Breaking down Clay's content strategy

I first heard about Clay when Obaid Durrani, who I’d been following for a while, wrote about joining Clay as a content creator. His post got over 1000 likes.

Obaid is both an influencer and thought leader in the marketing space and it was the first time I had heard about a B2B company bringing in a creator full-time.

That really caught my attention.

From that point on, I started seeing Clay everywhere on LinkedIn.

Recently, I wrote about Clay’s approach to their LinkedIn content and following that post, I was inspired to do a bit of a deeper dive.

I went through A LOT of their social and blog content, listened to Bruno Estrella’s episode on the Exit Five podcast… and as I took notes, I realized I was slowly starting to piece together their content strategy.

And it’s sick.

So I decided it was worth sharing. Because if I was in-house right now… I’d be trying to build something similar.

The strategy I’m sharing here is pretty tactical, but in the takeaways I’ll be sharing ways any B2B company can apply this strategy to their own product and brand.

I’ll start by getting into their organic and free content channels and then I’ll also break down their paid motion - walking you through their most top-of-funnel efforts, down to bottom-funnel plays.

Of course, everything here is what I’ve extracted as an external marketer to their team. You can read about Bruno’s strategic approach to marketing here for a closer look at their high-level strategy.

This post is more about how I as a content marketer, see and understand and value their content approach.

Let’s get into it.

Background: Clay ($500M valuation) serves GTM teams of all sizes, from large enterprise companies to solo founders. Clay is a complex product. Which is why there are Clay consulting services that handle Clay table builds, sequence building, etc.

But they’re also self-serve, meaning that if you want to start a free trial and start building, you can and for that reason, they give you the templates, support, and tools to do so.

This is a really important call-out: Clay is a low-friction product with a high return on investment, which dictates a lot of their growth strategy.

Basics first: The PLG model

Knowing where to start with their content strategy is the number one thing I see founders struggle with.

My advice to companies and founders is always to start small. Not to try and tackle every channel but to start with one, the most relevant one for your audience and really double down there.

Trying to be everywhere, all at once, is a recipe for failure.

To find your channel - you’re going to want to identify your most top-of-mind goal.

This goal will be what guides your content prioritization.

For Clay it was increasing self-serve user acquisition.

Why?

Clay started out with a product-led-growth (PLG) model - going after freelancers, founders, and small businesses.

Because of this, their marketing and content strategy was born from a place of needing to bring in a high volume of users that would be encouraged to sign up to try Clay for free.

This meant that they would need to build a strong TOF motion.

So I’ll start by breaking down that motion first.

Organic Channels: Social, Top-of-Funnel

I can identify two main strategies that Clay leverages on social - UGC and their creator program. Together, they create a really powerful flywheel.

Main channel: LinkedIn

Strategy #1: UGC

• Everyone is obsessed with founder-led content…but that’s not the only growth hack that exists on social.
• Clay was able to build a UGC machine and if you want a deeper dive, Adam Robinson talks all about it on his post here.

• TLDR: Clay is leaning heavily into UGC, tapping into content from Clay creators, experts, and partners.
• Users showcase applications and examples of Clay workflows. This is similar to Notion, where templates went viral and a wide community of creators formed around the product.
• For example, Balsa Kosic, who has less than 2k followers, had a LinkedIn post blow up after sharing a Clay template that brought them new business at OneAway, a Clay partner:

• Benefit: This strategy creates a very powerful ecosystem effect on LinkedIn where when you search for Clay, Clay templates, Clay outbound, etc, you’ll find pages and pages of posts. This doesn't only magnify reach and distribution - but does so in a really cost-effective way since a lot of these posts are not sponsored. Jen Allen-Knuth (who is also a Clay brand partner) explains it very well here:

Strategy #2: Creator Program

• Beyond just happy users sharing their Clay templates, Clay takes UGC a step further with their creator program.
• Notion was the first to absolutely crush at this. But Bruno at Clay was able to build their own impressive creator program - Clay for Creators.
• Clay earns revenue and the creators (aka affiliates) earn commission (20% revenue share for referred Clay customers). It’s a win-win.

