Brand Awareness Case Study for Cloud Operations & Analytics Company
Content strategy generates over 2 million impressions in under 4 months
Client overview
Sumo Logic is a cloud-based machine data analytics platform that provides real-time continuous intelligence across the entire application lifecycle. The platform enables businesses of all sizes to operate and secure their modern applications at cloud scale.
Services
175%
Increase in keyword rankings in top 3 spots on the SERP, YOY
38%
Increase of 4.3 million impressions from Q3 to Q4
20%
Increase in new organic users to the site
39%
Increase in new users from direct traffic
Directive provides a true team-based approach, meaning they cover multiple marketing disciplines and gets “economies of scale” benefits associated with leading campaigns for over 70 SaaS companies.
—Mike Greeves, Head of Digital
The challenge
Although Sumo Logic’s main product line is rooted in the areas of log management and continuous intelligence, their solutions are relevant and useful in various other sub-industries such as cloud security, security analytics, cybersecurity, and more.
This creates a unique marketing challenge: when you have an effective solution that services multiple industries, how do you position your product to compete against the companies that already dominate those specific verticals?
To establish itself as a key player across multiple sub-industries, Sumo Logic needed to build out a wide-scale brand presence to resonate with a diversified audience. The Sumo Logic team turned to Directive to help them get there.
The strategy
To tackle this challenge, Directive laid out a plan to elevate the client’s level of brand awareness for each sub-industry that their product serves. Our efforts were focused on creating content to target enterprise and mid-market buyers at both the top and bottom of the marketing funnel. Organic traffic would serve as the north star metric; however, we would closely monitor keyword rankings, impressions, and conversions as additional indicators of performance.
For the top-of-funnel audience, we aimed to create a comprehensive glossary resource to educate buyers and drive organic traffic. Using a glossary format would allow us to target a variety of different search terms that are relevant to buyers in multiple industries.
To target buyers at the bottom of the funnel, we sought out to create application-based content that heavily revolved around Sumo Logic and its applications and software integrations. This type of content helps educate the bottom-of-funnel buyer about the product and provides just enough value to entice them to fill out a lead form.
Reviewing the competitive landscape
Before we could begin executing on content strategy, we had to get a better understanding of the competitive landscape of the sub-industries we were trying to target. To do this, we conducted a competitive analysis that helped to paint an accurate picture of where Sumo Logic stood against other vendors in each industry.
We audited search engine results pages (SERPs) across tens of thousands of keywords to identify the top search terms that we wanted to create content for. These terms were chosen strategically based on the top keywords that the main competitors were already ranking for.
Once this list was finalized, we strategized topics for over 100 pieces of rankable content that would allow us to target these search queries and gain headway over the competitors that already owned the top results.
Building a streamlined process
If we wanted to create a lot of content in a short period of time, we knew there were many moving parts that had to fall into place first. A single piece of content needs to be written, edited, published, and promoted. From beginning to end, this process can require bandwidth from several different team members.
To streamline workflows across both the Directive and Sumo Logic teams, we developed and implemented a content creation process built for efficiency. From writing and editing to wireframing and interlinking, every step of this process was optimized to maximize productivity.
Improved SEO elements
Each piece of content was reviewed and edited to maximize its SEO potential. The content itself was written around a target keyword and optimized for all on-page SEO elements that have an impact on rankings. This includes the meta description, image alt-text, and URL structure.
On the technical side, we aimed to lower the average crawl time of Sumo Logic’s website through internal linking. By strategically placing internal links to high-value pages in specific areas on the site, we helped improve crawl time substantially.
Navigating the buyer’s journey on the website
As part of our larger strategy, we wanted to ensure that visitors who found the website organically were primed to convert. This required an audit of existing pages to identify the areas where users were leaving the website. Using advanced behavior analytics software, we were able to find these low-performing pages and improve the messaging to target prospective customers more effectively.
