Category: content-marketing

Building great technical content is only half the battle. In an era where AI overviews are significantly impacting search traffic, proactively distributing and promoting content has become essential for reaching developer audiences. But how can companies maximize reach without damaging their brand reputation through spammy tactics?

In a recent Draft.dev webinar, Manuel Weiss shared the exact content distribution playbooks that helped his previous company, Codeship, achieve over 1 million unique blog readers per year, generate 85,000 e-book leads, and attract 15,000 webinar registrations—all with a marketing team of just four people. Here’s how they orchestrated sophisticated promotion waves that respected their audience while driving massive reach.

Watch the whole webinar here:

Why Proactive Distribution Matters More Than Ever

The content marketing landscape has fundamentally shifted. Companies can no longer rely solely on search engines to drive traffic to their valuable content, especially with AI overviews now appearing in 49% of search results.

Just because the blog post or the e-book is live doesn’t mean the work is done. Far from it. – Manuel Weiss

This makes proactive promotion critical. The key is casting the widest net possible while maintaining respect for your audience. With a technical audience especially, being spammy can backfire extremely quickly and permanently damage brand reputation.

Optimizing for Reach Through Multiplicators

The most effective distribution strategy leverages what Manuel calls “multiplicators”. Multiplicators are channels that grow their audience while you focus on building your product. These are platforms actively working to expand their subscriber base, creating ready-made audiences companies can tap into when the timing’s right.

Effective multiplicators include:

• Tech newsletters (Cooperpress is our favorite example)
• Developer podcasts
• LinkedIn and Slack communities
• Industry influencers
• Subreddits and forums

The beauty of multiplicators is the symbiotic relationship. Newsletter curators and podcast hosts need quality content to grow their audiences, while companies need access to engaged developers. When brands provide genuine value to subscribers, everyone wins. Learn more about effective promotion strategies for technical audiences.

The Power of Content Calendars and Orchestrated Waves

At Codeship, the team didn’t blast all promotional content on day one. Instead, they created carefully orchestrated promotion waves using content calendars to coordinate timing across multiple channels.

Here’s how their monthly promotion cycle worked:

• Week 1: Launch top-of-funnel e-book via newsletter and external sponsorships
• Week 2: Promote middle-of-funnel content while referencing the previous week’s e-book
• Week 3: Final reference to Week 1’s content while introducing new assets
• Week 4: Host bottom-of-funnel webinar with product-specific content

In week one, we promote ebook number one, and then in week two, we promote another thing, but we also reference in a message eBook 1 from last week: ‘Hey, if you missed it last week, eBook 1’ – Manuel Weiss

This approach created natural promotion waves where audiences saw content across different channels at strategic intervals, maintaining top-of-mind awareness without overwhelming subscribers. Understanding how to effectively structure content across the marketing funnel is crucial for this strategy.

Strategic Funnel-Based Content Promotion

Codeship’s promotion strategy aligned with the marketing funnel to maximize lead quality and sales team effectiveness. The monthly cycle strategically moved prospects through different intent levels:

Who wants to see the same ad for one and a half years, right? Keep it fresh by rotating 2-3 ads every 30 days, and pay attention to which assets are actually helpful. – Manuel Weiss

Beginning of Month: Top-Funnel E-books These high-level, broadly appealing resources generated volume but with wide intent gaps. While not immediately sales-ready, they brought new audiences into the ecosystem and provided the sales team with fresh leads to nurture.

Mid-Month: Middle-Funnel Content
After sales teams had 10-14 days to connect with top-funnel leads, middle-funnel e-books provided more specific, problem-focused content. These assets mentioned the product and addressed specific pain points, generating fewer but higher-intent leads.

End of Month: Bottom-Funnel Webinars Product-specific webinars like “How to do XYZ with Codeship” attracted the highest-quality leads. Attendees had just learned how to solve their problems with the specific product, making them prime candidates for immediate sales conversations.

Because this is ‘how to do XYZ’ with your product, the attendees to these webinars are the highest quality leads, because they just watched how to do something with your product, and they might be ready to try your product. – Manuel Weiss

Building Relationships With Newsletter Curators and Influencers

One of Codeship’s most effective strategies involved building genuine relationships with tech newsletter curators like Peter Cooper (Golang Weekly, Ruby Weekly, JavaScript Weekly). Rather than just purchasing sponsorships, the team focused on providing genuine value.

The relationship-building approach included:

• Submitting high-quality, relevant content for potential feature inclusion
• Providing feedback on newsletter content
• Offering expertise when appropriate
• Only reaching out with truly exceptional pieces that fit the audience

For newsletter curators, it’s important to have good content to grow their audience. And if it’s genuinely good content, they will feature it – Manuel Weiss

This strategy resulted in both organic placements and stronger relationships that enhanced paid sponsorship effectiveness. For companies looking to expand their reach, building authentic connections within developer ecosystems is essential.

The Codeship Content Distribution Engine

Manuel detailed how Codeship’s content programs worked together to create a comprehensive distribution engine:

Blog Content Program

• Generated 80-90,000 unique readers monthly
• Used primarily for awareness and community building
• Created retargeting audiences for paid advertising
• Drove newsletter subscriptions through clear calls-to-action

E-book Content Program

• Gated content behind qualifying forms
• Generated sales prospects through progressive profiling
• Mixed top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel content
• Used form questions to automatically route leads to sales or marketing nurture

Webinar Program

• Averaged 250 attendees per session (some exceeded 1,000)
• Focused on middle and bottom-of-funnel content
• Featured product-specific how-to presentations
• Generated highest-quality leads for immediate sales follow-up

This comprehensive approach demonstrates the power of scaling developer content across multiple formats and distribution channels.

Strategic Newsletter Distribution: Quality Over Frequency

Perhaps most surprisingly, Codeship successfully sent two newsletters per week to over 120,000 subscribers. This worked because they surveyed their audience and received explicit permission to increase frequency.

Because we respected the audience and the content that we produced was genuinely helpful, they were okay with getting two emails per week from us. – Manuel Weiss

Their newsletter strategy balanced promotional content with value:

• Tuesday newsletters: Mix of blog post links and e-book promotions
• Thursday newsletters: Single high-value blog post links with minimal friction
• PS sections: Gentle reminders about previous week’s gated content

This approach maintained engagement while providing multiple touchpoints for content discovery. Companies looking to replicate this success should develop a comprehensive content plan that balances promotional and educational content.

Newsletter Sponsorships: Best Bang for Your Buck

Tech newsletter sponsorships proved to be one of Codeship’s highest-ROI distribution channels, particularly effective for reaching software developers where they consume information regularly.

The advantages of newsletter sponsorships over other channels included:

Clear Attribution: Sponsors receive click-through reports, making cost-per-lead calculations straightforward compared to podcast sponsorships where attribution is difficult.

Ready-Made Audiences: Newsletter subscribers are pre-qualified and engaged with technical content, reducing the need to build audiences from scratch.

Measurable Results: Direct links to landing pages provide clear conversion tracking from sponsorship investment to lead generation.

If you sponsor an interesting e-book in these tech newsletters, that can work really well, and why I like this especially is that attribution is just so much simpler for tech newsletters – Manuel Weiss

Codeship’s approach to newsletter relationships went beyond just purchasing sponsorships. They built genuine relationships with curators by occasionally submitting high-quality content for organic inclusion, providing feedback, and being genuinely helpful rather than purely transactional. This approach aligns with best practices for syndicating developer content across external platforms.

Strategic Sales and Marketing Alignment

One critical aspect of Codeship’s success was ensuring marketing promotion waves didn’t interfere with sales outreach. Without proper coordination, prospects could receive multiple messages on the same day—one from marketing promoting an e-book and another from a sales rep sharing the same resource.

Misalignment between marketing and sales can be quite detrimental to your brand. – Manuel Weiss

The content calendar served as a shared visibility tool, allowing sales teams to see upcoming marketing activities and coordinate their outreach accordingly. This prevented message overlap and ensured a cohesive brand experience across all touchpoints.

Podcast Sponsorships: Brand Awareness Over Lead Generation

While Codeship used podcast sponsorships as part of their multichannel approach, Manuel emphasized treating them differently from newsletter sponsorships due to attribution challenges and wider intent gaps.

Podcast sponsorships worked best for:

• Reinforcing brand messaging (“Codeship: continuous integration and delivery in the cloud”)
• Building brand awareness through repeated exposure
• Announcing major feature releases or company news

However, for companies with limited budgets, Manuel recommended prioritizing newsletter sponsorships and retargeting ads over podcast sponsorships due to clearer ROI measurement and attribution. Learn more about maximizing your content marketing ROI through strategic channel selection.

Paid Advertising: Systematic Asset Rotation

Codeship’s paid advertising strategy emphasized systematic asset rotation to keep content fresh across extended retargeting windows:

Monthly Rotation System

• Two to three different assets per month on each platform
• Monthly performance review with winner retention
• Automatic rotation of underperforming content
• Exclude audiences who had already converted

Platform-Specific Approaches

• Twitter Ads: 2-3 rotating ads monthly
• Google Retargeting: 3 ads per quarter with audience exclusions
• Facebook Ads: Similar rotation (though effectiveness varied)

The key was avoiding ad fatigue while maximizing the value of retargeting audiences built from blog traffic. By segmenting audiences based on content topics (Ruby, Python, etc.), they could serve highly relevant content to specific developer segments.

Multi-Channel Social Media Strategy

Different social platforms received tailored treatment based on audience expectations:

Twitter/X: High-frequency news outlet approach

• Promoted both owned and curated content from tech newsletters
• Multiple daily posts during blog publication days
• Pushed frequency limits based on audience feedback
• Served as a news outlet sharing valuable industry content beyond just owned assets

Facebook: People-focused content

• Highlighted team members and company culture
• Lower frequency than Twitter
• Emphasized the humans behind the technology
• Surprisingly effective for lead generation despite being unexpected for a technical audience

LinkedIn: Business-focused announcements

• Major company news and press releases
• Fundraising announcements
• Professional thought leadership
• Underutilized channel that Manuel noted would receive more focus today

Alternative Channels: Reddit, Hacker News, and Slack Communities

Codeship experimented with various alternative distribution channels, each requiring different approaches:

Reddit and Hacker News

• Effective for generating traffic spikes
• Required understanding of platform etiquette
• Never promoted gated content (major violation of community norms)
• Best used for genuinely helpful blog posts without promotional intent

Slack Communities

• Required consistent, long-term involvement
• High effort for relatively low marketing return
• Better suited for dev rel teams than marketing
• Worked best for asking feedback rather than direct promotion

Budget Allocation for Maximum Impact

When asked about optimal budget distribution, Manuel recommended a prioritized approach:

1. Content engine development to drive consistent blog traffic
2. Retargeting ads on Google and LinkedIn (impressions are free, only clicks cost)
3. Tech newsletter sponsorships for clear attribution and qualified audiences

This approach can start with budgets as low as $100-150 monthly for retargeting ads, scaling up to $1,000-2,000 quarterly for newsletter sponsorships. The focus on retargeting ads makes particular sense because impressions cost nothing—only clicks are charged, and clicks indicate genuine interest in the content. For startups with limited resources, explore our guide to content marketing for bootstrapped startups.

Respecting Your Audience: The Foundation of Success

Throughout the presentation, Manuel emphasized that respecting audience preferences and maintaining brand reputation is especially critical with developer audiences, who are particularly sensitive to spam and promotional overreach.

Brand is every touchpoint somebody has with your company, and spamming is one of the most egregious things you can do to destroy your reputation. – Manuel Weiss

Key principles for respectful promotion include:

• Surveying audiences about preferred communication frequency
• Listening and acting on feedback when promotion feels excessive
• Coordinating with sales teams to avoid message overlap
• Providing genuine value in every communication
• Excluding converted audiences from ongoing campaigns
• Respecting individual team members’ comfort levels with sharing company content

The success of Codeship’s twice-weekly newsletter to 120,000+ subscribers demonstrates that high frequency is possible when you earn permission through consistent value delivery and audience respect. This approach exemplifies the product-led growth philosophy applied to content marketing.

Automation and Efficiency Tools

Codeship achieved their results with a small team by leveraging automation and smart tooling:

Content Calendar Management: Provided visibility across all marketing activities and enabled quick decision-making about asset rotation and channel coordination.

Social Media Scheduling: Tools like MeetEdgar allowed them to set up content categories and automated posting schedules, reducing manual work while maintaining consistent presence. For more comprehensive automation strategies, explore social media automation tools and techniques.

Browser Automation: Simple techniques like bookmark folders for opening multiple social media tabs simultaneously streamlined the posting process.

Progressive Profiling: Automated lead qualification through form questions that changed based on previous responses, gradually building detailed prospect profiles without overwhelming users.

Measuring Success and Attribution

Codeship’s approach to measurement focused on clear, actionable metrics rather than vanity numbers:

Newsletter Sponsorships: Direct cost-per-lead calculations based on click-through reports and landing page conversions.

Retargeting Ads: Cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion tracking with audience exclusions to prevent redundant spending.

Content Performance: Blog traffic quality and conversion rates to gated assets, rather than just pageview volume.

Sales Pipeline Impact: Tracking how marketing-generated leads progressed through the sales process and contributed to revenue.

The key was maintaining clear attribution chains from initial touchpoint through final conversion, enabling budget optimization based on actual performance rather than assumptions.

Conclusion

Effective content distribution requires systematic orchestration across multiple channels, strategic timing, and unwavering respect for audience preferences. The Codeship model demonstrates that with proper planning, content calendars, and disciplined execution, even small marketing teams can achieve remarkable reach and engagement.

The key lessons include:

• Build sustainable promotion waves rather than one-time blasts
• Leverage multiplicators who are already growing relevant audiences
• Align marketing and sales activities to prevent message conflicts
• Prioritize channels with clear attribution and measurement
• Always ask for and respect audience feedback about communication preferences
• Focus on providing genuine value in every touchpoint

People will tell you when you’re emailing too much. But when they tell you, listen and act on the feedback. Don’t ignore them. – Manuel Weiss

For companies looking to implement similar strategies, start with a solid content calendar, identify relevant multiplicators in your space, and remember that successful promotion is about building relationships and providing value, not just pushing messages into inboxes. The systematic approach that generated 85,000 e-book leads and over 1 million annual blog readers is achievable with discipline, respect for your audience, and consistent execution of proven distribution principles.

Ready to build your own content distribution engine? Draft.dev can help you create high-quality technical content and develop comprehensive developer content strategies that drive results. Whether you need help with content creation or want to explore our resources for technical marketing success, we’re here to support your growth.

Draft.dev Fireside webinars:

• Creating Developer Content That Spreads Organically
• Designing an Optimized Developer Journey
• Interactive Content Strategies: Engaging Developers Through Action
• How to Market to Diverse Technical Audiences Effectively
• How DevRel, Marketing, and Sales Work Together
• Balancing Open Source and Product Advocacy
• Designing an Optimized Developer Journey

Draft.dev Educational webinars:

• How to Orchestrate Technical Content That Drives Revenue
• Setting Up a Content Marketing Engine in the Age of AI

In this Draft.dev webinar, we explore how to create technical marketing content that resonates with developer audiences and spreads organically. Host Clayton Kast was joined by Adam Gordon Bell, podcast host at CoRecursive, and Richard Rodger, CEO of VoxGig, a developer relations agency.

This blog post recaps their conversation about defining organic content, effective distribution channels, common misconceptions, and strategic approaches to creating content that developers actually want to share.

Organic Developer Content

When discussing content that spreads organically, our panelists had complementary views on what success looks like.

For Adam, organic spread happens when “you hear about [your content] even after you post it.” He describes the ideal scenario: 

I shared something on Reddit, and then it went on Hacker News, and then from there maybe it goes dark a little bit. And then somebody tells me that it was in their Slack channel at work.

Richard emphasized the sustainability aspect: 

I’d emphasize the more sustainable side a little bit more… It’s nice if you have a kind of a group of content creators where the audience or community is kind of excited every time they produce something.

Both perspectives highlight that organic spread isn’t just about viral hits—it’s about creating content that resonates deeply enough that people voluntarily share it beyond your initial distribution.

Where Do Developers Discover Content?

Understanding where developers find content is critical for any organic distribution strategy. Our experts shared their experiences with different channels.

Reddit: The Community Hub

Adam emphasized the power of Reddit, despite its reputation for sometimes harsh feedback: 

Reddit is divided into like a thousand little subreddits, and oftentimes there is one where people are interested in what you’re doing.

He also noted that Reddit serves as an excellent research tool to understand what types of content perform well in specific communities: 

You can just go to Reddit and switch to top and see what’s the top thing in the year… It can be a good indicator of the type of content that’s organic and spreads.

