Onshape is an innovative SaaS cloud-native computer-aided design (CAD) product development platform. They empower engineers and designers all over the world to speed up time-to-market for their products with the power of designing in the cloud, real-time collaboration tools, and integrated product data management (PDM) in an all-in-one solution.
The experts in cloud-native product development were at a key flex point in their company growth. They had a solid internal marketing team, but needed to usher-in a product-led, enterprise-grade marketing and advertising strategy to continue to scale. How could they ramp up their efforts while navigating a rebrand, being acquired, and tapped out internal bandwidth?
Onshape pioneered the future of product development with their cloud-native software, but their more traditional, somewhat fragmented marketing approach needed the same disruption they’d become known for. We knew we needed to help them systematically implement a customer-centric demand marketing machine that was measurable at a unified, macro level as well as at the tactical level. To educate buyers at scale, we’d need to roll out more value for users than ever before with free trials and a library of ungated resource content.
To begin blending demand generation into Onshape’s existing lead generation approach, we’d need to build from the ground, up: refining audiences and content, testing new advertising channels and campaigns, and rebuilding their attribution and reporting to align to solid business goals, not just marketing metrics. That way, whether our approach moved the needle or not could be evaluated as a whole, rather than in piecemeal efforts.
Onshape’s internal marketing team was facing all-too-familiar growing pains with their bandwidth and the need to manage new efforts necessary to keep scaling. We seamlessly integrated with Onshape’s team to operate as a true extension, spearheading digital marketing strategy so marketing leadership could focus on product development and departmental growth and reorganization. From developing key internal workflows and processes to extending their internal bandwidth, skillsets, and strategic capabilities, we helped lay crucial internal groundwork for our new enterprise-level international marketing strategy to succeed.
We broke down previously existing siloes and increased interdepartmental communication, effectively bridging internal resource and knowledge gaps. We earned trust, and by collectively distributing responsibilities, everyone could see that sustainable growth would now be possible.
We worked with the marketing, content, product, and customer success teams to co-develop new customer personas and develop fresh, more tailored messaging to drive core brand stories and more effective content creation. We reframed and updated unique selling points (USPs), and developed a new end-to-end content strategy focused on filling touchpoint gaps we identified, as well as more finely focused on providing value via educational resources and solutions that addressed specific customer pain points and objections. After all, the average user engages with 3 to 5 pieces of content before talking to a sales rep, but once you earn their initial trust, 78% of consumers will choose you over another brand. This, coupled with a revamped information architecture on the website would create a more compelling and consistent throughline threaded throughout the customer experience.
We now could directly address customers who were entrenched in conventional beliefs about on-premise vs cloud-based CAD software and file collaboration and helped them understand that Onshape assembles the whole product design team — anytime, anywhere.
The tentpoles of our revamped marketing strategy were centered around un-gating crucial educational and credence-building content, offering a free trial of Onshape to prospective new customers, and reaching a new generation of engineers: students in college classrooms learning how to use CAD software for the first time.
To effectively create, capture, and nurture demand, we created a product-led, enterprise-level demand marketing framework of integrated content development, account-based marketing (Demandbase), and advertising campaigns across paid social (Youtube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter), and display. Paid search effectively captured the demand we were creating with timely retention and education content promotion and pain-point driven targeting based on their level of intent.
This omnichannel approach drove demand at new customer touchpoints across a diversity of prospects, while staying fresh as the product continued to innovate and iterate, and would be scalable for years to come. This approach helped Onshape evolve their marketing approach from an SMB startup mentality into a product-led, full-tilt international CAD marketing triple threat.
Through mutual trust and close collaboration, we helped Onshape’s marketing approach grow into an international enterprise-grade demand gen machine that will scale with them for years to come. From equipping their team with necessary tools and skills to breaking down internal silos, we pushed through a truly innovative strategy that gave them their most profitable year to date.
