Learn all about this huge campaign success in this video:

The Business

Our client was a cloud-based performance management software company based in the United Kingdom. The company provides a platform for performance reviews, goal setting, and employee feedback and aims to improve employee engagement, productivity, and overall business performance.

Just as their website was about to launch, they enlisted the services of Thinkplus to help with their digital marketing.

Our Strategy

At the outset our client was still in their first year of business and their product, Continuous Performance Management Software (CPMS), was brand new. Their new website was freshly launched and not receiving any traffic (yet!). Few people had heard of “continuous performance management software” so there were low search volumes for this keyword.

But there was a demand for searches like “reduce employee churn”, “improve team performance”, and “improve annual appraisals”, especially amongst our target audience of HR managers and professionals.

We decided to plan our content around the specific problems that our target audience was having. We then marketed our client’s service as a solution to those common problems.

To amplify our message, we used digital PR to get the founder and his content featured in all sorts of business publications that were popular with our target audience. We still weren’t leading with the term “continuous performance management” as search volumes hadn’t yet picked up.

But the articles that we were writing on related topics helped to position continuous performance management software as a solution. This helped raise the profile of our client, his business, and the concept of continuous performance management more broadly.

We’ve mentioned the target audience several times because it was crucial that our content was created with a clearly identified audience in mind. By understanding the searches that HR managers were making on Google, we were able to create content that specifically helped HR managers with the problems they were facing in their roles.

As a result of our work, we got the client’s content ranking in position 1 for 32 important informational keywords.

Our Work

To kick off the Content Marketing campaign, our team compiled a comprehensive list of reputable websites, magazines, and blogs that are read and trusted by HR professionals. Our approach centred around creating research-led articles that positioned the client as a thought leader for this field.

We also expanded our reach by publishing on LinkedIn, the social network predominantly used by HR professionals.

Meanwhile, on the client’s blog, we published frequent posts and guides on various aspects of HR. After noticing that an article on HR “Trends of 2016” was ranking highly, we updated it for 2017, and it quickly climbed to the top of Google’s search results for its target keyword.

The Results

During the first year of the campaign, some of our articles gained significant traction on social media, particularly on LinkedIn, receiving hundreds of shares from HR professionals. As a result, we began receiving inquiries and requests for demos of the software from interested parties.

An exciting development came when a journalist from the Guardian’s small business sector approached us after seeing our client featured in several notable publications. They requested a quote from the client for a feature article, which was published on the Guardian’s website and included a valuable backlink to our client’s website.

We also successfully pitched an article to our contact at Entrepreneur, who accepted the company founder as a contributor. The resulting article on Entrepreneur, which included a link to our client’s website, received over 500 shares on social media and further solidified the client’s credibility and authority in the industry.

By 2020, three years into our marketing work, the client’s website was earning tens of thousands of visitors through search. These visitors became customers at a decent rate, which in turn helped the client secure the cash exit of his dreams.