I’ve talked to a lot of startup founders and marketing leaders lately who want to strap a rocketship to their business with Content Marketing & SEO.

In these conversations I hear a version of the same story:

“We want what they have.”
It’s hard to watch your competitors rake in free traffic from well-established Content programs while you spend a fortune on paid ads.

“We don’t really know how it works.”
Many marketers only know paid acquisition and other performance-driven tactics. The art and finesse of content marketing can be scary if you’re used to taking a blunt sales approach.

“We’re so small right now and this is so much work.”

Startups often have 1-2 people dedicated to marketing. They’re managing daily operations, sales, support, every other marketing channel, and a million other details to keep the lights on.

“Our neck is on the line for every penny.”
Marketing dollars are always highly scrutinized. A solid Content Strategy takes time to marinate. If you can’t measure it and communicate about it properly, your program will die before it ever has a fighting chance.

Whether you’re just launching a new website or you want to grow your established business with Content & SEO, you’ll face a lot of these challenges.

We’ve been there

Before I started Narrative Bent, I consulted with brands of all shapes and sizes (including Tiffany & Co, OralB, Nike, McKesson, Facebook, and Ben & Jerry’s) to bring their content to life and drive tangible incremental revenue.

I’ve also rolled up my sleeves and dug in to do the work in-house at fast-growth startups. At HomeLight, I built their real estate content program from scratch and turned it into one of their most enduring and profitable assets over 4 years.

Then, I went to Kickoff, launched their health and fitness blog, and turned it into a top traffic-driver and brand building asset. Now, I’m using the same strategy to grow my own marketing agency.

While we can’t promise a magic formula, we’ve faced down these exact challenges and earned millions for our companies and clients as a result.

Here’s what works for us:

1. Build your case for a budget and evangelize

You have to be ready to communicate with your organization and educate stakeholders on the long-term bet they’re making. They’re not going to get it. Sorry.

They need to understand that SEO is an endurance sport, not a sprint. Unlike other marketing channels where you spend money, put up an ad, and see results right away, it can take 6 -12 months for your SEO to start paying off.

You don’t get into Content Marketing for short term gains. We’re not day trading stocks, we’re building long term sustainable assets with compounding interest.

It’s your job to show the skeptics that if they spend money now and do a bunch of work upfront, wonderful things will happen down the road.

So, how do you do that?

Speak in business terms

You’ll find a ton of eccentric creative people in this field — people who’d have much rather been an artist than a marketer but life had other plans. I love that about this industry but it creates a big problem for us when we want to get things done. Us creative types often don’t speak the same language as the performance marketers and MBAs holding the purse strings.

So, if you want to get buy-in on this channel you need to put it into terms your executives can relate to. They don’t care about the art or the brand (most don’t, anyway).

They care about one thing: Return on Investment.

Here’s how I like to talk about how Content Marketing works and how they should set their expectations for the channel. These folks have a lot on their mind and our stuff is complex and squishy. Good mental models can help in a big way.

Let’s say you purchase a house for a million dollars. You spend that money because you believe that the housing market will rise over time and you’ll build equity. You keep putting money into it knowing that it will boost its value. You have confidence that when you sell, you’ll get your money back and then some. That’s how SEO works too: your website is the land, your technology is the plumbing, your content is the house and furnishings, and your promotion and distribution should attract renters and buyers.

Or, consider venture capital. VCs take a look at which companies to back and they make educated guesses about which companies will succeed and when they feel confident in them they invest. They expect that these investments will pay dividends in the long run. We’re doing the same thing — but with blog posts, videos, and social media.

Starting a Content program is a lot like starting a new business. It requires an initial investment of time, money, or both to get started and get growing. Over time, you’ll need additional cash infusions to keep running. But with careful planning and a solid strategy, you can reap significant returns in the long run.

Give yourself a north star: What’s the total opportunity here?

You’re about to ask your company to spend $5K to $20K per month for an extended period of time and a lot of that’s going to go into a black box never to be seen again. So, what can they expect to get out of that in the end?

That’s where the opportunity forecast comes in. Arm yourself with data-driven arguments that resonate with leadership when you need to justify your spend. To create one, start by collecting information and metrics related to your industry such as:

• What are our customers’ biggest pain points?
• Which of these pain points does our product solve?
• What are our competitors publishing on and talking about?

