How do you market a solution to a problem nobody knows they have?

The problem

This organization provides a complex master data management solution — a necessary upgrade for process improvement in healthcare and life sciences. But it is sophisticated backend technology solving a problem most buyers do not know exists, or cannot yet articulate.

So we did not only need strategies to drive direct sales. We needed to become educators first.

Approach

Marketing an "unknown unknown" starts with basic education about the problems it solves.

I designed the blog and website infrastructure as the vessel for new content, integrated with Google Analytics and HubSpot for tracking and Mailchimp for subscribers and privacy compliance. I wrote an SEO regimen to be applied to every future piece, detailed enough that interns and marketing coordinators could follow it without supervision.

Then content. I repurposed old material carrying important messaging into new whitepapers and case studies. I outlined heavy-hitting pieces to develop with internal staff. And critically, I found and contracted writers who could produce content about this complex technology with minimal input from our subject-matter experts — which freed those experts to work on the deep technical material only they could write, while weekly articles on less complex topics kept publishing and building SEO.

Results

Consistent growth in web visitors and content downloads. The material fed demand generation and account-based marketing campaigns, and blog activity data let us target accounts by demonstrated interest rather than guesswork. It also produced the raw material for the organization's first email nurturing campaigns.

A blog is a necessary vessel for a B2B SaaS company — not because you become a publisher with avid readers, but because it helps your audience understand why they need you, and it teaches you what your audience actually cares about.