Mastering Organic Marketing: Strategies To Grow Your Business

Today we're breaking down how you can build an organic marketing engine for your business. We give you the frameworks, we give you the models, we give you the tactics that you can use that has helped billion dollar companies grow and scale beyond just paid marketing. Let's get into it. Hey.

Hey. Welcome to another episode of Marketing against the Grain. I'm your co host, Kip Bodnar, CMO at HubSpot. I'm joined by my co host Kieran Flanagan, CMO at Zapier. I was having had a bunch of great work meetings and everything this week, did some cool workshops around strategy. I gotta talk to you about this strategy framework and then you and I should deep dive on it and then we should do a show on it. It's from Frances Frey's book Move Fast and fix Things. And it is awesome around just like how you look at a business and your strengths versus your competitors strengths. It's awesome. We'll talk more about that on a future episode. But I also talked to an awesome founder and this was a founder of a very successful startup, you know, more than $10 million in revenue, product, market fit growing fast, accelerating growth. And I was like, oh wow, like great board of directors, like everything. Like if you're looking, you're like, oh, they've really got this figured out. But that conversation realized like this Guy's a top 1% founder and he doesn't understand the basics of building the right demand generation marketing engine to scale him to that hundred million dollar revenue mark. And I thought we'd talk about that today and kind of use that conversation I had with him as a guide so that we can basically selfishly send this episode to all the founders we talked to and say like, hey, here's the, the 40 minute pre watch or pre listen before we catch up. Basically their situation is they're growing fast. Greater than 80% of their leads for their business come in through advertising, paying people at Google, Facebook, your classic online advertising. And he's a great founder. And he's like, you know what, I know this is not gonna scale with us and I know that I need to build a more balanced way to bring in new customers, generate demand for my business.

And he's like, why should I do one quick thing? Because I, this is obviously you and I probably get asked this question by founders all the time. Did you ask him why he. I'm always fascinated by the answer to this question. Why do you want to deviate from paid or why do you, why do you want to diversify from Paid.

He had a couple reasons. One was that it's expensive. Two, that he needs to get the unit economics of his business better, which is kind of a part two of expensive. And three, he knows that it's going to get more expensive as it scales, which is what a lot of founders don't know that, oh, I'm spending, let's say I'm spending 100 grand on paid media a month right now to generate demand. You don't, a year from now, you're not going to be spending 200 grand a month on paid media and getting twice as many leads. You're going to be spending 200 grand on media to get 50% more leads instead of 100% more leads.

Right.

And he was smart enough to kind of know and understand that.

I think that. So the first two actually should take care of themselves because if you scale via some sort of return on ad spend model or LTV to CAC model and you integrate your payback period, you can scale it. Because the interesting thing is, right, like you can scale indefinitely unpaid if unit economics are in your favor. And there's just, you know, there's enough that you can go, which is a lot of like B2C mobile companies. The third, the third is actually the, the insight that most founders fail should have or yeah, that is the right insight, which is over time, when I need to continue to scale, this channel will at some point saturate and you can. So we should just talk about this really quick because there's a real good tip here for founders or even marketers, which is. So I always divide paid into three core buckets, right? Like, so there's direct return on ad spend, which means I spend a certain amount of money and certain someone clicks on something and then converts. And I can actually see what the lifetime value is. And I can calculate exactly what the return on investment is because the person directly converted on the link that I was advertising. There's the indirect model, which is for the most part that I'm doing like video ads, right? Like I'm doing these kind of social ads, video ads. And they're still, they're still optimized for conversion. So you still optimize the platforms based upon your conversion event. So they're still optimizing towards the actual goal of conversion, but they are conversion through indirect. Indirect. And so the way you measure that is through these conversion lift studies, we call it incrementality, which is, hey, I put them off and I put these on. In these parts of the U.S. i turned them off in these parts of the U.S. and I can incremental, I can tell what the incrementality is of conversions based upon that spend. And then the third is kind of like the second bucket. But you actually optimize the ad platforms for engagement, not for conversion events. And so the reason I would start there is because the first one, which is direct return on ad spend or direct LTV to cac, I suspect that that founder, that's what they're doing, right? Because they're 10 million in revenue. They're probably spending a certain amount of money to get directly. I spend my $1 to get my $3 back. And I can guarantee that that's what I'm getting back. Cause they click on the, the ad link that one you could actually. So you can, you can kind of build enough science to understand where your saturated point saturation point is. Like back in the day in HubSpot actually when we started to build the PLG model, Rex, who's a awesome person, runs paid marketing within HubSpot, we did this me and Rex, which is we ran burst tests. And so burst tests basically saturate the channel for a certain period of time and you can start to look at the curve to see when you start to curve to the point where it no longer works in terms of unit economics. Like I can get to this number.

