Jun 15, 2017

Procurify's 2015 Marketing Strategy: A B2B SaaS Growth Retrospective

I was digging through some old files and found a marketing strategy I wrote in late 2014 for Procurify, an early growth stage B2B SaaS company in the procurement space.

It felt like reading a time-capsule of the moment that many B2B SaaS companies faced: shifting from a vanity metrics, “spray-and-pray” approach to a more deliberate, data-driven, and measurement-oriented strategy.

When I joined Procurify in 2014, they had a product, they had a sales team, but they lacked a functioning inbound lead generating funnel. Sales was frustrated at wasting time on demo’s with leads looking for a completely different solution. Founders were stressed about fundraising with revenue numbers behind expectations.

The direction going into 2015 was to learn from industry leaders what works, prioritize what would make the biggest impact for Procurify, and execute as quickly as possible.

Looking back, this document was pretty sophisticated for its time. It laid the groundwork for a data-mature marketing engine, focusing lean sustainable growth, and maximizing every dollar spent in an era where organic organic channels were forcing brands to pay for visibility.

The Core Objectives

We built the strategy on a few foundational objectives:

Optimize the website for conversions and build a robust nurturing and lead scoring system.
Expand market share, profitability, and enter new markets.

The most critical objective was a radical change in measurement. We aimed to move away from first-touch analytics to a multi-touch attribution model to truly understand “what are the programs driving quality leads?”

Content Marketing & Analytics

HubSpot’s 2015 blog redesign taught us a key lesson: individual blog articles received 95% of traffic. This meant we had to improve them. We even turned to Yahoo Answers and Quora for content ideas.

We also knew our CTAs in the sidebar and top bar were underperforming. The plan was to bring back a small popup window for signups, ensuring our CTAs had Prominence, Promise, and Proof.

A significant challenge arose with our analytics stack. KISSmetrics assigned all tracking to an individual, but our developers needed tracking assigned to Actions. This friction between marketing, sales, and development needs prompted the creation of a committee to find a better solution.

Content Strategy

Our content strategy shifted to ensure quality content was both impactful and easily consumed.

Visuals Matter: We utilized images (especially pictures of people) for high engagement. Images constituted 93% of the most engaging posts on Facebook.
Speed is Critical: We optimized images for fast load times, knowing that 47% of viewers expect a two-second load.
Blog Upgrades: We acknowledged that viewers preferred finding articles via search and social over the blog homepage. The focus became improving individual blog post pages with a cleaner, single-column layout.
The Reader’s Experience: We realized the goal is to improve content discoverability and enable more cross-pollination because people mostly just want to be able to consume your content. Aggressive CTAs in sidebars and top bars were underperforming compared to small, non-intrusive pop-up windows.
Filling the Holes: We planned to use Google Analytics Site Search data combined with the Exit Page secondary dimension to identify what clients are searching for but not finding. This gave us a direct roadmap for new content creation.

External Wisdom: Learning from Google and Slack

Our strategy was heavily influenced by insights from industry leaders.

Neil Hoyne’s presentation on Evolving Beyond the Conversion, showed that only 6% of marketing decisions are made using data while 54-56% are based on how marketers feel. This influenced us to nail down our measurment plan and mapp out the customer journey.

We also looked at Slack’s incredible growth. A Growth Hackers article, “How Slack Became the Fastest B2B SaaS Business,” showed that Slack’s laser focus on doing a few things “extremely, surprisingly good” (search, synchronization, file sharing) led to over 33x user growth in a year, reaching 500,000 daily active users and adding $1 million in ARR every 11 days by early 2015.

Organic Growth

The core challenge isn’t just respecting data, it’s about how we turn it into a story.

The key pivot was to stop focusing on sheer volume (e.g., traffic source conversion rate) and start focusing on profitable customers. We began to ask, “What makes a customer profitable?” This allowed us to concentrate resources on the 10-20% customer base that drives +80% of our overall revenue.

