Here we’ve collected Draft.dev’s favorite resources for content marketing teams. Whether you’re looking to learn about content marketing, recruiting writers, or writing technical blog posts, you’ve come to the right place.
We’ve worked with over 100 startups over the past three years at Draft.dev, so I’ve heard just about every question about SEO (search engine optimization) you can imagine.
Two of the most common questions that founders and early marketing hires ask me are:
Is SEO worth it for early-stage startups? Does it work?
How should we approach SEO given very limited time and budget?
These are complex questions, but after digging into them many times, here’s what I typically tell people:
Creating content and optimizing your website for search engines early will help a lot in 6, 12, or 24 months when the efforts really start to pay off.
That said, it’s a waste of time and money if you don’t have some of the fundamentals down first.
Prerequisites for SEO
The only thing that’s constant in an early-stage startup is change. With pivots so common (and often so stark), there are some basic things you want to have in place before you sink a lot of resources into SEO:
Some degree of product-market fit – This doesn’t have to be perfect, but you should know who you serve and what need your product fulfills.
Basic messaging – The way in which you talk about your solution is often instrumental in creating good content. If you don’t have product and company landing pages down yet, don’t worry about SEO yet.
A clear CTA (call to action) – You need something for readers to do after they find your site. Typically, this would be a free trial of your product, a newsletter subscription, or a call booking page.
A basic understanding of SEO (or time to learn) – Staff at early-stage startups are notoriously stretched thin. If nobody on your team understands basic SEO and content, this isn’t going to be the highest leverage strategy for you.
Assuming you have the above in place, you might be ready to start your search engine optimization journey. The next logical question that founders and marketing leads ask me then, is “What kind of content should we create?”
Let’s dive into that question next.
What Kind of Content Works in Early-Stage Startup SEO?
I’ve found that there are two paths early-stage startups can go down when it comes to SEO content creation. The first is more often the right option, but the second can put up some truly impressive numbers if you have the budget.
Path 1: Focus on Conversions
Conversion rate is the percentage of readers that take a desired action (eg: sign up for a trial, schedule a sales call, subscribe to a newsletter, etc.). Content that focuses on conversions does so at the expense of total traffic volume.
The content most likely to convert is typically bottom or middle of the funnel and highly targeted. Because of this, it typically has very low monthly search volume, but high purchase or conversion intent.
Example
For example, if you ran marketing for an SMS API, the keyword “python sms” would be a great keyword to rank for. Developers searching for this tool are likely looking for a tool exactly like yours, so content that shows how well your tool works for sending SMS messages via Python could do well and lead to a lot of conversions.
But, when you look at the keyword volume in ahrefs, you can see that there are only an estimated 350 searches per month for this term.
That said, the conversion rate for a keyword like “python sms” will likely be much better for you than content that ranks for “python frameworks.
There’s more search volume for “python frameworks” (as you can see above), but developers looking for this term are much less likely to be looking for an SMS API.
When to Choose This Path
Low-volume, high-conversion content is best when you want to sell your C-suite on the value of content with a very small budget. You can target just 3-6 keywords, write a few pillar pieces of content, see them rank and show your boss your conversion rates.
Using this early, low-volume success, you’ll be able to sell the team on scaling up your content operation and pursuing keywords further up the funnel.
Path 2: Focus on Capturing Search Marketshare
The other method that early-stage startups use for SEO is to flood their entire niche with lots of relevant content designed to capture as much readership and search volume as possible. This effectively creates a moat that is exponentially harder for competitors to cross without investing even more in content than you are.
Then, after capturing as many high-volume, low-difficulty keywords as possible, you can use your high domain authority and reputation to start turning this top-of-funnel traffic into trials and paid users.
You can also mix in thought leadership and “hot takes” designed to go viral, attract more backlinks, and build brand awareness on social platforms. This allows you to continue ranking new content faster and the virtuous cycle continues.
Example
If you’re focused on capturing as much search traffic as possible, you want to build up a massive list of high-volume, low-difficulty keywords to pursue in your space. These keywords will typically be less focused on your product and more generally aimed at topics that your target audience might read about.
One of our clients, ContainIQ, took this approach to build a Kubernetes blog with over 200,000 visitors every month before they sold in 2023.
As you can imagine, you have to create a lot of content in a highly focused area to make this work, but it’s one of the most reliable ways to generate traffic that I’ve ever seen.
When to Choose This Path
The problem with this approach is that it requires significantly more investment in content than the first pathway, and you still won’t see results for a couple months. So, there’s a period of blind faith where you’ll need to spend a lot of resources to get the machine running before you see a couple pieces start to climb in the rankings.
The only times I’ve seen this method of quickly scaling developer content work are when the founders are experienced in content and bullish on it as a long-term asset. Typically, this path will require hiring a few content managers and several freelancers (or agencies) to oversee and optimize the high volume of content you produce.
Conclusion
Whether you choose the high-volume/low-conversion or low-volume/high-conversion path, we highly recommend the topic cluster model for selecting keywords. This ensures that you have opportunities to interlink content and prevents the scattered approach that many unsuccessful content operations take.
If you have questions about early-stage startup SEO or you’d like to learn more about how we work with startups to create technical content at scale, schedule a call with us today.
I tried dozens of side projects before starting Draft.dev, and now I’ve worked with hundreds of early-stage startups to help with marketing. So, a lot of founders ask me how to get started in marketing when your marketing budget is small and your product is new.
I created this list to give people an answer that is evergreen (not chasing fly-by-night marketing trends), easy to execute, cheap, and provides a proven ROI when done well.
This marketing checklist is a comprehensive, chronologically ordered list of marketing tactics and strategies that you can use to market your startup. The list is free and open to improvements, so feel free to reach out if you have suggestions.
Pre-Launch Marketing Checklist
Your marketing plan starts long before you launch. Market research, planning, and preparation are critical parts of any marketing strategy, even if you haven’t fully baked your marketing team.
Competitor Research
I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it. – Walt Disney
Social media is the ultimate equalizer. It gives a voice and a platform to anyone willing to engage. – Amy Jo Martin, CEO of Digital Royalty
Search for availability of names on social networks.
Choose 2-3 social media accounts you’ll use based on your customers’ preferences:
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Instagram
Snapchat
TikTok
YouTube
Standardize profile image, background photo, links, and call to action across social channels.
Post-Launch Marketing Checklist
Once you launch, the real fun begins! Whether you go out with a bang or you gradually grow your userbase over months, getting customer feedback is essential for building a successful startup.
Free Promotional Channels
I don’t care how much money you have, free stuff is always a good thing. – Queen Latifah
Post your product on directories and review sites (Matt McCaffrey has compiled a great list on Github or you can use a service like Instaaa).
Run an engagement contest with prizes or free products for winners.
Run retargeting ads to target users who have been to your site before.
Recurring Marketing Checklist
Much of marketing is staying consistent over time. While you need to know that a tactic is viable, you might have to stick with it for weeks to see real results. This marketing to do list gives you a chance to check off all the boxes – literally!
Ongoing Content Marketing and Blogging
Blogging is like work, but without coworkers thwarting you at every turn. – Scott Adams, Creator of Dilbert
Build/update publishing calendar for your blog/video marketing efforts.
Regularly post blog posts on your blog(s).
Solicit guest posts from early customers and fans of your product.
Repurpose existing blog posts:
Record/post video of you reading the post on YouTube.
Any email that contains the words ‘important’ or ‘urgent’ never are, and annoy me to the point of not replying out of principle. – Markus Persson, aka “Notch”, creator of Minecraft
Send a regular email newsletter with blog posts, use cases, customer stories, etc.
Promote email list on social media.
Send 20 cold emails per week to connect with early customers and get direct feedback.
