WHERE THEY WERE:
Onward is a post-purchase platform for Shopify brands. Shipping protection, returns, order editing, tracking, and loyalty, sold as one order upgrade that raises customer lifetime value instead of sitting on the P&L as a cost. The company grew fast on sales, referrals, and founder-led LinkedIn.
What it did not have was a marketing team. Customer wins were landing every month and nobody was writing them up. Competitors owned the comparison searches. The company page posted less than once a week. Product knowledge, customer data, and sales call insight were all there, locked across the product, sales, and success teams, with no system to turn any of it into content.
THE MESSAGE:
Onward is the post-purchase layer that drives LTV, and every customer on the platform has the numbers to prove it. The job of the content engine is to get those numbers out of the admin portal and in front of the next brand, every month, in the formats search engines, LLMs, and LinkedIn reward.
THE SYSTEM:
A monthly content engine built on Onward's existing assets: ICP, brand voice, product docs, sales calls, and the admin portal. Four work-streams run on a weekly sync.
Automated case studies. Trelliswork connected to Onward's admin portal, so a new customer's attach rate, upgraded orders, and claims data flow straight into a case study draft. Named-customer stories ship on a fixed cadence and feed the social calendar.
Comparison and category pages. Head-to-head pages against Route, Loop Returns, Redo, SavedBy, AfterShip, and others, plus listicles and an ROI calculator. Refreshed on a quarterly cycle with new features and sharper titles.
LTV thought leadership. Point-of-view pieces that reframe post-purchase around lifetime value, with Onward's product leads as named voices. Every piece answers one question: how does this drive your LTV?
Site and SEO. Homepage and messaging updates in Framer, FAQs and schema on product pages, title and meta work on every page, and a monthly SEO and Reddit review with Onward's search partner. Content is structured for LLM retrieval as well as Google rank.
WHAT IT PRODUCED:
In eight months, 27 pages live on the site (8 comparisons, 11 case studies, 3 thought leadership pieces, a listicle, and a calculator) and 33 organic LinkedIn posts. Pages the engine built now earn 26% of Onward's site-wide search impressions, 53.5K impressions and 284 clicks across 25 pages, at an average position of 7.1. The two Route and Loop comparisons carry 68% of that reach. Named case studies like Everlane ($1.5M in 90 days) and Parke ($466K) convert at three times the click rate of the comparisons.
On LinkedIn, impressions per day rose 390%, engagement rate went from 1.09% to 4.05%, and the page added 2,228 followers. ChatGPT referral leads started to appear, the first sign the long-tail Q&A work is being retrieved by models and not only ranked by Google.
See the work:
- Onward Blog
- Onward Case Studies
- Onward Website (design and flow improvements)
