Efficient marketing that moves the needle
Four founders discuss their most cost-effective marketing investments.
“Everyone faces this problem,” says Vara Kumar, co-founder and chief product and technology officer. “We thought we should tell everyone how they can benefit from our technology.”
While the company was experiencing healthy growth, the approach proved too general, and not powerful enough to drive dramatic scale, Kumar says. “Creating awareness for our category was very important, but conversions were lower,” he says. “People needed the ability to see how this is beneficial to their specific role in their specific industry.”
So in early 2021, seven years after launch, the company shifted course, making a big bet that focusing on just three vertical markets would be more cost-effective. Whatfix had already created internal strategy materials and case studies showcasing the power of its platform. But it had never used them directly to attract customers. As part of this new strategy, they would be used to build marketing campaigns aimed at key customer use cases: car insurance, claim handling, and insurance policy underwriting.
Whatfix quickly redirected budgets from the broader efforts into the vertical approach. It was a multipronged initiative that started with the updating of the language and user journeys on its website in ways that spoke to the company’s more targeted audiences. The company also struck partnerships with systems integrators and software vendors. And it began attending and sponsoring events in their targeted industries.
“We weren’t sure what it would take,” says Kumar. “But we started with a small team, as an experiment, and grew from there. Now we have dedicated teams focused on niches.”
Kumar says the shift was risky. Doubling down on marketing efforts around three industry segments meant mostly ignoring the rest. But the payoff has been tangible. The new marketing focus, he says, has filled the pipeline more consistently than any other strategy and is on track to become “the biggest channel for revenue generation.” Even better, the overall costs of the program will decline over time as “virality and network effects kick in,” Kumar says.
The company made a bet that its viability hinged on a successful media offensive. It launched a PR strategy that involved publishing a regular cadence of news releases about the business and its prospects, developing relationships with journalists who could help tell the story of Funding Societies and gradually legitimize the concept of crowdfunding. Kurniawan calls it “the lowest investment” the company has made in marketing with “the biggest return so far."
Kurniawan says the effort was critical and delivered “positive vibes about the industry and our brand.” Perhaps more importantly, in 2016, Funding Societies was awarded a business license from the Indonesian government.
Focusing on PR was such a good idea, he says, not only because it helped create credibility with regulators, but also because of other, unexpected outcomes.
“The original goal of PR was not to become top of mind for small and medium-sized enterprises or to generate organic traffic,” Kurniawan says. But the media coverage created broader brand awareness, which drove traffic to the site. As a result, the company’s cost of acquiring customers fell by more than half.
“We had no doubts that the PR would educate the markets and help us gain trust,” says Kurniawan. “It was only later that we learned about the impact on our business.”
In the beginning, costs were low, as attendees paid their own way to be at the event. As its size grew, OurCrowd began selling sponsorships to recoup some of the costs. Medved says the investor summit remains worthwhile because it delivers tangible outcomes for the business.
The summit creates a massive amount of goodwill for the brand, Medved says. “It anchors a worldwide community,” he says. But the summit also drives meaningful deal flow, especially among the bigger investors. “Everybody who has written significantly large checks — multimillion-dollar checks — the vast preponderance of them are people who’ve come to the summit,” he says.
One critical element of the marketing program’s success, Medved says, is having a set of KPIs to evaluate performance. OurCrowd seeks to facilitate at least 1,000 meetings at each event, and Medved expects about 10% of them to convert into investments. The face-to-face interaction is essential for the biggest deals.
“We’re delighted every time someone clicks a button and they invest $100,000 or $500,000,” he says. “But if somebody’s writing a $5 million or $10 million check, they’re usually sitting in a room with you."
But when prospective customers got there, they found something that, in Parker’s words, “looked more like a community service than a world-class business.” As such, it had a low conversion rate, and did a poor job of helping visitors understand the business.
“When people go to look at our website, we want it to match the expectation that they have for a world-class company,” says Parker, who is founder and CEO. “And so that’s what it does now.”
A website redesign might seem de rigueur for any growing business, but Parker says the overhaul and brand refresh this year is the best marketing investment the company has made in its five-year history. Customer journeys are now cleaner and clearer, and have seen better prospects, resulting in more qualified Papa Pals. And since the site was built economically with short-term agency resources and self-serve tools and templates, Papa kept the cost in check, helping to increase margins.
Parker expects it will have a substantial impact on business for years to come. “We had no lead-gen business before, no way to close deals in an automated fashion,” he says. The new site also better reflects the company’s mission of social impact, he says.
Following the site’s relaunch in March, webpage session duration has increased by about 20%, bounce rates have improved by 28%, content and event resource landing page views are up 128%, and total form submissions are up 147%. The website redesign, says Parker, has helped increase the velocity and strength of the sales pipeline.
“If you can’t come to our website and have a good experience, you’re going to just step away,” says Parker.
