The Blueprint to Go From Inception to Acquisition in 3 Years

Here’s exactly how you can build your B2B company through media and content with a small budget and limited resources.

Use the framework I deployed to take airline software provider Kambr from inception to being acquired in just three years by Amadeus — the biggest travel tech company in the world!

… All the while enduring a global pandemic that brought the aviation industry to a halt.

Let’s walk through it.

Build a Strong (Brand) Foundation

The first order of business was ensuring we had a strong foundation to build on, which meant getting the brand in order.

Kambr found itself in a familiar space for early-stage startups. It put together a few brand assets and had different pieces circulating through its channels and around the web without any clear strategy or alignment.

Developing a brand is never easy, especially when you have a holding company with multiple business units underneath it to account for.

That was precisely the challenge we had as we set out to create a consistent look and feel across Kambr’s various channels.

It was a matter of striking a balance between a uniform design and giving each of Kambr Advisory, Kambr Solutions and Kambr Media enough space to exemplify their unique attributes.

We were able to construct an effective multi-brand modular brand strategy for Kambr, that provided an exceptional platform to formally launch the brand, while also giving plenty of flexibility to evolve.

To keep it brief, if you want to get into all the technical aspects, I’ll refer you to the in-depth Medium article I wrote about building the Kambr brand — where I completely nerd out.

The important takeaways here are:

• Ensure you have a clear and consistent brand across every touchpoint (aka everywhere someone interacts with your brand).

• Construct a brand that not only serves you today but is purpose-built for future growth that will scale with your business.

• A brand is never complete. It’s a constant process of iterations and improvement. A brand is a living, breathing entity that evolves with your company(ies) and product(s).

Generate Brand Equity & Establishing Thought Leadership from the Beginning

The best piece of advice I can give is DON’T WAIT!

It’s common practice to be head down in product development, leaving marketing as an afterthought.

While general wisdom tells you this makes sense (no product, no company), you end up delaying the growth of your company by not establishing an audience and distribution from the beginning.

At Kambr, we gave ourselves a headstart by launching Kambr Media (a niche media site dedicated to commercial aviation) out of the gate.

Because Kambr was still mostly in stealth mode at the launch of Kambr Media, this added a lot of intrigue in the industry, which helped to gain early traction.

While the product was still being developed, Kambr was already attracting its core audience and building valuable brand equity.

It also opened the door for discussions with prospective clients, partners, and even competitors.

When Kambr was ready to publicly launch its software, there was already an established distribution platform.

This resulted in a campaign that garnered press clippings from A-level publications such as Business Insider, AdExchanger and Skift.

In total, the campaign received 117 total pickups and reached an audience of over 20,000,000.

As I previously wrote, owned media, earned media and paid media all feed into one another. In this case, the traction from owned media boosted the earned media campaign at launch.

Had Kambr waited to build an audience through content, its initial launch would not have been as successful, and its entire trajectory would’ve been stalled.

Connect with Your Audience & Satisfy Content Gaps with Keywords

Give your audience the content they crave. One of the core tenets of my communications philosophy is that traditional media massively underserves long-tail B2B audiences.

This was something we recognized in the commercial aviation space. The content available was a mile wide but only an inch deep.

Being at the intersection of technology and commercial aviation, put Kambr in a unique position to fill the content void of its niche audience.

One of the first tasks was connecting with both internal and external commercial aviation experts to learn topics and themes to cover and identify content gaps in the industry.

Then it was all about consistently publishing and collecting feedback from the audience to fine-tune content and find future inspiration.

Besides the direct feedback we received, a major signal for us was found in our web analytics data:

• Over 50% of our website traffic was from organic search

• Because of our content strategy (more on this below), our best content got thousands of views a month even long after publication.

• We were capturing organic traffic from a wide range of long-tail search terms relating to Kambr’s business and the aviation industry.

Content Development: Evergreen & Educational Content, Headlines & Consumability

Not only was knowing WHAT content to produce crucial to our success but also was HOW to produce it.

We focused on two primary types of content, often fusing them — educational and evergreen.

Educational

What is considered common sense knowledge is often useful information for someone else, especially in technical fields. There is a bit of “I don’t know, but I’m too afraid to ask” thinking.

In my experience, this is some of the best-performing content you can produce. People want to learn, especially if it helps them improve themselves.

Some of Kambr’s most viewed content came from basic terminology and tactics from the field of airline revenue management.

What’s great about this type of content is — that apart from maybe needing some occasional updating depending on the medium and topic — it’s evergreen, so its value will compound over time.

