Content Marketing From Scratch to Scale at Personio
Over the course of the past six years, annual recurring revenue (ARR) at Personio grew from under €1 million into triple-digit million euro amounts.
While there are many factors and people contributing to Personio’s growth, I want to focus on something I was lucky enough to observe first-hand: The evolution of content marketing into a key revenue driver.
My name is Jörg Hipper. As Head of Web & Content Marketing, I built up the teams and functional areas of Content Marketing, Marketing Operations and Website at Personio.
Today, what we define as ‘organic content’ is our second most important marketing channel (after ‘brand’) in terms of marketing qualified leads, accepted pipeline and closed won business.
Note: For both our sakes, I won’t go into the weeds of attribution. No attribution is perfect, but whether you look at it from a first-touch, last-touch or any other perspective, the importance of this channel stays the same.
In this post, I’ll talk about how we made content marketing work for us, what sets our approach apart from many other businesses that I’ve seen and what we learned along the way.
I’ll focus a lot on SEO and you’ll see why. But we’re actually doing much more, from webinars to newsletters and integrated campaigns — it’s all part of the bigger puzzle. And of course, none of it will reach its full potential without figuring out the value prop, persona, etc. first.
If this is your first time hearing about Personio, it’s an all-in-one HR software that upgrades people operations for small and medium-sized businesses now and into the future.
That’s enough for introductions. Let’s dive in!
Phase One: The Early Days
Back in 2017, the marketing team at Personio consisted of around five people. Nobody could dedicate significant time to content marketing while we were hacking our way to meet monthly lead and MRR goals to secure our next round of funding.
We published some blog posts about topics that were relevant in the HR space at the time but we had no real activation strategy behind it. We didn’t see much impact.
Looking back, it’s far too easy to get stuck here. There is always too much to do and so much competition and stakeholders screaming for your attention (“Can you please write a byline for xyz?”, “Can you please write a post about our latest feature?”).
After a couple of months, we decided to focus the few content resources we did have on SEO content. Our research showed us just how much untapped keyword potential there was on the market.
While we only made slow progress on competitive keywords like ‘HR software’ we started to see traction for a few long-tail keywords while others fell flat — a pattern we would continue to see for a long time.
We published around five articles per month on our blog and at the same time optimised our product pages for SEO in order to be able to rank for transactional topics as well.
Key Learning #1: It’s always easy for a small plant to wither away. A push to save resources before you can prove the effectiveness of content marketing can kill your efforts. For any content marketing strategy, whether it focuses on SEO or social or PR, you need time and to commit to building a repeatable process that everyone buys into.
Phase Two: The First Playbook
We quickly began to realise that some of the evergreen content we produced for pure SEO purposes didn’t fit well on our blog. That was the place where we tried to establish Personio as a thought leader with timely and opinionated content.
We decided to launch what we call our ‘HR Lexicon.’ This is where all of our evergreen SEO content would go, while thought leadership would continue to be on our blog. This division became huge for us.
A little recommended reading: Your blog is not a publication.
The move paid off big time and we started to see rankings go up. Over time, we moved more and more articles from the blog to the lexicon and each time we’d see rankings and traffic increase. This was our ‘aha moment’.
Seeing first traction allowed us to start developing our playbook. We would come to refine it over time, but the general process for a while was this:
- Keyword and search intent research
- High-quality written production (internal and external) with no compromises
- Consistent optimisation for SEO and CRO
Pretty straightforward, right? But many companies actually miss out on step 3.
In addition, we also produced videos, thought leadership articles, whitepapers, webinars and established a newsletter and nurturing program. But the biggest needle-mover always came from our SEO efforts.
We thought about our content in terms of three core pillars:
For all three pillars our guiding principle was always quality over quantity.
At this point in the journey, almost all of the content we produced was in German. We had started with a German content marketing manager and soon hired a second to create more SEO content and more of the other content types listed above.
To this day, we still have two German content marketing managers that cover all of these aspects together.
The focus of this piece is about the strategic approach. But please keep in mind that you also need to get the technical SEO part right (href lang, canonicals, domain strategy, internal linking, information architecture, etc.).
