Content Strategy for B2B Startups: A Short Primer

Marketing orthodoxy is geared to the Fortune 500, with content marketing no exception. And this can leave startups, with their limited resources and compressed timeframes, either with unrealistic expectations or general uncertainty regarding what they should be doing with content.

Be Lean & Mean

No startup can or even should have it all. Even if you have the money to hire an army of writers and creatives, you'd be lucky if one person on your content team actually understands what your company is trying to do, so control over your messaging will suffer (i.e. you’ll produce a lot of noise but very little signal). And your growth and/or marketing processes may also suffer if you plant too many seeds in too many fields at once, due to the resultant confusion regarding strategic priorities and the shape of your customer journey.

So, if you’ve got the bank, focus on a few pieces of grand slam content, and promote the shit out of it. 

Are You Pioneering or Competing?

Every startup occupies a position at least slightly different than the others, and therefore has a unique set of problems for content to solve, but B2B startups can be grouped into two general categories that I think useful in terms of how to approach content.

Pioneers

Pioneer startups sell something no one else does, and are essentially creating a new product category. This makes education the name of the game in terms of content. You need to teach people what you sell, how it works, and most importantly, why it needs to exist.

The good news is, because you have no one to compete with, you probably won’t have a pressing need for a lot of expensive high-gloss content. Clarity is what will win the day here, not sex appeal. The bad news is nobody out there in Google-land is presently looking for what you sell, which can render a number of standard content marketing tactics useless.

What You Need Most

Paid Ads

Some might not consider Google ad copy or paid social ads content, but someone has to write and/or design them, with as much care and craft as a piece of longer proper content would demand. Paid ads are specifically designed to inspire an action, without a lot of space to make your case, so they need to be good, or at least efficient. And you’ll need multiple versions and multiple promotions, so don't be stingy here.

Whitepapers

A whitepaper is a great thing to offer in a paid social post. And your goal with it will be to explain why your product needs to exist. What problem does it solve? What trends are you capitalizing on? And your audience, who has never heard of you, needs to be sure that you’re not making things up, so pay a consultancy for their name and expertise, and don’t gate the finished product. If nobody knows who you are, or why you need to exist, you need awareness more than you need the email address and job title for Seymour Butts.

And if the whitepaper does its job, its readers will come find you more information. With a unique product like yours, where else are they gonna go?

The 3-Minute Sales Video

This is the video you show to the customer’s board. Now the thing about video is that Hollywood has conditioned us to expect top quality, or we tune out quickly, so pay an agency or top-notch freelancer to do it right. And try not to be too stocky (animation is a good way to avoid this), because stock will cause the audience to start checking their Twitter feeds almost immediately. And since this video is usually written in standard awareness language, you can also put this video on LinkedIn. People like sharing good videos. It makes them feel useful.

Bylines

Trade publications are often a good way to reach the B2B crowd, but they’re often neglected due to internal siloes and high turnover in the key positions. A CEO-authored byline that repackages the executive summary of your whitepaper can whet your audience's appetite through media validation in a way that a paid social ad simply can't.

Testimonials/Case Studies

Once you've got a viable product, and after you’ve established the aforementioned stuff, this is your next priority, because it establishes that you’re not just theoretical. You’ve actually closed a deal or two, and your customers are currently happy, and often better at explaining in plain English the real-world problems that you solve than you are.

What You Need Least

Blogs/Organic Social/SEO

Dripfeed content has minimal value to a pioneer startup. The SEO utility of a blog is marginal (as is the utility of SEO in general) if nobody is looking for what you sell. And organic social is largely a brandbuilding tactic, and conventional brandbuilding doesn’t work if nobody understands what you sell. In fact I would only advise trying it if what you sell has features that travel well (i.e. striking visuals).

What Kind of Writer Do You Need?

When you move at startup speed, the temptation is to use freelancers, but when you sell something unique, getting a freelancer to understand it can be challenging. There is no substitute for total immersion, so a contract role might work best.