Send new users a personal email introducing yourself.
Social Media
We have technology, finally, that for the first time in human history allows people to really maintain rich connections with much larger numbers of people. – Pierre Omidyar, Founder of eBay
After you’ve kicked off your marketing engine and start to see results, it’s time to optimize. The following ideas will help you get started, but optimizing your marketing efforts is a never-ending challenge.
Run a customer poll (can also generate content for your blog or social media channels).
Create a side project to promote your startup (read more).
Because you’re reading this, I’m going to assume that you already know content is a great way to reach software developers. When done well, content helps you build trust, reach new customers, mitigate support requests, and augment your sales process.
But once you see content working, the next question is how much content do you really need to produce? And, if you create more of it, will you necessarily get more traffic or conversions?
This question comes up a lot in our work with developer tools companies, so I thought it would be interesting to quantify this. I spoke to several clients and colleagues in the industry to understand the kinds of results they’ve seen and the correlation between consistently publishing high-quality technical content and traffic growth.
*Not officially confirmed. Estimates based on previously published data, Ahrefs, and/or SimilarWeb.
This chart is not meant to suggest that publishing frequency is the only factor in generating traffic. All of these brands have been consistently publishing a high volume of content for at least two years, and Twilio and DigitalOcean have been at it for over five years.
Raw traffic numbers are also not the only business goal here. A blog post that attracts 1000 visitors per month, but never leads to a single conversion isn’t nearly as valuable as one that brings in 100 visitors per month with a 25% conversion rate.
Still, I find data like this quite compelling. It’s also interesting to see how companies that have seen success with developer content continue to double down and increase their publishing volume as they grow.
When is Scaling Developer Content the Right Move?
Clearly, publishing more frequently works for some developer tools companies, but is it the right move for every company?
There are basically three things you need to consider to answer this question:
1. Your Goals and Timeline
Typically, developer tools companies start producing content because they want to drive awareness, increase website traffic, and convert more leads into paying customers. These high-level goals are great, but in order to determine how much content you need, you’ll have to get more specific as to how and how quickly your content needs to affect these goals.
For example, if you want your content to help your brand be perceived as a “thought leader” and you have a long timeline, you can probably get away with publishing just one or two pieces of content per month from your executive team.
On the other hand, if you want to rank #1 on Google for highly competitive industry terms and generate 100,000+ pageviews within 12 months, you’ll need to find a way to publish 3-5 new high-quality pieces of content every week. There’s just no way around it.
Nate Matherson, who was the CEO of ContainIQ before it was acquired in 2023, published 225 pieces of content in just 14 months. This took a lot of work to pull off, but the impact on the business was huge. By the end of that period, ContainIQ was receiving over 200,000 visitors every single month.
It’s also important to understand that content efforts compound over time.
Early on, you’ll have to put much more work into it than you see in results, but if you’re consistent and strategic in your approach, you will see exponential results. This creates a huge moat that competitors can’t breach overnight, and it’s the reasons that many companies increase their publishing volume as they see positive results.
It took us about three months to get to 10k visitors per month, about six months to get to 50k visitors per month, and about 12 months to get to 150k visitors per month.
Next, in order to determine how much content you need, you need to consider your product, customer, and buying cycle.
Some businesses only need a few pieces of content to augment a robust sales function. For example, if you’re an early-stage startup selling a high-ticket software product that CIOs at Fortune 100 companies will buy, you don’t need massive inbound interest or a bottoms-up content strategy to start. You probably just need a few pieces of content to help augment your sales efforts.
But if you’re pursuing a bottoms-up strategy that will reach hands-on practitioners or you’re pursuing a product-led growth strategy, you need to produce a lot of content. Ideally, you want this content to rank well in search engines, get spread on social media, and act as a useful resource for your users. This means you’ll need a high-volume content operation because you’re competing with larger, more mature businesses (like those listed above) that already publish multiple pieces of content every week.
3. Your Budget and Team Strengths
Finally, while most marketing teams want to produce more content, there are almost always practical limitations based on your budget and existing team’s strengths. Producing technical content at scale is a lot of work, and it typically costs 2-3x as much to produce as non-technical marketing content.
You also need to consider whether your organization is ready to start increasing its content output. For example, if your CEO demands to approve each piece of content before it goes live, he’ll perpetually bottleneck your output.
What if We Run Out of Things to Create?
Another concern that developer marketing teams sometimes bring up is that there are only so many pieces of content they can write that directly relate to their industry or product.
This fear comes from either a limited understanding of content marketing or your target audience. There is always more valuable content to create, which is why the top developer-first brands’ publishing frequency typically increases as they grow.
First, you can create content designed to capture all the relevant keywords in your niche. Next, you can explore keywords that relate to other problems your target audience will solve around the same time as they adopt your product. For example, if you’re building a software testing tool, you might start by targeting keywords around software testing, unit testing, automated testing, etc. Then, you can move on to cover keywords around continuous integration, agile development, coding best practices, and upgrading legacy software as all these keywords are closely related to software testing.
Next, you can create content that focuses on your product: how it works, why you built it a particular way, how customers are using it, etc. Tutorials, integration guides, and “how to build X” type content is some of the most popular content we produce for clients of Draft.dev.
Then, there’s opinion-driven content. This kind of content can help differentiate you and define your brand voice. Plus, it tends to be more viral when done right.
Next, you can focus on your customers. Produce case studies, get testimonials and present them in interesting ways, highlight industry news, and interview your customers’ subject matter experts. Making your customers look good always makes your brand look good to them.
You can also explore other forms of media. I still think writing provides the most accessibility and value in developer content, but video is closing in. Some developers tend to prefer video over written tutorials, and webinars work really well for certain businesses. Audio is also becoming increasingly appealing as podcasts are very popular among software developers.
You can also invest in more short-form content or in “spinning” your long-form content for social media. Twitter, Linkedin, and even TikTok are popular with certain subsets of the developer community, but you can also seed content in relevant Slack or Discord groups.
Once you’re publishing enough content on your own site, you can also start to explore syndication partnerships. Cross-publishing your content on Dev.to and Medium is a good starting point, but also consider paid collaborations with other industry sites and newsletters.
Finally, your work in producing technical content is literally never done because the landscape around you is changing all the time. Tutorials get out of date as new software is released, best practices change as trends evolve, and new competitors are constantly joining every developer tool market.
We have to refresh content nearly every week, to ensure that past content is still relevant. This is especially true for tutorials, where we have to ensure the latest updates in tech or feature changes are incorporated.
So, if you’re committed to content as a growth channel, you have to be ready to invest in it.
Consistently.
For years.
The results of scaling up your content can be fantastic – it’s one of the most consistent and predictable long-term marketing channels – but it’s not necessarily easy to do.
In two years, our team at @Draftdev has created over 1400 pieces of developer-focused content! 🤯
If you had told me we’d be here a year and a half ago, I would have laughed at you.
It’s amazing what having a great team and strong focus can do.
And of course, if you’re looking for help producing more high-quality technical content aimed at software engineers, data engineers, platform engineers, or similar, I’d love to chat. Book a time to talk to us today.
Product-led growth (PLG) has been one of the hottest terms in marketing for several years, and recently it’s become more prominent in the developer marketing space. Coined in 2016 by Blake Bartlett at OpenView Partners, product-led growth describes a growth model where product usage drives customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. Twilio, Stripe, and Shopify are known as developer-first organizations that use a product-led growth strategy, but there’s one thing that really helps set them apart: their content.
At Catchy, a developer marketing agency based in Seattle, our content team has seen a significant uptick in client interest in product-led growth. Over the last six months alone, we’ve had more clients come to our door asking for product-led growth support than we have in the rest of our 13-year history. This isn’t surprising, considering the 2022 Product Led Growth Benchmarks report found that 58% of B2B SaaS companies had a product-led growth strategy last year, and 91% of them planned to increase their level of product-led growth investment.
