Unlocking 2023's Content Marketing Success: A Strategy Revealed

By Pavel Molyanov
I blog about content and marketing.
I run a content marketing agency.

Since the beginning of 2023, we have received 666 requests for our services, despite the fact that we only handle content marketing. In this article, I will explain how we conduct content marketing and share our content strategy. If you are running a business with a complex product and a long decision-making cycle, this information will be especially valuable to you.

Hello! My name is Pasha Molyanov, and I lead the content agency “Sdelaem” (“Let’s Make It”) We specialize in providing articles, landing pages, email newsletters, social media posts, media publications, or comprehensive content marketing management.

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The main challenge in promoting such a product lies in the fact that it heavily relies on the trust the client has in the company. When someone needs content, they can choose to hire freelancers, bring an editor-in-chief in-house, turn to another content agency, or opt for a full-service marketing agency.

Everyone promises something along the lines of “We’ll create quality content that will solve your business needs.” The catch is that it’s true! Everyone strives to do just that. The question is who does it well and who does it poorly.

This is where content marketing comes into play: if you’re conveying your expertise, discussing tools, showcasing case studies, then you’ll gain more trust compared to those who don’t do any of this.

Where do we get leads from?

When a person submits a request on our website, they indicate how they found out about us. While this isn’t perfect analytics, it provides enough insight to understand which channels are effective. Here’s the statistics for traffic sources from the beginning of July to September 17th:

SEO: 21% of the total. These are the leads who entered their query into a search engine and came across our agency.

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For example, when someone searches for “content agency,” we rank first in the search results. We also appear in the compilation of agencies on VC in the second position.

“Reading Molyanov” has 15%. Since the beginning of 2022, I have been publishing articles several times a month on VC and other media outlets, managing a Telegram channel with 15,500 subscribers, and speaking at conferences. As a result, people subscribe to me or at least remember me, and when they have content-related tasks, they reach out to “Let’s Make It.”

“Recommendations” has 14%. If someone knows us and follows our content, they may not necessarily make a purchase themselves. However, they may recommend our agency to their acquaintances or colleagues.

This is Arseniy Ashomko from “Vinou.” We collaborated with Nikita Belogolovtsev when he was at “Yandex,” and Nikita recommended us to Arseniy, which is how we’ve been working together ever since.

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“VC” has 11%. Some people mention that they simply “read Molyanov,” while others specifically refer to my articles on VC. Interestingly, they often don’t point to a particular article that prompted them to submit an inquiry but rather refer to my blog in general.

“Agency Content Marketing” has 10%. It can be said that we have two content marketing approaches: one based on my personal brand and the other representing the agency. For the agency, we manage social media and conduct email campaigns. Primarily, copywriters and editors read these channels, and they mostly serve for recruitment and the sale of copywriting courses. However, segmentation is never one hundred percent precise, so we also get leads for the agency’s services from there.

“Our Content Marketer” has 4%. He has a small Telegram channel about content marketing, and he also produces videos for our YouTube channel. Together, these activities generate a small stream of inquiries.

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“Unclear Source” has 25%. This is our most productive source of inquiries =) Some people write something unclear in the “How did you hear about us?” field, while others reach out directly to the agency’s email or our sales representative’s inbox. We haven’t yet developed a systematic way to determine the sources of these leads.

We’ve written 40 articles on VC.

VC is our primary platform for “business-oriented” content. Here, we publish articles about content marketing that can be useful to entrepreneurs and marketers. We discuss tools, share case studies, and generally help people understand content marketing while promoting it as a channel for promotion.

We began actively writing on VC in the middle of 2022. During this time, we’ve published 40 articles that have collectively garnered 353,000 views. Here are a few materials that I consider particularly important ↓

“How to Promote Your Telegram Channel in Other Channels: A Detailed Guide” is our most popular article in our blog, which has also ranked well in search results and continues to bring in thousands of views each month. It’s a comprehensive, practical guide that demonstrates our ability to work with traffic.

