Can we grow our site to 40,000 users/month in six months? (You can read that piece here.)

There were two main reasons behind launching this challenge and setting this goal:

1. We were unknown entities in the content marketing world. We thought that instead of sharing content marketing strategies, the best way to build trust and show people that we knew what we were doing would be to publicly pursue the challenge of growing a site from scratch.
   
   
2. In addition, this would force us to work hard from day one to grow the site. Mind you, we both had other jobs then, and it’s easy to let new side projects fall by the wayside. This forced us not to.

While we didn’t hit the 40,000 number, we hit 16,000 users (24k sessions) in 4.5 months (mostly without SEO traffic, too). We felt like we did achieve Part 1 of our goal: building an audience and building trust. We had tons of people following along our journey, rooting us on and sharing their thoughts and best wishes with us. People kept saying they loved the transparency of the challenge and were hooked on our journey. They wanted us to keep going, and they wanted to keep following our journey. 

However, candidly, I needed money. A few months into the challenge, I quit my job and moved abroad. But by the end, I was running out of the little savings I had, so with an audience built, we felt like we now needed to figure out how to turn the site into a business.

We went through multiple iterations of our business publicly. We tried a phone course, an in-person training program, and an online course. None of them worked, meaning none of them got enough interest or customers to turn into a business. But after extremely poor course sales, a glimmer of hope emerged. Several newsletter subscribers emailed us and asked if, instead of buying our course, they could just hire us to do their content marketing for them.  

(Note: All posts chronicling this early journey can be found here.)

After some initial resistance (Devesh had an agency already and I had no desire to start one), we realized we sort of had no choice but to say yes. What other business model did we have? So, we began taking on content marketing clients. 

Fast forward seven years, and now we run a seven-figure content marketing agency that employs over 15 people and has built some brand recognition in our space. 

Why Share Our Journey Publicly Again?

Towards the end of 2023, for the reasons we outline below, we felt like this business was ready to be scaled, and we were ready, as founders, to do it. So naturally, the next question is how? As Devesh and I thought about how to double our business, we felt like we needed to add a marketing channel on top of what we’ve been doing so far to help accelerate our growth. 

Let’s look at why.

To date, our main driver of leads has, of course, been our content. This content can be bucketed into two categories: 

1. SEO content
   
   
2. Non-SEO content (or content that is not targeting a keyword, but rather that makes an interesting point and that we distribute through Twitter ads and organic social media, such as LinkedIn and Twitter).

To be clear, we’re going to continue doing both of these things. They worked, and they’ll continue to work. But since we have a team helping with a lot of this now, we asked ourselves what else we personally could do to help accelerate growth. 

Our minds definitely gravitated to how we could utilize our content brand framework, in other words, content that could really get our brand more notoriety and get the G&C name out there, beyond just showing up when someone Googles “SaaS content strategy” or “best content agency.” This is because a lot of buying decisions for hiring an agency don’t happen via Google search. 

Hiring an agency isn’t the same as buying sneakers (eCommerce SEO) or searching for a new CRM or accounting software (SaaS SEO). Most people hire agencies based on word of mouth. They ask their colleagues, friends, and followers on Twitter. So even if you theoretically dominated all possible SEO keywords as an agency, you still can never get this word-of-mouth business unless you’ve built the brand recognition that leads to word-of-mouth referrals. 

We talked about doing YouTube SEO, a podcast, a marketing meme account, and a few other options, but none of those seemed on-brand or interesting to us. 

What about ads? We do do some Twitter and Google ads now, but even then, we just use those to get extra traffic to our high converting articles. We never seriously talked about scaling with lots of ads or “media buying.” That sounds costly, the lead quality is poorer than those that read your content because they know nothing about you, and frankly, it just isn’t us. Our whole goal is to be remembered as the premier content agency to hire. Content helps do that; ads don’t really do that.

So we asked ourselves: How can we do something like this again? 

Then, we thought: What if this time, instead of focusing on how to start a business from scratch, we shared how to scale a business that is already at seven-figures and already has a team of employees? We liked that idea. We feel like there’s already been a ton of content produced about how someone is starting a business or a site (including many self-case studies about growing “from 0 to X”). But we haven’t seen a lot of these transparent growth journeys chronicled about businesses that are already established and trying to scale. 

And the problems aren’t the same between starting and scaling. In the early stages, it’s all about getting product market fit and hustling to just get your first few customers. But when you’re scaling a business that already has product market fit, already has inbound channels, and already has a team and processes to execute, what do you do then? What are the challenges then? 

For us, they include things like:

• How do we continue to scale hiring and training? This is one of our biggest challenges, and many times we’ve had to turn away clients because we didn’t have the people to execute on it. We’ve made progress and plan to create videos. 

• What do we delegate versus what do we do ourselves? When is it okay to step in and fight a fire versus letting the team handle it and possibly fail or upset a client?

• How do we scale lead generation? 

• How do we evolve our organizational structure? Do we need managers? When?

• How do we handle various tricky client situations?

• How do we deal with burnout and the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship?

You can watch our first episode here:

Where Our Business Is Right Now — And Why We Feel It’s Time to Scale

We’ve always been hesitant to grow our agency too quickly. We’ve seen the mistakes that other agencies make: They sacrificed quality of work for revenue, hired a bunch of junior people that aren’t trained well, and then their quality of service declined. It’s our belief that as an agency, all you have is the quality of your service and reputation, so we’ve purposely taken the slow growth route, making sure that we could execute well and get results across all of our clients. This may be to our detriment; who knows? 

Now, we feel like we have a solid foundation from which to scale. Specifically, we feel really good about a few key aspects of the business:

1. Our product: We can reliably grow leads from content for our clients using our Pain Point SEO process. This is our product, we’ve proven to ourselves it can work over and over again across a number of different clients, and we’re proud of it. We didn’t start G&C with this process in hand. It took years of iteration and tweaking to get this to where it is now.
   
   
2. Our target client: We know who this works for. We’ve gotten really good at sniffing out what kinds of companies are a good fit for our process and which are not. We learned it the hard way by taking on all kinds of clients that weren’t a good fit, something we’ll likely outline in future content, as per what we’ll explain below.
   
   
3. Our operations: We’ve made a lot of mistakes in hiring, managing, assigning roles, and general team architecture. And when I say a lot of mistakes, I mean a lot, including some really boneheaded moves. But we’ve learned from them and ironed out operations:
   
   • We know the team structure that works for servicing clients.
   • We have supporting roles hired.
     
4. Our recruiting: This was a tough challenge for a long time. In many ways, it still is our biggest challenge. We have frustratingly high writing standards, and finding writers that meet them has been really hard. But thanks to an amazing employee on our team who took on recruiting, we have a process for testing, filtering, and training new writers now.  There were many times in the past where we lost clients because we didn’t have the people to take them on. Now that’s a lot less likely. 
   
   
5. Our marketing: After some hiccups in trying to position ourselves as an SEO agency, we know our positioning as a content agency, and our content continues to bring in qualified leads, so we have a way of reliably getting new customers in the door. 

Those are all the components of a good business: a good product, the right customer, a team and a process to reliably reproduce the product, and a channel for getting customers. So why not scale at that point? 

That’s what we want to do. 

Our Public Goal and What We Plan on Sharing

Currently, we’re at 17 clients. We want to get to 40 clients by January 2026 (two years from writing this).

On a monthly basis, we’ll share an update covering:

• Our monthly client count
• How many leads we got in a given month
• What percentage closed
• Patterns in what they told us they wanted
• How many clients we lost that month and why

Every week, we’ll share new videos on our YouTube channel on a unique challenge or issue we’re having and/or a new strategy we’re trying to help solve some current problem. We’d love to have you join us on this journey. We’ll be sending updates whenever a new video drops to our email list, which you can join here. 

Any comments or requests? Let us know in the comments. 

In the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023, the top 500 companies amassed a staggering $41 trillion in revenue, yielding a profound $2.9 trillion in profits. The U.S. emerged as a profit behemoth, with its 136 Fortune 500 companies contributing a massive 38% to the global profit pool.

This study meticulously examines sector-wise profitability, country comparisons, and the highs and lows within the Fortune 500, offering a panoramic view of the world’s economic powerhouses.

Key Findings

• Global Giants: Fortune 500 companies amassed a colossal $41 trillion in revenue, with $2.9 trillion in profit.

• Top Global Profit Makers: The top 10 companies globally amassed $689.8B (24%) in profit, with Saudi Aramco leading at $159.1B.

• Global Losses: The bottom 10 companies worldwide incurred a collective loss of nearly $126B.

• U.S. Dominance: U.S. companies (136) secured a remarkable $1.1T profit, overshadowing China’s $528B, despite similar company numbers.

• The U.S. and China jointly generate 56% of the global 500 companies’ profit.

• Sector Powerhouses: Technology, Finance, and Energy sectors claimed 63% of the $2.9 trillion global profit.

• U.S. Sector Standouts: The Technology sector in the U.S. emerged as the most profitable, generating $306B, constituting 28% of the country’s total profit.

• Top U.S. Performers: The top 10 U.S. companies contributed 46% of the $1.1 trillion total profit, led by Apple.

• Sectoral Disparities: Media, Wholesaler, and Retail sectors in the U.S. lagged behind with profit margins of 0.76%, 1.53%, and 2.60%, respectively.

Top 500 Most Profitable Companies: U.S. vs. the World [Infographic]

10 Most Profitable of the Largest Companies in the World, 2023

The elite league of the world’s 10 most profitable companies in 2023 showcases a powerhouse of financial success. These industry giants, representing the Energy, Technology, Transportation, and Financial sectors, collectively amassed a jaw-dropping $689.8 billion in profits, constituting 24% of the total profit from the analyzed Fortune 500 companies. 

The average profit per company within this elite group is an impressive $69 billion.

Notably, half of the top 10 are U.S.-based corporations, underlining the economic dominance of American businesses on the global stage. 

Each of these companies showcases the diverse financial prowess across sectors in 2023. Saudi Aramco steals the spotlight with an unparalleled profit of $159.1 billion, accounting for a remarkable 5.49% of the global 500 total profit — emphasizing the dominant role the energy sector plays in generating substantial financial gains.  

The U.S. Postal Service surprises as the only representative in the transportation sector, boasting a remarkable profit of $56 billion (71.29%) with a revenue of $78.6 billion, outshining all of its peers with ease. 

In the technology realm, Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet secure top positions, collectively contributing $232.5 billion in profit. Microsoft stands out with an impressive profit margin of 36.69%, underscoring the profitability potential in software and technological solutions.

In the financial realm, Industrial & Commercial Bank of China and China Construction Bank secured their spots by contributing a combined profit of $107.7 billion. 

The energy sector, represented by Exxon Mobil and Shell, contributes significantly too, with both companies together accounting for $98 billion in profit. 

Overall, this top 10 ensemble underscores the global impact of varied industries, from energy giants to technology titans, that shape the financial landscape with substantial profits.

10 Least Profitable of the Largest Companies in the World, 2023

The bottom 10 companies in 2023, however, collectively faced significant financial challenges, accumulating a staggering combined loss of almost $126 billion during the analyzed fiscal year. 

Notably, industry giants Berkshire Hathaway and Uniper, ranked 14th and 16th in Fortune’s official ranking with huge revenues of $302.1 billion and $288.3 billion, respectively, found themselves among the least profitable.

The average loss per company within this group amounted to -$12.6 billion, reflecting the significant financial challenges these companies encountered.

The energy sector, represented by Uniper, Korea Electric Power, Electricité de France, and CPC, dominates the list, collectively contributing to a substantial $53.2 billion in losses. 

Meanwhile, technology and telecommunications companies, such as Uber Technologies, AT&T, Warner Bros. Discovery, and SoftBank Group, have also had to grapple with substantial losses, emphasizing the many challenges faced across diverse sectors. 

The inclusion of well-known names like AT&T and Uber in the least profitable list helps to highlight the wild unpredictability and volatility inherent in today’s global business landscape.

Most Profitable Sectors for the World’s Largest Companies, 2023

The top 3 sectors — energy, finance, and technology — emerge as the most profitable among the world’s largest companies in 2023, collectively contributing to a massive 63% of the total global profit, amounting to $1.8 trillion. 

With a profit share of 24.56%, the energy sector takes the lead, bolstering $711.6 billion in profit by 88 companies within the Fortune 500. 

Finance follows closely, with 101 companies and a 23.07% profit share, showcasing it still holds considerable financial dominance. 

Technology, represented by 35 companies, secures a notable 15.54% profit share, underlining its continued significance in the profit landscape.

Healthcare, represented by 30 companies, holds a 7.51% profit share with $217.6 billion in profit and significantly contributes to the profitability of the world’s largest companies. 

Transportation, with 22 companies, secures a notable 5.54% of total profit, amounting to $160.5 billion in profit. The sector’s role in facilitating global movement is evident in its substantial profit share.

Motor Vehicle and Parts, encompassing 34 companies, contribute a noteworthy 5.36% to the global profit, generating $155.4 billion. The automotive industry’s impact is still substantial, albeit with a slightly lower profit margin compared to other leading sectors.

The remaining sectors, including Food, Beverages and Tobacco, Telecommunications, Retail, Materials, Wholesaler, Industrial, Engineering and Construction, Household Products, Aerospace and Defence, Chemicals, Food and Drug Stores, Apparel, and Hotels, Restaurants, Leisure, collectively make valuable contributions to the global profit landscape, showcasing the diverse strengths and importance of each individual sector.

This analysis helps to highlight the diverse strengths and contributions of various sectors across the globe, with energy, finance, and technology leading the charge in shaping the financial landscape of the largest global enterprises.

Ranking Countries by Total Corporate Profit, 2023

In the dynamic landscape of global corporate giants, the United States and China emerge as titans, each housing a near-equal number of companies on the Fortune 500 list with revenues totaling $13 trillion and $11.2 trillion, respectively. 

Despite this similarity, the U.S. outshines all nations, with its 136 companies generating a staggering $1.1 trillion in profit, representing 37.56% of the total global profit. China follows closely, with 135 companies contributing $528 billion, comprising just under half of the U.S.’s global profit pool with 18.22%.

