How Upmetrics Leverages MOFU and BOFU Content to Drive Growth

Whether you’re looking to open a restaurant, start a SaaS business, or launch an eCommerce company, one thing you need is a solid business plan.

Instead of taking weeks to create one, Upmetrics provides an all-in-one business planning software to create plans that are actionable and effective.

During our interaction, Ajay Jagtap, the head of content at Upmetrics tells us all about it. He talks about his role, what he thinks is good content, and how they use the power-packed combination of content and SEO to spearhead growth and conversions.

Upmetrics’ Success Highlights

• Upmetrics relies on a powerful combination of templates and AI tools to get more people to try their product.
• They focus heavily on MOFU and BOFU content and make it a point to create supporting content for their most important pages and templates.
• Brand-related listicles have been their top-performing content when it comes to getting conversions.
• Their content SOPs and guidelines ensure that besides content, they focus on important aspects like internal linking, CTA placements, etc.

Hey Ajay, thanks for taking the time to share the behind-the-scenes on Upmetrics’ content and SEO efforts. Before we get started, our audience is keen to know more about you.

Can you tell us about your professional journey so far?

I have been in the industry for the last five years. During my college days, I started with content writing as a side hustle. I was a bit of a generalist at the time and used to take on various content gigs to gain experience. Eventually, I discovered my passion for SEO and content marketing.  

I worked with a few diverse content-related roles over the years. Eventually, I started my own personal finance blog which didn’t work out, but in that duration, I learned a lot related to content marketing and how things work. 

Fast forward to today, it’s been more than one year that I’ve been working with Upmetrics, leading content efforts and contributing to the company’s success. 

Can you give me an overview of Upmetrics and the impact it is creating?

Upmetrics is an AI-powered business planning software. It helps small businesses and entrepreneurs create business plans, pitch decks, financial projections, and strategic plans. The traditional business planning process involved hiring business plan writers or using standard templates to write the whole thing from scratch. 

What Upmetrics does is provide them with a readymade template. 

For instance, if you are starting a restaurant, we have a library of business plan templates geared towards the restaurant industry. So, you can simply take that template, use our editor, and start making changes depending on your requirements. 

The task that used to take entrepreneurs a few weeks started getting done in a day or two. Over the years, we have helped over 110K+ entrepreneurs globally. 

We recently also launched our AI module, where all you need to do is provide your basic business information and let AI create a detailed business plan for you in a few minutes. This and other changes in our pricing strategy have resulted in great numbers for our brand.

Can you tell me about Upmetrics’ demand generation strategy and where does content feature in that strategy? 

Mostly, our demand generation strategy revolves around SEO. We have a library of business plan templates working as middle-of-the-funnel content. These templates connect users to Upmetrics. They help us get signups and email addresses and we later convert them into paid users with our email nurturing campaigns. 

We also publish a lot of content around these templates, which we call support content. For example, if there’s a business plan template for the restaurant industry, the supporting content pieces would be articles on “How much does it cost to start a restaurant?” “How to start a restaurant?” “Restaurant industry statistics,” “Restaurant trends,” etc.

Besides, we focus on informative blog articles around business planning, etc, with a proper internal linking strategy which typically helps us increase engagement and reduce bounce rate. Our bottom-of-the-funnel content includes alternative pages, brand-related listicles, feature pages, and comparison posts and is aimed at getting conversions. In fact, our listicles have brought in some of the most conversions when it comes to BOFU content.

“If I have to break it down, 60% of our users come from templates, followed by 30% of users coming from bottom-of-the-funnel content. The rest 10% is through top-of-the-funnel information articles.”

How do you prioritize content across the funnel stages? 

Prioritization depends on on-page and off-page activities. Middle-of-the-funnel content, basically our templates, require less off-page activities. So, we don’t actively engage in making a lot of links for these MoFu keywords. But we regularly monitor their performance and the corresponding changes that might be required. So we keep regularly updating them in terms of on-page. 

For off-page activities, we prioritize our bottom-of-the-funnel content, which is our landing page, core feature pages, like our AI business plan generator, pitch deck generator, etc. 

TOFU content is generally the last on our priority list but we constantly keep checking their performance and updating the best ones to keep them fresh. 

Which content metrics do you prioritize? 

The metrics we choose depend on the content type, priorities, and overall business goals. If I’m talking about middle-of-the-funnel content, which is templates, we prioritize how many conversions they are making. 

