824: Increase Your Organic Reach Through Content Marketing for Your Software Startup with Karl Hughes

Speaker 1 0:00 marketer of the Day episode eight to four, increase your organic reach through content marketing for your software startup with Carl Hughes.

Robert Plank 0:14 Welcome back to the marketer of the day podcast and I have an important question for you Do you have a software product or a software service, you need to get more of the word out there, you need to get a jump on your competitors, you would love it. If someone came to your site and browse your blog and found out all kinds of features and new things you're adding to your software. Would you love it if someone could jump on YouTube and search the name of your software product and see just all the features and all the things that they can do? Well, if so, or if you would like that, in the future, you're in exactly the right place. We're here with Carl Hughes. He is a former software engineer. He is a CTO who right now runs draft dot Dev, which is a specialized content marketing agency that helps companies reach software developers exciting stuff, Carl, glad to be talking to you. Yeah. Good to talk to you, Robert. And so So yeah, what do we need to know about this whole service you provide and about creating content for software products?

Speaker 1 1:07 Yes. So I was a software developer, as you mentioned, for a number of years. And one thing I noticed was that a lot of companies are just kind of bad at getting in front of software engineers and to sell products. So there's an increasing number of tools being marketed at developers these days. And the challenge that every company has is how do we market it developers in a way that's genuinely helpful and educational without being overly pushy and salesy because developers hate things like cold emails, and really spammy pop ups and stuff like that, that maybe some industries and marketing or some parts of marketing get into? So what we do at draft dot Dev is, is just educational content focused for software engineers, by software engineers. So to give me a really tangible example, let's say that you are a web hosting company, and you want software developers to deploy their products, their webs, their web applications, their mobile applications out to your service, how are you going to reach the software engineers, one of the ways you can do it, it's content. And that's what we write. So we'll write detailed tutorials with code samples, lots of use cases, different ways that software developers can integrate tools together to help to build things faster and better. And so it's just really helpful content written by developers who are out there using products for companies that want to reach them.

Robert Plank 2:21 What it sounds like, software companies all over need this kind of thing. But what would you say? If someone said, well, our team, they're the coders that they make it, they support it, they maintain it, and no one else knows us knows enough to make these tutorials or to make them write these code samples. So How dare you even suggest that some outside party, right, this content, what would you say to someone like that?

Speaker 1 2:45 I would say if your developers who have a full time job building the product, also want to have, you know, many hours a week writing blog posts, and they don't mind think go for it by all, by all means, I think it's a great way to go. What happens though, is as you scale content production, you're going to run into this practical limit, so like how much your software developers can write. And then the question becomes, do we want only to live? Do we want to limit ourselves to the content we can produce in house? Or do we need to start looking outside. So what we do is actually modeled after what a lot of really big companies like Digital Ocean Okta, and Venmo, places like that, that have developer community writing programs. So they've already got these programs, basically, like what we do at draft at Dev, but they're at this big scale. So we take those programs, we sort of slice them up in a way that smaller midsize companies can afford, and can bolt this on as community driven engineering content for their blog.

Robert Plank 3:39 And so you and your mentioning about these things, like you know, scaling up ramping up, is there a, like an approximate, like ballpark of how much content a company should be busting out? And I know, that's kind of like a question. And it might be like, on a case by case basis, but sometimes I wonder like, should there be something every day every week, like how much is enough or too much as far as putting out this content?

Speaker 1 4:03 So I'll give you my personal opinion, I think every week is kind of a baseline for good content marketing, I can think I think some smaller companies can get away with less because they don't have the budget, or they're not really sure how they're going to promote content. But to be honest, at least once a week, we have clients doing anywhere from one piece a week to 20 pieces a month. And so the it kind of depends how competitive the other people, you know, targeting the same areas of content are and how much content you can produce at a high quality within your budget. So I don't think there's like a one answer to that question. It's probably it depends, like any good question. But at the same time, I do think there's kind of a good baseline of probably getting a piece of content every week is going to make a lot of difference in search engines and with just staying consistent for your audience.

