Notable Content Performance Metrics:
Content Formats:
- 📄 Blog Posts
Marketing Objectives:
- 📈 Brand Awareness
Industry / Business Model:
- 👔 B2B
- 👩🏽💻 Software
Truly successful B2B content requires empathy. Put yourself in your readers’ shoes. What do they need?
Toast’s blog post about licenses and permits for restaurants is a good example of how asking this question can lead to winning content. The company sells point-of-sale software to restaurants—you know, those touchscreens you see waiters and bartenders clicking on when they’re getting your bill.
Toast’s marketing team identified an audience—first-time restaurant owners—and the point in the customer journey where they’d want to reach this audience. Toast’s creative team delivered incredibly helpful content for audience.
Through this collaboration, Toast delivers an important message to highly-qualified potential customers: We understand the journey you’re on, and we’re here to help.
Why It’s Great Content
It Targets Their Exact Audience
Anyone opening a new restaurant will want point-of-sale software in place the day they open. But not everyone opening a new restaurant is in the market for a new vendor. Anyone with existing restaurant ownership experience will probably have a favorite software system already.
Toast’s best chance for sales is with someone opening a restaurant for the first time—which also happens to be the exact type of person who’d need help understanding what licenses and permits they need to open their new venture.
It Targets Their Audience At The Exact Right Time
Identifying a target audience—in this case, first-time restaurant owners—is only part of the battle. You need to reach the audience when they are most likely to consider your product.
A first-time restaurant owner also needs to lease space for their eatery. But, at that point, they are not going to be thinking about point-of-sale software—they need a place to put it first!
Once they do find their location, that’s when they’ll start thinking about the restaurant’s operations. Permitting is a big part of that. So is point-of-sale software.
Toast explicitly addresses this in the post.
It’s Informative
If I’m planning to open a restaurant, sure, I want to know what permits I need. But that information isn’t actionable unless I have two other pieces of information—how to get the permit, and how much it’s going to cost.
Toast’s article follows a simple but helpful template. It explains the purpose of each permit, suggests at least one way for the reader to acquire the permit, and gives an idea of the cost.
It Promotes Other Content
Getting a potential customer that fits exact target audience to visit your website is fantastic. Now, you have to figure out a way to keep them there, and keep them coming back. Toast does a terrific job, with:
- A strong call to action to subscribe to Toast blog updates.
- In-line ads promoting Toast’s “Restaurant Startup Kit”, restaurant management e-book, and business plan template
- Call-outs pointing readers to “related posts” with more detail about a topic.
- A strong call to action for a Toast software demo.
It’s Evergreen
Hard to imagine restaurants ever not needing permits. This information will need some updates as inflation or government funding cutbacks cause prices to rise, but that’s probably an every-five-years type of project. As you can see from some small print at the bottom of the page, the information has already been updated at least once.
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