Nii was in the midst of a promising new career with eBay. He was content with his first gig right out of UC Berkeley. But he was also curious about entrepreneurship, which he experimented with throughout college.

So six months into his new job, he connected with Rick Backus, an old friend who also worked in eCommerce. They kicked around a few ideas.

At that time, internet shopping was still coming into its own. Nii and Rick thought the space was at a favorable junction of circumstance. It wasn’t long before they found a problem they knew they could fix.

“We were looking at the industry and saw the opportunity that most retailers and eCommerce companies didn’t know how to leverage paid advertising online,” Nii said when we interviewed him for this piece.

What followed was the founding of CPC Strategy (now Tinuiti), a performance-marketing agency focused on data-feed driven advertising. It served a small, but rich market of comparison-shopping companies.

While keeping their day jobs, Nii and Rick laid the groundwork for the agency in its first year. By the start of 2008, they grew enough to bring on two more partners, Tien Nguyen and William Parris.

Over the next decade, CPC Strategy thrived in spite of some early hurdles it had to overcome.

During the heart of the Great Recession, the agency enjoyed year-over-year growth of 50%. And by 2018, CPC Strategy grew from a small group of four founders to a company of 135.

In the agency’s early years, a lean approach protected it from the crash of the market. To keep expenses low, Nii and his partners managed their clients’ campaigns themselves. It was a few years before they hired their first employee.

Meanwhile, it was their content marketing that spearheaded their growth. In this article, you’ll learn how their blogs and webinars earned them industry clout. We’ll cover the creative tactics they used for reaching the right audience, including:

• How they turned their blog into a trusted news source for paid digital advertising.
• How they landed a chance partnership with Google to start hosting webinars.

Why CPC Strategy Doubled Down on Content Marketing

As the world began to emerge from the recession in 2010, Nii and his partners started shifting focus. They began thinking about how they could build CPC Strategy for the long haul. But to do so, they knew they needed to be more strategic about how they generated revenue.

To continue growing, Nii and his partners knew they had to figure out how to generate more leads. So, they started researching what their most effective marketing channels were. They found referrals, cold calls, partnerships, and content brought them the most business.

Their next step? Distinguishing which one of the four deserved most of their attention.

With referrals, Nii and his partners found it hard to create the right incentives for clients. For partnerships, they lacked enough necessary knowledge and experience. And with cold calling? No one enjoyed that approach.

“Cold calls are terrible, right?” Nii said. “Nobody likes cold calling. (They’re) frustrating, whether it’s you as a founder doing it or you’re trying to hire somebody to do it.

“Nobody wants to be a telemarketer,” he added.

But content was a different story. Sure, they had fun creating it. But they also found it was the one channel they could influence the most. It helped that the early returns on leads suggested there was opportunity, too.

The CPC Strategy Playbook for Blogging

Before social media, YouTube, and podcasts, blogs were the internet’s kings of content. In CPC Strategy’s early years, blogging was one of the company’s go-to-channels for marketing.

When the blog first started, Nii and one of his partners served as the main writers. In fact, it would be a few years before anyone else earned a byline. Handling content creation themselves kept its operating expenses low.

Again, the agency’s specialty was in data-feed driven advertising. Niching down in the competitive business of ad strategy provided them an advantage. Few companies could compete with them when it came to creating relevant content.

As a result, Nii and his partners decided to focus writing two specific kinds of posts for their blog:

Industry News

The blog grew in part because it was a valuable source of news. Nii and his partners shared information that visitors couldn’t find anywhere else. For example, they reported on changes to pricing for many of the industry’s top comparison-shopping engines.

“If PriceGrabber changed their rate card from 20 cents a click to 30 cents a click, we would be the first to report it,” Nii said. “If Shopzilla changed their ranking algorithm or their networks that they (served ads on), we were the first to talk about that as a news destination.”

These kinds of posts weren’t long, either. Nii and his partners focused on quality over quantity. Putting out accurate information fast was the most important task.

Unique Data

They also wrote using aggregated data of their entire client roster. With their clients’ permission, they indexed campaign performance. They then wrote reports, ranking comparison-shopping engines based on benchmarks like functionality and price.

Their audience found these reports valuable because they were both rare and unique. The specificity of their content helped CPC Strategy earn authority in the industry.

“If you were interested in comparison shopping, you were coming to us,” Nii said. “In fact, we had a number of people pursuing master’s degrees and PhDs reaching out to us, asking for our raw information because they wanted to do research on what we were doing.”

How CPC Strategy Generated Traffic and Captured Leads

Writing was only one element of CPC Strategy’s blog. Generating traffic and lead capture were the others.

The first order of business for Nii and his partners was generating traffic. To do this, they started on SEO and wrote posts that targeted specific keywords. At the time, ranking on Google wasn’t as competitive. Creating for a very narrow niche also helped.

Public relations was the next tactic Nii and his partners used. There weren’t many reliable sources that offered the kind of data that CPC Strategy had. As a result, it wasn’t hard to get eCommerce journalists and bloggers to bite on their pitches.

Once their site started yielding more traffic, Nii and his partners went to work on lead capture. First, they built squeeze pages to collect emails from their audience. Then, they nurtured those prospects by serving more reports, opinions and breaking news.

“That was really how we got our content game started,” Nii said of blogging.

The CPC Strategy Playbook to Webinars

To this day, few of Nii’s colleagues even know why the agency started hosting webinars. According to him, it all began thanks to a huge industry shift caused by the world’s most-used search engine.

In 2002, Google launched a free comparison shopping site called Google Froogle. This became a valuable promotional channel for every retailer online. For the next decade, Google Froogle drove organic traffic to businesses that participated.

But in late 2012, the free ride came to an end when Google decided to change Froogle into a pay-to-play product. The shift took every retailer by surprise as it seemed to happen overnight.

“Obviously, when you’re taking something away that people are relying on, it causes a lot of dislocation in the industry,” Nii said.

When Google made the change, they gave companies 90 days to prepare. But it turned out that wasn’t enough time to calm the panic that had swept the market. As a result, Google had to search for a solution.

Enter CPC Strategy. By this time, the agency already had the trust of the entire eCommerce industry. So Google reached out to Nii and his co-founders to see if they could help educate the market.

“Our first webinar was really talking about how this paid Google product would work,” Nii said.

How CPC Strategy Conducted Webinars

When it came to hosting webinars, CPC Strategy never followed a standard framework. Instead, it relied on a north star, centered around the goal of education.

To find topics to discuss, they’d take a close look at the industry. Nii and his partners would target any subjects that appeared to have gaps in knowledge.

To fill those holes, their webinars featured subject-matter experts. They ranged from partners like Google or their staff members at CPC Strategy.

Like blogging, webinars became another vehicle for CPC Strategy to show its authority. Through education, the agency continued to build trust with its audience.

“Even if we teach you everything there is, everything we know” Nii began. “There’s always going to be individuals and organizations that don’t have time to be able to do everything to that degree.

“And so based on us demonstrating our capabilities, our knowledge, the goal is for individuals to say, ‘Oh, you know what? These guys have it covered. Let me go ahead and reach out to them to be able to learn this,’” Nii added.

And What About The Competition?

Sharing information of course doesn’t come without risk. After all, they made their webinars public for everyone, including their competitors.

But this didn’t phase Nii and his partners. They understood there was a space between idea and execution that only they could fill.

“The number of competitors that used to come to our webinars was ridiculous,” Nii said. “But, we don’t have a scarcity mindset. I’m okay if our competitors come in because at the end of the day, as long as we continue to stay sharp, we’ll always have the best tactics. And the people who are in the industry, they recognize that.”

Where Nii and His Company Are Today

After more than a decade of business, CPC Strategy’s hard work finally paid off. In 2018, Nii and his partners negotiated a successful sale to Elite SEM . It was highly-regarded as one of the best places to work in the entire ad industry.

After the acquisition of CPC Strategy and others, the company rebranded into Tinuiti in 2019. But even after the sale, Nii suggests that webinars and blogs still remain the bedrock of their content marketing strategy. They’ve only made a few minor adjustments to their tactics.

When it comes to their blog, they create 95% of their content in-house. As CPC Strategy, the agency didn’t rely much on freelancers. As Tinuiti, that remains to be the same.

Tinuiti has a full-time staff of four, dedicated to working on their blog. They have three full-time writers who focus only on drafting original pieces. They dedicated a fourth person who focuses solely on research.

With these four staff members, Tinuiti produces over 150 blog articles a year. The expanded team also creates 50 to 60 industry white papers and webinars too.

Meanwhile, Tinuiti continues to go live with a new webinar every single week. In 2019, it hosted 60 in total. Like its blog, Tinuiti has full-time webinar staff. Their sole responsibilities center only on coordination and outreach.

Take a step back and you’ll realize that teaching is the heart of their content strategy. Lending a helping hand worked then and continues to work today – especially as the world braces for another economic downturn.

“That focus of talking about the industry and providing education is still a cornerstone of our marketing efforts,” Nii said.

Commentary from Devesh and Benji: How to Execute Similar Content Marketing Strategies Yourself

Devesh recorded this video to tie in the content strategies that Nii and CPC Strategy used in their content marketing with what we’ve talked about before on Grow and Convert:

Here are links to the articles discussed in the video:

• Originality Nuggets
• Customer-Content Fit
• How to Conduct Customer Interviews Even If You Don’t Have Customers

We define positioning as the “market fit” part of “product-market fit”:

If your positioning isn’t dialed in, it causes a bunch of problems, but for marketing specifically, there are two big ones:

1. Your conversion rate stays frustratingly low no matter what you do on the traffic generation side.
   
   
2. You can’t set your prices as high as you’d like.

Companies with these issues end up not closing as many deals as they like (problem 1) and/or feel like the leads they do get can’t afford them (problem 2).

And here is the kicker: Most management teams end up pointing their finger at marketing tactics when they encounter this problem.

You’ll hear things like:

“X channel [facebook ads, linkedin ads, content, insert other acquisition channel] just doesn’t work for us”

…or…

“The traffic from content is just not converting into customers, we need to go [upmarket, different niche, optimize our conversions, etc.]”

But they’re barking up the wrong tree.

If your brand positioning is off, it won’t matter what inbound channel [paid, content, etc.] you use to get in front of your customer. The problem will be that the traffic you generate from the channel won’t convert or won’t pay what you want because you’re not positioned properly to demand those things.

Our Four Criteria for Getting Brand Positioning Right

In our positioning post, we also argue that simply stating your brand positioning as a brief phrase of who you’re targeting (“We make a CRM for small businesses”) isn’t enough. That’s not really positioning, it’s just a very broad initial target market statement.

We define 4 criteria you need to think about and demonstrate in your copy, your sales pitch, and your engagement to customers, to really have positioning done well:

1. Who are you targeting?
2. What pain points does your product solve?
3. How are you unique?
4. Can you prove the above is true?

If you miss on any of these criteria, there is a good chance you will suffer from some of the positioning based problems above (customers not closing, can’t charge enough).

Using Our Agency as a Positioning Case Study

Since publishing that article, we realized that our own agency can be a good example of positioning, especially if you look at it in terms of the two problems above: conversion rate and pricing.

1. Conversion rate: Since starting our agency, we’ve generated on average a little over one new lead a week. Obviously a “good conversion rate” is very subjective, depending on traffic, industry, service, price point, size, growth goals and more. But for our size agency, that’s enough, and considering we have displayed our $10,000 price point in bold on our work with us page (very rare for agencies to do this at these prices), we think that’s pretty good. Our close rate is currently 14.3% on those leads, which we also are happy with because we offer a boutique service and don’t work with many clients at once.
   
   
2. Pricing: One of the top questions I get from other agency owners is how we’re able to charge $10,000/month for our services. In particular with delivering “only” 3 articles per month to clients. The answer is positioning — in this case, we make it clear our lead and traffic results are what you should focus on, not publishing quantity.

In this article, I’ll go into detail on how we positioned our service and why, using the 4 criteria above as an anchor. We’ll cover who our target customer is, how we identified their pain points, and the differentiation that we have versus other content marketing agencies.

The goal of this post is to help other services businesses differentiate themselves from their competition and position themselves as a premium service instead of being lumped in with all of the other service providers out there.

Although we’re case studying ourselves — a service business — the underlying principles (be extremely judicious about identifying a gap in the market, positioning yourself as the solution for these pain points, knowing who you’re targeting with obsessive focus) apply equally well to product companies as well.

How We Identified a Gap in the Market

A lot of our positioning is based on Criteria 2: Pain Points. Even the first criteria, who we are targeting, stems largely from those pain points. We’ll start by telling the story of how the agency came to be, because that’s based on us experiencing pain points ourselves.

Before Grow and Convert: Identifying the Content Gap for ThinkApps

Before starting this agency, I ran marketing for a startup in San Francisco called ThinkApps. I joined the company as the first marketing hire and fourth employee. At that early stage, a marketer wears a lot of hats. My job was to test out various acquisition channels that would help us generate new leads for the service we offered (building apps).

The job started with redoing our positioning, messaging, and website. Then, we focused on paid ads and realized that our CAC (customer acquisition cost) was fairly high through paid channels. We tested doing educational events in San Francisco to drive awareness but most of the people who showed up didn’t have any money for services.

So, we turned to content.

I started by doing research on content in the app building space and realized there was an opportunity there — no one was writing helpful content on how to build mobile and web apps from start to finish.

Trying to Find a Content Agency That Was Willing to Be Held Accountable to Leads

Content was the next logical channel to test. The only problem was I had no time to do it all myself — I was also managing our paid channels, talking to inbound leads, and talking with customers.  I’d done content marketing in-house before and knew how time intensive it would be to build out a team, so I decided to bring on a content marketing agency to work with. I started doing research online for agencies and setup calls with about 10 different companies.

