Collaboration SaaS: How to Grow an Intranet Solution from Zero to Top-10
Key Achievements
- 155 solid opportunities during a year;
- $2M of LTV added into the sales pipeline during a year;
- 10 to 20 inbound leads generated weekly;
- 2K monthly website visitors (in 9 months);
- Top-3 in Google for most commercial keywords (in 6 months).
Introduction
A SharePoint Intranet is essential for organizations with 50-100+ employees, aiming to enhance communication, collaboration, engagement, and secure information exchange.
Our client, a Gold Microsoft Partner specializing in custom software development, has chosen to promote their proprietary corporate intranet software. The product includes a freemium option tailored for companies with fewer than 50 employees.
Challenges
Solution
In collaboration with the client, we meticulously crafted a comprehensive marketing strategy, including market research, the concept creation, complex website design, PPC campaigns, SEO plan, email marketing and content production.
To distinguish our client’s product from competitors, we highlighted its unique features and benefits, such as an AI chatbot, user-friendly workflow, task manager, social newsfeed, and various other collaboration tools.
We also created separate campaigns for the features and tools that were sought as independent solutions. Moreover, we developed a clear and consistent brand message that highlighted the client’s commitment to excellent customer service and support.
Activities
We designed an omnichannel strategy based on an informative website that showcased the product’s complexity and the variety of features essential for large businesses. To bring the relevant traffic, our action plan consisted of several components:
- PPC campaigns on Microsoft Ads, targeting users who work within the Microsoft environment and use Bing as their main search engine.
- An SEO strategy that involved keyword research and grouping based on the product features and tools, as well as creating comprehensive and engaging content for prospects who were curious about specific functions or intranets in general.
- Email marketing campaign for both opt-in contacts and cold outreach to thousands of potential clients, such as information officers, HR directors, and CEOs, who were unfamiliar with our brand.
- A content marketing strategy that included not only blog articles and distribution but also other types of content, such as ebooks, infographics, slides, video explainers, tutorials, and checklists, using lead magnets where applicable.
- We also created a social media presence to increase brand awareness and support content marketing efforts. Although we did not anticipate much lead generation from this channel, we received our first lead through Facebook.
Results
The main achievement is the client’s sales team was consistently engaged in providing product demos and selling monthly subscriptions, primarily at the $500 and $1000 price points.
Our digital marketing efforts generated 50-60 leads, eliminating the need for cold outreach and enabling more targeted sales.
Among the other outcomes for the client were the following:
- Website traffic experienced a substantial increase, with regular visits reaching around 2,000 per month after nine months of collaboration.
- The brand achieved heightened recognition, evidenced by prospects actively searching for the product name (at least 40-50 requests per week) rather than just the solution (intranet).
- Our client also gained expert authority, attracting even students seeking such information as intranet advantages and disadvantages.
Further contributing to the client’s success, their solution earned features in several industry publications. This not only bolstered credibility but also enhanced visibility in the market.
As a result of our concerted efforts, the client successfully established itself as a leading brand in the collaboration SaaS (intranet) market, earning global recognition as one of the 10 best SharePoint intranet solutions.