Product-led growth is here to stay, and developer marketing professionals have been creating content to support it for years, whether they’ve realized it or not. Developers are, at their core, an audience that wants to get hands-on with a product to learn, build, and scale. The key to any successful developer marketing program is a brand’s ability to provide the right content that gets the product into users’ hands as seamlessly as possible.
In the following blog post, we’ll go over the types of content that are the foundation for a best-in-class product-led growth strategy.
What Developers really want
The first step to creating content that supports product-led growth is mapping out each stage of the developer journey. No matter what stage they’re in, the ultimate goal is to provide developers with an easy way to self-serve. If you don’t provide content like this, users have a steeper uphill climb searching out the information they need to prove the value of your product or get answers to issues or bugs they encounter. Spending hours digging up answers on Reddit or Stack Overflow definitely isn’t making a developer’s life easier.
Here’s what you need to know about the goals of product-led growth content in each stage.
Discovery
In the Discovery stage, the goal is to make your product stand out. You need to quickly inform developers what unique value your product will add to their lives and how they can quickly begin to implement it. Developers want to make sure a tool that’s good today will still be good five years from now. Your content should address the key questions they’re using to evaluate your product, such as the quality of the documentation, ability to scale, integration with existing ecosystem of tools, and more.
If you’re starting from scratch, checking the search volume of relevant keywords using the Google Keyword Planner can be helpful. If you type in something like “code review tool,” you can filter by average monthly searches and use the results to guide what you create. For example, “code review checklist” has a high number of searches per month, making it a piece of content your users might want to see.
Evaluation
The goal of content in the evaluation phase is to go deeper into the value of your product – with things like case studies, webinars, explainer videos, and robust documentation. Since folks have different learning styles, you want to offer as many different types of content as possible, from written documentation to video tutorials and webinars to live office hours where users can ask questions and get help.
At Catchy, we use deep audience research and strategic recommendations to drive and inform content creation. If you’re just getting started producing content or you’re launching a new product, the Developer Marketing Flywheel is a structured approach to building an effective developer marketing program.
Retention
Once a user is in your ecosystem, the goal becomes quickly meeting their needs when challenges arise, as well as showing how other customers are getting value from your product. What are users building and why? Where can your users turn for help when they run into a problem or bug? A robust community, help articles, and customer support are all essential.
Your community can also become a source of content ideas. Ask your developer community what types of content and topics would be most useful on their journey.
How to bring content types to life
Here are three pieces of content you need to win with developers.
Documentation and Technical Manuals
Documentation, aka “the docs”, is the platform where technical users build a working mental model of your software product. Detailed feature explanations, technical architecture diagrams, procedure walkthroughs, sandboxes, API specs, and tutorials with code snippets are all part of your documentation. From there, your world is their oyster!
Because it’s so foundational and important, it makes sense to treat your docs like a product that can be updated easily and truly meets your users’ needs. A frustrated or confused developer looking at incorrect or outdated docs is not a happy developer, and they certainly aren’t going to stick around.
The good news is the data is in, and technical users love self-serving technical information. In fact, no matter how good the “live support” offering is, less than 5% usually contact customer support immediately when confronted with a product problem.
There’s a reason RTFM (“read the friggin’ manual!”) is a time-honored and evergreen piece of advice for developers at all levels: The documentation should have all the answers your users need. For this reason, making sure your technical content is platinum standard needs to be a priority. Focus on writing and maintaining great docs that you’ve tested robustly and have confidence in. Devs raving about your docs to other devs is a fantastic vehicle for product-led growth.
Onboarding Guides
Onboarding guides are another cornerstone of your developer content. This may seem obvious, but it’s worth pointing out: 74% of customers say they’ll switch to other solutions if the onboarding process is too complicated.
The entire onboarding process is an opportunity to introduce yourself to your users. On a very basic level, what is your company all about, and who is your product for? And equally important, how can users quickly get up to speed on your product and begin using it to create value and make their lives easier?
An onboarding guide doesn’t have to be a written PDF: for example, Slack has shared several snackabletweets that help users get started deploying apps faster. Think outside the box and consider video tutorials and drip email campaigns that provide a steady stream of tips. You can also mix media formats by embedding video or audio to appeal to a wide range of users.
Case Studies
Your content work doesn’t end once a customer starts using your product. Content still plays a very important role in client retention, from a robust knowledge base to a community where folks can connect and get questions answered. And there’s another type of content that is immensely valuable in both the evaluation and retention phases: case studies.
Sure, you’ve got a nifty new toy, but what are you going to build with it? Giving your users inspiration is a key part of not only selling them on an initial investment, but keeping them around long term. When customers start doing new and exciting things with your product, you need to engage with them. Invite them to share their story in a video (like this great example from Cohere) or a blog, and highlight the success they’re seeing.
Putting real people and, ideally, great statistics out there as the face of your product can be a real flywheel for growth. Maybe other customers in that particular industry see the case study and start exploring, or maybe a developer who already uses your product for something else sees new possibilities. Case studies can significantly contribute to your overall product-led growth strategy by showing the tangible results your product gets out there in the real world.
Conclusion
Content is the bedrock of any quality product-led growth strategy, and creating educational content that contributes something of value to your users can feel overwhelming to those new to it. Creating a community, nailing your technical documentation, and building a solid onboarding guide – all these things can add up, taking a team of a few people countless hours.
Our advice is: focus on the little things that can make a big difference. Maybe that’s writing up amazing “Getting Started” docs, or maybe that’s a drip email campaign that improves your new user retention. Whatever it is, focus on what you can do and do it well. There are few things developers appreciate more than thoughtful, genuinely helpful content.
Have any thoughts or questions about how developer content contributes to a product-led growth strategy? Connect with Kathie and Lucy on LinkedIn.
If you want to hear more from Catchy on differentiating your content, take a listen to the DevMar Debugged Podcast with Cam Agnew, our Creative Director, and Kathie Jurek, our Associate Director of Content.
To say that Developer Relations is booming is an understatement.
Half of all DevRel programs were instituted less than two years ago. A quarter of companies doing DevRel have multiple programs active and 33.5% of these companies aren’t even what we think of as traditional “technology” companies.
It seems that any business with a connection to third-party developers is considering a DevRel program. On top of that, Developer Relations requires a unique set of skills that are difficult to develop quickly. This has led to a scramble for scarce talent when it comes to hiring DevRels.
As a former engineering manager and CTO, I can empathize. Hiring engineers in a competitive market was tough and the job market almost always felt painfully lopsided. In this piece, I’ll outline a framework for hiring developer relations professionals with insights drawn from other leaders in the space. By the end of this, you should have a good sense of what DevRels commonly do and how you can source and attract the best ones to your organization.
Are You Ready to Hire a DevRel?
Before you start your search, you should consider whether you genuinely need one and where they’re going to fit into your org.
Developer relations covers a vast multitude of activities which are almost never done by the same person. Your DevRel could be anything from an evangelist to a community manager, a technical content creator, or a support liaison.
Source: State of Developer Relations Report 2022
If you want your very first hire to be an “all-purpose” DevRel or you want them to figure out the mix of activities themself, you’re setting them up for failure. Qualified candidates will actively avoid companies without a clear goal and plans to execute DevRel.
Josh Dzielak, Co-Founder and CTO at Orbit, says as much in his blog:
Your first DevRel should scale what’s already working, not completely start from scratch…DevRels put their reputation on the line for the companies they represent, and companies with no history of participation represent unknowns and risk.
Before you actually hire a DevRel, founders or executives should spend some time doing the job themselves. This will give you a sense of what works in the space and save you a ton of time and money later.
