How Content Marketing Works

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Introduction

During the last 10–15 years I have had the privilege of working for two organizations that have had a substantial impact in a specific industry. The Eclipse Foundation was one of the first open source foundations that developed a model for companies to collaborate in open source. HiveMQ continues to lead the adoption of MQTT in the IoT industry. Both organizations excelled at content marketing and consequently are recognized as being a leader in their respective industry. They have been able to convert this leadership into long-term commercial success.

Content marketing is a strategy I would recommend to any small technology start-up. To help others learn from my experience, I have written the basics of how content marketing works. This is directed at small high-tech companies with limited marketing resources. It is how you can get started to execute a content marketing strategy.

Feedback and comments are certainly welcome.

What is Content Marketing?

The way people buy technology has changed substantially over the last 10–15 years. The Internet and social media has made it a lot easier for individuals to research technology and products without speaking to vendors. Google search is often the primary resource technologists use to find information about products and vendors. Content marketing is about inserting your company’s point of view and message into this research process.

Content marketing is about creating and distributing relevant information that potential customers will find valuable and want to consume. Content marketing could be writing a blog about an industry relevant to your company, a video that explains how to accomplish a task, a tutorial on how to use something, a webinar with industry experts, or a white paper that clearly explains concepts and why they are important. The key for successful content marketing is the audience needs to find it relevant and valuable.

Content marketing is not about promoting your specific product. Product marketing is still important to explain the features and benefits of your product and solution. It is important for the overall marketing strategy but it is not content marketing.

What are the benefits of Content Marketing?

1. Content Marketing is Relatively Cheap. For small companies with limited resources, content marketing is relatively cheap. All you really need is for people on the team to start writing and/or producing video content. This does take time for some key people in the organization but it doesn’t take cash. For small companies, cash is king, so content marketing is often the obvious choice.
2. Content is a sustainable investment. Unlike trade shows or media advertising, content is a sustainable investment. A blog post or video can be viewed by potential customers over a period of months/years. These become important assets owned by the company that can actually increase in value over time. I have seen blog posts written 7 years ago that continue to attract thousands of potential customers. The money you spend on a Google Ad is gone as soon as the click occurs.
3. Content is used for other marketing activities. If you are going to do a Google Ad campaign or a social media campaign, you will need content for these channels. A great content marketing strategy is often the starting point for Google Ads or social media campaigns.
4. Content marketing is at the heart of SEO. Google Search is often cited as the primary resource for finding information about products and technology. If you want your website to be found by Google, you will need relevant content. Product web pages can be optimized but an amazing collection of relevant content about your industry and technology will definitely get you a higher ranking.
5. Content marketing delivers high quality marketing leads. Based on my experience, leads that came from organic search were more likely to convert to a sales lead than any other marketing channel. In general, leads that come from content marketing are people who have interacted with your brand before speaking with a salesperson and have self identified.

Why is Content Marketing is Important for Lead Generation

Lead generation is high on the list of challenges for any small technology company. How do you get potential customers to consider your product for purchase?

A common method is hiring sales people to do outbound sales. Outbound sales is the process of targeting companies and individuals to engage with them to have a conversation about purchasing a product. There are two key challenges with outbound sales:

1) Lots of people have made their purchase decision before a salesperson calls. This is especially true if you do not have a strong brand in the industry, and

2) It is now very very difficult to get in touch with a decision maker. People don’t typically answer their phones, so cold calling is problematic. Emailing a contact that doesn’t know your company is hit and miss and LinkedIn is similar. Outbound sales is still important but it takes significant financial resources to hire a professional sales team to make it happen.

A marketing team is responsible for generating leads for the sales team. This is typically referred to as inbound lead generation. There are many different types of tactics marketing teams can use to generate leads, such as trade show participation, media advertising, Google AdWords, etc. These all involve getting your brand and product in front of potential clients using external channels.

One key marketing channel that can’t be underrated is your own website. A company’s website is often the first experience potential customers have with the company. It is the ideal source for generating leads. However, how you attract people to the website is an issue. Creating compelling content that brings people to your website is one way to do this. Content marketing can become a significant source of leads for your company.

Content Marketing is about Community Building

Content marketing is all about building a community of individuals that share a common interest in technology or industry. An important goal of content marketing is building up credibility with these individuals so when/if they start looking for a solution they will consider your company.

A key to success for your content marketing is you treat these individuals with respect and speak to them in their own voice. The Cluetrain Manifesto is a classic book on communities and I recommend it for anyone thinking about content marketing. The book is based on 95 theses, the first 5 are very relevant to any content marketing strategy:

1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

How to start your content marketing strategy

1. Define your audience

The first step to getting started in content marketing is to define your audience. Who are you trying to educate and attract with your content? What is the industry or technology that you will target to create content? Ideally both these answers will support the segmentation and personas defined in your overall marketing strategy.

2. Select content topics

After selecting your audience and industry, begin the process of generating content ideas. This is often the hardest part of content marketing. Ideally you start with educating your audience on technological concepts. For instance, at HiveMQ we created a lot of content educating developers and architects about MQTT. Hubspot has created a lot of content about online marketing. The MQTT content or online marketing content is not promoting HiveMQ or Hubspot but it helps educate the target audience on industry concepts. Remember content marketing is not about selling your product. It is about reaching individuals who are researching a technology or concept and might one day become a potential customer.

3. Select the medium

After you have created a list of topics, before you start the process of creating the content you need to select the medium. Today there are three main mediums for content: written, video and podcast. I would suggest that for most technology oriented companies, written content should be the starting point, quickly followed by video. Based on experience, most technologists still use Google Search to find content but in the last 5 years YouTube has also become very important.

