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Like many of us, Si Quan (or “SQ” for short) is a content marketer. He’s spent two of his last five years as a content marketer at Ahrefs*, a “powerful but easy-to-learn SEO toolset with a passionate community.” He works with eleven other people on the marketing team.

*The company’s name is read as “‘h’-refs.” The “a” at the beginning is silent.

Ahrefs' secret to bootstrapping: know your product, know your customers

A majority of Ahrefs’ team is based in Singapore, but like many companies during the pandemic, they’ve implemented #WorkFromHome measures. Much of SQ’s time is now spent video editing, video recording, and writing content from his home in Singapore.

Ahrefs is a small but powerful company. It is a head-to-head competitor with SEMrush and Moz, despite being a fraction of their size. The Ahrefs index is updated with the freshest backlinks every 15 minutes, and its crawler processes up to eight billion pages a day.

The team achieved this success by investing their time heavily in content marketing. There are three main keys that inform all that they do at the company:

  • Their employees are familiar with their product
  • They’re familiar with their customers
  • They ensure that their customers are familiar with their products

The team at With Content had a chance to chat with SQ about some of Ahrefs’ marketing efforts, and how they’ve been integral to helping Ahrefs grow without any investor backing or additional funding.

 

The pitfalls of being backed by a venture fund

In today’s high-stakes, high-rewards startup world, most companies want to grow as fast as possible. This usually involves swapping out some equity in return for hard cash.

Dmitry Gerasimenko, the CEO and founder of Ahrefs, is firmly against accepting outside capital. SQ explains, “What he found was that when you get investors involved, they become hyper-focused on gaining market share.”

He adds, “I think this is a problem with venture-backed companies, because they have a lot of money to spend. So they are more willing to spend, and less careful about what they spend on.”

Rather than trying to please customers, too many companies are trying to please their shareholders or board of investors. Dmitry took a different approach and decided to double down on customers.

 

Ahrefs chooses to woo customers instead

Boards of directors and investors may never actually use the products of the companies they support. Focusing too much on what they want can put companies at risk of alienating buyers, who are the company’s true lifeline. Without loyal customers, a business will never be able to succeed long enough to establish its place in the business world.

Instead of trying to please an external group of investors, Ahrefs seeks to identify and woo customers all the time. It’s one of many companies adopting a customer-centric approach to content—others include popular Singaporean finance blog The Woke Salaryman and even consumer goods giant PHILIPS.

Before the pandemic began, Ahrefs’ marketers attended conferences and sought out customers to speak to in person. SQ shares, “In the SEO industry, customers are very outspoken about what they dislike about your tool. They have no fear about comparing your product to those of your competitors, and that actually helps us build a better product.”

The company also has a dedicated Facebook group for their paying clients. “Only paying customers are allowed to join,” he explains. “They need to give us their customer email, and someone from our team will verify their membership before allowing them to enter.”

This group is just one of the channels they use to build a more intimate relationship with their customers. When the folks at Ahrefs are feeling lost or need product feedback, the members of their Facebook group are the first people they turn to.

It’s a win-win situation: their subscribers get dedicated support, privileged access to potential new features, and more say in the product’s development. Ahrefs gets the data and info they need to fulfill real customer needs.

Another way Ahrefs ensures that their employees are close to customers: they make all new hires work in support roles for several months. “I did that,” SQ shares. “You can begin to see the kinds of questions that customers are asking every single day, and really grow close to them. You learn their needs and how to best speak to them.”

Lastly, the team spends a lot of time on their blog and content creation. SQ believes that many companies underestimate the power of their blog as a valuable channel to connect to customers. As a result, they miss out on leads and potential sales.

 

Writing for humans first and foremost

SQ believes that many marketers slip up because they prioritize the wrong things. Rather than communicating about the product’s benefits to customers, they aim for arbitrary numbers, such as page views.

He explains: “There are plenty of case studies where businesses boast about growing their site to a million views in a month. But I’m always disappointed when I check them on Ahrefs and their top articles are so general—like how to delete your Instagram account, or how to change your Twitter handle.”

It’s possible to produce plenty of top-of-the-funnel content and get a lot of traffic, explains SQ. But that just incentivizes companies to continue investing in broad, general topics that have nothing to do with their product. And too often, this general content won’t improve business numbers in a significant way.

Unlike the many marketing gurus touting page views in the millions, Ahrefs’ marketers focus on middle-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel content. SEO marketing isn’t easy for beginners, let alone seasoned pros. Search engine algorithms and page rankings can change daily, so marketers need powerful tools that can help them navigate the confusing landscape. Most importantly, they need to actually know how to use these tools.

To this end, they regularly write long-form blog posts and tutorials with embedded videos, images, and even their own tools.

Here’s a screenshot from one of their posts, titled “How to Build Local Citations (Complete Guide)”:

Ahrefs' secret to bootstrapping: know your product, know your customers

The article above successfully fulfills three purposes:

  • It offers readers a solution to a challenge they want to solve
  • It positions Ahrefs as the perfect partner to help readers solve their problem
  • It showcases one of their tools: the Content Explorer

As of September 2020, this specific article is at the top of the Google Search results for “local citation how”, coming in second only to Moz:

Ahrefs' secret to bootstrapping: know your product, know your customers

Over the years, many have wondered how they can optimize their content for search engines, to ensure that readers will find their business. For Ahrefs, it’s all about crafting and delivering information that readers need.

Nearly ten years ago, common SEO advice was to write blog posts at least 500 words long. But the most recent research now shows that many of the top results on Google have at least 1,500 words. Fresh, insightful, long-form content is now a necessity if you want to land on the first page of Google results.

