Business Is a Team Sport

Five years ago, Saatva’s Chief Marketing Officer came to me with a proposal. He wanted to launch a content marketing program. At the time, I wasn’t sure if we were ready or needed it, especially to the tune of nearly half a million dollars, which is what he told me it would cost to get a program off the ground. Oh, and by the way, I shouldn’t expect to see any return on the investment for at least a year, maybe longer. 

For a company built on performance marketing, that was already a big departure from business as usual. And then the CMO went one step further: He said the point of the content wasn’t to sell mattresses; in fact, its main focus wouldn’t be the Saatva brand or our products at all. The mission of the new blog would be to answer any and all questions a consumer might have about mattresses and sleep.

He offered a pretty compelling rationale. For the first seven years of Saatva’s existence, we dominated online mattress search. But in 2017, the landscape was changing. A slew of new online mattress companies had emerged on the scene, all competing for the same search terms and driving up our digital marketing costs. If having a blog could help us capture some of that search traffic organically, without us paying for the clicks, think of the money we’d save.    

I reluctantly let myself be persuaded and proceeded to torture the guy for the next two years. What was all this money getting us? Why did we need two trained journalists on staff? Couldn’t we stop once we’d produced a couple hundred articles? How much longer was I going to have to wait before we saw some sort of return?

Then an unexpected thing happened—unexpected to me, anyway. The CMO’s prediction started coming true. When people began researching their mattress purchase, they found our articles, which gave clear, unbiased information about the very confusing process of mattress shopping. Once consumers started getting more educated, they knew what to look for and how to evaluate our products against competitors. And sure enough, they started buying Saatva mattresses. A lot of them.

Looking back at it today, my willingness to suspend disbelief was one of the best decisions I ever made. We’re up to over 850 articles, on topics ranging from sleep apnea to mattress foam density to the best material for cooling sheets. Readers of those posts now purchase more than $10 million annually of Saatva products. Add to that the money we’re not spending on paid search, and our organic content has a higher ROI than almost any other marketing channel at the company. 

Just this week, we got word that the Sleep Enlightened blog was a finalist for the best content marketing program of the year—all the more impressive when you consider that our mattress brand was up against marketing behemoths and content agencies like Google and Message Labs. I couldn’t be more proud.

The experience has confirmed a few things for me. One is that successful leaders know they don’t know everything; in this case, I had to trust someone else’s big vision. Another is that patience can really pay off. These concepts don’t always come easily to CEOs.

It also reinforced my thinking about brand behavior. The blog was conceived as a place to help, not sell. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in some ways our content program is the truest expression of our customer-centric values, giving something without asking for anything in return. My advice to any founder would be to make sure that high-quality content has a place in your marketing plan. The rewards may take time, but I promise you they’ll be worth the wait.

- Ron Rudzin, Saatva Founder and CEO