In organic growth, the wins almost never come from novelty. They come from discipline.
That is not how it feels day to day, though. The daily pressure is always to make something new. The blog went out on Monday, so what goes out on Tuesday? A competitor posted a clever reel, so why haven’t we? Topic X is trending this week, so we need to create something quickly before the window closes.
Every founder and marketing team I have ever worked with has felt that pressure. And chasing it is usually what holds their growth back.
Here are five truths about content marketing and organic growth that I’ve built over years of working with B2B tech brands, and now they are integral to my playbook.
Mind you, none of them is about chasing the next shiny object; it is about staying disciplined and going deeper.
Let me take you through them.
#1. A piece of content should be repurposed to death
Turning a blog into a tweet thread is old advice, so that’s probably where your mind went. But that’s not all I mean.
Here’s what repurposing to death actually looks like.
If I’ve written a long-form article, say 3,500 words or more, it’s definitely trying to cover something else exhaustively — a related topic, a product, an industry benchmark or more. That means multiple things are covered in there.
So I would pick those subtopics and write smaller blog posts or LinkedIn articles from them.
I’ll convert those subtopics into video scripts, Instagram reels, LinkedIn carousels, YouTube shorts.
A long piece like that should always have an accompanying video or audio, for those who prefer watching or listening to reading, however well the text is written.
From the topic itself, many inspirations can be generated for tweet threads, social posts, and even Quora answers.
This isn’t to say you should produce every one of these repurposed pieces. No. But when you create one piece of content, look at all your channels and create one or more pieces for each of them from the same master.
The master doesn’t have to be an article, either. The same approach can be applied to a podcast episode or a video interview. Any long-form content worth its salt, whether text, audio, or video.
I started doing this for effort economics. But soon realized it does something more important: reinforces one idea across every channel.
We know at least 12-15 touchpoints are needed before a lead is ready to buy. Those touchpoints need to be cohesive, not conflicting. If a potential customer sees you promoting feature 1 on LinkedIn, feature 2 on Instagram, and feature 3 on YouTube, they get confused about what your main offering even is, and whether it’s worth exploring at all.
But how do you pinpoint the “death” of the master piece? Where do you stop?
When you can no longer produce something from that master without feeling you have done that already.
Because repurposing does not mean repeating. The moment you feel this new piece you are planning has already been covered, you stop, and you pick up another master article, video or podcast to repurpose.
Brian Dean built Backlinko on exactly this discipline: publish less, then squeeze far more out of each piece.
Repurposing gets the most out of what you create. But creating is only half the job — the other half is making sure people actually see it.
#2. A piece of content should be distributed to death
Repurposing and distribution get confused, so let me clarify that first.
Repurposing is about creating the content. Distribution is about promoting it.
You take one piece of content. Then you distribute it on all your channels — your website, your podcast platforms, your social accounts, your subscriber emails, PR platforms and more. That’s distribution.
When you create clips, blog posts, social posts, infographics, checklists and more out of that podcast, that’s repurposing.
And every piece you create, whether it’s the master or something repurposed from it, must itself be distributed to death.
By “to death,” I mean this: when you stop getting engagement, you stop promoting. That’s how you build a library of evergreen content.
You might sometimes be surprised that the main podcast wasn’t that popular but the blog post or the clip you pulled out of it got tons of engagement.
You don’t know in advance, so you distribute, and you watch. Then keep what should be kept and discard the rest.
This is where the discipline comes in. Every month or every quarter, take stock. Decide which pieces are still performing and stop distributing the ones that aren’t, because distribution takes real time and effort.
That stock-taking is really a question of return. We’re talking about businesses, so we must always look at the ROI. Coming up with unique ideas for every piece on every platform is effort-intensive and time-consuming. Production takes effort too. So you need to maximize the outcome of each idea you decide to run with, and that’s what repurposing and distribution are for.
The stock-taking is also where you decide the limit. When the effort of repurposing and distributing an old piece is higher than creating something new, that’s when you create something new.
The data backs the patience. Tomasz Tunguz has shown how content compounds: evergreen pieces keep returning traffic for years, while trend pieces spike and die.
Repurposing and distribution both squeeze everything out of your own content. The next belief is about resisting the pull to borrow someone else’s.
#3. Your competitor’s strategy cannot be your marketing strategy
If I had a penny for every time someone said “look at what your competitors are doing, and then do it,” I’d be rich enough to never work again.
When someone on your team says “two of our competitors are doing this, there must be something in it” they forget something. That the competitor’s product is different. Their business value is different. Their customers are not exactly the way yours are. What you want to build your brand to be is be not same, so how can their playbook be your playbook?
