Strategy

Yes, You Should Talk About Your Competitors

Editor's note: Originally published by Ryan Law in 2020. Updated by David Galic in 2025.Talking about competitors makes many brands nervous. But it shouldn't.So we'll say it clearly:...

Ryan Law , David Galic • 8 min read

10/23/25

Strategy

AI Content Strategy: Lessons from the Field

In the first version of this piece just two years ago, we wrote that AI marked "the dawn of a new era in content marketing."If that was the dawn, we're well into the morning now. The...

Nathan Wahl , KT Malicke • 9 min read

10/22/25

Strategy

Break Through Bureaucracy: 10 Lessons from Enterprise...

Enterprise content marketing teams often have a speed problem. Legal review cycles take weeks. Brand guidelines require 12 stakeholders to approve a single asset. Quarterly planning fossilizes your...

Nathan Wahl • 12 min read

10/15/25

Strategy

Escape the Content Order-Taker Trap (Tactics from 4...

Every enterprise content leader knows this moment: Another “urgent” request lands in your inbox from a colleague. “Can you do a blog post on this?”Now you’re stuck in a tough spot. Do you respond...

Sara Coggin • 8 min read

09/24/25

Strategy

The Burden of Quality: When High Standards Drag You Down

Ask any content marketer to define "high quality" and you'll get the same answer: well-researched, expertly written, professionally designed, thoroughly edited. But if you look at...

Nathan Wahl • 9 min read

09/18/25

Strategy

The TIP Method: Choose the Right AI Model for Every Task

Using just one AI model is like having a team of one.You wouldn't hire a single person to be your developer, designer, writer, and analyst. So why expect one AI model to excel at...

Tim Metz • 11 min read

08/21/25

Strategy

17 Flagship Frameworks From 10 Years of Animalz Content

Animalz just turned 10. In that time, we’ve built content strategies for hundreds of B2B SaaS companies at every stage — from pre-seed startups to public companies. Our content has helped companies...

Nathan Wahl • 13 min read

06/12/25

Strategy

AI Overviews Are Eating Your Search Traffic: Here’s How to...

AI Overviews (AIO) are eroding the click-through rate (CTR) of search results by as much as 15% to 35%, according to several studies. And that figure is only expected to grow.At Animalz, we’ve seen...

Ajdin Perco • 9 min read

05/15/25

Strategy

AI Visibility Pyramid: How to Improve Your Presence in AI...

As if ranking atop Google isn’t hard enough, marketers are now also expected to gain visibility in AI search. And while SEOs broadly understand what traditional search engines look for, AI...

Ajdin Perco • 8 min read

04/24/25

Strategy

AI Content Works (But Only If You Do the Work)

Your boss thinks AI can 10x your content output. LinkedIn is full of people saying they replaced their entire content team. You’ve tried it yourself. And yeah, it kind of works. But it also kind...

Nathan Wahl • 10 min read

04/09/25

Strategy

Write Smarter, Not Harder: How to Use AI Without Losing Your...

This playbook distills the most valuable lessons from the AI & content season of the Animalz podcast, drawn from conversations with the people doing the real work: founders building tools,...

Ty Magnin • 21 min read

04/03/25

Strategy

Get Organic Traffic Estimates With Our Free SEO Forecasting...

"How much traffic will we get from SEO?" It's a question you've likely faced—whether you're pitching leadership or mapping out next quarter's content strategy....

Tim Metz • 6 min read

02/11/25

Strategy

Get Organic Traffic Estimates With Our Free SEO Forecasting...

“How much traffic will we get from SEO?” It’s a question you’ve likely faced—whether you’re pitching leadership or mapping out next quarter’s content strategy. Forecasting organic traffic often...

Tim Metz • 6 min read

02/10/25

NewsStrategy

Our AI Journey: Lessons from Failed Experiments and Where We...

In August 2022, four months before ChatGPT’s launch, we predicted AI would change content marketing — and still its impact caught us off guard when AI really hit.We knew rejecting AI completely...

Nathan Wahl • 9 min read

01/30/25

Strategy

Content Marketing Experiments That Worked for Us in 2024

We’ve turned our content program into something of an R&D lab this year. With a full-time, dedicated marketing role at our agency, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to test new ideas before...

Tim Metz • 7 min read

12/19/24

Strategy

How to Use the Hook Model to Make Your Content Irresistible

What If Your Content Could Have the Same Pull as Your Favorite App?If you’re like me (or anyone I know), you probably spend way too much time on your phone. I do use my phone for some important...

