Content Marketing for growth stage startups – iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable #Bangalore

Playbook-RoundTable is one of the most sought after community events of iSPIRT. It’s a gathering of 12 like-minded product startups who are beyond the early stage. RoundTables are facilitated by an iSPIRT maven who is an accomplished practitioner of that Round-Table theme.

The Playbook Roundtable (#PlaybookRT) on content marketing is a brainstorming session on how to acquire users at scale and confer them to customers without paying a dimethrough content marketing. The playbook roundtable is facilitated by Ankit Oberoi, Co-CEO AdPushup(an ad layout optimization platform that helps web publishers drive more revenue from their existing website ads)

The session will include:

Building the Inbound Company Culture
- Psychology behind Inbound and why it works
Understanding and creating Personas
Creating the right content
Distribution to reach your audience
Content measurement and analytics
SEM – Using a combination of content and paid
- Overview of AdWords
- Hacks to improve keyword quality score
- Case Studies

Expectations from participants:

Basic understanding of inbound marketing
Should have used WordPress or any other CMS
Basic knowledge of search engines and SEO

Ideal participants will be founders/marketers, who are working in startups where:

the business is focused on targeting SMEs.
the founder/organization is about to or is already investing some resources in content/inbound marketing

If you are interested in attending the Playbook, please apply here

Content Marketing for early stage startups – iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable

The Playbook Roundtable (#PlaybookRT) on content marketing is a brainstorming session on how to acquire users at scale and confer them to customers without paying a dimethrough content marketing. The playbook roundtable is facilitated by Ankit Oberoi, Co-CEO AdPushup(an ad layout optimization platform that helps web publishers drive more revenue from their existing website ads)

The session will include:

Building the Inbound Company Culture
- Psychology behind Inbound and why it works
Understanding and creating Personas
Creating the right content
Distribution to reach your audience
Content measurement and analytics
SEM – Using a combination of content and paid
- Overview of AdWords
- Hacks to improve keyword quality score
- Case Studies

Expectations from participants:

Basic understanding of inbound marketing
Should have used WordPress or any other CMS
Basic knowledge of search engines and SEO

Ideal participants will be founders/marketers, who are working in startups where:

the business is focused on targeting SMEs.
the founder/organization is about to or is already investing some resources in content/inbound marketing

If you are interested in attending the Playbook, please apply here

Content marketing your way to multi-million dollars in revenue – iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable

The Playbook Roundtable (#PlaybookRT) on content marketing is a brainstorming session on how to acquire users at scale and confer them to customers without paying a dime through content marketing.The playbook roundtable is facilitated by Paras Chopra, founder and CEO of Wingify (the makers of VWO). Paras founded Wingify in 2009 and the company today has 3700 customers across the globe including the likes of Microsoft, AMD and Groupon, and is known as one of the SaaS poster boys of the country.- How to generate initial traction for your product with content marketing?
– How to target your content to the right audience using personas?
– How to get top marketing experts in the world your biggest influencers?
– How to measure RoI on your content marketing?
– How to scale up the team?
– How to get covered on TechCrunch, trend on HackerNews and write for the likes of Moz and Smashing Magazine?

If you are interested, please fill the below mentioned form. If shortlisted, we will confirm by 31st March 2015

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20/10/201420/10/2014

Global Lean Sales – Selling your software online to global markets, without field-force #PlaybookRT

Last week I was going through the startup class videos and one particular statement by Sam Altman stuck with me. He said “All successful founders are fanatics”. And YCombinator has seen a whole bunch of them. The way he puts it is very awesome, let me reproduce the statement here:

“The word fanatical comes up again and again when you listen to successful founders talk about how they think about their product. Founders talk about being fanatical in how they care about the quality of the small details. Fanatical in getting the copy that they use to explain the product just right. and fanatical in the way that they think about customer support. In fact, one thing that correlates with success among the YC companies is the founders that hook up Pagerduty to their ticketing system, so that even if the user emails in the middle of the night when the founder’s asleep, they still get a response within an hour.Companies actually do this in the early days. Their founders feel physical pain when the product sucks and they want to wake up and fix it. They don’t ship crap, and if they do, they fix it very very quickly. And it definitely takes some level of fanaticism to build great products.”

