A successful private equity content strategy should have an initial team that steers its direction. When deciding on your team’s leader the most likely candidates are your firm’s marketing director or head of investor relations. In some cases, that’s going to be you.
Regardless, this is a leader who will get all of the key players together for that initial strategy meeting. But before setting up that meeting, take a look at our recommended process to prepare. Consider the following the Introduction to Your Content Strategy homework.
Preparing for the Kickoff Meeting
1. Identify Your Audiences & Create Personas
Begin by creating three unique personas for who you’re trying to reach. You may have already put these together, but if you haven’t, it shouldn’t take that long at all. Decide who you are creating content for, based on your firm’s unique goals. It could be that it’s all about prospective portfolio companies and their decision-makers. If that’s the case, who do you want to be talking to in those companies? Their owners? Their CEOs? Their management team? Take a look at who your ideal existing partners are in portfolio companies and make a list of 10 of them with links to their LinkedIn profiles. Now you are ready to build your personas around people in those roles. Here are three persona examples you could use.
The key thing to remember here is that you shouldn’t overthink the personas – if you do, you could go on forever creating them. For the best results, start with three to five – this will give you a diverse pool to reference for content themes and topics moving forward.
2. Get a Handle on Your Tone
Next, narrow down the key descriptors of your PE firm’s style and attitude. For example, our agency’s tone is humorous, calm, straightforward… and focused on giving private investment firms great advice when it comes to digital. Put together a sentence or two that captures your unique tone. Fleshing this out will guide your content themes (and what goes into them) when you hand them off to your content producers.
3. Build a List of Useful Links
This is the part when you look at your competitors and assess where they stand with content strategy. Are they positioning themselves as thought leaders, or have they even started? Also, pay attention to which firms are doing content strategy well. This will help give you some ideas that you can… let’s say “adapt” to fit your style. Organize your list of 3-10 links and include some brief commentary for each.
4. Grab Some Analytics Reports
It’s assumed you have Google Analytics running on your site, if not (GASP!) set it up right now! Pull the following reports and use them to answer the respective questions:
- Audience/Overview – How many unique visitors do you receive daily on average? How long do they stay on your site?
- Acquisition/Overview – What are the primary sources that drive traffic to your site and what is the percentage makeup? What are the primary keywords being used right now to find your site?
- Behavior/Site/All Pages – What are your top landing pages? What pages are your most popular and how are people getting to them?
Pull these reports for the year to date and get to work on studying them. Or, if you are only in the first quarter, pull for the prior year that just ended. Whichever time frame you choose, compare it to the same time period in the previous year. The idea here is to get a solid understanding of basic metrics and become familiar with your site’s activity. This information allows you to establish where things are today.
When you implement a solid content strategy you will see these numbers change over time and for the better. You can expect to see your blog/thought leadership content bubble up to the top of the 3rd report. You will see branded searches (e.g. user searches for “your company name”) decrease in the percentage of overall percentage as your thought leadership starts taking more of the pie.
Putting out quality content that leads people to your website is what you’re aiming for.
5. Establish Themes
You don’t want to just start coming up with things to write about all willy nilly! You want to establish themes that the headlines and content will roll up to. Look at themes as topics your headlines fall under. Themes are the big branches of the tree, your headlines are the leaves.
Let’s say you are a private equity firm focused on middle market healthcare services and healthcare technology SAAS companies. Here are some example themes:
- Leadership
- M & A
- Sales
- Operations
- SAAS
- Software
These are all solid topics within that niche that you could go on and on about with content creation. Oftentimes you will see markets used as themes. The golden rule is to make sure they meet in the sweet spot as shown below. Themes must be in your “wheelhouse”, meaning that you have the subject matter experts to address them and the audience to care about them.
Your themes should align with who you are as a company and your audience’s needs and pain points. We recommend having anywhere from 4 to 8 themes listed initially. Hopefully, it’s not just you working on these prep steps and you have a team to bounce ideas off of. You definitely want to be running your themes and tone by others to get feedback. Why even bother with themes you ask? I’m glad you did, here is why we recommend the use of themes:
- Strategy & Simplicity – They allow you to clarify your strategy and allow you to better plan your content. It’s easier to come up with content ideas when using themes. This overall organization is useful on a number of levels and keeps focus. It makes it clear that these are your areas where you are an AUTHORITY!
- SEO Boost – Theming has implications as the search engines like to see organization, it allows them to categorize and make sense of your content. You can structure your site in a way where each theme has a landing page with a high-level overview and an ever-growing list of links to deeper content that belongs to the theme. When a particular piece of content is ranking well that “juice” is passed up to the overall theme.
6. Identify the Kickoff Members
Even if yours is a larger firm, try to keep your kickoff team to no more than ten people. It’ll be much easier to keep everyone on the same page and moving in the same direction. Here’s who we think you’ll need:
- Marketing Director or Investor Relations Lead (1-2) This is the person who will head up the kickoff meeting. They will be your content strategy point person tasked with keeping the entire effort moving – no small order, to be sure. If your firm is large enough to have a marketing team, invite any of the key members who support the point person.
- Subject Matter Experts (3-5) These are the people in your firm who have the knowledge of what your audience actually wants to hear about. Because of that, they are essential to this meeting. Their time is precious, so make sure it’s clear you only need their brain power for laying the framework and formulating ideas.
- Leadership (1-3) Whether it’s your CEO, COO, or Managing Director, you’ll want their critical insight and confirmation of tone and approach. In some cases, they may also be subject-matter experts, but that is only typical for teams of 16 or less.
7. Send Your Invite!
If possible, try to make the meeting in-person and with a whiteboard. We understand that this isn’t necessarily realistic given everything going on in the world right now, so if you can’t pull it together, do a video conference with screen sharing.
