Content Marketing 101: For Lean and Agile Teams (+ Prologue)

Growing businesses, such as SaaS startups, usually struggle to dedicate appropriate resources for content marketing. This, for many reasons, is an unavoidable problem with serious consequences because content is marketing.

Hence, being an engineer who loves to solve problems, I decided to write a handbook for those lean teams in startups to establish a powerful content creation and distribution workflow.

And it can be done by a one-man team.

Obviously, the one man should be skilled to the bone. If you want to be that one-man team, the first objective is to build all the necessary creative, technical, and managerial skills.

You can realize what you need to develop by looking at the entire process.

Lean content creation and distribution process

The workflow below is built to optimize for one thing — quality content. Any task or effort that didn’t lead to that was removed to ensure fast-moving companies don’t waste any time.

1. Pillar-cluster ideas set for each topic

The first step is to determine the topics. Usually, each new company has 4-5 topics to talk about centered around their products and services. Just look at your landing pages or offerings, and you will get a solid idea about your topics.

The next step is to generate long-form blog title suggestions for each topic. It will make sense below why you should start with long-form, research-oriented, data-packed blog articles.

The title suggestions, emanating from the topics, can be around:

• The benefits of this product or service

• How our business has developed this offering (differentiation)

• The impact on our customers’ lives

• The technology and philosophy behind such a solution

• The problem it solves and the consequences it helps avoid

• Method to pick the right solution in the market

Honestly, the list goes on. And for each of the above categories, you can certainly think of 3-5 good long-form blog title ideas. Each of them will promote your offerings within the right context, making you sound like a trusted friend rather than a desperate salesman.

Additionally, when writing these long-form articles, you will easily get ideas for short-form blog posts (clusters), which can support the big ones. The short ones should (ideally) be educational, opinionated, and thought-provoking.

The goal is to create a large pool of pillar and cluster title suggestions. This is critical for building you a well-oiled content engine.

2. Produce content around your narrative

Every long-form blog article contains a key message for your audience. That can be distilled into one sentence. That sentence, occasionally, can be about 50 words.

For instance, if you are providing web design services and are writing an article titled “X Best Practices for Web Design,” then your one sentence could be, “We follow all these best practices to ensure you get the best results, so you should hire us.”

Similarly, if you are trying to market accounting software, a long-form blog post could be titled “How Enterprises Should Select the Right Accounting Platform.” The core message from you to your potential buyers, in this case, can be “Our platform checks all these boxes, making it the perfect fit for your organization.”

Keep this one sentence in mind when creating outlines and writing the draft. You can use AI-powered tools, like ChatGPT, to enhance your writing process, but refrain from directly publishing machine-generated copy on your website.

3. Accessorize with visuals, tables, and keywords

The first two components are significantly important. As you already know, the attention span of humans is decreasing significantly. Multimedia content is critical for attracting them and retaining their attention. 

If you are explaining a logical path, use flowcharts and diagrams. Draw it on a piece of paper and use multimodal LLMs to do it for you. It may not look as polished, but it will get your point across.

Another thing is bullets and tables. This makes your content scannable, and your readers will appreciate you for not wasting their time. The practice of using diagrams, bullets, and tables is broadly related to keeping your content user-friendly as well.

The point is that you must leverage the right method of presentation based on the information.

If it can be relayed better with a diagram, do that. If you think a table will help with comprehension, go with that. 

Ideally, you can engineer your blog articles so they naturally produce these creatives.

4. Distribute through new content

Most marketers think distribution is different than content creation. The truth is that distribution is marketing, and marketing is content. 

You distribute a landing, for instance, through a long-form blog article. And you distribute that long-form blog article through guest posts. 

Anyway, writing guest posts can get challenging because it involves shortlisting publications, sending them emails, and collaborating with the editors until it gets published. It can be done in-house if you follow a simple strategy: work on two guest posts at a time. 

Trust me, it’s not that difficult.

Other ways to distribute your content include:

• Write 2-3 LinkedIn posts (~150-200 words) for each blog article.

• Publish each section of the long-form post as a LinkedIn Pulse piece.

• Create a carousel and post it on Instagram and LinkedIn.

• Each table, diagram, and infographic can be a post on different platforms.

• Short-form videos for various platforms.

5. Pick the most important one and continue

Sometimes the most important topic is the one outside your pool of titles you created in the first step. It could be an emerging trend or a technology that has revolutionized your industry, or perhaps a regulation that has changed how your audience perceives your offerings.

Either way, the rest of the workflow remains the same.

As you can imagine, the most critical component of the aforementioned lean content marketing process is content creation. In the rest of this book, I’ve dived into the buts and bolts of it.

The following chapters will explain each of the individual workflows and strategies for creating each type of content. I’ve also mentioned the tools you need to do them effectively.

After that, you can find the philosophies around content marketing, particular for tech brands and service providers (like agencies), which will help you expand your process into other avenues, such as digital PR, expert-led journalistic pieces, and long-form videos.

But first, the prologue.

Prologue for Content Marketing 101

I joined the digital marketing industry by fate in December 2020, when a SaaS brand gave me an opportunity to drive their promotional efforts. I was a complete noob, so my initial focus was to work as hard as possible to develop the skill sets to improve at this job.

Within a few months, my content creation velocity and the general understanding of marketing became noticeably better. 

Over the years, I read multiple books that helped me become a better communicator, comprehend human psychology, and recognize the nuances of perception engineering. Anything I read, I practiced. Wrote different styles of articles and eventually ventured into video creation.

During this journey, I was keeping a close eye on the marketing efforts of some popular brands across industries. Be it TV ads, podcasts, blog posts, social media content, anything. I would stalk their profiles across all platforms to map their overall strategy.

After numerous failed experiments and tough lessons, I started gaining some success in becoming a complete content marketer. Of course, the major part of it was content, which was (and still is) my forte, but I became better at the “boring” stuff.

Every marketing process is backed by a bunch of administrative action items, such as creating documents, tracking metrics, and maintaining the overall workflow. I only became better at those after I started creating content for my website and YouTube channel.

Anyway, I knew how hard it was from firsthand experience and wanted to do all the dreamers out there, agile teams trying to disrupt their niche and delivering great services to their customers, a huge favor.

My goal is to write this book (duh!) and promote it across any channel I can, for free, to ensure it reaches the right audience. It will also test the overall marketing strategy presented in this book.

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Next Chapter: The Anatomy of a Content Marketing Strategy

Index:

• The Source Code

  • The Anatomy of a Content Marketing Strategy

  • Content Marketing: 5 Things to Ignore

  • The Goal of a Content Marketing Strategy

  • Content Marketing Challenges for Lean and Agile Teams

• Strategy and Execution

  • What is a Content Strategy and How to Create One

  • Content Topics That Move the Marketing Needle

  • The Foundations for E-E-A-T in B2B Content Marketing

(more chapters coming soon)