Offline B2B marketing is a new concept for many people — and that requires selling the idea behind your solution and the solution itself.
For Postal content manager Richie Pusateri, that’s what makes it so fun.
In marketingspeak: Postal helps personalize, automate, and scale direct mail, internal and external events, branded company swag, and personalized gifts to drive better engagement with prospects, customers, partners, and employees.
Translation: They make it unbelievably easy for you to delight the people you work with, even if you don’t regularly see them in person.
That infectious sense of delight carries through to their approach to content marketing, too. I asked Richie to take us behind the scenes on how Postal is reimagining offline B2B marketing, nurturing relationships, and integrating its own platform into its content.
Focus on Being Helpful
Postal doesn’t have a lot of competition in the traditional sense. Instead, as category creators, they have to compete with something much tougher: ignorance and inertia.
“It’s hard to tell the story of a company that’s in a maturing market because not everyone just understands what we’re doing,” Richie says. “You have to lay the foundation. That’s a product marketing thing, it’s a branding thing, and it’s a content thing, and we’re still working on the best way to communicate why what we’re doing matters. The number one challenge is just telling that comprehensive story to the people who haven’t used anything like us.”
To introduce that story, Richie focuses most of his efforts on creating top-of-the-funnel educational content on topics that matter to their ideal buyer: better corporate gifting, more interesting virtual events, and creative demand gen tactics. When the Postal team writes about their solutions, they offer guidance on their partnerships and integrations, not making hard sales pitches.
As prospects get more familiar with the concept — surprising people with individualized gifts on the fly without compromising their privacy — follow-up content focuses on case studies and other content about integrating Postal into your workflow.
This approach to requires patience, but it allows the marketing team to tell their brand story in an organic, sustainable way.
Keep It Personal
Richie acknowledges the power of marketing automation software while also recognizing its limitations.
This leads us to one of the most interesting things he shared with me in our conversation: He doesn’t use any social media management tools for scheduling content. It’s all manual.
That doesn’t mean he’s winging it. “We plan out posts weeks in advance, but we don’t schedule and automate in these platforms, especially on Twitter, where people are DMing us. It just feels like there’s no point,” he says.
Show, Don’t Tell
My favorite thing about Postal’s content marketing strategy is the way they’ve integrated their offline B2B marketing solution itself into each campaign.
For example, they’ll offer an asset to a prospect, and if the person engages with the content link, it triggers a HubSpot workflow that automatically sends them a gift. I personally find this quite appealing as a way to compensate people for giving attention to a brand, rather than spending exclusively on advertising with a third party to get their attention.
When Salesforce went down recently, Richie and the team gave out free drinks on Twitter to help sales and marketing people cope. “It did really well.” (You don’t say, Richie? 
)
Alright friends, how can we help you during this trying time
Salesforce is down and I want 👇— Allyssa✨ (@HeyitsAllyssa) May 11, 2021
“I don’t know if this is technically content marketing, but it does enable us to tell the story of Postal and why what we’re doing is important, Richie says. “To be able to bring people together in a time like this, especially with so many of us working remotely, that’s something the whole team takes pride in.”
