Introduction (to me)

Business books usually start with a passage from the author where they put in the hard sell on themselves. That makes sense, you’re probably still deciding whether to invest the next few hours peering into their brain.

Sadly, I am not a particularly impressive person, so this book will not start with a list of accolades. I don’t have a trophy cabinet full of awards, I’ve never worked at Google, and I don’t have an owl’s neck that can swivel around to give you a 360-degree view of the software industry.

However, I can offer something you won’t find in any other book. Over seven years spent trying to figure out how to grow software businesses with content marketing, I’ve developed an approach for early-stage B2B software businesses that works very well.

And perhaps because I feel like I have a lot to prove, I’ve squeezed every element of this approach into an easy-to-follow sequence. It’s thorough, yes, but it’s also the quickest way to introduce a joined-up content strategy from scratch.

I also want this book to be the antidote to skim-the-surface strategic recommendations and out-of-context tactical instructions you’re more likely to read online. There’s lots of helpful information around on how to build and launch a content strategy, but as far as I know, this is the only guide that takes you from start to finish, with all the pitstops and sanity checks you need to get content right first time.

Following this approach has helped me achieve results for clients that I’m proud of, and I’d be doubly proud if it helped you do the same. Here are some highlights:

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• Brought in 4X organic-sourced leads in nine months for online finance provider Uncapped
• Won millions of organic social impressions and 17X sign-ups from blog for Adobe-acquired content scheduling tool ContentCal
• Grew pipeline 3X after repositioning and relaunching content workflow platform Lets Flo
• Doubled revenue and grew pipeline 5X in a year for ecommerce agency Nest Commerce

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So let’s get started, shall we?

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Introduction (to you)

How rude of me. I was so busy talking about myself that I forgot to introduce you. Before we get going, I’ll make a few assumptions about who you are and where you’re at with your business’s growth.

If I’ve got this wrong, and I’m introducing you to a version of yourself you don’t recognize, maybe you should put the book down and consider whether it’s worth pretending to be someone you’re not for the sake of a book about marketing.

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Anyway, these are the on-the-door requirements for this book to be worth your time.

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You’re either a founder, you’re responsible for revenue at your organization, or you’re a marketer. You might also be a consultant looking to swat up on how you approach content strategy for your clients.

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You’re probably working towards hitting your first $1M ARR, though if you’re late to content, you may have already passed that milestone. If you’re raking in more than $5M ARR, this book probably isn't for you.

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You’re also likely to relate to a few of these statements:

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• You depend on ads too much
• You've not tried content yet
• You think you mishired a content marketer
• You’ve tried content already but you didn’t see results
• You need to finally get started with marketing in earnest
• You need to put together a content strategy but don’t know how
• You want to hire a content marketer but you don’t know what to look for
• You’re producing a lot of content, but you don’t understand its relationship to bringing in new business

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But most of all, you want to grow your B2B software business with content. If that’s not true, I don’t know how on God’s green earth you made it past the front cover but now would be a perfectly acceptable time to stop reading.

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Whoever you are, and whatever your situation, welcome.

What you’ll get from this book

Lucky for you, I’m not going to spend forever preaching the benefits of content. If you weren’t already a convert, then you wouldn’t be here, right? Instead, let’s look at the five most important things you’ll achieve by introducing this book’s growth-focused approach to content.

Grow your business

Here’s a brain teaser. You could be an incredible content marketer at one company, then join another and produce flop after disappointing flop.

How? Because your content can only be successful if your business’s commercial strategy, product strategy, and marketing strategy are successful first.

If you’re working for an early-stage company, the most important part of your job as a content marketer is not to produce content, but to figure out whether the conditions for good content exist in the first place. You’re Matt Damon on Mars. Does your content have the right conditions to grow?

In practice, that could mean ruffling feathers. If your boss’s attitude is ‘go do content’ and you have what you think are valid questions about their marketing strategy, then please persevere and get these answered asap. Throughout this book, we’ll go through all the tests you need to ensure your content strategy is built on stable foundations. This is about doing the right thing, not the thing that keeps everyone happy.

I appreciate this can be a tricky situation, so feel free to email me (alan@greenhouse.so) about it. I’m in your corner!

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How this book will help

You’ll interrogate your business’s ability to grow with content and introduce a content strategy that lays the foundation for your business’s growth.

