How competitive has content marketing become? Is it still a viable way to get growth for your business?
The answer is YES!
Especially if you're great at it, we talk to one of the best minds in SaaS, Patrick Campbell, CEO @Profitwell, on how their investment in content marketing has paid off. They're a bootstrapped company that is now doing 10 million in ARR.
We talk:
- Why Patrick invested so heavily in content marketing in the early days of Profitwell, what worked, and what would he do differently if starting again.
- How Profitwell is going all-in with the first online content network for SaaS called - "The Recur Network".
- Why most SaaS brands are not investing enough in their retention, and monetization rates, and some tips on how to start improving them.
Time Stamped Notes:
[3:00] - Patrick gives us an intro to Profitwell, including the number of employees and ARR.
[6:00] - Patrick talks about why Profitwell invested so much into content marketing from an early stage and some of the data points around their content marketing efforts.
[10:30] - Profitwell now has six shows that go out through different mediums - video, audio. They're planning to launch a network, called the "Recur Network," that pulls all of their various shows together in one place.
[12:00] - Patrick talks about how, as a CEO, he determines the success of content marketing, which is notoriously hard to quantify. Profitwell looks at the average touches people have with their content, and they've managed to move that from 1.6 to 3.1.
Patrick discusses how he makes investment decisions around Profitwell's different content marketing programs when the data is tricky to get.
[15:40] - Profitwell has a couple of different ways to look at metrics around their content:
- They've just set up HubSpot's attribution reporting
- They look at what content a customer had interacted with before signing up
[18:00] - If Patrick were building the Profitwell content marketing again, there are a couple of things he would do differently are:
- Hire a dedicated SEO person earlier to get more traction on the content they published.
- Hire a video producer to scale out their video marketing efforts earlier.
- Built out a content framework earlier
[21:25] - Patrick gives us some stats about effort vs. reward across customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer monetization.
[23:25] - 60% of your retention has to come from fixing your product, optimizing for your target customer. The other 40% comes from a range of things you can do by optimizing your pricing and packaging, plus fixing payment failures.
Patrick gives us a bunch of ways to improve both retention and monetization efforts.
[26:45] Patrick talks about why freemium could be an excellent choice for most SaaS businesses to scale revenue at some point in their growth.
– Patrick on Twitter / LinkedIn
– Kieran on Twitter / LinkedIn / Medium
– Scott on Twitter / Linked / Medium
