Client

DevOps Startup

Project

Growth Marketing

Project Description

This DevOps startup wanted to grow their footprint in an increasingly complex market. As a smaller player amongst many large competitors, they were struggling to get the message across. Additionally, direct selling efforts to boost pipeline faced a serious challenge due to the nature of their buyers (highly technical audience).

In order to grow their audience, we looked at a highly-targeted ABM approach that focused on directing industry, group, sub-group and persona-specific messaging. We would leverage intent data to scale as much as possible while maintaining a high-degree of personalization.

Project Specifics

  • Outbound Systems
  • Inbound Systems
  • Intent Development
  • Audience Growth
Strategy

Taking a modified Account-Based approach.

The market for this company is highly competitive. We looked to find wins in strong narratives that we could champion with specific industries, groups, sub-groups and personas.

Leveraging company history & strengths, intent data and targeting, we developed layered outbound campaigns by level of targeting precision and driven by increasingly targeted content. We followed that with an inbound engine to nurture with increasing precision.

Technical

Engaging, growing and nurturing an audience

We sought to smash through competitive barriers with a stack designed to deliver this company's strongest narratives to the right groups at the right time.

Outbound:

  • Robust email stack that unifying with all account and contact activity in real-time through CRM. Built on top of equally robust deliverability infrastructure 
  • We specified an Ad strategy for this technical audience, aiming to target them where they spend their time. This included a diversified social media approach supported by search.

Inbound:

For an audience that's stretched for time, layered with a competitive market constantly vying for that time - we had to create a content strategy that not only showed value, but raised our trust level.

  • Content & Events: We sought to leverage technical influencers in our content, video content for easy consumption and forum-based webinars to ensure the perception of thought leadership vs. product marketing.
  • Automation: The last piece was to build an inbound funnel that nurtured and converted the organic audience into leads. We needed to bake personas into the automation in order to deliver tailored content based on demographics.

Our mission was to win the attention of a time-strapped audience over the overwhelming pressure from competitors through alternative and community-boosted content.

Results

Email subscribers and followers increased by factors

This was a heavy undertaking with meaningful results. This audience is very particular with their time, subscriptions and followings - meaning every subscriber and follower was closer to a sale than typical.

Key findings:

  • Alternative social media made a big impact: Reddit engagement exceed expectations.
  • Influencers and contributors help drive live event attendance.
  • Video content - particularly shorter ones - had the most engagement, proving a hypothesis that this audience would choose expediency in consuming content.