Give give people the deep dive on what a burst test is so that they really understand how they could go and do that.

Right. So a burst test is I, I overspent. Like if I take Facebook I will overspend on Facebook for by like 2x and then I will actually saturate the channel. Like we, I think we did like.

10X for 10 extra normal for a couple weeks.

Is that certain period of time. It's, there's like data you can actually pull to figure out how much you should, you should actually. There's like data in the background that you can do the two data crunching you can do to figure out like what the X is. But let's say It's a, it's 1x to 10x because you're actually going to saturate the channel for a certain amount of time. And by doing that you can plot a curve and you can plot to see when you're. How much you can acquire from that channel at this, at the threshold when, where it's still cash flow positive to you. Right? Like where, where do I start to turn into one for one roas which means I get my $1, I spend my $1. I get my one there. The back. Right. When do I start to break that. That curve and that. It's. It's not perfect, but that actually gives you a certain bar in terms of like, how. How much can I spend here until I'm actually saturated? The other two are. You cannot do that because they're indirect models. So you can. You. You cannot actually figure out incrementality or through the brand ads, which are, which are optimized towards awareness. Like, how much can I spend? Well, the, the number is probably like infinite. So I think that's a good place for founders to start, which is. Not every founder can do that because you do waste. There is like a little waste in the money. Right. Like, because you're going to overspend in that channel for a certain period of time. And so some of that is not you. You. You will not have.

It's not the most efficient route.

Yeah, this the same. You would. Well, you'll take like three weeks where your return on investment on that spend on that channel is like net flow, negative or break even. Right. Because I'm purposely overspending within this channel.

Hold on, let me break this down for people because I really want everybody to understand why you would do this. So if you are running a company, whether you're a founder or you're an executive or ahead of marketing, Kieran, what you were saying is part of your advertising strategy is going to be a direct response advertising model, normally measured on return on ad spend. And you should either have some internal person running that or you should have a really good external paid agency. Like we had the folks, Ralph and Kasimon from Perpetual Traffic, one of our really popular shows from a couple months ago, go work with people like that and they're going to help you. And Kieran, what I think you're saying is you're running this burst test to see how much Runway do I have before my direct response advertising is going to hit the edges of profitability. And so if you run this birth test and you see, hey, you know, in six months, if I keep wanting to grow at this same pace, I'm gonna start getting breakeven or negative return, then you have to go and shift your strategy very quickly. If you're saying, oh, I actually have two years before that happens, then you have a longer period of time. The burst test is to give you the timeline that you need to diversify. Is that.