Sara Coggin • 12 min read

11/14/24

Strategy

Milestone Marketing: An Overlooked Growth Engine in B2B SaaS

We marketers are busy people — hunting for perfect keyword opportunities, juggling a bloated MarTech stack, trying to stay ahead of ChatGPT, explaining the ROI of thought leadership to the CFO —...

Tim Metz • 11 min read

10/09/24

Strategy

5 Content Leaders Share 7 AI Insights for Your Team

Generative AI has shaken up the world of content marketing. Teams are rewriting their playbooks and questioning long-held assumptions about what content is and how to produce it.Some are...

Ajdin Perco • 11 min read

09/05/24

DataStrategy

Content Marketing Budgeting: What Should Your Content Cost?...

Google “content marketing budget” or “content costs,” and you’ll find ranges, hypotheticals, and benchmarks. But when prospects get on calls with us, what they really want to know is: “How much...

Tim Metz • 8 min read

08/22/24

Strategy

5 Signals You’re Ready to Invest in a New Content...

Why aren’t we on TikTok? Can’t AI build up our SEO? How about funny Reels? You have probably been on the receiving end of these kinds of questions. The implicit assumption is that entering new...

Ajdin Perco • 9 min read

07/07/24

Case StudiesStrategythe-blog

How a Printed Book Helped Unit21 Generate Millions in...

In Fintech, “fraud” is like the “f-word” — companies are reluctant to discuss their battles against fraudsters for fear of revealing vulnerabilities. This secrecy leaves organizations exposed...

Tim Metz • 10 min read

06/27/24

Strategy

How to Do a Content Audit (the Strategic Way)

Content marketing is one of the few marketing channels that gets more valuable over time. Pay for an article once, and you can generate traffic, links, and sales from it for months to come.To a...

Ryan Law • 22 min read

06/21/24

Strategy

How to Run an Enterprise Content Marketing Operation...

Content marketing at small companies is like riding a bike — you jump on and start pedaling. If you pedal long and hard enough, you’ll eventually get where you need to be. Content at large...

Jimmy Daly • 18 min read

05/03/24

Strategy

Everybody Wants Thought Leadership Content. But How Do You...

Done right, thought leadership content is the single most brand-differentiating content marketing asset a company can produce. But it takes more than just having an opinion.You know when you see a...

Katie Parrott • 22 min read

04/28/24

Strategy

How to Create or Refine a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing has become very popular in the last decade. But for all that growth, there seems to be more noise and lower quality than ever. We’re seeing an influx of spending and a massive...

Jimmy Daly • 23 min read

04/05/24

Strategy

Distribute Ideas, Not Content

We love to invite content marketing pioneers to share the innovative strategies they’re using to drive results. In this guest post, Mark Rogers, Director of Content Marketing at Freshpaint and...

Mark Rogers • 9 min read

03/28/24

Strategy

Your Blog Is Not a Publication (But It’s Not Just a...

A few years back, I mentioned to John Collins, then content director at Intercom, how much Animalz customers admired their blog. “We’d love to help our clients create something similar,” I told...

Jimmy Daly • 9 min read

03/21/24

Strategy

Welcome to the Distribution-First Era, Where Strategy Starts...

"If you build it, they will come" is a classic startup mistake. It's the belief that customers will find your great product without a distribution strategy. Sometimes they do. Often,...

Ty Magnin • 7 min read

02/26/24

Strategy

Welcome to the Distribution-First Era, Where Strategy Starts...

“If you build it, they will come” is a classic startup mistake. It’s the belief that customers will find your great product without a distribution strategy. Sometimes they do. Often, they...

Ty Magnin • 7 min read

02/25/24

DataStrategy

From Trash to Treasure: Turn Product-Led Leftovers Into a...

There’s a hidden epidemic in the Product-Led Growth (PLG) movement, and it’s happening right under our noses: the waste of valuable by-products. Every day, teams create artifacts as part of their...

Sara Coggin • 10 min read

12/14/23

Case StudiesStrategy

How SupportLogic AI-Proofed and 5X Its Organic Traffic in 12...

The first half of 2022 was an exciting period for SupportLogic, a support experience (SX) management platform. A new website, domain, and positioning set the stage for a strong, content-driven...

Ajdin Perco • 7 min read

10/26/23

Strategy

Don’t Build It, Yet: How Content Can Validate Your...

