Sendbird Paid and SEO Strategy

The Challenge

As a startup in a competitive marketplace, Sendbird had aggressive marketing goals. But the inability to fill, track and nurture prospects in their lead pipeline presented a major obstacle. They needed a strategic partner with digital marketing expertise to execute on those goals, formalize and optimize their lead pipeline, and help them stand out from the competition.

Early work, including persona research, an SEO audit and paid channel setup, built a strong foundation for the partnership to evolve. Walker Sands also played a key role in Sendbird’s Marketo standup and helped optimize lead scoring, establish integrations for paid campaign tracking, and advance data enrichment and integrity.

Following these early foundational successes, Sendbird looked to Walker Sands to further optimize the paid program and SEO strategy to improve organic and paid ad performance, drive leads and unlock the full potential and value in their sales pipeline.

The Solution

Sendbird collaborated with Walker Sands to execute on vital areas for their continued growth and competitiveness.

Tracking and Optimizing Paid Performance

Walker Sands addressed tracking implementation across paid campaigns to ensure visibility into what was sourced and influenced by paid efforts. With better visibility, the team could make smarter strategic decisions on budget, content and pacing to create a reliable nurture stream. 

As a strategic partner, Walker Sands also delivered recommendations to Sendbird that pushed them to consider different promotional angles based on pain points from the buyer’s journey (such as tackling the decision to build or buy). These insights guided the development of content and creative that would resonate with their audience. 

With new content and greater visibility into performance than ever before, Walker Sands launched hundreds of new paid campaigns over three months, rotated active content on a regular basis and trialed different types of ads and copy — constantly testing and optimizing along the way to ensure top performance.  

Building a Strong SEO Strategy

Alongside the paid work, Walker Sands built a content and technical SEO strategy that would achieve short-term results within a long-term strategy to improve Sendbird’s search rankings and maintain relevance. In addition to writing new, optimized pages for Sendbird’s website, the team provided strong guidance around CTAs, meta descriptions, broken links and keyword research. 

Walker Sands also served as a technical resource across the board by helping optimize Sendbird’s SEMrush instance and adding Google Tag Manager and Marketo Munchkin to their pages for enhanced tracking and greater optimization potential down the road.

The Results

Thanks to a strong partnership built on early successes, Walker Sands was able to collaborate with Sendbird to shore up their lead pipeline and uncover technical areas to improve performance throughout the funnel. As Sendbird’s needs evolved, Walker Sands remained a valuable strategic partner, ultimately leading to impressive paid and SEO results.

With increased visibility into the paid program, the teams were able to accurately track leads that directly impacted Sendbird’s revenue. The paid program alone brought in 4,028 MQLs, influenced 342 opportunities valued at $6.4 million in pipeline, and sourced 250 opportunities valued at $2.5 million in pipeline.  

Walker Sands also made great progress in improving Sendbird’s organic search performance. In addition to seeing a 54% increase in organic search traffic, the quality of traffic also improved significantly with a 59% increase in organic search conversion rates.

Following the paid and SEO program’s strong results, Walker Sands continues to be a consistent, valuable force in Sendbird’s paid and organic strategy, serving as a strong strategic partner as they continue to scale.