Read the full talk here (later)

2014-10-18 15.23.57

This statement came alive for me yesterday when I met Pallav Nadhani, the founder of FusionCharts. As he walked us through how he built his company and sharing his experiences and wonderful insights in building his company, his fanaticism was apparent. I am sure everyone who was there, wanted some of it to rub on to them. Even though it was a “RoundTable”, I think Pallav had more experience than a lot of us and pretty much carried the group. He shared some very cool insights, with real life examples and actionable suggestions.

There were 11 of us, all selling business-to-business (B2B) products in the range of $1000 – $75,000, some online, some offline, most on a subscription model, some early stage, a few past the validation stage. Almost half of the founders depended on high touch sales and half had products that were Do-it-yourself. Here is a summary of the meetup:

Pallav’s Story

Pallav shared his story on how he started the company when he was 16, to get some pocket money. He made a charting widget for himself and then wrote an article about it, which became popular. Then one thing led to another and he now runs a company that publishes 90+ types of charts has 23,000 customers and 70 people. Some of the things that he focused from very early on was:

Reduce all friction for the user who is evaluating the product.
He promised his users that they would get their money back if they could not build the first chart in 15 minutes. That helped him simplify the on-boarding process and make it very easy for his users.
He was a one person company for a long time and handled everything from developing the product, documenting it to doing customer support.

Documentation

Pallav’s father is an author of 15 books on accounting and that gave him a strong foundation to document his product very well. This was particularly important since his target audience was developers who needed good documentation to use the product.

Pallav himself wrote 3000 to 4000 pages of documentation and still reviews every word that is added by his team.
Documenting the product gave him key insights as a user and helped him refine and debug the product.
Every time someone asks a question. His team is forced to answer using a public document. This made sure that the same question did not get asked again and also created a good knowledge base for his product.
He learned from his father on how to structure documentation (with headings, sub-headings etc) so that the reader can quickly find out the relevant sections to read.

There is another interesting anecdote. jQuery was a late entrant to javascript libraries and according to its creator John Resig, it was because it was the first one that was properly documented.

Marketing and First Impressions

Pallav’s hypothesis is that all sales / conversions are driven by “Fear” or “Greed” and products must highlight these in their marketing copy, specially the headling. He even asked all of us the rephrase the core message of our product to appeal to one of these emotions. I had strong reservations on whether this was correct and if this lead too to much focus on top of the sales funnel (new visitors). Either way, the group seemed convinced. While I thought it went went with Pallav’s aggressive and “switched-on” approach, I have my doubts if it works for all kinds of products. Products have the personalities of their founders embedded in them, and I feel its best to stick with the approach that goes best with the philosophy of the product and the creator.

Pallav also referred Kevin Hale’s analogy of building a customer relationship like a marriage and how the first visit of a customer on the website is like dating. For more on this, I would recommend Kevin Hale’s enlightening talks on the matter (later!).

Some other interesting points that were discussed were:

Classify your traffic into different personas. For Fusion Chart, it is the Developer, Product Manager and Designer.
Deeply understand each persona. Appreciate that they are overloaded with information and identify openings in their daily routines where you can reach them.
For security startups, a weekly roundup of major reported breaches worked well when sent at 8.30 in the morning.
Online marketing has evolved from “carpet bombing” to “sniper”. Audience have to be segmented and messages have to be finely targeted.
It is important to reach the users main Inbox and not the promotions box. So keep the mail personal and do not add an unsubscribe link.
Pallav showed how he used WebEngage for conducting surveys on their visitors and how he tested his hypothesis. For example, his survey would ask if a visitor intends to pay for the product on offer or select an open source alternative. Based on the feedback, Pallav said he would change the marketing copy.
He also used VWO for A/B testing and showed us an example on which one of “HTML5 Charting” or “Javascript Charting” resonated more for the user.
Asking feedback from customers who had evaluated a product was also important. A simple email with the subject “5 minutes of your time for 5 questions” gives Pallav great customer insight.
He said he tests all kinds of hypotheses and keeps experimenting on the message. Examples:
1. Do users like a simple or complex layout
2. How many fields should a form have
3. What colour a button should have