Robert Plank 4:47 It Fair enough. And I think that having an article about once a week sort of rhythm, it helps just get your mind wrapped around it because I don't know about your car, but if I'm even thinking about a piece of content ever Every day and like 30 days of content or 90 of the content, I'm thinking, like, I'm so overwhelmed, I think to myself like, well, if I have, if we have a bunch of ideas, like half of them will suck, or we won't even have enough like meat on the bone to create that, and we'll be putting out like, it'll little bits of things. And that won't be very good. But if when you're saying one piece of content per week, it seems like you can kind of wrap your head around, okay, that's sort of like a mini launch kind of thing. They're like, you can look at some ideas on this day and come up with a rough draft on that day and put it on that day and work on the marketing and the traffic, it seems like a little more logical, easier to get our head wrapped around when we think about these weekly blocks. And then so then then to the kind of another loaded question is when you say a piece of content, I know it can mean a lot of different things. But like, Is it is it typically like these super long blog posts with like, so long? It needs a table of contents? Are we talking about like videos in between? When you say a piece of content? What are we talking about?

Speaker 1 5:58 Yeah, again, the answer is it depends, of course, but I do think the internet has is standardized, at least around most content being a roughly like 1500 word piece of, you know, written content with probably a mix of three to five images, videos and other graphics to support it. That's kind of how we standardize. Now, at the same time, there are certain topics that require a lot more than 1500 words. And some topics may not require quite that same amount. So I don't think it's necessarily like, I actually think word count is less important. It's more about covering the topic in a way that is helpful to the end result reader who's trying to get something out of this. So if they're looking up, what's the definition of a term, you don't need to give them 3000 words to define a term, but at the same time, like if there's more that they're looking to learn, like, they're trying to get an in depth tutorial for how to scale up their Python applications, you do need to cover that with enough detail. So there might be a 3000 word piece there. So yeah, it does depend, we end up kind of having some standard lengths. And then clients come in with their own thoughts. And we sort of work with them to figure out what what makes sense for each piece.

Robert Plank 7:04 Oh, fair enough. So you're saying that 1500 words, even though that's not the, that's not the box we're trapping ourselves in? That's a good starting point. That's kind of the baseline of what people think about when they think about content. But then again, you start from there, and then case by case basis, as far as what needs to be done. But you're also saying, it's not just about the word length, because who needs someone pontificating for 1500 words, just explain one term, when you can say it in just a couple of sentences. And so the next thing that makes me think of it based on your answer there is, is, you know, I'm thinking about, Okay, what's the what's the importance of like having this whole dedicated team such as yours to do things instead of doing things in house, and there's always that that problem, especially with software of things going out of date, right? Like, even when we look on YouTube for like a tutorial on how to do this, I'm like, Okay, if this one says, like, this year, versus when they put the year in the title, I'm like, if it says, blah, blah, blah, you know, WordPress tutorial 2025. I'm going to click on that versus like, 2015. Right. So is there any of that in the strategy, like updating things for like, new versions of the software or like new technology and going back and like, making the old content fresh again?

Speaker 1 8:19 Yeah, absolutely. There's a few different kind of points to mention here. So one is, a lot of times, in any sort of technical content, you are competing with existing pieces of content out there on the internet, you know, whether it's for things to be shared on social or it's through Google and search results. So what you want to look at is like if your competitors wrote a big guide to something, but it's four years old, now, that's a great opportunity for you to come into something much more current, because in four years, the tools that software developers use change pretty pretty, in pretty big ways. The other thing, so yeah, that's just keeping an eye on like, what's out there and how your content can be better. But then your internal content also does need to be updated. This is something we do with a lot of clients is they may have written an article several years ago that they're like starting to see that drop off and traffic on and they're saying, Could we update this the latest version of Java or PHP or whatever, because it's kind of fallen out of favor with the internet now. So absolutely important to keep that stuff up to date. Another reason that, that you look at outside writers for content, whether it's with us, or you build a community Writing Program, or you hire freelancers, or whatever, is that a lot of times companies will have an internal developer team that knows let's say, your internal developers know JavaScript and Python really well, but they don't know go they don't know rust, they don't know. Swift. And there's like dozens of other programming languages they may not have any knowledge about, but you want to write on those topics. What do you do, you can either hire a million engineers to cover all that those topics, which is really expensive, or you can start to work with freelancers, outsiders to do that stuff. So a lot of times that's a really helpful use case for bringing in outside help for technical content like we do.

