How Geckoboard Reached New Audiences with Content Marketing?

With organizations using an average of 130 SaaS tools, businesses have a lot of data at their disposal.

But it’s not always easy to get that data into the hands of people who will make the most use of it – your team. 

Geckoboard makes it simple for businesses to build real-time dashboards that visualize data from tools like Hubspot, salesforce, and Zendesk, so you can improve team performance.

We got in touch with Dale Pearson, the Head of Marketing at Geckoboard. He spoke about his journey and how Geckoboard uses content marketing to reach new audiences.

Geckoboard’s Success Highlights

• Geckoboard believes that when it comes to having great content and content approach, it’s all about getting the fundamentals right.
• In recent years, they experimented with YouTube content which has brought them significant results.
• Before capitalizing on BOFU content, they built topical and search authority with TOFU and MOFU content.
• They use dashboard templates to get people acquainted with their product and sign up for their trial.

Let’s hear more about Geckoboard from Dale.

Hi Dale! Thank you for taking the time to talk about Geckoboard’s content and marketing journey. Before we dive into strategies and tactics, our audience would love to know more about you.

Can you tell us about your professional journey so far?

I started my journey in creative writing (specifically for theater). It taught me a lot of skills I’ve since come to use in marketing – not just how to write, but also how to build teams, how to work with other people, how to market to audiences, etc.  

I then got a job in the NGO sector for an organization that develops leaders in different sectors and countries. I started working on social media content, video content, written content, so a bit of everything really, and built my way up through that team. After three years, I was running the team as a Marketing Director, which taught me a lot of responsibility early on. That role helped me to get more strategic about marketing as a whole. 

Later, I decided I wanted to change sectors and I moved to Geckoboard. I started with Geckoboard in a content role. And then within two years, I was promoted to Head of Marketing at Geckoboard. 

Tell us about Geckoboard and the impact it is creating.

Geckoboard has been around for over 10 years now. People often talk about big data, predictive modeling, and the more complex things you can do with data. But we believe that the most powerful thing you can do with data is make it accessible to people who are doing the day-to-day work. However, a lot of tools require a level of data specialism that most teams just don’t have. So the real mission behind Geckoboard is to make it completely seamless and easy for your team to be able to access the data that they need to see. 

Geckoboard can plug into tools like Zendesk, Salesforce, and HubSpot, and within a few minutes, build easy-to-understand KPI dashboards that visualize data in real time. So that means that if you’ve got a team, whether it’s a sales team or a customer service team, they are never too far away from being able to see where they stand concerning their KPIs. And we think that the feedback loop between teams working on live deals and live customers and being able to see how they’re performing in real-time is probably one of the most powerful things you can do with data. 

What is your content strategy like? 

I don’t believe in having a ‘content strategy’ per se. We have a marketing strategy and content is a tactical pillar, which is there to serve the overall strategy. 

“In terms of some of the stuff we’ve tried and what makes good content marketing, I believe it comes down to the fundamentals. It’s about knowing who you’re speaking to. It’s about knowing how you’re going to reach them. And it’s about knowing what you want to happen when you do reach them. And often, that’s really underpinned by understanding what your core competence is as a business.” 

So when it comes to our content approach, it’s about lining up those things and just making sure that we’re delivering high-quality content concerning marketing goals. We’ve tried different things over the years. This year, we’re trying to capitalize as much as possible on BOFU content. 

That’s where we see a lot of the low-hanging fruit at the minute but that’s only possible because for years before, we did a lot of work at the top of the funnel. We worked on content that helped us build topical authority, search authority, and backlinks. Because of all that groundwork, now, when we target long tail keywords, we find we are getting to the front page and number one quickly. 

We have also focused on LinkedIn and YouTube content over the past few years. The difficulty with YouTube content is it requires much more time investment. So we need to think carefully about which videos we produce. We have produced some videos which have got tens of thousands of views. 

For example, one video on “12 dashboard design tips” gets a good 2,000 views a week, and that’s well over 100,000 now. And what we’re seeing from our attribution is that YouTube accounts for almost 5% of all our new customers. So it’s not insignificant.

We think YouTube is a good strategy because we’re a very visual brand. Those visual content channels are always going to be a good fit for us. 

How have dashboard templates helped you generate trial sign-ups?

We have a section on our website showing people what they can do with the product. And it’s very SEO oriented in the sense that the structure of that section and the names of the individual dashboards are aligned to search terms that we see as being popular. 

We used to get about 50 sign-ups per month from that particular section. We did some work on it a couple of years ago, and now we see around 700 sign-ups per month. It brought in a lot of people who were searching for specific types of dashboards. 

We put a lot of time and thought into researching real use cases for the dashboard examples. What I’ve seen some of our competitors do in the past is create similar example content, but they are very facile. The reason our section has done so well is that when people are searching for inspiration, for ideas on how to set up a dashboard, what they see in our dashboard examples are real-life use cases. 

So if you’re a sales manager who’s found our sales manager dashboard examples, you recognize the KPIs, the mental model, and the types of things you would want to be reporting on daily with your team. 

My advice for anybody else who’s considering putting out example content (of their products in action): it is worth going deeper to reflect real-life solutions. Because the people looking at that content can tell the difference between something that’s been written by a content manager with no subject matter expertise and something that’s been written and produced with care, attention, and knowledge of who you are and what your pain points are. 

What do you think makes good content?

I didn’t come up with this myself, but I think at the very heart of it, content can do either one of four things – it can inspire, entertain, educate, or persuade. Before we start any piece of content, we tend to think of what we are trying to achieve. 

And if it’s not doing any of these four things, then all we’re doing is just contributing to the noise. I think we all know, especially in B2B, that there’s a lot of content out there which is just white noise. 