Social Media: Fragmented but Essential

Richard pointed out that while Twitter (now X) was once the primary channel for developers, the landscape has fragmented: 

It used to be okay, it’s still Twitter/X, and that’s still where the main dev communities are… But now Twitter is also fragmented… Now you’ve got to have a strategy around all these smaller communities, Mastodon, Bluesky, all the reddits, Twitch, whatever.

Other Effective Channels

The panel also mentioned several other channels worth considering:

• LinkedIn for professional networking
• Email newsletters for direct engagement
• Slack communities for focused discussions
• In-person and virtual conferences for relationship building

Common Misconceptions About Organic Content

One of the most valuable segments of the discussion covered misconceptions that companies often have about creating developer content that spreads.

Misconception #1: Your Product Is All That Matters

Adam highlighted how companies often focus too narrowly on their specific product offering rather than addressing broader industry topics:

Your product is this little thing, and your whole world is about the product, right? But if you zoom out and look at the larger context, that’s the number one thing I think people miss.

He shared an example of a company specializing in advanced Kafka implementations who only created content for the tiny subset of developers who had outscaled Kafka. His advice was to “zoom way back out” and create content about why Kafka is a great solution in the first place, addressing a much larger audience.

Misconception #2: How-to Guides Will Drive Organic Traffic

Richard cautioned against relying solely on product-specific how-to guides for organic spread:

One of the misconceptions that we see a good bit is people take their how-to guides and try to turn that into organic content. And that’s way too focused on the product… It’s not helping you with the bigger picture.

He cited Intercom’s early content strategy as a counter-example, where one founder “literally spent 90% of his time writing articles about how to do Internet marketing” rather than focusing narrowly on their chat product.

Misconception #3: Perfection Over Consistency

Clayton emphasized that many organizations get caught up in details while neglecting the fundamentals:

People get so caught up in the minutia that they’re just publishing something like once a quarter instead of as frequently as they should.

He compared content strategy to dieting—rather than obsessing over specific foods, the most important factor is consistently maintaining a caloric deficit. Similarly, with content, consistency in publishing trumps perfection. This aligns with successful developer content strategies that work and scale.

Examples of Content That Spread Organically

The speakers shared examples from their experience of content that gained significant organic traction.

Adam described an in-depth tutorial on AWK (a Unix text-processing tool) that he created while at Earthly, a build tool company:

I spent a long time just writing a really in-depth tutorial for how to use AWK… I shared it on the programming Reddit—people there love old school command line tools. And then from there it went on Hacker News… We got like probably 60,000 visitors from Hacker News.

What made this content successful was that it:

1. Addressed problems their users actually had
2. Provided exceptionally high-quality information on a topic that lacked good resources
3. Connected indirectly to their product’s value proposition

Richard shared two contrasting examples:

1. Ryan Dahl’s original Node.js introduction talk, which went viral because it introduced fundamentally important technology
2. A “weird and cute” project called startupdeathclock.com that briefly went viral but provided limited lasting value

The key takeaway was that chasing viral content for its own sake rarely yields sustainable results. Instead, focus on creating genuinely helpful, high-quality content that addresses real developer needs.

Distribution Strategies That Work

When it comes to distributing content effectively, our panelists emphasized authenticity and engagement over aggressive promotion. For technical audiences, distribution and syndication strategies require a thoughtful approach.

Be Present and Responsive

Adam stressed the importance of being available to interact with people who engage with your content: “I will try to interact with people who have questions about it… I will just set aside some time to interact with people.”

This personal engagement often leads to further organic sharing. Adam noted that he rarely submits his content directly to platforms like Hacker News—instead, his engagement with readers often leads them to share it themselves.

Leverage Internal Experts

Richard suggested identifying technical team members who can effectively communicate with developer communities:

You’ve got to create space in your technical organization for people who are good at communicating to have time to get out there and do stuff.

This approach creates “micro distributions” by accessing the trusted audiences that internal engineers have built.

Adam added that interviewing internal subject matter experts can be an efficient way to create authentic content when engineering teams are busy:

I’m almost in an editor role or a journalist just interviewing them, and that can have a very small time commitment from their perspective.

Use Podcasts as a Relationship Tool

Both panelists highlighted the value of podcasts for connecting with technical audiences and industry leaders. Richard called podcast content “super cheap to create” yet “really effective, totally authentic.”

Clayton added that podcasts also provide an opportunity to talk directly with potential clients:

In those 2 years [building an audience] you’re gonna be talking to all the people you want to sell your product to.

If you’re considering this approach, check out Draft.dev’s ultimate list of developer podcasts for inspiration.

Engage Your Community Champions

Clayton emphasized the importance of identifying and building relationships with community members who are already promoting your product:

Whether you’re enterprise focused… there’s that one client that always has that problem that is in your customer service inbox every single day—build a relationship with that person. Or if it’s the community users, they’re already cranking on YouTube videos on how to use your product, engage with that individual.

Richard added that inviting these community champions to speak at your conferences or events can turn them into lifelong advocates.

Balancing SEO and Community Engagement

The conversation also touched on how to balance data-driven SEO approaches with community-focused content strategies.

Adam suggested these approaches should complement each other:

If you want to do things that spread through community, it’s going to take some effort… But that just led to a lot of people to link to us, and that just meant that when we wrote very specific, keyword focused content, it did very well.

Clayton noted that Google’s evolving approach to SEO is increasingly rewarding content that genuinely informs readers:

If you focus on creating good, engaging content for your community, you’re going to end up winning the SEO battle anyway.

This approach aligns with SEO keyword opportunities in developer marketing that prioritize quality over keyword manipulation.

Tips for Getting Started

For organizations just beginning to build their developer content strategy, our panelists offered these key recommendations:

1. Focus on consistency through a disciplined content plan
2. Understand your audience deeply before creating content
3. Look beyond your product to address broader industry topics
4. Raise the quality bar by studying the best content in your industry
5. Engage authentically with community platforms like Reddit and Slack
6. Leverage community experts rather than solely promoting your brand voice

Conclusion

Creating developer content that spreads organically isn’t about chasing viral hits or gaming algorithms. It’s about consistently producing high-quality, genuinely helpful content that addresses the real needs of your audience.

As Adam summarized, there’s no big secret—it comes down to quality.

By focusing on understanding your audience, zooming out to address broader topics, maintaining consistency, and engaging authentically with communities, you can create technical content that developers actually want to share.

Draft.dev’s blog and monthly webinars are a great way to learn more about similar DevRel and technical marketing topics.

Join us for our next session with live Q&A by visiting our upcoming webinar page.

Draft.dev Fireside webinars:

• Designing an Optimized Developer Journey
• Interactive Content Strategies: Engaging Developers Through Action
• How to Market to Diverse Technical Audiences Effectively
• How DevRel, Marketing, and Sales Work Together
• Balancing Open Source and Product Advocacy
• Designing an Optimized Developer Journey

Draft.dev Educational webinars:

• How to Orchestrate Technical Content That Drives Revenue
• Generate Leads Without Spamming
• Setting Up a Content Marketing Engine in the Age of AI

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:

1. Is SEO worth it for early-stage startups? Does it work?
2. 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:

Does SEO Work for Early-Stage Startups?

The short answer is: yes, it can.

Even if it takes months to build up content as an organic traffic source, content marketing provides many other benefits to both sales and product-focused startups.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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 and established enterprises to help with growth 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

• Make a list of competitors (see this list of tools to research competitors).
• Competitor data to collect:
• Link to their website.
• “One-liners” and taglines competitors use.
• Pricing and business model.
• Blog/RSS link.
• Social media links.
• Key employees on social media.
• Subscribe to RSS feeds of your competitors’ blogs.
• Follow your competitors and their key employees on social media.
• Monitor competitors’ websites for changes.
• Site monitoring tools to try:
• Deep Dive Duck
• Versionista
• Subscribe to industry newsletters, magazines, trade journals etc.
• Use Google Trends to do initial demand and search volume research.

Customer Research

If we knew what we were doing it wouldn’t be called research. – Albert Einstein

• Find people in your contact list who might be future customers. Have 20 conversations (see The Mom Test).
• Attend meetups or conferences for your target market.
• Meet another entrepreneur who has a similar or competitive product.
• Make a list of your competitors’ customers:
• Check competitors’ Twitter followers, mentions.
• Look through their Facebook fans.
• Find people who follow them on Linkedin.
• Check their website. Some companies list customer stories on their websites.
• Reach out to your competitors’ customers, find out what they like/don’t like.
• Create an “early access” list for potential future customers.

PR (Public Relations) Preparations

• Create list of tech, startup, and industry blogs.
• Create list of local small business journals.
• Create list of local bloggers and journalists in your industry.
• Create a “Media Kit” page (check out this example).

Website Setup

• Come up with a name and domain name.
• Write a site tagline and elevator pitch.
• Create a logo.
• Set up a landing page.
• Create “About” and “Contact” pages.
• Create Pricing page (see this list of pricing models):
• Consider/test various pricing options:
• Create a free or trial tier for your paid product.
• Offer a 100% satisfaction/money-back guarantee.
• Make product invite-only to start.
• Offer free/discounted access for early adopters/beta testers.
• Add social media follow links to landing page.
• Set up analytics to learn about who signs up, bounces, etc.
• Analytics platforms to try:
  • Google Analytics
  • Mixpanel
  • Fathom Analytics
  • Kiss Metrics
• Set up error logging, monitoring, capturing, etc.
• Set up on-site messaging to capture leads and engage customers as they land on your site.
• Test your website for common SEO, speed, and security problems like broken links, missing page titles and insecure pages.

Email Setup

Email is the Jason Bourne of online: somebody’s always trying to kill it. It can’t be done. – Unknown

• Set up email address to send and receive emails.
• Set up email list and signup form.
• Create a standard email template for your brand.
• Create transactional emails for when users sign up/purchase.

Blog Setup

Content Marketing is all the marketing that’s left. – Seth Godin

• Choose a blogging platform
• Research keywords that you’d like your site to rank for.
• Keyword research tools to try:
  • Ahrefs
  • SEMrush
  • Google Keyword Planner (free!)
• Create pillar posts or pages for keywords you’d like to rank for.
• Have a blog post brainstorming session
• Add email signup form or link to all blog posts
• Add social media follow links to all blog posts

Social Media Setup

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).
• Write and distribute a Press Release (here’s a comprehensive guide from Wajeez).
• Write and distribute an eBook, exchange it for email signup.
• Write and distribute a white paper, exchange it for email signup.
• Give free access to influential bloggers in the industry.
• Build a “best of” page with your best blog posts that you wrote or contributed to other sites (ProBlogger calls this a “Sneeze Page”).
• Make sure all blog posts have high quality images (see this list of free stock image sites).
• Create an online course or guide around your product/industry.
• Run an influencer marketing campaign.
• Run a link-building campaign.
• Share the story of how you started your business on Starter Story (it’s free and you get a do-follow backlink).
• Try other link building strategies:
• Skyscraper campaign
• Ego baiting
• Interview/expert Q&A post
• Guest posting
• Broken link building
• Get interviewed on podcasts.
• Become a source on Help a Reporter Out.

Paid Promotional Channels

You must spend money to make money. – Plautus, Ancient Roman playwright

• Try a few social, search, and commission-based advertising platforms.
• Sponsor a local meetup or conference for your target customers.
• Sponsor podcasts your customers might be listening to.
• Sponsor/advertise an industry newsletter.
• Set up a user referral marketing system/platform:
• Expect Referrals
• Frederick
• Genius Referrals
• InviteBox
• InviteReferrals
• Referral Candy
• Viral Loops
• Girafi
• 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.
• Turn posts into a podcast.
• Create an infographic based on the post.
• Create a presentation of your post.
• Promote your blog content (see our Content Promotion and Distribution Guide:
• Send post to your email list.
• Promote on your social media.
• Email friends and relatives, ask them to share if relevant.
• Send to other bloggers for feedback, ask to share if they like it.
• Add your latest blog post or landing page to your email signature.
• Submit your post to relevant aggregators and niche communities.
• Refresh old blog posts every 6-12 months

Email Marketing

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.
• Manage customer data and track interactions with a CRM for marketing

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

• Schedule regular social media content (try these social media tools to help automate the social media process).
• Social media content ideas to try:
• Show what’s happening “behind the scenes” (eg: pictures of your workspace, in-development features, etc.).
• Blog posts from your blog (or partners’ blogs).
• Special offers or discounts.
• Relevant news, advice, or blogs.
• Funny or inspiring quotes.
• Polls or questions for your followers.
• Suggested books.
• Useful tools or websites.
• Join Facebook and LinkedIn groups where your product ideas for marketing projects might be beneficial.
• Send exclusive offers to LinkedIn/Facebook Group owners.
• Join Twitter chats related to your industry/product.
• Search Twitter for people talking about issues you’re solving with your project and interact with them.
• Give early users discounts for taking pics with your product.

Public Relations

The art of publicity is a black art; but it has come to stay, and every year adds to its potency. – Thomas Paine

• Ask bloggers with list articles to add your site to their content.
• Reach out to small business journals, reporters, bloggers. Inform and ask for coverage.
• Reach out to podcasters, try to get featured on their show.
• Find professors and students with .edu sites to link to your content (good for SEO).
• Find reviews or lists of similar products. Ask to be added or leave a comment about your product.
• Guest post on other blogs:
  • Build a list of blogs that are a good fit for your product and accept guest posts. Save their contact form/information.
• Write a few posts on your own blog first (to use as a demonstration).
• Create a list of “pitches,” blog post ideas with a title and one paragraph summary that might grab bloggers.
• Pitch the blogs one idea each. See what they respond to.
• Help promote your posts via social media, email lists, etc.
• Reach back out in a month and try another pitch. Try to become a “regular”
• Join and participate in forums related to your product or industry.

More Ongoing Marketing Ideas

• Answer relevant questions on Q&A community sites (check back regularly):
• Stack Overflow
• Quora
• Industry or geographically specific forums
• Product Hunt
• Register to be notified of topics on Reddit and Hacker News with F5Bot.

Marketing Optimization Checklist

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).
• A/B test your landing/payment pages.
• A/B test email newsletters and promotions.
• Implement Twitter cards on your blog posts.
• Implement rich snippets in Google search results.
• Analyze user signup flow (check out the teardowns here).
• Test your website on multiple platforms, make sure speed is good.
• Use Website Grader to pinpoint website improvements.
• Create and track weekly traffic and growth goals.
• Time social media posts and email newsletters to when your audience is most likely to respond.
• Make sure each page on your site has a clear call-to-action.
• Audit and improve your conversion rate (see this checklist for detailed steps you can take)
• Set up automatic analytics reports to be emailed to you each week.
• Experiment with various signup form locations, colors, and sizes.
• Add an “Exit Intent” popup to your blog/site.
• Create an FAQs page.
• Verify your website’s tags are correct with Google Tag Assistant.
• Watch a first time user use your product/website.
• Collect and display testimonials from happy users.
• Survey or poll your users for feedback (see our content marketing tools for lots of great options at any marketing budget or this list of Google Forms alternatives).
• Use Monkey Test It to find bugs and broken links of your site. Set up an alert to notify you on breakage.
• Use Checkbot on your website to test for and fix SEO, speed and security problems.
• Consider a LinkedIn post generator to transform rough ideas into high-value content.
• Follow the steps here to ensure GDPR compliance.

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.

In 2022, I gave a webinar to some of our 100 clients at Draft.dev about maximizing the return from your content marketing efforts. In this piece, I’ll share the content marketing framework I outlined there maximizing your ROI over the long term.

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 growth 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:

1. ensures that all your content efforts are pulling in the same direction; and
2. 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:

1. Your content is simply not good enough. 
2. 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 provide growth marketing to 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. According to IBISWorld, 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.

_____________________________________________________________________

Subject Matter Expert Writers. Proven results.

If you’d like to know more about how content can help grow your blog and increase your conversion rates, schedule a call with us.

No matter what you do or where you work, content marketing is critical to helping businesses get seen. But managing all its elements alone can be challenging, particularly as you scale your brand or startup. It’s important to plug into high-quality resources that increase your knowledge of the craft, as well as your comfort levels with making and marketing content.

We’re going to cover resources for some of the most integral aspects of content marketing, including ten relevant categories:

1. Beginning content marketing
2. The content creation process
3. Content marketing professionals
4. Tools for content marketing
5. Technical content marketing
6. Content marketing analytics
7. Strategy of content marketing
8. Content marketing formats
9. Understanding SEO
10. B2B content marketing

Beginning Content Marketing

Spinning up a new content marketing strategy is no easy task. Getting off on the right foot is a surefire way to develop lasting value in the future. Learn from some of the following resources to generate ideas that cover all the bases – from brainstorming topics to item checklists.