What I wanted was an agency that could produce educational content that would be interesting/useful to our audience, drive traffic to it, and measure the results — essentially own the entire channel and be held accountable to results. I couldn’t find this type of content marketing agency, that is, one that’s held accountable to leads and traffic.

Gaps in Content, Promotion, and Lead Generation

The pitch for most of these agencies was that they’d produce ‘X’ articles per month and “promote the articles,” which essentially meant that they’d draft social media updates for you to share on your own social channels. To my amazement, these agencies were charging anywhere from $6k–10k+ per month.

When I asked how they created the content, they would say that had a team of writers that could write on any topic. I looked at some of the sample pieces of content, and while the topics looked alright, the writing was mostly mirage content.

Intro level content is fine if your customers are truly beginners on a topic. Typically this is appropriate for B2C companies. For example, if you sell yoga apparel and equipment, a huge majority of your customers will be beginners in yoga, so simple posts that any lay person freelance writer can Google their way to writing about yoga routines will be fine.

But for most B2B companies, your customers are experts in their niche. For example, if you sell security software to head of IT, they have been in IT for decades and know a lot about security software. How is a lay person (a freelance writer with surface level knowledge of IT) going to Google their way to posts that will impress and attract IT directors? They can’t. This is why you see company after company product “10 trends of 2019 in [niche]” posts all day. They don’t work. And I knew if I went this route I’d have to spend a ton of time editing, which I didn’t want to do.

When I asked how they measure results, they’d give me the same standard line (that most content marketers, including individuals also give) “well, over time, you’ll grow traffic from the content we’re writing and some subset of that traffic will turn into leads/customers.” That was a cop out, it meant they held themselves accountable to output (x pieces, y word count) — not results. I wanted leads, not articles.

So after a month of talking to different agencies and not finding one of them that offered the service that I wanted, I opted to build out our content marketing operation in-house. We built a team of freelance writers and brought on an editor. I handled our content strategy, promotion, and conversion efforts.

In a little over 6 months, we grew the blog to over 35,000 monthly unique visitors and the blog became the #1 acquisition source for the company.

To recap, here were the gaps in the market:

1. No leads-driven content solutions: There weren’t any content marketing agencies that measured the same metrics that marketing departments are held accountable to (leads or signups generated).
   
   
2. No good promotion strategies: None of these agencies had a promotion strategy beyond sharing content on that specific company’s social media accounts, and none could produce content at the level needed for this channel to be effective.
   
   
3. Poor advanced content writing abilities: Finally, most writing services just deployed freelance writers to Google a topic and write up some intro-level piece on that topic. That works fine if your company sells to customers with a beginner-level understanding, but for most B2B and B2C companies, you need more advanced content to effectively communicate with your audience.

Filling the Gaps: How We Formulated Our Service Offering, Pricing, and Positioning

Devesh and I started this site as a way to teach the learnings that both of us had from our experiences in content marketing. I was sharing my learnings from hiring writers, content strategy, promotion, and conversion from ThinkApps and Vistage. Devesh was sharing his experience doing conversion optimization and measurement for people like Backlinko, Bryan Harris at Video Fruit, and a number of different SaaS and service companies.

When we started Grow and Convert, we both agreed we didn’t want to start an agency from the site. But after about 4 failed attempts trying to build a product company, we eventually couldn’t ignore the numerous requests from our audience to “just do content marketing for us”. So we opted to give a crack at a service business.

How We Came Up with Our Service Offering

Armed with the lessons about what most content marketing agencies were missing, we decided that we wanted to build the service that filled the gap we identified above.

Here are the things that we thought were important for our service to offer:

• A service that focused on results (driving leads and qualified traffic) and not just deliverables (like ‘X’ number of articles per month). [Gap 1 above]

• A service that produced content that was useful/helpful to the target customer (not just high-level Mirage Content or Google research papers written by freelancers with no knowledge on the topic, and therefore risked lacking Customer Content Fit). [Gap 3 above]

• A service that actually drove traffic to the pieces that we created — originally done solely through community content promotion (not just content shared through a companies social media channels). [Gap 2 above]

• A service that was transparent — as a client, you could see traffic and conversions at all times. There was always a way to reach us and ask questions. (Most of the other agencies kept you in the dark about results and were hard to get ahold of outside of a monthly or biweekly call.)

We drafted the original sales page in Google Docs outlining our service offering. Our goal was to have a lot of these principles shine through on the page. Here it is:

There were still a lot of unknowns in terms of how we were going to execute on all of this. At this stage, we didn’t have any writers, we had only vague ideas about how we were going to attribute leads to content, we didn’t have any systems or processes, and the only person that knew how to do promotion was me.

But at this stage, the only thing that was important to us was to validate our hypothesis: Companies wanted a content marketing service that was held accountable to traffic and leads, produced high quality content, and took care of all of the work for them, not just a writing service, and they were willing to pay a premium for it.

How We Came Up with Our Pricing

Speaking of premium, the next challenge for us was to figure out how much to charge.

The question we had to ask ourselves was:

“If we could live up to all of the promises we made in our pitch, what would we value this service at?”

I know it’s basic, but many people forget this: Price is a function of the perceived value of your service.

Having knowledge of what it costs to run a content marketing operation in-house, we started adding up all of the people/roles needed to make a successful operation.

What are the costs associated with an in-house content marketing operation:

• Mid/senior level content marketing manager ($80k–120k+): Someone who led the customer research efforts, content strategy, SEO strategy, coordinated all content marketing efforts, helped with promotion strategy and conversion strategy.

• (Optional) Full-time editor ($50k–120k): Note that this isn’t necessarily needed early on; you could also hire someone on a contract basis to do editing.

• Freelance writers ($250–1k/article): Costs associated to the content you need to produce.

• (Optional) Analytics consultant ($50–100/hr): To help measure attribution of your content marketing efforts.

• (Optional) Promotion person/promotion budget for paid if it’s not in the content marketing manager’s skill set ($1k–3k/month): To help drive traffic to the articles produced.

• (Optional) SEO strategist consultant: Full time: same range as content marketing manager; part time: $3k–5k/month.

• (Optional) Developer time. Inevitably, every content operation needs dev time and many readers know it can be a struggle for the marketing department to get this time from the main developers (who are busy with “core” work). So to circumvent this, they need budget for freelance developers of their own.

If we added up all the costs of the team to make a content marketing operation successful — on the low end, you’re looking at around $100k per year just for the content marketing manager and writers (cost of pieces), and even that is not including benefits, healthcare, etc. Then, on the high end, with many of the bullets mentioned above, you’re looking at around $300k–500k per year.

At first, when we listed out all these responsibilities, I had a flashback to how hard it was to build this in my previous companies and flat out said no. I told Devesh it’s just too much work and people don’t understand that and their expectations won’t be realistic. Devesh said “Ok, but at some price, it’s worth it. What’s that price?”

I blurted out “$10,000 a month”.

We figured that’s high, but not unreasonably high. There are agencies roughly in the same space charging that much. But not many companies can get that kind of content budget approved. In addition, we had zero client history, so were essentially unproven.

We discussed and settled at $6,000 per month. That’s a rate many companies are used to paying different agencies, and we figured if we can make this work, we can grow to $7,000 per month, then $8,000 per month, and beyond.

Plus, this translated to $72,000 per year, which we felt was a steal compared to the “do it in house” costs above. So we knew we could explain that value proposition in a sales call pretty well.

On top of that, we knew (from talking to many G&C readers at that point) that most marketing heads or founders aren’t happy with the results they’re getting from the content marketing they’re doing in house. They either aren’t happy with the content they’re producing, they don’t know if they’re actually getting leads/customers from content, they don’t have a way to drive traffic to articles, and many times don’t have a strategy in place to acquire new business from the channel.

So if we were to (1) price competitively against the other options companies have, and (2) provide better results than they’d get through these alternative options, it should be a no-brainer to work with us.

But we needed to validate this hypothesis.

When we launched that Google Doc landing page above and emailed our list about our service offering, we landed our first two clients in a matter of weeks — we were in business!

How This All Translates Into Our Positioning

Let’s recap here:

• At this point, we figured out the gap that other agencies weren’t offering (content marketing agencies that were held accountable to results).

• We figured out what was wrong with most in-house operations (it’s expensive to execute on and most companies aren’t happy with the results they’re producing).

• We figured out a service offering based on what was needed in the market (an agency that was responsible for producing a great content strategy that actually drives results and provides full transparency throughout the process).

• We determined the pricing that we thought people were willing to pay based on alternative options to them in the market.

• All of this was validated with real customers who agreed that all of the above hypotheses were correct.

Our Agency Positioning Based on the 4 Criteria

I’ll walk through our 4 positioning criteria to illustrate how we choose the clients that we work with, what pain points we solve in the market, how we’re unique, and how we can prove all of this to be true.

Criteria 1: What market are we targeting? (i.e., who are our best clients)

In our original positioning article, we introduce the wide vs. narrow problem for this criteria: do you narrow down to a specific segment or keep it wide and have other things (like specific pain point solutions) be your differentiator?

Our answer for this agency is actually kind of subtle.

We are wide in vertical (we’ve had very B2B clients like marketing and development agencies, clients like Cognitive FX, a concussion treatment center that treats individuals, and everything in between), but we are narrow in specific characteristics that stem from Criteria 2: pain points.

That’s why we spent the bulk of this article telling the story of identifying the gap in the market. Our narrow-ness in who we’re targeting is all around criteria that indicate that they resonate with the pain points we solve (i.e. the gaps we identified).

Our current working hypothesis of our best customers is as follows:

1. They need to have a substantial amount of customers (this is subjective, but shows us that the business/model is somewhat already proven. It’s a criteria many agencies use and is sort of a basic “ticket of entry” criteria.)
   
   
2. They need to have an existing sales or marketing channel that works (We want to make sure the company has already proven that they know how to sell into accounts [service] or can drive signups [SaaS]. This ensures the leads we generate can be closed.)
   
   
3. They have typically tried content marketing already and understand the difficulties/expectations and are looking for help from a 3rd party (i.e., they understand the pain points above).
   
   
4. Have medium to high readability (people are interested in reading about the topic and/or do research prior to buying).

Criteria 2: What pain points does our service solve?

We discussed this at length in the sections above, but to recap:

1. Most content solutions don’t hold themselves accountable to leads.
   
   
2. Most cannot write on advanced topics that require specialized knowledge.
   
   
3. Most don’t have a thorough promotion process.

Which takes us to our uniqueness…

Criteria 3: How are we unique?

As the gap identification section above outlined, the fact that we solve the above pain points as a single service provider is what sets us apart. Specifically:

• We’re accountable for leads generated. We’re held accountable to the results delivered (ie. leads and traffic). Most other agencies focus on deliverables or just traffic growth and aren’t willing to be held accountable to real business metrics. Our service aligns to the outcomes that our customers want — they want to create great content that also drives ROI.

• We’re able to cover advanced topics. We limit ourselves to 3 posts per month so that we can keep them extremely high quality and focused. Our system has produced highly specialized pieces that lay people could not write by themselves, like neuroplasticity treatment for concussions, how Cars.com transitioned their backend framework to node.js, how to use a content delivery network to execute on the burgeoning “Edge SEO” concept, various posts on how hard money lending in real estate works, and more. It’s really hard to find writers or agencies that can do all of these. I can’t emphasize this enough: If your customer is advanced in any topic like this, having writers produce beginner level content in your space is not going to impress your customers.

• We have a solid promotion strategy. We have a 3 step promotion process including:
  • community content promotion
  • paid facebook promotion (that comes out of our budget)
  • targeted link building for SEO

Again, it’s virtually impossible to find a single employee or agency that does all of this in addition to writing advanced-level content.

We simply don’t know of another agency that does all of this, nor of a single person you could hire that would do all of this and only cost your company $10,000 per month.

Criteria 4: How could we prove that our positioning was true?

The proof is easy when your company is based on content.

Since starting Grow and Convert, we now have a bunch of case studies, some of which are published here, and some of which are emailed to prospects after talking with them.

At the time of starting the agency, this wasn’t as strong. But it wasn’t zero. We had success stories from past work we did. If you’re starting a new business, you won’t be strong here… that’s normal. You’ll need to find ways to get your first few customers so you can build up the proof. At that point though, you need to figure out how you’re going to convey that proof (either through content marketing or some other strategy).

Here are some examples of what we did early on to show proof:

• We shared case studies of our promotion techniques.

• We shared case studies of our conversion tactics.

• We did a live challenge of us growing this site from scratch — to prove that we knew what we were doing in content marketing.

• We gave talks and did podcast interviews about content marketing strategies and case studies.

What Other Companies Should Take Away From This Post

If you’re getting in front of customers but it’s not easy to sell them your product or service, you likely suffer from a positioning issue.

We know how hard positioning is to get right because we’ve been through 4 pivots ourselves to get to all of the insights about what works for us.

If it’s not easy to sell your product or service, as in, you get leads but no one is purchasing, you likely suffer from one of these issues:

1. Your product or service doesn’t solve a real problem for your customer.
   
   
2. You’re selling to the wrong customer.
   
   
3. There is nothing truly unique about your product or service.
   
   
4. You’re not explaining what your product or service does in a clear and concise manner.
   
   
5. It’s not easy for someone to prove that the solution you created would work for them.

You can find out which issue you’re facing by talking to prospects that were interested and didn’t convert, asking customers that churned, and asking people in your target segment why they’re not interested in your product or service and why they didn’t purchase.

The answers are always humbling and you’ll get closer to figuring out what will work better for your business.

To figure out how to strengthen your positioning against competitors, you should continually ask yourself:

• What problem can my product or service solve better than anyone else?

• What do my customers want my product or service to do that no one else is doing?

• What do my customers think would be better than everything else out there?

