How Rilla Doubled Brand Traffic with Proprietary Data and SEO

Will Gao, Head of Growth at Rilla, faced exactly that situation. They had a goldmine of proprietary insights but not enough resources to turn them into content. His to-do list is typical for a marketer at a rapidly growing AI startup (scaling from $1M to $10M ARR in just one year): launch events, grow brand awareness, produce data-driven content, manage the blog, interview experts, and handle distribution.

Animalz helped Rilla overcome these resource constraints with SEO-optimized content based on proprietary data. Monthly brand traffic doubled within months, fueling inbound demos and product usage.

Challenge: Turn Data Insights into Marketing Assets

Rilla uses AI to transform field sales coaching. Their technology unlocks insights from calls, texts, and face-to-face meetings — data previously lost or inaccessible to sales leaders.

As the leader in field sales AI, Rilla faced growing competition. "There are copycats springing up monthly," Will says. "But we're the only ones with proven ROI with top national brands." It’s a position grounded in data: Rilla has a proprietary database of tens of millions of sales conversations — a depth of insight no competitor can match.

Rilla's content vision was clear: publish proprietary data studies ("Rilla Reports/Labs") showcasing their ability to extract insights from sales conversations. But as a one-person growth team, Will couldn't:

• Produce data-driven blog posts.
• Create branded data visualizations.
• Manage social distribution.
• Extract insights from their product team.
• Monitor performance metrics.

Solution: A Content Concierge Partnership

Animalz developed a "concierge" content model for Rilla where our out-house team members worked like in-house resources. This full-service approach prevented Will from getting bogged down in daily operations and allowed him to finally ship data-driven SEO content.

Audience immersion

The partnership started with audience immersion through a structured onboarding process. Will says, "The initial onboarding period — the memo that you had me fill out, and then having deeper Zoom calls going over the product and the market characteristics — was critical."

Through these sessions, Animalz got an understanding of Rilla's customer base: home services business owners buying AI technology for their sales teams.

"Our customers are white males, 35+, mainly in Florida, Texas, and the Midwest," Will explains. "They're dedicated entrepreneurs — up at 5am, in the field all day, home at 9pm, working weekends.” He describes them as “very down to earth,” with a “no-nonsense” attitude."

This deep understanding was essential for entrusting an outside vendor like Animalz with crafting content for an audience that values authenticity and practical insights.

Adaptive content strategy

When Rilla’s data team had to prioritize product initiatives over content, Animalz helped Will pivot the approach. They mined Rilla’s Notion libraries for insights to develop search-friendly topics around sales conversations and operational insights. This way, they could still showcase Rilla’s expertise through existing — rather than new — data.

Custom brand visuals

Animalz created customized visuals for Rilla's data insights. Will emphasized how critical these branded infographics were for reinforcing their category leader position. The "Powered by Rilla" watermarks turned each visualization into a brand asset, particularly effective with their audience who strongly preferred visual formats over dense text.

End-to-end execution

Will's biggest pain point was getting content out the door: uploading articles and scheduling social media. Animalz took over that workflow.

As Will describes it: "At one point there was this operational bottleneck where you guys had this awesome article ready to go. You'd have these social posts kind of pre-drafted up, but because of all this other stuff I was doing, it would take me days to even copy and paste that into social." Giving Animalz direct access to their platforms removed this bottleneck.

Done-for-you reporting

Instead of spending hours analyzing metrics, Will simply showed up to monthly calls where Animalz presented performance updates, strategic recommendations, and a clear path forward.

Will says: “Animalz would say, ‘Here’s what’s working, here’s what’s not working, here’s how we keep driving numbers up or fixing things that are failing.’ Those sessions gave us total clarity — just making sure we stayed aligned on goals and seeing that spending an extra hour a week on the Animalz stuff was actually translating into business metrics.”

This approach also allowed Will to feed content insights back to product and sales teams, keeping everyone aligned on what resonated with customers.