For informative blogs, the purpose is to inform users. If it is written for educational purposes, we are not expecting conversions from that blog post but we expect that people who click on that content piece should get the information they are looking for. So, we prioritize engagement and bounce rate. 

According to you, what makes up a good content piece?

“I feel in content marketing, content writing is only 10%. There are so many other things that play a crucial role. When you push a content piece, it’s not just about written text. I also consider videos, graphics, infographics, CTAs, and all that goes into that piece. All of this together makes up great content.” 

Besides the presentation, the content must also be relevant, original, and value-adding. If I talk about the SOPs that we follow at Upmetrics, we cover all the main aspects like, our brand style should be maintained, like it doesn’t matter who’s writing the post, it should be like the other posts we have published. 

The content must be conversational, relevant sources should be included, internal linking guidelines must be followed, etc. We also focus a lot on CTA placements. So, if you check our site, especially the blog posts, we are on point with our CTA placements. We ensure that if the content has potential, we are placing actionable CTAs in between to drive results. 

Do you have a backlinking strategy in place? 

Yes, we have an outreach team of around eight people who take care of our backlinking strategy. We do guest posts, ABC link exchanges, and draw links from other activities like Reddit, Quora, Medium, etc. 

We also create a lot of content around statistics. While our main purpose was to create supportive content for different industries with these statistic-heavy articles, we also got a few backlinks from them. Besides, our listicles like “AI tools for small business” have garnered backlinks from many high-authority sites such as Forbes, Upwork, Shopify, Investopedia, etc.

Do you follow any podcasts to stay updated? 

I do not actively follow podcasts but the one often listen to is Marketing School by Neil Patel. Besides, I prefer to analyze these things myself instead of hearing from someone else about what’s happening in the industry or what’s new. 

I prefer checking other websites, like what they’ve been up to, what they’re doing, what they’re doing differently, if it is working for them, checking their traffic, what pages they update, checking out competitors, reading industry-related blogs, etc. I also follow certain blogs like HubSpot, Copyblogger, Backlinko, and so on. 

Any advice you would like to give to content marketers in the SaaS industry? 

I would say, focus majorly on two things: 

(i) Knowing your audience better. For example, if your blog is bringing a million visits but they are not converting, it could be your content is not relevant enough to lead them to act on your CTAs. In content marketing, conversion is more important than traffic. So, the better you know your audience and what they want, the better content ideas you can conjure and work on. 

(ii) Things are changing pretty fast these days. Google is coming up with updates every second or third month. So, being relevant to the industry is very important. 

How do you foresee the future of content? What do you think about AI and different content formats gaining more popularity? 

If I talk from Upmetrics’ perspective, the AI revolution has helped us a lot. Like when we put up our AI-assisted tools back in June-July, we saw almost a 145% increase in our purchases the next quarter. 

So, it helped in terms of our product sales because the quality of our product increased. 

The task a user needed a day to complete, was finished in half an hour or less than that using Upmetrics. If I talk about in terms of content creation, it is helping scale the content creation process. 

I feel podcasts and video content are pretty much the future. You’ll find videos turning up for many search queries. To adapt ourselves to this new era of content, we are working on ways to incorporate videos and podcasts into our content. 

For example, we are planning to incorporate videos that can provide a summary of the entire blog post and target users differently. Besides podcasts and videos, webinars are doing great. Our founder, Vinay Kevadiya, recently did a webinar on business planning, and we ended up getting a few users from that. 

SaaSy Tidbits from Ajay Jagtap

• Content is one part. You must focus on different aspects like presentation, CTA inclusions, visuals, etc, to get your content piece the best chance of success.
• While following certain leaders and podcasts is important, analyzing, and experimenting is always a good practice. What works for one company may not work for another.
• Experiment with different content types. This will help you attract different audiences with different content consumption preferences.

Upmetrics is one of many SaaS companies that believes great content is not rocket science. It’s built on minute details like getting the presentation right, experimenting with different content types, and understanding the audience.

As a SaaS content marketing agency, we also focus on creating content pieces that are not just valuable but tick every other aspect that determines content success. 

If you have any questions about Upmetrics or its journey, we recommend visiting their website or getting in touch with Ajay on LinkedIn.

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Author

Nidhi Parikh

Nidhi is a freelance content writer with an experience of over 4 years. She uses a strategic process to come up with well-researched and value-driven long-form content for SaaS brands. When not working, you can find her finishing entire novels in a day and binge-watching the latest web series.