• What pain points do my customers want me to solve that I’m not solving currently?

• Does my promise to my customers (i.e., what you say your product or service does) live up to the product or service that I’m offering?

• How can I get better in the eyes of my customers?

Questions? Comments? Feel free to ask them in the comments below. 

For content marketing to be effective for a company, a content marketer needs to get a lot of things right. They need to be able to produce articles on topics that will attract your target customer, they need to be able to drive the right traffic to the content your produce, and they need to be able to convert that traffic into customers.

On top of that, you need someone who understands SEO and how to drive long term organic traffic, someone who can look inside analytics and make sense of what’s going on, report results to your management team, and manage a team of writers.

So at the end of the day, you’re essentially looking for a unicorn.

There are very few content marketers that have all of these skills AND have past experience growing a blog and generating revenue from it.

In this article, I’m going to share my learnings from growing three content marketing operations (Vistage, ThinkApps and Everwise) as well as growing a content marketing agency from the ground up in terms of who to hire, what skills your content marketer needs to have, I’ll share a sample content marketing job description, I’ll share how much you should budget for your hire, and what to expect in terms of additional investment as your content marketing operation grows.

Where most companies go wrong when hiring their first content marketer

The number one mistake we see companies make in hiring for this role is: hiring a writer to run their content marketing efforts.

They typically do this because it solves the immediate problem with content: they need to start publishing articles.

Second it often stems from an overly simplistic view of what content marketing is: writing. That is the hiring manager’s fault — whether that be a founder, manager, CMO or whomever.

If you think content marketing is just writing, you are setting yourself up for failure. Getting content written is only one of the challenges to solve, and in my opinion, it’s the least challenging.

(Note: Of course hiring good writers is important. If you’re trying to solve the writing challenge we wrote a multipart guide on hiring blog writers.)

The bigger challenges to solve are knowing who you’re writing for (user research), knowing what to write that will actually resonate with your customers (content strategy), figuring out how to drive traffic to those articles (content promotion) and then figuring out how to turn that traffic into customers (conversion strategy).

These are the skills that a marketer has, not that a writer has.

What skills are important for a content marketer to have?

As I mentioned above, it’s going to be tough to find a content marketer that has all of the skills necessary to execute on content marketing – because typically the skills span both the creative and analytical side.

For example, for our agency Grow and Convert, I’m the “grow” and my co-founder Devesh is “convert”.

My skills as it pertains to content marketing are:

• User/customer research – creating survey questions, talking to customers in-person and over the phone to figure out what their pain points are
• Content strategy/ ideation– Turning that research into content ideas that will attract the right customers
• Content promotion – Driving traffic to content that we’ve produced through communities and through reaching out to influencers
• Analytics – Pulling insights from Google Analytics and making informed decisions on how to move forward (however, I know nothing about setting up analytics)

Then Devesh’s skill set is:

• Customer research- he’s done a lot of customer research online through surveys and services like Hotjar
• Operations – He’s great at project management, streamlining our operations, managing the team, etc.
• Editing – He’s great at turning ideas into a compelling narrative, he’s also obsessed with blog intros.
• Conversion optimization – Figuring out the best way to drive leads from content
• Analytics- Figuring out the right software to track conversions, setting up goals, tracking and measuring traffic and conversions from content

If you’re hiring your first content marketer, I’d say the “grow” skills are the most important, not because it’s my skill set, but because those are the core skills you need to start gaining traction with content marketing.

Devesh’s skills come in really handy when you’re trying to scale your content marketing operation, but in the early days of investing in content marketing– you need someone who can get content created and promoted to have a chance at converting anyone.

Note that writing is not on the list. You of course need to have taste, that is, you need to know good content from bad, but you don’t need to be a writer. In fact, it may be better that you’re not a writer so that you obsess and excel at marketing, and not writing. You get around this by simply hiring writers and managing them.

Content Marketing Manager Job Description

If you’re looking to hire your first content marketing manager, I put together this job description that shares the responsibilities, skills and experience that are necessary to land someone great.

Job responsibilities:

• You’ll be responsible for all content marketing initiatives which includes: identifying customers to target, producing content, driving traffic and leads from content marketing.
• Identify and hire freelance writers to produce content that we can publish on our blog.
• Analyze current customer base to figure out who we should target from content marketing and talk to customers to figure out pain points, questions and topics to write content about
• Identify promotion channels that we should use and proactively share content in those places
• Understand which content will target customers at the top, middle and bottom of the funnel
• Optimize blog posts around high impact keywords
• Manage the content calendar
• Measure content performance and report on traffic, conversions, SEO, etc.

Experience:

• 1-3 years experience managing a blog, editorial team, and/or website
• Case studies or data showing proven growth of traffic and business metrics from content
• Need to have working knowledge of WordPress, *or other CMS*
• Need to have working knowledge of Google Analytics and be able to report on a blog
• Ability to make decisions off of data

Content Marketer Hiring Questionnaire/Exercise

When trying to hire for content marketing roles, I’ve found that it can be really helpful to use a questionnaire to filter out candidates.

It’s really hard to tell if someone has the skills and experience you need just from a resume, so what I do for every role is I create a Google Form that has questions that are pertinent to the role and helps me filter out candidates quickly.

Here are some of the questions and exercises that I think are important to ask:

• Have you ever built or managed a team of freelance writers before?
• Please 3 share links to articles that you’ve produced that are most similar to what we ask for above (ideally involve interviewing a(n) expert(s) or subject(s) and turning it into a story). Feel free to say why you like them/are proud of them:
• What 3 companies do you think are the best at content marketing and why?
• What’s the biggest site you’ve grown?
• Here’s an article (link to an article) – please share 5 places you think would be a good fit to promote this piece of content.

Here’s a link to a content marketing hiring questionnaire that you can copy:

How much should you pay a content marketer? Here are some content marketing salaries ranges.

Here are some ranges that you should expect to pay a content marketing manager based on how much experience they have and how much value they can add to your company.

Content Marketing Manager (1-2 years of experience): $50k-$60k per year

Content Marketing Manager (3-5 years of experience): $60-$90k per year

Content Marketing Manager (6+ years of experience): $90-$120k+ per year

Obviously usual caveats apply about location, company, industry, and more but this is what I’ve seen.

If you’re curious if this is worth it for your business, consider reading our article on Content Marketing ROI.

Where to find great content marketing hires

If you’re in tech or have a startup, then I’ve found AngelList to have some of the best talent. The reason is because candidates that are on of their platform tend to be more “in the know” than candidates on Indeed or LinkedIn.

LinkedIn and Indeed are both older platforms with a ton of candidates on them, but AngelList I’ve found to have fewer, quality candidates and the talent skews more towards tech marketers.

Another great way to find candidates is to look to companies that are known for their content marketing, reach out to the people in the role you’re hiring for and ask if the person knows of anyone great. Chances are, if the person is looking to make a move, they’ll respond and let you know, or if they’re not, they likely know a lot of great other people that might be a good fit for your company.

You can also find great content marketers in Slack groups. There are a lot of freelancers who go off to start their own businesses and aren’t able to grow their clientele. They tend to hang out in Slack groups for networking purposes and to try to get more clients. They have the skills and ability to execute on content marketing and do the work, however struggle growing their own business. If they’ve exhausted their marketing efforts, chances are you can get these marketers to come and work for you if you reach out to them at the right time.

Here’s a list of Slack communities to look into for marketers: 11 Slack Communities for SEOs and Digital Marketers

Marketers tend to know other great marketers. If you know of some talented marketers, I’d send your job posting to them and ask them if they know of anyone who’d be a good fit for the role, chances are they’ll know of a few people that are great. You can even sweeten the deal by offering some sort of referral bonus if they refer you to the right candidate (the referral bonus will be a lot cheaper than hiring a recruiter).

How to Manage a Content Marketer? What Metrics Should They Be Held Accountable For?

If it’s your first time managing a content marketer, here’s some things that you should know.

In terms of expectations, the first measure of success will be an increase in qualified traffic to your blog (here’s a way to measure qualified traffic), the second measure of success should be signups or leads driven from the blog.

“What is good traffic growth?”

That’s a subjective question. Don’t compare your traffic growth to other businesses because your business is unique and the amount of traffic that you can drive really depends on the industry you’re in.

Instead what you should do is compete against yourself. If you previously had 5,000 visitors to your blog, can your content marketing hire get 1000 or 2000 visitors within the first couple of months? 5000 within 3 months, etc.

The first 1-3 months should be spent talking to customers and doing customer research, building the writing team (hiring writers and testing them out), starting to produce content and testing out promotion channels. A good goal to set for each article that’s more top or middle of the funnel would be 1000 visitors per post. Bottom of the funnel content might be harder to promote initially but should be able to gain traffic longer term if it starts to rank for keywords.

Content marketing is a long-term play that can have short term wins. Your content marketing hire should be able to start producing signups within the first 3-6 months, however don’t expect there to be a ton of volume. Volume builds overtime as traffic compounds and SEO traffic starts to build.

In terms of reporting, the metrics that they should measure are as follows:

• # of unique visitors to the blog on a monthly basis
• # of unique visitors coming from organic traffic
• Amount of leads/signups coming from the blog
• Which blog posts are producing the leads/signups

At the end of the first year, if your hire isn’t producing measurable signups or leads from your blog, you should really start to question whether they’re the right person for the job.

If that’s the case, you should throw in the towel and hire us, or you can check out our content marketing course and get them up to speed.

If your positioning is wrong, your marketing will fail.

…including content marketing.

And if your marketing fails, you’ll fail in general, because you won’t have a repeatable, scalable acquisition channel.

We’ve learned this lesson time and time again, with our own businesses, and with clients’ businesses. So we wanted to finally share our thoughts on this.

First we need to define what the heck we mean by positioning.

What Is Positioning in Marketing?

Here is our definition of positioning with respect to product market fit:

In other words, positioning is the “market fit” part of “product market fit” and it’s likely the part you are ignoring.

Most people when searching for product market fit, focus on the product:

• Let’s release an MVP (product) to see if people are interested
• Not enough people are signing up? Let’s add features to the product!
• Still not enough signups? Let’s pivot and change the product.

Then, for the “market fit” part, they just state a high level overview of their target customer and call it a day:

• Our new CRM targets sales managers
• Our dev shop targets series A and B startups
• Our ecommerce store caters to millennial women
• My consulting practice offers copywriting services to small businesses that need copywriting

This is not good enough. The above statements are just general target markets. But what about how your offering is perceived by the market?

• Who do customers think your product/service is for?
• What do customers think makes you unique?
• What pain points do they think you solve?
• How credible do they perceive you to be?

That’s positioning.

And there’s a lot of detail involved in getting it right that, if ignored, will lead you to throw your hands up and blame the product if you don’t get enough sales (interpreted as not achieving product-market fit).

But the problem may not be in the product itself, but the subtleties of positioning the product that you get wrong.

Many companies ignore this positioning mistake, and as a result, end up tweaking the product over and over again and spinning their wheels.

To explain this, we’ll first go over our own case study of a positioning “fail”, where by simply changing the sales copy and not touching the product at all, we were able to increase sales 300% for our product.

We’ll then go over the 4 aspects of positioning you need to get right.

Positioning Failure Example: Our Content Marketing Course

You can find a link to our content marketing course in our nav bar. We love this product and genuinely think it’s one of the best content marketing resources around.

But the first time we released it, it was a failure.

We wrote all about that here, but in short, out of roughly 6000 people on our email list, around 10 bought. That’s an 0.16% conversion rate.

Typically online courses released to an email list should sell around 1% – 2% in this space (we know this from just talking to folks in the space and from what happened when we fixed our positioning mistake).

Aside: In the end this was a wonderful failure, as it led to the launch of our agency, which is doing really well, despite it being a hell of a lot more work than a course business, but that’s a debate for another time. 

Fast forward one year and we re-released our course via the landing page linked to in the nav bar and, with only a slight increase in email list size, we sold over 65 seats, for roughly a 1% conversion rate from our list.

Our Positioning Strategy Change

We did not change the product at all. It’s literally the exact same product. We just changed its positioning. Literally speaking, we changed how we positioned what the product is, who its for, and why it’s unique.

We flipped the diagram above to this:

There were 2 key changes in positioning.

(1) We changed from “for the company” to “for the person”

This was the single biggest change in positioning. Our previous sales page headline was this:

What do you notice about how this product is positioned?

It’s all about benefits to a company, not a person.

• “Drive qualified leads”
• “Specifically to help B2B companies”

This was not an accident. We did this extremely intentionally. In fact, we thought we were geniuses for doing it.

But we were dead wrong.

How do we know? After our failure, we emailed a survey out to folks as well as got on the phone with a few people we knew and asked them why they didn’t buy.

A theme emerged where more than one person told us this: “I don’t really care about taking a course so I can help my company. I want to take a course to help myself.”

Woah. What the heck does that mean?

We dug in deeper.

It turns out marketers wanted to learn so that they could be awesome content marketers and drive traffic to any business. Not the business they happen to work for (or be working on) right at that moment.

In other words, they didn’t actually care about driving leads to the business they work for. Strange at is sounds, that’s what we learned. What they cared about is being great content marketers.

Things like “driving leads” was just some tactic along the way that would get them to their goal: be great.

But the sales page didn’t position the product like that.

Look at the opening sentence:

It’s literally written to the company.

This absolutely didn’t resonate with our readers. One person told us on the phone he just started skimming instead of reading.

(2) B2B vs any business

Compounding the “for the company” positioning, was our failed hypothesis that we could create uniqueness in the market place by positioning our product as “B2B” only.

This was another a total miss.

Readers told us that they wanted to buy our course really badly but when they saw this page they immediately ruled themselves out because they didn’t want to only learn B2B content marketing.