What competitors are doing may be a good starting point. A way not to start from a blank canvas. But it cannot be your complete strategy. Even when you are starting out. Even for a quarter or two. Unfortunately, out of lack of time and understanding, I see many startups simply emulating their competitors. That means you’re setting yourself up to always follow in their footsteps.
What they don’t understand is that the time to build their strategic thinking muscles is exactly at the beginning. Once something is set in motion, it is hard to start afresh.
Here’s what I’d do instead.
Forget your competitor for a moment. Think about what you’d do if you were operating in a market where yours was the first such product. That’s your laundry list of things you can do for growth. And then pick from there.
Competitors are only for inspiration, not emulation.
Zappos is the example I keep coming back to when I think of this. They didn’t price-match the incumbents. They built their whole game around radical customer service: free shipping both ways, a 365-day return window, letting customers order several sizes and send back what didn’t fit. Because They knew what they wanted to do, and they stuck to it. That is how you become the leader.
But, playing your own game only works if that game stays tied to what you actually sell.
#4. Be beholden to your product
Every piece of content you produce should tie back to your product or its features. The aim is to market them, so why talk about anything else?
AI has made top-of-funnel content a commodity. You have to stand out from all the other ToFu content making the rounds in your domain. And what better way to stand out than tying it back to your product — a feature, a special offering, or a customer story?
Now, the obvious worry.
Doesn’t that make everything sound salesy?
Well, it only sounds salesy when it’s obvious you’re trying to sell something.
Say you’ve created a piece about the importance of credential verification in hiring. The whole post, or the whole video, doesn’t talk about your product at all. Then at the end, you say: want to see how this should be done? And you link to a video or a self-serve product test.
In my experience, customers don’t like it when you push them to sign up for a demo or buy something. If your only ask is an email to join your subscriber list or a link to a valuable two-minute video, most of them don’t mind. And the ones who do mind, even that small ask, were never your target customers anyway.
Ahrefs has built its entire growth on this: almost every piece teaches something genuinely useful, and almost every piece ties back to using the product.
Tie every piece back to your product, yes, but tied back to what, exactly? That is what your pillars decide.
#5. Decide your pillars, and stay true to them
Before anything else, pillars are the decision that anchors your entire organic growth strategy. Every piece of content ties back to them, so getting them right is what keeps your content from scattering.
Pillars, in my view, should be the products and the industries you operate in.
Say you have a SaaS product for businesses in healthcare, tech and manufacturing. Those could be the three pillars. If you have multiple products, each of those could be a pillar too. I’ve found real success with this approach, and it’s what I stay with.
Deciding your pillars is one thing. Staying true to them is another. What happens when a trending, viral topic shows up that could pull huge engagement, but sits outside your pillars?
When we’re talking about organic growth, we’re talking about multiple channels. If a founder wants to talk about a trending topic, their social accounts are the best place for it. A viral topic has a short shelf life anyway. But if you put it on your website as a blog post, or on your channel as a video, it lives there forever, taking up space that evergreen content should hold.
There’s one exception though.
If you genuinely believe a trend has the capacity to become important in the future, then it’s the right time to jump on it, and start building evergreen content around it.
This is the model the best in the business already follow. Ahrefs and the content agency Animalz build libraries that compound over years. Look at BCG’s growth-share matrix: published in 1968, BCG still hosts and teaches it on its own site today. That is what a durable, on-pillar asset looks like, and durable frameworks like it signal authority in a way trend commentary never can.
The doubt you’re probably having
I can tell one objection is forming in your head right now. The most famous evergreen advocate of all, Ahrefs’ CMO Tim Soulo, recently declared last September that “the era of evergreen SEO content is over.”
So am I giving you dated advice?
No.
In my opinion, the Tim’s advice applies to businesses that are already established and have some evergreen content already up. Because that content is still needed to build context for the “trend pieces” and a web of interlinks for the search engines.
Plus, evergreen, the way I mean it, is about building durable, on-pillar, owned assets across every channel. Not just about ranking for one more keyword.
And there is a practical point underneath it. Reacting to every shift in what the algorithm rewards is just trend-chasing in another form. Durable, owned assets are the part of your growth you actually control, which is exactly why you should focus on them.
So here’s what it comes down to
Repurpose what you have. Keep distributing it. Don’t copy your competitors. Tie every piece to your product. Hold your pillars. Each of these five truths is a way of compounding what you already own instead of chasing what’s new.
And that is the real work of organic growth. It is less a creativity problem than a discipline problem: not a shortage of ideas, but the discipline to keep investing in a few things long enough for them to pay off.
This article is a small example of it: one master piece, built to be repurposed and distributed, with each of these five beliefs becoming its own deep-dive over the coming weeks.
So, I’ll leave you with a question.
Of these five, which one do you break most often?
Because that’s usually the one holding your growth back.