Yeah, it's to give you the hypothetical maximum amount of money you can spend in that channel. Right. So If I'm spending a million dollars and I can look at that, and some people may call it an elasticity test or reverse test. And I hypothetically look at that, I do that test and I say, well, I think based upon that test, I can spend 10 million on that channel and still have a roas a return on ad spend at a number that I am happy with. And then I say, well, how long will it take me to get to $10 million? And maybe for some companies, they're like, hey, I would just spend $10 million now if I knew I could spend that the money right? Or it's going to take me based upon the budget that we have another 18 months to 24 months to actually saturate that channel and maximize my, my spend within that channel. Wow. Now I know that I have probably like 18 to 24 months to actually start to build these organic channels. So there's two like core channels you can build some sort of saturation models for. Because we did this at HubSpot, we've done one of them, we've done them at Zapier as well, which is the paid advertising direct return on ad spend and search. Like people don't understand that you can build actually some I kind of search addressable market score. Like you can actually figure out how much available traffic can I hypothetically get if I look at all the things that are relevant to me and then I have some methodology to say my average rank is here and the average conversion rate is this and the average conversion rate from search into a customer is this. And I can say, well, search for me is a great channel, average channel or non meaningful channel. So I've done a bunch of advisory for companies and they're thinking like how do I start to shift in to organic? And most like we should actually get into this which is like it's all just search. Like because outside of search it's really hard to, to, to, to monetize. But I'll just say that the thing I tell them to do is start with is this a, is this going to be a meaningful channel for me or not? I think what most people do in search, they start with, let's just start doing search. I would start with how meaningful could this channel be for me by building a search tam, right? The total addressable market of traffic that I could acquire and then how many customers can I hypothetically get from that channel?

And how do you figure out that search tam Kiran? Because somebody's gonna be here and they're like, hey, I'm Running this startup. I know what my my revenue TAM is but how do I figure out how many people are actually out there looking for my product versus people who. Because I think that's the distinction I want everybody listening or Washington to understand is because there's a universe of people out there that could buy your product. A subset of them knows your product or category exists and are actively searching for it and another percent of them are not. They do not know that to go and look for that. And so depending on how much of your actual revenue total addressable market is searching, that will tell you if a search based strategy is really good or if you need to go for a more awareness based strategy. Right? Like if you have this big market and only a couple percent of it is actually searching and looking for your stuff that would be like going into a search strategy wouldn't be the smartest thing. So you want hopefully at least like half of your market out there searching for your product or service or things related to it so you could build the search strategy. So how do you go and figure out that search tab?

Karen? Yeah, so look, I think if you should divide search up in a similar way that I divided paid up, right? There's people that will search for your brand, there's people who will search for the product, the generic term around your product, the category that you're in and then there were there will be people who search for topics related to your product but they are educated themselves within those topics but they have some sort of relevance to your, to your product. Right? So if you took HubSpot or is app here but let's start with HubSpot. If you had said, if we had said hey we are going to look at our search tam and we looked at the brand search and we looked at the transactional search and we stopped there.

This is what everybody does and it.

Drives me God darn crazy. We would have never invested in content search, right? We would have never invested in content and search because no one was really looking for the brand and no one was looking for marketing automation here.

How many, how many companies have you told have you talked to like oh yeah, we've done some search. We've, we've ranked for like our 50 keywords that are related to our product and we're done like how many like what percent of companies you talk to tell tell you that Most.

Most I think the biggest and that.

Is wrong way to think about it.

They struggle, they struggle at the either the, the either side of that spectrum. So they'll struggle at the. I'm going to like have a really defined narrow view and, and try to rank for the transactional generic terms that are associated with my product. And doing that in B2B is pointless, right? There's just not that much people searching for your generic terms. Like CRM is a good example of a term that actually has a ton of search traffic and there's 18 keywords, which actually fascinating. This is how much of a dork is I have like, I actually know keyword categories. There's 18 keywords in CRM that have the. The had the 80% of all traffic, right? But it's actually a pretty sizable amount of traffic. But very, very competitive. But most B2B generic terms actually when you group all those generic terms together around your product, they're not going to equate to like meaningful growth. You're not going to be like a unicorn based upon that. So that's one end of the spectrum. But you have a lot of companies, they spend all their time doing that. It's the most competitive part. And they just like, don't really make much progress. The other end of the spectrum is like, okay, well, what topics, educational topics that people educate themselves in, which is like the HubSpot formula and the Zapier formula. And, and so what companies do understand that, right? They'll go off and they'll start building all the content around topics. I can get into some how. How you would like do the search time there. But they'll build all this content and things around these topics. But what they have failed to understand is what is the bridge from that content into the product. So what people really misunderstand about HubSpot success is in content. It's just not breaking, not so much the content we published. It's that we figured out how to convert that content into customers at a higher rate than any other company. And we did that through creating bespoke templates and ebooks for blog posts that ranked for certain keywords. So if we saw a blog post rank around pr, we created an ebook or template just to convert the traffic that was read in that blog post to create the bridge into like that becoming a lead for the company. And Zapier, we do that by creating templates, right? Like we teach people how to automate things and then we actually give them an exact template in that they can just click and go use. You have to think about what is the bridge and put yourself in the customer shoes and say, is this a valuable thing to me? Would I actually click this and convert on it.

