How to build and grow a content brand
An investigation (with 4 tactics) into using content to ace your startup's marketing
Late last year, I realised there was a new kind of startup brand being built.
For a long time, advertisements were the only way to get your new brand in front of consumers. These could be ATL or BTL campaigns, or newspapers or TV or magazines or radio. But with the internet, there was a new kind of media that could help kickstart a brand. This media is what we now call, somewhat lamely, 'content'. The dourness of that word can be debated later, but what it means is a proliferation of different platforms and native forms of media that were serving as launchpads for new brands (and also as new spaces for old ones).
A new kind of brand
This was a new kind of brand: Not just digital native, but platform native (only Instagram, for example), which understood the opportunity on offer, and went after it hammer and tongs.
To describe them, I came up with the term 'content brand'.
And because these brands chose carefully the mediums and channels to use, I classified them that way: Video, podcasts, writing, and social media.
I wrote about them throughout last year and this year, as readers of this newsletter will know, and I felt it is now time to round them all up as one thematic read.
I have chosen one example for each, to illustrate how a brand can be built upon that particular kind of content. The intent is to understand and pick what might work best for our own brands.
Let’s dive in.
1. Video
Slack launched in 2013.
The pitch was they would replace email. We all remember this, because it was the story everywhere at the time: The email killer.
The PR it garnered was the aim of the provocation, and it was brilliant marketing, creating hype for a completely new kind of product.
But that’s only part of the story.
Slack had nailed their pitch to the world. But that didn’t mean customers would turn up. It was a category creating product, and was trying to change enterprise/employee behaviour. This is difficult, and they had to do more to increase adoption and new business. So they did not stop with the PR. They thought about the prospect, and what it would take for them to immediately understand the product and its value.
And so the next year, in 2014, they launched this spot.
It’s longer than a traditional advertisement, but shorter than other content that their audience was used to seeing.
This is because they didn’t really need it to be an ad. The rise of YouTube and social media meant that Slack had real estate where they could put this up, and from where it would be picked up by its audience: Technology workers.
The video explains Slack with the example of how a small company adopts and uses it. The value is immediately clear. There’s no explanation needed, certainly not over a 30 minute onboarding call.
Slack understood the power of video, and deployed it to kickoff a great run, ending in a $27 billion acquisition 10 years later.
Why it works
Good marketing is more often that not just good communication. If you have a clear value proposition, and you’ve put it front of your target customers without confusing them, most of your job is done.
Branding is even more about good communication. Branding is essentially simplifying: Telling your prospects a story about who you are and what you do so they remember, and hopefully tell more people.
Video does this job spectacularly well, simply because seeing something is infinitely better than having it described to you. You just get it. It is arguably the most powerful channel for branding we have.
With smartphones and the ubiquity of high quality digital equipment, video is now a level playing field. The channel is available to everyone, from scrappy startups to big companies.
It’s time you used it too.
2. Podcasts
In his book Founder Brand, marketing guru Dave Gerhardt dedicates an entire chapter to podcasting. I’ll let Dave lead us off on why podcasts are a great marketing tool.
“Pick a product. Pick an industry. There is more competition and noise than ever before. Many businesses do essentially the same thing as their competitors. The marketing is similar, the features are similar, the pricing is similar. With that said, how do you make your company stand out from the competition? The best way is to create a personal relationship with potential customers and improve their lives in some way.
The best way to communicate the brand? Podcasting! In podcasting, you are creating content and creating a community because the medium is your voice.”
But it’s not just about how podcasting can create that relationship. It can, yes, but the main reason podcasting is amazing is how versatile it is.
Here’s Dave again.
It’s not just the actual episode, it’s all the ways an individual episode can be used in this process. Your episode can become a blog post. You can extract quotes or clips, and they become social media posts. It becomes a Twitter thread, LinkedIn posts, and audio or video clips. A podcast can be used in almost unlimited ways. Snippets can be used as tweets. One podcast episode can give you social media posts for most of the week.
This is why it’s like a Trojan Horse. It can secretly get into your city and unleash a wave of content.
And this wave of content is incredibly important for an early stage startup. Because the only way people will pay attention to your startup is if they keep seeing it again and again, until they are forced to pay attention. Which is why podcasts are a great way to launch your content brand.
