How to Entice Investors To Your Startup

The CEO comes up to you, the VP Marketing, and tells you, “We are looking for our next investment, and I want all hands on deck. I will be meeting with venture capital firms and I want you to tell me how you can contribute.”

There is a lot you can do, and if you connect the right dots, you can engage and entice potential investors via the same website and content that you have already produced.

Investors Don’t Suffer Fools – Skip The Hard Sales Approach

Investors know exactly what they’re looking for. They’re not lacking in confidence, so the “You’re one click away from …” copywriting that works great in B2C and astrology commercials won’t work here. If the content you have on your startup website is good, you don’t need to create special content for potential investors. Let investors see you as you present yourself to the world.

You may decide to put together a brochure, but don’t spend too much on it – fancy paper doesn’t impress companies who take tens of millions of dollars of new risk almost every year.

Your disruptive technology either speaks to an investor or it doesn’t.

Your Startup Blog Is Your Investors Brochure

My definition of a blog is “A lighter version of your website content that presents your business and technology case.”

Your blog had better be making your case to every type of decision maker, influencer and 5th cousin. If you are successfully making your case to business and technology professionals, you are almost there. Step back a bit, and think of how you would present your startup to the CEO of a non-related company? Verbalize your 2 minute pitch and put it into words. 500 of them – skip the wordy approach. Most of the time, if you need over 1,000 words, it’s a datasheet and not a blog post.

The Choose Your Own Content Journey Approach

My hunch is that investors aren’t looking for the world’s next breakthrough technology by running hashtag searches on Twitter. Investors are reading, liking and sharing LinkedIn content. They are obviously not investing in everything they see – technology investing is a subtle process.

A lesser-known LinkedIn Advertising feature allows you to specifically decide the names of the companies that you want to see your blog posts. Remember, you are not selling anything, you are paying for the right to show a potential investor a blog post that makes your case. You have 2 minutes of his or her time at this stage. Google “venture capital”, find a new list and type them in one by one. Don’t even think of sending an investor to a landing page – that will be the quickest bounce in history. Send investors to a quality article that makes your business case – this is exactly the information they are after.

I believe that Blog as a Landing Page is the only way to engage and entice a serious audience to technology startups and businesses. Our products and services are too complex to explain and sell with 2 sentences, 3 bullets and a stock photo. Startup marketing professionals have to realize this and take the “choose your own content journey” approach.

Think of a store at a mall – when you enter a store, you want to choose your path through the aisles. You zig zag back and forth between departments and racks and ask questions along the way. You may be gently nudged to buy this or that item, but you decide when you are ready to pay (“the submit button” for websites).

For someone expected to “pay” hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, you’d better let them choose their path around your store and have a powerful technology and business case.