Great content. Yep. Experienced B2B SaaS leadership team. No question. So what’s the problem? Content that just wasn’t converting. After partnering with Five Tool, Crossbeam put a plan into action and increased organic traffic by 248%, and saw a spike in Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) coming through the door.
Producing amazing content is hard. Like, really hard. But Crossbeam is doing just that. Their newsletter has great engagement and is outpacing industry benchmarks by a significant clip. Their prospects – engaged. But for organic traffic, there was a leak. Great content without a clear conversion pathway can make prospects feel like they are walking through a maze. Together we put a plan into action that changed everything.
September 22, 2021
Series B
Partner Relationship Management Software
Content Strategy, SEO
Sean and his team at Crossbeam were – by all accounts – crushing it. A quick look through their marketing playbook and it was clear they were hitting on (almost) all cylinders.
Newsletter with highly engaged readership. Yep.
Great thought leadership pieces validated by plenty of backlinks and traffic. Yep.
But organically, there was room for improvement. The website wasn’t converting as well as it should have been.
In a sense, Sean had a room (website) full of comfy, highly functional furniture (great content). But the “room” lacked flow. The behavior of visitors made it clear that moving around the Crossbeam website sometimes proved challenging and, at times, clunky.
Having worked on a previous project together, Crossbeam CEO Bob Moore reached out to Five Tool to see if we could provide some recommendations. After talking through some of the challenges, we honed in on the core issues.
Five Tool has been a true force multiplier for our marketing team. Their SEO strategy helped us prioritize our roadmap, make the best use of our resources, and have confidence that we weren’t leaving any easy wins on the table.
Crossbeam had great individual pieces of content. However, there were gaps. Frequently, there was no clear flow from one piece to the next. For example, a visitor might find an answer to “What Is an Ecosystem Platform” but there was no callout promoting their eBook on “How to Buy an Ecosystem Platform”.
Crossbeam was pouring hours into great content but was missing some key opportunities to get a prospect from one step of their buyer journey to the next.
There is a flow to how everyone consumes content. And because Crossbeams prospects might be at different stages in their journey there are many pathways to consider. Traversing from one room to the next is not always linear.
After running a content audit and identifying some missed opportunities, Five Tool provided Sean and the Crossbeam team with a plan on how to reorganize content.
The plan was a combination of creating hubs from existing content and also producing new content to fill in the gaps along the buyer’s journey. These gaps ranged from awareness (“hey I have a problem”) to conversion points (“oh, Crossbeam has a solution”).
To illustrate this, check out this visual.
The content was grouped into categories (columns). Each category represents different stages in the journey. And then use case or product feature pages served as hubs to link to each of these different content types (rows).
Sean and his team went to work to put the plan into action. The results? Over the course of 9 months, Crossbeam went from 2,624 organic visits/month to 9,144 organic visits/month (a 248% increase).
This jump in traffic resulted in a significant uptick in marketing qualified leads MQL.
More importantly, the improvement in website traffic and performance paved the way for a longer-term SEO strategy with a significantly higher ceiling for traffic and new revenue.
Our mission is to help great products find the people and companies they help most. We’d be honored to help bring your vision to market. Let’s have a conversation.