Case study: The CRO strategy that’s helping this B2B tech company scale conversions

by Sophia Dagnon | Conversion Optimization | 0 comments

+16.3% in overall conversions

+72.8% in organic search conversions

“GetUplift is one of the best vendors I’ve ever worked with. They’re truly partners and an extension of our team. The flexibility and the range of projects we can work on with them is great — it’s a relief to know we have a resource that can support the conversion-focused projects that help drive the business.”

Michela Fossati-Bellani
VP of Growth Marketing, Strata Identity

Optimizing your website, campaigns, and marketing strategy for conversion — whether it’s to a free trial, a paid plan, a demo, a sales call, or a sign-up for the company newsletter — is never easy. But, when you’re:

a highly specialized, rapidly growing B2B company with
a deeply technical product that solves a significant problem for your market and
you serve Fortune 500 Enterprises,

It can be tough.

Sales cycles for this kind of product tend to be (understandably) long because the cost of getting it wrong is excruciatingly high. Your website needs to fully support that cycle, speaking to the needs of multiple decision makers, all with unique desires and questions. Your website and marketing campaigns have to intrigue and interest all of these decision makers—enough to either take the next step or give the green light so that someone on their team can take that next step.

Your website has to be the perfect buffet: inviting, easy to scan, superbly thought out, and with something for every taste so that prospects can make a beeline for what interests them.

That’s one of the challenges Strata came to us with.

At the time, the Strata team was in the middle of building out the right user journeys and paths into the product so that prospects coming to the Strata website and engaging with Strata’s ad campaigns could quickly:

Feel confident they landed in the right place,
Understand exactly what Strata did,
Understand exactly how Strata could solve their specific problems and
Quickly navigate through the site to take the next step

However, the sheer technicality of Strata’s product and its space made this challenging.

Effective website and campaign messaging has to walk a tight line between clean, clear copy and extreme technical accuracy and proficiency. It has to incorporate a conversion strategy without over-simplifying the solution — and it has to work with the strategies the Product, Creative, Content Marketing, Growth & Acquisition, and Sales teams are using to hit KPIs and grow the business.

Strata already had excellent, in-depth internal expertise on the subject matter and they were creating powerful, thought-leadership pieces that showed they owned their space.

“Our internal team is excellent at creating articles, blog posts and long-form content, but when it comes to really pithy, powerful, jargon-free website copy & campaign messaging, we knew we needed assistance.”

Mark Callahan
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Strata Identity

That’s why Strata started searching for a partner. Somebody who could bring in conversion expertise to help focus the brand’s voice, support & grow the strategy, and take a lead in execution — creating web and campaign copy that truly appealed to all the right buyers and reflected who Strata is and where they’re going.

How we built the right foundation for smart, creative & effective conversion-focused campaigns that support Product, Growth & Acquisition

“I was skeptical at first, about an outside agency being able to handle the technical concepts we were working with. And I’ve been completely (and pleasantly!) surprised at how quickly GetUplift were able to understand what we do. Because even people in the industry are still asking, ‘What is this?’”

Mark Callahan
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Strata Identity

Not everyone can support the conversion strategy and lead copy execution for highly complex products.

Naturally, the Strata team had some concerns about non-technical newcomers to their space, coming in to help explain a very technically complex product, simply. Because to (badly) paraphrase the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, writing short, sharp copy takes both time and expertise.

Brevity needs in-depth subject matter understanding — and it’s impossible to be sharp and precise if you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Luckily, we have a well-tested process for that — something we’ve been honing for the last eight years at our CRO agency. Our team can support conversion strategy and execution for deeply technical fields thanks to two main steps:

Step #1: Exhaustive research

“GetUplift takes the time to learn your product, learn your market, and your target audience. They are always willing to learn more, and always here to get things done, especially in ‘startup world’ where we move at a very fast pace. They’re a great partner.”

Sarah Boucher
Director of Growth Marketing, Strata Identity

This is the slightly obvious first step of any new project because you can’t write about things you don’t understand.

Here’s how we approached this with Strata:

Team interviews and surveys. We sat down with sales engineers, multiple product engineers, content marketers, product marketers, the sales team, Growth and Acquisition, and anyone else who would talk to us until we had a deep understanding of the space, the product and the problems it solved.

VOC research. After getting to know Strata from the team’s perspective, we watched dozens of demos, read thought leadership pieces and the responses they generated, and got stuck down a few Gartner, Forrester and Reddit rabbit holes to get a feel for how Strata’s ICPs talked about their Identity challenges.

Emotional competitor intelligence. We dove into how companies were solving all kinds of Identity and Access Management challenges so we could fully understand the existing context Strata lives in.

