The following is a transcript from a lunchtime talk I gave at Saleswhale.
Saleswhale talk from Visakan, ReferralCandy
Left 3mo ago
How the RC business model works
I was functionally the first marketing hire. I was #6 when I joined. The first 5 were engineering, technical. Founder was talking… consensus was that you needed a blog. So he knew he wanted to run the experiment of having a blog. Found me through my blog, invited me.
~100-ish users. When I joined, referral revenue was ~$2.6m. When I left, it was $100m.
When I joined it was about 1000 blog hits a month, when I left we had crossed about 120,000
Helped with hiring, recruiting
What ya’ll would be interested – how we grew, how we built our marketing team.
It was a very trial and error process for us. When I joined, prior to me joining, they would have a few freelance bloggers writing posts on the blog, they themselves wrote a couple of posts, but they didn’t really have the time to think too much about it. There were maybe 20-30 posts. We were also posting on forums, blog comments. We were also on Facebook and Twitter – we didn’t think anybody was going to sign up through those channels
First year or so, mostly comments + forum posts + blogposts, trying to make sense of our market. There’s this kind of concurrent process going on – you want some sort of marketing output every day, week – be shipping blogposts, be shipping stuff – on the other hand you also want to be improving your understanding of your customers, who they are, what they want, where they hang out
Along the way we realise, oh, people don’t just think “oh I want a referral program”, they think in terms of their platform. When we’re producing content – on our end it feels a bit stupid, it’s almost like you’re changing the titles – “how to setup a referral program for Shopify” – each gets more leads than a more general post that the average potential user doesn’t care so much about, so we had to figure that along the way
We realise that you need to care about SEO – search traffic, what keywords you want to rank for, what’s the search intent. Am I making sense so far?
How do ya’ll plan what to write on a monthly basis?
Good question. Early on it was super unscientific. My first blogpost was like “how sharing makes us smarter” – there’s this whole funnel approach to thinking about this sort of thing. Eg ReferralCandy is a referral program product. And there are people who want a referral program for themselves – they’ve seen referral programs themselves in the wild, “get a referral program” is on their action item todo list. Those folks, we can get them quite easily just by having a good product, a good website.
Then there’s this larger group of people who don’t even know that they want a referral program – so we have to educate them. But nobody types into google “teach me about referral programs” – you’re not going to get taught about a thing you don’t know about. So you have to figure out what are things that people already care about that are kind of adjacent to what you care about – we try to figure out what the interest groups are, content topics are.
We decided to frame it in terms of word of mouth. People who are interested in word of mouth elsewhere – we would do blogposts analysing other companies’ marketing strategies. Commence stores – think of an commerce brand like bonobos – they make pants. So imagine you’re another ecommerce brand – making shorts. And you recognise bonobos, and you want to learn from bonobos. And in that blogpost discussing bonobos, we also talk about referral programs.
If you’re not convinced word of mouth is important, we’ll convince you that word of mouth is important.
examples of guerrilla marketing. Or how “X book” talks about marketing.
A thing I learned about a year in that I wish I learned earlier. It’s easy to forget when you’re a writer that readers have some set of things that they already care about – so instead of coming up with something from scratch that they might not don’t care about, you have to go after than with something that they care about, and then lead them from there to what you care about. And the connection has to be genuine, you can’t just be like, “celebrity -> AI chatbot”. And of course you’ll lose people along the way. And off course there’s a drop-off.
That post has authority in google’s eyes -> link to a blogpost about Starbucks’s marketing strategy -> word of mouth -> referral program. So it’s about figuring out all the roads that lead to what you’re trying to sell.
Figuring that out was like the first 2.5 years of my career – and it’s an ongoing thing.
Initially we had about 3-4 in-house writers – eventually we found that once you’ve articulated your marketing strategy very well, you don’t really need a lot of in-house writers – when they left it didn’t make sense to hire new in-house writers vs hiring engineers, product people, etc.
So we had freelance writer -> one in-house writer, more writers -> smaller again -> freelancers. But now you know what to tell the freelance writers what to write, very specific instructions that fit your branding. All these pieces are aligned with what people come to expect
Why would you rather work with freelance writers?
