Speaker 1: I wasted thousands of dollars and countless hours developing content for my last startup. I was looking for low cost methods of acquiring new customers, especially because our annual contract value was pretty low in the early days. And so content marketing was a way of driving eyeballs to the website. Problem was, I was spraying and praying. I was looking at any topic dealing with email marketing because we were an email service provider and I had no real strategy. In today's video, I'm gonna tell you about one of the smartest marketing strategies I know and it's the key to unlocking your success with content marketing. And if you stick around till the end, I'm gonna tell you which founders shouldn't worry about content marketing at all. After finally figuring my way out with Drip and having a lot of success and exiting that business, I developed an actual content strategy at a tiny seed gathering. So tiny seed is the accelerator that I run for SaaS bootstrappers. And we were doing a kickoff event and some of our founders were sitting around a table. One of them asked, how do I kickstart my marketing efforts? People thought content marketing was great for him. So the ideas started flowing, but towards the end, he had made a bunch of notes, taking them all down. He was kind of shaking his head and he said, all this sounds great, but where do I start? So I sat down and on hotel stationary, I still have the piece of paper. I broke down all the different content ideas and I bucketed them into the five levels of awareness that Eugene Schwartz lays out in his book, Breakthrough Advertising. We're gonna dive into the levels as we get into the video, but briefly, the five levels are being unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware. And so the key to this content strategy that I laid out is overlaying your content ideas with these five levels of awareness and then choosing the right level or levels in the funnel to focus on. And other people have talked about this over the years. I know some folks over at Powered by Search, for example, have talked about levels of awareness with content marketing. It's not a brand new concept, but to take it and apply it to practical content ideas in an example, I think could be really helpful. So all this theory obviously can be a bit abstract. So let's just take an example. You're in the early days of developing a content strategy for your new CRM called Bump. Let's run through the kind of content you might create at each of the five levels. So we'll start with least aware and move to most aware. So at unaware, which is level one, people are kind of oblivious that they have a problem at all. So you're gonna be targeting super broad, general keywords. You might create articles like how to sell, how to get more business, entrepreneurship. Here's how to be a better salesperson or do better sales demos. At the next level of awareness, being problem aware, folks are thinking, wow, I have a lot of leads and I'm having a tough time organizing all of them. So you might create pieces of content around how to organize your sales leads, how to close more deals by staying organized, how to use software to help you close leads. Five tips to closing more sales deals. One of those tips is to use your software bump, right? Any of these, you can imagine someone coming to your website to find out how to close more deals or be more organized and that could lead them to sign up for a CRM. The next level is solution aware. And so solution aware content is for people who know that there is software out there that could solve their problem. So you might create content around what are the top five CRMs? What are the cheapest 10 CRM systems? What's the best CRM for XYZ industry? You would of course include bump as one of the items in these lists or mention it at the top or the bottom and get email opt-ins. And there's another angle here too. There's also alternative to types of articles where you state how bump is an alternative to different CRMs but I'll explain those in a minute. Now at the next level of awareness, these folks are product aware. People know your product bump exists but they don't know everything about it. So this is where you can do versus content, right? You can say bump versus HubSpot, create an article or a piece around that. Bump versus close.com, bump versus Salesforce. A lot of people create versus articles. You really only wanna create them once people are searching for your product name because without that, they're not gonna find these pieces. I guess the other time you could do it, you put it in the footer is when people find out about bump and they do genuinely want to know the differences between your product and Salesforce or HubSpot or Close. But in that case, it is less about content, it's more about marketing per se and it's more about educating your prospects. Another angle you can take is if people are not searching for bump, your product name, you create alternative to articles. So this is where you say alternative to HubSpot, alternative to Close, alternatives to Salesforce. And you're trying to essentially piggyback on their brand equity and people searching for alternatives to those products. And you can go even one level deeper which is like product detail content, right? So integrating bump with Twilio or with Zapier, building your lead list with bump, like what if you're so popular and you have an actual brand at this point, you can try to rank for people who are trying to accomplish a task with your specific software. And finally, in the most aware level, this is mostly people who are experts in the space. So this might be someone who is a CRM consultant and they know everything about all of the CRMs in the space or perhaps it's the founder or an employee of one of the CRMs in the market. So realistically, if you're gonna market to this segment, oftentimes you're looking to get agencies or consultants to become partners with you because if they're gonna choose between five, 10, 15 different CRMs and they're gonna bring customers, then you can market to them as partners. So now let's circle back to the tiny seed founders question from the beginning of this video, where do I begin? At which level should you start creating content? If you are in your early stage, if you're an MVP, if you have 10, 20, 50 customers, you need content that will help you get conversions and get you sales. You wanna create content for people who are already searching for a solution to their problem because they're looking to buy soon. And then you wanna show why your solution is the best fit for them. So in this case, I would start with solution aware. People already know what they're looking for. And then as you get a bit of brand recognition, you can start with product aware or you can do, honestly, the alternative two pages pretty early. So really solution and product aware are where I would start. You're starting down deep in the funnel because if you start at the top of the funnel with unaware people, it might take them years to convert or to ever need a CRM or they may never need a CRM. So while there might be more traffic to those articles, they're worth much less to you. And the reason I wouldn't typically start by focusing on those who are most aware is those are usually industry insiders. And if you're trying to recruit partners, fine, but if you want to get the broader community and get individual customers, most individual customers will not be most aware until they've used your product or used many products and tried them out. And so that product aware and that solution aware level is where I think the sweet spot is for your first pieces of content. And keep in mind, even if you're not doing content marketing, if you're running ads, if people are finding you through word of mouth, they are gonna wonder what's the difference between Bump and Salesforce. They're gonna ask themselves that question. And so building product and solution aware content isn't just marketing, it's actually education for people who are considering buying your product. In a minute, I'm gonna tell you which founders shouldn't worry about creating content at all. Before I do that, I wanna let you know about MicroConf Remote. It's focused on early stage marketing, November 1st and 2nd of 2023 from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern. Talks include the Bootstrap Startup Marketing Checklist, hiring a copywriter and how to hire one that doesn't suck, building sustainable customer acquisition funnels, SaaS email marketing, plus founder by founder sessions where you get to meet other Bootstrap founders just like you. Head to microconfremote.com. It's very inexpensive. I highly encourage you if you've never attended one of our remote events, you should check it out. All right, so which founders shouldn't worry about creating content at this point or diving into content marketing? If you don't have your first 10 customers yet, I think that content can be a distraction. Right now, you're trying to scratch and claw and do whatever it takes with outbound marketing. You want things that go quickly, right? So you wanna do cold outreach. You're gonna be in the forums. You're gonna be talking to folks. Content takes a long time. And while I wouldn't say it's a terrible idea to do in the early days, realize that every hour spent creating content is gonna pay off in five, six, eight months. And when you're trying to get your first 10 customers and prove that you've built something people want and are willing to pay for, oftentimes you want something that's gonna work in the next few weeks. Content marketing is just one of the big five marketing channels that I lay out in my book, The SaaS Playbook. But there are obviously other ways to get your product in front of more people. And if you wanna add an additional approach to your marketing tool belt, you'll wanna watch this next video for seven more SaaS marketing strategies that your competitors might be using to beat you.