5 years of content marketing lessons from Dock

TABLE OF CONTENTs

TABLE OF CONTENT

What we actually learned—and unlearned—running a lean content operation from zero.

Alex started building Dock's content engine about five years ago—before the seed round, before there was a marketing team to speak of.

He came in with a strong prior from five years running marketing at Lattice: the benefits of SEO and content take a long time to compound, so start before you need it.

The plan: invest early, stay patient, and build a content moat before the product was ready for the attention.

I came on as a freelance writer in late 2021, then joined Dock full-time in October 2022. In the spirit of building in public, I shared our content strategy after my first 90 days.

I got some things right, some things wrong. But five years later, we're still here—regularly hitting our quarterly pipeline and revenue targets—so clearly, something worked.

Here’s a full retrospective on what we learned.

Growth Bytes

Top takeaways:

Start with one channel and stay there. Spreading a hundred dollars across ten channels returns less than a hundred dollars in one. Pick your channel, commit to it, and resist the urge to hedge your bets.
Taste and format are separate calls. SEO, LinkedIn, YouTube—every channel has a game you have to play. You can write the best piece in the category and still get buried if you refuse to work within the structure that the platform rewards. Bring your taste to the angles, examples, and things only you would say.
Founder brand works only when the founder is the real source of the content. Alex does the thinking—in podcast conversations, internal sessions, and product discussions. Marketing’s job is to mine those ideas for content without adding to his plate.
Trying too many channels at once usually means you weren't ready for any of them. In 2024, we stretched into communities, influencers, and events simultaneously—and got modest results.
A podcast is worth it, even with a small audience. The value of our podcast is the raw material it generates for the channels that actually drive pipeline—SEO and LinkedIn.
AEO & GEO have made off-site mentions a top priority. It's not enough to own the SERPs anymore—you need the broader internet talking about you too.

Go all-in on one channel before you add another

The case for starting SEO from day zero was essentially a 10-year moonshot argument.

Our marketing was intentionally forward-facing. “Any company that reaches the size we're planning to build will need this, and the only way to have it then is to have started it already."

"Building a startup is a 7-10 year commitment. If you need paid ads to get $1M ARR, you aren't setting yourself up for scale. That's why I wanted to invest in content marketing very early." — Alex

We committed hard to SEO. For the first two years, I was producing 8-10 blog posts a month with a team of freelancers—a lot for a one-person team to manage (pre-AI).

The high-output cadence was a forcing function for creating production workflows that scaled, experimenting quickly, and establishing faster feedback loops. It also cured me of being overly precious with content. When you're publishing that much, you can't spend three weeks on something that should have taken four days.

In year one, we didn’t see many gains in traffic yet—but we were watching domain authority climb, tracking backlinks as they accumulated, counting published articles, and monitoring rankings inch up from page three to page two. I’m glad we tracked those leading indicators, otherwise we may have quit too soon.

The payoff came later. Content and SEO are now our number one acquisition channel, driving the majority of Dock's pipeline.

We often get asked: Would we do SEO again if we were starting over today? I can't say with certainty—the channel is less valuable than it was five years ago, and your competitive landscape matters a lot.

My advice is to pick one channel you believe in and can execute exceptionally well. I had a strong SEO background, so it was the channel I was best-equipped to execute.

SEO wasn’t the only right answer, but it worked for us. Our two closest early competitors took completely different approaches, and both succeeded. Aligned built their early buzz almost entirely through LinkedIn influencer marketing. Arrows went deep on the HubSpot partner marketplace.

None of us did an exceptional job any time we tried to dabble in each other’s spaces. The commitment and focus mattered more than the channel.

If you have only a hundred dollars to spend on marketing, spend it all on one channel. It's more likely to succeed, and you're more likely to learn something. When ten channels get ten dollars each, you learn nothing from any of them.

