Content Marketing: Building An In-House Team Vs Outsourcing to Agency Vs Freelancer Vs Product Led Content

by Lalit Singh Patel | Sep 24, 2022 | Strategy

Hiring for marketing is the toughest job in startups. It can make or break your startup.

When starting content marketing operations, you have two choices: Build a team in-house or Hire an external party (can be freelancers or agencies).

I’ve been helping startup founders to start their content marketing programs for many years. The first question that I usually encounter from them is whether they should build an in-house team from scratch, hire freelancers, or work with an agency.

Some other variations of this question are:

Should I Hire A Full-Time Employee Or Outsource Our Content Marketing
Does it Make Sense to Outsource our Content Marketing?
Should I Build Our Own Content Team or Outsource?

If you are thinking about whether to hire a full-time employee or an agency or freelancer to do content marketing for your B2B SaaS product, you are in the right place. I’ve been where you are now.

While I was looking for help running content marketing during my last job, I explored all these options. I’ve worked with many freelancers as well as many well-known agencies across the world, and I think you’ll benefit from my experience.

Building A Content Team In-House

Hiring can definitely work, but it is tough. Since most of the founders and even marketing heads are not from content backgrounds, it is difficult to judge if the person you are hiring possesses the right set of skills.

Want to build an in-house team, you can take our content team-building service.

Who is involved in running content marketing operations?

Before you go about building your content marketing team, let’s see who is involved in running content marketing operations.

We have discussed this in detail in this post. Here is a summary of the post.

Content writers: Technical content writers are foot soldiers of your content marketing operations. They write articles for your blog. The content writers in the content marketing team must be well versed in the 3 key pillars of content writing for marketing purposes: target audience (TA), product, and market.

Content marketers: Marketing is the core job. They distribute content via channels such as SEO, social media, and community promotions in different groups on LinkedIn, Slack, Reddit, etc.
Content strategist: Responsible for the overall content marketing, from making strategies, to overseeing content creation and distribution
Editors: They work on the articles and give feedback to writers. Mainly responsible for content quality.
SMEs: Subject matter experts are an important but often ignored piece of the content marketing team. Though they don’t work full time, their inputs are necessary. They provide contextual examples and help writers write posts relevant to the target audience.
Designers: Graphic designers create visual content pieces for blog posts and their promotions.
Developers: Developers help the content team by helping with making changes to the website for SEO and UX improvement purposes.

Earlier (till a few years ago), a content writer was sufficient to run content marketing operations at small companies. Now, after the funding boom in the SaaS space, every startup wants to do content marketing because of the huge benefits it offers.

Because of this, the competition is very high. Now, just hiring a writer is not enough. To cut through the noise, you should be able to distribute it.

You have to be very strategic in your approach. It requires huge planning and someone experienced to plan for different situations and get the results quickly because content marketing is a slow channel. So, having content marketers and strategists is a must. It’s not optional anymore.

If you are going this way, keep in mind the following things.

Hiring is time-consuming

Hiring is time-consuming. It takes months to build a content marketing team. As content marketing takes a good amount of time to show results, waiting to build a full content team from the start can prove to be a wrong decision.

Moreover, a significant amount of time goes into training them. They need to train about the product, market, and target audience. Until they get a complete understanding of all these, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll produce content that brings leads.

Probability of failure is high (when nobody in your content marketing team has hands-on experience)

Even if you build a complete team there is a good chance that things won’t work out if you don’t have previous experience in content marketing or you won’t take the help of experts in hiring.

Most companies don’t provide training to writers about products and target audiences. So writers fail to contextually include the product in posts.

Not only that it is hard to build authority or trust among the target audience if your writers don’t know about them, the disconnect heavily impacts the conversion rate for sign-up/demo.

Outsourcing Your Content Marketing to Freelancers or Agencies

Outsourcing is not about throwing money and getting results. Content marketing is not a money problem. If you don’t have the right strategy and execution, you will fail even after spending a considerable amount of money on content marketing.

This is one of the main reasons why we like content marketing. Unlike paid ads, the guy with deep pockets does not always win!

There are two cases where you want to outsource.

You don’t have internal expertise. If none in your team has a content background, you would want to take external help. Even marketing heads with a proven track record can’t help you as content marketing is very dynamic. If they have got success with content marketing in their previous job, it doesn’t mean that they will get into your company as well. Content marketing is rapidly evolving. It has changed a lot in the last 2 years. The strategies that worked in 2018 won’t work now. You wouldn’t want to take chances with content marketing. The cost of doing it wrong is very high. So, you can take expert help.
You want to focus on your core job. It takes a lot of time to build a content team from scratch; you may not have the time to search for good content writers, marketers, editors, and strategists. It will take many months. Furthermore, building a team from scratch distracts you from your core job. Hence, to save time, you may want to outsource your content marketing. Considering the slow nature of the channel, it may be a good strategy to engage external parties specializing in content marketing.
For saving money. When you are building an in-house team, there is a minimum cost involved. Further, you can’t just get rid of the team when things don’t work out. There is always an emotional connection and bonding with the team. On the other hand, you can find external people in all ranges of prices—starting with a few thousand.

Now, let’s see the pros and cons of two main outsourcing options: freelancers and marketing agencies.

Outsourcing to Freelancers

When it comes to outsourcing, it’s extremely rare to find a freelancer who can take care of your content marketing end to end. You can at most outsource the content writing part.

Here are the key points you need to know about outsourcing to freelancers.

Finding good freelancers is difficult. A good freelancer can help you immensely. But they are hard to find. If you are starting out, it is difficult to hire them without spending a lot of money or committing a regular work.

Working with freelancers requires huge time from your end. To make the engagement worth it requires a huge time commitment on your end. You cannot just give a topic and a few keywords to a freelancer and expect them to write high-quality content pieces for you. You would still need a content strategist in-house as there is a lot of work involved before the after the writing process, like creating content briefs, reviewing written drafts, giving feedback, SEO optimization, etc.
They are economical. Freelancer writers come in various prices and generally charge based on word count. My advice is to do a test piece to check the quality of writing.
Issue with professionalism. One major problem with many freelancers is a lack of professionalism. It reflects in everything they do, from their invoices to communications. We don’t blame them. They are working solo—and they work with multiple clients—so you may face deadline issues. Note that this represents a general sentiment. I’m not saying that all freelancers are non-professionals. There are very good freelancers but the charges can shoot up high.

Outsourcing to a Digital Marketing Agency

Today, there are hundreds of digital marketing agencies in the world. Let’s see what to expect when you go out to work with a digital marketing agency.

