How Postal Uses Demandwell to Drive More Growth with Less Spend
Postal is an offline marketing automation SaaS platform that integrates with existing tech stacks to help go-to-market teams automate the right sends, at the right time, for the right people – without a trip to the post office.
When Bridget Poetker first joined the team at Postal as their Director of Content & Brand, the team was getting most of their leads from pay-to-play channels like events and paid search.
“We know the short-term PPC play works for us, but long term, if we can find ourselves on the first page of Google organically, that’s where we want to be!” Bridget said. “The goal was to stop paying for leads that I knew we could get organically.”
Bridget knew that they could rank organically for the terms they were spending money, paying per click for. Bridget and the Postal team also wanted to create more balance in our marketing mix.
So, she leveraged insights from PPC to build organic campaigns that drive leads and pipeline without having to pay for every visitor.
Here’s a quick look at their success – keep reading for more!
Bridget built Postal’s SEO program from the ground up – without a full-time team member to support the effort. She also needed to do it in a brand new category.
Before Bridget joined the team, there was a robust paid keyword strategy, but no organic strategy. They were organically ranking for branded terms, some long-tail oriented infographics, and some existing thought leadership content like blog posts and podcasts…but nothing that was driving traffic, MQLs, or pipeline for Postal.
“I have a background in Demand Generation,” said Bridget, “And rather than just keep increasing our budget on the paid side – which we did consider – we wanted a better long term play. We wanted to try and shift from pay-to-play, to content and brand.”
Today, Bridget has re-allocated some marketing spend away from paid search, and moved it toward organic. They used insights from paid search keywords – which terms had the highest conversion rate – to decide where to start with organic.
“Corporate gifting was getting the highest conversion rate in PPC,” she said. “So, this was the best intent match for where the market was at in their understanding of what they want in our product.”
“We’re really picky about the keywords we pull out of Demandwell. For example, with corporate gifting – when someone is searching for just that, they might be looking for a list of 50 things they can send their prospects, versus those low funnel, high intent modifiers like ‘corporate gifting platform,” said Bridget.
“We’re working through our first SEO Campaign for ‘corporate gifting’ terms right now,” Bridget said. “So far, we’ve seen 300% increase in search impressions, and last quarter, our search traffic to our corporate gifting product page was up over 800%. All this has quadrupled Postal’s organic search-sourced opportunities.” They also increased the number of keywords that they rank for 3.5x in just six months.
It’s easy for some marketing leaders to let a lack of full-time SEO staff prevent them from making an investment in search engine optimization. With Demandwell, Postal has managed to overcome those limitations to drive meaningful growth.
“We have one content manager who does a lot of content work across our channels,” said Bridget.
Postal’s content manager uses the Demandwell platform to automate much of the time-sucking tasks out of their workflow.
“It’s not like all he does is SEO – with so many other things to work on with our content, I’m glad he only has to spend about five to ten hours per week on our organic content! And we spend about $1000/month on average – which is a bargain, considering our PPC budget before.”
“If we do want to launch a new product and go after a different set of keywords, it wouldn’t be that difficult to scale up to 20 pages per month. It’s super scaleable.”
“With a small team, it’s near impossible to create content for a specific channel alone. I like to think of our owned platforms and the blog as our home, and then everything getting it in front of people as a distribution channel. Social is a channel to find content, and organic is the same. We don’t have the resources to create content for just social, just organic search. It can be the same content.”
“It takes forever to write a good ebook,” said Bridget. “So, I want to put that content to good use across as many places as possible.
“Chances are, nobody on LinkedIn is going to see your blog and click into it,” she said. “We pull all of the valuable info out of the content of, for example, a case study, and put that right in your feed – what quote or fact can we share to help viewers immediately?”
“Everyone always worries about where to start when they feel they don’t know everything they want to know. My advice: just start. Nobody really knows what they’re doing with SEO at first.”
“One of the great hacks of organic is that you can publish generic pages essentially (just with custom H1, H2), and run CRO on them after they start actually ranking or driving traffic… it’s easier to execute when every page that you publish doesn’t have to be perfect. I like how Demandwell gives us signals on what to do next,” Bridget said, “And your graphs look better than Google’s for our slide decks!”
“It seems complicated, but it’s really not. A common misconception with SEO is that you need to pull all the levers at the same time. It really can be taken in stride, step by step, one thing at a time. It’s not all going to get to the same place at the same time anyway,” said Bridget. “SEO is about continuing to learn and grow.”