#content-collab
this channel is for finding SMEs to add expertise to your content or guest posters. no link swaps pls.
Thread
What do you all think about founder-led content marketing? Any tips for making it work? Anything you think people get wrong about it? Any brands you think are killing it?
I'd love to hear from marketers or founders who have stories to tell about founder-led marketing (researching for an article for Relato).
Hey Rosie 🙂 Hopefully you'll find something useful here.
Founder-led marketing can work really well. But whether it works depends on a lot of factors.
A willing founder is great, but they also need to be extremely knowledgeable and a great speaker. Especially if you want them to make video content and appear on podcasts. That doesn't mean you have to be perfect, but you won't get away with looking bored or unengaged while others are talking, stumbling over your words, taking too much time to formulate answers, etc.
These things can be coached, to an extent. And of course, it's the role of the marketing team to support the founder. Make sure they're fully prepped on talking points, and help them through the early stages by acting as a producer of sorts.
(I worked with a founder once who was a good communicator, but had trouble responding quickly to unscripted questions - when podcast conversations naturally branch out sometimes. I'd just be sitting at a shared Google doc, typing quick bullets for them as prompts.) 😅
I think you also need very clear audience signals that they want to hear more from the founder. You can't take someone who hasn't established themselves as a thought leader and force them onto an audience that doesn't care.
The thought leadership has to already exist. And it has to exist in a relevant way.
If it doesn't, you'll need to spend time building that.
Most of the successful examples I can think of come from founders who were talking about specific problems they had been facing for years. Then they launched a product to tackle that problem.
They'd already built an audience who agreed there was a problem. Now they can market the solution directly to that curated audience.
The classic example in the B2C space of why this type of audience curation matters so much is . Over 2.6 million followers but she couldn't sell 36 t-shirts.
You can't just build a broad following and assume you can market what you want to them. Similarly, you can't really build trust as a thought leader if it's too obvious that you're only doing it to sell something. But once you have the trust, you can sell really well.
Brands doing it really well:
• Wynter with Peep Laja and his 'Do you even resonate?' show
• 37 Signals with David Heinemeier Hansson in the B2B tech space (they have a all about their approach)
• Exit Five with Dave Gerhardt (also has a book called Founder Brand)
Thanks Tom, this is great!!