Grammarly’s Marketing Strategy: Growing to 20+ Million Users via Content Marketing
Grammarly’s marketing strategy perfectly proves that content marketing generates 7.8x more site traffic than all other channels.
Don’t take my word for it.
Sit back and watch me expose exactly how this SaaS company powered its way to over 20 million users, hinged primarily on content marketing.
Hint: Grammarly’s target audience positioning tactics equally plays a huge role. you’ll see how.
To spy into the complete details, read this well-researched guide till the end (and drop a comment if you need some clarifications).
The Foundation of Grammarly’s Marketing Strategy
Grammarly owes its enviable success to having a well-defined content strategy.
You heard me right.
Content marketing is king. Hence, having a great strategy for it is the bedrock required of most SaaS brands to drive growth (like Grammarly does).
Unfortunately, according to the Content Marketing Institute, only 39% of content marketers document a working content strategy. And just 42% of them try to understand content product users’ and prospects’ needs.
Are you one in any of those odd numbers?
You shouldn’t be.
That alone is why most SaaS content marketing doesn’t produce results.
However, if you’ve ever doubted the importance of having a defined content strategy to guide your SaaS marketing efforts, Grammarly’s results will shock you.
I’m sure about that because I was also shocked when I tried to feed my curiosity and asked:
How much of Grammarly’s content strategy contributed to it reaching a market valuation of $1.3 billion, as of 2017 and millions of users?
A lot.
So, in this well-researched exposě, you’ll discover:
1. How much traffic Grammarly’s content strategy drives/month (it’s in double-figure millions and very targeted).
2. How their target audience positioning plays an important role.
3. How it played a significant role in the company reaching 20M+ daily active users.
4. How the company’s content strategy powers its social and paid acquisition tactics.
5. Bonus (free guide to create your SaaS content strategy and replicate Grammarly’s fantastic results)
Fasten your seat belt, I promise you gon love this one.
How Much Traffic Grammarly’s Content Strategy Drives/Month
According to estimates by SimilarWeb, Grammarly gets over 41 million unique visits/month.
A whopping 26.4% of that comes from search with about 85% of all search traffic being organic.
Which reveals two things:
- One: Those are visits from people already in need of their solution.
- Two: Relevance and scale. I did the math (41 million*26.4%).
The result?
About 10.66 million prospective customer visits/month.
Capturing product interests, and doing it at scale, are critical to the lifeblood of any SaaS or B2B business.
Lemme tell you why they’re so important.
Currently, SaaS and Saturated have become identical words. According to Chief Martec, there were over 7,000 of them as of 2018.
More joined that party in 2019.
Many have died off, too.
For those who survive, like Grammarly has, something is common among them.
Wanna know that common thing?
It is the thoughtful creation and distribution of relevant content pieces.
And, of course, engineered by a proactive content strategy.
Sorry.
When it comes to content marketing, which generates 3X more leads than PPC and should be the engine room of all your marketing efforts, not just any strategy will suffice.
What would work?
A content strategy tailored to the needs and interests of your customers and prospects, which also supports your business goals.
Yes.
You can’t just copy and paste what everybody is doing because every business case differs.
However, you should look at other high-performing companies for insights and ideas for powering yours.
As for Grammarly, they use what I call the Content Topic Clusters’ Strategy, CTCS.
Grammarly leans heavily on this strategy to capture the interests of people who are likely to use their software and at scale, as per my investigation.
How so?
This unique strategy enables the SaaS company to position itself correctly for its diverse target audiences. Also, it sets the tone to attract and guide them into product trials and paying customers.
Grammarly’s Target Audience Positioning
As you’ll know, Grammarly is a SaaS product whose target audience includes everyone from students to entrepreneurs and enterprise companies.
In short, anyone who writes or edits.
As a SaaS content strategist, I use it almost every day.
Students and academic workers use it to edit their written drafts.
Startups and enterprise companies use the group license to enable employees to edit emails or other communication materials.
Hence, considering Grammarly’s diverse target audience, the company doesn’t position itself to one particular demographic.
Instead, it uses relevant content pieces to appeal to everyone based on their needs: To write better, to edit better, and to communicate better.
These are things everyone aims for.
So, as these diverse target audiences turn to the search engines looking for better ways to write, edit, and communicate…
Grammarly’s content strategy and well-thought-out content marketing pieces capture them into site visitors, leads, and customers.
How?
By creating articles and short written tutorials, teaching people (its diverse target audience) about how to improve their writing skills.
By so doing, they rank on Google’s featured snippets, and on the 1–3rd spot for most keywords, which drives millions of traffic to Grammarly’s site monthly.
For example, examine the screenshots and highlighted keywords below:
Grammarly’s content piece ranks for the keywords, “affect or effect:”
They also rank on the first page for “whether or weather:”
There’s even more.
