B2B SaaS Startup Sees 190% ROI With First Year Of Growth Content! [Case Study]

When looking to grow your company, there are many different tactics to consider. Between paid ads, social media, email, and content marketing you can end up spending your money on various campaigns across multiple channels.

But how do you know which tactic is the best one for getting directly in front of your target audience? And how do you know for sure that you’re not just burning money for the sake of driving more unengaged traffic to your site?

That’s why we decided to create a new approach to content marketing—an approach that’s rooted in data and custom-tailored to the specific needs and wants of your designated target audience.

We call it Growth Content.

This is the story of how one of our clients used Growth Content to drive a massive amount of traffic to their website—achieving a 190% ROI within the first year!

(Note: Not all websites are built the same. If you’re curious about how long it might take for your company’s website to grow, check out this study we did around our average website growth for clients.)

Now, let’s take a closer look at this client’s first-year performance with Growth Content in this Nectafy ROI case study:

Client Profile

Industry: B2B SaaS

Product/service: Cloud computing software

Client lifecycle: First year

Average monthly investment with Nectafy: $5,320

Results After One Year Of Growth Content

Blog Traffic: reached 8K pageviews per month
Blog Leads: gained over 140 total blog leads
Total organic sales: $185,900
Total Nectafy investment: $63,840
ROI: 190%

The Bottom Line

In the very first year of doing Growth Content, this company invested $63,840 and returned $185,900 in organic-driven sales.

Before Working With Nectafy

Before reaching out to Nectafy for help with its content marketing efforts, this client was doing a decent job of growing its website using internal resources.

In the span of nearly two years (from Jan 2019 to Nov 2020), they managed to grow their monthly blog traffic from around 300 page views per month to an impressive 4,000 per month.

So why did they reach out to Nectafy if they were already seeing positive progress?

The main answer = scalability.

During our initial communication, the client informed us of their team’s overall lack of bandwidth to continue producing monthly blog posts at their desired rate for further scaling up of website traffic and leads.

Also, while they had seen some success from their content, certain blog posts weren’t getting any traction and they were unsure how to proceed further with these underperformers.

That’s when they decided to turn to the Growth Content experts at Nectafy.

Results After Working With Nectafy

Blog Traffic Growth

After publishing a total of 40 blog posts in the span of 12 months, we were able to help this client grow blog traffic to over 8K page views per month with Nectafy-produced content.

That’s twice the traffic produced by their own internal content efforts in half the amount of time—talk about scalability!

Blog Lead Growth

This growth in blog traffic also led to a massive uptick in blog leads. In the same span of time, Nectafy-produced content generated a total of 146 blog leads; most of these leads began arriving four months after publishing our first blog post.

Keyword Ranking Growth

Since keywords strongly correlate with organic traffic growth, we also measured their monthly keyword rankings using Semrush’s Position Tracking tool.

Keyword rankings are important to track on a monthly basis because they are the main driver for a website’s organic growth and the leading indicator that traffic is on the way—even before the traffic data starts to file in.

To clarify, keywords are the specific questions (or queries) that people type into search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) that eventually lead them to a blog post or website that helps answer their questions.

Keyword rankings are the positions where a blog post or website is listed in the search results for any given keyword.

For more information about keywords and keyword rankings, check out our blog post around using Semrush for keyword research.

In the screenshot below, you can see how this client’s keyword ranking growth (aggregated into a single chart using Semrush’s visibility metric) correlates with the two screenshots above showing their organic traffic and lead growth.

Some keyword ranking highlights for Nectafy-produced content over these 12 months:

• Semrush keyword visibility metric improved by nearly 12%
• 67 total keyword ranking improvements (with 52 of these happening on the first page of Google search results)
• 13 new keyword rankings moved into the top 3 search results (top of the first page of Google)
• 17 new keyword rankings moved into the top 10 search results (first page of Google)

Key Ingredients Of Growth Content Success

Wondering what we did to help our client achieve this level of success?

