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I wasted thousands of dollars and countless hours developing content for my last startup I was looking for lowcost 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 cuz we were an email service provider and I had no real strategy in today's video I'm going to tell you about one of the smartest marketing strategies I know and it's the key to un locking your success with content marketing and if you stick around till the end I'm going to 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 in exiting that business I developed an actual content strategy at a Tiny Seed Gathering so tiny seed is the accelerator that I run for SAS 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 taken 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 Schwarz lays out in his book breakthrough advertising we're going to 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 going to be targeting super broad General keywords you might create articles like how to 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 optins and there 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 want to create them when once people are searching for your product name because without that they're not going to 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 hub spot or close but in that case it is less about content marketing per se and it's more about educating your prospects another ankle 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 closeth 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 zappier 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 going to Market to this segment often times you're looking to get agencies or Consultants to become partners with you because if they're going to choose between 5 10 15 different crms and they're going to bring C 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 want to create content for people who are already searching for a solution to their problem because they're looking to buy soon and then you want to show 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 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 going to wonder what's the difference between bump and Salesforce they're going to 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 going to tell you which Founders shouldn't worry about creating content at all before I do that I want to let you know about microcom remote it's focused on early stage marketing November 1st and 2nd of 201 23 from 11:00 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 SAS email marketing plus founder by founder sessions where you get to meet other bootstrap Founders just like you head to microcom remote.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 want to do cold Outreach you're going to be in the forums you're going to 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 going to pay off in five 6 8 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 often times you want something that's going to 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 SAS Playbook but there are obviously other ways to get your product in front of more people and if you want to add an additional approach to your marketing tool belt you'll want to watch this next video for seven more SAS marketing strategies that your competitors might be using to beat you