The combined force of the U.S. and China stands out, jointly accounting for $1.6 trillion (56%) of the total profit, surpassing all other countries combined, which contribute $1.3 trillion (44%) in total. 

Saudi Arabia secures the third position with a single company generating $159.1 billion in profit, making it 5.49% of the total global profit. 

Continental Analysis

In the global landscape of corporate profitability, North America takes the top spot as the foremost economic powerhouse, contributing an impressive $1.18 trillion in profit and commanding a substantial 40.75% share of the global profit. The United States emerges as the major player within the continent, underscoring its unparalleled economic influence.

Venturing across the pond into Europe, the continent collectively generates $629.9 billion in profit, claiming a notable 21.74% share of the global profit. The UK and Germany take the lead among European nations, showcasing their economic strength and significant corporate contributions.

Across the expansive and diverse Asian continent, encompassing China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, the combined profit amounts to $974 billion, representing a formidable 33.62% share of the global profit. China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia emerge as major contributors, collectively illustrating Asia’s substantial economic influence.

Brazil is the only South American country. Their corporate entities contribute significantly to the global profit pool, generating $76.2 billion and holding a 2.63% share. 

Australia, positioned in the Asia-Pacific region, makes a notable impact with $36.7 billion in profit, constituting a modest 1.26% share of the global profit. 

This continental analysis provides a comprehensive and clear overview of corporate profitability, showcasing the major players and their contributions within each region.

Top 10 U.S. Companies with the Highest Profit, 2023

In the dynamic landscape of corporate profitability within the United States, the top 10 companies among the Fortune 500 elite emerge as extremely formidable contributors. 

These 10 corporations, out of a total of 136 U.S. companies, collectively generate a staggering $499.5 billion in profit, comprising an impressive 46% of the total profits amassed by all 136 U.S. entities. 

Apple leads the pack, commanding a lion’s share with $99.8 billion in profit, constituting 9.17% of the overall profits among U.S. companies.

The composition of the top 10 reflects a diverse range of sectors, with technology taking the lead. Following Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet secured the second and third positions, contributing $72.7 billion and $60 billion in profit, respectively.

The U.S. Postal Service, representing the transportation sector, stands out with a remarkable profit of $56 billion.

Continuing down the list, energy giants Exxon Mobil and Chevron contribute significantly, with profits of $55.7 billion and $35.5 billion, respectively. 

Financial institutions JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America showcase their dominance, with profits amounting to $37.7 billion and $27.5 billion, respectively. 

Meta Platforms, a technology giant, rounds out the top 10, contributing an impressive $23.2 billion in profit. 

This collective dominance underscores the significant role played by these select few in steering the economic trajectory of the nation.

Top 10 U.S. Companies with the Highest Loss, 2023

In the realm of corporate challenges, the top 10 U.S. companies with the highest losses faced a combined setback of $66.9 billion. 

Notable among the highest losers are Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway, ranking as the 4th and 14th largest global companies, with massive revenues of $514 billion and $302.1 billion, respectively. Despite their prominent positions, both companies incurred significant losses during the analyzed period, with Amazon reporting a surprising loss of $2.7 billion, and Berkshire Hathaway facing a substantial loss of $22.8 billion.

Uber Technologies and Warner Bros. Discovery experienced the most significant percentage losses, with 28.68% and 21.80%, respectively. 

Intriguingly, four out of the top 10 least profitable companies in the U.S. belong to the Financials sector—Berkshire Hathaway, State Farm Insurance, Prudential Financial, and Allstate. 

These challenges illuminate the diverse landscape of corporate performance, emphasizing the sectoral variations within the top companies experiencing losses.

Most Profitable Sectors for the Top U.S. Companies, 2023

The technology sector emerges as the powerhouse for the top U.S. companies, contributing significantly to the country’s total profit of $1.3 trillion. 

With a remarkable $306 billion in profit, the technology sector commands a substantial 28% share of the overall profit generated by all sectors. Impressively, the Technology sector also showcases a robust profit margin of 19.76%, underscoring the efficiency and profitability of tech companies within the U.S. corporate landscape.

The top four sectors—Technology, Energy, Healthcare, and Financials—stand out as major contributors, collectively accounting for 75 companies and generating a substantial $779 billion in profit, representing 72% of the total profit across all sectors in the United States.

Healthcare, with the highest total revenue of $2.5 trillion, further solidifies its prominence. 

On the other end of the spectrum, the Media, Wholesaler, and Retail sectors exhibit the least profitability, with profit margins of only 0.76%, 1.53%, and 2.60%, respectively, highlighting the modern-day challenges faced by these sectors in the specified fiscal year.

Methodology

Our comprehensive analysis delved into the profitability of companies listed in the Fortune 500, a globally recognized list comprising companies with the highest revenue. Our objective was to shed light on the most profitable companies and sectors worldwide, with a particular emphasis on how U.S. companies fare in comparison to their international counterparts.

Approach to Analysis

• Data Source: We sourced our data from the Fortune 500 list, ensuring that we based our insights on a reliable and respected global business ranking.

• Profitability Focus: The primary focus of our analysis was profitability. We evaluated not just the revenues but more importantly, the profits of these companies to gauge their financial health and performance.

• Sector-Wise Analysis: We categorized companies based on their operational sectors, allowing us to identify which industries are leading in terms of profitability and which are facing challenges.

• U.S. vs. Global Comparison: A significant part of our analysis involved comparing the performance of U.S.-based companies against those from other parts of the world. This comparison provided a broader understanding of the global business landscape.

• Interpretation of Data: By reorganizing and scrutinizing the data from multiple perspectives, we aimed to extract valuable insights into the financial health and market positioning of these leading entities.

The methodology employed in this analysis enabled us to gain a nuanced understanding of the financial dynamics at play within the Fortune 500 companies. It highlighted the sectors and regions that are leading in profitability, providing a clear picture of the current state of global business and economic trends.

Some brands have been able to do this successfully, for example:

Drift was able to separate itself from all of the other “chatbots” by creating the concept of conversational marketing and evangelizing it through content.

Clearscope was able to set itself apart from other SEO tools by sharing long-form webinars and videos, where their founder analyzed detailed examples and case studies around search intent, which search queries had overlapping results, and what that meant for on-page optimization and content optimization (what their tool does).

These are two examples of companies that have managed to create a “content brand,” or in other words, a brand that differentiates itself through the content that they produce. 

At Grow and Convert, we differentiated ourselves from the commoditized content marketing and SEO world when we coined the term Pain Point SEO. The term is now synonymous with a bottom-of-the-funnel first content strategy and has gained popularity over the past five years.

When companies are able to create a content brand, they benefit from prospects viewing their product or service as differentiated (even if their product or service from a feature perspective isn’t that differentiated). The quality of their content can differentiate their brand and build trust. 

The reasoning: Prospects know the brand, like the brand, and trust the brand because of the content, and therefore assume that the product or service must be good, too. 

In other words, even if you think all chatbots are the same, you might buy into Drift’s narrative on conversational marketing, and that might make you want to buy their product over the rest of the companies in that category. Or, if you’ve watched a Clearscope webinar with smart insights on SERP analysis, a part of you assumes that those strategies are baked into their product and will also help you to rank well.

Obviously, this is a massive advantage to a brand trying to differentiate itself in a commoditized space.

Additional benefits of creating a content brand:

• Prospects come in educated and have already bought into what you do
  
  
• Sales cycles are shortened 
  
  
• You reduce the number of competitors that prospects are considering

In this article, we’re going to share what a content brand is and how we think about creating one.

What Is a Content Brand?

A content brand is a company that has been able to differentiate itself, grow awareness, and change the perception of its business through content. Oftentimes content brands are in categories that are heavily commoditized, but a big reason they stand out is because of the content that they produce. 

Examples of B2C content brands are Redbull, Yeti, Nike, Liquid Death, and Patagonia. 

Examples of B2B content brands are HubSpot, Drift, Gong, Moz (via Rand Fishkin), and Basecamp.

Notably, most of the examples we listed are larger brands. We’ve noticed that smaller brands either don’t try or struggle to execute in building a content brand.

Why? 

We think it’s because there’s an important precursor to successfully building a content brand: a crystal clear understanding of your positioning.

The Foundation of Building a Content Brand: What Makes Your Company Unique?

Step one in creating a content brand is understanding the reasoning behind what makes your company unique, or in other words, your positioning.

This isn’t just about what features your product has that others don’t have. It’s bigger than that. It includes elements of why you exist, what hole in the market you fill, and how you make your customers’ lives better. 

To figure out what makes you unique, these are the sorts of questions you need to ask yourself (or your customers):

• Why was your company created?
  
  
• What’s different about the strategic approach you take vs. the way that everyone else in the industry does things?
  
  
• Does your product or service have any unique features that other businesses don’t have?
  
  
• Do you approach solving any problems in your business in a unique way?
  
  
• Does much of your industry believe in something you think is wrong or false?

We ask every single client questions like these in our sales conversations and in extensive interviews at the start of the engagement because we also need to deeply understand their positioning in order to pitch their brand at a high level in their content. And we’ve found that these questions do a great job in developing concepts that differentiate a brand from its competition. They often lead to lively discussions that reveal that different folks at the company even have disagreements on these answers, and they’re forced to do the hard but rewarding work of resolving those differences. 

The answers to these questions will be the foundation or the seedlings of the core concepts that we discuss below. They’re the original seedlings of how your brand is different or what you’re disrupting or changing that’s broken in your space. These ideas will lead to the foundational content pieces that will differentiate your brand. 

Case Study: Figuring Out What Makes Grow and Convert Unique

Here’s an example of what answering these questions can lead to from our own positioning case study. This is a summary of the problems we set out to solve that were rampant in the content and SEO marketing agency world.

In short, agencies weren’t good at measuring or holding themselves accountable to leads generated, they often didn’t promote the content they produced (and if they did, they just shared from social accounts without any real strategy), and content production was farmed out to freelance writers that had no experience on the topic they were writing about. All of these things led to subpar results.

Our solution to the above three problems was to create an agency that (1) held itself accountable to leads generated, (2) actually promoted the content it produced, and (3) could write on very advanced topics in wide-ranging fields (such as concussion and cancer treatment and software development) because we interview subject matter experts inside of the business rather than farm out writing to people that don’t have expertise on a topic.

Having a clear understanding of what separates your business from its competitors is what allows you to create core concepts for your brand that all of your content ties back to.

Coming Up with Core Concepts for Your Brand

We think that every business has around 3–5 core concepts that are unique to them. (At the start, it may be just one or two, which you can build on over time.) 

These core concepts are your “thought leadership” — concepts that push the thinking in your industry forward. These are opinions, stories, data, and/or strategies that share how you approach solving a problem core to your industry that’s different from the way that everyone else does things. 

You formulate these core concepts over time as you start to come up with ideas that truly set yourself apart from the way others are doing things. These concepts should map to the problems you solve in the section above. Almost every business should have some sort of differentiation. It doesn’t necessarily have to be from a feature perspective, but it can be a philosophical difference in the way that you approach things, a strategic difference, a process difference, or a cultural difference.

We’ll use Grow and Convert as a running example throughout this post because we feel that most people reading this are familiar with our company, so it should make it easy to understand.

Grow and Convert’s Core Concepts

Pain Point SEO (Strategic Difference) 

We came up with Pain Point SEO when we were trying to figure out how to drive more leads from the content we produced for our clients. If we hadn’t initially set out to solve the problem of lead attribution of content marketing, we might not have come up with this strategic difference. 

After measuring and figuring out what the highest converting articles we published on behalf of clients were, we noticed that posts that ranked for search queries that had high buying-intent had the highest conversion rates. Contrary to industry norms that prioritized top-of-funnel content, keywords with high volume, and an idea of not selling too much in content, we realized that producing more articles around these bottom-of-the-funnel, high buying-intent keywords (that pitched the client’s product) produced results much faster than the typical top-of-funnel approach. This core concept differentiated us strategically from the way most businesses did content marketing.

Pain Point Copywriting (Process Difference) 

Pain point copywriting came from us trying to solve the problem of how to write advanced content that converts for our clients’ businesses. The industry norm for agencies is to hire a bunch of freelance writers, send them a topic and/or content brief, have them self-research the topic, and then write the article. This leads to content that doesn’t sell the value props of your product or service and a lot of surface level content that’s the same as what everyone else writes. The difference in our ability to write advanced content has to do with our process. We interview subject matter experts inside of businesses and use their expertise to write product-focused sales copy. 

Content Distribution Strategy (Strategic and Process Difference)

We came up with this differentiator when trying to figure out the best way to drive targeted traffic for our clients. Many agencies just published content and then waited for content to rank. Or, they’d schedule some tweets or LinkedIn posts in Buffer. We figured out an approach to content promotion that was different from how most agencies or in-house brands were doing it, and we shared the strategy in this blog post.

Content Brand (Philosophical and Strategic Difference) 

This post is meant to be a core concept for Grow and Convert going forward. There are many companies looking to distinguish themselves with content, but few know how to produce thought leadership content. We created this article to guide people through a framework to produce content that differentiates themselves from their competition.

You can see that all of our core concept examples map to our positioning differences. These articles share how we approach things differently than the status quo and back our core thesis up with evidence, data, stories, and examples that prove the concept to be true.

The next part of building a content brand is to produce supporting content that maps back to these core concepts.

Produce Content That Maps to Core Concepts

Once you’ve come up with a core concept, you need content that explains and supports that core thesis.

You should produce case studies, data posts, strategy guides, and more that help prove the validity of your core concept. 

For example, if you look through a bunch of our case studies or strategy articles, you’ll see that they all serve to show how Pain Point SEO was implemented in different types of businesses. 

Even large data pieces like this recent analysis of SEO conversion rates adds a ton of original data backing our Pain Point SEO approach. We could’ve just analyzed SEO conversion rates broadly, but instead we chose to tie the conversion rates to the content frameworks we share in our post on Pain Point SEO. 

A piece like this not only supports our Pain Point SEO core concept, but it’s unique. (Most other sites in the content marketing space aren’t publishing data on conversion rates across 90+ posts; it’s hard to find data like this.) It’s also extremely hard to replicate since you can’t just hire a freelance writer to go publish a post like this one. 

