6
Focus on the People in Your Market—Not Just Your Products

How can we learn to be great at something? A few generations ago, the answer might have been to read about the craft at the local library or apprentice under a recognized expert. In the Internet age, a simple web search or “Hey, Siri” can lead to a limitless spring of information and education—how-to videos, detailed blog posts, or even following business luminaries on social media. Consumers today are learning new languages online, sharing recipes on international cuisines, and even graduating from accredited universities, all from the comfort of their laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. This desire to realize our fullest potential as humans is, according to American psychologist Abraham Maslow, our highest motivation for psychological health once our most basic needs (such as physical survival, safety, and others) are met. Aiding in our efforts towards self-actualization is the abundance of educational content available online on quite literally any topic, whether professionally created, community/user generated, or otherwise.

As we discussed in Chapter Two, category creation is in and of itself a subset of B2H marketing—a belief that behind every logo that companies are trying to market and sell to is a human, somewhere on Maslow’s pyramid and hierarchy of needs (see Figure 6.1 as a reference). Unique to category creation is the realization that no company in the world is paying attention to that particular human (or set of humans) in a meaningful way, or at least in the context of their quest to solve this particular problem that you’ve observed for the first time. Your job in defining the category, at a very simplistic level, is to serve them as a trusted advisor on their journey up the pyramid. Can you help them justify the strategic importance of their role or initiative within the organization to management (safety)? Can you build a community of peers and innovators around them (belonging)? Can you help them get promoted or recognized at their company and within the industry (esteem)? These are some of the most basic needs within early markets that are unmet and typically have little direct correlation to your products and services. Focusing marketing efforts here will make the difference between success and failure in category creation.

The figure shows a pyramid illustrating Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The pyramid shows five categories of needs (from top to bottom): self-actualization, esteem, love and belonging, safety needs and psychological needs.

Figure 6.1 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Pyramid

People are at the heart of category creation, not products. I mentioned in Chapter One that one of the signals that there may be a category to create is the existence of a passionate niche of people who “get it” set within a larger population of people who don’t. These early adopters are people who understand the pain and believe that you’re onto something, even if investors, analysts, and others do not. Eventually your products will matter to them, especially if positioned as an accelerator to movement up Maslow’s pyramid. However, through the filter of business-to-human, developing a content marketing strategy that speaks to all levels of the pyramid can build that trusted advisorship and category leadership that’s much more impactful than positioning feature benefit in the early innings of new markets. People care about their careers, but careers, in the broadest sense, can mean so much more than just work. How are you building the foundations of your category to support the people within it?

The Psychology of Early Adopters in New Categories

New categories tend to attract a certain type of person—a pioneering spirit known as an “early adopter.” The term was first introduced by American communication theorist and sociologist Everett Rogers in his 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations, a landmark effort that has become the foundation for modern thinking about how ideas and products spread. Rogers defines early adopters as influencers early in the innovation adoption lifecycle (see Figure 6.2) who test new products and ideas and become the influencers who drive subsequent phases of adoption. If this sounds familiar, you’ll certainly recognize the line between early adopter and early majority as the toughest leap of the entire curve and representative of the “chasm” popularized by Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers. But before the chasm can even come into view, you’ll have to understand what drives early adopters, whose validation is a prerequisite for spreading new ideas into the mainstream.

The figure shows the Rogers’s technology adoption bell curve. The curve is vertically divided into five different categories: Innovators (2.5%), Early Adopters (13.5%), Early Majority (34%), Late Majority (34%) and Laggards (16%) from left-to-right.

Figure 6.2 Rogers’s Technology Adoption Curve

Early adopters are subject to the same observations of Abraham Maslow in his hierarchy of needs theory. The primary differences are the psychological drivers underlying their progress toward self-actualization—motivations that Forrester Research identifies as information, novelty, and status.1 Early adopters are diligent researchers who have set themselves up to learn about new things before anyone else, thus underscoring the requirement for aspiring category creators to saturate the web with content regarding the problem your category addresses. Early adopters tend to jump on board to new ideas earlier than most, but that risk is mitigated by the research they’ve done before throwing their support behind a concept. These folks are also driven by novelty or, said another way, the success and competitive advantage that can be realized by adopting a trend early and ahead of the market. According to the Forrester Research survey, early adopters are 72% more likely to say: “I am always willing to try and do new things” than the “laggards” at the right end of the bell curve. The third motivator for early adopters is status, or choosing to affiliate (or be the novel first to affiliate) with brands that represent them in the world. From a professional context, early adopters care deeply about their personal brands and will respond favorably to companies who engage them in opportunities to build or promote themselves.

