Mucker Growth Series: How to Kickstart Content Marketing at Early-Stage Companies

I'm Tony, Tony Yang. If I haven't met you, I run the growth team here at Mucker, which basically means I get to work with a lot of really smart founders to guide them on their go-to-market. But really the start of today's show is my buddy, Dennis Shao. I've known Dennis for, I'd say what, over a decade now. We used to work in the same building in our past lives at other companies. And these days, Dennis is the founder of a marketing agency consultancy called Attention Retention. And he's been the marketing leader at a number of different startups and tech companies. Now he's helping many more. So Dennis, we're excited to have you. And yeah, it's... it's all yours okay thanks so much shoney and thanks everyone for being here today i'm going to be talking about starting a content marketing function at early stage companies often when you have no one dedicated to marketing or perhaps when you have a single marketing resource or maybe some agency relationships i myself have been in roles in the past where i was a one person content marketing team so i can speak to i will be speaking about some of the things i did when i was a team of one A quick notes about me. I started my career as a software developer. I kind of wonder these days, maybe if I stayed down that path and I could be developing large language models today, maybe that's, I would be better off financially, perhaps. I transitioned to marketing about 15 years ago. I do feel like marketing and creativity is where I'm naturally the most talented. I could quickly, I got a degree in computer science and I was writing code, but I could quickly discover that my colleagues code was just in a different level than mine. So I guess it's a little less in self awareness. I was not going to advance too far as a top notch software developer. I ran and this is going to be dating me a little bit, but I ran and completed the 100th Boston Marathon that was many, many years ago. So if you look it up, you'll know what year that was. This was a lesson in who you know, because the Boston Marathon for those of you who run, you might know that it's a qualifying marathon, which means you need to run another marathon. at a certain time in order to even get into the Boston Marathon. And this was my first and only marathon. So this was a case where my sister worked for Procter & Gamble, who is a corporate sponsor of the marathon. So I was able to get a spot in the marathon. Long story short, I finished it in under four hours. So my one and only marathon, and I don't run it anymore. Speaking of running, I run the Bay Area Content Marketing Meetup. If you go to meetup.com, you should be able to find us. We've been around since 2015. And we shifted to online talks during the pandemic and we're now doing continuing online and occasionally in person in the Bay Area. As Tony mentioned, I'm a marketing consultant. I work a lot with a lot of B2B tech companies, a lot of SaaS companies. I'm active on LinkedIn, so feel free to send me a connection request. If you wouldn't mind, if you want to connect with me, I just mentioned that you were on this webinar because I do get other random connections like most of us do. So that way I know where you came from. And then one last final note, I am in the Bay Area. However, I'm currently in the midst of a move. So my wife and I are moving to Chicago. We're actually leaving the Bay Area this Saturday. We've already packed up the house. So if you're in the Chicago area, also mention that when we connect. I'd love to maybe meet with you for coffee in Chicago. I'll be there by next week, by like the first week of May. Okay, let's get started. So first, I'm not going to go over too much about the why. But for those of you who are muck or portfolio companies, if you're in the seed stage, if you're just looking to find product market fit, you might not be thinking of marketing just yet. But when the time comes that you found product market fit, you want some awareness, you want to fill the top of the funnel with sales leads, you want to drive revenue, then marketing in general is going to be a benefit to you. And content marketing in particular is a way for you to generate awareness, get your brand, your company, and your mission out into the world and known. And it can also generate awareness of your own expertise of yourselves, the founders, or perhaps your subject matter experts in your organization. Content marketing can help lead prospects along the sales cycle from top of the funnel down to consideration and purchase. And it is a long-term game. It's not direct response marketing. It's not like you're going to put an ad out and get an e-commerce transaction and a sale right away. Sometimes that does happen, but I would think of content marketing as a long-term gain. You want to earn trust with your audience. Your audience today might not be in the market for your products or solutions, services, but if you build the trust with content marketing when they are in the market and they're starting to look at solutions, yours could and should be the first that comes to mind for them. Another quick note, I am not going to be, you might have come into this webinar thinking, Okay, content marketing at early stage companies with no marketing function. Let's just throw AI at it. I'm not going to cover that today. And I would actually, this could be the subject of a different webinar, but I've had some, my experience in using AI like ChatGPT and other tools for content creation is there's good use cases for very specific things, but not for creating content. I would not, I've had discussions with some clients about. let's just write some blog posts using chat gpt almost solely so that's a bad idea so the quick answer there is if you're trying to write a new piece of content like a blog post and you go to chat gpt what you're going to get is the average of what's already been published on the web and i don't think any of us really wants strives to be average it's average and you know ai can hallucinate so there's a lot of whole a lot of risks in relying