Most teams have no specialization. There are large digital marketing agencies that do everything in digital marketing: PPC, email, social media, SEO, content marketing, and PR.

Their content marketing team works for multiple niches with no specialization. They work with both B2C as well as B2B clients. They market SaaS products, eCommerce, and services in all.

Their main goal is the optimization of time. So they treat content like a pipeline. There is less customization according to your specific requirements.

Rapidly scale your content outputs. If you need a very high volume of content in a short period of time, such agencies can be a good fit. They can churn content at a high velocity.
There can be quality issues: Many agencies charge an exorbitant amount based on their reputation. You have to ask who would be actually working on your project.

While working with an agency, the content quality was so poor that I had to rewrite all the content pieces. Furthermore, their content strategist was only passing my feedback to the writer and then the writer’s replies to me—and not taking responsibility for the quality.

I found that the writer has a lot of misconceptions, and we need to discuss those first before he writes anything.

So, I thought it was better to give feedback directly to the writers, but they didn’t allow me to. Instead, they asked me to send voice notes, and write detailed comments when the same thing could have happened over a video call.

It was an unnecessary step, especially since the account manager is not from the content background. Why? Because they don’t have any value. In fact, they diluted the feedback which I was giving for the writer.

Though I like to suggest changes in Google Docs, I (as a content strategist) want to explain the reasons/why behind those comments so that writers don’t repeat the mistakes.

As you can see there are pros and cons to each option. There is another option, i.e working with a specialized agency. We (Product Led Content) faced these issues at the beginning of our career and hence started our content marketing agency.

About Us: A Specialized Content Marketing Agency for B2B SaaS Products

Now, I’d like to give you a glance at what it is like to work with us.

We (Product Led Content) are a specialized B2B SaaS content marketing agency that works with only a handful of clients. We only work with clients if we see there is a mutual fit.

We take responsibility from strategizing to creating content to distribution to analytics and improvement—basically, we are accountable for getting leads, sales, and revenue from content.

We have a full team of specialists:

Content strategists
Editors
Content marketers,
Designers
Writers

Further, we have access to all the important tools needed for running robust content marketing operations.

Our approach is very collaborative. We work together as an extension of your marketing team. We don’t work as an outside third-party vendor.

We have deep insights that can save you months or even years. We specialize and work with multiple clients, so we have data, and we can find insights quickly. We can see patterns in what is working and what is not.

Who all are Involved in Running Content Marketing Operations?

by Lalit Singh Patel | Sep 11, 2022 | Creation, Strategy

I've helped a lot of startup founders and marketing heads build a content marketing team over the last few years. One of the biggest mistakes I see them making is hiring a content writer to run their content marketing operations.

While a writer can write well, they may not be the best person to include the substance. The writers are not subject matter experts.

While a writer can and should promote their articles, it doesn’t mean they are the best person to do so. The majority of them don’t have distribution skills.

These are the people you need for your content team to work efficiently:

Content writer(s)
Content marketer
Content strategist
Content editor
Designers
Subject Matter Experts

Disclaimer

Here, we are assuming that your goal is to generate revenue from your content. You can see the list is a mouthful. This is because content marketing has changed a lot in the last few years. You need to make an investment if you are serious about content marketing.

Otherwise, if you want to do it for the sake of doing it or even if your goal is on vanity metrics like generating traffic, you can just hire a content writer or outsource to freelance writers or agencies who can produce content in bulk for you. But as we discussed in our previous article, higher traffic more often doesn’t mean more leads.

We are not saying you need to hire separate individuals for each of these positions to start your content marketing. In the beginning, one person plays more than one role. But you need to hire smart people who have the skillsets required to do these jobs.

As a general rule, seed-stage startups should have 3 roles in full-time positions to run content marketing operations: writer, marketer, and strategist.

At series A, you can add 1-2 more writers and full-time designers to your content marketing team. For example, if you have any gap in your content marketing team, you can hire for that position, like a dedicated editor, social media specialist, or SEO specialist.

When building a team from scratch, it will take months to hire for these roles, and you can’t judge them if you have not done content marketing yourself/don’t have first-hand experience running content marketing.

One Big Mistake to Avoid: Non-marketer building the content team

Even someone from a marketing background but with no hands-on experience in the content will most likely fail.

Going with the cheapest option while building your content team only leads to time, money, and effort wastage. Is demoralizing. We’ve seen companies back to square one after months of working in this way.

One of our customers did not choose to work with us because they have found a less expensive option but came back to us months later only to do the whole work from scratch. When they came back, they had already published over 100 articles on their blog but it had generated 0 leads in 7 months.

Check out my post on hiring a content writer if you are doing it for the first time.

We are always looking for good content writers and markets and are in touch with them via many communities. If you need our help, you can take our content writer hiring service.

Let us see the responsibilities of each role:

The Role of Writers, Marketers, Strategists, Editors, and SMEs in a Content Marketing Team

1. Content Writer(s)

Technical content writers are foot soldiers of your content marketing operations. They write articles for your blog.

Note that these writers should be dedicated to content marketing work. If you need content for other marketing or sales activities like newsletters, knowledge base, website revamp, or landing pages and copy for paid adverts, you will need another writer.

The content writers in the content marketing team must be well versed in the 3 key pillars of content writing for marketing purposes: target audience (TA), product, and market.

Awareness of the target audience

Awareness of the target audience is required because articles must be written considering your ideal customers. Though it may seem obvious, I’ve seen many content writers lose awareness of their target audience while writing content.

In effect, this means:

Saying obvious things that they already know
Not respecting their expertise
Not providing context
Not addressing the pain points of decision-makers and end-users

Writing for B2B is very different than writing for B2C. Most companies hire generalists or creative writers. As a result, the content is poor. The writer struggles to write.

Writing for travel or health niches is not very difficult as you can relate to these. We all have some experience in our personal lives. But when it comes to B2B, it is not easy to relate with decision-makers unless you have been in the position yourself.

We have seen such content writers making weird analogies. For example, when we were working with a freelance writer in our early days, the writer was explaining a point about getting discounts when buying assets for their company in bulk.

She explained that by giving an example of buying vegetables in bulk. Though there is nothing wrong with logic, since our target audience was procurement teams in enterprises, it was not an appropriate example.

This was not the only instance. Even after a lot of training, it is very difficult for someone to get this if they have never worked in a B2B setting.

We had constantly seen variations of such instances with many writers where we were frightened that if it went unnoticed, it would have posed the risk of losing credibility in front of the target audience.

Product expertise

Most content writers have little to no knowledge about the product the company sells. Most companies don’t provide product training to their content writers.

This is why we see writers not being able to sell the product in blog posts. Product expertise helps in weaving products in the blog post naturally—so that it doesn’t look forced at the bottom.

