Amanda Natividad is a top 1% content marketer — she is the Head of Marketing for Growth Machine, hosts the Growth Machine Marketing Podcast, and has done content marketing for Liftopia, Fitbit, NatureBox and more.
At Growth Machine, she has built a well-oiled content marketing machine that produces several thousand high quality pieces of content every month.
Several thousand every month!
It is a rare and challenging feat to produce quality and quantity, consistently.
But Amanda and her team have mastered the scale of high quality content production, and she discusses it in this conversation.
Amanda shares the details of her strategic approach, as well as the tactical details of the tools that she uses to do so (like Clearscope and Ahrefs).
A few actionable content marketing takeaways:
- How marketers are not getting enough from their content efforts
- How to approach content differently depending on the stage of customer journey
- A content framework to stand out from other content: create an “Us vs. Them” narrative
She also shares more details behind Growth Machine’s DTC beverage case study, “How a D2C Beverage Company Grew 4x in Search Traffic in 3 Months”.
Here’s the full episode:
Some highlights of the conversation:
Why do you think that marketers might not be doing enough with their content?
It’s really interesting because my experience in content marketing was not SEO first. It was really true “content marketing” and using that content to kind of power other areas of the business.
So while yes, absolutely SEO is important, but not necessarily for every kind of business.
But I also think that for a lot of marketing teams and businesses, there’s often such a missed opportunity with the way they use content.
Content should be sustainable: It should sustain your marketing efforts and the rest of your business.
When I was at Fitbit, the way I sort of ran my team was content as a service. So we used it. We created content, use it for white papers, eBooks guides that we would use as gated assets for a lead generation.
We also use it for email marketing and customer onboarding materials and for product marketing materials and events.
So we really use content and infuse it through all areas of marketing, through all areas of the business.
So I think I would kind of wrap up this thought with, there is so much more to content than SEO.
Content really is the foundation for what the rest of your marketing team is going to say and the way they promote your business.
The way they promote the product or the company.
Therefore, it’s really important to look at other kinds of KPIs and other ways of tracking success of your content.
There can be SEO and organic growth goals, but also another content goal might be sales and sales and customer retention. So using the content you create to generate more leads, to engage leads through your marketing funnel and keep your customers.
So I think of content that really supports those needs, whether it’s help-related content, like how to use,certain features of the product in a way that maybe the user might not think of normally.
And then as far as the sales content goes, you know, I think about content that helps sales, close sales. So things like case studies and the sort of outcomes oriented content or outcomes that user your customers would get by way of using your product.
Amanda’s two-pronged approach to content, and how it helped a DTC Beverage brand grow.
I like to think about this as taking a two-pronged approach to content strategy.
So you have your high volume, low difficulty keywords. These are the keywords that you know, that potential customers are really searching for. And that’s really how you grow your organic traffic.
People are looking for certain topics, certain keywords, and then hopefully they find your website. And so I start reading your amazing content there.
And then the other track I like to think of is the sort of conversion-focused content. Maybe it’s maybe it’s low search volume, but it’s high intent. So you’re not going to, maybe you’re not going to have as many people searching for this stuff, but the people who are, are just going to be a lot more likely to convert.
So an example that I want to use is with a Direct To Consumer beverage company that we work with. So in terms of their high volume organic traffic oriented goals, we have a lot of content there that talks about alcohol in a really friendly and accessible way.
We wondered whether alcohol related content was a saturated space. Just because this was like at the beginning of 2020, pre-pandemic. And we thought like, well, content has existed for a long time. Surely there’s a lot of content on alcohol and there is okay. But we saw that there was a big opportunity for content that was friendlier and easier-to-read stuff, that’s not geared towards experts.
Like for instance, a lot of the wine related content we saw tended to be about like whole cluster fermentation. If you’re new to wine drinking, you’re not researching how is made. You just don’t think about that stuff.
So the friendly and accessible content we created with stuff like how to store wine, how to cook with alcohol, how to remove wine stains from furniture, like stuff like that, that the average person would be looking for.
