Toggl's Tips And Lessons On Using Content Marketing To Boost Organic Growth

And to make matters worse big brands like Facebook are actively limiting your organic reach so that you have to pay more and more to reach your audience because Facebook's trying to make money. We understand that, but promotion is getting more expensive as well.

So content marketing is not easy given those circumstances, and that's depressing.I'll try to make it a little bit more fun ;)

Here's the stuff we create with our content team.The most successful sort of content project we have is we create these colorful comics and infographics. They're usually aimed at software developers, web designers, also people who work remotely. So we create these comics for people who work in fields where they very likely might need time tracking software. We keep that goal in mind and when we create these drawings.

I draw these things myself, so this is something I used to do, but now we're doing them for work as well. And it's not just me, everybody in the company contributes to this because I'm not a software developer myself so I don't really know any good jokes for programmers. So I have to go to Toggl programmers, and they tell me what's funny, and then I write it up.

And recently we've also started experimenting with outsource artists. We went to Reddit and picked out some comic artists whose work we really like and started paying outside artists to deliver comics for us. Making these comics takes a lot of time so we want to see if we can speed up the process a little bit and scale up the production using freelancers. So it's a little bit early for results yet as we only started doing it. Outsource comics can cost anywhere between $400 to $1,000, so we'll see how many sign-ups and traffic we get from those.

Here's another fun project, it is called the "Unicorn Startup Simulator." It's a game you can play in your browser, and it lets you simulate being a startup CEO, and the goal of the game is to reach a billion dollar valuation or literally die trying.

It's sort of a fun experiment with content we did, but you know creating comics and fun little games is just the tip of the iceberg. The life's not all fun and games, it's not just about drawing comics. When you're doing content marketing the strategy side is pretty important as well you need to have a like a bigger underlying strategy. So this is obviously what Toggl's content marketing model looks like:

I would say the most important part for us is SEO. It forms the foundation of everything we do. Toggl already ranks really well for the keywords that are relevant to us, but it's important that we keep fighting for those keywords. We have an SEO manager working for the company, and her job is to basically do keyword research, figure out what words we need to rank for more and then produce, i.e., landing pages aimed at those keywords and get more traffic coming in.

We also hire freelancers from Upwork to help us write more articles because it doesn't always make sense to hire a full-time position in your team. If you need project-based work, our recommendation is to hire freelancers, but pay them well. Don't hire the cheap freelancers because then you get what you pay for. Good writers cost about 10 cents per word, and that's what we're paying right now for content writers.

Here's an example of like how important SEO is:

The red line over there indicates the date (it was last year) when we hired the SEO manager to start doing more systematic SEO work. And since we hired her our search traffic and keyword rankings have been steadily going up. It's starting to strength trend upwards.

But SEO, by the way, is a long-term challenge. So if you're looking to invest in SEO, keep in mind success is not going to come overnight. It might depend on how new your site is or how popular you are already. You might have to wait for a very long time before you see any results. Google's very smart, and thus it's very difficult to fool Google into thinking you're more popular than you really are.

The second important thing is promotion. We use Facebook and Reddit for that, and we have a dedicated person whose main responsibility is to make sure that we have content going out to social media every day. Her job is also to use the Facebook ad manager. Content very rarely works if you don't share it.

There's an old Chinese riddle "if a tree falls in a forest and no one's around to hear it, does it make any sound?" It's the same with content if you write a great piece of content, but you don't share it with anybody it doesn't exist. Promotion should be a big priority for you. And here at Toggl, we spent a lot of time on promotion. We spend more time on promotion and SEO than we do on creating those very high-impact popular content pieces.

I think that's probably the smartest insight I can give you today. We mostly use two promotion channels:

• Reddit for organic traffic
  
  
• Facebook ads to reach specific audiences
  

As I said before Reddit is something we post our comics and infographics. That's a great place for getting viral traffic coming in. Reddit overall is a very good place for sharing your content because you get to keep all the traffic so most of the time.

If you post a link there, the traffic comes straight to your site. So you get to sort of bombard users with messages about your product. But be careful with Reddit because when the Reddit community senses that you're trying to sell them something and you're not being sincere with your content efforts, it can backfire pretty badly.

This presentation is about organic growth, but I would say it's very difficult to do content marketing today without spending anything on Facebook. It's becoming sort of inevitable. On the upside, Facebook has very good targeting options so you can target people in very specific ways. It's a good tool for reaching your audiences, not just reaching your existing ones.

I'll give you an example of why sharing and promotion is important from our experience. So back in August, we were thinking what to do with our signup numbers. Our signup numbers were stalling and we weren't getting the growth we were hoping.

Thus in August we were thinking like how to get our signups and traffic up. In September and October we came up with the plan. We decided to invest in Facebook Ads, and we hired a person whose job was to do that. We basically didn't create any new content this autumn. What we did instead was we took all the existing content we had produced over the past two years and a little bit more. We took everything that was even remotely popular or even remotely successful. And then we scheduled it over like a period of two months, it was a super tight sort of schedule. And we agreed to spend Facebook money on promoting each and every one of those so it would reach new audiences. We wanted to see if we can milk our own content without putting in the effort of printing new stuff, just by paying Facebook a little bit of money.

