A Change of Role: From Content to User Acquisition

For the last few weeks, we have been trying a new team structure in the Buffer marketing team, and I’m taking on a new role. I’ll be grateful for any advice.

In the past, the marketing team organized ourselves around marketing channels. For example, someone manages social media, another person does PR, and another person focuses on emails. I was working on our Social blog with Ash Read, our managing editor.

For the most part, that has been working well for us. That approach gave each of us a lot of autonomy and allowed us to create very high-quality work. We have been able to grow multiple marketing channels, build our brand, and get more users and customers.

There were also a few drawbacks. As you can see from the graphic below, things can get pretty complicated. This makes setting clear goals challenging. For instance, content marketing can influence every part of the marketing funnel, from awareness to retention. So should we set a goal for reach or signups? (We have tried both.) Furthermore, it was easy to focus on only our own areas unless we were very intentional about collaborating across areas. And having the silos didn’t feel great.

After testing a new team format with a few people in the team, we decided to move forward with a new team structure that we think would bring more clarity to our work and encourage more teamwork.

A new team structure

Now, we are grouped into two squads — a brand squad and an acquire squad. The brand squad focuses on building our brand and reaching as many people in our target audience as possible. Then, the acquire squad focuses on encouraging those people to sign up and try Buffer.

This is how we envision it to look in practice:

The brand squad would work on top-of-the-funnel projects to increase our brand awareness. We don’t tie the projects directly to revenue metrics so that the squad can be creative and experiment with wild ideas. Having said that, we set ourselves constraint metrics to ensure that we are reaching the right people, and not just anyone.

The acquire squad would pay attention to the customer journey to drive user acquisition. We would look at how we can educate social media managers about the benefits of using a social media management tool and how we can help them decide if Buffer is suitable for them. Here’s where we track business metrics like conversions and Monthly Recurring Revenue.

While I’ve mainly been writing content, which is mostly top-of-the-funnel, I’m glad to be given an opportunity to join the acquire squad. So now I’m in a transition to a new role to explore user acquisition for Buffer. 🎉

New area, new opportunities

I’m excited about these changes for many reasons — we will have clearer goals and will collaborate more often. (And we are seeing these already!)

What I’m most excited about is that I see several opportunities for the business and for our individuals’ professional growth. User acquisition is something we have not really explored before as we have mostly been focusing on top-of-the-funnel projects. This means we’re venturing into unchartered territory, and I’m optimistic about what we’ll learn and achieve.

On the business front, I feel that there are many areas we could optimize to improve the experience of a customer’s journey. For example, do we have sufficient information on our websites to help a visitor learn about Buffer? Do we have the right information on our pricing page to help someone decide if they should try Buffer? How can we make someone feel that it’ll be worth their time to take up a free trial? (I’ll share how I think about such projects in a future blog post. Keep an eye out for it!)

On the professional growth front, I’m thrilled to get a broader perspective on marketing. I used to focus on only one marketing channel (content marketing) and one part of the funnel (awareness). Going forward, I’ll learn how to use multiple channels (e.g. SEO, emails, copywriting) to impact a different part of the funnel (acquisition).

In addition, the new role can help me shift my focus from output to outcomes. In the past, I often relied on the number of blog posts I wrote as the main gauge of my productivity. For instance, if I can write two pieces of great content each week, can I increase that to three? That was probably not the best approach. The new role will encourage me to think differently. It’ll be less about what I did (though this is still important) but more about how much I moved my metrics.

I hope to share more about our projects and learnings in the coming months. It’ll be great to get your thoughts on them.

A learning journey

I’m very grateful for the opportunity to explore something new and meaningful. Frankly speaking, this new role is also a little intimidating as I don’t have much experience in this area yet. But I’m sure we’ll be trying a lot, failing a lot, and learning a lot. And that’s why I opted to join the acquire squad.

“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”

— John A. Shedd

If you know of anyone who is also working on user acquisition, I would love to chat with them. Also, if you know of any resources on user acquisition, I’ll be grateful if you would send them my way. Thank you!

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Big thanks to Kevan Lee, my team lead, for many of the ideas and graphics in this blog post.

The amazing featured image is by Jeremy Bishop and was taken from Unsplash.