UX and heuristic design analysis. We reviewed the site and dozens of industry sites so we could put UX, CRO design and heuristic recommendations into a context that made sense for the space.

Quantitative research. Finally, we dove into site interaction, running heatmap analysis, watching user recordings and mapping out the user journeys to properly understand how prospects were interacting with the site and what was missing.

All of this helped us understand the messaging layers that had to be peeled back and start understanding the right conversion angles for Strata’s Ideal Customers (ICPs).

“GetUplift helped us find the hook in all that we do, which is hard to do sometimes internally. You want to talk about all of these wonderful things your product does, but you need to find the one unique thing that matters most to customers.”

Mark Callahan
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Strata Identity

Step #2: Set up the right collaboration steps and review processes

Great websites and campaigns don’t happen in a vacuum — they come to life through structured teamwork with dev, product, growth, content, and design.

After getting to know the space and the product so that we could test the conversion strategy confidently, we set up review & check-in processes for each asset category:

Keystone web pages (homepage, pricing page & platform pages)
Secondary web pages (use cases, solutions, recipes)
Ad campaigns (google, LinkedIn, web)
Email campaigns (email list, promo emails, ABX emails)

This allowed our team to focus on messaging, conversion and clarity while bringing in experts from Strata to make sure every asset still retained the right level of technical depth. This process usually includes kick-offs for each bigger piece, team brainstorming, collaborative wireframing, co-working sessions, guided review sessions and — obviously — intense copywriting and analysis.

“Before GetUplift, creating a web page or a use case page was a bit chaotic. We didn’t know who to ask [internally] or what questions to ask to get the output we needed to create a conversion copy. So we’d be chasing people down for information. GetUplift has standardized how we create various assets and brought a lot of process rigor.”

Michela Fossati-Bellani
VP of Growth Marketing, Strata Identity

This collaborative team process has sped up the way assets get created and it means that we can rapidly support different teams with everything they need.

“A recipe that used to take two weeks to put together can now be created in an hour from the Strata side – with one 30-minute interview with one of the product team followed by a 30 minute workshopping session with GetUplift. The rest, GetUplift handles behind the scenes. It’s been a great improvement in productivity.”

Mark Callahan
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Strata Identity

Continuous internal collaboration with Product, Content Marketing, and Growth has also helped us hone in on the right brand voice.

“Before GetUplift, we were in the very early stages of developing our messaging and our voice. Now people are starting to recognize our voice and tone. They’re recognizing our brand and our personality has been a defining factor —it flows through to all the different elements.

We’re still young and we’re still a work in progress but when we go to events and when prospects talk to our sales team, they will say that our voice is very recognizable and comes through as professional but approachable — and not overly serious — but without being too casual. It’s not stuffy tech boring.”

Heidi King
Content Marketing Strategy & Production Manager, Strata Identity

And it’s helped us keep researching, learning and honing in on the right message. (Because good conversion strategy should always evolve!)

“GetUplift has actually influenced our core messaging as an organization, and it’s resonated with analysts and it’s resonated with prospects. We use it at trade shows. Watching our messaging land in conversations and helping people get to the aha moment of, ‘Oh, I get what you do’ faster. It’s tangible.” I would say it’s increased the velocity of leads and the quality of leads.”

Mark Callahan
Senior Director of Product Marketing, Strata Identity

We focus on working with every team so that everything flows as smoothly as it can.

“The thoughtfulness that goes into the copy, word counts, and wireframing is exceptional. I literally don’t need to wireframe anything extra because it’s already been thought of.

With other agencies you sometimes get copy “thrown over the fence” — it’s just words in a doc and it’s on the designer to decipher a layout for it. But by the time my team works on design, the GetUplift team has already thought through the conversion aspects of the design and kept us in the loop every step of the way to make sure it works for us. It’s quite unique the way GetUplift delivers the work.”

Brian Leonard
Creative Director, Strata Identity

A powerful collaboration process built for growth

And it’s helped us keep researching, learning and honing in on the right message. (Because good conversion strategy should always evolve!)

“Finding GetUplift has been a game changer. It’s freed us up from having to stress about trying to write copy that converts. Now we have a dedicated team that looks at all the website and campaign messaging through a conversion lens — and that’s just so reassuring! We just look forward to meeting with the team — they ask the right questions and it’s just like having another team member.”

Heidi King
Content Marketing Strategy & Production Manager, Strata Identity

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Case study: The CRO strategy that’s helping this B2B tech company scale conversions

+16.3% in overall conversions

+72.8% in organic search conversions

How we built the right foundation for smart, creative & effective conversion-focused campaigns that support Product, Growth & Acquisition

Step #1: Exhaustive research

Step #2: Set up the right collaboration steps and review processes

A powerful collaboration process built for growth

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Get Exclusive Optimization Resources

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