Article's Content
Article's Content
There’s a famous quote from the philosopher Seneca, that goes: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
It’s a recipe for success that, 2000 years later, still applies to the software industry. Companies identify a customer need, build a product to fill it, and build a growth strategy to spread awareness.
These companies then try to position themselves for the greatest opportunity of success. And once in a while, a major event will bring them some strategic luck.
Like the HR company, Lattice. Founded in 2015, they used the pandemic-driven remote work wave to their advantage. Here’s some of what they accomplished since their inception:
- A recent valuation of $3 billion
- Nearly $330 million in total funding
- 4.7 rating on G2 and a 4.5 on Capterra
- 5,000+ enterprise customers
Today, we’ll look closely at how Lattice applied content and brand marketing to rise to the top in a crowded HR industry.
Lattice Help You Make the Best of Their Platform with Content
Lattice distinguish themselves in the bustling SaaS landscape as “The people management platform that helps you make the most of your talent.”
This tagline is a testament to Lattice’s commitment to enhancing the capabilities of HR professionals and people leaders, allowing them to unlock the full potential of their workforce. Dominating the Performance Management category on G2, Lattice have carved out a niche for themselves that sets them apart from competitors like Culture Amp, BambooHR, and HiBob.
But what really propels Lattice ahead in this competitive race?
At their core, Lattice’s strategy is finely tuned to not just meet but anticipate their users’ needs. This foresight is evident in how they approach content creation.
While some SaaS platforms focus on the nuts and bolts of navigating their system, Lattice takes a more holistic approach. Their content strategy isn’t driven by technical guides or API documentation but by empowering users to excel in their roles through the platform. This gives them the digital space they need to operate (and a few tips from their content team, of course).
Consider the top-performing pieces of content on Lattice’s site (more on this later), which illustrate the platform’s value proposition:
- Tips for Writing a Strong Self-Evaluation (With Examples)
- What Are Employee Total Rewards and Why Should You Implement Them?
- How to Write More Effective Performance Review Comments
These articles are great resources for HR professionals and people leaders who want to improve workplace dynamics and employee engagement in a digital space. What better way to sell yourself as the top brand for “making the most of your talent” than by helping users build their own?
As we mentioned, these empowering blog posts also drive a significant amount of organic traffic to the Lattice website.
How Lattice Brings Traffic to Their Website
Like many well-funded SaaS unicorns, the most significant traffic channel to their website is direct search — about 40%. When you constantly make the headlines of business and tech websites, it’s easy to build a strong brand position.
But a closer analysis of Lattice’s traffic sources reveals the potency of their marketing channels. Nearly one-third of their traffic comes in via organic search, and a notable 15.38% comes via social media — primarily LinkedIn and Twitter, according to SimilarWeb.
It’s clear that Lattice’s content does more than just educate and empower — it engages readers to keep them returning to their website and drives conversions.
In terms of organic performance, the Lattice website brings in nearly 118,000 organic visitors every month. By creating content that targets over 61,000 keywords, 2,000 of which are in a top-3 SERP position, this content ends up saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars each month in paid advertising.
Lattice have also built up a strong backlink network of 320,000 URLs from thousands of domains, which is an integral strategy to increase traffic to their website — and with low effort on their part, apart from developing connections with high-authority websites.
Of course, this level of organic engagement doesn’t just happen overnight. It takes time to build up a keyword strategy that works, as well as critical assessment periods to make content adjustments. But, without a doubt, creating content that’s informative and personable that your audience will appreciate takes precedence.
Now, let’s look at how Lattice turned the content engines up a notch during a pivotal period for the industry.
Capitalizing on the Digital Work Revolution
As the digital work revolution took hold in the wake of the global pandemic, Lattice capitalized on the shifting dynamics of workplace management.
In March 2020, as businesses around the world grappled with the sudden shift to remote and hybrid work models, Lattice’s website included approximately 650 pages. That’s good for an SMB but nothing to brag about for a company sitting on Series C funding.