Robert Plank 9:52 And you know, you mentioned this whole idea of bringing outside writers to kind of like cover more bases versus what your internal does. And you mentioned here about this idea of what even if your competitor has this really popular blog post, it's really popular topic, don't despair, because maybe their content is five years at a date. And you can do a better version that that's in the current date. And even mentioned near the beginning there of talking about how your software integrates with other systems, because that's such a thing. Now these days, like, you know, things in the cloud and things like that. So, so like, what sort of like marketing or like promotional strategies such as these present themselves with software writing that we don't normally see anywhere else, because like, I mean, my brains are already on fire with all these kinds of ideas that you've just offhandedly skated past. So I'm already excited.

Speaker 1 10:42 Yeah, so let's take something really tangible. And again, if you're not a software developer, I'm going to try to keep this high level enough that you can follow along, I don't want to get too in the weeds here. But when you're a software developer, and you want to push code to a server to a web host, that's gonna hold that code for you and run it on the internet. There's a lot of steps that go into it. There's these tools called CI CD platform. So it's continuous integration, continuous deployment platforms, they're testing platforms, they're linting platforms. I know, none of these words mean anything, but it doesn't matter. The point is, there's several different services that usually touch code before it goes out to a server live. And what's interesting, if you're a web host, and you're trying to write it, like write good content around how developers can use your web hosting service, you kind of need to write all these different integrations and best practices for using these other tangentially related tools. Because that's going to help developers and customers, when they come to you and say, Look, we want to use your host, but we're not sure if it integrates with JIRA in the way that we want it to. So those kinds of questions are gonna come up network content can really help you sort of like, push past those objections. So that's kind of more, you know, this is kind of touching into bottom and middle of funnel content, which is, you know, one great use case. But it could also be that these integration guys help with some top of funnel reach if software developers are

Robert Plank 11:55 searching for how to integrate JIRA with my web hosting platform or something similar. And and so that's just a seems like a good starting point, in general, of if you're saying, Well, what's what kind of content do what do we want? And what lecture that library and like thinking of ideas, it's just like, Okay, if somebody wanted to use my web host for with this tool, like, there we go, like just that, that combine these two things, and there's a tutorial there's a piece of content. And so what is quarter of the, like, the research process, like this isn't a matter of like, you ask your client, what what they want written about? Is it a matter of like going deep on the Help Desk, going on the internet, looking at competitors, all of the above? Like, what's sort of the the method to the madness front as far as coming up with all these ideas? Because with content, it's like, you always need to be churning them out, right?

Speaker 1 12:45 Yeah, totally. I mean, like we've said, if you're gonna write a piece of every week, then that means every year, you got to come up with 52 new topics, right. And that is a pretty high load, especially when you're talking about technical content in a specific vertical or niche or little small area. There's a few things that we see clients doing that we do with clients. One is you can take the keyword research based approach where you say like, what would developers in our space be searching for you try to look for lots of different keywords, and then come up with some that have some High search volume and low keyword difficulty. I personally use hrs but there's other tools that are great out there to do this. So whatever you want, that's that's one approach. Another one is to go to developer communities, say Reddit subreddits, that are focused on software engineering, or Stack Overflow, different slack groups focused on different kinds of engineering Hacker News, the big one with developers, you go to those communities and to see what people are talking about within your area of your vertical. That's a really helpful way to figure out what the community has lots of discussions around and what kind of things fire up engineers. And then another thing to do is exactly what you mentioned, with talking to your support and sales teams and seeing what questions come up from customers all the time that we could we address with content. And this is usually good for bottom of funnel kind of crossing people over conversions. A lot of times I encourage really early stage companies that aren't sure about SEO or top of funnel yet, like maybe just start by talking to your customers and seeing if you can build some content that pushes them over the edge into a sale because that will show some early wins with your content that are directly related to revenue. Or maybe you upsell clients based on the content or something like that. A lot of times if you're a content marketer that can be helpful to kind of get more buy in from upper management about how we do content more and get more budget for it.

Robert Plank 14:27 So so many ideas and what I'm hearing is that there's like there's like the data side of it and there's the judgment side of it right there's the judgment is going out and seeing what there is but you also mentioned like keyword tools and you also mentioned a little bit earlier about that like monitoring the traffic and and if something is really popular create more of that if something was popular and it has gone down in the clicks then you say well, maybe we need to figure out why that is or is this going out of favor is this this need to be like updated or find something like that? And so is this is that like part of the Like an ongoing process as far as what your team provides, because when you imagine content creation, it's easy to just be short sighted and say, Alright, just write a bunch of stuff and publish it. But is there like a, like an ongoing? Like, kind of, like monitoring that happens after all this?