And then on the other side, we also created that sort of conversion focused content.
So the most successful piece of content we’ve had there is this a blog post that we’ve written for them that about certain ingredient (and basically this company, they make their alcohol without this certain ingredient). That’s kind of, what’s unique to them.
And so the blog post was all about whether you should you even look for this kind of alcohol without this ingredient: what are the implications of that? Why would you care? And then if you do care, what are some brands that you would consider buying from?
So it’s really just all the information somebody would need if they’re looking for that type of content and then how to make that buying decision.
And we’ve been able to tie revenue to this blog post, and we know that they make over a thousand dollars a month, just from the organic traffic of that blog post.
Can you describe the process and timeline from creating the strategy and execution to seeing actual results?
We always say it takes about six months, whether it’s a brand new website or an older one.
We do the initial keyword research strategy. And then get content production off the ground. It could take a couple of months and then there’s also this point where your content or your website kind of needs to just live for awhile.
And it speaks to the fact that we’ve never really seen traffic grow in a very linear, clear way.
But what we have seen is not a lot of movement for a couple months. And then it usually is around the six month mark.
It’s, it’s kind of hard to place exactly what it is because it’s not always attributed to the back links, even though backlinks obviously do help, but we’ve, we’ve seen this kind of growth even for sites in which we’re not doing a very active link building strategy.
It’s like a combination of Google needing to crawl your site, your site needing to exist for awhile there needing to be a chance for back links. And sort of you getting the recognition that you deserve for your website.
How can smaller teams create content calendars and follow through and execute on those?
So the way that we Growth Machine would approach it is mainly from the organic traffic standpoint.
So we would do a really thorough keyword research strategy using Ahrefs and we would develop the first six months of content or a content calendar based on maybe a couple of hundred keywords that would be sort of high volume, low difficulty to really ensure that we’re growing your organic traffic.
But if I were in-house content marketer were thinking about this and I if I were trying to be scrappy, I would want to have two tracks of content.
One track is the organic traffic goal.
But then also a separate track, which will meet your more immediate goals because I know as an in-house marketer, I know how painful it is to have to justify your content marketing efforts when it takes like six months to rank for anything in SEO.
I like to try to execute on content that will meet immediate goals, which has content sustainability and business sustainability.
This means developing a calendar that will meet the goals for sales, customer success, your executive team, etc. This is going to be the stuff that’s like case studies, customer pain point stuff, how to guides, and your kind of overall brand, like what, you’re, what you stand for, what, what it, what it means to you.
We like to think about it like, well, what’s the stuff that’s going to be most beneficial to our customers, like what are the things they ask us about and how can we document this stuff in a way that’s useful for them and kind of streamlined efforts for our internal team.
So having this content that serves some of these immediate needs will help you. It’ll help you realize how much of an impact your content is making.
How do you think about standing out in terms of the content that you create?
One thing that I think about for e-commerce is that it’s very competitive–there’s always someone selling something similar to you. But one thing I would think about there, and it’s something that we did with Cup and Leaf back in the day, and it was crafting that “Us versus Them” story.
And that’s the thing that makes speak to your key differentiator, right?
For example, with the Cup And Leaf story, it was that we’re a small company, we really care about quality and the quality of our product and delivering on a great experience to our customers.
Larger retailers don’t care as much about quality, they’re trying to just make money.
One other more general piece of advice is to think about “what’s the one thing that I (or my company) do really really well that no one else does.
For instance, you know, a growth machine, it’s an SEO and content agency. It’s really, really competitive and SEO by its nature is really competitive. So I don’t know that we’re ever going to rank number one for “how to do SEO”.
So that’s not really a goal for me. I care and I care more the experience our customers or our clients are having. I care more about creating content that supports them and content that supports the rest of our team.
So for us, our differentiator isn’t how we can produce the number one ranking content on SEO, but instead it’s how can we use our content to convey the high quality experience that our customers and our clients are getting?