SEO has rules you can't ‘taste’ your way out of

Not all our SEO experiments succeeded. Here’s what did:

Product-led content that focused on jobs to be done worked pretty consistently. Articles like “how to build a sales proposal" or "how to build a customer success plan"—where Dock could provide both the answer AND hand them the solution—were a slam dunk. And the free product template would naturally lead to free trial sign-ups.

While writing these articles, I noticed it was almost impossible to find real examples of sales collateral, so we built The Revenue Archives—our biggest SEO success to date. Building something that is both genuinely useful and hard to replicate is always a safe SEO play, even in the age of AI overviews.

Articles on emerging industry terminology with zero search volume (according to the SEO tools) also worked surprisingly well. The marketers at big companies are inherently further from their customers than we are as a small team, and they rely on search volume tools, so they didn’t notice emerging terms like "asynchronous sales" or "scaled customer success." We did, and early content created around those terms converted at a surprisingly high clip.

The lesson here: use your unique product advantage and vantage point as a startup as an SEO wedge.

What didn't work: prioritizing taste over algorithms. I came in believing that even SEO content could be unique and opinionated. We would write deeply considered, well-argued software guides in unique formats that nobody ever found because I refused to format them as a "20 best tools” listicle.

"The second I went and changed the article to 'here's 20 tools in a list,' it ranked instantly. The big lesson is that you can be a tastemaker with some things, but there are some channels with very defined rules, and SEO is one of them." — Eric

Every channel has a formula or structure it rewards, and fighting that formula is a losing battle, regardless of how good the content is.

The skill is knowing where taste applies and where it doesn't. Format, headline structure, and backlink building—those are hard and fast rules. But there are still places to strategically apply taste, like the angle you take or the example nobody else would use.

Great B2B content is about coloring beautifully inside the lines.

One more thing that helped our SEO strategy: long-term relationships with great freelancers. I onboarded them less like contractors and more like employees—by demoing the product for them, walking through customer pain points, and giving hours of feedback on early drafts.

It's not a common approach—most content leads hand over a keyword and hope for the best. But two or three years into a relationship with a freelancer who actually understood Dock's product and voice, quality compounded.

Founder-led content only works when it’s truly founder-led

Alex has been the face of Dock's content since the beginning: hosting our podcast, appearing in product demos, and posting on LinkedIn. The Dock company account barely exists other than to repost Alex's content.

Our reasoning: People buy from people. Before anyone knew what Dock was, some people knew who Alex was—he was the former VP of Marketing at Lattice, and a credible voice in sales and enablement. People were rooting for him.

Founder-led content is having a moment. But I've seen it fail more often than not—typically because the founder is the face of the content rather than the original source. Put words in your founder's mouth, or hand them a script marketing wrote, and it reads as exactly that.

"It's not just me taking what you say and writing it up fancy. You're actively contributing ideas and your time. I think that makes it a much more successful model than a handoff to marketing."

As our marketer, I produce the majority of Alex's content. But mostly I'm amplifying things Alex has already said—in internal training sessions, product discussions, webinars, or conversations on this podcast.

If your founder is theoretically on board but doesn't make themself available, don't jump to fully ghostwriting on their behalf. Look for where they're already sharing ideas—all-hands presentations, sales calls, product reviews.

Why we built our entire content strategy around a podcast

In 2023, we launched The Grow & Tell podcast (which we eventually evolved into this newsletter). It’s never been our biggest marketing channel. It probably never will be. (Podcasts are more of a nurture play than an audience-building play.)

But pull it out of our content stack, and most of what we do falls apart.

Every conversation Alex has on the show gets turned into LinkedIn posts, SEO articles, and newsletter fodder. We're not starting from scratch every time we sit down to create content—we're mining a conversation that already happened. The podcast feeds everything else.

We design our interviews around topics we want to use in other formats. For example, we ask every guest how they use AI for sales enablement so we can turn around and create the most expert-led blog post on the internet on that topic.