In fact one content marketer who worked at a B2B company said they didn’t buy because they wanted the option to apply it any company in the future. Wow.

Another reader bought the course, said she absolutely loved it, but told us on the phone she almost didn’t buy because she was going to use it for B2C but decided screw it, and wanted it bad enough to just buy anyways. Wow again.

B2B only was a totally unnecessary and forced positioning failure. Our strategies can totally apply to B2C companies, but we thought B2B would give us an edge, and we were wrong.

In Contrast, Here Is Our New Positioning (That Nearly 10X-ed Our Conversion Rate)

In two of our conversations (shout out to Tam Pham and Dave Peralta), we were told “Guys, what I want the course for is to become the Michael Jordan of content marketing.”

From that line, the phrase “Become a Top 1% Content Marketer” was born:

When I used that phrase on the phone with one of the other people who gave negative feedback, he got excited and said “YES! That sounds amazing.”

And if you read our new sales page, you’ll see it’s now all focused on the individual, how to gain this knowledge for yourself, for your career growth, to give yourself options, etc.

As we mentioned we didn’t change the product at all, we just changed the positioning.

More specifically we fixed 2 positioning mistakes:

1. Who we were targeting: We were positioned to businesses, we changed to positing to individuals
2. What are their pain points: We were listing things like “lead generation” and “traffic quality” we changed to “grow any business” and “stop guessing with random tactics”

In our experience these are only 2 of the 4 types of positioning mistakes we see companies make.

Let’s look at all 4 mistakes. Knowing these 4 positioning mistakes can serve as a checklist for getting positioning right.

1. Market: Who are you targeting?
2. Pain Points: What do they care about? (And how do you help?)
3. Advantage: How are you unique?
4. Proof: Can you actually deliver?

Positioning Criteria #1: Who Are You Targeting?

This is clearly the most obvious of our positioning criteria. And to be fair, this is the one least likely to be “ignored” like we said at the start of the article.

But there is a lot more to this than just “We target sales managers at companies with 50+ employees”.

Namely, you need to answer this question:

How specific should your targeting be?

The Wide vs. Narrow Problem: How Specific Should Your Targeting Be?

Let’s look at two hypotheticals to understand this.

First, a development agency. Say you have an agency that is great at product development of all kinds. Well, that’s damn broad.

Should you just say “We are a product development agency?”

Should you narrow down and say “We are a mobile app development agency?”

Should you go even more specific and say “We are a mobile app development agency focusing on android firmware?”

We call this the Wide vs. Narrow positioning problem:

This is a really important question and we know companies struggle with it. We know this because when we take on new clients, about 50% – 75% of the time we end up exploring this question with them in the first month of our engagement.

And they openly tell us they don’t know the answer.

Second, a customer support app. Take the battle between Drift and Intercom for example.

Drift decided (and it’s working for them), to go after marketers and salespeople. Instead of building a product for multiple segments– sales, marketing, product, customer support, etc., they went all in on building the best product for these two customers.

They coined the phrase conversational marketing:

…and they position their entire product around customer acquisition, a uniquely marketing issue:

On the other hand Intercom, with — let’s be honest — an almost the identical product, has positioned it to a wider target audience (marketing, sales, support):

Note how important messaging is to this positioning criteria. You can use both Drift and Intercom for the same thing. But they position their products differently.

It’s a matter of emphasis.

This is exactly like the lesson from our course launch fail.

First, we positioned to B2B only (narrow) — this didn’t work. Then we switched positioning to any business type (wide) — it worked.

You may find more success going in the opposite direction: Wide to Narrow.

It’s not a matter of which is correct, it’s a matter of knowing that this is an axis you can play with.

You may get this wrong at first (we did), that’s okay, just know that you can play with this lever. You don’t have to go trying to change the product for no reason (and spend weeks/months of wasted time and money doing so).

Positioning Criteria #2: What Pain Points Are You Solving?

Once you decide on your wide vs. narrow targeting, the question to answer is:

What pain points should we position our product as solving?

You might think this is kind of obvious. For example, you build some SaaS tool like accounting software so you’re thinking, “Of course it solves usual accounting pain points”.

But it’s not so simple. Two problems can happen:

1. You get the pain point wrong – This is what happened with our course and it happens with countless SaaS startups. You build software for pain point ‘X’, but users end up using it for pain point ‘Y’.
2. Your product solves a bunch of pain points – Which do you pick?

Problem 1 is more of an obvious problem. Our course story above is an example of that, and you need to do the user research we discuss below to figure this out.

But Problem 2 is more subtle but still could really hurt you if you get it wrong.

Let’s look at an example.

Here are the first 3 sections on Quickbooks’ marketing homepage:

Seems normal, but here’s why getting pain point positioning down is more difficult than you think: These are only 3 of many pain points that Quickbooks could have listed.

Most (I’m tempted to say all…) products and services alleviate a lot of pain points, but you can’t reasonably emphasize all of them. By definition you have to choose which ones to emphasize.

Even if you have a giant marketing site with pages and pages of benefits, you only have one homepage, and on the homepage you only have one “hero unit” above the fold.

Which pain points (or inversely, value props) will you put on that hero unit?

That’s the pain point challenge.

For example, we’re a customer of Quickbooks, and if you asked me to list out what pain points of mine (yes mine, Benji runs from accounting like I run from recurring meetings), I wouldn’t list out any of the ones in their homepage above.

Instead I’d say:

1. Taxes – God bless Quickbooks for making it so easy to know revenue/expenses come tax time.
2. Understanding – It’s let us know P&L’s from a client to client basis.
3. Planning – This understanding let’s us project into the future and plan growth.

You could argue that “organize” and “keep more” in their screenshot touch on my 2 and my 3, but the point is, they — for whatever reason — chose those three pain points to mention first.

That’s fine, that’s their decision based on whatever user research they did.

You need to make the same decision.

Example: Our Agency…Picking the Biggest Pain Point

Our main business is our content marketing agency.

It solves a lot of pain points for clients:

• Content quality
• Content production (writing)
• Hiring (writers)
• Driving traffic (promotion)
• Getting leads (conversion)
• And more…

But here’s what our homepage says:

We’ve talked to many clients, they all have some mixture of the pain points above.

But we know there’s one overarching theme in their pain points: Content marketing has a lot of moving pieces and getting them to all work together is really hard.

We uniquely have a service that does everything for them, start to finish. We have writers, an editor, we promote content, we source stories, drive leads, measure and report on ROI, and more.

They can’t find that elsewhere. Most other agencies don’t do all of that and it’s almost impossible for single employee to.

So that’s the pain point and message we choose to emphasize.

How to Know Your Customer’s Pain Points

Like many before us have said, to know which pain points to emphasize (“position” around) you need to talk to customers.

We’ve written plenty on this topic so we’ll refer you to those articles:

• You Don’t Know Your Customer And It’s Crippling Your Growth – Lessons on Conducting User Research
• How We Used A Simple Survey To Crack The Code On Our Customers
• The Best Way To Come Up With New Marketing Ideas: Ask Your Customers
• How to Conduct Customer Interviews (Even When You Don’t Have Customers)

Positioning Criteria #3: How Are You Unique?

At this point you’ve:

1. Focused on a particular customer
2. Understood their most important pain points

The next step is to add just a smidge of uniqueness or competitive advantage.

Why only a smidge?

Because you don’t need a ton of uniqueness. In fact being so unique that you have no competitors is usually a dangerous sign as many have written before.

This smidge of uniqueness needs to be factored into your positioning.

Yes, your product or service needs to actually have this smidge of uniqueness (see the next section: Positioning Criteria #4: Can You Deliver) but time and again we run into companies who don’t have any uniqueness in their positioning even though, after talking to them in person, we learn they actually do have some great competitive advantages.

What’s the quintessential example of this? Software development companies!

Dev shops are notorious for all sounding the same. In fact, Benji and I have this running joke that we can predict any dev shop will claim the same few things, the most common being some version of:

“We’ll take your idea to completion” or “start to finish” or “end to end”.

Like here…

And here…

And here…

Another thing you can bank on is that they’ll all mention their “unique process” which always involves Step 1 being “get to know the business” or “listening to you”:

And again here…

Now, you may be thinking “But web dev isn’t that unique. It’s all the same.”

Hold your horses.

I had that same objection and brought it up to Benji when discussing this and here’s his (verbatim) response:

From Benji: “It is though. You can be the best at designing and building SaaS apps, or be the best at building sites using a specific language like Ruby on Rails. If someone was looking for that, then they’d immediately think you’re the best fit.

The problem is more that the agency isn’t surfacing what makes them unique. They’re just generalizing because they haven’t gone through the process of determining what they’re best at.”

He’s right.

If you’re in this situation, your best bet is to do steps 1 and 2 above and emphasize some of the details of your target customers and pain points.

For example…

Mentioning customer specifics:

• We are an ecommerce web design agency
• We are experts in Shopify Plus
• We do B2B websites really well
• We can design the best SaaS marketing sites

Mentioning pain point specifics:

• We specialize in SEO optimized websites
• We build websites in under 3 weeks
• We also have copywriters to write sales copy, not just design
• We can do ongoing IT maintenance of your ecommerce backend

Positioning Criteria #4: Can You Deliver? If So, Prove It.

The last criteria is the one that is most closely related to your product.

But we feel it’s still a core positioning criteria because it closes the loop on whether your company can actually deliver on the criteria above (1. Who 2. Pain points 3. Uniqueness).

This closing of the loop ensures that customers you do acquire have a positive experience and thus:

1. Don’t churn as much
2. Refer friends

If you get this wrong (i.e. you claim solving pain points for a target segment but can’t deliver) your bucket will be leaky and your business will likely fail. So remember:

1. Churn – Customers will churn (for recurring businesses).
2. Referrals – Word of mouth won’t work for you, and will eventually work against you.

So in many ways this puts limits on positioning criteria 1 and 2:

So when thinking of pain points and who you’re going to target, make sure you ask this question:

Can our product/service actually fulfill these claims?

This is where a product pivot often makes sense. The story often goes like this:

1. Your initial product/market fit hypothesis failed
2. You decide to do some customer research to figure out who to target and what their pain points are
3. You find a burning pain point from a specific group of customers and get excited
4. Uh oh, your current product or service doesn’t actually solve those pain points for those customers

Then (and only then) does it make sense to consider a product pivot.

Using some of the examples above, this would mean:

• Our course – Our course didn’t help individuals get better at content marketing, but we learned that’s a great pain point to solve, so we spend time adjusting the course to solve it.
• Quickbooks – They discover that taxes are a huge issues for their target segment but their product lacks key functionality to solve it, so they add that and reposition.
• A development agency – They discover that the exploding field of AI and Machine learning has a burning demand for software developers, so they learn or acquire those skills and offer it.

You get the idea.

We urge you to first consider what pain points your existing product/service can solve before trying to add new things to the product.

Remember, product pivots are more costly and time consuming than positioning pivots.

If You Can Deliver, Prove It

Now, assuming you can deliver, then you need to decide how you’re going to show that proof.

Specifically, we are a content marketing site after all, so let’s talk content (finally, at the end of this post).

Content is one of the best ways to prove you can deliver on your unique positioning angles and value propositions.

Here are 3 content frameworks that can prove your ability to deliver.

(1) Long Form Case Studies

This is the number one content framework for proving you can deliver on your value proposition. Case studies show that you can achieve your results. By case studies we don’t mean the cheesy marketing site case studies like “problem…solution…” but long form stories like this or this.

But case studies are not all.  You can also prove you know what you’re doing in other content frameworks. We teach 6 frameworks in our course, but I want to focus on two here:

(2) How-To’s

Most how-to blog posts suck. Plain and simple. They are way too beginner and don’t have customer-content fit. Fixing that is proof you know what you’re talking about and is a great asset for your positioning goals.

(3) Opinion

Opinion pieces are controversial pieces that take a stand instead of teaching, for example this Why Marketing is the Hardest Position to Hire For article by Benji. Most crappy blogs don’t have the ability or wherewithal to produce high quality opinion pieces. Change that. Show your understanding of the subtleties of your field by writing a thoughtful piece. It will prove you know what you’re doing and that you understand the customer.

Speaking of proof, this leads me to the final step.

Final Step: Messaging vs. Positioning, Do They Match?

Positioning and messaging are not the same.

Positioning is how you want your product/service to be perceived in the market and messaging is what you actually communicate to your audience to get them to believe that.

Your messaging needs to align with your positioning, but we often see that that’s not the case.

We’re not going to give any examples to call anyone out here, but we see this all the time with clients.

They tell us they want super specific leads but their messaging is really generic. In the wide-narrow framework above, that looks like this:

This would be like the development agency that wants consumer mobile app design projects with a website that effectively says “We’ll develop anything”. You laugh, but it’s extremely common.

So after you go through the positioning process above, including in particular the user research articles, you need to comb through your messaging and ask yourself if it aligns with what you just concluded.

• We want these super specific customers – Does the messaging align?
• We help solve this critical pain point – Do you say that anywhere?
• We are unique like this – Is that obvious?
• We have proof to back it up – Can prospects easily say this?

I’ve spent a lot of time talking with marketers and business owners recently.

When I ask them if they know their customer, they typically say “of course we do, I mean we’re selling our products (or services), how could we not know who our customer is?”

“They’re the Director or VP of Marketing, in the retail industry, and 35-45 years old. They have a team of 2-5 people, and have x challenge that we help them with. That’s the person that buys from us.”

…I hate to break it to you, but that’s not knowing your customer.

You’re not conducting user research the way you should be, and it’s hurting your ability to grow and scale your business.

