How to make your content convert?

Content? Check. They have plenty of it at the management consultancy firm RevelX. But converting their content remains a challenge. That is why, during the last four years, SUM Digital and the RevelX team explored what works well and what does not. Potential customers can now easily find their way to innovative power.

“There is a strong sense of loyalty and SUM keeps challenging us”

“Of course we can, and we want to do that René!” It starts with Control. To improve business results, you first need to understand what is happening and why. That is why we explored the current situation during the Control-phase of the Growth Framework. We realized that the brand owns buckets full of content.

Blogs that are written full of enthusiasm and knowledge, but which without a strategy, without a funnel, do not contribute to sales. A waste, but more importantly: promising!

Diederik, co-founder and growth marketeer: “For a complex product like management consultancy, a good inbound-strategy is extra important. Otherwise, you supply your target audience with knowledge, without converting this into leads, now or later. That is a nice thing to do, of course, but if you want to grow, you need a method and it is important to determine a conversion strategy.”

When we met the team of RevelX back in 2019, only little attention was paid to growth. René: “I saw us as a scale-up, lacking focus on scaling. That is typical for consultancy firms. When people are too occupied with customers, marketing comes to a halt. That is why our revenue fluctuated immensely.”

How do you sell innovation?

René realizes that it is hard to sell innovation: “Improving innovation generates business results in the long term. It is very important, but rarely urgent. A sale can take months.” His team tried to get the sales going, implementing several creative marketing initiatives, but it was difficult for them to come to one solid strategy.

Opportunities in content

“Of course we can, and we want to do that René!” It starts with Control. To improve business results, you first need to understand what is happening and why. That is why we explored the current situation during the Control-phase of the Growth Framework. We realized that the brand owns buckets full of content.

Blogs that are written full of enthusiasm and knowledge, but which without a strategy, without a funnel, do not contribute to sales. A waste, but more importantly: promising!

Diederik, co-founder and growth marketeer: “For a complex product like management consultancy, a good inbound-strategy is extra important. Otherwise, you supply your target audience with knowledge, without converting this into leads, now or later. That is a nice thing to do, of course, but if you want to grow, you need a method and it is important to determine a conversion strategy.”

“In B2B-marketing only one result matters”

René recognizes the funnel-driven strategy that appeals to him in our Control to Marketing Automation framework: “Many marketing firms are driven by vanity metrics; clicks and views worth this many euros. But in B2B marketing, it only comes down to one thing: the number of appointments with new customers. And you keep leading everything back there.”

Trial and error

That might all sound very successful, but the first funnel we made for RevelX was a total fail. Diederik: “The C-level managers from our target audience seemed to have a problem mainly with executing a strategy. Not with coming up with one.”

“That is why we used a playbook for our second funnel. A download that feels like a manual. Behind it, there is a funnel that leads to an offer you cannot refuse: an innovation scan.”

Checking in every two weeks

Together with RevelX, we go through the dashboards during a bi-weekly Huddle. We assess what is going well, where there is room for improvement and which actions we will take next. René: “This meeting is half about having fun together. During the other half we quickly and professionally decide who will do what.”

“You are like colleagues. There is a strong feeling of loyalty and you challenge us.”

“SUM Digital really keeps us on our toes! Diederik provides daily operational structure and creativity. He will say: ‘This and this is fine, so we will take the next step. How would you feel about doing this and that?”

Patience and perseverance

RevelX has the right mindset, and the SUM team enjoys that. Diederik: “We have been working with RevelX for four years, during which we implemented a growth engine which is ready for automation right now. They keep showing curiosity for the lessons learned from our framework and want to apply them with us in the next spurt.”

Four years of partnership with RevelX meant four years of tinkering with that growth engine. “I was surprised to see that it requires such a long search and continuous experiments to set up a good growth machine. You need patience and perseverance. And you need to prepare a good sales team. Because without sales, marketing is a waste of your investment”, René emphasizes.