3. Writing
First Round Capital was founded in 2004. It is a respected venture capital institution, and not just because it makes good investments and backs founders.
It is also because First Round built, in First Round Review, one of the biggest content marketing success stories in the industry. Literally every content marketer in startups knows First Round Review. And if you are a marketer in the VC world, you are done for. It will come up in every conversation.
This success is also remarkable because VC marketing is hard (I know this well!). Money is a commodity. There’s no differentiation that you can clearly boast of, unless you are ready to actually pick a positioning that’s different. So what matters is reputation and access. However, being in front of potential founders and great operators is always an advantage. Mindshare in the startup ecosystem is what VC marketing is about.
So how did First Round solve this problem?
They hired a former journalist called Camille Ricketts, and asked her to write. Ricketts had worked at the Wall Street Journal, Venture Beat, and as a PR executive at Tesla. She could write, and she also understood what to write.
First Round Review launched in 2013, and started putting out deeply researched articles and long interviews on tactical startup problems and challenges. This was stuff you could take and immediately use. It was well written and superbly designed. And because it was written, it was easily shareable.
They kept doing it.
By 2018, the Review had 130,000 email subscribers, and up to 500,000 monthly visitors. These are unheard of metrics in the VC industry. By 2019, the articles had started becoming books. They had the content there, of course. All they had to do was arrange it so there was value.
So in just half a decade, First Round had built a content brand on just writing great stuff for their audience. Everyone in the industry knew them, they were the gold standard. And remember, there were no other channels, no gimmicks. Just writing.
Why it works
In 2018, the New York Times published an article by journalist Farhad Manjoo about the internet and the words that make it up. "The internet was born in text because text was once the only format computers understood," he wrote.
This is true, and also why text is still the format that underpins search and discoverability. The internet understands text very quickly, search engines work on identifying and delivering text to us so we can find what we want. It is the easiest format to deliver to mobile devices, more than audio or video. It also remains the easiest to skim through, understand, and take buying decisions.
With photographs, short videos, audio, and other kinds of content also raising their hands as brand-building tools, writing still remains king because of one simple point: Whenever a bunch of information needs to be assimilated and parsed before making a buying decision, text is the only real option.
Which is why the act of producing text - writing - will remain the foundation of your content brand.
4. Social Media
The conversation intelligence company Gong was founded in 2015, relative latecomers to the SaaS boom of the 2010s. But in just a few years, they had broken through the clutter in their category and were on their way to being the top player in the space.
Plus, they built an instantly recognisable brand. You cannot miss Gong, especially on social media, and especially if you are in sales. You’ve either read stuff from them or about them, that’s just how it is.
So how does a relatively boring company making software for sales people build a brand that helps it scale rapidly? Gong found a way, and it was social media.
The Gong team realised that everything was crowded in terms of SaaS. Keywords were expensive, SEO was all over the place. You still had to do these things, but what was the differentiation? Even social media was saturated.
Or was it?
Gong’s CMO Udi Ledergor has talked about what happened next on several podcasts. They had understood that their target audience was on LinkedIn, and none of their competitors were engaging them in a fun, human manner. So they set about doing just that.
Ross Simmonds says how, on his blog: "Gong understands that their audience wants opinions, techniques & data and that they’re spending time on LinkedIn."
Their LinkedIN content then basically wrote itself. The Gong team used their own data to give insights to sales teams, produced content that was aimed at helping sales people, and from time to time made jokes and memes that sales teams would immediately get.
They had cracked the code.
By now, Gong started sharing about 10-15 posts every week on LinkedIn. This is almost the same as the number of posts B2B companies do in a year. With volume, quality, and consistency, Gong had won LinkedIn.
One way to see how important LinkedIn had become to Gong was that till a few months back, the CTAs on their blogs said 'Follow us on LinkedIn'.
No newsletter, no request demos, LinkedIn follows. Genius.
Why it works
First, Gong knew well who their customers were, and more crucially, where they were hanging out. In Gong’s case, that was LinkedIn.
Second, they used their customers themselves to make great content: Gong used their own data to produce insights.
Third, they weren’t afraid to take risks with their content. Using memes and gifs isn’t usually done in the B2B space, making ambassadors of normal people also isn’t usual. Gong took that risk.
There you go then: 4 tactics and 4 channels, available to you. All you need to do is pick one, and begin.
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