Organic SaaS Growth: A content strategy for high ROI without SEO

"If SEO takes months to kick in, how can we generate ROI from content in less time?"

I get asked this question time and time again while working with SaaS businesses.

Honestly, at first, I didn't have a clear answer.
Until I discovered a strategy that leverages content to bring new revenue within weeks as well as contributes to SEO.

It's called the organic propagation of winning themes.

But why does your SaaS business need quick ROI for content in the first place?

You see, creating quality content takes a lot of time and money.

After such an investment, a business would expect to move the needle on growth, e.g., signups and demos. Not just website traffic.

With limited resources, early-stage SaaS businesses find it cash-flow challenging to wait for 6 to 12 months for SEO to kick in.

On top of it, there is an urgency to validate the business by acquiring early customers.

Thus the need for quick results.

So, what is the organic propagation of winning themes?

✔️ Strategically share your newly published blog post with those who stand to benefit from it most.

I don't mean to spam every social network and community group on Earth with a link to your blog post.

💡 Here is a real example of this strategy in action:
One of my content pieces consistently ranks 1 on Google for the keyword 'webflow growth strategy'. (Google it!)

It brings me new business.

But I didn't wait for it to be Google's number one result to generate ROI.

I shared it with webflow's competitors by sending them a short cold email with a plain-looking subject line - "webflow growth strategy."

I devoted a few weeks to propagating the ideas from that blog post to the most relevant audience.

The result?

I closed a client within two weeks.
Since then, the lifetime ROI of that one blog post has grown over USD 30,000 and counting.

Here is how you can do it:

👉 Create well-researched content that is one of its kind.
👉 Make a list of different micro-messages from it
👉 Pair these micro-messages with different target audiences
👉 Reach out to your audience in an informative manner e.g. social posts, cold email, community posts etc.
👉 Customize the outreach for message-audience-channel combination.
👉 Be ready with a quick sales cycle - demos, scripts, signup, onboarding, and everything in between.

A note on execution: it's not a volume game. Success depends on the quality of the content and message-audience-channel fit.

SEO is a powerful way of content distribution, but it's not for quick ROI. Discover quicker channels depending on your goals.

Now, what kind of content should you create for this strategy to succeed?

I will discuss it tomorrow.

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I write the Organic SaaS Growth newsletter. It's a long-form, low frequency, deep-researched growth newsletter. You can join it here - thoughtlytics.substack.com.