Overall, a two-hour meeting should allow you to accomplish everything on your agenda.
When sending out the invite, make sure you include all of your due diligence work. You’ll also want to give attendees some very easy homework to complete in advance, just to get them up to speed.
Once you have your kickoff team assembled, you can send out that invite. If we were sending it, it would look a little something like this:
Hi Everyone,
I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to our content strategy kickoff!
We will embark on a process where we regularly produce and publish meaningful content for our target audiences. Speaking of, I have attached personas that represent the different user types we will provide content for. I have also included a list of links to competitors and/or PE thought leaders along with my commentary. I have also included a brief description of the tone that captures our firm’s personality. Please review, and as always I welcome any feedback.
I also have some light homework for you – but don’t worry, it won’t hurt too much. Please send me three headlines that you think would be valuable content for our users. Spend no more than five minutes on this – all we need are the headlines. I have also included the themes for our content, so be sure your headline would “fall under” one or more of the themes. Let these questions guide your independent brainstorm.
- What questions do you consistently receive from potential portfolio companies?
- Are there any “Top 5 or 10 Lists” you have in mind for giving advice?
- What are our competitors not addressing in their content that we should be?
Please have it to me by Friday. There will be prizes at the conclusion of the meeting rewarding you for this work! Looking forward to our meeting!
Sincerely,
Your Super Awesome & Enthusiastic Spearheader of Content Strategy
Play with the timing as you see fit. For example, maybe a good approach is to send the invite on a Monday for Wednesday of the following week so you give the team till the end of the week to supply their headlines giving you Monday/Tuesday to incorporate them into your presentation. Do what makes sense for you and your team!
8. Create your presentation
Have a slide presentation to guide the meeting. Finalize this closer to your meeting so you can display the team’s feedback – we even built one out that you can use. Here you go!
Running the Kickoff Meeting
Regardless of whether you’re meeting in person or through a video conference call, be sure to set up your presentation for sharing and collaboration. If you’re going the video conferencing route, use a platform that offers screen share capabilities – Zoom and Google Meet work well for us. You should have your presentation and all assets you created in the previous steps loaded up and ready to go. Have someone on the team dedicated to taking notes. Here is a proposed agenda and timeline:
1. Setting the Goals & Agenda (10 minutes)
Remember that for your meeting to be successful, you need to keep everyone focused and engaged at all times. Start with an explanation of what your firm is looking to accomplish with your content strategy. Give a high level of the agenda and then really stress what you want to accomplish at the end of your meeting which is to:
- Determine the tone and direction of your content strategy plan
- Confirm 4 to 8 themes that guide up your content strategy
- Come out of this meeting with 10-20 headlines per theme that are just dying to get written and published!
Do an overview for attendees to make sure everyone is on the same page. Pay particular attention to your firm’s tone, as this is going to be a driver for all the themes and headlines you determine.
2. Confirming the Team (5 minutes)
Confirm who the team members are and what their roles are. At this point, your team may not be complete as you may rely on partners for some of the work but your internal team should be established. You may want to frame the team in terms of doers (marketing/investor relations), thinkers (subject matter experts), and guiders (executive leadership).
3. Review Assets, Confirm Audience, Tone & More (30 minutes)
Start off by reviewing what you have already put together – first with analytics but run through it fairly quickly. Make sure you are not getting bogged down in the weeds. The reports are just meant to give everyone an idea of activity and sources and provide a benchmark. Spend more time reviewing tone and personas. Are they on point? What additions or modifications are needed? This should flow fairly quickly as the attendees were provided this information well prior to the meeting.
4. Themes & Headlines Fun (45 minutes)
This is where you spend the majority of the meeting. Confirm and draw out the themes via screen share. For this type of stuff, we love Invision’s Freehand, a virtual whiteboard, which is just what you need! Plenty of other options though – don’t mind us going all fanboy over here.
Now it’s time to review the headlines team members came up with and place them under their appropriate themes. This should be a fun process! Here are a few ways to make it so:
- The slackers that didn’t email you back their headlines can come up with ones on the spot while you still make fun of them for being slackers!
- It’s a brainstorming session so people should be throwing out all sorts of ideas which is fun!
- Award a prize to the overachiever who submitted the most headlines because it’s always fun to get a prize!
- After they’re presented vote on the top headline overall and award the creator of the winner!
- Brainstorm alternative names to just “blog”. Most firms that are practicing regular content production have it all released under “blog” or “insights”. You are cooler than that so come up with a unique name for where your content lives!
Have fun. Make it fun. Fun stuff! Get it?
5. Review & Wind Down (15 minutes)
At this point, you are an hour and a half into the meeting and you have gotten everything you set out to do accomplished! Take a look at some of the useful links and competitors you have curated. Summarize and give an overview of the next steps. Have some snacks for sure if in person, then let your team continue to wind down with unstructured discussion. Wrap up the meeting early, because everyone appreciates that and they are probably tired from getting all this great stuff done.
Unpacking from the Meeting
All throughout the meeting, make sure that someone (preferably someone responsible) is taking notes so that they can be distributed to everyone who attended later on. You may also want to use a shared repository so that attendees can access meeting notes and other products of your content strategy.
Just use whatever methods are equal parts fast and easy for empowering communication. Don’t worry, we’ll get into all of the actual tools of the process later.
And now, Congratulations, you did it! Well done, you.
You’ve pulled together a game plan and have an inventory of thoughtful topics to craft content around as well as the titles for the actual content. Phew! Now, before you get into content production you need to get a handle on your technology stack – probably the single biggest asset you’ll have available to you moving forward.