Knowing your customer means:

1. Knowing what your customer’s biggest challenge is in regards to your product or service.
2. Knowing what questions potential customers will have before they even know they need your product or service.
3. Knowing what they’ll research when they have a need for your product or service.
4. Knowing what sites they read to educate themselves about the industry you’re in.
5. Knowing who they go to for advice about products or services related to what you’re selling? Google? A Friend? And Influencer? A magazine? A book? Television?
6. Knowing the objections they’re going to have to your product or service.
7. Knowing who your competition is. And not just your direct competition, but your indirect competition.

So many people get obsessed with finding that one “Growth Hack,” “tactic” or “idea” that will help them grow to a $1M or $1B company. But if that’s what you obsess over, you’ll never find the answer to how to grow your company.

What you should obsess over is knowing your customer so well that you can predict their next move.

When you know your customer inside and out, that’s when you’re able to come up with ideas, messaging and tactics that will change the growth trajectory of your business.

Knowing your customer means knowing how to capture your customer’s attention by serving them the right messaging at the right time.

Knowing your customer means knowing what growth channels to test because you know where they’ll be and how to get in front of them.

Knowing your customer means knowing how to build trust and a relationship with them by adding value instead of selling them.

In this post, we’re going to show you how to conduct user research that will tell you what will make your customer purchase from you. I’ll share my experience as well as stories from other businesses, share specific survey questions and their reasoning, and how to modify these techniques for B2C SaaS and B2B enterprise sales businesses.

How User Research Changed The Trajectory of a Business I Worked For

I still remember the first time I was turned onto user research (well, at least the proper way of doing it).

I was a few months into my time in San Francisco, working at ThinkApps, and I decided to go to a GrowthChats event to listen to Hiten Shah give a presentation on Product/Market Fit.

Hiten’s presentation was eye-opening, it went into detail about how he used qualitative feedback to determine if a company had achieved product/market fit, using various tools like Survey Monkey and Qualaroo.

I remember coming back to ThinkApps the day after this presentation with a new mindset. I was determined to see if we had achieved product/market fit and get qualitative data back from our prospects and customers to figure out where we should focus as a company moving forward.

I started meeting with past customers in person and by phone to ask open ended questions. I started surveying past customers through Survey Monkey. I implemented Qualaroo on our site, and lo and behold, I started finding out tons of information that informed all of our decision making going forward.

I started seeing patterns in people’s answers to our questions, I learned about the pains people had with software development, the problems with the industry, who they trusted and didn’t trust, and learned how we could position ourselves in the market to one-up our competition.

ThinkApps is an app development company, and the outcome of this extensive user research included insights about our customers and competitors such as:

1. When it came to software development, there was a lack of trust in the industry. Many people had been screwed over by development firms, developers on sites like UpWork, and outsourced developers. Sometimes people had spent $60k-$100k to only be left with an uncompleted project.
2. Many development companies didn’t provide visibility into the development process. Developers were known to not give access to source code and sometimes even let clients see the product until it was finished.
3. Many people complained about a lack of communication. Sometimes clients would contact their developers for several weeks before getting a response.
4. Companies were concerned about their IP and development firms stealing their ideas.
5. Project timelines by development companies were typically over promised and under delivered – this sometimes greatly impacted clients as they had pre-planned launches.

Essentially, we had figured out all of the pains and concerns people had about building apps, and then set out on a path to alleviate these concerns.

Here’s a page on the site that speaks directly to concerns people would have.

We then alleviated pains points and concerns in our business model, our content, our messaging, our ad copy, our landing pages, and our sales approach. And within a year, our business grew by 4x revenue.

That’s the power of knowing your customer inside and out.

User Research Is The First, And Most Important Step, A Marketer or Growth Hacker Needs To Employ for Growth

Over the last couple of years, I’ve taken the concept that Hiten shared at his presentation and have modified it to get the information that I need to do my job.

When I enter a new role at a company, researching the customer is always the most important step needed to be effective in my role.

The questions that I use might slightly change depending on the knowledge that I’m trying to gain.

The same process works to determine what messaging will be most effective in ads and on my website, what marketing channels I should test, and what content I should write to attract the right audience.

User Research Questions to Ask Your Customers and Prospects

Conducting a User Feedback Survey Online

The base template that I always use is this sample survey from PMF Survey. I typically take this template and recreate it in Survey Monkey, or you could use a tool like TypeForm to send the survey out to your audience.

Again, the survey questions below would change depending on the information I’m trying to gain.

Let’s go into the purpose behind these questions and how they can be used to extract the information you need:

Question 1: How did you discover (Product or Company Name)?

This question is meant to figure out how a majority of your users found you. The information here can be used to determine what channels have been effective for user acquisition. Also, if you wanted to take this a step further, you could also use data from your CRM to determine which channels have driven the best customers in terms of deal size, time to close, etc.

Question 2: How would you feel if you could no longer use (Product or Company Name)?

This question is meant to determine product/market fit. 40+% of respondents should answer that they would be very disappointed if they could no longer use your product or service.

The open ended box below is to try to get people to explain why they feel that way. If you haven’t achieved product market fit yet, use the feedback from the survey to improve your product or service and retest after implementing changes.

Question 3: What would you likely use as an alternative to (Product or Company Name) if it were no longer available?

This question is meant to determine what your users consider to be your competition. Hint: It’s not always what you’d think.

A great example of this comes from when Sujan Patel ran Growth at When I Work – a SaaS company for online employee scheduling. I remember hearing the story from him, that when they conducted user research, they found that instead of customers mentioning a competing SaaS scheduling platform, the largest competition was actually using an Excel spreadsheet to schedule your employees. They used this information to come up with an onboarding program to take people off of Excel and into the When I Work product. That’s the kind of value this type of information can provide.

In fact, “Excel” as the primary competitor became so well known, that they were able to use this to collect leads for their app by offering Excel templates for scheduling in exchange for email addresses.

Question 4: What is the primary benefit that you have received from (Product or Company Name)?

This question determines the main benefit that your customer received from your product or service.

Again, a lot of the times you think your product or service helps your customers in one way, and through this question you uncover that the main value that they got from your product or service is way different than what you thought.

You should look for commonalities amongst respondents’ answers and then test using the learnings in things such as messaging or ad copy.

Question 5: Have You Recommended (Product or Company Name) to anyone?

This question will determine two different things:

1. If people are recommending your product or service to others
2. How they described it to others***

The second part of the question is important to help narrow in on compelling company messaging. A lot of times companies come up with really lengthy and confusing way to describe what they do – hearing how your customers describe what you do to others can help you learn how other people think of your company.

For example, here is how one company describes their CRM:

It’s hard to imagine that prospects actually say they are desperate to “optimize customer interactions to return maximum value”.

On the other hand, here’s messaging from Base, another CRM platform:

Not only does that make immediate sense to a human, there is something more subtle in their messaging: it’s clear they’ve learned that there are two distinct users they need to satisfy: salespeople, and sales managers. And, importantly, those two groups have different wants.

Question 6: What Type Of Person Do You Think Would Benefit from (Product or Service Name)?

Many times we assume that we know our audience inside and out – that we know the perfect use case for our product or service. A lot of the time, when using this question, you’ll be turned onto an audience that could be a great use case for your product that you were completely unaware of.

Question 7: How Could We Improve (Product or Company Name) To Better Meet Customer Needs?

This is often times the most important question, second to the primary benefit people find from using your product or service.

This will give you a good indicator of where your product or service is falling short, and how you can fix this to help reduce churn, get closer to product/market fit, or improve relationships amongst your customer base.

For marketing (or growth) to be successful in an organization, they typically need to be working with, or tied directly to, the product team. While the product team would typically take ownership of this type of feedback surveying, I think it’s important for this responsibility to lie under marketing. A good marketer should not only be concerned with acquisition, but should be concerned with retention and LTV as well. Knowing where your product or service falls short is important knowledge for a marketer to have.

__

Companies often assume that they know their customers in depth, but surveying in this way helps you gain a different perspective on your customers – hearing how customers think of you in their own words.

The insights gained from running surveys like this are key to making informed decisions about how to improve your product or service, where to focus company resources, how to best catch your potential prospects’ attention, etc.

Here’s a great resource, if you’re looking for more survey questions to ask your customers.

How and Why You Need To Modify This Approach For SaaS Companies

For consumer SaaS companies, I’d recommend using the same survey technique but segmented amongst three audiences:

1. Your most active and loyal users
2. Your infrequent users
3. People who’ve signed up for a trial and/or your service but have never used it

If you run the survey across your entire customer base, and don’t segment by these types of customers, then the data will be skewed and you’ll be unable to make informed decisions.

What’s interesting if you break out responses in this way is that you’ll be able to determine why some of your users are more active than others, why some people only log in or user your service less than others, and why people churn.

By collecting this type of insight, you’ll be able to make company or product changes that should help you scale.

How and Why You Need To Modify This Approach For B2B Companies

For B2B companies, a slight modification on this technique: you could run this survey amongst your highest contract value (or best customers) – the top 20% and then the other 80% of your customers to see the difference amongst respondents answers.

A Note on Statistical Significance and How to Interpret the Qualitative Data

Some people might argue that they don’t have enough customers or that segmenting data in the ways above would lead to data that is of non statistical significant value. Yes, that is correct, but what’s important to note here, is this is just supposed to give you indicators on areas to explore.

By using the process outlined above, it should give you ideas for things to test – feature improvements, product improvements, messaging, marketing channels, etc.

Take all of the responses to questions and start looking for patterns amongst answers. Pull out those ideas, right down things that stick out to you in each question asked and start coming up with ideas for tests to run.

Questions? Comments? Leave them below.

Want us to write an in depth case study or story like this about you or your company? We’ll also drive traffic to it. Apply here.

Like this article? We produce stories like these for our clients, learn more here.

Yet… most marketers are afraid of Reddit.

Despite its huge traffic potential, marketers stay away.

They rationalize with excuses:

“They’re going to roast me and I’ll get banned”

“The traffic quality must suck”

“Redditors aren’t the type of people who would buy”

“It’s too much time, the ROI is bad.”

I don’t blame them.

After all, Reddit is a site with a reputation of destroying self-serving marketers. Look at this simple chart of the journey of a marketer on Reddit:

Ok that was a joke. But like every joke, there is some truth to it. And the truth is, most marketers crash and burn even before they begin. That’s why they think Reddit is bad for traffic.

But I’ll say this: it IS entirely possible for you to get lots of high-quality traffic while adding tons of value to the Reddit community… if you do it right.

And I’ve done it. Not once, not twice, but multiple times for two different startups.

Here are some of the results I’ve achieved while posting on Reddit:

This was from my work at my previous startup, where I had to promote articles that talked about back health and ergonomics. It received a total of 620 upvotes.

I’ve recently used the same principles (which I’ll be sharing with you) to do the exact same for a new blog post about Instagram that I’ve written. Here are the results:

These upvote counts can be impressive to marketers that don’t know how to do this on Reddit. For example, here’s Devesh’s comment when I outlined this in a Google Doc:

In this post, I’ll first outline my Reddit approach: what I think is essential to being able to drive traffic from Reddit. Then, I’ll share a case study where I’ve put these principles into action.

How To Succeed On Reddit

If you can’t be active, Reddit isn’t for you

This may be cliche advice — but the real key to success in using the community content promotion technique is adding value to the group wayyyyyyy before you even begin promoting.

And this is especially true if you want to succeed on Reddit.

There is no way around it. You can’t just be a casual user. You can’t lurk. You can’t pretend to like Reddit for the sake of it.

To see success, you have to become a Redditor. By that, I don’t mean you have to literally transform into Snoo. I mean — you would enjoy Reddit… even if you didn’t have something to promote. As the Reddit admins say:

“It’s perfectly fine to be a redditor with a website, it’s not okay to be a website with a reddit account.”

That’s rule #1, #2 and #3. You have to be active.

If you can’t dedicate time to be active, then stop here. Reddit isn’t for you.

(I’ll even venture to say that the community content promotion technique isn’t for you. You’re better off buying paid traffic.)

But… if you think you can do this, and you think you want to figure out Reddit, then keep on reading.

Reddit isn’t just for business. Reddit IS fun. And Redditors can be fun to hang out with. They are snarky, sarcastic, crack great jokes and come up with the craziest ideas.

Have fun with it. Let loose. Don’t always be “business-ey”.

(Me having fun)

That makes you boring.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about some guidelines you should remember.

Commit These Reddit Principles To Memory

1. Accumulate Karma Points

Before you even begin posting anything about your business, you need karma points. But how many do you need?

At least a few hundred karma points.

Now, I want to be clear. Karma points in itself mean nothing. It doesn’t work like Domain Authority, or Klout.

Having more karma points doesn’t mean you’re a better Redditor. Having more karma points doesn’t mean you’re more respected. Having more karma points doesn’t mean your submissions automatically get more upvotes or weight than other people.

The only reason you’re accumulating karma points is simply to prove that you are an active Reddit user. That’s all.

That being said, most large subreddits require you to have a minimum amount of karma before you can begin posting anyway, so gather them.

(I’ll teach you how to do that in a short while.)

If you’re wondering, here’s my profile and how much karma I have:

(Fun Fact: some of my promotional posts have been given Reddit Gold.)

2. Age Your Account

If your account is too new, you will be barred from posting too regularly, as well as posting in larger subreddits. Get around this by creating your new Reddit account 2 weeks before you even begin your Reddit promotion strategy.

3. Keep Your History Clean

The #1 activity Redditors love the most once they discover you’re a self-promotional marketer is to dig through your entire Reddit history — and point out every single promotional posts you’ve ever done.

Yes, it is scary. Yes, they can be pretty vicious. But don’t let them deter you from promoting.

If you truly have great content, and all you desire is to help the community and add value, don’t let a few naysayers bring you down.

However, to help you with your cause, I’ll suggest you keep your history clean from promotional posts. Here are 2 rules of thumb that I personally follow:

• I post maximally 1-biz related content per page of my Reddit history.

