Content marketing for start-ups and founders | Weekly meetup - Built in Notts | Catherine Allen

So hi everybody, my name's Katherine, I'm head of content at Tank, we are a digital and PR agency based in the lace market. I've worked in PR marketing for over 10 years now, worked with a lot of tech companies at different stages of maturity, so everyone from sort of global tech brands right through to startups, entrepreneurs and everybody else in between. I'm a former journalist and I'm really passionate about clarity, creativity and human-centric communications, if that's not too much of a mouthful. Just a really... Small bit about Tank. We are based over in the lace market near the Keeneshead and St Mary's Church, if you know it. We've been running for about 16 years now. It might actually be 17. We started as a regular PR agency, but we've kind of moved into digital content. We've also got a creative agency that we work with as well. So it's all about kind of, you know, how we can help clients make their mark, really, no matter what stage they're at. in their sort of journey so what is content marketing again this is a bit of a mouthful for somebody who likes clear communication but I don't know what how much experience people have had of content marketing both with their own businesses and you know previous jobs but it's essentially a way to market based on you know providing content that is valuable, relevant and consistent. It's designed to educate primarily and also to share information about products but it's not sales led so there's an educational element, there's a trust building element to it and it's ultimately designed basically to build your communities and persuade people to buy your products. And content marketing is nothing new. If you know the Michelin Guide to Britain which is where Michelin restaurants take their name from. That was produced as a guide to the UK. It's nothing to do with tyres, but obviously it's a kind of one step removed from what the product is. And it was designed to encourage people to go out and explore the UK, obviously in their cars. But it was a way to sort of build trust, build brand awareness. So there's a great picture there of a kind of a stunt. I'm not sure what that dates back to. But yeah, it's nothing new. But content marketing is really big in tech. So, reasons why. The longer buying cycles tend to be the main reason. It's not like a sort of small purchase, low value purchase. Often it's about, particularly in the B2B world, it's about kind of those very long sales cycles where you need to build trust, you need to build authority, you need to persuade people that you're the right person to partner with. There's an education element as well. Sometimes tech is very complex. People may not necessarily know how your product can benefit them there's lots of tech around there's lots of products around so you know giving them a clear understanding of what you do and how it can solve their sort of wider pain points um is really important and it's important to mention too is that content marketing is framed in the context of your industry and what you do it doesn't really it doesn't exist in isolation um it's about how it sort of feeds into those wider conversations that are happening People don't want sales content straight away. There's a place for advertising, there's a place for very sales driven content. But initially when they're researching, when they're looking at what's available on the market, they might not realise that there's a solution available to their problem at that moment. They might be searching for, how do I solve this particular problem in my life or in my work before they get to you. We cover topics that are often one step removed from the product itself, hence the Michelin story. It's not necessarily about tyres, it's about encouraging people to get out. Insightful and relevant content allows businesses to establish authority, differentiate themselves in competitive markets. Again, it's about guiding readers through that sort of journey and giving them the information they need at the right moment. So at the start of the journey, it's just about brand awareness. Do they need this particular thing to solve their problem? As they get further and further down the marketing funnel, they'll get to a point where... They're comparing you against your competitors. They're comparing pricing, features, that kind of thing. So essentially, you need to show up at every stage of that journey. Otherwise, if you're not, for example, sharing pricing and features, somebody else will do and that could sway their decision. And content marketing is critical in both B2B and B2C. So thinking about big tech companies like Google, that's essentially a B2B in that context. They'll produce things like huge white papers, which have technical detail, have research, have expert-led opinions, that kind of thing. Again, it's an education tool, but it's also a way to draw people in and make it... relevant to them airbnb another tech company but it's a consumer-led one their content might not be white papers but it might be things like infographics inspirational blog content again it's all designed to persuade people to do something but in a way that they receive something useful how it all fits together so i mentioned there is a marketing funnel which you're probably familiar with um in terms of you know right at that start of the journey people will be looking to research your product content marketing includes a mix of different activities so just listed a few on there it includes things like longer form white papers guides product guides you know or it might be something a little bit adjacent like for example creating a marketing plan a marketing software company could create resource for you to create a marketing plan emails blog articles of varying lengths and things like social media it normally has three purposes so It can be brand-led, so in the case of the Airbnb content, it's about enticing people into that brand, making people feel like they're part of that community, and it could include things like inspirational blogs, and in a B2B context, things like thought leadership. So thought leadership that sits on your site in the form of articles, but also thought leadership that you might pitch out to the press, relevant articles in publications that your audience also read. it can be seo led so content that is designed to help you rank for certain keywords in search engines so that tends to be topics that