Story-Driven B2B Content Execution Beat HoneyCart’s Previous Marketing Efforts
See how VEC Studio’s story-driven, product-led content execution (aka, Product-Led Storytelling) helped B2B SaaS startup, HoneyCart, to:
– Increase organic impressions by over 900%
– Boost organic clicks by more than 450%
– Directly convert engaged readers
Toss a few hundred dollars, and boom, they got traffic to their site. There weren’t any limits. Even if it meant dolling out a million dollars. The more dollars they could toss, the more traffic they could drive. It’s the classic give-and-take play. Give Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and any other ad platform your hard-earned dollars, and they will toss you some traffic.
But it’s often not a win-win situation.
At least, it wasn’t for Andrew Woo, the Co-Founder & CEO of HoneyCart. The hard-earned dollars they were pouring in instantly added to the bottom lines of Google and Facebook. But it wasn’t moving the needle for them. Traffic, yes. But the people visiting their site from that traffic were bouncing off their website like water bounces off rocks.
Why HoneyCart Worked with Us
Even funded startups can’t afford to continuously pay for traffic that doesn’t contribute to pipeline. But it’s worse for bootstrapped ones like HoneyCart. Every wasted dollar is like a day removed from their existence.
Andrew Woo had to brainstorm.
To mitigate losses and save their bootstrapped startup, he realized they needed to better educate prospective customers. They needed visitors acquired with hard-earned dollars to become really interested in using HoneyCart. Andrew’s search for how they could achieve this and get the most bang out of their small marketing budget led him to VEC Studio:
How HoneyCart Found VEC Studio
Andrew’s path to discovering and opting to work with VEC Studio is atypical of today’s B2B buyers. He sought high-quality content, as mentioned in the short clip above. But more importantly, he wanted that content to revolve around their product’s value, HoneyCart. Put simply, product-led content.
Andrew’s search led him to a ranking piece on OpenView Partners, pioneers of the Product-Led Growth GTM strategy. Coincidentally, OpenView happened to be one of VEC Studio’s clients at the time. There, he found and read our 1st article on Product-Led Storytelling. The idea of using relatable stories to weave a SaaS product into content resonated with Andrew.
So he reached out.
Our First Engagement Act —Laying the Foundation
After just one discovery call, we signed an initial 6-month engagement and were ready to roll. Such speed in getting B2B content projects started is by design. Time is money. As such, VEC Studio’s Content Strategists conduct thorough research before every client discovery call.
In HoneyCart’s case, our pre-engagement kickoff research confirmed a critical flaw we see with most B2B websites. Their messaging wasn’t clear enough. It was obvious visitors acquired through ads didn’t understand the unique mission of Andrew Woo and his Co-Founder, Omar Santana.
To resolve this and lay a solid foundation, we recommended revamping their website’s copy and layout, as part of the content marketing strategy we designed. Happy with VEC Studio’s recommendations, they further engaged us to craft copywriting for crucial pages of their new website.
One such is their ‘About Us’ page:
Previously, this page was basically a pitch and a CTA.
When we checked their Google Analytics, there was no conversion from this page. Visitors were also spending less than three seconds, proving it wasn’t resonating. As shown above, we turned it into a story about Andrew and Omar more likely to resonate with drop-off caterers —their target ICP.
Impressed, Omar and Andrew said:
2nd Engagement Act –Content Marketing Plan
Before I come to this…
Our recommendation to revamp HoneyCart’s website didn’t come from gut feelings alone. At VEC Studio, that’s never the case. To design an effective, authority-building content marketing strategy, we conducted competitive research and analysis on HoneyCart’s direct and indirect competitors:
Our analysis revealed that their competitor’s positioning leaned towards corporate speak or promised to revolutionize catering. On the flip side, interviewing drop-off caterers, HoneyCart’s target ICP, we found they wanted a simple solution to automate client-facing processes.
This informed our decision and recommendation to make their positioning about two people driven by a mission to build software that helps drop-off caterers compete against giants. But not just that. It also informed the initial, 6-month content marketing plan we created for HoneyCart.
Here’s a peek:
3rd Engagement Act –Crafting Success Stories
HoneyCart came to VEC Studio mainly for one reason. It’s the same reason other B2B SaaS startups choose to work with us. Like others, Andrew Woo lacked the expertise and time to craft content that demonstrated the value HoneyCart, their product, brought to the table.
In his words:
This clip confirms Andrew sought product-led content. But HoneyCart needed much more than that. Our interview with their existing customers on why they chose HoneyCart uncovered something vital. Like most B2B buyers, HoneyCart’s potential buyers desired solutions that have been tried and proven by those similar to them. Essentially, they wanted to see (and not just be told) how other drop-off caterers were using a specific software product in their processes.
This meant we didn’t just need to create product-led content. But we needed to infuse real stories readers could resonate with and relate to.
To do this, and do it well, we needed deep knowledge of how HoneyCart worked. This is something we do for all engagements. So, in our usual fashion, we hopped on an hour-long call with Omar to walk us through how every feature on HoneyCart worked.
Below’s a snapshot from that session:
This call helped us to empathize with how existing customers were actually using specific product features to solve their problems. It informed the kind of success stories we needed to craft to better compel prospects.