Yeah. So I want to explain to everybody why this doesn't happen. Because what you just said is what everybody needs to do that is like content marketing, bringing in demand through Search101. But why doesn't it happen, Kieran? Because you and I have seen why it doesn't happen. Why does it happen is because you have somebody on your team who writes some blog posts and they do all that over there. And then you normally have somebody on your team who they're doing like the ebook or the long form webinar or whatever. And that ebook long form webinar is normally either way too processed, focused, or it's about whatever topic you care about at the time. You're like, oh, you know what I really want people to figure out? Marketing automation.

Yeah, yeah. It's the thing you want them to learn.

I want to push that marketing automation. And so you're trying to email people, you're trying to do all this stuff and it's, and it's like, wait, wait, but over here you have thousands of people coming to your blog on this different topic. And if you just made that thing not about marketing automation, but instead conversion rate optimization, I'm making this up for like our HubSpot example, then you are going to convert like 10 times as many leads as you will from this very disjointed approach. Right. And that's why it doesn't happen is because people are trying to run these campaigns. And for you and I, I think one of the things that I really want people to understand is that campaigns were always secondary to us.

Right.

The campaigns were what was left over. The campaigns were never the driver. It was, oh, how people are finding us. And what people are discovering is the driver. We're gonna give them the right conversion pass and whatever time money we have left over after that, we're gonna drive kind of campaign focused topics.

Right? Yeah. Your cues are what people are consuming. Right. Like it's not what the cue isn't. I need you to learn about this thing. The cue is what is the popular topics that people are consuming? And, and how do I give you more of that thing to the point where you then you then can learn about the product. Right. Like one easy way for companies to do this is to create a feature map. Right. Like I create a map of all the, all the features within my product and then I reverse engineer out to like topics that are associated with those features. Like what, what is the job to be done for that feature? And then what are the Topics that someone would educate themselves.

Give me a specific example for Zapier of like just pick, just pick like a one feature and feature map it out so people understand the steps, right?

Well, Zapier is kind of interesting or.

Any company, Zapier helps anybody.

So Zapier allows you to do. One of the interesting things about Zapier is it's horizontal products. You can do a ton of automation, but you can basically there's an infinite amount of possibilities because there's 6,000 apps. And if you combine those 6,000 apps, I think we did it before the map that gets hundreds and hundreds of thousands of different integrations you can build. And so the example for Zapier is that you would start with what's a, what's a popular app like G Sheets and then what's, what's popular apps that people want to integrate that with and what's workflows. And then you would like step back and say, okay, like we could create the different levels of fidelity, right? Based upon people wanting to automate things around G seats for a marketer, for a salesperson, for an ops person. Then you can go up one level and say we could do something pretty extensive around that, like via a webinar, like this kind of long form content. Then you go back up one step and you say, well, we can do that via a blog post. And within the blog post we're going to actually create templates that make it really easy to connect these things together. Like the example in HubSpot might be even easier to understand. If you do a feature map and you say one of the features was a paid advertising feature that allowed you to connect to Facebook and do Facebook advertising through HubSpot. And then you go up one level of fidelity and you say, well, people are trying to educate themselves around how to help, how to get Facebook to perform better as an ad platform, right? Like just educating themselves on Facebook. And then you got one level of fidelity. And you say people are trying to just do better around paid search, right? How do I create a, how do I create a dashboard for paid search? How do I understand my cost per click? What is that? Roas LTV to model, right? And so you continue to go up until you are at the, you know, upper, upper echelons of this is where I would start. And then I can create a path. Then what? If you're trying to teach yourself paid advertising, you're gonna have to use Facebook. If you're trying to use Facebook, then you actually need to, you need to know these Kind of basics. And then if you're, if you really want to go one step further, well, why don't you just set up a campaign and actually start using that with HubSpot, very similar with Zapier. Like, if you want to automate these, if you want to automate these apps, here's all of the different things you can do, right? Here's ways that you as a marketer can automate a bunch of work through G seats. Here's what you can do with sales, here's what you can do with ops, and then here's the template. And then you can go in and get the template ready. So I think it's trying to make sure that you have worked backwards and not what most people do, which is let's create content and then figure out how we can get them to be interested in our product. Right, Correct. First, what's interesting about our product. And if you start from that point, just keep going up a level until you actually have a pretty well defined content path.