Defining Scope of Work and Success Criteria
The more specific you can get with your DevRel job description, the more likely you are to find the right person.
You’re also going to have to find the right metrics to measure their success. This tends to be a particular problem, as Shawn Wang, Head of Developer Experience at Airbyte, points out in his excellent blog post:
I’ve been asked to measure all these in my work: GitHub stars on my demos (yuck), traffic attributed to my Google Analytics UTM tag (yuck yuck), number of badges I could scan at a conference (yuck yuck yuck). All well intentioned but ultimately not meaningful, because they value quantity over quality, breadth over depth, free-and-superficial over paid-and-indicating-serious-interest.
Here’s a more systematic way to go about it: 1) list the activities you want your DevRels to perform, 2) set logical targets for those activities, and 3) work out how many people it’s going to take to perform those activities.
Typically, DevRel tasks can be categorized into three buckets: Content, Community, and Code.
1. Content
Content is a cornerstone of developer relations. In fact, according to the State of Developer Relations Report 2022, the primary challenge for DevRel programs today is keeping up with “continuous content creation.”
Adam Duvander, Founder at EveryDeveloper, puts it like this:
Imagine a room full of developers, ready to hear your conference talk. How many are in the audience—50? 100? 500? As awesome as web development is, there’s a natural cap to who can hear your message in person.
A blog post can garner the same attention month after month. If you are strategic about what you publish, your content will attract even more developers.”
Developer-focused content tends to be very technical and edges up right against the documentation world. Everything from use cases to integration tutorials, implementation guides, FAQs, and support collateral are useful content assets.
It’s not unusual for companies to have multiple full-time DevRels just for content creation. Alternatively, you can have someone set content strategy internally and outsource the writing to a specialized agency.
If you don’t have a way to reach your developers, the rest of your DevRel program doesn’t amount to much.
Community engagement can take different forms. Online forums like StackOverflow, Reddit, Hacker News, YouTube comment sections, and various Slack groups are typically where developers will have discussions that shape opinions and behaviors.
Your DevRels absolutely have to be there in order to influence, but also to engage with and collect feedback from the audience. The thing about online communities, though, is that a) they’re vast spaces and b) the discussions aren’t instantaneous. This means that if community momentum is important for you, you’ll probably have to devote full-time technical community managers to these forums.
The other place community interaction can happen is at conferences and in-person events. Here the conversations tend to be rapid and robust. Companies typically deploy Developer Evangelists at these events to speak, persuade, and to listen.
The trick is to let the excitement of an event bleed into online forums later, where the discussion about your product is kept alive and you can hype up the next event you’re organizing. This sort of operation requires deep coordination within your DevRel team.
Community Metrics:
Members in Slack/Discord
Number of weekly new topics in StackOverflow/GitHub Discussions
Attendees at events and talks
User contributions (content/community responses)
Code
Code- or product-focused DevRels can bring tremendous value to both the community and their company. For instance, in the lead up to a product launch, you might see them beta testing the product, often in association with users, or creating interesting demos around the application.
Frequently, they’re also responsible for non-core integrations and developer support. At SendGrid, for instance, Developer Evangelists are custodians of all their official API wrapper libraries and open source documentation.
As part of these activities, DevRels are also well placed to funnel user feedback back to the product teams.
Code Metrics:
Open source code contributions
Number of user issues funneled through DevRel
Monthly users of product/integrations
Launch day users and mentions
Finding DevRel Professionals
Developers, especially senior ones, rarely spend time browsing through run-of-the-mill job boards, even though they may well be open to a career change. You have to reach out to them where they spend time.
1. Look to Promote from Within
Companies tend to underestimate how big a role product and organizational familiarity can play in the success of a DevRel.
Often, the ideal candidate can be found among the ranks of your own engineers and technical leads. Similar employees like solution architects and sales consultants who have technical backgrounds and direct experience working with customers can be good choices as well.
This is a good way to make your first DevRel hire for a number of reasons: a) there’s less of a learning curve involved, b) if they don’t enjoy the experience, you can always transition them back to core engineering, and c) it establishes a starting point that newer hires can scale from.
2. Consider Champions Among Your Customers
You don’t want to make a habit of poaching engineers from your customers. But the fact is, a developer who has argued for your product at their company and can identify with other users of your product is really the perfect candidate.
And frankly, you’d be surprised how often this kind of thing happens naturally. Big champions of a tool will leave their company for the tool because they see more potential in that product than their current role.
3. Look for ‘Non-DevRel’ DevRels
You’ll often come across engineers who are doing DevRel activities like creating content and speaking at conferences without actually being a DevRel.
Keep an eye out for these people as you browse through blogs and videos and ask them if they’d like to make a job out of it. Relevant HN bloggers, Twitter influencers, YouTubers, and Slack contributors can all be good candidates.
4. Use Specialized Job Boards
If you’ve hired other developers, you’ll know this. LinkedIn and similar job boards are simply not the right places to look for a DevRel. The space is big enough now that there are specialized job boards that cater to DevRel careers. Whether you’re looking for a Developer Advocate, Technical Writer, Community Manager, or Documentation Engineer, you’ll find one there.
5. Talk to Your Content Partners
One of the more creative ways to discover “hidden” candidates is talking to business partners like your technical content agency. At Draft.dev, for instance, we work with over 300 software engineers to create authoritative developer-focused content.
We don’t mind making introductions that benefit both our clients and writers. In fact, for clients who need less than a certain volume of content, we often refer them to freelance writers anyway for scaled-down service.
Hiring DevRel Professionals
Once you have a list of applicants for the role, you’ll need to start filtering through them to make hires.
You’ll want to get this right since your first few DevRels tend to set the tone for the whole team. Moreover, they’re expensive to hire. The median base salary for a DevRel is a little more than that of a senior developer in the U.S. — $148,105.
Step one is outlining the necessary values. Some of the best DevRels I know aren’t necessarily great engineers, but they do have these qualities:
Empathy
Passion for sharing knowledge
Willingness to learn new technical topics
Check for value-alignment as you hire your candidates. Make sure you use a process to do this so that you can test them objectively and standardize the quality of your hires.
Here’s a process that I’ve used to recruit a number of developers over the years as well as one that we’ve used to hire over 150 people at Draft.dev:
1. Transparent Job Description
By now you will have set out your DevRel expectations. List them out in as much detail as possible in the job description. At Draft.dev, we also make it a point to publicize the salary for every role so that candidates can decide at the outset if it’s a fit for them or not.
2. Preliminary Screenings
Initially, you’ll want to screen applicants based on their resume. I recommend asking the remaining ones to remotely complete a mini-assignment that takes anywhere between 15-30 minutes.
This will let you test a couple for the skills in the job description. For instance, questions such as how they’d react in certain interactions with product users can let you test for communication skills and empathy.
3. Technical + Cultural Interviews
A reasonable grounding in technical subject matter is essential for this job. After all, your DevRels will need to competently talk to users and address their questions.
Consider evaluating their experience with things like API standards and best practices, documentation, SDKs, general programming skills, and whatever else is necessary for your product and community. You’ll also want to test their soft skills and situational responses in real time.
4. Paid Trial
Finally, ask your top two or three candidates to complete a paid trial that mimics the day-to-day of the job. This will let them experience your work style first-hand and vice versa. PostHog, for instance, hosts what it calls a SuperDay, which is a paid full day of work at the company.
Provided your finalists make it through a reference check, you now have your first DevRels. Rinse and repeat for future hires. Don’t be afraid to experiment with your process either. The beauty of using one is that you have data that lets you improve the outcome each time.
Want to learn more about Developer Relations? Read more about it on our blog, and if you need compelling developer-first content as part of your DevRel strategy, schedule a discovery call with us today.