Content Marketing

We spent a whole bunch of time discussing and sharing great insights on Content Marketing. Sahil Parikh of BrightPod.com shared his experiences in content marketing. He has built a product for the marketing community and started a blog with the purpose of reaching out to this community. It took him six months of building the blog before he saw some returns. He has hired two content writers and produces 3 to 4 blog posts a week. He shared that aggressive content marketing teams target producing one post a day. He also reached out to Indian authors on popular blogs like ZDNet and TheNextWeb and pitched the Indian product angle that got him attention. Sandeep Todi of Emportant.com shared that he bumped into a content writer for SiteHR, a popular HR portal and is how working with her to build content for his product.

Content marketing seemed like a favorite of strategy of a Lean Sales team but again it boils down to execution. It is very hard to product high quality content and as more and more people start getting good at it, the bar keeps on increasing.

Some content ideas / anecdotes shared were:

Interview / Talk Show Series: Publish interviews with customers and thought leaders in the domain
Use big brands in your blog posts. Examples from Fusion Charts:
1. How Unilever / Walmart / P&G uses data visualization
Act on industry events:
1. Security Breaches
2. Flipkart Billion Day flop
3. Home Depot breach
“News Jacking” – Connect popular news items to your product.
1. GangamStyle in numbers
2. Infographics on FIFA World Cup
3. 10 infographics on Fitness Apps
Put customer logos on your site, content unless the customer objects. Don’t mention it in your contract or it will trigger a red flag.
Allow your site content to be reproduced.
Curate, collate good content from other site and credit the original author.
Get quotes from industry influencers, the will also ReTweet your content.
Speed is of essence. Create great content quicly (yeah right!).
Publish whitepapers. They are popular with higher management.

Sales Funnel

Pallav walked us through the various parts of the sales funnel.

[From his slides]

Awareness (ads, blog, event, word-of-mouth…)
Initial Visit
1. Different channels / different ROI
2. Best channels = low cost, high ROI
Engagement
1. Trial, case study, whitepaper, anything that could give you email AND other information
Nurturing
1. Mix of product, marketing and sales
2. Sales job: get the customer on the call and do aggressive follow up
Closing
1. Handover from sales to client success.
2. Repeat business through subscriptions, up-sells or cross-sells.

Pricing

There was a very heated discussion on pricing. Pallav was of the mainstream industry opinion that price is a reflection of value. The higher the price, the better the quality of customers and revenue. There was a discussion on discounts and how in high touch sales, discounts are a bane. Here Pallav shared that adding artificial constraints to negotiate. For example, you can extend the support by 3 months instead of giving a discount, or increase the number of servers etc.

Open Source

There was some resistance and suspicion from the group in discussing this and understandably so because of the nature of the software products business that depends on Intellectual Property Rights. We did touch upon this briefly and why based on our (ERPNext) experience we see open source as a great way to not only reach out a new generation of users but also believe in an alternative way of doing business.

Conclusion

It was great to learn from Pallav, and we thank him for sharing so many suggestions and learnings. Also a big thanks to him for openly sharing specific insights and walking us through an A/B test or testing an hypothesis. This is also a great initiative by Avinash Raghava and iSPIRT, the think-tank/lobby group for Software Products to bring together entrepreneurs so that they can share tips and build networks. It would have been a bit better if there was more unstructured time so that there would be better interaction between the group, to build deeper relationships between the founders. Also a big thank you to FreeCharge.in for hosting the event and providing lunch.

Finally what really matters is execution. For me the biggest takeaway was that the product is a reflection of the creator / founder and it was important that the founders are obsessed with each detail of the product and its quality and also work with the energy that is required to do so much work. For that it is important that they see success early on as Pallav did and the once they are on to something they make sure that they do not lose it.

Specifically, for me it reminded me that its time to go back to fixing the documentation!

16/10/201416/10/2014

3 Reasons Why Start-ups Should Invest in Content Marketing

Today, a stream of regular and engaging content can get people talking about any organization.