Creating a category will require building a groundswell of support from early adopters in the industry—the select few who already “get it” and those within their sphere of influence. Understanding how to develop content, community, and other strategies that activate their motivations of information, novelty, and status is critical. Whether that’s telling their story on your blog as innovators in the category, providing them with speaking opportunities, or asking them to speak on a podcast, getting early adopters on your team early is important to build long-term brand equity in the category. Their support can create a network effect that propels category awareness and thought leadership into the marketplace, sparking a flywheel that will compound and gain momentum as time goes on. We’ll cover these tactics throughout the course of the book, but regardless of how the narrative is presented (live events, digital, otherwise), at the heart of the strategy is building a content marketing machine with early adopters in mind.

A Primer on Content Marketing

Starting and scaling a content marketing engine may sound daunting: Who will do the writing? How do we distribute? and How exactly do we find time for all of this anyway? That’s what this chapter is all about, whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to reimagine your content efforts through the lens of category creation. However, before we dive in, I’d like to define some basic language around content marketing—definitions and key considerations that I learned early in my time at Gainsight from Marketo who (along with others) evangelized this era of content marketing. Content marketing, as Marketo defines it, “is the process of creating high-quality, valuable content to attract, inform, and engage an audience, while also promoting the brand itself.”2 They go on to classify different types of content into three buckets: early stage, middle stage, and late stage content.

In category creation, the majority of effort and resources are spent developing early stage content, educating the market on a problem they don’t know they have, why it’s important, and how to solve it. Figure 6.3 gives a few examples of early stage content themes that we’ve published at Gainsight. It’s critical that the narrative is early-stage in nature, and even more critical that the content is delivered by you as the aspirational category leader. Not only will early stage content efforts build thought leadership equity for your brand, but since the nature of the subject is educational rather than promotional, these assets are indexed by search engines and will eventually drive considerable organic traffic to your website, fueling your inbound marketing machine. More than six years into Gainsight, there are still content assets online that were originally written in 2013 that are performing great and driving inbound lead velocity for us. Today over 60% of the traffic to Gainsight.com is through organic channels, a testament to the early stage content marketing investments we’ve made from early days and continue to invest in today.

Four different images illustrate few examples of early stage content themes. First image is labeled “How we structure CSM bonuses,” second image is labeled “How do you account for the costs of a customer success team,” third image is labeled “How to recognize and reward your CSMs” and fourth image is labeled “How we work with our product team.”

Figure 6.3 Examples of Early Stage Content Themes

So what do you do with middle and late stage content in new categories? These types of assets are important to develop, just not quite as important as early stage content in the foundational chapters of your journey. As your category starts to mature, middle and late stage content assets are critical to position your solution as the answer of record to the problem that the market is now starting to understand. However, successfully executing an early stage content marketing strategy does not come without its challenges, mainly the two funnel effect that I introduced in Chapter Three. In the two funnel effect, you become extremely successful in driving broad awareness of your market and category (funnel one), but struggle to monetize that brand impact into closed revenue of your product or service (funnel two).

One of the ways to build a bridge from funnel one to funnel two, or to otherwise inspire a product evaluation within your new category, is to take middle and late stage content, remove them from behind the gate, and promote them as if they were early stage content. The idea here is to teach your market how to buy products and solutions for the problem they’ve uncovered, as it’s often the case that new categories do not have universally understood sales processes. Consider creating a Platform Buyer’s Guide e-book and promoting that on social media or to your marketable database. Invest early in customer testimonials and case studies—a strategy we’ll cover in depth in Chapter Nine—and drive widespread awareness and engagement around that content. Design a sample RFP asset and promote that to your audience, evangelizing buying criteria for products in your new category. Classic content marketing guidelines would suggest most of this content ought to live behind a gate or content management system that your sales team alone can access, but putting some promotional muscle behind middle and late stage content can help build a bridge between awareness and consideration within your new category. Before we get too far down that road, however, let’s discuss how to develop a content marketing strategy in the first place.

