Two Founders Share How Startups Can Reach a Massive Audience
2. #promotingyourstartup
What you’re going to learn
1
2
3
How to create content that gets press coverage and thousands of shares
How to combine PPC & SEO to create a total search solution that fits
into your content strategy
Why your promotion strategy is part of, not an afterthought to, content
creation
@robertjmoore
3. How to Reach a
Massive Audience
(Even Though No One Knows Who You Are)
4. #promotingyourstartup
Content marketing is any marketing that involves the
creation and sharing of media and publishing content in
order to acquire and retain customers.
Content marketing is...
@larrykim
16. #promotingyourstartup
✓ 30k+ pageviews on day one
✓ Top of Hacker News
✓ Column in the New York Times
✓ Multiple speaking engagements
✓ Tons of positive brand vibes
@robertjmoore
21. #promotingyourstartup
Two rules for “big win” content
1. If you can’t figure out ahead of time who will promote
your content and why, don’t bother.
1. Content marketing success is largely determined in the
planning phase, before writing a single word.
@robertjmoore
26. #promotingyourstartup
Donkey’s Vs. Unicorn ads
@larrykim
Distribution Point Vs. Expected CTR Comments
Bottom 50% Below Expected CTR Donkeys
Top 15% 2x OK
Top 5% 3x Better
Top 1% 6x Unicorns
Most Ads Suck (+90%)
37. #promotingyourstartup
6. Remember who your audience is
@larrykim
Keywords Targeting: Google vs. Twitter
Google AdWords Twitter
Infant clothes boy Julian’s first birthday
Content Marketing Position Freelance SEO writer needed
Small Business Loan I’m starting my first business
Grow My Business #frustrated we need Bar Rescue
Mobile landing page tools #mobilegeddon
Social Keywords: Higher Funnel, Informational, Conversational, Hashtags
38. #promotingyourstartup
Using PPC for PR
1. Always Focus on Quality Score - Look for Unicorns
2. Tap Into Your Customer’s Emotions
3. Publish High Quality Content
4. Promote to Influencers
5. Say NO to Promoting Junk Updates
@larrykim
47. #promotingyourstartup
60,000 views per year
0.1% view-to-SQL
60 SQLs
19.8% SQL-to-paid
11 paying clients
$12k ARR ACV
$132k of new ARR/year
15x ARR Multiple
(w00t!)
$2MM of Equity Value
Cost: One Day
@robertjmoore
56. #promotingyourstartup
Making this work for your startup
1. Hit the gas with PRable content
2. Boost performance with paid
3. Maintain momentum with SEO
@robertjmoore
Bob: Hello everyone and welcome to today’s webinar.
We have a ton of great real-life examples that we’re going to be sharing today, and everyone should leave today’s event knowing three things:
How to create content that gets press and shares
How to use PPC and SEO to get your content and message in front of more people
The importance of thinking “promotion first”
LARRY: So, let’s jump into it. The secret to reaching a massive audience, even when you’re just starting out -- is to NOT talk about yourself. Nearly every startup makes this mistake. You’re excited about your product, you genuinely believe it could make people’s lives better, and you want to tell people about it. Resist this urge. If you want to reach a massive audience, you need to talk about things people already care about. And you do this using content.
Just in case someone found this webinar without knowing what content marketing is...here’s the definition. Content marketing is so effective at building up a brand because it delivers value to prospects before they ever engage in any type of business transaction.
Bob, you have a good way of thinking about this, can you explain the reciprocity index?
Sure, here’s the way I think about the role of content marketing. You need to care about your company’s reciprocity index, the ratio of how much value you deliver to the value you receive in return. If we think about this in terms of customer relationships, this is simple: if r is greater than 1, your customers will stay with you and continue to spend money with you. If it’s less than one, they’ll churn. At one, you have perfect efficiency, true value-based pricing. Good luck with that.
But what’s important is that you think about the reciprocity index of your audience. Reporters, influencers, or the names in your database who have never bought anything but have otherwise interacted with your brand. How do you keep these people from hitting unsubscribe or ignoring all of your communication?
It’s the same equation, only the value you receive is their attention, their time, their consideration. And what value do you deliver to these people? A sales pitch? That’s not very valuable. Maintaining a reciprocity index above one for your audience is hard! Content marketing is one solution. Good content marketing grows your list, keeps your relationships with your prospects healthy, gains you the attention of influencers and press, and has great branding and other effects.
Larry, can you get a little more into explaining what this actually looks like.
This diagram breaks down essentially how you want this to work. Once you’ve earned someone’s trust and built that reciprocity index, they’ll be much more open to hearing about your business and services -- because you’ve already delivered value. That’s your “owned” audience, this is essentially names in your database.
What we’re going to be spending most of our time on today is these other two categories -- paid and earned. These are the channels where you reach thousands of people and deliver that initial value.