Key Learning #2: Understand your user’s intent — any SEO expert will tell you this. But you need to incorporate this into your strategy, not just on a per keyword/page level. If you write evergreen content, create a space where all of it lives. If you tackle transactional keywords, build pages that serve this purpose.
If you try to win a juicy keyword with your product page but the search intent is informational, you won’t see much success. There are no shortcuts here.
Phase Three: Traffic AND Conversions
Fast forward a bit and we have some nice traffic and we’re growing 10–20% month on month. But what are we going to do with this traffic?
Influence All Stages of The Buyer’s Journey
Well, what’s the goal of content marketing? At the end of the day, it’s the same as for all marketing activities: to influence revenue at one or all stages of the funnel or buyer’s journey.
We tuned our approach to influence all buying stages as well as existing customers. We created brand awareness by driving a lot of traffic and we also generated touchpoints and conversions further down the funnel.
If you just drive traffic, you’re only playing the brand awareness game. If you only have your quarterly thought leadership whitepaper/study, you’ll lack the distribution to have it noticed by your target audience and intended buyer.
Find The Right Balance
To do this, we had to find the right balance. That balance is investing enough in SEO to drive significant traffic, while optimising for conversions.
That balance is also giving the user what they want, while getting from them what you want. Meet their search intent to rank and get clicks. Then offer different conversion opportunities so they can just pick which suits them.
Don’t try to shove them into a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. Don’t just advertise the shiny new whitepaper. Instead, continuously test different premium content pieces on all pages that get enough traffic to be worth a test.
Over the years, we have created 100+ checklists, templates, calculators etc. that match the user intent of certain pages (consider this a new chapter to the playbook).
The fact is that many users are not looking for your product or service right now. You need to engage them, but you also need to let them engage on their own terms.
Don’t focus only on your main conversion goal. If this is not what users are looking for, they simply won’t convert. You’ll need to experiment with different conversion goals.
This is where a newsletter as well as a nurturing program can pay dividends. They’re all key pieces of the life cycle, but that’s a different topic from today’s discussion.
Never Stop Optimising
In the early phases of a market, we would see conversion rates of 0.02% to our most important goals — that’s not a lot.
Through constant optimisation, we were able to roughly double that number each year. I can’t emphasise this part enough: You constantly need to optimise your content for both SEO and CRO (or even more simply, for the intended user).
There are two guiding questions we use here. For both, you don’t need any expensive tools. You’ll just need just the basics:
- Google Search Console: Which articles/keywords are getting a lot of impressions but not their fair share of clicks? Optimise these meta titles and descriptions until you nailed it.
- Google Analytics: Which articles convert at a lower rate than your average? Optimise these for conversions too.
Of course, there are many more things to boost your traffic and conversions but if you repeat these steps over and over, you’re guaranteed to see improvements.
Another way to look is distinguishing between content that attracts and content that converts. Most companies tend to focus too much on content that converts.
Content That Converts
That great new research? That shiny new whitepaper? That inspiring new blog post? They’re great. But how are we going to get them in front of our target audience?
If we feature them in our newsletter and post them on our company’s LinkedIn account, we’re going to get some reach. But we won’t reach a lot of new people. We’ll have to have a full blown campaign with PR, paid media, performance marketing, dedicated landing pages and more to get them in front of thousands of new people.
And by all means, we’ll do it. We need it to build our brand. But it’s a lot of heavy lifting and it requires weeks or months of planning every time.
A campaign like this focuses on one or few key pieces of content that convert an unknown user to a lead. But they need to be activated. Activation often requires the most effort — with the highest risk of failure.
So let’s look at how we can take on a lot of the heavy lifting with a different type of content.
Content That Attracts
There are different ways to attract the attention of your target audience. We focus on SEO here but there are other ways as well, from a well-run social media account to an amazing newsletter. Picking the right one depends on your product, your positioning, your competition and to some extent, also on the person executing it. You almost need different personality types for each to succeed.
The beauty about organic traffic from SEO is that you can get in front of millions of people at relatively little cost. Out of all the people visiting your site, most will just read the content and leave. That’s fine. We still count that as brand awareness.
But there will also be many that download an asset or subscribe to your newsletter if you position it the right way. Depending on the asset, this can be top, middle or bottom of the funnel.