This exercise should help you formulate a list of themes your content should cover. Next, look at:

• What keywords map to those topics?
• What’s the data for those keywords?
• What’s our estimated conversion on those keywords?

Your deliverable should be detailed enough that you can start talking to your executive team about their investment in real dollars. You want to tell them what you believe the channel will be worth in 4-5 years time and back it up with data.

Basically, you need to complete this sentence:
I think there’s X traffic here. We need $Y investment to try and get that traffic. If we succeed, that traffic would be worth $n.

You can use keyword data, competitor’s traffic estimates, and your own assumptions on conversion rates down the funnel to do this. Ideally, you can show a path to at least 5X return on the initial investment.

Stutter step your way to growth

Now that you’ve shown what an SEO channel could generate for your company (maybe it’s $100,000 ARR, maybe it’s $15 million), you’re ready to outline your approach of how to get there.

In my experience, the opportunity forecast should buy you about a year of budget. During this time, your only goal should be to break even. In the beginning, the name of the game is to stay alive and keep the investment going. A business can only tolerate blind spend for about a year, maybe a year and a half if you’re lucky. You need to show that its working and at least on track to be cost neutral or there’s a big risk they pull the plug on you.

Tally your costs

To calculate spend, you need to account for all associated costs, including salaries, writers, link-building expenses, etc. This total cost represents your initial investment or “burn” rate.

Align on a golden number

Your goal as a marketing leader is to figure out your organization’s “golden number” — the amount of money they’re comfortable burning through in the name of growth. This number will be your guardrail. It’s different for every company and every team. Some teams are more risk averse and others are shoot-from-the-hip types. You need to know who you’re dealing with.

Invest when revenue exceeds spend

Once you’ve set your budget and secured buy-in, hold your costs steady until revenue meets that level. Then, you can incrementally increase investment as your revenue begins to rise.

At that point, you double or triple your investment and wait for revenue to catch up again. You continue this cycle of increasing investment and holding until revenue matches, gradually scaling up your SEO efforts.

Your chart should look something like this:

When you apply the stutter-step approach and manage your organization’s expectations and investment levels, you get the budget you need to scale. Without this budget you won’t be able to afford the people and tools that will make your content engine hum.

2. Focus on adding value to your customer, then scale up

Now that you have a budget to back your Content program… Welcome to the arm’s race. Strap in buddy, It’s competitive out there!

That’s why you need to take that budget and make AMAZING stuff with it. Do not blow it on publishing a bunch of sludge that no one wants to read.

I used to publish random gibberish about how to smash a coffee table with a hammer and it would rank 1 for “coffee tables.” Those days are over. They were over a decade ago and it’s only getting harder. In SEO, you can’t earn and sustain rankings with bad content anymore. In social media, you’re competing for attention with some of the best creators on the planet. You don’t need to produce Hollywood Cinema level stuff but you at least need to give a shit about what you’re making.  

Quantity is important, don’t get me wrong, but start slow and figure out your unique value proposition before you go into it blind.

Your content is a product, not an appendage!

Think of your content as another product of your organization. You need to care about what you produce and approach your blog audience in the same way you would care about the customer for your product.

You wouldn’t launch an app feature to your customer base knowing it was total junk and riddled with errors. So, why would you serve them a crappy throw-away blog post?

In my experience, that means you should set a high editorial standard — as high as your budget will allow — and then hire people who can knock it out of the park.

If your content lacks subject matter expertise, authoritative research, a recognizable voice, killer headlines, or an easy-to-follow structure…you’re going to waste a lot of time, money, and energy.

It’s not enough to “post content” anymore. You need to add to the conversation. You need to bring insight, credibility, authority, point of view, and authenticity to everything you publish. Otherwise: who cares? No one wants your run-of-the-mill veiled press release, man. Just stop.

Always Ask: how can this be better?

All the content “gurus” claim you need to publish daily to fill the void and feed the beast. While consistency in your publishing matters, you don’t want the quality of your work to degrade to the point where no one wants to hear from you.

You’ll waste a lot of time trying to scale up when you should be thinking about how to go deep and make something better. Create incredible resources for your top 10-20 priority keywords and from there, evaluate your process, the final product, and whether you need to make any adjustments.

