Content-driven growth
There are five unique content-driven growth strategies:
- User-Generated SEO-Optimized (UGSO): Your users generate public content which Google finds and surfaces in organic search. This primarily drives the growth of companies like Quora, Glassdoor, and Reddit.
- Editorially-Generated SEO-Optimized (EGSO): Employees (or contractors) of the company create content with the goal of ranking higher for certain keywords. This primarily drives the growth of companies like Ahrefs, Slidebean, and HubSpot.
- Data-Generated SEO-Optimized (DGSO): This strategy is the combination of UGC and Editorial – your company auto-magically generates thousands of individual pages off on your UGC and proprietary data. This primarily drives the growth of companies like Thumbtack, Zapier, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Grubhub.
- User-Generated Virality-Optimized (UGVO): UGC content leads to users sharing that content with their friends, which then pulls those friends into the product. TikTok is the ultimate example of this (users sharing watermarked videos with each other), as is the Reface app. The edges of this zone include Airbnb listings (that users share with each other) and Zillow’s Zestimate (which home-owners pass around).
- Editorially-Generated Virality-Optimized (EGVO): Employees/founders make one-off viral content — also known as thought leadership or brand building. Content that the founder/company creates with the goal of having that content spread through WOM. This includes Spotify Unwrapped, along with virality-oriented creators like Mr. Beast, Stir’s one-off drops, and Superhuman’s early blog posts.
[see original article for deep dives into each]
Most relevant during:
PMF phase
GTM Fit phase
Scale phase
Most relevant for:
ACVs < $15K
ACVs $15K-$50K
ACVs > $50K