Why writing is the foundation of your brand marketing
Part 3 of Content Brand, a series on using content to ace your startup marketing
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.
A long time ago, I wrote about the launch of Hey, in the context of good storytelling.
Hey, from Basecamp, has a point of view that is different enough to provoke opinion, helps them pick a villain (regular email), and positions itself as the new saviours of time and money for people who value both.
Basecamp did this well with Hey because they are such a writing company. Basecamp’s marketing is built upon the brand building Jason Fried and DHH did by writing over a period of time. Signal vs Noise, their immensely influential blog started around 2006 and kept going till 2021. It only ended because the founders started writing on their own personal platforms.
That blog gave rise to their bestselling books, Rework and Remote, which became work mantras for a lot of organisations. They kept publishing on other platforms like Medium too, and whenever there was a launch, you knew they were going to say something.
Basecamp built a content brand by writing. And they did the same for Hey. They wrote about it, and it gave the new email product the best SaaS launch in years.
Grammarly is built on content marketing, which is understandable give the domain it is in. But even so, Grammarly’s a powerhouse.
Grammarly’s blog brings around half its overall traffic. Grammarly’s traffic stats last year indicate almost 18M monthly organic visitors, which would be much higher now.
Grammarly’s success is built on writing too, only different from First Round and Hey in the sense that they are using writing as an SEO tool, and not so much to talk about their brand directly. And this is incredibly effective.
Grammarly’s pages are long-tail focused too, which means they have pages for everything, and their brand marketing complements this SEO push beautifully.
The result is a powerful content brand built on the core practice of writing.
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.
Of course other formats like video can be employed in the later stages to hasten the buying process, but none of that would be possible if text wasn’t how we interacted with the internet.
Which is why the act of producing text - writing - will remain the foundation of your content brand. It’s time to build, yes, but it’s always time to write.