In the first six months of working with Callroute, a monster pipeline appeared. And it wasn’t by luck.
The tale of this success is twofold:
- Focused messaging and positioning
- Creation of high-quality, hyper focused content
The challenge faced is one I hear time and time again from my customers, especially those who are smaller than the giants like Cisco, RingCentral, and Zoom who dominate Google, have marketing teams of hundreds, and seemingly unlimited budgets.
Good for them, by the way. I love it when the unified comms industry takes marketing seriously.
The challenge here, however, was that Callroute had a new product (automated provisioning for Microsoft Teams), a minor identity crisis, and only one person officially tasked with marketing.
To raise awareness of its new product and to start generating leads, Callroute needed to make a technical solution digestible to audiences unfamiliar with its business and start creating demand.
Here’s where we started…
1. Focused messaging and positioning
Mark knew the importance of getting the core messaging right before we started to generate content.
After all, it’s no good generating demand via blog posts and videos if you then send potential customers to an unclear landing page.
The process
I first set about interviewing everyone involved with the product and customers.
This included the sales director, product director, CEO, partner manager, and social media marketer.
My goal here was to extract as much information as possible about:
- Product benefits
- Problems we solve
- Typical customer job role
- Typical customer job level
- Frequently asked questions
In a perfect world, I’d interview some customers as well. But, due to the product immaturity, this was hard to achieve. Sometimes, you’ve got to be adaptive when working with a startup or early-stage product.
From here, the output was a refreshed home page with a new simplified positioning. Callroute became The Microsoft Teams provisioning company and the message was clear:
“Save time and reduce manual errors when provisioning users in Microsoft Teams.”
The home page, various landing pages, and blog post content all takes its inspiration from the customer problems uncovered. We talk directly to our target audience.
Landing pages ask questions like:
- Are you responsible for Teams user provisioning?
And we outline desirable goals like:
- Solve your number management headache for good
The website remains product-led. But now with more emotion and customer-first language.
We’ve made changes so that it’s obvious people who land on the homepage know exactly how Callroute can benefit them.
And we’ve quantified what those benefits might look like:
We’ve sprinkled in some social proof, to make sure web visitors know we’re legit:
We reached out to prominent industry folks to review what we are trying to achieve:
“Auto provisioning for Microsoft Teams means a faster, more consistent, more secure process that will improve the overall end user Teams experience.”
- Kevin Kieller, Enable UC.
And we included some genuine FAQs. Listening to sales calls and interviewing sales people really does pay off here.
Often, businesses load up an FAQ section for the sake of filling space. Our goal is to shorten the sales process and give web visitors everything they need to know before booking a demo.
We then made the strategic decision to embed our booking form instead of relying on CTA buttons only.
Since going live with our original messaging, we’ve acquired some customers. Naturally, we’ve added a section with their testimonials.
The results
Overall, the Callroute freshly refined messaging and positioning has been performing very well. Hence the title of this blog post, Callroute built a $500,000 pipeline in six months.
But this messaging and positioning exercise is only worthwhile if you’ve got web visitors making their way to these pages containing the clear message.
Which leads us on to the content marketing strategy.
2. Creation of high-quality, hyper focused content
With all my content marketing customers, I take the same approach.
I fully believe in Bottom of Funnel SEO when working with tough niches. And when we’re talking about a supplementary service of a unified comms platform, we’re pretty darn niche.
The process
Having carried out considerable sales and product interviews, the beginning of our content calendar became pretty obvious.
We were to write about our customers’ problems and explain how we solve them.
Once such example is: How Do I Bulk Add Members To Microsoft Teams?
While it might not be our most viewed blog post, it’s super niche, bottom of the funnel, and our product can help with that problem.
When building out that content marketing plan, I looked to my good friend, Google.
By taking what customers and sales staff had already told me, and combining with what people were tapping into their search engines, it became even more obvious what to double down on.
We proceed to write 10 long-form blog posts. Then 20, and now in excess of 100 blog posts relating to niche queries that Teams admins (our buyer persona) need genuine help with.
I then used the same process I use to write all my SEO blog posts:
- Keyphrase research
- Writing a blog post outline
- Getting the point across above the fold
- Filling in the blanks of that outline
- Editing each post for the basics (spelling, grammar, tone, etc.)
- Editing each post to ensure it’s the best version available online
- Optimizing each post for search intent
- Publishing the content
From here, a common mistake made in both small and large businesses is promoting their content minimally.
When you write comprehensive blog posts that demonstrate you’re the best in the game about this topic, it takes time to reach the final product.
For example, check out this post on The Rising Costs of Microsoft Teams.
It’s a 3,857-word monster. But it’s not necessarily about the word count.
If you spend days/weeks assembling a blog post to make it the best resource available on the internet (for that search query), why would you cut short the distribution phase?
Often, marketers spend eight hours writing a blog post and eight minutes on promoting it.
Even when your primary channel is organic traffic, you could add up to 67% more traffic simply by sharing your content in the right places.
Resource: I made a content promotion checklist to help you out.
The results
By the time of publishing our 10th blog post, we could see clear results.
People were searching the web for help with the problems we could solve.
With all my customers, I like to share success when it happens. If you ask the Callroute team what I post most in the Guest channel (where we collaborate), it’s screenshots of our posts hitting the top of Google and nabbing featured snippets from competitors✌️
We even have AI snippets with our blog posts referenced as the source:
What’s more, these posts weren’t just ranking high on Google, they were triggering people to take the next step.
If you solve customers’ problems in your content, and offer your product as a way of helping solve that problem, your demo form fills and meeting calendars are going to start filling up.
It’s this combination of focused messaging and positioning and high-quality, niche content that have contributed to Callroute building a $500,000 pipeline in six months.
There is still work to be done
Most case studies end like a fairytale.
But the reality is that the show must go on.
Just because we got 20 articles to #1 on Google and grew a healthy pipeline rather quickly doesn’t mean we all put our feet up.
Marketing functions must be scalable, repeatable, and ever-evolving.
- We must conduct content refreshes as time goes on.
- There are elements further down the funnel that need optimizing.
- There are technical hoops to jump through during proof of concept.
There is still work to be done.
But $500,000 of pipeline in six months is a rather nice start, don’t you think?
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