Learn how Grizzle helped SmileBack create and distribute thought leadership and product marketing content to increase product adoption and paid subscribers.
When serving a niche audience, attracting in-market buyers with SEO can be tricky. Sometimes, it's best to serve your customers with content and messaging on the channels and communities where they’re most active.
Which is why we helped SmileBack produce helpful content that attracted a wider audience of MSPs while empowering existing users to use the platform to its full potential. This methodology fueled their user acquisition, activation, and retention efforts leading up to their ConnectWise acquisition.
Challenge
By solving a specific problem for a niche audience, SmileBack generated a large user base within their first year of business.
To reach the next stage of growth, they needed to maximize awareness in the MSP space while generating and converting more trial users into paid subscribers.
“We’re a small team working in a space that has a number of high-profile industry leaders, not to mention dozens of smaller companies across different markets. So, competition for Google Search traffic is fierce."
Solution
To achieve the ambitious growth goals leading up to their acquisition, SmileBack wanted to take a direct-to-buyer approach to organic marketing.
This meant identifying the right channels and producing thought leadership and product-led content that taught MSPs how to solve their problems.
Fully understanding our client’s audience is foundational to any successful strategy. For SmileBack, this meant deeply embedding ourselves into their audience of MSP leaders and learning as much as we can about their goals, problems, and jobs-to-be-done (JTBD).
Doing so not only helped us understand their customer feedback challenges, but the challenges they face every day as IT service operators.
The strategic process is split into three phases:
Through this process, we found a handful of industry experts to collaborate with and make our content more authoritative—all while tapping into an existing audience for content distribution efforts.
We used a content briefing and research process that tapped into the expertise of the MSP community, allowing us to produce content across social and email channels to cement SmileBack’s team as thought leaders in the space.
Most importantly, this helped us fully understand the inner workings of the MSP business model, the language of their buyers, and their motivations and challenges.
With a strategy and editorial calendar at hand, we set out to produce high-quality content that educated SmileBack’s audience and accelerated the user journey.
To do this, we craft strategic and actionable blog content that helps MSPs solve their biggest customer retention and marketing challenges.
To amplify reach and awareness, every piece of owned content is repurposed into social assets across employee accounts and company profiles.
Finally, we launched an email marketing program that leveraged:
Workflows were created for customer segments and user behavior within the product at critical milestones. For example, prompting the user to set up their first CSAT survey after signing up for a trial.
For PLG companies, demonstrating product value as quickly as possible is critical for user activation.
SmileBack has a dedicated customer success team to guide leads through specific use cases, but this comes with limited scalability.
To reduce time-to-value and increase the number of “aha moments,” we produce two types of product marketing content:
The latter was produced after dozens of conversations with SmileBack users who expressed a common sticking point: setting up surveys and email templates.
Simply put: MSP leaders don’t want to jump through hoops to implement customer feedback solutions. They want someone to do it for them. So, we did just this by packaging up the templates and other assets and offering them within our articles.
These guides are then delivered by email and in-app Intercom messages based on user behavior, giving them the content they need right when they need it.
Finally, we enhanced SmileBack’s suite of product marketing content through our end-to-end video production service:
Using explainer videos like the one above, we’re able to communicate the benefits around core product features and educate buyers and users alike to generate trials and further improve product adoption.
Results
Through Grizzle’s end-to-end content marketing and organic growth methodologies, SmileBack was able to increase trial-to-paid account conversions by 47%.
Further, they saw a number of qualitative signals that established them as thought leaders in the MSP space leading up their ConnectWise acquisition:
"When I first saw Grizzle’s LinkedIn content, I was admittedly skeptical. “Is anyone actually going to read this?” Needless to say, they’ve been our best performing social posts to date."
About the company:
Industry:
Grizzle’s approach to product-led content is unique, intelligent and highly effective. The content they’ve created for SmileBack is excellent. It provides significant value to our very niche audience, driving outcomes for our business both in terms of increased conversions from lead-to-subscriber and increased product adoption within our customer base. With Grizzle, content has become a key pillar of our sales and CRM strategies.
Andrew Wallace
Managing Director, SmileBack
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