Introduction to Multi-touch Attribution

“Multi-touch attribution is no longer a nice to have, it’ a must have for any marketing program.” - Aaron Bird, CEO, Bizible

We started talking with Bizible, a company nearby in Seattle that was rocking MarTech with their Salesforce tool.

They shared compelling evidence “last touch” attribution completely missleads our decision making by ignoring what happens at the top of the marketing funnel, leading to missguided optimization.

Here’s some bullets from their research based on 480,000+ leads:

Top First Touch Channels: Search (56%), Direct, and Referral dominated first touch lead generation.
Most Common Combination: Search first touch and Search last touch accounted for 37% of leads.
Closed Won Rates (by First Touch): Direct (56%) and Search (40%) had the highest closed won rates.
Average Marketing Cycle: 25.88 days. Search and Social were below average, while Display (51 days) and Email (54 days) were significantly longer.
Normalized Revenue (by First Touch): Referral had a significantly higher revenue, and Social had a lower revenue.
Middle Touch Impact (when Search is First Touch): A middle touch of Referral or Social had a positive impact on the win rate.

A Year of Testing

2014 was all about testing. We experimented across various channels and campaigns, which led to a tiered system based on a model from Hootsuite: Tier 1 for proven channels and Tier 2 for experimental ones.

PPC

Initial overall CTR was low (0.91%), dragged down significantly by the ‘procurement software’ ad group (0.26% CTR) which contained loosely themed keywords. The keyword +procurement management had tons of impressions (10,888) but a 0.11% CTR and zero conversions.

2015 Recommendations:

Keyword Hygiene: Clean up poor-performing ad groups by removing keywords outside the tight theme to boost relevance and Quality Score.
Location Bidding: Introduce bid modifiers down to the state level for better audience targeting.

Remarketing & Display

We identified a risk in display. Display ads further down the funnel can pull people OUT of the funnel. Ads that follow users via remarketing can have a negative impact, making them feel less interested and like they are being “stalked across the web.”

2015 Recommendation:

Test remarketing efforts by creating segmented campaigns (e.g., targeting soft leads by email, or blog visitors who do not visit the website) instead of a broad “all visitors” list.

We shifted to paid ads on LinkedIn in December 2014. An initial PPC test had a very low CTR (0.016%), telling us our ad copy and creative (just the company logo) wasn’t cutting it. However, a promoted video commercial showed very strong engagement with a 0.308% CTR.

2015 Recommendation:

Focus on Video: Continue promoting the commercial.
Testing Baseline: Use the demographic data from LinkedIn as a control group for future campaigns.

Facebook

In 2014, our Facebook efforts were all organic. The plan for 2015 was to launch our first direct marketing campaign on the platform.

Mobile

Mobile users accounted for 7.5% of sessions and 5.5% of conversions. While our landing pages were mobile-friendly, we had to decide if the low volume justified a major investment. iOS was the clear winner, driving 46% of traffic and 54% of conversions compared to Android’s 41% traffic and 32% conversions.

The Grind of Organic Growth & SEO

We had ambitious goals for organic growth, aiming to compete with established players.

Pagerank: The goal was to increase our Pagerank from 4 to 5, matching competitors like Coupa and Tradeshift.
Domain Authority (DA): Our DA had dropped from 42 to 37 after a website update. The target was to get it to 50.
Image ALTs: A huge technical gap was discovered: 86% of images on procurify.com were missing alt tags, a massive missed opportunity for image search traffic.
Wikipedia Piggybacking: We had success embedding Procurify into Wikipedia articles related to purchasing software. This drove signups and boosted organic rankings, acting as a great top-of-funnel contributor.

Why This 2015 Strategy Still Matters

Looking back, this document isn’t just a relic. It’s a testament to the foundational principles of modern B2B marketing. The focus on data and learning from the best in the business is as relevant today as it was then. It’s a great reminder that while tools and channels evolve, the strategic core of marketing remains the same.