How Sprinklr Grew Traffic by Adopting a Full-Funnel Content Strategy

Businesses are increasingly looking to adopt solutions that solve multiple problems. One company that has made a name for itself is Sprinklr. It offers a unified Customer Experience Management platform that caters to enterprises as well as small businesses. 

We got an opportunity to interact with Ruchi Madan, Sprinklr’s content marketing manager. She reveals tidbits about Sprinklr’s journey as it rose from a brand with zero Google presence to one that dominates the SERP for relevant keywords. 

Sprinklr’s Success Highlights

• Sprinklr relies on multiple strategies like blogs, free tools, paid ads, and word-of-mouth to drive demand and revenue.
• Their focus on content refresh has brought growth in traffic and rankings on SERPs.
• Their content is based on insights from customer-facing teams, which makes it more relevant and actionable.
• The team constantly tracks results to optimize their content and SEO strategies.

Let’s learn more about Sprinklr from Ruchi.

Hello Ruchi! Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. Before we get started on Sprinklr, our audience would love to know about your journey.

Can you tell us about your professional journey so far? 

My professional journey has been rather eventful. I started as an English language teacher in a private school in Delhi for around seven years. When I look back, I realize that the transition from an educator to a content marketer was destined. Because as a teacher, I always had an eye for editing and a flair for the language. 

As fate would have it, I had to take a break from full-time work and retire from my teaching job. Post the break, I took up a freelance content writing gig as an experiment. I was servicing multiple clients at the time and learned the skills of client servicing, project management, etc. 

I realized how much I love writing content. Once I was ready for a full-time commitment, I joined a digital marketing agency. I wrote for B2B SaaS clients like Zendesk, Influencer Marketing Hub, GetResponse, etc. I gained a lot of exposure and insight into B2B personas and the industry. I started as a freelance content writer there and moved into a content lead position in two years. 

This stint was crucial to my career, but somehow, I wanted to work for a product company; to understand a product inside out, and create a content strategy for them. 

So that’s how the shift to Sprinklr happened. Sprinklr reached out to me. And the rest, as they say, is history. 

Can you give us an overview of Sprinklr’s journey and how it became so popular? 

Sprinklr is in the unified CXM (Customer Experience Management) space. It’s one product with four modules – customer service, marketing, sales & advertising, and research. These four products work together on a unified platform powered by Sprinkler’s AI engine. 

Today Sprinklr is listed on NYSE. We have got 3500 employees in 26 locations globally. To describe the impact it has made, pick any 10 enterprise brands globally, and 9 will be using Sprinklr. That’s the kind of popularity it enjoys. 

I joined Sprinklr in 2020 as part of the integrated marketing team. It was a very exciting time because COVID had just lifted. Life was returning to normal. There was unprecedented demand in the market for unified tech solutions. Customer experience has suddenly become the new selling point and differentiator for SaaS companies. 

It was not about the price or the product’s look and feel anymore. It was all about the experience. People were so used to getting everything at their beck and call in COVID that companies like Spinklr became very important. 

At that time, Sprinklr was a sales-led company. Salespeople were doing all the heavy lifting, and marketing was a supporting function. Their demand gen strategy was rooted in integrated marketing campaigns across paid, owned, and earned media.

As a content lead, I looked at editing and refining SEO content to drive brand awareness, traffic, and rankings for the company. Within six months, we were able to create a huge impact through high-quality, engaging content. We were able to 3X our website traffic and conquer SERPs for around 305 core keywords. 

Shortly after, I was asked to own the full funnel organic growth strategy. Earlier, it was just TOFU, but now it is a full funnel. 

“A company with zero presence on Google has suddenly become a household name. I saw first-hand the power of targeted, outcome-driven content marketing. I learned how good content marketing – customer-centric content marketing can amplify your brand’s presence, and authority, and also drive solid revenue.”

What has been Sprinklr’s demand gen strategy? 

Sprinklr’s demand gen strategy is tethered to four broad pillars – field marketing, customer growth marketing, integrated campaigns, and organic. All four work in tandem. And since I’m on the organic side, I’ll talk about that. We focus on tactics like product-led growth, lead magnet hooks, tailored content, etc. 

So, we are currently in the process of establishing topical authority. We’ve made some inroads into it. Our strategy is straightforward – if there’s trust, demand will follow. While we have a lot of authority in one industry, we are still trying to establish ourselves in the other three categories and drive that messaging of a unified platform for all business functions. That’s been our main objective so far. 

It’s not easy, as people are still used to adopting point solutions despite all the chaos they bring. So, we first create category awareness and then focus on demand generation. 

If you talk about TOFU and brand awareness, there’s nothing better than a blog to drive traffic, and our blog has been able to do that. 

But if you’re talking about conversions and trials, a blog can’t do it alone, right? There have to be other things. So, we have a full-funnel content strategy. 

“One quick-win strategy for us has been content refreshes. When we started, we did not have any content depth at all. Our blog was in a very nascent stage. Once we were able to build that content depth, then what? 

What do you do once you cover all the topics under the sun for your industry? You have to start refreshing the content. We have driven a lot of traffic and rankings because of that.”

