How to Find Startup Success Through Content

Claire Suellentrop, Director of Marketing at Calendly, joins the Content Pros Podcast to discuss how infusing content marketing throughout an organization plays a vital role in the success of startups.

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Full Episode Details

The Invaluable Marketer

Starting a business is a risky venture with a lot at stake: money, reputation, career, and the list goes on. Before embarking on this exciting and terrifying adventure, many entrepreneurs do their best to ensure success by creating a solid business plan.

For Claire Suellentrop, a proper business plan should take a fresh look at content marketing and understand how it can be used to fuel business growth. As a marketing professional, this means stepping out of your comfort zone, rolling up your sleeves, and applying your content development skills to all areas of the organization.

From sales to recruitment to customer education, the right content can drive success in all areas of a new business. It’s also a rare opportunity for a marketing professional to truly infuse content as a tool throughout the organization.

By focusing on building the organization as a whole instead of just “staying in your (marketing department) lane,” content marketers can have an enormous impact on the growth and longevity of a startup; making themselves an invaluable asset to any organization.

In This Episode

• Why content marketing for a startup means a blending marketing with sales and infusing it throughout the organization
• How understanding the right positioning for your product leads to natural story-based content that sells
• Why developing impactful content around customer success means rolling up your sleeves and diving into data
• How understanding and adapting to the current stage of growth for your company leads to more successful content

Quote From This Episode

“What’s the tiniest little push that they need to go to the next step?” —@ClaireSuellen

“Rather than focus on content to get people into the app, we had to focus on customer success.” —@ClaireSuellen

“Calendly has been a huge experiment in doing the work across the entire department.” —@ClaireSuellen

“Content needs to be something we infuse throughout the entire buyer journey.” —@randyfrisch

“The job of all content is to create value in some way. It’s supposed to solve some kind of problem or fill some kind of need.” —@ClaireSuellen

“When it comes to engaging our existing customers with content, we try to keep it as simplistic as possible.” —@ClaireSuellen

“We don’t want to over-communicate and fill people’s inboxes with too much of ourselves.” —@ClaireSuellen

“It’s only in a real conversation that there’s room to ask customers to expand on something.” —@ClaireSuellen

Resources

• Claire Suellen on Twitter: @ClaireSuellen
• Calendly

Content Pros Lightning Round

What’s the worst pronunciation of your name that you’ve ever heard? Not offensive, but the most common mispronunciation is “sue-ellen-trop.”

What are you watching on Netflix? Grace & Frankie or binging on Parks & Rec.

What is the best time to meet in the day? Afternoon, once you’ve had the morning to be productive.