TRANSCEND THE FUNNEL: How SCORCH is Shaping the Future of Content Marketing

The Silicon Review

Content marketing is evolving. Lead capturing is more obnoxious, content is more readily available, and there are more voices, ideas, and opinions answering every question customers could possibly have. Every brand on the planet contributes to the noise and the result is a burned-out audience that refuses to fill out forms, blocks emails, and ignores your calls. Marketing is the only industry on the planet where a 1% success rate is acceptable, let alone celebrated. Nevertheless, large and small organizations alike continue to feed money into the machine and accept lackluster results.

SCORCH—a global content marketing agency and B2B content marketing powerhouse — and its Founder and CEO, Chris Buehler, have built an entire business model around challenging that status quo.

Evolving to What’s Next

We live in an era where everything is right at our fingertips. We can pay our bills, order take out, and book a hotel all in an instant, but the second we need more information about a service, we’re funneled through some scoring model just to earn the right to talk to a BDR, SDR, or an AE. Content marketing has to adapt to exceed that expectation.

For the past decade, SCORCH has used a “Big Rock”-driven content approach to generate some of the most successful B2B content marketing campaigns on the planet, including cross-channel strategies for leading tech brands like LinkedIn, Marketo, Microsoft, Salesforce, and several other Silicon Valley companies.

Fueling Brand Activation with LinkedIn and Microsoft

With a relationship dating back to 2013, SCORCH and LinkedIn have worked together to deliver some of content marketing’s most successful campaigns. The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn, a 50-page “Big Rock” piece of content, set the tone for LinkedIn to own the “Sophisticated Marketer” conversation and created a franchise opportunity for the company. To date, The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn has been a top source for LinkedIn qualified leads and the original edition generated
18,000% ROI.1

After several successful campaigns with LinkedIn, SCORCH received an opportunity with Microsoft.

As Buehler tells it, “Microsoft was looking for a new agency partner. So, the CMO of the US Central Marketing Organization told his team to go find content campaigns that re ally resonated with them. The team did their research and came back with multiple samples of rock star quality content.

Most of the samples they found just happened to be from SCORCH.” A dinner in Nashville sealed the deal, and the relationship has been going strong for nearly five years.

Since it’s kickoff in 2015, the keystone of the SCORCH + Microsoft partnership has been it’s Real Stories of Digital Transformation campaign—a customer centric celebration of technology’s impact in the modern workplace. Within its first 9 months, Real Stories engagement was 815% above goal and led to a multi-year campaign that has generated 200K+ views of over 130 customer stories.

In 2018, after several years partnering with LinkedIn and Microsoft, SCORCH was named a go-to agency for LinkedIn’s Content Partner Program. As leaders of this proven content marketing model, SCORCH provided a systematic formula designed to help LinkedIn’s SMB and enterprise customers achieve their goals. And it’s working — SCORCH’s relationship with LinkedIn has helped the program expand from North America to Europe and other key global markets.

Identifying Precious Assets

With their model tested and thriving, SCORCH has continued to challenge how brands engage with their audiences. In 2016, a small team developed a software to get customers to the right person inside a company. Driven by their Click-to-Human™ technology, PingPilot^®, SCORCH is applying the tech to create Conversational Content and think beyond the sales funnel as we know it.

Imagine reading an eBook and you have a question about the service described on the second paragraph of page four. With Click-to-Human™ technology, there are deep hyperlinked buttons on the page that takes you directly to a real person with real answers. Chat, call, text, video, email—however you prefer, it’s right there. Better yet, the company knows you came from page 4 of that ebook and can tailor the experience to your exact touchpoint.

By giving customers immediate and unhindered access to the right experts at the right time, Conversational Content creates a focal point between context, timing, and purpose. Context, by using real conversations to better understand the customer’s need in the channel they prefer, timing by being readily available at the precise moment the customer is ready to engage, and purpose, by catering each interaction to the exact topic at hand. There’s no hard sell, no cold calls or spam emails, just two people working together to reach a shared goal. On the customer’s terms. When THEY are ready. Not the other way around.

This customer-driven approach build’s trust amongst their core audience, so even though the next conversation might not end with a new deal, the interaction creates a memorable experience for the end user, and when that customer is eventually ready to engage or transact, they know who they can trust, who knows their stuff, and is one click away from speaking with them.

Conversational Content gets your customer to the right person in your company through the channel of their choice with a frictionless, hyper-relevant experience.

Ready to talk now? Ping us at ping.me/SR2019