Content Marketing As A Forcing Function
Content Marketing As A Forcing Function
Determining Positioning And Conveying Expertise To Buyers
Hey friends! I’m Akash, an early stage software & fintech investor at Earlybird Venture Capital, partnering with founders across Europe at the earliest stages.
I write about startup strategy to help founders navigate their company-building journeys, from inception to PMF and beyond.
You can always reach me at akash@earlybird.com if we can work together.
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In the immediate aftermath of the Baltimore bridge collapse, Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen quickly asserted his expertise in logistics, and by extension, Flexport’s category-leadership.
Conveying expertise and authority in a category matters to buyers.
Pavilion and Kickstand’s Content to Conversion report surveyed 824 buyers in North America and the UK and found that:
73% of B2B buyers agreeing their purchase decisions were directly influenced by a brand’s content
86% arguing that engaging with content has accelerated their purchase decisions
78% of buyers said helpful content has increased their company’s ROI on B2B purchases.
What’s more, buyers in executive-level roles are particularly interested in original research and data, which increases trust in a brand.
This is becoming quite pervasive among post-PMF companies, where the startup gives a comprehensive overview of their category with first-party data to back up the findings. Some of them have become hotly anticipated among investors and prospects alike, such as:
Retool publishes the State of AI
Vendr publishes the SaaS trends
Okta publishes the Business at Work
Databricks publishes the State of Data + AI
Postman publishes the State of API
Zylo publishes the SaaS Management Index
Pocus publishes the Product-Led Sales
Executives are 27% more likely than other employees to agree that original data increases their trust in a brand. Much like the Michelin brothers catalysed the market for tires by creating the Michelin Guide, content marketing (as a subset of brand marketing) ought to convey expertise and acknowledge the ecosystem around a product. This form of content marketing strengthens solution-selling, demonstrating awareness of how a solution fits into a broader ecosystem that facilitates outcomes.
I would even argue that researching and publishing an opinionated ‘State of X’ report is a forcing function for clarity of thought about a company’s positioning, and more software companies should do it much earlier in their lives. Fundamental strategic decisions are answered in the process:
Are we a partner-first company?
Where are we in terms of enterprise readiness?
How buyers are benefitting from different use cases in production, and where most value is generated.
GitGuardian’s annual State of Secrets Sprawl report is a collaboration between content, R&D, and data science teams (with a third-party polling service to incorporate survey-based perspectives from security practitioners). The earlier the company, the more the founder is involved.
The merits as an internal document are clear, but the importance of this clarity of thought for executive decision-makers is worth stressing.
Charts of the week
Applications have flourished, whilst open source infrastructure projects have faded due to their capital intensity
The AI Premium is very real
AI compute startups are competing aggressively for market share, catering to a range of training and inference workloads at significant discounts to the hyperscalers
Reading List
The Buffett Formula: Going to Bed Smarter Than When You Woke Up The Knowledge Project
8 Google Employees Invented Modern AI. Here’s the Inside Story Wired
DBRX: The new best open model and Databricks’ ML strategy
Life in Low Data Gravity Andrew Ng
Seven Miracles of Venture Research
What I learned from looking at 900 most popular open source AI tools Chip Huyen
Quotes of the week
‘This is a general trend we have observed a couple of years ago. We called it Mosaic's Law where a model of a certain capability will require 1/4 the [money] every year from [technological] advances. This means something that is $100m today goes to $25m next year goes to $6m in 2 yrs goes to $1.5m in 3 yrs’
Naveen Rao
‘The best investors are learning machines. The best investment organizations are as well. Effective research embeds an intentional culture of curiosity inside an investment organization by creating intellectual breadcrumbs charting the evolution of a firm’s (and individual investor’s) point of view and its decisions, deepening self-awareness. Additionally, the artifacts developed through research – especially when shared publicly – increase surface area and engage the broader ecosystem to increase the pace of learning and engage a diverse set of perspectives not found in-house.’
Brett Bivens
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