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“How to Write an Article About Your Business on vc.ru and Avoid Embarrassment: A Guide from Topic Selection to Comment Battles” serves as a condensed version of the technique we use to write articles on VC for our clients. It showcases our expertise in working with this platform, and I particularly appreciate how our case studies seamlessly fit into it =)

“What Content to Create to Drive Sales – 4 Strategies for Different Types of Businesses” helped us systematize our knowledge of content strategies and emphasized the importance of not just producing engaging content but doing so with a thorough understanding of the entire sales funnel.

Maintaining a consistent theme across VC and all your content efforts, where “Let’s Make It” and Molyanov are associated with content marketing, is proving to be effective. People read one article, then another, and another, creating a connection between your brand and content marketing. This strategy is paying off as readers are more likely to reach out when they have content-related tasks. It shows the power of building a strong brand presence and expertise in a specific niche.

Absolutely, the influence of VC extends beyond the 11% of leads it directly generates. It's possible that a lead may mention reading your content but is introduced to it through VC or other channels indirectly influenced by your VC presence. The interconnected nature of online content consumption means that readers can discover your expertise and brand through various touchpoints, making it important to maintain a strong presence and consistency across multiple platforms. Your content on VC serves as a valuable entry point into your content marketing ecosystem.

We publish articles in other media

It is not worth efforts to invest so much time into an article on VC, only to publish it once and forget it. Therefore, we try to squeeze the maximum out of it and publish it several more times on other platforms.

After publication, the article is picked up by a crossposter and taken to Habr, Pikabu, Adpass, Clerk, Spark, Rusability. Recently, the UGC section appeared in the “Business Secrets” of Tinkoff Bank, so we will soon publish there as well.

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VC: 8400 views. Pikabu: 6000 views. Habr: 2900 views.

The same article on VC, Pikabu and Habr.

Some publications are okay with a full copy-paste of the original text, which is fantastic. For others, we need to rewrite it, but it’s not difficult when the article is already written.

Sometimes republished articles garner several thousand views, but in most cases, they accumulate up to a thousand. It’s understandable why: our articles may not align well with the themes of platforms like Hubr, Pikabu, and Clerk, and other publications simply have smaller audiences compared to VC.

Nevertheless, it’s alright! There is still an effect for us:

In each individual publication, the reach might be modest, but it adds up significantly. Seven publications with 500 views each already amount to an additional 4,000 reach.
In the articles, we leave a link to our website, which helps grow our backlink profile – beneficial for SEO.

I’ve detailed our content reuse strategy in a separate article ↓

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Zero-waste Content Production: How to Drastically Increase Reach with Minimal Effort

Creating high-quality content can be expensive, which is why simply releasing it once and forgetting about it is too wasteful. In this article, I will explain how I distribute content in my projects to maximize reach from a single piece.”

We write about content marketing on social networks

Content marketing is a service with no immediate demand. At any given moment, it may not be relevant to someone, but it can be valuable in a few months. That’s why it’s important to maintain long-term contact, and the most convenient way to do this is through social media—both my personal accounts and agency profiles. We are present on VK, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, and Zen, but Telegram channels yield the most significant results.

I manage a personal Telegram channel with 15,500 subscribers. There, I share insights about content marketing, writing, agency development, employee recruitment, and adaptation.

My subscribers include both copywriters and editors, as well as marketers, project managers, and entrepreneurs. For lead generation, I periodically discuss our agency’s services and share case studies—sooner or later, one of our offers resonates with a subscriber, and they become a lead.

And if not, they might consider purchasing one of our courses.

Or recommend us to a friend.

Or invite us to a conference.

Or propose publishing an article.

Or apply for a job vacancy.

