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3 Lessons from the worst content marketing campaign I ever ran
PLUS: How one genius company generates $17.2M of dollars of revenue withy content channels that endlessly feed each other
Helloooo content connoisseurs.
It’s Perrin from Content Bites.
Saddle up for a doozy my friends. I’m going to tell you about the absolute sh*t show of a content campaign that almost got me sued — and 3 big lessons I learned from it. Then, we’re going to talk about how one company built $17.2M of revenue with compounding content channels.
Main course: 3 Lessons from the worst content campaign I ever ran
Snack: How one genius company generates $17.2M of dollars of revenue withy content channels that endlessly feed each other
Morsels: Links from HubSpot, CMI, Ahrefs, and more…
Let’s dig in.
Main Course: 3 Lessons from the worst content campaign I ever ran
Who would’ve thunk content marketing could be so dangerous?
This is the story of the worst content campaign I ever ran, how I almost got sued, how I almost sued someone else, and, finally, how I managed to learned some very valuable lessons about what NOT to do.
Here we go…
In the early days of my agency, I was hurting for clients.
When it had been just my business partner and I, we could scrape together a living on pretty much any amount of money. We didn’t mind eating beans and rice.
But now, we had a few employees who depended on us, and we were just starting to feel the kind of pressure most first-time founders feel: the feeling that you’re responsible for your team.
And when you start to feel that, getting clients — the hardest thing to do in business, by the way — feels much more momentous.
I also didn’t know how to get clients.
I eventually did learn how to get clients, which is a story for another day, but at this point, feeling this new responsibility for my team, I would have said yes to pretty much anything…
So you can imagine my relief when there was a figurative knock on the door…
A lead came in.
My eyes lit up. Was it spam? Did the form break? Was my business partner running a test?
No, this seemed to be a real lead.
The website was real, the email was real. This might just be a real person with a real business.
I poked around the website a bit, and even after 15 minutes, I couldn’t tell what the product was (red flag number #1).
So I went back to the lead form to look at the section that asked the lead to explain what they wanted, what their goals are, and how content marketing fit into their business.
“Call me”, it said (red flag #2).
So I called.
It was a guy from New York who could have been in a mafia movie. And guys: I am not lying when I say he talked for 35 minutes without so much as acknowledging there was another human being on the phone with him (red flag #3).
FINALLY, finally… he took a breath long enough for me to politely ask him what his business does.
Before I tell you what he said, let me ask you to think of all the products you’ve ever promoted in your stint as a content marketer. Maybe it was an interesting piece of software. Maybe it was some cool Instagramable doo-dad. Maybe it was something a bit more mundane — tax services or something. As content marketers, we’re used to the challenge of promoting anything, and we’re good at having fun with content no matter what it is.
But I was not prepared for this.
He said… “cryogenic metallurgy".
Great. Let me just grab my dictionary.
Truly, I had no idea what he was even saying. But hey. My team needed to eat. So after another hour listening to the ramblings of a cryogenic metallurgist with a thick brooklyn accent… I said yes.
Cheer up, Perrin, I was saying to myself. You just got a new customer. It’s money in the bank, I was saying. And after a few minutes, I really did begin to cheer up.
I went back and told my team about the project. This is what they looked like.
But we were pros. My team was awesome. We could do it.
So we set out to do what we did best: become an expert in our clients’ industry as fast as we possibly good, build a strategy, and then start pumping out content like absolute banshees.
And this is actually not where it went wrong.
The content was working.
My team did an astounding job learning about something none of us had even heard of weeks before. We were reaching out to engineers, reading books, and slinging words on cryogenic metallurgy like nobody’s business.
Our tech team fixed their site, we set up some basic distribution channels on assets they already owned, and published as much as we could.
The traffic started coming in. Not only did it arrive, but it grew.
It wasn’t a grand slam by, like, e-commerce or SaaS standards. But for cryogenic friggin’ metallurgy??
We were absolutely stoked to grow their business from 0 to about 7,000 regular, hyper-targeted visits/mo. We did this in about four months, and all the trends indicated their audience would keep growing.
This is where it went wrong.
One day, I got a call… and on the other end of the phone was a thick Brooklyn accent. It went something like this.
“Hey we’re not growing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our business isn’t growing.”
“…uh… well, traffic from your media properties is trending pretty ni…”
“Our revenue. Our revenue isn’t growing. We’re not making more money.”
[Long, painful pause]
“Well, we know the audience is growing. Way more people are visiting us than before, and the content feels very targeted. How are you converting visitors?”
“What?”
“How are you converting people?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“When people come to your website from Google or social media, what is the next step for them to start a conversation with you.”
“What do you mean? People just call us on the phone” (which was true; I’d seen their phone number on their website).
“Are more people calling you?”
“Yea, a lot more, but [insert litany of sales-related reasons they couldn’t turn phone calls into customers].”
I’m sure you can see where this is going…
Finally, he lost his cool and went full-Brooklyn, “LOOK. YOU’RE A MARKETING AGENCY. I DON’T COULDN’T GIVE TWO #*%#@ IF I HAVE MORE HITS OR WHATEVA. JUST MAKE ME MORE @#$@!*& MONEY!”
Click.
I have this thing where I really don’t mind firing rude clients. So that’s what I did.
And y’all… it didn’t take ten minutes for me to get a long email threatening to sue me for… not making them more money?
And then emails didn’t stop. It got pretty dicey for a while.