Gareth Davies is the content lead at Parabol, an online Agile meeting tool. He explains how they’ve pioneered a unique approach to product development called “content-led product.”As a content...

Animalz • 9 min read

09/14/23

Strategythe-blogWriting

Autopilot Link-Building: How To Create Content That Attracts...

Manual link-building isn’t for the faint of heart. You knock on many doors, endure countless rejections, and occasionally score a few backlinks — campaign after campaign after campaign.It’s a...

Ajdin Perco • 8 min read

07/26/23

Case StudiesStrategyWriting

From Numbers to Nuggets: How Sacra Transforms Data Into...

Take an ounce of business analysis. Add a dash of narrative, a sprinkling of journalism, and a pinch of content marketing. Stir until it simmers with insight, then serve to critical startup...

Tim Metz • 7 min read

06/29/23

Strategy

The EVE Framework of Content-Led Link-Building

A post-ChatGPT world will be awash with copycat content.And backlinks (and other off-page ranking factors) may become even more important for Google as a means to differentiate between similar...

Ajdin Perco • 11 min read

05/29/23

Strategy

The Future of SEO in a Post-ChatGPT World

SEO is the growth engine that powers many companies, so it’s worth paying particular attention to any new technology that might change the rules of search.While SEO isn’t dying, it is undergoing...

Ryan Law • 10 min read

05/02/23

Strategy

The 6 Risks of AI Content

There are already plenty of use cases for generative AI in marketing. Industry and article research. Getting to first draft faster. Creating content briefs. Brainstorming titles and headers,...

Ryan Law • 10 min read

04/18/23

Strategy

The Quality Cliff: A Mental Model for CMOs

When does it make sense to invest in content quality? When is the time and expense—the research and interviewing, editorial review, structuring and optimisation, UX and design—worthwhile? And when...

Ryan Law • 7 min read

03/08/23

Strategy

Content Strategy for Horizontal SaaS

Content marketing is baked into the DNA of most successful horizontal SaaS companies.And with good reason: the growth challenges these companies face can be uniquely solved through content. For the...

Ryan Law • 8 min read

10/04/22

Strategy

How to Use Twitter for Thought Leadership

Twitter is pretty consistently the fourth-best traffic source for Animalz. And that’s great—but it’s also entirely the wrong way to think about social media. Here’s a better way to frame the power...

Ryan Law • 9 min read

09/13/22

Strategy

The Pageview Paradox: How Great Results Cause Poor...

Here’s the pageview paradox: many of the things that we do to improve our marketing metrics actually hinder long-term business growth. This happens through two mechanisms. The actions we take to...

Ryan Law • 8 min read

08/16/22

Strategy

5 More Mental Models for Content Marketers

Back in 2018, we published an overview of five mental models we find useful for content marketing. Now, four years on, we wanted to share another collection that has proved its worth, time and time...

Ryan Law • 8 min read

08/03/22

Strategy

6 Predictions About AI in Content Marketing

I shared a cryptic LinkedIn post last week, so in the spirit of elaboration, here are six predictions about how AI is going to change content marketing.

Ryan Law • 12 min read

07/12/22

Strategy

The Winner Doesn’t Take It All: ‘Information Gain’ and the...

Content marketing today is a story of underdogs and goliaths, of upstart brands trying to compete with industry giants — or else fight over the scraps they leave behind.You know what this feels...

Ryan Law • 9 min read

06/28/22

Strategy

The Power of Second-Order Pain Points

One of the simplest (and best) content marketing strategies is to write about pain points — the ugly problems your product is designed to solve.This strategy is a bona fide triple threat. You can...

Ryan Law • 6 min read

06/17/22

Strategy

Media Strategies Aren’t as Crazy as They Seem

More companies are investing in “media content” like publications, books, podcasts, and shows. Think HubSpot’s acquisition of The Hustle newsletter and huge efforts in building its podcast network;...

Ryan Law • 8 min read

04/20/22

Strategy

Content Arbitrage: Shopping at the Thrift Shop of Ideas

The core risk of content marketing is creating something that nobody cares about. You pour time and energy into a topic that your audience ignores. You focus on the wrong angle. You take a bet, and...

Ryan Law • 8 min read

01/25/22

Strategy

Dear Executives, Stop Writing Your Own Thought Leadership

What do Will Smith, Megan Rapinoe, and Gucci Mane have in common? Besides being masters in their respective fields, they were all savvy and humble enough to recognize that their life stories would...