1. The 3 Questions You Should Ask Before Starting a Technical Blog
2. The Startup Marketing Checklist
3. Content Marketing At Early Stage Startups
4. A Blog Launch Checklist
5. How to Create a Digital Content Strategy
6. Lost in the Content Marketing Forest
7. The Big Blog Promotion Checklist
8. Blogging Platforms for Your Startup
9. The Best Golang Blogs
10. The Draft.dev Technical Blogging Style Guide

The Content Creation Process

Building a content pipeline is just the first part of the content marketing process. Drafting compelling, practical, and valuable content is perhaps the most important element of any marketing strategy. Use these helpful resources to start copy with the end consumer in mind.

1. Great Content Marketing Doesn’t Depend on Luck
2. 26 Low-Cost Content Marketing Ideas
3. 50+ Startup Blog Ideas
4. How to Write Persuasive Technical Content
5. How to Write Technical Comparisons
6. Topic Clusters and Keyword Research for Technical Content
7. 10 Technical Writing Style Guides You Can Use
8. A Guide to Writing Technical Roundups
9. How to Write Better Technical Content
10. Generating Content Ideas That Will Resonate With Software Developers

Content Marketing Professionals

Content doesn’t just appear in a vacuum. If you need to create professional or niche content at scale, it might make sense to hire a team, freelancer, or content marketing agency. These tips will help to set the stage, and encourage you to compare your hiring options, payment plans, and sourcing platforms.

1. How to Hire a Freelance Marketing Writer
2. What to Expect from a Content Creation Agency
3. Dealbreakers When Working with a SaaS Marketing Agency
4. Finding Ghostwriters for Hire
5. Best Content Creation Agencies
6. How to Find and Motivate Writers for Your Blog
7. What is a Ghostwriter and Does Your Company Need One?
8. How to Find a Technical Writer for Hire

Tools For Content Marketing

Equip your content to perform at its best with a plethora of tools that integrate with any tech stack. Use automations to streamline your workflow process, or tools to repurpose your content into other formats. It pays to think ahead!

1. Hugo vs. Jekyll: Which is Right for Your Blog?
2. Social Media Automation Tools for Startups
3. React vs. Vue: A Modern Comparison
4. Live Customer Chat Tools for Startups
5. Press Release Creation and Distribution Tools
6. Customer Relationship Management Software for Startups
7. Creating a Multi-Author Publishing Calendar in Airtable
8. Free Stock Images for Your Startup
9. Survey Tools for Startups
10. Landing Page Tools for Startups
11. Email Marketing Tools for Startups
12. Online Course Creation Tools

Technical Content Marketing

At Draft.dev, technical content marketing is our bread and butter. We love helping developers, B2Bs, and SaaS brands create content that people actually want to read. Here are some tips and tricks for developing a technical content marketing strategy, including some helpful tips for building outlines, making edits, and writing introductions.

1. The Best Technical Blog Platforms
2. Syndicating Developer Content
3. Community Research for Technical Content
4. Great Technical Tutorials Address the “Why” and “How
5. Steps to a Quality Edit for Your Technical Blog
6. A Complete Introduction to Technical Marketing
7. How to Write a Technical Tutorial
8. Field Guide to Technical Editing
9. Hands on with Developer Marketing
10. 6 Tips for B2D Marketing

Content Marketing Analytics

It’s not enough to simply write and post your content online. Marketers must be able to track the performance of said content in the marketplace and report on key metrics and KPIs that influence the brand’s success. Check out these resources for performing research, choosing the right metrics, and finding the perfect analytics platform for your content.

1. Creating High-Quality Technical Content Increases Blog Traffic
2. Competition Research Tools
3. 16 Content Marketing Analytics Tools That Finally Do What You Need
4. Content Marketing Analytics: 11 Ways Data Can Inform Your Content Strategy
5. 6 Do’s & Don’ts of Content Marketing Analytics
6. 20 Content Marketing KPIs To Track (+Infographic)
7. Six marketing KPIs that will improve with effective content marketing
8. How to Measure Your Content Marketing ROI + 7 Metrics That Matter

Strategy Of Content Marketing

No two marketing strategies will ever look alike. It’s important to understand what you want from your content campaigns and what you need to get from point A to point B. These resources were specifically chosen to guide your strategy creation process, including how to write and execute a content marketing plan.

1. Selling and Marketing Unsought Products
2. The Case for Bottom Up Marketing
3. Refreshing Old (Technical) Blog Posts
4. How to Create a Technical Content Plan
5. How to Develop a Content Strategy in 7 Steps
6. How to Write a Content Marketing Strategy (w/ Template)
7. 30 Content Marketing Tactics You Have to Try
8. How to Develop a Content Marketing Plan

Content Marketing Formats

There are dozens of different kinds of content marketing formats. From blogs and tutorials to infographics and podcasts, brands can use just about any form of content to their advantage. Use the resources below to explore your options, discover new ideas, and hone in on alternatives that fit your vertical best.

1. How to Create Diagrams for Technical Blog Posts
2. How to Use Markdown
3. How to Write Technical Thought Leadership
4. How to Write Technical Guides
5. Content Types And Deliverables: What Are They?
6. How to Create a Technical Writing Rubric
7. How to Turn Your Conference Talks Into Technical Blog Posts
8. Successful Consumer-Generated Marketing for Technology Companies
9. 113 Types of Content Marketing You Can Add to Your Calendar Now
10. How to Determine What Formats to Use in Your Content Marketing

Understanding SEO

Also known as search engine marketing, SEO is one of the most critical elements of the modern content strategy. But how much should SEO principles guide your content production, and is it possible to do without the help of an expert? These resources spell out everything you need to know about navigating, implementing, and strategizing for SEO content.

1. Finding a B2B SEO Agency That Works for You
2. SEO Keyword Opportunities in Developer Marketing
3. What is SEO? Your Complete Step-By-Step Guide
4. SEO In 2022: 10 Important SEO Trends You Need To Know
5. The Definitive 30-Step Basic SEO Checklist
6. Why focus on long-tail keywords?
7. H1 vs H2 vs H3: What are Heading Tags and How to Use Them?
8. Video SEO: 9 Ways to Optimize Your Video for Search
9. The 10 Best Free SEO Courses Available Online
10. How to Add SEO to Your Marketing Campaign (8 Ways)

B2B Content Marketing

If you sell to brands, businesses, or other enterprise customers, your journey through the content marketing process will look very different from your peers. Here’s how to design and implement a B2B content marketing plan that works – including the critical mistakes you should avoid along the way.

1. The B2B SaaS Marketing Guide
2. B2B Demand Generation Tips and Tactics
3. Best B2B Content Marketing Agencies by Vertical
4. How to Do B2B Writing Right
5. B2B Content Marketing (New Research for 2022)
6. The Best of B2B Marketing Content: 10 Examples
7. 90+ Important B2B Content Marketing Statistics
8. 29 smart B2B content marketing examples and success stories
9. Five Content Marketing Ideas for Enterprise and B2B Startups
10. Breaking Down the Marketing Funnel in B2B

The Next Steps

A strong knowledge of content marketing doesn’t happen overnight. If you’re looking to reinforce your understanding of content from a B2B, SaaS, or technical sense, we’d recommend steeping yourself in some good ol’ fashioned resources. The more you do, the better you’ll be at writing and publishing content (and the more confident you’ll feel to boot).

Is there a tip, trick, or resource we missed? Let us know!

A good marketing agency can accelerate a company’s success, but bad ones cost time, money, and the success of your campaigns. This article will highlight some of the main red flags to watch out for and how to successfully navigate the marketplace.

More than 78,883 digital marketing agencies were registered in 2020. As you might imagine, comparing, interviewing, and evaluating your options to find a perfect match is anything but easy.

Choosing the right SaaS marketing agency is like picking a romantic partner. You’ll want to be on the same page about your goals, work together to actualize them, and actually enjoy spending time together. If you aren’t feeling that magic’ spark,’ or if your goals don’t seem to be making any traction, there might be a reason why.

Not all marketing agencies are created equal. It’s a good idea to understand the dealbreakers that exist both for your company and the SaaS industry. By identifying red flags early on, you can prevent severe disasters from impacting your bottom line and make more informed decisions between the types of digital marketing agencies within your niche.

This article will explore the ins and outs of SaaS agency dealbreakers and explore some ways to interview agencies correctly. We’re going to keep it simple, covering all three of the bases:

• The benefits of hiring an agency
• Red flags to look for when hiring a marketing agency
• How to interview your agency before signing up

The Benefits Of Hiring An Agency

SaaS enterprises looking to scale their marketing efforts often discover that agencies offer excellent solutions for growing businesses. Not only can they provide expert-level inbound marketing strategies across multiple channels, but they can meaningfully scale alongside your business.

If your company has enough marketing spending to account for higher volume content production, agencies are the way to go.

• Agencies may have ample experience in your niche that allow for a more comprehensive campaign
• Many marketing agencies dedicate a team of seasoned professionals to your strategy rather than one or two experts.
• Campaigns can be started right away, with little to no downtime.

It’s important to note that not all agencies are created equal. While some agencies could be a perfect fit for your niche, others may not have the level of professionalism or experience necessary to make your campaign a success. That’s why it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the biggest dealbreakers of SaaS marketing agencies.

Red Flags To Look For When Hiring A Marketing Agency

Before you sign on the dotted line, keep an eye out for these marketing agencies’ red flags well in advance.

Bad Communication

A marketing agency that doesn’t respond quickly or respect your time is a red flag from the very beginning. Beyond its implications to professionalism, any agency that shows difficulty communicating with your team could (and should) be a huge dealbreaker.

Bad communication can manifest in many forms. There could be slowness in email replies. Maybe it’s ignoring your questions. Perhaps it’s ignoring your calls and messages entirely.

Poor communication can also exist from a planning standpoint. If your agency isn’t asking you any questions or requesting direct feedback, that could be a good indication of how they approach campaigns. SaaS marketing agencies need to understand your business, product, and goals exceptionally well. If they aren’t putting forth the effort to stay in touch, they probably aren’t worth your time.

They Ask For Your Direct Login Details

Professional SaaS agencies should never ask for your direct login details. Although it may be necessary from time to time, this direct access could put your team in a weaker position.

Great marketing agencies should have additional user access logins that allow them to make an assist without holding all the cards. Passwords and other details could give ill-intentioned agencies plenty of leverage when you want to part ways and make it extremely difficult to move on when you’re ready.

Promise Things They Can’t Control

If a SaaS marketing agency promises something too good to be true, it probably is. Although some of these organizations can make a significant impact on rankings, organic traffic, and clickthrough rates, you should be cautious if they promise outrageous results that aren’t under their control.

Agencies that promise to rank you in Google’s first position are one example of an overpromising and underdeliver scenario. There’s no guarantee that keywords alone will get you to the top — not to mention constant SEO updates and other internal processes that change your ranking over time.

Know this: it’s much easier to create keywords that won’t drive you any new business than to rank for keywords you want to push. If a SaaS agency isn’t interested in listening to your requests and claims to provide #1 ranking results for every client, they might not be 100% honest.

They Don’t Understand Your Business Or Product

You can’t properly market what you don’t know. If your agency doesn’t understand what you do or what you sell, they won’t be able to reach your audience or your messaging correctly.

Keep tabs on how interested your agency is at the start of the relationship. Are they asking questions and getting to know what you do? Do they already have some level of expertise in the industry?

Generalized marketing agencies produce good work, but excellence is rarely achieved without experience. Look for a marketing agency in your niche, and pay attention to how they treat you and your industry.

No Client Testimonials

Reviews are a quick and effective way to see the results an agency has achieved for previous clients. In our current era of internet prevalence, you can find reviews just about anywhere: Yelp, Google My Business, and various ranking platforms. Additionally, you could find an actual client willing to provide a testimonial in writing or over the phone.

Although it’s common for younger agencies to have fewer reviews, not having any could be a red flag. Do some additional research about the agency in question, looking for any dealbreakers that could exist.

Remember: trust your gut. If something seems off, even if you can’t quite put your finger on it, proceed with caution.

They Have A Different Idea Of What Success Looks Like

Agencies and their clients need to be aligned on a common goal. If the agency focuses on increasing social media followers, but you want email subscribers or leads, there will be some significant performance disagreements.

Success should be defined within the first few agency visits and written down in the project proposal or contract. The agency shouldn’t try to convince you to take a different path or accept other types of metrics. If they don’t respect your campaigns or decision-making capabilities, they probably won’t take your marketing seriously.

Keep an eye out for any variation in reporting or metrics cropping up that you didn’t ask for. Repeated offenses should be cause to reconsider your agency options.

They Focus On “Brand Awareness”

Brand awareness isn’t always bad, especially from a B2B standpoint. However, it shouldn’t be the primary focus of your marketing agency.

Unfortunately, it’s relatively easy for agencies to attribute spending money to brand awareness and achieve little or no results. It’s challenging to attribute ROI to brand awareness and even more difficult to measure it appropriately.

Have a transparent meeting with your agency, and talk about the metrics and KPIs you want to see in your campaign. If they aren’t willing to listen, or if they won’t budge from their brand awareness tactics, you may want to go somewhere else.

How To Interview Your Agency Before Signing Up

The importance of due diligence in picking the right marketing agency cannot be underestimated. Although you can’t know everything about a company unless you experience it yourself, it’s up to you to spot the warning signs before committing to something challenging to escape. Take the time to interview your agency like you would a job candidate and thoroughly inspect their background for red flags that give you pause.

• Ask peers for testimonials, especially about their overall experience with the agency.
• Go the distance with case studies and online reviews. Look for patterns or trends in the facts that are reported.
• Even better, ask the professionals in your space about potential agencies they’ve used in the past.

If you’re willing to treat your agency hunt as a partnership rather than a one-and-done process, you’re bound to be successful in finding the perfect fit.

If you’re looking for a technical marketing content agency with experience in SaaS, Draft.dev is a great place to start. Book a call to chat about blog posts, tutorials, and other content we build for software devs.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that traditional marketing isn’t working anymore. Customers are barraged with thousands of messages every day, and thanks to tone-deaf strategies, they are becoming less and less interested in responding. This makes it incredibly difficult to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.

Long story short: being the loudest guy in the room is no longer a viable marketing strategy.

Customers aren’t interested in the top down approach of management speaking to the ‘little people.’ They don’t care about how amazing you think your company is when compared to everyone else’s. But they do care about choice and the ability to source products that they want. Employees and field experts know this better than anyone, offering valuable insights into customer pain points and needs. Today, this idea has become known as ‘bottom up marketing.’

In this article, we’re going to make the case for bottom up marketing cycles, and explain the how, what, and why behind its many strategies. We’re going to dive into the most important elements, including:

• Bottom up marketing defined
• Top down vs. bottom up marketing: the differences explained
• Bottom up marketing analyzed: 3 case studies
• Making the case for bottom up marketing

Bottom Up Marketing Defined

Before we discuss bottom up marketing, let’s discuss its predecessor: top down marketing.

Top down marketing is defined as a promotion strategy that trickles from the top of the ‘pyramid’ to its lowest levels. Company executives and higher-ups define a strategy they want to take and communicate this down the line to upper management and other officials. Supervisors and middle managers delegate tasks to employees, who create tactics in order to match the strategy. Top-down marketing has been used for hundreds of years and is considered to be the traditional approach to marketing.

Bottom-up marketing flips this model on its head. The lowest rungs in an organization, namely employees and contractors, offer input on current trends, news, and audience insights. These insights are used to create individual tactics (i.e. single customer needs), which are passed up the ladder for company-wide collaboration. Tasks are then completed and sent to higher-ups, who will approve the work and send it to appropriate parties.

This infographic from Smartsheet is really helpful for making sense of it all:

If you’re still a little shaky on the lingo, don’t worry too much. Let’s look at some real world examples for better context.

Top down marketing is very evident in an organization like Mountain Dew. Top level executives perform a situational analysis to create marketing objectives (i.e. sell more soda). The analysis turns into the creation of a marketing strategy, usually with very broad goals. These decisions are then passed down to mid-level managers, who have their employees create graphics, copy, and dynamic ads (tactics) that will culminate in a marketing strategy.

On the other side of the spectrum, HubSpot takes a bottom up approach to marketing. They start with their customers first: what is one customer need they can meet using a tactic? How could their in-house experts turn this tactic into a strategy? Employees with a strong knowledge of said customer needs can start contributing to the planning phase of the process. In other words: bottom up marketing means you put your mind in your marketplace. By immersing yourself in the needs of your customers, you can discover new pathways where customers get in contact with your company and its services.

Contrary to popular belief, there’s really no wrong or right way to position your marketing ‘triangle.’ However, there are a couple of strengths and weaknesses you should be aware of before making any drastic decisions.

Top Down vs. Bottom Up Marketing: The Differences Explained

There’s a reason why top-down marketing has been the traditional format. This strategy maintains a very straightforward planning phase and supports a centralized decision-making process. All roles and responsibilities within the organization are very clear, which boosts time to market and improves internal communication.

