Content marketing seems to have fully taken over as the way to generate leads and grab the attention of potential customers. Instead of putting a billboard on the side of the road telling people to buy your new sales forecasting software, the best marketers will write a blog post on the "top 10 ways to improve your sales forecasting" with a short blurb about their product at the bottom of the article. Content marketing is a lower-cost, passive way to generate attention that will spread much faster than a traditional advertisement, and it generally lasts forever.

For founders, the question becomes: what kind of content should we create?

I think the guiding principle for content creation should be to honor your user. Create content that highlights and compliments your users’ work or lifestyle and helps them get better at whatever it is you help them do.

Let's use the sales forecasting software example that is being sold to VPs of sales. Some content that would honor the VP of Sales:

A case study on how a similar company used the software to improve forecasting.

A Q&A and profile of a very successful VP of Sales.

A roundtable that VP of Sales of potential customers could participate in with a published transcript.

A podcast about issues facing VP of Sales.

Producing this kind of high-quality content that helps and highlights the work of your users drives attention, virality, and trust and is the guiding light for the best marketers and brands. If you’re looking to model another company, Gong does this really well on the B2B side, and Whoop does a great job at B2C. It’s worth checking them out.