Dominic Vaiana • 9 min read

01/05/22

Strategy

The Content Value Curve

Ever wish you could carry a spare bottle of water around in your underwear? If you do, then the 2005 Evian Water Bra was designed with you in mind. The garment, meant to serve as a cooling...

Cassandra Naji • 9 min read

10/11/21

Strategy

The Search Singularity: How to Win in the Era of Infinite...

Weird things happen in the heart of a black hole.Huge stars collapse under the strength of their own gravity to become one-dimensional points. Spacetime reaches infinite curvature. Matter is...

Ryan Law • 14 min read

08/03/21

Strategy

You’re a Content Marketer, Not a Writer

Most content marketers have a “writer brain.” It’s the part of them that appreciates beautiful, clever writing. It’s instilled in them by years of reading fiction, writing essays, and aspiring to...

Ryan Law • 9 min read

04/29/21

Strategy

Why ‘Vertical Volatility’ Is the Missing Link in...

As content marketers, we base our keyword strategies on the most accessible—and simplest—data points we have: domain ranking, monthly search volume, and keyword difficulty. Often, keyword...

Cassandra Naji • 10 min read

04/06/21

Strategy

Experiment, Systematize, Differentiate: The Content Strategy...

We often criticize the use of ultimate guides and listicle content, and with good reason. Many companies operate in content-saturated industries where these “classic” content marketing tactics are...

Ryan Law • 9 min read

03/29/21

Strategy

The Hybrid Content Team

The best content teams are hybrids. In most world-class content organizations, you’ll find in-house employees, freelancers and content marketing agencies working in unison, a combined effort for...

Ryan Law • 9 min read

03/03/21

Strategy

How to Get Competitors Speaking Your Language

In 2014, I read an article that has remained lodged in my brain ever since.Competition was growing in content marketing, the author argued, and declining ROI was an inevitable consequence. An...

Ryan Law • 4 min read

02/03/21

Strategy

How to Go Viral: A Content Marketer’s Guide

Over the years, we’ve watched an elite club of articles generate hundreds of backlinks and rack up hundreds of thousands of views. These are the articles that went viral, circulating through...

Ryan Law • 9 min read

01/28/21

Strategy

The ‘Google Knows Best’ Fallacy

The way most companies approach content marketing is predicated on the unspoken idea that Google knows best.For any keyword, they search through results page after results page to work out what...

Ryan Law • 6 min read

01/21/21

Strategy

Deep Cuts and Smash Hits: The Best of Animalz in 2020

There’s a lot to be learned from a year of content marketing. High traffic articles provide a blueprint for future content. Real-world feedback from readers shines a light on the articles that...

Ryan Law • 8 min read

12/14/20

Strategy

Content Refreshing: How to Win Traffic by Updating Old...

All content that grows via organic search experiences decay. This means that, over time and for various reasons, those posts lose traffic.Decay occurs slowly enough that no alarms go off. The...

Jimmy Daly • 14 min read

11/30/20

Strategy

No, You Shouldn’t Always Focus on the Bottom of the Funnel

I’m a big believer that the difference between “writing” and “content marketing” is revenue. Content marketing is writing that serves a business objective. It exists to make sales easier.But that...

Ryan Law • 6 min read

11/30/20

Strategy

6 Low Effort, High Impact Content Ideas

We’ve written before that there is often little correlation between the time spent on a piece of content and the results it achieves. Great ideas, simply written, can generate thousands of views....

Ryan Law • 8 min read

11/18/20

Strategy

Write for the Lurkers

The 1% rule is the idea that only 1% of participants in an online community actively contribute content, while 99% quietly consume. The 1% create every new Reddit post, Twitter comment, and...

Ryan Law • 5 min read

10/27/20

Strategy

How to Fast-Track ROI From Your First Blog Post

It’s a misconception that content marketing takes three months, or six months, or even a year to be valuable. Content marketing can—and should—have a positive impact on your company from day...

Ryan Law • 6 min read

10/05/20

Strategy

The Second Mover Advantage in Content Marketing

Look for the North Star on a cloudless night and you’ll see a picture of the universe from 323 years ago. From that picture, we can learn little about the North Star as it looks today. We can see...

Ryan Law • 8 min read

09/16/20

Strategy

You Need a Nemesis

It isn’t always enough to cast your company as the hero—sometimes, you also need a villain. DHH’s recent spat with Apple turned a pedestrian product launch into an epic battle between a corporate...

Ryan Law • 8 min read

08/25/20

Strategy

The Auteur Theory of Content Marketing: Why It Pays to...

