The Startup Playbook, 2nd Edition

Chapter 26Your Marketing Approach

Modern marketing techniques are making it easier than ever to align your marketing strategy with the rest of your business. There's been so much innovation and creativity in how to target customers cost effectively.

I've (Rajat) experienced this firsthand with our latest company, JumpCloud. We are targeting IT administrators with our cloud directory solution. Traditionally, these people weren't easy to reach, nor did they have the authority to make purchases. But now, IT admins are critical to making virtually any foundational purchase for an IT organization. We also know that this audience is incredibly discerning, and they don't like to be sold or marketed to. They also believe in trying products before they purchase them.

With that level of understanding, we now know that targeting this group has to be authentic and feel organic to the IT admin. The result? The JumpCloud team has built out a content marketing strategy that produces thousands of pieces of content that help solve problems for IT admins. As part of those content pieces, we provide the audience with options on how to solve their problems, with JumpCloud being one of these solutions.

Of course, all of these content pieces are crawled by Google, and when IT admins search for solutions to their problems, the hope is that the content we have written ranks highly. Fortunately, this strategy has played out successfully, and we have seen significant numbers of IT admins become aware ...