“Driving demand really is cross-functional,” says Jessie Coan, Director of Content Strategy for Demand Spring, a Boston- and Ottawa-based revenue marketing consultancy.
Her point: Successful revenue acceleration campaigns are not built around a single channel or by a single department.
Attracting, nurturing, and winning new business requires a multi-channel, multidisciplinary approach that transcends traditional divides between sales and marketing to provide highly individualized experiences.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to get stuck in your particular silo when you’re involved in marketing or sales. Those responsible for various channels, strategies, or technologies fail to communicate, and the result for prospects is a disjointed experience and incoherent messaging.
Sometimes you just need someone (or a team of someones) who can step back and see the bigger picture. That’s where an agency like Demand Spring comes in.
Among many other things, Demand Spring is a proud member of the inaugural class of Drift Certified Solutions Partners. That’s not surprising because Demand Spring’s strategy team includes multiple veteran Drift users. (Jessie is one of them.)
For the latest in my series highlighting practical advice and success stories from Drift’s inspiring Solutions Partners, I invited Jessie and Demand Spring Strategy Consultant Alexandra “Lex” Capello to talk about using Drift to unite isolated channels within a fully integrated funnel.
Editor’s note: The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Nick Salvatoriello: How would you describe Demand Spring?
Lex Capello: We’re a revenue marketing consultancy with service lines spanning from technology to strategy to content to talent to digital.
Nick: So, are you typically working with marketing, sales…?
Jessie Coan: We tend to work cross-functionally within the marketing and sales organizations. We’ll be brought in by one department, but usually, we get our fingers on everything because of the nature of revenue marketing. Driving demand really is cross-functional.
For example, our head of martech might bring Lex in to look at the strategy for a nurture campaign, and then I’ll get pulled in when they determine, “These emails aren’t converting the way we want them to.”
We work with a lot of people across the board. Our day-to-day operations tend to live at the VP or CMO level, but we also lead workshops and train contributors on things like email marketing best practices, updating their Marketo systems, and writing digital ads.
We like to get in and support all levels. And that’s kind of how Drift was a good fit for us, too.
Nick: Ah, you beat me to it. Can you expand on what you just said, that Drift is a good fit for your agency’s approach?
Lex: As we said, we have services across content, strategy, and technology, and those are all key pieces to launching a successful Drift initiative, as well. You need the technology, you need the strategy to build playbooks and identify your audience, and you need strong copy. So, Drift has felt like a natural partner for us.
While clients usually come to us to solve a specific pain, once we dig in and understand what’s going on, we can provide recommended outcomes to serve their conversion needs appropriately. Drift just makes sense for this.
So, for example, if we’re building out a nurture campaign, landing pages are a big component of that. Why not build a chat conversation within the context of the landing page that’s targeted directly at the messaging throughout the entire campaign itself?
Drift is an important part of a well-balanced multi-channel diet. For us, Drift is an essential component for solving conversion challenges for our clients.”
Nick: Companies come to you to increase conversions to drive revenue, and you see Conversational Marketing and Conversational Sales as great ways to accelerate those conversions, correct?
Lex: Exactly, and to scale, too. Many of our clients are already Drift customers, but they haven’t been dedicating enough resources to it to be successful.
Here’s an example where we recommended Drift to a client as part of a multi-channel nurture strategy:
We were scoped to deliver the strategy and the execution for a Marketo email nurture. And we noticed they had Drift, but all they were doing was one very generic homepage playbook. We thought, “It would be great to know that, in the email nurture campaign, we’re sending a lot of leads onto your website.”
We recommended creating some personalized Drift playbooks where we could acknowledge that these leads are within the email nurture. Based on the content the prospects have been receiving in the nurture, we can use Drift to feed them relevant content based on where they are in their buying journey.
We realized our client didn’t have the resources themselves to build out these playbooks, so we worked with Drift Professional Services to create them.
And of course, no success story would be complete without some results to back it up. From 2020 to 2021, we’ve seen a number of positive results as we’ve worked with our client to refine and launch new playbooks.
We’ve seen an over 70% increase in meetings booked, and over a 170% increase in overall Conversation Qualified Leads (CQLs).
While some playbooks worked better than others, these results are across all Drift playbooks as a whole.
Nick: Do any other client success stories come to mind?
Lex: A client came to us wanting to maximize the messaging around a specific content piece, and Drift was a key component of our strategy for doing that.
When we launched this campaign, there were already assets that were live — we were just adding and refining. We find when that’s the case, adding in a Conversational Marketing component allows us to cross-promote assets more easily (and it also gives things less of a “sales-y” feel). This hopefully leads to more engagement, more time on site, and more positive information gathering about us — resulting in a buying decision.
If you think about it holistically, people aren’t always coming in from one spot. In this particular campaign, we put a customized conversation playbook on the landing page where the main hub asset of the campaign lives and some targeted blog posts.
Nick: So, the idea was to create a consistent customer experience?
Jessie: We wanted the messaging to be consistent across all channels.
Sometimes, within marketing organizations, you get siloed. Somebody owns this channel; somebody owns this other channel. One of the advantages of working with a consultancy like Demand Spring is that we can spot cross-channel opportunities quicker.
We have the vantage point to say, “Hey, have you considered this? You’re paying for this technology. Let us optimize it for you.”
Nick: What would you say to a company thinking about bringing on a consultancy like Demand Spring?
Jessie: A consultancy is going to poke and prod. Be open to it because we may see things that you don’t. We want to know you. We want to know how to build success for you and your organization.
The job of a good consultancy is to ask a ton of questions. If they don’t, buyer beware.
Nick: Speaking of asking questions, I’m going to wrap mine up and let you get back to doing what you do so well. Thanks so much for your time today!
Lex: Thank you, Nick.
Jessie: Our pleasure.
Interested in working with a Drift Partner like Demand Spring? Check out our directory here.