Having worked with startups for over a decade, I’ve seen people try a lot of creative things in content marketing. The truth is, content marketing is partly creative, but it’s a lot more methodical than most people realize.
While most of our clients at Draft.dev are developer tools companies, these tips are relevant in other contexts as well, so I hope this helps you as you attempt to get the most from your content marketing this year.
Framework for Maximizing Content Marketing ROI
Marketing is more science than art. While there is certainly some creativity in it, the highest performing content marketing teams tend to be analytical and data-driven in their approach. This four-part framework offers you a set of repeatable processes that you can bank on to drive predictable results.
1. Defining Success
To have a successful content strategy, you need to define what success looks like.
One of the first questions we always ask our new clients is what are their goals for their content and these are some of the responses we hear most often:
Garner 10,000 page views in the next quarter or so
Rank among the top three results for five of their 50 target keywords
Generate 500 qualified leads a month
Answer 20 support tickets a month with content
Create collateral that helps close “X” new sales deals a month
All of these are good, specific goals that will tell the kind of content you need and, with a few follow-ups, allow me to gauge the strength of your funnel.
But they’re also very different goals and it’s impossible to chase all of them at once without a massive budget and team behind it. If you’re a smaller company or startup, you probably don’t have those kinds of resources and you have to prioritize the goals that will help you most at this point in your journey.
One way to prioritize them is by estimating their payback period. For instance, generating page views is great for awareness but, generally, views don’t translate into sales immediately.
Content is a long-term effort that typically takes 12-24 months to drive revenue. If you want quicker ROI, consider content like sales collateral that helps convert leads into customers.
In general, the fewer goals you have at a time, the easier it is to track and hit them. This is not to say, however, that you can’t get inventive with your goals. I once had a client, a series A startup, tell me that they simply wanted to own every keyword in their niche. This was what they needed to showcase progress during their next funding round.
As long as you have a goal in mind, you can justify (or not) the ROI on it. Without one, you can cycle through as many agencies or marketing initiatives as you want, but you’re just flying blind.
2. Design a Content Plan
The next step is to take your goals and design a plan for the pieces of content you write. Most of our clients tend to have a goal in mind (ex: page views) and they come to us for content planning and creation.
Typically, we’ll ask them questions around where in the funnel they’re trying to drive conversions. This tells us what kind of content is likely a better fit for you.
As a rough rule-of-thumb, the higher up the funnel your prospects are, the cheaper it is to produce content for them and the greater the payback period for that content.
Thought Leadership
Thought leadership pieces are a chance for your company to give its take on where the industry is heading and key trends within your space. These are best suited to the awareness stage of the funnel.
They aren’t very good at triggering purchases, but they can be powerful assets that help drive interest in the brand, shareability, and backlinks. What’s more, you only have to create a few of them to get good results.
Keyword Research
Pieces based on keyword research are another way to build awareness for your brand or product. For instance, if your product is a better version of SQLite, but nobody knows what it’s called, you could go ahead and write really good content around how to use SQLite and plug your tool at the end.
Your target keywords ideally have to be a mix of high-volume, high-intent, and low-competition search terms.
Keyword-optimized content helps drive page views and improve your domain authority. It also gives you an opportunity to showcase industry knowledge and push along prospects at the consideration stage of the funnel.
Community Research
This is similar to keyword research, but a little less predictable. By going out to places like StackOverflow, Reddit, different Slack groups, and other community forums, you can glean insights from the discussions happening there.
This is a great way to discover new content ideas and real-world problems that nobody else is writing about. Community research helps improve audience consideration for your brand, especially around topics that aren’t being addressed by other companies.
Sales Collateral
This is any kind of content that helps your sales or marketing teams close deals. It targets prospects who are at the bottom of your sales funnel (e.g. people who’ve completed a free trial of your product) and gets them to purchase your tool.
A good example of sales collateral is something like an integration guide or tutorial for your product and other frameworks.
This can help an engineer go from “this seems cool” to “this might actually work for me.” It can also help eliminate resistance from engineering stakeholders when the primary buyer is the IT head or a business lead.
Sales collateral works pretty much opposite to the way thought leadership and keyword content does. It’ll help you close deals but won’t bring in any new traffic. This is why good content strategy involves a mix of different content-types for different situations.
Augmenting Documentation
Augmentative documentation also targets the bottom of the funnel and is very similar to sales collateral, but more in-depth. A good example of this is a step-by-step guide that demonstrates how a product might work in practice.
For instance, if you have a code coverage tool that integrates with different CI/CD platforms, languages, and frameworks and you need to show the integrations between these things, building out a detailed tutorial can help you do that.
This kind of content lets engineers test out your product for themselves before they buy into it or maybe even discover it as they’re researching related frameworks and tools.
Bear in mind that the kind of content you produce, the reach you want to achieve, and the budget you have to commit are all related. Reaching more senior business leaders at a high volume is extremely hard. On the other hand, reaching a high volume of junior staffers with content can be relatively cheap because there’s a greater search volume for junior-level keywords and junior-level content is much cheaper to create.
3. Publishing and Promoting Your Content
A lot of clients tend to underestimate this bit. The amount of time spent and resources spent publishing and promoting your content can be difficult to nail down.
There are three main channels to publish and promote your content:
Social media and email newsletters
Community forums and blogs
Search engines
The channel you use has to be in line with the stage of the funnel you’re at. Public channels like Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Hacker News are naturally more top-of-funnel and offer broader reach.
On the other hand, if you’re sending out content as DMs, support responses, or Slack messages in your community, it’s usually aiming towards the bottom of the funnel.
The first step is to create a checklist of where each piece needs to be published and how. Once you have the checklist in place, it’s a good idea to delegate the rote work of actually publishing and promoting it to a junior member of the team or even a freelancer.
You can also put some money behind it, either by promoting a piece on social media, running ads to a piece, syndicating it, paying for backlinks to it, or contributing to a newsletter, depending on your budget.
It’s worth noting that there are plenty of ways to organically get backlinks without a cold outreach to various webmasters, such as contributing to HARO or via guest posts.
And finally, don’t be afraid to repromote a piece on your personal and company social media channels every so often. Social media algorithms often limit the organic reach of a post to a certain percentage of your followers. Reposting it can help you reach a wider audience every time you do it.
4. Tracking and Iterating
If you want to maximize ROI on your content, you have to a) track your current ROI and b) iterate profitable practices.
Here is how some of our clients track their ROI.
A long-form piece of keyword-based content can cost you around $2,000 to produce. Let’s be generous and say it brings you 100 email signups, 3% of which convert to paying customers. You know from your internal data that the customer lifetime value (CLV) for your SaaS product is $1,000, bringing the lifetime value of that piece of content to $3,000. This means that your ROI for that piece is $1,000.
Now there are plenty of caveats here in that you could run paid ads to it or spend time refreshing it, both of which will carry additional costs and revenue. But if this is how it shakes out, you can do content all day long.
The only catch is that it takes a while to build up enough content and data to get you these numbers. And if you’re on a funding cycle and have to demonstrate results in six months or so, it’s a good idea to be flexible in how you target your prospects, such as via sales collateral and BoFu content.
Let’s say your sales team has 10 leads stuck at a certain technical question that your team doesn’t know how to answer and they’d like content around it. You create a piece of sales collateral which solves that query for 30% of the prospects, who in turn become customers. At a CLV of $1,000, the lifetime value of that sales collateral is now $3,000 and your ROI $1,000.
The difference is, it’s a lot faster to prove content ROI like this than if you’re using keyword-based, ToFu content that your leads will take time to discover
There are a few different tools you can use to track result metrics. Google Analytics and Search Console are two that you should absolutely have installed. Other essential ones include an email capture tool like Mailchimp, a CRM tool like HubSpot or Salesforce, and a social scheduling tool like Buffer or Sprout Social.
