Congratulations, you’ve raised your Series A. You’ve built a product customers want, managed to sell it, demonstrated traction and generated material revenue. Now investors have injected additional capital to accelerate your growth. In addition to hiring engineers, investing in R&D, and perhaps opening an office, one of the most important things you’ll have to do at this stage is build your go-to-market engine. We explain why content is the fuel that powers your growth engine, and how to deploy a winning content strategy.
Most of your early customers were probably 1st-degree connections. They included people in your network, folks you met at events or conferences, warm introductions from early investors and so on. Now the game is to reach far more of your target market, and quickly. You’ll hire a sales team and if they’re good they’ll be well-connected. But no matter how deep their rolodexes, they won’t be enough to generate the number of prospects you need to have engaged in your funnel. You’ll need to supercharge their efforts with a broader marketing approach.
Ads and cold outreach are fine strategies, but low-yielding and expensive. Events and conferences are useful but lack scale. If done right, the most important marketing activity you’ll undertake in your growth phase is content generation. Providing useful content - with your unique insights and expertise - is a product in and of itself. That makes it the best foundation for building a funnel, as it creates a following of 2nd and 3rd-degree connections who enter your brand’s orbit and come to view you as competent and credible. Content also enhances your other marketing efforts by creating brand recognition and additional touchpoints that reinforce your message.
The recipe for great content is simple: it needs to be fresh, authentic, and useful. And the founders and executives of growth stage companies have it in them - after all, the same unique perspective that enabled you to tell your story successfully to early customers, investors, and employees is what will make your content sing. The challenges of launching a content strategy relate to where to focus, how to ship your content, and how to operationalize a system that supports timely content distribution at scale.
Think for a moment - as a founder or early exec, what did you wish you knew, or what resources do you wish you had that might have made building your company easier? Now ask the same from the viewpoint of your customers. What information are you positioned to provide them that could help them execute their job better? That can help guide or validate their decisions? That can point out obstacles they may encounter before they see them? That can lend meaningful expertise in areas where they may have less experience? And how should they interpret recent news or developments in their job role or industry? The goal of your content should be to answer one or more of these questions.
In addition, consider bringing your audience along for the ride of building your product or business. Share the why behind product decisions, the how of creating a company, and the challenges and human stories along the way. Building in the open is a wonderful way to foster connections with your audience and show the thoughtfulness and passion behind what you’re bringing to market.
Once you’ve identified where to focus, an equally important step is to determine where to push your content and in what format. To do this correctly, you’ll need to know where your audience spends time and what they like to consume. The platforms are few but the choice is important. Some audiences are highly present on LinkedIn, others prefer Substacks or newsletters. Some browse X and others peruse Slack or Reddit communities. Often it’s a combination. The dimensions of consumption, meanwhile, are many: short-form vs long-form, written vs video, webinars vs interviews, how-tos vs analysis, case studies vs press releases, best practices vs new developments, white papers, research papers…the list goes on. The options and permutations can feel overwhelming.
Shipping content - in the right form and forum - requires studying your audience’s existing content consumption patterns, launching small content experiments, measuring engagement, and quickly doubling down on what works. Which brings us to the last component - how to deploy and re-optimize quality content at scale.
The trouble with content is that it’s time-sensitive, time-intensive and hard to measure. For this reason, it’s important to design and operationalize a content system, wherein organizations employ foundational content primitives, automation tools, and workflow orchestration to deploy topical, timely and useful content - in several formats and on multiple platforms simultaneously. And yet most of today’s content strategies are run manually, resulting in content that is often incomplete, irrelevant, stale, or simply low-quality. This topic is the subject of a much deeper dive, but for the purposes of this piece, a brief example will be illustrative.
Consider a developer tools startup that wants to provide its audience with helpful commentary related to the latest advances in AI-assisted software development. Most commonly, one or two people at the company will scour the news for relevant breakthroughs or releases. Once they identify something relevant, they’ll draft commentary on the topic in a number of formats - for instance, a LinkedIn post and a blog article. The commentary will need to be reviewed such that it conforms to brand guidelines, adjusted to incorporate feedback from colleagues and copy-edited before being published. At publication time, the content may be rushed or stale.
Because of the manual nature of the process, other relevant news in the same period or separate content opportunities might be missed. Other formats or platforms for publication may be ignored due to time constraints. Experimentation is often out of the question, and while measurement can be done, re-optimization is difficult unless someone is very closely following the drivers of results. Meanwhile the team may lose significant time and attention that could be spent on product development, client services or other key business activities.
An operational content system would automate many of these steps - news detection, commentary generation, embedding brand guidelines, measurement, re-optimization. Through tools that scrape the web and are trained on your notes, docs, and past publications, the lion’s share of these steps can occur autonomously. Your team in turn simply sits in the loop, editing content at the margins and approving its publication. With such a system, you’ll have successfully operationalized your content marketing efforts.
Once you’ve raised your series A, the game is all about building your growth engine. A great content strategy scales your prospect funnel to power efficient customer acquisition. To execute optimally, keep your content fresh, authentic and useful, and deploy it in an operational content system.