Speaker 1 15:15 That's a great question. We don't provide that right now today, we say pretty execution focused. And so typically, clients have their own internal marketing teams that are setting strategy keeping track of analytics. And they're relying on us as essentially their content engine, just producing the content they need, or updates they need and things like that. So that's our current model today. But I do know that a lot of SEO agencies or just content agencies generally will focus on like keeping up with each piece of content and tracking it over time. We do this internally for our own content for draft dev on our blog. So like, we have a big list of that we audit every three to six months of each piece of content, make sure we haven't seen traffic dip will add internal backlinks to it will look for opportunities to ask for backlinks, other places, will also get into like re promoting content every few months. So this is another great thing. Like we've talked a bit about how like, it's nice to think of your content. And here's a piece of content one week, and then we're gonna spend a couple of days promoting it. Yeah, I think that's that's absolutely key to making a piece of content stand out is investing a day or two or some time in making sure people know about it, putting it out in the right places, social media, and reaching out to newsletters and asking them to promote it for you if it's really good, things like that. But you can do that every two or three months, you don't have to do it just once to a piece of content and be done with it. I think that's a huge oversight for a lot of content teams are out there trying to promote stuff, it's just doing it once instead of continuing to hit it every few months.

Robert Plank 16:41 Well, this is great. I mean, I'm again, like you said there's there's the the focus on exactly your business, Carl and your type of client. But there's also kind of more of a high level, kind of, in general, like content marketing things to think of even if someone's not a direct, exact fit for you and your team, it's still good to get educated, right? I mean, it's kind of kind of like practicing what you preach are all about the tutorial videos and saying, We want to educate you about how to use this and that feature. So that way, if you're almost using it, or almost using the software, this pushes you over the edge. If you are frustrated with our software, guess what there's this feature that you might not have known about, or maybe this gets you to use it more upgrade to a bigger plan or use it with more users in your organization. There's so many cool things to think about. And I mean that that right there, that little tip about go back a few months later, and consider re promoting something old. I mean, such a simple idea. But it's so easy to forget, because with all this content marketing stuff, there's like 35, things always happening. And it's it's easy to just like remember, like four or five things, but there's like so many little low plates to be spinning, I guess I feel I feel like I've thrown out like 27 different metaphors in our conversation. It kind of makes it fun to think of it that way. And so So I want to make sure that we plug you and your company and that way we talk to exactly the right people we want to talk to so it's good to be educated about you know, content marketing, and that, you know, teams can look at your product or your software and you know, do all these amazing things for you. But as far as draft dot Dev, who should be listening to your message, exactly what type of company and what should they be doing as far as contacting you and taking the next step here?

Speaker 1 18:19 Yeah, sure. So we work almost exclusively with Developer Tools companies, or API driven companies that have a an API they want developers to integrate with, usually, our main contact is a head of content, or head of developer marketing or developer relations, depending on how big the company is. We work with mostly startups in series A and Series B range. So yeah, a lot of companies that are out there in the Kubernetes space, this these days, data engineering is really big these days, there's a lot of low code tools we're also starting to work with. So anything in that sphere, we can probably help with. And if you're not sure, I'm always happy to hop on a call and maybe refer you off to somebody else, because I ended up getting to know a lot of people in the b2b marketing space just through running this agency. So you can find out more at draft dot Dev, and my email is Carl K RL at draft dot Deb feel free to shoot me a mail or book a call with me there on the website. And either way, I'm looking forward to hearing feedback from people.

Robert Plank 19:18 Well, I'm looking forward for you if that is the thing, Carl with a K. At draft dot dev the website is draft dot Dev and as we completely wrap up our conversation here, Carl, you have any final parting words of advice or any little nuggets,

Speaker 1 19:32 you felt like we left out? No content, I just say to people just get started. And if you're a founder of a small company, you're just trying to get something going. I mean, try to get yourself on a cadence of writing one blog post a month just to kind of expose your worldview talk about what your business does little and then get into the optimization later. You know, it's just just important to get started so have fun with it and get get into trying it you'll you'll learn as you go Do you have wine podcast.com forward Slash Free. Go there right now to see what you could be missing in your podcast. Maybe you aren't active enough on social media? Are you writing and broadcasting an email for every episode of your podcast? Do you follow up with your podcast guests? Do you do things to make your podcast interview and content creation easier? Go to deify podcast.com/free to claim your gift right now