Evergreen

Evergreen content remains relevant over a long time, as opposed to trending content, which is a hot topic today but gone tomorrow.

At Kambr, we prioritized consistently publishing evergreen content, which created a compound effect over time. As outlined above, this was an effective SEO strategy and our biggest traffic driver.

Think of it like a high-yield content savings account. The longer you wait and the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it.

We doubled down on evergreen content by targeting different personas and stages in our sales funnel.

Our content strategy was about more than just lead generation, it was about supporting sales at various points in what was typically a long sales cycle.

Headlines

Headlines SHOULD NEVER be an afterthought. Focusing on headlines was a large part of our keyword strategy.

You must balance piquing the reader's interest, brevity, keyword optimization and being true to the content. The onus should be on keywords, headlines are not the place to get too creative.

A good practice is to write your headline ideas after finishing your content. Make this an iterative process until you land on the best headline. A lot of effort was put into headline development at Kambr.

It’s also important to understand the first 60 words in your content get indexed by search engines, so you’ll want to include your keywords here (without being obnoxious about it).

If you’re looking for assistance, you can use headline analyzer tools such as the ones provided by Advanced Marketing Institute or Sharethrough.

Consumability

Once users were drawn to Kambr Media, it was about keeping them engaged.

The average attention span of an adult is a mere 8.25 seconds.

This is where structure plays an important role.

Content must be easy for your audience to consume. This is where chunking comes into play.

The idea behind chunking is to break up your content into small consumable pieces, making it easy for the reader to scan and read.

It’s best to vary your content with applicable items such as images, videos, pull quotes and bulleted lists, along with bolding or highlighting noteworthy information.

It’s important that proper formatting is applied to headings, subheadings, lists, spacing, etc. To nail this, we spent a lot of time on the UX and design of Kambr Media (including building multiple iterations).

This not only helped our audience consume our content, but it also made it easier for search engines to index our content, furthering our organic search success.

Get the Experts Involved

We had our topics and keywords down and a strong structure in place, the next order of business was extracting knowledge and information. This is a common obstacle for content marketing initiatives.

At Kambr, we created a culture of learning, sharing and publishing content. If you’re looking for inspiration, consider these content culture pillars.

If content creation only involves the marketing team, chances are it will lack substance and depth.

Not only were our in-house domain experts involved with content — giving insights, sharing ideas and creating their own content — we also deployed an outreach program to get outside industry thought leaders involved with Kambr Media.

By presenting the expertise and opinions of outside professionals, Kambr Media became the voice of the industry, giving it an extra layer of credibility compared to if it only featured Kambr employees.

It also extended Kambr’s reach because Kambr Media contributors were keen to share the content they were involved in, creating a significant network effect.

Just as important, it alleviated resource constraints and allowed Kambr to efficiently and effectively publish content even with a small team and budget.

Kambr would not have achieved the same level of success without the contributions of others in the industry. And they were happy to contribute because they were provided a platform to share their thoughts and promote themselves and their projects.

This was a true win-win scenario.

The Results

All of this culminated in success in a relatively short period, even in the face of unprecedented challenges because of the pandemic.

The penultimate outcome was the acquisition by marketing leader Amadeus, but several other successes were achieved with a small budget and limited resources.

In total, seven figures of enterprise value were captured through Kambr’s content efforts, which included:

• Marketing qualified leads which were converted into deals

• Getting (free) press access to events where tickets otherwise would cost thousands of dollars.

• Getting Kambr Media content redistributed on leading trade publications where sponsored content typically costs 5 to 6 figures.

Additionally, Kambr’s owned media success accelerated paid media campaigns and helped identify Kambr’s core audience.

LinkedIn advertisements in particular achieved an astounding level of success performing at click-through rates of five times the industry average.

I must stress that this was only so successful because a granular audience was identified and targeted with content we already validated with that audience! Don’t run before you can walk when it comes to paid media!

Brand building through content was also fundamental in building relationships with key stakeholders:

• Sales prospects (potential Advisory and Software customers)

• Recruiting and employee retention (i.e.corporate branding)

• Fundraising (i.e. investor relations)

• Partnerships and Acquisitions

Kambr’s combination of outbound sales with a strong brand was fundamental in achieving commercial success.

More often than not, prospects knew of Kambr because of our content initiatives, which opened the door for sales and created a strong foundation for discussions.

What was most rewarding and most telling was the direct feedback we received from Kambr’s core audience. Beyond fulfilling commercial objectives, we were filling a gap with much-needed content. 

We received countless messages stating how useful or compelling information was, how content had been shared across teams and general gratitude towards Kambr Media.

I’ll leave you with a few snippets I have saved: