CASE STUDY

The Content & Acquisition Strategy That Created a Category Leader

INDUSTRY

SaaS

LOCATION

New York (US)

TIMEFRAME

February 1st, 2022 to Ongoing

Tamara Ceman

Director of Product-led Marketing

Minuttia is always extremely helpful with catching some things that we missed on our end, which shows they really care about their clients, beyond their scope, which makes me feel like we're in secure hands.

Turning organic search into the company’s best-performing channel

More than 75% reduction in monthly paid search spent due to paid users acquired through organic search

Integrating and benefiting from the acquisition of the assets of a competing SaaS

The company

MarkUp is a web-based tool that enables users to add comments directly onto digital content such as websites, PDFs, and images, facilitating collaborative feedback and review processes. It is especially useful for teams involved in web development, design, and content creation, allowing them to pinpoint specific areas of a project for discussion or revision. Users can highlight text, add notes, and share their annotations with colleagues in real-time, streamlining communication and project management. This tool enhances efficiency by centralizing feedback and reducing the need for extensive email threads or separate review documents.

Growth Summary

Within 26 months, we helped MarkUp become the #1 software in the world in the markup category. We achieved that through a multi-layered strategy that included acquiring and fully integrating another SaaS company called Oroson, defining the content strategy to reduce overreliance on paid search for user acquisition and creating human-crafted content that targeted different search intents and market segments. Our team provided the strategy behind Oroson’s integration as a product and online asset that generated decent organic traffic and had an existing content inventory. We then aligned the acquisition and integration strategy with the overall content strategy for MarkUp and started coordinating with MarkUp’s in-house team for implementation.

The Challenges

Highlights
Heavy reliance on paid search with a 6-figure monthly investment that wasn’t translated into positive ROI for the company
Lack of knowledge and experience in integrating the online assets of a newly acquired company
Lack of strategy and overall direction when it came to content
Little-to-no visibility in the US and other English-speaking countries for terms relevant to the company’s product
Little-to-no traffic coming from the US and other English-speaking countries
Zero free trials were directly attributed to organic search
Needed high-quality content to integrate the product when and if it made sense
A few months before we started working with MarkUp, the company had acquired a competing product called Oroson.
Around the same time, the company was heavily dependent on paid search for user acquisition, with questionable results.
In addition, the company’s blog had just a handful of posts, most of which focused on product announcements or company milestones.
On top of all that, the company operates in a very competitive category with direct (e.g., online proofing software) and indirect competitors (e.g., online collaboration software).
The company needed to understand if and how Oroson’s strong website visibility and traffic could be leveraged (since there was feature overlap between the two products) and how it could reduce reliance on paid search (since the company’s motion was and is product-led).
The timing for calling in an experienced and reliable partner like Minuttia couldn’t have been better.
Following our qualification process and after agreeing on all levels, we kicked things off on February 1st, 2022, while our content creation service started two months later.

The Solution

Highlights
Analyzing the feature and content overlap between MarkUp and the newly acquired Oroson
Coming up with a plan on how to treat existing content on Oroson’s website and get the most out of the visibility and traffic Oroson was receiving
Building the content strategy for MarkUp with a focus on reducing reliance on paid search and increasing the visibility and the number of users acquired from organic search
Creating human-crafted and objective-specific content that targets different search intents
MarkUp and Oroson had some feature overlap but the products weren’t the same.
Our first task was to understand how similar the two products were and map their features.
This was a tedious task, but it allowed us to:
Understand the product really well, really quickly
Understand which content pieces and feature pages from Oroson’s website could be used in MarkUp’s strategy.

After mapping out the features of the two products, we followed a similar process for Oroson’s and MarkUp’s content inventories.
As discussed earlier, MarkUp had just a handful of content pieces, while Oroson had decent content pieces and feature pages that could be leveraged in different ways.
Here’s what the process looked like in the back end.
This was the first step in building our content strategy, and a very important one since Oroson’s traffic was something we needed to start with an edge.
What followed was the identification of net new opportunities, taking into account the data MarkUp had from the performance of its paid search campaigns.
This was important because one of our objectives was to reduce the monthly 6-figure spend and reduce the company’s overall reliance on paid search for user acquisition.
Our SEO and Content Marketing teams worked together to craft the content strategy.
Following the sync with our client, we started working on the approved strategy with Minuttia leading content creation.
Very easy communication, bi-weekly meetings, and quarterly overviews. The deliverables are always on time.
Of course, a strategy isn’t—and shouldn’t be—a static thing.
Our team was always proactive in communicating additional opportunities and roadblocks that can set us up for success.
Minuttia is always extremely helpful with catching some things that we missed on our end, which shows they really care about their clients, beyond their scope, which makes me feel like we're in secure hands.
That’s what allows us to achieve great results for most of the engagements we get into.

Results

Highlights
Turning organic search into the company’s best-performing channel for the acquisition of visitor-to-freemium and freemium-to-paid users
More than 75% reduction in monthly paid search spend due to paid users acquired through organic search
Integrating and benefiting from the acquisition of the assets of a competing SaaS
The first thing we achieved was pointing our client in the right direction regarding the acquisition of Oroson.
Our collective efforts drastically reduced our client’s monthly spend on paid search.
That was achieved through a tremendous growth in MarkUp’s organic visibility for topics with different search intents.
The website now has high visibility for terms with commercial search intent that the company previously had to target through paid search.
This resulted in turning organic search into the company’s best-performing channel for the acquisition of visitor-to-freemium and freemium-to-paid users.

CASE STUDY

The Content & Acquisition Strategy That Created a Category Leader

INDUSTRY

LOCATION

TIMEFRAME

The company

Growth Summary

The Challenges

The Solution

Results

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