• Simplified planning process
• Unified expectations
• Improved internal communication

Of course, these benefits also come with their fair share of drawbacks:

• Knowledge gaps may lead to insufficient marketing
• Lower employee engagement could cause burnout
• Tactics and strategies are less customer-centric

This is where bottom up marketing kicks in. One of this method’s greatest strengths is a decentralized planning process that allows every team member to provide their expertise and input. Any knowledge gaps from higher ups are supported by a wealth of employees, identifying new tactics in order to build a strategy. Bottom up marketing is particularly strong in technical industries, especially fields like developer marketing that rely on employee experience and creativity.

The benefits of bottom up marketing defend against the drawbacks of a top down strategy:

• Decreases the risks of knowledge gaps
• Engages all employees with all talents
• Customer-centric tactics could draw a larger audience

Of course, this doesn’t mean there aren’t any weaknesses to bottom up marketing. Since the strategy phase takes a decentralized approach, initial project phases could take much longer. In addition, newer customer tactics may be complicated to develop, and significantly stretch out the project timeline.

Bottom Up Marketing Analyzed: 3 Case Studies

Getting started with bottom up marketing in your software company isn’t that complicated. DigitalOcean’s community tutorials allow users to access and implement solutions at a glance, leading to tactic generation. Zapier’s use case library provides detailed information about tactics that could be used for a wide variety of marketing strategies, especially for front-line employees.

Regardless of your industry, bottom up marketing gets results. Below are two of the most commonly cited case studies.

FedEx

FedEx is in direct competition with a number of other shipping companies, including the USPS. For this reason, remaining competitive requires them to think outside the box.

For the majority of FedEx’s history, the company relied heavily on a top down strategy that promoted all of its shipping services to the audience. However, the key to their competition was not in an overarching strategy, but in individual tactics.

A number of FedEx employees noticed that customers were consistently talking about overnight shipping services. The company promptly turned its top down strategy on its head, and focused on a singular tactic (customer need): how could they create overnight shipping?

Frankly, the rest is history.

Dominos

Pizza delivery is a staple of the American diet. For Dominos, who lagged behind its peers for several years, the top down approach simply wasn’t making the cut.

Domino employees and managers had interesting insights related to customer needs, namely the prompt delivery of pizza. It was then that Dominos executives had an idea: what could they implement to meet this single need for their customers? This developed into a strategy that guaranteed fresh pizza deliveries within 30 minutes or your money back. This bloomed into a hugely successful marketing strategy, and put Dominos back on the map as a strong competitor in the marketplace.

Making The Case For Bottom Up Marketing

Bottom up marketing transforms a tired, traditional industry from a hit-and-miss enterprise to a powerful, relatable force that attracts a wide base of potential leads. Marketers are able to connect to leads through their needs, not the needs of their business. Instead of creating a strategy that needs to be executed with tactics, it makes far more sense to find a tactic that can be used to build strategy. Some of the world’s biggest names, including FedEx and Dominos, have used bottom up marketing to achieve big success in their industries.

Between ample use cases and extremely measurable benefits, the case for bottom up marketing is stronger than ever. The concept is simple to understand, easy to manage, and nets strong results for the organizations that put it into practice. It’s not just a new method of marketing; it’s a transformative powerhouse for the future. The question is, are you going to cash in on it?

If you’re in a technical industry that’s interested in marketing to software developers, Draft.dev could be a great way to make the switch to bottom up marketing. We provide blog posts, tutorials, and other written content generated from bottom up industry experts with hands-on industry experience. By siphoning finished content through a quality control program, we integrate SEO with technical accuracy to provide value across the board.

If you want to get started on a customized technical content marketing plan, get in touch with us to book a call at your earliest convenience. We can’t wait to chat soon!

How Earthly Increased Its Monthly Blog Visitors by 346% and Ramped Up Its Content Production with Draft.dev

Earthly is a build automation tool for the container era. It works with existing build systems to create repeatable and understandable builds. 

Earthly partnered with Draft.dev to ramp up their content production and create awareness about Earthly’s product. The benefits of this partnership speak for themselves:

• A 346% increase in monthly blog visitors within 6 months 

• 1,500 blog visitors per workday

• 6% blog conversion rate

We had a chat with Adam Gordon Bell, Director of Developer Relations, to understand how these amazing results came about.

Challenges

Q: What led you to Draft.dev in the first place?

ADAM:  One of our investors, Mitch Weiner, advised us that the best way to create awareness was to make Earthly’s blog a valuable resource for developers so that they always come to us for information. 

He recommended that we create four or five new pieces of content for our blog every week. And that was more than our team could take on.

Q: What was your writing process when you were creating content in-house?

ADAM: We still do our own writing for the blog, we use Draft.dev to augment our content creation process. 

Before, I would try to come up with things that I thought would be valuable to developers. Then the primary software engineers on the team and I would spend time once a month creating the content. 

Q: Did you have a publishing schedule?

ADAM: We were publishing once a week.

Q: Did anyone on your team have previous writing experience?

ADAM: One of the developers on our team actually has quite a bit of writing and editing experience. Besides him, the rest of us were pretty new to it. One of my early articles got feedback saying ‘this sentence is in passive voice,’ and ‘this sentence is hard to read.’

Q: How long did it take you to write a single post?

ADAM: One to two full workdays. Between four people, that’s one to two days for each person per month.

Q: How did you choose the topics you were going to write about?

ADAM: We didn’t have a good idea of what topics we should be targeting. Our main criteria was to write posts that we thought would be relevant to people who might use Earthly and to write about what we were interested in.

Q: Did you consider other alternatives before working with Draft.dev?

ADAM: We didn’t consider anybody else. I liked Karl and once our CEO met him, we thought that he was a great person to start this relationship with. He seemed like he was here to help us out.

Solution

Q: Did you have any specific goals in mind when you first started working with Draft.dev?

ADAM: We wanted people to land on our blog, read our content and say, ‘this is really valuable, who wrote it?’ and then check out Earthly and say, ‘this is an interesting product, let me explore it.’ We wanted to build awareness with our potential customers.

Q: Can you walk me through what it was like to get started with Draft.dev?

ADAM: We decided to have Draft.dev write one article per week for a quarter. Karl wanted us to come up with 12 topics and our CEO and I brainstormed some topics and we shared them with Karl to get his feedback.

We’ve changed the process in the last two quarters. We’ve had Draft.dev do some of the research on what would be a good fit of article topics for us.

Q: Can you tell me a little bit more about the research process?

ADAM: We came up with a bunch of ideas for areas related to what Earthly does. So, mainly around building software or around command-line tools or various things for developers that we thought would be a good fit with us. It is a vague high-level list.

We gave it to the Draft.dev team, and then they did research, looking for what was underrepresented in the search engines. They advised us on the specific areas that we needed to target. 

We reviewed the topics to find the ones that were a good fit for us. From there, they worked on outlines and then they started writing the articles. 

Q: Have there been any benefits to Draft.dev’s process?

ADAM: Draft.dev’s process gives us reasonable expectations of how the articles will look like and the confidence that there are people searching for those topics. It takes the guesswork out of the process.

Results

Q: How much organic blog traffic you were driving before working with Draft.dev?

ADAM: 20 people a day. With Draft.dev the number has grown to over 1,500 per workday.

Q: Are there any specific articles that really, really have excelled?

ADAM: Yes. There’s one on Docker Networking, that brings in 100 people per workday. There’s another one on Docker Multi-Stage that brings in 75 visitors per workday.

We had a series of articles on Makefiles written and they’ve brought  5,000 visitors in the last 28 days. 

Q: Can you tell me about the conversion rate of your content since you started working with Draft.dev?

ADAM: This September, 6% of the visitors who came to the blog, went to the main website. And then, 20% of them went to our download page.

Q: Imagine working without Draft.dev, what does life look like today having done that work yourself, or having begun working with freelancers?

ADAM: I don’t think we would’ve been able to hit the scale of content that we’ve produced without Draft.dev. Right now, we have 1,500 visitors per workday, I suspect we would have half as much or less traffic without Draft.dev.

Q: What would you say to someone who’s interested in driving traffic to their technical product about working with Draft.dev?

ADAM: It’s difficult to find an agency with enough high-quality subject matter expert writers to build up the content pipeline that Draft.dev gives you. It’s a shortcut to building an in-house writing team.

Subject Matter Expert Writers. Proven results.

Download The Case Study Here

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Content creation agencies help manage a company’s content strategy, from planning and creation to publication on the client’s behalf. This article provides a list of the top five content creation agencies in the US and beyond and some of the industries they specialize in reaching.

In January of 1996, tech pioneer Bill Gates coined his famous essay, Content Is King. “The broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate,” he wrote candidly. “Those who succeed will propel the Internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products – a marketplace of content.”

Although Gates could not have known how providential his statement would be, his quote remains an oft-cited indication of the power of content creation. Content was, is, and will remain the king of the online marketing world.

Today, there are quite literally dozens of content creation avenues available, from freelance work to in-house teams. One of the most highly sought-after methods is the content creation agency: a cost-effective, highly efficient team of experts specializing in generating, curating, and publishing content.

Not all content creation agencies are equal, though. You also need to watch for Saas marketing agency dealbreakers. Finding the best among them takes industry insight and a good sense of your goals and milestones. However, there are a couple of shortcuts that could help you make an informed decision.

Let’s look at some of the best content creation agencies on the market and how they make a difference for clients worldwide. Strap in, because we’re covering:

• What do content creation agencies do?
• Benefits of hiring an agency
• 5 of the best content creation agencies
• Finding the perfect content creation agency

What Do Content Creation Agencies Do?

According to Draft.dev’s founder Karl Hughes, content marketing “utilizes the power of storytelling to raise awareness and desire, to build trust, and to drive sales.” In other words, it’s the process of creating content that your customers actually want to consume.

Content creation agencies specialize in the design, execution, and publication of content in many forms. Depending on the agency in question, this could mean:

• Blogs
• Videos
• Tutorials
• Websites
• Podcasts
• Images
• Infographics
• Social media posts
• Webinars
• Contests
• Reports
• Quizzes
• Ebooks

Content creation agencies are not always necessary for the creation of content. Businesses can and do build content campaigns with internal teams all the time. With a solid knowledge base, content creation, publication, and dissemination can bypass agencies entirely.

However, internal teams are not always an option for younger businesses or growing startups. If your ultimate goal is to reach a new audience, turn a profit, or raise leads over time, you may want to rely on a content creation agency. Even if you have an internal team, agencies can partner alongside your growing in-house experts to create even more focused content. What’s more, you may not be prepared for the time it takes to develop a solid in-house team and need a little extra help. More on that later.

Benefits Of Hiring An Agency

Given some time to learn your business, agencies can create high-quality, long-form content that reaches your target market.

The best content creation agencies partner alongside your business to create sustainable success:

• Diverse content teams with multiple skills, talents, and subject matter experts
• Accountability to your KPIs, team members, and long-term goals
• Work alongside your in-house experts

Content creation agencies often specialize in particular industries or business structures, with some of the most common including finance, SaaS, B2B, and eCommerce. This allows you to find the best possible fit for your business.

If you’re unsure of the benefits of content creation agencies, 98% of B2B brands believe that the cost of hiring a content agency is justified by its many benefits. Two of the most cited benefits include five times the lead generation and 62% less overhead compared to older marketing formats.

Perhaps the most significant benefit of content creation agencies is lightning-fast speed. Unlike in-house teams, which could take time to ramp up, content creation agencies can get started as soon as you sign on the dotted line. It’s a win-win for everyone!

5 Of The Best Content Creation Agencies

Content creation agencies vary wildly in both form and function. Understanding your options is a great way to refocus and pick the best agency for your needs and niche.

Audience Ops

Audience Ops is a content marketing agency focusing on blogs and podcasts. Although it doesn’t specify a particular industry or target niche, it is best known for working with enterprise founders and CEOs within the digital B2B industry.

Evergreen content management from Audience Ops comes with the complete package:

• Content idea generation
• Writing and editing
• Image sourcing
• Blog setup services
• Newsletters and email copy
• Social media copy

The most impressive aspect of Audience Ops is its total commitment to fast, tight, on-demand content. Access a team of vetted writers in your B2B niche and build a content plan within weeks.

Codeless

Combining data with long-form content, Codeless is a content marketing company emphasizing writing and video. They specialize in SaaS, service-oriented, and affiliate brands, many of which are found in the most competitive online spaces.

One of the things that help Codeless stand apart from its competitors is data-driven content creation. Unlike agencies that create copious amounts of short-form content, Codeless specializes in organizing data with storytelling and has had work featured in publications all over the US, including:

• The New York Times
• Business Insider
• TheNextWeb

If you’re looking to get your startup business off the ground and seen in the marketplace, Codeless may be a great option.

Scribly

Scribly is a fully scalable content marketing agency with the ability to generate many forms of content, including:

• Social Media
• Email
• Blogs
• Landing Pages
• Ebooks

Unlike the previous agencies on this list, Scribly works with both B2B and B2C companies. A large portion of its clients are new startups or growing enterprises that need their content to grow along with them. Scribly offers three separate packages (the Micro, Mega, and Turbo) to fit businesses at any stage of development. Best of all, it also provides one-off projects and services for companies looking for a minor boost.

Scribly provides an excellent economy of scale for businesses big or small. It’s a great place to start a campaign, primarily if you’ve never worked with an agency before.

Brafton

If you’re looking for a full-service content creation agency, Brafton may be the best option for you.

In business since 1998, Brafton has been creating content for over two decades and offers six major areas of expertise:

1. Blog Content
2. Ebooks & Whitepapers
3. Infographics & Assets
4. Case Studies & Website Copy
5. Newsletters & Email Copy
6. Video Production

Once you fill out the initial questionnaire, you’ll be contacted by a rep with a uniquely generated strategy and price tag. Brafton doesn’t specialize in any particular industry or business structure and caters to companies worldwide. Get highly customized content creation for any segment of your business, and watch organic leads roll in.

SeedX

SeedX is a relatively newer content creation agency established in 2016. In just five short years, the company has become a well-matched rival to more established agencies like Accenture and McKinsey.

SeedX operates in a wide variety of industries, from sports to alternative health. Its unique experiences allow this agency to work with many kinds of enterprise structures, such as:

• Small businesses
• SMEs
• Nonprofits
• National & Global brands

Both SeedX co-founders were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 for marketing and advertising, and were recognized as some of the most influential marketing professionals of 2021. In other words, these people know their stuff.

Finding The Perfect Content Creation Agency

Now that you’ve been introduced to some of the best content creation agencies, you’ll likely be comparison shopping to pick the best one. If you’re not, you’re doing it wrong.

Research is probably the most crucial aspect of picking the perfect content creation agency. Some agencies offer full-service marketing and scalable features. Others have a stronger bent toward B2Bs or SaaS enterprises. In any case, research is vital. The options are always available, but the choice is up to you.

Finding the right agency and its content tilt will go a long way towards a successful content marketing campaign. If you’re looking to reach software developers, Draft.dev may be able to help. We help our clients reach technical decision-makers with quality, accurate content creation.

If that sounds relevant to you, book a call, and let’s chat!

Nearly every business engages in content marketing today, but many do so without direction or consistency. Publishing random videos on TikTok and writing a blog post every now and then isn’t sufficient for attracting enough customers — or the right ones.

If you’re not strategic about content creation and promotion, you could inadvertently damage your reputation and erode trust with your target audience. This is especially true when you’re trying to reach a savvy, skeptical audience like software developers.

After working with over 60 clients to write highly specialized marketing content over the past year, I went on Fundraising Radio to share some of our insights. Konstantin Dubovitskiy and I talked about some of the fundamental content marketing principles all startups should align with — and what to avoid — when trying to find your first customers.

Below is a summary of our call, but you should check out the entire episode here.

Content Marketing vs. Direct Sales

Although it might seem like content should be one of the first items on your entrepreneurial to-do list, content marketing is not mandatory for every business in the beginning. In fact, the decision to start a content engine there shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Early-stage companies that don’t have content marketing embedded into their culture probably want to hold off until they’ve got the resources to hire a full-time content manager. Creating content is not cheap and the payoff term is long, so you need to consider your bottom line when your resources are thin.

Pre-seed founders are often better served by direct sales to get the ball rolling. The time and energy your team dedicates to generating content could be wasted if your company doesn’t survive long enough to see results.

You need to understand your company’s bandwidth before taking on content marketing, as getting a sale in the first year or two is much more important than writing a thousand pieces of content.

One reason founders lean on content is fear. Ask yourself if you harbor some fear around cold outreach or sales?

It might feel easier to write a bunch of blog posts than to talk to 100 customers, but content needs to be intentional. You shouldn’t do it just because you’re afraid of talking to people.

Startup Content Marketing Mistakes

If writing, video production, or another content-related skill is native to you and your team, or if you’ve brought an expert in to help, the time is probably right to build your content base.