Fast-forward two years, and the landscape has transformed dramatically — not just in how people work but also in how Lattice communicate their value proposition. By early 2022 Lattice had more than doubled their content footprint to 1,350 pages, paralleled by a surge in monthly traffic from 16k to over 50k visitors.
This exponential growth signals that more was at play than just an increase in the number of pages on the Lattice site. There was a deeper, more fundamental shift towards the digitalization of people management, including increased investment in HR tech by VCs and enterprise companies.
Naturally, this is a trend that Lattice and the rest of the people management niche were uniquely positioned to lead.
The company’s chairman and co-founder, Jack Altman, highlighted the essence of this shift, noting, “We are staring at a box all day now, and we don’t have a manager who comes by and says ‘great job’ and makes us feel appreciated. Systems like Lattice give a process for how we connect and interact and make sure that I know that I am cared for by our manager as a professional and a person. COVID-19 created that tailwind.”
This perspective underscores the critical role of people strategy in the post-pandemic world, where digital tools like Lattice not only facilitate management tasks but also foster meaningful connections and recognition within teams.
Lattice’s success in navigating this digital work revolution can also be attributed to strategic leadership in their marketing efforts.
David Cain, who served as CMO from March 2021 to April 2023, played a pivotal role in this journey. Under his guidance, Lattice saw remarkable achievements, including tripling their ARR to over $100 million while leading a global marketing organization of approximately 40 employees.
Cain’s tenure at Lattice coincided with the launch of a number of new marketing initiatives to build interest in people management among enterprise decision-makers, including:
- Uniquely Led, a C-Suite interview series on the importance of people management.
- The creation of a revenue marketing team focused on demand generation.
- Live industry events like the Resources for Humans Virtual 2023.
This is a testament to the company’s ability to extend their marketing efforts to generate demand for people management platforms and harness the digital work revolution for sustained growth and impact.
Now, let’s get to another key contributor to Lattice’s growth — their content library.
Lattice’s Legendary Library of Content
Nestled within the Lattice website, the library subfolder is a treasure trove of insights for HR professionals. The Lattice Library contains mountains of content, such as:
- SaaS marketing material
- Long-form articles
- eBooks
- Case studies
- Podcasts
- Interviews
- Events
- Templates
The Lattice Library subfolder currently brings in 72% of Lattice’s total traffic — 84.5k visitors monthly. In case you were wondering about the value of content marketing, this influx of organic visitors represents an equivalent ad spend of approximately $967,000 a year!
Beyond the homepage, the top-10 organic traffic magnets for Lattice are all from the library subfolder and are a testament to the brand’s SEO and content mastery. Each page, commanding over 1,000 visits a month, not only ranks highly in the SERPs but often secures the coveted top position.
Take Lattice’s page on Tips for Writing a Strong Self-Evaluation. It’s the biggest traffic magnet to the site by far, attracting 14k visits per month on its own. Spanning 2.1k words, this piece exemplifies Lattice’s approach, consisting of informative and accessible copy, ample use of lists, and links to relevant internal and external pages.
Similarly, their article on employee total rewards (stretching just over 1,800 words) and performance review comments (slightly in excess of 2,500 words) also follow this blueprint and exemplify how Lattice provides readers with resourceful material related to the people management sector at no cost.
Let’s look closer at how the Lattice team creates impactful content for their customers and potential users.
Creating Highly Digestible, Easy-to-Read Content
Lattice’s content walks the fine line of conveying complex information in a way that’s designed for maximum digestibility. Through the liberal use of headers, subheaders, bullet points, and lists, the content team ensures that even the busiest HR professionals and people leaders can quickly skim through to find the insights they need.
This approach, grounded in principles of UX copywriting, reflects a deep understanding that true copywriting serves the user first and foremost. In SaaS, all good copywriters should adopt UX principles to make writing for the reader their number one priority.