So I believe a lot of great content comes back down to the very basics of how somebody consumes it. And are they going to get anything out of it? And I think if you start from that point of view, you’re going to get good quality content. 

How do you set content goals at Geckoboard?

It depends on the content type. With BOFU content, it’s really easy to see where that converts into paying customers, so that’s what we use to set our goals. 

But it’s not always about output metrics. One thing we did at the start of the quarter was set a volume goal for our team. With a small team, we set ourselves a task of producing 90 new pieces of written content in the quarter. 

The goal was, as long as we’re pretty confident that the term is high intent enough that if we were to rank for it, we would get a customer, let’s not overthink it and just focus on the volume. That sounds modest but I think when you’re in the long-tail business, you can’t be expecting lots and lots of subscribers from each individual content. 

I was really proud of the team when we achieved the volume goal and saw many of those pieces resulting in customers. 

If we were doing something further up the funnel, then it’s much harder to track what value is, so you’ve got to be more confident in the effectiveness of that content, how is that landing with individuals, whether or not you’re really speaking to your ICP, whether or not you’re getting viewers, and so on. 

Do you share content with people during your 14-day trial period?

We send more content when people have already subscribed. It’s a way of helping people understand how they can get more out of the product. Because we have a great customer service and support team, we actually put more onus in the trial period on letting them get in touch with these teams.

While the trial period might be 14 days, for most people, in reality, the trial period is a day. So rather than trying to sequence lots of content and second guess what we think people might need, our focus is on making it easier for people to get in touch with our customer support team who is on hand to answer any questions. 

Often, the questions people have are about getting their data set up and we find that the high-touch approach is better in the trial period rather than trying to do that through content. 

Any advice you’d like to give to marketing professionals, especially in the SaaS domain?

The one thing I found about moving into SaaS was it almost feels sometimes like you’ve got this FMCG marketing world and you’ve got this more tech marketing world and they don’t speak to each other that much. For example, it’s really rare to see people in tech and SaaS talking about people like Byron Sharp at Ehrenberg Bass. 

I think LinkedIn’s B2B Marketing Institute is doing a fantastic job of bridging the gap between these two worlds. 

“So my advice would be – immerse yourself in the SaaS world because there are great thought leaders here but also recognize that it can sometimes be a little bit of a bubble too and there are great marketing thought leaders outside of the tech and the SaaS world who are worth paying attention to.”

Any favorite podcasts you’d like to talk about?

When it comes to SaaS and tech, I think Lenny’s Podcast is fantastic. He’s always speaking to really influential, interesting thought leaders in the world of tech and growth and product marketing. On the more general marketing side of things, Mark Ritson and Marketing Week are fantastic for keeping up to date with the marketing world. 

How do you foresee the future of content?

In terms of AI, the way I think about it is it’s going to be very similar to the transition we had when things like stock photography came into play. So if you imagine being the head of a brand, say, 50 years ago, and you wanted to create an advert and have photography in it, then your only option was to go and produce that photography yourself, right? And it was quite expensive to get good quality stuff. 

Then stock photography came in and all of a sudden it became really easy to find any type of picture possible and put it onto your leaflets or promotional materials. But soon, it also became easy for people to recognize it and say, “Oh that looks a bit like a stock photo.” 

I think that’s going to happen with AI. People are going to catch up very quickly just purely through saturation. And they’re probably going to realize when something is produced through AI. Now, we obviously still use stock photography for a whole load of things, but you’re probably not putting that stock photography on the homepage of your website, right? You’re probably not leading with that because you know it’s not very distinctive. You know that people can tell. 

So I think we’ll hit a similar thing with AI where we will use AI to produce a lot of stuff at speed and scale. But customers will also recognize very quickly what is AI and what that feels like. And therefore, I think the more creative industries and the brands that want to be distinctive, will just have to find ways of standing out. It’s like the old BBH advert for Levi’s, ‘When the world zigs, zag.’ 

“AI is going to automate all these things. It’s going to be easier to do a thousand things. But the things brands will ultimately be valued on is the stuff you can’t do with AI. And it might feel like there’s going to be less and less you can’t do with AI, but that’s also going to produce some of the biggest opportunities.”

Is there any piece of content you’d like to talk about?

One thing we’ve worked on recently that we’re really proud of is a dashboard buyer’s guide. April Dunford, a positioning consultant, speaker, and author, has been doing some talks recently about one of the best things you can do as a content marketer educate the buyer on your market and their buying decision. 

So we’ve created this helpful piece of content which is not designed to sell Geckoboard, per se. But to help people understand how to choose a dashboard tool in a very crowded market. And I think it does that really well. 

SaaSy Tidbits from Dale Pearson

• Experiment with different content types and channels. This helps attract diverse audiences with varying content preferences.
• While creating product-led content, always focus on incorporating real-life use cases. The more relevant your content is, the better its chances for conversion.
• Look up to thought leaders in the SaaS industry but remember that inspiration is everywhere. Gain diverse views and knowledge from people outside of the tech industry.

As a customer-centric SaaS content marketing agency, we also believe in creating content that is relevant and actionable and we will continue working on that with renewed enthusiasm. 

If you have any questions about Geckoboard and its journey, we recommend visiting their website or connecting with Dale on LinkedIn.

Stay tuned to our SaaS Expert Interview Space for more insightful conversations around content and marketing.

Author

Nidhi Parikh

Nidhi is a freelance content writer with an experience of over 4 years. She uses a strategic process to come up with well-researched and value-driven long-form content for SaaS brands. When not working, you can find her finishing entire novels in a day and binge-watching the latest web series.