Mastering Organic Marketing: Strategies To Grow Your Business

today we're breaking down how you can build an organic marketing engine for your business we give you the Frameworks we give you the models we give you the tactics that you can use that has helped billion dooll companies grow and scale Beyond just paid marketing let's get into it hey hey welcome to another episode of marketing Against the Grain I'm your co-host kit Bodner CMO at HubSpot I'm joined by my co-host Kieran Flanigan CMO at zappier I was having had a bunch of great work meetings and everything this week did some cool workshops around strategy I got to talk to you about this strategy framework and then you and I should Deep dive on it and then we should do a show on it it's from Francis Fry's book move fast and fix things and it is awesome around just like how you look at a business and your strengths versus your competitor strengths it's awesome we'll we'll talk more about that on a future episode but I also talked to an awesome founder and this is was a founder of a very successful startup you know more than $10 million in Revenue product Market fit growing fast accelerating growth and I was like oh wow like great board of directors all like everything like if you're looking you're like oh this they've really got this figured out but that conversation realized like this guy's a top 1% founder and he doesn't understand the basics of building the right demand generation marketing engine to scale him to that hund million Revenue Mark and I thought we'd talk about that today and kind of use that conversation I have with him as a guide so that we can basically selfishly send this episode to all the founders we talked to and say like hey here's the here's the the 40-minute pre pre-at or pre-list before we we catch up basically their situation is they're growing fast greater than 80% of their leads for their business come in through advertising paying people like Google Facebook your classic online advertising and he's a great founder and he's like you know what I I I know this is not going to scale with us and I know that I need to build a more balanced way to bring a new customers generate demand for my business and he's like what should I do one one quick thing because I I this is obviously you and I probably get asked this question by found all the time did you ask him why why why why he I'm always fascinated by this the answer to this question why do you want to deviate from paid or why why do you want to diversify from paid the he he had a couple reasons one was that it's expensive two that he needs to get the unit economics of his business better which is kind of a part two of expensive and three he knows that it's going to get more expensive as it scales which is what a lot of Founders don't know that that oh I'm spending you know let's say I'm spending 100 Grand on paid media a month right now to generate demand you don't a year from now you're not going to be spending 200 Grand a month on paid media and getting twice as many leads you're going to be spending 200 Grand on media to get uh 50% more leads instead of 100% more leads right and and he was smart enough to kind of know and understand that I think the third so the first two actually should take care of themselves because if you scale via some sort of turn on outspend model or lb to CAC model and you and you integrate your payback periods you can scale it that because the the interesting thing is right like you could scale and definitely imp paid if the unit economics are in your favor and there's you know there's enough that you can go which is a lot of like b2c mobile companies the third the third is actually the the in the Insight that most Founders fail should have or or or yeah that is the right Insight which is over time when I need to continue to scale this channel will at some point saturate and you can so we should just talk about this really quick because there's a real good tip here for for Founders or even marketers which is so I always divide paid into three core buckets right like so there's direct return on that spend which means I spend a certain amount of money and C someone clicks on something and then converts and I can actually see what the lifetime value is and I can calculate exactly what the return on investment is because the person directly converted on the link that I was uh advertising there's the indirect model which is for the most part the I I'm doing like video ads right like I'm doing these kind of social ads video ads and they're still they're still optimized for conversion so you still optimize the platforms based upon your conversion event so they're still optimizing towards the actual goal of conversion but they are conversion through indirect um indirect and so the way you measure that is through these conversion LIF studies we call it incrementality which is hey I put them off in I I put these on in these parts of the us I turned them off in these parts of the US and I can increment I can tell what the incrementality is of conversions based upon that span and then the third is kind of like the second bucket but you actually optimize the ad platforms for engagement not for conversion events and so the reason I would start there is because the first one which is direct return on ad spend or direct LTV to CAC I I suspect that that founder that's what they're doing right cuz they're 10 million in Revenue they're probably spending certain amount of money to get directly I spent my $1 to get my $3 back and I can guarantee that that's what I'm getting back cuz I click on the the ad link that one you could actually so you can you can kind of build enough science to understand where your satura point saturation point is like back in the day in HubSpot actually when we started to build the plg model Rex who's awesome person runs paid marketing within HubSpot we did this me and Rex which is we ran burst tests and so burst tests basically saturate the channel for a certain period of time and you can start to look at the the curve to see when you start to curve to the point where it it no longer works in terms of unit economics like I can get to this number can you give give people the Deep dive on what a burst test is so that they really understand how they could go and do that right so a a burst test is I I I over spend like if I take Facebook I will overspend on