Episode Summary
There’s a trend with B2B SaaS companies: the desire to become media companies.
Why is this a trend? And how can these companies actually operate as a media company?
In this episode of Recorded Content, Justin Brown explores the ins and outs of this topic, including the challenges and opportunities involved.
Let’s face it: advertising can be expensive, and not everyone has the funds to experiment and build up a customer base that way. So that’s where content creation comes in to the picture.
But, as Justin points out, it takes more than a few blog posts to establish yourself as a media company.
Featured Co-Founder
- Name: Justin Brown
- What he does: He's the co-founder of Motion.
- Company: Motion
- Noteworthy: Justin is also the co-host of the Recorded Content podcast.
Key Insights
- Balance is the keyword in shaping your company as a media company. As a result, B2B SaaS businesses, primarily early-stage, use different channels to create and distribute content to deepen the conversation with prospects and build trust and credibility, ensuring additional revenue streams. ''If you don't have a ton of money to spend on ads, and you have to find your buyers, how are you going to do that? You're going to talk to people that would probably resonate from listening to conversations. [...] It'll be very interesting to see what the future of that looks like as every brand tries to have a better balance between their organic and paid growth,” explains Melissa Rosenthal of ClickUp.
- Your content strategy changes as your operations grow. Therefore, don't pressure yourself into copying other companies' content strategies. You don't have the same resources, experience, business maturity, and objectives. Remember, a media company doesn't grow overnight. But as long as you are consistent and open to experimenting, you'll find your content marketing success formula. ''Things happen at the right time when they're supposed to. You might not have a big enough audience; you might not have enough contributors. And so, the unlocks that happen later are because those things start to grow, change, or evolve; that's when the unlocks have happened. So it's tough to say 'I wish we were doing this earlier' because we couldn't,'' says John Bonini, the marketing director at Databox.
- Find one path to your customers' hearts. In other words, first determine where your target audience is, their challenges, and how you can help them find solutions. Then, create content that provides those solutions, and distribute it on their preferred platforms. ''Make educated decisions on the top two or three opportunities in the market for you right now. From there, I would recommend having a couple of experiments running to figure out what are the positive signals in one channel that I'm looking for, which could be, for me, on LinkedIn. [...] So you need to be able to shift what you're looking for at the beginning to achieve the positive signals, which are the early indicators, which would then push you to say, 'Okay, for right now, LinkedIn is working, I'm going to push these other two to the side,' which for me was podcast and Instagram,'' explains Chris Walker, the CEO of Refine Labs.
Episode Highlights
The Reasons SaaS Companies Want to Become Media Companies
”If you’re a small SaaS business that doesn’t have a huge cash infusion, how are you going to market? You have to become a media company. You have to create content. And that extends way past just creating a blog.
A media company encompasses a lot. It can encompass your entire community strategy, social strategy, content creation strategy, and any other things you’re doing internally to get your brand out there. […]
But it makes a lot of sense having that content strategy or media strategy for community-led,” says Melissa Rosenthal, the chief creative officer at ClickUp.
Becoming a Media Company
”The theme here is, and will continue to be, that there isn’t a right or wrong answer. You need to find out what works for your organization and what you can do that you can stay consistent with and execute over long periods of time regularly.
For you, it may be a once-per-quarter webinar, a monthly long-form blog post, or an every-other-week podcast. You also need to understand how and where your audience is consuming their content and how you can get it out in front of them,” says Justin.
Still, You Must Determine Whether Content Marketing Is a Viable Strategy in Your Industry
”The thing you want to do is, as efficiently as possible, sell something with content marketing. So, in that case, we’d probably do like a bit of bottom-of-funnel content. What is the keyword closest to the problem you solve, or is there a particular sales conversation that your sales reps are having over and over again? We can write a bit of content to make that conversation compelling, a bit more interesting, and a bit more credible.
And then, beyond that, you start unlocking the higher levels of the hierarchy. So maybe you want loads of SEO traffic, but your domain authority is terrible. You’re a brand new company. You can’t rank for anything because you’ve got five backlinks to your site.
So instead of writing a bunch of SEO content, which is probably not going to get many backlinks, […] you should pick that one goal and go as directly and as hard for it as you can, and create content specifically to build links,” explains Ryan Law, the VP of Content at Animalz.