solely on ai for your content marketing so i'm going to talk about other things a couple of things i'll go into posting videos on linkedin how to use webinars to drive both leads and awareness and how to use webinars to create multiple formats content formats here's i think a key one we all you all have internal so sme stands for subject matter experts so either you yourselves as the founders technical founders are the smes in your company or you have the people building the product they are also smes They are a great source for extracting their insights to generate content. And even if you have no marketing team, I'll show you some ways you can take advantage of their knowledge. And then I'll talk about licensing content as well. All right, just take a quick sip of water. Okay, this is one of my clients, Mike Crudy. They are a seed stage startup trying to annuitize 401k plans. So they create the data architecture. that allows fund managers, record keepers, and plan sponsors to talk to each other. And their mission is to try to get 401k plans, which are now somewhat standard in most businesses, as opposed to pensions, to annuitize them so that you can have a pension-like savings in your 401k plan. Pictured here is their CEO and founder, Trevor Gary. So MyCruity is a small startup. When I worked with them, they were 10 employees or less. they did not have a marketing function so i was helping with a little bit of marketing and i would curate industry articles so this is a way to create awareness on a third-party platform linkedin and get a lot of attention so i was curating industry articles in their space and we would post a link to that article with some commentary from mike crudy monday through thursday the big success was every friday we posted a video and trevor was kind enough to lend his time so this is the founder with a perspective on an article so i would spend he would pick the article for the friday usually by thursday he'd pick it and by friday morning he would send me the video and you can see here's the example of a particular article we curated you can see we get some attention because we're tagging other people in the industry and we're tagging organizations but i think most importantly the video tended to be two minutes or less And rather than the typical LinkedIn post is, well, this is like a side conversation, but typically people will say LinkedIn comments. But in this case, we're putting the link in the post. And the unique thing is we have a video-based perspective from the founder talking about the article, which often is about, so it's not about my crew read the company, it's about the space in which they're operating. Trevor would speak for two minutes or less, would often say, you know. He would often end the article by saying, you know, the links up there and these Friday and people began to follow this company page, knowing that we usually call it. You see here it says in this week's video, we often called it like the Friday video. So people were expecting a video from Trevor every Friday. And of course, the video post performance compared to the curated articles Monday through Thursday was probably 10x performance. So a video would get. 1000 to 2000 impressions on LinkedIn on the company page, and probably 50 likes and maybe up to 10 comments. So this was a low effort. I'm not trying to minimize Trevor's effort, but it was not that much work for Trevor to record a short video each week. And it gained a lot of engagement on the company page. You can see it in this screenshot. They gained five, they had 5000 followers, decent number for a small company, but a lot of that following. the follower count was based on them consistently posting these videos on LinkedIn. So there's an idea for you to think about is have yourself as the founder or your SMEs do video posts to LinkedIn. You can do it on your company page and you can also sprinkle it in on your own personal LinkedIn profile and like tag your company page. Hey, Dennis, I have a quick question. So. Sure. Great idea about leveraging internal subject matter experts, especially the founders. About how long or how many posts did you guys start to see, you know, that inflection of more followers, more engagement, more comments and shares? I don't imagine it would be the first post and all of a sudden, hey, we got $5,000. It's like, you know, there's consistency in terms of posting every Friday. In general, how, like, what have you seen in terms of how? how long does it usually take to see some tangible result it was a pretty quick result it's like like you said it wasn't the first day but i would say probably within the first month and i think we started some traction just from posting the article purity articles without the video so we're starting to get some consistency there we also did an exercise where in addition to trevor we had team members just say we gave them three questions to answer who are you what's your like what's your what do you do for the company What do you like to do in your spare time? Like two or three questions. We tried those as well that worked. So I think within a month we got some good traction. And I still, back then, so this was maybe two years ago that we were doing bulk of this. It was clear that the LinkedIn algorithm was favoring native video. So when you upload the video to their platform as opposed to link off to YouTube, I still think it's prioritizing native video today. but it's just that a lot more people have jumped in. So you probably see a lot of your own connections posting their videos. So it's maybe less exclusive time to do that. But I would still recommend this approach to using native video because it gets the algorithm really wants to put that in front of your audience. Yep, absolutely. Okay. And then another question, and I don't want to derail you from your presentation, but one, one more question. Was my crew team posting in between each of these videos as well, or was it the only piece of content that they're doing every, every week? Are you asking about on the company page or their team members to their own profiles? On the company page. Oh, so the company