Scaling content development and distribution (Vendia)

BACK STORY I was recruited to join Vendia as the first marketing and content creative, just as the company was moving from seed stage to early-stage — about 18 months after launch. I took the role, in part, because the opportunity to build a content marketing engine, team, and brand point of view felt too good to be true. (Turned out it was, but that’s a story for another time.)

In the first six months on the job, one of my objectives was to was to scale blog content production and distribution so we could establish domain authority, drive organic traffic to the web site, and build awareness and credibilty for our voice and SaaS product in the market.

Posts to be proud of

Contributions include content strategy, copy editing, project management

• Achieving end-to-end supply chain visibility with your data architecture (Alex Vucovic)

• Data protection approaches: How to balance need to know vs. need to share (James Gimourginas)

• Introduction to B2B data sharing with Vendia Share (Vikrant Kahlir)

• Shared data architecture patterns (Li Dai)

RESULTS

With the help of an SEO agency consulting on our keyword strategy, a small handful of internal SMEs I could turn to for informed expertise and collaborative drafts, and the occasional freelancer who was versed in data tech and Web3 concepts, I created and managed an editorial calendar where we produced more content in my first six months than the company had produced in the first 18 months since launch. We also pushed open repurposing and distribution doors with two email nurture tests, social posts, an ebook, syndication partnerships, and a webinar campaign related to key content.

• Blog content production up 5x YoY

• Drove increases in site traffic 4-12% with an average of 8% MoM

• Content packaged for (new to the brand) distribution channels including LinkedIn and Twitter (before it was X), white papers, an ebook, webinar programs, newsletter sharing, and syndication partnerships at industry mastheads like The New Stack, VentureBeat, and Forbes

• 6 new, diverse voices added to our roster of SME bylines

I absolutely helped us accomplish our goal of achieving domain authority.

But was it the right goal and best use of resources?

TACTICAL CHALLENGES

• The CMS I inherited was GitHub, fine for developers, not so great for marketers trying to build a premium enterprise SaaS brand trying to convey “trust” as one its key marketing messages.

• It took 6 months to win the business case for a CMS upgrade.

• Our “upgrade” was to the free version of Netlify, again selected by Engineering, not Marketing because “It’s cheaper to build our own.”

• I spent another 6 months submitting tickets for bugs, basic UX modules, reiterations of launched modules because of little things like spacing or header inconsistencies, and twiddling my fingers while Engineering fit Marketing’s website and blog UX/UI needs into their sprints.

• No graphics library. No resources for graphics or photography or video. (No such thing as Midjourney or ChatGPT then.)

• When we could get a cycle on the Design team’s calendar, they insisted on creating custom graphics (even for hero artwork) because it was an opportunity to “build the brand.” (When you add up FTEs and opportunity costs, our approach was so much more expensive than a stock photo license.)

• Design reported into Product, not Marketing. The two Design resources, great people and wholly talented, were 98% deployed for Product and Sales functions. And our Marketing leadership was vacant, so there was no executive presence to advocate for our team’s/the org’s Marketing needs.

THE GORILLAS IN THE CORNER But the biggest challenge in scaling content production was based in what may have been a premature launch. Strategic product and GTM shifts happened monthly if not weekly (I kid you not), and we just didn’t have many stories to tell or sell.

There was no place to find middle or bottom of funnel footholds, so we spent a lot of time on the top-of-funnel content, cultural content for recruiting purposes, and (because Becks would want me to be honest) naval-gazing thought leadership. …I learned so many lessons from this role and working at an early-, early-, too-early-for-content-marketing-stage startup.