It takes about 30 seconds to recognize a Wes Anderson film, care of the pastel colors, symmetrical framing, and oddball characters. In fact, his style is so recognizable that it has spawned a cult...

Ryan Law • 10 min read

08/17/20

Strategy

GPT-3 is the Sparring Partner You Didn’t Know You Needed

You probably haven’t read the whole internet. Slacker.GPT-3 has. It’s read all of Wikipedia, even the article about Berserk llama syndrome. It’s gone through all of Google Books. It read every...

Andrew Tate • 22 min read

08/10/20

Strategy

How to Succeed as a Content Team of One

Many of the content marketers we talk to operate as a content team of one. They share a common backstory: as companies scale, engineering is the first team to grow, followed by sales. Marketing...

Ryan Law • 11 min read

07/20/20

Strategy

Why Wirecutter Wins: Opinionated Content

Wirecutter carved out a $150-million niche in the crowded affiliate marketing industry by understanding one core tenet of content marketing: opinions are not optional.Imagine you want to buy a DSLR...

Ryan Law • 7 min read

07/06/20

Strategy

The Category Creator’s Manifesto

Category creation is not an act of true creation but rather an exercise in positioning.Successful categories result from identifying a nascent change, a great cresting wave moments before crashing...

Ryan Law • 7 min read

05/25/20

Strategy

Technical Content: A Strategy Blueprint for SaaS Companies

“… In order for the beautiful technology … to achieve its intended vision, a bridge has to be built from the authors of the technology to the rest of the market. That bridge is the sales and...

Andrew Tate • 10 min read

05/12/20

Strategy

4 Growth Opportunities Hiding in Recession

Recessions feel like one-in-a-million events when you live through them, but, in truth, they’re a dime a dozen.There have been 47 recessions in US history, including eight within the last 50 years....

Ryan Law • 7 min read

05/04/20

Strategy

This Is What Content Marketing Looks Like in a Crisis

We can’t hold our breath forever. Even in the midst of crisis, marketing must go on. In many cases, how businesses interact with the wider world is more important than ever. We need to offer...

Ryan Law • 9 min read

03/31/20

Strategy

Take Charge, Be a Voice of Reason and Keep Publishing

Should you continue publishing content during the COVID-19 crisis?The short answer is yes—you absolutely should.Marketing during a time like this can either be greedy and opportunistic, or genuine...

Jimmy Daly • 6 min read

03/23/20

Strategy

Hubs vs. Pillars: What’s the Difference?

There are a lot of words that get thrown around marketing meetings, Twitter threads, and client calls that lack clear meaning. This is the problem with marketing jargon—words find their way into...

Jimmy Daly • 6 min read

03/16/20

Strategy

Planning to Hire an Agency? Here’s How to Be a Great...

There is plenty of great advice out there on hiring and building great teams, but you won’t find much on vendor selection and management. In either case, the goal is to leverage the talents of...

Jimmy Daly • 7 min read

02/24/20

Strategy

Risk vs. Reward: How to Build a Diversified Content...

Great content marketing looks a lot like a diversified investment portfolio.Smart investors realize that different types of investments serve different purposes. Index funds, for example, offer a...

Ryan Law • 11 min read

02/03/20

Strategy

Forget About Traffic and Start Using Content to Drive Leads...

Using Google autocomplete to source content ideas is a useful hack, but a trivial one. In fact, nearly all keyword research tools and tips are the same—an impersonal, seductive way to flesh out a...

Jimmy Daly • 10 min read

01/27/20

Strategy

Unlocking Internal Knowledge Is Actually a Great Content...

It’s 2 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. You’ve spent all week in meetings. You helped sort out an issue with an important customer and even jumped in to help another team wrap up a project. Now, just...

Jimmy Daly • 7 min read

01/13/20

Strategy

How We Quadrupled Monthly Traffic With a “Shot in the Arm”

We’ve written before that top of funnel content can be a great loss leader. We’ve also talked about how to handle outlier articles that make the rest of your content look bad. Today, we have a...

Jimmy Daly • 4 min read

12/30/19

Strategy

Looking for a Job in Content Marketing? Ask Your...

We speak with a lot of companies who are looking to hire content marketers. We also talk with a lot of content marketers who are looking for new opportunities. These two parties don’t match up...

Jimmy Daly • 7 min read

12/02/19

Strategy

Your Content and Sales Teams Don’t Communicate—and It’s...