And then there will be some that are actually interested in your product. Ready to engage or ready to buy. We get demo and trial sign-ups from all sorts of keywords, some obvious, high-intent but many more from long-tail keywords. These are keywords that we wouldn’t be able to afford with performance marketing at this volume.
We actually cover the whole funnel (including existing customers) with content marketing. We don’t just collect leads that are ready to buy, we generate demand for our product by solving the problems our readers have while offering our product as part of the solution.
To achieve all of this, you’ll need the right skills to complete the jobs to be done. You don’t have to have all of it in-house and often one person can cover more than one aspect at a time (depending on the size of your market/goals).
Key Learning #3: Equip your team to understand the balance between content that acquires and content that converts. Then, have them each do work to understand the balance and the value themselves — everyone needs to buy in.
Phase Four: Going (and Growing) International
As Personio grew as a company and expanded into more markets, so too did our content efforts. For each new market we launched, we transcreated (creative translation for local relevance) a content toolkit consisting of lexicon articles, key premium content pieces and SEO text for product pages.
Once we started to target more markets outside of Germany, we added a first and then a second English-speaking content marketing manager.
To increase productivity, they started managing freelancers and agencies that cover some of the research and write some of our content (through a focused and diligent editorial lens).
Not every market is big enough to justify a dedicated regional marketing manager, yet alone a dedicated content marketing manager. If we see enough SEO potential, we’ll still try to win it but have agencies that do the heavy lifting for us.
Each piece of content gets reviewed and edited at least by a second pair of eyes. It’s easy for the quality of content to suffer when you try to scale your efforts. We’ve always made it a point of emphasis to keep up the quality. It’s not only what Google needs, but more importantly what our customers need.
Once you go international, things get a lot more complex. Here are some of the many things we learned/struggled with along the way:
- Every market is different. Competition can be 0 to 100.
- Onboarding agencies can be a struggle with regards to quality. You need time to find your footing together.
- Constant optimisation is harder to do with agencies than producing new articles (CRO even more than SEO). How do you pay an agency for optimisation?
- Focusing English efforts on one particular region of the English-speaking world (when there are so many and English is often the language of business) is not as straightforward as you’d think
- It takes around nine to twelve months to get off the ground with traffic. It takes longer to see meaningful MQL numbers.
- Once a website is established in a market, new articles can rank within 2–3 days.
We’re still growing our organic traffic by roughly 50% a year at more than one million sessions per month. Relative growth is slightly lower in our home market while newer markets are growing at three-digit rates.
Key Learning #4: Invest early and have the stamina and patience to wait for the results. They will come, especially if you do it right and don’t cut corners.
Phase Five: What Next?
Over the last year, we have established a strong regional marketing team with experts in each of our core regions. As our markets and organisation matures, our organisational structure needs to do the same.
We’ve seen two interesting challenges with our current setup:
- Integrated campaigns can be tough to execute
- Our content efforts are not always fully aligned with our regional needs (typically, regional teams have local needs that go beyond any central strategy)
That’s why we have decided to move from a pure content team to regionally-focused teams where content marketing managers still work together in a centre of excellence but become part of our regional marketing set-up.
The idea is that this will ensure better alignment with our markets. But, we will maintain a centralised content strategist and centre of excellence across the board. It’s a move we made with confidence because of all the phases that preceded it.
We are moving in this direction because it makes sense for Personio at its current stage with great alignment and learnings. But we first needed that more tactical ‘centre of excellence’ to evolve into the more strategic kind we have nowadays.
The Final Key Learning
As people, we often overestimate what we can get done in a day or a week but underestimate what can be done in a year or two.
Content marketing is a long-term play that helps you scale, but it can be tricky to balance if you’re scrambling for every lead or are looking for yet another mini-campaign in an effort to try and ‘save the month’.
That’s why you need full buy in across the organisation. And not just for three months, but for a minimum a year so you can actually reap what you sow. Trust me, it will be worth it.
And that’s it, you’ve made it to the end. If you want to discuss any of this feel free to reach out on LinkedIn. I’m always eager to learn how others are doing it, how to best set up the team, what tools to use and all the nerdy SEO stuff.
