David and Goliath: How We Helped Playbook 10x its Monthly Organic Traffic and Gain 700,000+ Subscribers

Going Toe-to-Toe with Industry Giants

Back in January 2021, Playbook faced a common conundrum in the world of startups. As a challenger brand in the digital asset management space, the Playbook team was clear who its target audience was: creative professionals including designers, marketers, photographers, videographers, illustrators, and animators who handle large volumes of digital content, including heavy and unusual file types. 

Playbook set out to solve a specific problem for these creatives: namely, reducing the amount of time they spend manually organizing and searching for their files. 

There was just one problem: they were going up against industry giants like Google Drive and Dropbox (one of the first-ever SaaS unicorns). This was a David and Goliath situation, and they turned to Literal Humans to devise a growth strategy that would help Playbook carve out a distinct position in a highly competitive market. 

By leveraging a mix of content marketing, SEO, and community-building efforts, Literal Humans worked to amplify Playbook’s visibility among freelancers, agencies, and small in-house teams, positioning it as the go-to solution for those looking for a faster, more intuitive alternative to traditional file storage platforms, and helping it to grow to more than one million active monthly users.

Phase 1: The Audit

Playbook already had a solid website design in place at the start of our engagement—we wouldn’t expect anything less from a team of professional designers!

We suggested a few tweaks that would improve engagement and conversions, including:

• Adding tabs such as ‘Newsletter,’ ‘Resources,’ ‘About us,’ and ‘Use cases’ to the navigation menu.
• Website copy hacks to highlight Playbook’s unique selling propositions (USPs) compared to its competitors, including its 4TB of free lifetime storage for designers.
• SEO tweaks, such as updating URLs to reflect page content.
• Adding page copy to make the site more crawlable by Google.
• Highlighting artists, designers, and community members who use Playbook.
• Running competitions and giveaways.

We also ran an Instagram audit for Playbook. They were doing a great job with the visual aesthetic of their page and had decent engagement. Our recommendations included:

• Increasing post frequency to three to five times per week
• Leveraging the bio to promote Playbook’s USPs
• Adding a greater variety of content, including video content
• Adopting a more conversational tone to increase engagement
• Highlighting the Playbook features and use cases that make designers’ lives easier to complement their posts showcasing artists and their awesome work

Overall, Playbook had made a respectable start both on building their website and growing their Instagram presence, so we had a really solid foundation to build on and felt confident we could help them take on the industry giants.

Phase 2: The Strategy

Playbook to increase its organic traffic and user acquisition, and entrusted us to build their content marketing strategy from the ground up. Here’s how we did it. 

Flexible and Adaptable SEO 

Once the audit was out of the way, the content strategy team hopped on a brainstorming call and churned out over 50 content ideas for SEO-optimized blog posts during the first quarter of 2021. 

The strategy focused on building a community of artists and designers on Playbook — aside from its unique features, this would make it a more attractive platform for their ICPs than corporate tech giants like Dropbox and Google Drive. 

As well as creating SEO-optimized blog posts aimed at providing value for both individual designers and in-house design teams, we built out case studies and customer stories to help drive conversions.

Evolving Strategy to Meet New Needs

Over time, Playbook’s needs and priorities have shifted, and the way SEO works has changed dramatically since our engagement began. As a result, in 2024, we shifted our strategy away from a “keyword-first” strategy, pivoting towards a “research-first” approach. 

This aligned with a request from the Playbook team for more product-focused and conversion-focused content, so we set about carrying out market research with existing users, including surveys and interviews. We reached out via Playbook’s Discord channel, offering survey participants the chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card in exchange for taking part. 

Once we had gathered the data and insights, we used them for two things:

• To create a “State of Creative Digital Asset Management” report, which provided us with fresh firsthand insights to use in our content and positioned Playbook as a thought leader in the space.

• To inform our SEO strategy moving forward. The insights gathered from our research helped us to identify the needs and pain points of Playbook’s users and get a better understanding of why they chose the platform and how they use it. We then used these insights to inform ongoing SEO strategy in line with Playbook’s goals. 

The new strategy focused on highlighting Playbook’s unique strengths, such as its visually engaging interface tailored to creatives, competitive pricing, and substantial storage capacity—all designed to cater specifically to the needs of smaller creative teams. 

Building Community with Competitions and Giveaways

Competitions and giveaways seemed like an obvious way to build community and drive user acquisition. The first competition we ran for them gained over 1,000 entries and 30,000 votes. 

Since then, Playbook has gone on to run dozens of competitions, attracting thousands of new community members in the process. In 2024, they launched the Imagination Fund contest, giving away $100,000 worth of prizes to the community, and Literal Humans created blog content to give visibility to the winning projects. 

Getting the Right Eyes on Playbook Content

There’s a lot more to a successful content strategy than just ‘posting and praying’—you have to know where to promote your content to get it in front of the right eyes.

As part of our audit process, the LH promo experts built Playbook an Earned Media Bible. The Earned Media Bible contains a comprehensive list of Facebook and LinkedIn groups, subreddits, Slack channels, and influencers to distribute content, as well as a comprehensive list of publications to pitch guest posts.

We then used this resource to promote every piece of content we published, as well as the competitions and giveaways, to further extend their reach. 

Creating the 2023 Annual Report

At the end of 2023, we produced Playbook’s first-ever annual report, a visual PDF that looks back on Playbook’s year — from its acquisition of CanFy to new feature releases like Playbook AI, as well as highlighting community members and competition winners.

The Playbook team was delighted with the final result. Here was co-founder Alex Zirbel’s reaction:

1 Million Active Monthly Users

Playbook is one of our longest-running client partnerships—and perhaps this is why. Over the last four years, Playbook has grown from 20,000 active monthly users to over one million. 

While we can’t take all the credit, these results demonstrate the power of a robust content marketing strategy done right. I mean, just look at the numbers. 

In the first six months, we helped Playbook increase its website traffic by 26% week-over-week, tripled its organic search traffic, and increased its new user acquisition by five percent.

Over the following 18 months, we continued to help Playbook grow its organic search traffic and build domain authority. In December 2020, the Playbook website had 2,200 daily visitors. By November 2022, that figure had increased more than tenfold, with 33,000 monthly hits from organic search traffic.

As of November 2024, that figure has more than doubled, with 70,000 organic visitors to the Playbook website every day

The results: 5x more monthly active users

Playbook is one of our longest-running client partnerships—and perhaps this is why. Over the last four years, Playbook has grown from 20,000 active monthly users to over one million. 

While we can’t take all the credit, these results demonstrate the power of a robust content marketing strategy done right. I mean, just look at the numbers. 

In the first six months, we helped Playbook increase its website traffic by 26% week-over-week, tripled its organic search traffic, and increased its new user acquisition by five percent.

Over the following 18 months, we continued to help Playbook grow its organic search traffic and build domain authority. In December 2020, the Playbook website had 2,200 daily visitors. By November 2022, that figure had increased more than tenfold, with 33,000 monthly hits from organic search traffic.

As of November 2024, that figure has more than doubled, with 70,000 organic visitors to the Playbook website every day. 

The Playbook story is the perfect example of a plucky young tech company disrupting its industry as a challenger brand with a unique value proposition. 

With Playbook, we proved that a brilliant tech-for-good product and a well-executed content strategy make the winning combination for growing a startup. It also highlights the importance of a relationship based on mutual trust and respect. 

If you’re a small tech-for-good fish in a big pond looking for a marketing agency you can trust, look no further. 

Schedule a free discovery call with us, and let’s start building your content strategy today.