Content Marketing as a Growth Engine for B2B Startups

Building an inbound demand engine with social for B2B startups is a buzzy topic right now. As outbound becomes harder, companies should think about how inbound tactics like content marketing can help. We chatted with Nick Chan, founder of B2B agency GTM Social (and Assembly customer!) to share more about insights on how B2B companies can use strategic content creation, especially on Linkedin, to create compelling narratives, case studies, and thought leadership to win business.

Tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you find yourself starting an agency?

After spending the last few years working in-house as a Product Marketing Manager at fast-growing companies like Convictional and Vidyard, I realized the power of content marketing for driving results across the stack at B2B companies. In the beginning of 2024, I decided to start an agency (GTM Social), and help other B2B founders create LinkedIn content. Now, we're increasingly focused on helping people with case studies and trying to support them across as much of their content function as possible, really building a full content engine for startups. 

Many B2B companies are heavily product or engineering-driven. How does content play a role, and why is it crucial to support B2B companies with content?

There are many ways to approach this problem or question. The first thing I realized was that content is like the fuel across all your different go-to-market functions. People often assume content is only good for marketing, to drive inbound, right? To build a brand—what's the value of that? But what I saw working at startups the past three years was that not having enough quality content was a barrier across many departments. This included sales and customer success. 

In sales, it was getting hard for our enterprise account executives to close deals. The big barrier was that they didn't have great case studies or ROI models. They lacked content that shared best practices of our existing customers, which is slightly different than case studies—how you're actually using the product to drive value, the exact playbook, and the results they're seeing. 

On the customer success side, content is also overlooked as a key to driving metrics like upsells and retention. The moment this stuck to me was at a company similar to Loom, where we were recording and sharing videos. We had signed very large enterprise clients—Fortune 100, Fortune 500 scale. These contracts were gigantic, easily seven figures worth. Listening to these customer calls, imagine having a seven-figure client you've worked with for years, but their team is still asking, "How should we use video in our organization?" Essentially, they're asking, "How should we use your product?" The fact they didn't have a good grasp on that was a failure on the content side. The content function needed to capture the best practices of other customers better. 

Many organizations on the CS side share best practices in one-on-one conversations every quarter. A better practice is to create easily shareable content. Instead of waiting for quarterly discussions, content can be shared daily via social platforms or monthly through newsletters—a more scalable and consistent way to filter out best practices. These experiences led me to believe that content is a crucial glue across different go-to-market functions. That's why I want to spend more time on it—I think it's a big operations problem for many companies. It's easy to see the impact great content can have once B2B companies start creating.

When should companies invest in content?

Once you've signed your first one or two customers and know your product has value, and customers will pay for it, you can start talking to them on a more frequent basis and start building your content around, "What questions do they have? What problems are they facing? How can I make their life and job easier?”

If one customer has a problem, chances are others in your market or similar target personas have that same exact problem. So as early as possible, start using content [to address these problems]—from the moment you have your first customers and can listen and learn from them. The fundamental of product marketing that translates well to content marketing is deeply understanding your customers, understanding their insights, gathering their insights, understanding what problems they're having, and very importantly, how they can grow their career.

How do you think about the distribution of content? 

It depends on what type of company we're discussing. The big difference would be if you're an enterprise company selling into enterprise accounts, then an important distribution channel to consider is your sales reps. Your account executive sales reps need content that's easy to share, talk about, and use. For product-led growth companies where you may not be talking to people on a more frequent basis, you might need to consider channels like your home screen or dashboard. Like, “Do you have a resource library or support library?”

From my startup experience, I've realized that dashboards and libraries are powerful places for these resources. Often, companies invest in creating great content like case studies, playbooks, and more. However, it can be difficult for their users or customers to find it. So, dashboards should definitely be considered. While newsletters are common across all B2B companies, I believe it's important to have a LinkedIn social strategy. LinkedIn is really good for surfacing your content to your audiences.

Another reason LinkedIn and social channels are effective is that it gives you an excuse to constantly have a stream of content for your customers and for your prospects to consume. There's no other channel out there where it's remotely acceptable to post or send a piece of content daily. Based on what I've been seeing across clients and even my accounts, people will read that every day, consume that content every day, which is just impossible to get across any other channel.

What tools do you use for content?

Assembly for managing approvals and scheduling has been really big. I think I've scheduled like 300 to 350 pieces of content on Assembly in the last couple of months. 

I've experimented with AI tools to create content, and my conclusion is that it's faster for me to do the research and write it out myself. However, for video editing, I use Descript. They have a great captions feature I like. Another feature I appreciate is their studio sound, which even makes recordings with bad mics sound amazing and simplifies caption cleanup. 

For design, I work with a designer who uses Figma. Figma is incredible; I use it for everything. One more tool that's actually the most important: Fireflies. I use it to record all my sales calls and customer calls. I encourage all my clients to record their sales conversations so I can review and organize those insights. This is a key pillar in ensuring all the content resonates with customers. 

What's a controversial opinion you have about B2B content?

I think that the biggest problem for a lot of startups isn't content strategy. Their biggest problem is that they just have an operations problem and a patience problem. I think what's a lot more important is that you need pace, you need to experiment and you're going to learn a lot more by starting to create content and see how the market sort of resonates with it.

And a lot of people want the perfect strategy and they'll take weeks or months to build one perfect report. No one responds, no one cares, right? I think for many companies, they would benefit a lot more by taking a mindset of, “Okay, like let's just ship like two pieces every single week. It doesn't have to be super high quality.” And their marketing strategy and content strategy will be in a much better place after one or two months of doing this.

Lastly, what are your favorite companies or founder accounts to follow today on LinkedIn and why?

The first one I really love is a guy named Peter Walker, the head of insights at Carta. He's sitting on a gold mine of data on startup funding rounds, their sizes, fundraising types, and how early employees are compensated. What he does is publish these insights and great data visualizations almost every single day. The reason I think it's unique is because he's answering questions that his customers and VC funds are always asking. Creating data visualizations makes it inherently viral. These visualizations get shared because they're so great. It's a great way for him to raise awareness of Carta and establish their team as experts in that space. 

Another example is I'm a big fan of a fintech company called Sardine because what their CEO, Soups Ranjan, does is he has a recurring content series posted on LinkedIn. Every week he has a series called New Fraud Just Dropped. He goes into detail about the newest fraud in the market, what it is, the vectors of attack, and the step-by-step process of how fraudsters steal money and how you can prevent it. I think it's original research and I admire it because it's clearly a problem that, if you're in cybersecurity, you want to stay on top of these things [fraud]. So there's a strong content-to-target ICP fit. Even as someone not in that space, I find all these breakdowns really interesting.

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