While this is definitely good news for start-ups, the reality is that they often don’t have the time, resources or know-how to turn their organization into a lean, mean content marketing machine. Just like that, developing content often gets relegated to the bottom of the team’s to-do list, or simply isn’t a priority at all. However, the cost of missing out on the content marketing game is high: start-ups are essentially forgoing an opportunity to attract customers. In fact, The Content Marketing Institute says “the idea of content marketing is to attract and retain customers by creating and curating relevant and valuable content.”

Here are three reasons how content marketing can help your emerging organization succeed:

Announce your existence and develop brand recognition

A successful, responsive and targeted content marketing strategy can help an emerging organization capture a prospect’s attention even when the market is crowded with bigger and more established names. Valuable and unique content – and this could be anything from a white paper to a video – is always appreciated in the form of shares, likes, retweets and/or comments. You can even repurpose long-form content into social media content for Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms. This goes a long way in establishing your organization’s presence online.

Encourage and enable product usage

A key objective for many start-ups today is to of course attract more customers, but also get existing users to actually use the product. After all, if a user sees value in the product then there’s a higher chance they’ll talk about online and in turn influence more people to try the product out. Quality content that’s sent out on a regular basis can help users make optimum use of the product’s features and improve their overall experience. As an agile start-up, consider creating Vine videos on your mobile devices — you can capture great testimonials and product reviews. You can also record conversations and monologues, if you’d rather not write all the time.

Understand market requirements and act as a funnel for ideas

Response to your organization’s content can give you a clear idea of what your target audience feels about relevant issues, the industry they operate in and their wish-list for the future. While actually eliciting a response may take some time, the end goal is worth it: you’ve got an active “idea catcher” for future product enhancement and new product ideas! Consider creating LinkedIn forums about topics that are related to your start-up, and engage in conversations with your target audience

It’s essential that start-ups focus on getting the right content marketing strategy into place, and this involves understanding your target customer, the right content “tone of voice” and more. If you’d like to understand how emerging organizations like yours can leverage a successful content marketing strategy to drive brand awareness, click here to download this free eBook titled “How to propel start-up growth with content” by Yorke Communications.

03/06/201330/05/2013

How to get your product’s content marketing juggernaut in place

Congratulations, you have just started up. It has taken so long to get here – you’ve worked hard, saved up, staved away every comfort, and your product is out, garnering rave reviews. Now you turn to the other important stuff you need to do – get your product in front of your market. It’s time for the marketing and selling push in a startup.

And this is when you know you have to set up a content marketing effort. You know it costs less, brings in way more, and can contribute to branding in an unimaginable way.

But how and where do you start?

I’ll try to answer that.

When I started out, content marketing was just about catching fire as a viable marketing channel. The field was nascent (and in many ways, still is) and everything we have learned about it, we have learned by doing. I’ve tried to make a small guide out of what we’ve learned.

The two towers of content marketing

There are two separate efforts involved in content marketing. I call them the two towers. One of them is of course creating the content that will educate the market and convince people to buy your product. This is your first challenge. The other is getting it in front of them, what we call ‘distribution’. Even if you have written and designed amazing content, it’ll only be valuable if your audience reads it. Your second challenge lies in grabbing the eyeballs that will translate into greenbacks.

Wading in, then.

The first tower – content

1. Blog
2. Whitepapers
3. Case Studies
4. E-Books
5. In-product help texts
6. Infographics
7. Videos
8. Presentations

The list I have compiled above is just a snapshot of the things you can do. Platforms and formats abound for people who want to get more creative and tell stories in a new way. But to get started, the list above will do very well. For any B2B product, educating the customer about what your product can do and what your product can do better than others is the aim, and all the content generated should be tailored around specific takeaways for the audience.

I still believe in the blog as the key channel for any startup. A few months after my CEO Girish Mathrubootham had started up Freshdesk, he wrote a post on the Freshdesk Blog about how a Hacker News comment had been his inspiration to quit his job and start a company. The post went viral, people across the world read it, shared it, and were inspired by it. It brought us recognition on a scale we hadn’t even imagined. And this was when we didn’t even have a marketing plan in place. It is just not about the customers the blog brings as well; a good blog is a good branding statement. The first thing that most people look at when they reach your site is the blog. It just has to be amazing.