It’s cheaper! There’s a whole science/art to this. The way to get the absolute – this is my belief, not everyone will agree – the way to get the highest bang for your buck – is to find people who are very early in their marketing careers. to provide value to your writers – a few of my writers have told me that I’m their favourite editor. Which allows me to pay them a lot less also ah. The thing is I don’t feel bad saying that. How it works is I have a budget, and my budget is not that big.
And I could pay one professional $500, or I could pay multiple students $50, $75, and because I give them such precise instructions, and guide them through the process, they get to write something that punches above their weight, that is of a higher calibre – than they would’ve been able to do on their own. And some of them are now charging other people $200-$500 per post. Which I feel very good about. Even if I had a bigger budget, I get satisfaction out of helping these newbies become more professional – then they can go on and do what I do at a new team. I think this maybe also applies to engineering – if you hire someone else to join the team, they’ll have a new set of things that the highest priority.
How do you frame your marketing strategy?
So everything I’ve talked about so far is content
I was the first hire – after about 1.5-2 years in, when we started to get clarity knowing what we’re doing, we hired a marketing director, Dave. Dave’s job was a senior marketing role relative to mine, and he has experience running marketing for another company – and in there is figuring out attribution, ads, a more wholistic, big picture – partnerships with other companies, webinars. Figuring out what everyone should be doing… when it’s one person, you have to do everything, but once you have more people, it makes sense to specialise – like a football team – defender, midfielder, etc. I didn’t have to worry too much about the overall strategy – it’s not that Dave decides what to do and I do it without thinking – we have conversations about what’s going on, and I understand – I focused more on producing content – this is just to give context as to how the marketing team was structured, how it takes shape as it grows from one person to more person.
Even within content there is content strategy – there are few different ways to look at it. One is to maximise for traffic, one is traffic to lead conversation, one is signups. I think we were very agnostic – the end goal is revenue – we were agnostic as to how we do it. we do several things at the same time, one person working on long form, one person doing short, snackable content. We trial and error, have a sprint process and quarterly goals – “oh this months we must get X backlinks or we’re dead” – but it’s useful to decide to focus on one thing at a time. Instead of each thing going up a little at a time – it’s like experimenting. If everything goes up a little bit, you don’t really learn anything because you don’t really know what’s going on. But if you focus on a different thing each month, and you find that something has signups increasing in correlation to it, then that’s a sign that it’s something you should look into, explore deeper.
One month, let’s comment on everything. One month, social media like crazy, one month blog hard. Ooh, blog response is doing interesting, let’s do more of that. Search intent is hard. One month lets do lead cap experiments, one month lets email… but it’s possible to overdo that too, some things don’t reveal their value until many months down the road. On that front it depends on the team, it depends on the organisation, can go all the way up to the CEO – what s the Vision that the company. Yesterday I met a CEO and he was telling me that he – every month they have things that are urgent for the month – and every month you know that if you did a content + community + branding push, 12 months down the line, it’ll pay off. I’ve never been the CEO of a startup so I wouldn’t know how – it’s easy to say as a content person “of course you should have more content” – it’s a conversation that I think the team should have about their values and their interests and their long term goals.
How do you think about distribution?
We’ve had a few different distribution strategies over the years – long ago we’d go on twitter, look for something that’s being shared in the marketing space – Adweek, etc – we’d search the URL of some post – and those posts are breaking news type posts so it’s quite short, and we’d manually tweet people who post A and share “hey we have a more in depth Post B” – but over time it seemed like twitter shares of that sort of content isn’t as legit, there are more bots, less engagement.
The thing about distribution is you work backwards. Before you even write it, who’s going to read it? Who’s going to share it? Who cares? You should never write anything without a bunch of people in it. And don’t quote Branson or Bezos or other big shots because they’re not going to retweet your stuff – quote like the VP of marketing experience of Airbnb – that guy will be happy to retweet – it’s like ego-bait. I have to retweet this and share with all my friends. It’s a win-win thing – if ya’ll make a medium sized person who’s saying the same thing that a famous person would say – and you celebrate them – it’s also relationship building, you know. Each new piece of content that we work on, we try to find people we can quote in it, email them, tweet them, they’ll be happy, they’ll show it off to their audiences.