That sounds simple, is incredibly powerful. If people do just that, your whole business will change. Your whole business will change. Like if you think about what we're saying today, it's like, hey, most growing businesses are growing through paid. We're telling you, hey, you can figure out how much you can grow solely through paid. We talked about doing a burst test as a way to like have a good understanding of direct response paid and doing the math around that. And you're either working with somebody on your team or an external agency. Then Kieran, what you're saying, if you want to, the first step in diversifying, pass paid is search. Right? We can agree on that. You and I are like, hey, search is the best form. And search comes in a whole host of ways. It comes in Google search, YouTube search. Those would be, I think those are the two biggest search engines in the world right now. There are other, you know, smaller search engine review site search, other things that you can, you can do. And so what you're saying is do that content mapping, starting with your product all the way back to kind of the broadest level of abstraction. So you see what people are searching for and then have a content path to get people back to your product and that most people fail because they don't have the right content path back to their product to actually monetize that search visit. Is that correct?

Right? Yeah, I will say so. Like if you ask. So there's a couple of things in that. So one of the interesting things about there may be other inputs Other. So there may be other inputs that you can use to figure out other things you can create. Right. So one of them is obviously what are people searching for. So if you do levels, we're going, let's get into the search time because I can quickly explain this and then get onto another thing. So if you kind of follow the same process, which is like, all right, what are, what are the jobs to be done for my product? If I take those jobs to be done, how can I go up, keep going up one level of abstraction until I have like an actual content plan and content path mapped out, whether that's my. And that really means that you have gone from the actual individual feature that someone uses and then the mid funnel content that is applicable to that and then the top of the funnel content is applicable to that. Right. Then you connect those two things together and you can get them to actually be interested within that feature. Sign up and convert into the product. If it's plg, convert into a lead if it's marketing, led sales, that business. The TAM part is actually when you take all the topics now you've gone up and you've said, okay, these are all the topics that are relevant to that job specifically be done. Let's say there's an individual job to be done which is email marketing. And then email marketing has a bunch of different topics associated with it where people are trying to educate themselves around email marketing, which is like, how do I do Gmail? Like what's the best way to do Gmail marketing? What's the best way to do email automation? What's the. Whatever it may be, you look at all the keywords within there, right? So that's like one topic. You look at all the keywords in there. You can, you aggregate them together and you have monthly available, the total available monthly search traffic for those topic for that topic, right? So one topic cluster all the keywords, look at the, the traffic in totality and you have what is the total amount of monthly traffic that is available for this topic? Right. But you're not going to get all that. Then you say on average that you can do some models, right? So it depends how you want to do this. You would say on average we're going to rank from 3 to 6, 6 to 9, 9 to 12. Let's. There's like, there's just some assumptions you have to build in, some subjectivity you have to build into, like how you want to average those things out. So why are we doing that? Because then you can look at the average Click through rates through Google and say, well, on average the click through rate is going to be this and then the on average the conversion rate is going to be this. So from that total monthly available traffic, we think we hypothesize from that one topic that equates to hypothetically this many customers. And if you do that for each topic that is relevant to your business that you feel you can convert into demand for your product, because you've gone reverse engineered from job to be done into mofu and tofu content. Now you have total addressable, you have the total addressable market for search traffic.

There are some gotcha, explain mofu and tofu content. I don't want you to move past that. Okay, so for everybody to understand.