answer a particular pain point so for example it might be again a marketing software company might put out a lot of content around you know how to produce a marketing plan, all the pain points that people will be talking about, all the questions that they're going to be asking. You can create what we call topic clusters around those particular subjects. And lead generation, this is particularly common in B2B. things like white papers, especially ones that you've invested a huge amount of research time into, resource into. You don't necessarily want to give those away for free. So it might be that you gate that content to get email addresses. sign ups, that kind of thing. You can do the same with webinars, podcasts and so on. Normally it will be a mix of gated and non-gated assets, so you'll give away some of your content for free in the form of shorter guides, but you might save your main pieces for your other audience. But it's never too early to start. Oh yeah, have you got any questions? We've done email marketing before, but we might add it back again. When do you tend to use email marketing? I say email marketing is something you can have as an always-on activity. I'll just go back a slide, actually. I suppose the content marketing mix, it makes it sound like it's a bit random here, but what we tend to do is kind of work on a campaign sort of level. So we might take a particular theme, so not a marketing theme this time, but like... preparing for the end of the tax year or something like that. You know, a particular theme that can, you know, we can create different types of content around. So it might be that we produce a bigger asset. It doesn't have to be white paper, but it could be a series of blog articles on that. And then I would just use the email to amplify that. I'd have it as an always on activity. How often you send your emails might vary. Is it, have you tended to do like a sort of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it can just be a general newsletter as well. It might be that you sort of have a campaign around a specific theme that points people to different resources that you've got, or it might be alongside that a sort of business as usual. You know, you've got your you've got your database. You just want to keep keep the lights on as well with it. Cool. Yeah. So as founders, it's never too early to start. In fact, you need to start straight away. Just because you don't have a big budget doesn't mean you can't make a big impact on your audience. And I've had a few conversations with you already about those early months being actually really crucial. You've got a lot of energy, you're building, you've actually got lots of content ideas that are out there. And sometimes it's a case of how do you formulate that into a bit of a plan or into a bit of a kind of structure. without overwhelming your audience in those early stages. So yeah, your story is your competitive advantage. There are a few things more powerful than the founders stories. We all like to read them. We all engage with some of the big tech founders stories are always really interesting. And those first 18 months when you're sort of building your product, even if it's not launched, you have an opportunity to build your audiences out. So as I was talking to you earlier, building your following on LinkedIn even before you make your sort of product announcements or anything like that is really important and that might just be sharing a little bit of thought leadership and commenting on other people's articles just sort of you know building that following showing where you've been to events and things like that it just kind of lays the groundwork early on even before you're ready to start posting As I said before, content marketing plays a really important part in building that authority, educating the market, making sure that who you're following and engaging with are your competitors, not competitors, sorry, your customers, but also taking a look at what your competitors are doing as well and nurturing those early adopters as well. So if you do launch something or you can create sort of databases of people who might want to try it in beta before you launch it officially, those kind of things are. great for just sort of building that community and it's just a bit of a slow burn but it's something that you can kind of keep going on in the background and it helps you build your reputation you know people buy from people they want to know that you're a credible person and an incredible business beforehand they want to know you know when you are ready to launch you'll have that captive audience so I think one of the biggest barriers people face is they don't know what to write about or they don't know what to produce and as I said startups obviously have a huge amount of energy in those early days but sometimes it's a case of formulating that into a bit of a plan knowing what sort of things you can talk about what would you know help you so i've sort of broken these down into three pillars um your story is what builds connection those human stories being authentic being who you are explaining why you started what you're seeing in the market um how things are going how things are not going so well at that early stage before you become a big corporate, you actually have an opportunity to be a bit more raw and authentic. And I think people value that. I think you don't have to, you know, we shouldn't really use corporate speak and jargon at that stage. It's all about you. It's all about the story and the people around you and how you're sort of building that product and community. You remember that you're an expert. There's a reason why you came into doing what you do, even if you feel like you're not a techie person or you've not actually worked in that industry, but you know that there's challenges and you've done your research and there's a reason why you've set up this particular product share that expertise you know engage with people who are in that industry and talk about you know how you can sort of help them and build community social media in real life it is great for just building that community ensuring that you're always speaking to customers pain points you understand the challenges that they face the challenges in the industry and what your product can do again it doesn't matter if it's a bit raw but behind the scenes of what you're doing if you've been up all night coding for example you might want to just share that you know it's there's loads