First off, everything in this post works. Yes, even if you haven’t nailed product/market fit yet (but I’ll get into that later) ☺

This is what we’ve used to get Blossom, a lightweight agile project management tool up to a couple of hundred paying companies and
a few thousand dollars in recurring revenue.

Trust me, if we managed to do that, you can do it as well.

I’ve also helped some fellow founders to go through exactly the same setup just to check if I’m not dreaming.

Content marketing can be overwhelming. It’s hard to know what to focus on and how to get started.

This post is basically what I would have loved to read instead of going through hundreds of blog posts, mailing lists and dozens of books.

So here it is. Just focus on this post and get going.
You can always add more stuff and change things going forward.

Here is a clip from Glengarry Glen Ross to get you in the right mood.

Disclaimer: this post isn’t very polished yet, I apologize.
I just wrote it up on my Caltrain ride up to San Francisco earlier today.

1. Identity & Narrative (Positioning!)

Don’t skip this point. This is what most companies forget about.

People buy why you do it, not how you do it or what you do.
Customers buy what you stand for. Your identity, your personality.

Today’s marketplace is no longer responsive to the strategies that worked in the past. There are just too many products, too many companies, and too much marketing noise.

— Positioning, The Battle for Your Mind

It all boils down to how well you are positioned in the minds of your (potential) customers and what you do about it.

A lot of companies get this wrong. They are weakly positioned and have no identity. Not because they are stupid. Just because they did not spend the time to think about it.

They think about their product and revenue, sometimes about their customers but not really about their identity and how they are perceived.

Getting this in order is probably the highest leverage thing you can do.
It will affect all other areas of your business. Trust me.

Getting to a clear understanding of your identity and positioning is not easy.
Even for the best companies this is a process and takes time & dedication but luckily we’re not alone. ☺

We have support from a few very brilliant people. Here we go …

Des Traynor of Intercom has two fantastic ideation questions for
exploring your identity …

• What (other than making money) is the reason why you exist?
• How will the world be a better place if you succeed?

Related, here are a few branding & positioning questions
from Becca Edwards …

• Who do you want to be known as?
• What do you want to be known for?
• What do you NOT want to be known for?
• What are 5 words you want people to say when they hear your name?
• What values are important to you?

… another take on it, the famous Babylon5 questions …

• Who are you? — Do I like you?
• What do you want? — Do you want what I want?
• Why are you here? — What do you stand for?
• Where are you going? — Should I join your journey?

… or FAKEGRIMLOCK’s post about
Minimum Viable Personality on Fred Wilson’s blog …

• HOW YOU CHANGE CUSTOMER’S LIFE? — Mission
• WHAT YOU STAND FOR? — Values
• WHO OR WHAT YOU HATE? — Enemy

All these questions should help you with getting a grip on your identity.

[You can skip this section, this is just an example about Blossom’s positioning]
In our case at Blossom we came to the following conclusion …

Mission: Help our customers to create the best software products out there.
Values: Simplicity, pragmatism & continuous improvement.
Enemy: Scrum, dogmatism, cargo cult & snake oil.

Once we’ve clarified for ourselves what we stand for and why we care it suddenly became way easier for us to create a narrative & content strategy around it.

Here are some example medium posts that match & underline our personality at Blossom & what we want to be known for …

• The Scrum Backlog is where Features go to die. [Enemy]
• How I deal with Customer Feedback [Mission & Values]
• Which Features to build? [Mission & Values]
• The Dark Side of Scrum [Enemy]
• The simple Secret behind wonderful Products [Mission & Values]
• 10 Product Management Hacks for Times when you’re strapped for Resources [Mission & Values]
• What Product Managers can learn from Jiro Ono [Mission & Values]
• A Case against Test-Driven Development [Enemy]
• What would you do? [Mission & Values]
• Technical Debt is a Tool. [Enemy]

Let’s look at our case at Blossom specifically. Why pick Scrum, dogmatism, cargo cult & snake oil as our enemies?