What we’re trying to do here is to provide further proof that our core concepts are a better way to approach things than the status quo or industry norms and that we best understand (or are leading the way on) this core concept in our industry. 

Also, original, hard-to-replicate content that maps to your core concepts like this is what starts to get your brand known for its content. In this case, people will start to know that if you want detailed analysis content and SEO conversion rates, you go to Grow and Convert. 

Examples of Drift Content That Supports Conversational Marketing

Let’s also look at some of Drift’s content that backed their conversational marketing core concept.

First off, Drift wrote a book on conversational marketing which outlines their core concept. This is the equivalent of our post on Pain Point SEO; it just goes way more in depth.

Drift started a State of the Conversational Marketing Report that surveyed 503 B2B companies to find data and trends on how people benefitted from conversational marketing.

You can find some of those here:

• 2021 State of Conversational Marketing
• 2022 State of Conversational Marketing

When you create a state of the industry report and use your own branded term to share the data, it’s hard for other companies to argue that they do the same thing.

Not only did they do that, but they also developed a conversational marketing certification program. Again, if you’re certifying people on conversational marketing, it’s going to be hard for someone who has gone through that program to want to buy another tool because they won’t think that the other tool does “conversational marketing,” even if the tool is the same from a feature perspective.

Lastly, Drift has created a number of case studies and JTBD pieces that share how companies have successfully implemented conversational marketing into their sales process.

All of these supporting pieces build on the case for why companies should sell with conversational marketing and follow the Drift process rather than use another tool that has a similar feature set.

Examples of Clearscope Content That Supports Conversational Marketing

I want to include Clearscope examples because they’re different in two ways from us and Drift. 

1. They’ve developed a content brand without creating a branded concept like “pain point SEO” or “conversational marketing.” 
   
   
2. Their content goes beyond written content and includes a heavy dose of webinars and video.

Clearscope founder Bernard Huang has really compelling beliefs that he shares in webinars about how Google’s algorithm figures out search intent and what content to rank. Then, he supports it with data, analysis, and examples. These beliefs are the basis for how the Clearscope tool was built and why it gets rankings better than other tools that help with on-page SEO.

Essentially, if you buy into what he’s saying in his videos about how search works and why you should create content in specific ways, then you’ll also buy into his tool being able to help you get results from SEO.

Here are some examples of webinars he’s done:

• How to rank SEO content in the era of generative AI
• How to get your content to rank for keywords you’re targeting

They also have written content that supports the idea of ranking on the first page of Google:

• How to get on the first page of Google

While Clearscope uses a different approach than the two examples above (both Grow and Convert and Drift), if you’ve read or watched any of their content, you probably immediately bought into their strategic difference and the value of using Clearscope over many of the other tools that do similar things.

How to Integrate the Content Brand Framework with Your Existing Content Strategy

The content brand framework and your existing content strategy should go hand in hand. The idea is to create a number of pieces around core concepts that are not SEO focused but that can be promoted via paid social (Twitter, LinkedIn), shared through newsletters, and shared through organic social. 

Then, you can create supporting pieces that help build on that core thesis. The content type doesn’t matter. You can create YouTube videos that are focused around SEO keywords, webinars, a podcast, eBooks, or pain point SEO focused articles like we do. 

The key to differentiating yourself as a content brand is having something unique to say. Hopefully, the content brand framework will help you discover your company’s uniqueness.

How We’re Helping Clients Build Content Brands

We help clients build content brands in two of our services. 

First, in our core content service, when it makes sense, we often start the engagement off by publishing a disruption story that is not SEO based (it doesn’t target any SEO keyword) but rather explains what the company and product or service is disrupting. It’s the equivalent of our Pain Point SEO piece or a blog post version of Drift’s Conversational Marketing book. Then, the majority of the SEO-focused pieces we publish after that in our standard engagement harken back to the disruption story and its core concepts. That way, our SEO pieces build this foundation of organic traffic that helps lead prospects that are Googling various high buying-intent phrases to a core concept of the brand. 

Here are some examples of disruption stories that we’ve produced:

Rainforest QA

Rainforest QA is a client who has a really innovative product in the software quality assurance (QA) space. Most QA is done using code-based software, so it has to be managed and run by developers. Their product is visual, so other departments can own the QA process as well. This piece talks about how that concept can transform product development processes for the better. 

Asking Developers to Own QA Is Broken. Here’s a Better Way.

Vocal Video

Vocal Video has built a really easy-to-use software for collecting video testimonials. Instead of hiring a video production crew and meeting on-site somewhere, marketing teams can send happy customers a single link that allows customers to walk through a simple guided process to record their thoughts using their own phone or computer camera. This piece goes into what that ease of producing testimonial videos enables for marketing teams. 

Producing Video Testimonials Used to Be a Huge Pain. Here’s How We’re Fixing It.

Lawclerk

Lawclerk is a marketplace of lawyers available for other law firms to hire when they need extra legal help. That sounds simple, but behind the idea is some really provocative thinking around how the business model of large law firms is broken. Here, we helped Greg German, a co-founder of Lawclerk, get those ideas across via their founding story. Note how the piece also sells Lawclerk in addition to the commentary on large law firm business models and their issues. 

Why the Large Law Firm Business Model Is Dying and What We’re Doing Instead

Second, we also offer a one-time project based engagement where we help brands figure out their foundational core concept(s) and positioning via interviews. We expand upon the questions above to uncover what the brand is disrupting, what differentiates them in their space, what core customer pain points they are solving, and more. Then, we publish one or two disruption story pieces that convey that core concept in an engaging and educational way. You can learn more about this service here. 

• “AI is going to remove the need for writers”
• “You’re going to be able to produce 10X the content with AI”
• “Search is going to become so much more competitive because companies will be able to churn out 100s of blog posts in the amount of time it takes a human to produce 1 blog post”
• “Keyword strategy won’t be important because you can produce so much content that you’ll be able to rank for any keyword you want to target”
• “Writers will become prompt engineers – all you need to be good at is telling AI what to write for you”

All of the arguments center around the theme of companies being able to do way more with less resources, but none of the conversation has focused around the quality of AI written content and if your customers will actually want to read anything produced with AI.

To me, that’s where the center of the conversation should be.

Here are some of the questions that I’ve been asking myself:

• Can AI produce the content that we produce better than a human on our team can?
• Can it educate customers on a product or industry better than a human can? 
• Does it have unique and compelling arguments that are different from what everyone else writes on the subject?

The answer to all of those questions at this point is no. This is why we haven’t been as bullish on AI as other content agencies and vendors pushing the AI narrative. 

It’s not to say that AI can’t get there, but I think people are focusing too much on the speed of work instead of the quality of work and that’s a dangerous game to play if you’re wanting results from your content investment.

Let me explain why I think this.

ChatGPT Content is Mirage Content 2.0

In 2016, I wrote an article called Mirage Content, it argued that most of the long form content produced by marketing departments looked, on the surface, like it was well-written, but if you actually read the details it was just high-level fluff. Specifically, when you do a Google search on a topic, many of the articles on the first page have interesting titles, but when you click into them, they all just regurgitate versions of the same few talking points.

I argued in that piece that this problem stemmed from two flaws in the content production process:

1. Most companies would hire freelance writers to write on a subject they had no expertise in. That writer would “research” the topic by Googling it and reading the top 10 results and then rehashing what those articles already said. We coined this The Google Research Paper approach, as it mimics a high school student producing a research paper where you can clearly tell the person doesn’t have expertise on the topic they’re writing about.
   
   
2. The second flaw was that most articles weren’t specific enough. They would cover broad concepts, which forces them to cover them at a high level. They never got deep enough into the details that people actually care about. This specificity problem is also a function of the writer not having expertise on the topic they were writing about.

Now if we think about what AI does, it basically mimics the flawed approach outlined above. AI is trained from a large portion of the web, books, and articles written on a topic, so when you ask it about anything, it simply rehashes what’s been written on a topic (in grammatically pristine English, to be fair).

But what is the “correct” answer? How does AI decide what to say? What does it say on topics where there is no right answer? Does it ever take a strong stance on a topic? 

The answer is that AI writers are biased towards saying the most average thing because that’s how they’re built. They’re programmed to produce a response that is as similar to the information they were trained on. All AI-writing tools know is what they’ve been trained on, which is by definition, things that people have already said. They are literally programmed to find the most likely word that goes after the word it just wrote, over and over again.

This is why AI content feels so much like what I defined as Mirage Content 7 years ago: when you first read it, it sounds really articulate and well-written, but when you stop to really dissect the arguments, you realize it’s just stating the same generic arguments in different ways.

So as a content marketing tool, AI is effectively just making it easier to produce mirage content at scale. Many companies and agencies are taking the same flawed approach they used before to produce content and are now doing it faster with technology. Instead of hiring freelancers to Google a topic for an hour and regurgitate what the top 5 results are saying into their own blog post, they can now just use AI to do the exact same thing, but faster.

So if this is the type of “content marketing” you do (largely surface-level coverage of introductory topics), I absolutely agree that AI could be a good replacement for this type of writing. This is writing where you don’t care about selling your personal or company’s expertise to someone else, and where you don’t care about having your company or CEO’s opinion on the topic woven into the pieces. There’s a large number of writers and agencies who produce mirage content that will get replaced because their approach and strategy was flawed to begin with.

But most companies don’t want to produce content that says the same thing as everyone else. They want to share unique, original, or provocative opinions. They want to explain why the approach their competitors are taking to solve the industry problems are wrong, and why their approach is better. They want to be known for their thoughts and their opinions and be considered “thought leaders” in their industry (easier said than done).

This kind of high-quality content is effective. It helps convince customers about your product over competitors and it helps your brand and ideas stand out from the rest. But if your process to produce great content starts with getting the argumentation on a topic from AI, you’ve already lost. You’re just going to end up with the same unoriginal content as everyone else.

Going forward, I think that AI written content will be a race to the bottom. Companies are going to experiment with it, the web is going to get flooded with more bad content, and I think in a year or two the content that will be most valued will be the ones produced by humans. People have always wanted to read something that challenges their thinking, educates them on something new, or has a differing opinion. The way to produce content like that going forward isn’t with AI, it’s with humans.

There are many people that might disagree with this opinion, but I have yet to see anyone show me an example of a good piece of content produced with AI. So if you have one, feel free to share a link to it below.

They get an idea, test it, and before they’ve given it enough time to work, they hear of another idea, and decide to test that instead. The cycle repeats.

Instead of ending up with marketing channels that drive revenue for the business, many of them will end up just cycling from one idea to the next and end up in shiny object hell.

The CEO and the sales team aren’t happy because leads, trials, and demos aren’t coming in. Yet the marketer feels like the pressure is unfair and they’ve accomplished a lot because of all of the new things they’re trying. Things are “happening”, yet nothing is “working.”

The problem isn’t that nothing works, it’s that the marketer doesn’t have the focus and patience to commit to what’s starting to work and double down on that. They’re constantly distracted by that new shiny idea.

Good Marketers Commit to a Strategy When It Starts to Work

In the first two years of our business, we were trying to figure out a content marketing strategy that worked across all of our clients.

The challenge was that we had clients with many different business types and business models (e.g., B2B, B2C, SaaS, Service, eCommerce), so whatever process we used had to work across all of them.

Our initial idea was that we’d produce stories that were interesting to the target audience of our clients, we’d interview influential people in their industries, and share those stories on social media. Our logic was that these interview based stories were a lot more interesting and “higher quality” than top 10 lists and “ultimate guides” that people were pumping out.  The result was that we were able to grow our clients’ traffic a ton, very quickly.

However, we also started our business to solve the problem of getting content to generate leads for our clients and measuring and reporting on those leads. So while the stories drove a lot of traffic, conversions weren’t as high as we had initially hypothesized. In fact, many of these stories produced barely any conversions.

Around that time, we had a client challenge us to make sure our content would grow traffic and conversions long-term. Naturally, that conversation led to SEO (since SEO-based content will keep driving traffic and conversions once it ranks). He asked us why we weren’t doing more SEO based content and why we were producing all these stories that just get traffic for a short time and then die out.

Now, here’s what’s important — at that time, we happened to have produced a few SEO-based stories. They were targeting keywords that we would now call “bottom of the funnel” terms. Basically, we had accidentally done Pain Point SEO — even though we didn’t have a name for it back then — and when we looked at the results of those pieces once they ranked, we saw they drove a ton of conversions (and because they were ranking for SEO keywords, they drove continuous traffic).

So when we took a step back and compared the results of both ideas (cool stories versus these BOTF SEO pieces), it was clear that the second method got better results. So we decided to double down on that second method, coined the term ‘Pain Point SEO’ to describe the method, and pivoted our whole agency’s positioning and process around it.

We’ve now stuck to that system for over 5 years.

Many marketers in that same position would try another idea, and another idea, instead of committing to the one thing that works. They often question, “well, what if there’s something that works better?” We could have also done that and chased some new shiny object. But we didn’t.

At that time, we only had a few SEO based articles published, but we saw good results from them and stopped to really test that channel. We produced more SEO pieces, then a few more after that, and kept seeing these pieces produce crazy amounts of conversions. So we doubled down hard.

The reality is, you only need to test something new if there’s something wrong with the current method of doing things.

You don’t need to constantly look for new tactics or new ideas. You just need to commit to a strategy that works. That’s how you grow.

Almost every large company you know of grew largely through one channel, and only when they started to exhaust that channel, did they move onto something else.

Stop Focusing on Shiny Objects

There are constantly going to be new tactics, new methods, and new technologies that will distract you from the strategy that drives results now.

You don’t need to be the first one to try them out or pivot your whole strategy around them.

For example, right now a popular thought is “ChatGPT is going to be the next way to produce content, we need to get on it before everyone else does.”

Why? If you already have an existing process that works well and gets results, do you really need to be the first to try that technology? You only need to be trying something else if your existing process is broken.

Rarely is there an advantage to being the first to try something. In fact, it’s usually the opposite. While others are focused spending their time testing and trying new things to try to figure out what works, you could be focused doing the things that work for you now — while getting results.

