Part II: Our journey to $2.8M ARR in Surfer. Marketing perspective

Together with Sławek Czajkowski (CEO of Surfer), we crafted a summary of Surfer’s journey to $2.8M ARR. This is the second part of the two-part series, focusing on marketing. Read the first article to learn more about our approach to product, business, and team. 

“So, what’s the strategy?” I asked when I joined Surfer back in 2018.

Michał Suski, one of the co-founders, showed me a whiteboard photo with a few milestones on it.

“That’s it?” I was confused.

“That’s it.” 

This photo was the most simplified version of a strategy I have ever seen. I wasn’t sure if it was brilliant or stupid.

Many months later, I think it was brilliant. Marketers tend to overthink stuff. I know that because I used to overthink stuff myself. At our ARR level and the journey to it, there’s no reason to build fancy attribution models and invest your small team's precious time to create a precise plan that will change along the way anyway. Because it always does.

Instead, we invest in programs and campaigns with a focus on efficient delivery.

Keeping things simple is our mantra. We still like to use whiteboards (or virtual workspace since we’re working remotely now). And we love building campaigns that are easy-to-understand for us and our audience.

I joined Surfer as the seventh person when we had no idea if Surfer would stick around. Now we have twenty-nine people, $2.8M ARR, and I have no doubt that our product is a vital part of the SEO and content ecosystem. No VC, no angel investors.

This is what worked for us in 2020 🎉

Sidenote: A few words about Surfer for better context... Surfer is a SaaS, on-page SEO tool for SEOs and content creators. With Surfer, you can accelerate every step of content creation: from strategy, writing to page optimization, and maximize your chances of high rankings for any keyword.

1. Free Chrome extension with data from our paid tools (Keyword Surfer)

Back in 2019, we introduced Keyword Surfer to the SEO community. The free Chrome plugin contains keyword data for a researched query. In 2020, we updated the tool, so it reflects our product better. Now it contains on-page factors as well, like word count or exact keyword matches.

It was at a time when another popular Chrome extension moved from free to paid, so the timing was perfect. In April, we did a Keyword Surfer 2.0 version release that was trending on Product Hunt.

Keyword Surfer has been our biggest campaign oriented on brand awareness.

Now, we have 220,000 people using the extension. They get to see the Surfer logo every time they use Google search. Other perks of this campaign include:

• Over 1k people landing on our site directly from the CTA placed in the Keyword Surfer panel;
• Hundreds of backlinks from high-authority sites (more on the later);
• Around 20 trials and 5 subscriptions sold monthly directly from the extension.

2. Affiliate program

Affiliate marketing is big in the SEO niche. This is why at Surfer, we have a partner program that created 15% of our client base.

Affiliates work as your outsourced sales team for a commission. Moreover, they are your biggest promoters. This is why we worked hard to get the biggest SEO influencers as our partners.

Right now, we have around 300 partners. Since our program is not public (there’s no “become an affiliate” page that you access from our site), this is how we grow our program as of today:

• When someone on our team gives an interview, we invite the host (usually an authority in the field) to join the program;
• When we see a “big name” sign up for a trial or a subscription, we do a direct outreach with an invitation;
• We build direct connections with the most influential affiliates on Facebook groups or LinkedIn. We also invite them to contribute to our content.

You have to take care of your affiliates just as much as you take care of your clients. We have a whole onboarding process for new affiliates, and we let them know of different ways to earn their commission.

3. Organic link-building

SEO as a marketing channel is extremely competitive, which is why we were postponing starting our own SEO efforts. We haven’t done any link-building activities, for example. And yet, the number of linking domains keeps growing:

While this is a story that can fill a separate article, these are three main levers in our backlink growth: 

1. Keyword Surfer – people, create dozens of articles that list free tools for different tasks. After the release of Keyword Surfer, we got organic links from top domains in the SEO industry like Ahrefs, Neil Patel, and Moz, just to name a few.
2. Affiliate marketing – our affiliates create articles dedicated to our tool that rank well for keywords like “Surfer review.” This high-quality content increases the authority and credibility of our brand.
3. Innovative product – As Sławek mentioned in his summary, we invest in product innovation a lot. This is why people are curious about the things we deliver. We get much attention from industry leaders, which gets us backlinks from great domains.

4. Webinar series instead of one-shots

Video is still a thing in 2021, and we will keep investing in video content. One of the most satisfying marketing activities we did in 2020 was the On-Page Roast series hosted by Michał Suski. 

Over 2k people signed up to get notified about new episodes of the roast, which are also public on our YouTube channel. Instead of gating our webinars, we keep them open. Thanks to that, they keep getting views and are great educational materials for our audience. 

Running a series instead of a single webinar turned it into a “thing.” People were talking about it. They started to recognize the name. They were excited about next month's episodes.

We spread brand awareness, grew our YouTube channel, and gained a decent email list.

5. Customer support as a growth lever

As Sławek mentioned in his article, customer support is our big differentiator. We created a dedicated customer support team as early as it was possible. Surfer co-founders were spending A LOT of time in the early days to answer all the questions and teach people how to use the toolset.

This is one of the best testimonials we ever got. And the author was kind enough to post it as a comment on our Facebook group: 

In August, we introduced weekly walkthroughs that get 20-40 signups every week. 

As the reciprocity rule states, people reward positive actions towards them with a positive reaction. While it’s getting harder and harder as we scale up and grow the customer base, we will do our best to remain personal and help people resolve any questions and frustrations.

