BACKGROUND
This project was for a client in the personal finance app space, serving freelancers and self-employed people. The goal was to move beyond "be more specific" as a content direction and find the precise audience segment and need that was underserved by both the brand's content and the wider market.
I combined keyword research, a competitor content audit, the brand's own user onboarding data, and three months of community listening across freelance forums to answer one question: which specific audience aligned with the brand's product was being left behind by existing content. All four data sources converged on the same answer: first-year freelancers, who made up 62% of the brand's user base, had a 40% higher retention rate than later-stage users, and were being consistently failed by the existing content market.
That finding became the brief for a 16-piece editorial series called First Year Freelance, published over eight weeks and designed to follow the financial arc of a first year in self-employment from registration through to the first self-assessment deadline. Six months post-launch the series was generating 14,200 monthly organic sessions from a pre-launch baseline of 1,800, with 340 app signups per month attributed to the content and a 68% 30-day retention rate for series-acquired users compared to 44% for paid-acquired users in the same period.
