Content Strategy And SEO Success For B2C SaaS Freemium Product
I worked with a SaaS company, distill.io, to boost the number of users finding them by 140% year over year. Here are the details.
Project Background And Challenge
Consumers and businesses use Distill to track changes in websites.
For example, a popular use case is e-commerce. Imagine you want to buy the latest Nvidia GPU or Graphics Card for gaming. But the product webpage says “sold out”. You can use distill to select the text “sold out”. It will notify you when the text changes on the webpage.
So you can use distill to track the availability of GPUs on e-commerce websites like Amazon. See a demo here.
Businesses in the legal, pharma, or insurance verticals also use the product.
After the pandemic, distill.io saw a drop in its revenue and user traffic.
I discussed with their
Chief Executive Officer (CEO),
Chief Operating Officer (COO),
Chief Innovation Officer (CINO), and
Marketing Manager.
I heard an urgency to implement some solutions. Instead of jumping into the solution, I suggested taking a step back to understand the problem statement.
We wanted to increase revenue. We saw a decrease in users discovering our product in Google Analytics. We wanted to get more users to try our product because the team was confident in the product quality. So, to boost revenue, we aimed to increase the number of users who discover our website.
The client had previously tried paid traffic through Google Adwords but found the customer acquisition cost too high. So, they preferred to focus on slower, organic growth.
But, instead of their hunch of copying competitor’s content, I suggested reaching the goal via customer-first thinking.
My value in this project was to research and provide a content strategy, including:
Topics
Format
Channel
Process
I have permission from the client to share their logo and project details. But, I’ll hide the data.
Company Profile
Name: distill.io
Type: SaaS, primarily B2C, with B2B customers as well
Age: Operating for over 10 years
HQ: Oregon, US
Size: 10 to 20 employees
Revenue: $X millions ARR
Project Milestones And Execution
I divided my project into milestones and got approval from both the CEO and CINO to go ahead. Here's how I laid it out:
Research to figure out our user acquisition funnel, the baseline metrics, and understand our customers’ perspectives.
Experiments to give customers what they need, where they will find it, and when they need it.
Building a sustainable process that doesn't rely on me. My goal was to make the client self-sufficient. The client can keep it going and follow the strategy on their own.
To drive organizational change and motivation towards this approach, I worked with the CINO and Marketing Manager to publish our first piece of content before completing all research. We focused on a product use case many people look for, like tracking orders on Amazon. This allowed us to start publishing content, see the content creation process, and get motivated. Meanwhile, I conducted the research.
Research For Content Strategy
I followed a three-step reflective pyramid framework for my research. You can read about this framework here.
1 - Quantitative - I gathered data about the product and users at each stage of their customer journey. I used these tools:
Google Analytics,
Ahrefs,
Google Search Console,
Google Trends,
Chrome Extension App Store Analytics, and
Telemetry data via SQL and Metabase.
2 - Qualitative - I reviewed 3,700 user reviews of our product and those of our competitors. I used this to build a Kano Model for the product. This helped me understand customer sentiments, reasons for satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and common use cases. I understood the competitive landscape.
3 - Empathy - I conducted interviews with 13 customers across segments. I talked to users in these segments:
New,
Old,
Free,
Paid, and
Recently churned customers.
The CEO found the insights from customer interviews insightful to also modify the product roadmap. I’ll touch on the roadmapping project in a separate case study.
Customer Journey Map From Research
Combining insights from these sources, I built a customer journey map to understand how users discover our product. I noticed a decline in the number of users discovering our product. I also identified areas for improvement in retention and upgrades, which we addressed in separate projects.
Learn about customer journey mapping here.
Dealing With The Long Tail Of Content
I wish we could have created content on just 5 or 10 topics to regain our organic traffic.
But, our users used our software not on 5, not 10, but on 26,000 websites. So, we aimed to diversify our content beyond Amazon and Best Buy. But, we had to be realistic that we cannot cover every website.
Our content strategy's goal was to identify evergreen content sources, not trends or fads. I did a separate project to build a process to identify trends and create content to catch those waves.
I categorized websites using a website classification API. I worked with the technical CEO to integrate and script the Klazify API for extracting classifications per website domain. I reviewed the output with the CINO given their deep context on their product’s usage. This helped find and correct inconsistencies.
So, I could simplify the 26,000 websites into 30 categories.
This data, aligned with premium users' usage patterns, informed our strategy to target a specific percentage of blog posts per category to attract both free and paid users. We chose to avoid content on adult material or guns among 30 categories.
Sharing Content On Social Media For Discoverability
The majority, 40%, of our social media traffic came from Reddit. So, users could share a how-to guide when they want to share about our product with other community members without having to write instructions themselves.
I collaborated with the Marketing Manager to try different approaches to sharing our content on social media platforms like Reddit. This was challenging because user-generated content platforms like Reddit have strong opinions against advertising or promotional posts.
We had to consider how users discovered our product on social media. For example, a community member might post in a gaming forum asking how to get the latest GPUs. Another user might respond by mentioning our product and explaining how to use it. However, writing down these steps for others can be time-consuming or difficult. So, making it easier for our current users to point others to us would help reduce this friction. This led us to focus on creating use-case or how-to articles, rather than concentrating on features, benefits, or competitive comparisons.
Executing The Effective Content Strategy
I distributed the content proportionally to attract more free users while putting extra emphasis on topics that attract a significantly higher number of paid users. I looked at:
Use cases that are most common among all users.
Use cases that are more common among paid than free users.
I discussed the content strategy with the Marketing Manager and CINO. We aligned on the content type, topics, channel, and process.
From here, the Marketing Manager owned publishing content covering all the topics to reach high coverage of our SEO keywords. I knew it would take 6 to 9 months after we finished that to see the complete boost to our organic traffic.
Measurable Results: Effective Content Strategy
The weekly organic traffic to client’s website went up by 140% year-over-year from July 2022 to July 2023.
91% of all the traffic to our blogs now comes from the content made following our plan.
Recommendations
If you aim to boost your organic traffic or user engagement, start by understanding what works well.
Brainstorm or find out:
Why do users enjoy your product?
How do they find your product?
Insights from these questions will guide your content creation and distribution strategies.
If you have any questions or want help to grow your web traffic, get in touch.
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