Facebook for by by like 2x 3x and ordin I will actually saturate the channel like we I think we did like 10x for C 10x your normal spin for a couple weeks of time it's there's like data you can actually pull to figure out how much you should you should actually there's like data in the background that you can do the two data crunching you can do to figure out like what the x is but let's say it's a it's 1X to 10x because you're actually going to saturate the channel for a certain amount of time and by doing that you can plot a curve and you can plot to see when you're how much you can acquire from that Channel at this at the threshold where it's still cash flow positive to you right like where where do I start to turn into one for one which means I get my $1 I spend my $1 get my $1 back right I when do I start to break that that curve and that it's it's not perfect but it actually gives you a certain bar in terms of like how how much can I spend here until I'm actually saturated the other two are you cannot do that because they're indirect models so you can you you cannot actually figure out incrementality or through the brand ads which are which are optimized towards awareness like how much can I span well the number is probably like infinite so I think that's a good place for Founders to start which is not every founder can do that cuz you do waste there is like a little waste in the money right like because you're going to overspend in that channel for a certain period of time and so some of that is not you you you will not have it's not the most efficient route yeah this the same you well you'll take like three weeks where you return on investment on that spend on that channel is like net flow negative or or break even right because I'm purposly overspending within this channel yeah hold on let me let me break this down for people because I really want I really want everybody to understand why you would do this so if you were running a company whether you're a founder or you're an executive or a head of marketing what Kieran what you were saying is part of your advertising strategy is going to be a direct response advertising model normally measured on return on ad spend and you should either have some internal person running that or you should have a really good external paid agency like we had the folks Ralph and kasamon from Perpetual traffic the one of our really popular shows from a couple months go go work with people like that and they're going to help you and what Kieran what I think you're saying is you're running this burst test to see how much runway do I have before my direct response advertising is going to hit the edges of profitability and so if you run this birth test and you see hey you know in six months if I keep wanting to grow at this same Pace I'm going to start getting Break Even or negative return then you have to go and shift your strategy very quickly if you're saying oh I actually have two years before that happens then you have a longer period of time the burst test is to give you the timeline that you need to diversify is that yeah it's to give you the hypothetical maximum amount of money you can spend in that channel right so if I'm spending a million dollars and I can look at that and some people may call it an elasticity test or a burst test and I hypothetically look at that I do that task and I say well I think based upon that test I can spend 10 million on that Channel and still have a row as a return on ad spend at a number that I'm am happy with and then I say well how long will it take me to get to $10 million maybe for some companies they're like hey I would just spend $10 million now if I knew I could spend that amount of money right the or it's going to take me based upon the budget that we have another 18 months to 24 months to actually saturate that channel and maximize my my spend within that channel wow now I know that I have probably like 18 to 24 months to actually start to build these organic channels so so there's two like core channels you can build some sort of saturation models for cuz we did this at HubSpot we've done one of them at at we've done them at zapier as well which is the paid advertising direct return on not spend and search like people don't understand that you can build actually some uh I kind of search Total addressable Market um score like you can actually figure out how much available traffic can I hypothetically get if I look at all the things that are relevant to me and then I have some methodology to say my average rank is here and the average conversion rate is this and the average conversion rate from search into a customer is this and I can say well search for me is a great Channel average Channel or non-medial channel so I've done a bunch of advisory for companies and they're thinking like how do I start to shift in to organic and most like we should actually get into this which is like it's all just search like because outside of search it's really hard to to to to monetize but I'll just say the the thing I tell them to do is start with with is this a is this going to be a meaningful channel for me or not I think what most people do in search they start with let's just start doing search I was start start with how meaningful could this channel be for me by building a search Tam right the total addressable Market of traffic that I could acquire and then how many customers can I hypothetically get from that channel and how do and how do you figure out that search Tam Kieran because somebody's somebody's going to be here and they're like hey I'm running this startup I know what my my Revenue TM is but how do I figure out how many people are actually out there looking for my product versus people who because because I think that's the distinction I want everybody listening or watching they to understand is because there's a universe of people out there that could buy your product a subset of them knows your product or category exists and are actively searching for it and another percent of them are not they do not know that to go and look for that and so depending on how much of your actual Revenue total addressable Market is searching that will tell you if a search based strategy is really good or if you need to go for a more awareness-based strategy right like if you have this big market and only a couple percent of it is actually searching and looking