Nearly all SaaS companies use content to generate leads, but that’s usually where the collaboration between content and sales ends. The content team has a job to do, the sales team has a job to...

Jimmy Daly • 10 min read

11/18/19

Strategy

Copycat Content: SEO Tools Got Us Here, Humans Will Get Us...

There’s a copycat crisis in content marketing. Explore the search results for virtually any lucrative keyword, and you’ll find a bunch of articles with lookalike titles, headers and examples....

Ryan Law • 8 min read

10/28/19

Strategy

Here’s How to Handle a Wildly Successful Article That Makes...

SaaS blogs that derive significant traffic from a single post are at high risk for several frustrating problems. We call these outlier posts “whales.” A whale is a single post that is performing...

Jimmy Daly • 8 min read

09/16/19

Strategy

Here Are Three Ways to Improve Your Keyword Research

Organic search is one of the best distribution channels at your disposal. It’s predictable. Traffic compounds over time. You can use it to reach your target audience at a pivotal moment, whether...

Ryan Law • 10 min read

08/12/19

Strategy

2019 Content Trends Gleaned from 160+ Sales Calls

There’s a common challenge in the content marketing world that creates some friction between content creators and their managers. The creators are heads-down working on new content while the...

Jimmy Daly • 11 min read

07/22/19

StrategyWriting

10 Ways to Create a Healthy Feedback Culture at Any Company

As a child, I asked my parents the same question over and over: on a scale of 1 to 10, how “good” was the thing I just did? An underwater somersault, a dance move, a picture I drew. I wanted to...

Devin Bramhall • 10 min read

07/16/19

Strategy

How to Diagnose and Maintain the Health of a SaaS Blog

All content marketers seem to believe that their site is underperforming. There’s an underlying sense of anxiety about never having enough traffic. At the same time, no one seems to know how much...

Jimmy Daly • 9 min read

07/01/19

Strategy

Use These 8 Content Creation Lanes to Flesh Out Your...

Your business strategy informs your content strategy and your content strategy informs how, when, why and what you write.The lanes below are ways that you can flesh out a content strategy, but make...

Jimmy Daly • 13 min read

05/28/19

Strategy

The Secret to Content Promotion Is Hidden in Plain Sight

For many marketers, distribution is the final stage of the content marketing process. They bring their creativity to bear on a novel, interesting concept. They write a well-crafted article, often...

Ryan Law • 8 min read

04/10/19

Strategy

How to Earn a Senior Content Marketing Role

Work hard, deliver great results, get promoted, become a manager—wouldn’t it be nice if advancing your career were this simple?That’s part of the equation, but there’s more. To build a great career...

Devin Bramhall • 12 min read

04/03/19

Strategy

Why You Shouldn’t Try to Be the First Round Review: 3...

The First Round Review, the content arm of First Round Capital, has earned a reputation as one of the best publishers of startup and tech content on the web. That’s thanks largely to its first...

Jimmy Daly • 8 min read

03/25/19

Strategy

How to Use Templated Content and Cross-Cutting to Grow Your...

Teardowns, list posts, case studies, experiments—some of the best blog content originates from handy, well-worn templates.Templated content can be one of the easiest and fastest ways to grow...

Jimmy Daly • 7 min read

02/05/19

Strategy

Why the Best Content Happens Fast

There is no correlation between the time invested in content and the performance of that content. This is either the best thing about content marketing or the most frustrating. It just depends on...

Jimmy Daly • 4 min read

01/07/19

Strategy

3 Challenges to Producing Great Content

For all the advice out there on “growing an audience” and “leveling up your content,” there's precious little about the real-world hurdles of writing content that someone might actually want...

Jimmy Daly • 9 min read

12/18/18

Strategy

3 Challenges to Producing Great Content

For all the advice out there on “growing an audience” and “leveling up your content,” there’s precious little about the real-world hurdles of writing content that someone might actually want to...

Jimmy Daly • 9 min read

12/17/18

Strategy

5 Mental Models for Content Marketers

Mental models are frameworks and principles that help you make decisions. They don’t provide answers, but they do provide new ways to approach old problems. Try running a few problems through the...

Jimmy Daly • 7 min read

11/27/18

Strategy

The Marketing Executive’s Guide to Content Strategy

Marketing executives make important decisions about high-level content strategy, budget, and personnel, but aren’t always content experts themselves.To avoid creating unnecessary constraints for...

