Ever wondered why the Pipedrive content marketing strategy is so inspiring?
While a known leader in sales tech, Pipedrive manages to keep their content simple, valuable, and engaging to an audience of small business owners.
Nothing about their site or content is boring or enterprise-y.
If you want to appeal to small business owners with high quality content, then check out this teardown.
We’re diving into the details of Pipedrive’s content marketing strategy and execution.
Teardown Table of Contents
- Pipedrive’s simple resource navigation
- Enviable search traffic
- LinkedIn advertising strategy
- Human level differentiation and Estonia pride
- Clear cross-channel positioning
Pipedrive’s simple resource navigation
We’ve all seen hefty enterprise websites. You know—the ones with gigantic menus with tons of drop downs and options.
Pipedrive’s website menu is refreshingly simple. They lead website visitors in the direction of their features, pricing, blog, and case studies.
Once in the blog subfolder of the website, visitors can navigate to different content topics and formats. The “Improve Sales” category covers sales psychology, sales tactics, and tools. Meanwhile the “Scale Up” category covers data management, sales process, and team management.
Considering that Pipedrive was founded in 2010, this is a smart way to organize over a decade of blog content. You can do the same by keeping your main website’s menu simple and separating your blog into a separate subdomain or subfolder with its own navigation.
In the footer menu, you can see that of course Pipedrive does have additional resources, such as their newsletter, course, and community.
As with everything Pipedrive, their resources page features the same simple UX. Website visitors can choose from sales tips, sale management thought leadership, templates and tools, CRM education, or their blog.
Rather than shove all of their resources in people’s faces at once, Pipedrive makes it easy for website visitors to navigate deeper and deeper into the site.
Enviable search traffic
Founded in 2010, Pipedrive was an early adopter of content marketing. A website report in Ahrefs pulls up 78,000 keyphrases that the company ranks for. Many of their page 1 rankings are for valuable topics that are highly relevant to their product.
For example, they rank for “cold calling scripts,” sales funnel,” “sales pipeline” and other great search queries.
Elements of a winning blog post
All of Pipedrive’s ranking posts rank for a reason. They are valuable pieces of content and feature the elements that both readers and Google loves.
Their blog post on cold calling scripts includes:
- Compelling, SEO optimized title
- Clear reason for reading the post and what will you get out of it
- Table of contents
- Real script templates
- Bullet points
- Numbered lists
- Bold sentences
- Quotes from experts
- Quality infographics
- Relevant screenshots
We’ve seen it time and time again. The content that Google ranks is meaty. It’s specific. It’s bursting with resources. It’s easy to read. It’s compelling.
If you want Google to rank your content, add more elements and resources to it, while still maintaining a cohesive purpose for the article.
Converting blog traffic
Pipedrive’s content marketing features many clear and simple ways for blog readers to progress down their sales funnel.
Their blog posts often include content upgrades, such as the ability to download scripts or templates.
And, the blog subfolder also has a great CTA “Try it free” that sticks to the top of the page, even as the reader scrolls down further through the content. A sticky menu with a CTA is an easy way to get better results out of your blog content.
LinkedIn advertising strategy
Pipedrive’s content marketing is complimented by social ads.
Pipedrive is a very active company when it comes to LinkedIn advertising. While paid ads aren’t part of content marketing, they do of course come into play, especially with retargeting.
Expansion into new markets
With so much English-language success from SEO, content marketing, and over a decade of brand awareness, Pipedrive is currently expanding into new markets. From several ads on their LinkedIn account, we can see that Brazil is one of their highest priority countries right now.
With approximately 1.89 million businesses in Brazil, it’s no wonder that Pipedrive has their eye on gaining more CRM market share in this country.
Quality video ads and retargeting
In addition to targeting new markets, Pipedrive also uses their LinkedIn account to retarget blog readers, newsletter subscribers, and leads with high quality video ads.
As we can see, these ads are more bottom-of-the-funnel. This one walks you through a quick introduction video of Pipedrive and also offers a quick-start course.
With software, convincing someone that your product could help them is only half the battle. You also have to convince them to invest the time into learning something new. Business owners, sales leaders, and sales representatives are busy. When they’re focused on the day-to-day tasks and operations that they’re responsible for, it’s difficult for them to spend time learning a brand new CRM.
That’s why retargeting leads with a quick-start course is such a great idea. It offers a way for the lead to explore what it would be like to use the product, and only requires a small investment of time. This also reinforces the messaging that the product is designed for sales representatives and is easy to use.
When an operations manager is procuring new software, one of the most important criteria they vet for is ease of onboarding for the team. A company can’t get better results from a CRM if they can’t figure out how to use it.
Pipedrive also uses LinkedIn ads to show off their social proof. They include testimonials and star ratings in their ads to convert more leads into customers.
Content marketing without advertising is dangerous. You run the risk of educating your audience about why they need a solution like yours, and then losing those leads to competitors with more optimized bottom-of-the-funnel systems in place.
It’s so critical to set up retargeting ads for your website. To make them even more successful, you should retarget based on the buying stage. For example, if a reader clicks on a top-of-funnel article with a low solution awareness level, they shouldn’t be shown a sign up ad the very next day. Instead, you’ll want to target them with middle of the funnel content, such as a guide or other opt-in.
But for leads who have viewed multiple pages on your website, especially your contact form or pricing page, you should show them your bottom-of-the-funnel ads, like the quick-start course and social proof ads above.
Human level differentiation and Estonia pride
Pipedrive’s content marketing also differentiates the company on a human level. Your business, your founders, and your team are unique.
How can you use your story to build a more human connection with your customers and fans? You don’t have to share personal stories about your past (though you can). There are probably simpler ways that you can stand out and create a positive reputation for your brand.
Pipedrive does this really well by regularly releasing content about Estonia, the country in which the company was founded and still has offices today.
Particularly since Pipedrive is used by many tech companies, sharing content about Estonia, which is one of the most digitized countries in the world, helps them stand out and connect with customers.
Estonia offers free internet and e-residency. By posting about Estonia, Pipedrive does all of the following:
- Showcases their roots and connects on a human level
- Appeals to others in the tech industry
- Creates content that isn’t just business-related
- Improves the perception of their brand as one that is on the cutting edge
Your company certainly has ways to connect with people on a human level. What stories and content can you share on social media that aren’t specifically related to your product or service, but will still appeal to your target audience?
Maybe you can talk about how your team collaborates, where your team members are from, how the company was founded, or how your brand is contributing to an important cause.
For best results, make sure the content still appeals to your target audience, and be consistent. Don’t pick 20 different stories or causes to constantly post about. Instead pick 2 or 3 side topics that fit with your brand, and post about them quarterly.
Clear cross-channel positioning
Pipedrive also does well with clarifying their message across all of their content distribution channels.
With a product that can do so much (it has CRM, chatbot, and prospecting features), it would be easy for Pipedrive’s messaging to get confusing and messy. But the company does a great job of simplifying their core value proposition.
Across all profiles, Pipedrive mentions that their platform is a CRM developed from the salesperson’s point of view, and that the software is focused on making sales success inevitable.
Take a page of Pipedrive’s book and make sure that your messaging across all platforms is simple and intriguing. You should be able to distill your messaging down into the basics. Use the “what, who, and why” framework.
- What - CRM
- Who - salespeople
- Why - make sales success inevitable
This clarity and simplicity will help make all of your content marketing more successful.
Did you enjoy this deep dive into Pipedrive’s content marketing? Check out our other teardowns to inspire your content marketing strategy:
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