Content marketing can be a great way to generate leads and more business. But if you are a startup, how do you make awesome content work for you? Girish Mathrubootham, Founder & CEO of Freshdesk shared three lessons on Inbound Marketing with startups at our previous UnCafe Google + hangout.
UnCafe, in association with Accel Partners, is a meetup at which we take a topic, bring a few practitioners and have everybody share their experience or solve a puzzle to accelerate learning. We will soon announce the topics for the next UnCafe. We’ll also be sharing more notes from the last UnCafe from people like Paras Chopra, CEO of Wingify, through the week. Stay curious.
1. Hiring the right kind of people for content
We did a Linkedin ad and got more than 80 applications. One thing that I’d clearly specified in the ad was that people should send me a link to their blog or send me stuff that they have written. Because I believe that there is a content part in Inbound marketing. First is content. We need people who can write awesome stuff. In India most people write a lot of technical stuff or too much of their own product. They are not able to write a compelling story. Look for people who have good writing skills and vocabulary who can write good stories. Then you can make them write. It doesn’t work the other way around. Command of the language is the hardest because that comes from schooling and lot of grooming. Even if they have no experience in writing technical stuff, its okay.
2. Communicate like Apple
When you look at most mp3 players before the iPod, people used to write about the product like this is 512 MB or a 1GB player. But when Apple launched, they said it can hold 1000 songs. Thats the difference between good content writing and feature listing. 1GB Mp3 player is a feature and holding 1000 songs is looking at it from the users point of view. Thats something we try to do. Even the best marketers make mistakes because we are all obsessed about what we built. We forget what is in it for the user. Two of our best posts had nothing to do with Freshdesk. One was about how to incorporate a company in the US and the second was the Freshdesk story. Stop writing content for the sake of writing it. If you can really think of sharing inferences, that makes a different.
3. Great Inbound marketing is all about building links
Like most people, we are writing posts and pieces. Great inbound marketing is all about building links. You can build links by submitting to other publications by being a guest blogger. E-mail works. One of the things I learnt from Neil Patel was that every time he writes something, he’d send out an email saying hey Girish take a look at what I wrote recently and let me know what you think. Basically keep getting the word out. The marketing piece of inbound marketing is important.
For the UnCafe hangout last week, we had Akshat Choudhary, Founder, BlogVault, Girish Mathrubootham, Founder & CEO of Freshdesk, Lalit Bhise, CEO of Mobisy, Paras Chopra, CEO of Wingify, Prashant Kumar, Founder, PromptCloud, Shekhar Kirani, Partner, Accel Partners, Tejaswi Naidu, Founder & CEO of Tek Arena and Vijay Sharma, Co-Founder at Exotel.
Recommended read: SAAS, Inbound Marketing, Indian Customers and more [Notes from UnCafe 1.0]
PS: Folks from Exotel, the cloud telephony company, have done a great post from the last UnCafe. Check it out here.
