In 2016 the Vendasta  was named 42nd in the Profit 500, the definitive list of fastest growing companies in Canada, from Canada Business Magazine.

Powering the growth is a robust marketing strategy. The company, which sells omni-channel marketing platforms to SMB´s via local media resellers, applied its marketing skills to its own plan.

Today a sophisticated marketing engine  generates 1,000 to 2,000 leads a month. Sales have grown by  50% per year for the last three years with projected sales of $30 million in 2017 and a team of 300.  The company now supplies SMB marketing tools to 1,100 reselling partners in the U.S. and Canada.

Here’s how they did it.

Location: Saskatoon, Canada

Core Team: Brendan King, CEO; George Leith, CRO, Jeff Tomlin, CMO,

Founded: 2008 Projected  2017  Revenues: $30 million

Background

In 2012 Vendasta started selling online reputation management tools for media and agency resellers. Their basic business model was three-tiered subscription, plus wholesale pricing per product.

“Today when a consumer sees an ad, they go into the research phase and go online before they ever go to the door of the business.

“There is this entire additional stack of products that local businesses need. We enable the media to sell the entire stack,” Leith said.

“We made the decision consciously or unconsciously that we needed to put ourselves in the shoes of the salesperson, or a day in the life of the agency…Nobody had paid any attention to those people.”

“We finally made that connection, to build out the platform into a complete stack that includes a CRM, that we were already a long way down the road.”

The upgraded platform can send a snapshot report or conduct a needs analysis “without a call on the client.”  Sales increased by 50% to a projected $30 million by the end of 2017.

The role of content marketing

The company’s success, Leith contends, is based on marketing “muscle.”

“A new way to get in front of the customer is with content… We could not do what we do in the organization without marketing.  They create content for inbound marketing and, also, curate it for nurturing so that salesperson can send it easily to the end customer,” Leith says.

The Vendasta team that will top 300 by the end of 2017  is composed of 100 developers, 60 sales reps and 16 marketers, supporting an ecosystem of  14,000 salespeople in the field.

Leith says that a core philosophy is to let ideas “bubble up from the customer,” as well as from the marketing team. The content is organized into a powerful lead generation system that produces 1,000 to 2,000 leads from the website monthly.

They also design “content and lead generation for partners,” Leith said.

There are three tiers of audiences for marketing: the media company that buys the software, anyone in a sales role calling on small businesses and the third tier is content marketing developed for the small businesses themselves.

With 100 developers in R&D, “innovating at a blistering pace,” a  huge task is just educating and delivering information through the ecosystem about new products, services they provide,” Leith said.

All content created for salespeople also builds credibility and becomes a differentiator when media and agency resellers are deciding which digital service provider to use.

The result is a virtuous cycle, more of a content web than an indexed library.

Here’s a quick tour of how the marketing works:

• The Website

“The sales department are storytellers. But a good web presence is going to do some of this work,” Leith said.  He advises to “Identify your customer base and give them something that shows them that you are someone they can trust.”

Vendasta’s home page is primarily aimed towards media and other resellers; a “Request a demo” is a colored button, not just a tab, at the top right of all pages.

Numerous pop-up case studies

Numerous case studies on the site give critical information about strategies that  media companies have used to be successful in growing revenues.

Numerous case studies on content are aimed at all three levels of customer.

Plus pop-ups for best practices

Reports on “best practices” help both sales reps and their SMB customers. A portion of the most important are also used as pop-ups to capture leads.

• The blog

The blog has a critical role in keeping both the internal sales team up on the innovations, plus communicating to 14,000 sales people logging into the platforms around the world.”

“With 100 developers, we are innovating at a blistering pace,” Leith said.  “It’s a challenge to keep internal sales and the 14,000 sales reps up to date.”

All new innovations, press releases and content are posted on the blog in order of recency.

Where relevant, interstitial ads embedded in the blog promote related case studies and best practice reports with email capture.

For example, three recent blogs include an infographic on “163 stunning social media stats,” a press release on being ranked #42 in Canada’s Profit  500 and  B2B Audience Targeting Tips for LinkedIn and Facebook .

In the center of the B2B targeting blog is a promotion for a “Customer profile worksheet,” one of the recommendations before creating an ad campaign.

There is also a pop-up at the end to obtain a LinkedIn best practices report on using Autofill, also in return for an email.

Each promotion and blog includes shareable links and counters.

• Helping SMB’s with content aimed at their customers

Content designed for SMB’s to use is also available with a Partner Log-in.

“The same (marketing concepts) apply to the businesses we help. They should have a content engine and we are helping to provide content in a vertical-specific manner. The vertical content is white labeled so the agency or reseller is the trusted provider of that content.”

All sales resources are housed together in a what the company calls “the single source of truth.”

• Distribution

As important as the content itself is magnifying its visibility via multiple distribution channels including conferences, email newsletters, social platforms and paid advertising.

• LinkedIn advertising

Vendasta uses both Facebook and LinkedIn advertising in their lead generation strategy. However, a notable recent success has been the use of LinkedIn advertising for a lead generation program. The 1.1% CTR was so unusual that LinkedIn headquarters called Vendasta‘s marketer, Jamie Taylor, and took him to lunch. Of course, he wrote a blog about it, with two related email capture pop-ups.

• Email

Critical is email, which effectively “re-markets” to new leads and keeps all the constituencies up to date.

An opt-in to the email can receive a notice every two to three days. These  fall into a few categories:

• Product and sales webinars/videos

These are all educational webinars and videos on new products and concepts:

• Local Media Scoop

These are colorful blog posts that inform in a highly digestible format, like Dear Agencies: You’re Screwed based on a pep talk from CEO Brendan King. It includes observations learned, and company announcements.

• Product Insider

This email showcases new products and what’s in BETA. Blogs are promoted at the end of the newsletter.

The result of the content and distribution is a virtuous cycle of leads creation and development supporting 60 Vendasta sales reps and 14,000 media and agency reps around the country.

“My advice is to market your organization with relevant content and see who is interacting with the content,“ Leith said. “The days of fitting the package to the needs of the media company are gone.

“The right mix of content you supply should be the one the customer needs.”

Companies who are interested in building or adding to their own content marketing capacity, we can help with strategy, B2B writers and distribution channels.