Elevating Semrush’s Social Media Presence With Premium Microcontent

The Challenge

Semrush engaged Walker Sands to act as a strategic partner in leveling up its creative expression on Twitter. While the martech provider had a standard business presence on social media, Semrush needed supplemental support to distinguish its brand from competitors, drive a higher engagement rate among its target audience and build brand loyalty.

The Solution

Over the course of three months, the Walker Sands team set out to design and implement a premium Twitter microcontent program for Semrush that would:

• Use humor to emphasize product value
• Embed the brand in timely, trending conversations
• Lead with empathy, prioritizing audience interests over marketing messages

While Semrush already had brand guidelines in place that outlined its verbal identity, the Walker Sands team identified a need to create a sub-persona for Semrush’s Twitter platform to distinguish the brand from its competitors in the martech space. After kicking off the program with social listening and competitive research, Walker Sands documented an evolved brand voice for Semrush that took on a snarky, relatable tone that differentiated the brand from its more conservative competitors and resonated with its audience of passionate digital marketers.

To bring the new voice to life, Walker Sands created themed, recurring Twitter content to demonstrate Semrush’s product value in amusing ways while showing empathy for its target audience. Every Monday morning, Walker Sands’ Social Media Strategist scanned the latest Twitter trends and social listening topics to identify popular topics for the week — from new meme formats and gifs to celebrity gossip, sports, new Netflix shows and more. Walker Sands then determined how these topics could relate to Semrush and the most appropriate format to illustrate the brand’s value, such as leveraging the company’s platform features with a screen grab, a new meme or snarky commentary.

With these insights in hand, Walker Sands’ copywriters developed microcontent centered around niche industry humor and relatable struggles experienced by digital marketers to drive emotional engagement. The team also curated content that lightheartedly poked fun at Semrush’s competitors to demonstrate the value of Semrush’s product in comparison, and leveraged humor to showcase Semrush’s search product features though recurring themes such as #StruggleSearch or “Asked + Answered.”

In addition to the recurring content, Walker Sands also produced content that enabled Semrush to react to comments and news, embedding the brand in timely Twitter conversations. From reacting to Elon Musk’s latest tweets to trending search topics, the team kept tabs on relevant news stories and “viral moments” that Semrush could attach their Twitter persona to in an organic way for the purpose of elevating the brand’s voice in the digital marketing community.

The Results

Through this premium Twitter microcontent program Walker Sands was able to define a new voice for the Semrush Twitter account, which was reflected in posts from the Semrush internal team and recognized by its audience as a successful shift. One user even tweeted, “Did you hire a new social media person?” 

The Twitter program drove high engagement and awareness among Semrush’s target audience, as shown through a significant increase in impressions and engagement. In just the first month, the social program resulted in:

• 250,000+ Total impressions
• 17,900+ Total engagements
• 7.16% Average engagement rate
• 182 Total shares
• 87 Total comments

Ultimately, with the distinguished voice and increase in overall engagement, the Twitter program introduced a human approach to Semrush’s social media strategy — enabling Semrush to eat away at the competitor share of wallet and successfully improve its brand sentiment over time.