StashAway’s First 4 Years of Content
This month marks the 4th anniversary of the first batch of articles we published, and I’m currently having flashbacks/night terrors as I remember learning about fund management fee structures, reward-to-risk ratios, emergency funds, and ETFs so that I could start guiding people through the confusing world of finance.
Our investment product was still months from being ready to launch, but we wanted to launch our website to start building a waitlist and overall traction.
Content was something the co-founders wanted in the early days because they believed that education was key to the experience they wanted to deliver. (Just look at our personal finance and investing seminars: well more than 17,000 people attended them in 2020 alone!) Somehow I found myself sitting with the title ‘Head of Content’ at just 24 years old. I was the first full-time marketing hire. I had worked at a couple financial services companies in the past, and my most recent job was at a publisher. I kinda knew content. And I kinda knew finance.
But knowing the subject matter and content strategy weren’t what turned out to be the foundation to our strong content (and more largely, our communications) strategy. The key was the mindset we had in every decision: First, be customer-centric to our core. Second, move quickly.
Be customer-centric to our core
1. Prioritise building relationships above all else
Ultimately, we’ve reached a point where people would trust that the information we deliver is something they should know and that adds value to them. The day someone doesn’t believe that everything we say is in their best interest, we’ve done something wrong. The details matter to earn trust, and the speed at which we move matter to grow the business. I’d rather get half the number of articles out if that means not compromising the quality of information our clients see.
2. Content strategy isn’t one-size-fits-all
Decide your own content strategy by assessing your resources and objectives. Don’t just take a Hubspot “How to Build the Perfect Content Strategy” post and copy+paste it to decide your strategy and KPIs.
Many content strategy blogs would recommend gated content. We’ll never do that. But that’s only because we are hyper-aware of our customer journey: It’s longgggggg. Investments are a high-consideration product, and then creating an account isn’t just linking your Facebook account. The idea of creating any more friction just to capture more email addresses goes against everything we need to do for our clients. (I might change my mind on this someday, but for now “never going to happen” stands.)
In a SUPER early-stage tech startup, our first few articles were to get something out there, and sure, it was for SEO, but given that we weren’t tracking SEO, it wasn’t actually for SEO. If it was, we would have been tracking and maintaining those articles.
We knew that we’re disrupting a multi-trillion dollar industry. Our goal was to create quality content that enhanced people’s understanding not just of our product but also their finances.
Another thing we did was that we went with quality, not quantity. Our content calendar has always been decided by asking the question, “What do our clients need to know?”
We weren’t writing listicles, such as “5 Ways to Get Rich Faster.” We were writing articles, such as “How to Protect Your Personal Data and Finances” and “How Much Cash You Should Really Have”. Sure, a little catchy, but the information was driven by what we as a product-and-customer-obsessed content team deemed our customers needed to know. So it was catchy for them, not just for our performance marketing numbers. But the byproduct was that many were catchy for performance marketing, too.
Our performance marketing team does promote the articles, so the content does get used for acquisition. But that team promotes whatever we give them. We decided that any content must always be customer-centric because we use content to acquire clients as much as we do to retain them.
3. Don’t try to do everything at once
Our first articles were published 17 March 2017. We didn’t start managing our social media accounts until 28 June 2018. In other words, we didn’t post on Instagram for almost an entire year of having a product. Why? Two reasons. One, we were just getting started, and we needed high-impact marketing efforts; managing an Instagram grid wasn’t going to give us the early traction we needed. Two, we were taking on the biggest banks in the world, and my job was to make sure that people took us seriously. Under no circumstances were we going to have a page of stock photos that I cobbled together on Canva.
It was largely a quality and branding decision, but we also had to be smart with our resources. To build the company’s traction, we had so many other things we needed to focus on, and we decided the ROI for an Instagram presence wasn’t what was going to help us build momentum in the early days.
4. Get the entire company’s buy in to your communications philosophy
These days, consumers expect brands to be transparent and bulletproof. This means that there shouldn’t be any corner of the company that has weaker communications or content than another part. Everything needs to be rock solid. The only way to make sure everyone understands that it’s everyone’s responsibility to build and maintain trusting relationships with your customers is to educate the entire company about why the brand and content rules are important.
Although the content team does produce most of the outward-facing content, the content team is not the only team producing materials that eventually go to clients. Occasionally, I notice a live product screen or document that wasn’t reviewed. And that’s because the teams embody “move fast”. But when I see a sentence that requires the reader to think more than he or she should, I make a point to make the change.
The marketing and product teams know how high my standards are for any output. Our content style guide is 37 pages long and growing. Our product microcopy guide isn’t much shorter. But why would an engineer or ops manager need to know about our brand, content, and communication principles? Why do they need to know that we don’t allow legalese even in legal documents, or why we use contractions and why we can’t use the passive voice? They can catch inconsistencies. They can be brand protectors. The more eyes you have on your communications, the better your customers’ experience will be. This is more a branding than content consideration, but the truth is that every single potential touchpoint is part of the user experience.
When you have a company culture where everyone works towards the same goals, it’s not a burden to ask them to pay close attention to what they write or send you a document for review. You get the buy-in when you explain to them why it’s important that communications are handled delicately.
Move quickly
One of the biggest things I learned in content strategy for a 0 to 1 business is, when you can, let perfection go.
Coming from a publishing and copywriting background, and Type A blood flowing through my veins, I only knew how to aim for perfection. I wanted no passive voice, no nominalisations. I won the Oxford comma debate with ease, but we’d debate whether the word after a colon should be capitalised. Still, “perfect” was the only thing I knew when it came to writing. I had never worked at a startup. But luckily, I was surrounded by people who had careers in startups and were willing to teach me why it was important to loosen my grip on perfect writing.
The three most important words I learned from our Co-founder and CEO, Michele, in the first couple months were “It’s good enough.”
Now, since we’re a financial services company, “Good enough” has to be a really, really, really, really, really good. We had to earn and maintain people’s trust. One misspelled word or, worse, one wrong number, would make people think that if we didn’t check our writing and math, could we actually deliver effective investment products? So the reality was that the difference between our “good enough” and my perfection was not visible to the reader, but it was the difference of publishing 2 articles a week or only 1.
This post is a great example of me letting my perfectionism go. If I wanted to give it more time, I could get rid of all “to be” verb conjugations, passive voice, typos (sorry if there are any), and the run-on sentence that is the first paragraph of this post that you probably didn’t even notice but is irritating me. But this isn’t meant to be a work of art. This post is meant to get a message across. So the ROI of another hour of editing would do what? Maybe you’d notice the differences, but I’d just get hungrier for dinner.