page was every Friday was the video. And then Monday through Thursday was one post each day of still a curated article, but no video. So they did five days a week, five days a week. Okay. So they were constantly posting content. So that was, that's another key is consistency. They were sure like every weekday, if there's no holiday on the Monday or whatever, there's no holiday. They were out there with a post every single weekday. So I think the algorithm probably also liked that consistency and their audience, their page followers came to expect like, here's my crew, please take today on Tuesday. So consistency is also key. Great. I'm sorry. One more question here. What's the typical length of one of these videos that Trevor was recording? I think different experts have different opinions on the ideal length of video on LinkedIn, but Trevor himself wanted to keep it relatively short. So he always looked to do two minutes or less, like a quick nugget. And he wanted you to like, I mean, if it's two minutes or less, you're probably going to listen to it. if you're interested if you're in the industry and you want to hear from them you're probably going to listen to the whole two minutes so that that's a benefit cool awesome thank you sure okay what next so webinars if you're doing webinars today you can if you're not maximizing the investment in a single webinar you ought to think about doing so so i'm talking here about a three to one return so let's say you're planning a video like we're on a video a webinar right now and i know the mucker team is using this same strategy Well, maybe not the pre-event blog posts, but they will be posting the recording. I believe they're going to be publishing a blog post with a summary. So they're maximizing the, and they promoted it on social media. So they're maximizing the use of this particular event that we're on right now. So you, as you're doing webinars, you can do a similar strategy. You can publish a blog post before the webinar. There's a site called SlideShare that still exists. I just checked earlier this morning that site still exists. But when I was doing webinars several years ago, SlideShare was part of LinkedIn. Apparently in 2020, LinkedIn sold SlideShare to Scribd. I feel like it's gotten a little less known. There's less traffic to SlideShare compared to the heyday. But I used to post every webinar presentation to SlideShare. It's basically a slide-based site where you can, in your browser, click through. a slide presentation and then heavy promotion on of all the assets on social media and i would encourage i would encourage you to encourage your team to amplify all of your company's social media posts to further get further reach of the webinar promotions this was an example that of a webinar that the company i was working with we had an expert do 10 ways to improve website performance so i simply watched the recording and summarized it And you can see here it managed to get 27,000 page views. So that for an investment, and this is a webinar that it was an internal expert. It was content marketing in a sense that we weren't promoting our product. We're giving our audience useful tips. It's an easy way to gain attention and awareness from a single asset. Then posting to SlideShare, this was a case where a particular webinar presentation got 10,000 views in the first week. This was a case where SlideShare had an editorial team that would pick SlideShare presentations to feature on their homepage. So we made it onto the homepage, which resulted in that spike that you see. The main message here is maybe SlideShare come and go. The main message here is to take one asset and create multiple other assets from it. Then here's some tools that you might be using today for your meetings, where if you're doing the webinar on a platform, there are ways that... the tools can use ai to generate a summary so there's a so if you don't have a marketing team you can have a summary generator of your webinar what i would do is have somebody review that so you're not publishing a blog post straight from an ai transcription but you're double checking it i i my experience today is using ai transcripts for meetings i always have to go through and fix like little miss words that were not transcribed properly but there are tools to help automate or help in the automation of creating summaries from webinars. So if you're not already doing webinars, I think they are a great vehicle for getting some awareness. Potential presenters include your own team, internal SMEs. You can feature your customers. I think that's always a great tactic is to feature them. Feature your partners or feature industry experts that you know. So I'm a big fan of webinars and I would consider that as a key vehicle if you're not doing marketing today. You can do webinars both. And we're talking about content marketing in this talk, which is less about pitching your own directly your products or services, but webinars can do both. Webinars can be a form of content marketing that you're being useful to your audience. And you can also use them in a way to announce a product release, talk about something new that you're building. Essentially, use it as a product marketing or go-to market vehicle. So that's totally fine. Okay. So licensing content, this is a case where you can- Sorry to interrupt. I'd love to maybe spend a minute or two to double click on the repurposing content. And we run the same way as well that you outlined here. And we guide a lot of our portfolio companies in a similar manner. What are other ideas in terms of repurposing content? into other types of content. I think there's a lot of value that perhaps founders or people who don't have a marketing background like you do that they're not thinking about. What are some ideas about repurposing content that you could share? So some of the other things you could do that I haven't mentioned. So if you think about a webinar, let's just take the case of an educational webinar. It's going to be typically a deck of say 10 plus slides. uh one or more experts speaking to those slides so in addition to posting recording in a