Plus, most guests are potential customers, partners, or people in our extended network. The show gives us a reason to get on the phone with people we'd want to know anyway—and some of those conversations eventually turn into something useful. A few have turned into sales conversations.

Alex also points out that the written word feels a little cheaper in a world where AI produces it in seconds. Two people having a real conversation—with real opinions, real tangents, real disagreement—is a different kind of content. It's getting harder to replicate, and more valuable as a result.

The year we broke our own rule

In 2024, we decided to branch out. We sponsored two communities—one for sales enablement, one for RevOps. We did a bunch of sponsored posts with LinkedIn influencers. We sponsored a few in-person and virtual conferences.

None of it was a complete failure—but none of it made money rain down from the sky.

We were (and still are) a one-person marketing team with part-time support from the founder. Running too many channels at once cost us focus at a time when the channels that were actually working deserved more investment.

Alex also realized, in hindsight, that we didn't have the demand-gen infrastructure to support what we were trying to do. Events require a whole system—outreach before, follow-up after, something concrete to send people to when they leave the booth. We were running all of it with pieces of both our time. We were half-assing it.

"It would probably have been better to either just keep focusing on SEO, keep focusing a little bit more on our own LinkedIn content, or build up the demand gen muscle, or just wait and be patient."

Why did we break our one-channel-at-a-time rule?

Part of it was competitive pressure. Our sales team was hearing about competitors' LinkedIn influencer programs, and we were more reactive than we should have been.

In hindsight, we also didn't quite have product-market fit yet. We repositioned as a revenue enablement platform in 2025, and that shift changed everything—our story got sharper, the ICP got clearer, and our ACV got bigger.

So we’d be in a much better position to succeed on more channels today—but we’ll hire help before we do.

What is five years of SEO worth in the age of AI?

We've bet heavily on SEO and content, which means we have more skin in the game than most when it comes to AI overviews and LLMs disrupting traditional search.

When I first looked at citation-tracking tools to see how often Dock was mentioned in AI answers, we were doing better than expected. AI tools largely draw from the same content that already ranks on Google, so we had a strong influence over AI answers.

That said, our SEO traffic is at its lowest point in years. AI overviews are eating into click-through rates, and more buyers are using LLMs to do product research instead of Googling their way to a blog post.

The saving grace: our sales pipeline is stronger than it's ever been. Traffic was never a perfect proxy for SEO success, and AI has made that clearer. Buyers are doing the research—they're just doing it in ChatGPT instead of Google, and they're not leaving the same footprints they used to.

So what has changed for us in the age of AEO?

We’ve leaned even harder into expert-led content—reviving this podcast and newsletter in early 2026 and featuring experts more heavily in all our content.

Off-site mentions matter a lot more, too. AI weights third-party mentions more heavily than what you say about yourself—which means your own website's content matters less than what the rest of the internet says about you.

"Even though we're ranking well with the content, we also need everybody else on the internet to be talking about us. Our SEO strategy has to evolve to what's also happening off our site."

There's also a repositioning wrinkle. We moved away from "digital sales room" in 2025—but LLMs don't forget easily. The internet spent years calling us a DSR, and that's what LLMs still reach for when describing Dock. Getting LLMs to unlearn something about your brand is like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.

Alex's more speculative take on the future of AEO is on agent-to-agent marketing. When someone builds a product in Lovable, Lovable automatically recommends Supabase as the database.

Supabase didn't earn that through content marketing—they became the default in an agent's decision tree. Most marketing teams haven't started thinking about what that means for them.

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Five years ago, the plan was to write good content, stay patient, and trust that it compounds. The podcast borrows from the blog audience. LinkedIn borrows from the podcast. The AI citations borrow from the SEO. Pull out any one piece, and the rest gets weaker. That only happens when you've gone deep enough on something to build a real foundation.

Our TL;DR advice: Pick one marketing channel you believe in, commit to it longer than feels comfortable, and don't spread thin before you've maxed it out.