SmartRent (2024-2025)

The Situation

When I joined the SmartRent marketing team, they had a strong product-market fit in the rental industry SaaS space, but the team was primarily focused on brand awareness, not generating leads and pipeline. As a result, their digital funnel was fragmented and in need of serious optimization. For example, their website conversion rate was only about 0.2%, and the benchmark for SaaS websites is 1.1-3%! Their fragmented funnel was further exacerbated by a lack of clear reporting tied to pipeline and revenue outcomes instead of vanity metrics.

Biggest Risks

While increasing brand recognition was essential for a new company like SmartRent, there were limited systems in place to capture and nurture leads into new clients. If the rest of their demand generation engine was not built out, they risked wasting marketing dollars on driving awareness and media buzz without translating that attention into interested, high-intent leads to hand off to Sales. Finally, without solid, KPI-based reporting that tied back to pipeline, the team had no reliable way to measure the outcomes and improve our campaigns.

My Response

While I managed our Senior Marketing Automation Specialist and two agencies, for a project of this scope I need to unite a larger team with more resources around our goal. I partnered with Marketing Ops, Growth, Sales, Product Marketing, Web Development, Brand Marketing and Creative to address five key areas.

1. In partnership with Marketing Ops, I developed a KPI dashboard (site conversion rate, CPL, lead-to-MQL, pipeline, ARR, etc.) With clearer measurement in place, I began work on optimizing each of the digital channels under my purview.
2. My next project was raising our site conversion rate. I led A/B tests on site headings and CTA copy, as well as redesigns of several key landing pages on the site and the lead form itself.
3. Paid digital drove the highest site traffic volume but had the lowest conversion rates. To resolve this pain point, I led monthly performance reviews with our Product, Brand and Creative teams where we tested ad messaging. I also worked with our ad agency to test audiences and new channels (streaming audio and connected TV) to discover the most effective places to reach our ideal customer.
4. Next, I onboarded a new SEO agency and worked with our web dev team to implement a technical SEO audit. I also partnered with our Brand team on content and design improvements for our blog and high traffic landing pages. We added FAQs and lead magnet downloads to our most-visited landing pages to guide visitors down the marketing funnel.
5. Finally, I managed and mentored our Senior Marketing Automation Specialist as he worked to improve our email marketing outcomes. Together we launched lead nurture sequences for our top four product lines and implemented A/B tests in campaign emails and landing pages to improve our lead-to-MQL and account expansion.

My Results

In my last quarter at SmartRent, I generated a $1.6M pipeline, which was the highest pipeline marketing had delivered in the previous six quarters. We also saw signs of improvement at the top and middle of the funnel: 18.5% higher organic search traffic, 53% higher conversion rate and 260% more MQLs generated year-over-year. Combined with our new, executive-ready KPI dashboard, we were poised for even greater improvement in the next quarter.