A few different clients have said the same phrase to me recently:
“How can I spend more money with you?”
I mean, not exactly like that, but some variation of “how do we invest more, how do we go faster, what’s next?”
And while it’s obviously something I like to hear (at least better than, “how do I spend less money with you?”), it also makes me think there’s a communication gap at times, where I’m not pre-empting this question with a little bit of vision.
The way I think about building out organic growth programs is in three rough phases:
- Foundations
- Scaling journey
- Leadership
In the early days, you need to hit “escape velocity,” building out your foundational assets, website authority, and audience.
Upon hitting this threshold, you can begin to compete directly for high value topics, augment your strategy with additional growth levers (like conversion optimization, multimedia, etc.), and generally, scale your efforts and actually see faster return on investment.
Finally, there comes a point where you want to dominate your category. You’re positioned to be the HubSpot of your space (with organic / SEO, I mean; Salesforce is still the HubSpot of HubSpot’s space by revenue).
Here’s You, Here’s Your North Star
There’s a paradox, or as Tom Critchlow put it, an uncanny valley when it comes to making investments in the enterprise:
“While you might think that a small investment for a big gain is the goal – in fact businesses tend to be wary of such ideas and tend to prefer large investments that lead to large gains.
This might sound counterintuitive but there’s a decision tax that companies pay – they can only effectively focus on a small number of strategic initiatives at once and you want your SEO initiative to be one of them. That requires correctly framing your idea as “a big idea”.”
The challenge with any pitch, especially SEO, is that those who give you your resources don’t often have the same visibility or vision as you do. Benyamin Elias related this to trying to describe a painting (or series of paintings) that the person has never seen before:
“That’s what you are asking for when you pitch an idea — to add a splash of red to a painting that the other person can’t see. How are they supposed to give you a yes or no, unless you can illustrate a vision of the painting you can see and they cannot?
When you go to communicate that vision, you’ll quickly find it’s not so easy. A painting, just like the model of your work you carry in your own head, isn’t something expressed linearly through language — it’s experienced all at once in a single instant. You can’t just describe the part of the painting you want to add red to. You have to describe how your changes affect the entire system of the business, and it’s not always so easy to do this.“
One service we’ve built out to do this, in detail, is what we call the Organic Growth Blueprint.
A few large software companies have asked us, essentially, to show them the path to SEO domination. We index them on multiple dimensions – search TAM, website & content inventory, technical, user experience, and off-page – showing the total addressable opportunity as well as their current position in relation to that north star.
This helps us build a massive, exciting vision, but also to determine which levers to pull, in which order, to get there.
Perhaps you’d think “yeah, if you’re a massive software company that makes sense, but what about early stage startups just building out their first few pages?”
Turns out, they want a big vision to work towards as well (often even moreso).
The trick with earlier stage programs is balancing painting that big vision with setting reasonable expectations and milestones to see those returns.
In other words, if you’re just setting foot into a martial arts gym, it’s going to be a long time before you’re a black belt.
Still, the point I want to drive here is that building an exciting case, showing the “where we could be” and making sure that end state is truly interesting to the business, can go a long way in getting buy-in and alignment.
The opposite is more common, however. Benyamin Elias called it one of the most common mistakes in getting buy-in: not considering or presenting the size of impact:
“I’ve heard pitches about how we should spend $10k+ on a webinar that would only get ~500 visitors (and in fact, I’ve watched it happen). Right now I’m in a business with 100k+ users and an intentionally small team — the ideas we consider need to be able to meaningfully drive 1,000+ users at a time. In my career, the biggest mistake I see in presenting ideas is in the presentation of ideas that are simply too small to have an impact of the size the business needs to grow.”
Case Study: Building the Surround Sound SEO Program at HubSpot
I’ve pitched ambitious programs to dozens and dozens of clients at this point, but I learned a lot of these lessons while at HubSpot.
I was working on freemium acquisition and stumbled on an interesting bit of data – a single listicle I had found was converting at like 10X above the average for the blog. It was a product listicle, and HubSpot wasn’t even listed at the top.
