Guerrilla Content: 30 Growth Hacks To Content Marketing Success On A Limited Budget
My journey into content marketing actually started in 2004 when I went to work for a well-known market research firm that very few people had actually ever heard of.
They hired me as their first VP of Marketing. My team of 1 (me) had absolutely zero budget to start. But as a research company, we did lots of surveys for clients who wanted to use the survey data to build reports and get good PR.
My first taste of success in what we now call content marketing came when our website crashed from all the traffic we received for an article I wrote based on survey data from the American Cleaning Institute. Yes they are a thing!
The article was titled “Survey Reveals How Many Of Us Pee In The Shower.” (77% is the answer if you’re wondering. Gross, right?)
But the main thing I learned was that 1 fun, helpful, or entertaining piece of content can outperform all the copywriting for product web pages on why we were the best company to conduct surveys. But in order to win this game, you gotta go guerrilla baby!
Quick Takeaways:
- Guerrilla Marketing is art of using free or already available resources to attract your audience to your website.
- Growth Hacking is the science of testing creative ideas, using analytics and demand metrics to sell products and gain exposure.
- Applying both guerrilla tactics and growth hacking to content marketing can bring you huge ROI on a limited budget.
Here’s an example to get your creative juices flowing:
96.3 Rock radio’s free air guitars:
How to do content marketing with (almost) no budget?
At the research firm, I took our greatest asset: survey research. And used it to continuously update our newly revamped website to drive inbound leads for our sales team. I taught myself SEO basics and used a list of target keywords to create and distribute stories on our latest research.
Traffic on our website grew exponentially. Inbound leads started coming in to the company on a consistent basis for the first time. I even spent some time teaching the CEO about digital marketing and how to do paid search.
He ended up saving my job, my house and maybe even my marriage. But for that story you have to go read Mean People Suck.
Growth Hacker Content Marketing
When I initially proposed content marketing at SAP, many people asked, “How much software you gonna sell with blog posts?”
Luckily I had a direct manager who saw the declining effectiveness of traditional advertising. She knew that the digital age demanded more engaging and consistent content marketing.
At the time, we were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising landing pages. These destinations had 99% bounce rates, no organic search traffic and zero social engagement. I asked for a fraction of that cost to build our thought leadership content hub.
So for a third of the cost of a throwaway landing page, I built a content marketing program to serve as the landing destination for advertising, and to reach new people with great content marketing.
Once we started publishing, we saw a 20% lower bounce rate, almost immediate organic search traffic and a growing level of social engagement.
That is growth hacker content marketing. The site basically funded itself – it had a return on investment from day one! And we were continuously testing, iterating and improving our results.
Guerrilla Content: How To Growth Hack Your Way To Content Marketing Success On A Limited Budget
OK, so now you have a site built. But how do you produce enough and a consistent volume of content, at an acceptable level of quality, to stay relevant to your audience?
This is where you can turn to what I call Guerrilla Content:
Guerilla Content: content created with almost no budget, simply by re-purposing things your organization already has.
For example, people ask me all the time how do you find to time to create and share content? The answer: I re-purpose stuff I already create. I look at my email outbox. Each one is an answer to a question!
In many cases, it is a few paragraphs and detailed enough to turn into a blog post. I turn my powerpoints into slideshares. I turn my keynote speaker notes into articles and my speaker videos into lead generation assets. This example from during the pandemic brought me about 5 new clients:
Why keep content created for a few dozen people from reaching hundreds or thousands?
The first 24 blog posts I wrote on SAP’s Business Innovation were all white paper summaries I wrote from content that was sitting in a campaign library.
So if you are looking for your own Guerrilla Content, here are some ideas I’ve used along with some examples:
30 Guerrilla Growth Hacks To Content Marketing Success
- Identify the top issues and trends on the minds of your executives or customers
- Survey your prospects / ideal audience profiles for their top challenges (this should define your editorial strategy)
- Answer the biggest mistakes people make in your industry
- Profile your executives and customers by asking Who are you? Greatest challenge? How you solved? + Profile photo and turn it into a blog post.
- Ask multiple experts “what is the future of” your industry
- Ask people to share their worst mistakes
- Share the best examples of . . . content marketing in our case.
- Answer the simplest questions about your solution category like what, why and how.
- Use Klout, Buzzsumo, Topsy, YouTube, Slideshare to identify “best of” lists like this.
- Highlight content you love from others (OPC = other people’s content): Infographics,
- People to follow,
- Blogs to read,
- Slideshares,
- Linkedin Pulse articles,
- Videos,
- Conferences,
- Books,
- Quotes,
- Facts, etc.
