SaaS Content Marketing Case Studies: Initial State, HubSpot, Basecamp

Jamie Bailey
How SaaS Works
Published in
10 min readOct 15, 2019

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The How SaaS Works series simplifies the complex world of software-as-a-service (SaaS) into the practical fundamentals for anyone involved in SaaS. These are the real-world lessons learned from founding a SaaS company from ground zero to growing it all the way to acquisition as well as case studies from other SaaS companies who have both succeeded and failed.

Introduction

Content marketing combined with search engine optimization (SEO) sits at the top of the list of effective ways to generate leads for today’s best SaaS companies. Anyone can create content, but not many are actually good at it. Architecting an effective, long running content marketing strategy has proven difficult for most companies. One of the best ways to learn how to create such a strategy comes from studying the content marketing successes and failures of others. Let’s take look at three very different examples of content marketing from three very different SaaS companies — Initial State, HubSpot, and Basecamp.

Initial State — Leveraging Beer to Grow SaaS

This case study comes from firsthand experience. Back in the summer of 2015, we (Initial State) were preparing to come out of Beta and officially launch the service we had been building for the last 18 months. Our service was (and still is) a data streaming + data visualizations platform for the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT was a relatively new market with a lot of hype but no established playbook on how to market and sell IoT related SaaS products. We knew content marketing was emerging as a really effective way to get eyeballs on your product, but we did not know how to actually implement a real content marketing strategy. We had a blog and kept trying to write about things that we hoped our target market might actually want to read (e.g. “Top 5 Ways the IoT Will Change the World”). Pretty much everything we wrote up to that point in time either received no interest or had a few readers that liked the article but had no interest in us.

We desperately needed a content strategy shift because we could not get anyone to pay attention to us with launch day just was weeks away. We had settled on a bottom-up sales strategy — get our foot in the door with the engineer then work our way up the business. We needed to get those engineers’ attention.

On June 2, 2015, I somehow managed to get on the phone with Matt Richardson, Product Evangelist/Executive Director for Raspberry Pi. For 20 minutes, I had Matt absolutely bored out of his mind while trying to convince him that Initial State would be exciting for his customers. As the call was about to come to a sad end, I mentioned an idea I had as a final Hail Mary. I was trying to catch my 19-yr old nephew stealing my beer and was working on a way to turn my beer fridge into a smart beer fridge that would tell me how many beers I have left and text me when any are taken. I was using a Raspberry Pi and an old Wii Balance Board that I was hacking to send data to an Initial State dashboard. Matt paused after hearing the idea then absolutely lit up with excitement. He told me he had just been ranting about how Raspberry Pi needed more unique, creative example applications like this one. He told me to write up the project ASAP and send it to him. We hung up, and Matt immediately put me in contact with Donald Bell, Projects Editor for Make: Magazine. This put in motion a content marketer’s dream scenario.

Front page of raspberrypi.org on June 10, 2015 featuring the smart beer fridge

A few days later on June 10, 2015, my smart beer fridge project was featured on the front page of Raspberry Pi’s website. This was our first break. We had tens of thousands of people, the kind of people that could actually use our service in their lives, reading about us for the first time because of a tutorial that caught their attention. Traffic to our website spiked as did signups to our Beta. We finally had some market momentum.

Smart Beer Fridge tutorial on Make: website, July 27, 2015

Make: published the Smart Beer Fridge tutorial on their website a few weeks later on July 27, 2015. This caught the attention of even more media channels, specifically magazines and other technology news sites. In September, 2015, I received an email from Nicole Lou, a writer for Popular Science magazine requesting an interview. A short snippet about Initial State and our IoT applications was subsequently published in the Jan/Feb 2016 issue of Popular Science.

Popular Science magazine, Jan/Feb 2016

The Smart Beer Fridge project ended up in multiple magazines including Micro Mart, a weekly computer magazine published in the United Kingdom, Elektronika Praktyczna, a Polish magazine for electrical engineers, MagPi, a Raspberry Pi focused magazine, and the print edition of Make: magazine. Dozens of technology sites picked up the project over the next several months giving Initial State massive exposure on an international level. This exposure resulted in thousands and thousands of inbound Initial State users.

Make: magazine, October/November 2016

A major part of our content marketing strategy became clear — we needed to write quality tutorials that included Initial State as a core component. Engineers searching for “how to” articles would find our tutorials and use our service when implementing their projects. We wrote more tutorials, some of which were hits like “How to Build a Super Weather Dashboard” featured on Hackaday, and “How to Build a Silent, Texting Doorbell With an Amazon Dash Button” featured on LifeHacker. Others were duds.

What we did not realize at the time was the lasting and powerful effect of SEO for the content we created (Google “how to build a smart beer fridge”). We were so smitten with the spike in users from a short viral spurt that we were not paying attention to the steady traffic coming from older tutorials that had established solid SEO. Each good tutorial stacked on more traffic. We still get a ton of website traffic coming from all of these tutorials to this day, even the ones that are three to four years old.

