How Hypercontext Fought Off an Economic Downturn by Investing in Content

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After nine years of product experimentation, Hypercontext was finally finding product-market fit. Its new product, a one-to-one meeting platform, was attracting 300 signups a week, many of them converting into paid customers. Everything was trending in the right direction, until the pandemic threw on the brakes.

In the spring of 2020, companies began running layoffs and Hypercontext, which operated a “per seat” pricing model, saw its revenue tumble by around 30%. Despite having a signed term sheet, their investors got spooked and pulled their funding.

Faced with an uncertain market and shortened runway, the founders made the choice to cut hard and fast, laying off 50% of their workforce, including all but one marketer.

Hiba Amin, who had joined the company one year earlier to lead content marketing, suddenly found herself in charge of the entire marketing function.

Daunted by the scale of the challenge and wracked by “survivor’s guilt,” Hiba nevertheless rebuilt Hypercontext’s marketing strategy, reversed its decline, and returned the company to growth.

In this article, you’ll learn how Hiba:

• Evaluated and selected marketing strategies
• Rebuilt Hypercontext’s content strategy during an economic crisis
• Optimized a back catalog of hundreds of blogs

Step #1: Audit available channels

Before the pandemic, Hypercontext’s marketing strategy was robust and broad. Content formed the centerpiece with support from paid search, app store partnerships, and product-led acquisition.

With a suddenly frozen budget and reduced headcount, Hiba knew she couldn’t maintain everything the marketing team had been doing. She began by auditing each channel’s impact, exporting traffic and goal completion data. 

She discovered that earned media, and organic in particular, had the largest impact on the business.

“Organic gave us the best quality of visitor,” Amin explains. “In terms of attracting people who turned into paid customers, it performed better than ads or the iOS App Store.”

However, performance was only half the equation. As the de facto head of marketing, Hiba also had to consider whether she had the in-house skill set to continue existing strategies. During the layoffs, Hypercontext lost its paid search lead, WordPress developer, and mobile engineers in charge of partnership products.

If her channel analysis had highlighted paid media or partnerships as the best-performing strategy, Hiba says she was prepared to go to bat for additional resources.

“I’d have pushed hard to bring in a paid search freelancer or contractor while I ramped up my own learning,” she says. “And I would have reached out to marketing leaders who run ads to ask for advice and support.”

However, in the end, Amin’s background in content marketing aligned with Hypercontext’s most productive channel—content. It was a no-brainer. She paused every channel that required ongoing maintenance (paid search, paid social, and so on) and focused all her efforts on content.

Step #2: Double down on what works

Choosing content as her main marketing strategy narrowed Hiba’s focus, but it didn’t solve all of her problems. Hypercontext published brand-led thought leadership, in-depth reports on team performance, and templates for one-on-one meetings. Even limiting her focus to content, Hiba still didn’t have the resources to do everything. So she repeated her channel analysis, only this time for content programs.

While she didn’t have a sophisticated attribution model in place, she did have the product analytics platform Mixpanel, which tracked how people interacted with Hypercontext’s website. She pored over the data, manually investigating each successful paid customer and identifying what content was driving customer acquisition.

“It was super unscalable,” she says. “We didn’t have HubSpot to build dashboards for us. We relied on a lot of spreadsheets. But it helped me develop a better understanding of our customers.”

Even without Mixpanel, Hiba could have brute-forced her way to insights. For example, she could have called each new customer and asked them about their customer journey: Where did they learn about Hypercontext? What articles did they read? What convinced them to sign up? If Hypercontext had an in-house sales team, they too could have been a resource.

As she gathered more and more data, Hiba could accurately gauge impact across content programs. She discovered one performing far above the others: Hypercontext’s template library.

Thousands of people were landing on weekly one-on-one templates and OKR goal-setting templates. Many hundreds were signing up for Hypercontext’s free plan and converting into customers. It was a proven lead generation engine. All she needed to do was pour in more fuel.

She treated each template as a miniature customer acquisition funnel. A top-of-funnel blog generated awareness and drove readers to a middle-of-funnel blog. This second blog eased readers through the consideration stage and funneled them toward the template itself, which drove signups.

But in practice, the funnel was piecemeal and incomplete. While some templates had one or two supporting blogs, others had none at all. Hiba began writing new articles, crafting TOFU entry points for each template. A piece on goal-setting theory links to the SMART goals template. A listicle on must-have sales agenda items links to the sales meeting agenda template.

Article by article, Hiba filled the gaps, turning Hypercontext’s template library into a lead-generating machine. But even when she was done, there was a problem: articles weren’t always up-to-date or relevant. That brought Hiba to the third and final step of her rebuild: optimization.

Step #3: Optimize the funnel

Although Hiba added a lot of fresh content, many pieces were quite old. One article focused on suggestions for team-building during an off-site, including activities like meeting for coffee. It just wasn’t relevant for peak covid times.

Hiba ran a month-long content update initiative, evaluating and improving assets across four themes:

• Relevance: There’s a lot of change during downturns—economic, social, environmental, and so on. Amin ensured that each piece of content remained relevant to the life readers were living at the time.
• Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): Due to layoffs, Amin didn’t have many colleagues to ask for help. Instead, she turned her community into an asset. She tapped industry authorities, customers, and peers for quotes, enriching blogs with original content. Not only did it improve the authority of each piece, but it also aided distribution. Her interviewees wanted to share pieces with their network as it buoyed their personal brand.
• Intent: With a non-existent marketing budget, Amin’s strategy relied on organic search for distribution. She reviewed ranking data for each piece and assessed the search intent—informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial. Someone searching for What is a one-to-one meeting? clearly wanted educational content. On the other hand, someone searching for Best one-to-one meeting template wants an actual template, not an explainer guide. Wherever Amin found a mismatch between intent and content, she rewrote the blog.
• Empathy: Context is important—even for evergreen content. During Amin’s marketing strategy rebuild, the world was undergoing a joint economic and healthcare crisis. People were falling ill, losing their jobs, and being separated from their loved ones. Wherever possible, Amin injected empathy into Hypercontext’s language. 

By the end of her update initiative, Amin had created a potent content machine. Hypercontext’s TOFU and MOFU blogs were enticing new readers and funneling them toward templates. There was one improvement still to come, although this one wasn’t Amin’s.

Hypercontext’s old marketing team had designed templates to be tool-agnostic. Site visitors could download assets and use them on Google Drive or Office 365. Although template pages had a sign-up button for Hypercontext, it created a blank account. A member of the engineering team suggested they change the sign-up button to a “Use this template” button. When someone clicked it, Hypercontext would pop up and populate a new account with that template. It created a seamless experience from awareness to conversion.

“Their onboarding experience changed entirely,” Hiba explains. “New customers went from having a blank slate to having a fully populated agenda. The time to value was so much shorter.” 

Growing through an economic crisis

Amin took charge of Hypercontext’s marketing at an unenviable point in the company's history: massive reductions in headcount, frozen budgets, falling revenue, an uncertain market, the list goes on. But she didn’t let the conditions overwhelm her. She carefully audited Hypercontext’s marketing efforts, selected the channel that drove the greatest impact, and threw her weight behind it. The results were immense.

Within six months, Hypercontext had doubled revenue from its pre-pandemic levels, and the company’s growth showed little sign of slowing down. Their success attracted new investors, too. One year after their term sheet disappeared, the company successfully raised a bridge round, securing its future.

“It felt good,” Amin says, reflecting on the journey. “No, it felt incredible.”