Ravio’s content strategy

Building brand authority and inbound pipeline from zero through a tailored approach

Company name: Ravio
Industry: HR tech
Funding stage: Series A
Timeline: 2023 to present
My role: Content Lead (second marketing hire, first content marketing)

The challenge:

Building brand authority and generating qualified leads for an unknown HR tech startup in the competitive compensation benchmarking software space.

Finding the right strategy:

When I joined Ravio as their first content hire, I could have easily copied the standard SaaS content playbook – generic “thought leadership” posts, basic how-to guides, and surface-level industry commentary.

Instead, I spent my first few weeks diving deep into customer calls and compensation community discussions.

What I found shaped our entire approach.

Compensation professionals are often working in isolation – either they’re part of a broader People team juggling a million priorities without deep comp expertise, or they’re dedicated Rewards Managers working alone on complex strategy decisions and desperately trying to stay on top of talent market trends.

They were hungry for real expertise and genuine connection.

I also knew from the start that Ravio’s proprietary compensation database was our biggest advantage.

So, instead of fighting for attention with generic posts, we’d:

  • Create research reports using our actual data: helping our audience stay on top of trends, whilst also showcasing the data’s value to potential future buyers.

“Your comp report is brilliant and well timed! Great format, trends, and insights. Huge well done on making yourselves stand out.”

Tech Startup CPO, previous roles at Personio and Wise
  • Showcase how other companies are doing it: a regular ‘compensation stories’ series providing inspiration and lessons for professionals without a team to lean on e.g. Buffer, Checkly, Netflix.
  • Build connection through monthly Reward Hours webinars with rewards experts, now expanding into a Slack community and regular events too.
  • Centre our Chief People Officer as a human voice within our brand: Vaso is our internal expert, and is centred within our own content (blog content, hosting Reward Hours) and through her regular LinkedIn posts too as an authentic voice sharing real startup lessons and vulnerabilities.
  • Collaborate with experts from our partner network: sharing their insights on the toughest compensation decisions, from detailed guides to big topics like compensation reviews, to specific pain points like how to benchmark niche roles – with the added benefit of supporting distribution via their networks too.

The focus on quality, expert-led content that genuinely helped our audience meant we accidentally started performing well for organic search – hitting Google’s EEAT guidelines naturally rather than trying to game the system.

I built on this success through further optimising our key guides (e.g. equity compensation, compensation reviews) for SEO and now LLM search engines too, as well as creating bottom-funnel pieces to capture high-intent searches too (e.g. salary benchmarking tools, Radford alternatives).

Results:

From zero brand presence to go-to resource for Reward Leaders, with £82,500 average monthly revenue pipeline from organic search alone, and £550k+ revenue influenced via regular original research reports.

ICP prospects now regularly mention our “fabulous LinkedIn posts,” excitement about our expert collaborations (“love to see you’re working with Matt McFarlane”), and recognition that we’re “really leading with knowledge.”

Vaso’s authentic voice has resonated so strongly that people reach out about her “inspiring posts” and she’s even been recognised by strangers on the street in London.

Want to see the strategy in action? Check out Ravio’s latest research report or follow our LinkedIn to see what we’re up to next.