The biggest mistakes I see technical founders making when they initiate content marketing include:

1. Lack of Strategy

It can be tempting to emulate big companies with a presence on nearly every medium by throwing content out there haphazardly. When you do it this way, you waste precious resources, and you’ll probably waste a lot on content that flops. You need to have a proper digital content strategy.

If you don’t know the answer to questions like these, you probably need to flesh out buyer personas and understand your target customers better first.

How to avoid this mistake: 

• Tap into your existing audience first. Do you have an email list? Revamp your newsletter with more robust content to test it out.
• Consider your readers’ state of mind when they consume your content. People probably aren’t on TikTok to buy B2B marketing software.
• Build sales enablement content. Answer commonly asked questions about your product or address pain points with your early content so it can support your sales goals.

2. Failure to Promote

Once you’ve produced a fantastic piece of content, your work isn’t over. Many business owners underinvest in promotion, hoping that a few social posts will be enough to make the article go viral.

The problem is that you’re competing with a world of content that’s moving all the time. It’s naive to assume readers will magically come across your blog post or helpful guide organically without some intention.

How to avoid this mistake:

There are several strategies for promoting content with limited resources.

• Share the link in appropriate subreddits. If you’ve never used Reddit, there could be a learning curve here. Slice up your content and use it to answer questions in relevant communities.
• Post on your personal social accounts. Ask your employees to do the same, and be sure to post multiple times over a year.
• Recycle your content. Many people forget to reshare a blog post or video more than once. You can remember to recycle by spacing out several uniquely phrased posts on a quarterly content calendar.
• Reach out to industry newsletters. Some will accept submissions if the content is highly relevant to their audience.
• Run ads if you think there will be ROI. It’s unlikely you’ll see a return on top-of-funnel ads, but you might choose to put some spend behind content that’s intended to drive sales. Retargeting ads are a powerful way to grab the people who have already visited your blog.

I’ve also written a complete content promotion checklist that might help you push more traffic to your pieces.

3. Publishing Inconsistently

Posting sporadically or giving up when you don’t see results in the first three to six months isn’t a recipe for content marketing success.

When you realize how long building a content engine takes, it can be disheartening. But lack of consistency will kill any forward progress you make, so you have to stick with it.

How to avoid this mistake:

For some, there’s a fear factor underneath this content inconsistency.

It can be scary to put yourself and your company values out there — particularly if you’re shaking up a space. In this case, the remedy is to do it repeatedly until you recondition yourself to believe that there are people out there who need to hear what your brand has to say.

Business Competitions: A Brand-Building Opportunity

Some marketing channels require that you let go of stage fright.

I once worked for a startup whose founders appeared on the popular TV show, SharkTank, so I saw firsthand the effect of sweeping market visibility that big events (like being featured on a popular pitch show) can provide.

Funding competitions can build brand awareness quicker than traditional marketing strategies for consumer products, but they aren’t free. In the case of Shark Tank, you have to give up equity, and there’s always an opportunity cost associated with these kinds of channels.

Building Up Once You Have a Content Foundation

Once you’re deep into a consistent content publishing routine, you’ll want to regularly assess how it’s going and, ideally, get more strategic with Search Engine Optimization. 

Adding elements like keyword research helps your content move up the ranks on Google and will likely improve your marketing outcomes in the long run.

Most businesses should be doing some form of content marketing. But it won’t work unless it’s strategic. You don’t want luck-based marketing. That’s a dangerous, expensive game.

My weekly grocery store run is easy. I know exactly what I need and exactly where to find it. For businesses, marketing the products that people already want is simple, but what about products people don’t know they need? These are called unsought products, and their marketing strategies cost a great deal of time and money to execute.

Because consumers either don’t know unsought products exist or their benefits, they’re difficult to market. This article will explain what they are and why content is a perfect marketing tactic for them.

Marketing helps your business boost awareness and comprehension of its products or services. When a product is already clearly defined and understood in the marketplace, advertising, sales, and marketing are more or less straightforward.

Unsought products are a unique beast. These items certainly have a use in the marketplace, but require extra exposure and additional marketing tactics to inform and motivate consumers. They are often extremely specific, so they appeal to very niche audiences. They also need a large advertising budget to sell to consumers.

In this article, we’ll cover the most critical aspects of marketing an unsought product, including:

• What is an unsought product?
• Challenges of unsought products marketing 
• Why content is an ideal tactic for marketing unsought products
• Creating a cohesive strategy for specialty products marketing

What Are Unsought Products?

There are four primary categories of products: convenience products, shopping products, specialty products, and unsought products.

Convenience products are bought frequently, immediately, and sometimes on impulse. Think of items like laundry detergent, chewing gum, and fast food.

Shopping products are distributed through fewer outlets and are often compared and contrasted by factors such as price, convenience, and quality. Although these are still frequently purchased, they’re not as common as convenience products. Clothing items, flights, and furniture fall into this category.

Specialty products are positioned for luxury, hard to obtain, and highly specialized. They are exclusionary by nature and come with a high price tag for their unique designs, models, and benefits. Luxury vehicles, specialty jewelry, and designer clothing are considered to be specialty products.

An unsought product has none of the elements from other segments. If a product is unknown, not actively searched for by the marketplace, and is very specific, it is likely an unsought product. Its price can be highly variable, and its marketplace perception is often more muted than other segments. Eugene Schwartz classified it as a stage one unawareness product, meaning clients and companies have no idea what the product is or why it exists, although it can also include services that people know about but don’t want to buy.

Below are a few other indicators of an unsought product:

• Little to no desire to purchase, like home smoke detectors.
• Associated with negative connotations, such as pre-paid burial plots.
• Lack of immediate tangible benefits, similar to health insurance.
• Low motivation to spend time or money, especially reference books or encyclopedias.
• Unaware of a new product, like SlaaS programs (Sleep Lab as a Service).

Unsought Products Examples

Unsought products are often sold through industries that remain in the background. Software companies, large industrial brands, and insurance companies are just a few of the most common.

Some examples of unsought products include:

• Funeral caskets are perhaps the most titular example of unsought products. No one likes talking about death, and coffins are no exception.
• Life insurance, disability insurance, and nursing home insurance are unsought product examples that require a great deal of backend marketing.
• Airplanes and helicopters are frequently considered unsought goods thanks to their higher price tags.

There are many other examples of unsought goods in the marketplace, from fire extinguishers to thesauruses, and they require a large amount of money and time to secure willing buyers.

Challenges Of Marketing Unsought Goods

Due to their unique marketplace positioning, unsought products have several inherent challenges to overcome. They may be unknown to consumers or associated with negative connotations or life events, such as a burial plot’s association with dying, which dissuades people from purchasing. What’s more, a lack of immediate benefits can turn buyers away.

There are other challenges that stem from unsought product marketing, although unawareness and lack of immediate benefits are the most significant factors. In both scenarios, long-term advertising campaigns are required to generate awareness of and interest in the product or service, which can mean enormous marketing spending.

Many marketing tactics have been used to sell unsought products, some with great success. But as time goes on, it’s vital for marketers to do away with tired ploys that are less efficient and easily tuned out.

Fear, for example, is a classic motivator. Consider unsought goods such as accidental death insurance. Discussing the negative consequences of not purchasing the item can motivate consumers to buy, but it is a risky strategy that doesn’t always pay off. For one thing, leveraging fear is not always ethical. For another, it can be easily ignored by customers with low motivation or interest. The message needs to be executed carefully so it doesn’t exaggerate product claims.

Why Content Marketing Makes It Simpler To Market Unsought Goods

Content marketing has long been one of the most potent forms of inbound marketing. The content itself offers short-term spend and long term gain, as well as results that last a very long time. Once you post a piece of content to the internet, it’s there to stay. You can continue to reap the rewards of content long after being published, months or possibly even years into the future.

It’s easy to see why content is one of the best mediums for selling unsought products. Content draws an audience directly to your site and avoids costly TV or billboard ads. Even better, its methods of raising awareness can be highly cost-effective for an unknown or unsought goods.

Let’s look at some of the most significant benefits content marketing offers in an unsought niche.

Content Marketing Is Actionable

Content marketing provides information at every stage of the buyer journey. It funnels customers from the awareness stage to the comparison stage, eventually leading them to purchase. You may also know this process as top, middle, and lower funneling.

Content Marketing Is Informative

Content marketing is informative first and entertaining second. It helps answer any pressing questions that people are searching for online, particularly about your industry. If you are the first company to make a post or answer a question, you have the opportunity to drive an enormous amount of traffic and position yourself as an authority.

Content Marketing Is Integrated

Content marketing is a cross-platform strategy, which captures bigger audiences using less work. For example, your brand could create social media posts that advertise blogs on a specific topic. Customers click through to your site, where they read a post that encourages email sign-ups. They enjoy your blog so much that they sign up for a weekly newsletter. Your brand will continue to nurture leads via email, which will eventually help readers decide to buy.

Content Marketing Is Customer-Oriented

Content marketing makes it easy to emphasize the benefits of an unsought good safely and ethically. It can also highlight the risks of not having it without devolving it into a fear tactic. For example, technical blogs could capture a drip campaign about industry trends and your product and all the ways they’ve helped customers thrive.

Content Marketing Is Affordable

Content marketing ranges wildly in terms of cost, but it is widely considered to be one of the lower-cost strategies. It doesn’t cost a penny to send out a social media post or create a blog post on your site. If you want high-quality copy in a particular niche, you may need to pay extra for creative labor, in which case freelancers and content agencies are both popular options.

An excellent case study of unsought goods using content marketing includes pre-planned funeral homes. Well-conceived websites and unique on-page content can nurture leads through the funnel. According to this case study on Hoff Funeral Home, good website content helps leads find and place trust in your brand. In this case, a single lead was able to submit an online funeral pre-plan using an online form. Finally, the lead RSVP’d services for another loved one on the same site. This would not have occurred if the company did not have strong website content and good inbound marketing strategies.

If you aren’t sure where or how to begin your content journey, consider partnering with a pro. Technical content marketing agencies like Draft.dev make it easy to generate quality content without the hassle of sourcing writers.

Creating Cohesive Strategy

Unsought products are any item or service customers don’t know they need or don’t actively want. This could be due to the product’s position in the marketplace, the type of product, or the target demographic Unsought goods face many marketing challenges due to their unique positioning, including extensive marketing spend, low awareness, and high comprehension thresholds.

Harnessing the power of inbound marketing is a great way to alleviate some of the pain points in unsought products. Create a cohesive marketing strategy that integrates strong content marketing for the best possible outcomes. Highlight the benefits of your USP and encourage engagement to create an active audience segment. Finally, focus on creating a solid content marketing strategy that communicates the advantages of your offering and moves people through your funnel.

Marketing at a startup is really tough.

Most startups have tight budgets, few internal resources, and short timelines to show traction to their investors. Nearly 40% of startups fail because they don’t generate enough traction to make it to their next fundraise, and unfortunately, it’s no longer enough to build something and just hope that people will show up.

While I don’t think content marketing will solve every startup’s growth challenge, there’s a compelling case that it should always be part of your marketing strategy.

It’s typically more affordable than paid advertising (when done right), and it provides many fringe benefits. Content can support paid marketing, sales teams, recruiting efforts, and customer support teams.

Almost all of the companies we work with at Draft.dev are early to mid-stage startups. Many come to us because content is a core part of their developer marketing strategy, but they aren’t able to produce enough of it in-house. During initial conversations, my goal is to understand each client’s content strategy so I can figure out where Draft.dev might fit into the picture.

There are essentially three questions that help dictate your content marketing strategy:

• What’s your go-to-market strategy?
• What’s your timeline?
• What resources do you have? Or what’s your budget?

In the remainder of this piece, I’ll go over these questions and some of the ways early stage startups can shape their content strategy based on the answers.

What’s Your Go-To-Market Strategy?

While most early stage startups are testing many marketing channels, it’s critical to understand whether your go-to-market strategy is more sales or marketing focused.

Sales-focused companies will likely use cold prospecting, demo calls, and account executives to close deals while marketing-focused companies will rely on self-service signups, trials, and content to help them attract customers.

That said, content can play an important role in both of these go-to-market strategies. You just need to adjust the kind of content you create accordingly.

Content Marketing for Sales-Focused Startups

Content can be a fantastic form of sales collateral. It can help you close deals, handle objections, and mitigate support requests.

Most sales-driven startups focus on bottom-of-the-funnel content that helps prospects see how they might benefit from their product. Case studies, FAQs, tutorials, comparisons, use cases, integration guides, and webinars are all good examples of the kind of content that can help move prospects down the funnel and facilitate sales.

For example, take a look at LinkPoint’s FAQ page.

I bet these FAQs are common questions that customers ask during sales calls. LinkPoint realized that it would be easier to head these questions off before the call, but it also gives salespeople a central place to point customers that have a lot of questions or if they want to send resources to other team members.

Content Marketing for Marketing-Focused Startups

Startups who need mass-market reach or want to focus on inbound interest can also use content, but should be more focused on top-of-funnel pieces. The goal here is to raise awareness, introduce the product to the world, and build long-term traffic from Google searches.

Marketing-focused companies need content that has wider appeal. High-level guides, keyword research-driven content, community-driven content, and strong op-eds from the founders are all good examples of this. For our industry (engineering), documentation, demos, and feature lineups are also important pieces of content as buyers won’t be getting on a sales call as often. They need to learn what the product does for themselves.

One of our clients, ContainIQ, has been doing a good job building this sort of top-of-funnel content for their Kubernetes monitoring tool.

Each piece of content on their site is aimed at exposing engineers learning about Kubernetes to their product. While the call-to-action isn’t strong, they’re building a base of organic search traffic and readers that they’ll be able to build on for years to come.

What’s Your Timeline?

I’ve already hinted at this, but for startups, timing is critical. Most raise enough funding for 12-24 months of operation, planning to raise their next round off the success of the previous one.

Unfortunately, content marketing gets more expensive and riskier the shorter your turnaround.

Short-Term: Showing Results in 3-6 Months

If you need to get significant traffic from content in 3-6 months, you’ll need to put a lot more money behind it.

Assuming you’re new to writing for search engines, you won’t have time to rank highly for any competitive terms, so one way to generate leads and traffic from content quickly is to put advertising behind it. Write a few long-form pieces, put them behind a signup wall, and run ads on Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. to drive traffic. The cost varies depending on your industry, but you might pay anywhere from $0.10 to $20 per click with signup rates of 0% to 20%.

Another option is to syndicate or publish content to third-party sites that already generate a lot of traffic. Many news and industry publications allow sponsors to publish promotional content for a fee, but you can also try pitching your pieces for organic placement.

Finally, you can attempt to write viral hits. My recommendation would be to have your founders take a strong point of view on something and share it to tons of places (Reddit, Hacker News, newsletters, Facebook groups, Slack channels, Twitter, etc.) in hopes that it might take off.

This option might seem attractive because it requires more time than money, but it’s the least reliable way to generate qualified traffic. It’s basically like playing the lottery, but even if you do get a viral hit, out of millions of readers, very few might actually be in your target market.

Long-Term: Showing Results in 6-24 Months

On the other hand, if you have 6 or more months to prove out your content marketing strategy, you have more low-cost options.

With time on your side, you can invest a week or two on keyword research to find topics with search volume that you could rank for on Google relatively easily. Because you know what the reader was searching for when they arrived at your piece, you can organically introduce your product and help them understand the need it fills.

Most of this content should be placed on your own site and you should build backlinks to it from other sites. This will help your whole site’s visibility in Google as the search engine will start to associate your site with the keywords you target.

Finally, you can invite readers to subscribe to your newsletter or social media channels so that you can encourage repeat visits. My friend Manuel Weiss and I collaborated on a full course on this topic earlier this year, so if you want to dive deeper into content marketing, be sure to check that out.

Attracting traffic on Google is really appealing because once you’ve created a piece, the traffic typically compounds over time. You don’t have to keep paying to promote it, and it quickly becomes a largely passive source of traffic and leads.

How Much Are You Ready to Invest?

The last question every early stage startup should ask is what percentage of their funding will they allocate to marketing, and what percentage of that to content marketing? I am amazed at how many founders get funding but have no idea how they’ll deploy their capital.

Producing high-quality content is not cheap. But, beyond production, you have to promote it, build links to it, and update it periodically to maintain its value. Hiring a full-time team to create content every week is often cost-prohibitive for early stage startups, but managing and editing a team of freelance writers is very time-consuming.

This is why specialized agencies are often appealing. I don’t believe founders should outsource high-level marketing strategy, but hiring a content creation agency can take a lot of the risk and hours off your plate. Just be sure to get a firm that understands your market as you want your content to be authoritative and compelling.

Common Content Marketing Mistakes

If you can answer the above questions, you’re doing much better than many early stage startups when it comes to content marketing. That said, you’re only starting to scratch the surface.