for your stuff that would be like going into a search strategy wouldn't be the smartest thing so you want want hopefully at least like half of your Market out there searching for your product or service or things related to it so you could build the search strategy so how do you go and figure out that search T Karen yeah I Alo look I think if you should divide search up in a similar way that I divided paid up right there's people that would search for your brand there's people who will search for the product the generic term around your product that the category that you in and then there were there will be people who search for topics related to your product but they are educated themselves within those topics but they have some sort of relevance to your to your product right so if you took hopspot ERS app here but let's start with HubSpot if you had said if we had said hey we are going to look at our search Tam and we looked at the brand search and we looked at the transactional search and we stopped there this what everybody does and it drives me God darn crazy we would have never invested in content or searches we would have never invested in content and search because no one was really looking for the brand and no one was looking for marketing automation how many how many companies have you to have you talked to like oh yeah we've done some search we've we've ranked for like our 50 keywords that are related to our product and we're done like how many like what percent of companies do you talk to tell tell you that most most I think the biggest thing compan strugg think about it they they struggle at they struggle at the either the the either side of that Spectrum so they'll struggle at the I'm going to like have a really defined Nar viw and try to rank for the transactional generic terms that are associated with my product and the the the doing that in B2B is pointless right there's just not that much people searching for your generic terms like CRM is a good example of a term that actually has a ton of search traffic and it had there's 18 keywords which actually fascinating this is how much of a dor is I have like I actually know keyword categories there's 18 keywords in CRM that have the the had the 80% of all traffic right but it's actually a pretty sizable amount of traffic but very very competitive but most B2B generic terms actually when you group all those generic terms together around your product they're not going to equate to like meaningful growth you're not going to be like a unicorn based upon that so that's one end of the spectrum but you have a lot of companies they spend all their time doing that it's the most competitive part and they just like don't really make much progress the other end of the spectrum is like okay well what topics educational topics that people educate themselves in which is like the HubSpot formula and the zapier formula and and so what companies do understand that right they'll go off and they'll start build in all the content around topics like can get into some howow how you would like do the search time there but they'll build all this content and things around these topics but what they have failed to understand is what is the bridge from that content into the product so what people really misunderstand about HubSpot success in content is just not so not so much the content we published it's that we figured out how to convert that content into customers at a higher rate than any other company and we did that through creating bepoke templates and ebooks for blog posts that rank for certain keywords so if we saw a blog post rank around PR we created an ebook or template just to convert the traffic that was reading that blog post to create the bridge into like that becom an elite for the company in zapier we do that by creating templates right like we teach people how to automate things and then we actually give them an exact template in that that you can just click and go use you have to think about what is the bridge and and put yourself in the customer shoes and say is this a valuable thing to me what I actually click this get some convert in it oh yeah so I I want to explain to everybody why this doesn't happen because what you just said is what everybody needs to do like that is like content marketing bring in demand through search 101 but why doesn't it happen K because you and I have seen why why it doesn't happen why it doesn't happen is because you have somebody on your team who writes some blog post and they do all that over there and then you normally have somebody on your team who they're doing like the ebook or the long form webinar or whatever and that ebook long form webinar is normally either way too product focused or it's about whatever topic you care about at the time you're like oh you know what I really want people to figure out marketing automation yeah yeah the thing you I want to push that marketing Automation and so you're trying to email people you're trying to do all this stuff and it's and it's like wait wait but over here you have thousands of people coming to your your blog on this different topic and if you just made that thing not about marketing automation but instead conversion rate optimization I'm making this up for like our HubSpot example then you are going to convert like 10 times as many leads as you will from this very disjointed approach right and that's why it doesn't happen is because people are trying to run these campaigns and for you and I I think one of the one of the things that I I really want people to understand is that campaigns were always secondary to us right the campaigns were what was left over the campaigns were never the driver it was oh how people are finding us and what people are discovering as the driver we're going to give them the right conversion pass and whatever time money we have left over after that we're going to drive kind of campaign focused topics right yeah you your cues are what people are consuming right like it's not what the CU isn't I need you to learn about this thing the cue is what is the popular topics that people are consuming and how do I give you more of that thing to the point where you then you you then can learn about the product right like one easy way for companies to do this is to create a feature map right like I create a fe a map of all the all the features within my product and then I