Scroll back up, and you’ll see this learning informed our 6-month content marketing plan. Our hypothesis? Crafting client success stories in month one, we’ll make resources demonstrating how others were succeeding with HoneyCart available. This way, skeptical new site visitors could see (not just be told) of HoneyCart’s unique value. But most importantly, we could leverage excerpts of those stories in other content pieces.
We began with this one:
After publishing the first success story, we advised Andrew to promote it with part of their ad budget. This time, visitors stayed longer on their site, time on page and average pages/visitor increased, and they got a few leads. The initial results were profound. So much so that, instead of just two success stories planned for the first month of our content plan, we adjusted our plan. And ended up crafting more in the coming months:
Some live examples are:
- How Two Unique Catering Saved 30+ Hours a Month with HoneyCart
- Saved 90 Minutes Per Catering Order: Here’s How Kasper’s Catering Is Doing It with HoneyCart
- How Nicholas Restaurant Saved 12 Hours & Got 18 More Catering Orders Per Week With HoneyCart
- How Low Country Quisine Increased Catering Sales by $27k with Catering Automation
These story-driven articles performed so well in driving pipeline that out of the blue one night, Andrew emailed me, saying:
“Goodnews! Omar was able to close 2 out of the 3 demos on the spot. They were some of the hottest leads we got from the latest story-driven content pieces you guys created. The 3rd will be ready in 6 months’ time.”
4th Engagement Act –Ongoing, Product-Led Content Execution
Most, if not all, SaaS businesses don’t sell ad banners.
You only make money if a fraction of visitors to your site exchange hard-earned dollars for access to your product. This means buying traffic for the sake of it, as HoneyCart did before engaging VEC Studio, is like washing cash down the drain.
But now that we had proven, through the site revamp and initial pieces we crafted, that they could convert traffic to customers, it was time to step harder on the traffic gas. This is where we started crafting product-led content pieces targeting relevant queries.
Some examples include:
Five months into our engagement, we noticed that organic impressions for these pieces were high. But they weren’t getting decent traffic because they ranked low on the SERPs. We had to act.
And we did.
When your content is great, that is, people actually spend time reading them, the boost it needs to rank higher and drive more traffic is backlinks. Our Hotjar session replay data on the pieces we had crafted for HoneyCart proved the latter. People were actually spending time on them. But we needed to also achieve the former —build relevant backlinks, so those pieces could rank higher and get discovered when HoneyCart’s target ICP searched. To achieve this, we pitched a new content idea that resulted in this published guide:
Our goal with this was 3-fold. First, by interviewing these experts, they could link back to HoneyCart from their own, more authoritative domains. Second, they could also link to it when they guest post on other sites. Third, other reputable organizations in the US catering industry could link to the guide, and by extension, HoneyCart, due to the rare expert insights.’
It was a grand slam.
Just one month after we published the guide, HoneyCart attracted relevant backlinks without soliciting. As a result, organic website traffic soared. As their Google Search Console data below shows, organic clicks went up by about 900% and impressions were up by over 450%:
We were humbled.
Especially as Omar said:
Results (and What We Could’ve Done Better)
These testimonials shared by Andrew and Omar came at the end of our engagement, about 14 months after it started. Most content agency engagements don’t last that long.
But ours is probably different for two reasons. First, we always prioritize our clients’ goals. Every. Single. Time. Second, we’re not just a content agency, but a Product-Led Storytelling Studio. It could also be because we’re not “yes” men who do anything clients think just to unlock the next retainer, even when we know it won’t drive the results they seek.
For instance, there were times we didn’t agree with Andrew. One case was when he played down interviewing experts for the guide that brought them the backlinks needed to rank higher. Andrew felt like just buying backlinks was better than the stress and back-and-forth involved in getting the experts we researched and shortlisted to agree to an interview. And it was really stressful. But no good thing comes easy. So we insisted because that was the only way we saw to acquire the most relevant links they needed.
I’m sure Andrew will be glad that we insisted. Otherwise, he’d not have raved about how working with us helped them drive more growth than all of their previous marketing efforts combined.
Hear it from him:
But we weren’t perfect.
As we take on more B2B content projects, we learn every day. So looking back, there’s one thing we didn’t do, which we should have done for HoneyCart.
We should’ve built an owned audience from the traffic our content generated for HoneyCart. Over the years, we’ve learned that the B2B sales cycle is only getting longer. Also, B2B buyers often don’t go from consuming content to becoming customers. It happens, but it’s rare. So, companies must stay top of their potential buyers’ minds until they are ready to buy.
Earning such mindshare requires being able to predictably distribute content to your prospects. Without paying for traffic for nothing to show, as HoneyCart did before working with us. This isn’t possible without owning an audience comprising your prospects. It’s why, today, we always factor in building an owned audience into every B2B content marketing strategy we design and execute.
One way we do this is by not just helping clients start a branded newsletter (as we have with our own Growing with Content Newsletter). But by also helping them design blog and article layouts that encourage engaged readers to subscribe to their owned audience (community or newsletter) for more content.
As we did for Cyber Sierra:
I could be wrong.
But this incessant desire of ours to put our clients needs above everything else is probably why Andrew and Omar said they looked forward to working with VEC Studio again. It could also be why they recommended us to other B2B SaaS startups and thanked us for working with them.
But don’t take that from me:
Crafted with ❤️ in Port Harcourt