• Of course, they only accept verified and vetted Clay experts. Once they’re in, Clay benefits from ‘Claymakers’ - who add the Clay Expert title to their profiles, and create / share videos about their product.
• Benefit: First of all, you can find 452 results if you search for Certified Clay Expert on LinkedIn. That’s 452 connections that have the Clay brand, or are posting about it. Think about the impact that has on social. The other big benefit is that Clay gets a ton of material they can repurpose as promoted posts on LinkedIn - more on that later.

Organic Channels: SEO, Top-of-Funnel

Moving on from social, Clay is also investing in SEO. With a lot of the Clay team being ex-Webflow, I can tell that Clay applied some of Webflow’s SEO strategy to their own brand.

They also take a lot of inspiration from a website UX, design, and content perspective - just compare their navigation bars. But it’s intentional. The website structure works really well for both companies because of their investment and focus in education, community, and self-serve workflows and tools.

Specifically on the SEO side, they have a lot of similar content types that make for great SEO opportunities.

Both Webflow and Clay have made use of the following to rank for relevant keywords:

1. Glossaries: Webflow did this for web design and web development terms. Clay is doing it around industry-specific terms for key sales, growth, and GTM terms. Glossaries are a classic SEO play - there’s really no excuse not to have one - never hurts and gets your basic grounds covered.
2. Long-form guides: Clay has a bank of tactical guides, their Outbound Plays, that give detailed explanations both on how to use the product as well as frameworks and tips on outreach, prospecting, etc.
3. Clay University: Following the steps of Webflow University is very smart. It may not be a lead generator, but it plays a huge part in product adaptation, user activation, and long-term can become a resource that is referred back to, distributed, and easily repurposed for growth on new channels like Webflow did on YouTube.
4. Templates: As part of their product-led motion, Webflow has a freemium model so obviously driving organic traffic to their free templates was a great way to get users into the product. According to digital marketing agency, Foundation, Webflow’s “44+ free HTML5 responsive website templates” page attracts at least 4,000 people every month. Clay has the opportunity to do the same - driving traffic to their template page is a key way to increase their top-of-funnel free trial user acquisition.

The last SEO content type is unique to Clay.

I’ll explain more about this in the next section but Clay uses their own product to create unique content with a lot of SEO power. For example, using their unique data set of thousands of known valid emails - they created this article on best email providers of 2024. Why is this smart?

1. This is the kind of the article they can update every year and bring new traffic to.
2. It’s agnostic to the Clay brand - meaning that it’s perfect for TOF.
3. Shows not tells. These are the best kind of articles because you get a sense of the power of the product, without the writer actually having to spell it out for you.

When I worked at Riskified, our top-performing SEO articles by far were always our data-backed articles. I can’t express enough how important propriety data is in generating high-traffic but still high-value content.

‍Organic Channels: SEO, Bottom-of-Funnel

That wraps up their main TOF content plays.

But Clay also has plenty of bottom-funnel content they’re using as part of their SEO engine - particularly tools that they themselves have built using Clay.

Something Bruno mentioned on the podcast with Dave from Exit Five is that they obviously also use Clay at Clay. And because it’s running on the back-end, they’re able to use their product and model to leverage data to build SEO acquisition motions.

This means that they can leverage the product to actually create unique tools that can then be used by their audience.

So for example, because Clay’s product uses a unique method, “waterfalling,” to allow users to get email data using multiple data sources - they built a publicly available and free email finding tool.

This email tool landing page is part of their programmatic SEO play - each page is optimized for SEO and follows a similar structure.

Why does this work so well for them? As a general rule for programmatic SEO, it’s preferable that the data you use is either hard to acquire or hard to parse, so you will have less competition for those topics. Enter Clay.

They have unique access to data and they turn this data into valuable tools - each tool creates unique value and a unique page for the visitor.

For example, they did the same for an employee count finder tool, as well as a number of free calculators, like their CPM calculator.

