Winning with Content In Crowded & Emerging Markets

For startups tackling crowded, complicated, or not-yet-created markets it can be hard to define and differentiate your company from competitors or existing options.

Telling your company story is a vital piece of a strong marketing strategy. Through our lens at Verbatim, this is why “tactical storytelling” is one of the best use cases for long-form content.

Here’s what we’ve learned from helping young companies and founders tell their stories.

How Pillar Content Sets Streamlined Apart in a Crowded Vertical

‍Boris de Souza has seen far too many companies push articles designed purely for SEO. 

While planning content in the early days of Streamlined, he immediately knew they’d have to keep away from pieces built to serve search engines instead of readers. 

Instead, he wanted the company to produce content with actual value-add — stuff that could help customers understand the pain of B2B payments, even if they didn’t try Streamlined. 

In that sense, their content vertical is focused on generating educational content for users who are newer to wholesale, often brands beginning to encounter growing pains in the space. He specifies, 

“We realized that many eCom founders come from different backgrounds and experience levels. We wanted to make sure our content was approachable and easy to understand.” 

To become a true force of thought leadership, they’d have to establish their position as a trustworthy, reputable source in an often crowded, confusing area. 

Throughout the earliest stages of Streamlined, Boris grappled with how to define the brand voice and navigate a space flooded with jargon, lingo, and (again) simple SEO garbage. 

So, Boris entrusted the Verbatim team with architecting the Streamlined blog and other potential content franchises that would serve his vision of actually assisting eCom teams. 

The end result? A content engine that’s in equal parts built to: 

• Address different pain points and issues eCom brands experience
• Provide expert insights and solutions regarding these problems
• Explain these pain points through the Streamlined brand lens

“Verbatim's content strategy helped us tell our story compellingly and authentically, making it easier for our audience to resonate with what we were building.” – Boris de Souza, Founder & CEO at Streamlined

How Novel Found Value in Editorial-Led Education for Emerging Sectors

Verbatim first partnered up with Novel while they were still in beta testing. We got them prepped and geared up to go live and to market with a bang. 

As Anna recalls, it was mission-critical to have content up and ready to go both on-site and across social platforms for three reasons: 

1. Legitimacy — You’re fighting for credibility from the second you launch. Having a brand voice and robust content engine in place shows you have it together as a company. 
2. Lay claim in the space — If you’re established in a new ecosystem, your content (and thus your brand) can become the de facto educational resource for the space. 
3. Proof of value — Content can communicate your raison d'être and prove why your solution needed to be built in the first place. 

Landing pages, marketing pages, and on-site content are responsible for making a positive first impression on potential customers. 

So, having a rich content marketing function — from case studies to how-to guides to interviews with industry experts — becomes critical to early, foundational success. 

As a part-eCom, part-web3 tool, Novel is building up a brand-new ecosystem that the average consumer knows little to nothing about. 

The team realized early on that, while there was a ton of demand for NFTs and what Novel was building, no one quite knew what it actually was or what to do with it. 

As such, content has become a de facto guide for Novel users to understand the larger ecosystem and learn how and where they, as brands, fit in. 

Content helps the company go further to actively educate and guide new users — without the lift of extra support team efforts — throughout their early days in web3.

“Any brand in a competitive space needs to build high-quality, high-value content ASAP. Content becomes your first point of contact with the outside world.” – Anna Merzi, Co-Founder & COO at Novel

How Goody Applied Content to Build Its Reputation

As a gifting platform, Goody relies heavily on its positive reputation, both in terms of consistent product quality and reliable fulfillment times. 

After all, in order for someone to rely on your business to send a gift on a critical day in someone’s life, you have to present as perfectly trustworthy. 

To build this trust, content is a critical piece of the Goody team’s marketing strategy, going beyond traditional, flooded channels like Instagram or LinkedIn ads. 

Instead, the company needed grassroots content to attract varied audiences while advocating for Goody across user attributes and demographics. 

Today, Goody publishes large amounts of original content aimed at convincing both businesses and individuals that gifting is a valuable activity and relationship builder. 

• Consumers — People turn to Goody to ensure timely delivery for birthdays, anniversaries, etc., as well as to alleviate decision paralysis in the midst of countless gift options. 
• Businesses — Employee gifting is proven to boost retention, satisfaction, and NPS. 

Goody, therefore, leverages content to educate both prospective user pools on these benefits. 

“A 40-year-old woman in Florida is probably looking for something different from a 20-something in New York. We want to speak to users at their own level.” – Oliver Citrin, Chief Business Officer at Goody