The problem with content marketing is people underestimate how long it takes to kick in.
It can take months or even years to yield results- and most startups can't
wait for months or years to find out if their growth tactics are working.
We've built a multi-million dollar SaaS business on content marketing,
but when founders and marketers ask me if they should do it-
I always start with a word of caution: it may not be what you need for your startup.
A startup doesn't usually have the runway to wait. They get customer feedback and
usage metrics as fast as possible, and content marketing is slow, as slow as marketing gets.
So in this video, I'm going to share when it's safe to begin content marketing tactics,
how much we spent, how we structured the team, and how long it took us to see results. Finally,
I'll share how we transitioned from written content into video.
A startup is a race against running out of money- more specifically,
a race to find product-market fit before you run out of money.
Product-Market Fit is this mythical concept startup people like to throw around,
but it's, in essence, what makes or breaks a company.
Marc Andressen defines it as 'being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that
market,' which honestly is pretty abstract. A better way to measure it is when ' 40% percent of
your customers say they would be "very disappointed" if they no longer had access to it'.
Companies have been built, raised capital, and failed without ever finding product-market
fit- and all this blurb is to say that content marketing is a shitty way to find product-market
fit. What you really want to be doing is coming up with a thesis about who your customer could be,
putting that product in front of them, and then measuring if your theory is correct.
This cycle doesn't look too different from The Lean Startup approach.
The faster you can go through a cycle, the more chances you will succeed.
Google Ads are a fantastic way of doing this because you can target particular searches,
searches that only people of specific profile would be making. It's not the only way,
it's certainly not the cheapest, but it's FAST.
We started as a presentation platform and targeted searches
around 'PowerPoint Alternatives' or 'Presentation Builder,' but customers
from those keywords didn't really engage with the product, and very few converted.
We were casting too wide of a net. Anyone could be running that search,
and it wasn't specific enough to build an audience.
The good thing was that people use presentations for many things, so we started looking for more
specific use cases. After a couple of weeks of testing, we found THE keyword: pitch deck.
It turned out that searches related to 'pitch deck' did great for us, and customers converted,
giving us profitable numbers. So we just doubled down again and again.
We doubled down on budget, on landing pages, on branding, and even on the product itself,
and it worked, all from a good Google keyword. But the cycle that made us find that keyword
took a month. As a new website with no domain authority or followers - there is
no way we could have found an answer like that with any content marketing.
But once we found it, it was time to go all in. We had a website with no domain authority- so
we understood that we had to create that from scratch and that it would take time.
We were a small marketing team back then, one other person and me:
so we made sure that the search campaigns driving growth continued to operate fine,
that would continue to drive customers- and we started moving resources to this new project.
The first absolutely crucial thing you have to decide is where you will
host this content because you will need a CMS. If you're unfamiliar,
a CMS is a content management system- so an infrastructure that allows your
writers and your marketing team to publish content without needing to code the website.
Once you choose, going back or changing where you are hosting is a risky, delicate,
and incredibly time-demanding process because you risk losing all the domain authority you built.
And there are two schools of thought: A) Hosting your blog on the same
domain as your main page. We can probably make a whole
video about it- so I'm not getting into the details- the point is a CMS will make it a
lot simpler for content creators to publish without needing time from your developers.
The most popular CMS globally is WordPress: it's free,
open-source, and has hundreds of plug-ins and optimizations for SEO (search engine
optimization). You essentially 'install' WordPress in a hosted server, like an operating system.
My recommendation for this is to use Hostinger- it's fairly easy to use,
and it's pretty fast. In the last few years, they released a WordPress hosting
plan which already gives you a server with WordPress for as little as $2/mo.
So Wordpress is like this open-source operating system for your server,
but people have leveraged Wordpress to create some of the most famous content sites: The TED blog,
Microsoft News, The Sun, BBC America, Techcrunch- these are all hosted on WordPress.
So after you sign up for Hostinger, they’ll run you to a quick wizard and WordPress will
be installed automatically. You can pick a template, and essentially start creating.
I had a long-overdue revamp of my personal website, so I used this opportunity to move
it into Hostinger so I could show you how quick it is to get set up.
