Forbes recently published an article describing the incredible results achieved by the iPrice in-house Content Marketing team, in a short 12 months span.
I thought it could be helpful to further expand on that article and share some additional lessons learnt along this exciting journey, as we experienced it first hand.
The aim is to help any Founders / CMOs / Content Marketers who are thinking of setting up a brand new content marketing team or are simply looking for ways to improve their current practices. Learnings that should resonate particularly well for companies operating in this part of the world (SEA) and operating in more than one country.
First off, from a company perspective, why does CM matters and why are we investing in it at iPrice?
Content Marketing at iPrice serves three main purposes:
- [short term impact] Increase Search Marketing visibility (SEO): every meta-search aggregator, no matter the vertical, be it travel, financial comparison or products/eCommerce like us, heavily relies on search marketing as a user acquisition channel. For organic search, obtaining quality links and mentions from trusted media still remain one of the most important signal that Google uses in its ranking algorithms. Ceteris paribus, more and better links => better search rankings => more traffic & users
- [mid term impact] Establish Thought Leadership (B2B): in order for iPrice to exist (and to make any money) we need to integrate on our platform the highest number of eCommerce merchants operating in the 7 countries where we are present (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam and Hong Kong). Establishing ourselves as a thought leader in the eCommerce industry goes a long way in supporting our Sales & Customer Success Team to more easily reach out and onboard new merchants on our platform.
- [long term impact] Raise Brand awareness (B2C): last but not least, CM can help to increase iPrice’s overall brand awareness also among the end users. Still a lot to be done on this dimension, but we are starting to see some positive progress derived from our CM activities.
Lesson #1 — Distribution, Distribution, Distribution
The single biggest mistake that you can do when investing in any Content Marketing activity is to believe that “if you build it, they will come”. It’s really staggering to see the number of startups/companies that keep living this mantra. This typically translates into having entire teams spending 99% of their efforts in producing the content and close to 0% into the distribution part.
Distribution, especially when you don’t have built a big and engaged audience yet, which by itself is very very hard to achieve, is absolutely key.
When you are getting started or if you haven’t yet built proper relationships with media, your CM team should spend more than 50% of their time into distribution.
In our case, we went as far as sacrificing the distribution of the content on our own proprietary publishing channels (Blog, SM, website), in order to provide to media exclusive content. This then translated in larger distribution and visibility for our content.
Lesson #2 — Importance of building human relationships with media
There is no way around it. If you want your content to be published anywhere, you need to build genuine human relationships with the relevant journalists/editors of the media outlet you are targeting. Once the connection is built and is solid enough, it gets much easier.
Building such relationships is conceptually not that hard, but the actual implementation is. Two tips:
- Always put yourself in the shoes of the journalist/editor you are reaching out. Why would he be interested in replying to you or publishing anything that you are sending me? Are you helping him doing his/her job better? If the answer is not a clear “Yes”, better to revise the pitch or content you are using to grab his/her attention.
- Take aside your fear of rejection and keep trying. Again. And Again.
When trying to build a relationship from scratch, here is our step-by-step approach:
- Find the journalists’ or editors’ contact information via social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) and invite them to connect.
- Read their articles to understand what kind of topics and formats they like, as well as their writing style.
- Once you have their personal email, email the journalist to give a brief introduction about your business and share what story or research you are working on.
Once the connection is built, it’s not over. We typically keep in touch with them on social, and most importantly we always try to keep the bar of the content we are producing high enough so to keep the connection and trust intact. It’s easy to ruin several months of hard work with just a couple of too commercial or sub-par quality content.
You are not that special to them.
Lesson #3 — Team Localisation vs. Centralisation
Assuming you are operating in several countries, with different languages and different cultures, you should have a team distributed across several countries, right?
Maybe. But it’s not mandatory.
In our case, the entire team is located in the same office (in Kuala Lumpur).
At the same time we have local people in charge of each of our 7 countries. This is absolutely key. Aside from the obvious language barriers, you need to be able to produce localised content and understand the local media landscape. Might not seem that much of a big deal initially, but trust me, it is.
Having the entire team in just one office brings the following advantages:
- Cross-pollination of ideas and know-how sharing: any new strategy or experiment that proves to work in one country can be immediately tested in the other countries. Face to face interaction remains the quickest and most effective form of knowledge sharing.
- Team atmosphere: Face to face interaction remains also the best medium to build a proper “team spirit”. That intangible asset that will push everyone to give a little bit more, by means of mutual motivation. Be it holding together when things are not going that well or by celebrating each others’ success. Pushing up overall happiness in the workplace and sense of belonging. Priceless.
- Cost saving: most of the times you don’ t need an extreme form of localisation to make a content successful in multiple markets. That is, human psychology works pretty similarly all around the world and many important events covered by local media are global (ie. new iPhone launch). Working in parallel on a similar content “base” in multiple countries, from idea generation to data gathering and design, can bring substantial cost savings.
Lesson #4 — Avoid Boring
Everyone surely agrees in theory with such principle. But what does this mean in practice?
- Avoid content which is specifically centered around your company. No one really cares about the latest commercial partnership your company has secured or the new product you have just launched. That is, unless you are sending rockets to Mars and want to update the the world on the progress your company is making in making life multiplanetary :). Don’t spend time over-optimising such type of content or setting unrealistic expectations in terms of distribution results. In our case for example, even our SERIES A funding announcement couldn’t match the distribution of our most successful non-iPrice centric type of content.
