Which startups are best at content-driven growth, and what can I learn from them?<\/h4>\n

This question got me thinking \u2014 what are all the ways that content can drive growth? There\u2019s obviously SEO. There are also viral blog posts, user-generated-content (UGC), editorially produced blog posts, data-generated pages, and so on. What other strategies are there, and how do they all fit together?<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s break this down:<\/p>\n

User-Generated SEO-Optimized (UGSO): Your users generate public content which Google finds and surfaces in organic search. This primarily drives the growth of companies like Quora, Glassdoor, and Reddit.
\nEditorially-Generated SEO-Optimized (EGSO): Employees (or contractors) of the company create content with the goal of ranking higher for certain keywords. This primarily drives the growth of companies like Ahrefs, Slidebean, and HubSpot.
\nData-Generated SEO-Optimized (DGSO): This strategy is the combination of UGC and Editorial \u2013 your company auto-magically generates thousands of individual pages off on your UGC and proprietary data. This primarily drives the growth of companies like Thumbtack, Zapier, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Grubhub.
\nUser-Generated Virality-Optimized (UGVO): UGC content leads to users sharing that content with their friends, which then pulls those friends into the product. TikTok is the ultimate example of this (users sharing watermarked videos with each other), as is the Reface app. The edges of this zone include Airbnb listings (that users share with each other) and Zillow\u2019s Zestimate (which home-owners pass around).
\nEditorially-Generated Virality-Optimized (EGVO): Employees\/founders make one-off viral content \u2014 also known as thought leadership or brand building. Content that the founder\/company creates with the goal of having that content spread through WOM. This includes Spotify Unwrapped, along with virality-oriented creators like Mr. Beast, Stir\u2019s one-off drops, and Superhuman\u2019s early blog posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":53,"template":"","elemenfoliocategory":[5],"class_list":["post-343","elemenfolio","type-elemenfolio","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","elemenfoliocategory-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/startuppadma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/elemenfolio\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/startuppadma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/elemenfolio"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/startuppadma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/elemenfolio"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/startuppadma.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/53"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/startuppadma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"elemenfoliocategory","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/startuppadma.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Felemenfoliocategory&post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}