Engineering-focused startups often don’t know where to start when it comes to creating content. Every tech company needs three basic layers in its content cake: cultural content, functional content and constructive content.
Cultural Content
Layer one of your content cake is cultural content which captures a company’s core beliefs and values about itself and the world. It must inspire and motivate employees, customers and investors. Cultural content is a longer-term investment than other content types and its impact is often more difficult to directly measure than other forms of content. However, the impact of cultural content is powerful and wide-ranging since the core beliefs and values that it captures influence everything you do as a company from recruitment to product development. Your story really is your strategy. Corporate messaging and company symbols like logos and other visual branding are foundational cultural content.
Messaging: Corporate messaging captures beliefs and values in succinct soundbites and images. Messaging is always the first piece of content MadeVivid creates for clients as part of a content package. It’s the DNA inherited by every other piece of content a company creates.
Symbols: Logos, visual and audio branding are symbols or tangible representations of the company.
Stories: Storylines in which the company, its products and its sector are leading characters help explain a company’s mission to itself and the world. For each client, MadeVivid creates many storylines grounded in messaging. Wonderbly makes personalised books for kids.The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home was the story of a child lost in space and MadeVivid suggested that the company send the new book into space as part of NASA's story time from space program where astronauts read children's books with scientific themes. Wonderbly launched a competition where one child won the chance to send his personalised book to the International Space station and have it read by astronaut Tim Peake. This inspiring story was widely covered in the media.
Functional Content
The next layer in your content cake is functional content which directly helps you to achieve a goal like increasing leads or revenue. Basic sales and marketing material whose performance can be easily measured is often functional content.
Website: The company website is often an important step in capturing leads in your sales funnel. Website copy and other content resources on the website should help improve marketing metrics. MadeVivid often creates new copy for company websites based on messaging.
Sales content: Sales presentations and other sales content should help move leads to the next stage in the sales funnel and boost sales metrics.
Content for hiring: This is a neglected area in many tech companies in spite of the competition for talent. Effective and honest functional content for hiring should help potential recruits to make a decision about whether this is the right company for them. Cultural content also plays an important part in hiring.
Constructive Content
Constructive content solves a problem for your prospects even if they never buy a product from you. The best constructive content shares expertise on a cutting edge topic. Companies often get constructive content wrong by producing a glorified product brochure. Various sales and marketing metrics can be used to measure the performance of constructive content.
In-depth technical content: eBooks, practice papers and technical white papers give advice and guidance which solve a problem for the reader or help them to achieve a goal. A good example is GitHub’s Development Workflows for Data Scientists ebook. Github wanted to encourage more data scientists to use Github and there were few established best practices for development workflows in data science teams so MadeVivid interviewed a dozen different experts and cutting edge data science teams to gather the material for the ebook.
Original Research: Original research and insights in your area of expertise is also very valuable for prospects. MadeVivid contributed to Pivotal Software’s BuiltToAdapt Benchmark, a quantitative framework of indicators that gauges how well an organization builds, deploys, and operates software. Pivotal then gathered data on these indicators from more than 1,600 respondents across six countries and five industries. Companies could explore the data or measure their own performance by filling out the Benchmark questionnaire.