All of the rest come under the banner of educational informational content. Make it a point to tailor content to different stages of the sales cycle and deliver it when the customer has the most need for it. For example, when a customer is trialling your product, make sure he gets in-product help texts to help him navigate the newness of it. You can send him white-papers comparing your product with your competitors and tell him all the reasons he needs to choose you. You can send him videos showing him little tips and tricks in the product that makes his work easier. You get the point.

Now on to the trickier part of the equation.

The second tower – distribution

1. SEO
2. Social
3. The Community

Anyone getting into the Content Marketing equation should understand this first – one thing you do will feed into the other.

Now that you have created the stuff you think your audience will like, you need to get it to them.

Basic SEO is imperative. This is the most targeted form of inbound marketing there is. If you do not deliver content to the people who are actually looking for it, you might as well pack up and leave. And make no mistake about it, this is grunt work. You have to get down, get your hands dirty, pick through tags, metatags, best practices, measure impact, rinse, repeat. Use a tool like Scribe. Think keywords, SEO pages, landing pages and more.

This should get you started.

Now to the social web. Your social presence is your admit card to the masses. You now have access to people all over the world who are looking for and consuming information just like what you are creating and some of them are ready to open their wallets for the product you have made if it is going to give them any value. But again, it is not something to be totally enthralled by. The worst thing you can do is consciously try to ‘go’ viral. Get on the social platforms that make sense for your business, and build a consistent and interesting presence. Share stuff that your followers are interested in, and not just what you create. Build a social community. This will give you credibility as well as an audience that wants to listen to what to have to say.

For a product, it is sometimes better to build communities by themselves. One way to do this is like how Dropbox does it, forging a community by giving users incentives to evangelize the product in exchange for more space. This is a great way to growth-hack, if your product is something as inherently social as Dropbox. But for other ‘normal’ products, several support tools let you build your own community, including Freshdesk. When you let customers talk to each other, put forth new ideas for your product, vote on new features, share tips and tricks and so on, what you have is an engaged community that co-owns your product, has a stake in it becoming better and even more amazing, and will go out of their way to help you make it so. This community will be the greatest pack of evangelists you’ll ever have, and your content will be shared and trumpeted by them, thereby reaching audiences far beyond what you’ll be able to reach yourself.

I was talking to my boss Vikram last night, and standing on the balcony of our 7th floor office, he told me about how “There is no shortcut to slogging. You just have to. Only then will anything worth learning be learnt.”

An so it is with Content Marketing. To get better at it, you need to put in your hours, grind it out, make mistakes, learn.

So that is what I urge you to do. Start.

08/03/201308/03/2013

Digital Marketing for the B2B Landscape

The B2B buying process has undergone a transformation, and so has the B2B customer. Let’s roll the clock back in time. Information about your company, services, products and solutions was not readily available, or if it was, then not readily accessible. The sales representatives were the first touch points for your customers to gather any information about your services, and for your company to gather information about them and generate leads.

This was a time when salespeople were ‘actively’ trying to sell products and services to potential customers, which is otherwise known as ‘interruption marketing’. Traditional marketing tactics like direct mail, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc. were the means to reach out to prospects. And there was no way to gauge the interest of your target audience in your offerings.

Now let’s come back to the present. Customers are no longer waiting for your salesperson to ring the door bell, figuratively speaking. With the emergence of digital technologies came information abundance, and with it a highly informed B2B buyer. The internet, social media and other digital platforms have overwhelmed the target audience with information with a multitude of options and competitive offerings to consider. While earlier, the objective was to capture your prospects’ attention, the objective now is to focus the attention towards your company. The changing B2B landscape has thus necessitated a change in the tactics for marketers, and this is where digital marketing comes into the picture.

Take a look at the modern B2B customer. According to the Marketing Leadership Council, on average, customers progress 60% of the way through the purchase decision-making process before engaging a sales-rep. 78% of B2B buyers start their research with online search (Eloqua) and 33% of global B2B buyers use social media to engage with their vendors (Social media B2B). These statistics clearly show the upending of the customer’s role in the sales cycle.