Developing a Content Marketing Strategy for New Categories

Whether you’re building a content strategy from the ground up or are interested in revisiting your existing programs through the lens of category creation, there are five principles you’ll need to keep in mind.

1. Name Your Category

One of the most significant decisions early in the category creation journey is what to name your category. Identifying a category name will do more than just unite your company, but also serve as a rallying call for the entire community of prospects and customers within your market. You’re going to be spending a lot of time and resources creating content around the category name, betting a non-trivial amount of marketing budget that your choice category is a massive, multi-billion-dollar market worthy of attention. Deciding on the name isn’t necessarily easy, as analysts won’t recognize it (more on that in Chapter Ten), competition will call it something else, tangential categories already exist and are causing confusion, search volume is extremely low for most of your ideas, and all the good domains are already taken. Sound familiar?

Although there aren’t a lot of universal truths on how to come up with a category name, here are a few tips that can guide your thinking:

  • Brand around people, not the product. Analysts have a habit of coming up with extremely complex category names devoid of any human emotion that also happen to make great acronyms. Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Recurring Revenue Management (RRM), or Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) are just a few examples. Consider instead anchoring your category name on the outcomes that your customers hope to achieve through your products.
  • Look for clues in customer job titles. Consider the job titles of your prospective customers and create a connection with what’s unique in your category. At Gainsight we discovered that a role had already existed and predated us called the Customer Success Manager, but no company was creating any content around Customer Success. It seemed like a good option for us to consider.
  • Use Google Trends to gauge search volume. Search volume will inherently be low for a new category—if not, I would question how new the proposed category actually is. But by using Google Trends, you’re able to quantify the little traffic that is being driven to your short list of category names. The data gives you a small window into interest and search behavior of the broad market—best served as a way to benchmark your best ideas against your worst.

Selecting a category name is the first step of your content marketing journey. Once you get there, wave the flag for the category everywhere you possibly can—buy the domains, write to the hashtag, set up social analytics and Google Alerts to track share of voice and search volume. Since you’ll be committing to creating momentum for the category brand, benchmarking what the world looked like the day you named it is not a bad idea. Now all that’s left to do is a whole lot of writing—so who’s going to do it all?

2. Identify Spokespeople, Writers, and Contributors

Figuring out where all this content is expected to come from can be a difficult proposition. In the early days of category creation, it’s entirely possible that all of the subject matter expertise is trapped inside the head of the founder or chief executive and difficult to transfer over to a junior marketer or agency. Later on, as a company matures, the target executive or department within your organization (e.g., CMO/Marketing at HubSpot or CRO/Sales at Salesforce) can be a great source of content contribution. Some companies have even hired subject matter experts who are early adopters in the young market as evangelists who write content and speak at events as their full-time job. Regardless of who does the actual writing, it’s important to identify who within the company will serve as the external spokesperson and provide that name on the byline of the articles written.

In order to do the actual writing, hiring a content writer as one of the first few employees in Marketing is a good idea. Writers can either develop a piece of content based on a recorded interview or outline or edit content provided by a founder or executive. Writers can also capture your brand voice and ensure that all assets are in compliance before publishing to the web. Since the nature of the content is early stage, a great way to scale your content program while tapping into the status motivator of the early adopters in your market is to ask customers (or non-customer members of your community) to contribute content as well. Not having every article on your web properties written by someone at your company has a positive secondary effect on your credibility as the category leader.

Content Hack for Early Stage Startups

I have the privilege of meeting with early stage founders who are interested in category creation, but are still extremely early in their operations and have no marketers on staff. I explain to them how important content marketing is to the strategy, and every time, I can physically see the reality of scarce resources set in over them. We are very fortunate at Gainsight to have a CEO who loves to write. In the early days before in-flight Wi-Fi was widespread, we used to joke that we can send Nick on a cross-country flight (without Internet) and he’d land having sent us three to five complete blog posts.

