🎨 My content strategy explained

From 0 to +4.5k subscribers and +11k LinkedIn followers in 1 year

Hi Growth folks 👋  It’s Pierre-Jean there!

I’m a Growth Manager at BlaBlaCar and share every 2 weeks Growth articles, inspired by the world’s leading scale-ups.

We’re now 4,353 so thanks for your support 🫶

If you’re new to the newsletter, here are the last 3 articles you missed:

1. What’s wrong with Growth Hacking?

2. My 5 predictions for 2024

3. 8 Cognitive Biases to Increase Conversion

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People often ask me what is my content strategy and how I managed to grow a newsletter and a LinkedIn audience while working as a full-time employee.

Unlike many content creators who are solopreneurs or business owners, content creation isn't my primary role. So I need to have a great strategy and process to produce content efficiently in my free time. And after +1 year of content creation, I learned a few things.

In today’s edition, I’m sharing with you:

• 📊 The newsletter and LinkedIn numbers over the past year

• 📚 My content strategy and production process

• 🔭 My “Personal brand” growth objectives for 2024

This is a new type of “Behind the scenes” format, so I hope you’ll like it!

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📊 The numbers - LinkedIn and The Growth Mind Newsletter

✍️ LinkedIn

Over the past 365 days, I posted 56 times on LinkedIn (approx. once a week). Those 56 posts generated:

• +9,557 followers

• 1.08 million of impressions → ≈ 19k impressions per post

• 11.7k engagements → ≈ 208 engagements per post

Number of LinkedIn impressions over the past 365 days:

Number of LinkedIn new followers over the past 365 days:

💌 The Growth Mind Newsletter

Since January 2023, I published 30 newsletter editions. Those 30 editions generated:

• 87K articles views

• +4,300 subscribers

Subscribers Growth since the launch of the newsletter:

Monthly views of articles since the launch:

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📚 My content strategy and production process

🏢 The 5 foundations of my strategy

For engaging content, uniqueness and interest are key. Beyond a great process, which I'll delve into soon, it's essential to have robust foundations. Here are the 5 key pillars of my strategy:

1. Value Proposition: Each week, I bring you growth insights drawn from leading scale-ups, based on real-world tactics and strategies I've personally used. This ensures the content is not only interesting but also actionable.

2. Content Pillars: My focus lies in three main areas:

   • Full Funnel Growth Strategies: Bridging the gap between Marketing, Product, and Customer Care.

   • Career Development: Helping growth professionals expand their skills, with frameworks like the Full Funnel Growth Skills Map.

   • Tech & Startups: Sharing ambitious growth strategies from the tech world.

3. Enemies: I challenge the short-sighted 'Growth hackers' who focus on quick fixes, by offering long-term, sustainable strategies covering all growth stages.

4. Unfair Advantages: My unique experiences at BlaBlaCar and in both B2B and B2C sectors provide me with a diverse perspective and credibility.

5. Style: My approach combines simple yet powerful visuals with a friendly, humble, and educational narrative, offering actionable tips and strategies.

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⚙️ My Content Production Process:

1. I always start with one big idea where I deep-dive through long-form content → The newsletter article (every 2 weeks).

2. I then break the newsletter edition into one to three short-form contents, depending on the structure of the article and its length → LinkedIn posts, mentioning the newsletter (generally 1-2 posts per week)

3. I then, a few weeks or months after sharing those LinkedIn posts, repurpose them but with different formats → For example, a simple text post can become a more detailed one with an illustration/cheat sheet. It can also be turned into a carousel, where I dive deeper into some specificities of the topic. The format and some things change, but the idea is the same.

With this process, one newsletter article can become 3 to 9 LinkedIn posts over time. The prerequisite to this process is to write a great newsletter article, where there is enough relevant information to build and to make sure the repurposed format is adding value.

Aside from the newsletter topics, I also share sometimes ad-hoc LinkedIn posts, that are not directly related to a newsletter edition. I don’t have a specific frequency or process for them, but if an idea comes to my mind and suits more a LinkedIn post format than a newsletter format, I do it.

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📝 The importance of note-taking and keeping a backlog of ideas

To never run out of ideas, I strongly recommend building a backlog. I personally use a simple Notion table for it:

Every time I think about a content idea, I add it to this table. I found that my most interesting ideas often come during unexpected moments, like when I’m doing sport or simply relaxing, so noting them to not forget them helped me a lot. I currently have +70 topics logged into it. I probably never use some of them, but I’m also sure that I will not run out of ideas in the next 12 months.

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🔭 “Personal brand” growth objectives for 2024

After +1 year of content creation, it’s the first time I set proper growth objectives for my personal brand growth.

I divided them into 2 sections: Inputs (What I need to invest) and Outputs (the results of my investments).

Inputs objectives:

• Share a newsletter deep-dive article every 2 weeks (same as in 2023)

• Post on LinkedIn 2x a week (double what I did in 2023)

• Promote each new article on LinkedIn

• Explore new formats: Podcasts, guest posts, videos…

• Explore content monetization opportunities: sponsorships, paid content, etc.

Outputs objectives:

• 25,000 followers on LinkedIn (+130%)

• 8,000 newsletters subscribers (+90%)

• Test one new format of content

• Generate my first € with the newsletter

Based on my 2023 experience, those are ambitious but realistic figures I know I can reach if I respect my input objectives.

I chose to not put too much pressure on testing new formats and monetizing, as I want to be free to not explore anymore those opportunities if I consider they are not enough interesting or too time-consuming.

We’ll see what happens, but those objectives will likely evolve during the year 📈

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And that’s a wrap for today folks 👋

I’m curious to know what you think of this type of “behind the scenes” articles? Do you like it, or do you prefer to only read the classic articles (growth strategies, frameworks…)?