Scale up when it starts to work

Once you know you’re making something amazing, for the love of god, make as MUCH of it as you can. The trick is to make MORE without ruining it. Hit your standards, but quiet your inner perfectionist. Don’t let red tape and “too many cooks” bog you down. If you’re always producing amazing content but never increasing your output, you’ll never grow as big as you could.

3. Focus on the body of work, not individual articles

Once you’re publishing at scale, think of each article or landing page as a bet. If you only focus on one article and it flops, you’re in trouble.

Put yourself in Hollywood. A movie studio doesn’t just produce one movie. They’ll place a bunch of bets — an indie picture, a blockbuster adventure film, a horror show. They assume most of their movies will either break even or bomb, but one or two of those will go viral, spin off a million franchise films, create a cinematic universe and rake in billions to cover the cost of all those other lost bets.

Content marketing works the same way.

Every blog post, video, tweet, or slide show is a little bet you’re placing. Most of them will flop but keep going and you’ll get enough hits to more than cover the cost of failed attempts.

The goal is to place a lot of bets and take as many shots on goal as you’re comfortable with. Make sure those shots are accurate and good, but know that you’re going to miss sometimes.

It’s OK to take chances. Encouraged, even.

You’ll forever walk the line between quantity vs. quality!

The best content programs are the ones that can have accuracy in their shots and take a lot of shots. If you’re a perfectionist and only take one or two shots, you’ll lose. If those shots flop, your budget is burnt, and your executives are mad.

On the other hand, if you try to scale up immediately, take a thousand shots, and none of them are accurate enough, you’re going to end up with a lot of mediocre content that nobody cares about. Your budget is burnt and your executives are mad — and you’ll be exhausted.

What works is the middle ground. Be as accurate as possible, publish as much as you can, and understand that 50% to 90% of your shots are going to miss.

More than the sum of its parts

If you’re a performance marketer who asks me, “How does the blog convert?” or “What’s the conversion rate on the blog?” — you’re thinking about it wrong.

You can’t isolate the parts that are working from the parts that aren’t working. It’s the whole body of work that matters. Many of your bets won’t pay off, but some of them will.

Eventually, you’ll find that 10% of your content drives revenue and 90% of your content supports that 10%, helping it drive more revenue and performance. But if you only focus on that 10%, you’re going to make less money and make your life a lot harder. You need all of it.

Don’t forget promotion (and tech basics)!

There’s 3 (maybe 4) spokes to this wheel: Strategy & Tech, Content, and Promotion.

For your strategy, you need to know what you’re publishing, why you’re publishing it, and who you’re publishing it for. That’s why we spend a lot of time on keyword research, market data, customer interviews, and talking with product stakeholders.

Then there’s the content itself. It should be outstanding, with a unique value proposition that sets it apart.

After you’ve got your content flywheel going, you need to promote the crap out of it. Build links, run PR campaigns, do social media, and send out email campaigns. Your content won’t take off in a vacuum.

The underlying technology also matters (though to be honest it matters less than it used to). Google has to be able to crawl your site and index your pages. You want to make sure you don’t have broken links, that your Search Console is set up properly, and that your site is fast and user friendly.

When you can nail all three of these elements — technology, strategy, and promotion — that’s when you start to see really big success. Without them all working in harmony, it just isn’t going to take off.

If this sounds hard, it’s because it is.

We’re living in unprecedented times. Every single one of us has the opportunity to reach billions of people for almost no distribution costs at all. When you get into Content Marketing, you’re not just “launching a blog” or “posting on social” you’re speaking directly to your customers, you’re crafting your own image, and you’re influencing their decisions.

Why settle for buying ads on the Home & Garden Network when you could be HGTV?

But this isn’t easy. It takes resources, prolonged investment, and a team of brilliant creatives and analysts to seize the full potential of what’s on offer.

At Narrative Bent, we’ve seen Owned & Earned marketing channels do wondrous and amazing things for the businesses we’ve worked with. We believe every marketing team should have the tools and knowledge to make it a part of their growth strategy. While we covered a lot of territory in this post, we’ve barely scratched the surface.

If you’re out there trying to start your program from nothing or grow it into something bigger and better, we’d love to chat with you!

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