A few cool things we do you can steal right away:

• Use Loom to record quick tutorials for your client on the go – especially when you try to solve a complex problem;
• Assign a developer who is responsible for customer support in a given week. That’s how we make sure that small issues are fixed asap, and that a user gets quick feedback on their issue. 
• Implement a quick feedback survey, so you know how satisfied people are with your support. 

6. Trial onboarding play that boosted conversion by 33% 

The Surfer trial lasts seven days. We noticed that most conversions happen on the 7th and 8th day. After that time, the probability of converting a user decreases significantly. It is understandable – once the trial ended, they forgot about us and didn't feel any push to buy a plan.

We wanted to add a push so that more people sign up on the 7th and 8th day.

And since urgency and scarcity are the king and queen of marketing, we used their powers for the onboarding email sequence. 

By offering additional queries for people who sign up for Surfer within 48h after receiving the message (which is automatically sent to everyone on their sixth day of the free trial), we managed to increase the conversion from trial to a paid subscription by 33%:

7. 637 new customers net during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend

Every Black Friday is a huge deal for our marketing team. We pour all we have into the dedicated campaign. Last year, we managed to get 251 new customers who helped us stay afloat, hire new people, and become profitable. 

Fortunately, in 2020 we grew our email list to 20k people (with email courses, multiple webinars, and, of course, our product), and our remarketing list raised to 40k records. We did cold ads as well. During BFCM, our CPC grew 3,5x, and it was not as effective as marketing to people who already knew about us. 

This is what one of the most efficient ads looked like: 

Our main deal was the Starter Pack plan. It cost $49 and included features from our $99 plan (NLP optimization), which was an attractive selling point for our audience.

I think it was not a crazy irresistible offer. We could offer a discount for yearly plans or a lifetime deal. But we didn’t, because we hate discounting our product and agreed not to do it a year ago. 

Discounts may devalue your product and hit your current user base. Maybe, just maybe, the success of this campaign would be higher if we did that. But I’m sure it would be harmful to many people who signed up for yearly plans before Black Friday. And we always put our existing customers first.

The good lesson from our campaign is this: every SaaS business should have a BFCM deal. But it’s the best time to get creative about it. Maybe you can offer onboarding as a part of the deal? Maybe a course? Cool t-shirt? You don’t have to make discounts to offer something attractive. 

8. Natural Language Processing (NLP) campaign

The second biggest campaign of 2020 was the NLP product release. 

As you know, Google releases new algorithm updates all the time. The most significant ones, so-called core updates, are big events in the SEO world. In October 2019, Google announced the BERT update. To put it simply, it improves how Google understands words and their context.

Natural Language Processing was a big part of this update. This is why we decided to add it to our product as fast as possible.

A significant part of our strategy is always to be the first ones to respond to changes. This is what we did with NLP. People were desperate to figure out how they should approach content post-BERT, and we provided a solution that quickly delivered the results they needed. We now have multiple case studies about the effectiveness of NLP that are a big part of our product marketing flywheel. 

Both our article and video related to NLP are some of our most popular pieces of content up to this date.

9. Community growth

Community. The promised land of every marketer… Community marketing was the first channel that ever worked for us. First, we engaged in existing (mainly Facebook) groups. In 2020, we emphasized building our own community of people interested in on-page SEO, content, and Surfer. 

This is the growth of our community members on Facebook:

It’s not enough to start a Facebook group to have a community, though. You have to motivate your audience to be active! We do many different things to make it work: build our product based on voices from the community, have a YouTube channel, organize live streams, create content with our users, and share unique data… The list goes on and on.

And after carefully cultivating our group for some time… we noticed we didn’t have to steer the discussion anymore. It just flows freely. Right now, the group doesn’t need us to heat it up; but we still take care of it with our many activities.

We got serious about content so that we can grow our community, and we will continue to do that in 2021.

10. Staying in touch with customers 

I cannot stress this one enough. One of the most critical strategies that worked for us is making it super easy for our users to talk to someone on our team. 

Why? Because we want to make real human-to-human connections. We want our users to know who our founders are, even if they are not one of those celebrity executives. We want them to know who’s on the marketing, customer support, and product teams (as long as it makes sense, of course). And we want them to know THEY ALL CARE and that they’re here for them.

That’s how we make sure people won’t leave us the moment a new competitor pops up. And it makes our work so much easier, pleasant, and fulfilling. 

We did many different things to encourage contact:

• Onboarding emails that have not a single link but open-ended questions;
• All the things related to customer support, including weekly walkthroughs;
• Live webinars;
• Community growth; 
• Regular feedback collection;
• Offering a “let’s hop on a quick call” approach to solving users’ problems.

To name a few of them. 

We’re all opened for contact, and we all write back. No unapproachable C-suites and no faceless customer support.

What’s coming next?

I’m very proud of what we managed to achieve in 2020. We learned so much along the way, and I’m endlessly grateful for our team and the people who use Surfer.

One of the most exciting things happening right now is the release of the SEO Writing Masterclass release. It's a free course for content creators with 27 actionable videos on SEO writing, strategy, and sales (!).

We're also building new exciting things to support the content-side of Surfer and allow writers and business owners to create data-based strategies for their domains.

Thank you for reading this brief summary of the last 12 months in Surfer! Make sure to check out Slawek's part about business & product and let me know which point you find the most interesting in the comments below. Let's talk!