Challenge
Anyone who's launched a content strategy from scratch knows how hard it is to get things going. When you have next to no traffic, subscribers or followers, it's really hard to build momentum. That's where Solverboard was when we started talking to them. They were a pre-launch SaaS platform who wanted to start building their audience. Our KPI for this project was to generate just 10 leads.
Solution
Solverboard wanted 10 new accounts on-boarded as part of their beta launch by Christmas 2019. We started working with them at the start of October, giving us just three months to find those 10 beta users. Organic SEO and social would take too long. Ads would be too expensive. We decided that an inbound approach combined with targeted LinkedIn and email outreach was the way to go. No other approach would deliver the results they wanted with the time and budget available. Luckily, Charlie and Aaron at Solverboard already had a list of 100 dream clients for us to target. Our next step was to learn more about the people on that target accounts list. Who were they? What were they interested in? How could we help them? We conducted our own research using tools like SEMRush and BuzzSumo and cross-referenced what we found with Solverboard's user-testing feedback. This gave us multiple quant and qual perspectives on their buyers. We knew that whatever we did needed to be original and distinctive. This was Solverboard's first big content marketing campaign, so it needed to be memorable. We were also aware that as a total newcomer in this field, Solverboard wasn't yet a 'thought leader'. So we needed to find a way of establishing some credibility. After all, why would an experienced enterprise innovator take advice from a platform they've never heard of? As briefs go, this was pretty tricky... The big idea As is often the case, the idea was staring us in the face the whole time. It was right there in Solverboard's user-testing feedback. It was right there in the conversations Solverboard had with customers while they were researching the product. Enterprise innovators in different organisations were struggling with the same problems. These problems that were already at the heart of Solverboard's product strategy. So why not put them at the heart of its content strategy? And rather than just dish out our own advice, why not co-create the report with well-respected innovation thought leaders, at the same time as showing how the platform could help? We called it... Innovation Blockers. Alongside the report and landing page, we produced a bunch of supporting blogs, social posts, social ads, as well as the outreach copy for the InMail and email campaign.
Results
As of May 2020, six months after the Innovation Blockers report was published, that one report had generated: 362 leads 37 out of 100 targets account engaged through ABM approach on the platform 100% increase in traffic to the site Session to conversion rate of 5.5%, up from 2% and above industry benchmark of 2-4% New website leads per month up 109% in 6 months
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