It’s really easy to spend a lot of money and time producing content and then find that nothing is working. The four issues I see most often are:

• Trying random things instead of acting strategically – It’s easy to fall into this trap, but you need to be intentional. Great marketing should deliver consistent, predictable results.
• Failure to measure results – With dozens of analytics tools available, there’s no excuse not to monitor the effectiveness of your content marketing. You really just need three metrics to start: visitors, signups, conversions.
• Not putting enough time or money into content before quitting – I get it, you don’t want to waste money, but like any organic channel, content marketing takes time. I typically recommend 6-12 months.
• Not promoting content – Finally, if you’re strategically writing great content but letting it languish on your blog with no traffic, you probably need to spend more time or money promoting it. I advocate using a promotional checklist like this to help seed some conversations.

If you’ve got your own tips for marketing at early stage startups, I’m always open to updates and suggestions. Find me on Twitter to pick up the conversation.

My grandmother, like most grandmothers, was a wise woman. She had a variety of lines that she would say with regularity, and one in particular always stands out:

“Your local doctor is a generalist who knows something about a lot of things. He’ll tell you where a problem is, but you wouldn’t let him do heart surgery on you.”

In other words, when you’ve got a specific need, you should see a specialist with deep expertise in that area.

Some freelancers and agencies offer a broad range of services, which may include website design, content creation, social media management, public relations, and almost every other area of marketing imaginable.

Others, like Draft.dev, have a narrower list of services.

This article will explore what a content creator agency offers, who should consider working with one, and how they differ from in-house staff or freelancers.

What is a Content Company?

Before we get to who should work with an agency, let’s take a minute to look at content and how it performs.

Although it’s a relatively new term, content as a form of marketing has been around for as long as people have had something to sell. At its most basic level, it’s using words to convey the benefits of a product or service. It utilizes the power of storytelling to raise awareness and desire, to build trust, and to drive sales.

Legendary copywriter Gary Halbert created a popular newsletter in 1986—delivered by snail mail! Each installment was written on a typewriter and mailed out to recipients along with the rest of their letters. In one issue, Gary taught a business model of offering an interesting report and running classified ads to generate sales. This is the exact same model still being used today with lead magnets, except it’s now digital.

We know that content as a tactic is not new. It’s also effective: companies have found it costs 62% less than traditional marketing, and generates 5x more leads.

No wonder that 98% of B2B brands believe it justifies its cost.

Fortunately, anyone can try their hand at content creation. In fact, many businesses, small and large, create their own content. Larger companies may have internal teams dedicated to it, but it can be more challenging for smaller businesses. As such, it’s not unusual for content to be an afterthought or another thing on a person’s seemingly infinite to-do list.

What are Content Creation Agencies?

A content creation agency is for businesses that recognize the need for content as a marketing channel, but need additional support in creating it. The agency is, as my grandmother would have said, a specialist that can solve the issue to a high level.

Why Hire a Content Production Agency?

When a company decides it needs additional resources, it has three main options:

• Hire in-house staff
• Work with freelancers
• Work with an agency

Building an internal team can be a slow and expensive process, especially if multiple people are needed. It’s a multistage process that looks something like this:

1. Post a recruitment advertisement
2. Wait for applications
3. Filter the applications and compile a shortlist
4. Conduct first-round interviews
5. Evaluate the applicants
6. Conduct second-stage interviews, and possibly more
7. Offer a package to the preferred candidate
8. Negotiate the package
9. Wait for the candidate to complete their probationary period
10. Onboard the candidate and teach them the company culture
11. Give the new hire a period to settle in and find their feet
12. Start creating content

It can take months just to reach the stage of conducting interviews. Depending on how many applicants will be interviewed, and how many rounds are required, this can also take months.
Then, once you’ve found an applicant you like, you have to wait for them to join. A typical notice period is four weeks, or longer for more senior members, and it usually takes a little time for someone to settle in.

Hiring internal staff takes a long time even if things go well—but it’s not unheard of for a new hire to be a bad fit, and then the process takes even longer.

Internal staff are also the most expensive option. In addition to the salary, there are costs such as sick and vacation days, possibly benefits like healthcare and 401(k) contributions, and you’ll have to pay a fee to the recruitment company if you used one.

How Do Freelancers Compare?

Freelancers are a popular option, particularly for businesses that need additional resources occasionally but not enough to justify hiring a new team member. They are often the cheapest option, are available for ad hoc work, and can provide support almost immediately.
But freelancers aren’t without their complications. There can be difficulties in paying them. They face the notorious “feast-or-famine” cycles, where there are periods of high income and ample work, followed by periods of uncertainty. Understandably, freelancers can be reluctant to turn work away, so it’s not unheard of for them to overcommit to too many projects.

Some are able to balance this commendably, but it can result in missed deadlines or sloppy work—neither of which helps your business reach its content creation goals.

Freelancers are often solo workers, too. If they become ill or have time away from work, there may not be a contingency. This can also mean that they’re not considered part of the team or culture, and they can be overlooked in team meetings and discussions. This is entirely dependent on how each business chooses to incorporate them, of course, but many see them as an execution-only resource—there to complete the tasks they’re given, rather than part of the strategy discussions.

Content Creator Agencies and What They Offer

Agencies offer a third option that sits between the two. It’s a quicker and more cost-effective solution than hiring internally, and avoids the main drawbacks to working with individual freelancers. In particular, an agency will have its own team, reducing the risk of overcommitments and delays from someone being off work.

There are several types of content creation agencies in the marketplace:

• A social media content creation agency
• A devmarketing content creation business
• A tutorial or writing content creator agency

Because the agency provides its own team, you’ll have more resources at your disposal. This might result in a higher output, or it could open up more avenues such as topic planning and the creation of additional types of content.

By choosing to work with a content creator agency, you can expect the benefits of having an internal team—including experienced people creating your content, both saving you time and providing extra capacity—without the drawbacks of individual freelancers.

How the Process Works

The first step in the process is finding a content creation business that appeals to you. This will be a working partnership, so you need to be as happy with them as you would be with an internal member of staff.

Be sure to check their expertise, confirming that they know how to write B2B content effectively. You can shortlist your favorites and have meetings with each one to help make a decision.

Once you’ve chosen a content creation agency, it’s time to get down to business. They’ll want to learn as much about your company as possible: what you do, who your audience is, your tone of voice, branding, and so on. This is also where you will discuss deliverables—what types of content they will produce for you and how often, as well as any other responsibilities. It’s important for both sides to be clear on all responsibilities from the outset, as this will avoid any confusion down the road.

The content production agency will have its own process for working with clients, from onboarding through to the first set of deliverables. Again, being up front about processes and expectations will help to ensure a smooth and pleasant partnership.

Possible Services an Agency Will Provide

Content creation agencies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Draft.dev creates written technical content aimed at reaching software developers, including handling topic planning and research as well as creating social media collateral. At the other end of the scale are “full-service” marketing agencies, which offer a wide range of marketing services typically including web design and social media management.
And of course, there’s everything in between. Brafton describes itself as a “creative content marketing agency,” offering blogs, email newsletters, and video production, while SeedX creates content for industries as diverse as e-commerce stores and political campaigning.

Needless to say, it’s essential that you hire an agency that’s capable of producing what you need. That means not only the type of service, but the quality of that work too. For example, it’s no secret that developers are known to be averse to marketing, and strategies need to consider this. Therefore, not every agency will be capable of reaching developers effectively, whereas it’s what Draft.dev specializes in. On the other hand, if you want a new website and omnichannel marketing strategy, you’d need an agency that offers those.

Conclusion

A content creation agency can have a drastic impact on your business. By increasing the amount of content you create, you’ll reach a wider audience and have more visitors to your website, where you can turn them into leads and customers.

An agency should be able to offer more support than an individual freelancer, while also removing the risks inherent in relying on one person, such as illness, personal time, or overcommitment.

At the same time, an agency can also be a faster and cheaper solution than hiring an internal team. You pay only for agreed deliverables and not the additional costs an employee requires, such as paid sick leave, healthcare, or retirement contributions.

If your company would benefit from a content creator agency handling your technical content, get in touch with Draft.dev and see how we can help you.

A blog isn’t just about putting words on a page for Google. It’s a window into your business.

A blog is a powerful tool in your business arsenal, and unlike adverts—where you put yourself in front of people in the hope they’ll like it—a blog attracts people to you. It’s an opportunity to create a new relationship through education, information, humor, shared values, or simply a need for what you offer.

By blogging, you give yourself the chance to be found by potential customers all over the world. But it’s not a golden ticket to growth. There’s a right way and a wrong way to build a blog, and just like there are millions of incredible artists, musicians, writers, and other creatives that success eludes, your ability to create a great blog is only part of the equation.
What you need is a digital content strategy, of which a blog plays a significant role.

While your content needs to be good enough to retain the visitors it attracts, most of a blog’s success is the result of what happens after you hit publish—at least in its early days. Your blog also needs a solid purpose. The internet is awash with unread blogs, and there are three big reasons why:

1. A lack of purpose, making it difficult to find a consistent readership
2. An irregular posting schedule
3. No promotion

As the old saying goes, “It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it.”

How To Blog The Right Way

If the intention for starting a blog is to support the business as either a sales or marketing function, then it needs to be treated with the same consideration as any other business function:
– What is it for?
– Who will manage it?
– What are the key metrics?
– What does success look like?
– How will the intended audience know it exists?

One of the best ways to do this is with a checklist. This is especially useful and important when multiple people are involved in the process and you need to ensure consistency.

Creating Your Blogging Checklist

Once you’ve decided that you want a blog, and you’re committed to the ongoing requirements of creating and promoting the content, it’s time to make your checklist. You can print this out and tape it to your monitor if you’re likely to forget about it. You’ll also want to distribute it to any members of the team who need to follow it.

1. Set Your Key Metrics

These will be your North Star. If the blog’s main purpose is to drive email subscribers, that needs to be reflected in the content and the blog’s layout. Pushing readers to a phone number, for example, will undermine that metric, so your writers, editors, and web developers need to be aligned on the goal of the blog, which in this case is building an email list.

Similarly, if the goal is to increase followers or boost views of particular site pages, that needs to be demonstrated through the blog activity.

With the metrics decided, track them monthly in a spreadsheet to ensure the blog is achieving its goals.

2. Choose A Platform

WordPress is, without question, the big player in the website space, reportedly powering 40% of all websites. That’s enough to convince some people that it’s the best option to use, but there’s not really a right or wrong answer when it comes to choosing a platform. The best startup blogging platform will be the one that meets your requirements.

If you want full control, then a self-hosted option like WordPress or GitHub may be most appropriate. On the other hand, if you want to launch your blog quickly and have readers immediately then an established option like Medium might be more appealing. The trade off with Medium is you have no control over the platform. The trade off to a self-hosted option, however, is the additional time required to build the blog and grow the readership.

3. Configure The Platform

Once you’ve chosen your platform, it’s time to set it up to achieve what you need it to do.

If a key metric is collecting email addresses, you’ll need a mechanism to do that. Other considerations are:
– Will readers be able to leave comments?
– Where will images be hosted?
– Will anyone need an account to access the blog?

4. Set Up An Email List and Opt-in Form

Building an email list is one of the most effective steps you can take for engaging your audience and encouraging visitors to keep coming back.

If you don’t have an email list, you’re relying on people remembering you. With so many things fighting for a user’s attention, the odds are stacked against that happening. Even if a reader does bookmark your site or remember to check in occasionally, it’s unlikely they’ll do so often. After all, how many sites do you check daily or weekly?

There are plenty of email marketing tools to choose from, including some free options.

Once your email marketing account is created, you’ll need clear ways for your visitors to sign up. A list that nobody knows how to join is just as bad as not having a list at all.

Opt-in forms can be used in multiple places. Popular options include static forms in the sidebar or placed within the blog post. Alternatively, you can have dynamic forms that appear when the visitor reaches a certain point of the page (such as halfway down), after they’ve been on the page for a certain period of time, or if they’re about to close the window.

You can include more than one, but be mindful not to overdo it, otherwise you might just annoy your visitors and discourage them from reading your content in the future.

5. Get Familiar With Self-editing Tools

Before you publish your posts, it’s worth running them through a self-editing tool first. They’re no substitute for a professional editor, but these automated tools can help to ensure your post is easy to read, not full of incomprehensible words, and doesn’t have embarrassing spelling mistakes.

Two of the most popular tools are Hemingway and Grammarly.

Hemingway reads your content and gives a readability grade, highlighting things such as use of passive voice, notes when you’ve used a phrase that has a simpler alternative, and tells you when a sentence is difficult to read.

Grammarly works as your assistant, spotting spelling mistakes and offering improvements to grammar. It can be added as a browser extension too, even helping you with social media posts and emails.

6. Set Up A Publishing Calendar

Once you have everything set up and ready to go, it’s time to turn your attention to your publishing calendar. This will help ensure the blog has regular posts, and if you have multiple writers a calendar keeps everyone accountable.

There are, as always, multiple options to choose from at various levels of complexity.

It’s entirely possible to keep a simple spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets, showing all the topics that are in planning, being written, or have been published.

Alternatively, you can choose from a dedicated project management tool like Trello, Airtable, or Asana. Each one can be customized to your needs and preferred way of working, and they’re all adaptable whether you have a single writer or a larger team.

7. Adopt A Style Guide

A style guide is optional, but if you want your blog to stand out and scream professionalism, it’s worth taking the time to create one.

By having a style guide, you’re providing a consistent experience for readers, in exactly the same way that businesses use specific colors and fonts in their branding. The guide should include the voice of your blog, so posts don’t range from very formal to very informal, or first-to second-person. If readers enjoy the posts because they’re fun and light, they’ll be surprised and possibly disappointed to find a dense, humorless post.

The guide should also include rules on the content itself. To determine those rules, consider asking yourself and your team:
– Will you have specific content types?
– What structure should the articles follow?
– Are there templates?
– What are the requirements for supporting links?
– Will images be hosted on a central repository such as Imgur, or uploaded directly into the blog’s database?

There’s no right or wrong answer to any of these questions, and the goal is simply to provide a level of consistency for readers.

8. Draft Your ‘Kick-off’ Post

Now comes the fun part: writing your first post!

This is a great time to tell the world all about you. New readers can discover more about the person or business behind this blog they’ve found, and you can continue to refer back to this introduction post well into the future.

Make the “kick-off” blog post a cornerstone piece of content that you keep visible for years to come, by including:
– Who you are
– Why you’ve started the blog
– What your company does
– Who will be writing the posts
– How often posts will be published
– How people can subscribe

9. Draft The First Five Posts

To avoid your blog fizzing out before it gets going, it’s recommended to have five posts drafted. This will help you build momentum, as well as start to create a backlog of content that you can pull from if you’re behind or struggling to create new posts in the future.

These posts can be stored in an ideas section of your project management tool, giving you a deep well of topics to draw from.

10. What To Do Before Publishing Your Blog Posts

Once the post is written, there are a few steps to take to help it really shine.

First, edit the text. It’s good to have a person read over it—either yourself or someone else. Make sure the content makes sense and there aren’t obvious mistakes. This is also a good time to use Hemingway or Grammarly for anything you may have overlooked.

Second, add an image. If you have the resources then a custom image can be used, otherwise there’s nothing wrong with using free stock images.

Third, add your call to action (CTA). This should be in line with your key metrics, so if your goal is to increase the number of subscribers on your email list, the CTA could be an email signup.

11. What To Do After Publishing Your Blog

As noted earlier, creating content is only part of the task. To get readers and subscribers, you need to get the posts in front of the intended audience.

The first step is to promote the content internally. Share it with your team and ask them to engage with it.

Then, you’ll want to promote the post externally. Use everything from your email newsletter and social media profiles, to relevant online groups, subreddits, and forums.

The recommendation is to spend as much time sharing your content as you spend creating it. The end goal is to get viewers, and that means informing people that your blog exists. As with the checklist for your blog itself, promotion should be consistent and organized, so you can have a separate checklist for promoting your blog posts.

Summary

Blogging is an incredibly powerful tool for boosting your visibility online and attracting your target audience to you. To improve the chances of success with the blog, it’s worth spending a little time before you launch to work out some important details. That includes which platform is most suitable, what the key metrics are, and a checklist to ensure ongoing consistency with your publishing schedule.

I talk to a lot of early-stage startups that aren’t sure about content marketing yet. I’ll admit, it’s usually not the best marketing channel to start with because it takes a long time to ramp up and a lot of prior knowledge to do well. That said, the payoff over years is huge.

In this post, I’m going to share 26 low-cost or free content marketing ideas. This collection isn’t meant to be a comprehensive strategy, but rather a source of inspiration to help you make the first steps into content. You might not see a ton of results from these ideas alone, but they will give you a base of content to build on. Once you invest in a real content strategy, you’ll be better off with some of the basics covered than if you were starting from scratch.