of sort of opportunities there loads of opportunities to share your tips for other founders for example so it's not necessarily just about potential customers but about sort of founder communities as well and how you can sort of build those networks and showing up on the channels that matter so email it's about getting the right mix some of these channels here are about quick wins social media email i wouldn't well i'm not saying a quick win as such but it's quick to produce that type of content it's quick to get it out and you can see instantly you know what the feedback is um what the engagement is on that um and mixing that with with other forms of content as well and as i said to you again earlier it's not a case of doing everything straight away it's a case of right what can i do now with the resources that i've got and then move on to these other sort of bigger pieces so long-form content um podcasts all that kind of thing that's the sort of thing that will come a little bit later down the line but in those initial stages sort of think about you know what what's feasible for me to do right now for my team to do around me and focus on those and sort of build them in and once you've sort of got a plan and once you've got a momentum of you know content being produced regularly consistently you're in a much better place to do other stuff as well there is a temptation to go for every single channel But actually picking a couple, a few good quality ones and knowing where your audience is is really important. If your audience isn't on TikTok, don't be on TikTok. If your audience isn't on LinkedIn or, you know, if you're more of a consumer facing business, look at the consumer channels and just sort of work with that and see and see what works. word on AI search now this is like a bit of a rabbit hole but you might have seen it popping up it's linked to SEO and it's about showing up on LLMs like chat GPT it is a completely new field and some would say it's a bit of a wild west essentially you know it's there's been a huge shift in how people find products, how they find brands. So half of consumers are now using AI to make a buying decision. Around 95% of B2B buyers say they're using AI as part of their buying journey. So that could be at any stage, that could be at the research stage, product comparison stage, it could be looking at pricing. It can be very deep and personalised conversations about how these products will work for you. So that's opened up opportunities. we get a lot of brands who say we want to show up in AI search. It's a hard thing to do and nobody really knows how to do it. And as I said, each search is personalised to that particular person. So I might be looking at restaurants in Nottingham. It knows that I'm doing that. Someone else might be looking at restaurants in Nottingham and it will give a completely different result. So it's very unpredictable. It's very difficult. But we know that this is happening. I would just say it's not magic. None of it is, you know, it feels like a bit of a black box, but actually what it comes down to is good practices. Are you producing content? Is it good quality? Is it answering people's questions? Does the intent reflect what people are doing? If they're at a research stage, is it an educational piece? If they're at a buying stage, is it a more sales-led piece? And yeah, it's just sort of, it just comes down to good practices, really. They're very similar. Yeah. Very similar. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a few small technical differences in the sense that so you've got to allow the AI robots to crawl the site. So there's a few like technical things that you can do. The LLM seem to prefer text that is like chunks of text. So like real direct, clear explainers. But arguably that's the same for SEO now as well, particularly with AI overviews. It's not actually that much different. But yeah. to all intents and purposes if you're producing authoritative clear content you're probably as likely to get cited by google as lms uh has anyone got any questions so far with the ai is there anything that's like caught your surprise in terms of let's say the ai seo yeah i suppose just how quickly it's changed from being you know SEO has always been a bit of a sort you know there's ways to work it but it's always been a bit mysterious as to how you know what exactly is going to rank and what the results are going to be I suppose AI search I would say it's just more volatile so for example we might have looked at SEO and sort of the search has been kind of like you know fairly steady you know as long as you're doing all the right things the improvements might be quite steady I think with AI search we just don't know when it's gonna you know what's going to impact it so you might see spikes you might see more citations there's no reliable measurement tools either so knowing it you know a lot of the time i sort of think it probably comes down to your feedback from customers you know how are you finding it as how are you accessing information about us are you just chat gpt-ing it and finding the information there are you landing on our website um quite a few Businesses have been concerned about a massive drop in their website traffic because people aren't landing on the site anymore. They're just going to the AI overview or the Orchak GPT resort. So that's a bit of a difficult one. Yes, in the last week, I think they've started appearing in the US, haven't they? Yeah. Yeah. I think it is in the US. Yeah. Yeah. hierarchy of path which is it will go to verify trusted sources first so if you're about finance it'll search like your standard industry finance websites first if you go to marketing it'll pick up your big marketing websites first and stuff like that so it's seo in a way but you can't instruct it to rank as much as you can in SEO, where you can manipulate it through keywords and things like that. LLMs more rely upon, they learn from you and your profile, so what you generally go down first. So if you start looking at marketing and you cater towards a certain specific type of marketing, because you've researched that, it's memory will pick it up. and then it will start steering you consistently down towards the same sort of roads and avenues. So for ranking on ChatGVT for instance, it's linked in the sense that the higher you rank on Google, the better because you already have that trust form from it because it researches you as a business and because you rank on Google it thinks