{"id":7460,"date":"2015-03-09T12:08:55","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T10:08:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/?p=7460"},"modified":"2026-06-17T15:54:51","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T12:54:51","slug":"how-to-grow-a-startup-from-0-to-5-million-buffers-digital-marketing-strategy-exposed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cognitiveseo.com\/blog\/7460\/how-to-grow-a-startup-from-0-to-5-million-buffers-digital-marketing-strategy-exposed\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Grow a Startup from $0 to $19 million – Buffers’ Digital Marketing Strategy Exposed"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m sure most of you are familiar with Buffer. What started as a simple, lean utility for scheduling tweets has evolved into a comprehensive, indispensable social media management ecosystem. Now the tool is viewed as a necessity, not only for startups, but for every business which aspires to do great content marketing and build a tribe for itself. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

While its early growth milestones originally turned heads in the SaaS world, Buffer has scaled aggressively beyond those initial benchmarks, now generating over $19 million<\/b> in annual recurring revenue (ARR). It has cemented its status as one of the premier platforms for scheduling, analyzing, and optimizing digital strategies across the modern social landscape, including LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, and X (formerly Twitter).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What follows below is the reverse engineering of Buffer’s digital marketing strategy. We’ll try to uncover what strategy they used as a new startup and how they adapted it while growing their company and becoming a necessity for digital marketing agencies around the world.<\/p>\n

1. The BufferApp Story<\/strong><\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

Just like many other startups, the story starts in the college rooms of the United Kingdom, in which Leo Widrich and Joel Gascoigne set the building blocks of Buffer. Joel writes the code for the twitter scheduler and soon after that tells Leo about it.\u00a0The idea seemed great to both Leo and Joel and so the partnership began. The marketing side of the business would fall in the hands Leo Widrich.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Being new to marketing, Leo started using content marketing as a way to promote the business. Buffer focused on blogs and social media with its marketing efforts.\u00a0<\/span>The first step was to gain an audience and win some notoriety for their tool.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Buffer was pitched to the top tech blogs like Mashable, TechCrunch but nobody wanted to write about them.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Moreover, even blogs with a smaller audience declined to talk about the newly created tool.<\/span><\/p>\n

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“Okay. Let\u2019s set up the Buffer blog. Let\u2019s write about interesting things that are in the social media space so people find it interesting […]” –\u00a0Leo Widrich\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As a result, Leo started to produce the content on his own and publish it on their newly created blog. During the first 10 months he wrote about Twitter, how to get more followers and how Twitter\u00a0could\u00a0be used for SEO purposes. He then started publishing with a frequency of 2-3 articles per month, but soon wrote 3-4 articles each week. After he produced some great pieces of content he reached out to other blogs and asked if their audience would be interested in similar articles.<\/p>\n

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He started creating relationships. He gained their audience through guest blogging and after 10 months, Buffer had over 100,000 users.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

“We then, from the U.K., moved to Silicon Valley. Half a year later raised the seed round from some great angels in the Valley, and I dropped out of college. My parents weren’t very happy about it.” – Leo Widrich
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The shift of the content strategy appeared when they integrated other social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn within their tool. Their content marketing turned away from Twitter and started writing content about social media marketing and its uses. They tackled topics such as what works best on Facebook<\/a>. The biggest switch in content marketing tactics came with the publishing of the content marketing manifesto<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0Rand Fishkin. The manifesto pushed one thing:<\/p>\n

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Instead of creating your content for potential customers, create it for influencers who are already reaching them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This switch in tactics was remarked on the Buffer blog. More business, more efficiency and overall more fun articles started appearing. Their average 250 tweets per article quadrupled and reached 1000 with this switch and their successful content strategies.<\/p>\n

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They wanted to influence the influencers and they managed to do just that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Let’s take a more in-depth look at how their startup became a multi-million dollar business:<\/span><\/p>\n

2. The BufferApp SEO Strategy<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

Buffer didn’t use a traditional form of link building in order to reach the success they encounter today. What they’ve done is pure organic growth through content marketing and growth hacking. In this chapter we’re going to reveal the SEO metrics related to the digital marketing strategy in which Buffer has engaged.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2.1 Understanding the SEO Visibility<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"SEO<\/p>\n

Looking at the data from cognitiveSEO<\/a>, we can see the result of a well executed long term strategy. A slow but steady growth in the seo\u00a0visibility, and once it took off in June 2014,\u00a0the growth was exponential. The visibility drop\u00a0you can notice in September in the SEO Visibility was from a “hasty” switch from HTTP to HTTPS, together with a manual penalty received from Google. They have recovered quite quickly from it seems.\u00a0Other than that, the growth was constant, and the recovery was quick. The increased SEO Visibility from June\u00a0is owed to the switch in content marketing strategy and expanding the topics that Buffer usually wrote about till then.<\/p>\n

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2.2 Digging the Alexa Visibility<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Alexa<\/p>\n