For example, take this article on employee retention.

This article discusses ways to improve employee retention.

In the best case, they would do something like this:

There is no mention of the product in this entire article. If this product helps with employee retention, why did they not show it?

If it is one of the product use cases, then this is a lost chance of showing the product in action. I think it is because the writer doesn’t have a deep product understanding.

But you cannot sell the product unless you know the product very well. If your goal is to sell a product, then product training is very important. If your content writer doesn’t know the product, they cannot sell it via content.

Contextual product appearance in the blog suits well with selling the product.

At Product Led Content, we ensure that everybody working on the content has in-depth product knowledge.

Market

At PLC, we only work with companies who have nailed their positioning and messaging. That means you know your strengths and weaknesses compared to other products in the market.

At the beginning of our work with any client, we discuss and get comparisons with competitors so we can include them in the article.

So, we provide our content writers with product battle cards, positioning, and other product marketing collaterals that are generally used during sales (sales enablement content) to show not only that your product can solve the target audience’s problem but it can solve it in the best way in the market.

In fact, it is very easy for the target audience to smell the fakeness in such selling.

Note that content writers who are a part of a B2B content marketing team are very different from general writers, like those who write for hobby or social media, newsletters, copywriters, and B2C writers. It’s writing with a goal.

Normally, everyone thinks they can write. But it is a job that requires creative and analytical skills. It requires immense research skills and a truth-seeking attitude.

SaaS products are more complex than other products and the writing requires technical (domain-expertise) understanding. I’ve seen many writers having fear when it comes to going into technical details. But you cannot write good articles and convince the TA without having in-depth knowledge/ understanding of the problem, product and competitors.

It requires storytelling skills. You cannot engage people for long.

2. Content Marketers

They are marketers at the core. They are well versed in consumer psychology. Many people have misconceptions about this role. They think content marketers mean content writers. But they are very different.

Till a few years ago, (till 2018) a content writer was sufficient to run content marketing.

Earlier, just writing anything used to get a lot of attention because very few companies were leveraging content marketing. Just writing “top 10 tips” or “20 ways to improve your employee engagement” was enough.

Now, after the funding boom in the SaaS space, every startup wants to do content marketing because of the huge benefits it offers.

Because of this content supply is now more than content demand. So, there are dedicated efforts required to distribute content.

Because of this, the competition is very high. Now, just hiring a writer is not enough. To cut through the noise, you should be able to distribute it. So, having a content marketer and strategist is a must. It’s not optional anymore.

Earlier there was less/no competition, so people have no/fewer choices. Now the competition is more, to attract people you have to work with a distribution strategy.

Content marketers are people who can do the distribution. Content promotion is their key role. So, things like SEO, social media, and community promotion are done by them. Their goal is to get the content in front of the target audience. If you fail at this, no matter how good your content is, it is bound to fail.

SEO is a vast and technical field. So, you can’t leave it to content writers.

In SEO, one main task could be building topical authority. A few other things that search engine optimizers will do:

On-page SEO: UX factors, internal linking, headings, keyword insertion, keyword research, etc.
Off-page SEO: Outreach efforts are also from the content marketer to get relevant backlinks. They can also shortlist websites for guest posting.
Technical SEO: They give technical SEO suggestions. There are few people in marketing who can implement these as well. Because not the standard for these people to touch the website/coding part.

Apart from this, content marketers collaborate with designers to get the distribution materials:

PPT
Social media marketing
Infographics
Videos
Youtube community

They repurpose the content for distribution on various other platforms. Find opportunities for promoting every article:

Quora
Reddit
LinkedIn and Facebook group etc
Other industry-specific communities
Social media (if there is no dedicated social media marketing executive)
Webinars, if you don’t have a separate community manager (optional)

3. Content Strategist

Content strategists own the entire content marketing outcomes. This is a managerial role. They are the ones who make the strategy, come up with new ideas, and talk to content writers and marketers internally to get things done.

A content strategist hire and trains writers. They also work as editors in small teams.

They talk to various stakeholders to make KPIs and work on the same to deliver that. First, they work with CMO to finalize the KPIs, and then they report on the same.

They also enable insights from other departments. They are the one who talks with other people like product managers, sales managers, account executives, customer success, and support. They enable the flow of information from these people to content writers and marketers.

Content writers need to make a lot of decisions while working on a content piece. They need context. A proper content brief includes all these things which are required to make good decisions. Good decisions are a function of what information you have.

Some of the key tasks that a content strategist does:

They do topic ideation and create content briefs.
Use keyword research inputs from marketers to finalize keywords worth targeting.
Competitor research.
They create content for the entire funnel: BOFU, MOFU, and TOFU.
Identify low-hanging fruits. Find opportunities for quick conversion.
When new content makes sense and when a content refresh/update is required.

A content strategist is not a project manager though it requires project management skills. Being a content strategist requires deep knowledge of content marketing to complete things on time (deadline).

Content writers without a content strategist (manager) are like an engineering team without a product manager and senior developers. First, they can execute many tasks, but these things don’t add up because of no clear direction.

Running content marketing operations without a content strategist leads to content debt (similar to technical debt for engineering teams.)

A content strategist can start with a raw idea and turn it into a thought leadership article. There is a lot of thinking required that a content writer can’t just do on their own. Before content writer starts writing, they need a lot of context and substance.

They are the pillars of content marketing operations. If the overall content marketing fails, they are responsible for it.

4. Content Editors

Content editors’ main job is to ensure the quality of the content. They are a very essential part of the entire content creation process. They give feedback to writers.

If you look at the profiles of most content writers, they are not from a writing background (especially in India). They are engineers (or from any other field/domain) turned writers. Hence, they don’t know the techniques of writing.

Even when someone says they are experienced writers, it means they have been writing for a long time, but writing techniques would be the same as those of beginner writers.

Why does this happen? Because they are not getting the feedback. Writing practice is a different thing than working on the techniques of writing.

For example, content editors help improve clarity. Help create a better narrative. But when writers don’t work on their techniques, their feedback is limited to improving the word choice and sentence structure. In the best case, they would work on improving the paragraph structure.

But great editors who have learned the techniques of writing will ultimately help you improve your communication, not just proofread your articles.

Examples of a few writing techniques:

Parallel structure
Cohesion and coherence
Active/passive
Types of sentence

Editing is a science because there are techniques involved. Most writers working on the company’s blog claim to be creative writers. But if you are working in content marketing, you need to be analytical as well. This is a very important skill for anyone working in the content team—content writers, editors, strategists, and marketers.

They review the article. It is not enough to hire the best writers; you need to give them feedback too.

