From $80K to $455K MRR, with search traffic up 9x and CAC down 60%
Growth was not sustainable and churn was eating it. The fix started at the top of the funnel, with a programmatic search play that won spots on the results page we would not normally have ranked for.
Lumen5Sr. Growth Marketing Manager & AdvisorDec 2019 – Nov 20223 min read- $80K$455K
- Monthly recurring revenue
- 80K750K+
- Monthly search sessions in 12 months
- −60%+
- Customer acquisition cost
- 7-fig
- ARR growth in year one
Context
Lumen5 is an AI video creation platform that turns written content into video. About 65% of the business came from enterprise clients and 35% from self-serve, single-user accounts.
When I joined, growth was not sustainable. Churn ran as high as 33% in bad months, which put a hard ceiling on how big the business could get. My goal was to add $300K in monthly recurring revenue by significantly increasing the number of users, while bringing churn down to lift that ceiling.
I reported to the VP Marketing for the first half of my tenure. When they left, I was promoted to lead the marketing team, reporting to the CEO.
The thesisMost teams fight for the ten blue links. The bigger opportunity is often everywhere else on the results page.
Competing for the whole results page
| Result type | What it is | How we competed |
|---|---|---|
| Informational | How-to and explainer results | Programmatic pages built around high-volume topics |
| Transactional | Results for people ready to act | Pages that went straight to making a video |
| Local | Results tied to a place | Localized long-tail pages generated for location-based searches |
| Rich and thumbnail results | Visual results with images or previews | Schema markup that made our pages eligible for these spots |
A search results page is not one list. Depending on the query, Google mixes transactional results, informational results, local results and rich results with thumbnails, such as products and recipes. Each of those has its own rules for what gets shown.
We used structured data (schema) to make our pages eligible for the visual, thumbnail-style spots that video and template pages would not normally win, which put Lumen5 in front of searchers in places competitors were not competing.
The programmatic search engine
The engine ran on simple rules. Any search term with more than 1,000 monthly searches got its own page, generated from a template. If the term could also be paired with a location, the system went one step further and created localized pages for those longer-tail searches, which supported the main page and captured demand competitors ignored.
Every page carried structured data, so it could compete for rich results as well as standard listings. Results fed back into which terms and templates we expanded next.
Layering in paid
Once search was carrying the base, we added a large paid program across Google, Meta and native ad platforms. Paid was there to scale what was already working, not to carry growth on its own.
Organic traffic changed the economics of paid. As search brought in more customers at almost no marginal cost, blended acquisition cost fell by more than 60% even while monthly paid spend rose by six figures.
Results
Monthly search sessions grew from about 80,000 to more than 750,000 within 12 months, and the channels I ran drove seven-figure ARR growth in that first year. Over my full tenure, monthly recurring revenue grew from $80K to $455K, beating the $300K goal.