Spend less, convert more

Advertising is a direct avenue to new customers, but it can get pretty expensive. Without much prior brand awareness, cost-effective campaigns are harder to achieve for the cash-strapped startups that need them most.

Content can help. With a better understanding of your audience and a clearer message to share with them, you’re able to produce focused content that’s more likely to convert. When you’re only serving ads with a relevant message to likely buyers, you’ll spend less and get a better result.

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For creative workflow software LetsFlo, a combination of tight targeting, messaging, and pent-up demand for their product saw their first campaign bring in a weighted pipeline value of $100k from just $2k ad spend.

Although the size of this return is unachievable for most software businesses (and no subsequent campaign I ran with LetsFlo reached these dizzying heights), well-positioned copy and creative reliably make your ads more profitable.

Plus, if you’re seeing prices in the auction march upwards, you’ll want to diversify how you acquire customers by focusing on other content-driven channels, such as search and social. For one of my clients, the cost of acquiring customers with these channels was about 80% cheaper, and with a 50% shorter sales cycle.

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The kicker was that, in their case, it took 18 months for content to reach its potential, and even then, these channels never replaced ads as the biggest-volume acquisition channel.

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How this book will help

I’m telling you both sides of the story here because understanding the performance of your content campaigns is not always straightforward. However, there are a couple of things you can rely on content for.

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Better content improves the unit economics of your ads. In other words, you’ll get more qualified leads for every dollar you spend. Better content also wins more engagement and leads on organic (non-paid) channels, which gives you access to new audiences, improves conversion from lead to customer, and reduces your overall cost per lead.

More broadly, content is a thread that runs through everything ‘marketing’. By improving your content, you improve the effectiveness of your marketing. There’s plenty more on that later.

Hire the right marketer

Looking to hire your first content marketer? When you try, you’ll probably find yourself in a Catch-22. To hire a good marketer, your marketing needs to be good. For your marketing to be good, you need to do good marketing. You need a good marketer. Hmm.

Let’s unpack this. For a marketer, there’s nothing exciting about the prospect of joining a company that hasn’t proven marketing can work. And if their content looks naff, that’s a turn-off too.

On the other side of the coin, founders need some basic understanding of how marketing should work to know what type of marketer to hire. That basic understanding comes down to (a) knowing your audience, (b) knowing how to pitch what you do, and (c) knowing how to reach your audience with campaigns.

Founders often have a decent grasp of (a) audience and (b) message, they just don’t know how to (c) reach them at scale, so they hire a channel specialist to fill the skill gap. This seems to make sense, but it can be a mistake.

For any channel or campaign to work at scale, your new marketing hire needs to be obsessed with understanding their audience and knowing how to influence them. Good campaign results happen when you get these two right, or in other words, when you’ve built a solid strategy. Being good at managing and scaling a channel is not the same as being good at building a marketing strategy. Yes, strategy takes time, but prioritizing it ahead of other marketing activities saves you the many hours and dollars you’d waste launching unfocused campaigns.

VC and startup commentator Tomasz Tunguz shared, “The most frequent mishire in startups is the first head of marketing.” Developing a basic understanding of how marketing works helps you sidestep this early error and land the right hire.

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How this book will help

You’ll know how marketing, and content marketing, works so you’ll be able to find a marketer that ‘gets it’ too.

Don’t waste time                        

Never mind wasted ad spend, when it comes to content, time is the biggest killer.

Focusing on the wrong strategy means pushing out content that no one cares about, teaching your audience that your content is worth ignoring, eroding your own belief in your ability to attract customers as you fail to win leads, wasting hundreds of hours of your business’s time, and forfeiting market share and revenue in the process. This all sounds very dramatic, doesn’t it?

The belief among some founders that you can ‘muddle through’, failing fast until you discover what works is especially dangerous with content. That’s because good content takes so damn long to create, and poor content isn’t worth creating in the first place.

Is it worth running a test on content that took ten hours to produce, when you could have produced the right content to begin with? Of course not. Understanding how your audience learn to solve problems, how they buy solutions, and the messages they need to hear along the way all make it more likely that your content will perform as you expect.

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How this book will help

You’ll only work on campaigns that are likely to succeed.

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In the next chapter, we'll come to a clear definition of what content actually means - and how it works.