Business Spotlight: Cyber Made Simple

If Amanda Layman tells people she’s a writer, they get it. If, on the other hand, she describes herself as a content marketing specialist, the result can be a blank stare.

But Layman is quick to note a content marketing campaign is exactly what it sounds like.

“It’s a marketing campaign that uses digital content – blogs, articles, white papers, case studies – to nurture leads and move them down the sales pipeline.”

Through Tigris Content Marketing, Layman serves a niche of midmarket and enterprise companies with long sales cycles.

“They need to educate their leads on whatever it is they do,” she says.

And her niche is even more particular, as she serves mostly business-to-business technology companies. Examples includes software companies that sell software as a service or provide e-learning or business intelligence services.

Tigris serves clients all over the world, like U.K.-based MyWalletHero, a personal finance website created by The Motley Fool. Tigris helped the company grow an already-large readership with an organic keyword strategy, according to a case study on the Tigris website.

The spa software company Zenoti is another client, as is BenchmarkOne, which offers sales and marketing software for small businesses and marketing agencies. Another client, European-based Passendo, produces an email ad server and supply-side platform.

Altogether, Tigris serves eight clients with a full range of services to generate sales.

“Hiring Tigris was one of the best decisions I have made to help my business,” he says.

“We love working with Tigris and have been using them for years now,” says Natalie Slyman, content and social media network for BenchmarkOne. “With three brands, we have quite a bit of content output we need to manage. Tigris serves as our content creation team by helping us create high-quality, informative and tactical content that is aligned with the needs of our brands and our audience bases.”

Slyman added she appreciates the independence of the Tigris team once she provides initial direction.

“What I love most about working with Tigris is that they’re basically an extension of our team. They don’t require a lot of management at all; they can simply take an idea I have and some additional resources and run with them to create content that we need,” she says.

As a freelance writer before founding Tigris in 2016, Layman says she grew well versed in the technology space as she learned about the cloud, digital transformation and software as a service. Now she helps clients explain their offerings in a way potential customers can grasp.

She says there are two ways she works with customers: with an editorial team or as a marketing consultancy.

According to Layman, even companies with in-house marketing departments may need a team of writers who understand that niche to deliver content on a regular basis.

“The problem we see for people in those roles is they have big plans, a big editorial calendar, and they don’t have writers in house to carry them out,” she says. “They can come to us, hand us their big plan and their editorial calendar, and we can take it and run with it and deliver polished content.”

In Tigris’ marketing consultancy function, Layman offers a marketing insights and action plan.

“It outlines everything they need to do to get from Point A to Point B with a B2B marketing goal,” she says.

She notes many people know their industry well, but they aren’t wordsmiths.

“A lot of people may understand what to do in terms of digital marketing, but they kind of freeze up when it comes to voice and tone,” she says. “You need to inject a little bit of humanity into that, and we can definitely help with that. We’re fun people.”

This year, the fun people at Tigris expect to bring in a record $250,000 in revenue, which would be a 56% increase year-over-year.

“I think we’re going to be close,” Layman says. “It’s been a really big year.”

In addition to Layman, Tigris employs an account manager, Nanushka Kraus Clarkson, and a content writer, Anne Putnam, as well as a team of freelancers.

Clarkson says she loves working for Tigris, in part because of its tight focus on a specific industry.

“There are obviously a lot of different content marketing companies out there, so instead of casting a wide net and hoping we get clients, Amanda’s focus has been to target a niche demographic and serve them well,” Clarkson says. “It’s been nice to push the envelope of making an impact and doing exceptional work.”

Layman’s goal is to grow the business past the $1 million revenue target by 2025 and then maybe sell it when the time is right.

Layman says the specialized nature of her business has made her feel isolated at times. She didn’t have a lot of connections in Springfield, although this is the place the Chicago native has lived for most of her life, and when COVID-19 hit, she felt even more disconnected.

To counteract this feeling, she says she subscribed to the Springfield Business Journal and started reaching out to some of the people she read about.

“I started realizing there were a lot more people like me than I thought,” she says.

As a result, she says she began to lay down some roots.

“My big goal is to do what I can with Tigris so I can be more involved in Springfield and hopefully encourage other women to start their own businesses,” she says.