We believe they are the things that are holding the software industry back from reaching its full potential. We are moving towards …

• Ever shorter release cycles
• Continuous feedback
• Continuous product decisions
• Distributed teams
• Autonomous cross-functional teams
• …

But Scrum, dogmatism, cargo cult & snake oil are stalling this transition.
We could be much further already. ☹

While there are a lot of ways we can make a difference and help people who create software — I believe the biggest difference we can make is get people off of Scrum & help them to embrace & leverage continuous-flow and a “just-in-time” philosophy.

You might pick other values (and optionally enemies). But once you have your identity defined it gets much clearer which content you might want to create to support it.

2. Content Marketing (Evangelism!)

Content marketing works incredibly well for SaaS companies.

Why? Adopting SaaS products usually is costly. Even if you lower the barrier for your potential customers by providing a free version or a demo you still need to convince them that it is worth their time to give you the benefit of the doubt.

High quality & well targeted content is a great way to bridge that inertia.

Ok so, here is the deal. There are a lot of writing/blog post formats that work well. That said, I personally found the following framework to be simple & effective. You might want to adapt it or play around with other formats later but start with this one …

Start with the Intention.

I usually put “what I want to achieve with the post” into the header of my textfile/google doc before I start to write the post itself. I basically prefix this area with “Intention:”. It guides me through the writing process.

The post’s intention works great as context for feedback.
If you share the draft of your post with others instead of giving general feedback they can give you specific feedback on how to improve your post related to what you actually want to achieve with it.

In a nutshell define what you want to get across (ideally a single thought) to whom (who is your audience?). How do you get their attention (title & open graph meta info)? What do you want them to do (call to action)? …

• Single Thought
  Write about one thing at a time. Want to write about 3 things?
  Split it up into 3 posts.
  Why? Single thoughts are easier to share, easier to agree/disagree with, easier to talk about, easier to use as evangelizing material to get a point across. Think of your single-thought posts like leaflets that your customers can use to convince their boss, co-workers, friends …
  But it gets better. Once you have 100s of single-thought pieces of content it gets super easy to cherry-pick/mix-and-match a hand-full of them and re-assemble them in a collection/meta post. Just take this post as an example. Writing about 10 growth hacking tips makes it more likely that you will disagree with at least one of my tips. This means you are less likely to share/feel strongly about the post. It’s probably a better idea to split this post up into 10 single-thought posts. Yay for not following my own advice ☺
• Audience
  Defining the audience helps you to find the right words, phrases, emotions, quotes, images but also what good distribution channels for the content are (where do these people hang out?).
  Related: who might agree/disagree with your content? How can you get their attention (multipliers)?
• Title
  Optimize for clarity, tweetability & fear of missing out. Ideally the signal to your audience is so strong that they wonder “Can I really afford to not read this?”. Examples for catchy formulas: “5 Proven …”, “How to …”, “Did you know …”. Some newspapers even measure the performance of different titles using their content management systems. IIRC the super smart people at Buffer use tweet engagement metrics to try different titles. Also consider that many people will share content using the title you’ve picked for them (sensible defaults!).
  Getting the title right is worth a lot.
• OpenGraph Image & Description
  This is similar to getting the title right. Social networks, bookmarking tools and a lot of other apps that display content will use whatever you’ve defined as OpenGraph Image & Description. Pick great pictures and descriptions. Look at how content gets displayed on twitter, facebook, google+ and all other platforms you expect your content to appear. Depending on the platform getting Image & Description right might be even more important than the title.
• Call to action
  Ok, congratulations. You’ve earned the attention of your audience. They might have read the whole post or only the conclusion.
  Now have them do something useful. Ask them to follow you on twitter, sign up for your mailing list, check out your product, whatever fits your content strategy …

Obviously this framework will not automatically help you to produce high quality content. It just sets the stage. It helps you to package your content effectively. Use it as a check-list to go through so you’re not unnecessarily reducing the potential reach your content could get.

