ProjectManager.com’s biggest initiative of 2019 was to release a brand new version of our software that’s loaded with new features, improved UX/UI, and various under-the-hood improvements.
Our product team worked insanely hard to build the new software, so the marketing team was on the hook to ensure the promotion goes well and that we get as many new eyes on the software as possible.
The Product Launch
For months, we prepared for product launch day. We planned out every marketing initiative we could dream up: PR, social media campaigns, paid campaigns, giveaways, etc.
When launch day finally came, we unleashed all of our marketing campaigns and managed to make quite a splash. We announced the product launch through VentureBeat (a dream for any tech company) and new customers started pouring in. In fact, we set new customer sign up records 2 months in a row after the launch.
This is where many companies would have ended their launch marketing. But we knew that in order for us to see consistent growth, we would need a longer term strategy. We don’t just want 2 months of epic growth, we want epic growth every month! This is when we made the decision to focus on organic growth strategy for the new product.
Phase 2: Organic Growth
The window of launch promotion was now closed — there’s a limit to how long we could hammer our audience with “Try the new software” messaging.
Now that the new software was live, we needed to shift our energy towards building evergreen marketing assets that would bring in new customers month-after-month.
Our plan was to develop a content strategy around all of the new features in our software.
The most important new feature that we added was our Kanban boards. This one new feature allowed us to target thousands of new keywords that we previously had zero content for. We made it our goal that if someone is in Google searching for anything related to “Kanban”, we need to get in front of them.
We started building out a new “keyword universe” for kanban related search terms. Using AuthorityLabs, we compiled every new search term that we wanted to rank in Google for. We then tagged and sorted the keywords out into different categories to keep things organized.
Finding the Right Content Targets
Using AuthorityLabs search volumes, we found “Kanban” to be the best top-of-funnel head term with 40,500 monthly searches. We decided to build an Ultimate guide to Kanban for this term, because we would need high quality content, and lots of it, to rank for such a high volume keyword. The search intent for a head term like this can be hard to pin down, so we would also need lower funnel keywords for better targeting.
For the mid funnel, we chose target keywords like “Kanban project management” (590/mo volume) and “Kanban methodology” (880/mo volume). For these keywords, we decided to produce learning content, ie “How to use kanban methodology to manage your projects”.
Finally, We selected “Kanban software” & “kanban board” as our keyword targets for the bottom of the funnel, where the most qualified buyers are searching. We chose to build a software page for these keywords that would explain ProjectManager.com’s kanban tool and why users should try it.
Tracking The Success of the New Content
Once our new content was written and the pages were built, we began the content promotion process. In order to measure the success of our efforts, we used the AuthorityLabs Rank Tracker to track our new keyword rankings over time.
For example, here is a screenshot of our Google rankings for the keyword “kanban board”. Within three weeks of launching the new content, we watched our rankings improve over 75 positions in Google:
And sure enough we started to see traffic growing for our new content and keywords:
Scaling Organic Growth
After we finished the content for “kanban”, the process was rinsed and repeated for other new targets. This scales really well, as we can take the same process and apply it to any content theme we want. The process looks like this:
- Find themes and keyword targets
- Produce the content
- Promote the content
- Measure the results
- Rinse and repeat
The amazing thing about this organic system we’ve built is that the results it produces are evergreen. A traditional product launch can lose steam rather quickly, but a content and promotion plan for the product yields more-and-more new traffic to our website every month. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.
Organic has been a core driver of our company growth (our monthly website traffic is now in the millions!) By combining this content marketing strategy with our other paid advertising, product, and sales initiatives, we’ve built the growth engine that’s landed us on the 2019 Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in the US.