(Only one promotional post for the entire history.)

• I delete any “promotional” submissions that do not get > 10 upvotes in 48 hours.

4. Don’t Spam

I know I’m being long-winded here, but it bears repeating. Don’t spam subreddits.

No matter how helpful you think your content is, Redditors will call you out for spam if you post about your site too often within a short span of time.

Post a promotional post in the same subreddit once every 2-3 weeks.

5. Preventing Spam Filters

Every subreddit has its own automated spam filter, and this may cause some of your posts to be “caught in it”. Prevent this from happening by participating in the subreddits you intend to promote in.

6. Reddit Participation Tips

Imagine yourself using Twitter. How do you look active? You don’t just hit ‘like’ on tweets – that doesn’t matter. You share articles, retweet interesting tweets, reply to people, start discussions and message other people.

Reddit isn’t all that different.

Just like “Likes”, upvoting doesn’t really matter. Upvoting contributes neither to your Reddit history (in which Redditors will dig through), nor does it allow you to accumulate karma.

If you want to look like an active Redditor, do it like how you would do Twitter. Comment. Ask questions. Start discussions. Post about interesting articles (not just yours.) Reply and message people.

That’s all there is to it.

Still think it’s too much hard work? Fret not.

In the next section, I’ll show you different ways of being active… in a fun, easy way without stressing with business-related posts every day.

How To Be Active on Reddit

1. Subscribe to subreddits of your interests

What is Reddit? Reddit is essentially a giant forum with multiple sub-forums spanning different interests. Which also means, there will be at least a few subreddits that cater to what you love. It can be anything – your hobby, your work, the country you live in, your favourite shows – there WILL be a subreddit for it.

Find those subreddits and subscribe to them. This makes it more fun when promoting on Reddit, as you’re simply participating in what you love anyway.

I personally subscribe to r/singapore (my country) and r/bboy (my hobby).

2. Participate in popular subreddits

There are a few general subreddits that talk about almost everything. These subreddits are super active, with hundreds of threads that generate thousands of upvotes and comments.

Participate in them to earn yourself quick karma points.

Here’s an example of what I did recently. I merely mentioned “bird-watching” as a cheap, obscure hobby, and received 909 upvotes:

(Karma points achieved instantly!)

Here are some of these subreddits you should participate in:

• r/AskReddit
• r/todayilearned
• r/YouShouldKnow
• r/askmen
• r/askwomen

3. Submit links

Read an article you liked? Don’t just share it on Twitter and Facebook. Share that link in relevant subreddits too.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

How To Post on Reddit

Now that you’ve understood the general principles of participation in Reddit, I’m going to teach you how to post so that you stand a chance of getting attention, upvotes and the traffic you want.

Headlines on Reddit

Since Reddit is all about headlines, a good headline matters a lot.

Here are some tips on how to write a good headline on Reddit:

1. Different subreddits prefer different types of headlines

Click the ‘Top’ section of the subreddits you want to promote to.

Look at the headlines that have gathered the most number of upvotes of all time. Reverse-engineer those headlines. What do members of this subreddit like? How is the structure? How can you emulate it?

2. No clickbait.

Throw away everything you’ve studied about blog headlines. Redditors abhor clickbait. So, as a general rule of thumb, no clickbait titles.

Instead, use personal and friendly headlines, something like this:

3. TWO of the best headlines formulas I’ve personally used

Here are 2 of the best headlines formulas that I’ve personally tested and used to great effect:

• Need [x]? Here’s [y]

Example:

Tensed shoulders? Try these few stretches (very work-friendly!)

• [specific time before] I [did something]. I will now [explain to you/share even more detail/teach you how/explain what happened].

Example:

3 months ago I posted the exact process on how I sold $150,000 selling T-shirt on Amazon. I will now explain the exact steps you can take to earn your first $1,000,000 selling on Amazon via the Shopify integration with ZERO inventory.

Body of your posts on Reddit

Writing the body is simple. Share 50% – 80% of your original blog post (formatted nicely) as a text-post. Then, leave a link back to your blog post and ask them to check out the rest of the content.

Make sure (I repeat: make sure) that whatever you’re sharing (i.e the 50% – 80%) is still valuable enough to stand on its own. Don’t half-ass it and pretend to share a “teaser” just to get people to click.

This isn’t your email list. If you’re going to do that, please go away. Reddit doesn’t want you.

If the subreddit allows, include a few internal links within the body of the content.

If you have images and gifs, consider using Reddit-approved sites to host it (e.g. Imgur, Gfycat).

Once you’ve published the post, stay around and reply to comments. This is social media. People expect you to respond. Don’t simply post and leave. That just makes you a spammer.

Engage, engage, engage.

One of the best ways I’ve discovered to make you look genuine and ready to help is to tell people you’re staying around and answering questions.

Here’s a brilliant example:

(This is my co-worker by the way.)

Cross Posting on Reddit

While it is important that you do not spam, here are two things you should understand:

1. Not everyone will have seen your post.
2. Your content will likely be useful for some other related subreddits (unless you’re in a really obscure niche.)

With that in mind, feel free to cross-post your original post to other subreddits.

Here’s an example where I cross-posted from r/fitness to r/DotA2:

To prevent “spamming-related” callouts from other Redditors, remember these few rules:

• Change or tweak the headline
• Add a [x-post from y-subreddit] like my above example
• Cross-post to other subreddits every 1-2 weeks instead of immediately spamming other subreddits.

Reddit Case Study

This is not theoretical. This is not a process I regurgitated after reading the first 3 links on Google.

I religiously follow this process when it comes to promoting content from ReferralCandy, and our new product, CandyBar.

Here’s what I mean:

I recently interviewed several influencers on how they would build a following on Instagram from scratch. I decided to promote it on Reddit, following my own framework.

I posted it to r/startups, and this was what happened:

439 upvotes, and 80 comments. It stayed on the 1st page of r/startups for 2 days long. (It’s also now #10 on the all-time upvoted piece on r/startups. Coincidentally, #6 is also mine.)

I later cross-posted to r/webmarketing, which had these results:

Not the most number of upvotes I know, but considering the size of r/webmarketing, it’s quite remarkable. In fact, it is NOW the top most-upvoted post on r/webmarketing.

Then, I cross-posted it to r/entrepreneur.

Not too shabby. 442 upvotes in a subreddit with hundreds of posts a day.

Total traffic for this post in the past 9 days since I started?

(And that’s only from Reddit.)

It’s Your Turn

Most people immediately assume that Reddit only sends poor traffic, and it’s not a good use of their time.

They can’t be more wrong.

If you target your subreddits well, you will get people who are interested in your content and your product/services.

Be patient, follow my process and become an active Redditor yourself, and you should see your traffic skyrocket.

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Learn More About Grow and Convert

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With their primary product Price Intelligently easily doing half a million dollars, he made the conscious decision to pay himself just $50,000 while living in Boston. If that sounds insane to you, just wait.

When you’re starting a business, at some point you’ll have to make a decision. Are you building a lifestyle business, or something you want to scale? Patrick Campbell wanted the latter. And to get there he had to make multiple hard choices and stay disciplined.

This is the story of how Patrick built Price Intelligently and ProfitWell into million dollar businesses by having a clear goal of building a scalable company, having the discipline to stick to that goal when it would have been easier not to, and the courage to experiment with business models that aren’t always popular. Doing this, he’s managed to build a business that now does between $6 and $7 million, and a software company with an ARR of over $1 million, and growing.

Finding a Pain Point: Companies Are Guessing on Pricing

In 2012, Patrick Campbell was tired of working for other people. He’d been through the bureaucracy of working for the government. He’d moved to Google thinking the situation would get better, and then to a smaller startup for the same reason, but in the back of his mind one idea wouldn’t leave him alone.  He wanted to be his own boss, and that year he decided to go for it.

It wasn’t an easy decision.

“The way I convinced myself [is by saying to myself] I can always get a job. Worst case scenario, I could move back to Wisconsin and my parents would let me sleep on their couch. I told myself that I was going to give myself 6-9 months, and if it doesn’t work out, I could always try to get my job at Google back.”

He needed an idea. His background is in econometrics and math, and at his last job, the startup, he’d been a jack of all trades, or more formally in “strategic initiatives”. Basically, give him a problem, he would analyze it, and find a solution that he could hand off for implementation.

One thing he found himself doing a lot was analyzing pricing structures. In particular, he noticed that companies would spend immense resources on product but when it came to pricing, they’d just guess.

“They would tell me that they put so much time and effort into the product, but when it comes time to ascribe the value [via pricing], ‘we just throw shit out there and see how it does.”

That didn’t seem logical to Patrick, so he wondered if there were a smarter way to handle pricing. Could he build a far more intelligent system for companies to pick their pricing, instead?

This was the beginning of what we now know as Price Intelligently, Patrick’s first company.

Early Product Market Fit with a “People Powered Product”

”We learned, in hindsight, that building a tech-enabled service business actually was a better way to build a software company then when you just start building the software.”

“It was a little bit of a tempestuous founding,” he says. “All three of us had not founded companies before, especially bootstrapped ones. The other two guys were part time, and they helped where they could while still working at their full-time jobs.”

Patrick was looking for a business that he could scale. With his background in data, he built a two pronged product to solve the “we’re just guessed at pricing” problem he identified.

The system, (1) gathered survey responses from a company’s customer base, and (2) used those responses to craft an intelligent pricing strategy.

“It was basically me 18 hours in a room just grinding away trying to figure this out,” he says. “I’m definitely not an engineer. Instead, I focused on more selling stuff and figuring out how to provide that in a non-engineering capacity. We sort of fell into the tech-enabled service.”

This offering involved using algorithms (to analyze the survey data and make recommendations) but it wasn’t something a customer could do on their own. It needed Patrick or a trained person from Price Intelligently to execute.

It was almost a standalone product, but not quite.

He called this offering a “people powered product.” There was a product that was doing the heavy lifting (algorithms to analyze data and make pricing recommendations) but it required people to help execute it, so it wasn’t just  “pricing consulting”.

“I loathe the word consulting,” he says, “It’s not because I don’t value consultants, and that consultants don’t have their place in the world,” but the vision from the beginning was to be a product company because pure software business is, of course, very scalable.

Services enables deep customer development while generating revenue

“We would not have learned what we needed to learn if we did not do the more heavy services.”

Patrick says it’s actually fine that they started with a tech-enabled business because it allowed them to see deeply into the problems companies have. “We learned, in hindsight, that building a tech-enabled service business actually was a better way to build a software company then when you just start building the software.”

It was an incredible customer development opportunity. “We were learning more about these companies than anyone else,” he says. “We would not have learned what we needed to learn if we did not do the more heavy services.”

The “people powered product” also generated revenue, an all too critical piece for a bootstrapped company.

Over the next 6 months Price Intelligently booked around $130k in contracts, which was great.

But the reality that their product was still “people powered”, i.e. it wasn’t a totally standalone product was something they couldn’t shake.

“It weighed on us a lot,” Patrick says.

Not just because Patrick’s vision was a pure product company, but also because he sold that vision to recruit key early hires, including their head of sales.

As he puts it, “The reason I was able to get Peter [their head of sales] to come work here, was because I sold him the vision of the product company…Not a lot of people want to work for agencies, if they’re interested in software.”

So they kept brainstorming product ideas.

The team had various product visions, which they were actively doing customer development on, (such as hosting pricing pages for companies) but a chance encounter in the boardroom of an existing client sparked the idea that stuck.

Starting ProfitWell: Discovering a Pain Point with Accurate Financial Data

Patrick says there were two data points that led them to start their product business.

First, Patrick and his team were sitting in the boardroom of a client preparing for an  IPO when they realized that this client wasn’t calculating their monthly recurring revenue correctly.

“We were sitting in a company’s boardroom that was about to IPO, and they were calculating MRR completely incorrectly.”

Knowing your MRR is a fundamental part of SaaS accounting, and this was the third company that this CEO was taking public, so the fact that it was being calculated incorrectly, was, to put it mildly, surprising.

But beyond this (amusing) data point, the team began noticing that getting accurate financial data from online software businesses was not easy. It was more complicated than just knowing MRR. A key part of Price Intelligently’s service was ascribing value to customers: i.e. How much is a particular customer persona worth to a company?

This required accurate financial data. How much are these customers paying per month? What percent of them churned? When did they upgrade? How long are they staying customers?

They couldn’t count on Google Analytics or a client’s CRM to give them this financial data accurately and in detail.

“The hardest data to collect was that financial data,” he says.

This was their second data point, and the idea for the product that is now ProfitWell was born.

They decided to build a product that would collect data for SaaS companies, initially by plugging into Stripe, and display key financial metrics (like MRR, LTV, churn, etc.).

Bootstrapped Product Development: Having the Discipline to Reinvest Profits in a Brand New Product

At this point, Price Intelligently, the people-powered product, was about two years old and generating roughly half a million dollars a year in revenue.

Building the new “pure” software product — now called ProfitWell — required finding and hiring technical talent (they eventually hired Facundo Chamut as a contractor (he eventually became their CPO), who was previously Principle Engineer at Compete.com and thus had a lot of experience with data focused SaaS products), which means it needed capital.

They were bootstrapped (still are) so there was no investor capital to lean on.

This meant as much margin from the Price Intelligently service as possible would need to be funneled into their new product, and lifestyle sacrifices needed to be made. For example, Patrick paid himself only $50,000 a year at the time. Although that’s not “meager” by any means, remember Patrick was a twenty something founder/CEO with a successful, profitable business, generating half a million dollars a year and living in Boston.

He tells us his mindset then was, “I very well could have been making $150[k] or something like that, but it’s all about getting to product…It literally took the discipline to take all of the margin of the Price Intelligently side of the business and invest it into ProfitWell.”

