Small but mighty. That sums up our experience with Emdash.
— Manasi Nair, Managing Editor, ClickUp
In 2023, ClickUp took a giant leap. They set up an India office with the ambition of scaling their marketing and content efforts. They hired some amazing talent who immediately hit the ground running.
Their biggest concern: Content quality.
Competing in the massively crowded project management SaaS space, ClickUp couldn’t afford to have its content quality drop. Sudarshan, ClickUp’s Head of Content, was looking for agencies that could deliver high-quality, thoughtful content about complex tech and productivity-related topics.
He chose Emdash (among multiple other agencies, but we’ll get to that!).
ClickUp is an “everything app for work,” i.e., an all-in-one virtual workspace product that combines project management, team productivity, communication, reporting and then some.
Their product-led growth strategy hinged on being discovered. They needed to rank higher than some large and established incumbents on Google Search. For this, ClickUp’s content needed to be superior.
As a fast-growing startup, ClickUp also needed scale. Their calendar had a few hundred pieces each month. But Emdash wasn’t built to handle that scale.
As a small team, our focus was on quality and thought leadership. So, we only bit a small chunk. To make up for the scale, we insisted on the toughest topics from the lot — a bunch that ClickUp considered tier-1 content.
Emdash wrote over 150 such pieces — each an average of 2,500 words — in a year.
ClickUp hands off clear and comprehensive briefs — a roadmap of sorts. So, Emdash’s job isn’t to find the way, but to walk the reader along the garden path around the topic. This required a reliable process and rich imagination. Here’s a bit about the former. (You’re welcome to speak to Ranjani personally about the latter!)
ClickUp’s topics ranged from ‘executive summary examples’ and ‘AI for SEO’ to ‘agile prioritisation frameworks.’ As a tech content agency, these ideas weren’t alien, of course. We had run into most of them in the past. So, research is less about understanding the topic but more about validating our knowledge and defining the boundaries of the article within the interests of the ideal customer persona.
For each piece, Ranjani and Dinesh pull up their socks, the ever-so-helpful Google Search, Gemini, ChatGPT, Surfer SEO and Emdash’s own knowledge base to put together an accurate (albeit all-over-the-place) first draft.
We broke down the how into three interconnected parts: Abstraction, connection and customisation. We explained both in theory and in practice what this would look like. Some examples below.
ClickUp defines good content as:
— Simple: easy to read and skim
— Structured: Supported by practical real-life examples; made of multiple formats of content, such as block quotes, tables, bulleted lists, highlights, templates, etc.
— Optimised: Incorporating SEO best practices, keywords, internal links, etc.
In this project, the real work — i.e., the writing — is in making the first draft ‘good.’ In a way, the research phase delivers the rock in the middle of the room. The writing phase begins to chisel away what’s not relevant. Ranjani sits down with each piece, embellishing it with examples drawn mostly from experience and sometimes from imagination. At this stage, she also integrates the SEO bits and bobs.
A small sample from an article about human vs. AI generated content.
For articles of this length, editing is the toughest part. The editor needs to make sure that all the 2,500+ words are meaningful and necessary. Vamsee takes up this job, running each article through Emdash’s sharpened quality control checklist and Grammarly. His editorial intent, however, isn’t that of a copy-editor, but a lay reader. He checks for readability, engagement and enjoyability.
Vamsee and Dinesh then take it to WordPress, publishing it to meet the SEO score.
We wrote 150+ pieces across topics in technology, project management, culture, creativity, AI and more. Several of our pieces ranked #1 on Google Search after 90 days. Some handpicked samples below.
Small but mighty. That sums up our experience with Emdash.
The team built nearly 150 content assets for us over a year. Each piece was deeply researched and crafted with a unique point of view, while centering our product and being optimized for search. No easy feat!
Ranjani's experience (and obvious comfort) with technology and advanced project management models was obvious in each piece of content. As a result, we always assigned our most challenging pieces to Emdash.
If I needed a writer to crystallise esoteric, emerging tech concepts into business-friendly, conversion-centric content, Emdash was my first choice.
Managing Editor, ClickUp
