Engineering Content at a Growth Startup

John DohertyFounder, GetCredo.com

You’re trying to hit escape velocityYou can’t do this with a blog.

Don’t have a blog (unless you love to write).

But you can engineer your way to scalable content success as long as you find the right story.

You’re a founder not a marketerYou likely don’t have a pre-built audience for your startup. Most founders don’t. You know how to code or how to do sales, but you’re not a writer.

And that’s ok.

You probably hear marketers talking all the time about “content marketing”, but you’re not a writer. You’re technical.

It’s time to be a marketing technologist.

Technologist As A Marketer (TAAM)Increasingly, startup marketing is about tying together your different systems to make them work together.

You can tie together your data aggregation, publishing, and (some) promotion to work for you automatically.

But you must tell a story to make it work.

Ask what your audience

doesn’t know

Data collection

Data analysis

Answer questions for

your audience

Scalable marketing

(email, SEO, social)

Adjust as needed

Automate

Start here

What stories can you tell?Every industry has interesting stories to tell. Start with keyword research to identify questions asked.

Pro tip: you don’t have to use your own data either.

What stories can you tell?It also doesn’t have to look pretty at first, though that never hurts.This piece took two weeks of work (one data scientist and received 12 sites linking to it.It was built in Tableau, Excel, and published on our own CMS. Outreach via email marketing and PR.

It doesn’t have to take a lot of time.My PR manager and I launched this in 3 hours the day House of Cards Season 3 came out. Did some outreach and got these links.

Start Small, Then ScaleZillow’s housing reports started with just their top metros. Now they do them automatically every month for pretty much every major market.

HungryHouse in the UK is a startup doing a version of this, though they could take it further and do it by year to make it pop more.

Automate ItBaremetrics is analytics for Stripe. They realized that Buffer wanted to make their metrics public, so they let companies start showing them publicly.

This is totally automated and has a bunch of links to it.

(Semi)Automate The MarketingNew Data Each

Month

Send automatically to

email list (via Mandrill/SendGrid/email provider of

choice)

Outreach via PR and bloggers

Track social metrics via BuzzSumo

Adjust as needed

You can semi-automate your marketing by building email lists that get emailed via SendGrid/Mandrill when data updates (Glassdoor does this), automatically sharing on social media a few times (via Buffer or MeetEdgar), automatically put emails gathered in FB Custom Audiences, and so much more.

Thanks.

John DohertyFounder, GetCredo.comMarketer, husband, outdoorsman, Labrador owner.