Part 1: Content Ideas

This first section of ideas are all about content. People who are just starting out on their writing journey often have a hard time coming up with topics to write about. The suggestions here are pretty much universal, but they’re also relatively easy to write (or hire a freelancer to write cheaply).

Note: If you’re looking for more blog post ideas specifically, check out this huge list for a place to start.

Idea 1: Interview a Customer

Example: CFP Land’s speaker story series

In the early days of your business, you should be talking to customers regularly anyway, so an easy way to generate some video, audio, or text content is to turn those conversations into a published interview. It builds good will, costs nothing, and chances are your customers will share it as well.

Idea 2: Record and Write Out Your Sales Pitch

Example: Lightrun’s launch blog post

Besides being good practice, writing out your sales pitch (the what, why, and how of your business) will serve as great content for your blog. You can even use this in lieu of a sales call if you have a low-touch sale.

Idea 3: Summarize a Video or Conference Talk

Example: Fabric.inc turned this video into this blog post

You don’t have to have a direct connection to the talk or video to do this. In the example above, the speaker wasn’t even a customer, but the content was relevant to their industry, so this summary performed really well. The speaker might even be game to help you share the post since you’re likely helping raise their profile as well.

Idea 4: Publish a List of Competitors

Example: HubSpot’s huge list of marketing tools

In addition to doing well in search engines, creating a list of your competitors is a good way to learn more about them and compare their relative strengths and positioning in the market. An easy way to do this is find a list of similar businesses on G2 and then write a better, more descriptive list on your blog.

Just don’t lie to make yourself look good. Customers will figure this out, and you could face legal issues.

Idea 5: Compile Tips from Twitter Threads

Example: 26 Hilarious Tweets Only Software Developers Will Understand

Okay, the example is a little silly, but you can imagine taking this same format into some industries. There’s a lot of great content on Twitter that can inspire a blog post or be expanded into long-form content.

Sharing other peoples’ ideas (with credit) might also make them want to share your post.

Idea 6: Create a Graphic or Video Summarizing a Blog Post

Example: “Free Stock Image” post with embedded video showing how to use the images

Infographics were all the rage five years ago, but imagery can still be compelling. If you have existing blog posts or find good ones, you can create a graphic or video summarizing the post. This reuse of existing content will save you a lot of time over trying to create everything new from scratch, and readers might like the option to view rather than read the content.

Idea 7: Use Popular Ideas from Reddit

Example: u/smoke4sanity wrote a question about whether a specific kind of book existed in 2019. Then, in 2020, he wrote the book he wanted. He essentially tested market demand using Reddit upvotes.

Forums like Reddit have tons of great content. You can use the Top filter to find the most popular content in each subreddit, then condense that content into a blog post, guide, book, image, or video. You know people are interested in the topic, and you might even be able to share it back on Reddit (like u/smoke4sanity did above).

Idea 8: Interview a Team Member

Example: The Graide Network’s Graider of the Month posts

People buy from other people, so showcase your humanity. Highlight someone on your team in a video or text interview to give customers and future employees insight into your values. You can also have team members share interesting challenges or projects. It makes everyone involved feel good, and your team members are likely to share it as well.

Idea 9: Break Each Feature of Your Product or Service Into a Piece of Content

Example: Courier’s blog posts covering major features

Product pages are great, but what if you want to go really deep?

Creating video or text content around each of your product’s features is a good way to showcase what you can do for customers, and serves as valuable sales collateral. The challenge with this kind of content is that it tends to get out of date quickly, so you might need to revisit it every year.

You can also create content around each use case or variation of your product or service.

Idea 10: Compare Multiple Ways to Solve a Problem

Example: BackHub’s “Three Ways to Backup Your GitHub Issues”

One of the easiest ways to create content around your business is to highlight what it does well. If you solve a difficult problem, you can compare your solution to other established methods to help readers pick the best one.

Idea 11: Define the Key Terms Your Industry Uses

Example: Nutshell’s list of sales slang terms

Not only does this showcase your knowledge, it helps your site come up in search results, as newcomers to your field are likely searching for these terms pretty often. While this kind of content is best for “top of funnel” traffic, it’s easy to create if you know your field well.

Idea 12: Publish the Results of a Survey

Example: The State of Developer Ecosystem survey by JetBrains

If you have access to a significant portion of your target market (say through an email list, social followers, or partnerships), you can survey them. Turn this data into a blog post or downloadable resource that others watching your industry can use.

Data does well in search engines, and if you can get some pull quotes as well, you’ll have some more free original content from your survey.

Idea 13: List Bloggers in Your Industry

Example: List of the best technical blogs on Draft.dev

We help companies create better technical blogs, so we decided to create ranked lists of some of the best resources in our niche. These posts tend to get shared widely and do well in search engines. While they take some time to create, they’re relatively straightforward to write.

Idea 14: Take a Stand

Example: “Why AnyList Won’t Be Supporting Sign In with Apple”

Picking a side on a controversial issue is tough, but if you have the conviction to do it, you can separate yourself from competitors who have a less-established stance. Just remember that you might alienate some customers in the process.

Idea 15: Share a Mistake You Made

Example: Robbie Abed’s “The Year I Figured Out That I Was My Own Worst Enemy”

Everyone wants to share successes, but very few people are willing to write about their failures. Showing vulnerability can be a great way to add humanity and honesty to your brand though, so consider creating some content around what you learned from mistakes.

Idea 16: Answer Questions or Respond to Another Blogger

Example: Justin Jackson’s “Get Traffic for Your Content”

If you have an audience, you might get questions from time to time. Look at public questions on Twitter or Quora for inspiration, or you can respond to another blog post with your own questions. I find that the more I read, the more I am inspired to write new ideas.

Part 2: Tools of the Trade

Once you have a bit of content on your blog or social channels, you might be wondering how you can effectively capture or monetize this traffic. The tools for setting this up are relatively cheap and easy to use, so in this section, I’ll focus on them.

Note: I’ve been collecting lists of marketing tools here for the past year, so be sure to check them out if you want more.

Idea 17: Start a Newsletter

Example: The Draft.dev newsletter for technical marketers

Cost is no longer the barrier to starting a newsletter. Cheap and free platforms like Mailchimp, Substack, and Revue are all designed to make it really simple to start a newsletter. If you really don’t have time to write much, just share a few links to articles relevant to your customers and put a signup form on your website and social media handles.

Idea 18: Use Google Keyword Planner to Find Keyword Ideas

Example: Step by step instructions for using GKP

A lot of people outside the content marketing world don’t know about Google Keyword Planner. Designed for advertisers, it’s actually a very handy, free tool for performing keyword research. You just put in a few keywords relevant to your business, and Google Keyword Planner will show you thousands of keywords with search volume and competition data.

Note: Some people say the search volume and competition numbers aren’t great, so you can augment them with a tool like Ahrefs.

Idea 19: Use AI to Help You Write

Example: Using GPT-3 to write content

This year, I’ve been playing around with automated content generation using the GPT-3 machine learning model. While it’s not great for deep, technical topics, it’s not bad for general information, and it might help you get “unstuck” if you’re not a prolific writer. If you want to try it out, give Shortly.ai a go.

Idea 20: Write Detailed Outlines for Freelance Writers

Example: “How to Create a Technical Content Plan” on Draft.dev

A lot of people think you have to spend a ton of money to get a decent writer, and while there are absolutely differences between a $0.10 and a $0.50 per word writer, one way to make average writers look better is to give them a good outline. Even if you’re writing the content yourself, having an outline makes you faster and more focused in your writing.

Idea 21: Add Appropriate Calls to Action on Existing Content

Example:

Whether you use a banner (like the above example) or simple text, having a call to action in your content is an easy way to get more subscribers. If you already have content on your blog, go through and add one or two calls to action on each post, directing readers to sign up for a free trial or subscribe to your newsletter.

Idea 22: Add Retargeting Pixels to Your Blog

Example: Adding the Google Retargeting Pixel to your blog

If you ever might run advertisements for your business, you want to use retargeting (or remarketing). This allows you to target readers with ads as they browse Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or just about any other site to try to bring them back to your site. People who have already read your blog are more likely to click an ad if they’re familiar with your product, so retargeting is typically very effective.

Idea 23: Do a Content Audit

Example: Ahrefs’ content audit strategy

A content audit is about figuring out what content you have on your site, how well it’s doing, and what content you should have. I did one a few months ago when I started refreshing my old blog, and traffic went up considerably after I started implementing some changes. While tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush can help, you can use their free trials or just Google Analytics and Search Console to cover the basics.

Idea 24: Learn Google Analytics and Search Console

Example: Google Analytics vs. Search Console

These two tools will give you most of the data you need to improve your position in search engines, track the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, and ensure that you’re getting the most out of every piece of content you publish.

That said, Google Analytics is notoriously complicated, so I’d recommend investing a day at Analytics Academy (it’s free) to help get you started.

Idea 25: Offer to Write a Guest Post

Example: A guest post for Free Code Camp brings me dozens of visitors and inquiries every month

Don’t just create content for your site and social channels. Spread the love by submitting guest posts. They can help you build links to your website, raise your profile in the community, and expand your audience.

Idea 26: Promote an Old Post

Example: “How to Promote Your Blog Posts” on Draft.dev

Finally, don’t be afraid to share content—even the old stuff. I have a huge backlog of old content that I’m constantly refreshing and recycling across my social channels. Most people won’t catch every blog post the first time, so re-promote them every few months to get the most out of each piece.

Need Technical Content?

If you’ve gone through the ideas on this list and you’re ready to invest in high-quality technical content for your business, let me know. I’d be happy to help.

While most of our clients are larger now, I worked directly with a lot of founders at early-stage startups in my first few months at Draft.dev. I like working with founders; they are passionate, enthusiastic, and typically quick learners. On the flip side, they can be tough to please. Because they care about every detail and know their product better than anyone, some of them can be very hard to work with.

There’s a fine line between having trust issues and high standards, but founders who don’t learn to delegate will be a huge detriment to their business. I could talk about this problem in engineering, product development, and sales, but today I’m going to focus on marketing.

The Mind of a Founder

First, let me say that I empathize with founders who struggle to delegate. Many first-time founders are stepping into their very first management role, and even if they’ve led teams before, they might not have had good role models to guide them in the past.

Plus, a lot is on the line. When you start a business, that business is a piece of you. It’s really hard to sit back and watch other people screw little bits of it up.

Even if with a great team, most founders are used to being “the voice of the company.” This makes it especially hard to pass blogging, customer communication, and sales functions off to others who don’t have the same history and context.

The founders who struggle to scale their content marketing efforts tend to fall into one of the following buckets:

The Perfectionist: Becoming the Approval Bottleneck

My background is in software engineering, so when I first started hiring other writers to produce technical content, it was a struggle. I would comb through every line of code and refactor it based on my preferences. I didn’t realize that nobody reading this tutorial would discount the whole thing if the writer preferred camelCase to snake_case.

Founders who fall into this same trap likely have a long backlog of blog posts to approve. They become the bottleneck, and while the content that finally makes it to the blog will undoubtedly be great, this strategy won’t work at scale.

Perfectionist behaviors include:

• Spending hours rewriting articles that were already 90% there
• Getting stuck on minor style choices that don’t impact value or comprehension
• Creating massive approval backlogs because something feels “not quite right”
• Rejecting work because it’s not how they personally would have written it
• Requesting endless low-impact revisions

The Ideator: Random Content Without Strategic Focus

Another common pitfall is having too many ideas with too little focus. It’s okay to be a little more scattered in your approach to content marketing in the early days, but if your posts randomly oscillate between 300-word release updates, video announcements, 2000-word tutorials, and short news commentary, it’s really hard for readers (or search engines) to know what to expect.

Ideator founders treat their startup’s blog like a personal blog with little focus on keywords, types of content, or formats. Again, it’s fine to do this when you’re early on and just finding your footing, but this is not a scalable content marketing strategy.

Ideator behaviors include:

• Publishing across wildly inconsistent content types and lengths
• No keyword research or SEO strategy informing topic selection
• Following current interests rather than audience needs or business goals
• Constantly changing content direction based on latest inspiration
• Minimal consideration for how pieces work together strategically

The DIYer: Insisting on Personal Content Creation

Finally, some founders just like doing everything themselves. Sometimes it’s a matter of money (I’ll admit, high-quality technical content is not cheap), and sometimes it’s therapeutic. Founders who are strong, prolific writers can pull this off for years, but it gets harder the bigger the company gets.

In the early days, I think it’s fantastic when founders are very involved in their company’s blog. In fact, they should probably be creating most of the content and testing lots of ideas and formats in the first year or two.

But, the story changes if you want to use content marketing as a sustainable, scalable growth channel. This is typically why startups transition away from founder-led blogs by the time they raise a Series A or B and why we usually don’t work with startups before that stage.

DIYer behaviors include:

• Writing every blog post despite having a marketing team
• Refusing to hire writers or agencies even when budget allows
• Using “nobody understands our product like I do” as justification for not delegating
• Treating content creation as stress relief rather than business investment
• Spending limited founder bandwidth on activities that others could handle

The Forest vs. The Trees: Strategic Content Marketing Thinking

While most move on, some founders get stuck in these unscalable content production patterns for way too long. There’s an expression common in the United States that describes them perfectly:

They can’t see the forest for the trees.

The Forest: Consistent, Helpful Content That Serves Your Audience

When it comes to building a scalable content marketing engine, your primary target should be producing helpful content consistently.

When we create something, we think, is it really useful to our customers? Will they thank us for it? I think if you think of things through that lens, it just clarifies what you’re doing in such a simple, elegant way. – Ann Handley

Founders who do manage to scale their content marketing efforts are the ones who face the challenge with this degree of pragmatism. They realize that plenty of people besides them can produce helpful, high-quality content.

Take DigitalOcean’s content marketing strategy. They’ve been running a community-writing program for over a decade where they’ve invested roughly $1000 per article to create dozens of articles per month. With over 5000 tutorials now on the site, they’re now generating something like 10 million visits per month.

Was every article they’ve produced the best piece ever? Did their founders painstakingly and lovingly approve each one?

No. Instead, they allow developers to pitch ideas that they think would be useful and interesting to write about. Over time, these unique pieces of content have snowballed into millions of monthly visitors and a steady stream of new customers. The founders helped set this in motion, but eventually, they stepped away and built processes that allowed their team to scale these content efforts.

While output is just one part of what has made DigitalOcean so successful (promoting their work and >$100 million in funding helped too), increasing your output of useful content is essential to content marketing success.

What “The Forest” Looks Like in Practice:

• Publishing consistently (weekly or bi-weekly minimum)
• Maintaining acceptable quality thresholds (good enough) rather than perfection
• Building topic authority through content clusters around relevant core themes
• Serving reader needs systematically and consistently rather than publishing randomly
• Creating processes that allow others to execute without founder bottlenecks
• Measuring results by traffic, leads, and conversions rather than quality assessments

The Trees: Implementation Details That Consume Founder Attention

So what holds some founders back when it comes to content marketing?

Usually, it’s the details:

• Implementing editorial standards and a style guide
• Creating a publishing calendar
• Setting up a blogging platform
• Finding writers
• Evaluating writers
• Writing briefs
• Picking the perfect image
• Coming up with new ideas
• Hiring an editor
• Promoting your content

There’s a lot to this whole content marketing thing, so rather than document and handoff all these processes, some founders think it will be easier to do it all themselves. In the short term, they’re right, but in the long-term, founders must let go of the trees to keep an eye on the forest.

How to Scale Your Content

If you see yourself in the descriptions above or you know a founder who’s having trouble letting someone else handle their content marketing efforts, here are a few things you can try:

1. Start Small

Let someone on your team write a few blog posts. Try hiring an external editor to do line editing and implement some editorial standards.

You don’t have to immediately outsource your whole content creation process, but you do need to get comfortable passing pieces of it off to other people. As you do, you’ll run into problems. Someone will write a post that isn’t very good or an error will slip by your team and make it to the blog. You’ll realize that 99.99% of these small mistakes don’t really matter much in the grand scheme of things.

2. Invest in a Plan

I typically steer early-stage startups away from consultants, but if you’re at the point where you want to take content marketing more seriously, working with a specialist is an excellent way to get started. A content marketing consultant will usually help you come up with some ideas, do keyword research, and help you implement tools to capture the most value out of each blog post.

We don’t do advising in this area, but I typically recommend Manuel Weiss or John-Henry Scherck to tech startups looking for content marketing advice.

3. Stay Connected to Readers

As you let go of the execution of your content marketing strategy, that doesn’t mean you have to disconnect from readers. Share content on your social media regularly and ask customers, subscribers, and people in your network if they’re reading your blog. Just because you’re not writing everything doesn’t mean you can’t use your blog to accelerate existing relationships.

Conclusion: Seeing the Forest to Scale Your Content Marketing

Scaling content marketing requires a mindset shift from controlling everything to building systems that produce helpful content without founder bottlenecks. The most successful startup content programs all eventually transitioned from founder-led to systematic content engines.