If you can take a point of view on something that there’s an existing community about – analysing crossfit, post on /r/crossfit and people can argue about it. We’ve actually done a thing – I get my other colleagues and we have genuine disagreements about an article while we’re writing it – and that’s great because then you can have that disagreement in the comments – and it can be interesting
A thing I struggled about early on – I want to write about X, but also in my mind, maybe not X? There are imperfections, flaws, things can go wrong if you do Y, it can go wrong if you do this… and it feels that it weakens your argument, but it’s actually all about how you frame it. I’ve written things like I write a blogpost, then disagree with my own blogpost in the comments – and then people have an interesting conversation. You can criticise… academics do this too, right, this study is limited, need more data, etc. invite people to have a conversation
Once you learn how to do this, it’s very sad to look back all the content you spent 2-3 days writing about that nobody cared about
What are the KPIs that y’all measure?
- Blog traffic month on month
- Leads from the signup forms on the blog – popups, inline boxes that collect emails
- We have some attribution – when someone signs up on the site, we can tell who goes to the blog and then subsequently signs up, so we track that and we want that to go up. Oh we have 100 posts and 20 posts are the things people visit before they signup, so we make more posts like that. I think my manager’s KPIs were signup and revenue, and there’s “average revenue per new retailer” – it’s up to ya’ll what you want to measure/track.
I personally care about intangible stuff – long-term goals like building relationships with other people in the marketing space – every year people do a roundup “best marketing content 2017” – and it’s nice to be featured. It may not give you customers or signups overnight, in the long run – as an individual is nice to make that your personal goal. I think it’s good for the brand of the company, makes the company look better.
We’ve had things like engineers go to Ruby meet ups and they hear “ey you’re from ReferralCandy! I read the ReferralCandy blog.” And when I hear that at lunch it’s like yeahhhhh! “If you can do more of that or get more signups, I’d probably prefer you get more signups” – it’s so context dependent and everyone has slightly competing interests. I think I would have made the trade the other way. But of course working in a team means having a compromise where everyone is happy.
What do ya’ll expect of your content person?
I think it’s good to be precise about what your expectations, what you want. Sometimes people will say things like, the blog user experience at RC was never *great*. You wake up, go to work, it could be better. But it’s always so easy to say what you would’ve done on retrospect.
The thing is the average reader doesn’t really care – and even if they do… there are bigger priorities? It’s good to know – it’s to know why you’re prioritising what you’re prioritising.
How do you balance awareness stage article vs talking about your solution
We tried to alternate, to cycle through the types of options. At one point we’d try to do 3 pieces a week, one for each stage of the funnel. At some point we realised that there was an opportunity to get a lot of content in the middle-of-the-funnel range for quite cheap. At some point it was a 1-2-1 split. But I don’t think readers really care, if they’re mostly coming through search? When you do something balanced, and one part is doing extra well, it makes sense to prioritise the part that’s doing well. There’s always some way you could bring in a word-of-mouth perspective on anything marketing-related.
Early on we tried to publish as much as we could – there was a period of time where we were publishing almost every day – the content wasn’t great, but we wanted to take as many shots as we could to see what would happen. I wouldn’t do that now, because I have a better idea of what I’m trying to achieve. You take as many shots as you can, but you want some amount of confidence that the shot will be on target. So you optimise for shots on target. And initially you don’t even know what a shot on target is, you’re shooting in the dark.
Content should have something to say – I have all these internalised heuristics about what minimum viable content is – take person X from point A to point B, describe both points clearly. If you can do that then it’s a viable blogpost that’s potentially useful to people. I don’t know if you can do one a day. Depends on the complexity – there may be something you can do – but you’ll probably run out fast.
It really depends on how confident you are that you know what you’re talking. Imagine say… a very strong subject matter expert in some part of law, and they start a startup that solves some law-related problem – he can write very quickly, what to do when X happens, what to do when Y happens – all the work is already done in his head. Very often a very good place to find these insights is from your customer support people. If they’re repeating something to your customers regularly, there’s likely something that will make a good blogpost – CST can even share the blogpost with future customers. It has currency, it’s being used…
It’s easy to forget that everyone on your team is also a reader. You can always write content that’s useful for people on your team, and then they can use it, share it. The ‘currency’ of the content is very important, useful
Whenever somebody tells me that they use X to teach other people how to do something – even if the net traffic is not that much, the conversion rate of that traffic in terms of how people feel about your brand, is very high. “I read a blogpost about how to do X from the ReferralCandy blog, you’re looking for a referral program? Maybe check them out”. The thing that affects this variable s that your content has to solve a problem. I wish there was an easy answer but there isn’t really one.”
