Smartsheet.com, a Bellevue, Wash.-based software startup, launched its first product in the fall of 2007 – online team task management tools. The business, which has just 12 employees, had to be smart with its advertising dollars. Vice President of Marketing Maria Colacurcio tells IncTechnology how it revised its online ad strategy to get more bang for the buck.
Elizabeth Wasserman: How did you first advertise your business and products?
Maria Colacurcio: We started out doing primarily paid search on some generic terms. But we weren’t getting the results we wanted.
Wasserman: What was wrong with it?
Colacurcio: The market we’re in is very noisy. You have everything from online project management at the more complex end to the wiki market and free form collaboration at the other end.. Everyone is pounding on the same message: Collaboration. We were trying to figure out a way to differentiate ourselves and have a voice in the market. So we decided to look at our customers — at what pain points they have and what problems they’re trying to solve. Instead of saying, “Collaborate more efficiently,” we’d say, “How is our customer in HR struggling in terms of collaboration?” They’re dealing with the hiring process and have to deal with consolidating information from hiring managers, new employees and upper management. They have to keep track of job postings, resumes, interview notes and references. They need to streamline the hiring practice and that’s how we could help. So we wanted to leave a very generic model and go to a very specific advertising model to reach more qualified potential customers.
Wasserman: So what new techniques did you try?
Colacurcio: The first was going from specific to targeted. Instead of having one landing page or five generic landing pages that we’d send everyone to, we started splitting out specific landing pages and now have between 40-50 landing pages. They’re targeted at really different audiences. One could be targeted at an events manager. Another could be targeted at someone planning a trade show, and trying to streamline processes and make them more efficient. Once we had these 40-50 landing pages, we had to figure out how we could really optimize the landing pages. That’s when we undertook a multi-variate testing project with Widemile. We didn’t want to have to test each one – because that would be a really big project to take on – so we picked out top five.
Wasserman: What is multi-variate testing?
Colacurcio: Multi-variate testing consists of testing multiple elements in a webpage very quickly to identify the optimal combination. We had six elements that we were testing. One test element, for example, was a quote. We tested how effective a customer quote on the landing page was as opposed to an industry analyst quote. The customer quote might be, “I’ve used this product and it’s been great.” The analyst quote might be, “I’ve vetted Smartsheet and it’s a great company.” What we found was that the analyst quote was much more powerful. They felt much more comfortable that we were vetted by analysts as opposed to by a customer.
At the end of the day, we tested over 1,000 different combinations. As you can see, it’s not practical to design and build over 1,000 discrete webpages, and that’s the beauty of multivariate testing. We were really able to discover the ideal landing page and which factors are most important. What you find is that things like big blocks of copy don’t really make a difference. People don’t read them. People do read captions under a picture or a diagram. They think that’s important so that is a great place to have a couple of sentences of copy.
Wasserman: What results have you seen?
Colacurcio: We’ve seen twice the number of conversions of people who click on our ad and are converted into customers. With our product being a software-as-a-service, people can sign up to try out product or sign up for an account right there. We’re still spending the same amount on Google Adwords. But while before we were seeing a conversion rate between 4-5 percent, after the testing we saw a conversion rate of 6-12 percent. It pretty much doubled.
Wasserman: Why is it so important for new business to get a bigger bang for the buck through advertising?
Colacurcio: As a new business, there is so much value out of online advertising and paid search. As a small company, we really wanted to make sure we were optimizing every dollar. If I’m spending a lot on the Google side, I want to make sure I’m doing everything I can to capture those people and get them to try our product. It’s an investment that’s absolutely worth making.