reverse engineer out to like topics that are associated with those Fe like what what is the job to be done for that feature and then what are the topics that someone would educate themselves can you give me a specific example for zappier of like just pick just pick like a one feature and feature map it out so people understand the steps right so so Z well zapier is kind of interesting zapier so like zapier so zapier allows you to do one of the you know interesting things about zapier is this horizontal products you can do a ton of automation but you can basically there's an infinite amount of possibilities because there's 6,000 apps and if you combine those 6,000 apps I think I we did it before the math that get hundreds and hundreds of thousands of different Integrations you can build and so like the example for zapier is that you would start with what's a what's a popular app like G sheets and then what's what's popular apps that people want to integrate that with and what's workflows and then you would like step back and say okay like we could create the and then it's the different levels of fidelity right based upon people wanting to automate things around G seats for a marketer for a salesperson for an Ops person then you can go up one level and say we could do something pretty extensive around that like via a webinar like just kind of long form content then you go back up one step and you say well we can do that via a blog post and within the blog post we're going to actually create templates that make it really easy to connect these things together like the example HubSpot might be even easier to understand if you do a feature map and you say like one of the features was a paid advertising feature right that allowed you to connect to Facebook and do Facebook advertising through through through HubSpot and then you go up one level of fidelity and you say well people are trying to educate themselves around how to uh help how to get Facebook to perform better as an ad platform right like just educating themselves on Facebook then you go up one level of fidelity and you say people are trying to just do better and Page search right how do I create a how do I create a dashboard for p PID search how do I understand my Coster click what is that Ro as LTB to model right and so you continue to go up until you are at the you know upper upper edch lons of this is where I would start and that I can create a path that well if you're trying to teach yourself paid advertising you're going to have to use Facebook if you're trying to use Facebook then you actually need to Ed you need to know these kind of Basics and then if you're if you really want to go one step further well why don't you just set up a campaign and actually start using that with hopspot very similar with zapier like if you want to automate these if you want to automate these apps here's all of the different things you can do right here's ways that you as a marketer can automate a bunch of your work through G seats here's what you can do with sales here's what you can do with Ops and then here's the template and then you can go and get the template ready so I think it's trying to make sure that you have worked backwards and not what most people do which is let's create content and then figure out how we can get them to be interested in our product right correct first like what's interesting about our product and if you start if you start from that point just keep going uh you know up a level until you actually have like a pretty well- defined content path that sound simple is incredibly powerful if people do just that your whole business will change your whole business will change like if you think about what we're saying today it's like hey most growing businesses are growing through paid we're telling you hey you can figure out how much you can grow solely through paid we talked about doing a burst test as a way to like have a good understanding of direct response paid and doing the math around that and you're either working with somebody on your team or an external agency to do that then Kieran what you're saying if you want to the first step in diversifying past paid is search right we we we going to agree on that you and I are like hey search is the best best form and search comes in a whole host of ways it comes in Google search YouTube search uh those those would be I think those are the two biggest search engines in the world right now they other you know smaller search engine review site search other things that you can you can do and so what you're saying is do that that content mapping starting with your product all the way back to kind of the broadest level of abstraction so you see what people are searching for and then have a Content path to get people back to your product and that most people fail because they don't have the right content path back to their product to actually monetize that search visit is that correct right yeah I will say so like if you so there's a couple of things in that so one of the interesting things about there may be other inputs other like so there may be other inputs that you can use to figure out other things you can create right um so one of them is obviously what are people searching for so if you do levels of we're going let's get into the search time because I can quickly explain this and then get on to another thing so if you kind of follow the same process which is like all right what are what are the jobs to be done for my product if I take those jobs to be done how can I go up keep going up one level of distraction until I have like an actual content plan and content path mapped out whether that's my and that that really means that you have gone from the actual individual feature that someone uses and then the mid funnel content that is applicable to that and then the top of the funnel content is applicable to that right then you connect those two things together and you can get them to actually be interested within that feature sign up and and convert into the product if it's plg convert into lead of it's a marketing L says that business the T part is actually when you take all the topics right you you now you've gone up and you've said okay these are all the topics that are relevant to that job to be done let's say there's an individual job to be done which is email marketing and then email marketing has a bunch of