summary and the slide deck itself you could potentially turn some of that content the audio itself into podcasts or downloadable audio so i actually had one client project i worked on where the client did about three to four webinars per month so it was a good amount And in some cases, so we basically launched a new podcast from that company and took the audio track. So you have to listen to the webinar to make sure it makes sense on a standalone basis in audio. Because sometimes if you're talking like I'm doing now and I say, if you see on this slide, slide three, like that's not going to work well if it's just audio because all you're listening, all you have is the audio. So in some cases, it might work well. I was able to create multiple episodes from webinars by just extracting segments of the audio and running it as a podcast. We would record an introduction and a closing. But it worked really well because the nature of that webinar lended itself to standalone audio. What else? You can create like little snippets of the video that you can share on social media. So even as we're talking here, if I'm saying something, you could either extract me and the video, just me or the video with the slides and then maybe put some voiceover. So you're putting the the captions of what I'm saying. Those are those to work well as social media posts, especially if it's your customers, maybe speaking about how they're using your product. That's a great promotional post that you can extract from webinars. What else? Oh, the Q&A. So as you're we have some questions here today, maybe there are some that we will not have the time to answer. you can take the q a get the answers from your smes and publish the q a as a blog post as a follow-up deliverer yeah great those are all fantastic ideas from like my past experience also there's you know if you don't have a webinar idea well in the past taken you know just blog content turning into a webinar presentation taking webinars and then converting it into other long form content like an ebook or you know perhaps a white paper and then yes certainly these days especially with video you know definitely i think cutting up into smaller segments or chunks in posting in social media is you know a great way to repurpose content one thing that a lot of people don't realize and i want to make sure that we keep moving sorry again to derail your presentation dennis but youtube is probably the second biggest search engine after google i mean it's part of google so one idea this is sort of a freebie for all you non-mucker portcodes one of the things that we guide our portcodes on is you know cut up the webinar content and where maybe we're asking a certain question you take that little snippet you post it into youtube and you optimize the title and description answering that question so you're you're now then populating you know you have to address any search queries uh that are commonly asked questions in your market right and so not only will it get indexed on youtube but also on google so those are all different ways that you could think about repurposing you know content in this case webinars so i'll shut up now keep going dennis great content sounds good okay excuse me so licensing content the idea here is that because you're Early stage, you might not have resources to create long form content of your own, but you can partner with other companies, agencies, analyst firms to have content produced for you. It would be both published under the brand of the partner, the company you're licensing from, as well as have your logo on it. And you can use that for generating awareness, but also for lead generation. It gives you in front of audiences that you otherwise wouldn't have had access to because sometimes, as an example I'll show you, the partner that you licensed the content from might help promote that content. And that partner might also help get earned media coverage of that licensed asset. So here's an example. This is a social media marketing agency called Leadtail. And I was working for DNN. So we were the sponsor of this report. They used a pump. publicly available twitter api to get data from twitter on how marketers at mid-sized companies were engaging on twitter at dnn we were had a campaign where we were trying to reach potential customers prospects at mid-sized companies and this was a probably 10-page research report and this was at a time when like reports based on twitter were very sought after i think the whole nature of twitter has changed recently But this got a lot of attention. It was a PDF. Let me go to the next slide. So this was a PDF that we licensed and we could put behind our registration page. So we were able to generate leads from people who wanted to download the report. There was a joint press release between DNN and Lietel announcing it. Lietel then pitched this report to earned media. So we got coverage in business websites that mentioned both. Leadtail as the source, but also DNN as the sponsor and with a link to the DNN website. We created a lot of blog posts about it, created an infographic, and then we did a live webinar with Leadtail to share the findings of the report. So all of that created a whole lot of content assets and a lot of coverage and awareness, both with business media and on Twitter itself. So this does not require you to have much in-house. You do need a point person. to be the project manager with whom you're licensing the content from. So that could be someone on your team. It could be like a marketer that you contract with, but you do need someone on your side just to manage the overall execution. There's additional opportunities. You probably know of the big analyst firms like Forrester and Gartner. For the stage of company you're at now, that could be cost prohibitive. but there are more mid-tier analyst firms that you might be able to partner to work with, especially those in your industry. There are business media sites like Harvard Business Review where you can license content that fits. If they're publishing content on a subject that fits what your target audience, your customers care about, you could license that content with your logo on it. In some cases, you can license that. as a downloadable asset that you can put a registration page in front of. There are also nonprofit organizations and communities potentially in your space that you can partner with. I will show you an example in the next slide. Or just individuals, influencers, experts that your target audience follows. You might be able to partner with a blogger or an influential analyst, individual analyst, who covers your space. This was an example of an engineering community. So I was helping Logica, that's the sponsor of this report. Plato was our partner that we licensed this report with. Plato is an engineering mentorship platform. So they have a network of senior engineering leaders that provide mentorship to junior engineers or engineering managers who aspire to become VPs of engineering. So they did a state of engineering leadership where they did an online survey and they interviewed 50-5-0 of their mentors. and generated this long form 20 plus page report of course this was three years ago so it's the state of engineering leadership 2021 and the target audience was engineering leaders which is whom my client logico was trying to reach and so this was something where we could get we got mentioned in the as a sponsor in the report and then because we licensed this downloadable asset it was placed behind a registration page for logica and it was their top performing lead generation asset that year. All right, let's move on. This is the case where you as a company, often if you're a SaaS platform or you're any sort of platform that has data, often customer data, you have the potential to aggregate that data in an anonymous way to produce research reports. This is a Zora, which is a monetization platform. They sell to SaaS companies that are looking to do things like revenue recognition and billing. And they create the subscription economy index. I think they've been doing this for several years. The one I'm showing here is March 2023. I believe they just published the 2024 version this month. But the idea here is that you can take data that you're collecting in your product or platform. You want to anonymize that so you're not revealing any particular companies or users, but it's a way to then show to the industry how your industry is trending based on what's happening on your platform. So you hear what the way Zora described it here, it's anonymized system generated activity on their billing service, and it measures the change in volume of businesses for subscription-based products. So they're trying to say, make the claim here, that By using their index, you can track the growth of the subscription. Another example is Snowflake. They have the data trends report that looks at data on how Snowflake accounts are. What does it say? Reveals the seven ways organizations are building the foundation for advanced AI success. So this came out this year. So you can think about so this will require resources on your technical team to be able to think about how you can take the data that you already have on your platform and turn that into a marketing and awareness asset okay so i'm going to cover a couple of different ways to get content from your subject matter experts the three i'm going to cover are transcribing technical presentations the second is having engineers write an original article or blog post based on a challenge they solved and the last one is to interview smes to extract the knowledge and insights they have in their mind and put it out into the world. So the first example was working with a client that had a lot of, they were selling to engineering leaders, but they had a lot of a global team of software engineers. And there was a case where in Eastern Europe, they were doing, they call them tech talks, where they would use a technical presentation as a way for recruiting new software engineers. So they'd get together in a venue and they'd have, and this is a case of a language called Kotlin. So it was an engineer that was going a deep dive into Kotlin and an event and they would probably serve refreshments. So it was an recruiting event. So other software engineers came to hear this talk on a particular language. And what we did was we were on the marketing side, we were able to get, vet some of these topics with other engineers in the team. and say these are ones where we think it would be useful as a deep a long form blog post we then got the record the transcript of the engineers tech talk so this was actually done in ukrainian we then had an agency translate the transcript from ukrainian to english then what i did was went to that english translated transcript and turned the deep dive technical presentation into like a narrative that would read well as a blog post as if the engineer wrote it himself so you can see a little bit snippet here at the beginning that was some of my massaging to give an introduction on the engineer who's giving the tech talk and these things performed extremely well because they were often two to three thousand or four thousand words so because it was the nature of a tech talk it was a lot of detailed in-depth insight We could then also, we got the slides as well as the transcripts, so we could then embed particular slide images to give context to what we're covering in that slide. And it turns out these were working extremely well for long tail searches from search engines. So there's so many long tail keywords because they're talking about Kotlin and all this other technical considerations that these blog posts were ranking really well. for key terms related to Kotlin, Java, Scala, etc. So this was a great way to take the expertise of the software development team and turn that into content that the marketing team needs. So the next one is a similar one, same client, where instead of a tech talk, they work on a lot of client engagements. This particular company worked with a lot of Silicon Valley. tech companies to help them augment their software development teams so this was a case where they would write a long form blog post based on a particular project they often cannot name