That said, don’t forget that producing high quality content that fits your narrative and content strategy is the important high-level thing to get right.
The format just helps you to distribute your content in an effective way.

Oh one last thing I almost forgot. When you have a blog post or Medium post you can leverage Google Authorship to your advantage.

You basically tell Google that you wrote a certain piece of content by connecting it to your Google+ profile. This makes your content stand out in Google search results (and probably other apps that take authorship information into account).

This is how it looks like:

3. Channels & Formats (Distribution!)

Re-use the hell out of your content, convert it into different formats and don’t be afraid to distribute it to other places. The content from a blog post can also be …

• A slidedeck on Slideshare or SpeakerDeck …
• An answer on Quora, StackOverflow, …
• An Ebook
• An Email
• A Podcast
• A Youtube Video
• A Tweet
• A Facebook Status update
• A Hackernews, Reddit or ProductHunt discussion …
• Re-published somewhere else

Having your content published on platforms like Medium, Quora, Slideshare et al have the added benefit that you can easily tap into an existing audience which can be way bigger than your current reach.

Also these platforms are incredibly fine-tuned for search engine rankings. And on top of that they know their users really well which enables them to re-surface your content over and over again to the right people (e.g. look at Quora’s email digests and Medium’s “read next” recommendation).

Think about where your intended audience hangs out. Are there specific niche platforms in addition to twitter, facebook et al? All things being equal 100k readers are better than 1k readers.

4. The Landing Page (Conversion!)

The landing page is usually the URL that the most people will visit.
Try to anticipate the questions your visitors will have.

Here are a few from the top of my head …

• What is this?
  This might sound obvious but a lot of SaaS companies don’t clearly explain what the product is they are selling and what it is used for.
• Is this for me?
  Am I in the right place? Is this a product for me? Am I your ideal customer? Or should I just browse on …
• Why should I use it & for what?
  I haven’t used you until now, so why should I change that?
• How much is it worth to me?
  What is the value you provide for me? (Remember: Price != Value)
• Who else is using it & why?
  This is similar to “Is this for me?” but also related to social trust. How much risk am I taking on if I use your product? Chances are I have to convince other people in my company …
• …

Here are some fantastic examples for landing pages of SaaS companies that really thought through the questions that potential customers might have when they arrive at their doorstep.

Sqwiggle — (Team Telecommuting)

Intercom —(Customer Relationship Management)

HelpScout — (Customer Support)

Blossom — (Agile Project Management)

5. The Honey Pot (Collecting Leads!)

People might not be ready to buy at the time they find you.
Especially if you are looking to educate your customers or change their behaviour the leap of faith might be just too much. Even if your landing page sounds convincing. Many of our customers signed up months after they initially found us. That’s ok.

The great thing is even if they aren’t ready to buy you can still offer them something that’s easy to say yes to (a no-brainer).

This is the honey pot.

The honey pot is a deliverable that gets traded for an email address (or telephone number or similar). The goal is to make it super easy for your potential customers to decide that they want your honey pot.

Can I afford to not read/download this?
— Your potential customer

Many SaaS businesses use an ebook, but this can really be anything.
Access to a video, a white paper, a demo, a webinar, any valuable deliverable will do.

The key is you ask for an email address. This way you have a list of people to reach out to. A list of warm leads.

A list of warm leads is traffic (& potential revenue) at your fingertips.
On demand, whenever you need it. These leads are already qualified.
They know you, they know what you do, they know what you are got at.
They just did not convert yet.

6. The Drip Campaign (Converting Leads!)

But you can be even smarter about the email addresses you’ve collected using your honey-pot. You can create a drip-campaign.

It’s basically a hand-full of emails that get sent out automatically (take a look at Mailchimp’s autoresponder feature). This is a great chance to regularly get into the mind of your warm leads. Your chance to build trust over time and provide value.

At one or more points during your drip campaign you might want to try to convert your leads into your SaaS offering. You can even add motivation by offering a time-limited discount (remember the teles.

