Belkins is a lead generation and appointment setting company. By 2024, the company had worked with 1000+ medium to enterprise companies, generating over $50 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). To boost ARR and keep customer acquisition costs low, the company scaled organic growth by publishing articles.
Belkins partnered with Precious at Content Estate to increase its organic traffic without sacrificing content quality. After over a year of working together, Irina Yelisova, Content Manager at Belkins says:
Collaborating with Precious was a winning decision for us. We saw a significant growth in traffic for blog posts Precious wrote.
Pipeline has increased too. As Irina said:
Your articles have brought over 100 leads in one year, secured a customer, and resulted in multiple ongoing deals.
Initially, Belkins engaged Content Estate to produce high-quality content for only a few months. However, this changed because of our simple but thorough content research approach, output, and results.
The Challenge: More Traffic, No Booked Appointments
When I spoke to Eugene Zatiychuk, Organic Growth Manager at Belkins, he said, “Our goals were (and still are) to drive more leads from organic search; attract high-quality leads that match our ICP and are more likely to become an opportunity or a client; convert more of these leads into appointments with our sales team.”
The goal seemed on track, except that a challenge surfaced:
🤦🏾♂️ More traffic, no booked appointments.
Despite increasing organic traffic, Eugene said their content never brought booked appointments. Margaret Lee, Head of Marketing at Belkins, corroborates this.
We didn’t start as well as we would have liked, primarily because we inherited a legacy site with a ton of content (over 600 pages). But it was all TOFU content, turning our website into a sales glossary.
The Solutions
Content Audit
To address its new challenge, Belkins deleted educational TOFU pages with little potential, focusing instead on content tailored for their core decision-makers: sales & marketing heads, and C-level executives.
Eugene said Belkins did this because their core decision-makers and target personas don’t need education on what they already know.
This realization caused us to pivot into creating content that would help our readers and position us as the foremost lead gen partner, Eugene said.
For this to happen, Belkins needed to hire competent writers.
Collaboration with Content Estate
Irina shared that before working with us, Belkins had collaborated with other writers and agencies. She said the relationship didn’t work out after they changed their strategy because of:
- Lack of research
- Poor writing: fluff, weak arguments, value judgments
- Delivering raw copy with no editing or basic proofreading
- Missed deadlines, over-promising regarding delivery terms
- Ignoring our requirements and guidelines
- Permanent quality roller coasters
With the new strategy in place, Irina’s said Belkins sought skilled writers with:
- Experience in writing solely business articles, primarily for B2B companies
- Knowledge in B2B sales and marketing (preferably former or real practitioner)
- Experience in running deep research, interviewing experts, and using relevant content platforms for surveying
Our portfolio ticked all of Belkins’ boxes after they found it on a database of 174 writers compiled by Jakub Rudnik, Head of Content and SEO at Softr.
The Pilot Project
Though Belkins knew I was a good fit, I always want every new client to have peace of mind before signing a contract. As such, I proposed we do a pilot project.
After receiving Belkins’ buyer persona and style guide, I conducted detailed research to do a 100% content update of an existing article. The outcome is this piece, titled, ‘How to Generate Sales Leads: A Guide for Sales Managers.’
According to SurferSEO, “how to generate sales leads” has a monthly search volume of 590 and a cost per click of $22.71.
To put it in context, ranking organically for this term can save $113,550 (5,000 visits * 22.71) in Google ad spend with just 5,000 visits. Since the piece went live, it has remained on page one of Google, allowing it to generate valuable organic traffic for Belkins.
Expert marketers like Ashley Faus, Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Atlassian, also left thoughtful comments after I distributed the post on LinkedIn. Ashley said:
I’m not in sales, but this is a great guide 👏. And your research and depth of expertise shows! As you note, this is not the content you’ll find via AI or a standard SEO content shop. It requires much more time to dive in, find the insights, and turn it into a publish-ready piece!
Beyond the comments, the content update helped the post rank quickly, surging its traffic from 27 visits in February 2023 to 1,175 visits in June 2023 and 4,000 visits by September 2023. With the trial project completed, we created more valuable content for Belkins.
The 3 Part Approach to Driving Valuable Organic Traffic for Belkins
Our content writing approach for Belkins focused on three elements:
- Doing deep research
- Writing expert-led contents
- Showing concrete examples, not telling
Doing deep research
We use a simple but highly effective content research approach. The result is the creation of copy that aligns with different copywriting frameworks.
Think:
- AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action)
- PAS (Problem, Agitation, Solution)
- BAB (Before-After-Bridge)
As an example, here’s a brief insight on what we did to write ‘How to Generate Sales Leads: A Guide for Sales Managers.’
- Scoured subreddits to mine insights about the problem
- Sent quote requests on expert aggregator platforms
- Requested insights from SMEs at Belkins
- Included my experience with the topic
The outcome is a great post with an intro that aligns with the PAS framework.
Writing expert-led content
Experience and expertise are core to Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. We emphasized both in our content right from the introduction. Here’s an example:
Post – How to outsource appointment setting to a company
Showing concrete examples, not telling
Finding quality examples or tips to buttress a point is hard. That’s why it’s not uncommon for articles that rank for a keyword to copy themselves by using similar examples.
Besides doing research, our approach to this was to collaborate with Belkins by asking the right questions to get the best materials. Doing this makes Irina and the Belkins team confident of receiving a ready-to-publish content. Our content also serve as a standard for other writers to follow.
Getting Similar Results
Belkins’ switch to high-quality, expert-led content resulted in notable gains in lead generation and client acquisition. Our collaboration achieved:
- Lead generation: Over 100 leads generated in one year.
- Client acquisition: Secured a customer with multiple ongoing deals.
- Saved resources: Thousands of dollars saved by publishing content, rather than relying only on ads.
- Traffic growth: A notable increase in traffic for key blog posts, with one post surging from 27 visits in February 2023 to 4,000 visits by September 2023.
These are the outcomes of high-quality content production and effective client collaboration. Interested in getting similar results from your content? Contact us.
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!