Like “canceled or cancelled” (and countless others), which their content pieces get featured snippet rankings:
Ready to get blown away?
Then take a look at the jaw-dropping volume of search traffic these content pieces attract to Grammarly’s site per month:
Over 4 million monthly website visitors from just three (well-thought-out) content pieces.
However, this enviable achievement isn’t driven by just writing content pieces here and there.
It’s by having a well-defined SaaS content strategy.
An area where Grammarly’s marketing strategy leaves its competitors (and most SaaS companies) in the dust.
How Grammarly’s Content Strategy Helped to Drive 20M+ Daily Active Users
Before we delve in, what exactly is Grammarly’s content topic clusters strategy anyway?
Excellent question.
In a nutshell, it involves bundling content pieces into relevant clusters under relevant topics.
Content clusters grew in prominence with the introduction of SEO topic clusters in 2017.
Lemme briefly explain how it works.
At its core, the content topic clusters strategy, CTCS, helps you to become a topical authority (or category creator) on key concepts relevant to your business.
But that’s not all.
It also enables you to cluster pertinent content pieces around those topics, giving your site an excellent internal link structure.
This structure allows the search engines to crawl your site correctly and improves customer experience, as site visitors can easily navigate and find relevant content pieces.
Ultimately, you get higher search rankings, which leads to the predictable organic acquisition of leads, and customers.
See this structure in the image below:
In the scenario above, each cluster contain contents to address both informational and transactional customer queries.
Then, they’re linked together to achieve context and improve user experience with some lead magnets between them.
This process is only logical, considering that research revealed that 47% of B2B buyers read 3–5 content pieces before activating any sales talks.
Hence, by clustering and linking related content pieces together, user experience improves because prospects who find one content piece can easily click through to a related one.
That’s exactly what Grammarly does.
The screenshot below shows how they do it in real life:
As you can see, the blog post, “5 Essential Writing Tools For All Writers,” has links to related articles, providing more value to the reader and pulling them further into Grammarly’s sales funnel.
Specifics on How Grammarly’s Content Strategy Powers its Sales Objectives
The company has over 2,100 content pieces on its blog page alone.
For a SaaS product used by both B2Cs and B2Bs, if these content pieces were just written and thrown here and there, they’ll be scattered and difficult to target which ones go to their different audiences.
Worst off, it’ll prove difficult for prospects to discover them, as there would be inconsistent links for structuring related content pieces to form clusters under the same topic.
Grammarly knows that.
That’s why you shouldn’t let that volume (over 2,100 content pieces) confuse you.
Volume is, of course, critical when necessary, but it isn’t the only force behind Grammarly’s content marketing success.
The company achieves success by first having a content topic cluster strategy in place to bundle the contents they create and promote to specific interests (and pain points) of audiences the company targets.
These include students, marketers (content marketers, editors, copywriters), and businesses (with the logic that internal communications are more effective when the right words are used).
According to top marketing pro, Aaron Agius, of Louder Online:
“By learning about the values, desires, and pain points of their audience… The content team at Grammarly has consistently produced superb actionable articles to boost engagement and remain visible.”
Aaron Agius.
It’s why over 84% of Grammarly’s entire organic traffic are unbranded searches, meaning these searches came from people who didn’t have the company in mind when they began researching:
And that’s helped them achieve the holy grail of growing any B2B or SaaS business: Getting consistent traffic from new prospects organically.
Why so?
As long as people search online for solutions to the problems you solve; then, even you too can acquire prospects organically and turn them into customers through a content marketing strategy that suits your business.
Why do I believe so?
Status Labs’ study found that 90% of online searches for products or services started online, and these were by people who didn’t have any brand in mind when they began researching.
Status Labs’ research was interesting because it revealed that:
- The majority of people researching for solutions like yours (SaaS and B2B) start online.
- And when they search, they’re more interested in knowing how to solve their problems and don’t have any brand in mind.
Hence, any company’s website having contents with the most valuable information stands at the forefront of pulling them into their sales funnels.
Grammarly’s content strategy does that excellently, powering the company to reach over 20 million daily active users.
The steps they used to achieve it are:
As more people continue searching for tips to overcome their writing blunders, Grammarly’s contents continue to bring in more traffic:
This ever-increasing traffic is apparent if you look at the top pages driving the most traffic for the company: Content pieces targeting people’s writing challenges:
As the volume of web visitors increases, the company gathers more keywords to create content. Thus, new organic keywords to create new clusters grows steadily:
Wondering how they turn those visits into millions of users?
Firstly, these content pieces focus exclusively on providing the best information to help visitors overcome their writing pains.
And that’s paramount.
In content marketing, it’s best (and you can always win) if you always concentrated on adding value with your content.
