Names in quotes are obscured.
Crises abound
“Nimbus Mobile Tech Solutions” marketing team had been running without issue on paid Google Search ads and a smattering of PR campaigns without issue for a decade.
At a very large scale ($30k+/month), performance marketing works. It brings paying subscribers, as long as the marketing messages are somewhat coherent. Or at least it used to be this way.
As early as 2018, they started to see signs that PPC was beginning to slow. ROI was decreasing, free trial signups were decreasing, and “Kyle,” CEO of Nimbus Mobile, realized that something would need to change.
He had heard of “Growth Hacking” and invited his friend Vlad Shvets to Taiwan to meet the team, with hopes that he would join their marketing as Head of Growth, and revamp Nimbus’s Marketing direction towards a new future with less dependency on Ads.
Vlad, a Ukrainian native working in Berlin as CMO of Phase, a visual prototyping software startup, had already spent 4 years honing his skills as an SEO in various startups.
But he too was having somewhat of a crisis. So-called ‘growth-hacking’ techniques which had easily allowed brands to skyrocket their digital presence in 2015, were no longer working in 2018, as Google added more and more capacity to its algorithms to prevent techniques meant to provide advantages to savvy markers.
Instead, Vlad knew that likely, the future of digital marketing would be the highest-quality, inbound, white-hat techniques. This is what he pitched to Kyle one hot afternoon in their offices just inside Taipei’s university district. And Kyle was sold.
The question was, would he have enough influence over the marketing team, who, in 10 years of Nimbus’s development, had depended so heavily on PR and SEM.
On returning to Berlin, seeing the opportunity, Vlad decided to start a new company, “Growth Farm,” with two Ukranian college buddies. Growth Farm became a prolific contractor for Nimbus Mobile, providing digital marketing services that allowed Nimbus to achieve their first sustainable market presence, launching on platforms like ProductHunt, and AppSumo, and engaging strongly in Quora and Reddit.
Nimbus’s marketing team understood the appeal of these platforms, working similarly to ads, promoting the brand in front of a large audience, with small engagement touches.
Traffic to the Nimbus products began to climb, and the product pages saw increases from 20,000 views per month in 2019, to over 50,000 in 2021.
But Vlad knew it wouldn’t last. The Algo never lets you win for long. Even at the beginning, Vlad was conceiving of an exit strategy from “growth hacking.”
Vlad hired me after about 6 months of working with Nimbus in 2019. I, with minor blogging experience, a passion for behavioral economics, and time writing sales enablement materials, knew that there was a disconnect between growth hacking and what really made prospects buy the product. I wanted to have Vlad’s SEO knowledge, but also strived to connect it to the psychology involved with marketing writing somehow.
That is when I discovered Ahrefs’ Blogging for Business course.
Hacks aren’t meant to be permanent.
Tim Suolo, in a little over one day of study, gave me the “eureka” moment I needed to challenge Nimbus’s growth marketing attitude. Together with Vlad, we formed Empact Partners, a white-hat first, content marketing agency. It was designed to be future-proofed, using only content marketing to create sustainable inbound marketing potential.
But Nimbus wasn’t ready to accept such a radical concept as ‘blogging for business.’ To them, a blog was a place they had used to chronicle a timeline of events, to provide their users with updates, and to keep the current subscribers engaged. Traffic was measured in Google Analytics, but the vast majority of it was direct, coming from in-app push notifications, or from other channels like PR. To Nimbus’s team, they saw nothing wrong with that. Traffic was traffic.
The average length of a blog post was 450 words, and there were hundreds of them, spread across blogs for each app– all productivity-related tools aimed at students and small businesses.
But Vlad had a plan. We would consolidate, prune, redirect, and clean up the content assets, to provide a strong foundation to start writing authoritative content. And, the promise was that it would drive organic traffic for years to come without ads.
For years, we persuaded Nimbus’s team one campaign at a time to move towards inbound, and away from PPC. But PPC was the only thing bringing in app downloads. Nimbus spent $30k per month on Google Ads, and couldn’t afford to let up. As the ROI for ads slowly declined, so did any margin to ‘experiment’ on other channels.
And for years, the blog wasn’t bringing in any organic traffic. Its posts were thin content, with backlinks distributed throughout, and very few pieces ranking in the top 30.
On top of that, Nimbus marketing team required quarterly results, which weren’t possible to show with inbound marketing (Tim calculates with Ahrefs data that almost 95% of newly published pages don’t get to the Top10 within a year).
So, we struggled for a long time. Our other clients were growing their inbound strategies, but not Nimbus. After working for them nearly a year, we decided to pivot, and targeted bottom-of-funnel growth, as if Nimbus were a startup. Instead of blogging, we wrote landing pages. A lot of them.