Competitors

Competitor startups are not in a unique product category. So your focus will be less on education (which a more established rival is probably already doing better than you) and more on standing out from the crowd, winning mindshare, establishing trust, and minimizing headaches.

What You Need Most

Paid Ads

Yeah, I already said this, and as a content person, I’m not supposed to drone on about ads. But that doesn’t make them any less necessary. If you’re a competitor startup, you’re in a noise contest, pure and simple. But your challenge here is somewhat different than those faced by pioneers. It’s not about explaining what you do. It’s about explaining it differently, and this is difficult given the limited real estate you have to work with in a paid ad. This means you’ll need SEO (i.e., keyword) skills first and copywriting skills second.

And when it comes to paid social, you’ll need the most viral, guerrilla, whirligig content you can conjure. It’s not about just words and pictures here. It’s about creativity, showmanship, and stuntwork. So check your preconceptions at the door. It’s time to get weird. 

Credibility Content

But after you’ve gotten the suckers in the tent, you have a very different problem to solve. When a bunch of brands all suddenly appear in the same segment, it resembles a boomtown in the Wild West. And boomtowns were full of thieves and charlatans who could disappear with your money overnight.

So a startup looking to prosper in this environment needs to put some effort into appearing trustworthy. You’ll be needing testimonials and case studies to prove you’re not some fly-by-night operation. A blog is also useful if it’s largely written by customers. Influencer content can also work well, since it's about the closest thing you can get to a celebrity endorsement in B2B.

And if you’ve got the time, resources, and suitability, don’t be shy about creating a little humanizing behind-the-scenes or “About Us” content. People want to do business with other humans, especially other humans like them. Not with a chatbot being commanded by some Silicon Valley hotshot.

UX Content

A/B testing of your website content can be very useful in a highly-competitive space. Every little bit helps. B2B is very much about minimizing friction and pain. If a prospect visits your website, likes the idea of what you’re selling, but can’t complete the signup process, or gets lost in a fog of unclear terms of service, they might take their business elsewhere. So respect the journey. 

Email

And because you've got a lot of competitors, you need to make sure that current customers don't get lured away. A nice mixture of exclusive offers and exclusive content sent via email is a good way to make sure your brand doesn't lose it's shine once the novelty has worn off. But don't be a pest. You always want customers to be surprised and happy to see you.

Post-purchase is actually the best time to offer thought leadership and education if you're a competitor startup, as such content won't make much of a difference to an initial purchasing decision, and won't provide enough of an SEO benefit to be worth the trouble. And even if it did, you really don't want prospects loitering around your website reading a lot of content that isn't related to buying. The longer they dither, the greater the risk of something coming along and knocking them out of your funnel.

But after they've gone to bed with you, go ahead and hit 'em with some listicles and webinars with industry leaders. They'll be more receptive if they think it's a bonus instead of the sales pitch. But don't overextend yourself with this content, because you don't want to sink too many resources into content that doesn't benefit awareness.

And resist the temptation to use such content for organic social media. You don't want to sacrifice its exclusivity or have it eat into your algorithmic reach for the high-value viral stuff.

What You Need Least

In-House Thought Leadership

This notion can be considered sacrilege in B2B, but if everyone in your segment is having the same thought, it’s not really leadership. And if you’re in a competitive sector, it’s not about “Why your sector?” It’s about “Why you?” This makes persuasion more useful than lecturing in most instances, with the exception being if you’ve got a rockstar CEO. Then you should get them to preach & teach as much as possible.

But if you don't have one of those, try to utilize guest bloggers, influencers, and other outside experts for education and thought leadership as much as possible. Your brand probably doesn't have a lot of street cred, but they do, so use theirs to help build yours.

What Kind of Writer Do You Need?

These different content types require a variety of different skills, so you’ll largely be outsourcing it to freelancers, agencies, influencers, and users, though you’ll need at least one skilled in-house UX strategist who has sufficient experience with these other content types to effectively keep an eye on what outside content producers are doing.