Guerrilla Content: 30 Growth Hacks To Content Marketing Success On A Limited Budget

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My journey into content marketing actually started in 2004 when I went to work for a well-known market research firm that very few people had actually ever heard of.

They hired me as their first VP of Marketing. My team of 1 (me) had absolutely zero budget to start. But as a research company, we did lots of surveys for clients who wanted to use the survey data to build reports and get good PR.

My first taste of success in what we now call content marketing came when our website crashed from all the traffic we received for an article I wrote based on survey data from the American Cleaning Institute. Yes they are a thing!

The article was titled “Survey Reveals How Many Of Us Pee In The Shower.” (77% is the answer if you’re wondering. Gross, right?)

But the main thing I learned was that 1 fun, helpful, or entertaining piece of content can outperform all the copywriting for product web pages on why we were the best company to conduct surveys. But in order to win this game, you gotta go guerrilla baby!

Quick Takeaways:

Guerrilla Marketing is art of using free or already available resources to attract your audience to your website.
Growth Hacking is the science of testing creative ideas, using analytics and demand metrics to sell products and gain exposure.
Applying both guerrilla tactics and growth hacking to content marketing can bring you huge ROI on a limited budget.

Here’s an example to get your creative juices flowing:

96.3 Rock radio’s free air guitars:

How to do content marketing with (almost) no budget?

At the research firm, I took our greatest asset: survey research. And used it to continuously update our newly revamped website to drive inbound leads for our sales team. I taught myself SEO basics and used a list of target keywords to create and distribute stories on our latest research.

Traffic on our website grew exponentially. Inbound leads started coming in to the company on a consistent basis for the first time. I even spent some time teaching the CEO about digital marketing and how to do paid search.

He ended up saving my job, my house and maybe even my marriage. But for that story you have to go read Mean People Suck.

Growth Hacker Content Marketing

When I initially proposed content marketing at SAP, many people asked, “How much software you gonna sell with blog posts?”

Luckily I had a direct manager who saw the declining effectiveness of traditional advertising. She knew that the digital age demanded more engaging and consistent content marketing.

At the time, we were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising landing pages. These destinations had 99% bounce rates, no organic search traffic and zero social engagement. I asked for a fraction of that cost to build our thought leadership content hub.

So for a third of the cost of a throwaway landing page, I built a content marketing program to serve as the landing destination for advertising, and to reach new people with great content marketing.

Once we started publishing, we saw a 20% lower bounce rate, almost immediate organic search traffic and a growing level of social engagement.

That is growth hacker content marketing. The site basically funded itself – it had a return on investment from day one! And we were continuously testing, iterating and improving our results.

Guerrilla Content: How To Growth Hack Your Way To Content Marketing Success On A Limited Budget

OK, so now you have a site built. But how do you produce enough and a consistent volume of content, at an acceptable level of quality, to stay relevant to your audience?

This is where you can turn to what I call Guerrilla Content:

Guerilla Content: content created with almost no budget, simply by re-purposing things your organization already has.

For example, people ask me all the time how do you find to time to create and share content? The answer: I re-purpose stuff I already create. I look at my email outbox. Each one is an answer to a question!

In many cases, it is a few paragraphs and detailed enough to turn into a blog post. I turn my powerpoints into slideshares. I turn my keynote speaker notes into articles and my speaker videos into lead generation assets. This example from during the pandemic brought me about 5 new clients:

Why keep content created for a few dozen people from reaching hundreds or thousands?

The first 24 blog posts I wrote on SAP’s Business Innovation were all white paper summaries I wrote from content that was sitting in a campaign library.

So if you are looking for your own Guerrilla Content, here are some ideas I’ve used along with some examples:

30 Guerrilla Growth Hacks To Content Marketing Success

Identify the top issues and trends on the minds of your executives or customers
Survey your prospects / ideal audience profiles for their top challenges (this should define your editorial strategy)
Answer the biggest mistakes people make in your industry
Profile your executives and customers by asking Who are you? Greatest challenge? How you solved? + Profile photo and turn it into a blog post.
Ask multiple experts “what is the future of” your industry
Ask people to share their worst mistakes
Share the best examples of . . . content marketing in our case.
Answer the simplest questions about your solution category like what, why and how.
Use Klout, Buzzsumo, Topsy, YouTube, Slideshare to identify “best of” lists like this.
Highlight content you love from others (OPC = other people’s content): Infographics,
People to follow,
Blogs to read,
Slideshares,
Linkedin Pulse articles,
Videos,
Conferences,
Books,
Quotes,
Facts, etc.
Define the terms You Need To Know on [your topic]
8 Steps To Success In [your topic]
Best Practices For [Topic]
What [Hot Topic] Means for [Your Issue]. My Example: What Google’s New Algorithm Means For You
Re-purpose content from your own campaign material, or
Cover research reports, or
Highlight analyst reports
Turn marketing keynotes + Speaker notes into articles
Customer service people are a great resource. Ask them to identify your customers’ biggest questions or FAQs
Turn customer testimonials (talking head videos) into “customer profile videos” by just taking out the promotional parts.
Ask your employees who attend events to provide you with their notes.

I also suggest teams sit in a room once a quarter and bang out lists of content ideas. Here are a few resources to help you with brainstorming your own list of Guerrilla content marketing ideas:

Feeling overwhelmed? Let Marketing Insider Group be your guide to creating ROI-producing content without breaking your budget. We’re not free but for less than the cost of sponsoring 1 webinar, we can bring you a years’ worth of content ideas, full-length articles, and reports that prove our value.

Check our our annual blogging service today or reach out for a free content marketing assessment.