Content Marketing for Early Stage B2B Startups
Part 4 of our interview with Rachel Kim, VP of Marketing at Wonolo, and Emily Kramer, former Head of Marketing at Carta and Asana
We recently sat down with marketing experts Rachel Kim, VP of Marketing at Wonolo, and Emily Kramer, former Head of Marketing at Carta and Asana. Here is a summary of our conversation.
We got so many insights that we decided to split this interview in five parts. You can find them here:
- Part 1: Trends in B2B Marketing for Early Stage B2B Startups
- Part 2: Brand 101 for Early Stage B2B Startups
- Part 3: PR for Early Stage B2B Startups
- Part 5: How to Make Your First Marketing Hire
Q. What types of content work best for B2B-focused companies?
Rachel: My biggest tip with content is know your audience. Know what they want to read. Write stuff they’ll actually care about. Don’t write stuff that is boring, business-like and bland that no one would want to consume. You have to find a way to make it interesting to your audience. Focus on quality over quantity.
If you focus on quality, SEO will come over time. SEO is a long game. If you’re trying to produce content only to get to the first page of Google search results, I don’t think it’s a winning strategy. SEO takes time — create content your audience will enjoy and in the long term your SEO will follow.
Emily: When people think about content, they think about blogs. A lot of the content I’ve had success with are templates and tools. Create things that are helpful to your audience and they are likely to download. Tools/templates can be paired with an article.
For example at Carta, we had a cap table template in excel. It was useful and allowed us to reach people who need cap tables and may be good potential customers for Carta. Another example is we had an offer letter template that explained to employees how equity works. Carta is not a recruiting platform, but this tangential content still worked.
You can post these templates in communities, blogs, twitter, slack groups, etc. Providing this free offering can go a long way towards reaching potential customers.
Q. What’s your take on case studies, especially for early stage startups? Are they useful?
Rachel: If you can get a couple of early adopters who go to their network and say, “this is life changing,” that could be more valuable than a case study. That’s how you can start to see how your evangelists become part of your marketing engine when you don’t have a lot of money.
Emily: People rarely read a full white paper. They typically read the few soundbites you pull out. Your early case studies are about having personalized quotes or experiences that you can use when you’re targeting specific customers. It doesn’t have to be the longform PDF with the classic intro. You can go a little more tailored and have great quotes or great shorter stories from customers and use them in a targeted way.
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Thank you to our partners Oracle for Startups and WSGR for making this event possible.
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