Too many companies with great ideas fail, not because their idea is terrible, but because they fail to acquire customers fast enough. While ineffective marketing is always a good place to improve customer acquisition efforts, more companies should focus on building their product in tandem with growth marketing efforts. Just like marketing is the tip of the iceberg for a company’s success, marketing’s failures only tell half the story of the company’s shortcomings. 

What lies beneath the surface of a successful new company: product design, content marketing, SEO, and growth all working in harmony together. While each of these elements serves a distinct purpose they must work together to drive outsized results and return on investment for entrepreneurs, marketers, and investors.

In other words if you want to launch a successful product you really need to understand how your product decisions will ultimately drive or hinder your growth efforts.

Product Mistakes & Growth

Product mistakes will kill a fantastic business idea before it even gets off the starting block.

What many founders don’t realize is that the launch is only the first step in what will be a very long journey to profitability. By not fully comprehending the length of the journey, many founders and their teams make marketing an afterthought.

As product people, it’s natural to think that innovation alone will drive adoption. Spoiler alert: the market doesn’t care about your product, you have to make them care.

Despite being technically savvy, many product owners do not understand the mechanisms behind social media marketing, the technical parts of SEO, or even how small changes in sharing or conversion rates compound over time. What’s fascinating about digital businesses, is they all have unlimited access to demand.

An estimated 4.96 billion people use social media and the internet every day. So it’s never been easier to get in front customers and sell them something cool or innovative. The question is how do you cut through the noise when everyone else is thinking the same exact thing?

The easy (and not so easy) answer is: by understanding our innate desire to consume stories, and the mechanisms of digital distribution, product owners can better engineer features for marketing and revenue generation.

I’ve seen so many startups struggle with executing against these two very basic elements. Entrepreneurs and sales teams then blame their failure to grow on the marketing and growth team. While I understood this approach in theory, I never understood how damaging missing the basics could be until I joined Thirstie.

Thirstie was a liquor delivery startup (think Uber for booze). They’re still around, but a series of massive mistakes forced them to pivot to building ecommerce infrastructure for liquor brands instead of being acquired by Uber, Drizly, or Instacart. Still a great business, but as an early employee or early investor it was not the outcome you signed up for, So I’m sharing this cautionary story because it’s avoidable and I see many early stage companies making the same mistakes almost 10 years later.

Thirstie made three major mistakes that made it nearly impossible for them to hit their growth numbers.

1) Not using a proper Content Management System for the product’s web pages

This meant that every new page that wasn’t a shopping page, had to be custom coded, or worse lived on a blog hosted on Tumblr. The founders refused to move the blog and so all the content that was created helped improve Tumblr’s ranking for alcohol-related content and not Thirstie’s.

2) Producing pages that were not crawlable or unique

On top of the content not being unique, without a CMS to spin up the pages the content was not indexable by search engines due to the lack of a URL. Also by choosing Tumblr out of convenience they were forced to look backward at their mistakes, instead of looking forward and developing iterative product tweaks based on data that could lead to app store features, and other growth opportunities. Thirstie lost over a year’s worth of incremental progress that could have led to greater investor interest, or revenue growth simply by not paying careful attention to the basics of product design, information architecture and SEO.

3) Not producing high-quality original content

The founding team had identified a real need for recipes and alcohol-related content and were committed to making it a part of their user acquisition strategy. Having spent some time doing SEO for craft beer and food sites, I knew there was a ton of search demand. Consumers were struggling to find consistent, high-quality alcohol-related content. It was clear that Thirstie could really help consumers solve that problem, and then monetize that interest through e-commerce sales.
So Thirstie inked a big partnership deal with a food publication to republish their cocktail recipes instead of creating their own. Of course, while this was a huge strategic win for the business, but search engines disregard duplicate content in making their rankings. The first page of results in Google search generate 76% of all click-through. The duplicate content meant that the food publication gained the SEO credit from Thirstie’s recipes due to the hundreds of backlinks that they gained overnight. This SEO gaffe killed Thirstie’s rankings and pushed them to the fourth or fifth page of Google’s search results because Google saw the site as some sort of spammy content farm.

The point of this cautionary tale is that growth hacking and product-led growth are not buzzwords. The companies who use these tactics effectively make them a fundamental part of their product, business, and marketing strategy. At these brands, growth and content marketing are part of their culture, not an afterthought.

Using Content to Develop Products Primed for Growth

Unlike paid forms of advertisement, content marketing continues to generate results even after publisher has stopped caring. It can take some time for your efforts to get going, but once they do they never stop producing results.

It’s easy to say “we have a content marketing strategy, or we’ve hired a great editorial team, or have a top production agency on deck” To make ANY inroads with content marketing you have to commit entirely to it, it has to be part of your company’s “why?”.