This can be uncomfortable because it requires accepting that others won’t write exactly as you would. Their word choices will differ. Their explanations will take different approaches. Their style will diverge from yours. And that’s fine as long as the content serves the readers’ needs and business goals.

The forest (consistent, helpful content building topic authority and driving organic traffic) matters far more than the trees (perfect execution of every detail). Focus your limited founder time on activities only you can do: setting strategy, building relationships, making key decisions, and representing your company. Let specialists handle the execution.

Start small with incremental delegation. Invest in strategic planning and process documentation. Establish clear quality standards. Hire domain specialists rather than generalist writers. Stay connected to readers without controlling every word. Measure business outcomes rather than subjective quality.

Most importantly, remember that perfect content at low volume loses to good content at high volume. Your competitors publishing 20 solid articles monthly will outrank your 2 perfect articles monthly every time. Let go of the trees so you can tend the forest.

Ready to scale your technical content marketing without sacrificing quality? Draft.dev specializes in high-quality technical content produced by experienced practitioners who require minimal founder involvement. Our network of 300+ technical writers allows you to scale content production while maintaining the technical depth and accuracy your audience demands.

Explore our guides on building effective content plans, creating content marketing strategies, and scaling developer content for additional frameworks supporting systematic content growth.

How Do You Generate Startup Blog Ideas?

Coming up with ideas for your startup’s blog can be mentally taxing. While keyword research can help you find opportunities in Google results, it can leave your blog topics feeling a little bit flat.

One strategy is to publish a mix of SEO-driven content with more creative, shareable posts that help you build organic backlinks and social proof. If you want to make sure you always have some ideas in the hopper, you need to put a healthy backlog of creative blog post ideas into your publishing calendar.

Where Can You Find Blog Content Inspiration?

Original ideas do not come from within. They are given to us, from without. A writer should not look inside, but outside, at external sources, stories, events, and emotions. – Robert Bruce

Ideas won’t come to you if you spend all your time writing and editing – you have to get out of the busyness trap and read, learn, and listen. Here are a few ways you can expose yourself to good ideas:

• Talk to a customer – If you can get some face-time with a customer, ask them what they searched for to find you, what websites or newsletters they read regularly, or what issues they’ve faced recently.
• Talk to your teammates – Ask your sales or marketing team about common questions they hear from customers, talk to your dev team about projects they’ve recently worked on, and ask your boss to have a chat with you about the company’s vision.
• Talk to other blog managers – Technical blogs face unique challenges, but you can learn a lot from marketers in other industries too.
• Subscribe to newsletters – Subscribe to a handful of newsletters, filter them in a particular folder, and review them once or twice per week.
• Subscribe to Hacker Newsletter – It’s easy to get lost in Hacker News, so avoid the time-sink and subscribe to the once-weekly Hacker Newsletter.
• Subscribe to your competitors’ blogs – Be unique, but aware.
• Read a book – I like a blend of fiction and non-fiction. Read whatever inspires you.
• Keyword research – Using a tool like Ahrefs, you can do in-depth keyword analysis to generate ideas that are likely to be searched for on Google.
• Listen to podcasts – They’re a great way to expose yourself to new ideas on the go.
• Do a deep dive into Stack Overflow – Look for common questions relevant to your blog’s audience and consider if any would make useful blog posts.
• Watch YouTube videos or conference talks – A lot of new technology is announced at conferences, so being plugged into the conference circuit can help you come up with timely ideas.
• Use your product – Sometimes, it’s hard to know what unique challenges your customers face until you become one.
• Create an idea matrix – An idea matrix is a multi-dimensional collection of combinations of ideas. See this startup idea matrix for an example.
• Take a break – Take a walk, go for a run, or just sit outside. My best ideas come when I’m just reflecting on past conversations or projects.

How Should You Capture and Organize Blog Ideas?

Ideas Won’t Keep. Something Must Be Done About Them. – Alfred North Whitehead

When I read something that triggers an idea, I write it down.

I don’t think it matters which to-do list you use. Just have a consistent and reliable way to capture ideas at any time, and make a habit of putting those ideas somewhere regularly.

How Do You Build a Content Backlog?

Plan ahead: It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark. – Richard Cushing

If you expose yourself to inspiration and collect ideas for very long, you’ll have more ideas than you could ever write about. You need a method of refining and filtering them.

I spend a little time every week going through my ideas and doing cursory research on them. Many technical blog posts require a high-level understanding of several frameworks or tools, so I’ll read the introductory docs and skim the APIs.

By the end of this process, most ideas are left on the cutting room floor, but the ones you do have are much stronger.

50+ Startup Blog Post Ideas

Over the past decade, I’ve written a lot of blog posts and I’ve seen many of these ideas work for myself or clients. While not every idea in this list is going to be a good fit for your startup, these might help spark your creativity.

1. Product Awareness

These ideas are great if your startup is still in the launch and product-market fit phase. Once you start building a collection of posts explaining your product, you can send these to prospective customers to help make your case.

Later on, as your product gains traction, these posts will offer Google searchers authoritative information that guides them into your funnel. If you’re going to start blogging, covering these topics should be at the top of your list.

• Highlight a little-known feature of your product.
• Highlight various use cases for your product.
• Write a “how to” guide for using/buying/setuping up your product.
• Create a customer case study.
• “10 ways to solve problem X” (One of which includes your product).
• Mythbusting a problem your product solves.
• Compare your product to your competition.
• Do a screencast or record a video using your product.
• Share an excerpt from an ebook, white paper, webinar, etc. with a call to action to download it.
• Respond to frequently asked questions about your product.

2. Interviews and Surveys

Another interesting way to generate content without quite as much writing work is to compile data from customers, partners, and prospects. I have published many interview posts and compiled the advice from an interview series into a comprehensive guide.

This strategy can net you dozens of blog posts with just a few hours of work, and your interviewees might even share it with their audience.

• Interview customers who are using your product.
• Interview industry specialists.
• Interview someone who used to work for a competitor.
• Interview a professor, recent graduate, or someone who just retired from your industry.
• Interview speakers or sponsors at a conference.
• Ask a question or conduct a poll on Twitter and share the results.
• Do a survey with Survey Monkey (or similar survey tool) among your community members.
• Get experts to offer a tip and do a round-up of their recommendations.
• Feature guest posts from industry experts.

3. Roundups

Lists of tools, tips, and ideas
(like this one) are among the most widely-shared and easily read content on the internet. Readers can skim the piece quickly and use the roundup as a jumping-off point for solving their problems, and they tend to rank well in Google.

Here are a few ideas for generating lists that might do well on your blog:

• Compile a list of popular sites in your industry (be sure to notify them and encourage them to share).
• Compile the most popular social media posts in your industry this month/year/week.
• Create a list of benefits for doing something.
• Create a list of things to avoid.
• Find tips in other content, create a list of those tips, and give links to those articles as the sources.
• Share a list of conference takeaways.
• Collect the top motivational YouTube videos, ebooks, webinars, or infographics for your audience.
• Collect Tweets from a webinar or conference hashtag, and offer your own takeaways in the blog post.
• Create a list of trends to watch.
• Make a list of products that complement yours well.
• Collect a list of social media accounts people in your industry should follow.

4. Thought Leadership

Positioning your startup’s founders as important leaders in the space is a good way to build your brand and showcase your expertise. Some founders do this naturally, and others work with a ghostwriter. Either way, people in your leadership team should make a point to do some thought leadership content as you get your blog started.

• Take a stand on a controversial issue.
• Make a prediction related to your industry.
• Industry trends commentary.
• Side-by-side comparison of complementary company/service.
• Review a book your customers should read.
• Point out common mistakes in your industry and offer solutions on how to fix or avoid them.
• Relate your content to a current event or a celebrity (eg: “5 Lessons from Lady Gaga” or “What the Election Teaches Us About…”).
• Take the contrarian position on someone else’s article that you disagree with.
• Share your slides from a recent presentation.
• Respond to industry research with your own perspective. Offer a fresh angle to spark conversation.
• Do an in-depth case study about one company, or offer a few examples of how other companies do something successfully.
• Offer industry takeaways about breaking news.

5. Team, Company, and Culture Focus

Finally, if you’re looking to build more content that attracts talent or showcases your team, here are a few ideas:

• Highlight your culture, mission, or values.
• Write about “What we’re not”.
• Create a music video for your company.
• Interview each member of your team about their career and experience.
• Post photos from a recent event/conference.
• Post screenshots from a virtual event.
• Videos/photos of employees behind the scenes.
• If someone gets promoted, talk about how/why they were successful.
• Post about the current season or holiday.
• Sum up the year that was.

Finally, if you’re looking for writers to help you generate more content on your startup’s blog, check out our services at Draft.dev. We focus exclusively on technical content written by subject matter experts, so you’ll get industry-leading knowledge without distracting your engineers.

Why Do Some Blogs Fail?

The #1 mistake new writers and blog managers make is failing to share their work.

Creating great technical content takes time, but without adequate promotion, nobody’s going to read it. Writing a fantastic, in-depth tutorial and then posting it once to your Twitter/X account is unlikely to yield results, but that’s what 90% of writers do. It’s sad to think how much great content is out there that we’ll never see.

How Much Time Should You Invest in Blog Promotion?

Many bloggers advocate spending as much time sharing your content as you do writing it. Derek Halpern goes further, recommending that you spend 80% of your total time promoting your post. It may sound extreme, but I’ve found a direct correlation between how much traffic a blog post gets and how well I promote it.

Case Study: “Alternative Career Paths” on FreeCodeCamp.org

I recently wrote an in-depth, 3400-word article about the alternative career paths you can take as a trained software engineer. It was inspired by my personal experience leaving a role as a CTO to start Draft, and I spent almost 8 hours writing it.

After it was published, I spent about 2 hours promoting it using the checklist below. I knew the intended audience well, so it was relatively easy to translate the blog post into posts on Twitter (1, 2), Reddit, Linkedin, Facebook, several email newsletters, and Hacker News (which was then reshared more successfully by someone else).

Partly due to the platform (FreeCodeCamp is a popular blog) and partly due to the promotional work I did on the piece, it took off. I ended up spending a fair bit of time responding to conversations online and answering questions about it. A Chinese publication even reached out to ask if they could translate it for their readers, and Code Nation asked if they could use it in their curriculum.

Why Does Blog Promotion Improve Search Engine Rankings?

If I had a formula for making every post I wrote go viral, I’d probably be on a beach somewhere, but the fact remains: nobody will find your writing if you don’t tell them about it.

Like any creative effort, writing is partly doing and partly telling people what you’ve done.

To understand why promoting your writing works, you have to understand how websites get traffic. There are two primary channels:

1. Social media and email newsletters
2. Search engines

Many people think that sharing your writing will only improve social media and email engagement, but that’s not true.

Getting ranked in search engines can take weeks or months, but a necessary prerequisite is having high-quality links to your content. A strong promotional plan will help build links to your content, and social sharing may directly impact your search engine ranking.

Here are some great podcasts to learn marketing from, if you’d rather listen.

The Complete Blog Promotion Checklist

Rather than haphazardly sharing content on social media as you have time, you should plan your promotional strategy. Ideally, you’d customize the plan for each piece of content because some channels will work better than others for each piece, but even if you try half the things on this list, you’ll be in a better spot than most.

While there are plenty of general promotional checklists for bloggers out there, not many are specifically built with a software engineering audience in mind. Here is the blog post promotion checklist I use for all my technical content:

• [ ] Publish a summary as a Twitter/X thread with a link to the entire post at the end.
• [ ] Publish/schedule tweets mentioning any technology or people referenced in the article.
• [ ] Schedule one tweet per month promoting the post for the next three months.
• [ ] Pin the Tweet to your Twitter profile (if it’s really great).
• [ ] Share with your personal/company newsletter.
• [ ] Share with any relevant Slack channels/groups.
• [ ] Publish a post on Facebook and Linkedin.
• [ ] Create a reminder to share on Facebook and Linkedin again in a month.
• [ ] Share the post as a link on any relevant subreddits.
• [ ] Republish in part as a post on the most relevant subreddit.
• [ ] Pitch a variation of the post as a guest post on relevant blogs in exchange for a link back to your original post.
• [ ] Share the post on Hacker News if relevant.
• [ ] Find and answer any relevant questions on Quora, referencing the post.
• [ ] Find and answer any relevant questions on Stack Overflow, referencing the post.
• [ ] Add links to the post from any relevant posts on your personal or company blog.
• [ ] Republish the post on Medium, Dev.to, Linkedin, or HackerNoon 2+ weeks after initial publication (Or use CrossPost App to automate this).
• [ ] Create an image using content from the post and share it on social media.
• [ ] Create and publish a video version of the post, share it on YouTube.
• [ ] Repurpose content by creating videos, resources, and social media posts.
• [ ] Reach out directly to technical newsletters to see if they’ll share with their subscribers.

To download a printable copy of this checklist, click here.

How Can You Measure Blog Effectiveness?

Track these metrics to evaluate promotional success:

• Traffic sources: Monitor which channels drive the most visitors
• Engagement metrics: Analyze time on page, scroll depth, and social shares
• Conversion rates: Measure newsletter signups, demo requests, or other goal completions
• Link acquisition: Track backlinks gained through promotional efforts
• Search rankings: Monitor keyword position improvements over time

What Should You Do Next?

Start by implementing 5-10 tactics from this checklist, then expand as you identify which channels resonate most with your technical audience.

Looking for more hands-on guidance with your content promotion strategy? Book a call with our team to discuss how we can help elevate your technical content.

Most technical blogs have a surprisingly small staff, and many of the most prolific ones rely on contributions from freelancers or volunteer contributors. If you’re just starting out, you might wonder what options you have for finding and motivating writers for your technical blog.

Option 1: Write everything yourself

You can’t do everything, and if you try to you’ll do even less. – Josh Steimle

In the early days, you might have to manage, plan, and write everything yourself. While this will give you a lot of control over the content, it’s hard to produce more than a few pieces of content per month this way.

There are a few tricks you can use to maximize your output when you’re the only writer though:

• Publish interviews with customers or team members
• Transcribe conference talks and turn them into blog posts
• Ask partners to collaborate with you on posts
• Republish (with permission) content from the community

I usually recommend these methods for companies that aren’t sure if they really want to invest in content yet and just want to test the waters.

Option 2: Solicit contributions from your coworkers

Your coworkers may enjoy taking a break from their typical workday to write a blog post.

If you’re looking for technical walkthroughs, ask your company’s engineering team if anyone would like to contribute. If you’re looking for high-level thought leadership pieces, you can ask a founder or executive to write a post. If they’re too busy, you can write it for them as a ghostwriter.

The challenge here is that other people in your company have a job to do, and it’s likely not blogging. It might take an engineer 8+ hours to write a robust technical blog post – not to mention revisions and editing – so they’ll have to justify not shipping any code for a day. The challenge is even more acute with executives as they often have a manager’s schedule full of meetings and light on focus time.

Option 3: Hire community members or freelancers

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. – Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire

If you have a budget for creating content, you can probably find customers, community members, or freelancers who will be willing to write content for your blog. Many companies have paid writing programs that you can reference for inspiration.

Hiring outside freelancers is a great way to get new voices, but it presents its own challenges. You have to manage writers who probably have a full-time job. Even if they’re good writers, they aren’t going to jeopardize their job for a few hundred bucks.

Second, to cover a wide range of topics, you’ll need a variety of writers. The more writers you have to manage, the more overhead you’ll incur. If you hire people outside the country or in certain states, you might have to worry about the legal ramifications of paying them or whether they’re considered a “contractor” or not.

Option 4: Work with a technical blogging agency

When you realize how much work it is to manage freelancers, you might consider hiring an agency. I’m biased because that’s what my company Draft does, but it is a good option for some companies.

Typically, an agency will work with you to decide on a list of topics each month and then deliver that content to you. They’ll usually take care of the editing and may even help with promotion and distribution. You will have one bill to pay each month, one contact to interact with, and you will likely get higher quality content.

The downside to an agency is cost. While they will save you time, you will pay a markup on the content they produce, so you should be committed to building a blog before you engage them. I only recommend the agency model if you’re looking to build high-quality, long-lasting technical content as a business asset.

Option 5: Hire in-house technical writers

I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way. – Lee Iacocca

Finally, the most expensive option is to hire a team of in-house technical writers. This is usually cost-prohibitive for all but the largest tech companies, but it gives you a lot of control over the quality and quantity of content on your blog. Companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Google have teams of developer marketing and developer advocates producing original blog posts, videos, and conference talks.

Whichever option you choose, your blog will grow faster with a range of voices and topics. Using external writers is a great way to do this, but you’ll have to weigh the overhead of managing them with the cost of working with an agency or hiring someone full-time.

Have you found great ways to find and motivate writers for your technical blog? Share them with me on Twitter and I’ll add them to the list.