If you hadn’t guessed, they also refused to pay us, and at that point, they owed us several months’ worth of invoice, so we had to lawyer up a little bit, too (normally, I would have just let it go, but it was early days, and I needed that money to pay my team).
This went on for a good long while, and it came really close to blowing up into a full legal battle, which would have not only sunk my company, but probably destroyed a big part of my life and financial well-being.
In the end, we did get paid. My team did get their paychecks. They also got a massive apology from me.
It was a wild ride, and it sucked.
But I feel like most business owners, especially in service industries — and maybe even more so in marketing? — go through something like that.
We all learn from those nutty experiences. Here’s what I learned from mine.
Lesson #1: Saying no can sometimes be a lot better for a business than saying yes.
More than anything I learned the value of saying no.
Did I feel like I needed money at the time? Yes.
What I didn’t see, however, was the cost of doing business with a terrible client — in time, in emotional labor, in opportunity cost — hell, even in legal fees.
There were so many red flags I chose to ignore.
Had I just passed and doubled down on finding a great client, I would have saved so much time, and because we would have been a better fit, everyone would have been happier and would have made more money.
Lesson #2: Don’t start a content marketing campaign unless the business already has a proven way to make money.
Content marketing is not the first step in any business model.
We were bringing all kinds of boys to the yard here, and they still weren’t making money because they had no money-making systems.
After this client, I started asking up front about potential clients’ business models, and I’d even straight up ask them “If I bring hordes of people to you, do you have ways to turn those people into customers?”
If not, I’d pass.
I’m a content marketer.
I’m not a management consultant, or a CRO expert, or a revenue specialist, or a salesperson.
The job of content marketing is to bring targeted people into the building. But the business needs a way to generate revenue from that crowd.
We are the gasoline. We are not the finish line.
As an in-house content marketer, I’d often fight to set the expectation that the best way to get the most out of a content marketing campaign is to have working conversion mechanisms and funnels.
Can we still do content marketing to build an audience while we’re working on that stuff? Absolutely. But the content marketing team should not be on the hook for revenue until those things are in place.
Lesson #4: Content really can be used to build an audience anywhere, for anything.
A positive lesson.
When I took on this project, I truly had no idea if we could do it.
But we did. We built a great, targeted audience of people who were interested in cryogenic metallurgy and cryogenic metallurgy services.
It made me a lot less scared of out-of-the-box campaigns in the future.
As long as there are customers out there, content can be used start conversations with them.
Here’s what you can deploy this today:
For your next campaign, ask questions about the business model up front
Adjust your campaign to account for those things (think: type of content, where people need to land, what kinds of lead magnets you can create to help get people into a funnel, etc.)
Say no to campaigns that don’t have some way — somehow — to make money unless it’s specifically and explicitly a brand awareness campaign
Snack: How one genius company generates $17.2M of dollars of revenue withy content channels that endlessly feed each other
Let’s talk about one of my favorite content-driven companies: ChefSteps.
Lots of companies claim to be content-driven.
ChefSteps really and truly is content driven.
And not only are they content driven, they’re driven entirely by organic content.
Really, it’s a $17.2M/yr company, and they run no ads.
Here’s a screenshot of their Meta Ad library.
And here’s a screenshot of their Google ads from Ahrefs.
Spoiler alert: there’s nothing in either.
So how in the world do they generate so much revenue?
They use different content channels that compound into each other — and then they sell a hyper-relevant product.
They have several different channels, but their primary channels & audiences are are:
Their blog (3.6M visits/yr)
Their YouTube channel (1.8M subscribers)
Their email list (1.7M subscribers)
The important thing about all these channels is that they are tuned to drive traffic to the other channels.
For example, when you visit their blog, at the very top, before anything else, you see a message that says the following & invites you to put your information in:
“Dear ChefSteps,
I am ____________ and my email is _________. I want to join 1,773637 others to learn to be a better cook! Please set my password to: ______”
Here’s a screenshot.
Their email newsletter, as you can imagine, drives people to both the YouTube channel and the blog.
And their YouTube channel similarly drives people not just to their blog (usually by listing full recipes on the blog), but also to a lead magnet — a guide called Sous Vide: Getting Started.
And this is where the real genius comes in.
The lead magnet is about sous vide cooking, and their primary product is…. drumroll… the Joule, a gadget that makes it easy to sous vide at home.
All of this combines into a machine that has consistently grown year over year, through all the platform algorithm updates, and now earns $17.2 million per year.
ChefSteps is worth its own full case study because they do an absolutely brilliant job compounding traffic by having all their channels feed each other.
If you guys want a full case study (or would be interested in massive deep-dive case studies at all), drop me a line 🙂
Here’s how you can deploy this RIGHT NOW:
Add CTAs in your major channels that feed each other
Plan a campaign where different parts of the content are available exclusively on separate channels
Measure and repeat
Morsels: Content marketing links
Luxury Brand and Talent Powerhouses Predict Future of Marketing for Every Industry (link)
Follow Our Content Audit Process for 2023 (link)
SEO and Content Marketing: 3 Steps to Attract More People to Your Next Article (link)
How a Subscribed Audience Can Draw a Crowd for Your Next Content Product (link)
Unveiling the Best Content Creation Platforms: Analyzing Top Competitors (link)
B2B SaaS Marketing: The Ahrefs Guide (link)
That’s the issue.
It was a little less tactical than normal, so let me know if you do/don’t like this kind of thing.
If you missed the last issue, you can read it here: How to Spend 90% Less Time on SEO.
Go forth & conquer.
—Perrin
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