Results from regular content sharing:

The plan was to spend $7000 over two months on Facebook promotions and we only managed to spend like $800 of that budget. Because it turned out that if your content has good quality, Facebook drives your cost per clicks down pretty significantly. It's quite difficult to spend a lot of money on Facebook.

And we're still doing the scheduling thing because it's working quite well. We've managed to maintain those good levels and I think in terms of cost we're currently across all our content, not just the comics. We're spending on average about $0.5 per click which is you know nice.

I think we also got a lot of brand awareness while doing this thing. The brand awareness is a very difficult concept because brand awareness is not something you can measure. We're not just reaching new audiences with our content, but our existing users are reacting very positively to what we're doing. Brand awareness is not a metric you should be following. It can't be a goal because it's basically immeasurable. But it's a really nice side effect and it's a really nice reason for doing content.

The reason I think brand awareness is important and content is important is that products aren't really special anymore. Toggl is a really good time tracking tool, but at the end of the day, we're just a time tracking tool. That means at any moment a new startup can come out of the blue. They can do something fundamentally better than us and they might steal a significant chunk of our user base. Or one of the big tech companies might come up with a competitive offering and a sort of pull the rug from under your feet and then you're like smack down.

It's getting easier to make products as it's getting cheaper and cheaper. So I think content can help you stand out from the crowd. This is a really good quote by Alex Turnbull, who's the CEO of Groove, which is a helpdesk tool. BTW, if you want to read a great blog or a really good example of serious content marketing, then the Groove blog by Alex Turnbull is a right place for tips on growing your startup. A couple of weeks ago he did an interesting blog post where he basically said that if you're selling SaaS, you're selling a commodity.

And the point was exactly that if you're selling SaaS, you're not special. You're just one of the many products and anytime somebody can just swoop in taking customers by doing something slightly better. And the reason why Groove and Alex Turnbull are using content is that content helps them build meaningful relationship with their followers. Their existing users are big fans of their writing and that creates like an extra layer of loyalty from the users. If you're giving your users something special other than just the product, you're basically making them more loyal. I think that's a good important point to keep in mind.

By the way, this is called the clickbait title, never use those, people don't like them anymore. They were very effective two years ago, not so much anymore. Let's back to three things to do before you start doing content marketing.

Yes, I said that products are commodities these days, but even if your product is a commodity, it needs to be a great commodity. If your product doesn't work and you're spending money on marketing and you're getting signups, then what's the point if your users are leaving right after signing up? Invest in your product first, make sure it works and then start thinking about how to get more and more customers.

Also for Toggl having the great product is a really good marketing tool. Because we did a survey a few months ago where we basically asked a bunch of paying users about how they found Toggl. To our surprise, personal recommendations were the second biggest driver of growth in paid users.

Almost you know as important as Google and SEO. We knew it was big, but we didn't know it was like that significant. The thing is paid users, the decision-makers who want to pay money for your service, they're not gonna read your comic no matter how fun it is. They won't say something like "I like that comic thus I'm gonna pay these guys a lot of money." They want reassurances, so what they do is they ask friends and their friends say them: "Yes, I've used that service, it works. You should do it too". For paying users having a good product is crucial.

So for Toggl our goal right now is to drive as much traffic from relevant audiences to our site as humanly possible. And for that purpose the comics and infographics work pretty well. But again, if we wanted to go after higher paying teams and bigger decision-makers in these conservative business verticals, comics are probably not the way to go. In this case a better idea is to do an e-book with an email signup form. You might get fewer less traffic, but higher quality leads. Think about what your goal is before you start doing things.

For example, earlier this year we wrote an e-book called "Out of office," which is basically a guide to remote work. The most of our companies are completely remote, so our employees work from around the world from their homes. That's why we decided to do like an e-book based on our expertise.

And as a result, people really liked it, but in five months we only got 11 000 visitors to the e-book site. Although, we got signups and the conversion rates were like pretty okay, nowhere near enough the volumes we needed. For us it didn't work out in terms of new users that much. But if you have a sales team, you can slap this email signup form on it and collect the leads and you might not need a lot of traffic to convert people using sales people. Toggl doesn't have a sales team, so for us it didn't really work.

People don't want more content they want better content. I don't just mean money, I also mean the effort. So if you're going to do content marketing, keep in mind that there's a lot of stuff out there, people's attentions are completed. There's so much content out in the world, that the last thing people need is another site to visit. That's why you need to make sure that you're investing in your content efforts. Be prepared to invest in sharing and promotion.

As I've already said, for us content promotion is the most important thing, the content creation comes second. Promotion can go a long way if you have someone on your team who's very good at managing, customizing, and testing audiences, driving your acquisition costs down. If you have people working on content, also make sure you pay them because basic needs are important. If you pay people, they'll be happy, while happy people do good work. If you don't pay people and don't show that you appreciate their work, they're gonna do bad work. So make sure you appreciate the people either you hire them from the outside to do content or the people that are working in your team. You gotta be happy with the content you create, you gotta be enjoying the process of making it. Because if you're enjoying the process of making it, and if you're happy with what you're producing, chances are your audience is going to be happy as well.