How Defining a New Category and Building a Content Engine from Scratch Landed 5 Major Deals for Smart Web Technologies
* Stock image
5x
Increase in pipeline
40-50
Increase in relevant webinar sign-ups from 2-3 to
5
No. of Major Deals Landed
INDUSTRY:
Software Development
COUNTRY:
India
COMPANY SIZE
100+ Employees
GROWTH TYPE
Sales-Led
THE TARGET AUDIENCE
SMB Operations Leaders
SMB Founders
PRODUCT MARKETING SKILLS:
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Go-to-market Strategy and Execution
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Leadership
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Project Management
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Systems Thinking
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Market Research
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Funnel-wise Content Planning
Unfocused Content, Stalled Pipeline
Smart Web Technologies is the parent company of an app development software agency called MaxMobility and a digital marketing agency called UrsDigitally. They combined operations under one company to provide an option of either one joint service for companies that needed internal and external digital transformation or modular offerings based on specific business goals.
Back in 2021, the company was facing significant blocks in their sales process. Based on conversations with sales and C-suite, specifically, the lead pipeline was slow-moving, deal conversion rates were low, and the content being produced was not effective in improving these metrics.
My Role
I was employed as the Head of Marketing by the company and owned the marketing goals from end-to-end. The marketing team led by me consisted of really ambitious members who also wanted to contribute and make a difference which massively contributed to the success of the processes and plans I would set up. The team consisted of a content writer, a video producer, an SEO expert, and a designer. My role was that of a strategic head understanding the market, making informed marketing decisions, managing team and executive expectations, and putting systems and processes in place.​
The Goals
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Build a consistent and scalable inbound pipeline as a reliable source of leads for sales
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Map content to each stage of the buyer journey to move prospects through the funnel
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Enable sales with assets that would increase the likelihood of deal conversions
The Stakeholders
Teammates
They were siloed and needed clarity on goals of the organization, cross-functional counterparts, and each other. They were also lacking a content production system to follow ​for consistency in frequency of posting the content.
C-Suite Executives
They needed a clear path to revenue growth and a well-defined plan on how marketing would achieve that.
Sales Head
Their biggest objective was to meet quota each quarter, which translated to larger quantity and higher quality of leads.
The Discovery
The Thinking + Decisions
The Actions
A sample of assets created as part of the full-funnel content strategy. Each was designed to reinforce the category narrative across different stages of the buyer journey.
UrsDigitally explainer — awareness, marketing-first audience
MaxMobility explainer — awareness, operations-first audience
Webinar 1: Digital Strategy Masterclass — mid-funnel, consideration
Webinar 2: Digital Transformation Masterclass — mid-funnel, category education
Understanding the current content process and sales targets
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Spoke to the c-suite, team members, and sales head to understand the existing process of planning, producing, and updating content
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Took note of the number of content pieces being produced and the quality of topics being chosen
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Collaborated with sales team to understand which part of the pipeline needed the most work.
Honing in on the issues
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The top issue I found was that there wasn't a consistent narrative in the content that hit on the major pain points and emotions of the prospects.
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Secondly, the content was not personalized to each stage of the sales funnel, was not based on the latest trends in the market, and was highly infrequent.
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Thirdly, there weren't too many high-quality pieces of content to run effective ads on or present as case studies as proof of impactful, credible work.
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Digital transformation was a new category in India at the time but gaining popularity given the pandemic. However, that still meant we had to educate customers and contribute to creating this new category.
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Lastly, since Smart Web is a relatively lesser-known company, the lack of brand awareness impeded their traction with prospects.
Prioritizing the highest ROI and lowest effort moves first
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Out of all the problems, I decided that the first and second problem would make 80% of the difference and partially solve problems three and four.
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My reasoning was that understanding the market is the foundation of good content without which we would be aimlessly posting random content. In fact, what makes prospects even consider a product is their understanding of the solution, whether it is something they need, and where they see it.
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This was also a problem of team motivation and consistency-building that would only be solved by building momentum with a regular rhythm of creating and distributing content.
Content and channel considerations given limited resources, i.e., time, personnel, and budget
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In terms of channels, since we were a B2B company, I decided that we needed to reduce efforts on social media like Instagram where our audience was sparse and focus more on SEO and Meta ads that used value-forward lead magnets like webinars, both of which would be crucial for inbound lead gen.
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We avoided using LinkedIn ads at the time due to their high daily costs, especially in the rupee, at the time. Many business owners were also active on Facebook so we leveraged that platform instead.
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Added a WhatsApp button on the website for easy access to the sales team instead of booking calls or demos, a popular way of collaborating in India
Funnel-wise content breakdown
The kind of content for each funnel stage included:
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Top of funnel (awareness + discovery) -
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Educational social content and co-CEO thought leadership to build brand awareness and point of view.
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Invited customers to review us on review sites such as Capterra and Software Advice
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Middle of funnel (consideration) -
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Monthly webinars that were formatted as live workshops showing how the company broke down digital transformation problems and solved popular business issues found during the pandemic.
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Bottom of funnel (evalutaion+ conversion) -
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Sales enablement assets - refurbished 4-5 past case studies, especially for the manufacturing, retail and CPG industries where the company had historically seen most traction.​
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ABM-like strategy decks for prospects with high interest in converting, mostly done by the brand strategy team
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Finding the narrative and value proposition
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I had conversations with sales and customer success about their experience with prospects and customers (given there was no formal CRM in place) and conducted some competitive research, industry research, and basic online customer research
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I found the company's differentiator to be that it could solve most operational and marketing problems for mid-market to enterprise level customers in the private and public sectors that were not too heavily regulated
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The most popular status quo to fight against at the time was to develop something internally which took away resources and time from customer and profit-generating work for prospects.
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We weaved in these narratives in most of our content.
Setting up a new content research, planning, and development process
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After understanding the core problem, I came up with a 3-step plan:
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set up a content development and delivery process
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set up meeting schedules amongst the team and cross-functions like sales and customer success, and finally
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track not only business outcomes but also team output.
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Executing on the plan
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Created a content strategy template called 'the master plan' that would be updated month-on-month with funnel-wise content topics
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Used tools such as SEMRush, Google Trends, and Google Analytics and the insights from the sales team to decide on content topics for each stage of the customer journey
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Added the goals, KPIs, and success metrics to be monitored and based on the results optimized the content topic and channel every month
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Set up the approval process with c-suite for the master plan
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While I didn't create a formal RACI, I organized duties by discussing them in meetings, assigning tasks on our project management platform and set up a reporting and updates process with sales and C-suite
The Impact
Leading metrics: Productivity of content development increased by 2x, Pange Rank climbed to 3, and Webinar sign-ups went up significantly
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The content template and planning process helped the team get clarity on monthly deliverables and enabled the members to stay on track to produce double the amount of content in the form of blogs, case studies, website content, videos, and social media posts
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The initial webinars would have hardly 2-3 sign-ups but with constant optimization of topics and ad promotion strategies, sign-ups from relevant prospects increased by to 45-50 attendees, providing another source of leads for sales
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Since the content was now relevant, answering customer pain points, and upholding the SEO keyword needs, UrsDigitally's website appeared as the first result for relevant keywords, significantly increasing website visits
Lagging Metrics: Organic, inbound leads to UrsDigitally's website increased by 500% and we gained 5 major new clients within 2 months of launching and following this process
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Given the increase in website visits and implementation of the WhatsApp button, the organic leads through the website increased by 500%
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In the end, the sales team landed 5 major deals as a result of this process.