Our content marketing strategy worked for us because it fit with the type of service we created and our ideal customer target. We figured out how to create content our target users not only wanted but often needed. The Smart Beer Fridge tutorial was special because it also had an attention grabbing headline that appealed to media outlets. Getting multiple third-party media outlets talking about your content is hard, unpredictable, and content marketing gold when it happens.

HubSpot — Turning Email Signatures into $64M

HubSpot has long set the standard for leveraging content marketing for growth. This is fitting since HubSpot provides a SaaS solution to help businesses optimize inbound marketing and sales (i.e. CRM, landing pages, email marketing). While some companies become complacent and predictable when they are on top (HubSpot IPO’d on Oct 10, 2014 at a $759M valuation; $7B market cap in 2019), HubSpot launched one of its most brilliant content marketing campaigns in 2016.

Ryan Bonnici was working for HubSpot as the Head of Marketing over Oceania, South East Asia, and Japan in 2016 when he started seeing a slowdown in new leads and new website traffic. The HubSpot brand had started to show signs of saturation with their existing content marketing strategy. In true startup fashion, Ryan had an ambitious idea to bust through this wall and cobbled together the resources to bring his idea to life.

Ryan’s focus was to generate new leads from small and medium sized businesses. He needed to leverage something people who work for these types of companies were often searching to find. With a little SEO research, he discovered “email signature” was a high volume search term at almost 100K per month but also had fairly low difficulty/competition.

HubSpot’s email signature generator tool (2019)

His idea was to build a free, interactive email signature generator on HubSpot. Think about what people put in their business email signatures — name, job title, company, email address, phone number, and more. This is precisely the information you want to know if you are scouting for potential leads. An email generator would require this information to be input by the user.

A HubSpot tool that generates an email signature would accomplish two incredible things simultaneously. First, a potential user would be introduced to the HubSpot experience without even having to create an account. Second, all of that potential user’s information would be captured as a lead for the HubSpot sales team.

With a small team and a whopping $6,000 budget, Ryan turned his idea into a reality in one month. A team of three people spent the next few months promoting the new tool to drive SEO all the way to top 10 where it still sits today. From January 2017 through June 2017, the email signature generator had 524K unique visits, 51K leads generated, and $8.5M in new customer LTV. After two years, Ryan estimates this project generated $64M for HubSpot.

The success of providing a free, interactive tool on high-value search terms led to HubSpot creating an out of office template generator, invoice generator, and more. What a brilliant marketing strategy. The execution on this strategy was equally brilliant. Not only did the team create a great tool, they had a plan for optimizing SEO, capturing lead information, and nurturing those leads to create revenue. With established SEO, this project continues to generate revenue for HubSpot and will for years to come.

You can listen to Ryan, now the CMO of G2, talk about his journey at HubSpot on the SaaStr podcast, episode 268. Ryan also wrote about his experience building the email signature generator in an article titled “The World’s Most Effective B2B Marketing Campaign (+How to Apply It to Your Own Business)”.

Basecamp — Turning Personal Connections into Long-Term SaaS Growth

Basecamp, a set of product management tools, has been around since 2004. With over three million sign-ups to-date, Basecamp adds between 5K-6K new sign-ups per week. Approximately one million people visit basecamp.com each month. How much revenue does Basecamp make? That is one of the few things about their company that Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) are not going to tell you because they do not have to. They are a private company, plan to stay that way, and love to tell you why every chance they get.

Fried and DHH put their own content marketing strategy in motion over a decade ago, well before content marketing was the talk of the marketing world. DHH summed up Basecamp’s long running content marketing campaign in a 2017 Everyone Hates Marketers podcast:

“We write books. We write medium posts. We maintain prolific social media accounts. We go on podcasts like this. We basically just try to out share and out teach our competition as such to build an audience and people who trust what it is that we say such that they hopefully will also trust what it is that we sell.”

I personally discovered Basecamp because a colleague recommended I read one of their books, Rework, when I first founded Initial State. Rework is a book on the lessons learned building and scaling Basecamp (formerly called 37signals). Not just any lessons. This book changes your entire perspective of how companies should operate because “work doesn’t have to suck”. I liked this book so much that we give a copy to every new employee on day 1.

Initial State new hire essentials including Rework by Jason Fried and DHH

Jason and DHH write about work, culture, product, marketing, business, and more. They have worked tirelessly to build an audience through their content. Their blog, Signal vs. Noise, generates over 100,000 daily readers. When they want to make an announcement about their products, they have a massive, engaged audience listening. This has translated into steady growth and profitability for Basecamp.

This is a long-play marketing strategy, which perfectly matches their long-term business strategy. It works because Jason and DHH are amazing at making personal connections with their audience. Those personal connections are fueling Basecamp’s SaaS engine.

Few companies have the patience, dedication, and vision to successfully pull off a Basecamp style content marketing strategy.

Conclusion

Three SaaS companies, three completely different content marketing strategies, all successful. A great content marketing strategy can emerge in the form of tutorials, free interactive tools, building an audience, or something unique to a particular product. The goal is to stand out in a web full of noise.

Up Next … SaaS Lead Qualification: You are So Screwed if You Aren’t Good at It >>

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Jamie Bailey
How SaaS Works

EVP Strategy, Alto | ex-CEO Initial State | SaaS | startup guy | nerd