The Alexa rankings metric represents an estimate measure of a website’s rank, compared with others from the internet. In the Buffer case, the Alexa chart mirrors the one from the social visibility chapter, with a huge spike in June and the drop in ranks in the month of September.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For their tool, which targets worldwide users, having a rank of 1,150 means they are really doing well. Once again we\u00a0notice the increase in global rank in June and I have to mention that n<\/span>ot only the content marketing switch helped gain more visibility in the SERPs, but it also increased the Alexa ranks.<\/span><\/p>\n

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It\u2019s important to keep in mind that the Alexa Traffic tool can sometimes be way off in its results, as it gathers data only from the users using the Alexa toolbar.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

2.3 What Keywords Does Buffer Rank on?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Ranking<\/p>\n

A characteristic of using content marketing to promote your business is ranking well for long and relevant keywords. As you can notice in the chart above, most of Buffer’s high ranking keywords are pointing to blog articles. This is a good metric to take note of when you want to follow the success of the content marketing strategy.<\/p>\n

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The irrelevant keywords that appear in the chart are due to the site’s overall\u00a0authority. Buffer’s authority increased and started ranking for keywords they weren’t necessarily focusing on. This just adds to the success of their content marketing strategy and allows them to spread their content to a wide variety of topics since the site’s authority is already established.<\/p>\n

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2.4 A Mystic Google Penalty<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\"Buffer

Screenshot from open.bufferapp.com\/august-content-report\/<\/p><\/div>\n

The\u00a0drop in SEO Visibility mentioned above came from a hasty switch <\/a>of their social blog from HTTP to HTTPS combined with a manual Google penalty.\u00a0The decision to make the switch came after Google announced <\/a>that they will take into consideration the security of the website and the use of HTTPS over HTTP. Their desire to quickly jump on the bandwagon led to some mistakes. Moreover, they didn’t catch the mistake just in time and they managed to lose a large portion of organic traffic. Buffer also received a manual penalty<\/a>\u00a0warning in the Google Webmaster Tools but no further details were given about it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

They did fix the issue with the HTTPS and mentioned that with the help of John Mueller<\/a>\u00a0(Webmaster Trend Analyst at Google) and his team, Buffer also recovered from Google’s penalty.<\/p>\n

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2.5 Link Building Strategy – Shady or Not?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

\"Unnatural<\/p>\n

Looking at the backlink profile, Buffer seems like it’s not doing so well in terms of link health. Over 22% of links pointing back to it are unnatural. This could have caused a penalty from Google and a huge loss in organic traffic. The SEO Visibility chart did show a drop in rankings and it could have been from the manual penalty mentioned above together with the hasty switch from HTTP to HTTPS.<\/p>\n

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The links are coming from the Buffer Widget and they are all pointing to the “\/add” directory. <\/span><\/p>\n

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Google did state that links inserted in widgets are a big no no, and that’s why our tool <\/span>marked the links as unnatural. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

We can assume that the links are from blogs which have social widgets installed on them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But that Page is NoIndexed by Robots.txt so No Influence on Rankings.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Bufferapp<\/p>\n

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We can see how they worked around another Google penalty. With the help of the robots.txt<\/a> file, Buffer asked Google and other web crawlers not to index that directory on their website. By doing so, Google won’t index the links and it will not consider the links to be unnatural. The Google penalty would have been triggered and their organic traffic would have hit rock bottom. Those lines in the robots.txt file really saved them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Blogs<\/p>\n

It was really smart of them to point the widget only to one directory on their website. This way, they could easily block the indexation of the directory in the robots.txt file.<\/p>\n

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Link Building Strategy = Relationship Building<\/strong><\/h4>\n

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Looking at the overall backlink profile, link gain velocity and overall SEO strategy, we\u00a0can say that Buffer didn’t really use a traditional<\/a>\u00a0Link Building Strategy. They seemed to understand that link building switched from hunting for links in web directories and blog post spam, the unnatural one, to a more organic strategy. They used a new link building mentality:<\/p>\n

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Link Building Mentality\u00a0– Create relevant &\u00a0engaging content in order to build a reputation in the community, and get your site linked.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

3. The Startup Secret: Hyper-Listening and Emotional Feedback<\/b><\/h2>\n

 <\/p>\n

One of the core pillars behind massive startup growth, as seen in Buffer’s trajectory, is an absolute obsession with community feedback. Successful startups don’t just push marketing messages out; they listen intensely to what the market echoes back. Understanding the exact sentiment of your early adopters allows you to pivot your messaging, fix product bugs instantly, and turn casual users into vocal brand evangelists.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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To scale this level of community intimacy, modern startups deploy<\/span> BrandMentions<\/b>. As an elite brand monitoring tool, it goes beyond simply counting your brand name on Twitter. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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It provides the most granular sentiment analysis available, breaking down customer feedback through precise emotion-level analysis. Knowing whether your latest feature release sparked “joy” or “confusion” across niche forums and social channels gives your startup the ultimate unfair advantage: the ability to build exactly what the market emotionally craves.<\/span><\/p>\n

