We’ll give it to you straight. The venture capital market is super crowded and even more competitive than ever. With firms across the US and the world fighting over their slice of the pie, marketing teams within venture capital, growth, and private equity have to do some serious strategizing to remain ahead of their competition and grab the attention of the very best potential portfolio companies.

There’s tons your team can do to establish or maintain a footprint in the industry and spread the good word about your company. And, by working with several firms, the team at Edgar Allan has noticed several emerging trends. One of them shouldn’t surprise anyone: Even in VC, content is king. 

Even the most straightforward marketing websites should never be a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. You must constantly refresh your site's content to attract new eyes, engage visitors, and keep interested parties coming back. Our advice: Most investment firms should expend some energy on starting up content creation engines. 

Simply sharing knowledge and insights, providing opinions, speaking to trends, and giving entrepreneurs a peek behind the curtain at your firm are all viable ways of generating insightful information that intrigues potential partners and sets your firm apart.

‍Here are four strategies your venture capital team can embrace to start your content engine today:

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1. Harness your voice

Podcasts certainly aren’t a new idea, but their increase in popularity in recent years is something to note and leverage. We’ve worked with firms that are at the beginning stages, wanting to get podcasts off the ground, and some who already have distribution and a backlog of episodes, looking to highlight ownership of their work by creating a dedicated podcast built in Webflow. After creating a solid handful of these, we can confidently say that anyone who’s anyone is getting behind the mic.

It makes sense. There’s something to be said here about the podcast’s accessibility and connective properties. But episodes are also great spin-off content generators. Recording a few and then mining the material for potential blog and whitepaper topics (more on these later) is a great way to speak to trends or industry news in a timely way or even doubly feature a changing roster of guests that range from internal stakeholders to partners and other industry big-wigs. 

Whatever you decide to do, make sure to film while recording if you’re comfortable doing so. That way, you can use the content on platforms including YouTube, LinkedIn, X, and wherever else your audience might be spending their time. 

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2. Craft insightful narratives

There are plenty of reasons why company blogs are still a must-have in content marketing. They’ve been around for as long as websites have, and they’ve yet to be thrown out the window entirely. 

More than just a means of gaming search algorithms to get more eyes on your site, blogs offer another way for you to share your unique knowledge in your company’s singular voice. The list of possibilities regarding what to write about is pretty endless. Consider sharing insights into your firm, how your investment team and stakeholders think, how you approach investing, what sets you apart, insights into the latest regulations, and more. They’re all great options worth exploring to create valuable content regularly. 

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3. Unveil the story behind the story

An appreciation for stories is ingrained into every human’s DNA. And there’s nothing anyone loves more than a good success story. So, why not leverage the ones your firm helps create? Every investment your company makes is a potential story, one that, followed from start to finish, can cover the entire investment journey, from its early stages to funding and even exit. 

Whether you call them case studies or portfolio pieces, narratives about your partner companies are a great way to tell comprehensive stories and highlight successful investments that will attract partners in similar fields to your firm. People love to read about others who are doing well. So, think about what would be most valuable for entrepreneurs and potential partners to know about each investment you’ve made, including learnings that you and they can apply down the road and get typing. 

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4. Create whitepapers that matter

When a blog or even a series of blogs won’t do a story justice, longer-form written content is always there to take advantage of. Whitepapers not only serve as a means of sharing your wealth of knowledge and expertise but can be incredibly helpful for founders and entrepreneurs, too. The delight is in the details here. Create content around guidance for startups, fundraising strategies, product development, marketing tactics, and scaling operations — all with a spin only your firm can have.

An alternative is to flex your industry knowledge through in-depth analyses of specific sectors. This approach offers investors a comprehensive understanding of market dynamics, key players, and growth prospects. 

These are just four content strategies your venture capital, growth equity, or private equity firm can employ to get — and keep — your name out there and in circulation via SEO and social shares. Finding what works for you is just a matter of giving each (or all) of these ideas the old college try and seeing what works. Every firm is different, and it’s only through consistent experimentation and pivoting that you’ll find your content marketing niche. 

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