the client that they worked on for but they could certainly talk about the technologies and what they learned from doing so so this was building a low latency system based on aws lambda and for this case you would take the full post from the engineer And they would often do their own bedding of particular slides. And then as a marketer, just do some copy editing to make sure that things were being communicated clearly. In some cases, turn some like quote unquote engineering speak into something that is more that you would find in a written article. These, just like I said in the earlier example, these were fantastic in terms of generating search traffic on some of these key phrases of the technologies that. they're talking about in the post. I think this case was either AWS Lambda, the project, either linked to this or they shared it on Twitter because somehow they found this and it was so useful that the AWS Lambda project itself saw value in linking to it. And then the last example is interviewing subject matter experts to generate content. So you could... kind of do something like this article. So this article, by the way, was at least 2000, maybe 2000, 3000 words. So pretty in-depth stuff. Sometimes it's tricky to be able to extract all of this detailed knowledge from an interview, but you could do maybe a higher level version of this, perhaps tips for building low latency systems on AWS Lambda. So it's not going as deep into the engineering, but it's more of the high level tips. And the way you would do that is you would need to find the subject matter experts that are willing to participate, an internal, a writer to interview them. And the process is the writer is usually the one or the writer or the marketing team will identify the topic or angle to take. So like I said, from this one, maybe the idea here is let's do an article on tips for building systems based on AWS Lambda. Then the writer would develop. five or ten questions for the interview send them in advance of a meeting to the sme to look at in some cases the sme will just say thanks i i can see i know what you're going to ask me in other cases the engineer starts like i i use google docs in other cases in some cases the engineer will go in and start answering your questions in the doc and then you can have the interview to almost clarify some of the answers they provided so if they're going real detailed already ahead of the meeting Then you already have the basis of a draft right there. Then you have the interview. I would record the interview. You could do as little as 30 minutes, maybe 60 minutes, and then you can get the transcript generated. So then you as the writer will need to review that. So the writer then drafts the article, sends it to the SME to review, usually asks for like a one week turnaround time. The engineer will either make little changes. In some cases, if they say this is not what I expected and they have some objections, you can navigate that. And then you just publish the article under the SMEs byline. So all of this has worked really well when I needed to get technical content from experts. The biggest challenge is getting people to participate. In the case of the tech talks, there was already a program that the company ran, basically their recruiting team. incentive the engineers to participate in tech talks and they would they would give up they had a points based system to give companies swag so apparently there's these hoodies with the company logo and the engineers really wanted those hoodies so they would give the tech talks to get points or in order to get the hoodies so those are extrinsic rewards are basically tangible prizes swag gift cards if you get fancy enough or people participate enough you can give them more higher priced consumer electronics. So those are important to get people to participate. I think just as important, maybe more important than the extrinsic rewards are the intrinsic rewards, which is not tangible like an object, but it's the recognition and the appreciation from the organization. So shout outs from the leadership team and company wide meetings. It's the CEO or the founder. You are thanking or commending the person who participated in having the content created. as well as posts or comments from the leadership team in your different collaboration. All right. And then just some closing thoughts. I'm going to talk about sometimes if you're if you're not doing marketing today, you might not be aware of all the different variety of options you have available. So once we talked earlier about creating multiple pieces of content from the webinar. So these are other ideas that might not have covered yet. Infographics are. They're kind of like a law, a vertically oriented graphic that shows different data points that you want to share or different information flows. They're often pretty popular. I think they may be less popular today than when they first came out five or six years ago. We mentioned podcasts. You can create sliders on social media. So for instance, on LinkedIn or even on Instagram, you can take an assortment of images and the slider means that the. consumer of that image has to click through almost like in a slide deck. You can do short videos on social media platforms or there's also on YouTube. Webcam videos, this is the Trevor example that I showed earlier with Mike Cruity. I love these things called whiteboard animation videos. It often requires an agency who specializes in this, but it's often like if you're trying to share the background story about your company, the whiteboard animation uses a sketch, but it's animated. So if they're on They're like drawing out a message with voiceover. Those were pretty neat. And then product demo videos, showing your product in action with a voiceover. Then once you have these different, and I'm sure there's other formats that we can talk about that I haven't covered. But once you have all these different formats, there's also many additional distribution platforms that you can consider posting your content to. Tony had mentioned YouTube. There's other video sites like Vimeo and there's several other