Demand generation is an essential part of any go-to-market strategy, which could be defined as an action plan that specifies how a company will reach the target audience and achieve a competitive advantage. The purpose of such a strategy is to provide a blueprint for delivering a product to the end-users. Pricing and distribution should be taken into account as well. In the software industry, a go-to-market strategy is somewhat similar to a business plan, although the latter is broader in scope and considers factors such as funding.
In the mid of 2017, I joined the BCL Technologies team. This Silicon Valley-based company develops document creation, conversion, and extraction solutions that are used to automate a wide variety of manual processes while saving time, increasing productivity and profitability.
The company is supported by the US government and has already developed proprietary technologies through research sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Advanced Technology Program (ATP). These technologies assist in commercializing digital library research from NASA, NSF and DARPA.
As a digital marketing professional, I was accountable for BCL's online products (pdfonline.com) and SDK promotion.
BCL easyPDF SDK is a powerful PDF Programming Toolkit designed specifically to help programmers develop and maintain PDF server and PDF desktop applications. It is developed from the ground up to fit well in an environment where programmability, quality, speed, and reliability are of the utmost importance.
The ultimate digital go-to-market strategy based on organic and paid search channels has delivered additional traffic to the website. As a result, it raised the number of download leads for SDK by 42.88%. As part of the strategy, in 6 months my team developed over 30 different web assets, published over a hundred articles, and conducted 10+ digital marketing campaigns that have increased the performance of SEM by 368.79%. CPC was reduced by 60.25%.
A unique approach was used to generate organic traffic. We leveraged modern SEO and content syndication techniques combined into solid digital PR tactics. Therefore, search engines appreciate PFDOnline.com as an important tool and source of information for PDF developers. For a long period of time, the site was ranked #1 for such queries as PDF SDK, PDF API, and online converter.
BCL has gained several competitive advantages, including brand awareness and over 2M visitors on the website per month. It has signed several long-term contracts with well-known companies such as Adobe, Prompt, Sony, Abbott Laboratories, etc.
SDK and online cloud products have become the main source and stable of income of BCL Technologies.
Another Silicon Valley-based company, a well-known RPA industry leader - Automation Anywhere Inc. (AAI) had made me an offer to join their demand generation team in November 2018. The biggest marketing challenge for me was to develop a go-to-market strategy for the new Robotic Process Automation Platform and to create a stable flow of leads via their website.
The new platform's strategy was based on paid search as the main channel and used on social media together with display campaigns. Within 4 months after the launch date, it delivered over 27,500 sign-ups with a Cost Per Lead at less than $50.
As an additional effort, and the main one to getting Marketing Qualified Leads faster, my team used a new approach to implement SEM campaigns in the cognitive automation solution. Global SEM campaigns were designed to engage business users who were interested in a particular solution (provided by the company) and convert them into MQL in fewer efforts. As of now, this campaign generates more than 350 leads per month on search engines with a CPA under $150.
As a general result of our joint efforts, AAI website's audience has increased by 389.88%. Furthermore, digital marketing channels have generated over 2,730 MQLs globally (vs. 1,988 MQLs that was planned).
