How GetResponse’s Content Game Got Them a Thought Leadership Status in Their Niche

Owing to its massive popularity and high ROI, email marketing is a competitive field, making it challenging to engage the audience and build authority. 

What’s needed in such a scenario is the ability to innovate. That’s only possible when a business is willing to experiment, make mistakes, and determine the best tactics to achieve its goals. 

GetResponse is a big name when it comes to email marketing. And we were fortunate to connect with them to learn more about what’s working for them. 

We got in touch with Michal Leszczynski, the Head of Content Marketing & Partnerships at GetResponse. He spoke to us at length and shared his journey and how GetResponse has been dominating the email marketing industry for over 25 years.  

GetResponse, at present, is serving 400,000 customers globally in 180+ markets and we are keen on learning about their success journey. 

Success Highlights

• The 25-year-old email marketing and automation platform has been raising eyebrows with its stellar SEO-focused content and link-building strategies. 
• They leverage a potent mix of TOFu, MOFu, and BOFu content and gated content to engage their SMB audience and gain conversions. 
• The team at GetResponse believes in consistently experimenting with their content strategy – be it identifying authoritative blogs for guest posting or turning their top-performing content into engaging YouTube videos or technical tutorials.
• Their customer-focused content and resources have won them backlinks and brand mentions from over 2K unique domains. 

Let’s hear more about GetResponse from Michal. 

Hey Michal! Thank you for taking the time to talk about GetResponse’s journey. Our audience is keen on learning about your journey and GetResponse’s strategy to achieve a thought leader position in the email segment. 

Can you start by telling us about yourself and your professional background?

I’m the Head of Content Marketing & Partnerships at GetResponse.

I’ve been with the company now for more than 12 years. I started as a Junior Email Marketing Specialist, working directly with the company’s biggest customers on its email marketing campaigns.

After about two years, I moved to the Marketing Department to become an Education Expert responsible for educating our SMB audience. Together with our team, I was doing everything that could help our audience become better email marketers. We ran webinars, workshops, case studies, presentations, and a blog.

After some time, the Education Team transformed into the Content Marketing Team, and after a couple of more years, I became the team’s manager.

Along the way, my approach to content marketing has changed a few times. We initially created content around the things we thought our audience would want to know about. But as our SEO, web analytics, and PPC knowledge improved, I became more obsessed with data-driven content marketing.

Today, I’m much less a copywriter or content creator but more of a content strategist. I always try to see the bigger picture of how our content campaigns can influence our business and our audience’s success.

Tell us about your brand and how it impacts your customers. 

GetResponse is an email marketing platform for small businesses, solopreneurs, coaches, in-house marketers, and eCommerce brands.

Our mission is to empower businesses and individuals to maximize their revenue and income growth by reaching, engaging, and converting their audience with intuitive, affordable email marketing and automation software.

GetResponse is over 25 years old, making us one of the oldest platforms in this space. We’re also 100% bootstrapped, which is rather uncommon in our competitive space.

However, our approach of offering an affordable way for small brands to connect with their audiences seems to work, as we now proudly serve over 400,000 customers globally in 180+ markets.

What’s been your demand generation strategy?

My team focuses primarily on the self-service part of the platform, so I can share how we approach things to generate demand among our SMB audience.

We run your typical marketing campaigns, including paid ads, gated content such as ebooks or webinars, email nurturing sequences, and entertaining videos on YouTube.

A lot of our brand awareness is because of our SEO-driven content, so you’ll see us publishing many TOFu, MOFu, and BOFu articles on the blog.

Also, since I’m involved in co-marketing partnerships, we collaborate closely with other brands and sometimes influencers to produce gated content such as webinars or courses.

I’m proud of many projects our team has put together, but two are my two favorite picks lately.

One is our annually updated industry report called Email Marketing Benchmarks. It is a great go-to resource for email marketing statistics, which we needed to make our content more objective. On top of that, over the years, it has attracted backlinks from 2K+ unique domains and has gotten us mentions in various top publications. 

The other one is our Marketer’s Calendar, which significantly boosted our brand’s awareness in local markets and generated several thousand leads each year. It’s a super-fun project that’s useful to marketers who may never use our tool, but we continue to develop it to build our brand awareness.

We also experiment in our campaigns and try new approaches. So you’ll see us collaborating with other teams in the Marketing Department to turn our top-performing articles into engaging YouTube videos or even complex technical tutorials into a graphic novel.

Have you explored any link-building strategies? If yes, can you share about it?

My favorite strategy for link-building is creating content based on unique data that people naturally want to reference when creating their content.

That’s one of the main reasons why our Email Marketing Benchmarks report worked so well. It was based on our own data so nobody could copy it. Plus, it included information that I was looking up every other day or was being asked when giving a presentation.

We heavily invest in link-building by publishing guest posts on other relevant blogs. It’s costlier but allows us to pick link-building targets with more commercial intent.

Any advice you’d like to give to marketing professionals, especially in the SaaS domain?

I’d like to offer two.

Focus on one specific audience when creating your content. When you think about a small group of customers, it’s much easier to understand their needs, wants, and challenges. It’s also easier to identify long-tail keywords with lower difficulty, where you’ll find it easier to compete.

The second one is to take it easy. It’s a stressful space. There’s always going to be more keywords you could be targeting. There’ll always be a competitor with a bigger team or budget who can publish more content. So relax. And stay focused on your own goals.

Any new skills you are planning to learn?

I want to learn how to use AI to simplify my work, cut down on inefficiencies, and automate processes that can be automated.

At the same time, I’m a big fan of videos and podcasts, so I would love to learn how to become a better, more engaging storyteller and public speaker.

Is there any piece of content you’d like to tell us about?

Sure, this Email Marketing Benchmarks report is something I’m always proud of. And it’s ungated!  

Get the report here!

SaaSy Tidbits by Michal Leszczynski

• SaaS is a super competitive space. Identify one audience segment, understand their needs and pain points, and create content that helps them achieve their goals. 
• Work towards creating original content that shares your research in the domain. That way your competitors will not be able to copy you and you’ll establish yourself as a thought leader in the industry. 
• In the SaaS space, there’ll always be competitors with a bigger budget or team. Focus on your strengths, make it customer-centric, and work towards your goals. 

The willingness to constantly experiment with various forms of content while keeping the audience at the center has been the success formula for GetReponse. 

As a customer-centric SaaS content marketing agency, we completely relate to GetResponse’s strategy. When it comes to content, it’s always about getting these basics right! 

Thanks, Michal for sharing your content success mantra at GetResponse.  

If you have any questions on how GetResponse can help achieve your business goals, we’d highly recommend getting in touch with Michal on LinkedIn. Alternatively, visit their website to learn more about how GetResponse can convert your contacts into conversions. 

Are you looking to up your SaaS content game? Stay tuned as we share more inspiring success stories on Growfusely’s SaaS Interviews page.

Author

Hazel Kamath

Hazel Kamath is a Senior Content Writer and Strategist at Growfusely – a SaaS content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO.

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