different topics associated with it where people are trying to educate themselves around email marketing which is like how do I do Gmail like what's the best way to do Gmail marketing what's the best way to do email automation what's the B whatever it may be you look at all the keywords within there right so that's like one topic you look at all the keywords in there you com you aggregate them together and you have multiply available the total available monthly search traffic for those topic for that topic right so one topic cluster all the keywords look at the the traffic in totality and you have what is the total amount of monthly traffic that is available for this topic right but you're not going to get all that then you say on average then you can do some models right so it depends how you want to do this you would say on average we're going to rank from 3 to 6 6 to 9 9 to 12 let's there there's like there's just some assum assumptions you have to build in some subjectivity you have to build in to like how you want to average those things out so why are we doing that because then you can look at the average click-through rates through Google and say well on average the click-through rate is going to be this and then the on average the conversion rate is going to be this so from that total monthly available traffic we think we hypothesize from that one topic that equates to hypothetically this many customers and if you do that for each topic that is relevant to your business that you feel you can convert into demand for your product because you've gone reverse engineered from job to be done into mofu and tofu content now you have total addressable you have some you have the total addressable market for for search traffic but there are some you explain mofu and tofu content I don't want you to move past that that's important thing for everybody to understand so mofu and tofu is the bridge right like in zapier tofu for us is when people are what is tofu give people the background top of the top top of the funnel right so top of the funnel content the example in zapier would be when people are just trying to learn how to automate work through different apps that an example of tofu content CU zapier is not mentioned within that MH within that blog post the middle funnel content for us is when we explain how to do that specifically with zapier and what's interesting with us is our blog is like one of our best middle of the funnel channels for for most companies it's not like that PR for zapier because it's such a horizontal product with a large user and customer base the blog educates a lot of our customers and how you can do these things in zapier but think of tofu content is the content that you are educa you were educating someone to solve a problem but your product is usually not part of that story and the middle of the middle funnel content is the thing that you are trying to convert people on from the top of the funnel so the hot example we give is like I'm trying to do better as a PR like I'm trying to learn how to create the best PR release for my product the mid funnel content this is a real example from Hotpot I think this was one of the first times we really figured out how to engineer ebooks and templates to fit with blog posts to increase conversions is that we had one of the team created like PR template right and so you read the blog post and then you could just click the link and get the template the template was the middle FAL content the middle final content then actually started to expose HubSpot right talked about how you can do some of these things with HubSpot so metal funnel content is nearer to your conversion to customer to top of the funnel is really a discovery mechanism right tofu how people discover you mofu how you convert them into demand for your product people have bofu content as well but that maybe is going on a on a on a large tangent what's interesting in the also there's some gotas for Search keywords are not keyword tools are not always accurate right so do not rely only on keyword tools because there is a people some keyword tools that they sh like if they're start if they've never done this they're just going down the path like what are the tools that they should start using to to to help them figure out their I think ARS is like shout out to a like a is an incredible tool I I think that's one of the best tools but I just mean like keyword tools will not give you all of the information there's two things I would do is uh well there's three things there is like keyword tools like ARS can give you an initial like guidance on this kind of search time and the keywords that applicable to you within those topics the second thing is competitive analysis so you should you should uh augment it with a competitive analysis but you should take competitors for this is a a long it takes some time to do this we did this in zap year it took us four to six weeks I know in HubSpot we used to do this in cycles and it took us like a month at a time to build this but they're really valuable but basically you do competitive analysis for each topic so you go into look to see who your top 10 competitors are for these different topics and then you look at those competitors and say what keywords are relevant to us that they rank for that we don't rank for right so then you can actually start to look at look for for Relevant keywords in that way the third is that there are some products like the interesting thing about zapier is our content team do pretty incredible work where they look for insights within what people are using within zapier itself because we have so much data on the things that people are automating and they create more content around that and it that performs really well and it acquires a ton of search traffic but if you looked at it in isolation and said well what keywords map to this you probably wouldn't have created that post right so there's certain there's certain places where you can get data as well that will help inform your content strategy but first of all keep in mind that all this data is very Prospect customer Centric data whether it be from your product whether it be through search Behavior it is not like hey this is what I care about as a company it's like this is what the people who might care about me are looking for and are interested in and are doing and that is a very important