Howspace
Strategic marketing to enter the North American market
About Howspace
Howspace is a digital facilitation platform for consultants, trainers, and organizational development practitioners. Targeting small- and medium-sized consultancies, Howspace was looking to scale up its international growth through online channels.
At the time, the primary source of new customers was Howspace’s sales team, and the next step of the growth plan was for marketing to provide scale and validate the online sales model.
A bit later Howspace was doing well in Europe, so their next phase was to enter the North American market.
Because their product has many use cases, they needed help figuring out who their ICP was in North America.
Services provided
Goals
Together, we created a B2B growth marketing strategy and identified three objectives and one goal:
- Increase traffic: Increase online visibility, grow brand reputation and credibility using content, SEO, and paid acquisition.
- Grow the funnel: Implement a lifecycle stage model aligned with the customer journey to generate demand and create a marketing-driven sales pipeline.
- Empower sales: Figure out and optimize the positioning & messaging per use case. Deliver more, better quality leads to the sales team so they are able to spend more time on selling and closing deals.
- Generate more quality SQLs.
Goal: 10 SQLs/month
"We weren't looking for a traditional marketing agency, but a partner who understands SaaS and would help us grow rapidly. When you keep seeing these kinds of results, it’s hard to be anything but excited.”
Niko Nykänen
COO, Howspace
Our approach
To hit our goals we had to be hyper-focused on big impact activities and evaluated different b2b growth marketing strategies to define the best one for Howspace. Our first task was to build the foundational processes, and that started with aligning sales with marketing.
We developed a lifecycle stage model and defined what it meant to be a Contact, MQL & SQL with clear guidelines on when and how MQLs should be followed up by sales. We leveraged automation when applicable to scale this process.
Secondly we developed a content strategy using the topic cluster approach that tied back to the brand strategy and focused on creating a new category within the change management field.
Rather than target multiple keywords we identified three topics we could become an authority on and built content around pillar pages; much of this was high-buy intent mofu/bofu content.
We used our agile marketing model to ensure we kept focus on the most important tasks at all times.
Actions § Tactics
- Website refresh: developed product page, new use case pages,
and redid homepage (content, web design & dev) - A/B testing
- Paid Acquisition, Google, LinkedIn, and FB ads
- SEO: technical SEO and SEO-driven content
- Full-funnel content: blog posts, infographics, and gated e-books
- Nurturing emails and workflows (via HubSpot)
- Customer research & building a full lifecycle model aligned to the buyer’s journey
- Develop an internal commercial process aligning sales and marketing
Results
- Hit their monthly SQL goal within 3 first months
- Rank on the first page of Google with a featured snippet for several key search terms
- After the website refresh we managed in 2020, monthly traffic increased from 5-10k to 20-37k visitors
- Contacts increased from 200-300 to 800 contacts in Feb 2020 and up to 2000 contacts in March 2020
Let's have a talk!
If you’d like to talk to us about working together, your best bet is our calendar below. Find a time that's most convenient for you and simply book it! You'll be booked with someone from our sales team.
Alternatively, you can fill out this form and we’ll hit you back with an email within the next 24 hours (unless it’s the weekend or a national holiday, in which case we might take a tad longer, you know how that goes).
* if you're interested in working for us, visit our careers page!