Writing style/Editor	Substance (SME+ Research)	Distribution/Promote
Narrative	Matter: Claims backups Audience + technical + product	SEO, social media marketers, email + HARO + paid ads
Word choice	Jargons, word make sense to the audience	Understanding of channels
Sentence structure: simple, compound, complex	Communication with other teams: product, sales, support, customer success	Audience + technical + product
Paragraph structure	Choice of arguments	Outreach + writing for outreach
Good command over the writing, grammar	Good command over the subject matter	Requires command over the channel
Content writer	Content Strategist/ Editor and Manager	Content marketer
	Customer research	Market research

Elements of A Content Marketing Team

Supporting Roles that will Jeopardize Your Content Marketing if Ignored

Whatever roles we have discussed till now would be working full time on the content marketing team. There are a few others that play an equally important role. We are calling them a supporting role because they are not involved full-time in content marketing.

1. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

SMEs provide substance. Here we mean SMEs in a general sense, not necessarily someone who has experience working in the industry (or they themselves are the part of target audience).

That means anybody and everybody in the company that has consumer and market insights is SME for the content marketing team.

Weekly meetings with them are required, at least for the first few months. SMEs play the following roles:

Make content relatable to the target audience, by providing jargon and relevant examples that help in gaining audience trust
Prevent inaccuracy (in many fields, you will find different, sometimes opposing points of view. So, so content writers can’t just write based on online research)

SMEs may write too for content marketing if they are interested in writing but their main job is to provide inputs (by giving interviews, pointing to right resources, connecting with the right person, etc.)

If they are doing webinars or podcasts for the company, that content can also be repurposed for the purpose of content marketing.

SMEs also include people & teams who have the data or information that will be useful for the content marketing team, like salespeople and people in the customer service/support and success team.

People in the product and engineering team can also act as SMEs as they can have unique and deep insights into the product, customers, and market.

You don’t need to hire SMEs just for content marketing; just need to act smartly and work with other teams in collaboration. At Product Led Content, we develop our own expertise over time, but there is a good dependency on SMEs in the beginning.

2. Graphic Designers

Content marketing doesn’t mean just written content. There is a good amount of images required. Thus designers are an integral part of the content marketing team. The reason we include them in the supporting role is they may be working with other teams as well.

Designers start working on the image once the idea is conceptualized by the content marketers. They make images for blog posts and their distribution.

Now, you can’t use free stock images on your blog posts directly. You need to customize it to convey your message.

For images, we suggest buying access to premium stock image sites that aren’t available for free for everybody’s use (a good way of differentiation), for example, Shutterstock, iStockPhoto, PixaBay, and Evanto.

3. Developers (Frontend and Backend)

Here the main thing is to provide developers resources to your content marketing team when required. When there is no marketing buy-in from company founders, content marketing suffers whenever you need to make any changes to the website.

CTO has authority over developers and usually, they don’t allocate resources toward marketing. Therefore, it’s the job of business founders to make sure that the content team gets the necessary developer’s help as per requirement.

Usually, developers’ help is required for the following tasks:

For on-page SEO
- UI improvements (adding a table of contents, relatable posts, featured posts, posts categorization, making improvements to overall blog design for differentiation, blog posts width, changes to font, etc)
- Loading times
Making 301 directs
Options to download and collect email
Schema implementation
Setup for other tools like marketing automation, Google Analytics, GTM, etc.

4. Senior Marketing Leadership (CMO)/Marketing Manager/Founders

These people—CMO or founder marketer—don’t take part in the day-to-day operations of the content marketing team.

Their job is to:

Solve bottlenecks
Give strategic direction (High-level monthly meetings)
Approve budgets

Founders also have good insights into the product, customers, and market. So, they are almost always the SMEs as well.

Why Most Startups Don’t Have These Roles?

After talking with so many founders, I feel the core reason why startups struggle to build a content marketing team is because of a lack of awareness of content marketing operations.

I’ve seen people struggle to build a content marketing team are of these roles:

Startup founders with no marketing background
Someone in the leadership role but no marketing experience
CMO (GTM head or a senior marketer) but not from content background

In all these situations, the common issue is no first-hand experience running a content operations.

Moreover, whatever advice you see on the internet is mostly obsolete information that doesn’t work in the current scenario. That’s why most startups just hire writers to run their content marketing.

So, there is low awareness about these roles. The main problem is not about money. We have seen even the funded startups making this mistake. There is no reason why they won’t invest. Content marketing is a key channel for B2B SaaS startups. It also acts as insurance in case of funding winter or any other negative market scenario.

At Product Led Content, every piece of content passes through at least one person other than the writer himself for quality purposes. This is because you cannot eliminate all errors by yourself. You need another pair of eyes for that.

For self-editing, our writers leave that piece for a week and start working on other things so that their mind is occupied with other things and they get a refresh. Then they can see the article with a fresh pair of eyes.

Writers can only perform when they are given support. Just like, foot soldiers can win or lose a battle depending on the leaders who make strategy, and provide equipment and morale, the same applies to foot soldiers of the content team.

This is our approach to content marketing at Product Led Content. When working with us, you get all of these things.

These Mistakes Only Lead to a Waste of Time and Money

Just hiring a writer and thinking you will achieve the same results you heard a unicorn startup got will only lead to disappointing results.

To get the best results, you need to hire the right people and empower them to do their job. Support them in all ways. It is not cost-saving thinking you just need a writer. In fact, it is time wastage as well. This is similar to hiring a backend developer to do all the jobs.

The cost of a writer running your entire content marketing is very high. This is not obvious to many founders in the early stages. Only after a few months or a year, do they think that content marketing is not generating enough value that they have expected. By the time, you reach your growth stage; you need to have at least one marketing channel working that you can double down on.

At the seed stage, this pain may not be visible because you need a few clients that you can get via other channels, like paid ads or word of mouth, or references. But these are not highly scalable. They reach a plateau after a while and don’t help you much post series B and C growth stages when you actually need them.

Content marketing could be that channel. But if not taken the right approach, it fails.

Content marketing is a good channel, the one that will definitely work even if other channels fail. But it requires seriousness (involvement) from the founders to get the best from it.

This means starting at right time. If you start when other channels fail and you are to start your next (series A) fundraising process, it is already late.

Moving from Seed to Series A with the Help of Content Marketing (Zluri Case Study)

by Lalit Singh Patel | Jul 24, 2022 | Case Study

We started working with Zluri just after they raised their seed funding. The startup was founded only a few months ago. We were the first marketers on the team.

They were doing PoC with a few companies at that time and actively working on the product.

The co-founders—Ritish and Sethu—believed in content marketing as a growth channel and were ready to invest early on.