distinction um before we finish up today's show Kieran I couple we talk about time what one thing that's really interesting I wonder how you think about this when p is asking Kieran Kieran kieran's about to just do a solo po he's he's go he's going off it but there there's something really like I would love to he's like I'm about to be out I got to get it all in the timing really matters in this because sometimes a Founder will say to me um we have to get off paid search or we have to get off paid and diversify our channels because we are already like starting to plateau and you're like boy that's a hard problem yeah it's such a hard problem to Sol right because they're like well what can I replace paid with to start hitting like next month's number nothing like this is like the the Beauty and the you know what I don't know what the right word is like the devil and the the the beauty of paid which is it is highly measurable highly instable geted and the more you use it the worse it gets it is for you yeah literally literally like using a drug it's the only thing that really in marketing can like as a as as Discovery like there's things like if you have a large customer base and user base you can do things to actually uh increase your demand in a very short amount of time paid as a as a marketing channel in terms of like getting you act you customers you new users things like that it's hard to replace that within a certain period of time with Organic so what I tell what I tell Founders is the the quicker you diversify the better right like and and that means that you have to like when you are a founder and you have a everything is somewhat dependent upon paid you have a marketing strategy which really is just you have a performance marketing strategy you don't have a marketing strategy so it's when the founder wants to feels comfortable going from a performance marketing strategy to a marketing strategy and when you go to a marketing strategy it's a whole host of other things that founder has to educate themselves on well there there are two two things that come to mind when when thinking about making the shift one is the Charlie Munger quote that wisdom is prevention right like if you're coming in and saying you need to diversify how your business is growing then you're probably already too late right and then there's a there's a great uh quote from Carl Richards that's in Morgan H's new book same as ever which is risk is what's left over after you you've thought of everything like that's the definition of risk and so if you're trying to re to drisk your business one of the things you have to consider is how do I how do I think of everything to diversify my marketing engine and how my ability to attract new people into my business to become customers that's what we're talking about today and Kieran what you've done a great job outlining today is the process in which you can validate how long you have before you have to make that switch and how to get started in search to really think about how clear that opportunity is and how you could forecast your business based on people searching to people converting to people become uh converting to become a lead to people becoming customers based on having those very product uh use case driven flows there's one other part that we haven't talked about that I think is really important so this founder I was talking to earlier was like you know we're starting to have some early success in organic YouTube and that's where we're starting to get some some really interesting customers and you love that and so whether it be YouTube whether it be Google you start having that success then there is the second part of this which is the magic of how you make the content and how aggressively you invest to make it to make the timetable work like it's very cool to have to know like okay I need to go after these 100 keywords but do I need to go after these 100 keywords over the next year the next month like how aggressive how much do I need to make becomes a big question and what I normally see is Founders who don't invest enough or do not have high enough expectations in how fast they need to go on that path could you maybe explain to people everybody watching today like how do you get really aggressive in the making of the content so that you can capture that audience as quickly as possible I think this all comes down to you need a growth model because you need to be able to forecast you know you need to start with the end of you need to start with the result you want right so you start with what Revenue do I need to be at at the end of this 12- month period or at the end of this 24 month period and then you have to look at your different channels and forecast based upon historical Trends and the things that you think you will do to augment that channel what do you suspect the growth will be over the the course of 12 to 24 months and look to see how far away you are from that because content like for the most part the best content strategies are systems like I know you agree with this because that's what we built at HubSpot honestly that's what we that's what zapier has built as well which is like when you look under the hood there's a ton of creativity but that creativity is all housed within an incredible system with Incredible processes so what do I mean let me give you an example when we were in HubSpot and we were trying to figure out this very question which is how fast can we grow right I think we I think I think we the fundamental question everybody's trying to figure out I I think I think we had like I remember like JD shman who's who's this was our CEO and just totally awesome awesome awesome awesome person and I remember I think I don't know if you remember like I remember we passed like 1 million visits he's like wow that was amaz that was amazing and then we passed 2 million he was like I I honestly didn't give you I didn't want to say it but I didn't think you were pass and so then then we were like okay well well let's see how fast we could go right and you break it's kind of like first principles which is like you're really good at doing this but breaking it down into first principles which is okay we have writers writers can produce a certain number of posts each and every month those posts are spread between new posts and historical optimization of posts because what people don't