Although that might sound silly, there’s actually something profound hidden in that story. As I mentioned earlier, the vision for a new category and its unique positioning are often locked in the minds of the founding team. Since both time and resources are scarce, I’ve advised founders to commit to one weekend of writing—perhaps with no Wi-Fi—to create 12 chapters of an e-book manifesto for the new category. Twelve chapters is strategic, as each topic could become a monthly theme for a campaign: blog post, webinar, sales dinner topic, and so on. Working with partners to write response articles for each of the 12 will add some much needed validation early in your efforts, and if launched together, could build your marketable database by leveraging their audiences as well. All you need is one weekend to write and you’ll leave with an entire year of content.

3. Articulate the “Why” Behind Your Category

Remember that the very definition of category creation assumes that no one has been able to observe or articulate the problem that you’ve discovered in the market. That’s the initial focus of your content marketing efforts—proving the existence of the problem and making the case for why a new category has taken shape to address it. Third-party anecdotes and supporting voices may be helpful in validating your position. If successful, you’ll be able to convince the early adopters in your market that there’s something novel here worth paying attention to and that there’s a company out there who understands what they’re going through.

You’ll have to do more than just speak their language, however. As Maslow’s pyramid would indicate, humans have a psychological need for safety that may be triggered before they can bet their careers on your category positioning. Create content that helps the newly converted justify an investment in your category to their executives and networks. Arm them with the data, case studies, and other proof points that they need to create broad awareness inside and outside of their organization in order to green light a project. We’ve spent a lot of time at Gainsight writing content on how to justify an investment in Customer Success to the CEO or board. We also created a business case for Customer Success by quantifying the pain of churn through an ROI study conducted through a third-party research firm (as referenced in Chapter Three). Assets like these helped us prove to the world that churn was a problem for subscription companies and that Customer Success was the appropriate strategy to address it.

4. Educate on the “How”

After getting some momentum behind your category, the logical next set of questions from people in the young community will be around how to actually put the learnings of the category into practice. The market will naturally look to you as the company evangelizing the category for resources on best practices—an expectation that will frankly never go away. Build the online destination for category best practices on your blog, so that the market will come to align your website with industry thought leadership. Beyond the associated brand benefit, the content hosted on your blog will create a long tail of thought leadership indexed across search engines, driving organic traffic to your site when published with SEO considerations. In fact, a good way to think about your blog is as a publishing platform for your category—any early adopters in the community who have a story to tell should desire to tell it on your site. The aspiration is that as the category matures, an online search for your category name alone would reveal a number of high performing content assets that are hosted on your web properties.

However, online isn’t the only channel for creating and distributing early stage content. In fact, live events and experiences are arguably even more powerful delivery vehicles for companies in new markets. We’ll spend time in Chapter Eight talking about how to build and grow community and live events programs rooted in industry best practices. Whether online or experiential, the quality of your content is extremely important in new categories, as is the cadence of content delivery. Since there won’t be incumbent channels for relevant industry best practices, keeping a steady drumbeat of blog releases, newsletters, webinars, events, etc. will keep the young market “tuned in” to your programming and engaged with what you have to say.

With so many potential topics to cover, how can you prioritize your content roadmap and know exactly what to write? I’ve found that there are three places to look in order to source content ideas:

  1. What are your customers telling you? The best source of content ideas are from the market—What are your customers struggling with and where could they use support? Is it hiring the right person? Put together a sample job description and write a blog post about how to hire in your category. Is it the right meeting format to review progress? Host a webinar showcasing different agendas and approaches from companies that have figured it out.
  2. Where do you want to lead the market? Ultimately you’ll need conviction on where the market is headed, both informed by what your customers are telling you and by the true north vision that you’re building for on your product roadmap. Seed out the story through best practices and education before you release new products and features into a community who doesn’t understand them.
  3. What does the data reveal? Eventually you’ll want to make sure your content is performing well, meaning that it’s driving the right type of engagement online and impacting business results. Sometimes the content that performs the best is not what your customers are asking for, nor anything particularly novel, but rather a replay of the foundational questions that people regularly search for. Doubling down on the narratives of top performing assets with fresh ideas and approaches should drive good engagement.

