fbpx

Aki Balogh of MarketMuse

Aki Balogh

Co-Founder & CEO of MarketMuse

Aki Balogh co-founded and is CEO of MarketMuse. Prior to MarketMuse, he worked with the CEO of InfiniDB, a Series B startup that made an analytic database for Big Data engagements. Before joining InfiniDB, he was an Associate at OpenView Venture Partners where he looked at Series B investments in Big Data & Machine Learning.

Prior to that, Aki was a software developer and a management consultant in the Data Science practice of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants (now PwC Diamond Advisory).

Article

Data Journalism As A Content Strategy For Early Stage Business

When I was building my company we had a problem in the early days with getting content on our site. We were starting from scratch and we didn’t necessarily have the capacity to get high quality content produced and distributed without taking away from our services to clients.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Aki’s success

Using data journalism as a content strategy for early stage business

Result if you follow the steps in Aki’s session

Data journalism content that will differentiate you from others in your market and boost your inbound and sales pipelines

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

Hey, we don’t have existing authority, nobody knows about us, why don’t we work with somebody who is an influencer, and has a lot of, you know, presence and a lot of people, you know, following him or her.

And so basically over the first two years, we published like, literally like three content items. But they were all with influencers. And we put this data journalism, and we worked pretty hard on this stuff, we put it together and put it on an influencer site, and their existing authority that you know, the circles out there and just got the message out faster.

And then oh, by the way, this data was provided by market views. And then we got enough, you know, interest and enough qualified demand, qualified leads from that you know, that then prove enough kind of power for the early stages of our business. And now, of course, now we’re a bit later on, we raised funding, we have like a full team, we’re writing content now. But that’s what we did in the early days, that was like a hack.

Awesome. And well, it’s good to get that overview. And yes, we do want to dive deeper into that. What I’d like to ask you is, so when did you start implementing this? And where is it taking you now?

Yeah, so my approach, so I started working on MarketMuse in late 2013. And we started going to market in late 2015. So my approach was always, because I also have a little bit of a venture background, and I saw a lot of business models and stuff, and I saw a lot of companies that would raise money very early on, and then trying to figure out what their products and marketing and sales are. And when you do that, you end up basically wasting a lot of money, because you don’t really know and so you’re running experiments and stuff.

So I wanted to do it really cheap. So I spent just the first two years just really, really focused on product, built literally writing code and writing the product. And the reason I did that, too, was you know, was to get really intimate with the problem and just be very agile, all I needed to make that system work.

And the first two years ago, I just needed enough kind of early evangelist folks. You know, either people who I met through just networking or people came into the website, I just needed enough to get the product feedback to evolve the product to a point where it will be saleable, you know, in a more scalable basis.

So I started working on this and then 2013 we did not actually get featured in anything until late 2014, follow up to a year and was the first time there was a Search Engine Journal post written by a guy Eric Van Buskirk, who had been in the industry for a long time, and he did this analysis and also use our data and showed why in our case, content quality is really important and content comprehensiveness will help you win on search. That was the message, the first time it appeared and it was even that article.

Now like looking back, was like super early on low complicated little technical. Then in 2015, early 2015 we had another feature, by this time by Brian Dean in Backlinko. We did a data study with him. He put that out there actually, was late 2015.

And then in 2016 we had the third piece so literally three content items over the span of like three years but at each phase, each was enough to just give us validation you know get some you know, interested folks, you know, to learn about us and just really helped us understand the market by literally habit to write down what the products doing and you know, put out to an audience and that helped us kind of understand the business problem better too.

Hand-picked experts share their #1 tactic

One marketing tactic delivered to your inbox each morning, 5 days a week