VCs: From thought leadership to community building
The term ‘thought leadership’ is certainly over-used, and often misplaced, but in the case of Venture Capitalists (VCs) for the most part it’s clear how their content can add value for the two audiences critical to their growth: businesses seeking funding from the right partners to power their growth, and investors or Limited Partners (LPs) looking for the right investment opportunities.
It’s extremely rare to find a business in any B2B sector that doesn’t regularly publish content on their own channels and on platforms such as Linkedin, Twitter, etc. The problem is that there’s too much out there, and increasingly it’s not delivering value for the time that it asks of the intended audience - customers, clients and prospects.
Our analysis concludes that many VC firms are the most sophisticated and innovative users of content marketing in B2B as a whole. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that around a decade ago a handful of firms saw the opportunity and began to harness and professionalise the personal blogging that many of their principals and partners were already doing by building in-house content teams, partnering with agency and journalistic talent and developing well- resourced owned media platforms.
More recently, driven by the trends we outlined in our 2022 report The Business of Community, we have seen VCs leading the way in the growing ‘Community Economy’ - investing in platforms, talent, resources and technology to build and nurture communities of portfolio companies, partners, mentors, advisers and investors to build their brand, for dealflow, to support the founders in their portfolio & accelerate their growth, and to attract & retain the best talent.
It wasn’t always this way; VCs historically were, like their Private Equity colleagues, rather private compared to the rest of the finance and corporate world. Back in 2013 Forbes described VCs as being late to the content marketing party. But as is often the case in this sector, innovation in Silicon Valley that began a decade ago has now defined the rules of engagement for VCs worldwide. Big names like Andreessen Horowitz / A16Z and First Round Capital kicked things off by investing in journalistic talent and owned media platforms to become more transparent, showing potential investors and investments alike what they are all about, demonstrating their point of view - and their point of difference. Forbes notes that a big factor in VCs investing in their own content marketing was in fact the growing VC money piling into content marketing tech and SaaS businesses.
Fast forward 10 years and in 2023 VCs across the board are amongst the most prolific and professional users of content and community to build their brands, and the personal brand of their people.
So in March 2023 VOLUME analysed a broad range of UK VCs and published an overview of the sector’s use of content marketing and community strategy. This market intelligence and analysis is typical of the work VOLUME undertakes regularly to provide our clients with insights on best practice, market gaps and opportunities. Over the course of 2023 we will publish a series of papers like this focusing on individual B2B market sectors focusing on the brands that are innovating, setting new standards, and winning.