Jimmy Daly • 9 min read

11/14/18

Strategy

The Animalz Podcast

We couldn’t find a content marketing podcast that we really enjoyed, so we made our own. The Animalz content marketing podcast is a weekly show that focuses on real content marketing strategy—no...

Jimmy Daly • 1 min read

10/24/18

Strategy

Your Blog Is Not a Publication

Editor’s note: We’ve published a 2024 update of this classic post based on a recent Q&A with Jimmy Daly. In it, Jimmy shares his evolved insights on the library vs. publication framework and...

Jimmy Daly • 8 min read

10/23/18

Strategy

Why Venture-Backed Companies Struggle with Content Marketing

SaaS businesses that are venture-backed from the beginning typically struggle with content marketing. Content is a growth engine that takes years to mature. But venture-backed SaaS companies don’t...

Jimmy Daly • 8 min read

10/09/18

Strategy

The Content Growth Cycle

Content marketing gets easier and delivers better ROI over time.At the start, it’s a hard slog. New visitors, search rankings, and backlinks are few and far between, but each success builds on the...

Ryan Law • 6 min read

10/03/18

Strategy

What Is Bottom of the Funnel Content?

“One of the myths of SaaS is that the products are so good, so easy to use, so quick to deploy … that the product sells itself. But as many startups discover to their horror … this is far from the...

Jimmy Daly • 8 min read

09/26/18

Strategy

How to Take Your Content Upmarket When You Take Your SaaS...

Nearly all SaaS businesses aspire to move upmarket.Moving upmarket means acquiring larger customers who spend more money. There’s a financial incentive to move upmarket … you can make more money...

Jimmy Daly • 10 min read

09/18/18

DataStrategy

The Science Behind 100,000-View Blog Posts

All successful content marketing is successful in the same way.At least, that was our instinct and we wanted to prove it. We’ve seen many blog posts take off, delivering a steady flow of organic...

Andrew Tate • 14 min read

09/10/18

Strategy

Movement-First: How to Scale Content Without Sacrificing...

Jimmy Daly • 10 min read

08/20/18

Strategy

The Sunk Cost Fallacy in Content Marketing

Content marketing is an investment—until it’s not.A blog watered down with content that no one reads is actually doing your website a disservice. Imagine that…the physical embodiment of your...

Jimmy Daly • 9 min read

07/31/18

Case StudiesStrategy

How QuickBooks Nearly Doubled Traffic by Deleting Half Its...

Here's a bold SEO move.Will Waggoner, SEO lead at QuickBooks, decided to delete 2,000 blog posts to fight off aslow decline in organic traffic. Those 2,000 posts represented more than 40% of...

Jimmy Daly • 10 min read

07/24/18

Case StudiesStrategy

How QuickBooks Nearly Doubled Traffic by Deleting Half Its...

[CDATA[ <p style="text-align: left;"]]Here’s a bold SEO move.Will Waggoner, SEO lead at QuickBooks, decided to delete 2,000 blog posts to fight off a slow decline in organic traffic....

Jimmy Daly • 10 min read

07/23/18

Strategy

How Google Analytics Kills Great Blogs

If you remember the Animalz blog for just one thing, let it be this: The oversimplification of content marketing is a drag on the entire industry. A nuanced understanding of content marketing...

Jimmy Daly • 9 min read

07/16/18

Strategy

Why Organic Search Traffic Declines—and What to Do About It

It’s really difficult to gain traction in organic search, which is why it’s painfully frustrating to watch it slip away.When traffic is trending up, it can feel like you’ve finally cracked organic...

Jimmy Daly • 7 min read

07/10/18

Strategy

What is “Good Content”?

No one disagrees that you need “good content” to grow a blog, but there’s plenty of disagreement on what “good content” actually means.Let’s start here: Good writing is simply not enough. There’s a...

Jimmy Daly • 8 min read

06/26/18

StrategyWriting

How to Grow a Blog the Hard Way

[CDATA[<em]]“I think it would be quite disingenuous if I sat down and started writing an article about the future of design. I could write it, but I’d likely miss the subtleties and nuance a...

Jimmy Daly • 11 min read

06/18/18

Strategy

How to Ride a Wave of Growth, or Revel in Its Crash

For all the talk of creating great content, there’s a significant and often unspoken factor at work in every successful blog: timing.Riding a trend is one thing, but it’s an oversimplified way of...

Jimmy Daly • 10 min read

06/12/18

Strategy

How to Evolve Beyond “Actionable Content”

The problem with “actionable content” is that it’s a commodity.It often requires little subject matter expertise and lacks specificity. Actionable content is not a substitute for a cohesive content...