There are other best practices: Google’s algorithm has gotten much, much better at spotting keyword stuffing, so brands should avoid needlessly filling their published posts with spammy keywords or forcing them into content where they’re irrelevant. Additionally, brands should take time to publish posts with clear, properly-formatted headings and outlines. Clearly-outlined blog posts have been shown to perform better in SEO rankings.

Ahrefs tries to follow best practices with every article they write, and they have many in-depth blog posts that stretch past 3,000 words. This isn’t arbitrarily done to optimize for an ideal SEO word count. Rather, SQ explains, “We aim to create the best, most detailed article on a particular topic we’re targeting, and most of the time, that leads to an article on the lengthy side. But we have no qualms in publishing short articles if we have to.”

For example, an article SQ wrote on the 4 Best Facebook Groups for SEOs (Most Voted For) is only around 1,000 words.

 

A six-month campaign to help customers use Ahrefs’ full power

Their constant efforts to help and understand customers brought the marketing team to an epiphany: clients didn’t know how to use Ahrefs’ full potential. According to SQ, customers used just around 20% of the product’s power.

Most people knew Ahrefs as the backlink research tool, or sometimes the keyword research tool. But there were myriad other features that were going to waste.

To address this knowledge gap, they began a six-month campaign to educate customers about Ahrefs’ true power. They wrote tutorials and embedded them directly into the product.

Ahrefs' secret to bootstrapping: know your product, know your customers

Ahrefs' secret to bootstrapping: know your product, know your customers

These tutorials can now be found on nearly every Ahrefs product subpage. This way, customers who explore Ahrefs can immediately learn how to use a feature without having to get trapped in lengthy email chains or confusing phone calls.

Though they didn’t quantify success for this campaign, SQ happily shared that many customers remarked on how helpful the feature was in the following weeks and months. The team was happy that they were able to shed light on some of their most powerful, yet underutilized features.

 

Marketers must know the products they are writing about

At Ahrefs, the marketing team works very closely with their support and product teams. Because they all know the ins and outs of our product, they can approach content marketing with the perspective that their product is the best in class, and focus on winning customers over so they believe that as well.

SQ observes that marketers in other companies tend to be siloed away from the product team. “They aren’t really involved in product development. They may have never used the product in their life,” he explains.

This becomes an issue when it comes time to market their products. How can you sell a product you know nothing about?

He continues: “I had this experience myself many times as a content marketer. If you’re not careful, the content you produce may be interesting—but it will have nothing to do with the product.”

There’s an element of luck in SQ’s case—at Ahrefs, after all, they’re marketing to other marketers. That means their product comes in very handy for their day-to-day work:

Ahrefs' secret to bootstrapping: know your product, know your customers

Because they are marketers, they are relatively familiar with the user challenges and needs of the people who use their product. If there are use cases that they are unfamiliar with, then the marketing team will talk to customers and interview them.

After writing and publishing the content, they then measure its success by checking the Google page rankings.

That’s not to say that they don’t have other metrics. Si Quan says their most important benchmarks are Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). As long as MRR is stable or increasing, and their ranks are generally stable or climbing, they tend to feel positive about their progress.

They do set other quantitative goals, but rather than being used to measure performance or punish employees, they serve as goalposts to see whether they’re moving in the right direction.

Thanks to their customer-centric approach to content marketing and business management, Ahrefs grew its eight-figure ARR by more than 65% two years straight (+83% in 2016 & +65% in 2017). All that with no VC.

 

Investing in videos to build a consistent brand

The company is continuing its marketing efforts with their Youtube channel.

They started with 20 videos around five years ago, which gained the company a few thousand subscribers. In 2018, they doubled down on Youtube because some topics were too difficult to explain through text alone.

In just two years, they grew their subscriber base to 157,000. He says, “Sam is the guy directing our videos now, and he also appears in them regularly. By putting a face to our brand, we can build an even deeper connection and support our written content.”

SQ considers video useful because more and more companies are being encouraged to build a personal brand. “Even for content distribution, there are only a few channels that truly work. And one of them is personable, authentic business branding,” he explains.

More and more consumers are choosing brands that they like. Buying is, more than ever, a personal choice—not necessarily about cost or savings, but about great service, a standout customer experience, and a personal connection. A 2019 Edelman study found that 81% of consumers needed to trust a brand in order to buy, and Lucidpress found that consistent brand presentation can increase revenue by up to 33%.

By investing in video and presenting a friendly, helpful face for the brand, businesses can build their reputation and act as influencers in their own industry.

Now that Ahrefs’ content guys are managing multiple content channels—Youtube, social media, and the website—their long-form content production has slowed down slightly. “Even though we’re focusing so much on video, we still release two articles a week. We used to publish one video a week, but now that interval varies from one to two weeks.”

 

One last tip for marketers: grow as a person

When he’s not creating content for Ahrefs, SQ breakdances. He shares: “For about six months of my life, I ran a daily newsletter about breakdancing, writing up to 1,000 words a day or even more. It taught me how to write very quickly.”

The more you grow as a person or a business, the more avenues you have to connect and relate to customers. In today’s business world, connection is key. Buyers want to believe that they are buying from an ethical, responsible, and authentic business that isn’t just gunning for profit.

“It’s all about the commitment to your readers or your clients,” SQ says. “You have to value that promise you make to your audience to always do right by them.”

 

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Theodora Sarah Abigail

Ebi’s entire life revolves around words and stories. Over the past five years, she’s written business/science/tech content for major companies, one book, and countless essays and poems.