Self Perpetuating Growth

I used to think self perpetuating growth was unhackable. I assumed it was the natural consequence of a company's growth efforts over the years. The interesting thing about experience is that if you let it, it will destroy wrongly held notions and make you into a more skilled professional. Anyway, experience taught me that mechanisms for perpetuating growth can be built into demand generation funnels.

I started a growth marketing company to test my theory (because no one would employ me to play around with multiple funnels) and what a success it was—story for another day! Moving on, in June 2023, I started a new role as growth lead at Norebase and I spent the first 6 months of my time building a framework for self perpetuating growth. This episode describes my strategy and the results.

Brief background about me: I'm a growth and content marketer whose priority in any marketing role is to achieve appreciable growth using content-led demand generation funnels. I built a few productive funnels at Equally AI, after which I started my own company The Content Advocates and helped dozens of startups achieve demand generation. Most recently, I joined Norebase as the Growth Lead. It is at this point that we begin our story.

Figure it out first, automate later

As marketers in the age of AIs and automation technology, we tend to incline towards automating everything from the start. Automation is good, but timing your automation is better.

When I joined Norebase in June 2023, I spent the first 2 weeks looking at the existing content systems, identifying gaps, and spotting opportunities. At the time, about 60 articles had been published and Norebase only ranked #1 for the keyword "Norebase". My goal was to improve inbound traffic (organic search, direct, referral, and social), generate higher quality leads, and increase revenue generation from digital channels.

I started by optimizing old articles (adding newer outbound links, fresh data, internal links, and better images), then I identified other low hanging fruits in keywords with about 500 to 1000 monthly search volume and began to publish articles targeting those keywords. I used topical relevance + strategic content distribution as my approach.

Essentially, I published one or two pillar articles per keyword, and anywhere between 5 to 15 supporting articles, plus a bunch of guides, templates and other helpful material. Then I manually distributed the links to these articles in forums on WhatsApp, Facebook, and other places where people were genuinely interested in the content. It was only after I confirmed that this process was working and reproducible that I automated the funnel.

This approach ensured that we simultaneously generated relevant backlinks, qualified direct traffic, and eventually, organic search traffic. Plus, and this is a very important plus, the content was packaged in a way that people could share it. A good number of our articles included free templates, hacks, and strategies that people found helpful and shared with their networks. Of course, a funnel is incomplete with just lead generation.

The next part of the funnel was qualifying the leads and nudging them further down the funnel until they become customers. The leads were qualified using pop-up forms on the blog and website. We gauged lead intent based on the article that led them to sign up for our newsletter. Naturally, leads were segmented based on this same premise and followed up with email drips.

Here are the results:

Monthly organic website traffic:

• Before: 637
• After: 1,660 (260% increase)

Monthly direct website traffic:

• Before: 549
• After: 1,652 (300% increase)

Monthly organic blog traffic:

• Before: 264
• After: 1,640 (621% increase)

Number of pages ranking in top 100 search results:

• Before: 12
• After: 50

New leads gotten from the blog monthly:

• Before: 20
• After: 200 (1000% increase)

Achieved #1 on SERP for 5 new mid - high volume keywords

Obviously, I wasn't going to show you revenue numbers, but from the traffic numbers, it's clear that a good content marketing strategy is way more than just optimizing for search engines. You must optimize for other channels and most importantly, optimize for customers—only then does it become a growth strategy for demand generation.

In Closing

Since December, without optimizing for new keywords, we've ranked top 10 for 4 new keywords (positions 4, 3, 3 and 1). The traffic numbers just keep increasing on all fronts. This is self perpetuating growth—growth that begets growth.

One hack worthy of re-emphasizing in this strategy is how the content is distributed. It ensures that we get a ton of high quality leads. And from articles that don't rank yet, we still get conversions through direct traffic. Every part of the funnel is hardwired to perpetuate growth.

If you enjoyed reading this, then you should subscribe and stick around because I'll explore different kinds of demand generation funnels (including non-content based ones), growth hacks, and the intriguing world of dark social in the coming episodes.

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