With So Many Options for Marketing Your Business, What Content Should You Promote Where?

Your com­pa­ny typ­i­cal­ly has sev­en lay­ers of con­tent mar­ket­ing. Here are tips for each layer.

What content do you use in marketing your firm? And what content should go in which place?

Your com­pa­ny typ­i­cal­ly has sev­en lay­ers of con­tent mar­ket­ing. In descend­ing order of impor­tance, they are:

• Rep­u­ta­tion
• Web­site
• Email tem­plates
• Social media
• Events
• Deck
• Vir­tu­al data room

1. Rep­u­ta­tion
Jeff Bezos said, “A brand for a com­pa­ny is like a rep­u­ta­tion for a per­son. You earn rep­u­ta­tion by try­ing to do hard things well.” By def­i­n­i­tion, it’s unwrit­ten, but critical.

2. Web­site
To the max­i­mum extent pos­si­ble, in our mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als and LinkedIn pro­files, we ban adjec­tives. I real­ly dis­like see­ing com­pa­nies or indi­vid­u­als say that they are “pres­ti­gious,” “influ­en­tial,” etc. Those are not nor­mal­ly quan­ti­ta­tive­ly defen­si­ble, and belong in the rep­u­ta­tion lay­er. Your mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als should show, not tell. Of course, we do try to demon­strate quan­ti­ta­tive­ly the aspects of our sto­ry we think are worth high­light­ing. And if the press wants to use pos­i­tive adjec­tives, that’s great. But, when writ­ing about a firm in its own voice, I like num­bers, not adjectives.

3. Email templates
We have an ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion of email tem­plates for orig­i­na­tion, mar­ket­ing, fundrais­ing, recruit­ing, nego­ti­a­tion, etc. Every team mem­ber is expect­ed to use those tem­plates as the basis for their cor­re­spon­dence. These often link to spe­cif­ic pages on our website.

4. Social media
To the extent pos­si­ble, we try to use our social media pres­ence to point back to our web­site, our part­ners and/or our port­fo­lio com­pa­nies’ web­sites. Fun­da­men­tal­ly, we con­trol our web pres­ence. But Face­book, Twit­ter, Medi­um and oth­er social plat­forms con­trol the extent to which peo­ple see the con­tent we pub­lish there. I don’t like cre­at­ing con­tent pro­pri­etary to some­one else’s plat­form when they’re not pay­ing us to do it. So, we don’t cre­ate unique con­tent on some­one else’s plat­form, with­out at a min­i­mum also pub­lish­ing it on a site in our imme­di­ate cor­po­rate family.

5. Events
We cur­rent­ly par­tic­i­pate in events as speak­ers and plan to con­tin­ue host­ing peri­od­ic events to build aware­ness around our fund and port­fo­lio com­pa­nies. We don’t nor­mal­ly dis­trib­ute lit­er­a­ture at these events, but we do pre­pare FAQs before­hand (not for dis­tri­b­u­tion) to make sure that we’re all aligned on our talk­ing points.

6. Pre­sen­ta­tion materials
Our deck is for mate­r­i­al which for legal or oth­er rea­sons we can­not put online. There is some inevitable dupli­ca­tion here of the web­site con­tent.

7. Vir­tu­al data room
This is the gran­u­lar con­tent that only investors doing due dili­gence on your firm will assess, or per­haps a poten­tial client who is think­ing of writ­ing a large check. For MECE pur­pos­es, when­ev­er one of our poten­tial clients (a lim­it­ed part­ner) give us ques­tions, many of our answers are along the lines of, “Please see the slide __________ in our deck” or “See http://hof.capital/______ .”

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