Other add-on tools that can help include keyword ideation tools like Ahrefs and Semrush and user behavior analytics tools like Hotjar.
Finally, you need to update your content to improve its performance over time. Typically, developer-oriented content starts to get out of date within two or three years and by five years, it’s practically useless in most cases.
Keeping it relevant can mean either refreshing it to add in new keywords and information or even completely rewriting it if you want to keep ranking for a particular keyword.
You can also pay attention to the tactics that have helped you rank for certain keywords and then ideate topics in a similar way to repeat that success. I’d recommend reviewing your published content on a quarterly basis to see what needs to be revised, repromoted, and so on.
Conclusion
Yes, content marketing can take a while to start showing a return. But if you are consistent and use an established framework, that ROI is practically guaranteed.
I’d love to hear what you think. Find me on Twitter to continue the conversation.
There are very few marketing strategies where your budget is practically guaranteed to provide a compound investment, but when done right, content marketing is one of them.
I started writing blog posts for Draft.dev two years ago and initially, they’d bring in just a handful of visitors each per month. But, I kept at it and even hired other people to write for me, and now we get some 12,000 visitors a month through organic channels alone.
We’re paying nothing to receive these visits, whereas our competitors who run paid ads would have to pay close to $24,000 to get the same traffic. What’s more, the more you invest in content marketing and the longer you keep at it, the better your results get and the cheaper it is to acheive those results.
Content marketing may take time to get going, but it generates much higher ROI in the long term than most other channels. As I’ll explore in this article, this makes content an ideal strategy for ‘bootstrapped’ or self-funded companies who have a longer time horizon than venture-backed startups.
Why Content Is Ideal for Bootstrapped Startups
Venture capital funding leads to some interesting spending patterns. By taking cash from investors, founders are committing to show very fast results. This makes channels like paid ads or cold outreach more appealing as they tend to generate more short-term results.
The problem with paid ads is that the results scale linearly until you reach market penetration, making them less efficient than other channels in the long run. Let’s say you spend $2000 a month on paid ads and get 1000 visitors. If you want 2000 visitors, you now have to spend at least $4000. Often, as you spend more, you’ll have to stretch into less relevant results and end up lowering your conversion rate, making paid ads less economical as they scale.
Now let’s say you spend $5000 a month on a targeted content marketing strategy. Within four to six months, you could easily reach 1000 visitors every month, even if you stop creating content for a month or two. Organic traffic has a tendency to compound over time (assuming you don’t wait too long as eventually, it will get stale).
Content takes longer to pay off, but after a certain point, it consistently generates traffic that you no longer have to work or pay for.
Having said that, content works best when there is a sizable audience to read it.
According to Carly Cais, Founder at RevvSpark, content marketing is an effective customer acquisition strategy for startups that have at least 10 customers and have demonstrated initial product-market fit. “I would not recommend diving into content creation beyond a simple website until a startup has customers that they can learn from.”
Benefits of Content Marketing
While the long-term ROI is excellent, this return is just one among a multitude of reasons you should consider content marketing for your business.
1. Content Helps You Build a Following
Quality content has the ability to educate, entertain, and create positive experiences for your readers. This prompts them to keep coming back for more and even share your pieces on their channels. Persisting with thoughtful, original content can help you build a large following of potential customers.
2. Improves Visibility for Your Business
SEO-optimized content is a no-brainer for a lot of reasons. It educates your existing readers, but also helps new readers discover your content through the keywords you’ve embedded in it. It also helps improve the domain authority and search ranking of your website as a whole, making it easier for people to find you.
3. Generates Better Quality Leads
Content is excellent for driving leads and customers for your brand. You can do this either by placing calls-to-action (CTAs) directly in your content or targeting your readers via email. What’s more, inbound marketing helps generate much better quality leads than outbound, since content helps you earn trust before the sales call.
4. Positions You as an Authority in the Industry
A great blog can help build credibility, helping readers find information on the subject and positioning you as an industry expert. Sometimes trading off this reputation is enough to win you customers or at least traffic from other industry experts who respect you.
Tips for Effective Content Marketing
Marketing is much closer to a science than an art. There are simple, repeatable frameworks you can rely on to build a content marketing engine that delivers consistently. I built thisisgoodmarketing.com in partnership with Manuel Weiss to help startups do just that.
In our in-depth courses, we break down content marketing into a basic formula that you can implement to drive measurable results. In short:
1. Define Your Business Objectives
The first step to executing a successful content strategy is defining your business objectives. It sounds like basic advice, but you’d be surprised at how many companies make the mistake of publishing random pieces without a coherent strategy behind them. This will likely get you limited results even in the long term.
Decide what you’re aiming for — brand awareness, search ranking, or leads — and then set achievable targets for it. This will then inform all your downstream decisions, including your topics, the kind of content you create, where you publish it, how often you publish it, and so on.
2. Be Strategic About Keywords
A keyword strategy is a cornerstone of your SEO efforts and will determine the direction in which your business grows.
Let’s say you run a fintech startup that offers banking solutions for Zoomers. Presumably, solutions like simplified retail payments and access to credit would be key. Life insurance and mortgages — not so much. Before you push out content, you’ll need to embed it with keywords that target these specific pain points. What’s more, your keywords groups will need to be fairly consistent across all your content, including your website, blogs, and guest posts. This:
ensures that all your content efforts are pulling in the same direction; and
teaches the search algorithm what your business is exactly about and helps improve your ranking for those keywords.
In general, keyword strategy tends to be a mix of good research and technical skills and a basic grasp of human psychology. Let’s consider the example of a company that builds cooking processors. Now the keyword “cooking robot” can be quite competitive within the industry. However, a street-smart marketer might divine that other keywords, such as “home chef” or “daily meals delivery,” are likely users searching for a solution to the same problem — assisted cooking; they’ve just never heard of a cooking robot before.
Creative keyword targeting like this can get you traffic your rivals aren’t even competing for. This is important because keywords with high search volumes and high difficulty aren’t a realistic match for startups with low domain authority. It’s easier to rank your website for keywords which are less competitive.
Semrush and Ahrefs both have tools that you can use to gauge various keyword metrics. You can also use them to explore keyword ideas for your brand and strike a balance between attracting traffic and easily ranking your website.
3. Create Relevant Backlinks
People often find backlining a stressful process. There are many reasons link building campaigns fail, but there are two main ones:
Your content is simply not good enough.
It’s not relevant to the needs of top webmasters in your space.
Moz’s classic ‘How to Rank’ guide recommends that you should focus 50% of your time creating the content and 50% promoting it.
If you really want to rank for something, first ask yourself: How is your content better than that which is currently ranking for a specific keyword? Is it providing genuine value to the reader in exchange for the potential traffic?
Next, add information in your piece that makes it likely to be picked up by relevant websites. Backlinks from random websites which aren’t connected to your business won’t do you much good. This is because content “usefulness” (indicated by domain authority and popularity of the page) is believed to be Google’s overarching criteria for ranking a page. The more people share your content contextually, the more “useful” it is.
If you’re in the middle of scaling your startup and don’t have a lot of time or money to spend on premium backlinks, there are some tried-and-tested fallbacks for you. Early on at Draft.dev, our solve for this was publishing a lot of guest posts on relevant forums and pitching quotes to journalists on HARO.
This was a good starting point and helped improve our domain authority and grow our traffic. Once we were ready to start ranking specific articles (usually a tricker prospect), we hired an outreach specialist to help us build quality backlinks for each piece.
4. Adapt Content to Suit Your Needs
Different types of content have different strengths and weaknesses.
