Content Marketing Round-Up

Last week, Boston-based OpenView Venture Partners hosted 9 of its expansion stage portfolio companies at a workshop focused on content marketing. I think it was valuable for everyone involved – both our growth capital fund and companies. We had 6 industry leading speakers who presented on topics related to content marketing – what it really is, the strategy behind it, and execution tactics.

It was a lot of information packed into a day and a half. As a result, I wanted to share my top takeaways in this week’s blog post.

Here is my round-up:

1. Before you even think about what content you would like to start producing for your company, STOP. Take a step back and think about the goals you would like to accomplish with a content marketing strategy. For example, the content you create for brand awareness may be very different than content for lead generation.
3. You will also want to plan which customers and prospects you are targeting with the content strategy. It is necessary to understand and prioritize your buyer personas.
5. Once a strategy is determined, set a content schedule and commit to it. One speaker, Joe Pulizzi, described it as a “content promise.” There may be nothing worse than breaking that promise to your customers and failing to send out your weekly e-newsletter, for example.
7. Remember that your company’s brand will play a role in the content marketing strategy. We did not discuss this in great detail at the workshop, but it is EXTREMELY important. If your company is an innovative, fun company a video of an employee rapping may be perfect to engage your target prospect. However this approach may be counterproductive if your company sells into a more serious market, i.e. financial services, insurance, investors, health care, etc.

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