Pendo

The client 

Founded in 2013, Pendo has grown from a tech startup to a ‘Unicorn’ business. Headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, they offer a cloud platform for digital product creators and product development teams with two main sides to the business.

One side offers product experience solutions that help software companies understand their audiences. For example, app owners can use Pendo to understand how their platforms are being used in the real world, such as where their users are clicking, how they’re using different features and allow apps to get feedback from users on what they like and dislike.

The other side helps large companies to roll out new software; here, their solution can train users, get feedback and support staff through the transition.

Now one of the biggest players in the in-app analytics and digital adoption market, Pendo has eight offices around the world, over 800 million users and is currently valued at an impressive $2.6 billion.

The challenge  

Pendo came to Hallam with the aim of driving awareness and adoption of their products across EMEA. 

With priority growth areas including the UK, Ireland and the Nordics, they needed an agency to support them with their expansion targets, requesting agency support to review their current strategy and make recommendations from it, plus daily management of all paid performance marketing, guidance on content strategy, creative and messaging.

Alongside this, Pendo also needed an agency partner who could include insights on regional and language-specific initiatives, utilising specialist international growth knowledge for SaaS brands. 

What we did

Working with our strategy team to develop Pendo’s overall paid media strategy, our team supported Pendo with the management and expansion of their EMEA targeting campaigns, running ads through Google Ads and Microsoft Ads across 6 different countries. 

As part of the strategy, the team highlighted the opportunity for expansion using paid social activity. Starting with LinkedIn activity, our paid social consultants completely restructured the account to focus on the customer journey and lead funnel. 

Implementing a clear differentiation between retargeting and prospecting, we instigated the use of LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms and segmented location and language-based campaigns. By focusing on key territories and company size segments, it allowed us to define audiences at different stages of the B2B buying cycle without fragmentation. Introducing another thread to our approach, we also launched ABM activity to drive higher quality lead value across key company size segments. 

In order to heighten Pendo’s brand awareness and product education, we introduced sponsored video content and traffic-driving campaigns on LinkedIn; this approach was then mirrored across the Facebook Marketing Suite. To feed more users into the upper funnel qualification stages, we also launched Google Display activity to focus on replicating the success we saw through other branded campaigns in EMEA.

The results

This holistic approach to paid social activity saw both the quantity and quality of leads amassed increase.

From a standing start in the EMEA territory, we went from no paid branding activity to delivering over 1.2 million ads and over 250,000 key content views in an attempt to create a clear customer funnel. This branding approach was integral to qualifying users into our re-engagement audiences – it was a key foundation to the success seen at lead and MQL level. 

LinkedIn lead volume increased by 62%, with MQLs seeing an 81% increase for the same period. Plus, despite an 18% increase to paid spend across the download campaigns, Pendo saw a cost per download reduction of 27% and a cost per MQL reduction of 35%.

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