After those other people spend time figuring out what works, if your process starts breaking down, you can then test their strategy for yourself (while saving yourself all the headache of figuring it out from scratch).

So stop shifting from tactic to tactic. Stop with the LinkedIn posts talking about the newest idea you have. The marketers who share their daily tactics and all the cool things they’re “trying” are the ones that, behind the scenes, are not getting results.

Good marketers test until they find something that works, then they double down on it.

Bad marketers have shiny object syndrome.

This was true of both content produced by in-house teams and content produced by outside agencies.

Over the last 5+ years doing content marketing for dozens of B2B companies, we’ve learned there are 4 key issues responsible for this “no leads from content” problem:

• Issue #1: Content marketers and agencies chase traffic without taking intent into consideration.

• Issue #2: They write beginner level content for advanced B2B target audiences.

• Issue #3: They don’t actively promote the content they produce (there’s no actual marketing involved).

• Issue #4: They’re unwilling to be held accountable for lead generation (and instead want to be measured on things like page views or organic traffic).

If you’re looking to hire a great B2B content marketing agency, you need to check for these 4 problems.

In this article, we’re going to explain these 4 issues in-depth and explain how our content agency seeks to solve them. Then, since some companies like to evaluate multiple options, we’ll also share names of 4 other content marketing agencies who we have heard come up a lot over the years.

4 Issues with the Way Most Agencies Do B2B Content Marketing

Issue #1: Most Agencies Chase Traffic without Taking Intent into Consideration

The number one reason why most content marketers and B2B content agencies don’t produce leads for their clients is that they focus content efforts on topics and keywords with low to zero purchase intent.

This is due to a mindset that says traffic potential should take priority, and with enough traffic, conversions will follow. But we’ve seen time and time again why this isn’t true:

When agencies prioritize traffic first, they choose topics and keywords that have the highest search volume. They look up terms related to their client’s category in SEO tools, sort by search volume, and that’s how they prioritize the order in which to tackle keywords. They tend to focus on “top of funnel” topics.

Top of funnel (TOF) topics are topics that presumably could be interesting to your target audience, but have little or nothing to do with the actual product or service you sell. They lack any indication that someone reading has intent to buy (or even do research about) your product or service. And as a result, conversion rates for this type of content are miniscule.

While this may be an effective strategy for certain “lifestyle” or B2C brands, it’s often a distraction for B2B companies who want to see measurable ROI and leads from their content marketing efforts—especially when there are people actively looking to buy right now.

It also misunderstands the breadth of different high-intent search terms and how many prospective customers of B2B products are actively searching for and researching products at any given time.

In our opinion, a B2B content strategy that does not prioritize showing up in those discussions is leaving extremely qualified leads on the table and is therefore inadequate.

Our strategy, explained below, goes after those ready-to-buy-now prospects first before moving up the funnel.

Note: This tendency to focus on TOF topics also stems from a cultural trait of content marketing which says that the role of content isn’t to sell—that it should only be about getting “brand awareness,” capturing people at the top of the funnel and nurturing them over months or years (through email marketing automations, remarketing ads, etc.), hoping they’ll one day become a customer. We think this “don’t sell” culture is completely mis-guided.

Issue #2: They Write Beginner Level Content for Advanced B2B Audiences

The second major issue is that B2B content is often too basic to appeal to or resonate with advanced business-to-business prospects.

There are two layers to this problem. The first stems from the TOF topic issue discussed above.

As an example, say you have a B2B SaaS company that sells an IT product to chief technology or information officers. If you write a piece on “10 tips to improve your B2B tech stack,” what veteran CTO is going to read that? First, they don’t have the time to read generic pieces like that. Second, they likely know more than the writer who wrote about that. Third, their social feeds and email inboxes are filled with titles like that, so the chances of them reading yours are slim. Finally, the beginner-ness of topics like this mean that the content inside is also bound to be too beginner. So even if they do read it, it’s not likely to impress them enough to drive them to explore your product, start a trial, or request a demo.

The second layer has to do with the way most B2B content is actually written. Typically, a marketing manager hands freelancers or agencies a list of keywords or topics, and the writer, who is rarely a subject matter expert on the topic at hand, ends up writing what we call “Google research papers.” Like a high school student doing a research paper, they Google around the topic they were given and regurgitate what everyone else is saying on a given topic. (In their defense, what else are they supposed to do? The process itself is what’s broken. Below we explain how we have gone about solving this.)

As a result, even if content marketers get topics right, the content inside the article is still undifferentiated and ineffective at generating actual leads.

Issue #3: They Don’t Actively Promote the Content They Produce

Outside of topic selection, another common issue we have seen is that most content “marketing” agencies don’t actually promote or distribute content — they are actually just glorified writing services.

At best, they might share the content they write via your own brand’s social media marketing channels (tweet it out for you, share it on your LinkedIn page, etc.). But outside of that, if you ask them how they promote content, they’ll often just say, “We publish it and wait for it to rank in Google.”

This leaves businesses waiting around for articles to rank while their content sits on their site doing very little. And because search engine optimization (SEO) takes time to work, that often means several months pass by before content even begins getting traffic, let alone conversions.

Issue #4: They’re Unwilling to Be Held Accountable for Lead Generation

Finally, all of this culminates in arguably the biggest issue for us in our past experiences working with content agencies: They are unwilling to hold themselves accountable for generating leads.

They’ll report on metrics like pageviews and traffic, or impressions in organic search (or worse, simply word count and number of pieces published). But when it comes to getting actual ROI from content marketing, all the pageviews or impressions in the world mean nothing if that content isn’t producing any measurable leads.

These are the key problems we set out to solve when we decided to start our agency. Now, let’s look at how we’ve done that.

Our Content Marketing Agency’s Process for Solving These Issues

Solution #1: We Legitimately Measure Our Performance on Leads Generated

The number one differentiator of our agency—and the thing that should matter most to any B2B company hiring a content marketing company—is that we measure our performance on leads generated.

That is our benchmark. And that is the goal that our entire strategy and content creation process is based on.

It’s not based on traffic volume or other vanity metrics. It’s based on driving qualified leads.

For every one of our clients, we create an ROI graph like this one (a live graph from a B2B SaaS client we’ve been working with for over 2 years):

The horizontal lines represent the number of leads this client needs per month to break even on their monthly spend with us. Each month, we plot the number of leads from our articles on this graph. Then we report on our progress in relation to that break even number so clients can see when they begin to have positive ROI.

We’ve written extensively about how we do this here and here. Before we started our agency, this is the type of thing we were looking for but could never find.

Now, because leads are our main goal, the steps of our content production process—and our solutions that correspond to the issues we discussed above—are optimized for this. And that begins with the topics we prioritize.

Solution #2: We Prioritize Bottom of Funnel Topics with High Purchase Intent First to Drive Faster Results

In our experience, we’ve learned that the best content marketing strategy for B2B businesses is to begin by targeting topics and keywords that indicate people searching are ready to buy.

For example, in B2B SaaS, that’s keywords such as:

• Top/Best product category keywords: Keywords like “Best marketing analytics software,” “Best visitor identification software,” “Best video transcription software.”

• Brand/Product comparison keywords: Keywords like “HubSpot vs. Pipedrive” or “QuickBooks alternatives.”

In contrast to TOF topics, where readers generally aren’t in purchase-mode, most people searching these types of terms are actively looking to buy. As a result, conversion rates are much higher—in some cases like 10X higher (a finding that led us to develop our foundational Pain Point SEO Strategy).

B2B service businesses can take the same approach by targeting equivalent types of high-intent terms. For example, “best virtual assistant service,” or “business book ghostwriting service” as we’ve tackled for B2B service clients.

Our strategy is to tackle BOF terms first because they convert at a significantly higher rate—allowing us to drive results faster. Then, once we begin exhausting BOF keyword opportunities, we’ll begin working our way up the funnel. We do this very strategically, focusing on pain point-focused topics where there’s a direct product tie-in.

Note: Related to our BOF-first content strategy is our constant emphasis on intent over keyword volume. We’ll happily go after keywords that show minimal search volume in SEO tools if they indicate the searcher has really high intent. And in fact, as we’ve explained in this post, that often results in some of our highest converting pieces for clients.

You can read any of the articles linked above for in-depth discussions of these topics, or see the impact of this strategy via these case studies:

• How we scaled Leadfeeder’s signups to over 200/month

• Scaling content: Expanding from bottom of funnel content to top of funnel (Geekbot Case Study)

• Mini-volume keywords: Why targeting small search volumes makes sense

• Scaling SEO traffic from 920 to 14,577 sessions in 6 months (Circuit Case Study)

Solution #3: We Interview Experts at Our Clients’ Companies to Write at the Advanced Level of B2B Audiences

Because these BOF topics are very product-centric—and because B2B decision-makers need to be communicated with at an industry expert-level—we don’t produce articles in the “Google research paper” style we described above (where we just self-research a topic and write up what we found, trying ourselves to become the experts).

Instead, our writers start by interviewing people inside your organization who have the know-how and expertise to speak on that topic and convey their ideas into the article.

Thus the writer is not asked to pretend to be an expert themselves. This is a massive shift from traditional content services and is essential to producing genuinely high-quality content.

We’re not talking about grabbing a few quotes from experts to throw into an article. We’re talking about hour long recorded interviews where we shape an entire article around the viewpoint and knowledge of an expert.

This changes everything. It creates true thought leadership content, and adds genuine product expertise into our BOTF pieces discussed above because we’re able to include all the detail and nuance of how your product is differentiated, what it replaces, why features were designed in certain ways, and more that only product experts inside your company would know.

Solution #4: We Have a Two Pronged Content Promotion Process

Finally, we don’t just publish pieces and wait for them to rank in Google. We use a two pronged promotion strategy to drive both short and long term traffic. Specifically:

1. Paid Ads / PPC Marketing Campaigns (Short Term Traffic): We use paid ads to promote content using two targeting methods: Cold audiences (using interest and demographic based targeting) and lookalike audiences (based on the client’s existing customer list or website visitors). We test paid channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Ads based on each client and where we’re most likely to reach their audience.
   
   
2. Manual Link Building (Long Term Traffic): When certain pieces start ranking for keywords, we strategically deploy link building to boost them to page 1 or the top of page 1 in Google.

The combination of these 2 steps gives our pieces a short term boost in traffic followed by long term sustainable organic traffic that adds up from different articles and grows over time.

Companies also promote the content we create for them through email marketing, sales enablement material, paid ads, etc.—but regardless of how else they use it, we’re actively promoting it for them.

We do all of the above from our own budget, with no extra spend for our clients, making us a truly full-service agency. This is markedly different from other marketing agencies and something we’re very proud of offering our clients.

Further Reading

If you want to learn more, here is a summary of articles linked to above and others where we explain our process in depth:

• Pain Point SEO: Our foundational process

• SaaS content marketing: Why you should focus on bottom of the funnel first to drive signups

• How long does it take to rank on the first page of Google (aggregate case study of client data)

• SEO content writing: High level explanation of our writing process

Finally, if you’re interested, you can reach out about working with us here.

Other B2B Content Marketing Agencies Whose Names We Hear Often

To help B2B businesses weigh different agency options, here are a few other content marketing agencies whose names we’ve heard repeatedly—either through clients having worked with them in the past or just through colleagues in the marketing agency.

Note: We haven’t worked directly with any of these agencies, so we can’t independently vouch for the quality of their work. But that’s why we outlined our 4 criteria of evaluating a B2B content marketing agency above. If you want to reach out to these agencies, we recommend you ask them about each of these 4 B2B content marketing challenges and evaluate for yourself if and how they have a process to solve for them.

1. Animalz

According to their website, Animalz provides content marketing services to enterprise companies, startups, and VC firms.

They list having worked with companies such as Google, Amazon, Airtable, and others. They provide a variety of services including SEO consulting, brand awareness, lead generation, product marketing, and promotion and distribution.

Visit their site for more information about their services, team, podcast, and more.

2. Siege Media

Siege Media is an SEO-focused content marketing agency that offers SEO, content creation, graphic design, and link building services to businesses.

They list having worked with companies such as Zillow, Shutterfly, Tripadvisor, and others. And they say their marketing solutions have generated over $86,856,000 in yearly client traffic value.

Visit their site for more information.

3. Optimist

Optimist is an SEO-focused content marketing agency for startups and growth-stage businesses.

They specialize in working with product-led companies, and list having worked with companies such as Contentstack, FairShake, and HelloSign. Their services are broken out into startup content marketing, SaaS content marketing, and B2B content marketing.

Visit their site for more information.

4. Codeless

Codeless is a content production company offering a variety of SEO, content, and PR services.

They say they create a proven, customized workflow for every client, and list having worked with companies such as Monday, Zapier, ActiveCampaign, and others.

Visit their site for more information.

Want to work with us or learn how to implement our B2B content strategy?

• Our Agency: You can learn more about working with us here.

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn how to grow their SaaS business with content can join our private course, taught via case studies, here. We include lots of detail and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we (along with other members) give feedback. We also get on live Zoom calls about once a month and dissect members’ actual content strategies and brainstorm ideas on how we’d form content strategies for their businesses.

• Join Our Content Marketing Team: Alternatively, if this style of B2B content marketing appeals to you, consider joining our content marketing as a writer or content strategist. We have awesome clients. We’re a remote company. We pay well. And you won’t have to stress about getting your own clients or spend a bunch of time doing outreach to get them.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to share them in the comments below and we’ll respond.

If competitors with a huge marketing budget already rank for many keywords in their space, they have no shot in organic search.

There are a few reasons why they have this defeatist view of SEO:

1. They assume that bigger budgets mean better results
2. They assume it’s nearly impossible to compete with sites that have tons of backlinks and high domain ratings
3. Many of them have tried “SEO” and have seen little results so they assume it doesn’t work for them

These assumptions, and the conclusion that if you are an underdog in SEO (you have a new domain or few backlinks) you have little hope of success, is false.

In our client work, we’ve successfully ranked many smaller, newer sites for valuable keywords that generate qualified leads.

