Author: Joe Lazauskas / Source: The Content Strategist I’ve worked at the same company for the past three and a half years, but it feels,
I’ve worked at the same company for the past three and a half years, but it feels, at times, like I’ve worked for three different companies. That’s just the nature of startups; you’re reinventing yourself more than Madonna in the ’80s.
Contently’s mission is still the same as when I joined in 2013. We’ve always wanted to help brands create content by giving them powerful content marketing technology and connecting them with the most talented storytellers on earth. But as we’ve grown to nearly 150 employees across four offices on two continents, our business has matured. So has the way we help brands reach their marketing goals.
And guess what? Our own content marketing changed right along with it.
Stage I: The plucky startup days (2013-2014)
What Contently was like: We resembled the kind of startup you’d see on Silicon Valley. A dozen hoodie-monsters crammed into a single room, spanning every generation from “young millennial” to “old millennial,” doing 37 things at once.
We had meeting rooms, but I never remember using them. We would just turn around our chairs and yell at each other. Our VP of product sat across from me and criticized my articles, paragraph by paragraph, uninvited. His crisp German accent made the feedback sound both less and more harsh. In turn, I would nitpick every flaw in our platform. It was one of the most mutually beneficial relationships of my life.
What that meant for our content marketing: Content marketing was an incredibly new discipline just gaining momentum, and there were a couple of other content marketing platforms out there that had launched before us and raised more money. As a result, I had one primary goal: build awareness.
Our content marketing operation was extremely top-of-funnel focused because we wanted to establish ourselves as the leader in content marketing. As I detailed in this piece from late last year, we focused on our audience’s biggest pain points, took advantage of the fact that there weren’t a ton of other content marketing resources out there, and grew our audience from 14,000 readers to over 100,000 in that first year.
We built an audience, but as we raised a $9 million round and grew rapidly, our content marketing goal was destined to change.
Stage II: Fast growth and feeding the sales machine (2015-2016)
What Contently was like: Between December 2013 and December 2014, Contently grew six-fold as we won dozens of…
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