The first thing people always ask about super popular content is this: does it actually convert? And that’s a fair question. In the experience of both Bob and myself, a brand gains enormous benefits (awareness, backlinks, press coverage) by writing interesting, useful content. This type of content is often less measurable than lead generating content, but it’s worth it. Th
ere’s a whole other webinar around how to create mid-funnel content that turns an audience into leads and those leads into paying customers -- this is not that webinar.
So let’s get started with the big ones -- PR and Social. I’ll hand it over to you Bob to get us started.
BOB: Thanks, Larry. PR has always been particularly close to my heart. Writing content that gets covered by the press was a strategy that I used the RJMetrics headquarters was still my parent’s attic.
When you’re writing this type of content, the most important thing to keep in mind is your competition: it’s not other vendors in your space.
It’s content like this. Good luck getting people to sign up to your webinar while these adorable cats are on the loose!
(You want to play ball with content? You'd better be more interesting than Facebook, Instagram, Buzzfeed, TMZ, and YouTube.
And I know what you're saying: "not all of the people reading TMZ are my target customers”, BUT here's what you need to accept: some of them are. We all care about the big story of the day, we all click on our own versions of clickbait from time to time. Even the most sophisticated consumers click viral links from time to time. Some percentage of the time, your prospective customers are consuming media that isn’t about their job. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get their attention.)
Go big or go home. There are a few ways you can do this.
One way to do this is to offer a fresh perspective on something people already care about. We did this last year around the ice bucket challenge. Using Mechanical Turk we had people go through thousands of YouTube videos and collect data -- gender of the participants, number of people participating, whether or not they mentioned ALS, etc. Then we analyzed the data and provided a perspective that no one else could offer.
This earned us covered in Fast Company, Forbes, Media Post, and several other publications.
both of these examples of very planned, but sometimes life hands you unexpected opportunities. We got one of these about a year and a half ago when we released a new logo. Suddenly Twitter seemed to be blowing up with people telling us it looked like Y-fronts. I did a google survey and got to the bottom of it then wrote a blog post about what we learned.
We’ve received so much value out of this one post it’s amazing.
We just covered three ways you can approach “big win” content. Now I’m going to hand it back to Larry to talk about the #1 mistake people make when trying to write this content.
LARRY
The biggest mistake is forgetting to think promotion first.
What reporters are going to care about the piece? why? What vendors will care about it? why? What influencers will care about it? why? Until you know the answer to these questions, you shouldn’t be writing.
I couldn’t agree more. The two rules of thumb I try to follow are this:
If you don’t know ahead of time who is going to promote -- don’t bother
And success starts in the planning phase. Even if you write an excellent piece, if it’s on a topic the press doesn’t care about. You won’t get much traction out of it.
And this doesn’t all need to happen organically. Larry, something you do incredibly well is use paid ads to promote your content. Can you tell us how that works?
LARRY: Sure Bob, let me start off by sharing an example of how this works.
The first step is to write really great content. In this case, I was injecting Wordstream into part of a much bigger story about Google+
Once I hit publish. I have a list of influencers ready to go that I know will be interested in the piece. So I dedicate a small budget to promoting the content to them.
In this example, the piece was picked up by Marketing Land 2 hours later, and this was without me (or anyone else) needing to send 100 pitch emails.
And this trend continued. After Marketing Land it got picked up by engadget, Venture Beat, and Gizmodo, by Monday it was picked up by Fast Company, Cnet, and Information Week. Again, all of this happened without me sending a single pitch email.
Let me recap on what you need to be successful using paid ads for PR purposes.
Up until this point we’ve been very focused on using PR and social shares to get you in front a big audience. But there’s another channel that is incredibly effective at getting you in front of huge audiences -- SEO. I’m going to hand it over to Bob to get us started on this one.
BOB: SEO is a much longer term play then the strategies we’ve been talking about, but one that’s been incredibly effective for us at RJMetrics.
When we started focusing on SEO we were very focused on the long tail. And this is going to be the case for most startups. It takes time to build of pagerank and SEO juice and until that time, you can’t compete on the more popular keywords. Here’s how this played out for us at the beginning.
When we first started SEO research, we were looking at terms at the top of the curve. For us, that was business intelligence. Here’s what we saw: This is what happens when you search google for “business intelligence– this is the entire resulting page, above the fold.
What’s missing here? Organic results. There isn’t a single organic result on this page, which is absolutely crazy. Google’s “let me answer that for you” content, which is scraped from Wikipedia, pushes all the organic results downward.
This means that even if I was a total SEO baller with tons of link juice to dedicate to it and I became the #1 organic result for this term, I wouldn’t even appear above the fold. You want to appear above the fold on Google for this term, your only option is to buy an ad. Period. You want to know what that ad costs?
The cost for a single click on AdWords is $65.
When we were getting started, it was a losing proposition for us to try and compete on the big keywords in our space. Even when we had raised a series A and had millions in the bank, we were literally battling Oracle for that real estate.