In this article, we’re going to share our “Underdog SEO” strategy that we use to help underdogs in various categories compete for rankings with the “big guys.”

What is Underdog SEO? It involves

1. Being more strategic in the keywords you target
2. Crafting individual pieces of content to match the search intent of each keyword

Below, we’ll discuss those two principles in turn. Then at the end we’ll discuss an optional tactic of strategic, low-volume link building that can further speed up results.

Principle #1: Be more strategic in what keywords you target

The Mistake

The biggest SEO mistake we see companies make is: spending all of their time, money and resources on only targeting 1-3 category keywords. They have this (false) view that those are the only terms worth ranking for, and if they don’t rank for them, they think their SEO program isn’t working (or has no potential to drive ROI).

For example:

• A hosting company spending all of their effort trying to rank for “web hosting”
• A content marketing agency like us focusing all of their effort trying to rank for “content marketing agency”
• A CRM tool trying to rank for the term “CRM software”

You may read this and think “Well what’s wrong with that? Those keywords do sound valuable.”  Don’t get us wrong, all three of those keywords have great buying intent, and are therefore totally in line with our bottom of funnel focused strategy – we would go after them at some point as well.

But underdogs shouldn’t go after these terms immediately, and certainly not exclusively as we’ve seen many do. That is the mistake.

Specifically, the companies ranking for these sorts of category-definition keywords usually have extremely strong domains, are well-known brands in the category, have spent tens of thousands of dollars to own and protect those keywords (mostly through building a ton of links to the ranking page), have more money to spend on content and SEO, and have spent years trying to rank for these terms.

If you’re an underdog trying to compete with industry leaders for those head terms, it’s going to be a huge uphill battle. You’ll likely spend a lot more time and money than you need to start getting real results (i.e. leads and sales) from SEO– and if this is your entire SEO strategy and it doesn’t work (or takes forever to rank), you’ll get disheartened and wrongly conclude “SEO isn’t for us”.

Solution: More specific keywords that tie to product differentiators

In contrast to that approach, our Underdog SEO strategy says that these companies should go after longer tail, high-intent keywords first, then move your way up the funnel as time goes on and your domain authority builds.

Specifically, look for keywords that map to a competitive advantage that your product/service has over your competition, i.e. follow the specificity strategy.

Here are two examples:

The Client: A QA testing platform whose differentiator is that you can build automated QA tests for apps and websites without touching a line of code.

• What we didn’t target immediately: “qa testing”
• What we targeted instead: “automated web application testing”, “codeless test automation”
• Why: Their strength is that their tool is codeless, so anyone who enters that qualifier into Google is looking specifically for something like their tool. That’s extremely high buying intent. As for “automated web application testing”, it’s not as specifically tied to a unique feature like “codeless” but it’s a good example of a longer tail keyword than just “QA testing” and our client’s platform is really well suited for web application testing, and does shine in building automated tests, so it’s also a great example of underdog SEO in action.

The Client: A helpdesk software made for businesses that are fielding support requests via email.

• What we didn’t target immediately: “help desk software” (this is way too competitive with sites like Zendesk, Helpscout and Helpdesk owning the serp).
• What we targeted instead: “self-hosted help desk,” “customer service email management software”
• Why: They’re one of the only solutions that can support a self-hosted, on-premise solution for help desk software. Therefore, it’s a competitive advantage that the large companies aren’t competing for in the search results. They also mainly help companies that take customer support requests through email and have a hard time managing all of the requests– therefore these terms are much less competitive and easier to rank for when there’s a ton of large funded startups in the help desk space.

This is the foundational principle behind Underdog SEO and it works. For example, here is a Twitter thread showing our rankings for the QA software company that we mentioned above:

Really proud of our team for these SEO rankings for our client @rainforestqa, who make an awesome software/website testing tool.

We’re ranking for all of these bottom of funnel, high-buying-intent terms in the top 1, 2, and 3 positions by producing *unique blog posts* for each pic.twitter.com/23AeyCbtUb

— Devesh Khanal (@deveshkhanal) April 15, 2022

You can see more keywords in the screenshot from Twitter than those discussed above. All of these keywords are far more specific than just going after a category definition term like “QA testing software”. This list is only showing ranking in the top 1, 2, and 3 positions, there are even more keywords for which we’re ranking elsewhere on page 1.

And what’s most important, and foundational to our strategy, is these keywords all have high purchase intent. If you sell codeless, visual, automated QA testing software for websites and mobile apps, like Rainforest does, people who are Googling for those exact things (via the terms in that tweet above) are the exact audience you want to get in front of. They don’t need to be made “problem aware” or “solution aware”. They don’t need to be “educated” about the space. They don’t need to be “dripped” content on an email list for months. The fact that they are Googling these terms tells you they are actively looking for a solution like yours right now. They are ready to buy.

Further reading: How to Create a SaaS Content Strategy That Drives Product Signups

Principle #2: Create a unique piece of content or page for each keyword you’re targeting

The Mistake

On top of the problem with keyword strategy for underdogs, there’s also usually a content problem: Companies try to get a few pages on their site to rank for all of the keywords they’re targeting.

Backing up, from our experience, this is how this problem originates: Companies work with some SEO vendor or consultant that does an audit of their website, tries to do some small technical fixes, and picks some keywords they should target (including mostly the super competitive category definition keywords discussed above). Then, this SEO vendor tries to optimize a few existing marketing site pages (the homepage, solutions pages, etc.) around these keywords, and often recommend you spend your SEO budget on link building to try to get those pages to rank.

This is often because most SEO vendors don’t specialize in producing unique content to rank for keywords, they focus on optimizing the site you already have.

For example, before working with us, one of our clients had hired three different SEO vendors to try to get their site to rank for valuable keywords. As you can see below, they did a decent job on Principle #1 – they were going after more than just one or two category keywords, but they were using a only few pages (their homepage, some feature pages, and a couple of blog posts) to try to rank for their target keywords. Very few of these pages were actually optimized for each target keyword!

Look at what the homepage is trying to rank for above:

• time clock app
• online time clock
• employee time tracking
• online time and attendance.

These keywords all have different search intents! If you look at what’s ranking on page 1 of those keywords, you see a bunch of different posts. So there’s almost no way to get their homepage (where it’s particularly hard to add extra text for SEO purposes) to rank for all of those keywords.

This was true of other pages as well, even blog posts. A single blog post would be created with a title like “10 tips for helping employees do…” and it would be listed on the spreadsheet as the page meant to rank for a bunch of keywords that, for starters, were not included in the title but more importantly had search intent that was not satisfied by the body of the post, even if the keywords themselves were added multiple times in the post.

This is a really common mistake that we’ve seen many companies make.

The Solution

Instead you need to create specific pages for each keyword that you’re trying to target because the search intent of most keywords are unique. So if you want to give yourself the best chance of ranking for each of your target keywords, a specific page should be created for each.

Does that mean a lot of work? Yes. But good SEO takes work. If it were easy to rank for high conversion rate keywords, everyone would do it.

How do you create these keyword-tailored pages and what should go on it? We have an in-depth article that specifically answers this:

SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow.

But, in short, the key is carefully analyzing what’s already ranking on page 1, using that to really understand what the different layers of intent are behind that search query, and writing a single article (or creating a single page) aimed at nothing else besides satisfying all the different layers and nuances of that keyword’s search intent.

For example, in that article above, Cam Brown from our team includes an example of ranking for “paid search dashboard” for our client TapClicks:

And he notes how there are multiple layers to this term’s search intent, which he gleans from what’s already ranking on page 1: people want a definition, they want templates, and they want to see products that can do this.

Again, you can (and should) read the whole post here, but as per this principle note what wouldn’t work to rank for this: the TapClicks.com homepage! There’s basically no chance we are going to be able to modify their homepage to include all the different parts of the search intent of this keyword. So we created a blog post instead, which as of this writing is ranking #1 for that term.

Aside: The vast majority of conversions we generate for clients come when posts rank in the top 3 spots for their target keywords. So even if you slap the target keyword onto an existing page in hopes it could rank, you may get onto the top two pages of Google, or even the bottom half of page one, but in our experience, it will be hard to get into the top 3 spots. So, you’ll still be missing out on the bulk of potential conversions.

Common Objection: But won’t blog posts convert less?

A common worry at this point is that blog posts may convert less well than the homepage or product or solution pages. But in our experience, this is not true. We discuss this at length in  another article on landing pages vs. blog posts, but the simple reason is that the blog posts we write for these underdog SEO keywords heavily sell the product.

Most people think of “blog posts” as exclusively top of the funnel content because that’s what they are used to doing with blog posts (again read this and this for arguments on why we think is not a good idea).

But in our case, the blog posts we create to go after these keywords are still heavily product focused because these keywords are heavily product focused! As a result, they convert well, because the majority of the post sells the product. So if you do a good job of selling your product in the post, as per the landing pages vs. blog posts article we wrote, you can see conversion rates equal to or often higher than marketing site pages.

Optional Bonus: Build links to these pages

Lastly, once you’ve focused on the right long-tail buying intent keywords, and you’ve created unique content for each of the keywords you’re targeting, building links to each of the posts that you’ve created will help speed up how quickly the pages rank.

People often have the misconception that they’ll need to build tens or hundreds of links to their site in order to get their articles to rank, however, we haven’t found this to be true.

Because the strategy outlined here focuses on targeting specific keywords and creating an article targeting that specific term, oftentimes we’ll see that only building a few links to these pieces will get them to rank on the first page. (Or, in many cases, our articles have ranked well without any intentional links built.)

This is true if you have a decent domain rating (30+). If you have less than a DR of ~30, then we often focus first on building authority to site via PR link building as part of the beginning of an engagement with a client and then following that up with individual links to the articles we publish.

We share more about our specific link building strategies and how we execute on them in our course.

To see how long it takes to achieve rankings on the first page, we published this article How Long Does It Take to Rank on the First Page of Google?

Want to work with us or learn more about how we approach content marketing?

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute content marketing in this way, you can learn more about working with us here.
• Join Our Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.
• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here or watch this video walkthrough:

What is that? Everyone throws that term around but what does it actually mean?

We think what most people mean is simply: content that stands out and sets them apart from their competition.

Producing content like that is a reasonable desire. But in order to create content that actually stands out and sets you apart, you have to have unique or interesting ideas to share. That’s what thought leadership is—and that’s what defines thought leadership content.

So, if your company wants to “produce thought leadership content”, as we hear so often, you need to look in the mirror and face the truth about this question:

Do you actually have unique or compelling ideas to share?

This may come across as harsh, but in our experience, for most companies, the answer is no. Most companies are sort of just selling products and executing services that are largely similar to everyone else. To be fair, there is nothing wrong with that. Many successful businesses have been made selling products with minimal differentiation. But it’s hard to demand “we must produce thought leadership content!” when there isn’t much innovation happening in the organization in the first place.

But think carefully before you decide your answer to the above question is no. Many companies have one key thing that their product or service has innovated on or done differently than others in their industry. It may only be one thing – one detail that their product improves – but it’s something, and if done right, it can be turned into thought leadership content.

For others, their founders or leadership have a lot of disruptive ideas, compelling analyses, or provocative opinions, but these thoughts just haven’t been written down anywhere. They haven’t been formalized or worked on. Having a process to extract that and put it into clear, compelling content can produce a steady stream of actual “thought leadership content”.

Below we’ll outline in detail where we’ve had success finding these unique ideas in an organization and show examples of sharing them in content. Read through them and you’ll have a much better idea of how to brainstorm and discover these types of ideas in your own company.

But for those ideas to make sense we need to first outline the cardinal sin in trying to produce thought leadership content: outsourcing it.

Asking Marketers to Come Up with “Thought Leadership Content” Makes No Sense (And Produces The Opposite: Me-Too Content)

If you buy our argument above that thought leadership content is, by definition, based on rare and unique ideas in your field, then, the natural consequence is that trying to outsource it to content marketers or writers is not going to work.

Your marketing agency, freelance writers, or heck, even your in-house marketing team, are almost never the real subject matter experts (i.e. thought leaders) in your niche. Sure they can produce the ebook, or write the piece of content, or publish the blog post. But if you’re asking them to “produce thought leadership content,” why do you think they’re the source of disruptive ideas in your space? Did they found the company? No. Are they setting the company strategy? No. Did they design the product? No.

So why do we keep asking marketers to come up with the “thought leadership”? What about the people that did do those things? Why wouldn’t you go to them and get their ideas?

It makes no sense.

Instead tasking marketers with producing thought leadership produces content that is anything but thought leadership. In fact, it produces the opposite: me-too content. You know what I mean. You’ve seen it all over:

• The B2B SaaS company in the sales space with the same old basic “ultimate guide” on sales processes with the most basic, introductory level ideas in it.
• The company that says their target customer is CMOs that then produces a “whitepaper” that re-hashes obvious marketing tropes that are old news to every CMO.
• Every company with their “Top 10 industry trends in 2022” blog post for a business customer that has way too many things to do to wonder what the trends are in their own field.

It’s hard to blame the marketers making this. They’re told to make some thought leadership content. They’re given no unique thoughts or points of view to work with. They look around. They see what everyone else in their space is doing, and they try their best to create some educational content. The window dressing of this type of content is often high-quality: the ebook is super well designed, the blog page looks beautiful. But the ideas aren’t “leading” anything. So prospects aren’t impressed. No one cares. No one shares. It doesn’t work.

If you want to produce actual thought leadership content, you need a process for your marketers to tap into the unique ideas of the people in your company who actually have them. We’ve written at length about our process for doing this at our agency, so we’re not going to cover it here. Check out this article to learn how we approach it.

Now, let’s look at some of the ways you can find these ideas within your company.

Ways to Get Unique Ideas That Actually Count As “Thought Leadership”

Don’t get us wrong, we’re not saying that all thought leadership content needs to be based on the most innovative, ground breaking, earth shattering ideas ever. Nor does thought leadership content only have to come from the CEO.

Thought leadership content is actually way more accessible than that. The unique ideas they’re based on can often come from “the weeds” – the details that the daily executors in the company are mired in (e.g. designers in a product company or strategists in a service company).

