Diary of a Modern Marketer: How Hypercontext Surpassed Aggressive Content Launch Goal

Dear Diary,

It's me Hiba, Senior Marketing Manager at Hypercontext. When I first started at Hypercontext (previously Soapbox) back in 2019, we had just started building out our agenda templates library. We ultimately wanted to give actionable and useful resources to our existing audience while attracting new people.

Since launching the template library in 2019, we’ve seen a big increase in overall signups to the product, but also the quality of those signups.

So, when 2020 came around and we were launching our newest feature, goal-setting software, we saw it as a great opportunity to repeat the success of our agenda templates library. Enter: the largest goal examples library on the internet!

The library was an absolute blast for us to work on (and also draining).

We started with a small scope: create goals for sales, Customer Success (CS) and engineering leaders as those are typically the managers who find the most use in our platform.

But, the scale quickly evolved into a library for every role in tech. This happened for two reasons:

1. The goal-setting feature was going to be a part of our business plan, which is more focused on org-wide roll outs rather than land one team and expand. We didn’t want to exclude others who would be using this feature.
2. I was selfish and wanted goal examples for myself and my team. 😛

So, as we started to build the library here are some of the lessons I learned going into this now, much larger scope of work:

The pre-work is so important

Behind every great piece of content is an even better brief. During the planning and brief creation phase, we really wanted to answer the following questions:

• What is the purpose of this piece of content?
• How can we validate our idea?
  • Have our customers mentioned this in calls?
  • Are people searching for this? Are we targeting the right keywords? 
• Is something our customers will care about or want?
• How are we planning to promote this piece?
• Is this the right format to share this information?

We also wanted to understand, once the piece was done, what would our distribution plan look like? So, we wanted to map out how we would distribute all of this content, would it be through:

• Blogs
• Feature pages
• Library (similar to our agenda templates library)
• Product Hunt campaign
• SEO
• Social media

The answer was… All of the above.

Sharing is caring: involve others in the process

One of the best changes I’ve made to my content marketing strategy is to involve those outside of the organization in creating content. We started with the creation process being an internal one and set our goal to create 50 examples. It was taking a really long time.

So, I reached out to some marketing contacts and asked if they wanted to contribute to the library. They said yes so fast. That really opened the floodgates for us. I even messaged my manager, Brennan (Hypercontext CEO and Co-founder), to ramp up our creation goals.

One month before our launch, we opened up to valuable contributors. We sent out a Google form to people we admired, as well as strangers at companies we admired. The result was:

• 120+ goal examples contributed by external experts
• A big audience itching for launch day to share the library
• New content marketing partnerships forming
• A massive distribution network for our Product Hunt launch
• Credibility behind the goals we shared in our library

When it came to our distribution network, here’s a slide that I shared during our company demo day:

Distribution is key to the success of any piece of content

Many content marketing experts will agree that the general rule is that you should spend 25% of your time on creation and 75% on distribution (if not more).

When it came to our goals library, the main distribution channels we focused on and planned for before creating this piece were:

• Product Hunt: We experienced a lot of success in past campaigns we’d run, both in the traction we gained during launch day, but also beyond that. For us, a lot of ideal customers live on Product Hunt and if we succeeded in our launch, it would be a slam dunk for sign ups and paid customers to come.
• Social media and other communities: We wanted to spread the word across platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, Pinterest, as well as through leadership-focused Slack groups. It’s so easy to navigate the library and find something relevant to your role, if you’re working in a tech company. This made it easily shareable as a resource for many. In fact… We’ve been shared as required reading for a couple of founder accelerator programs organically. That’s just nuts!
• Content: From internal linking to the goals library to backlink building. We focused on mapping out new content we could create to ultimately lead people back to the goals library, but also finding existing opportunities on our blog. Having so many partners contributing to this also meant that, when they wrote about goals (a surprising amount of people do this!), they linked back to our resource! We get a link back and they get to share a valuable piece of content with their audience. Win-win.
• Email: We have a big list (we’re talking over 70,000). So, we better use it. We let our customers and newsletter subscribers know on launch day all about the library along with our new goals feature. Many people were all incredibly excited!

The results of a well thought out campaign

Here’s a snippet of our Search Console Data as it pertains to all pages within the goals library. We were able to launch during a time when many were planning out Q3 so it was really relevant to many in our audience.

Beyond that, all of the work we did in the coming months meant that we had our best Q1 in company history. We had not only gained a lot of domain authority (DA), but we also built great authority across all of our goals pages. So, when it came time for quarterly and annual planning in January… Our goals library was available as a resource. 🙌

Other noteworthy results:

• DA increased from ~61 to 71 since launch
• People were actually talking about the goals library on social media
• 51% increase in weekly traffic (in Q1)
• Doubled Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) in 3 months
• Created a steady pipeline for our new “Business Plan” pricing tier
• Large influx of users testing out the new feature, giving the product team access to feedback faster

Wrapping up

Overall, I think that this was an awesome campaign for us and now we just need to think about what’s next. The answer? Continue to learn from our success and find ways to repeat that success and prove to ourselves that our success came from more than just luck! 😊

Technology Used: Hypercontext

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