Joliene van Grieken

Content is only relevant when it shows the right message at the right time to the right person. So, all the content that you create should be placed in your buyer journey. If you are creating top of the funnel content people are not ready to buy and probably not even ready to learn about the solution. Top funnel: focus on the problem and brand awareness, Mid funnel: focus on building trust, Bottom funnel: focus on the product and how it works.

When seeking a marketer to join our team, I prioritize individuals who excel not only in the technical facets of their role, such as demand generation, content creation, and design, but also possess strong soft skills, which I deem equally, if not more important. The ability to effectively manage stakeholders, time, and projects is essential. Stakeholder management, in particular, is often underestimated, and this oversight can pose significant challenges, especially within larger teams. Therefore, it is imperative to emphasize and enhance your soft and team skills alongside your technical expertise.

The best products/solutions solve an actual problem for a specific buyer. Therefore it's important to focus the messaging around solving this problem for that specific buyer persona. Start with building content around the ever changing world and the problem that lives in that world and then focus your content on how your solution can solve for that problem. So make your content personal and specific for each and one of your buyer persona.

You should see PR as a marketing channel, like paid search or SEO. Therefore, PR only works if you do it consistently and make it a part of your overall marketing strategy. Place PR in your funnel as a channel and build your content around it. So, don't share only when you have something to share; instead, make sure you create content that people want to write about.

For startups, leveraging thought leadership is particularly effective when you align your key influencers with your brand. Having one or two prominent figures in your company, such as the Founder or C-suite executives, who not only possess expertise in the industry but also embody the essence of your brand, can be a highly valuable asset.

For me there is a stage before Awareness. In many industries, companies are not even aware that they have a problem. So just focusing on the problems will not create awareness. Therefore focusing on the changes in the industry(every changing world) and and showing the problems that arise in the world is so important. With this you can actually prep your audience before they go into the awareness stage, which will make it easier for them to move quickly for problem- to solution aware.