What building a content function from scratch at a B2B SaaS startup actually looks like
Four years, one website, and a lot of memories.
I joined Artwork Flow in 2022 as their Content Marketing Lead. My running joke as the first Content hire in the initial few months was that I managed a team of one.
Today, it’s been exactly 4 years since I took on this position. The team eventually even grew to 7 (!) amazing Content & Creative folks at its peak1.
We have a website I’m genuinely proud of and a department that didn’t exist before I walked in.
Gather around, dreamboats, for we’re going down memory lane and will talk about some life content marketing lessons along the way.
Disclaimer: I am deliberately not going to get too much into strategy or performance metrics here as this website is still a commercial engine and we have some competitors2 closely sniffing at our tails. Welp.
What I walked into
The 2022 site I inherited had bones. A freelancer had already worked on a good enough home page and there were also a handful of industry pages, decent blog posts, and free tools that drove top-of-funnel traffic.
However, what the website lacked was clear messaging that spoke to prospects. You could still understand what the software was, but the then messaging was soft, the nav was thin, and the website could not clearly answer who exactly the product was for/why they really needed it.
Getting that cohesion together was my first job.
Positioning first, everything else second
I’ve talked before about my hyphenated role that straddles content and product marketing. While this startup knew what it was when I walked in, it was not communicated clearly across all its channels. So positioning became my immediate priority.
Artwork Flow is a packaging label management software. It helps CPG brands manage the oft tedious process of getting a label from design brief to print, all from one platform.
This specificity was missing in comms when I started out.
The hero today is way more specific, has social proofing, and shows you the entire product transparently in a walkthrough by a product expert. Obviously this took a lot of iterations, rebranding, trial and error, and midnight revert-to-originals because a secondary CTA was tanking our home page demo requests.
Yeeep, I survived that last one and I am not accepting any questions about it at this point.
Building out the site
Once the Home Page positioning had a spine, the site could grow around it.
The nav started getting more fleshed out after countless Sales insights and demos from the Product team. We built in-depth landing pages on individual features, use cases, designations of end users of the software, and more.
Our product marketer3 also introduced us to interactive product tours via Arcade (10/10 tool, btw. I cannot recommend it enough). Before it, a prospect who wanted to understand how the product worked had two options: book a demo to talk to a human or watch an animated video explainer. We wanted to make our content more product-led and let our prospects do their own research without talking to anyone or seeing typography-based videos with upbeat music (as much as I love explainers).
The self-serve tours across the website helped them do just that.
The blog, rebuilt
Simultaneously, we started work on fleshing out the blog’s editorial calendar and strategy.
The goal was to make the blog shift from broad and hopeful to specific and intentional. Although, we did keep throwing some spaghetti of broad and hopeful on the wall hoping something would stick. It did not always stick and no, we will not talk about it. ;)
So, how did we do the specific and intentional? It involved answering one key question.
How do we show that we are the most useful software for someone managing packaging approvals in a mid-sized brand who’s also low-key losing their mind over its challenges?
This led to us prioritizing bottom-funnel articles over top4.
We also built out our competitive content properly. We did complete research on every meaningful competitor and then systematically covered every angle a buyer might search, including comparisons, alternatives, and head-to-heads.
I’ve also written about why I find this content category cringe when done dishonestly. That’s here if you’re curious.
We tried to do it with actual research and most of the time, we pulled it off if I do say so myself.
Putting the creative in Content & Creative
As you can see from the meagre images I’ve sprinkled in, the look and feel of the site changed drastically over the years. It was a labor of love shared by different people across different times.
We started with a designer on loan from another team, moved on to 3 successive different freelancers, one full-time Designer who then hired one more, bringing in some serious video editing game to a team that was chewed up and spit out by 2 different video contractors/agencies.
So. A lot happened.
But that’s what it takes to get your creative from this…
to this.
There’s nothing objectively wrong with the first version. But the second one is more modern and confident, speaking more to us being the disruptor startup in a competitive market ruled by industry giants. We subsequently got acquired by one of said giants too, so all around a happy ending, one would say.
The experiments along the way
One major learning for me as a startup noob was that pivots happen.
Sometimes the pivot is right, aaaand sometimes, it really tests yours truly’s absolute absence of a poker face. It is what it is. :)
We definitely tested some broader positioning directions during my time. I won’t name them specifically for reasons that are diplomatic rather than interesting. But what I will say is that we measured everything, and we came back to what worked.
Packaging management software. That’s who we are.
Sometimes the experiment just confirms what you already knew, and that’s still a useful outcome.
On the numbers I will not reveal
Traffic grew significantly year over year from 2022 through 2024, and it nearly doubled at the peak. Unfortunately, the LLM era took a bite out of everyone’s organic traffic (mark your days, robots 😤), and we were no exception. A mid-2024 acquisition also slowed down our publishing velocity, and I do not have the hockey stick traffic graph of my dreams to report on.
What I’d tell someone starting from zero
This was my first real zero-to-one journey in a startup. The last time I was a part of one, I was way more junior in the career food chain and we also got acquired 8 months into my new role (tangent, but how do acquisitions keep following me?).
Here’s what I’d tell myself if I could go back in time:
Get the positioning right before you write anything. Every piece of content published before you know what you’re saying is a piece you’ll probably rewrite.
Don’t wait for a big team. The first version of all of this was built alone, then with one person, then with two, and so on.
Get in the weeds. I came from two big companies where data was fed to me by Performance Marketing teams. I had to learn all about content performance from scratch and I’m happy I did. Now I can actually explain what we’re doing and why.
Overall, I’m proud of everything we’ve tried, broken, remade, and shipped in the last 4 years. And I’m even prouder to have hired people I love working with and I’ve learned waaaay more about CPG packaging teams than I ever expected to know.
Four years ago this time I was a team of one, figuring out just who the heck this product was for. Somehow I blinked and I’m surrounded by a talented team who make the work better every single day.
Onwards and upwards. :)
Some transferred internally, some went on to other jobs, but the fact remains that these people, in no particular order, have been a part of Artwork Flow’s Content & Creative in so many meaningful ways: Varun, Debolina, Mitha, Shirly, Gouri, Divya, Pragati, Piyush. Not to mention the freelancers who contributed considerably over the years too: Mrig and team, Kylie, Amisha, Madhulikha. <3
This article could very well apply for one of our competitors too because their website is just a clone of ours at this point. 🤐
While the entire team is well-versed with the product we sell, we did have Varun own product marketing as a whole. Arcade was his find and most of the tours were implemented successfully in his tenure.
My team dubbed the broad TOFU content we did as “fluff pieces” and I love the name. TOFU is absolutely necessary for brand awareness and we do have significant TOFU content, but our eyes have always been further down the funnel.
Loved reading this article, Shruti! I high-key wish I were part of your team and could do all the awesome stuff you do. Super proud of what you’ve built over the years. ❤️✨