Vidyard. so there's a lot of video platforms you could experiment if you think your target audience is skews younger and is on tick tock or instagram reels you could consider creating some content there i think the trick i would use there is to have people in that demographic create the content for that demographic so like use gen z to reach gen z because i'm not going to create a tick tock that's going to is going to be interesting to gen z i have a daughter who's gen z who can can can tell me like this is what you should do. But there's also communities, private communication platforms like Discord. There's public websites like Reddit and Quora. Those are cases where you can answer questions as yourself. And there's some cases where you can subtly include links to your website, but do it in a way that's not blatantly commercial. And I think we have time for some questions. Awesome. Cool. well the whole topic of content marketing is very broad right and and dennis just gave us like a a snapshot of some actionable items that many of you being you know busy founders of early stage startups and resource strapped you know don't have a lot of time or bandwidth to you know invest heavily in it so hopefully that was helpful for you guys i have a question regarding some of the tools What are some common tools of the trade, or at least ones that you use to help you specifically around the content generation, content development? Because I know on the previous slide, you had, you know, all the different places that we can distribute content, but in terms of, you know, interesting tools that you have used, what, what are some of those? The question is tools that help me like plan or generate content. Yeah. To create content. There is one interesting tool called, I think it's called answer. the public so you i think i got that right so you like google answer answer the public you can put in your a phrase of something that you want to create content around and it generates these visual tree diagrams so it's like storage system that's the root and then it'll branch off into many different varieties or subtopics or like yeah subtopics of storage systems and then it can create multiple branches so that's a good way it's almost like a mind map of sorts but It's often done when planning for planning content. This was back when we would do like keyword research. Sometimes it would help inform what if you're going to write about X also think about writing about these other things. I'm going to cheat on this answer. I think an old fashioned tool that I use that I think is the go to for me is speaking to users or customers because that will often inform what content I'm creating. So what I mean by that is Find through your teams, whether it's sales, customer success, et cetera, find some customers that are willing to give the organization 30 minutes of their time. And then you as the marketer can figure out what to ask. You have 30 minutes of a customer's time. You can ask about the challenges, how they're using your product, what keeps them up at night. And also interview people who are not your customers but are in your target market. So it could be prospects or people. that you know as the marketer that might consider the product but i think that audience research and insights is the key weapon to inform all content you create yeah um we use um a tool called descript to help us you know transcribe video content and then it it also takes out filler words like ums and ahs and stuff like that And it allows us to cut snippets. There are other tools that we've used or are considering like Opus Clip. I'm personally experimenting with Fathom, which is sort of like an otter. I think you mentioned that before where it records, transcribes, summarizes it as well. So there's a lot of these very cost efficient tools to help get content. The content engine started loom is another easy one where, you know, if you just want to record a quick video and a screen and don't want to go buy a zoom, a license, I mean, you could, you can actually sign up for a zoom account anyway, for free. But these are all different ways that you can use to create video based content and repurpose those regarding another question sort of related to the tools. Content. has, you know, intrinsic ties to this whole other area around SEO. So, and I know, you know, Dennis, you have a lot of experience in SEO. How do you think about creating content for SEO and also, you know, optimizing the content for SEO, which is, again, can be a whole nother webinar, but how do you think about that? creating content for the search engines and the crawlers versus for the reader. What goes through your mind when you're thinking about content? I'm in the camp of thinking of the reader and the human first and then applying what is considered best practice on the content from an SEO perspective second, but only in a way that it doesn't compromise the quality back to the reader. I think Google is very publicly stated the same thing is that their algorithm is places the searcher first as opposed to what the publisher might have put on the page. So they're looking out for the best result based on your query. So they want, and a lot of their Google guidelines are reference those things, like always make it prioritize the reader or the human. So I often very much just think human first. I will. I'm not an SEO expert, so I'll often use colleagues or in some cases an SEO agency to then vet what I've done. And I will listen to what they say, but there's always going to be some sort of tension where it's like change. Somebody says change this word and I might debate that. I mean, it's important. I should also note that the world is changing. We don't know what. how much of our content will be found from search relative to now or in the past. I think there's a Gartner projection on the amount of drop in search volume in two years. I don't want to misquote, but it's some drastic number that they estimated Gartner in terms of the drop of traffic to websites from search because we all know that there's now large language models and some of my friends in marketing no longer go to