In our work producing thought leadership content for ourselves and our clients, we’ve noticed that most can be put into the following categories:

1. Ideas based on your company’s “disruption story”
2. Ideas based on your company’s positioning
3. Ideas around the details of what you work on
4. Ideas based on unique opinions about your industry
5. Data that is unique and interesting in your field
6. Case studies that share unique details and insights

Let’s look at each.

1. Thought Leadership Ideas Based on Your Company’s “Disruption Story”

Almost every company is built to solve a specific problem that the founders had experienced themselves in their lives or their industry. They wanted to create something new to fill a gap in the market or make something better.

For example, how many software companies have been founded because the founders wanted to take an inefficient process of disconnected tools and spreadsheets and build a system to automate it? That’s their disruption story.

So one way to produce thought leadership content is to interview your founders and tell that story. Specifically, to lay out the problems and pain points that led them to start their company, and explain the unique solution they developed to solve those problems. This type of thought leadership content typically produces one piece for you. But it can be a powerful one. We’ve had success sending paid traffic (specifically paid Twitter) to disruption story articles for ourselves and our clients and seeing a steady drip of conversions from them. Specifically this disruption story article has generated consistent leads for us, and we share a client example of this below.

2. Thought Leadership Ideas Based on Your Company’s Positioning

Another place to look for thought leadership is in how your product or service does something differently or better than your competitors—i.e. your company’s positioning.

So if your company makes a CRM that’s designed to meet specific and unique needs of a certain industry, and your competitors are generic CRMs made for any industry or many verticals, that distinction could be leveraged as a form of thought leadership.

For example, you might create a piece that makes the case: “Most CRMs don’t solve XYZ problems for HVAC businesses. So we built a product that does. Here’s how.” Within the HVAC industry, that type of story—simply based on your company’s positioning—could be perceived as thought leadership.

3. Thought Leadership Ideas Based on the Details of What You Work On

Many companies don’t have a really interesting disruption story or unique positioning to rely on, but they do have smart people within their company that have unique insights related to the work they do.

For example, a lot of product managers will tell you about these really specific nuances of their product that work differently and are unique to other solutions. Or, for service businesses, strategists and account managers often have unique ideas related to the details of implementation and how they approach certain things.

These details from within the weeds can be another place to look for thought leadership.

For example, we once had a client who sold paid ad services. One of their account managers had a really specific Facebook ad strategy built on showing layers of ads for the same company that progressed from loose brand awareness to very specific conversion-focused, buy-now ads. This applied specifically to ecommerce companies. It was very specific but worked well as thought leadership.

4. Thought Leadership Based on Unique Opinions About Your Industry

Very often higher ups in a company (e.g. CEO, Head of Product, Head of Growth, etc.) have a lot of opinions about their industry that are outside the main focus of their company.

Bernard Huang at Clearscope is a great example of this. His product is built to evaluate Google’s existing rankings to see which keywords the algorithm wants to rank SEO content for a given query. However, if you talk to Bernard he has all sorts of other opinions peripherally about SEO that could be turned into thought leadership content.

The same goes for our agency. Our core business is conversion-focused content marketing, but Devesh and I also have a lot to say about peripheral topics like hiring marketers, promotion, analytics, etc.

Talking to the people in your company who have interesting opinions is another way to find unique ideas for thought leadership.

5. Thought Leadership Based on Unique or Interesting Data In Your Field

In many industries people are starving for data to reference in their content. They don’t have the data themselves, or don’t have someone to do the research and actually get insights from the data, so they look to others who have published data and link to that.

Doing the work to collect, analyze and share unique insights from data is a highly effective way of demonstrating thought leadership. Below we’ll share some examples (with data) that support this.

6. Thought Leadership Based on Case Studies That Share Unique Details and Insights

Case studies are another place to look for thought leadership ideas, especially for service businesses who’ve gained unique insights through working with a particular client.

If you’ve ever made an adjustment in your strategy or approach based on an experience working on a particular account, these types of learnings can make interesting stories that demonstrate thought leadership.

For case studies to work though, they need to be thorough. It can’t be the type of brief downloadable case study that many  SaaS companies, for example, share on their marketing site: “This customer came to us. Accounting used to take them a lot of time. Now they use our accounting software and it saves them a lot of time.”

This is not thought leadership. For case studies to count as thought leadership, there needs to actually be unique details or insights included in the piece.

Below we’re going to show examples of some of these categories of thought leadership content. But before we do, we need to clarify how we think about expressing thought leadership in content.

Thought Leadership Can Be Expressed In a Variety of Ways

Many companies think thought leadership content is just “the white paper,” or just the provocative opinion piece. They think it’s content with the sole focus of expressing a unique idea and laying out the arguments behind it (like this).

But thought leadership can also be expressed in smaller ways throughout otherwise unsexy or utilitarian content. For example, the unique ideas that might be featured in a provocative opinion piece can also be leveraged as supporting arguments or originality nuggets inside an SEO piece targeting a boring keyword like “best accounting tools”. The same goes with including some small but unique “in the weeds” details from your daily executors. In fact, this is what makes your everyday content stand out and be compelling to readers.

This is a key component of our content strategy. We interview our clients for each article we create in order to find bits of originality that we can include and use to differentiate our pieces from what others are writing on the topic.

This is good news because for many companies as we discussed above, their unique ideas may not warrant entire articles to be written about them. However, they can still be used to turn everyday content into content that’s actually unique, and therefore trends toward being perceived by some as thought leadership content—or at least possessing the quality of having thought leadership.

Thought Leadership Content Examples

So let’s look at examples of some of the different categories of thought leadership content we described above.

Disruption Story Example

During his time in the Stanford Research Design program, one of our clients had experienced first hand the pain of working with video content. He and his team would spend hours and hours sifting through raw footage to find the great stories and moments that would help convey the message of their findings to broader audiences.

The video content was a powerful tool—essential in their work. But the process of creating it was extremely time-consuming and painful. And in fact, he realized his team and industry weren’t the only ones with this problem. Filmmakers and marketers and others also dealt with this challenge, and many would shy away from using video content for this very reason.

His opinion and the impetus behind starting his company was that editing video should be as easy as editing text. And he went on to create a product to do exactly that.

This notion that video editing should be as easy as text editing was itself a unique idea, so we created a disruption piece to tell that story, beginning with describing the problem he set out to solve:

Then, we presented the unique idea:

And walked step by step through how their solution solved the problems described in the introduction:

When describing each feature, we harkened back to contrast the solution with the pain points of traditional video editing (e.g. “No hunting for timestamps, no manual cutting and pasting. Just highlighting text:”). This allowed us to continue emphasizing the differentiation and uniqueness of their solution, and strengthen the core assertion and thought leadership in the piece.

Industry Opinion Example

One example of an opinion article is from a client in the assistant hiring space. Throughout their careers, the two founders had experienced a problem of inconsistent outcomes when hiring for generalist assistant roles. So they set out to apply their backgrounds in behavioral science to create a better hiring methodology for assistant roles, and along the way they found many flaws in the traditional hiring process.

Early on in our engagement we learned that one of their core competitors are recruiting agencies, and that recruiters tend to use the same ineffective hiring processes that most companies use when hiring for assistant roles. This struck us as a unique idea because you’d expect recruiters—people whose sole job it is to hire great talent—to be a reliable place to go for hiring an assistant. So we created an opinion piece titled “Why You Shouldn’t Use a Recruiter for Your Executive Assistant ” to lay out their position and the arguments behind it.

In the introduction we stated the two reasons why they’ve found recruiting services aren’t great for hiring assistants:

Then we created dedicated sections to expand on each of those problems. For the first point, we explained why executive assistant recruiters are typically the least experienced recruiters:

And walked through examples of how the traditional hiring process they use is flawed and ineffective:

Finally, we explained in detail how their hiring methodology is a more effective approach. First, we described the three key areas that they found through research predict on the job performance in executive assistants (the core areas they built their process to evaluate):

Then we described the highly customized series of tools and steps they use to more concretely evaluate job candidates on these key qualities:

Details of Implementation Example

When we started Grow and Convert, we knew that our success would depend on our ability to show ROI to clients. To do this, we needed the ability to attribute leads (or sales, or “conversions”) to content marketing—a concept called content attribution.

This is an important part of our process, but it’s an “in the weeds” topic. It’s a nuanced piece of a larger content marketing process that involves content ideation, interviewing clients, writing and editing pieces, and content promotion (among other things).

However, Devesh and I have observed that most companies either a) don’t know how to measure content attribution or b) just don’t care to do it. And no one in our industry was really talking about this.

So we created a piece discussing this topic. We explained:

• Why most companies don’t measure content attribution or do so incorrectly
• The Model Comparison Tool we use in Google Analytics that let’s you see conversions from content
• How to set up the Model Comparison Tool to measure your own conversions
• Examples of blog post conversion data from different companies

The uniqueness of stating what most companies get wrong with content attribution, showing how to actually set up attribution for themselves, and showing examples of how it works in practice all contributed to expressing thought leadership in the piece.

Note: This is an example of a thought leadership post that was also optimized for SEO. Currently you can find this post ranking in position 2 for “content attribution”.

Unique Data and Case Study Examples

There’s often overlap between data-based thought leadership pieces and case studies because quality case studies are commonly based on data. So we’ve lumped examples from both of these categories together here.

Growth Rock Examples

Above we mentioned how data-based posts work great as thought leadership content because people love to share and link to articles that present interesting data.

Devesh has some great examples of how well this can work from his previous company Growth Rock. Here’s a look at his best pages by links shown in Ahrefs:

In the top eleven pages by links there are three data-based pieces. The first was a research post presenting an infographic with data that compared social media to email engagement. It has 272 Dofollow links, none of which he built manually.

The interesting thing about that piece is that it wasn’t his data. He just did research and analyzed public data online to create it. This is one of the most accessible forms of thought leadership content because you don’t have to have your own unique ideas or data to create it. You just need someone smart in your company to do the research and analysis.

The other two pieces are A/B testing case studies based on his own client data—one on the navigation menu and the other on what’s called a “sticky add to cart button.” Each of these also have a nontrivial number of external links,  a key indicator of having thought leadership.

Grow and Convert Examples

Leadfeeder Case Study: We’ve published a number of posts and case studies based on our own data and analyses. One example of this is our case study on how we scaled Leadfeeder to over 200 signups per month.

This is not the typical agency case study that’s light on data and thin on insight. It’s a 3,000+ word story that discusses:

• The content marketing strategy we were using when we first began working with Leadfeeder
• A question that their founder asked us challenging the long-term viability of our approach (i.e. why weren’t we more focused on SEO?)
• Our hesitations around using a more SEO-focused content strategy
• A discovery we made in our conversion data that led to a complete shift in our content strategy (what we would later call Pain Point SEO)
• Screenshots of metrics from Google Analytics and Google Data Studio to back up our findings and claims and explain the “why” behind our shift in strategy

Most agencies don’t publish case studies with this level of depth, insight, or transparency around data which makes this a unique piece of thought leadership marketing content.

Time to Rank Data Post: Another data-based article example is a post we recently published on our site detailing an analysis we’ve done on 20 active and former clients to see:

• How long did it take to rank articles on Page 1 and in the top 3 spots on Google for their intended keyword?
• How many leads did we generate over the first several months of our engagement?

Throughout the piece we present a number of findings that surprised us, and explained our evolving thinking behind them.

Similar to the Leadfeeder case study, this piece is unique in its transparency, its display of data that most agencies don’t usually publish or share (we haven’t seen anything else like it out there), and the insights that we present in it.

Summary of Our Key Takeaways on Thought Leadership Content

• Thought leadership content is based on presenting one or more unique ideas through content.
• Companies shouldn’t expect marketers to come up with the thought leadership ideas themselves. Instead, they should use a process that sources the unique ideas from the actual decision-makers and experts within the company.
• Thought leadership content creation is accessible to many companies if they understand where to look to find unique ideas.
• To find your own thought leadership ideas, there are a number of places to look within your organization: your company’s disruption story, positioning, details of what you work on, industry opinions, data, and case studies.

Want to Work With Us or Learn More About How We Approach Content Marketing?

• Our Agency: You can learn more about working with us here.
• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course, taught via case studies. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here or see this video walkthrough:

Specifically:

1. It’s taken longer to get blog posts ranking anywhere on the first 10 pages of Google (we normally see rankings within the first few months)
2. As a result, organic traffic was slow to come by in the first 3-6 months
3. Many of these younger domains had blogs on subdomains instead of subfolders

One client that had all three of those challenges (and is the focus of this case study) was Circuit.

We started working with them in February of 2020 and the first 4-6 months were stressful because we were using our content marketing process as normal but weren’t getting results as quickly as we are used to.

Organic traffic to our blog posts looked like this for the first 5 months.

Not good.

Then, in September 2020, I tweeted this:

This account gave me lots of sleepless nights. For what felt like forever, we couldn’t get articles to rank.

Then in June, we felt like the issue was the blog being on a subdomain. It got moved to /blog/.

3 months later… we finally have liftoff.

Trust the process. pic.twitter.com/iqmVTUw3Pv

— Benji Hyam (@benjihyam) September 23, 2020

I tweeted that because there’s a moment with every client where we can feel that the process is finally clicking and everything is falling into place — and it’s only a matter of time before results start scaling quickly.

Since that tweet on September 23, 2020, results have continued to climb. Circuit’s conversions have increased 313% (from 59 to 244 trial signups) and organic traffic has increased 1484% (from 920 to 14,577 sessions) in a ~6 month period ending Mar, 31, 2021. 

Those large percentage increases are mostly a function of starting with small numbers. The point isn’t what the actual number is, but rather how quickly organic growth can happen once all of the articles in our content marketing process start to come together. Here is the organic traffic generated from our blog posts for Circuit since we started working with them (we’ll show conversion graphs later in the post):

In this piece, we’re going to discuss some of the SEO learnings that came from this account, how we scaled traffic and conversions for Circuit, and the content strategy that helped them grow this quickly in a year.

Our hope is that this case study will be useful for anyone starting content marketing with a younger domain or one with similar technical SEO issues.

