Sujan Patel On Doing Content Marketing Right In Early Stage Startups

#BiteSize is a video series where leading experts answer some of the most pressing questions entrepreneurs have while building or marketing their startups.

In this latest episode of #BiteSize, Sujan Patel gives his insights on how to do content marketing right for maximum impact when you’re an early stage startup.

Sujan Patel

Sujan has 12 years of experience in digital marketing and co-created Content Marketer, a tool to help automate and scale content marketing. He is also an avid blogger and writes for Forbes, Inc, WSJ and Entrepreneur. In his spare time, he authored the Growth Hacking eBook 100 Days of Growth & Content Marketing Playbook. When he’s not working 80 hours a week you can find him at the racing cars/motorcycles or jumping out of planes.

Transcript of the Video

Content marketing for startups or early stage companies, I think of it a little differently. I think of it as education and you can promote education, but think about it as creating content for advocating the cause.

So, if you’re building a tool for sales, and let’s say you’re building this tool to increase outbound sales calls or performance of outbound sales calls. You want to write content for sales people and help them do that task that you’re solving. So, it’s more of like ancillary content or ancillary help around what your product already does and you don’t have to go deep into promotion. The core thing is getting people that are interested in your product looking at that content.

And the great thing about content marketing is that by writing good content and content that’s helpful for that audience, you’re going to be able to attract more people through the blog or content to your product. You don’t have to go crazy creating a ‘Skyscraper technique‘ or really solving the world’s problems. You really got to advocate the cause and think about who your customers are try to solve their problem.

A few weeks ago I launched ContentMarketer.io, we’re a content promotion tool that’s been in Beta for 6 months. The simplest thing I did is I wanted to put a blog out there because I know the power of it, just having a voice, just having an audience and what I did was anyone who requested an invite, automatically got subscribed to the blog. And I was a little lazy to create these drip campaigns to keep them interested, but I kept blogging and based off of feedback I got, I actually understood what level of expertise the audience was – so it actually helped me build my product.

And then vice versa. I have Intercom for Content Marketer and we’ve setup a couple of messages in-app and emails from me pretty much saying, “Hey, let me help you. Are you stuck based off how many sessions.” And though this I really understood the customer’s problems and actually started to revise my content to write about that.

My blog posts and content like guides and videos that I’m going to be doing – all around the pain points my customers and potential customers are having with the product. So, there’s a way to get it in as a sales tool as well.