So, very early on in our history, we decided to sit down and ask ourselves a simple question: what else are our prospects searching for? What might they be looking up while they're feeling the pain that our product solves?
And this was a helpful exercise, because it raised a very valuable point: most people who need business intelligence don't search for the words business intelligence. They're trying to do things like optimize their customer lifetime value, conduct a cohort analysis, join two sql tables together, run a test, or reduce their churn rate. Those are the terms they're searching for.
In under an hour, we were able to come up with dozens of terms that we thought our customers might be searching for while feeling the pains that we cure. (By the way that list has since grown to hundreds.)
We then ran these through the Google keyword tool to figure out what variations were actually generating the most search volume, and then we ran the searches themselves and looked at how good the leading content was.
Could we develop content that was more helpful than whatever appeared in the #1 spot? Was the existing content at a low enough PR that we could disrupt it?
Before long, we had a list of terms with nontrivial traffic just begging to be dominated by RJMetrics. Now we just needed something that could take over the search results.
We started writing blog posts, which worked pretty well. The challenge was that this content deserved more... it was really evergreen content that we didn't want to have attached to a date or relegated to a URL alongside things like company news. And in some cases we could actually build some interactivity, like a simple calculator or tool.
We also realized that the SEO benefit of having a domain name containing those keywords could be significant.
So we went out and registered whatever domains we could get our hands on, and we built microsites at those domains that provided genuinely helpful information about those subjects and also explained how RJMetrics was a great way to remove the pain they were feeling.
These are just a few of the sites we have out there. And they work great. For a B2B company like ours, this is thousands of highly targeted visitors per month landing on what's effectively a landing page for our product. Generating that kind of traffic using PPC would cost tens of thousands of dollars per month, and instead we made it happen with a few weeks of work from a junior member of our marketing team.
To boot, these leads are consistently, hands-down the most qualified and highest converting out of any channel we have. We can trace hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual recurring revenue back to leads that were generated this portfolio of microsites.
And we’ve saved a ton of money by generating these leads organically rather than paying. While much cheaper than “business intelligence” these leads would still have cost us a fortune over the past two years.
To boot, these leads are consistently, hands-down the most qualified and highest converting out of any channel we have. We can trace hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual recurring revenue back to leads that were generated with this portfolio of microsites.
And here’s some data to back up what Bob is saying here, we’ve found that the vast majority of value derived from content comes from a small number of pieces. i call these content unicorns. In most companies, these unicorns represent about 4% of total content, but it drives:
50% of traffic
70% of shares
80% of links
Whether you’re writing for the press or for long-term, evergreen content, it’s always better to start out trying to create a unicorn.
Bob just walked you through an RJMetrics example, here’s an example of how this has worked for the Wordstream team.
PRable content is great for giving you those big bursts of attention and brand awareness, but it also tends to go stale rather quickly. Writing content for SEO will deliver sustained value.
And that brings us to our closing section -- measuring success. I’m going to hand it back to the data nerd, Bob, to wrap this up.
BOB: We measure success of these strategies in two main ways: are we building a more effective PR machine? Are we steadily growing our “owned” audience?
RJMetrics is an analytics platform so of course we have tons of charts around this stuff, but here are the three that summarize our efforts at the most high-level.
We answer this question by setting PR goals. We just set this up about three months ago, so as you can see we’re still working out a few kinks in our measurement and goals.
Basically what we do is scrape the entire internet for every mention of RJMetrics. Then we rank these mentions based on the type of coverage we got and the quality of the publication we were mentioned in. Our marketing team can’t focus 100% on writing PRable content so this chart keeps us on track with making sure we’re allocating time to the right projects.
The second question we want to answer is how successfully we’re growing our owned audience. This chart tracks new additions and unsubscribes. I think of this as a high-level view of our reciprocity index. A spike in unsubscribes means our reciprocity index is off. A drop in new additions to the list means we may need to ramp up our content efforts or take on some CRO efforts.
This chart is paired with it’s cousin that shows the cumulative size of our list. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of pageviews and press mentions, but this chart keeps us honest -- is the content we’re producing ultimately turning into people who trust us and want to hear from us again? Looking at that year over year improvement, the answer is definitely yes.
And that brings us to the end of today’s presentation. We’re going to open this up for questions in just a second so a reminder to ask your questions on Twitter using #promotingyourstartup or via the chat window.
Before we jump into that let me do a quick recap of what we’ve learned today. The strategies Larry and I shared with you have worked incredibly well for us. And if you boil it all down, it’s this -- 1. PRable content is fuel for a startup. It gets you the attention of reporters and influencers that will be your biggest advocate. 2. Don’t forget to promote, especially using paid ads 3. SEO will help you maintain momentum and build traction over the long-term, if you want to reach massive audiences today and keep reaching them tomorrow you should be using a mix of PRable content and long-tail SEO content.