The role of digital marketing is to address this shift in the sales process by reaching the target audience in the right stages. The one common thread running through the transformation is building relationships. How well marketers build strong digital relationships with the customer base can impact the success of the marketing objectives. Companies have thus modified their B2B marketing strategies to include the digital channels and platforms like email, social media, content marketing, etc. to improve the relationship-building process, establish a strong brand presence and drive lead generation and nurturing.

Digital Marketing helps marketers meet major marketing objectives that they face in a B2B landscape.

Strong brand presence: By reaching the target audience early on in the sales cycle with a focused and relevant approach, digital marketing helps establish a strong brand presence with the audience. Content marketing creates a strong impact by catering to the information needs of the customers throughout the entire sales process and drives the demand generation for the products and services.

Communication Framework: Gone are the days when marketers struggled to reach and educate your prospects with relevant information. Digital Marketing creates a communication framework through multiple options like email, websites, search engines and social media which expand the reach and at the same time, allow companies to establish communities where potential customers interact among themselves and with the company easily.

Lead Generation and Nurturing: By syndicating content and information across a variety of digital channels and networks, lead generation can be improved. Digital marketing enables implementing highly relevant and focused targeting for the campaigns which ensures that the number of ‘relevant’ leads goes up. Providing interesting educational content for these prospects can build a brand recall and product preference much before the buy stage.

Analytics and ROI: The challenge with traditional marketing tactics is a lack of, or minimal, scope for analytics and measuring the Return of Investment. Digital Marketing provides actionable, updated insights for marketers on their initiatives which allow them to fine tune and optimize them. It also enables the measurement of ROI for each initiative to evaluate which of them work at any specific time and make the marketing plans more effective.

With more innovations and technologies in the future, more and more companies are adopting digital marketing as a significant part of the marketing blueprint. Digital is indeed the future!

13/02/201308/03/2013

Content Generation – The 10 commandments

Content Marketing is increasingly becoming a key strategy for product marketers. With prospects and customers ceasing to be passive and, on the contrary, actively gathering information, comparing product offerings and alternatives, product marketers are now turning to content marketing as a key strategy for their communication operations.

The purpose of Content Marketing is to create a scenario where your customers and prospects interact, react, engage and market on their own. Instead of publishing self-proclaiming ads, the focus has now shifted to providing content that the target audience finds relevant and resourceful.

The key question then is how to ensure you publish relevant and resourceful content for your target audience. The basis for any content marketing strategy is the content itself, and how you shape and mould your content can define your success. The following 10 Commandments of Content Generation will serve as an effective roadmap for your content marketing success

YOUR CONTENT SHALL NOT BE PROMOTIONAL
Your prospects don’t want to read self-promotional messages all the time. The key to winning your target audience over is building credibility and creating content that matters to readers.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE ORIGINAL
It does not matter how perfect you think your content is. The success lies in the appeal. The key to building brands and winning fans in the long term is creating content that is original, which is unique.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE RELEVANT
The content you create should be based on what your prospects are interested in and what is the most relevant in their space. Identify industry-relevant subject matter and popular topics before you create content.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE STRUCTURED
Your content needs a blueprint. Structure your message first and then create the content. Your prospects demand more than a bunch of loosely related words from you.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE DIVERSIFIED
Your prospects consume content in various forms – text, pictures, videos, etc. Your content must not be restricted to a single type. Instead, diversify your content to keep the interest high.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL CARRY A THEME
What message are you trying to push to your audience? Your content should carry an underlying theme that is aligned to your end objectives and goals.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL ADDRESS NEEDS
Most of your prospects and customers want to read things that benefit them. Your display of a deep understanding of the challenges they face can elevate your target audience from being interested readers to a highly engaged audience.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE EASY TO UNDERSTAND
The content, when it reaches your prospects and customers, must be easy to understand. If your target audience is forced to make an effort, there’s very little chance that they’ll go through your content till the end.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE ENGAGING
The aim of your content generation is to attract and sustain the interest of your customers and prospects. Rather than making it one-directional, make your content engaging by including calls-to-action in your content – comment, subscribe, share, register, etc. Customer communication management should be a priority.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE BACKED BY PROOF
In today’s world, information is just a step away to be found and verified. Publishing content without enough proof can backfire as you may end up losing the credibility you built. You should use information, stats, reports and trends to back your content.