Google. They go to a site called perplexity.ai. So you ask the question, it will give you a response and it will. So it won't give you the page, the 10 blue links. It'll give you an answer, but they also will give you footnotes. So when they say, when they, when they, they will attribute, they will give you the sources of their answer so that you can click on the source. So I've still use Google, but some of my marketing friends no longer even use search engines. Interesting. Perplexity.ai is the site. Perplexity.ai. Okay. Well, check that out. Awesome. There's two more questions and then we'll wrap up. The first question is related to your section of your talk about licensing content. So how do you determine what's a good vendor or research firm to work with? And how do you determine if it's worth that investment? And I guess part of that is, again, just probably ranges across the board. What's a like a average or ballpark cost for something like that? Sure. So I would think of it in two ways. One, so we'll cover cost first. I know if you're an early stage company, you're not going to be able to spend $50,000 on licensing report. So cost is definitely a consideration. I think a low end licensing could start out as free, meaning there's some cases where it's a nonprofit or individual. say individual expert that's in your space that you might be able to partner that you can get with your brand and potentially if they believe you have reach, you might be able to do it at no cost. On the low cost side, we're talking maybe 5,000, 10,000 for the licensing. But the main, beyond cost, the main criteria is the extent to which you believe they can reach your target audience. So you have your ideal customer. Can this, either the content or the the content you're licensing is it a fit for your target your ideal customer profile and in in cases where they're the partner you're licensing from is going to use some of their reach like they might promote it to their email list or on social media how broad is that so it's both the fit of to your ideal customers and what is the potential help that the partner can provide for you to reach that ideal customer okay great then uh final question we'll wrap up and this is actually going to be a pretty hefty question we love your quick thoughts how do you measure the effectiveness of content good question you i think you have to when you go into an initiative you have to identify what is the business outcome you're looking to drive so it could be you could be just looking to get some awareness out into the market so If that's the case, you might then translate that into specific things you can measure. So maybe it's page views on an article or impressions on a LinkedIn post. Impressions are kind of, to me, not that valuable. But let's say you want to connect marketing to pipeline or to revenue. Then what you want to do is figure out how your marketing systems can measure some attribution to say that. This particular piece of content resulted in these leads that resulted in this amount of pipeline value. So the results often is start with your business objectives first and then figure out ways that you can use metrics to attribute the contribution of your marketing assets or efforts to that business app. It's a tricky thing, attribution, but it's something you have to, without doing that, then you're going to get less and less buy-in from the CFO or maybe your CEO. So you do need to put in some, some measurement tools to demonstrate the value of your market. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. All right. So let's wrap up next steps. If those of you who are still with us, any additional questions or would like to contact Dennis, you can see his email address there. You can certainly reach out to me, especially if you are a Mucker Portco. Definitely reach out to me or your Mucker advisor. If you are a Mucker Portfolio company, we actually struck an agreement with Dennis where there's a special offering that if you are in need of a, you know, content marketing function for hire. I know he's working with a couple of our portfolio companies regarding that. So if you're interested in getting additional help, especially if you're a Mucker Portco, either reach out to me or reach out to Britton, and then we'll get you connected to Dennis to take advantage of that special Mucker agreement. For future sessions, if you have a topic that you're just dying to learn more about, Feel free to type that in chat now or simply email Brenton at muckercapital.com or he emailed me as well. We do have some really interesting topics lined up over the next few months, including one on generative AI for content. So and marketing as a whole. And those are through some mutual friends, Dennis, Rosemary and Bob. So yeah, and this is another sort of plug for what Dennis mentioned earlier. He, Dennis runs that content marketing meetup. That's actually now virtual. And so they cover a lot of great content similar to what we cover here. And if you are interested in the overall topic of content marketing, I urge you to join his meetup. Again, just go to meetup.com. Bay Area Content Marketing, I think is the name of your group, right? So highly recommend that. I've been part of that group for years now. Dennis, thank you so much for spending time with us. Thanks again, everyone. Have a great rest of your day.

Full recap and slides: https://mucker.com/blog/how-to-kickstart-content-marketing-at-early-stage-companies-with-dennis-shiao/

Can you kickstart content marketing when your early-stage company has no resources dedicated to marketing? Why yes, you can!

In this Mucker Growth Session, Dennis Shiao, founder of marketing agency Attention Retention shows how to make an impact with content marketing even when you have limited budget and resources.

Learn how to draw insights from technical founders and subject matter experts (SMEs) and turn them into articles, bylines, blog posts, social media posts, and more. You'll also gain tips on distributing and promoting the content you generate.

Speakers:
Dennis Shiao - Founder at Attention Retention
Tony Yang - Head of Growth at Mucker