How does the composition of the marketing team look like
At first was about 4-5 general purpose junior marketers and one director. As each team member left we replaced them with more specialists. An ad specialist, an email marketing specialist, a content marketing specialist – ET built out our email nurturing campaigns. We had a remote guy working on partnerships and webinars, one person doing nurturing, one person doing content. Then another guy joined doing content, then I left.
Nurturing and content have to interact a lot – she’d ask me, I want to nurture about X Y Z, and I’m like yes, there’s A B C content that does that job. And if there isn’t, that’s often a sign that I should write something. People who talk to your customers have insights – free blogpost!
> ratio about blogposts – do you have a split in mind
One way I think about it is – there should be content about every aspect of our product. Anything that anybody might slip up on, if CST says people signup and don’t know how to choose incentives then there really needs to be content about choosing incentives. We tried referral guide, but nobody wants to sit down and read through everything. For referral programs there’s about 30-40 posts maybe that… not everybody needs to read every single piece of content. We just want to make sure that anybody who wants to know anything to know about their product, that’s keeping them from signing up, doing well, those hot button issues – you want to make sure you have good content that addresses all those issues.
It’s worth doubling down and updating on past content if it’s doing well – think of the aeroplane thing
When we did marketing strategy posts, we saw that those posts were getting lots of traffic, it’s good for morale, good for getting backlinks – we always have some hypotheses or ideas about what are we not doing that we should try, every month we try something, I’d say the odds of something weird being useful is maybe 10-20%
Very early on I was curious, what are all the referral programs out there? We have a list of our own clients, but what else is out there? I searched for it and there wasn’t a list. In the past you’d get Starbucks, Delta Airways, etc as separate search results. I published a very clunky, ugly list – but now it’s the #1 example if you search “referral program example” – it wasn’t part of a strategy, it was just something that I thought should exist. I had enough time and space to do it. But there’s no way I could’ve done that in its current iteration off the cuff. The cool thing about online content is that you can update it. You can’t do that with a print magazine. If something works you can build. If it doesn’t work you can delete it or ignore it.
So you pick any ratio as you start, double down on what works and cut down on what doesn’t work – and it’s probably different for different industries, products
> education – how did you vs CST worked on how to educate your customers on using RC in the best way possible, vs internal account managers
I take reference from them. I defer to them because their KPIs are to keep people from churning, help them be successful – and over time they get a better understanding of how to talk about them. Everything that CST discovers is super useful because that’s how our customers think
> internal tone of voice?
Every so often we would bring it up as an action item in our marketing meetings and chats, we’d do slides, we should be talking like this? I think everyone just followed the existing style. We have loose guidelines – use numbers, use links, don’t be boring, conversational tone, use contractions, first person POV – but it’s not like we’re married to it… with my FL writers I send them my existing posts and say “write like this” – header image, paragraphs, subheads. But we’re not dogmatic about it
> paid strategy?
I wasn’t directly involved in Adwords, I cannot speak about it with authority – whatever I know about it secondhand from my marketing colleagues. I don’t think it was super useful for us, I don’t know, my confidence level is like 30%. I think the keywords that we would have liked to rank for – we already rank organically for the keywords that matter for people who’ll signup. Sometimes we have competitors who buy “referralcandy” and it’s actually not a bad thing for us, since the real competition is not our competitors but that most people don’t even care about referral programs. Higher up the funnel, it’s more expensive and the conversion rate is not so good
If you try it you’ll see results – $X go in, Y signups come out – it’s then hard not to keep doing it, because you can justify it. even now if I started my own company and am trying to rank for stuff I am not a fan of paid ads, but maybe I’m being naive or something on this front. I guess you have to test it? Monthly signup rate of X, and then you put in your paid ad, test it and see how much your signups increase, then turn off and see how much it drops, but you can’t read the minds of the people clicking you have to test it ah. Not very useful but better than me giving you a confident wrong answer
re: content and SEO – how long would you say is a good time period to see results from what you’ve written
The beginning is the worst, you get nothing. By the second or third year, everything I’m doing has an almost immediate impact. If I publish a post it’s going to rank on Google for its particular keyword/phrase. It depends on what kind of content you have, how in-depth it is. My rule of thumb is, you probably… the first 10-20 posts probably won’t get that much traction. It’s almost like you’re a band playing with no audience and you need to feel good about it yourself when you look at it, share it manually, solicit criticism.
