Content Strategy For Building A Climate Tech Brand

One of the best strategies is to publish content that position the founder/CEO as a thought leader in their industry. However, these articles don't have to live alone. They can, for instance, be recorded first as an interview and transcribed, written into a blog and broken up into multiple social media posts.

When you're designing your thought leadership strategy, go back to your brand's story. The basis for your content will be the "change in the world" that you identified in the first module (Brand Story). Within this context, everything you say should be fundamentally different than your competitors. You can then take the Magic Gifts (old world vs. new world way of doing things) and expand on them as your subject matter.

For instance, my six-month thought leadership strategy looks like this:

Context: Today, entrepreneurship is society's main mechanism to create impact. Whereas impact used to be delivered by charities, non-profits, and philanthropy, today brands must be the ones to build the sustainable economy of tomorrow. However, sustainable brands still communicate like their peers of yesteryear, and it holds back their growth. 

Solution: To overcome these challenges, Climate Tech brands need to approach entrepreneurship differently. They need to show their commercial acumen and their business prowess. And the best way to showcase both of these things is to build a brand (that tells stories, not just a product (that talks about features). 

There are six "magic gifts" or tools which will help you build a strong brand and create an investible Climate Tech brand:

1. Brand Foundations

2. Target Audience

3. Strategic Messaging

4. Brand Platform

5. Thought Leadership

6. Public Relations

Sound familiar? It should. This course is based on this strategy. And so is my content strategy. That's because my content strategy always follows one of these six pillars of brand building within the context of "the new way to do things vs. the old way".

Step 1. Magic Gifts

What are the key areas in which you operate? If you think back to your brand story in Section 1, this will be the "magic gifts" which you're armed with to help you target audience.

Step 2. For each topic, ask yourself the following five questions:

1.  What is it and what's the context? How does this subtopic tie into the greater brand story from Section 1?

2. Why is it important for the target audience? 

3. How does doing this wrong hold your audience back from success and what are the main mistakes they usually make?

4. How to do it right? What's the forumula? What are the steps you usually take with your clients/customers?

5. Give an example (or multiple of companies that have done it right. What about in your own experience? Or perhaps a famous case? Case studies build credibility.

Once you know your the answers to these five questions for each of your subtopics, create a long form piece of content surrounding one topic a month. Once you've recorded that piece of content, you'll be able to cut it up into smaller blogs and content for social media.

In practice, this is how small companies can create more content than most large companies. With the agility to move fast and the ability to create and distribute something that's not 100% perfect, this daily content strategy will help your brand build it's reputation and showcase it's brand.

Remember: Perfection prevents progress

Keep in mind, your content doesn’t have to be perfect. Whilst your company may be striving for perfection, these snippets should be more “behind the scenes” of your brand than faultless reality TV. Don't be too afraid to put yourself out there.

Social media and in particular, LinkedIn and Instagram, let you really connect with your audience. They give you a direct line of influence. Yet as impact entrepreneurs, we consistently under-leverage these platforms. Whether it’s because we don’t value them or simply because we don’t have the resources to throw at them, it holds us back from scaling our influence and ultimately, our solution. 

It all starts with having one podcast, webinar or piece to camera.