About Zluri: The Product & The Company

Zluri is a SaaS Management Platform (SMP) that helps software asset managers and IT teams manage the SaaS stack of their company.

The product helps IT teams optimize their SaaS spending. It also helps reduce security and compliance risks by identifying risky apps and users.

The problem Zluri was trying to solve for

Though the on-premise to SaaS migration was going on for a long time after companies shifted to the remote work model (due to the pandemic), there was a rapid growth in the adoption and usage of SaaS apps. But as is true with everything, too much SaaS also has its set of challenges.

SaaS apps help people improve their productivity and do their job better, but they can also lead to SaaS sprawl. SaaS sprawl means you have many more SaaS apps in your organization than required. Instead of helping you, SaaS apps start hampering employees’ productivity, causing overspending and bringing security and compliance issues.

Now there are SaaS apps for every niche task. Because now anyone can sign up for any app with a few clicks and a corporate credit card, there is the risk of overspending.

For example, take these two examples:

Suppose one person is using both Dropbox and Google Drive for file storage. As the number of files increases, getting the files when required would be challenging.
Consider that one employee uses Asana for project management, and the other uses Jira. In that case, it would be difficult to collaborate. Isn’t it ironic that using multiple collaboration tools is coming in the way of collaboration?

Additionally, since there is no visibility into what SaaS apps were being used (a phenomenon called shadow IT) inside the company, there is no control of data residing in those apps. This leads to security and compliance nightmares for IT and security teams.

Alignment on Goals: Leads and Traffic, in this Order

The average contract value was high since it was enterprise software (SaaS). So, they don’t need tonnes of search traffic. The goal from the beginning was to generate business for the company.

As VC-funded startups have to achieve milestones to graduate to the next round, we asked for the series A milestone and focused on achieving that.

Many marketers think they need hundreds of thousands of traffic for content marketing to work. So, they churn hundreds of blog posts in order to hit their traffic goal, assuming the higher the traffic they get, the larger the number of leads/sign-ups would be.

But it leads to setting and chasing goals that don’t help business. More traffic doesn’t mean more leads. You can end up bringing a lot of irrelevant traffic to the website, and since those are not the people who will use your product, they wouldn’t convert either.

Neither you need millions of traffic, nor do you need to churn out 10-20 content pieces every month at the early stages.

I think the reason behind such expectation is stories that regularly do roundups in the startup community. When founders and marketers hear inspirational stories of companies getting millions of traffic, they think they also need to do the same.

Traffic doesn’t matter if your content is giving you leads. Marketers who optimize for traffic without considering leads always feel the need for more traffic.

The Content Strategy We Used

The first thing we did was take them through a positioning exercise and improve the homepage messaging. This is an important lesson if you want to start with content marketing.

If your positioning and messaging are not working, content marketing will fail. Whatever traffic you bring to your website will not convert.

Incidentally, I had recently read a new positioning framework in the book ‘Obviously Awesome’, and was eager to apply what I had learned in practice.

We had gone on a call and discussed who we were really against. Since the SaaS management space was an emerging market at that time—and most companies were still using spreadsheets for managing their SaaS, we knew our real competition was not with other SaaS management companies but with the spreadsheets, the traditional way of doing things.

Audience Segmentation, Content Ideation, and Distribution

Content strategy include which target segment to prioritize, what content to create, and how to distribute the content.

SEO was a vital part of the distribution strategy. For the short term, we actively leveraged the personal LinkedIn accounts of company founders. They already had a good network that helped us amplify our messaging. We have done all the main 3 things for SEO: on-page, off-page, and technical SEO (more on this later in the #distribution section).
We have prioritized in-market audience. So, we created BoFu (bottom of the funnel) content. This means that we target those people in the market who are aware of their problems (SaaS sprawl, overspending, security risk that we described above) and solutions and are ready to buy.

The benefit of prioritizing this audience segment is that you don’t need to convince your prospects that they need to buy your category solution. You don’t need to educate them on the importance of your solution (in our case, it was SaaS management.)

It is much easier to sell to people who are already sold on the solution because you just need to tell them why they should choose you, rather than collect their emails and nurture them over many months or years before they are ready to buy.

This helps you get high-quality leads, meaning the salesperson doesn’t need to chase them. This results in a shorter sales cycle and thus a high deal—velocity.

Collaborate with customer-facing and product teams for new insights. For most early-stage companies, the product evolves rapidly, and they are getting new insights. So, it makes sense to regularly connect with the sales and customer support/success teams and get feedback on lead quality and new customer insights.

This is a key part of our strategy. Most marketers just rely on market research but don’t do customer research. We also regularly connected with product and engineering teams for knowledge transfer on new products.

Different Content Lanes We Leveraged

Introduced DUAAS framework: In this post, we discussed the five types of SaaS wastage—duplicate apps, un/underused licenses, auto-renewal of subscriptions, abandoned apps, and suitable licenses—and how to get rid of them.

Since the product helps eliminate SaaS wastage, a software asset manager will naturally find our helpful product to solve their problem.

Though this post is not a bottom-of-funnel post, it still helps our target audience understand how we can optimize their SaaS stack.

Giving framework and models is an excellent way to engage decision-makers. On the other hand, coining your terms help with distribution. This makes the piece memorable.

Leveraged the market leaders: BetterCloud was the market leader in the SaaS management category. So, we knew whoever was searching for its alternatives was in very much need of the solution.

At the time of writing this post, we are ranking #1 for the term BetterCloud alternatives.

Thought leadership: How SaaS is Powering the Next Big Revolution (based on interview).

An article on top SaaS management platforms. This is the audience looking for SaaS management solutions. This helped us in reaching the right audience at the right time.

We rank #1 for the key term SaaS platform platforms.

SaaS buying Service: They also introduced a new service of SaaS procurement and wanted our help in getting leads for this offering.

We helped them with a landing page and a post. Currently, we rank #2 for the keyword ‘SaaS buying’.

Show the better way of doing old things: We discussed why Zluri was better than traditional solutions like SAM (software asset management). SAM was mostly focused on on-premise software.

After the pandemic, many companies shifted from traditional software asset management to SaaS. The timing was right, and we captured this demand.

Help solve problems and offer the product as an upgrade: Created spreadsheet for manual tracking and content upgrade with Zluri. Since a large portion of the market was still using spreadsheets for managing SaaS apps, we offered a template and Zluri as a better way of doing the same job.

ROI calculator (this is a must if you are selling to an enterprise). IT teams (or any other teams) have to get the finance approval for the budget. To make the case helpful, we made an ROI calculator. Further, this report was downloadable, so IT teams could present it to the other stakeholders.

