Client
SharpSpring
Location
Gainesville, FL USA
Services Provided
Comprehensive B2B influencer marketing program
Situation
SharpSpring allows marketers to capture more leads and salespeople to track and convert those leads through a robust platform that includes CRM and automation capabilities.
While SharpSpring is a valuable tool for nurturing leads, their own challenge was to increase brand visibility, awareness, and trust among small digital marketing agencies, which are one of their core audiences. SharpSpring offers a re-brandable product that’s perfect for digital agencies to package and resell to their own clients, as a differentiator and profit center.
Historically, SharpSpring has found that outreach to agency owners and executives hasn’t been as successful as they would like, due to the limited time and attention of that audience.
Therefore, they came to Convince & Convert to develop an influencer program that would win the trust and time of these busy agency owners and executives.
Challenges
SharpSpring faced the following challenges:
- The product provides a ton of value to agencies, but it also requires education to get agencies on-board
- They compete in a space with brands including Hubspot, Marketo, and Pardot
- They needed to build trust, so agencies would want to learn more.
Solution
Convince & Convert had to help SharpSpring become viewed as trusted and valuable to agencies. While they had a strong email list of their own, SharpSpring also needed to reach new, highly relevant potential customers. To achieve these goals, C&C helped SharpSpring develop a program that would speak to the challenges and motivations of agency owners and executives—they identified the right content to build trust and desirability among the right people.
Together, C&C and SharpSpring created the “SharpSpring Agency Acceleration Series,” an online event that featured 13 macro and topical influencers including such names as Seth Godin, Ann Handley, Rand Fishkin, Shama Hyder, and others—people really known and trusted by agency owners.
Because agency owners wanted to learn from these experts, they readily signed up for the program. This not only cultivated trust in SharpSpring as a resource for agencies, but also gave the audience an opportunity to learn about SharpSpring’s capabilities in an organic way.
Results
- Within 60 days, more than 4,000 registrations to attend the event
- 2,500 marketing qualified leads from this C&C program so far
- Continuing efforts with C&C into 2021.
Convince & Convert hit it out of the park with a heavy-hitter influencer strategy. Jay and team provided a complete overarching strategy based on research, great creative ideas and detailed execution. No matter how small or big the task, the team came through and helped us launch one of our biggest marketing initiatives.
Kim Anchors
Director of Marketing – Lead Generation, SharpSpring