The quick version 🏃
- Vistage is the world’s largest executive coaching organisation for SME leaders, offering a peer-mentoring service for CEOs, business owners and executives
- The company wanted to grow the Vistage brand and membership in the UK
- Working closely with Vistage’s network of subject matter experts, we produced high-quality quarterly reports, blogs, newsletters, and social posts
- In one year we grew their website traffic to 26,000 visits per month, generated more than 1,500 leads and gained 2,637 new email subscribers
The long version 🤓
What’s the secret sauce of high-impact content marketing.
Distribution… copywriting… strategy?
Sure, these things are important. But there’s one thing that trumps everything else: expertise.
If you don’t have expertise, you’re not going to communicate with other experts on their level. You’re going to be stuck creating lukewarm content or telling people stuff they already know.
We love working with clients with awesome access to experts. If you’re able to chat to people who love what they do and really know their stuff, creating awesome content gets a lot easier.
This is the story of how we helped Vistage UK to grow their traffic to 26,000 visits a month and generate over 1,500 leads in 12 months. Every week we work with their network of subject matter experts to create high-quality content for their savvy and sophisticated audience.
The team are a total breeze to work with and they really understand our audience.
Our Client
Vistage is the world’s largest executive coaching organisation for small and medium-sized businesses. They have more than 24,000 members in 20 countries worldwide. For over 60 years they’ve given business leaders a trusted and confidential space to share ideas, look for advice and ask questions.
Challenge
Vistage have two target audiences: members and chairs. Members are business owners and entrepreneurs running UK SMBs. Chairs are typically former executives and entrepreneurs who have left the C-Suite to focus on coaching, mentoring or enjoying a better work-life balance.
Vistage’s UK marketing team is tasked with growing the Vistage brand and membership in the UK. To do this, they host conferences and run events throughout the year. They needed a partner who could help them complement this offline activity with a strong pipeline of online opportunities.
We’ve been working with Winbox for five years now to support us with our content production and they still deliver a great service.
Solution
One of the advantages of having members that meet up regularly to discuss their challenges is that those conversations generate a lot of content ideas. Our client has a great feel for what their customers are thinking and talking about.
This is a great start. But there’s more.
Vistage hosts conferences and webinars with some of the world’s top B2B thought leaders. These experts are usually happy to jump on the line to share their ideas and opinions.
We understand the audience. We have the expertise. Now we just need a repeatable process for turning these raw ingredients into a reliable pipeline of sales-ready opportunities.
We’re big believers in process (as you already know if you’ve checked out our playbook). Content marketing gets easier when you make it as systematic as possible.
Every quarter we produce the same set of deliverables:
- A quarterly report tackling a timely question or pain point
- 6 blog posts
- 6 newsletters
- 24 social posts
This bundle of content keeps Vistage’s audience entertained and their marketing channels busy for the entire quarter.
The results really speak for themselves - our audience and pipeline keeps on growing!
Let’s look at a specific campaign
Obviously, COVID was a hot topic for Vistage members. How was it going to impact their customers and staff? Where were the opportunities? Most importantly, how could they avoid disaster?
One of the big talking points for members was what to do with their offices. Offices are the second biggest expense for most UK businesses after staff. That’s a lot of cash to invest back into the business.
But is getting rid of your office the right decision? Do offices still have a role to play in team-building and culture?
These are important questions with complex answers. To help Vistage members make the right call, we built an expert panel from Vistage’s member and speaker community:
- Phil Muir, director of consultancy and design at Space Solutions
- Jonathan Naylor, MD of construction firm Concept Construction
- Marie Owen, CEO of media production service company LS Productions
- Helen Dyke, Senior Associate Solicitor at Irwin Mitchell
- César Gamio, workplace wellbeing consultant, coach and speaker
We also surveyed Vistage members to find out what UK business owners were thinking and doing. Interestingly, despite all the hype around fully remote work, we found that just 26% of members were considering going fully remote, with the overwhelming majority of business owners opting for hybrid working.
Our report gave readers a mix of detailed and helpful perspectives from a range of subject matter experts to help Vistage’s members make the right decision for their business.
Results
Over the 12 months from October 2020 to October 2021, our content strategy helped Vistage generate:
- 286,311 blog visits
- 1,511 leads specifically from our reports
- 2,637 new email subscribers
We’ve been working with the team at Vistage for more than five years now. They’re a great client and an awesome team. Thanks to everyone at Vistage for giving us the opportunity to work with them and create awesome content for their audience.