Shout out to Matt Goolding and Olivia Seitz on our team who have been the content strategists working with Circuit.

The Content Marketing Challenge Circuit Brought to Us

Jack Underwood, Circuit’s CEO, reached out to us back in February 2020 with a challenge. Their company had grown mainly through paid acquisition (Google Ads) and he wanted to start building his organic presence to take his reliance off paid.

At the time, Circuit’s main product was the Circuit Route Planner, which is an app to help couriers plan their routes and deliver packages faster. But they had also just validated and grown a small customer base for their new Teams product and they wanted to grow that too.

Our #1 goal with every client is to get financial ROI on their spend with us as soon as possible. So because Circuit’s Teams product has a higher plan size, leads we got for Teams were more valuable and thus it made more sense to focus our efforts there — and that’s what we did.

The 2 SEO Challenges We Came Up Against

There were two main challenges we faced when we started working with Circuit:

1. They had a low domain rating

2. Their blog was on a subdomain.

How to Do Content Marketing When the Site Has a Low Domain Rating

When we first started working with Circuit, their site had an Ahrefs domain rating of 18. That’s relatively low compared to most companies we typically work with (usually somewhere between the 30-60DR range). 

Domain Rating is a proprietary Ahrefs metric which runs from 0 – 100 on a log scale that, according to them, reflects “the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile (in terms of its size and quality).” As Tim Soulo explains in that post, there’s no hard and fast rule around having a certain domain rating number to get content to rank, since Domain Rating is a measure of the strength of a site’s backlink profile.

In general, the lower the score is relative to other sites in the SERPs for the same keywords you’re going after, the harder it’s likely going to be to rank relative to them. There are other factors that play into this as well, as the Ahrefs post above outlines, but this is just a simple way to think about it.

Finally, we should mention other SEO tools (e.g. Moz, SEMRush) also have similar proprietary metrics that in general do the same thing — measure relative SEO strength of websites, in particular their backlink profiles, on a simple 0 to 100 scale — and the lessons in this case study would apply just fine if you use one of those.

Here is Circuit’s Domain Rating graph in Ahrefs (all time). Remember we started working with them in February 2020.

From a content strategy standpoint, there are two things that we did differently here than what we would normally do on a stronger site.

1. We focused on pain point SEO content ideas that had varying levels of competitiveness to try to see if we could rank for less competitive terms much faster than some of the more competitive ones, even if the less competitive terms had much lower estimated monthly search volume.
2. We tried to come up with ideas that would do well both via paid content promotion and SEO being we didn’t know how long it was going to take for SEO traffic to kick in and we felt like getting conversions through paid would help short term performance while waiting for SEO traffic.

To drill in further on point one, in the beginning of working with them, we had the benefit of having some Google Ads keyword conversion data to base some early decisions off of — specifically, we could see what keywords were already converting for them via Google Ads. Obviously if we could rank for those terms organically, that means we’d also likely get conversions. So we identified 6 topics that we thought would convert well with varying levels of keyword difficulty and we started producing those pieces of content.

On point two, we tried to create more paid social friendly content that we thought would resonate with their target audience even if it wasn’t aimed at ranking for an SEO keyword. For example, we created this article “How to add local delivery to your small business during covid-19” as the Circuit team said they were getting increasing demand for a new use case – small business deliveries at the onset of the pandemic. We thought a piece like this could do well on social media if we could get it in front of small business owners to try to show off a new use case for the product.

Early Results and Noticing a Red Flag in SEO Results

The paid hypothesis (point 2) ended up playing out as we hoped and we saw not only traffic, but conversions (signup for their teams product), coming from paid promotion of the articles we created specifically for this channel. This was great.

As for our SEO results (point 1), we were having a harder time ranking for the keywords we were going after and we didn’t see any organic conversions in the first four months (which is rare for us).

I had mentioned above that there’s a “magic moment” that happens on every account where you can see it’s only a matter of time before everything in our process finally starts to click. To clarify what that magic moment is, it’s when we see our articles start to get indexed by Google and start to rank for the keywords we’re targeting in the top few pages.

Not seeing articles show up in the rank tracker for months is what caught our attention that something was wrong. When we pulled up the Ahrefs rank tracker, the tool that we use to track our SEO rankings, there was only one article that was showing up in any of the top 100 spots. The rest of our articles didn’t even seem to be registering with Google at all:

This is extremely unusual. Having blog posts be far from page 1 — page 3, 5, 7 — is fine, as they’ll work their way up over time, but having all of those posts show up as Position “>100” was a red flag.

Identifying the Subdomain as the Issue That Was Causing SEO Results to Lag

Just a couple months into the engagement (around April 2020), the team at Circuit needed to move their blog back to a subdomain for product reasons and before they had done that, we started to see our articles being indexed for the keywords we were targeting. But fast forward a month later (May 2020), articles that were previously ranking on page 1 moved down positions and/or fell out of the top 10 pages in rank tracker.
 

If you’ve read the SaaS content marketing case study that we did with Leadfeeder, then you’ll know that we saw SEO results increase massively when the blog moved from a subdomain back to the parent domain.

Because of that experience and having seen some of the rankings being indexed prior to the move to the subdomain, we thought that it might be the cause of the issue for the slow SEO results.

Fixing this immediately is really important to us, because when you have many pieces published but they’re not ranking anywhere, the organic traffic graph you have to present to the client looks like this:

It’s extremely nerve-racking to show up to a monthly client call with an organic traffic graph like that.

As a related aside: This is why we use a combination of distribution tactics that focus on both short term channels (paid ads) and long term channels (SEO and link building). So while organic traffic was slow to come by, at least we were showing higher overall traffic growth (below) and conversions (graph at the beginning of this article):

That said, what causes us stress is when we don’t start to see early signs of organic growth working. Because we know long-term SEO traffic and conversions are what lead to the compounding growth effect from the content marketing channel. So without it, it’s going to be extremely hard for us to hit our ROI goal.

We had an honest conversation with Jack and told him that based on some previous things that we had seen, we thought the blog being on the subdomain might be the cause of the slow results. Fortunately, Jack and his team have a long-term mindset and knew that if we could solve this puzzle, we could unlock organic as a channel and that would yield massive ROI.

In June 2020, Jack and the Circuit team moved the blog back from a subdomain to a subfolder, and right away, we started seeing signs of life on the rankings front.

Here is the “average position” graph of the keywords we are tracking for Circuit in Ahrefs:

Excuse the tiny date labels at the bottom but the low point is at the end of May, where the average position was > 50 (y-axis is on the right). The blog was moved to a subfolder June 14, and you can see the average position of keywords we were tracking (the ones our blog posts were targeted towards) made a steady climb after that.  

Scaling SEO Traffic and the Power of Compounding Growth

After we started to see rankings show up, we knew we were off to the races.

From there, our strategy consists of trying to identify as many variations of bottom of the funnel terms as possible and then working our way up the funnel.

At this point in our engagement with them, we’ve exhausted almost all of the bottom of the funnel terms and are now focusing on the middle and the top of the funnel.

We now rank in position 1-3 for 39 different keywords that we targeted for our articles (92 keywords on page 1 of Google) and many more keywords that we didn’t specifically target.

Over the last 6 months, traffic has scaled to 14,577 organic sessions per month.

Note the time gap between moving the blog to a subfolder (June), then seeing rankings show up (July, August, in the average position graph above) then seeing a big jump in organic traffic in this graph (September). Content and SEO takes patience.

You can see a similar increase in conversions (trial signups for the teams product) around September 2020, about 3 months after the blog was moved to a subfolder. The increase corresponds almost perfectly with the bump in organic traffic:

This correlation between conversions and organic traffic is something we see across many clients: even though paid and other types of content promotion tactics can yield conversions, the majority of content conversions comes from ranking organically for bottom of the funnel keywords.

Note: If you’d like to learn our content strategy and apply it to your business, we teach everything we do in our content marketing course and community.

Conversions from Low Volume Keywords

Finally, we mentioned towards the beginning that one key SEO strategy we use for lower domain rating sites is to go after lower competition keywords that still have good conversion intent (are “bottom of the funnel”) even if they are low volume.

The low volume part is key. Many clients worry at the start of our engagement that we are going after terms that show low volume on SEO software like Ahrefs or Clearscope.

But if you have a good conversion rate, it still works. For example, here are conversions from a few articles in March for Circuit.

The third row (“/routific-competitors-alternatives”) shows 6 first click conversions. But both “routific competitors: and “routific alternatives” have “0 – 10” volume in Ahrefs

Clearscope shows them with 10 searches per month:

How can a keyword with almost no search volume get 6 conversions per month?

From what we can tell, these monthly search volume estimates are exactly that, estimates. And for competitor keywords like this, they are almost always under-estimated. If you went by those estimates above, you may think:

“Even if we rank #1 and get 30% of the clicks for those keywords, that’s 3 clicks a month for ‘routific competitors’ and 3 more for ‘routific alternatives’, totalling 6 visitors a month. Not worth it!”

But here is the traffic to that post in March (we rank #2 for both terms):

It gets 80 pageviews, 71 of which are organic. Clearly those estimates are off.

In addition, almost anything you publish will rank for a variety of long tail terms that individually may have no volume but together make up the majority of searches on the web. So it could also be that even if those two target keywords don’t have much volume, a bunch of harder to identify long tail terms around those topics have enough volume in total to get way more than 6 pageviews to our post.

Finally, we should mention that competitor keywords like this one have done incredibly well for us with a variety of clients. They are low competition and extremely high search intent. Six conversions in march for routific competitors from 80 pageviews is a beautiful 7.5% conversion rate from a single blog post!

Key Lessons for Anyone Doing SEO and Content Marketing for a Young Domain

• Make sure your blog is on the parent domain instead of subdomain. Although Google has always publicly said subdomain doesn’t matter, we’ve seen this kind of massive improvement in SEO rankings and organic traffic in multiple clients now when moving their blog from a subdomain to a subfolder on the main domain
• Monitor your rankings movements on a weekly basis. Use a rank tracker of any type and look weekly to see how your pages are ranking for target keywords. If they aren’t showing up anywhere on the first 10 pages in a couple months after publishing, that is a sign there could be some technical SEO issues on your site.
• Go after high-converting, bottom of funnel topics first, even if they are relatively low volume. Most businesses should have several low competition but super high conversion intent keywords that are easier to rank for.
• Measure direct conversions attributed to your content so you aren’t left with traffic as the only metric of success (full article on how).  

Questions? Comments? Feel free to share them in the comments below! We’ll respond.

Why?

Because most marketers assume everyone starts at the top of the funnel and slowly makes their way down the funnel via nurturing and more content.

The logic typically sounds like this: “Well first, the customer needs awareness: They need to know about the problem. Then, they need to consider different options: Look for solutions. Then they’ll convert: Sign up to try your solution.”

Yes, in theory, every single customer for any product goes through these stages.

But here is the big fallacy marketers fall prey to: Marketers think their company needs to be the one to educate all potential customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey, starting at the top. This is not true, and it results in a huge waste of resources on content marketing that does little to help get trials or demos.

In reality, unless your SaaS business is truly creating a completely new category (which is extremely rare, as we argue below), other companies and individuals have already educated a large number of your prospects on top of the funnel topics. These prospects already know why they need to invest in your category, who the big players are, and how it would help them. These educated prospects are not at the top of the funnel. They don’t need top of the funnel content. Yet they are the best prospects you have.

Another way of saying it is that most SaaS businesses sell to advanced customers — people who have been in their industry for years. They’re not starting from a knowledge level of zero. And therefore, most top of the funnel content (which usually covers introductory level “why this is important” or “ultimate guide to this niche” topics) is below their knowledge level — they already know all that stuff.

Therefore, we think a more effective SaaS content strategy should prioritize middle and bottom of the funnel topics to capture people who are already actively searching for a solution to their problem.

How This Concept Would Be Applied to Our Business

Let us venture outside of SaaS for a hot minute to share an example of this thinking that hits close to home.

We, Grow and Convert, have two products: a content marketing course for people who want to become really good at content marketing, and a content marketing agency for companies that just want to hire us to do content marketing for them.

At no point have we tried to rank for the term “content marketing,” despite that keyword having the highest search volume in our space.

Why? Because who really searches for broad terms like that? Someone who has never heard of content marketing before? Someone researching the topic for a college paper? Ranking for that term would serve our business little direct value, because our best customers for either product already know what content marketing is and have very specific problems related to it. The only term from the image above that indicates someone would have a need for either product is content marketing agency.

If we ranked for any of the other keywords above, we’d have to collect emails (because very few, if any, of the readers of those topics will be ready to buy), nurture those people, and hope that at some point in the future, they’d be ready to buy. This is the way most people approach content marketing for SaaS companies.

What we do instead is identify pain points and topics that indicate someone is already looking for a solution, then we create content to rank for those terms and direct them to the main product-related call to action we’d like them to take (sign up for a free trial or demo). When you write bottom of funnel topics, you can go directly for the sale instead of pushing people to an email signup because the topic indicates someone has intent to buy your product vs. some of the broad topics that have no product intent.

Similarly for most SaaS companies, there are keywords and topics that indicate someone is looking for a solution such as your product. We think you should prioritize those topics and keywords first before ever focusing on the top of the funnel.

In this blog post, we’re going to back up the above argument with real client data. This is to (hopefully) convince you that SaaS companies should focus on bottom of the funnel content first and work their way up the funnel later — as opposed to how most companies do things, which is the other way around. Then we’re going to introduce you to our Pain Point SEO process to help you identify these high-converting keywords, we’ll share our process of how to discover them, and then we’ll show some examples of companies using this process to get results quickly from content marketing.

As a reminder, we teach this process in detail by applying it to various companies (including SaaS) in our content marketing course. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we and other members give feedback. We also get on live Zoom calls about once a month and dissect members’ actual content strategies and brainstorm ideas on how we’d form content strategies for their businesses. You can learn more and join here. 

Top of the Funnel Content: Why It Has Minuscule Business Value (Compared to Bottom of Funnel Pieces)

To further illustrate the point above, let’s look at an example of a real SaaS company and what they rank for.