Jimmy Daly • 4 min read

05/29/18

Strategy

Top of Funnel Content Creates All Kinds of Problems—But You...

Top of funnel traffic gets a lot of content marketers into trouble.Before we dive into why, let’s first outline what we mean by top of funnel content. This type of content marketing is meant to...

Jimmy Daly • 5 min read

05/14/18

Strategy

In 1989, the Wells Fargo CEO Dispensed Some Timeless Content...

Faced with bank deregulation and increased competition in the 1980s, former Wells Fargo CEO Carl Reichardt understood that cutting costs was essential. Reichardt was up to the task. And,...

Jimmy Daly • 3 min read

05/07/18

Strategy

Core Content Marketing Concepts

There are a handful of core concepts that we address on the Animalz blog over and over again. There’s good reason for this. Content marketing strategy isn’t rocket science, but it does require...

Jimmy Daly • 2 min read

05/03/18

Strategy

Content Strategy for Multi-Product Companies

How do you build a content strategy for a business with more than one product?A content marketing strategy should be built around product use cases. It can expand beyond that, but it should always...

Jimmy Daly • 5 min read

04/30/18

Strategy

How to Weave Content Marketing Into the Fabric of Your...

It’s much easier to succeed with content marketing when it’s baked into the company culture.To home in on the mechanisms at work here, it’s worth understanding how we’re defining culture in this...

Jimmy Daly • 6 min read

04/16/18

Strategy

You Don’t Need an Audience

“Building an audience” is one of the most common—and problematic—phrases in content marketing.Instead of thinking about building an audience, you should create content that addresses users’ needs...

Jimmy Daly • 3 min read

04/09/18

Strategy

Understand Your Growth Constraints, Then Deploy Content...

Content is traditionally used to drive top of funnel traffic and move users towards free trial signups. And that works really well—assuming that creating awareness of the product is the main...

Jimmy Daly • 10 min read

04/03/18

Strategy

Understand Your Growth Constraints, Then Deploy Content...

Content is traditionally used to drive top of funnel traffic and move users towards free trial signups. And that works really well—assuming that creating awareness of the product is the main...

Jimmy Daly • 10 min read

04/02/18

Strategy

Technical SEO for Content Marketers

Technical SEO is something that content marketers don’t fully understand. And Kevin Indig, SEO lead at Atlassian, has some strong opinions—and plenty of advice—about how marketing teams can...

Jimmy Daly • 9 min read

03/26/18

Strategy

50 Things We’ve Learned About Content Marketing

We’re lucky to work with some of the top SaaS brands in the world.The opportunity to chat strategy with some of the best minds in the industry and get access to dozens of Google Analytics installs...

Jimmy Daly • 10 min read

03/19/18

Strategy

Explore v. Exploit: How to Find the Perfect Content...

“The joy of the young is discovering. The joy of the old is relishing.” — Stewart BrandIn 1944, a friend invited Arthur Lydiard on a five-mile run. The 27-year-old figured he could keep up with his...

Jimmy Daly • 6 min read

03/12/18

Strategy

How to Succeed at Content Marketing: Do It Better, or Do It...

There are more than 780,000 games in Apple’s App Store. Nearly all rely on the same elements of habit-forming psychology to build addicting games. Some are massive hits, but most max out on...

Jimmy Daly • 6 min read

02/28/18

Strategy

Great Writing Isn’t Enough. Here Are Two SEO...

The benchmark for a great SaaS blog is 100,000 views per month. To get there, you need great writing. But that will never be enough. Above all else, you need a sound strategy.There are basically...

Jimmy Daly • 8 min read

02/12/18

Strategy

We Need a Slower, More Thoughtful Approach to Content...

Waste is evil.At least, that’s how it’s observed in the lean manufacturing world.Toyota, in particular, has revolutionized manufacturing by distilling complex manufacturing concepts into single...

Jimmy Daly • 5 min read

02/05/18

Strategy

5 Content Marketing Power Laws

If you double the side of a square, you increase the area by a factor of four. If you double the side of a cube, you increase the volume by a factor of eight. Small change, big impact. That’s a...

Jimmy Daly • 8 min read

01/19/18

Strategy

Most Blogs Fail. Why?

Plenty of entreprenuers point to Clay Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma as a guiding light, one of their go-to sources for insight on disruption. If you aren’t familiar with the book or the...

Jimmy Daly • 6 min read

01/09/18