There’s a know-how to this. If I start a new blog, I will be quoting people, emailing people, but there will be some traction – but still, google doesn’t trust me yet, stuff like that. I guess 20, I was going to say 100 because I used to shoot things out anyhow – it depends on your personality, your style, what you’re good at, it maybe good to encourage that. You can’t just throw… I think readers can tell if the content is forced. You have to try and make it natural.
How long should you give yourself before you expect any results… I would say a year to be safe. If I started now maybe 3-6 months, realistically about 9 months. If you’re diligent about it and do all the groundwork and distribute and email… 2-3 months maybe? You learn as you go. If you could be doing that you wouldn’t be asking the question.
What kind of metrics would you say define a great blog? What should one aim towards after year
For any company, you would want to have company that’s respected as industry standard. A lot of companies – intercom has posts about what intercom does, people will share content about their stuff. Buffer. Zapier. Product blogs – there’s a slight difference between wanting to be the best blog and wanting to serve the product – there are probably companies that might even over-invest in the content efforts but the product is not that great, and eventually they’re talking about general stuff but they can’t even celebrate the product. You can spend 2-3 years making a great blog that everyone likes but if your product is not doing well, then your product blog will also kind of stagnate by extension.
I think ideally the product blog should challenge and inspire the product team to be better. What to expect… you should have some things that you’re personally proud of. It shouldn’t just be traffic. Optimising for traffic can lead to not good traffic – but Starbucks white girls… I’m proud of the incentives post. Writing a very good “how to” post is something to be proud of, because then that piece of content is now like a living document that supports with people, and you can share it now they feel helped, you have improved their day. Sounds fluffy but it has measurable impact. Do you track the shares, yeah – actually the thing I care most about is backlinks – ahrefs – who are the people who are linking to your content?
Super simple level how google works – page rank – who’s linking to who – and one way to bootstrap – the measure of significance according to google is page rank, who is linking – a single backlink from gov.sg is worth more than 100 crappy backlinks from random sites. In a sense you can reduce the act of content marketing for a startup into a “game of backlinks” – to get that you have to have stuff that is worth linking to, so it’s kinda circular. You can almost celebrate when you get good links from good places. Wanted to go knocking door to door. A thing I tried to start once but never got around to doing was content marketers in a region – without being deceptive or malicious – but it has to be honest and legitimately relevant, real currency.
Do you target content towards engineers?
I’m quite proud of bytes, very good at helping us hire – people underestimate the amount of anxiety before you join a team, you don’t know if it’s a nice place to work, what life is like – there’s a lot of value in that sort of content. We’ve had people find us through other things as well. We have backend-related content, and that stuff was interesting to them, hacker news. Interesting stuff is everywhere.
RC did really well at one point because the marketing strategy content was optimised to be linked to – content that is moderately useful to readers, but very useful to other writers that need to link to content, and that boosts your page rank. But the most important thing is that the reader experience never gets compromise.
I sell t-shirts – local t-shirts, Singlish stuff – and I wrote a blogpost on my t-shirt company’s blog about the best t-shirt companies in Singapore, and that is the top ranking post for “Singapore t-shirts” – while I’m pointing at competitors, I get more traffic. Our enemy is not our competitors but people who don’t care. Indifference is the real problem.
> my take – as long as its consistent and manageable for you – there’s no hard fast rule – Godin posts every day, 300 words – works great for him – Tim urban, waitbutwhy
Yup that is the holy grail when you can really captivate your audience such that they really want to hang off of every word. So it also depends on your personality – better that you do what feels right for you – at the same time working in a company there’s some compromise to meet business goals.