In the past year, I had the incredible opportunity to work with Slyzed, a social commerce platform in the UK and Kenya. My role was to build the platform’s visibility and drive organic growth through strategic content marketing.
Here’s a brief overview of our steps, from initial market research to achieving significant organic growth and also engagement.
Phase 1: Laying the Foundation
When I joined Slyzed, the company had an online presence but was virtually invisible due to a lack of content and marketing efforts. My first task was to conduct thorough market research to identify the brand’s positioning. Slyzed aimed to be a platform where merchants could showcase their products, and affiliates could sell these products for a commission. This foundational research was critical in creating our subsequent strategies.
Phase 2: Developing a Content Framework
I focused on developing a content framework aligned with the company’s goals. Our content marketing goal was to build an online presence and also position Slyzed as a solution for businesses to grow their sales.
This framework would be the backbone of our content marketing efforts, ensuring consistency and alignment with our objectives.
Phase 3: Building the Infrastructure (CRM & CMS) Setup
During these months, we created a WordPress site as the central hub for our content marketing efforts. The site featured a homepage and a blog, designed to facilitate content marketing and attract organic traffic.
Concurrently, I developed a lead generation campaign that yielded over 600 leads on a modest $70 ad budget, with a conversion rate of a little over 7%.
This early success indicated strong market interest and also helped us start gaining sign-ups and improving our SEO visibility through consistent content writing.
Additionally, I suggested using a CRM for automation and other marketing functions because we were a bootstrapped company. After careful consideration, I set up the Hubspot CRM for the company and now we had a centralized hub to bring sales, marketing, and customer success on the same dashboard.
Phase 4: Targeted Content Marketing and Lead Nurturing
Our focus shifted to vigorous content marketing, emphasizing social media, blog posts, and lead nurturing through a weekly newsletter.
Initially, we were using MailChimp for email marketing and CRM solutions. However, upon careful consideration, we ended up getting the HubSpot Starter package. This helped us streamline our sales process through the CRM features, and also use the email marketing tool.
Here is a screenshot of one of the reports for our marketing efforts, growing from no email marketing infrastructure to this.
We also engaged in business development through cold emailing and cold calling, nurturing our newsletter subscribers to convert. At this point, we were able to onboard several clients including HotPoint Kenya, Motherbaby Shop, and other small businesses.
Additionally, we held weekly webinars with affiliate marketers and sellers to go over their pain points. This helped us assist them navigate the platform. This information also guided us in creating blog posts and video tutorials to offer self-help customer service.
Educating our customers through Explainer videos
We also invested in creating video tutorials to help our diverse target audience understand the different features. Here are some of the explainer videos I created from concept to publishing.
Slyzed Welcome Explainer Video
Affiliate Marketing for Beginners (Tutorial)
Traffic Acquisition
Organic search impressions
In addition, here is a list of the articles that garnered the most engagement:
Increase your online presence in 5 Cost-Effective Tips
Achievements
- Generated over 500 users with no marketing budget, achieving this entirely through organic growth.
- Successfully nurtured leads through consistent and engaging newsletters, leading to increased conversions.
- Created valuable content, including webinars and videos, to educate users on how to maximize the benefits of the Slyzed platform.
- Developed a wide range of content, including videos, to showcase how the product works and enhance user understanding and engagement.