📝 How to plan content on a monthly basis?

The following is based on a Q&A session I did at Saleswhale.

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.