Helping a SaaS Brand Scale in a Saturated Market

Challenges

1. Limited brand awareness in the crowded SaaS category of cloud-based telephony.
2. Well-funded competitors who could outspend and subsidize losses within paid search. Plus, low barrier to entry saw new competitors popping up every month. The Google Ads strategy needed to both “pick battles carefully” and react to a constant stream of new entrants into the keyword auctions.
3. Often ambiguous search intent. Trophy keywords such as “phone system,” for example, might be used differently in B2C and B2B contexts.

What we did

We started with the lay of the land – competitor research, product-market fit assessment, and defining ideal customer profiles.

Restructuring & Quick Wins

Next, we restructured the accounts and notched some quick wins with competitor and BoFu campaigns. To keep CAC in check, we scrubbed negative keywords daily, weeding out low intent keywords that weren’t bringing leads.

To outperform the competition, we expanded cross-channel and introduced Facebook ads. The social campaigns were meant to generate new demand for paid search fulfillment, though after observing their incremental impact to aggregate CAC, we wound up limiting paid social to remarketing against pre-qualified audiences.

Moving Up the Funnel

In the next phase, we moved up in the funnel in Search, bidding for terms such as “how to boost sales team performance.” This presented us with another challenge – we had to maintain rigorous optimization to ensure minimum waste.

The solution: tiering keywords based on their conversion rates, and removing non-performing ToFu keywords regularly. This way, we were able to find optimal keywords that either converted well or assisted lead generation downstream.

Once we strengthened the foundation of paid search through restructuring and optimization, we started increasing target CPA bids for tier 1 keywords in a controlled way. Those clicks and leads cost more, yes, but the keywords had proven to have higher sales closing rates post-lead and thus higher profitability.

On the ad copy side, we continually tested various value proposition messaging that could speak to different personas who may be googling identical search terms. Eventually this enabled us to hone in on the winning USP and value proposition in our messaging.

“Hop Online team has some really good folks. They always come up with new ideas that align with our business objectives. Working with them feels like working with an internal team who listen to your ideas, give feedback on those ideas, and then make it live.”

Abishek Shankar Srivastava
Product Marketing Manager at JustCall