want their reputation connected with yours. Journalists and event organisers are deciding who has something credible to contribute.
Existing clients are part of the audience too. Content can remind them of the expertise available to them, expose them to parts of the business they haven’t worked with yet, or simply reinforce why they chose you in the first place.
None of those outcomes necessarily creates a neat conversion that can be attributed to a particular post, but they can all create real value.
People need something to judge the business by
This becomes particularly important for startups and SMEs, where there is often little distance between the reputation of the company and the reputation of the people leading it.
A smaller business usually has fewer ways to shine that people can rely on. No TV appearances here. It may not have decades of brand recognition or a huge body of public proof. The thinking and experience of its founders and leaders therefore carries a significant amount of weight.
People want a sense of who they are dealing with. Do they understand their subject? Have they thought properly about the issues their customers face? How do they approach difficult decisions? What have they learned from doing the work? Does what they say seem consistent with what the company claims to value?
If that thinking, experience and point of view are largely invisible, people have less to go on.
This is where leadership visibility becomes valuable, without requiring every founder or CEO to turn themselves into a “personal brand” or spend half their week creating content.
You just need enough visibility for people to understand them.
That might come from an observation drawn from a customer conversation, an explanation of why the company approaches something in a particular way, a lesson learned through experience or a considered view on something changing in the industry.
The source matters. Publishing more often doesn’t automatically create trust.
Customer conversations, leadership thinking, reports, research, lessons from the work and genuine expertise give people something substantial to go on.
Over time, that body of content can tell somebody far more about a business than a polished About page ever could.
Content needs more than one job
None of this makes lead generation unimportant. Businesses need customers, and content should contribute to commercial goals. We are no different in that.
But it does mean we need a broader idea of what that contribution looks like.
Some content can help a potential customer understand the problem you solve. Some can show how you think about it. Some can strengthen confidence among existing clients or give a potential employee a clearer view of the organisation. Some can make the business easier to remember and easier to recommend.
That absolutely changes the question we ask when deciding whether a piece of content has worked.
Rather than expecting everything to produce an enquiry, we can ask what it was meant to achieve and whether it gave the right audience something that helped them understand or trust the business.
The eventual lead may be the part we can see and record in the CRM. What happened before it is often much less visible: repeated encounters, growing familiarity, a recommendation, somebody reading an article before a meeting or a prospect deciding that the people behind the company seem to know what they’re doing.
And sometimes there won’t be a lead at all. There will be a returning client, a strong candidate, an introduction, a partnership or an opportunity you never knew started with somebody reading your content.
If lead generation is the only value we look for, we miss a large part of what good content can do.