5. Evangelize the Category as the Leaders of the Movement

As your content efforts start to bear fruit, eventually your brand will become recognized as the official torch-bearer and leader behind the movement of your category. Your company will be asked to speak at conferences, investor events, and local meetups. You’ll be invited by customers to present at their all-hands meetings and company kick-offs. Although prioritizing executive time will only get more complex, opportunities to carry the torch for your industry are always well worth the effort in the long run.

One of the best evangelism investments that we made at Gainsight was agreeing to write the book on Customer Success, which was published by Wiley in 2016. Writing a book was by no means a small effort, but three years and 40,000+ copies sold later, we’ve developed a degree of credibility in having been both champions and evangelists of Customer Success since the early days of the profession. While some may wonder if people even read business books anymore, the reality is that writing the definitive book on our category has carried our brand to places we never thought we’d access with our online content efforts alone, including board rooms and investor meetings.

As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, I learned a lot about building content marketing programs from Marketo and some of the great evangelistic content they created in their “definitive guide” e-book series. One of the authors of a foundational piece of content that I learned a lot from was Maria Pergolino, an early marketing leader at the company who went on to serve in an SVP Marketing and CMO capacity at Apttus and Anaplan, respectively. Today, Maria is a celebrity in B2B marketing circles, having developed and shared her own playbook for building world-class go-to-market teams that drive growth, differentiation, and category leadership. I asked her to share her perspective on the intersection of content marketing and category creation, and what aspiring marketers should keep in mind when building and scaling their content marketing programs.

Ten Tips for Supercharging Your Content Marketing Program

By Maria Pergolino, Chief Marketing Officer (Previously at Anaplan, Apttus, Marketo)

Content marketing is changing almost as fast as technology itself. And because of this you may not be seeing the results you’d be expecting from your category creating content strategy. Let’s grab a glass of wine and talk about why.

We all know that the buyer now controls the buying cycle. But why is this happening? And how can we make this work for us? Essentially, the Internet has brought an inconsumable amount of data to our fingertips, but decision making is more complex than ever, with bigger groups of people wanting a say in what is being purchased for a company. In fact, CEB, a Gartner company, suggests there are more people involved in making B2B buying decisions, growing from an average of 5.4 stakeholders in 2015 to 6.8 in 2017. Everyone gets a vote, but most aren’t experts in what is being purchased, and many may not know a solution to solve the challenge even exists, especially when it’s a new category like yours. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been talking to another executive who tells me how they solved a problem using a home-grown tool they or a consultant created taking up big budget and development resources to overcome a challenge when there is an out-of-the-box solution available at a lower cost.

So how do we get buyers to purchase your category defining product, so this is avoided? The buyer has two options: ask the people in their network what to do (friends, influencers, or consultants) or go to the Internet, a conference, or maybe even buy a book (like this one!) to find a solution on their own. You need to be top of mind in the first approach, and your content must be front and center with the latter. Ensuring your brand comes up as the answer for that large buying team in both cases takes some effort, which is why we started with some wine. I’d also suggest reading in Chapter Nine about how to activate your customers as advocates and using these 10 content marketing tips:

