13
Jun 2024
How Mentionlytics Helped ContentCal Grow Before its $100m Acquisition by Adobe
How Mentionlytics Helped ContentCal Grow Before its $100m Acquisition by Adobe
CASE STUDY
How Mentionlytics Helped ContentCal Grow Before its $100m Acquisition by Adobe
Client: ContentCal
Contact Person: Andy Lambert, Director of Growth & Founding Team
Uncovered growth potential
by measuring Share of Voice.
Created new strategies
to spark online conversations.
Built strong relationships
and increased brand awareness.
The B2B SaaS market is a battlefield with many well-established players making it almost impossible for new businesses to grow and survive in this league. ContentCal, a content marketing and social media management tool, faced this exact challenge.
Andy Lambert, Co-Founder and Director of Growth of ContentCal identified that the problem was the lack of trust from customers. Being a new tool, customers didn’t trust it. Thus, he focused his growth strategy on building that trust through word of mouth.
According to Andy:
“The number one underlying emotion that governs all behavior is trust. And how do we engineer trust at scale? It’s by getting more people to talk about you.” (Source: YouTube)
That’s where Mentionlytics came into play. The Mentionlytics platform helped Andy track ContentCal’s online word of mouth by measuring its Share of Voice.
With this data, Andy could pinpoint where his brand should improve — increase Share of Voice as a direct reflection of word of mouth — and focus his growth strategy on creating awareness and social media conversations around ContentCal.
About ContentCal
ContentCal is an exceptional B2B SaaS success story. The company thrived within 5 years of its beginning, ending up being acquired by Adobe in 2021. And Andy’s branding efforts were pivotal to this success.
ContentCal was founded in 2016. In just a year, the team grew revenues by an astonishing 300% from Q1 2017 to Q1 2018. Furthermore, during the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020-2021, they managed to close multimillion funding rounds, despite the general uncertainty.
As for Andy, he’s a seasoned entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience in creating markets and building profitable businesses. Andy is a true supporter of social media marketing as the growth engine of B2B SaaS companies.
He also loves to share his experience and knowledge through podcasts – his new podcast series, Social 3.0, just launched -, videos, and LinkedIn posts to help marketers and business owners navigate the social media world.
The Challenge: Grow a B2B SaaS Company against Major Competitors
Since day one, the ContentCal team knew they were entering a saturated market with popular, successful competitors that people talked a lot about online. So, it became clear to Andy that to get a slice of the market pie, ContentCal should increase the online buzz around their brand. He believes that:
“The more people we get talking about us, the more we maximize mental availability, the more we create virality, the more we build word of mouth.” (Source: YouTube)
ContentCal, being a newcomer in the market, had limited social media buzz compared to major players, such as Hootsuite and Buffer. But one metric helped Andy showcase the difference, as he shared in a Marketing Meetup online discussion:
“We did this in the early days. It got one of our investors hungry straight away because I just put our competitor in Mentionlytics [...] and then showed where our tiny little Share of Voice was at that point. I was like, “The reason we’re not growing as quickly as we want to right now is because everyone’s talking about Hootsuite. We need to change that.”
Andy LambertFounding Team and Director of Growth at ContentCal
Watch Andy analyzing the importance of Share of Voice at 44:29.
Share of Voice: A Proof of Business Growth through Organic Content
For Andy, the Share of Voice is the most important indicator of the macro effect of organic efforts on a business overall.
Basically, this metric quantifies the online visibility of a brand compared to its competitors. That means, it measures word of mouth — the ultimate goal of marketing.
“Historically, word of mouth has always been the most powerful marketing channel and Share of Voice is the digital manifestation of that. Making it the most critical metric pertaining to content marketing growth.” (Source: Gyda.co)
To measure the Share of Voice of ContentCal, Andy trusted the Mentionlytics platform.
He started monitoring ContentCal’s mentions across the web and social media, along with key competitors. These mentions fed Mentionlytics’ Share of Voice feature, which automatically calculated this metric with a click of a button.
Mentionlytics provided a clear picture of how much people were talking about ContentCal compared to industry giants. This data was a wake-up call, highlighting the need to increase social media buzz.
Source: ContentCal’s Share of Voice in Mentionlytics
Also, Andy used Mentionlytics to scan ContentCal’s mentioners and see who was talking about his brand. Then, he forged powerful partnerships with influencers to strengthen ContentCal’s social media presence.
“Mentionlytics also helps you understand who is talking about your brand, so you can identify the most influential individuals mentioning you. Providing an opportunity to strike up deeper partnerships with those individuals and maximize your reach.” (Source: Gyda.co)
Andy LambertFounding Team and Director of Growth at ContentCal
The Solution: Focus on Organic Social and Content Marketing
Since understanding that the main barrier to ContentCal’s success was the limited conversations around the brand, Andy came up with a growth strategy focusing on giving value to the audience.
“Where many that appear to dominate an industry focus on value extraction, I focus on value creation. This empathetic approach leads to better products and happier customers that, in turn, become the growth engine for the business.” (Source: Andy Lambert’s Official Website)
So, he invested heavily in organic social media, to build a genuine relationship with ContentCal’s target audience and spark conversations.
Also, he focused his strategy on content marketing by launching the ContentCal Academy in which over 4,000 individuals completed their content marketing accreditation.
These efforts helped ContentCal increase awareness and word of mouth, which was evident in the increase in their Share of Voice as well. That made the company a strong player in the content management tools league.
The Result: Acquired by Adobe in 2021
Source: ContentCal after Adobe’s acquisition
Andy’s organic content approach, fueled by data-driven insights from Mentionlytics, resulted in rapid growth for ContentCal. The company became popular and credible in a short time.
Share of Voice helped Andy monitor and develop a winning growth strategy that made ContentCal well-known in the market. This, in turn, played a pivotal role in ContentCal’s acquisition by Adobe as their deciding factor was that “we feel like we know you”.
Currently, Andy is a Senior Product Manager at Adobe, helping the company grow even more with his smart strategies.
Final Words
ContentCal’s story is a powerful testament to the importance of Share of Voice. It’s not just a vanity metric. It’s rather a reliable indicator of a brand’s potential.
As Andy reminds us in his Marketing Meetup presentation:
“If we focus on having a bigger Share of Voice than our competitors, our brand will grow. If it’s less our brand will shrink.”
In other words, a business’s growth potential is directly linked to the volume of conversations around it online.
To wrap it up, with Mentionlytics’ insights, ContentCal grew through online word of mouth and became part of an esteemed enterprise like Adobe.
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