Lattice’s content is engineered with the user in mind — what they want, what they likely already know, and what they want to learn. Your content should show you have a deep understanding of your audience, as though you’re also living their experiences.
Boosting E-E-A-T with Valuable Content and Academic Sources
Lattice’s strategy aligns perfectly with Google’s increasing emphasis on content characterized by Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
Following Google’s 2023 E-E-A-T update to create helpful content, we’ve noticed that research-heavy content has had an uptick regarding the SERP position and the ability to drive valuable traffic to web pages. High-domain authority sites like WebMD have used this strategy to drive vast amounts of traffic.
For instance, when discussing the benefits of employee self-evaluation in one of their articles, the Lattice team cites three highly cited academic papers from relevant psychological fields. One backlink each to the following publishers, including PLOS ONE, APA PsycNet, and SpringerLink.
By sourcing high-quality external references, such as reports from major consultancies and academic papers, they bolster their content’s credibility and enrich the reader’s experience.
Using Internal Links to Funnel Readers and Spread Equity
The strategic use of internal links in the Library articles helps Lattice spread link equity throughout the site. Each piece serves as a nexus, funnelling readers and ranking signals to other essential product, resource, and enablement pages.
Looking at Lattice’s top-ranking post on self-evaluations, we can see that it’s highly connected to other key parts of the domain. It has 30 incoming backlinks from other library pages and directs readers to 96 other pages on the website with outgoing internal links.
A focus on internal linking is often overshadowed by the allure of backlinks, but it’s pivotal in creating unison on a website and enhancing a site’s SEO framework. The longer you can keep a reader on your website, the better. You want to become a hub of resourceful content so your users don’t need to turn to other websites. This is a strategy that other SaaS giants like NerdWallet and Shopify have used to successfully amplify their online presence.
Overall, Lattice’s investment in helpful content is clearly paying off — all they had to do was create the right content and do it the right way. Sure, the pandemic served as a catalyst for organic results but without the resources in the first place or their focus on being seen as as trustworthy experts in the field, their numbers might have looked very different.
And Lattice have recently turned their attention to another marketing domain.
We all know that SaaS brands are constantly evolving. Brands need to be as dynamic as the market itself — literally, in this case.
Let’s close things out with a look at Lattice’s recent rebrand.
“A Pivotal Moment for Lattice”: New Year, Fresh Rebrand
At Foundation, we talk a lot about how B2B branding isn’t dead. But it’s always good to get a reminder from one of the big players in the industry. Near the end of 2023, Lattice announced a major rebrand and website overhaul.
The announcement focused on the major overhaul of their website in anticipation of a major new product launch — Lattice HRIS.
Standing for Human Resource Information System, this product category has emerged to help large companies centralize employee information that’s typically spread across other platforms. Or, as the Lattice team puts it, “Clean up your HR stack.”
According to the Lattice team, the redesign aimed to improve site architecture, messaging, and visuals — a series of adjustments to effectively communicate the expanded capabilities and the interconnectedness of their product suite.
The main goals of the rebrand involved:
- Telling a “better together” platform story: Increasing awareness of the full scope of Lattice’s platform and how their products interconnect to maximize user value.
- Showing in addition to telling: Enhancing user interface imagery and utilizing animation to provide insights into the product experience.
- Using storytelling to guide the user: Clearly communicating Lattice’s employee-first differentiation and making it easy for site visitors to understand how Lattice solves their problems.
- Confidently leading the way: Adopting bold messaging and design decisions to assert Lattice’s position in the market.
By showcasing the “better together” story of their platform, Lattice looks to attract new customers and deepen engagement with existing ones. It’s another step in the company’s ambitious journey to lead the HR tech space in the remote-hybrid era.
It’ll be interesting to see the impact this rebrand has on the rollout of Lattice’s new offering. We’ll be keeping tabs 👀.