Thought, “huh, that’s interesting. We should try to do more product listicles.”
So I wrote a couple myself because I couldn’t convince the content team to do so or get the resources for freelancers. They converted just as high or higher.
This led me to pulling on the thread of the idea and centering my thoughts on the customer journey. Logically, someone searching for “best X software” is in a discovery phase, likely looking to pull a bunch of options to the table to try or consider with their team.
I knew from university classes that reach as well as frequency matter when it comes to advertising, meaning the more times someone hears an ad, the more likely they are to remember the brand and to take action and purchase.
So logically, if you appear on more of these listicles, review sites, etc. for search queries like “best X software,” the chances someone buys or tries your brand goes up. Plus, you get links and referral traffic from mentions on other websites.
Thus, the Surround Sound SEO strategy was born. But it didn’t flourish right away. In fact, it took me months to years to build this out into a fully functioning, well-resourced program that operated at scale.
The whole story is long as somewhat boring, but essentially here are the steps I took:
- Identify conversion rate data that led to hypothesis “listicles convert higher”
- Write more listicles myself to prove that out
- Secondary hypothesis: mentions on other websites will bring referral traffic in addition to untrackable brand awareness
- Partner with other websites to write listicles with HubSpot at #1 or ask to get included.
- Track referral traffic and conversion rates, prove that it’s also very high converting
- Write a MASSIVE Wiki post with early results, giving credit to everyone who helped or facilitated and even those, like my VP at the time, who weren’t supportive. Team work!
- Get budget from another VP at HubSpot who wanted to build these out for their specific product launches
- Get more good results, update Wiki and roadshow these results
- Finally, pitch to get headcount and resources
- Build slide deck explaining the conceptual idea of Surround Sound, bragging about early results and efforts
- Do rough math to show total opportunity if we saturate the some ~200 keywords directly related to HubSpot products
- Get buy-in, pass the torch to Irina Nica, who actually scaled this beyond the 0 to 1 stage.
There were many steps within there, like building custom tools with R to measure results and saturation, but the gist is I got early results to show some numbers, explained the concept in really simple analogies and visuals, and then mapped out the big ambitious vision for scaling this up.
And it worked.
Now, this idea also parlays into AI optimization, which I couldn’t have known about at the time.
And that’s an important caveat.
When you build out a big ambitious vision, it’s not a scientific exercise in precision. There are too many external factors you can’t predict or control. Covid could happen, accelerating or crushing search volume. Competitors could enter the arena. AI could develop.
But this is Midwit stuff; what you’re trying to do is say “this is worth investing in because the payoff is big and we’ve already got some data to prove how big the opportunity is.”
Now gimme headcount and lemme cook!
Big Meal, Small Bites
I can’t remember who said this phrase to me, but I remember talking to a client about being “impatient with action and patient with results.”
Like my martial arts analogy, no matter how many days you train per week, you’re not going to become a black belt in 6 months. In fact, you can burn yourself out by going too often, leading to injury, or you could be tempted to cheat, taking steroids or something, and leading to adverse side effects.
For example, when I ran experimentation at Workato, before I got to the big vision of experimentation everywhere, I had to first refactor our analytics setup and set up a proper experimentation process and quality standards. Then, I amped up experiment velocity. Then, I started running experiments in unconventional ways, doing personalization, etc.
So we’re back to “long game” thinking, paving the path to valhalla with a lot of good, consistent days and good, consistent work. No high risk shortcuts, and always balancing ambition with prudence.
I like to communicate these ideas using the idea of horizons. Yes, here’s where you could go, but we’re a long way from there. To get there, we need to do A, B, and C, which will unlock opportunities D, E, and F, which means we’ll need to invest incrementally more at these stages.
Again, it’s not precise science, but that’s why we call it an organic growth “blueprint.”
It’s a rough multiphasic sketch to help you visualize and achieve exceptional outcomes.
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