So mofu and tofu is the bridge, right? Like in Zapier, Tofu for us is when people are what is tofu?

Give people the background.

Top of the top, top of the funnel, right? So top of the funnel content. The example in Zapier would be when people are just trying to learn how to automate work through different apps. That is an example of tofu content. Because Zapier is not mentioned within that, within that blog post. The middle funnel content for us is when we explain how to do that specifically with Zapier. And what's interesting with us is our blog is like one of our best middle of the funnel channels for, for most companies it's not like that. But for Zapier, because it's such a horizontal product with a large user and customer base, the blog educates a lot of our customers on how you can do these things in zapier. But think of tofu content as the content that you are educated. You are educated someone to solve a problem, but your product is usually not part of that story. And the middle funnel content is the thing that you are trying to convert people on from the top of the funnel. So in the HubSpot example we give is like, I am trying to do better as a pr. Like I'm trying to learn how to create the best PR release for my product, the mid funnel content. This is a real example from HubSpot. I think this was one of the first times we really figured out how to engineer ebooks and templates to fit with blog posts to increase conversions is that we had one of the team created like a PR template, right? And so you read the blog post and then you could just click the link and get the template. The template was the middle funnel content. The middle funnel content then actually started to expose HubSpot, right. Talked about how you can do some of these things with Hotspot. So middle funnel content is nearer to your conversion to customer to top of the funnel is really a discovery mechanism. Right. Tofu had people discover you mofu how you convert them into demand for your product. People have BofU content as well. But that maybe is going on a large tangent. What's interesting in so there's some gotchas for search keywords are keyword tools are not always accurate. Right. So do not rely only on keyword tools because there is a can give.

People some keyword tools that they like if they're start. If they've never done this, they're just going down the path like what are the tools that they should start using to help them figure out.

I think a refs is like shout out to a refs. A refs is an incredible tool. I think that's one of the best tools. But I just mean like keyword tools will not give you all of the information. There's two things I would do is. Well, there's three things there is like keyword tools like Ahrefs can give you an initial like guidance on this kind of search time and the keywords that are applicable to you within those topics. The second thing is competitive analysis. So you should augment it with a competitive analysis, but you should take competitors. This is a long. It takes some time to do this. We did this in Zapier it took us four to six weeks. I know in HubSpot we used to do this in cycles and it took us like a month at a time to build this. But they're really valuable. But basically you do competitive analysis for each topic. So you go in to look to see who your top 10 competitors are for these different topics. Then you look at those competitors and say what keywords are relevant to us that they rank for that we don't rank for. Right. So then you can actually start to look at look for relevant keywords in that way. The third is that there are some products like the interesting thing about Zapier is our content team do pretty incredible work where they look for insights within what people are using within Zapier itself because we have so much data on the things that people are automating and they create more content around and that performs really well and it acquires a ton of search traffic. But if you looked at it in isolation and said, well what keywords map to this? You probably wouldn't have created that post. Right. So there are certain places where you can get data as well that will help inform your content strategy.

But first of all, keep in mind that all this data is very prospect customer centric data. Whether it be from your product, whether it be through search behavior. It is not like hey, this is what I care about as a company. It's like this is what the people who might care about me are looking for and are interested in and are doing. And that is a very important distinction. Before we finish up today's show, Kieran.

A couple we talked about timing. One thing that's really interesting. I wonder how you think about this when Karna's asking everybody.

Kieran's about to just do a solo pod. He's going off on it.

But there's something really I love.

He's like I'm about to be out. I got to get it all in.

The timing really matters in this because sometimes a founder will say to me, we have to get off paid search or we have to get off paid and diversify our channels because we are already like starting to plateau. And you're like boy, that's a hard problem. Yeah, it's such a hard problem to solve. Right. Because they're like well what can I replace paid with to start hidden like next month's number? Nothing. Like this is like the beauty and the. You know what? I know what the right word is like the devil. And the beauty of paid, which is it is highly measurable.

It's like a dry instable. You can get addicted to it and the more you use it, the worse it gets. It is for you. Yeah, literally like using a drug.