In fact, this year itself, we are focusing solely on content refreshes for our blog. Our specific strategy for these content refreshes flows in from our SEO team after solid competitive research. They come up with recommendations that cover everything from meta tags to images to new insights, adding new content sections, removing redundant ones, optimizing the length of the blog, etc. 

We have been doing that and all of this upranking has happened mainly through refreshes. The best part is it’s a very low-effort, quick-return strategy for SaaS companies. 

What does Sprinklr’s full-funnel strategy look like?

For TOFU, we focus on our blog. For the middle of the funnel, we have things like downloadables, pre-calculators, pre-assessments, how-to guides, etc. And then, of course, for the bottom of the funnel, we go deeper into the product. The assets are the same, but we go slightly deeper to make it more product-centric and actionable. We have more pitches, more CTAs, etc. We also tailor it more and target it to our persona. 

All this ties together because the brand messaging comes from the product marketing teams. They sit with the customer. They participate in customer interactions to understand what problems, objections, and pain points they are facing. All that insight flows to our team and you’ll see our assets based on these insights regardless of the funnel stage. 

We also believe in working on customer loyalty – the retention stage. We work with the best clients in the world who love to rave about us. We have customer stories built around them and we have customer testimonials. We also hold customer-based events. 

For example, we have events where we give awards to the customers who are most vocal about CXM or using CXM the best way.

Which content metrics do you prioritize at Sprinklr? 

So we’ve got our leading metrics – visits to a few important pages like the pricing page, trials, demos, and pillar product pages. The other metrics are leads and conversions. Not only do we track the performance of the entire blog section, but we also do page-wise performance monitoring. We have set quarterly targets for the number of pieces, and the rank growth and traffic growth we aim for, and so on. 

How do you set short and long-term content goals for Sprinklr? 

Basically, our content goals will go hand in hand with the organizational goals of the larger marketing team. For example, the marketing team is tasked to make selling easy. It’s tough to sell Sprinklr because of the competition in this space. Also, Sprinklr has a learning curve. This made it difficult for the sales team to sell the product. So, the goal was to make selling easy. 

Naturally, the content team supported this by devising assets like sales collaterals, competitive takeouts, battle cards, etc. These goals are then readjusted based on quarterly performance and results. 

What is your backlinking strategy? 

We post our content on authoritative websites, review platforms, and social media. We also have an employee advocacy program to encourage our team to post on their social networks and other places where they have a sound presence. That has brought in a lot of backlinks. 

We used to do content syndication earlier, but since it got blacklisted, we discontinued that practice. We have to be very careful of what we put out and how our name is being used because it’s always in the public eye being listed on NYSE. 

There are very rigorous guidelines. So, we are rather conservative in our back-linking strategy at the moment.

Any advice you’d like to share with SaaS content marketers?

B2B content can feel very dry and monotonous. To be known as an effective B2B SaaS marketer, you must be adept at humanizing that content. It should speak to the audience and be actionable. 

“Many times, we forget to focus on how easy it is to implement our product. We will talk about the product, we will talk about the feature, how great it is. We will not show how easy it is to use it.”

Aspiring B2B content writers, especially SaaS writers, should strive for that. And also, make sure that it’s easy on the eye. Use a lot of visuals. And visuals should not only be products or screen grabs. Different people consume content differently. So cater to all of them. Have clips, have videos, have shots. 

Any favorite podcast you’d like to talk about? 

A lot is happening in content marketing, especially with generative AI entering the space. To keep on top of trends, I follow a couple of podcasts. One is SaaS Marketing Superstars. I follow that for best practices, tips, and trends. Another hot favorite is Marketing Madness where I learn things related to content or SEO and the overall marketing domain. 

There’s also a Generative AI channel group on LinkedIn. It’s pretty cool. They share a lot of actionable tips on using generative AI in content and content marketing as well as in other things like creating visuals, prompt engineering, etc. 

What are your thoughts on Google’s SGE and AI? How do you think it will impact content marketing? 

At Sprinklr, we always embrace technology. We feel that generative AI helps us reduce slug work, be it researching statistics or correcting our brand voice. But we’re very clear that everything has to be done with human oversight. Relying on AI is good as a starting point. However, I believe in the human touch that SaaS writers and marketers bring a lot to the table.

According to me, Google’s SGE is an experiment. It’s at a very nascent stage and will take time to give relevant answers. It will be very long before it matches what companies with good content marketing can offer. You’ll still win if you tailor your content and make it hyper-targeted. 

SaaSy Tidbits from Ruchi Madan

• Instead of ignoring AI, the best businesses and marketers supplement it with human oversight to make certain parts of content marketing easy.
• B2B SaaS content should be anything but dull. Always focus on making it engaging and valuable for the target audience. Think in terms of their needs and pain points. 
• Experiment with different content formats and types. Step into the shoes of your target customers and create content according to their preferences. Your content should help them achieve their goals. 

As a SaaS content marketing agency, we also believe in humanizing content. It has helped us create content that readers love to engage with, and we’ll keep working on that.

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

Keep checking out our SaaS Expert Interview space for more SaaSy updates.

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.