This successfully (more than $100k MRR) bootstrapped B2B SaaS company has been around for a while and has been growing throughout the years mainly via content marketing and SEO. It should have been a year for scaling their lead generation, but instead, they found themselves facing stagnated growth numbers with a fractured marketing team and needed someone to guide them back to a healthy growth rate. I joined their team for a few months as a growth consultant to turn things around.
In addition to a new SEO-focused content marketing strategy, and helping the CEO to hire the right Marketing Lead, I worked closely with the whole marketing team while also giving my input to the sales, and product teams in order to put them on a new growth trajectory.
The Problem
The founder of this SaaS business approached me with a problem that’s not too uncommon – their marketing team was struggling with finding the right path forward and lacked clear leadership after the previous marketing manager had left the company to pursue new opportunities.
Once I started looking at their data, I quickly discovered that their lead generation flow was stagnated and they were steadily losing organic rankings for many valuable keywords on Google. This had been their growth engine throughout the years and it was slowly losing steam. We needed to turn this trend around asap.
I researched the causes of the current stagnation in the lead flow and declining keyword rankings and discovered that a combination of several different factors caused it:
- Page speed issues
- Core Web Vitals issues
- Usability issues (especially on mobile devices)
- Outdated content getting beat by new competitors in this space
- Low-value content and poor interlinking practices on older content
- Confusing messaging when upselling the core product
- No clear content strategy in place that would focus on lead generation
- Low content publishing velocity
The Solution
We agreed to focus on 2 key priorities:
- putting together a strong core marketing team
- adopting a new lead generation strategy so that the team would have a very clear path forward
The goal was to have a new fresh start for the in-house marketing team that would invigorate the whole company and gets them on a new growth trajectory.
Restructuring the Marketing Team
We decided on a few crucial key steps with the founder:
- start hiring for the Head of Marketing position right away
- promote one marketing specialist to a brand new Content Marketing Manager position who would start implementing the new SEO-focused content marketing strategy
- start the hiring process for an in-house content writer/editor role in order to scale the content creation processes.
We also set up very clear goals and metrics for each marketing function (also for the Product Marketing Manager) and I coached the team members on how to achieve them.
It was essential to set up a very strong new core marketing team that would have fresh ideas, lots of ambition, and eagerness to follow a new growth strategy. It was also important that this core team focused on what matters – scaling the lead generation via SEO-driven content marketing and improving the conversion rates of these leads coming to an A-HA moment when first seeing the product.
New Lead Generation Strategy
Since the leads coming from organic search traffic had been the main driver of their growth over the years, it made sense to fix this channel first and create a new strategy that would overturn the downward trend of the keyword rankings. The new strategy involved:
- Increasing the content velocity
- Fixing technical SEO issues
- Prioritizing improving the content quality of articles that targeted the “money keywords” first
- Creating new content that would cover keyword clusters that would ensure topical authority for their domain
- Adopting new SEO and content creation principles that would follow the latest white-hat best practices
- Improving the messaging when upselling the core product
The Results
Since the project just ended, it’s too early to see the bigger impact of the new SEO strategy on lead generation flow just yet, but there are already clear signs about them being on the right track. After 3 months of working together:
- The new Head of Marketing is hired and onboarded – already driving new initiatives and rallying the whole company to adopt a new way to position the brand and the product.
- The new Content Marketing Manager has hired the new in-house Content Writer/Editor and has ramped up content velocity to over 2x from what it previously was.
- All the new and updated content is already gaining new rankings and driving traffic to the site. Since the initial focus has been on the keywords with a high buying intent, the cost of this traffic (calculated by SEMrush based on how much you would pay for the same keyword rankings via Google Ads) has increased by 49%.
- The Product Marketing Manager now has a clear scope and goals set in place and has already improved key aspects of early user signup flow that will have a positive effect on the signup-to-active leads conversion rates.
In conclusion, this was a complex project to work on due to a lot of legacy within the marketing team and with the product, but this is also what made it so interesting. The team I worked with was amazing and I foresee an exciting new growth journey for them.
