How Growing a Company Page by 100K Changed the Way I Think About Marketing

A Good Product, a Quiet Brand, and a Big Ask
Before You Market, You Have to Clear the Fog
Good Content Solves Their Problem, Which Helps Solve Yours
- What I Learned Attempting to Serve
Not the Product. Not the Pitch. The Payoff.
What This Taught Me About Marketing

A Good Product, a Quiet Brand, and a Big Ask

I once worked for a company that sold a simple, effective product in the automotive industry. The product was Japanese, quality, and had been in the world for around 30 or so years. People who used the product loved it. And there was really only one competitor in the space. They were a copycat product with lesser quality and their selling point was predominantly that they were American made.

The President of the company wanted to create the gap between these two products that was deserved. Even though the company had a solid base and a beloved product, there was still plenty of room to grow. Things moved slowly but steadily. Business was good.

This was at a time when everyone in marketing was all about “going viral”. And I wasn’t the biggest fan of the notion because of the misconception that going viral drives business impact. While that could be the case, it could also be the case that you temporarily get attention on the internet that fades away just as quickly as it came, with little (if any) positive business impact.

Anyway, I was tasked, as a marketing team of one, with making the company go viral. But before anything took off, there were small decisions and quiet shifts that led us to the turning point. That process completely changed how I think about what most people call “marketing.”

In the end, I didn’t create anything flashy or entirely new. I made focused edits to existing assets, shifted the messaging to center the customer’s problem instead of the product, and put it out into the world. Over the next three months, the company’s following grew from 1,500 to over 100,000, with 80% of that growth happening organically. The result was a sales spike so sharp that our small team couldn’t keep up with shipping, and we had to move direct-to-consumer fulfillment to our B2B warehouse just to meet demand.

Everyone notices the win. But it’s the invisible groundwork that makes moments like that possible. That’s why I always push for marketing that starts with people, not products. It’s a subtle mindset shift, but it can change everything.

Here’s what happened.

Before You Market, You Have to Clear the Fog

Before I could add anything meaningful to the company’s messaging, I had to understand three things: the company, the product and, most importantly, the people we served.

The company story was easy to pick up. The President shared the brand’s heritage and there were plenty of materials to help me get up to speed on what we sold.

The real work was getting to know the people on the other side.

I spent the first few weeks answering emails, taking phone calls, and combing through forums where people were talking about the product. It didn’t take long to notice the pattern: we were fielding the same questions over and over.

At the time, support was eating up nearly a third of our workday. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became: if I succeeded in bringing more awareness, those same questions would multiply. Growth would just lead to more friction.

This wasn’t sustainable. We weren’t running a call center. We were running an e-commerce business.

That gave me my first real mission: make every point of confusion crystal clear for both potential and existing customers.

Most questions came after people had already spent time clicking around the website. They’d found us, tried to buy, hit a wall, and reached out. Realistically, they should have already checked out and gone back to their day. Others had already purchased, but chose the wrong size or the wrong style for their vehicle. These were minor mistakes that added major friction and additional shipping costs. It was avoidable.

If we wanted to multiply sales without multiplying confusion, we had to focus on content. Not content to sell, but content to clarify. The goal was to help people go from landing on the site to checking out and from unboxing to installation without second guessing their decision.

We needed clarity, and we needed it now.

Good Content Solves Their Problem, Which Helps Solve Yours

To settle the storm, we took two approaches. First, we tackled pre-purchase confusion with a digital knowledge base. Second, we addressed common post-purchase issues by including helpful printed content with each order.

For the first step, I evaluated a few tools and pitched Zendesk to manage the knowledge base.

Once I got approval, I got to work. I wrote down every recurring question we received and why it was being asked. I cross-checked forum threads to see what users were stuck on or unsure about, often waiting hours or days for someone else to reply. Once I had the list, I started writing.

Over three days, I created 65 short articles answering every common question we’d encountered. Once the knowledge base was live, we linked it in the main navigation, the footer, and directly on product pages so users could self-diagnose any confusion. I also sent out an email to our list, which included both past customers and potential ones, letting them know the resource existed.

I knew many of them were active in forums, so if they had these answers at their fingertips, they could help others without having to retype the same thing every time. They could just drop a link.

Within two weeks, repeat support requests dropped by more than 90%. What used to take up a third of our day now popped up maybe ten times a week. The knowledge base started circulating in forums. I watched my coworker go from hammering out the same response daily to just sending article links. Eventually, customers began doing it for us. The content didn’t just support our customers, it scaled our capacity.

That was the first real win. It taught me something important: good content isn’t about being clever with your message. It’s about knowing your audience, understanding their pain, and helping them move through it with ease.

This move didn’t make sales jump. But it gave me breathing room to think clearly and act strategically. I needed that space, because I still hadn’t solved the biggest problem: how to grow brand awareness.

What I Learned Attempting to Serve

Spending that time talking with customers gave me the clearest picture I could ask for. I learned that:

They hated fluff. Several literally said, “I don’t like fluff” in conversations.
They had a clear pain point: oil changes were messy, annoying, and often led to broken bolts and oil-covered arms.
Many of them didn’t know there was a better way to do things. When they found out, they were genuinely surprised.
Some had been imagining this exact product for years and were shocked to learn someone had already invented it… 30 years ago.
A huge number of confused potential buyers only had that lightbulb moment after someone in a forum showed a photo of the product installed on their own vehicle.

Building that connection gave me the insights I needed to breathe new life into an old asset and spark real growth.

Not the Product. Not the Pitch. The Payoff.

I still remember the moment it clicked. It was small and easy to miss—but it changed everything.

I was sitting across from the President while he walked me through a video that had been posted to the B2B business’s Facebook page. It was three minutes long and full of the usual stuff: the company story, the product breakdown, the materials used, the manufacturing…

And then I saw it. Tucked into the middle of that video was the one visual that could actually make someone stop scrolling. That moment where the product just worked. It didn’t need explanation. It didn’t need branding. It just needed to be seen.

We had less than three seconds to earn attention. And if our audience was no-fluff, problem-aware, and totally unaware that this solution even existed… then we didn’t need to sell it. We just needed to show it working.

Honestly, it felt like such an anticlimactic realization. No framework. No big strategy. Just listen closely, then give people the moment they’ve been waiting for.

So I ripped the video to my phone, opened iMovie, and cut it down. I kept the 15 seconds that showed the value, oil pouring out clean, hands staying clean, and dropped in some music. I saved it, rotated my chair, and said, “This is what we need to post.”

I knew it was better. I didn’t know it would grow the following by 100,000. I thought maybe we’d get a small spike. A thousand new followers, max. But sometimes you can’t predict what that thing will be.

We hit publish. The President left to grab lunch. Thirty minutes later, he walked back in and said, “Are you seeing this?”

I wasn’t. I pulled it up. It had taken off, with shares, comments, and likes, all spiking in real time. The next morning, we walked into an order count the D2C channel had never seen before. And it didn’t let up. The surge stayed steady enough that we had to move shipping operations over to the B2B facility just to keep up.

That’s when I realized something else about content: it can work right now. Especially in D2C.

Yes, B2B plays by different rules. But the idea that content must always be a long game (like SEO) is over-applied. Too often in B2B, we treat all content like a slow burn when some of it can be a spark.

That’s a conversation for another post. But in this moment, one thing was clear: when you show the outcome, not the pitch, people get it immediately.

And that’s when everything starts to move.

What This Taught Me About Marketing

Looking back, this experience reshaped how I think about marketing entirely. It’s not about attention for its own sake, or clever messages, or viral moments. It’s about understanding the people you’re trying to serve, removing their friction, and showing them something that actually helps.