Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. You can click the heart button 💙 above or below to share some love. And you can reach out to me anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Links that are worth your time:
Hi there 👋
In last week’s newsletter, I shared the Buffer and Polly marketing org charts as well as a few other favorite teams I love to lurk on (Webflow, Loom, Modern Health). I also asked for any tips that others had on ways to organize a SaaS marketing team. And boy did you all deliver! I linked to one of my favorite resources up above, and here are a few others:
HubSpot’s breakdown of different org types (e.g., Tofu orgs, Creative orgs)
Thanks to all those who shared. Wishing everyone a great week!
Kevan
Blogs, libraries, academies, and more: What content marketing has done to blogging
What is a blog these days?
For instance, at Polly we have an array of blog-like pages:
A Help Center, which is like a blog for customers
At Buffer, we had a social media blog and a workplace culture blog. Then our social media blog became a blog and a library. Then the social blog and culture blogs combined, were rebranded as publications, and now live alongside podcasts in a resources center.
And you see this trend everywhere.
Hubspot has an education section with a blog, ebooks, guides, courses, and microsites.
Intercom has a blog, plus podcasts, books, webinars, and an academy.
Wistia — one of the original blog evolvers — has a Learning Center with its blog, customer stories, events, and programs.
We are firmly entrenched in the Blog+ Era.
As you can tell from some of these big SaaS brands, a blog alone is no longer enough content to get the job done. In 2015, everyone had a blog. In 2021, everyone has a blog plus two or three other content destinations.
As you can see in the examples from Hubspot, Intercom, and Wistia, the word “blog” has remained, despite all the change around it. People recognize a blog as a place to go to consume chronologically-posted articles about a certain topic. But it’s really just an entry point into a world of other content.
So why wasn’t a blog enough?
Blogs are meant to be timely. At their core, they are reverse-chronological lists of articles that cover a particular topic. This works great if you are a) writing about a topic that has a trending, timely relevance, or b) looking to create an audience of people who love your blog — or your authors — so much they keep coming back on the regular to check it out.
Blogs aren’t sequential, and therefore, they aren’t the best medium for deep learning. You absolutely can learn from a blog, especially one with longform articles and guides. But when you’re learning a new topic, you’re better off starting from the beginning, working in sequence to build your knowledge. Most blogs aren’t set up that way.
Blogs have a sweet spot (1,000 to 2,000 word articles). Audiences expect more now. It’s hard to do immersive storytelling on a blog. It’s hard to craft experiential content within the standards of a blog.
(We discovered the second point — education — at Buffer when we looked at the data and noticed that our audience was split into repeat traffic that loved the trending topics and one-off visitors who came to our guides from search. We spun the one-off search content into a library in the hopes of getting them to stay.)
A great content marketer once told me:
Your blog is like a product, with its own levers for acquisition, activation, and retention.
And sometimes, you have to pivot your product.
Blogs have become more like publications. People come from referrals, from social, from clickthrus on your homepage, they come to be informed or entertained. You can design a blog for search, discoverability, topic clusters, email capture — there are plenty of tactics to help keep readers connected to your blog. And they work.
But there are more and more use cases for content today. And content strategies touch ‘em all.
Check out what’s required for a typical content role today (this one’s from Automattic):
Execute and maintain best-in-class content marketing execution across the entire buyer’s journey.
Write, create, manage, and edit various types of content including case studies, solution briefs, blog posts, website copy, presentations, videos, webinar and keynotes, demand gen emails, social media posts, and ad copy.
Instead of just a blog …
You might have a resource library full of guides and long reads.
You might build an academy or university with sequential coursework.
You could layer in podcasting, video, and multimedia storytelling.
You might have playlists of multimedia content based on different topics.
The possibilities are endless.
And hopefully the outcomes for customers are better and better, too.
Over to you
What does content look like at your company? Do you have a blog? Anything more than a blog? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
About this newsletter …
Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy what’s in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.💙
About Kevan
I’m a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Polly (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer and Vox.
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