Content Marketing Strategy & Implementation for Clubhouse

When Clubhouse (now Shortcut) and I started working together in November of 2016, they only had a handful of posts on their blog and their case studies were similarly scant. They weren’t ready to hire a full content team yet, but were looking for someone to create a solid content foundation that they could use to take their online presence to the next level.

From November of 2016 to June of 2018, I spearheaded content marketing at Clubhouse, creating foundational documents that other writers & workers could use, writing the bulk of the blog posts during that time, and conducting user interviews to drive content creation.

Work overview

Foundation

When you’re starting with a small library of content, building a solid foundation is important and was one of the first things I tackled:

  • Created foundational documents, including editorial calendars, a brand style guide, a competitive analysis and audience/user profiles to help guide content creation
  • Created process documents, including a post-feature release content marketing checklist, a post-publishing checklist, and guidelines for PR pitching and guest posting
  • Analyzed their previous content & traffic to create a content strategy based on the previous data and continuing to take the data into account when working on the editorial calendar

Content creation & repurposing

One focus I had during this time was getting the most mileage from my content efforts, as I was the only person working on said content and we wanted to both adhere to a regular content production cadence and quickly build out an archive of high-quality content. I approached that challenge a few different ways:

  • When interviewing customers for case studies, I would also ask them about their career journey, things they had learned, and any takeaways they wanted to share, then get the interview transcribed
  • This let me create a case study and a blog post for every customer interview, and gave me a library of customer quotes that I could return to for future content pieces (which also made it easy to tag the customer company and/or individual person in social shares, typically resulting in more re-shares/clicks/content views)
  • I also wrote, sourced relevant interviewees/quotes, and created a blog post series, that we then turned into a lead-generating ebook (example post #1, example post #2, lead-gen ebook)

In addition to all of this, I also provided creative direction for the blog post illustrations and the lead-gen ebook illustrations/design/layout, wrote additional content for the blog and site, and did copy-edits as needed.

Traffic and SEO

When I was doing the foundational work, I noticed that we were getting a disproportionate amount of traffic from a few specific Quora answers that had linked to the site. I wanted to test if we could replicate this effect at scale, so I created a process of regularly sourcing Quora questions that were relevant and sorting them by topic (and by related content). Then, I created template answers that could be easily combined and modified to write answers that were helpful and not too self-promotional, while driving traffic back to specific pages (one being the case studies page) or posts.

In addition to that, I also:

  • Wrote copy for competitor landing pages that were used in a broader SEO strategy
  • Incorporated those pages into the Quora answers when appropriate
  • Wrote and scheduled social media shares
  • Created an outreach and guest post strategy

Results

As a result of the above work combined with other marketing efforts, there was an overall increase in traffic to the blog, as well as the following increases:

  • Traffic to the main site increased by 147% from 2016 to 2017
  • Traffic to the customers page went up over a thousand percent (1,147% increase in unique pageviews, to be exact) from 2016 to 2017

Though we started out with little more than a website and an infrequently updated blog, Miche took on the challenge and helped us develop and build content so that we could truly begin to promote our company and brand across multiple platforms. They not only wrote blog posts but also conducted interviews, wrote case studies, created our style guide, handled most of our social media postings, and even authored our first e-book! Miche is an organized and diligent worker and was very flexible as we iterated on multiple approaches to try and find our unique voice. Clubhouse is blazing into an amazing new stage of marketing and growth thanks to the foundation that Miche helped us lay. Kudos to them!

— Camille Acey, former VP of Customer Success at Clubhouse

Content samples 

Blog posts

Case studies & other