How thought leadership helped get Inclusively to the World Economic Forum
With Inclusively, we launched a thought leadership ghostwriting campaign for their founders that quickly became something more.
The enterprise SaaS startup needed smart content that reached high-level decision-makers, built investor goodwill, and educated the market. Using their founders’ ability to explain the product, they did just that — and got on stage at the World Economic Forum in the process.
Key wins
10 hours saved per week
35 content assets/mo
Two panel invites to the World Economic Forum
One article in Fast Company
$13m raised in Series A
TLDR
“Our content became an extension of our founders’ brains,” says Sarah Bernard, co-founder and COO of Inclusively. “We talked to Dan for an hour per month, and he scaled those conversations into a full content engine that was true to our voice.”
The ask
Inclusively is the leading SaaS workforce platform for Fortune 1000s, driving productivity, retention, and inclusion with AI tools for employees to discover personalized accommodations and success enablers.
But their content was scattered and didn’t utilize their greatest strength: their founders’ ability to connect with potential customers, investors, employees, journalists, and those in the inclusion ecosystem. Three themes drove Inclusively's decision to ramp up their content offering:
Produce content directly from their founders.
Inclusively wanted content to flow directly from their co-founders, Sarah Bernard and Charlotte Dales. They needed content that was derived from the pain points potential customers were expressing in high-level meetings — and needed to articulate the solutions Charlotte and Sarah would pitch, but to a scalable audience. However, as busy tech founders often find, they didn’t have the time to produce this content on their own.
Power a larger SaaS content motion.
In addition to fueling their own LinkedIn accounts, Sarah and Charlotte’s insights needed to power Inclusively’s wider SaaS content motion: company social media, email campaigns from marketing and sales, blogs, website copy, landing pages, webinars, decks, one-pagers, whitepapers, and press releases.
Build intellectual credibility and momentum.
Inclusively needed to reach high-level decision-makers by exhibiting thought leadership through content, events, relationships with leading journalists in their ecosystem, and ongoing partnerships. Sarah and Charlotte’s insights — as well as additional research and insights from other key members of the team — needed to propel all of this, creating a “unified language” for Inclusively’s team.
“We needed to articulate ourselves to high-level decision-makers: who we were and how our product solved their problems. We could do this one-on-one, but needed to scale the message.”
Charlotte Dales, co-founder and CEO of Inclusively
The playbook
We worked with Charlotte and Sarah on thought leadership pieces, capturing their thoughts about their product, the industry at large, and what their customers’ responded to “in the room” during high-level conversations with Fortune 1000s. We then used these conversations to create a full content engine: LinkedIn posts, email campaigns, blog and SEO content, landing pages, whitepapers, webinars, Instagram and TikTok posts, and other content assets.
Generated thought leadership that was authentic, intellectually powerful, and scalable.
With just one conversation a month, Dan took insights from Inclusively’s co-founders and created both short and long-form thought leadership that was true to their voice and articulated their vision. This built credibility with journalists in the inclusion ecosystem, led to opportunities in publications like Fast Company, and helped Inclusively’s get invited to speak at the World Economic Forum.
Repurposed this thought leadership to power Inclusively’s entire content engine.
Using a mix of AI and human editing, Dan repurposed these pieces for Inclusively’s larger SaaS content function, creating up to 32 additional marketing assets per month without bringing on more full-time content staff.
Created the foundation for a “unified language” for leadership, sales, marketing, and product.
Dan established a framework for interviewing key stakeholders at the company. Over a number of weeks, Inclusively’s founders developed a unified language for describing their product, customer pain points, mission, and their wider ecosystem. This informed documentation across departments.
“Dan scaled our thought leadership with AI. We didn’t use ChatGPT to make generic content; we didn’t pull from the same information pool everyone else did. We created a custom knowledge base.”
Julie Meringer, SVP of Delivery & Operations @ Inclusively
The results
A full SaaS content engine to drive leads and build awareness.
Through Dan, Inclusively was able to build a founder-led content engine that scaled. They went from publishing a few scattered content assets to upwards of 32 pieces per month.
A trainable knowledge base that allows AI to do the work of an entire content team.
An AI model can now help produce much of Inclusively’s content. But this content doesn’t sound AI-generated; it sounds like an extension of Sarah and Charlotte. That’s because Dan created a knowledge base of interviews and thought leadership to train any AI models going forward. Inclusively’s social media, email campaigns, one-pagers, webinars, and landing pages are now extensions of their founders’ brains.
An invite to the World Economic Forum, an article in Fast Company, and credibility with F500 decision-makers.
Because of their consistent thought leadership program, Inclusively was invited to speak at the 2023 World Economic Economic Forum. They had established muscle memory around the issues that mattered to decision-makers, and were able to carve out their own intellectual real estate at the highest level.
Sarah has been asked to publish pieces for Fast Company, and has been quoted by influential journalists in the inclusivity space — which led to an influx of organic engagement. Powered in part by their thought leadership strategy, they now host events for Fortune 500 chief executives that strengthen existing partnerships and form new ones.
“Dan brought out our voice. It was like talking to a startup therapist — he helped us find what was already there. He didn’t just help us build a content engine; his work impacted all areas of our business.”
Sarah Bernard, co-founder and COO of Inclusively
