Lenny's Newsletter - Content-driven growth
👋 Hello, I’m Lenny and welcome to a ✨ once-a-month-free-edition ✨ of my newsletter. Each week I humbly tackle reader questions about product, growth, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out at the office. If you’re not a paid subscriber, here’s what you missed this month: This week’s newsletter is brought to you by… The Browser is consistently one of my most favorite newsletters. Why? Because every issue brings me joy. How rare is that? I even broke my rule of avoiding sponsorships because I love The Browser so much. Inside each issue, you’ll find a hand-picked selection of the most interesting, best-written, and most get-your-brain-juices-flowing articles on the Internet. Even if you just read the capsule summaries of each selection, your day will be brighter. As a subscriber, you can get 20% off your first year if you enter LENNY20 at checkout.
This question got me thinking — what are all the ways that content can drive growth? There’s obviously SEO. There are also viral blog posts, user-generated-content (UGC), editorially produced blog posts, data-generated pages, and so on. What other strategies are there, and how do they all fit together? Here’s my best attempt at mapping out the landscape of content-driven growth: Where you sit on this 2x2 is based on what you’re optimizing for (SEO vs. virality), and who’s generating the content (users vs. employees). I posit that there are five unique content-driven growth strategies:Let’s break this down:
In previous posts, we’ve explored the top-left quadrant (data and user-generated SEO), and the bottom half (viral growth strategies), so in this post, I’d like to zero in on the less explored top-right quadrant: Editorially-Generated SEO-Optimized (EGSO): I asked Twitter which companies do this type of content-driven growth best, and four companies came up over and over: Slidebean, Ahrefs, Intercom, and HubSpot. (also, Webflow, but we’ll get to that later) I reached out to the founders and/or heads-of-content at each of these companies and asked them if they’d be willing to share their learnings. They all very generously agreed 🙌 Below you’ll find their answers to the following questions:
A HUGE huge thank you to Caya (Slidebean), Tim Soulo (Ahrefs), Kieran Flanagan (HubSpot), John Collins (Intercom), and Mischa Vaughn for sharing these insights with the world. Note: Intercom and Webflow don’t fit squarely into this EGSO category (they aren’t primarily SEO-driven), but I decided to include them in this post anyway because their perspectives are instructive. High-level takeaways:
Any other takeaways as you read this post? I’d love to hear them 👇 Fun stats:Ahrefs: Have published 300+ posts with 1.5m visits/month. Most popular content: Slidebean: Have published 250+ videos with 160K visits/month. Most popular content: Intercom: Have published 870 posts and 262 podcasts, with 100k+ visits/month and 75K+ listeners/month, respectively. Most popular content: HubSpot: In HubSpot's early days, +30% of their customers would come from demand generated by our blogs. Also, if you look at their web traffic (organic, direct, referral), it’s bigger than a lot of other online business publications like TechCrunch, etc. It’s why they always think of their competition for online attention as other media outlets vs. other SaaS brands. Let’s dive in. 1. What convinced you to put resources behind creating content?Slidebean:
HubSpot:
Ahrefs:
Intercom:
2. What kind of resources did you put into content initially?Intercom:
Slidebean:
3. What do the content team and resources look like now?You’re on the free list for Lenny's Newsletter. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. |
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