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3.1 From Reactive Tracking to Proactive Product Evolution<\/h3>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hyper-listening shifts a startup from a defensive posture to an offensive one. Instead of waiting for traditional support tickets to pile up or relying on low-response surveys, real-time social listening captures unfiltered raw data right at the source. This enables your team to spot shifts in user behavior long before they reflect in your churn metrics.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Hyper-Listening<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

When you can see a sudden spike in “frustration” or “delight” mapped across specific user demographics, you gain direct clarity on your next engineering sprint.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

3.2 The Evangelism Loop: Turning Data Into Community Loyalty<\/h3>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The real magic happens when users realize they are truly being heard. When a startup uses emotion-level intelligence to quickly address a collective pain point\u2014or double down on an unexpected feature that brings users joy\u2014it creates a deep sense of shared ownership.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The Secret to Retaining Early Adopters:<\/b> Customers don’t just stick around for a great product; they stay because they feel fiercely loyal to a brand that actively respects and acts on their emotional feedback.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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4. What’s Their Content Marketing Strategy<\/strong><\/h3>\n

After we uncovered Buffer’s SEO strategy, we can notice that the overall marketing efforts for Buffer are focused on content marketing. In the following chapter we’ll take a more in-depth look at their content, its target and the behavior of Buffer’s readers.<\/p>\n

4.1 It All Started with Guest Blogging<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Started<\/p>\n

Buffer’s content strategy started with a few posts on their blog and more social outreach to other high authority blogs and magazines. They used guest posting as a way to build awareness and authority for their own website, so that in the future, once they gained the trust of readers, they could focus more on their own website.\u00a0In the chart above, we notice that today the main sources of links are from “blog posts or forum threads” and “short paragraph of text”. Buffer successfully managed to create conversations to build awareness for their application.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

4.2 Guest-posting to Buffer’s Blog Posting Transition<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Immense<\/p>\n

After they gained a lot of traction with guest blogging and starting online relationships, they focused more on their own blog. Buffer had huge success with their articles, especially on Twitter. Some of their blog posts reached more than 20,000 people. And to note is the fact that they reached the right people, relevant to their business.<\/p>\n

Nowadays their articles have an average of 4,000 twitter shares with an occasional spike of 7,000 or 8,000. They managed to create a “social following”, a tribe that engages with Buffer at every article they write.<\/p>\n

4.3 Number of Authors and Post Frequency<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\"Bufferapp<\/p>\n

Finding out the exact number of authors who wrote on a website can be easily done with a simple Google query.<\/p>\n

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Using the “site:blog.bufferapp.com\/author-“intitle:page<\/strong>” query, the SERPs will display all the pages in the author directory.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As mentioned in the introduction, for the first 10 months it was only Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer,\u00a0who wrote on the blog. As they grew more and more and reached a larger audience, more writers were co-opted for their business. We\u00a0managed to find that 45 writers<\/strong> blogged for Buffer.\u00a0These ones certainly helped to produce great pieces of content and expand the Buffer audience.<\/p>\n

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Seeing the evolution of the blog through time, we can notice the frequency<\/strong> of posting has increased significantly. In the first 10 months the Buffer blog published an average of 2-3 articles each week. Next it increased to 4-5 each week and nowadays they publish almost daily. And this is only on their own blog. Leo Widrich\u00a0<\/span>stated<\/a> that in the first nine months he wrote around 350 articles, 3 to 4 articles each day, and tried to get them published on different websites.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a04.4 What Kind of Content Does Buffer Publish<\/strong><\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

The types of content published on the buffer blog also changed as time went on. It had two important switches throughout time. I did mention above that initially the blog content focused on articles about Twitter. Being a Twitter\u00a0scheduler app it was Buffer’s way of creating a reliable and relevant tribe.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The first switch appeared with the integration of Facebook and LinkedIn in the scheduler. The blog focused then on a variety of topics from the social media world. This isn’t to say that other Twitter\u00a0articles weren’t published, but the authors also tackled some business development and growth on social media topics as well.<\/p>\n

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The last content switch happened with the publication of the Content Marketing Manifesto. This made Buffer’s writers to target influencers also, rather than only relevant users. The topics now were more focused on business, psychology and overall light topics. This quadrupled the social response, articles that usually averaged 250 twitter shares, managed to reach 1,000.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

4.5 What Kind of Content Works Best for Buffer<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In each business segment it’s best to tailor the content to fit a certain persona. Once this is achieved, further tweaks and adjustments can be added to make the content fit each of the main social platforms. Let’s take a look at what kind of content works for each social platform for Buffer:<\/p>\n

For Twitter<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Best<\/p>\n

The most shared articles on twitter are:<\/p>\n