Six tips on how brands can use content marketing to sell to startup founders

Does your company sell products or services to startups? Content marketing plays a crucial role in helping brands create awareness, demonstrate expertise and build trust. It’s one of the most effective marketing tools to reach founders and their teams.

Today’s buying journeys involve lots of touch points. Selling to startup founders is no different. Writing articles that answer their questions and challenges in a way that resonates can play a powerful role in your marketing funnel.

Inkwell specialises in creating educational content for startups, writing 40,000 words a month for brands ranging from Osome and Sage to Innovate UK and Enterprise Nation. We also run the national startup competition The Pitch.

Here are some of the key things we’ve learnt from our work.

1. Break your audience down by company size

SMEs are companies with zero to 250 employees. That’s a large band containing a hugely disparate range of companies: having a startup idea or running a company with no employees is a world away from being the CEO of a company with 200 staff. 

Being specific about the size of the companies you’re marketing to, normally in terms of turnover and employee count, allows you to be much more specific about the content you create – and makes it more likely to perform. 

If you want to sense check your personas, we’ve written a guide to the types of challenges different parts of the SME audience face.

2. Develop audience-led content strategies 

Content marketing strategies are normally built around keyword research. Brands want to understand what potential customers are searching for and create content to answer this intent. That’s an important part of the planning process, but it doesn’t give you the whole picture. 

We advocate audience-led content marketing strategies. In simple terms, that means talking to potential customers to gain a better understanding of their challenges. The findings can then be leveraged to develop content themes and articles. This is particularly important for top and middle of the funnel content.

Keeping an eye on small business communities like UK Business Forums is a useful way to build your understanding.

3. Develop a tone of voice that resonates

The tone of voice you use and the visual elements of the brand you develop make a big difference to engagement levels. 

The great thing about writing content for startup founders is that it’s a fun, inspiring group of people. The better your tone of voice reflects this, the greater cut-through you’re going to get and the easier it will be to build trust.  

Read our guide to developing tone of voice guidelines for more ideas.

4. Feature founders in your content

Including quotes, photos and videos of startup founders is a powerful way to improve engagement. It helps the audience identify with your content and adds colour. Video also helps keep people engaged and can make your content more accessible.

The articles we write for Inkwell’s startup programme The Pitch often include short video interviews. For example, our Sage-sponsored guide to staying healthy when you’re running a side hustle received 1.3k page views and a dwell time of 3:05, achieving a good balance of reach and engagement (the article was popular and people that viewed the post are taking the time to read it).

5. Leverage community building

Community building has become more prevalent in B2B marketing, particularly when it comes to small business owners. For brands, that can mean partnering with existing communities to raise brand awareness or building their own.

Building a community from scratch is tough. If you’re considering going down that route, it’s important to be conscious of the resources needed to seed and grow a vibrant community. But the benefits are huge: you’re building an engaged pool of prospects.

Another option is to support existing communities. There are lots of opportunities to sponsor events or online communities. For example, small business community UK Business Forums has worked with brands like Tide and ANNA Money, which sponsor content and display advertising.

As with creating your own content, the key is to make sure the content answers the audience’s challenges and has the right tone of voice. Treat these campaigns as top-of-funnel activity and don’t fall into the trap of shoehorning sales messaging where it’s not appropriate. There is a time and place. 

Please get in touch with our team if you’re interested in exploring either of these options.

6. Not everything has to be written for search

To get the highest ROI from content marketing, you can feel obliged to make sure every piece of content is as search engine optimised as possible. 

SEO is critical. However, content can feel wooden and will perform poorly when hitting a series of SEO criteria becomes more important than creating something of genuine value. This often happens when SEO or performance marketing teams play a central role in content strategy.

There’s a balance to be struck here. It helps to ask yourself whether the content is enjoyable to read from start to finish? And, does it provide something new and valuable for your audience?

Google’s recent helpful content update makes this more important than ever because it encourages websites to “focus on people-first content” where visitors feel they've had a satisfying experience.

Inkwell supports brands with content marketing strategy and creation. If you’re interested in talking to us about our work and how we might help you achieve your marketing goals, please get in touch.