Product use case: How to Optimize Your Microsoft 365 Licenses with Zluri. The launch was timed very well, with Microsoft announcing they would increase their Office 365 license price. So, we offered a solution to this to our prospective customers.

Tackling Customer Objections: When discussing with the sales team, we found that many prospects had this question: Do they need an SMP if they were using SSO?

Answering this required a good level of technical understanding. So, we went on a call with the CTO, Chaitanya, took his interview, and created a blog post comparing Zluri with SSOs. And it converts very well.

We couldn’t have found this topic by doing keyword research. Only because we were doing consumer research did we find that buyers had this problem.

Distribution

Relied on SEO for long-term and compounded growth. Yes, content marketing is a slow channel. But it gives compounded results.

As they say, the distribution gets easy once a channel is developed. It took us just 2 months to achieve what we achieved in the previous 5 months and 9 months previous to that.

SEO is very complicated, and there are over 200 factors that affect your website’s ranking in search engines. So, it is easy to get confused.

We had just focussed on these three things:

On-page SEO: Improve the blog design for a better user experience. People often bounce back if the page design is poor, even if your content is good. So, getting the blog design right is necessary if you are banking on content marketing to generate revenue for your startup.

When writing for the web, you have to take care of the skimability of your content. People don’t read articles word-by-word from top to bottom. Since our blog posts are in-depth in nature, it gets necessary to format the blog post properly.

Here are a few things we did to improve the on-page experience:

Added a table of contents so people can jump to sections they are interested in.
Changed the fonts to Georgia (usually, we change the font from Sans Serif to Serif font type blog before doing anything else.)
Optimized title tags and meta descriptions. It helps increase the click-through rate of the posts (the number of people clicking vs. people seeing the title on Google), which signals to the search engine that people are interested in that article. Thus, ranking improves.
Write in short paragraphs. On the other hand, the same content as large paragraphs makes a wall of text. This creates a mental barrier to reading. For example, consider this text from the same article.

Link Building: To be fair, we had not done much on this front. We followed a passive link-building strategy. We partnered with a research firm to create data-backed reports.

As journalists, bloggers, and other writers always search for data to support their claims, we knew these reports would help us get some citations.

We don’t do outreach for link-building purposes. Most website owners expect money or links in exchange for giving links, which is against Google guidelines.

But we have taken special care of building internal links. That was a crucial part of our strategy. Not only do internal links help us pass link juices from higher authority pages to our key pages, but they keep the readers on our websites for the next stage of the user journey.

Technical SEO: We were constantly monitoring for technical issues. We were identifying and redirecting broken links. We made sure the information and site structure were correct. We removed all orphan pages. We took the developer’s help to reduce the page load time.

Leverage Other Channels for Short-Term Growth

For short-term growth, the content was used by different teams for various purposes. This requires the help of other team members.

Used social media
Used content while doing cold outreach
For content for engaging existing pipeline
Used paid adverts on LinkedIn and a few other content distribution channels
For retargeting the engaged audience on the website

Final Results

We started to rank on the first page from the 3rd month, after our engagement with them. Since the website was new (DR was 6), it took a few months for all the core posts to rank.

After 6 months, we were getting consistent results. Though small in quantity, we were consistently getting highly qualified customers ready to move to the PoC stage.

After 9the months, we had seen a good jump in both leads and close rate.

Our marketing was so good that one startup founder reached out to Sethu on how they were doing their marketing.

If the text in the image is too small to read, here is what it says:

“Thanks for the kind words man. Zluri has been popping up everywhere as well. Love your PMM. Serves as an inspiration to us.

Did you folks do everything in-house? (Content, PMM, etc).”

At that time, Zluri had not hired any product marketing manager (PMM). We were helping them with the product content as well.

The main keywords

Ranking on page 1 for high purchase intent keywords

On the SEO front, we had started beating companies like G2 and Gartner. (see the screenshot of SERP below)

Zluri ranking above G2, Capterra, and Gartner

Leads

Leads for content marketing (SEO/organic)

The last non-direct click means the users read our articles before signing up for a demo. In such cases, our content directly leads to conversion.

Note that these numbers are lower bound. Tracking all leads from content is impossible due to the following attribution issues.

Google Analytics doesn’t allow you to track those who read convert for a long time (> 90days). The longer the purchase cycle, the higher the actual number of leads would be than shown in the Google Analytics report.
Tracking cross-device conversions is a challenge. Though Google now provides cross-device tracking, it is still in beta, and the accuracy is not guaranteed. So, if a person reads the article on their laptop and sign-up for the demo on their mobile, it’s not possible to track them.
When multiple people are involved (as is the case for Zluri), tracking the entire purchase journey of all the people involved is not possible. Someone may be reading the content, another may be doing the research, and finally, someone else fills up for the demo form.

Comparisons with Established Players in the Market

Now, let us see how Zluri compares with the top 3 players in the SaaS management space.

BetterCloud: founded in 2011, series F, raised $187 million till now
Productiv: founded in 2018, series C, raised $73 million till now
Torii: founded in 2017, series B, raised $65 million till now
Zluri: founded in 2020, series A, raised $12 million till now

Note that the other 3 companies had been in the market for much longer than Zluri. Moreover, they have raised much more funding and thus have more resources (marketing budget, people, tools, etc.). Still, we have been able to beat them for many-core keywords.

It was only possible because of a very focused strategy, high-quality content, and optimum usage of resources.

Collaboration Played a Key Role in the Success of Content Marketing

A Special Mention to Relationship and Communications

When we call ourselves an extension of your marketing team, what we mean is you don’t treat us as an external agency. This is a unique approach that we take at Product Led Content. This makes us different from other agencies in the market.

We don’t promise the above results to everybody we work with. There are many reasons why this engagement was so good.

They had an amazing product. Marketing is not a replacement for a product. After we get the leads, the salespeople and products need to perform. Users should get value from the product.
We got all the support from the founders. Leadership support is essential when it comes to the success of content marketing. We had their attention whenever required. We got access to all the internal people, accounts, and data.

The functioning was smooth because Zluri leadership “gets marketing” and had total buy-in. Ritish and Sethu had themselves written content before they reached out to us to run their content marketing operations. They were also contributing ideas on what we could do.

Having leadership buy-in ensures that we get the help required from developers and designers since there is a lot of dependency on them. For instance, when we needed their help optimizing the blog UI, it was prioritized and completed in a few days.

Furthermore, they were doing many other parallel marketing activities, like cold outreach, paid marketing, podcasts, building a community, running webinars, posting from their personal LinkedIn profile, etc.
The founding team itself was very strong: a rockstar salesperson (Sethu), an amazing marketing leader (Ritish), and an experienced product developer (Chaitanya).

