Around 2003, as blogs began to take hold in the internet psyche, it became clear that these writing tools could be more than an outlet for an individual’s ruminations — they also had vast potential for business and marketing.
In 2006, Hubspot launched as a way to take advantage of the trend, giving marketers a platform designed to get inbound leads via blog posts. That meant customers came to your website drawn by the content on the blog without a sales team explicitly having to call and ask them to buy something.
Around the same time, a marketing professional who had grown tired of corporate life, David Meerman Scott, was writing a playbook for marketers to understand this new way of delivering content. That book, “The New Rules of Marketing and PR,” was published in 2007 and proved to be a seminal work in the field. It helped marketing teams understand they needed to produce compelling content, not reproduce the slick brochure copy of the past, on the internet.
It turns out that writing a corporate blog was just the first step in a longer, broader media journey. Over the past couple of years, we’ve started seeing content marketing take a leap forward as SaaS companies like Salesforce, Hubspot and Shopify began behaving more like media companies, with content at the center of everything they do.
But why is it happening? And, can startups imitate the sort of content production we’re seeing at incumbent SaaS companies?
It’s time for richer content
Although content marketing is evolving, as with any technology, the old doesn’t simply go away. The venerable blog post is not going anywhere anytime soon, but over time, companies have been layering on richer content like podcasts and video.
Last year, Salesforce took it to another level when it announced a massive media arm called Salesforce+. The company built a Hollywood-style studio to produce entertaining content with the ultimate goal of attracting customers.
In another example, Hubspot, which has expanded over the years to offer a range of sales and marketing solutions, last year bought The Hustle. The deal included a free newsletter with 1.5 million subscribers, a subscription newsletter called ‘The Trend,’ and a podcast called ‘My First Million.'
Shopify in 2019 also launched a media arm called Shopify Studios, which produced a show called ‘I Quit,’ in conjunction with the Discovery Channel. The show focused on entrepreneurs who quit their job to start companies.
All the content above has a business focus, but the idea is to combine entertainment with high-end production values. These companies want to produce quality content at a regular cadence with the goal of keeping you coming back. In the best cases, the brand stays in the background. In the worst, they can’t help themselves and keep weaving the company more deeply into the story.
Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, says the key is to produce content that doesn’t feel like you’re watching an ad for the brand producing it. “They can’t be as successful if they try to use these new media channels they are building out to mainly deliver marketing messages to promote what they want to sell,” he said.
Leary feels these companies should be focusing on content that speaks to interests beyond their specific offerings to improve customers’ and prospects’ overall experiences. This could involve educational materials to teach new skills either broadly or directly related to the company’s products, or documentary-style programming with a focus on interesting stories from individuals or companies.
Building stronger connections
As SaaS companies consider this content marketing approach, some are building and others buying. Scott, the author of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” says the latter gives you a built-in audience, which could have great value.
While an established media company could be out of reach for most startups, hiring someone with a ready-made community or audience could be a way to bring this approach to smaller, less established companies.
“Where this is different is, how a company can acquire an audience that’s already been developed, and then be able to use that as a way to perhaps generate interest from people who are not yet their customers. And also to have content creators automatically become part of a team that were not part of before,” he said.
Robert Rose, founder and principal analyst at The Content Advisory, has been helping companies build content arms for more than 15 years. Rose says moving into more sophisticated media offers a way to forge a direct connection with customers and potential customers, and companies are willing to pay for that.
“As a marketing strategy, if I’m a CMO, I have to ask how I get access to these audiences. I can either continue to rent it through the access that Facebook or Google gives me, which are increasingly walled gardens, or I can start to build it on my own or acquire it,” Rose said.
At that point, he says, running a media arm begins to make a lot of sense.
“When you realize that you can build an audience through this media company, which you can embed in your own company, and build in access to those audiences, then all you have to do is sell into those audiences because now you have direct access to them,” he explained.
Rose says that while Hubspot paying $27 million for The Hustle might sound like a significant investment, it isn’t when compared with the typical company marketing budget. That makes it a low risk bet, he says, especially when chances are the property continues to generate cash, which can help pay for itself over the long haul.
According to Hubspot CMO Kipp Bodnar, the goal is to go where your customers are, rather than trying to lure them to your website. “Our whole thesis is, we just want to be where our customers are learning. And we want to inspire and educate our prospective customers and the world at large around topics and around business in the markets we serve,” he said.
“We realized that we needed to work with creators across the business world, both on our team and through partnerships, to build a much bigger media presence. We also realized we just needed to think about content, editorial, point of view much differently and much more clearly,” he said.
Colin Fleming, EVP of global brand marketing at Salesforce and the head of Salesforce+, appeared recently on Leary’s LinkedIn show, CRM Playaz. He said that Salesforce+ is an attempt to show that B2B marketing doesn’t have to be boring.
“This is what enterprise software looks like, in our opinion. The same people that are watching National Geographic or Netflix or doing Peloton in the morning are the same people that are buying software. So why not meet them in that environment?” he said.
He feels it’s about selling, but in a much less direct and more entertaining way, and they aren’t trying to hide that. “We’re a business, and we have to be thinking about how we generate attention, awareness and move them down the funnel.”
Leary has been producing CRM Playaz and A Few Good Minutes, a one-on-one interview series, on his own for years. He points out that smaller companies like startups need to consider that it takes a different set of skills to produce more in-depth multimedia content.
While there are a broad set of tools and technologies available today to put this kind of production in reach of more companies, Leary warns that you still have to work to build the skill set needed to produce more complex content on a regular basis.
“You can get good quality tech for a relatively small price. You can use Zoom and other platforms with little investment in time or money. But most people are going to watch the livestream when it’s actually live. So you have to do a lot after the fact, like producing snippets to share on social media to get it in front of a broader audience, and you have to do that over and over again.”
Leary feels you don’t necessarily need to have the resources of Salesforce and Hubspot to pull this off, but you do need to be fully committed.
“Digital-first, digital-native companies are building a media production arm as part of their business, because it lets them build a direct engagement line to customers and prospects. But keep in mind that it takes time to build and see benefit from it, and it requires consistently churning out content that’s built with engagement in mind.”