Managing Content for a SaaS Brand with @JoshuaCHardwick #vcbuzz

Managing Content for a SaaS Brand with @JoshuaCHardwick #vcbuzz

Content management for a big brand is a challenging task.

You need to research your customers’ needs, align your content to your product positioning strategy and promote that content as well.

And it is even more difficult when you are dealing with B2B content because you need to keep in mind all different decision makers that you have to sell your product to.

Let’s discuss managing content for a SaaS brand!

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About @JoshuaCHardwick

@JoshuaCHardwick is head of Content @ahrefs blog.

Joshua is addicted to all things SEO

Questions we discussed

Q1 How did you become a digital marketer? Please share your career story!

I learned at 16 that you could “make money online” by writing articles. I started doing it and wondered why people were paying me for this. One of my clients ran an SEO agency so I asked him. This is when I first learned about SEO from there I read the Moz blog and kept asking my client SEO questions on Skype. I started a couple sites, worked (very) briefly with @dannyashton at @neomammalian, and eventually realised the area of SEO I liked was content creation + link building…

So, I started creating linkbait for people and doing outreach for it. To market myself, I decided to write a huge list of link building tactics and publish it online for free. It was 60K words long.

I did outreach for this piece, then @timsoulo from Ahrefs asked if I wanted to write for the Ahrefs blog. I agreed. Did it for 2 years freelance, then asked if I could join the company full time. That was in 2018. I’m still here 🙂

Q2 You have joined an established blog. Are there any changes to the content strategy you implemented when joining?

Nothing major 🙂 Our content strategy was sound before I joined. So I’ve mainly focused on continuing that, systemising the process, and maintaining/improving our content quality.

Q3 How do you work on your content editorial? What’s your routine and tricks?

I think our process is similar to everyone’s: idea → outline → draft → review → publish But there are a few “tricks” to making it run smoothly. 1) Great processes/SOPs 2) Peer reviews 3) Talented team (Let me go into a bit more detail…)

Every post we publish is reviewed by at least one other person. This helps us catch inaccuracies and mistakes and maintain quality standards. Here’s a real-life example of @patrickstox spotting an inaccuracy in one my articles:

As for having a talented team, that’s the hard part and something I definitely can’t take credit for. 🙂 Many of the amazing people I work with joined the company before me 🙂

Q4 What are the biggest challenges when dealing with content for a SaaS brand and how to overcome them?

Hiring great content creators is always hard because although there are many great writers and SEO practitioners, it seems quite rare to find someone who is great at both! 🙂 I recently wrote up exactly how we do things here.

Scaling content while maintaining quality has also been a challenge. I spoke about this @brightonseo in April. Here are my slides.

If you attended the event and missed it, there’s also a replay of my talk online

Q5 What are your favorite content marketing tools?

I think that’s all you really need tbh 🙂

Our previous content marketing chats:

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