They were amazing people to work with. They even referred a few companies our way.

Nothing could compliment your work better than your clients referring you to others.

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Are We a Right Fit for Your Content Marketing Requirements? Here is How to Decide

by Lalit Singh Patel | Jun 9, 2022 | Our Story

Last year, we had to decline a few work requests simply because we knew things wouldn’t work and these customers would ultimately churn out.

We know that we cannot give results to every company. That is why we are choosy about whom we work with.

After working with some clients, we now know our sweet spot. In this article, I’ll discuss in which situations and to whom we can give results quickly and with the highest impact.

There are mainly three things on which we decide if we want to work together.

The people
Shared vision
Industry

But let’s start with a fundamental qualifier before we talk about that.

We are Focused on B2B SaaS

There are a few qualifiers, like, are you a B2B SaaS company? If not, then there is no question of engagement. We solely work with B2B SaaS companies.

We are a B2B SaaS content marketing agency.

We don’t work with B2C, non-SaaS, or e-commerce companies

Over the years, we have specialized in B2B, which is very different from marketing to B2C.

The key difference is the average order/contract value. To make sense of content marketing in the B2C space, you need tonnes of customers/users, which requires a mass volume of traffic. Those could be gained by writing a lot of basic ‘top 10 tips’ or similar listicles. Focussing on the number of content pieces you churn out results in compromising quality.

Having consumers as your target audience means visual content like images or videos is better than long-form articles.

Other marketing channels, like paid social ads or Instagram, can better fulfill your objectives.

Thus, working with B2C means slowing down on the B2B side.

Similarly, eCommerce startups don’t require the long-form articles that we do. They are mostly consumer-oriented.

Such businesses also require mass production of content to gain significant results from SEO. Paid channels give immediate results.

For example, a writer on OkCredit (a credit account management app for shop owners and their customers) has produced over 500 posts in just one and a half years. That is ineffective in the B2B space.

First, these are technical topics that require a good amount of research to understand. The target audience is senior-level people, like directors, VPs, and the C suite. Furthermore, they have good expertise in their field. So, the articles must be written more in-depth in order to be helpful for them.

Top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content will be sufficient for B2C. So, this content can be created by beginners or freelance writers.

This is not possible for most B2B companies. It’s not practical to find, hire, and train so many writers at scale while maintaining quality.

For example, see the kinds of articles on a B2B enterprise app, Zluri.

These content pieces can’t be just outsourced to any writer.

The writers should have experience in the field to understand the technicalities. And since these in-depth content pieces require a lot of research, you can’t produce more than 5-6 content pieces in a month.

We don’t work with services-based companies

We don’t work with service-based companies because it requires in-depth expertise in that service to write about it. For service-based businesses, we think either subject matter experts (SMEs) should create content, or you should get someone in-house.

There are two reasons for this:

Every service business is unique in a way. You can’t write stuff based on research alone. The SME or in-house person would be aware of that uniqueness and would be able to articulate it better than someone coming from outside.

They know the industry from the inside. They can talk with customers, conduct webinars, etc. because they are in regular touch with the target audience.

For example, let’s say you are a law firm for mid-size businesses. Since the order value would be significantly higher and your clients would choose you for your expertise, writing the typical ‘top 5 tips’ like articles for law firms wouldn’t help. This type of content can be created by anybody and doesn’t help you generate any real business.

We are not saying that service businesses can’t work with agencies. But it requires a huge time commitment from the company’s SMEs and salespeople for this relationship to work. Currently, that is not our focus.

Should We Work Together? This Question Boils Down to 3 Questions

Content marketing is a very collaborative process. Thus, we like to work as an extension of marketing teams, not as a third-party vendor agency.

It requires active participation from our clients’ end as well.

There are three key engines to running smooth content marketing operations:

Content: We take care of content strategy, ideation, and creation
Technical changes on the website: Need help from developers
Promotion: We take care of on-page SEO and need your help to amplify the distribution

1. The People: Who do we work with (decision makers)

Because it determines the nature of our working relationship, we are picky about who we choose to work with.

For this partnership to work, the right people should be involved from both ends. We have discussed in detail in another post who all are involved in running content marketing operations.

Importance of senior leadership

In that post, we discussed the importance of involving someone from the leadership team, like the founder, CMO, strategic head, etc., for the content marketing operations to run smoothly.

Therefore, we always want to involve startup founders, senior executives, or experienced marketers in content marketing strategy—and sometimes operations.

Without them, this becomes like a project going very slowly.

Non-marketers cannot take decisions timely.

Things don’t get done because junior executives don’t have much decision-making or budget authority.

Leadership buy-in: MoEngage does a great job at content marketing. Akshata Kamath, its content head, says, “Ravi (founder and CEO) has had a clear vision of content from the beginning.”

Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.

With senior executives involved, things move faster.

As a result, you get good outcomes.

Here are key reasons why, when working with us, the involvement of founders, senior executives, or experienced marketers is a must.

Strategic decisions in content marketing require a holistic understanding of the overall business strategy

Since the leadership team has a business context, it results in quick decision-making. Content marketing strategy is a subset of marketing strategy, which is itself a subset of business strategy.

Founders can make decisions quickly, even if they are not from marketing backgrounds, not just because they have the authority but also because they are aware of time wastage due to delayed decisions.

They have experience, help clear bottlenecks, and solve hurdles

Content marketing is a highly collaborative process. There are a lot of interdepartmental dependencies.

We all know how interdepartmental dependencies can slow down a project. But the experience of senior leaders in the company helps them navigate hurdles—either through authority or diplomacy—when we need help from other departments.

Such as when

We need to source information from other departments, for instance, people from the product team

Need the time of people from other teams, for example, salespeople

We need them to do something, such as modify the website design

In one instance, working with a client in our early days, it took them over a year to change the content management system.

Since the point of contact was a junior person, though he agreed with our suggestion personally, he couldn’t get the changes made by the developers. He didn’t have the authority to direct the developers to make the changes.

Someone from the engineering department was controlling that decision, and he/she decided not to change it because it was a hassle for them.

The person from the engineering team would not have ignored the request if it had come through someone from the leadership team.

They have the art of delegation, which juniors don’t

Most of our customers hire specialists for our expertise. So, we do most of the heavy lifting. We take care of end-to-end content marketing, from strategy and ideation to creation and distribution.

We have found that our engagement with senior people is generally smoother than when working with junior people.

Leaders know why they have hired us. They know the art of delegation and generally lead the project by giving directions, not prescriptions.