“ReadPro” PDF was by far the most valuable app in the Nimbus Portfolio, hauling in over 80% of traffic and subscription revenue. As a freemium app, anyone can download and use it, but for editing PDFs, subscribers should pay $5 per month. Compared to Adobe’s $25/month and annual commitment for Acrobat, it was a great deal.
But not enough people were seeing ReadPro.
A great deal is not enough.
To try to get ReadPro in front of a larger, more buy-ready audience, I performed Ahrefs Keyword Research on PDF-related topics, looking for long-tail conversion pieces that might work. By that time, Vlad was working as a Digital Marketing lead over at Paperform, and they had seen some success targeting “forms for X” keywords. So, we decided to make PDF Templates.
Each month, we created around 10 templates, covering all kinds of contracts, forms, and other things that can be filled out, edited, and re-used. The templates were added in-app behind the paywall, and e-signature options were added for “SignEase,” Nimbus’s newly acquired e-sign app. I don’t even want to think about how many people are using my (not a lawyer) contracts out there in the wild. (too many).
But, after publishing these first templates, within 2 months, organic traffic was suddenly a thing on Nimbus’s website. From 20,000 page views per month, we soon saw 35,000, 40,000, and 50,000.
And backlinks were coming in naturally as well. When writing the templates, I created 1500-word in-depth landing pages, and the templates were all professionally designed by yours truly. I have some experience working in a law office from back in high school, so I knew my way around building ‘general provisions’ in contracts. But yeah- not a lawyer. 😬
In total, we created over 75 different templates, which brought users directly from search into the app. This was the key to building organic traffic.
After about a year, Nimbus’s traffic was teetering at 100k/month. They knew something was working, but weren’t sure what or why. In 2020, we successfully wrote a couple of design-focused long-form blog posts for the “Pixelflow Studio” app. I personally outlined and edited the evergreen “best animation tablets for X” and “best animation apps for X” articles, which grew to the top 10 on SERP and brought tens of thousands of app downloads.
But convincing Nimbus’s marketing team to go all-in on content marketing was always “maybe in six months” – they had just had too much easy success in Reddit and Quora. But that was about to change.
Reality doesn’t care about your KPI timescale.
In July 2022, Google implemented the Product Reviews Update, and simultaneously Reddit and Quora implemented automatic promoted thread de-ranking systems.
Suddenly, Nimbus’s major sources of traffic besides PPC were cut off. Nimbus’s marketing team went into fight-or-flight mode. They launched a new product, new domain, and rebranding, but none of these were able to stave off the inevitable.
By December 2022, Nimbus’s content marketing teams were effectively shut down. ChatGPT had just came out, like the final nail, and we lost them as a client.
But not all was lost. In another office, the Nimbus Japan Marketing team had made something brilliant.
Back in 2021, Nimbus Japan marketing team, headed by “Lana Yu.” had begun to experiment. She met Vlad back in 2019, and always knew that content marketing was likely the future of marketing. Anyway, PPC through Google Search wasn’t as effective in Japan. So, in early 2022, after our PDF Templates campaign had clearly seen success, she was able to hire freelance content writers and go all-in on content marketing.
Within 6 months, the Nimbus blog had several 2-5k word, authoritative, long-form blog posts covering design, productivity, and sustainability topics. They shot up in rankings almost immediately, driving Nimbus JP blog to 50k traffic by the end of the year.
When we saw Lana’s strategy paying off, we knew that it was special. Topics that Nimbus English blog had been struggling to see 500 views per month were seeing five thousand views per month in Japanese. Lana had concentrated any link equity to a few pieces, and made sure those pieces were top-quality. A simple recipe for success. She kept updates and short-form pieces separate or with a noindex flag, and as the JP blog began to grow, it was easier and easier for her to request a budget from Nimbus Corporate to keep doing what works.
Failure is only truly failure if you don’t learn anything.
We at Empact Partners were determined to transfer these learnings to Nimbus English’s team. Kyle, to his credit, saw the light early on. But in late 2022, Nimbus’s team was still ordering Quora and Reddit Posts, keeping blogging to a minimum, with little to no results.
Arguably, our work with Nimbus could be seen as a failure. But often, SEO strategies interplay like this with CEOs, long-standing corporate structures, and uncertain markets.
Although we didn’t see our vision come to light on the Nimbus blog, we were determined to make something of the insights we gathered there. Lana’s success had given us a treasure trove of ideas.
It was time to launch a new experiment.
(Stay tuned for my upcoming post about this experiment, where we try every SEO play in the book on a new website, and grow it into one of the most popular marketing blogs on the web)
Leave a Reply