Questions around building a team for Content Creation.
Content creation across blogs, website copy, social posts, ad copies etc. is very critical to how your brand is perceived & you take a positioning.
We have tried with folks to write copy but often then not I have found it of average / poor quality. So, right now I along with one in-house marketer do the heavy lifting with discipline.
Thoughts on :
Where to look for good content creators ? Some good qualities to do a check when interviewing them ?
Can this be outsourced or shd be build in-house capabilities ?
Happy to hear your thoughts on this role of Content Marketer.
Hi Ravi - for identifying where your prospects hang out, Iād start with either a survey or a series of interviews. Try to get job titles, language your audience uses to describe themselves, things they regularly talk about WRT their work, etc. You can then use that to search https://sparktoro.com for things that make sense. E.G. I tried a search for āhidden gemā social accounts followed by people who use the word āpublisherā in their profile/bio:
You can also try doing this manually by taking a list of your customers/prospects emails and sending them through a service like Clearbit or FullContact to get their social URLs and then analyzing what they follow/read/watch/link-to/etc. SparkToro has a āCustom Audiencesā feature that does this, but if youāre long on engineering talent and short on budget, you can also do it yourself.
As to creating the watering hole vs. going to others, Iād think about opportunity cost, ROI, and timeframe ā how long do you have to build that community/watering hole? If itās a few years, Iād definitely go for it. If you need faster results, I might do more of the digital PR approach and leverage other peopleās platforms for a while.
In terms of self-service vs. servicesā¦ Itās a tough battle, especially in areas where customers are used to having managed services. Thatās often not because products lack the right features or ability to self-onboard, but rather because folks want a person or team they can talk to and interface with. As much as self-service web hosting and publishing platforms have become popular, thereās still a lot of demand and need for people help. I might consider whether you can maintain a long-term hybrid model that doesnāt exclude customers who need that human touch.
Hi Vivek - I think it needs to A) start from the top (you and your fellow founders/execs), B) be recognized and rewarded, not punished (as it is in most orgs), and C) amplified internally and externally on a regular basis (i.e. call out folks whoāve been candid and vulnerable, talk about what makes their contributions such, but only do it with their permission). Hope that helps!
Hi Abhi - Iād recruit from ex-journalists and fiction writers. Thereās a ton of folks in those worlds struggling and out of work, but they donāt often position themselves or pursue more technical and content-marketing sorts of roles. The other thing Iād do is make sure your requests on topics and focus arenāt so boring and stale as to drive people away. Many marketers think they need to write on certain topics for SEO or keyword matchingā¦ Let your writers go beyond that stuff, be creative, be inventive, choose their own (relevant) topics, and youāll attract far better candidates.
And yes! This is definitely something you can outsource. Thereās loads of great copywriting firms and contractors out there, and almost all provide samples you can read and determine fit from.
Things Iād do: gain a deep understanding of your customers, their pain points, their interests, what they talk about, read, watch, listen-to, follow, and engage-with. Go find publications that resonate with them and figure out why. Then determine whatās missing ā whatās not being done well that IS of interest to them.
As for what to avoid: donāt assume you can build a content marketing engine quickly. Itās minimum 6-9 months to see ROI. Be prepared for that, and donāt get frustrated if your first few months are crickets while youāre trying to figure it out.
Biggest advantage of being non-VC backed: You donāt have to only target billion dollar markets or huge growth opportunities. You can do things that donāt scale. You can do things with lower margins. You can make incremental (instead of only exponential) progress and reap the rewards. You can invest in serendipitous, hard-to-measure channels. You can do things you LIKE to do, instead of only things that maximize investor returns. You can focus on surviving for a long time, instead of growing as fast as possible no matter the cost. All of these are huge advantages.
Early-stage SaaS businesses with impressive marketingā¦ unfortunately, I donāt maintain a list. Off the top of my head, Iāve liked stuff from https://textio.com, https://checkmyads.com, https://meetedgar.com/, and others I canāt currently find/recall (sorry!)
Thanks for taking the time to address all the questions so thoughtfully!
Whatās immediately evident in the questions here is how much your work has informed and shaped the way founders think about so many different aspects of starting up.
Today, too, each response gleams with years of insight. But I guess that just partly explains why your work has made mattered so much over the years. The other half is, of course, how personal and earnest itās been all along. This lovely reflection is but one example:
All that said, the one thing I do miss from the early years of Mozā¦ the excitement. The low lows arenāt there, but neither are the high highs. If weād achieved at Moz what we have in SparkToroās first 6 months, Iād be jubilant, elated, bouncing-off-my-chairā¦ I do kinda wish I could still feel that way about hitting business goals. Now itās more a sense of relief and āOK, got that done, time for the next thing.
Thank, again, for joining us and sharing your lessons so generously. Hope to have you join us for another session in the future!
Iād love to hear why you took funding at all for SparkToro. I assumed you would have done well out of Moz and been able to roll it into the next venture!
What was the thinking behind going after funding at all?
Edit: Oops looks like I was too late. I was waiting for my Relay invite
Hi Jimmy - no worries! Short answer is no, I did not do well out of Moz. Have a few hundred thousand in savings, but thatās it. Without an exit, and with no buyer for the stock, thereās no path to a financial exit, so all that stock is worth something on paper, but not IRL.
That said, SparkToroās funding was also a form of validation for us AND, even more importantly, I wanted to pave the road for alternative kinds of funding for startups outside the classic venture model. Fingers crossed, if we prove successful with SparkToro, more investors will consider making investments this way (and more startups will think about fundraising this way, too).
Damn man Iām sorry to hear that. And thank you for your honesty. I hope in the future something changes for you there.
Thatās one hell of a funding model, especially the āwe must first return all of our investorsā capital via profit distributionsā. Very cool way of looking after the people that invest.
Makes me think one day Iād like to be an investor in something like that.
Congrats Rand and hope Sparktoro goes well. Iām a paying user and have found some pretty cool insights so far
Thanks, Rand! Makes sense. From what Iāve learned, this intersection is difficult to achieve but definitely possible by staying very close to the customer problems and finding the mediums through which you can reach your customers. And I feel itās also hard to identify/cultivate if a founder is attempting something for the first time. But youāre right. āDry analysis of opportunity vs. returns canāt compete with actual desire to invest.ā Experimenting to get to this personal alignment can be so important in the early stages as the founder is the marketer.
Thanks for sharing that, Rand!
I love this:
āThe low lows arenāt there, but neither are the high highs.ā
Those first, close encounters with uncertainty do produce a unique combination of emotional toll and purpose. The former dominating the latter, mostly. Not something one ever forgets.
Thanks a lot for taking time to responding to all the questions. Cheers - Rajaraman.
