Content-driven growth

Advice from HubSpot, Ahrefs, Intercom, Slidebean, and Webflow

Mar 2

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Q: Which startups are best at content-driven growth, and what can I learn from them?

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:

User-Generated SEO-Optimized (UGSO): Your users generate public content which Google finds and surfaces in organic search. This primarily drives the growth of companies like Quora, Glassdoor, and Reddit.
Editorially-Generated SEO-Optimized (EGSO): Employees (or contractors) of the company create content with the goal of ranking higher for certain keywords. This primarily drives the growth of companies like Ahrefs, Slidebean, and HubSpot.
Data-Generated SEO-Optimized (DGSO): This strategy is the combination of UGC and Editorial – your company auto-magically generates thousands of individual pages off on your UGC and proprietary data. This primarily drives the growth of companies like Thumbtack, Zapier, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Grubhub.
User-Generated Virality-Optimized (UGVO): UGC content leads to users sharing that content with their friends, which then pulls those friends into the product. TikTok is the ultimate example of this (users sharing watermarked videos with each other), as is the Reface app. The edges of this zone include Airbnb listings (that users share with each other) and Zillow’s Zestimate (which home-owners pass around).
Editorially-Generated Virality-Optimized (EGVO): Employees/founders make one-off viral content — also known as thought leadership or brand building. Content that the founder/company creates with the goal of having that content spread through WOM. This includes Spotify Unwrapped, along with virality-oriented creators like Mr. Beast, Stir’s one-off drops, and Superhuman’s early blog posts.

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:

What convinced them to put resources behind creating content?
What kind of resources did they put into content initially?
What do the content team and resources look like now?
How do they operationalize the content creation?
What advice would they give companies pursuing content-driven growth now?

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:

Start small: Start scrappy and play around with platform, topic, and style until you find something that works.
Align on a clear goal: Is your goal to bring SEO traffic, to drive virality, to build your brand, or to enable sales? Make sure you’re clear on this.
Hunt for opportunity: Research topics where searchers are underserved, and create content that delivers compelling, valuable, and differentiated value to those searchers.
Give the reigns to someone who cares: The best content will be produced by people go truly care about the product/business/topic. Normally, the founders or a passionate full-time employee.
Think long-term: Make sure there’s a clear path to this investment making a significant dent in your growth. Is the upside even worth it?
Build a dedicated team: Eventually, you’ll need 5+ dedicated to this effort. Even more, if you’re doing video.
Be patient: It took years for each company chronicled below to see significant payoff.

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:

“We noticed that the traffic coming from the “pitch-deck” keyword on SEM, was clearly our best type of lead. We doubled-down and very quickly, we maxed out the SEM keyword and were already the first result across our target geos. The problem was, of course, SEM traffic is expensive, and not enough (only about 5% of searches). So we started focusing on SEO, around startup-related keywords. This was the first major marketing breakthrough for the company.
That year, we produced a lot of content (~150 articles), and after a few months managed to get to 3-5 SERP rankings for most of the keywords we had focused on.
For the next two years, that traffic drove our growth. Eventually, though, we realized that getting to 1-2 rank was probably not going to happen regardless of how many articles we published, so we figured we had to find 'the next' search engine: YouTube.
Our first strategy on YouTube was SEO: creating videos that answer questions people are looking for (ie pitch deck).
Once we built an audience, we produce content focused on the YouTube algorithm: focused on high CTRs, high watch time, topics that appeal to broad audiences, and sharing. The thing with sharing is that we have little control on that decision.
I spoke about that here:

HubSpot:

“HubSpot started publishing before they even had a product to sell.
At that time, Dharmesh had been creating content and building a community through Onstartups. Through that site's success, both Dharmesh and Brian saw how much of an audience you could grow to your content if it provided value. It's how Inbound marketing came to be — create assets of value for your audience vs. pay money to interrupt them via traditional advertising.
HubSpot grew through inbound marketing, creating things of value for our audience. There are two parts to our media strategy:
Content to educate. People find this content through search, typically a blog post. Some of those people signup to get a more comprehensive piece of content - ebook, template, course.
Content to influence. We create original stories for our audience around business trends, stories, and case studies featuring successful companies. These are across channels like video and podcasts. Our goal is to get a large audience for these stories”

Ahrefs:

“I'm not sure that this was a single well-thought-out decision to start producing content and allocate a certain amount of resources there. If I remember correctly, the process of ramping up our content operations was very gradual.
When I joined Ahrefs back in 2015 I inherited their already existing blog, which wasn't too popular back in the day even though they had a team of outsourced writers and published content a few times per week.
And because I always thought of myself as a "blogger" and "content marketer" I naturally started looking into ways we could make our blog better.
And then it just kept escalating :)”

Intercom:

“For the four co-founders Intercom was not their first startup. They had come up through the Web 2.0 era so blogging and sharing lessons learned was just part of their DNA, particularly for Eoghan and Des. They were regularly sharing opinionated takes on what they had learned building software products and growing Intercom and other businesses. When I joined to establish a formal content team, about 2.5 years after Intercom was founded, they had built up a sizable reputation and audience with that strategy. Des wrote the first ~100 posts.
We initially focused on high-quality editorial content as a way to stand out from the SEO-driven approach which was the norm at the time. People were happy to promote and share that kind of content and on the flip side the customers who came to us through the blog and podcast spent more and hung around for longer, as they bought into the product and business philosophy we shared through our content. We gate some content as a way to generate leads but we always make sure it’s a fair value exchange i.e. for sharing your email you’re going to get a book that teaches you something meaningful about customer support and is well written and designed.
More recently we’ve been focused on enablement — making sure that the kind of content you see on the blog or hear on the podcast is available in the formats that are needed by our Sales team and other Marketing functions like account based marketing and paid acquisition.”

2. What kind of resources did you put into content initially?

Intercom:

“For the first year I was the entire team (some of the engineers used to jokingly call me “team blog”) but I had a lot of support from our brand design team and everyone at the company was incentivized to create content - whether that was writing blog posts, speaking at events, hosting podcasts, etc. We didn’t pay people or anything but by e.g. adding content creation to personal and team goals it was clear it was part of your job as a product manager/designer/engineer and benefited you in terms of career growth. So while I was the only person with content in my job title, we invested significant time and resources into it.”

Slidebean:

“The first YouTube videos were edited by me, so they only cost a bit of time. We were lucky to have a couple of people on the team who had a background in video production, so we all carved out some time to experiment. This made video experiments very cheap. For the first year or so our videos sucked, and they didn't get any traffic at all, but we didn't suffer because we had spent very little money to produce them. This allowed us to do a trial-error game with Youtube for over 18 months until we finally found the format that worked.”