After you have decided the topic and the medium, now decide upon the format. Written content can take more forms, including short blog posts, longer white papers, tutorials, infographics, etc. Videos can include webinars, tutorials, how to step by step coding sessions, etc. A topic might be better suited for a particular format so expect to be flexible and use more than one.

4. Who creates the content?

The final question is often: who should create the content? The answer is: It depends. :-). For small companies, content needs to be created by subject matter experts (SME). If your goal is to create relevant, valuable content then you need your experts involved. The SME in many small companies are the co-founders or senior technologists. Other sources are often product managers, professional services and even support people. Many companies will hire a ‘developer advocate/evangelist’ who is a SME and becomes the source of content. The bottom line in a small company, content creation is a team sport, it needs to become everyone’s responsibility.

Many co-founders and executives are typically too busy to be writing blog posts. If you do content creation correctly, your company and SME will become an industry thought leader that is invited to speak at conferences and participate in podcasts/webinars on other platforms. If your company is going to be a leader in the industry, individuals in your company need to be leaders in the industry. Great content creation is all about being an industry leader.

It doesn’t mean you can’t help your SME experts. It is possible to hire ghost writers to work with SME to write an article. However, in my experience the ghost writer needs to have sufficient experience in the subject matter or the process becomes too tedious. If you are creating videos or webinars, a digital marketing specialist can do all the post production processing.

Content Distribution

Now that you have started to create relevant and compelling content, content distribution needs to become part of the strategy. Posting it on your website is the starting point but that can’t be the end.

You can learn a lot about content distribution from media companies. Online web portals and even streaming services are all about producing, distributing content that their community comes back to consume. Some things that you should be considering, include:

• Have a consistent stream of content. Start with a blog post or video once a week. Ideally you increase this over time. Posting multiple posts one week and then nothing for the next month does nothing for reminding your community about your content.
• Try to think about a series of content on a specific topic and publish a post on this topic each week. This engages with people to return for the next post. It also provides the ability to market the complex series once it has been completed.
• Attempt to have high quality production. Invest in graphic design and video production to make sure your content looks great. As an aside, one of the first hires I would do for a small marketing team is hire a graphic designer who can produce graphics and videos and ideally help maintain the website.
• Think about how the content will be found by Google. SEO is an entire discipline in marketing but some of the basics can be easily added to the content you post on your website.

You also need a way to start building a mailing list of individuals that are interested in your content and community. This will allow you to remind people about new content and also engage with them as they continue their research and potential buying.

‘Lead magnets’ are website interactions that require individuals to provide contact information to have access. Some suggestions that I have seen successful in the past:

1. Produce a monthly newsletter that individuals can sign-up. This gives you permission to send them new content that you have published but also invite them to future events, like webinars.
2. Produce monthly webinars that require registration. The webinars become a great source of content but they also allow you to interact with your community members. Some of the best webinars I have produced were done with partners that would promote the webinar to their communities.
3. Create free trials of your product that allow individuals to learn about your product. Part of the learning and research that most technologists will use is to try the product. Technologists are all about ‘show me, don’t tell me’ and free trials allow them to see the product first hand.
4. Create ‘gated’ content that is only available if you provide an email address. I personally hate ‘gated’ content. As an individual who does a lot of internet research, it slows me down as I am doing my research and unless I know the company, I don’t really trust it to be high quality. As a content marketing strategy, gated content can’t be indexed easily by Google so you are limiting the exposure of the content.

As a compromise, I recommend all content to be available on the open web in HTML. If someone wants to download the content in pdf format, they are required to provide an email address. For instance, a blog series on a specific topic is available in HTML for anyone to read but it is also available as an e-book for pdf download.

Leads: Learning Journey vs Buying Journey

Content marketing allows you to build a contact list of individuals but these are not leads for your products; at least a large percentage of them are not leads. It is critical to remember that most of the individuals interacting with your content are on a learning journey. They are researching information about a technology or industry. Many of these individuals may not even be in your target segment or target persona. Others may be in your target segment but are not in a position to buy since they don’t have a project or budget.

The key is to be able to identify which website visitors are in a buying journey vs a learning journey. There are a number of things that can be done to identify potential buyers. One thing not to do is have a sales person attempt to contact everyone that provides their contact information. This is often just a waste of the sales resource and also it breaks the trust that you want to develop of being a reliable source of industry content.

To identify website visitors on a buying journey, consider the following:

• Clearly add a ‘Contact Sales’ or ‘Get a Demo’ to your website that makes it easy for individuals to self identify that they want to talk about your product.
• Start analyzing the data from your website traffic to map the behavior of individuals that eventually became a customer. This will likely begin to identify specific content that is relevant to a product purchase decision.

Keys to Successful Content Marketing

For small start-ups it is imperative to start on a content marketing strategy to develop the community that will allow you to generate growth in the long-term. Content marketing will take time to gain the results but if done correctly the results are sustainable in the long-term.

In summary, the keys to starting a successful content marketing strategy are the following:

• Content marketing needs to be a corporate responsibility, not just the marketing team. Key executives and product specialists need to consider it part of their responsibilities.
• Content marketing is not product marketing. If you are always pitching your product in the content you produce, people won’t find it relevant or useful. Make sure your content is part of the market conversation.
• Start writing content that you will find interesting or is your passion. This is often the topic that other people want to learn.
• Be consistent. Content marketing is a long game. It will take time to build up your community and start ranking on Google search. However, you will see the results that will begin to drive your inbound marketing channel.