Content Marketing for Industry Brand Positioning

The start-up lifecycle can be long and a grinding experience for the founder as they secure funding, seek resources, develop and test products, build a customer base and field advice (sometimes competing!) from various partners, investors and supporters.

Overview

A marketing and communications strategy is often not considered until late in the lifecycle while experts encourage founders to focus on product development and funding. However, this can lead a start-up to struggle with how to effectively message and reach its target audience which ultimately will help drive sales and investment.

Conversely, founders who are experienced business or industry leaders (versus scientists, researchers and academics) often recognize the value of a strong communications strategy early in the business lifecycle.

A founder must be able to effectively communicate how its product solves a critical problem for a targeted consumer, and how to reach those consumers in order to increase sales and secure much-needed capital.

Lisa First-Willis, a career HR executive with 25+ years of experience working with established companies and start-ups in the airline, gaming, hospitality, healthcare, technology and manufacturing industries in the U.S. and globally, is founder of Truvelop, a SaaS desktop and mobile app-based solution that enables continuous performance management and development and the delivery of real-time feedback to employees.

In a competitive HR-tech marketplace, she committed early to investing in marketing, messaging and communications to establish brand awareness and positioning for her product.

For three years, we provided fractional CMO services to support her growing team focused on customer engagement and sales.

Our Services

Create content calendar for blog and social media
Draft two blog articles per month working with the customer relations team to align with educational themes and common customer challenges
Work with CEO to identify associations, media and organizations withing key industry targets
Develop strategy for engaging with industry groups which included trade shows, newsletter content, quotes for Truvelop content, event sponsorships and podcast interviews
Establish CEO as thought leader among business and HR media
Develop media pitches
Ghostwrite columns and secure placement in business and industry publications
Nominate CEO/Truvelop for awards

Key Takeaways

Our work helped effectively position Truvelop in a competitive marketplace and create opportunities for the CEO and her team to build relationships with decision-makers in key industry verticals. We were also able to leverage existing customer success stories to improve Truvelop’s brand positioning as the leading SaaS product for performance management.

Without a marketing communications strategy, emerging businesses struggle to gain a foothold in the tech space to stand out among competitors and meet revenue goals that are critical to investors.

Kristi’s leadership and guidance has been spot-on, and she has always offered guidance from both strategic and creative perspectives.

I have had the pleasure to work with Kristi Halford over the past 5 years as our fractional CMO for an HR technology startup. Kristi’s leadership and guidance has been spot-on, and she has always offered guidance from both strategic and creative perspectives. She is best in class, honest, smart, super easy to work with, works tirelessly, and is just a good human.