It's the only thing that really in marketing can like as discovery. Like there's things like if you have a large customer base and user base, you can do things to actually increase your demand in a very short amount of time. Pay it as a marketing channel in terms of getting new customers, new users, things like that. It's hard to replace that within a certain period of time with organic. So what I tell founders is the quicker you diversify the better. That means that you have to when you are a founder and you have a everything is somewhat dependent upon paid. You have a marketing strategy which really is just you have a performance marketing strategy, you don't have a marketing strategy. So it's when the founder wants to feels comfortable going from a performance marketing strategy to a marketing strategy and when you go to a marketing strategy, it's a whole host of other things that founder has to educate themselves on.

Well, there are two things that come to mind when thinking about making the shift, one is the Charlie Munger quote that wisdom is prevention. If you're coming in and saying you need to diversify how your business is growing, then you're probably already too late. Then there's a great quote from Carl Richards that's in Morgan Housel's new book, same as ever, which is risk is what's left over after you think you've thought of everything. Like that's the definition of risk. And so if you're trying to de risk your business, one of the things you have to consider is how do I think of everything to diversify my marketing engine and my ability to attract new people into my business to become customers. That's what we're talking about today. And Kieran, what you've done in a great job outlining today is the process in which you can validate how long you have before you have to make that switch and how to get started in search to really think about how clear that opportunity is and how you could forecast your business based on people searching to people converting to people converting to become a lead to people becoming customers based on having those very product use case driven flows. There's one other part that we haven't talked about that I think is really important. So this founder I was talking to earlier was like, you know, we're starting to have some early success in organic YouTube and that's where we're starting to get some really interesting customers. And you love that. And so Whether it be YouTube, whether it be Google, you start having that success. Then there is the second part of this, which is the magic of how you make the content and how aggressively you invest to make it, to make the timetable work. Like it's very cool to have to know, like, okay, I need to go after these hundred keywords, but do I need to go after these hundred keywords over the next year, the next month? Like, how aggressive, how much do I need to make? Becomes a big question. And what I normally see is founders who don't invest enough or do not have high enough expectations and how fast they need to go on that path. Could you maybe explain to people, everybody watching today, like, how do you get really aggressive in the making of the content so that you can capture that audience as quickly as possible.

I think this all comes down to you need a growth model because you need to be able to forecast, you know, you need to start with the end, you need to start with the result you want, right? So you start with what revenue do I need to be at the end of this 12 month period or the end of this 24 month period. And then you have to look at your different channels and forecast based upon historical trends and the things that you think you will do to augment that channel. What do you suspect the growth will be over the course of 12, 24 months? And look to see how far away you are from that. Because content, like, for the most part, the best content strategies are systems like, I know you agree with this because that's what we build at HubSpot. Honestly, that's what we, that's what Zapier has built as well. Which is like, when you look under the hood, there's a ton of creativity, but that creativity is all housed within an incredible system with incredible processes. So what do I mean? Let me give you an example. When we were in HubSpot and we were trying to figure out this very question, which is how fast can we grow? Right? I think we, I think, I think.

We had fundamental question everybody's trying to figure out.

I think, I think we had like, I remember like J.D. sherman, who's, who's. This was our COO just totally awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome person. And I remember, I think, I don't know if you remember. Like, I remember we passed like 1 million visits. He's like, wow, that was amazing. That was amazing. And then we passed 2 million. He was like, I honestly didn't give you. I didn't want to say it, but I didn't think you were 1 million. And so then we were like, okay, well, well, let's see how fast we could go, right? And you break. It's kind of like first principles, which is like, you're really good at doing this. But breaking it down into our first principle, which is, okay, we have writers. Writers can produce a certain number of posts each and every month. Those posts are spread between new posts and historical optimization of posts. Because what people don't realize is when you get to a certain size, the historical optimization of posts actually acquire way more traffic than the new posts.

Correct.

