Case Studies

Why

Buyers typically do ~57% of their research prior to engaging with a sales rep (CEB). Building a demand generation focused website is mission critical to winning the early portion of the race.

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Situation

We had a running joke with our CEO - he was one of a select few that started a company in 2010 but was still able to find a developer to build a soviet-era looking website. Luckily, he recognized there was significant opportunity to improve it and agreed it could make a difference to the company’s demand gen engine. Because the company did not have a formal marketing department prior to our investment, the current website hadn’t been updated in years and did not accurately reflect how the company’s software platform had evolved since its early days. With our capital investment, the CEO asked for support in modernizing his company’s website and better aligning it with the customer value proposition.

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What

Through our experience across companies, we’ve found a company’s website should be able to achieve a few key objectives:

• Provide value to prospects
• Solving a prospect’s problem versus feature orientation: your content and messaging should be oriented around solving key problems for your prospects. Many companies get caught-up pushing their products and features - this puts the onus on the prospects to bridge the gap to solving their personal pain points.
• Align to the buyer journey: decide where in the buyer journey prospects are arriving at your website and ensure that each section of your website is oriented toward advancing prospects to the next stage.
• Present high value to prospects in return for contact info: make the ROI for contact info clear (white paper, eBook, case study, etc.).
• Provide demand generation & qualification
• Hone in on customer pain points: limit words on the company – focus on the pain/problems being solved. This can qualify prospects as “in” or “out”.
• Create the right calls to action: leverage your content to create reasons for prospects to want to engage with your team.
• Link all marketing activity together
• Coordinate with PR: all marketing should be part of a single thread – the website should include customer quotes and briefs from PR.
• Coordinate with SEO/SEM: the website should enhance SEO/SEM strategy.

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How

Given the company had only just started their marketing department (the 1st marketing hire was made in parallel with our growth investment), we simultaneously brought in Wendy Yale, an M33 Growth Advisor, to help execute and drive improvements while the team got up and running. Wendy has 20+ years of experience delivering brand and go-to-market strategy for leading technology organizations.

Wendy managed the website development with a digital design agency and coordinated content with the new marketing hire and the CEO. In just 6 weeks, they launched phase 1 of the new website to capture the inbound traffic from their big product announcement.

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Results

The company more than 3x’ed their leads in their phase one Q4 2018 rollout.