  1. Is there a doctor in the house? Ensure that buyers find your content when they search for answers to their problems. For example, when Marketo (and Eloqua and Pardot) were creating the Marketing Automation category, we were sharing tips on how to do marketing a better way, not about what the solution could do. This gave us an audience with our target buyer and allowed us to build credibility with them because we were helping ease their business pains.
  2. Face it, books are judged by the cover. Ensure your content stands out from the overabundance of marketing materials currently available. If your content marketing strategy can be summarized with a list of blog posts and white papers, I can almost promise that you’ll see limited success. So why are so many brands taking this approach? When content marketing was new, this worked, because there wasn’t as much content available. But now our buyers are in information overload, with attention spans getting shorter every day. This doesn’t mean abandon your content strategy, but instead make sure it is highly compelling to your prospective buyer. An example you may have seen that does a great job creating compelling content is the blending of an iPhone, hockey puck, Rubik’s Cube, and more via the Will It Blend series (willitblend.com) by Blendtec Total Blender. Instead of creating a white paper about how strong their blender is, they literally put their blender to the test, blending everyday items to educate their buyers. This marketing was so compelling it was featured in a Seth Godin book and made an appearance in a Weezer video.
  3. Cats (and content) have nine lives. When companies start thinking about marketing a product, they often start by creating a website. The problem is, as we discussed, people don’t know you, and your new category, exist, so they are not likely to show up on your homepage. Instead, you need to take all the different types of content you create and share it through various channels. This includes digital channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, as well as industry websites, association websites, press releases, online communities, and more. This also includes physical locations to share content like sponsored trade shows, user groups, and hosted marketing events.
  4. Opportunity can’t knock if it can’t find the door. Regardless of the type of content you create, you must make sure it gets found. Do this by optimizing the content for the channel where it is being featured. Every channel, whether it’s in social media, something printed, or even email, has a different way to ensure it shows up for your prospects. Figuring out how to optimize for each channel can take time, but there are many consultants and companies that help with this, from social media agencies to search engine optimization firms and more.
  5. All roads must lead to Rome (and your category). I wholeheartedly agree with Anthony that we must leverage early-stage content in our category creation, but we also must let our buyer know what steps to take next. When we create content about a pain a customer is having, we can’t just recognize their pain, but we must share how we can solve that pain, including how our customers have seen success and what they can do to see similar success.
  6. It’s not rocket science, it’s data science. Many companies recognize how important it is to create great content and share it through different channels, but it’s also important to make sure we know who that content is going to by having clean and up-to-date data about our prospects. For example, we can give Facebook a list of our desired customers and pay for ads to show up only to these people. Or we can do this by using channels like email or direct mail, where we send our content directly to our target purchaser. This drastically reduces the waste in our advertising, because we know who the content is going to. But it’s only as good as the prospect data that we have, so it must be up-to-date and accurate.
  7. Waiter, content for one, please. Content is often created for the masses, with one paper or video created to address the entire market. But if your product is a considered purchase, with few buyers who spend a lot on your solution, you may find creating content for a single buyer or small group of buyers is a better strategy. This account-based content strategy is very company-to-human centric and can help prospects know how truly committed your company is to solve their pain, building trust.
  8. There’s no I in Category. No one voice creates a category alone. Check out the TedTalk named “How to Start a Movement” by Derek Sivers. In this talk he has the crowd laughing out loud because of a ridiculous dancer at a music festival. You can’t help but think this dancing person is a bit crazy as he thrashes his arms in the air in the middle of a field. It’s not until others join him that you think it might be fun, and thus, a huge groundswell is created. Earlier I mentioned how Marketo had competitors, like Eloqua and Pardot, that also created great content. We gave each other credibility by agreeing there was a problem and showed similar ways to solve the pains the marketer was facing. All the customer had to do was choose which solution to buy. In content marketing for category creation, competition is not the enemy. A second, more current example is from the emerging account-based marketing (ABM) category. This is an emerging category where content marketing has been abundant. An early entrant to the market was Demandbase, who was sharing content about account-based marketing for years with little growth. It wasn’t until a strong competitor, Engagio, emerged that the category gained momentum, as this lent credibility to the entire space, with both brands benefitting.
  9. Hello, Madame President! While there must be a competitor for there to be a category, you need to be the biggest, boldest, most credible and differentiated voice across the competition to become the leader in the category you are creating. You didn’t come here to become vice president in your category, right? Being the first mover into the market does not make the leader (as Anthony highlighted in Chapter Three), but being the one with the momentum from great content does.
  10. The robots are taking over! Finally, keep in mind that content creation is evolving. And while we still don’t have robots fetching our slippers, machine learning now recommends content; AI, like Siri and Cortana, finds content for you; and IOT is bringing us content in new ways and places every day. Make sure your content is evolving as your customers do to ensure you stay in the front of your category.

Notes

  1. 1 Abe Garon and James McQuivey, “The Psychology of Early Adopters,” Forrester Research, November 2009, https://www.forrester.com/report/The+Psychology+ Of+Early+Adopters/-/E-RES55614
  2. 2 “Content Marketing,” Marketo, https://www.marketo.com/content-marketing/