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


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

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.

Ideas alone are cheap though, commiting to creativity is more important. The key is to take a chance on something that sounds good and just run with it. Simple stuff that's really well executed beats an elaborate idea that never sees production every time.
Not everything we do works out, but if we never tried, we'd be nowhere - and that's bad.
Impact of content on SEO
Impact of content on SEO

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:

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.
Content matters but sharing matters more
Content matters but sharing matters more
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
Reddit
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.
But more importantly, Reddit represents a wealth of knowledge on virtually every topic in the world. If you're thinking of launching a product, or are in the early days of trying to find a product-market fit, I think Reddit communities are great places to go in and validate people's needs and pain points, to talk to them or even to ask them for opinions on your ideas.
It's a gold mine for market research, for sure.
Facebook ads
Facebook ads
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:
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.
We are experimenting with Instagram & our comics too, but it's a little too early to offer any meaningful insight into how it will work out. We also use Twitter, but more for communicating with our existing users.
Reddit is a great source of direct traffic, but as it's a community-moderated platform you'll want to make sure your content doesn't come across as too salesy, and that your content meets the people's expectations. The Reddit community tends to have a very low tolerance towards brands trying to exploit the platform for advertising purposes, so you need to make sure whatever you're showing them is made with good intentions - and is worth their time.
Brand awareness is also important
Brand awareness is also important
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.
Three things to do before getting into content marketing
Three things to do before getting into content marketing
#1: Make sure your product works
#1: Make sure your product works
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.

#2: Make sure your strategy matches your goals
#2: Make sure your strategy matches your goals
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.
The marketing team - or the "traffic team" as it's called internally - is focused almost single-mindedly on things that create traffic for the public website. It's important to focus on fewer activities, rather than overstretch yourself over too many responsibilities. A big challenge for us is how to reach potential paid tier business users in a more direct, targeted manner - and how to do that in a scalable way.
Lastly, thankfully we have a great product, and the users get the simplicity and value pretty quick. Plus even if they don't upgrade themselves, they still help us a lot by introducing Toggl to other users and businesses. Big thanks to all the Toggl people out there for that!
#3: Don't go cheap
#3: Don't go cheap
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.
Discover More SEO Tools
Text Analysis Tool
Unlock the power of your text data with our advanced Text Analytics Tools
AI Content Detection
Ai Content Checker – realize if the text is AI-generated
AI Text Generator
Try our AI Content Writer tool and streamline your content creation process
AI Content Tools
AI Content Marketing Tools – simplify and optimize the content creation process
Recommended posts
Cases, life hacks, researches, and useful articles
Don’t you have time to follow the news? No worries! Our editor will choose articles that will definitely help you with your work. Join our cozy community :)
By clicking the button, you agree to our privacy policy.