you are more trustworthy, so to speak. And it picks up trust signals from third parties as well. So if you get cited, I mean, this is the gold standard. If you get cited by the BBC, then in a good way, then the LLN will. take that as a big trust signal that it's been it's got through the editorial scrutiny of the BBC so it sort of views it as a trustworthy document or trustworthy piece of content but also other things like reviews so Google reviews, Trustpilot reviews, any of those can contribute to that sort of trust that this is a you know a reputable company you know it's getting that organic sort of trust signal I guess. So paying attention to those kind of things can be really helpful. Again, there's so many channels to do that it's always better to focus on fewer and sort of doing them well rather than kind of thinking about all the different things that you can do. But yeah, the sort of AI search landscape has sort of broadened it out to things like Google reviews and that can help smaller businesses. sometimes the bigger businesses um i did an analysis of one company and the smaller business that i was analyzing actually had much better reviews because it wasn't a huge corporate that had all the millions of bad reviews mixed in there actually this small company that was just delivering a really good service had more five-star reviews so you know that that's quite a good a good signal i'm getting started so again i had a chat with you about this earlier um You don't need much to get started just a LinkedIn profile and in those initial stages it might just be building out community connections starting to comment post and make posts which aren't necessarily to do with your product if it's not launched but just that sort of taps into the sort of the pain points and issues that are happening in that particular industry um creating a content plan can make the whole thing seem a lot less overwhelming um staggering everything through the year you know again you might be brimming with ideas you might be struggling a little bit but if there's anything that you can tailor it around like key industry events and milestones product launches whatever it might be um just seeing that 12-month plan week by week is really helpful and there's all sorts of sophisticated ways to do it but i just think a spreadsheet is really good And that gives you ideas for repurposing that content as well. So it might be that you have a good idea for a blog article. How can you then use that in email? How can you repurpose it across social media? How can you create a nice graphic? All those kind of things. It just gives you that sort of holistic view of how you can use your content in the most effective way possible. Simple website is normally enough to host your first... articles you don't need to you know have your all singing or dancing website ready it might just be that you have a fairly basic one to start with and you start producing that content consider a sub stack but again it's one of those things that again if you can't commit to doing it regularly don't bother you know if you can do it on a regular basis again it's a really nice way to build communities avoid the channel creep know where your audience is, go for quality and consistent posting over thinking you need to have a million channels and you need to post on every one of them every day. And finally done is better than perfect. Obviously always aim for good quality content, as good as you can get it, but don't overthink it. Don't worry. Oh, I'm not a writer, so I shouldn't produce this article. You know, I'm not very confident with what I'm saying. You can just say it, you know, a lot of the time, you know. I think you've got to get over the cringe factor sometimes when you're posting stuff on LinkedIn or you're posting an article. What you do, your expertise has got you this far and it got you to the point where you're thinking about launching a product or are launching it. You've got something to say. You'll have something to say. And old content can be removed and updated anyway. What you say in the early years might be massively out of date. You know, you sometimes stumble across websites that have got articles about COVID or something like that, how the world's changing. And, you know, they can sometimes look a bit out of date and cringe, but you can just take them down, take them down or refresh them. LinkedIn is the foundation. Just good housekeeping really just make sure your profile is in place make sure you've got Exactly what you want to say on there be really clear on who you are and what you can offer You know sort of a lot of the time people don't bother updating their own personal profiles They might start posting but actually you know things like your bio Your picture your branding everything just make sure that that's all in place I would say aim for about three quality posts a week if you can. But again, it's quality. If you do one good quality post a week, stick with that and just do it. And have a test. See what works. So video can be highly effective on LinkedIn as a way to engage people. But if you're not comfortable doing it or you post it and it doesn't get much engagement, just think about other types of content that you can do. Static content, content with graphics, with Canva, something like that can be really nice. Just be part of the community, comment on people's posts, share your thoughts, repost, be supportive in that space and share your journey. Don't be afraid if you've not got any product news or anything like that. Don't be afraid to just talk about what you're doing at the moment, what you're working on and the challenges you face. You can talk about cloud coding or any things you've got from that. It's all relevant. It all sorts of builds a picture of who you are and why people should buy from you eventually. Now how AI can help? I don't know if you guys have used AI much to produce your articles and content. I know you've used it for code. But how helpful do you find it? Incredibly helpful. Yeah. Quality and quality. Utilise multiple. Perplexity for researching facts and figures. Chat GPT for sort of a generic writing tool and then clause for technical aspects. And one of the things I have found most useful is ask it how it would prompt itself to do the task you want to do. And it will build you out like a two-page. Nice. That's good. You're just asking it the one question. Yeah. I want to prompt you to do this. So like a reverse engineering project. Build me the best prompt. For instance, I did one for networking. It built me the best prompt to find marketing and networking events in the Midlands area. And it spat out a big thing and then I copied and pasted it into another chat window and it spat out a whole bunch of ideas. Nice. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, interrogating them and playing them off against each other I think is good. I've written for ChatGTP my brand profile. I wanted to have a meeting and I always start with that. That's a good idea. Yeah. That's a good idea. Yeah. Have you built your own GPT? No, not yet. So go into ChatGPT in the back end and you can customise the GPT. and then you can effectively tailor it however you want to what industry and sort of areas you want to follow so you don't have to constantly upload that this is my business this how it should automatically knows it and just save your time yeah that's a good idea as well in terms of like things eventually you know you'll get to a point where you know your branding will have its own identity and you're right in a certain way as a founder you know you're starting that already your brand itself may have a slightly different identity and feeding that into chat GPT in that more technical way is yeah great it will get to know who you are and you know your location and all those kind of things here's just a few um ideas here that in the way that you know i i often use it or people i know use it um i just think it's great for articulating your ideas quickly you've got all this energy you've got all these ideas just getting oh i'm sorry um Getting them down, you know, just getting them down in there, you know, stops you having that blank page feeling where you're sort of like, oh, I don't know where to start. You just get it down straight away. Content plan, again, creating a content plan saying, I want to achieve these things over this particular time period. I want to, I've got time to produce this number of blogs in a week. And just getting the AI to create that content plan for you. I use it to transcribe interviews. So, content is great when you you're writing for yourself but if you can bring in an expert have a chat with them create a sort of maybe a Q&A style piece, get their thoughts, get their comments, transcribe it. So you've got the source of information. Optimizing for SEO, you know, just simple things like the structure of the articles, how to position it, ensure that the intent for that particular audience is right. Voice to article, if you don't particularly like writing prompts, just talk to Claude. And that will give you plenty of, you know, it will organize your ramblings. ideas and to clarify sentences you know sometimes you write something you know what you want to say it sounds a bit clunky I just use chat GPT normally to clarify it and it normally works quite well it does yeah yeah and they're getting much more sophisticated in terms of understanding human language rather than writing it. Particularly if you wanted to sound more naturally, more like you, it just flows better. And it means also that you can just catch your ideas at any point when you're on the move. And I just feel that it just flows much nicer. Yeah, and it's your insights, ultimately. I mean, I think where people go wrong with using ChatGPT to create content is that they use it in a really generic way. So they might be like, you know... Give me 10 marketing tips for a blog article and you just get 10 very generic marketing tips that are pulled from all sorts of different sources But when you use it yourself, you're giving your your take on it. These are your ideas These are your insights the AI is essentially just organizing it in a way that you know makes sense and stuff But the original insight comes from you What's it called sorry? Avoiding the slop. We've all seen it. Very generic, long-winded, waffly slop. It's becoming more commonplace. But, you know, as with Google, you know, Google doesn't penalise AI written language, but it does penalise rubbish language. So if it, you know, if you're not saying anything new, if it doesn't seem very expert led. you're not likely to see your content do very well either with humans or with search engines. So as I said previously, just start with those insights. What you are doing right now, what you've learned is the gold really. The AI is just helping you to produce that. Bring in experts. Q&A's it could just be that you have an expert who can provide a few like nice little snippets or tips or something like that they can sit within an article again it just sort of gives your pieces another dimension and same is true of data if you've got any sort of data within your company that you can kind of confidential data but data that shows a trend for example or if you commission a survey or something like that that's your own data so again that's that's has value Continually refining your prompts, there's all sorts of ways to do that now, playing off LLMs against each other, ensuring that it gets to know who you are, your branding, your style, all that kind of thing. It's an ongoing process, but it will ultimately make sure that you can produce content much quicker. edit and edit again same is true of any piece of content that you produce whether you've used ai or not but really look out for those ai isms those cliches remove any waffles sometimes ai likes to give you a very long and convoluted response it doesn't need to be like that and ultimately making sure it sounds like you you know don't be afraid to bring in i we that kind of thing doesn't need to be detached and impersonal and just check that any sources that are cited are reputable just a few takeaways for today and then i will wrap up so yeah your story is your competitive advantage especially in the early days use it to engage with your audience and start with linkedin and build out your community and go for quality over quantity content plan so you're publishing consistently through the year done is better than perfect though don't overthink it use ai strategically to produce good quality content while keeping the human in the loop and enjoy the process many founders are already creative people so this is just another avenue for you to be creative come up with ideas talk about something you're really passionate about it's worth investing that time in producing content because ultimately it's what will elevate and enhance what you have to offer that's it has anybody got any questions thank you everyone thank you