Pipedrive is a SaaS product that positions themselves as a Sales CRM and Pipeline Management software. (We have no business relationship with them, they were just a well known SaaS company that came to mind for this example.)

If we look at some of their top rankings in Ahrefs, they rank #1 for terms such as “sales tactics,” “sales presentation,” “challenger sales model,” and “sales meeting agenda.”

Now you may be thinking, “That’s great! They rank for a ton of these sales-related terms, and they sell to salespeople. This will bring in the right customers.”

But the problem is those topics have nothing to do with their product — which is a sales CRM that helps with pipeline management.

If someone comes to their blog to read an article on “sales presentations,” what does that topic have to do with a CRM? Does the fact that someone Googled that term indicate they have a need for a CRM?

Nope.

It’s a massive leap for someone to read an article on sales presentations while on a CRM website and then think to themselves, “You know what, I’m actually in the market for a new CRM software; let me sign up.” You’re relying on chance: The article is about sales, so maybe by chance some people reading it will also need a CRM right now. The topic of the article itself is doing you no favors in helping find or filter people who do need a CRM right now.

What’s worse is that Pipedrive doesn’t rank for many of the keywords that do indicate that someone would be looking for a solution like theirs.

For example, they don’t rank for the terms “salesforce alternatives,” “pipedrive alternatives,” “automatic call logging” (a feature they highlight in the video on their homepage), “call logging software,” and a ton more high-intent keywords.

Their competitors do rank for these terms though. So Pipedrive is missing out on the opportunity to capture business from prospects who are literally looking for the exact use cases their product solves or alternatives to their competitors.

Pipedrive is even bidding on many of these keywords in Google Ads, which indicates to us that these keywords likely do drive business for them — yet they’ve chosen to prioritize top of the funnel keywords over topics that indicate someone is searching for their product.

We should note we mean no harm to Pipedrive, and this problem is not unique to them. It’s ubiquitous in SaaS, which is why we’re discussing it in this depth.

But Doesn’t Top of the Funnel Content Still Have Long-Term Benefits, Even if You Can’t Measure It?

Now, some arguments we typically get for going after these top of the funnel terms and keywords are: “These types of articles are great thought leadership,” or “You can’t measure the impact of someone reading one of those articles and telling their colleagues about it.” Therefore, “We know they work; you just can’t measure it.”

Well, I have two counterpoints to that.

First, most of the articles written on these top of funnel terms are what we like to call “Google research papers.” They’re farmed out to freelance writers that have little to no direct experience on the topic, and those writers Google around on the topic, jot down what others say, and largely regurgitate the same information in different words. The pieces technically cover the topic, but they have no originality. They’re not provocative. They take no interesting or unique stance.

Take Pipedrive’s #1 ranking for “sales presentation,” which we showed above. Let’s look at the table of contents of the article:

Remember: Who is the decision maker in a sales-driven organization on which CRM to use? Experienced sales executives. Is teaching them what a sales presentation is “thought leadership”? Or look at the third bullet point: “What to bring to your sales presentation.” Do experienced sales teams not know that?

When we look inside these sections, they just cover extremely basic information, such as mentioning that most sales presentations include a sales deck.

This is not thought leadership. Yet SaaS company after SaaS company produces articles like this and expect it to drive business.

Second, you can measure whether people who read top of the funnel content eventually convert later (even if they close the browser, or convert weeks or months later)! Most content agencies or marketers don’t do this, but we do it religiously (and have written about it in detail here).

So there is no need to hand wave and say, “It’s generating business, I swear; you just can’t see it.” The measurement isn’t perfect, and you can’t measure every single lead that comes from content, but it gives you a lower-limit estimate of the actual amount and is a great indicator as to what topics drive a majority of the volume.

We can look and see how much business top of funnel content generates versus bottom.

For example, the chart below shows the difference in conversion rates between top of funnel articles and what we call “pain point SEO” topics, our term for topics that indicate buying intent (aka mid or bottom of funnel). The highlighted articles are pain point SEO topics, and the unhighlighted ones are top of funnel topics that have no product buying intent but are loosely on the topic of this company’s industry (like “sales stuff” for Pipedrive above). Look at the difference in the conversion rates.

If what we can measure on the conversion side shows such a massive difference in product conversion rates between top of funnel and mid or bottom of the funnel topics, what makes you think the unhighlighted articles would magically result in a huge amount of conversions from people being impressed by your content and sharing it with others?

Now, let us be clear: We’re not saying the top of the funnel has absolutely no place in marketing. We are making an argument about priority in content marketing: Why would you produce top of funnel content that doesn’t have product intent prior to owning all of the keywords and terms that do have product-buying intent?

We believe in a “bottom-up” approach to the funnel: Focus on direct product-related and Pain Point SEO terms first, and work your way up the funnel to terms that have less buying intent.

Taking this approach, you’ll get results much faster than you would if you were taking the top-down approach.

The Spectrum of SaaS Companies: How Much Bottom of the Funnel Is There?

Now, a common question we get at this point is, “Okay, yeah; that makes sense, but what happens if there aren’t a ton of these buying-intent keywords for my product?”

Related objections are “We’re reinventing the way people do things in our industry,” or “We have some new technology that doesn’t exist,” or “We’re trying to create our own category, and as a result, there aren’t bottom of the funnel, buying-intent keywords for us, such as ‘sales crm software’ for Pipedrive.”

These can be legitimate concerns (but for most companies, the “inventing a category” objection is overblown, as we’ll argue in a second). The key is to remember that our bottom of funnel first strategy is about prioritization. Even if your product doesn’t have a ton of bottom of the funnel keywords, you should still go after them first. There’s no excuse not to.

But from a pure search-opportunity perspective, how limited are these high conversion intent keywords? Well, companies fall on a spectrum on this issue. Let’s share the two extremes first, and then we’ll meet in the middle.

“Lots of Competition” End of the Spectrum: You’re in a known category, and you have a known solution (i.e., the Pipedrive CRM example above). CRMs have been around for a long time, and everyone in sales knows what they are. Here you have plenty of bottom of the funnel terms, and you can (and should) spend a long time knocking them out before moving to top of the funnel topics.

Now, we sometimes get pushback from companies that we chat with who say, “Well, my product is different. We have an AI to automatically add contacts to a CRM … ” (or something to that effect). They think just because they have some competitive technology advantage or they position themselves differently that they need some unique approach.

This isn’t true.

Your customers would still search for a CRM or specific use cases that a CRM solves for from a search perspective. The body of the content should highlight the differentiators, and so should your trial and demo — but this doesn’t change the content strategy, specifically topic prioritization.

For more on finding these opportunities, read our post on Pain Point SEO, or join our course and community where we share our strategy and process to do this through written and video case studies (we’ll also answer questions specific to your business).

“Brand New Category” End of the Spectrum: You’re truly creating a new category. This is extremely rare in our opinion. In this case, creating top of the funnel to educate people on your category, why it’s important, and why they should invest in it, makes a ton of sense. But — and this is a big “but” — these companies come around once in many years.

An example of this would be Coinbase when they first started. Most people barely knew about cryptocurrency or Bitcoin then, so there wasn’t a ton of search volume, nor alternative products that they were competing with. It was an entirely new technology then, so people needed to be educated on the topic.

Other examples would be: You were truly the first CRM, you were the first marketing automation software, or you were Uber inventing ridesharing or Airbnb popularizing the sharing economy when it came to rentals.

Again, we want to emphasize: These examples are really rare. To be in this category, you can’t just be inventing a new thing. You have to be inventing a new category, meaning you are inventing a new thing and aren’t replacing an existing behavior or solution that people search for online; you are truly creating a new behavior.

Lots of SaaS founders and marketers think they’re here, but they’re not. Even Airbnb, if they had started with an SEO-based strategy, could have ranked for hotel-related terms, or Uber could have done the same with taxi-related terms.

For most companies, you’re likely somewhere in the middle. You might be in a category with a few other players, you likely have some technological or unique way of doing things that differentiates you, and in this case, there are likely some bottom of the funnel terms you can go after that indicate the customer is literally looking for your solution right now (such as the “salesforce alternative” we mentioned earlier). But there are also tons of mid-funnel terms that have high conversion intent that you can rank for. This is the pain point SEO sweet spot. In order to do this, you need to find the pain points your target audience has and then pair those with SEO keywords. Let’s discuss how to do that next.

SaaS Content Marketing:How to Identify “Pain Point SEO” Keywords That Your Best Customers Are Actually Searching For

Identifying keywords that have high conversion intent starts with knowing what the top pain points are that lead your customers to purchase.

When you know what your customer pain points are, you can back into what keywords are more likely than others to drive conversions. We call this process of identifying these keywords pain point SEO. These pain points are specific, not general. (To go back to the Pipedrive example, think, “Getting more of my sales reps to update the CRM” rather than “sales tips.”)

The more specific, the more the topic itself will filter for people who are like your best customers and have the exact pain points your product solves for and thus are likely to convert.

Step 1: It All Starts With Customer Research

We want to figure out two things here: who are their best customers, and what are their pain points.

This article on our site will share our process for conducting customer research to figure who your best customers are and what their pain points are.

Step 2: Building A Bottom-up Content Strategy off of Your Customer Research

After you’ve identified who your best customers are and what pain points they have, then you’ll use that information to back into what keywords and topics to target to drive conversions quickly.

There are two posts on our site that go into more depth on how to do this:

• Pain Point SEO: How to Produce SEO Content That Drives Conversions
• Content Ideation: Ways to Come up with Content Ideas That Convert

In our course, we go further and literally do this process for four different real companies, including SaaS; we interview their founding team, ask our customer research questions, and then come up with pain point SEO ideas in a spreadsheet, which we share. We breakdown all of this in detailed screencasts to show what we’re doing and why.

Examples of SaaS Companies We’ve Grown Using This Content Strategy

As with every article on our site, we don’t like to say this is a process or strategy you should follow without backing it up with data and case studies.

So we thought we’d share a few different SaaS companies that we were able to grow using the strategy outlined in this post.

How We Scaled Leadfeeder’s Signups to Over 200/month

As we explain in the full article, in the beginning of working with the SaaS company Leadfeeder on their content marketing strategy, we hadn’t developed this approach yet.

Back then, like everyone else, we also believed that top of funnel stories and topics would be what drove growth for the company. However, after looking through what was converting and trying to analyze why certain posts converted at a much higher percentage than others, we stumbled into this learning: The thing that affects conversion rate the most is the topic of the blog post, and bottom of funnel posts were converting way higher than the rest.

Once we shifted our entire content strategy toward pain point SEO and stopped going after top of funnel stories and topics, both traffic and conversions started to scale quickly.

For the full Leadfeeder case study, click here.

A Client Already Ranking for High-Volume Keywords

Next, here is the landing pages report of another SaaS client that had a solid content marketing operation already in place before we started working with them and thus were already ranking for some high-volume keywords in their space.

The top post, above, in this three-month time span ranks for some high-volume keywords and generates way more traffic than any other post: 21,000 sessions. It also generated a non-trivial amount of account creations: 12%, or seven out of 55. That’s because it’s mid funnel: It’s a “tools” keyword in their space — think “sales tools” in the Pipedrive example at the beginning. (This report is last click only. We’ll look at first click below in a second. Spoiler alert: The conclusion is the same.)

Now look at post #4. This is one, we produced for them. It brought in 1,900 sessions, only 9% of the traffic of the top post they already made themselves. Useless, right? Content marketers that focus on traffic as the key metric would think so, but it generated more last-click signups than any other blog post on their site in these three months. The conversion rate was a whopping 0.52%, when the entire blog was converting at only 0.08%.

We can also look at first-click conversions via Google Analytics model comparison tool to see if the story changes. Note that the difference between last click and first click, as explained in this article, is that first-click conversions count anyone who landed on one of these blog posts and later, within 90 days, came back and converted. Last click only counts conversions that happen in the same session.

(I’ve shown the last two characters of the URLs in both screenshots so you can see which post is which. Post #1 from the top screenshot is post #1 here too.)

In first-click conversions, the high traffic post has more (in fact, double) the conversions: 14 first click. Our post (#4 in the top screenshot) has 11 first-click conversions.

But the conversion rate difference is still astounding. The high traffic post converts at 0.07%, while our bottom of funnel post converts at 0.57%.

It’s even more impactful to see this as a graph:

This is the power of bottom of funnel pieces. They can generate the same conversions with way less traffic because their conversion rate is so much higher than everything else.

Take a final look at the top screenshot of this section, and see how the vast majority of blog posts generate almost no business. This is not an anomaly; this is status quo for almost all SaaS companies. In fact, for most SaaS companies, it’s worse: They have the non-converting blog posts without any of the high-converting ones.

A New Client Getting Conversions From Pain Point SEO Before Even Ranking in Google

As a final example, let’s look at the power of pain point SEO to generate quick results in the early stages of content marketing. This is a new client who we’ve only been working with for 4 months.

Like the previous client, they also have a strong in-house content team that has produced a ton of content, many of which generate conversions.

The two highlighted pieces in this landing page report are one of our early pieces; that is, mid-funnel Pain Point SEO. In other words, it’s not a topic where the reader is looking for the software (e.g., “salesforce alternative” for Pipedrive) but is a mid-funnel pain point that we knew from our customer research their best customers cared about, so conversion intent was still high.

It has generated eight conversions in this timespan (split over two URLs due to ad UTMs), all of which came from paid Facebook promotion of this piece:

That is the same number of conversions as the highest-converting piece on their blog (#1 above). But we’re generating those conversions before the piece even ranks for its intended keyword, strictly from paid social media channels, and by generating only 600 sessions. Note that 600 sessions is not expensive to buy from Facebook — we typically see click costs of $.30 to $.75 for this company.

This highlights the power of finding the right high-converting topics. They can generate conversions without waiting weeks or months to move up Google’s rankings.

Get help on your SaaS content marketing

• Questions/Comments? If you have any questions or comments about anything mentioned above, please let us know in the comments section below.
• Our Agency: You can learn more about working with us here.
• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn the strategy above and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course, taught via case studies. We include lots of detail and examples not found on this blog.  Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we and other members give feedback. Learn more here or see this video walkthrough:

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