And so we break it. I won't go into all the things, we break it down because I try to keep it simple. But say an individual writer can produce X amount of posts. Those X men. And posts are spread between X men and you and X Men and historical optimization. And that equates to a certain amount of traffic. We would cohort this. We will look at an individual writer and look at the cohort of traffic they would acquire over a 12, 24 month period. And then we would say okay, well, if we want to grow faster, there are some inputs that we can control, which is we can control the number of riders, we can control the amount of SEO things we do to make the individual post acquire more traffic over time, the individual historical posts acquire more traffic over time. So we built a content model to show like how we could actually grow rapidly over a 2012, 24 month period and then like basically how many riders we would need to hire to hit a certain goal. Right? So we would have like certain models to say, well, we want to be at 10 million after 24 to 36 months, or we want to be at 5 million. Like what is the deviation between those two things in terms of how much would we need to increase the average traffic? An individual post gets a new post versus historic post. And based upon that, how many writers would we have to hire over time to be able to grow into that demand? So you have to like, if you break things down to like the core inputs that make up the output, then that's how you can, I think, build like how much content should I produce? Right? Like, yeah. Now if you're in the early stages, that model doesn't really work. Like, I think you, you should think about marketing in the same way you think about building products which you, you have pre market channel fit and you have post market channel fit. I don't think you should invest and scale a channel aggressively in the pre marketing channel fit because you will end up with a pretty, you could end up with a pretty lackluster result. Right? You could end up with hiring over hiring for that channel and just being meh. But if you actually can see that there's real market channel fit, like we've figured out the core inputs that truly matter. When we replicate these tactics within those inputs, we see the same result each and every time. Then it really is just a case of how much can we, how aggressively can we hire here, freelance or outsource.

I think that's a great breakdown of like how you actually think about the production side of this. Because the production side of this is actually very hard. And there's an art to production and producing content and aligning it with your actual business goals. But when you have that growth model that you're talking about, Kieran, you can feel very confident on how much you need to invest to do that. Right, right. And you know, look, fortunately we plan on doing this podcast for a long, long time and we're going to cover these types of topics in detail. There's like 100 different, we could spend 100 hours on this topic. This is just the first one.

This is our wheelhouse. Yeah.

It's like, you know, just put the camera on, let it roll, we could go forever. But I think the core thing we gave you some very practical, like, how to kind of go along the way. But you can't do any of those without the right mindset and the right mindset of needing to change. And one of the things we talked about was that paid advertiser is kind of like the drugs of business. Right. Like, you can really get hooked. And so, Kieran, I'm going to leave you and the viewers with a great quote from another one from Morgan House's book, same as ever, which is. And as I'm reading this, replacement drugs in this quote with advertising. And it says, money buys happiness the same way drugs buy pleasure. Incredible if done right, Dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough. Right. And that's the same thing with advertising. Advertising is great when you get it just right. It is very dangerous if you have no diversification and you're trying to spend more and more money to, like, pretend that you don't have that weakness. And then you go so far over it that you have to spend whatever it takes and it gets disastrous because your economics blow up and the board gets pissed. Everything kind of falls apart in that. And so if you're listening to this, if you take nothing else away from the why side of this show, it is that. That you have to have the right balance and diversification of your marketing strategy as you're scaling up.

I think having a great performing paid channel and you've perfected paid and it's unit economics are great and you're scaling well. That is the best. That is the best time to ask this question, which is, wow, this is working. So I have some time now to really start to diversify. Right. That is actually when to ask that question.

Wisdom is prevention. Wisdom is prevention.

The wrong time to do it.

Do not wait till things are not good.

Yeah.

When things are good, ask yourself what might make them bad in the future and how do I prevent that from happening?

Right. Right. That is the way to do it.

Kieran, great luck on fatherhood. We'll all be thinking of you for all of our marketing against the Grain fam. I have an amazing series of guest hosts joining me over the next period of time while Kieran is out. And we're looking forward to baby updates when you get back here. Thank you so much, everybody. We'll talk to you real soon. This data is wrong. Every freaking time.

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Whoa. I can see the client's whole history.

Calls, support tickets, emails.

And here's a task from three days ago. I totally missed HubSpot.

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