This discipline (which, as we’ll discuss later) is something Patrick notices not all founders who have lofty business goals exert early on. In other words it’s easy to choose lifestyle over re-investing your margin.

In fact, Patrick told us they didn’t start building ProfitWell for a year after they had they idea because “we couldn’t really afford anyone at that point.”

In addition, competition also happened to be heating up at that time. “We launched our very very bare bones MVP, looked-like-shit product, right around the same time BareMetrics, ChartMogul and a couple of these other products started launching.”

With competition chasing a similar goal, speed is important. And to build faster, you need capital. So with Chamut as their first engineer, an intern, and as much Price Intelligently profit as they could muster, they started building ProfitWell.

Monetizing ProfitWell: Choosing a Freemium Model

“Selling an analytics product is one of the worst businesses to be in. Churn is awful. People aren’t willing to pay for it.”

As they began building ProfitWell, they (of course) applied their own Price Intelligently customer research onto themselves.  Unfortunately, what they realized, is that customers don’t use or pay for analytics products that often, and they often don’t stay as paying customers for very long.

As Patrick puts it, “it takes a ton of work to build an analytics product that’s accurate and people log in once a month.”

As he’s described in detail on the ProfitWell blog, they learned that monetizing ProfitWell directly through a typical recurring subscription price wouldn’t be worth the cost of customer acquisition.

So instead, they decided “ProfitWell essentially was going to be our wedge.” They’d use ProfitWell as a lead generator for for two other more advanced, high priced software services. Basically, it’s a freemium model, except instead of a paid product that costs $49 or $99, their paid versions start at $1000/month.

But their detailed analytics let them see when customers could use their more advanced products. “We can see,” says Patrick, “through different algorithms on top of ProfitWell, ‘Hey you have a problem with this, we have a product that helps with that problem, do you want to hook that up?”

But the freemium model further delayed having their product generate cash. It took months for ProfitWell’s leadgen to get traction, but once it did, Patrick’s initial discipline began to pay off.

Now, there are multiple “product tiers” on top of Profit Well, which has just crossed $1 million in annual revenue. They have Retain, a product to help with churn, Recognized, a product that helps with bridging subscription and GAAP accounting,  and “a couple others coming out” says Patrick. In addition, Profit Well also generates leads for Price Intelligently, the people powered product, that they’ve kept growing and new does over $6 million in annual revenue.

His Advice to Others: Decide If you want to scale, back up your decision with discipline

”If you want to just build a lifestyle business, this advice doesn’t really matter.”

Patrick draws a clear line for people wanting to start a large scale business. Either you decide on lifestyle or you decide on scale but don’t straddle the line.

Then, once you’ve made that decision, you have to have the discipline to stick to it, which is where Patrick says he sees a lot of other early entrepreneurs trip up.

“They don’t have the discipline to reinvest. It’s totally respectable. I think the discipline is a lot easier to say than it is to do, but it’s not super complicated.”

“If you’re making $150k a year and at the end of the year there’s 20% left over, are you going to invest that or are you going to throw that into a down-payment on your new house?”

This story was co-written by Devesh Khanal and Elizabeth Wallace, a Nashville based writer.

Want us to write an in depth case study or story like this about you or your company? We’ll also drive traffic to it. Apply here.

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In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

This post describes in detail why our course didn’t do as well (sales-wise) as we would’ve hoped.

Marketing is about testing things – not everything will work, but what’s important is that you take a step back and learn from your mistakes.

We went into our course launch thinking it was going to be a success and ended up coming out of it with an entirely new business model (an agency).

We took some time after our course launch to get feedback from the customers who purchased and the prospects who didn’t purchase. Then we determined where things went wrong and what we could’ve improved. Now, we want to share all of our learnings with you, and the new path that we’re going to because of the feedback we received.

The mistakes we made with the course were mainly around customer personas and positioning, but in order to get a full understanding of where things went wrong, it’s important for you to understand the backstory of our business.

The Story Behind Grow and Convert

For those that don’t know how and why Grow and Convert got started, here’s the story.

Devesh and I met at a dinner for marketers put on by Sujan Patel in San Francisco.

I had just switched roles from Marketing Manager at ThinkApps to Director of Growth at Everwise, and Devesh was running his CRO agency GrowthRock. Devesh and I both showed up to the dinner early, and our conversation was mainly about whether content marketing could drive high-value contracts for his agency.

Devesh, in his stubbornness, was arguing that content marketing wouldn’t work for his business because he’s trying to attract high value clients.

Having just come from ThinkApps, where I grew their blog from 0-35,000 monthly unique visitors in 6 months, and closed high-value deals directly off their blog, I made the argument that he was, well…wrong. Companies could drive large deals from content, they just need the proper strategy.

I slowly chipped away at his preconceived views about content marketing and the audience it can attract and eventually he said something to me like, “Well, if you can really do what you’re saying you can do, that skill would be extremely valuable to a lot of companies.”

I said “Yeah I know, I’m thinking about writing a book about it.” To which Devesh responded, “A book? That’s the worst idea I’ve heard…” and he proposed an interesting counter-idea:

“Why don’t you just show what you can do by starting a site and attracting real content marketers and publishing real case studies of doing this on real companies. So many blogs about content marketing are just beginner blogging stuff. Show this strategy on real companies.”

So this site was born.

Our First Public Challenge: Growing Our Own Traffic

Grow and Convert started on November 16th, 2015, with our first blog post “Content Marketing Has Become Too Trendy. Here’s What We Plan To Do About It.”

We made the argument that most companies were investing in content marketing but few were getting real results from it (traffic, leads and ultimately revenue). To prove that we knew what we were doing when it came to growing sites, we challenged ourselves to grow our new WordPress site from 0 to 40,000 unique monthly visitors in 6 months.

Devesh had real world conversion optimization experience and I had real world traffic growth experience from content marketing. So we felt like we had a wealth of case studies and stories to tell, and this would stand out from the noise in this space. (Also, hence the name Grow and Convert.)

People seemed to resonate with our content, and traffic grew. But a key question remained: what would the business be?

Our First Test Monetizing Our Site – An 8-Week Content Marketing Phone Course

Our initial (rough) vision revolved around focusing on this process we had built for content marketing. Over many years and multiple companies, I had built a process of (1) understanding customers, (2) building targeted content, and (3) promoting it to drive targeted traffic.

Devesh helped me formalize this process and together we add some pieces to it: (4) converting traffic to customers or leads (5) measuring the ROI and CAC of this whole system and (6) scale it by hiring writers.

We knew this was valuable. We knew companies were just doing “content marketing” in a haphazard way and it was grossly ineffective. We had talked to multiple companies about this.

Whereas, I had first hand experience generating lots of traffic and business with various versions of our process.

This was a definite gap in the market:

Our MVP to Bridge the Gap

Our initial hypothesis to bridge the gap was training. We figured we have a repeatable process to generate and track leads from content marketing. Let’s teach it to employees and teams so that they can be more effective executing on their content marketing strategy.

So in May of 2016, after 5 months of increased blog growth, we pivoted away from our traffic goal in order to start monetizing our site. We stopped focusing on traffic because we felt like we had proved our point that we knew what we were doing (we grew traffic to 16,000 users, 24,000 visitors in 4.5 months w/ little SEO traffic), I was living abroad with no income stream, and for Devesh to continue spending time on it, we needed to start making money.

We launched our first course (an 8-week phone course for $750) by creating a simple Google Doc landing page and including it in one of our posts.

We then sent emails to the 200 most engaged subscribers on our list. At the time, we were using Mailchimp as our ESP, so we could easily see our most engaged subscribers by organizing our list by users with a 5 star Mailchimp rating.

We capped the early adopter list at 10 seats, and to our surprise, we filled all 10 seats. A 5% conversion rate from outreach to close. We were off to the races.

We delivered the course over an 8-week period, distilling everything that we had learned into 4 modules – user research, content strategy, promotion and conversions. Everyone who took the course had great things to say.

But there was a catch…

The “phone” in “phone course” meant each company got 4 hour-long one on one calls with both Devesh and me. That’s a lot of calls. That’s also not scalable.

But we hoped this was just a way to validate our product hypothesis and that we could launch an online only version of this to the whole list.

However, after doing a round of post-course interviews, many of them said the main reason they purchased was because they got 1:1 phone time with both Devesh and I. Some of them clearly said that it was a great deal to get that for $750. Phrases like it was a “no brainer” were thrown around.

Ugh. So much for the online course.

Back to the drawing board…

All those phone calls just weren’t scalable. We spent 80 combined hours over the course of 8-weeks working with these companies, and while we loved working with these companies, to be perfectly honest, it was exhausting. We were coordinating calls between 8 time zones every other week and it wasn’t sustainable to keep doing things that way.

Devesh had to make this ridiculous time zone spreadsheet…and we only had 10 clients!

MVP 2.0: From A Phone Course To An In-person Workshop

After conducting exit interviews with people who had taken the phone course with us, we learned:

1. People wanted 1:1 time with us
2. Many companies had challenges measuring the ROI of content marketing
3. Many of the companies we worked with wanted to learn how to scale their writing teams

So, when I returned from SE Asia back to the United States, we started working on our the next iteration of our training – Grow and Convert Live.

We figured we’d be good marketers and “give the people what they want”.

They want more one on one time with us? Great, let’s do it in person!

We would travel to a company, spend a full-day with their marketing team and create a custom content marketing strategy for them. We also added two more modules to our content marketing system, one on how to measure the ROI of content marketing and one on how to scale writing teams.

The companies got more time with us (8 hrs in person vs. 4 on the phone), the value was much higher (more topics, more customized work) so we could charge more ($1500 – $3000), which made more business sense for us. Win win.

After doing the first three workshops, we learned that there was a pattern in why people were hiring us: they needed training for their new content marketing employees.

We realized that this training hit on another pain point companies had which is that few companies have senior employees that can train entry-level to mid-level marketers on content marketing. We could come into a company, and in one day set the new hire up for success in content marketing.

We had a ton of fun doing these workshops and were getting one request about once a month after the initial three just from people visiting our website and hearing about us from past workshop participants.

But we ran into another scale related problem with it: the demand just wasn’t high enough to offset the fact that it was one off revenue. We’d spend all this time “doing sales” to land one client, and in the end we’d get a few thousand dollars for a one day. That’s it. No recurring revenue. If we charge $3000, the LTV is $3000. We had no products “on the back end”, no software, no recurring service.

That’s a tough business to make work.

And on top of that, how many companies have “just” hired a content marketing person and are willing to invest in training for them? Not enough from what we could tell.

MVP 3.0: In order to try to scale our training to a wider audience, we went back to the online course idea

Note: The start of our mistake happened right around here.

By December 2016, with the phone and in-person training combined we had worked with around 15 – 20 companies. All or nearly all had great things to say.

So, we thought we had “validated” demand for our training, and decided to go back to our online course idea (this is a critical logical misstep).

We figured we had all of the material created, customers loved it, some even started seeing real results from it. So why not package it into an online course which was infinitely scalable?

Our goals were lofty and noble: create the best content marketing training course on the market for B2B businesses.

When looking at the competition, we thought that we had an advantage on a few points:

1. Many of the courses gave high level strategies, our material was an in-depth system that gave the strategy and then showed people how to execute on it
2. We realized that there weren’t any content marketing programs out there that were specific to B2B companies — we had lots of experience here, so doubled down on it
3. We had tested and validated the course material with real companies. We weren’t just creating this to make a quick buck, we truly believed our process would help companies succeed with content marketing.

But here’s where we went wrong…

Subtle but important errors in our hypothesis: Personas and Positioning

Having come fresh off of selling our in-person workshop to C-level executives inside of fast-growing, venture-backed startups, we knew the pain points that these executives and companies faced inside and out.

So when we created the landing page for our online course, we used the same pitch that we gave to sell our in-person workshops, to sell our online training. The problem with doing this was that the audience on our list was mainly marketers who were interested in learning content marketing to better their own career and we were selling a course to help companies get better ROI from their content marketing operation.

The assumption that we made was that marketers that worked inside of companies would want to buy our course and tell their bosses that there was a course that could help them get better at their job.

But when we launched the course, we learned that most marketers don’t really care about making their company better, they mainly care about making themselves more valuable to their company.

It’s a subtlety in the language we used – essentially, the big mistake we made was selling the value of our training to the company instead of the value to the individual.

Why didn’t you just make the right course: for individuals to improve their content marketing skills?

The reason we shied away from creating a content marketing course for individuals in the first place mainly had to do with being scared of how we’d be perceived by others.

Both Devesh and I have grown frustrated with the “online course crowd.” We think it’s full of a lot of BS: self-proclaimed gurus who make money by teaching others how to supposedly become rich like them by following some supposed “proven” process they’ve used (e.g. creating “marketing funnels”, using Facebook ads, starting a blog, whatever). Much of that space is so slimy and scammy.

We felt like if we had created a course teaching individuals how to become better content marketers and grow their site traffic “like Grow and Convert has,” that we’d be viewed in this group.

It also didn’t align with what we knew: helping companies generate business from content marketing, not individuals. I had experience using content to drive customers to a development agency, a VC backed HR company, and a huge nationally recognized executive coaching service. I didn’t have experience helping individuals quit their job and “make money online.”

In hindsight, this was a pretty stupid way of thinking. Here’s why…

First, selling to “individuals” doesn’t only mean “people trying to start a passive income internet businesses.”

We talked to multiple real individuals after our course launch that just wanted to use our course build their own skill so that they could get more freelance clients, switch jobs, or become better at their job.

Second, even if we wanted to just sell our training (online, offline, whatever) to companies, we still had to sell to the individuals within the company. And as we said above, the individuals inside the company don’t really care about the company’s ROI, they care about their own lives (their career, promotions, etc.), so the positioning is totally different.