realize is when you get to a certain size their historical optimization of posts actually acquire way more traffic than the new posts correct um and so we we break it I won't go into all the things we break it down because I try to keep it simple but like say an individual writer can chuse x amount of posts those X-Men and posts are spread between X-Men and you and X-Men of historical optimization and that equates to a certain amount of traffic we would cohort this we would look at an individual Rider and look at the cohort of traffic they would acquire over 12 to 24 month period and then we would say okay well if we want to grow faster there are some inputs that we can control which is we can control the number of writers we can control the amount of SEO things we do to make the individual post acquire more traffic over time the individual historical approach acquire more traffic over time so we built a Content model to show like how we could actually grow rapidly over our 2012 24 month period and then like basically how many riders we would need to hire to hit a certain goal right so we would have like certain models to say well we want to be at 10 million after 24 to 36 months we or we want to be at 5 million like what is the deviation between those two things in terms of how much would we need to increase the average traffic in individual post gets a new post versus a St post and based upon that how many writers would we have to hire over time to be able to grow into that demand um so you have to like if you break things down to like the core inputs that make up the output then that that's how you can I think build like how much content should I produce right like yeah now if you're in the early stages that model doesn't really work like I think you you should think about Marketing in the same way you think about building products which you you have pre-market Channel fit and you have postmarket Channel fit I don't think you should invest and scale a channel aggressively in the pre-marketing channel fit because you will end up with a pretty you could end up with a pretty lackluster uh result right you could end up with higher over hiring for that channel and just being the but if you actually can see that there's real Market Channel fit like we've figured out the core inputs that truly matter when we replicate these tactics within those inputs we see the same result each and every time then it really is just a case of how much can we how aggressively can we hire here a freelance or Outsource I think that's a great breakdown of like how you actually think about uh the production side of this because the production side of this is actually very hard and there's an art to production and producing content and aligning it with your actual business goals but when you have that growth model that you're talking about Kieran you can feel very confident on how much you need to invest to do that right right and you know we we have look fortunately we plan on doing this podcast for a long long time and we're going to cover the these types of Topics in detail there there's like a 100 different we could spend 100 hours on this topic this is just this is just the first one this is our wheelous yeah this is like you know just yeah just just put the camera on and let it roll we we we could we could go we could go forever but I think the core thing we gave you some very practical like how to and kind of go along the way but you can't do any of those without the right mindset and the right mindset of needing to change and one of the things we talked about was that paid advertis is kind of like the drugs of business right like you can really get hooked and so Kieran I'm going to leave you and the viewers with a great quote from another one from Morgan House's book same as ever which is and and as I'm reading this replace drugs in this in this quote with advertising and it says money buys happiness the same way drugs buy pleasure incredible if Done Right dangerous if used to mask a weakness and disastrous when no amount is enough right and that's the same thing with advertising advertising is great when you get it just right it is very dangerous if you have no diversification and you're trying to spend more and more money to likee pretend that you don't have that weakness and then you go so far over over it that you just have to spend whatever it takes and it gets disastrous because your economics blow up and the board gets pissed like everything kind of falls apart in that and so if you're listening to this if you take nothing else away from the Y side of this show it is is that that you have to have the right balance and diversification of your marketing strategy as you're as you're scaling up I think I think having a great performing paid Channel and you've perfected paid and it's unit economics are great and you're scaling well that is the best that that is the best time to ask this question which is wow I I can this is working so I I have some time now to really start to diversify right that is actually when to ask that to ask that question wisdom is prevention wisdom is prevention the wrong time to do it do not wait till things are not good yeah when things are good ask yourself what might make them bad in the future and how do I prevent that from happening right right that the way to do it Karen great luck on fatherhood we'll all be thinking of you uh for all of our marketing Against the Grain fam I have an amazing series of guest hosts joining me over the next period of time while Kieran is out and uh we're looking forward to to Baby updates uh when when you back here thank you so much everybody we'll talk to you real soon this data is wrong every freaking time have you heard of HubSpot HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated who I can see the client's whole history call support tickets emails and here's a task from 3 days ago I totally missed HubSpot grow better

Channel: Marketing Against the Grain

Views: 3,230

Keywords: The #1 Paid Marketing Mistake Even $10M Founders Make, marketing mistakes, affiliate marketing mistakes to avoid, marketing mistakes to avoid, common marketing mistakes, marketing mistakes by big companies, marketing against the grain, matg podcast, kipp and kieran, hubspot, hubspot podcast

Id: 1RMqQTK-Kvs

Length: 41min 21sec (2481 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 06 2024