How do you take a company fresh off a $50M series A that has a 25% growth rate quarter-over-quarter to the next level? Better, higher quality leads, of course. But how do you generate leads when you’re already pumping the gas as hard as you can?
That is the question that Steve Hall, VP Marketing at CloudCheckr faced in 2017.
CloudCheckr made cloud computing easy for companies like NASDAQ, Lockheed Martin, Intel, NASA, and hundreds of other tech giants by simplifying their cloud infrastructure for public users. CloudCheckr experienced enormous growth since its founding in 2011 and earned $50M venture funding to accelerate that growth further.
The company employed a mix of content marketing strategies, paid acquisition, SEO, and offline marketing to help them generate leads every quarter. In order to meet the expectations that came with their latest round of funding, they needed more exponential growth.
Today, we’re going to walk you through the four tactics that CloudCheckr used to grow leads by 54% in 6 months.
We’ll cover
- Website optimization
- Putting content in context
- Opening the top of the funnel
- Building microsites
Alright, let’s get started!
Strategy #1: Optimize your website for lead generation
Before CloudCheckr did anything else, they took a step back and had an honest internal conversation about their website.
What they found was a functional website that left a lot to be desired.
Navigating the site was difficult, messaging wasn’t always consistent, SEO best practices weren’t always enforced, and worst of all, it was a time-consuming pain for their marketing team to use.
It was time for a redesign.
Fortunately, they approached our team here at HUSL to help them build a persona-driven web experience.
How We Generated Leads
Our approach started with taking a deep dive into their customers. So the first thing we did was work together with CloudCheckr to build target personas.
Step 1: Extensive User Research to Define the “Who”
Every great website starts with a deep understanding of your target market so you can understand how to create value for them and provide a high-quality customer experience.
We started by looking at past customers of CloudCheckr to better understand what their behaviors, motivations, and pain points were. From there, we identified who their primary user groups were so we could conduct deeper research to better understand users needs and specific objectives.
Once we determined who the key user groups were, we set off to learn as much about them as possible so we could tailor the website’s UX to these core groups.
We did this through qualitative and quantitative research that included:
- User Interviews to have deep qualitative discussions to understand what a user’s needs are and what they’re looking for when going to CloudCheckr’s website
- Stakeholder interviews with CloudCheckr’s marketing and sales teams to better understand what they are hearing directly from customers when they speak with them.
- Analytics review of CloudCheckr’s website to understand vital demographic information like age, devices used, location, and common acquisition channels
Once completed, the CloudCheckr team had customer profiles that resembled these:
Step 2: Built clear and consistent messaging
After understanding CloudCheckr’s target persona’s, the CloudCheckr team went to work on building the right messaging for the website.
CloudCheckr knew that their home page should clearly state what they could help companies with, what the benefits of CloudCheckr were, and how they have helped other brands.
They created copy that consistently highlighted CloudCheckr’s benefits and showed off its slew of recognizable customers.
The result is a focused web experience:
Another beautiful example of a landing page that converts exceptionally well is Unbounce. They ensure every site visitor understand that Unbounce is all about building landing pages that convert quickly.
In just a glance you can clearly understand that Unbounce is a tool that helps users build landing pages that drive conversions, just like site visitors can easily understand that CloudCheckr is a cloud management tool that helps enterprises and service providers save money, reduce risk, and ensure governance at scale.
CloudCheckr repeated this messaging clarity and consistency throughout the entire website.
Step 3: Drive users to the most wanted action on each page
When building a conversion focused website, you should always keep in mind what action you want site visitors to take on your site.
The goal of CloudCheckr’s marketing website has always been to drive marketing qualified leads through inquiries. These inquiries could be demo, webinar, eBook, whitepaper, or newsletter signups that come from any point on the website.
CloudCheckr’s persona-driven website segmented the tool according to the persona, and each persona had a different buyer journey. So each page had a CTA designed specifically for that persona.
