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.

The post HR SaaS: From Pre-revenue to a $33 Million Cash Exit appeared first on Thinkplus.

Our client is an up-and-coming SaaS business that operates in a primarily B2B environment. The client’s offering is competitive, but the niche nature of their business means that the number of potential buyers is relatively small. With limited sales on the table and no shortage of competition, we had a fight on our hands to make our client stand out from the crowd.

Our Objective

Our client’s main objective was to earn more new business through their website. What made things different from a normal campaign was the niche nature of their field. There aren’t that many people in need of our client’s product, so while it would be possible to improve traffic, we were working with a fairly low ceiling.

Our focus had to be on conversions and the conversion rate. The month before the client started work with us, they recorded a conversion rate of 0.2%. That means, on average, they needed 500 visitors to their site to make a single conversion. That number needed to change drastically to get anywhere near our client’s sales goals.

To add more spice to the mix, the client had a big industry conference coming up and wanted our help preparing some sales materials — specifically, an eBook. That meant research, writing, editing, revising, and designing something that would impress potential clients, all in a matter of weeks.

How We Achieved It

The Package

The client signed up for a medium-sized marketing campaign with Thinkplus, which included Content Marketing, SEO, PPC and Design work. We allocated our resources between working on the eBook and working on the client’s website.

The Strategy

As mentioned above, the key to this campaign was the conversion rate. If we could improve that 0.2% figure to 2% or even 2.5%, we’d go from one conversion per 500 visitors to 10 conversions per 500 visitors, all without touching the traffic volume.

The client already had a fairly well-designed website, so instead of picking low-hanging fruit, we’d have to fight hard for every percentage point. We decided to roll up our sleeves and get to work rewriting copy across the site’s key pages and fixing any site issues that might impact conversions (like page load speed).

The Results

Our Content team worked hard to understand the needs of our target audience, then clearly articulated how our client’s offering could meet those needs. By making this clear in headings, body text, page titles and CTAs (calls to action), we made the value of the client’s offering immediately clear to people landing on the site for the first time.

This moved the needle, with the conversion rate improving from 0.2% to an all-time high of 1.99% over the next seven months! We were painfully close to our target number but couldn’t quite hit that 2% milestone we were aiming for. Fortunately, help was at hand. While it wasn’t our primary goal, we were also seeing substantial gains in organic traffic. A 144% gain when comparing the same month year on year. More users were coming to the site, and a higher percentage of those users were becoming customers. This culminated in a record sales month for our client that equalled the four previous months combined!

Last but not least, the eBook. Our content writers took what they had learned about the client’s business from rewriting the key pages and putting together an impressive content asset in record time (with the help of our hardworking editorial and design teams).

We managed to produce something that gave our client’s representative confidence at their conference and won plenty of praise from potential customers. It was such a success that our client immediately pencilled us in for part two. You can take a look at a couple of sample pages from that eBook below:

The post 10x Conversion Rate for a B2B Website in Just 7 Months appeared first on Thinkplus.

1. Background

An established SaaS business providing Sales Enablement software was previously driving conversions via its website through direct traffic and brand awareness but failed to capture new customers through PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads. This client came onboard with Thinkplus looking to generate leads through paid traffic to quickly increase revenue and lead volume.

With offices in the UK and US, the company has well-known corporate and mid-size clients.

2. Objective

When starting the campaign, our various obstacles included high-CPC keywords, low-quality traffic and a limited ad budget. The client wanted to target different geographical locations, including the US, UK and Canada, with a small budget. Our primary challenge was effectively managing the budget, which was quickly depleted before we could gather accurate data on what was working and what wasn’t. This made it tricky to optimise the account and meant we had to wait before making informed decisions; making these too quickly could have resulted in short-term success but long-term failure.

3. Strategy

To meet our objective and attract a greater number of qualified website visitors (visitors who were likely to request a consultation and become clients), we had to develop a strategy that put the right content in front of the right user and convinced them to take action.

Our first step, after conducting a thorough site review, was to help the client design a new landing page layout that provided more room for copy above the fold, and improve the contact forms and make the call-to-action messaging more visible across the website.

Our second step, after making changes to optimise the landing page for conversions, was to go through keywords the client had already gathered and analyse their performance to ensure we were attracting qualified traffic for a healthy cost per click (CPC). We also expanded the search queries to increase the conversion volume. This was a long-term solution — as we knew not all keywords were likely to convert — that would require us to gather data to see which keywords were the most profitable.

We also turned our attention to wider strategies that could help signal the client’s authority to potential clients. This included Google Display marketing, which has a much larger audience reach compared to the default keyword research model.

4. Results

Using Display and search marketing, we increased brand awareness, with  impressions (the number of times the ads were seen) increasing by 63.51% from 482,776 to 789,371 when comparing the period from January 19 – May 19 to June 19 – October 19. In the same period, we also reduced the cost per lead submission by 90.96% from £674.25 to just £60.96.

CPA is now down even further, to just £13.38.

Display marketing was the highest contributor to the lead submission form increase, as it visually conveyed the benefits of the business and the impact it makes to other businesses.

The post How We Increased SaaS Conversions by 1,228% and CPA by 94% appeared first on Thinkplus.