Blog articles are a staple of most content strategies. They’re a top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) mechanism perfect for a range of things, including SEO, starting a conversation with your audience, educating them, and thought leadership. With every article, it’s important to be really intentional about what you want it to do in relation to the buyer journey.
We have a spreadsheet that maps all of this out for every article we have. It says where in the buyer journey and where in the funnel [that article] is so that we can align calls-to-action, whether that’s ‘Start a Trial’, ‘Join an Email List’, or ‘Here’s a Download.’ The goal of every piece is not to convert somebody to some kind of event; there can be pieces that are just for [backlinks].
Early-stage, especially bootstrapped, startups should just focus on bottom-of-the-funnel pieces, just because it’s so much easier to see the benefit and business impact of those – Craig Hewitt, Founder at Castos
Bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) pieces such as case studies, product demos, onboarding content, FAQs, and worksheets are typically targeted to users who are ready to make a purchase decision. Also called sales enablement content, it’s perfect for startups that are in a niche space where there aren’t a lot of online searches for your product. In these situations, an organic strategy is often redundant, but targeted content can still support your sales team’s efforts and help convert your prospects.
5. Partner With Experts
The key to creating good content is having a great strategist at the helm who is also a savvy budgeter for these initiatives. If you have deep experience executing a content strategy, you might be able to manage everything in-house. This comes with associated costs, including continuous research on industry trends, SEO alignment, hiring writers, graphics, and so on.
If you’re light on time or expertise in-house, you could outsource it, as Cais advocates, “If the Head of Marketing needs some assistance with strategy, custom graphics, measurement, brand voice, and meeting the technical requirements for a piece of content (SEO keywording and content structure best practices, for example), then working with an agency will be extremely effective. It will also help provide an operational process to content creation that may not yet exist at the company. Why reinvent the wheel when you can piggyback off of SOPs that are dialed in already?”
Roundup: Common Mistakes to Avoid
There are lots of reasons why content marketing fails for companies, but they usually stem from inconsistency and a failure to understand how content works. Here are some of the common pitfalls to avoid:
1. Not Sticking With It
When you pull out of content too early, you don’t reap the benefits and you create sunk costs. According to Hewitt, it takes at least a year to start seeing solid returns, but the wait is worth it, “We’ve been writing about podcasting for about seven years and now we can rank for things with medium keyword difficulty like 20 in about a month.”
2. Lacking a Strategy
There has to be a reason, driven by strategic intent, for every piece you create, whether that’s to rank for a keyword, drive link equity, educate your prospects, prompt a conversion, and so on. You can’t afford the time and money you’ll waste creating random content.
3. Ignoring Distribution
Content needs a distribution mechanism. Often, once people have created a great piece of content and managed to get half a dozen websites to link to it, they’ll think their job is done. Track your page traffic and ranking once you’ve built your links. If it doesn’t improve in two months, you know you need to build better quality links. Keep sharing and resharing your pieces on your social channels so that they get picked up by more people.
Content can deliver outstanding results for bootstrapped startups, but you have to do it right. A lot of startups who realize the benefits of content fail at execution. If you’re uncertain of how to go about it, consult an expert.
I founded Draft.dev to help startups better market themselves to software developers. I liked the idea that I could help them speak to developers authoritatively, while supplying a service that most developer tools startups struggle to replicate internally.
We primarily work with venture-funded startups. Clients often come to us with more money than time and would prefer to lean on an experienced, niche marketing agency instead of hiring everything in-house.
However, every startup I’ve talked to struggles to find a marketing agency that’s right for them.
So in this piece, I’m going to give you an agency-owner’s perspective on finding the right partner for your startup. I’ll share some of the qualities you should look for, pitfalls you should avoid, and tips from other startup marketing agencies on finding the perfect client-agency fit.
Why Is Finding the Right Agency so Hard?
Part of the problem is choice; there’s too much of it. There are more than 86,000 advertising agencies in the U.S. alone, and frankly, a number of them aren’t very experienced at what they’re doing.
Then there’s the fact that startups are often evolving companies that haven’t settled on a product-market fit. We once worked with an early-stage startup that a couple of months into the relationship, decided to completely retool their product, target customer, and go-to-market strategy — and we had to pivot with them.
This kind of thing is very hard to do. As a client, you can’t reliably assess your agency’s ability and effectiveness when you shift the goalposts in the middle of a campaign. What’s more, you create sunk costs that make ROI very hard to measure.
Internal Clarity Is Crucial
Clients get the most out of their relationship with us after they have clearly identified their marketing mix and the role content plays in it. It makes for a much more productive engagement when you know where most of your leads are going to come from and you only need the external expertise to leverage those channels.
Before you approach an agency, get a firm fix on your short- and long-term goals. Once you have those, you can reverse engineer a marketing strategy to help you get there. Good agencies will make a point of learning about your organizational goals and will set objectives that you can track.
Something else startups tend to underestimate is the value of an internal point-person for the agency. As Alex Birkett, Co-Founder of Omniscient Digital says, “A good agency will eventually operate mostly autonomously, but during the first few months, it helps to have a dedicated employee who can be the bridge between internal strategy and goal setting and the agency’s work, as well as a quality judge to make sure the agency is on the right track. Agencies can accelerate your progress in a given area, but there are always things you know about your company and industry that an agency will have to learn.”
How to Screen Marketing Agencies
Finding available agencies is easy enough. Tried-and-tested methods for doing this include referrals, online searches, and consulting independent agency rankings and awards. The challenge is screening them so that you end up with a couple that are a good fit. I recommend using a range of criteria to do this:
1. Niche vs. Full-Service
One of the first decisions you’ll have to make is whether you want to go with a specialized agency or a full-service one.
“There are very few full-service agencies out there that do a good job,” says Gerald Lombardo at Gr0. “The only time a full-service digital marketing agency can really make sense is when you’re dealing with very large budgets. Otherwise, if you are a startup, recently funded brand, or small-to-medium-sized business, odds are you are better off with a specialized firm.”
In my experience, niche agencies are much better for addressing specific needs like SEO, CRO, and creative overhauls. A lot of clients come to us at Draft.dev after trying a more generalized agency that couldn’t find writers with the technical expertise that we have.
One of the biggest things to avoid if you’re a startup are marketing agencies that say they can do everything for everyone and don’t really have a specialty. That often means they don’t have much experience and are desperate for clients. Even full-service agencies usually have a focus area.
2. Budget
As a startup, some of the top-tier agencies that require $100,000+ budgets and year-long commitments may be out of reach. Small-to-mid-sized agencies that are more flexible are often a better fit, but inherently riskier because they don’t have as much experience.
At Draft, we typically look for quarterly commitments at a minimum. Sometimes, clients want just a few articles to begin with or are restricted by their funding cycle. In this case, we’ll often refer them to a freelancer or even a competitor that we trust to do quality work. This ensures the client has a good experience, and many come back to us when they want to scale it up, because smaller players will struggle to handle engagements with larger volumes.
3. Experience
Experience with your industry and channel is very important, but be wary of relying on it too much. According to Jim Huffman, CEO at GrowthHit, it can go both ways. “Sometimes it’s an absolute must and a lack of industry nuance, especially in highly regulated spaces like fintech, healthcare, etc., can kill a campaign. For example, we know Shopify very well with products that sell between $50-$500 and have over 500,000 visits per month. We can do more in 90 days than most general agencies could do in a year. However, some companies in archaic industries can benefit from a fresh perspective of an innovative and smart team.”
Typically, with something like D2C ecommerce or technical content, experience can be transformative. At Draft, we’re niched down to developer-focused startups for this very reason. Our biggest selling point is that we only work with writers who are developers and subject-matter experts themselves.
