
Bill.com
A creative social media campaign with compelling copy and motion design drives 5.8% engagement rate and 22,000+ impressions
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Owler, the world’s largest community-based business insights platform, needed to bolster engagement within its community and attract new members. Walker Sands leveraged Owler’s CEO Likeability Study to uncover data-driven storylines, tie data to timely news trends, and tailor outreach by city and industry. This approach generated hundreds of placements, thousands of social media shares and millions of impressions.
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With over 1 million active users and a global database spanning 15 million organizations, Owler is the world’s largest community-based business insights platform. Using crowdsourced information from business professionals around the world, Owler delivers unique insights like competitive analysis, private company revenue, funding and acquisitions, and CEO ratings to business leaders like marketers, investors and salespeople. To contribute information, members regularly answer simple, clear questions based on the companies they follow, profiles viewed and where they are currently employed.
Owler came to Walker Sands with two distinct challenges. The first was securing high-quality media placements to increase the community-based platform’s national brand awareness. Despite being well-known in the Bay Area, Owler struggled to achieve significant media coverage in top-tier business outlets. The second challenge was to bolster engagement with Owler’s existing community while attracting potential new members from all types of professional services.
When Owler reached out to Walker Sands, the company was launching its Top CEO Awards campaign using data from its community of business professionals. Owler recognized its business data possessed media value and approached Walker Sands for assistance building a campaign that could capture reporters’ attention using Owler’s data. This led to the creation of Owler’s first National CEO Likeability Study, which ranked the highest rated leaders across 50 cities and 25 industries. Armed with data focusing on recognizable CEOs and companies, Walker Sands developed a media outreach plan to generate lots of media coverage, as well as help Owler build a reputation as a trusted resource for business insights.
Walker Sands created a data-driven PR strategy leveraging Owler’s CEO Likeability Study to pitch reporters nationwide and generate buzz around the final rankings. Key elements of Walker Sands’ approach included:
Within the first month of launching the 2017 CEO Likeability campaign, Walker Sands generated over 200 placements, 442,131,328 impressions and more than 21,000 social media shares for Owler. The team secured a number of placements in Owler’s primary target – mainstream, national business outlets – such as Bloomberg, CNBC, Forbes, Quartz, Inc., Yahoo!, plus many more.
Outside of national press, the team landed media coverage in 21 different local markets and in 17 different industry verticals. Some industry and local highlights include the San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Business Journal, AdAge, Industry Week and Retail TouchPoints.
In addition to top-tier media coverage, Walker Sands’ work inspired:
As Owler’s CEO Likeability campaign garners additional media coverage, Walker Sands continues to pursue future publication opportunities to grow and strengthen brand awareness for the growing online community.