How We Built a Content Marketing Strategy on a Shoestring Budget
By Amanda Maksymiw, Marketing Associate, OpenView Venture Partners, Boston, Mass.
I work for OpenView Venture Partners, a venture capital firm in Boston that invests in Internet software companies. We look for companies in the expansion stage, bringing in $1 million to $6 million in revenue per quarter.
We've only been around for five years. Up until last year, we didn't do much in the way of marketing ourselves -- we were more focused on recruiting companies and introducing them to OpenView on an individual basis. But then we realized that if we wanted to round out our portfolio and grow more aggressively, we were going to need to raise our profile.
The thing is, you can't just market a VC firm the way you market other companies -- unless you want to deal with an onslaught of half-baked business pitches. You really need to plug into the right community of entrepreneurs. So last year we threw all of our weight behind a different strategy: Turn our website into a source for startup advice, and in the process reach the kind of founders we want to work with.
The only problem: Our three-person marketing team, which includes myself, Corey O'Loughlin, and Devon Warwick, has to publish a boatload of high-quality content on a budget of less than $5,000 a month. Here's how we've made it work.
Starting slow
Our founder Scott Maxwell got hooked on content marketing when he read the book "Get Content, Get Customers." Then he passed the book around to the team, and we got hooked on it, too. So we brought in one of the authors and other industry experts to start thinking about how we might launch a content strategy of our own. The goal is to build your reputation by giving away your expertise for free.
A couple of weeks later, our team was tasked with getting our website loaded with good content. All three of us are under 30. I think our relative inexperience has been more of an asset than a liability, since we don't have pre-existing notions of how this process should work.
We launched last year starting with baby steps. We launched the corporate blog, and asked each of our 20 OpenView employees to write a post once a week. That led us to more content ideas, including monthly case studies on our portfolio companies. Still, we knew we could do more to reach our target audience of technology firm CEOs and managers. We just needed to create more content... but it was still just the three of us.
Ramping up with outside help
We decided to focus our efforts on three main channels of content: OpenView Labs, a resource site for managers of tech companies; a corporate blog, where we share our opinions; and the main OpenView site.
We also established a few monthly publishing goals:
- One case study or research report
- 25 articles
- About 200 summaries of articles from elsewhere on the Web
- Four podcasts
- Around 25 videos
Spreading the word
It's a lot of work to keep churning out such a high volume of content every month, but we're beginning the effects in Web traffic: Our main site gets around 8,000 visitors a month -- compared to less than half that before we launched these efforts -- and the blog receives over 12,000 visitors a month. One of every five who go to blog click over to the main site, and many sign up for our newsletter, which now has over 5,000 subscribers.
We don't yet have a success story of recruiting a portfolio company through our content marketing efforts, but we're getting a lot more inbound requests from companies who are interested in speaking with us. In a field like ours, it's difficult to calculate a return on investment in financial terms, but we know that our efforts have significantly raised our brand awareness. A year ago, no one knew who we were. Now, when we speak with CEOs, we find that they've already heard of us and they get what we're about.
Amanda Maksymiw blogs as The Open Marketer on OpenView's corporate blog.
-- As told to Kathryn Hawkins
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