5 tactical marketing guides to help you get more done
The most actionable essays from 2 years of The CMO Journal
Something that almost all of us who write online aim for is usability. We want our writing to be useful, to be taken by someone and employed in something important.
Sometimes that is a mental switch: Maybe I’m arguing for the reader to think deeply about something. Sometimes that is a shift in the way we treat a certain kind of work: Like when I argued that we should pay more attention to maintenance in marketing, as opposed to constantly thinking up new initiatives and campaigns.
This utility has been something I aim for with The CMO Journal as well. If you take an essay and use it immediately to improve or upgrade the work you do, no one will be more happier than me. Especially when you tell me about it.
So I sat down and put together 5 of my most tactical pieces, the ones you can pick up and immediately employ. This includes content, marketing strategy, and early stage PR.
Here you go.
1. Become a better (content) writer in 5 minutes
One of my earliest essays and an immediate hit, I go back to its lessons from time to time. I do this simply because it’s easy to forget the basics as we aim higher in the things we do. But without the basics, we’ll get nowhere. This step-by-step breakdown has all the foundational pointers you need.
2. How to build a content engine that keeps leads flowing
This essay was a companion piece to a talk I gave at SaaSBOOMi Growth during the lockdown. It’s aimed at startups who are looking at content marketing as a demand generation activity, and is an easy primer to start building a lead funnel. Draws heavily from my experience at Wingify.
3. How Rocketlane built a marketing machine even before it had a product
There are two startups in India whose marketing strategies are immediately worth emulating. One is CRED, which I have also written about, and the other is Rocketlane. CRED is a pure brand play, and is genius audacity and execution. But Rocketlane, being B2B, is sharper, content marketing with a specific audience, and has been the most satisfying to watch. My breakdown of its strategy is still one of my most read essays ever.
4. The startup founder’s guide to early stage PR
Part of my role at Accel is to help some of our early stage startups with their funding announcements. As I made that into some kind of a system, I realised it could be useful for others too. This essay was the result, and it’s probably the most tactical of all the essays on this list. You can follow what’s in there blindly, and you’ll land at least some kind of coverage you want.
5. How to make 21000 people care about your funding news
This one can be read as a companion piece to the above. What do you do after you have coverage for your funding news? How do you make people care about it to read and want to know about your startup? My friend Rohit Srivastav, who works with more of my friends at the startup Kula, wrote this guest piece to show how they did it, and it’s a masterclass in doing a lot of things that don’t scale. Read and apply.
Some upcoming reads for you on The CMO Journal include a deep dive into a new kind of brand building playbook I’m calling the content brand. I’m still storyboarding this and I’m not sure of the structure, so this will take some time.
But something I’m bringing to you very soon is a guest author writing a playbook to repurposing and reusing content, an underrated and underused tactic that I want to learn more about as well.
Also, a reminder that if you want open roles at your company to be featured here, please inbox them to me on LinkedIn. And finally, this newsletter relies on you to get better. Ideas, suggestions, and criticisms are welcome.