Know the problem, set a high bar, create a system.
Every startup founder is driven by a purpose—that initial spark that catches wind and grows until it becomes something … real.
Whatever the idea, it’s that purpose—that reason for getting out of bed—that pushes you and those who would dare follow you to make something out of nothing.
The products and services you eventually build and share with the world are a byproduct of that purpose. So is the success you achieve along the way. If you want to use content as a tool to help grow your business, everything you choose to create must channel that same electric sense of purpose.
This sounds like a heady proclamation because, it is.
Fortunately, there is way to do this—and it works regardless of size or marketing budget.
Start at the end
It sounds simple. But just about everybody gets this wrong. When founder CEOs read about the promise of content to help grow their business, the reaction is almost always the same—blogs, white papers, videos, guides, we need it all! And we need it fast.
Cart meet horse.
If you run an early-stage company, you can be forgiven for wanting to move fast. Few things are more agonizing to ambitious founders and their investors than the appearance of sitting still, especially as the competition gathers steam around them.
Good news: Great content can be created with speed and urgency, provided you do a couple of things first.
- Know the problem
- Set a high bar
- Create a system
Know the problem
A lot of writers and marketers will tell you to know your audience. If you want to use content as a tool to help grow your business, this isn’t an adage anyone could rightly argue against. But at a hundred dollars an hour—or whatever the going rate for over-priced consultants is these days—it’s not exactly head-turning advice.
If your company has a great product—if it’s turning a profit, or on the path to revenue—you already know your audience, or at least where to find them. If you’ve got a marketing team, or an agency, chances are they’ve spent hours writing carefully crafted personas—cute little vignettes complete with photos and fake names and personal information, such as target age and martial status and whether the person wears white sneakers and jeans or black shoes and slacks with a belt to work.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s important for your sales team to know who they are talking to. But if you’re spending more than two hours and a hundred bucks tops on persona mapping, somebody sold you the wrong kind of magic beans. Rather than sit around like a bunch of amateur sociologists, spend a few hours at your next industry event scoping the scene. Use your eyeballs and your words.
Then, take the rest of your persona budget and put it toward what really matters: Understanding the problems these people are facing.
The difference is subtle, but significant.
If you want to create great content—that is, content that fuels an affinity for your brand—it’s got to be helpful. It’s got to add value. Simply knowing who your audience is won’t cut it. You’ve got to take aim at their problems. You got to show them you understand their plight, that you can talk to them, on the level, and add value in the form of practical solutions. That doesn’t mean shamelessly extolling the virtues of your product. In fact, if you do this right, you won’t mention your product at all—not at first.
Every piece of content you create for your brand should focus on earning trust through mutual respect and understanding. That happens only when you learn to talk to people in the context of their problems, not the ones your marketing team so cleverly “dreamboarded” for them at the last company retreat.
Set a high bar
There’s nothing inherently wrong with speed—except that, occasionally, it ruins things.
I see this with startups CEOs a lot.
You’ve got this great idea. So you rush to write an article or produce a white paper or shoot a quick and dirty video. The content is intended to demonstrate your passion, to build your thought leadership profile. But it ends up reaching only a small audience and, when it does, it falls flat. The result is disappointment—and, sometimes, an irrational abandonment of content altogether.
Slow your roll.
Get to know your competition. Have a look at what some of the best brands in the world are doing. Content is everywhere. If what you’re producing doesn’t pass a high bar, if it doesn’t perfectly capture your brand story and connect with prospects and customers in authentic ways—if it doesn’t add value by opening minds to bigger ideas—it’s not going to do you, or your fledgling company, any good.
That doesn’t mean you need to spend a lot of time and money on content design and development, or that you can’t continue to refine your message later. Gritty, personal videos and other “real” forms of content can be incredibly effective—and powerful. Just look at the rise of Facebook Live and LinkedIN. But don’t fool yourself into thinking your favorite internet luminary simply turned on her smartphone and started riffing into the camera. When something looks effortless, it almost never is.
My point is that, whatever you choose to create, it has to connect. You want people to know your brand for the quality of its message, regardless of the form it takes. That means treating your content operation like you would product development and constantly honing, refining and refreshing your message and its many forms of delivery as you go. If it helps, think of your marketing operation as a startup within a startup. Focus on solving problems. Adopt Eric Ries’ famous “build, measure, learn” feedback loop. And do the very best work you can in the time you have. Then iterate and improve along the way.
If you spend time hoisting a high-quality bar up front—that includes hashing out the right strategy, creating a recognizable aesthetic that can be carried over into different parts of your business and writing and producing content with value as your True North—you’ll find it suddenly possible to author stickier, more impactful messages and resources at a faster clip. And you’ll get more efficient and creative as you go.
Build to scale (the system)
Now that you know your audience’s problems, and you’ve set a high-quality bar for content, it’s time to put what you’ve learned to work. A lot of business owners go to bed at night dreaming of that one piece of content—the viral video or the NYT op-ed—that is going to catapult their brand into the stratosphere and start the MQLs and demo requests and phone calls flooding in. Unless you’re Apple Computer in 1984, this is, for lack of a better word, nutso.
But let’s humor the dream. Let’s say you have the budget—you team up with an A-list creative agency and blow the damn doors of a really big idea. You pour your heart and soul into the thing, and you empty your checkbook on the bet of the century.
Let’s go a step further. Let’s say it works. For six months, the phones never stop ringing. Then, one day, crickets. The shine fades and another company with a clever stunt captures the love and affection of the masses.
You’ve still got a business to run, and you need momentum. But, after sinking all your time and money into last year’s viral sensation, you failed to build a foundation, a system that would reasonably allow you to keep producing, to keeping moving the needle. You’re left with one option: swing for the fences again. Except this time, you miss. Or, worse, you don’t have the budget to even get in the game.
As a growing company, you have to dream big. Possibility and potential is what drives you; more important, it drives your team. But betting the farm on a quarter-million-dollar marketing stunt isn’t necessarily the way to win with content.
You need a system that scales—and one that won’t break the bank. That means hiring the right talent, creating a calendar and setting ambitious goals for the number of leads and amount of revenue the team will achieve month to month, quarter to quarter.
Consider your sales funnel. What types of content promises to help you facilitate progressively more solutions-oriented conversations with clients and prospects?
At the level of interest, you’ll almost certainly need some engaging thought leadership and blog-style content to build your prospect list and set initial meetings. Once clients start to engage, you’ll want to arm your sales team with content that clearly shows how your solutions work in context. Case study videos are a great way to achieve this. So are well-written profiles (we call these “people stories”). Finally, you’ll need a way to demonstrate exactly how your solution works for clients who are on the verge of a decision, in their exact situation. Tailored demos are useful here. So are product explainers. Provided you’ve established a high bar for your content (see #2), these resources can be created in a way that delights and amazes.
If none of this sounds as exciting to you as, say, buying a Super Bowl ad or working with a big-name agency, step back and think. Imagine having a tested internal engine that could consistently generate leads and reliably move clients through your sales funnel, contributing to steady sales growth and helping you transition from seed stage to revenue stage faster and more confidently than you ever thought possible. Imagine this engine wasn’t something you hired a third-party to create, but that it was part of the guts of your organization—what you might call value added.
Your investors would like that.
And the best part? With a steady stream of revenue, you can stop dreaming and start thinking realistically about exactly what it will take to become the industry’s next viral sensation. Now, where did I put Ridley Scott’s phone number?
Are you a business owner or founder CEO struggling to create content that generates revenue for your business? Content Better can help. Visit www.contentbetter.com to sign up for your free 20-minute strategy session.