- If you want to publish any content around a hot topic which is being already heavily covered by media, you need to add your own particular twist to make it stand out. If you don’t, the chances of anyone picking up your content will be extremely limited. There is simply too much competition. A couple of examples from our own experience:
- new iPhone 7 launch (September 2016)
Boring type of content: comparing the different prices of iPhone 7 across the region.
Adding a twist to make it stand out: Putting the prices in relation with the average GDP per capita to infer the number of days the average Singaporean / Indonesian / Vietnamese / etc would need to work to afford buying a brand new iPhone 7.
- Amazon entering in SEA (April 2017)
Boring type of content: adding noise by speculating on when Amazon would finally enter in Singapore / SEA.
Adding a twist to make it stand out: Create an April Fools’ prank by sharing with selected media the exclusive design of Amazon’s homepage in each SEA country, ahead of their imminent launch.
Lesson #5— Attitude over Experience
All the lessons above won’t bring you anywhere if you don’t have the right team.
Curious, driven people, genuinely passionate about getting their (and the company) content in front of the biggest possible audience. You will need to hire someone that despite his/her hustling mentality will be able to build positive human relationships with every person they interact with over email (or in person). Someone who will be always looking to evolve himself and never lose his eagerness to learn (see lesson #6 below).
The above traits are far more important than having people with relevant technical skills or previous experience “in the field”.
Most of our team members didn’t actually have any specific experience in neither CM nor PR.
It’s often much harder to make someone un-learn the previous practices learnt in a slower and less performance driven environment (such as traditional PR, at least from my experience), then for him/her to learn new practices and methodologies from scratch.
Finally, you will need to hire people who will be able to punch above their weight class.
Lesson #6 — It’s always Day 1
Deeply linked to the importance of having a team with the right attitude is the “Always Day 1” mentality which we try to live by and teach every new joiners.
What is an “Always Day 1” approach?
Here is Amazon ‘s Jeff Bezos, in its 2016 Letter to Shareholders:
“Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?”
“That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic.
Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”
Jeff Bezos
Why is the “Always Day 1” approach so important for us?
- it keeps everyone motivated: having a team of driven and high performing individuals is exceptionally rewarding but comes with risks and responsibilities. You need to provide them the opportunity to keep learning and broadening (or deepening) their skill-set on a daily basis, if you don’t want them to start looking elsewhere.
- we keep being relevant to media: by now, most media know that we will keep providing them with new and diverse type of content. This is another way for us to avoid boring.
- we make it hard for the competition to catch up: Content Marketing, like SEO, is a game which is mainly played with open cards. What you do, and to some extent ‘How you do it’, is visible to everyone. Especially to your competition. The only way to stay ahead of them is to keep innovate and never become complacent.
In our first 12 months, such approach has pushed us to keep on evolving the type of content created.
We started by providing media with simple and short articles on both eCommerce and non-eCommerce related topics.
We then tested out combining interesting data with visually compelling formats (ie. infographics).
We added to some of our content an interactive component, with the goal of making more complex data more easily digestable to readers.
We then experimented to co-brand some of our studies with trusted third parties such as our investors, to gain additional credibility.
Finally, we are now leveraging more and more of our own proprietary data for our own studies.
Some of the Content produced and Results achieved
Below some of the content we have enjoyed the most in creating and which obtained the widest coverage.
- The Map(s) of eCommerce
An interactive content, built in 6 different localised versions, providing a view on the main eCommerce players in each of our 6 markets and how they rank against each others. The content has been published on 100+ media, among others on Business Insider, The Jakarta Post, CNN Indonesia, The Star, Bangkok Post and many others. It is now often referred by local and international media when discussing about the eCommerce dynamics of a particular country (both in press and TV).
- Our April Fool’s prank on Amazon’s entrance in SEA
Leveraging Amazon’s announced entrance in SEA, we created an April Fools’ prank with the exclusive preview of the localised version of the Amazon website, which we distributed to media ahead of the 1st of April. The campaign was listed as April Fool’s 2017 Best Pranks by Channel News Asia, and gathered over 50+ top media publications, such as in TechinAsia or in the New Straits Times.Did you fall for these? April Fool’s 2017 best pranks and fake news
From IKEA play areas with digital pods to a new Ribena drink with an impossible flavour combination — here are some of…www.channelnewsasia.com
- The Education background of Startup Founders
With the objective of discovering the education patterns of successful start-up founders, we studied the education background of all the post-Series A founding teams,. We partnered in each country with some of our investors to help us on both the branding and distribution (Big thanks again to DMP, Venturra, Gobi Partners and 500 startups!). The content was published on over 50 tier 1 publications, including Bangkok Post, Thairath, Manager, Vietnamplus, Techz, Liputan6, Merdeka, CNN, The Jakarta Post, Business Insider, Yahoo News and referred by the universities mentioned in the study: NUS (Singapore), ITB (Indonesia), VNU(Vietnam)
All the results above were achieved :
- without any PR Budget: As a matter of fact we spent…precisely…$0 in PR (excluding the salaries of our team, see below). We didn’t employ any external PR or Marketing agency and we never paid a single $ to have our content picked up or pushed to media, in any of our 7 countries (btw Google, what about checking out websites that engage in paid links activities also in this part of the world? Last time we checked, paying for links was against your webmaster guidelines).
- with a team of only 7 people: for most of the past 12 months we were operating with one person per market or less.
- without an existing Brand we could leverage: the number of media and journalists who had heard of us when we first started out was close to 0%
This month should see the launch of our most ambitious content project to date, which we are overly excited about, as we are trying to push yet again the quality bar of our content marketing initiatives.
It’s Always Day 1.