From the Hostinger dashboard, you can connect multiple domains, enable SSL,
add email hosting if you want to have custom emails - and then from the Wordpress dashboard
you can just edit and publish your content.
Setting up a Hostinger account takes a minute. I reached out to the guys from
Hostinger and they offered a coupon code for you- so you can go to slidebean.com/hostinger
to access it. Their 4-year plan is already insane, at just $96 for 4 years,
and you can drop an extra 10% discount using the coupon Slidebean.
Now, in June Google released an update to their algorithm that puts incredible value
in site loading speed. In other words, if your site is slow,
Google will penalize you and show you lower than your competitors on search results.
To help with this the guys from Hostinger also released a tool called LightSpeed,
which caches your website so that it’s served faster. LightSpeed is also compatible with
the most common WordPress plugins, such as YoastSEO, bbPress, and WooCommerce.
In our case, we decided to keep everything inside the same domain, so if that's what you are doing,
you'll need to bring your landing pages into WordPress,
create a blog section- and start writing. This is what we did- for a whole year. We
wrote article after article about pitch decks, tearing down famous pitch decks,
designing others, creating templates of our own. It was a massive task that saw our team
grow from two to five people and spend around $70,000 promoting this content.
Our focus during this period was SEO.
In a nutshell, how well a page ranks depends on how good the content is (which Google
measures based on the time on site and bounce rate) and whether it matches the keywords
on the searches people are making. More recently,
again, Google really cares about loading speed and mobile performance.
That is also combined with the domain authority, which is defined
by the domain authority of other pages linking to your domain.
While the algorithm is immensely complex and one of Google's best-kept secrets,
the gist of the matter is that Google ranks Good content.
Now, if the content gets published and nobody reads it, Google can't measure bounce rates,
or time on site, or shareability- and it can't figure out that the content is good.
The most critical part of this was preparing my team, our investors, for a project that would take
months to show results: it was the first effort that we made that was so long-term, but again,
we did it at a time when we had found another channel to drive growth
so that our stats would still look promising for future investors.
We started this project in January 2016 and effectively
tripled our traffic by the end of the year, which also tripled our leads and revenue.
We did it by publishing about two pretty good articles per week. These weren't
articles meant to be viral sensations, but insightful articles with unique perspectives:
not just research re-edits of the content we found elsewhere.
That is NOT easy. You do need subject matter experts either
writing the articles or guiding other ghostwriters. Our articles weren't
whitepapers but provided something you couldn't easily find elsewhere.
Slowly but surely, the landing pages
we were promoting rose to the first slots in Google Search.
So again, a summary- Find a perfect keyword
so that your content marketing efforts are more narrowed.
Once you find it, set aside a good budget and prepare for a long-term effort.
I get a common follow-up question: did we do anything before this?
We did. We had a blog, and I'd write articles every other week or so,
but they weren't a key marketing strategy.
Since these efforts will take time to kick in, it's easy to be tempted and begin writing
content ASAP, and that's not necessarily bad as long as it's not a distraction from your other,
more relevant, more urgent calls.
When we depleted Google Search for the keywords we needed, we started looking for our next
long-term marketing bet, which was when we started playing around with video.
Youtube is the second-largest search engine in the world, so before doing content
about what we wanted to talk about- we did content focusing on what people were looking for.
We rode on a wave of Youtube Search before anything: videos targeting
searches that other videos didn't answer well, where we could create better content.
Only after we built a follower base, we started creating content
about topics that we found interesting. This took us years to figure out.
For the first 18 months, we created a few content series that never really worked. Then,
we did about 12 months of search-focused content, and for the last 24 months or so,
we've been focusing on more general startup content, regardless of the search traffic.
The problem with video is that it's even more expensive than written form content:
producing each of these videos costs us between $2,000 and $3,000 these days-
and we do it all in-house and with our Costa Rica team. I would see this
number go to $5,000-$7,000 easily if you were to do it in the US or through a third-party agency.
It would have been an impossible bet for us to produce 18 months' worth of content at $5,000
per video, and even if we 'knew what we were doing with Youtube and search,'
it took us a long time to get it working.
Moreover, the content we create very clearly speaks to our audience! We don't
have to get distracted testing different audiences to see which one converts best-
we know we are talking to you, startup founders, or future entrepreneurs.