And if none of these scenarios work out, I still generate income from each subscriber through advertising: almost 500,000 ₽ per month. It may sound cynical, but what can you do =)

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In our agency’s Telegram channel with 5,500 subscribers, we do exactly the same, but with a focus on a copywriting and editing audience. Here, we also publish posts about content marketing and agency services, but the primary content stream consists of tips on writing, job hunting, and client interaction, along with a sprinkle of local memes.

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Investing in Audience Acquisition

They say that no matter how high-quality your content is, to get it read, you should consider buying traffic; otherwise, no one will see it. I agree with this statement, but not entirely. We’ve been quite successful in gathering organic traffic:

We didn’t pay anything for 353,000 views on VK.
VK also provides us with 6-7 thousand monthly views from search queries on our old articles.
Our blog receives 8-10 thousand monthly readers from search engines.
Our free courses are downloaded by 300-500 people each month without any advertising.
People subscribe to our Telegram channels without any promotion. For instance, my channel gained 1,249 new followers in August. Out of these, 634 subscriptions came from no specific source.

However, there are two nuances to consider.

Firstly, we’ve been involved in content marketing for several years, and during this time, we’ve accumulated backlinks, mentions, and SEO traffic. If you’re starting from scratch, you won’t have any of these.

Secondly, organic growth often isn’t sufficient. Perhaps a freelance copywriter can find 3-5 clients and keep busy with free traffic, but for a larger agency, it won’t be enough, so a advertising budget is required.

We invest our entire advertising budget in promoting our Telegram channels—522,000 ₽ since the beginning of the year for my channel and the agency’s channel. This has brought us 4,864 subscribers at a cost of 107 ₽ per subscriber. Another 1,808 subscribers came from semi-free channels—VK and mutual promotion.

I’ve discussed the channels we use for subscriber acquisition in Telegram and the cost per subscriber in my previous article ↓.

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7 Methods of Promoting Telegram Channels We Tried – and How Much a Subscriber Costs in 2023 (Quite a Lot!)

We tested various methods to promote our content marketing channels on Telegram, including Telegram Ads, Yandex.Direct, brochures, VKontakte, mutual promotion, VC, and direct purchases. I’ll share the results and insights from each of these methods. This information will be valuable for those looking to boost their Telegram channels within the scope of their content marketing efforts, especially in marketing and business-related niches.

What We Aren’t Doing Yet, But Should Be

We are continuously expanding our content marketing efforts, and that includes incorporating new strategies. Here are some initiatives currently in development or on our immediate roadmap:

Case Studies: We’re already producing case studies, but not as actively as we’d like. The challenge lies in motivating our editors to write case studies about their projects, as client tasks always take priority, and internal projects tend to wait. We’re currently hiring a dedicated employee who will track agency projects, extract the details from editors, and compile them into case studies on our website.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Product-Related Queries: A couple of months ago, we brought in an SEO specialist who identified demand in search engines for agency services, which we haven’t fully tapped into. We plan to make some changes: rephrase the content on service pages, create new pages targeting specific keywords, and write articles around those keywords for our blog.
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B2B Lead Magnets: While we have lead magnets for selling copywriting courses, we don’t have anything similar for B2B services. This is a missed opportunity because we’re not capturing potential leads with emerging needs and guiding them towards making a purchase.

Content strategy of the agency “Sdelaem” (“Let’s do it”)

Everything I’ve described above isn’t based on intuition but rather a content marketing strategy. This strategy helps us work more systematically and avoid getting distracted by activities that may seem interesting but won’t contribute to lead generation.

Within this strategy, we have a promotion plan for both B2B services and copywriting courses. These are two distinct streams that run in parallel.

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We need expert type content marketing: We show ourselves as top professionals and only then sell the agency’s services.

You can view our content strategy by following the link →

If you’re interested in the topic of content marketing and find it relevant, please subscribe to my Telegram channel. I share a lot of useful and practical information there. And, as you might have already read, I also occasionally promote my agency’s services there → @molyanov_blog