Results: Doubled Monthly Visits with Real Business Impact

Rilla quickly saw results from their Animalz partnership: brand traffic doubled within months and translated into several business wins.

Inbound demos accelerated

Prospects began citing blog posts during sales calls, with a strong correlation between increased brand traffic and inbound demo flow.

Will recalled a specific example: “A large private equity group was in the final stages of signing a deal with us. In the lead up to that meeting, one of our AEs assembled materials — including our Rilla Labs articles — for them. They thought the insights were super fascinating, and it was a factor in their decision to work with us.”

Customers turned Rilla content into training materials

Field managers turned the content into training material. Over dinner, one told Will: "Every time you guys drop a new article, I see a spike in my reps' usage."

The impact was so strong that when Rilla missed sending out an article one week, customers noticed immediately. "We literally had three CSMs come to me saying, 'Hey, John from Iowa Plumbing is asking when the next insights are dropping — did he get removed from the list?'"

Content amplified event marketing

Will says events like Rilla Masters are essential for them, generating "half our new leads."

Animalz-produced content amplified this event strategy in two ways: it strengthened the conference experience (with pre-event emails and booth talking points) and filled gaps between events (maintaining prospect relationships through regular content).

This content-event integration turned isolated conference touchpoints into an ongoing engagement cycle, making Rilla's event marketing more efficient and effective.

Insights for Other Growing Teams

Rilla's success offers lessons for other resource-constrained teams. Will shares five insights that made this content partnership work.

1. Find a partner, not an order-taker: "You should vet [a content partner] as much as you would interview an actual content marketer joining your team. Ask what their background is, who else they're working with, and what results they've driven."

2. Invest in full-service execution: A concierge model can amplify reach for lean teams without ballooning headcount or day-to-day oversight. Will could be “hands-off” once he provided the data. “It felt so concierge,” he says.

3. Create content for existing customers, not just prospects: Rilla saw existing accounts engage more deeply when content validated their practices. "When we drop a blog article that says 'following a process and coaching people works,' there's a lot of virality because coaching organizations are like, 'Oh, we just got our thesis validated by real data.'"

4. Prepare for resource constraints by being adaptive: Even with limited data or bandwidth, maintain your publishing momentum. When Rilla's data team couldn't produce new analyses, they found ways to repurpose existing insights. Will appreciated this flexibility: "You guys understood what it's like to be in a fast-growing environment... and were right there next to me."

5. Identify and automate distribution to your audience's preferred channels: Know where your specific audience hangs out online and establish a consistent publishing workflow. For Rilla's contractors, this meant Facebook: "Facebook is definitely the most active social media... There's mastermind groups with like 100,000 people." Automating distribution to these channels ensured consistent reach.

From Resource Gap to Growth Engine

With Animalz handling the entire content operation, Will could finally step back from day-to-day content tasks and think bigger. With so much of the process covered, Will likened the experience to having an internal content team on standby, free of day-to-day oversight.

The partnership proved particularly valuable as Rilla maintained their ambitious growth trajectory, aiming to "10x our revenue from 10 million to 100 million in ARR" after already growing from 1 to 10 million the previous year. With content an increasingly important part of this strategy — Will noted that "half of the deals that we closed in March were inbound" — having a reliable content partner was essential.

Animalz inspired Will with what's possible with content marketing. "What was awesome about working with you guys is that you are such experts in the practice of content marketing that you really showed us the sky's the limit. There's so much more for us to learn and so much potential for us to keep investing in this."

The results speak to the possibilities of true partnership: doubled brand traffic, stronger customer relationships, and momentum for key initiatives like Rilla Masters. But perhaps most valuable was the peace of mind that came from having a sustainable content engine, even as a one-person team.

Tim Metz

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Tim is the Director of Marketing and Innovation at Animalz. He's also the creator of Lifeline, a pomodoro timer app for macOS. Tim lives in Koh Samui, Thailand. 🏝️