The answer to this ties back to Nectafy’s Growth Content ingredients:

Here are the specific actions we took across these four areas with this client:

1. We set realistic keyword targets. (SEO)
2. We consistently produced high-quality content. (Content)
3. We leveraged client insights and knowledge. (Industry expertise)
4. We did monthly reporting and project check-in calls. (Process)

1 Setting Realistic Keyword Targets (SEO)

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Whenever we onboard a new client, the first thing we do is create a thoughtful, data-backed SEO strategy for their Growth Content efforts. This is what we like to call the NectaPlan.

This NectaPlan consists of the following:

• We measure a client’s existing keyword rankings (before working with us), their average monthly organic traffic, domain authority, and other website factors to help gauge where they are in terms of overall website growth.
• We make sure the client has an established Buyer Persona to whom we can direct our content. If they don’t have one, then we work through the creation of their first Buyer Persona with them to properly identify our target audience.
• We identify keyword targets within our planned content that align with the factors listed above and that have a realistic chance of ranking for their website.

Through this layered approach of identifying a specific target audience and gauging where a client’s website fits in across the competitive landscape, we are able to pinpoint our Growth Content efforts around keywords and topics that have a realistic chance of ranking at the top of Google and other search engine results pages.

This SEO-focused approach to content planning ensures that each dime spent on Growth Content is going toward something that will eventually make an impact for our client websites; this is the same exact process we followed with the client we’re spotlighting in this case study.

2 Consistently Producing High-quality Content (Content)

Buena Vista Pictures Distribution

One of the many things we take pride in here at Nectafy is the quality of our writers, because you can’t produce high-quality content without top-notch writers!

All our writer applicants go through a rigorous evaluation process, which is how we’ve managed to create an ecosystem of high-performing writers that consistently get the job done for our clients every month. Plus, we make sure every piece of content is reviewed by an experienced editor. The end result is a steady stream of publication-ready posts—which is exactly what we delivered for this client.

Now, as skilled as our writers may be, we also understand they’re not going to have a firm grasp of every client’s niche. This is where our next action comes into play.

3 Leveraging Client Insights & Knowledge (Industry Expertise)

Tenor

Rather than sending our writers out to mine the internet and recycle information from other top-ranking articles, we made sure every piece of content we worked on for this client was original and uniquely tailored to their audience. To do this, our writers interviewed numerous subject matter experts (SMEs) at our client’s company.

The reason: No one knows this product and its place in the industry better than their own team—so why try to emulate their expert insights through paraphrased content from other blogs?

That’s like asking a chef to make your favorite dish for dinner without letting them know what type of food you prefer in the first place! (Okay, now I’m getting hungry.)

Through video SME interviews, our writers were able to create unique pieces of Growth Content for our client’s blog that stood out compared to other content across their list of competitors.

For more information on how Nectafy works with SMEs, check out what one of our other clients had to say when it came to fine-tuning their SME process for Growth Content, and how it helped them reach two million organic views on an annual basis!

4 Monthly Reporting & Project Check-in Calls (Process)

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Finally, in order to measure the impact of our Growth Content efforts, we met with this client each month to review the status of items in their pipeline and highlight the impact of their published Growth Content on their website and overall business.

Using various project management and reporting tools, our Growth Content strategists and client success managers meet regularly with their respective clients to review reports and upcoming deliverables to help keep their Growth Content engines running smoothly and reliably.

For more information on our client reporting process, check out this post.

Additional Key Ingredient: Client’s Dedication To Producing In-house Content

One additional ingredient that helped lead to this client’s organic traffic and lead growth was their decision to continue to produce in-house content while also working alongside Nectafy each month.

While this strategy isn’t typical, this particular client decided to double down on their in-house content efforts and managed to produce an additional two to three articles of their own each week.

This combination of in-house articles and Nectafy-produced Growth Content helped performance to soar across the board when it came to organic traffic, leads, and keyword ranking improvements.

Think your business is a good fit for Growth Content?

Book a call with us today to talk about why you believe Growth Content is a key part of your long-term growth strategy—and find out how Nectafy can help drive your business forward!