Engineering luck in Content Marketing
How a simple story about our holiday policy went a bit viral, and how that benefits our business
A while ago, I wrote “Content Marketing is a startup’s secret weapon”, which turned out to be a tremendously popular piece. In the past week or so, we’ve seen an example of exactly how helpful effective content marketing can be.
Back in February, we wrote a piece with the admittedly deeply link-baity title “How our unlimited holiday allowance backfired”.
At the time, it was relatively popular, but nothing to write home about. It was still a good — and relevant — piece, however, so following my own advice, we semi-regularly re-promoted it via our social media channels.
That must have worked, because last week, Inc did a piece, which kicked off a load of dominoes.
The Inc story is basically a third-person re-write of our findings in the original post, but that’s cool — they linked back to our post, and mention Triggertrap by name.
How did we end up on Inc? Not sure — you’d have to ask the lovely Ms Stillman — but given it took a solid 6 months between us writing the article and them covering it, I imagine it could be attributed to our social media pushes… Or perhaps it’s just that ‘unlimited PTO’ is a hot topic these days after a few big players introduced it recently.
Either way, it’s one of those un-engineerable moments where something goes viral 6 months after it was released.
And then the magic starts
After Inc’s story, things went a little bit mental. Smart Company did a piece based on the Inc story, after which the Batty Post jumped on the bandwagon, and Slate ran the story as well.
From there, it started going to the far corners of the world. You know something slightly weird — and utterly magical — is happening when a friend from the US points out that your little startup is featuring on television in Texas — twice, in fact, before turning up in NRC — the Dutch version of the Financial Times, and in Dagbladet, one of Norway’s biggest tabloids.
From there, we ended up on Yahoo’s finance news, in Spanish, no less. More? Sure, why not — we were covered on Boon.hu, a hungarian news source; and on Talouselämä, over at Tivi.fi, and at Iltalehti; three Finnish websites.
The true value is that a whole new segment of potential customers are discovering us for being a progressive, interesting company who are not shying away from a challenge.
Creating a follow-up
The interesting thing in all of this, is that our blog post is six months old, and it refers to a holiday policy that was already six months old by the time we wrote about it, so we’re looking about 12 months back in time. In it — as per the title — we identified a problem with the policy itself, and we course-corrected.
But we hadn’t yet reported back on our findings, which were overwhelmingly positive. So, Triggertrap’s brand new Managing Director Mat did a follow-up piece with our 6-months-later update, which is also getting a fair chunk of traffic.
What’s the benefit?
Now, you may ask yourself, what’s the point? All of this traffic is about a holiday policy which had an unintended effect, but that ultimately has very little to do with the product, right?
Well yes. But if you have a trawl through all of those articles where we were mentioned, you find something magical: They all refer to us as “British photography equipment company” or something to that effect. So, if you were reading that article, and you were into photography, you might take a look.
Much more importantly, for us, is that our ever-obvious challenge is that we are struggling to reach as many customers as we want: We are frequently covered on photography news sources, of course, but the sad truth is that not everybody reads those. To us, the true value in this particular streak of articles is a whole new segment of potential customers are discovering us for being a progressive, interesting company who are not shying away from a challenge. When you think about it — before they even click on the link to find out what we do, the potential customer already has a positive first impression of us, and that certainly can’t harm.
So, have we seen a tremendous amount of extra sales as a result? Well; yes, our sales are up by 20–30% for a few days, but that’s not the true value of this: We’ll have been seen — and hopefully noticed — by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of potential new customers, business partners, and future employees. And again; if this is their first impression of us, that’s a big, fat win.
Considering the cost of writing a few blog posts (negligible), and the potential upside (huge), you’d be crazy not to.
How can you make this happen?
The sad truth is that engineering this sort of virality is difficult; it’s always a throw of the dice. But there’s one thing you can guarantee when success is reliant on a dice throw: Throw the dice more often, and you’re eventually going to come up with double sixes.
Considering the cost of writing a few blog posts (negligible, considering that writing up our experiences is something we’d be doing internally anyway), and the potential upside (huge, if a blog post goes viral), you’d be crazy not to.
Realistically, it’s a simple game: Create great content that excites you, and keep seeding it to people who you think will enjoy it. Maybe even send the link to a journalist or two.
And never give up.
Updated 20 July 2015: Added 3x additional websites covering the story.
Haje is a pitch coach based in Silicon Valley, working with a founders all over the world to create the right starting point for productive conversations with investors — from a compelling narrative to a perfect pitch. You can find out more at Haje.me. You can also find Haje on Twitter and LinkedIn.
