In this presentation for This Week in Startups, I tell startups to not have a blog but rather to focus on bigger pieces of content that they can engineer to repeatedly drive results.

1. Engineering Content at a
Growth Startup
John Doherty
Founder, GetCredo.com

2. You’re trying to hit escape velocity
You can’t do this with a
blog.
Don’t have a blog (unless
you love to write).
But you can engineer your
way to scalable content
success as long as you find
the right story.

3. You’re a founder not a marketer
You likely don’t have a pre-built audience for your startup. Most
founders don’t.You know how to code or how to do sales, but you’re
not a writer.
And that’s ok.
You probably hear marketers talking all the time about “content
marketing”, but you’re not a writer.You’re technical.
It’s time to be a marketing technologist.

4. TechnologistAs A Marketer (TAAM)
Increasingly, startup marketing is about
tying together your different systems to
make them work together.
You can tie together your data
aggregation, publishing, and (some)
promotion to work for you
automatically.
But you must tell a story to make it
work.
Ask what your
audience
doesn’t know
Data
collection
Data analysis
Answer
questions for
your audience
Scalable
marketing
(email, SEO,
social)
Adjust as
needed
Automate
Start here

5. What stories can you tell?
Every industry has
interesting stories to
tell. Start with keyword
research to identify
questions asked.
Pro tip: you don’t have
to use your own data
either.

6. What stories can you tell?
It also doesn’t have to
look pretty at first, though
that never hurts.
This piece took two weeks
of work (one data scientist
and received 12 sites
linking to it.
It was built inTableau,
Excel, and published on
our own CMS. Outreach
via email marketing and
PR.

7. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time.
My PR manager and I
launched this in 3 hours
the day House of Cards
Season 3 came out. Did
some outreach and got
these links.

8. Start Small,Then Scale
Zillow’s housing reports
started with just their
top metros. Now they
do them automatically
every month for pretty
much every major
market.
HungryHouse in the UK
is a startup doing a
version of this, though
they could take it further
and do it by year to
make it pop more.

9. Automate It
Baremetrics is analytics
for Stripe.They realized
that Buffer wanted to
make their metrics
public, so they let
companies start
showing them publicly.
This is totally
automated and has a
bunch of links to it.

10. (Semi)AutomateThe Marketing
New Data Each
Month
Send
automatically to
email list (via
Mandrill/SendGrid
/email provider of
choice)
Outreach via PR
and bloggers
Track social
metrics via
BuzzSumo
Adjust as needed
You can semi-automate
your marketing by
building email lists that
get emailed via
SendGrid/Mandrill when
data updates (Glassdoor
does this), automatically
sharing on social media a
few times (via Buffer or
MeetEdgar), automatically
put emails gathered in FB
Custom Audiences, and so
much more.

11. Thanks.
John Doherty
Founder, GetCredo.com
Marketer, husband, outdoorsman,
Labrador owner.