Kickoff is a health and fitness startup that provides affordable daily exercise and nutrition coaching with an expert coach. Through a marketplace of coaches, Kickoff connects health-conscious consumers with a dedicated coach who offers guidance on all aspects of wellness — from exercise to nutrition to sleep and mindfulness.
Kickoff was always curious about content marketing, but wasn’t ready to invest the time and money in their early days. They saw sporadic growth using almost every channel and tactic you can imagine –– Google Ads, word-of-mouth referrals, corporate partnerships, and more.
“[Those channels] had done their job of getting us from small scale to bigger scale, but we needed more,” says CEO and co-founder John Gardner. “We needed new channels to get us to the next level.”
Finally, after a big fundraising round, Kickoff decided it was time to invest and make a long-term commitment to content marketing.
“I knew it was a very long-term process, so that's why we hadn't done it before. It's an investment with very few signs of life, then it builds over time and can become very attractive. I knew it was going to be hard and that's why I brought in Matt and his team––because he'd done it before.”
In the health industry––and especially fitness––it’s extremely difficult to get noticed. Consumers are inundated with often sleazy pitches for the latest pill or exercise gimmick. On top of the “snake oil” aspect, most people look at fitness as a DIY thing, not something that requires a coach.
Credibility was a must to separate Kickoff from the charlatans already working in healthcare. We also had to generate interest in a service that consumers usually feel they can do on their own.
We took a 3-step approach to growing Kickoff’s organic traffic.
This is a must for any startup, but especially one in the health industry. Consumers are starving for credible and useful health content! It’s also what Google wants to show in its search results, as evidenced by its emphasis on the E-E-A-T concept: Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.
Our guiding principle as we developed a content strategy: How can Kickoff break through the health and fitness noise and become a brand that both consumers and Google trust?
Content marketing isn’t a choice between quality or quantity. It’s both: quality AND quantity. We ramped up content production while maintaining a high standard of excellence for everything we published.
“They set up an editorial process to drive the content side of the equation,” Gardner says. “Their focus was on testing a number of different content marketing strategies––mainly focused around blogging to answer high-intent questions that could attract folks who want to train with a coach. They also developed programmatic content to have a listing page that could rank with top coaches in New York or wherever.”
Skilled, experienced writers and editors helped us ensure that every piece of content came from a place of expertise. We put guardrails in place to guide us in choosing the expert sources who would provide proven, scientific evidence to support the health and fitness advice in every article.
High-quality content that reflected the expertise and experience of Kickoff’s health coaches was only half of the solution. Great content needs to be promoted. That’s always been true, but never more so than in today’s world of information overload.
Again, we focused on both quantity and quality.
We avoided low-quality, easy link sources and instead reached out to journalists, bloggers, influencers, and companies in the health and sciences space. Since we were publishing great health content on Kickoff’s blog, most of them were happy to hear from us!
This targeted outreach helped us 5x the number of links that Kickoff typically earned per month.
More than a year later, Kickoff continues to reap the benefits of more organic traffic from the content and links we created over the course of the campaign.
“We scaled to about 65,000 visits a month and that's held steady for a while, which is great! That's the great thing about content––it lasts,” Gardner says.
“It's very hard to get that kind of traffic. I think it's the alignment of a lot of different things. Number one, high-quality content that answers people's questions and provides real value to them. Number two, domain strength––the authority that allows you to compete for the traffic which is all about getting PR, links, and credibility. And the last thing is the prioritization of which terms to go after––those have to be perfect or it doesn't work at all. They really nailed that side of it.”
“I'm really happy with their work and I recommend Narrative Bent highly for folks who want to go after content marketing.”
“The team delivered what we asked of them — bringing us traffic and prospective clients and getting us in front of the right people. It wasn't easy, but it really works. And now we have a flow of prospective clients that very few have.”
Let's 3X your monthly SEO traffic like we did Kickoff's. Book a discovery call to learn more.
SCHEDULE A CALL