- Define the terms You Need To Know on [your topic]
- 8 Steps To Success In [your topic]
- Best Practices For [Topic]
- What [Hot Topic] Means for [Your Issue]. My Example: What Google’s New Algorithm Means For You
- Re-purpose content from your own campaign material, or
- Cover research reports, or
- Highlight analyst reports
- Turn marketing keynotes + Speaker notes into articles
- Customer service people are a great resource. Ask them to identify your customers’ biggest questions or FAQs
- Turn customer testimonials (talking head videos) into “customer profile videos” by just taking out the promotional parts.
- Ask your employees who attend events to provide you with their notes.
I also suggest teams sit in a room once a quarter and bang out lists of content ideas. Here are a few resources to help you with brainstorming your own list of Guerrilla content marketing ideas:
- Top Resources and Tips to Develop Blog Topics Your Audience Will Love
- The Ultimate List of Blog Post Ideas
- 8 Ways to Brainstorm and Manage a Year’s Worth of Content Ideas
Feeling overwhelmed? Let Marketing Insider Group be your guide to creating ROI-producing content without breaking your budget. We’re not free but for less than the cost of sponsoring 1 webinar, we can bring you a years’ worth of content ideas, full-length articles, and reports that prove our value.
Check our our annual blogging service today or reach out for a free content marketing assessment.
This is a great list, thanks Michael. I wish more people would share their worst mistakes because there’s a lot to learn from them. Understandably, few people want to admit how bad they fell on their face, but I think it would help “raise the tide” a bit faster.
I agree. I did a “biggest mistakes” series for a while. Maybe need to pick that back up. Sharing lessons learned is great because it requires the humility to admit that you are never perfect but always striving towards getting better. It’s exactly what growth hacking is all about.
Great list. I loved your story at the start of the article. A lot of really successful content marketing today has truly unique, proprietary data that sets it apart. Your work at the market research firm would be an example.
So, it can be harder to tackle, but another tip is to think about what kinds of unique data or information your organization has access to, and how can you use that to produce new data that’s broadly interesting or ties into popular media topics of the day. Your content effectively becomes a primary source for 100s of other people’s content.
Thanks Gordie, I really appreciate the support. And totally agree with you. Many brands try to focus so much of their differentiation on how they speak but the real value in my opinion is in the unique research and expertise they have to offer. Tone and voice are important, but not as important as the things you are speaking about!
Great synopsis, Michael, and great advice for those starting out. Even for those who have lots to share, you’ve given some valuable tips & tricks.
It is really interesting that you share insights on how you started content marketing at Nielsen and SAP :=)
Is “Guerilla Content” a thing or did you “invent” the term? :=)
I thought the name was apt. I googled it briefly and didn’t find a single thing. But I have never “invented” anything in my life. I probably overheard some say it somewhere and the poor guy or lady deserves credit 😉
Thanks so much Mark. Really appreciate your support and great to “see you” here. Hope everything is going well.
Great post Michael. Long time reader. Personal context and scores of helpful links and lists. We’re glad to have you and your insight.
Thanks so much Rene. I’ve been getting over to the UK (London) a few times now this past year. We should grab a coffee or drink next visit.
Jay Conrad Levinson (RIP) was “The Father of Guerilla Marketing.” Jay was all about teaching people to really think about their marketing – and of course, about their target market, and how to reach them without blowing your budget. If he was still around, I’m sure Jay would say this is a great post.
Thanks so much Alan. That might be one of the nicest comments I could imagine getting. I appreciate the support. I truly believe that good marketing is less about getting more money and much more about being more “guerilla” – stopping the stuff that doesn’t work and focusing relentlessly on results.
Hi Michael. Great post.
I love stories, so I especially loved the story of how you got into content marketing. I think your idea of repurposing content is so important for two reasons:
1. It saves time.
2. It extents the life of the content.
Those are two huge things we all need to do. All of us are short on time and all of us would love for all the work we put into creating content to have a greater impact.
And the list you put together is such a great resource.
I especially love your point about creating a book. Many people who think they don’t have time to write a book would be surprised to discover that they probably have ALREADY created enough content to repurpose as a book.
I just took over 3 years of blog posts that I wrote on my site (and other sites) and compiled them into a book. I added what I call “content marketing hacks” at the end of each chapter and it ended up being 48 chapters and 258 pages! And the final product has been very well received.
I would anyone else with a blog to do the same. Take care, Michael.