If you asked a run-of-the-mill writer to work on something complex like “tips for scaling enterprise Kubernetes clusters,” they might be able to create a high-level piece based on research, but they wouldn’t be able to build a demo application, or speak from personal experience. That’s where subject-matter expertise is essential.
4. Reputation
Most of our clients come to us through referrals. You’ll see the same trend in most good agencies out there because clients prefer recommendations when they go shopping for services. This is often the best way to find trustworthy partners that you can rely on.
For startups, verifying an agency’s reputation is even more important, because one bad engagement can set you behind on your targets and affect your growth. Do a background check on your agency by talking to other clients. Look at reviews on sites like Clutch, Expertise, and Yelp to see what their track record is like. If they’re overselling themselves or have left clients in the lurch, you’re likely to find a mention of it somewhere.
5. Transparent Processes
Transparency helps set expectations. It gives the client more information to work with when they’re evaluating agencies, and it reduces chances of a disconnect later on. Through our onboarding process, for instance, we aim to give our clients a really good sense of what we can and can’t do, the timelines we follow, and the workflows we use to guarantee high-quality content.
I’ll admit, there’s something in it for us too. When a client knows that they can count on us to deliver what we’ve promised, they’re much more likely to come back to us for the same service and refer us to other companies.
6. Results Promised
Most agencies can’t guarantee specific performance on expenditure, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Digital marketing is complex, and often the agency’s work relies on other inputs from the client that they cannot control.
Knowing that there are limits on what’s possible can help you manage expectations going into an engagement, and good agencies will tell you as much. As Huffman admits, “I wish I could guarantee results, but it’s a lie. Every business and customer set is different. Instead, we guarantee our process and our output or growth experiments. Usually, the results follow. There are other ways for companies to protect themselves with shorter contracts or a 30-day out. If you insist on [performance-based compensation], then be open to two things: 1) a hybrid of retainer and performance base and 2) be very clear on how you track the performance.”
How to Vet a Startup Marketing Agency
Once you’ve screened your choices and arrived at one or two you really like, it’s time to vet them. Do not skip this step. Marketing agencies can be quite good at marketing themselves, and you should take some time to verify your agency’s experience and ability. There are a few different ways to do this:
1. Consider Their Body of Work
An agency’s portfolio and public work samples are often the best way to see how good they are at their job. With content and creative agencies, this is quite easy to do, since the results are often published online. At Draft.dev, this is where most of our clients make up their minds. If a client is looking for deeper insights, we also offer them case studies, which illustrate real customer problems, solutions, and results in greater detail. If you’re considering hiring an SEO or performance marketing agency, case studies are essential since their results are much harder to see through a simple web search.
2. Ask for Client References
Get some third-party validation on the agency. Ask the agency to provide you client references, including from an account that did not go so well. All agencies have had some not-so-perfect engagements, but understanding how they dealt with them can tell you a lot about them. Don’t hesitate to investigate independently either. Glance through the agency’s testimonials to see if they look genuine, and maybe even reach out to some of the clients for a background check.
3. Talk to Multiple Employees
If you’re working in a space where domain expertise really matters, consider asking to speak directly with team leads and employees who aren’t in sales. Gauge their skills and experience to ensure that all the know-how isn’t concentrated at the top levels.
It’s an unconventional approach, but not wholly unexpected. Agencies will usually understand why this is necessary and the truly proficient ones won’t hesitate to accommodate you.
When it comes down to it, hiring an agency isn’t all that different from hiring employees. As a startup, your marketing agency should function as an extension of your own team, aligned with the same values and goals that drive your company.
The key to making a good hire is to work with as much information as possible. Be thorough when you’re screening them and be equally transparent about your expectations in return. Nine times out of 10, you’ll end up with a quality match.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you have tips of your own or interesting experiences you’d like to share, find me on Twitter and let me know what you think.
Status Hero is a work communication tool that replaces time-consuming meetings and other interruptions with tidy reports.
Status Hero partnered with Draft.dev to create high-quality content that would increase top-of-funnel traffic and improve its trial conversion rate. The benefits of this collaboration are clear:
A 211% increase in blog visitors
50X growth in Medium audience
40 hours saved per week
We talked to Henry Poydar, the Founder and CEO to learn more about this successful partnership.
Challenges
Q: What internal content challenges led you to work with Draft.dev?
HENRY: We’re a small company and everybody wears many hats. My team is capable of producing awesome content, and we tried publishing content on our own, but we couldn’t do it consistently because we didn’t have enough bandwidth.
That’s why we reached out to Draft.dev, they came in and everything has been fantastic.
Q: What were your goals for the content that you wanted Draft.dev to create?
HENRY: Status Hero’s goal was to create content that would generate top-of-funnel traffic. We wanted to create content that would attract new customers and retain existing customers. Ultimately we wanted to grow the number of trial users and increase our trial conversion rate.
Q: Did you have specific requirements that the content and Draft.dev needed to meet?
HENRY: We wanted to create helpful content that would resonate with our audience. We didn’t want pure SEO-based articles created by non-technical writers. Those articles might attract SEO juice but they won’t resonate with our audience because our audience can see right through them.
Q: Had you tried other solutions before working with Draft.dev?
HENRY: We hadn’t worked with Draft.dev’s direct competitors but we had worked with writers and tried creating content in-house.
Q: Did you experience any challenges?
HENRY: One of the challenges that arise when you work with writers is that you end up with posts that are in one person’s voice. If we were to do this internally, there would be a person that would do it on their own, which is what we did before. That person is always going to write from their voice and our blog would have one perspective.
Solution
Q: What process did you follow when you started working with Draft.dev?
HENRY: Draft.dev started with a discovery process where they tried to uncover the core of our content goals. The team helped us hone in on what our audience cares about, and used that to build topic clusters that would address those needs. That’s where their expertise was useful because we didn’t want pure keyword content.
Q: What happened after the initial strategy session?
HENRY: Draft.dev helped us with keyword planning for SEO purposes. Next, they sourced the writers and they got the articles written. We edited the articles together and then we slotted them for publishing.
Q: What did you think of Draft.dev’s writers?
HENRY: I like the fact that Draft.dev’s writers are industry insiders. I’m also happy that Draft.dev gives us access to different writers from different backgrounds because it helps us create diverse content which improves the quality of the content on our blog,
Results
Q: Were you able to generate more top-of-the-funnel traffic with Draft.dev?
HENRY: Yes. Our audience has doubled between October and March. We had around 4,500 visitors in March according to Google Analytics on our marketing pages. The number has grown to 9,500.
Additionally, we syndicate our content on Medium and our content has grown 50X. The graph looks like a hockey stick, it’s amazing.
Q: Are there any specific articles that performed well on Google Search rankings?
HENRY: Yes. If you go to Google right now and type in ‘too many meetings’ into Google.com, our article that we created together with Draft.dev comes up first.
Q: Have you experienced any growth in the number of your trial users and in your trial conversion rate?
HENRY: Yes. I don’t think we would have the growth that we’ve had in trial users and conversions without the audience that we’ve gained through the content marketing we’ve done with Draft.dev.
Q: How much time does working with Draft.dev save you?
HENRY: They save us the time that a full-time writer would use to create content. About 40-hours a week. They also save us multiple thousands of dollars every week.
Q: What have these time savings allowed you to do?
HENRY: It allows us to concentrate on building a better product for our customers. We’ve also raised $3 Million in investor funding. Raising money is a big investment of time and effort. Knowing that our content engine was still cranking along in the background made the process easier.
Q: What would you say to companies that build software products for a technical audience about working with Draft.dev?
HENRY: Draft.dev has helped us create high-quality content that resonates with our audience on a regular basis. They have helped us double our audience, attract more trial users, and increase our trial conversion rate.