This is really smart.

If you can find ways to do programmatic SEO that leverage the unique data you have access to or that makes use of the same software you’re trying to sell - use it. Not only will it help you outperform competitor content but data is how you become a real resource. And that’s how you build scalable traffic, long-term.

Side note: Bruno did share that they recently started using an SEO agency - which I personally think is an area worth outsourcing. Not necessarily on the strategy level - but just to solve for a lot of the tactical and programmatic things that need to get done to rank.

Paid Channels: LinkedIn

Clay’s audience lives on LinkedIn. Full stop. That’s where they need to be. So it makes sense why they would also be investing paid spend there.

Although Bruno shared that they aren’t spending maybe as much as they could be, they’re still making use of it by:

1. Promoting case studies:
2. Everyone should be repurposing case studies for ads. This is a no brainer. What I do love about Clay is that they create REALLY creative visuals for all of their blog content. I’ve never seen anything like it in the B2B space.

2. Promoting video content made by content creators:
3. Todd Clouser makes great videos on LinkedIn. He’s probably making some of the most creative video content right now on the platform.
4. He also happens to be good friends with Obaid and apparently, he came up with the idea to make this skit about Clay’s integration with Salesforce.
5. It’s actually not a sponsored post - but part one of what Obaid is calling The Claytrix Trilogy.
6. Clay then promoted the video post to share the news about the Salesforce integration. Again - just really cool to see Clay leaning into LinkedIn creators, going against the grain, and betting on creative plays.

2. Promoting content from members of Clay for Creators as well as agency partners:
3. Patrick Spychalski, Co-Founder at The Kiln, a Clay agency posted this video of a Clay use case and Clay then promoted it as an ad:

This is a really smart strategy because promoting these thought leadership style ads builds a lot more trust and credibility than just traditional ads.

Here’s another post that Clay promoted from Alex Fine, a Clay creator:

You get the idea. Putting ad spend behind thought leadership content is definitely where more brands should be headed. It’s inherently value-first and authentic.

It brings in real POVs. Real use cases. And that’s what people need to see in order to want to buy from you.

Takeaways

Obviously, Clay has a lot of things on its side that create really unique marketing opportunities for them. Clay first launched on Product Hunt in February 2022 with a team of under ten, and now they’re over 50 employees, 100k users, and 2500+ customers.

But you don’t have to be a high-growth startup with $65M in funding to apply some of these tactics yourself.

Here are the broad and widely applicable frameworks that I’m talking about:

1. Start with your main goal.
   • Every marketing strategy should be built from this. Running private events or exec dinners doesn’t make sense if you’re trying to build a self-serve funnel. Clay focused on one north star: self-serve. And that’s what’s dictating the channels they’re using.
   • Once you have your goal, build a tailored plan based on your audience, business model, and product.
2. Plan for built-in distribution.
   • A great content strategy won’t get you far if nobody is actually seeing the content you’re creating. Clay is doing such a good job at this. Their social game is amplified by all of the UGC. Their SEO motion drives eyeballs to their content. Their UGC gets distributed on paid channels. Etc.
   • Find incentives for content amplification. The more people rallied behind your brand, the easier it will be to benefit from their distribution power. Clay creators are able to position themselves as experts and use that expertise to amplify their own brands and service offerings.Same goes for partners and agencies.
3. Don’t be afraid to be different.
   • This might sound like fluff but it’s not. Clay knew that they didn’t want to look like every B2B brand out there. This is actually a brand pillar for them. You can just tell. They stand out by sticking through to this commitment. Their blog articles have fun doodles and sketches. They don’t use stock photos. They partner with tons of creators to make super creative content.
   • Yes, they lean on best practices, follow playbooks from other great companies out there, but at the end of the day, they are clear and intentional about not just being like every other B2B or AI product out there.

That’s it! Hope you enjoyed this and feel free to let me know if you want me to do something similar for another B2B company out there. I love learning about how different companies are approaching content - especially when I actually come out of it feeling inspired.

Go Clay.