Then, while doing so, as Grammarly does, you invite readers to take action on that problem, which is where your product/service comes in:
Finally, at the end of each content piece, you can then make the invitation to try out your product or service more glaring. Then, take it further by linking related cluster content pieces under the same topic a visitor just read a content piece on.
Again, it’s exactly what Grammarly does.
This way, as readers navigate to other content pieces, they gather more information about what prospects really want, creating a system that improves its content marketing by itself.
The company’s Co-Founder confirmed the above steps in a podcast with Growth Everywhere, when he said:
At Grammarly, “ content marketing is an instantaneous feedback loop.”
Max Lytvyn — Grammarly’s Growth Marketer.
Adding to that, the company’s social media manager also emphasized the fantastic role organic content plays in driving Grammarly’s Growth.
In an interview with Contently, she said:
“ Our main metric is organic engagement ratio (engagement total divided by organic reach) though we sometimes look at total reach when relevant.”
Kimberly Joki — Grammarly’s Social Media Manager.
Hence, you can see that Grammarly relies heavily on its content marketing strategy to not only grow its business but retain existing customers, reaching over 20 million daily users in the process in just 10 years.
In case you’re asking, isn’t social media, paid acquisition, and the fact that they offer a free version of their tool more responsible for Grammarly’s growth?
You’d be wrong.
The company’s content strategy also powers those channels, as you’ll now see below.
How Grammarly’s Content Strategy Powers Its Social and Paid Acquisition Tactics.
First thing’s first, how do you come up with inspiration and ideas for your social media posts and ad campaigns?
For most B2B and SaaS brands, they push banner ads, repeatedly project their product features, or blab about how they trump the competition.
Does that help your target audiences overcome their hurdles and achieve their goals (things that pull them to you)?
No!
That’s why even when you get so many views or click-throughs, your important conversion metrics are still crickets.
How to do it better?
Do it as Grammarly does it.
Through its many relevant content pieces, which have been structured with a content topic clusters strategy that bundles and links related contents
…they get a better understanding of the writing challenges of people across different geographic regions, based on readership.
That alone yields information about what posts they should make for their different social media channels.
As a result, the company gets thousands upon thousands of engagements and shares across all social media channels.
As you see above, the reason why they get thousands of social engagements is because of the relevance of the contents they share.
Where those contents come from?
Their overall content strategy!
That isn’t all.
It’s also by having the right content strategy in place that Grammarly oil its paid acquisition campaign engines.
I know this because before I signed up for a paid account with them, the display ads I received from Grammarly were very targeted and unique to my goals: creating better content marketing pieces for B2Bs.
Being a marketer myself and having documented the content topic clusters’ strategy, these are the steps Grammarly uses content marketing to deliver ads that are more likely to convert:
As you can see below, each of Grammarly’s text display ads targets specific audiences, even though they still address the same pain point of writing more effectively.
And that’s why display ads alone account for about 5.22% of Grammarly’s overall 41 million uniques (that’s more than 2.4 million/month warm prospects going back to check the tool out).
You can also see this in the company’s YouTube’s ads, where some get tens of millions of views and engagements.
Look closely and you’ll notice that the videos having the most number of views are the ones direct from the content pieces on their blog.
The secret?
Simple.
These ads were relevant.
How?
Grammarly pushed them to people who had enjoyed one or two or three or more of their content pieces, showing them inspirational stories around overcoming their writing challenges.
And that should be your key takeaway.
Always target the interests, pain points, challenges, and goals of your prospects and existing customers.
B2B and SaaS is an industry in which you can survive by just having 1,000 loyal customers paying you monthly subscriptions.
Hence, ensure you have a content strategy in place to produce and promote content pieces that keep them successful and they could forever remain loyal to your brand.
That way, you’ll also be building a community that’s far more valuable than your tool, which ensures your churn rate remains negligible.
Make sense?
Good.
My Conclusion on Grammarlys Marketing Strategy.
Concentrate on the creation and promotion of content pieces that help your prospects and existing customers become better.
Specifically, target their interests and pain points.
Don’t sell.
Then, group these content pieces and link them into content topic clusters, as that would improve the user experience by providing more value per web visitor.
Based on how readers consume your content, create audiences of people that visit specific content pieces. Use these to inform your paid acquisition efforts.
Finally, even when you move to paid acquisition tactics, you still have to keep the messaging around their interests, pain points, and goals.
Which means always looking back to observe how your content marketing is performing.
So, is your SaaS content strategy performing? Are you getting results (leads and sales) from your content marketing efforts?
If you’re not (or crave better results). You may need a better strategy.
Get the complete SaaS Guide to developing a content topic clusters strategy (so you can replicate Grammarly’s success).
Originally published at https://victoreduoh.com on September 19, 2019.
