A Year of Content-Driven Communications

I was trying to think how to summarize 2018 at Valimail, and I can't do much better than this chart of news stories mentioning Valimail (above).

tl;dr: Valimail's buzz is building, and a lot of that success is due to our content strategy.

Behind this chart lies an enormous of work by the Valimail marketing and marcomm team, as well as a lot of groundwork by our PR firm, Method Communications.

In short, you can't just create good PR out of nothing. You have to have a great company, a good product, the right market conditions -- and you need CONTENT.

THEN you go to market with it: pitching, publishing, tweeting, pitching, publishing, tweeting ...

First, we had to lay the groundwork

In our case, we were fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. The U.S. government's push to implement DMARC last year increased awareness of email authentication enormously. Meanwhile, a rash of phishing-based hacks continued to highlight the danger of spoofed identities -- and showed just how easy it is to spoof non-authenticated email domains.

But first, we had to lay the groundwork. In our case, that meant leveraging the data Valimail sits on to create a robust research program. In 2018, we published eight original research reports based on Valimail data, plus one original consumer research report based on a phishing survey we designed and administered to over 1,000 U.S. consumers. We also sponsored two reports by the Ponemon Institute, a respected independent provider of market research.

We published weekly blog posts for most of the year, and in the second half of the year we brought in contributors from around the company (customer success, product, engineering) to add more technical content to our blog and to increase the frequency of our posts to 2X/week.

On top of that content we layered case studies, white papers, infographics, and we just recently launched a video channel. (You should subscribe! And definitely watch our ridiculously over-the-top trailer ... see if you can figure out who did the voice-over.)

A press release is still a useful tool for disseminating information

And yes, we issued a few press releases too. It was a bit of a surprise to me to find, after years of pooh-poohing press releases, that they still play an important role. It's true that journalists don't like them, and publishing a press release won't, by itself, get you any media coverage. But a press release is still a useful tool for disseminating information and keeping key people (customers, partners, investors) aware of what you're up to.

All this content adds up to a tremendous amount of raw material for use in media outreach, social media, and content-based marketing. Each one of these items is an asset that we can pitch, or use in an email campaign, or repurpose into 5 different pieces of content, or put in the hands of sales people to help them close deals, and on and on. I can't show you those metrics, but I assure you that the content we produced this year forms the backbone of a very successful B2B marketing machine. So I'm lucky to be at a company that truly understands the strategic value of that content, both for communications and for marketing and the business as a whole.

In short, we were busy in 2018. We produced a lot of content, and it paid off. Now on to 2019!

How do you use content in communications? What's your content-driven strategy? I'd like to hear from you. I'll be writing more about this in the near future, and I'm looking for some good examples to highlight.