In this talk, Catherine Allen (Head of Content at Tank) breaks down what content marketing is, why it matters for tech companies, and how founders can start building authority and community long before their product launches. Drawing on 10+ years in PR and marketing — plus a background in journalism — Catherine explains how content supports long buying cycles in B2B, builds trust through education, and helps brands show up across the entire marketing funnel (from early research to competitor comparison). She also introduces practical content pillars for startups (story, expertise, and community), how to choose the right channels without “channel creep”, and what founders should know about SEO vs AI search (LLM discovery) — including the role of trust signals, clear writing, and high-quality content. A must-watch for founders, marketers, and teams building visibility in Google and AI-driven search.

What you’ll learn

What is content marketing, and how is it different from sales-led marketing?

Why is content marketing especially important for B2B tech companies with long buying cycles?

How does educational content build trust, authority, and brand differentiation?

Why do people search for “problem questions” before they search for your product?

How do you create content that supports every stage of the marketing funnel?

What types of content work best for brand-building versus lead generation?

How do topic clusters help you rank in Google for high-intent keywords?

When should you use gated assets like white papers, webinars, or guides?

How do founders decide which channels matter and avoid spreading themselves too thin?

What should an early-stage startup publish if the product is not launched yet?

What are the three content pillars startups can use to generate consistent ideas?

How can a simple content plan (even a spreadsheet) reduce overwhelm and improve consistency?

What is AI search, and how is it changing product discovery and buying behaviour?

How can brands increase the chance of being cited in LLMs like ChatGPT?

What practical steps help founders produce content that sounds human and avoids generic AI “slop”?

How can AI tools support writing, SEO structure, and repurposing while keeping the founder’s voice?

#ContentMarketing
#B2BMarketing
#StartupMarketing
#SEO
#AISearch