Read time: 4 minutes

Hey!

Sam here 👋

As a startup founder, you know that you need to pick the right channels to grow your business.

Content can be a powerful growth lever, even a moat, if done right.

But most companies suck at writing content.

They waste time and money only to get minimal results.

Today, we’re going to learn how to create content that stands out and gets in front of the right people.

We’ll hear from two of my favorite content marketers: Camille Trent, Director of Content and Community at PeerSignal and Ryan Law, VP of Content at Animalz.

I know how valuable content can be when done right, and want to save founders the headache.

Excited to share their blueprint with you!

If you’re new here, join the growth code community for $0 with one click.

The right framework for content marketing if you’re an early-stage startup

Ryan’s advice is to focus on your biggest problem first.

Typically, 3 challenges come hand in hand with being an early-stage startup: domain authority, proof, and paid over-reliance.

1/ Low-to-no domain authority and brand recognition make contesting most SERPs difficult.

2/ Lack of social proof makes it difficult to close deals.

3/ Heavy reliance on paid spend makes diversifying into organic channels important.

As you can tell, these are three different problems with different solutions.

So the first step is asking: which of these is my biggest problem?

Content marketing is great at solving multiple problems, but to get the best results, you need to focus on one problem at a time.

Let's go through how to approach each of the three challenges.

1/ Low domain authority

Focus on building a handful of "linkbait" (valuable content that will lead to more people sharing and linking to it) assets:

✅ expert interview pieces

✅ long-form posts

✅ statistic roundups

→ Make sure your piece has strong social incentives for readers and participants to share your piece.

2/ Lack of social proof

Focus on what you can control.

✅ start writing a couple of case studies

✅ answer the questions that repeatedly pop up during sales

✅ show how you've solved the problem for real people/companies

3/ Over-reliance on paid efforts

To move away from paid efforts, start with a bottom-up approach to search:

✅ run keyword research

✅ prioritize the lowest-difficulty topics

→ Use the success of those pieces to gradually improve your topical authority, backlink profile, and ability to rank for harder keywords.

Camille recommends approaching content from four angles:

1. Positioning 

2. Content audit

3. SWOT analysis

4. Brand and content guide

1/ Positioning

Get your arms around the positioning of your product.

This tells you where to lean in.

2/ Content audit

Ask yourself: "What do I have?"

This goes for the content itself, formats that have worked, and resources you have available.

3/ SWOT analysis

Do a matrix that identifies some of the high-leverage (most reward for the smallest lift) opportunities based on your product/team strengths.

4/ Brand and content goals

• Start by defining what "good" looks like

• Begin a WIP brand & content guide

• Content & formats your audience gravitates toward

• Include examples, and make a mood board. Which brands and creators do you want to resemble?

In an era of infinite content, companies must follow this to stand out

"Original research" has a broad definition that covers 4 elements:

• Data

• Experts

• Network

• Processes

Let’s break down each one of them.

✅ Proprietary data from your own company or products

→ Ask: what can you learn about the world from your data?

✅ Expert opinions and experiences

→ Ask: what are your unique experiences, and what did you learn from them?

✅ Your network

→ Ask: who can you tap for expert insights?

✅ Original processes

→ Ask: what hard problems have you solved, and how did you solve them?

Your content must offer something that cannot be sourced from anywhere else.

Creating an incentive for people to read and share it.

Insightful speaks to the quality and novelty of the format or angle.

Actionability and Relevance prove you know the reader.

You understand the outside factors happening in the industry, the challenges of the job, and, ultimately, how to help them be better at their job.

Three pillars of an effective content strategy

💡 Educational - does it teach?

👀 Entertaining - is it in a format where folks will stick around and even return for more?

🔑 Effective - does it accomplish a business purpose?

You need to make sure that every piece of content gets you closer to your business goals.

• Make your brand more credible

• Make your audience open the next email coming from the brand

• Get people interested in your product/service

How to measure content marketing effectiveness

Camille shares that although it's tough to measure content marketing effectiveness exactly (besides links or DMs), you can start by asking your customers:

• how they heard about you

• what perked their interest

As a leading indicator, you can track engagement, audience growth, and quality.

I know it’s challenging to justify the investment without clear, measurable results.

So what else can we do?

Rand Fishkin from SparkToro recommends the following:

Even though tracking can be incomplete and frustrating, measuring these channels and tactics is still doable. 

However, it requires a shift back to the 20th-century mindset of marketing measurement, focusing on brand interest and sales lift tracked over time and experimenting in segmented markets.

We know how hard to track some channels may be. But we also know that we can still see what people do on these channels, even if we can’t attribute them. It’s not impossible to measure lift, what’s impossible is to see the lift at an individual level.

The best you can do is adopt a framework that approximates the overall lift in your marketing funnel.

Like this: 

That’s all for now!

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or feedback, just hit reply.

I read every email.

If you found this helpful, please forward this email to 1 friend or colleague. They'll appreciate you and you'll help grow the community.

🔍 Sam Pick’s: resources worth your time

• How to measure hard to measure marketing channels

• Zero-click content: the counter-intuitive way to succeed in a platform-native world

• 6 B2B demand generation channels for startups

Whenever you are ready to go deeper, there are two ways I can help you:

• Work with me 1:1 to help you build a defensible growth engine to scale your business to $10MM ARR. Let’s chat.

  • Ideal if you're a founder who reached $1M and now wants to scale.

• Get unstuck in 60 minutes in a high-intensity session to solve a specific challenge. Book a strategy call.

Until next time 👋

-Sam