For content to deliver, it's essential to understand the following:

1) SEO

How your website and should be designed, and structured with a proper taxonomy for search engines to properly index is crucial. There are two ways to think of SEO: it can either be editorial or it can be product based. Even if it would be challenging to rank in your niche for editorial content, there might be a great opportunity to spin up pages based on the information that already exists in your product’s database. So even if you are in a competitive niche, you may be able to capture the long tail of search simply by surfacing your brand’s values through content on automatically generated pages. But it starts by understanding your product’s purpose, SEO, and your product’s USP>

2) Content Management Systems (CMS)- It's crucial that your CMS has some basic SEO functionality. There are tons of platforms out there, so it's all matter of preference, features, flexibility, and what you feel comfortable with

3) What delights your customers- if you know what your customers are looking for (search) and know how to create content that engages them (social discovery, email) then the only thing you really need to focus on is creating a delightful content experience for them. Sometimes it’s as simple as having a unique take on issues in your niche and so blogging might suffice. Other times it might be creating an entire library of tutorials on how to get the most out of your products.

4) Why do people use your product(s) or service- what is the value that customers get from using your product or service over your competitors? What is your unique selling proposition?

Use that insight to not only drive your content strategy, but also where that content lives and how and when it’s surfaced to users throughout their product and customer journey. By being thoughtful about your product’s intrinsic value and positioning you can many engaging ways to bring that value to the surface in the product. That will also drive delightful experiences and create brand value.

Focusing on this will make it so much easier to create the hooks and lead magnets that will generate clicks to your content, but also conversion to sign ups, email open rates, and ultimately revenue events ($$$).

4) Compounding Effects- It easy to get caught up in big wins, but big wins in marketing for small brands are hard to generate. Instead focus on improving each stage of the customer journey incrementally, and do so in a thoughtful way that delights your customers. These small improvements can have a major impact especially when we take into consideration network effects.

Don’t be Thirstie. Spend real time thinking about how your content could be a game changer for your customers and company. Then commit resources to find the right talent, platforms, and tools to build a world-class content-focused growth engine. Doing so will allow you to accelerate your awareness and acquisition efforts for a fraction of what it costs to run paid ads or influencer campaigns. With that clarity of focus, content can deliver a return on investment many times over, every year, for years on end.

5) Network Effects

Network effects within a product can take on many shapes. When thinking about how content plays a role in network effects it’s more about the value users and consumers get that makes them want to share that content or tell their friends/colleagues about your brand. This may have been referred to as “virality” in the past, but not every business needs to go viral. A slow consistent burn within a high-value, or highly-engaged niche could be a 7-figure per year business or revenue stream.

Thinking deeply about how your product can make it easy to share content, or how to share your brand’s USP (value) is key to reducing friction around growth. Make growth a part of your product, and your product will grow.

Content As a Product & Brand Moat

We know that companies who focus on developing unique features, and compelling services stand out from their competitors and win in the marketplace. That unique product in combination with compelling content will help them leverage the power of recommendations, and network effects allowing them to cut through the noise and accelerate growth. 

Content as a product refers to the creation and distribution of written, audio, or video materials that are intended to inform, educate, or entertain a particular audience. In recent years, the concept of "content as a product" has become increasingly popular among businesses, as it allows them to establish themselves as thought leaders in their respective industries and build stronger relationships with their customers.

One of the key benefits of content as a product is that it can serve as a "brand moat" - a term popularized by Warren Buffett to describe a company's competitive advantage. By consistently producing high-quality content that is valuable to their target audience, businesses can differentiate themselves from their competitors and create a barrier to entry for new players in the market.

For example, a software company that produces educational content on the latest trends in technology is more likely to attract and retain customers than a similar company that does not offer such resources. Similarly, a fashion brand that provides fashion tips and how-to guides will be more likely to engage customers and build loyalty than one that does not.

Another way that content can serve as a brand moat is by creating a loyal following of customers who are invested in the company's mission and values. By consistently providing content that aligns with these values and mission, the company can create a community of customers who are more likely to remain loyal and recommend the brand to others.

However, it's important to note that simply creating content is not enough to establish a brand moat. The content must be of high quality, relevant, and consistent. Additionally, it's important to have a clear strategy in place for how the content will be promoted and distributed to reach the target audience.

With that in mind, if your website, or product isn’t properly designed to capture the interest surrounding the product or business then you’ll struggle to convert awareness into real growth. Without growth you’ll lack the customer insights to turn your cool product into one that’s truly sticky. So in that sense using content as a product is incredibly valuable in both creating a brand moat and a product moat.

This is why content marketing works so well, there are so many facets to it that it can provide valuable insights to product teams and help turn acquisition funnels into sticky product features. Most companies struggle to get real results from content marketing. Brands that do succeed at it are able to do so because they make all the aspects of growth a part of their product roadmap from day 1.

While you may not be able to meet your competitors on a level playing field on the day your product launches, you can identify new opportunities and new angles for growth, you can eventually take the higher ground. As marketers and entrepreneurs we only gain a real sense of the enormity of the business challenges when we begin to work through them. The hurdles and the path forward are never revealed to us when we begin the journey.

However, by understanding the basics of search engines, social media platforms, and how people consume the content you can eliminate any blockers that could handicap initial growth before they become a systemic business issue. By making these smarter product decisions and really understanding your target customer, you won't have to work as hard to acquire customers. They'll work with you, to help you grow faster over time and that’s the real growth hack.