A silver lining from the experience: demand for a “done for you” content marketing agency

While we only achieved a little under half of our revenue goal for the first course launch, there are a few good things that came from the experience.

The first being that the people who did purchase the course, had great feedback about the material:

The second being that there was an interesting trend in questions that we received when we launched our course that we weren’t expecting.

While some were interested in training to learn how to do content marketing better for their companies, a lot of business owners kept writing in with the same question – do you offer a “done-for-you content marketing service”:

After continuing to get messages on our landing page and emails from readers inquiring about content marketing services, we decided that maybe we should test out a service.

We launched a done-for-you content marketing service the week after our course launch, and within 3 few days of the announcement of our new service, we landed our first client. Then a few weeks later, we got our second.

Going forward, much of our focus will be put into scaling a content marketing agency. The good thing for you guys is that we’ll be profiling case studies of what we’re doing for them. So you’ll get content from deep in the trenches of what we’re doing, all of our new tests, what works and what doesn’t work.

Lastly, we’re now playing with the idea of launching a course for the freelancers, marketers inside of companies who want to build their content marketing skills so they can advance in their career or eventually go out on their own. Feedback from people who didn’t purchase the course leads us to believe this is what a lot of you want. We’re still unsure if we’re going to do this or not, but if it’s something you’d be interested in, feel free to email us or comment below.

The learning from all of this is that there’s never a clear path to success. A lot of people like to write posts that make things look easy – “All you need to do is build an email list, create a course, and boom you’re at six-figures and you’re successful like me.”

Entrepreneurship isn’t easy regardless of your past experience. We believe that it’s important to share our mistakes so that we can help prevent you from making the same ones, and just so you can see that you’re not alone when your path isn’t smooth.

We all make mistakes, but it’s how you deal with adversity that defines that outcome of your business.

Like this article? We produce stories like these for our clients, learn more here.

Whenever someone has a problem, they immediately try to find a tool to solve it.

I’m tired of being asked the question: “what’s the best tool for _____?”

For example, common questions I get asked:

“What’s the best marketing stack for my company?”

“What’s the best tool for content promotion?”

“What’s the best tool for blog conversions?”

If you’re asking these types of questions, you’re going about your job in the wrong way.

Tools Don’t Solve Problems, They Optimize Processes

If you read half of the blog posts about tools out there, you’d be led to believe that you can pay $x/mo for a software product and it will magically solve your problem with (insert job function here).

But, tools don’t solve problems. They optimize processes.

Tools bring speed, organization or improvement to something that already works, but they’re not going to help you solve a problem.

For example:

If I was already driving a ton of traffic and leads from content marketing, and I needed a process improvement for tracking, nurturing, and routing leads to a sales team, then I might invest in marketing automation. Or I might just use something like Zapier of Ifttt to push data from one place to another.

But if I wasn’t driving inbound traffic, leads, and had no strategy, buying Hubspot, Marketo, or Pardot wouldn’t improve my inbound/content marketing program.

People invest in tools when they’re looking for a simple fix, or when they’re looking to take the easy way out.

Then, when tools don’t work, people are confused why the tools they’re invested in aren’t driving results (“when they seem to be working for others?”).

Tools don’t drive results, strategy does.

Strategy is what solves problems

Many people have forgotten that tools don’t solve problems. Strategy does.

The problem with strategy is that it takes years of hard work and investment to learn.

For example:

If I wanted to learn how to become better at sales, I might enlist the help of a mentor, take a course, practice selling, start reading, and ultimately test things (and likely fail at them) until I succeed.

Honing a new skill takes time and effort.

Software has made people lazy.

People think if something isn’t working, they can go buy a sales tool and it’s going to improve their chances of succeeding by 1000%.

Why?

Because it’s a lot easier to blame something not working on a shitty tool you purchased than it is to admit you took the wrong approach or you’re just plain not good at something.

The thing is, that if you don’t get better at strategy, you won’t get better at your job.

Tools won’t make you better at your job. Strategy will.

Stop wasting money on tools. Start investing in strategy.

Seriously, take a look at all of the tools you’re invested in.

How many of them improve a process?

How many of them improve the speed at which you can do something?

How many of them help you organize information in a better way than you could do manually?

There’s a lot of shitty tools out there that you’re probably paying for, and that aren’t moving the needle for you, or for your business.

So I challenge you to take a look at all of the software you’re paying for, that you think will (replace x function) or (improve x function)… and think long and hard about whether those tools actually add value to your life, or your business.

If they don’t, cancel them.

Then, take the money that you saved from those tools, and start investing it into improving your craft.

We believe that it’s one of the most effective content promotion techniques that B2B companies can use. I’ve used it in multiple companies (examples below) and we routinely advise companies we work with to use it as well.

In this article, we’re going to learn how a little-known songwriter in LA used influencer marketing to get his song seen by tens of thousands of people, and how the steps he used can be replicated by any company trying to drive more traffic to their content.

I got the chance to talk to the songwriter over the phone this week after his content went viral, and I’ll share the research he did to make this happen, how he’s capitalizing on the initial win to get more traffic, and more.

I’ll also weave in stories from my own experience doing similar things with B2B companies.

Let’s dive in.

The Piece of Content That Put Songwriter Evan Blum on The Map

Earlier this week, I saw this story on Facebook:

The story detailed how aspiring singer and songwriter Evan Blum, perfectly executed an influencer marketing strategy to drive 40,000 views to his Youtube video overnight. I immediately saw parallels to influencer and PR marketing strategies for companies that I’d read about before. Most notably the strategies outlined by Ryan Holiday in his famous book Trust Me I’m Lying.

I decided this would make a great story for Grow and Convert, so I reached out to Evan and he graciously agreed to be interviewed for this piece. After talking to him, I learned that the execution of this strategy was in large part by accident, which adds to the entertainment value of this story. Nonetheless, there’s a ton we can learn about content strategy, influencer marketing and content promotion from it.

Evan’s actions break down how to leverage an influencer to drive targeted traffic to your site in a way that’ll be relatable to everyone.

Evan’s Crush on Pop Star Camila Cabello Gives Him the Perfect Song Idea for an Influencer Marketing Campaign

I sent a Facebook message to Evan on Tuesday night after reading his story and we hopped on a phone call a few hours later to discuss how he got covered in Refinery29. He told me that he lives in Los Feliz, a suburb of LA that’s just East of Hollywood, and that he is an aspiring musician. Evan is in his 20s, with a thin build and the look of an indie band lead singer. His dream is to be a pop songwriter and he just recorded his first album.

“My producer had a crush on Camila Cabello, and after looking her up, I had a crush on her too” Evan tells me. “We wrote this song as a joke. We thought it would be funny to create a song where someone gave a backhanded compliment to a girlfriend by comparing her to another girl.” The woman they chose to compare the girlfriend to in the song was Camila Cabello.

I didn’t know who she was prior to reading that article from Facebook. But it turns out Camila is a famous singer and prior member of the group Fifth Harmony – who recently recorded a hit solo album and has 3.44M followers on Twitter.

Evan explains, “As we created the song, we did a lot of research about her. For example, she often wears a bow-tie in her hair. We weaved all of these details about her into the song.”

The storyline of the music video is that Evan writes a song for his girlfriend, and when she asks to hear it, it turns out the song is all about how much he loves Camila Cabello – and how he likes his girlfriend because she’s like Camila Cabello. His girlfriend ends up breaking up with him at the end of the video because, well, he likes Camila more than her. It’s pretty amusing.

Here’s the video that you can watch for yourself:

Later we’ll show how Evan leveraged this to get in front of Camila Cabello’s millions of fans, but first let’s talk about why this was a perfect piece of content for an influencer marketing campaign and how marketers inside of companies (including B2B companies) can use similar principles to make influencer-ripe content.

Identifying an Influencer That Has Your Customer Base As Their Audience

Step one in a successful influencer marketing campaign is figuring out a good influencer to target.

To find a good influencer to target, you need to do user research to identify an influencer that your customer base is aware of. A simple way to do this could be to ask your customers “who do you trust most for advice about X industry?” via a phone or email survey.

In Evan’s case, he tells me “his goal is to become a pop singer and songwriter”. And for him, Camila is a perfect target influencer because her fanbase is made of up pop music lovers.

Creating Content That The Influencer Would Want To Share

Evan’s song wasn’t created for the sole purpose of being shared by an influencer. Marketers: notice how it’s not a piece of content that rehashes what an influencer has said, or bullshit roundup post that mentions one.

He created an original, thoughtful piece that wove Camila into his story (in this case, a song), which is flattering for the influencer he’s trying to get the attention of. The influencer isn’t sharing the piece of content out of guilt or annoyance, but out of delight.

The whole story is about how Camila is this amazing woman and how everyone should strive to be like her. And it’s genuinely funny and entertaining. What pop star wouldn’t want to share it?

Here are a couple of ways that you execute on this strategy for your business

Identify an influencer who has your same customer base and create a story about them or with them – ie. write a story all about the influencer that makes them look good.

This was a strategy I used while at ThinkApps. YCombinator did a video series called How to Start a Startup. It was a 20 lecture video series that featured some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names teaching one component of starting a company. Because each of the videos were an hour long, we decided to have writers watch the videos and summarize the lectures into blog posts.

We’d then share the stories with the people who taught the lecture, and share with YC via Twitter and HackerNews – oftentimes they’d share our content with their audience.

Another way to approach this is to reach out to an influencer and ask to do an interview with them as a way to get them to share your piece with their audience.

I reached out to Chris Messina over Twitter and asked to do an interview with him. The key part of the pitching him was letting him know about our audience – product managers, startup founders and developers from the Valley. I also cited traffic numbers and previous interviews that we had done in the past. He agreed and we transitioned the conversation to email to coordinate.

Chris is widely known as the inventor of the hashtag and was also a former employee of Google. We talked about his experience at Google as well as how he needed a much needed break to work on some passion projects. There was so much great information from the interview that we decided to make it a two part series.

The second piece of the series being about his thoughts on the future of social networks.

He shared both of those stories with his audience on Twitter after they were published (back then it was upwards of 70k, now he has over 95k followers). The stories got additional traffic after being posted to a subreddit. The results were thousands of visitors for each article.

I can’t say this enough, the essential part of this strategy is to not just half-ass the story with the intention of trying to get someone to share it. You need to put in the work to create a piece of content that the influencer would want to share AND that is interesting to your intended audience.

As you can clearly see with Evan’s video, it was a really good piece of content and it made the influencer look good.

Getting the Influencer to Share Your Content With Their Audience

After telling me about his thought process around creating his music video, Evan tells me about his initial, simple social promotion strategy, “I shared the video on Facebook, Youtube and Instagram five months ago when I first released the song. But we only ended up with 800 views.”

Not too exciting. But here’s where he accidentally stumbled into influencer marketing. As he explains it, “It wasn’t until I released the album on Spotify that someone searched for Camila by name, found my song and shared it in a Portuguese Facebook group that had a bunch of her fans in it. One of those people tweeted the song at Camila and she retweeted it to her 3.4M followers.”

HAHAHAHAHAHAH OMG OMG
evan, I don’t know why she was upset, I think your song is dope https://t.co/fNlGGfwNNX

— Camila Cabello (@camilacabello97) February 20, 2017

“I didn’t know what was going on” Evan says, “All of a sudden I started getting 50 comments per minute on my video in Portuguese and I was frantically trying to translate them to see what they said.”

From there, the publication Refinery29 picked up the story because they thought it was funny (which is how I first heard about him).

That Refinery29 article sent a ton more traffic to his Youtube video. “In a day and a half nearly 40,000 people had watched my video and my Youtube subscribers grew at the same time” Evan says.

Keep in mind his other videos have on average around 1,200 views, so this was a big deal for Evan.

While the way Evan got the influencer to share his article was an accident, there’s a lot we can learn from it.

The key piece in getting Camila to share the video was having a fan share the video with her telling her that someone created a song about her.

@camilacabello97 https://t.co/wSRhtwqQJ4 hv u listened to this? This song is named after you ?

— Louise Francisca (@FranciscaLouise) February 20, 2017

If I were a company trying to replicate this strategy, one way to engineer this is to identify someone who knows the influencer and have them share it with them. That way there’s a warm connection and it’s more likely to be shared.

Another way you could do this is to share it with the influencer yourself. The key to being successful with this approach is to take the time to craft a personal email. This is something that I did with Hiten Shah.

He ended up sharing the post in his newsletter and it drove over 1,000 people to my article alone.

Lastly, you could pitch it to publications like I did with this piece I created for ThinkApps about the Apple Watch. I identified industry writers who had written about the Apple Watch previously, and sent them personal emails pitching my article to them.

The results? My story got picked up by 9to5Mac and 200 other publications.

The syndication of my story to these publications drove 20,000 unique visitors in a week and it’s what initially launched the ThinkApps blog and put us on the map.

In the case of Evan, the advice I gave him is to use that Refinery29 story and start pitching other reporters about covering different angles of the story. Also, to tailor his pitch to what he thinks their audience might be interested in.

He tells me he’s already started on that strategy, “I spent the afternoon looking up people who’ve covered Camila Cabello in the past and I wrote emails to them sharing my story. One of the publications already wrote back saying they’re interested in covering the story.” Brilliant strategy in my opinion.

Update: After I finished writing this story, I looked back on Evan’s Facebook being we’re newly Facebook friends, and found out that his story indeed got picked up by another publication. None other than Billboard.com. Now it’s also been picked up by Teen Vogue.

While Evan’s success story was a combination of both genius and luck, he accidently laid out a perfect influencer marketing strategy for you to replicate.

For companies launching a blog or looking to drive a large amount of traffic, identify an influencer you can create a story about and get it in front of them. You never know, you could become an overnight success like Evan.

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