Check out how they structure one of their solution pages:
Here we see a clear call-to-action that the public sector would find the most appealing. The main CTA points to the AWS Marketplace where users can signup and directly install CloudCheckr for a free trial.
As you scroll down the page, you’ll also see offers for specific whitepapers that are compelling to the public sector.
By building a persona-driven website, CloudCheckr was able to build specific offers for specific users and give them the best experience and content possible.
Strategy #2: Put Content in Context
CloudCheckr has always had a robust content strategy that includes weekly blogging, webinars, white papers, and ebooks. Their content strategy proved to be effective, however, site visitors would only see this content if they were on one of CloudCheckr’s blog pages.
Instead of continuing to silo this content, the HUSL team built CloudCheckr’s pages to display the most relevant content.
For example, CloudCheckr’s cost and expense management page displays several articles that speak directly to site visitors that would be interested in expense management.
This “related resource” section gives site visitors a great opportunity to continue to engage with CloudCheckr even if they aren’t quite ready to engage in a demo.
Additionally, on many of CloudCheckr’s blog posts, they have the opportunity to opt into webinars, events, and eBooks from the blog pages.
By funneling more users into engaging content, CloudCheckr is giving itself more opportunities increase MQL’s
Strategy #3: Open the top of the funnel with SEO
Once CloudCheckr had a robust website that drove visitors to clear CTA’s and engaging content, they knew they could open up the top of their funnel and begin to drive more impressions.
“We traditionally had a very focused top of the funnel,” said Steve Hall, CloudCheckr’s VP of Marketing. “So we knew in order to grow at the pace that we wanted we would have to open things up.”
One of CloudCheckr’s most effective channels was SEO, so they resolved to double down on their on-site SEO techniques and create content that would help them rank for more keywords.
When HUSL rebuilt CloudCheckr’s website, our team focused on helping them improve their current on-page and technical SEO while providing them templates that enforced SEO best practices.
On-Page SEO & Technical
CloudCheck worked to improve both their on-page and technical SEO by optimizing critical elements of their web pages for the search terms and phrases they targeted. The most important elements include headings, sub-headings, body copy, image alt-tags, links, and anchor text.
From a more technical perspective, elements like meta descriptions, mobile optimizations, and page speed also needed to be maximized.
For CloudCheckr, this meant:
- Wrapping page titles in <h1> tags
- Wrapping subheadings in <h2> tags
- Building a fully responsive web experience
- Optimizing images with SEO friendly file names
- Ensuring site speed was top notch
To ensure these SEO improvements would be utilized on future pages, HUSL built web templates that would make it easy for marketers to enforce SEO best practices.
These SEO improvements along with expanded paid acquisition work resulted in an 81% increase in site impressions in just 6 months.
Strategy #4: Build Microsites
The CloudCheckr team attends 50+ trade shows every year that provides a huge opportunity to drive leads.
To take advantage of this opportunity, CloudCheckr creates microsites that help inform visitors and event-goers on the benefits of CloudCheckr and how they relate to the message of the event.
Each event microsite gives site visitors the opportunity to register for the event, book a meeting with the CloudCheckr team, or gather information on how they can see CloudCheckr at the event.
Benefits of microsites
These microsites have several benefits including:
Targeted Campaigns
Deliver highly targeted content to specific audience segments.
Ex. Send a geotargeted audience Facebook ads to your event.
Lead Generation
CloudCheckr generates meetings by targeting conference attendees with their landing pages.
Virality Potential
A well designed, informative, and easily shareable microsite has the potential to create buzz around a certain event.
Are microsites scalable?
One disadvantage of building a microsite is the potential for high costs and long development times if you’re working with your development team. For some teams the prospect of building even just a single webpage for an event is daunting.
Fortunately, companies like CloudCheckr can setup easily shareable and editable templates that anyone of their team members can customize and have live in minutes.