Once you have a drip campaign in place you might want to regularly check open & click-through rates of the emails you have set up and iterate on them over time. Or switch the content of your drip campaign for other content that

Ideally you will want to tie your drip campaign’s performance to revenue (& lifetime value)

Again some examples … ☺

7. Case Studies (Social Proof & Positioning!)

Chances are there is someone using your service who believes in you.
Find out why they are happy & what they see in you.
You want to attract more of the customers that are like them.

Case studies are a great way to increase your revenue and to improve the quality of feedback that you get from your customers.

But let’s talk a bit about product/market-fit first.

A lot of founders I meet are super worried about product/market-fit and they feel they haven’t nailed it yet. So they don’t want to spend time and resources on marketing & positioning.

Almost every time I hear this I actually believe that their product is quite good & polished and provides value. The only thing that’s lacking and skewing their engagement metrics is the fact that the lead quality at the top of their funnel is abysmal.

Making customers happy is way harder than making happy customers. Dharmesh Shah gave a great talk on this at Business of Software.

So yes, positioning is super super super important!

Quality of Customer Feedback = ƒ(Positioning)

Product/Market-Fit = ƒ(Positioning × Product)

Case studies are a fantastic way to fix your positioning.
Case studies are like band aid for your positioning.

You basically describe how your happiest customers are using your product, how they decided that you are a great fit for them & why they are with you.

This helps similar customers to understand that this is a service for them and that they could also be happy with it. You will attract/make more happy customers, get better feedback and fewer support requests. ☺

On top of that case studies lower the barrier to try your product.
Other people already trust you. You can’t be that bad, right?

[Disclaimer: in some situations (e.g. if your positioning was really really bad) you might want to reconsider publishing a case study about your happiest customers if they don’t help you to communicate where you want to go with your product or at least be smart about emphasizing the right parts in the case study so it actually helps to attract the customers you are looking for.]

Again some examples … ☺

Sqwiggle

Google Cloud Platform

8. Onboarding & Lifecycle (Retention!)

Retaining your customers is one of the key levers besides acquisition for the growth of your SaaS business.

Acquiring more & more customers doesn’t help if they all churn away. Usually the critical time where you lose customers in SaaS is in the beginning.

First off, don’t think of customers that signed up as already converted.

They are giving you the benefit of the doubt. Now it’s time to show them that they landed in the right place.

Ask if they are happy, make clear to them that you are available anytime they need you.

Use products like Intercom to get a feeling for how happy they are, and whether they are the customers you are looking for (again, positioning!).

Some examples for lifecycle emails/events …

• Welcome Email & Contact Information
• Getting started/here’s how to get the most value out of our product
• Here is a webinar about doing x using our product
• Are you happy with our product? (love it/ meh / no)
• Thanks for being our customer for one year ☺

Think about which emails/messages might make sense for your product.
How can you create an a-ha moment as soon as possible?
The first few days are crucial.

9. Annual Payments (Cash-flow!)

Once you have a good feeling that your customers are happy with you it is a good time to make them aware that they can also pay you annually. Usually SaaS companies incentivise this by giving a discount of 1 or 2 months.

This front-loads cash. You can use it to do more content marketing or play around with display ads that lead into your honey-pot to accelerate your growth.

Schedule an email to convert your happy existing customers into annual payment. ☺

10. Encourage Word of Mouth (Referrals!)

Word of mouth works. If someone I know & trust tells me to take a look at something I will take a look.

The thing is, most companies don’t even ask their current customers to refer them to people they know. If your product is absolutely amazing word of mouth might happen automatically but nudging people into it is definitely not a bad idea.

Again, some examples ☺…

Dropbox

Sqwiggle

I hope there was something useful for you in here. Also please let me know if you found other hacks that worked for you.
(I’m especially interested in learning more about display ads & retargeting).

If you found this post helpful, please spread the word & share it.
You can follow me on twitter where I tweet about Product Management ☺

Also make sure to check out Blossom an Agile/Lean Project Management Tool I’m currently working on ☺