2023 Revenue Starts with a Seasonal Content Push

Almost every company budgets for Q1 of the following year during Q4.

Starting a week or two before Thanksgiving on through New Year's, most companies are not making big budgetary decisions or signing new contracts. They've already decided what SaaS vendors and software platforms they’ll work with to kick off the new year.

With few exceptions, these decisions are made towards the end of Q3, between September and Thanksgiving. Among other growth levers, content serves as a type of fuel that can turbocharge lead generation during this crunch period – in turn laying a strong revenue foundation for 2023.

Drive Next Year’s Revenue with a Seasonal Content Push

What does seasonality mean for your company and your priorities?

If you're a software company or a vendor in the B2B SaaS space, you need to get in front of as many potential customers as possible over the next two months.

If you don’t, you'll most likely have to pick up those conversations in Q1, because companies have already laid out their Q1 budgets. That puts you in a really tough spot – you're most likely postponed to Q2 or Q3 at the earliest.

The TLDR: the next two months until Thanksgiving are crunch time. 

B2B companies selling into other companies must focus marketing efforts on tactics that boost top of funnel to get as many customers as they can in the pipeline and closed before Thanksgiving hits.

Content’s Varied Acquisition Roles

Paid and organic acquisition are both useful tactics for brands. Content gets interesting as an acquisition method because it’s organic while also serving as fuel across paid channels.

Content has the power to turbocharge partnerships, growth, and paid acquisition.

This is how to use a case study as an organic acquisition method:

1. Build and write the case study.
2. Use the case study on-site and drive traffic to the site via a blog.
3. Push the case study out across email campaigns, drip sequences, nurturing campaigns, and on your social channels.

By leveraging one content asset across top-of-funnel, mid-funnel, and conversion, you get outsized ROI relative to solely focusing on paid and related smaller creative elements.

Pillar Content Is Not Just a Marketing Asset

While it’s used for organic marketing efforts, long-form, pillar content should also be activating sales, partnerships, and business development functions.

You should instruct business teams to use new case studies or articles to help convert MQLs and SQLs. Send them to cold leads or leads that haven't been responsive lately – this moves people through the funnel.

For example, a testimonial from an expert or an influencer in your target niche sits in the organic acquisition bucket and can be helpful for top-of-funnel growth.

But, simultaneously, you should be using that testimonial and backing it with paid spend on different testing platforms. Or you should use that testimonial in a partnership one-pager to accelerate partnerships with other B2B SaaS companies in your niche.

Especially during the end of the year, seasonal crunch, content is a vital go-to-market lever that will boost organic acquisition and support other go-to-market functions.

Organic Content Works From Day One

A lot of GTM levers at your disposal won't directly impact all of those different functions.

At Verbatim, we're huge fans of SEO for the right company, especially ones that customers tend to find through Google. Unfortunately, with the holiday crunch where B2B companies are deciding their SaaS budgets for Q1, and often Q2 as well, it's not super helpful.

For young companies with low-domain rankings, producing two SEO-focused articles a week is unlikely to boost your SEO ranking and drive sizable returns in the next two months.

The issue is simple – SEO just takes longer to work.

SEO is just one example of a GTM lever you may want to deprioritize for the next few months so you can reallocate resources to areas that address the urgent, temporal market. 

Long-form, pillar content is the answer to the SEO issue right now. It drives immediate returns on organic and top-of-funnel acquisition and is useful across other revenue-generating functions.

The next two months are mission-critical to setting your company up for 2023 success, and investing in a seasonal content push is one of the best ways to drive outsized returns.