[Blogtec Update] 24-Q1: The Big Bet to Change Our Target Audience

Welcome to another quarterly update from Blogtec.

This quarter we made significant changes to our marketing strategy and target audience, so make sure to read this one!

Q1 Highlights

???YoY Growth: -36,83%

???Quarterly Growth: -22,10%

Currently, we're struggling to achieve our revenue goals.

One issue that we're facing is that it got difficult for us to acquire customers. This is an issue that we're struggling with for a while and that is mainly due to our heavy focus on SEO Content in the past, which is a product that is just not working as good as it used to. Therefore, we need to build new funnels that attract customers.

The second, and main issue, is that we're missing out on superusers. While in the past most of our revenue came from a few superusers, currently this revenue part is much lower. There is no specific reason for this drop or changes we made that could explain that.

While our revenue is not where we want it to be, we're still making progress that we can be proud of. I will share more on that in the Updates section. I'm positive that with the strategy changes we made beginning of this year, we will be on track again by the end of the year. It takes time, as we're changing our target audience and the deal flow is longer.

Updates

Positive Improvements in Customer Acquisition

Even though revenue is not where we want it to be, we made very positive improvements in terms of new paying customers, which was our main bottleneck the last 2 years.

• For the first time in 2 years, we reached our new paying customer goals in Q1.
• We reduced our CAC by 70% compared to 6 months ago.
• We reduced overall expenses by 50% compared to 6 months ago, and are on track to improve here even further.

Especially as we separated ways with our Head of Marketing & Sales 6 months ago, and I stepped up to do most of the strategy work, I’m happy that we're celebrating successes in acquisition.

The positive development came mainly by reducing spend on everything that was not working but already tested for a sufficient time, as well as focusing on cost-effective acquisition channels like service platforms and outreach.

The Big Bet: We Changed Our Target Audience

The key thing we're changing, which is still to show its results, is our target audience. While in the past years we focused mostly on our products, like SEO Content and tried to reach everyone, with a focus on SMBs, we're now focusing our marketing efforts almost entirely on agencies. There are multiple reasons why we decided this:

• Agencies have been the superusers I talked about that we want to have on our platform.
• They have a far higher lifetime value because: 1: They onboard 3–10 companies per year, instead of just being one company. 2: They stay much longer with us than SMBs, who often just want to test SEO a bit and don't bring enough patience for it. Agencies, however, constantly bring us new customers even when some of their customers want to stop doing SEO. The customers who are the longest with us are agencies.
• Agencies are cheaper to acquire because outbound is working to acquire them. Most companies receive plenty of emails, but there's no value for them. However, for agencies, we offer a partnership and a way to make more revenue or be more flexible and profitable, which is why agencies are usually happy when we reach them out.
• The agency market is huge! Based on Google My Business, there are 100.000+ relevant agencies just in Germany.

In addition, we changed our product focus from mainly advertising SEO Content to advertising White-Label-SEO to agencies and Monthly Managed SEO to SMBs when we still get inquiries from them.

Target Audience: Everyone / SMBs -> Agencies

Product Focus: SEO Content -> White-Label SEO (& Monthly Managed SEO)

Different Acquisition Channels

As I already mentioned, we also made changes in our acquisition channels. Before, we focused heavily on paid ads, as they are scalable and were working well to attract customers by advertising SEO Content. However, SEO Content got more competitive through AI and the ads stopped working.

That's why we're currently focusing on outbound for agencies, including email outreach as well as cold calling. In addition, we run entirely different paid advertising campaigns that focus on education and value by creating and advertising guides and building educational funnels from there. This was our first guide: https://blogtec.io/agency-guide/.

Paid Ads → Outbound + Value Focused Content Marketing

Forward-Looking Commentary

I expect most of our results to show end of the year because in Q1 we focused on agencies who do not offer SEO yet, showing them how they can expand their portfolio with Blogtec. These agencies take pretty long to convert as they need time to implement SEO into their service offerings and find customers for that. Also, we're simply still in a learning process for this new audience, which takes its time.

Quarterly Focuses:

As usual, we created focuses for the quarter, with the following being the major ones:

• Scaling outbound by building an internal lead database of agencies, increasing email outreach, and adding cold calling.
• Launching a new agency guide for agencies who already offer SEO and advertise it via paid advertising. In addition, test conversion-focused paid advertising funnels for agencies.
• Launching a brand profiles feature in our app to help agencies to manage multiple customers.
• Expanding and improving the pricing of our backlink offering, also focused on agencies.
• Launching a web design service under a new brand called Webtec as a future income stream. There won't be much focus on it for now, but we're already running a test project.

Roadmap:

Our potential is huge, and I'm confident that step-by-step we will be on track again to become a leader for digital services. Here's our current roadmap broken down:

1. Get every German agency to know us through outbound and paid advertising.
2. Expand to more agencies around Europe using working channels.
3. Take our learning from doing very targeted marketing to agency audiences to again expand to different/narrowed SMB audiences.
4. Expand to more services, like with Webtec.

Final Words

We had another quarter full of learnings, and I'm happy that we had positive results in customer acquisition by reaching our new paying customer goal and having successful paid ads and outbound tests. From here, we will experiment further in an efficient manner to improve on what we did in Q1.

I'm especially excited about the current narrowed target audience, which makes our marketing and sales efforts way more focused. We never advertised to this audience before, so it's very interesting to see how this will develop further.

I'm confident that this is the right way to go, and if we can make the agency focus work, it will be a big success due to the high CLTV of that audience.

Ask to Readers

If you're an agency or know an agency that could need white-label SEO or content services, please contact me or create intros.

We can help in various languages and are always happy to individualize our offerings and pricing. With additional agencies that we can onboard, we can make better progress on validating this new audience and adjusting our product and marketing efforts accordingly.

Thank you!

Manuel