On the other hand, junior people create hurdles by focusing on irrelevant or small things. They don’t know the art of trust.

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with prescriptions, but it’s the kind of engagement we don’t want to have.

Best case scenario for us

In an ideal scenario, we would like to work with a person from the leadership team who has a marketing background. They ‘get marketing.’

Even if they have no hands-on content marketing experience, there are good chances that they understand it.

Someone with marketing experience understands different marketing channels and how content marketing fits into the overall marketing strategy.

They know that content marketing is a slow channel that gives compounded results in the long term. So, they plan to use other channels, like cold outreach, paid advertising, etc., for short-term results till the organic channel picks up.

Ultimately, they can get the best from us.

2. Shared vision: Do you have a Content Culture?

We want to work with startups that have content baked into their culture. If you have a content culture, the content operations would be very smooth. You will get great results.

For building a content culture, we need to do three things: Align on goal. Align on strategy. Have a smooth information flow.

Are we Aligned on the Goals?

We often see content marketers focus on the wrong metrics, like pageviews, bounce rate, time spent on pages, etc.

Many believe that improvement in these metrics means content marketing is working.

However, these metrics don’t align with most early-stage startups’ growth strategies. When we talk with seed and series A stage founders, they have clear milestones in terms of annual recurring revenue (ARR) for the next stage.

Therefore, we want to be accountable for the business value (ARR). Not vanity metrics. Not improvements in bounce rate. Not an improvement in time spent on pages. Certainly not the number of blog posts we create in a month.

We measure our performance in terms of our contribution to the pipeline.

So we track these metrics

User sign-ups

SQLs we generate

Demo requests

This is because these metrics have business value—and are closest to the revenue that any marketer can help you with.

Go up, you risk losing yourself in the noise. Go down, and you will find yourself getting crushed under heavy weights.

Note that if salespeople are required to close the sales, marketers cannot be directly held accountable for sales. It’s the job of salespeople to convert those leads into paying customers.

Getting alignment on content marketing strategy

Our core strategy is to start selling products within the content while providing value.

If you want leads to be tracked as content marketing KPIs, it requires us to agree on a few basic things:

Topic ideation – see how we prioritize topics
Give a soft demo within the posts – show the product in action with screenshots, screencast, mockups, etc.
Show how the product solves the problem better than other solutions, be it direct or indirect competitors

The basic idea behind creating product-led content is to weave the product contextually into the topic discussion.

Our approach toward topic ideation is to help people with problems that our product can solve. When we choose such topics, we are able to reach the right audience at the right time—when the prospects are looking for solutions to their pain points.

Soft demo within the content pieces: Since we talk about the product when the readers are deeply engaged in the article, the product appears as a natural solution to their problem.

Another strategic alignment is to be willing to show product screenshots in the content.

Nailing your positioning and messaging first – In order for your content to generate leads, you need to nail your marketing fundamentals first.

If you have issues with your positioning and messaging, all the traffic we bring will go in vain, because we would not be able to convert them.

Not nailing the positioning implies other issues, like no product differentiation. Thus, we cannot show the customers how your product solves the problem better than other solutions, whether direct or indirect competitors.

Smooth Information Flow – Provide us access to information

We are not a good fit if you can’t give us access to the rest of your team. We don’t get consumer insights if we cannot talk to sales, customer support, customer success people, developers, or product managers.

As we discussed earlier, content operations require a high degree of collaboration of the content marketing team with other teams.

Creating quality content requires inputs from sales, customer success, customer support, product, other teams, and SMEs.

These teams can help the content marketing team with

Refining your content strategy

Sharing topic ideas

Building better arguments

Providing customer stories

Better backing for your claims

In the absence of these inputs, we are limited to just market research.

Read this article for the difference between market research and consumer research. Market research is external. Consumer research is internal.

For example, we want to be in regular touch with salespeople because they know precisely what problems customers face. Salespeople know the objections of prospects before buying.

By knowing the customer’s objections, we address those objections in your content. So, when they reach your sales, their basic objections are handled.

Talking with salespeople also helps us choose the right topics for content.

The right topics will help you attract in-market audience (people who are ready to buy the product.)

You attract the wrong type of footfall on your website with the wrong topics. You will face the following problems:

Wait for weeks or months before converting the traffic

You need to chase them, even if you get the leads

It leads to uninteresting content

You are at a competitive disadvantage

Furthermore, your salespeople get a headstart. They don’t need to explain what your product does, your key value proposition, and what makes you different. Thus, your sales velocity and close rate are higher.

Likewise, we talk to customer support and success because they are also in touch with paying customers. Talking to product and engineering teams helps us to understand your product’s unique benefits.

Access to data: Note that this information is also available at various places, like call recordings, CRM, and other conversations with your customers. Further, we ask for access to the following accounts: search console, google analytics, and support and sales data.

3. The problem statement you are solving

Content marketers spend a lot of time researching content. They spend countless hours reading articles, watching videos, and talking to people. Without an interest in the topics they are working on, the created content quality would be poor.

In fact, this is the main reason why we see such boring and nonsensical content on the internet. All these articles are written by writers with no interest in the topic they are writing about.

If your folks in your content marketing team don’t connect with the problem statement you are trying to solve, they will never perform well.

Thus, we only work with clients where we: connect with the problem statement, like to work in those industries, and want to talk to those personas.

Industries and target audiences we like to work with

We enjoy working in certain industries.

In my childhood, I was least interested in studying; instead, I would spend most of my time playing cricket. I was astonished by cricketers because they used to get money for playing.

Though I didn’t pursue my goal of becoming a professional cricketer, when I work in the industries of my liking, it’s a similar feeling.

This is also a key part of our hiring process. When we hire different people on our team, we check if their interests match what we do. Since they work on the topics of their interests, they perform very well.

If you are in any of the following industries, we can be a good content marketing partner for you.

HRTech, like recruiting software, ATS, talent assessment, employee engagement, learning and development, onboarding, and performance management solutions. Note that rewards and recognition and payroll are something that we don’t want to do.
Sales, like sales engagement, sales automation, revenue operations, conversation intelligence, pipeline management, contract management, demo enhancement, etc.
Enterprise software, targeting IT, HR, finance, security, etc teams.
Cloud security tools, CSPM, CNAPP, CASB, CIEM, etc.
Products used by product folks, like use onboarding and product analytics software
Most of the products selling to startup founders
Target audience: startup founder, marketer, HR, IT teams, CFO

We don’t like working in the following industries: real estate, legal, manufacturing, etc.

Timing? What’s the Best Time to Work With Us? 1

Now if you check all the above three points. The next question is, what is the right time to work with us?

We can create different values at different stages of the startup.

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