SaaS Content Marketing: Conversions Increased 5.08X In 12 Months
Increasing traffic 245% and conversions 508% in 12 months by getting this SaaS business featured in the Guardian and Entrepreneur
1. Background
This HR SaaS company needed help driving visitors to their website to request a free trial of their software. They requested our help and came on board for a Content Marketing, SEO and PPC campaign.
2. Objective
Because this business had an audience of HR professionals, we identified that the owner’s own experience in HR made him an excellent potential thought leader. We set about planning a Content Marketing strategy that combined making their blog a highly authoritative source of content, with getting the business owner featured on high authority sites.
3. Strategy
The Content Marketing team kicked off by building up a list of websites, magazines and blogs that were read and respected by HR professionals. We focused on writing research-led articles on the company’s specific area of expertise, staying on top of industry trends and news coverage in the sector.
We pitched these article topics to editors, tailoring and Ninja-fying our pitches to match the content and style of each publication. We successfully published articles on a number of smaller — but still influential — websites in the HR sector. We continued to get more and more publications and links every month, including publishing on LinkedIn, the social network predominantly used by HR professionals.
With the foundations laid and the business owner’s name beginning to get traction in the relevant circles, we focused on pitching to the big boys.
Meanwhile, on their blog, we wrote frequent blog posts and guides about different elements of HR. We noticed that a ‘Trends of 2016’ article that we’d written was ranking really well so, at the start of 2017, we wrote an updated version. Before long, this post was ranking top of Google for its target keyword.
Not only do the blog posts we write rank really well and bring in a lot of organic traffic, but they also give the client a lot of credibility when we go out to pitch publications.
4. Results
Some of our articles from the campaign’s first year started picking up hundreds of social media shares, mostly via LinkedIn. As HR professionals picked up the articles through LinkedIn, inquiries about the software — as well as requests for demos — began rolling in.
We then spoke to a journalist from the Guardian’s small business sector. They had seen our client featured in a number of notable publications and asked him to provide a quote for a Guardian feature. The comment was published in an article on the Guardian’s website — and included a valuable backlink to the client’s website.
We later pitched an article to our contact at Entrepreneur, who accepted the company owner as a contributor. His article was published and included a link to the client’s website. The article ranked in over 500 social media shares.
In the campaign’s second year, the momentum continued picking up. Articles on HR and recruitment sites routinely started pulling in over 1,500 shares on LinkedIn and Facebook.
5. What this means
This client is now one of the leading thought leaders in their space, and their site is the top-ranking site in ‘performance management’ (their particular branch of HR). The site’s traffic is continuing to increase every month and, with global visibility, they’re expanding the business and continuing to invest in their Exposure Ninja marketing campaign.
Although a UK-based business, their visibility for US searches as a result of our work has allowed them to sell to a global audience.