In 2020, Frontify, a brand management platform, had just closed their series B. They needed to quickly scale their organic growth to build their presence in a growing market. But, as a brand management platform, there was one thing they weren’t willing to compromise on — their own brand.
Frontify partnered with Animalz to increase their organic growth through content marketing in a way that maintained their brand. And after two years working together, traffic from organic search has increased 52%. Pipeline has increased too: from just one piece of Animalz-produced content, Frontify has generated 25,000 visits, 550 leads, and influenced at least 4 deals.
Initially, their plan was a short-term engagement with an agency that could produce high-quality content while they scaled up their internal team. But working with Animalz turned into so much more.
The Challenge: Maintaining Brand Image While Improving Acquisition
For Frontify, content marketing serves a dual purpose. It’s a new-growth channel, yes, but each piece of content — every article, every guide, every email — needed to showcase the brand, and by extension, their product.
“We really try to practice what we preach by heavily investing in our own brand,” explained Kevin Ailloud, Head of Demand Generation at Frontify. “From the communications to the product marketing or creative teams, we strive to lift our brand recognition through every initiative we put in place.”
Oskar Duberg, Frontify’s Content Lead, added, “Everyone that’s working with the brand is part of building and evolving it.”
Animalz’s content needed to generate demand quickly and effectively while still upholding Frontify’s brand image. Here’s how we did it:
1. Generated Leads with In-Depth Guides
Frontify needed a steady supply of assets for their demand generation teams to use in their upcoming campaigns, which would keep new leads coming in for their sales team to nurture.
Creating this content was a collaboration between Animalz and Frontify: the demand generation team planned their campaigns around upcoming product launches, updated features, or new use cases for the Frontify platform. They shared those ideas with Animalz, then we identified what kind of content — guides and landing pages — would best tie into that campaign.
One such guide was How Brand Building With Software Can Save Companies More Than $700,000 a Year. To date, it’s generated more than 25,000 visits to the Frontify site and more than 550 leads in total. According to Kevin, this one guide has “directly contributed to 4 deals and most likely influenced a larger volume.”
This guide has also made early conversations easier for Frontify’s sales team. As Kevin shares, “The feedback from our own sales team has been very positive. It has allowed them to develop conversations with prospects around ROI in a more structured and supportive manner.”
2. Opinionated SEO Increased Organic Traffic
Paid acquisition was a key part of Frontify’s early growth strategy, but as a channel it’s costly over time, as companies need to spend more to maintain the quality and volume of leads coming in.
As companies scale, it’s important to diversify acquisition channels. Animalz’s content helped Frontify increase their organic traffic, which gave them another dependable source of visitors and leads alongside their paid marketing efforts.
Since working with Animalz, Frontify has seen a significant shift in where their web traffic comes from. In 2019, 26% of traffic came from paid search, and an additional 18% from display adverts, while only 21% came from organic search. By 2021, that had dropped to 23% from paid search, 6% from display ads, and increased to 32% from organic search.
| 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | |
| Paid search | 25.6% | 25.5% | 22.6% |
| Display ads | 17.6% | 5.5% | 5.6% |
| Organic traffic | 21% | 25.2% | 31.5% |
We achieved this with opinionated SEO content, aimed at increasing Frontify’s rankings for relevant keywords and growing the proportion of website traffic coming from organic search instead of paid channels.
To avoid rehashing the same ideas as every other top-ranking search optimized article (aka copycat content), we worked Frontify’s unique opinions, expertise, and values about brand-building into their content. Their viewpoint and experience is part of what set them apart from competitors and search results, which helped strengthen the Frontify brand as well as their content’s performance.
This meant:
- Challenging industry norms. Why It’s Time to Ditch Your Brand Guidelines PDF (& What to Use Instead) argues against the continued use of PDFs for documenting brand guidelines, and shows the benefits of switching to a cloud-based solution instead.
- Showing their customers’ success. 3 Ways to Boost Brand Engagement with Brand-Building Software uses three different Frontify clients as supporting examples to demonstrate the benefits offered by using brand management software – more credible than an abstract explanation or just one example in isolation.
- Leading by example. Frontify is an expert on all things brand-related, so we can also use their branding set-up as an example in their content. In 8 Elements Your Brand Voice Guidelines Should Include we feature part of Frontify’s own brand voice guidelines as a concrete example of one of the elements.
While paid search is still an important acquisition channel for Frontify, they’re seeing the benefits of investing in an additional acquisition channel. Kevin said, “Animalz’s content has enabled us to capture the interest of a big portion of our target audience.”
3. Unified Frontify’s Brand Voice
Content is one of the main channels that brings the brand and its values to life. It was essential that Animalz was able to represent the brand effectively – and consistently.
For Frontify, that means everyone communicating their brand (both internal teams and external partners like Animalz) contributes to peoples’ perception and opinion of the brand.
Animalz created and maintained internal style guides and resources to ensure writers, editors, and anyone else working on Frontify content had a clear understanding of the brand and its values. This meant, with each piece written, we were able to more exactly match the Frontify brand voice.
Oskar added, “Animalz worked with our brand guidelines but also would always take notes of our talks and feedback sessions so they were always moving closer to our own internal style – often without me knowing.”
Now, there’s a unified brand voice and message across all Frontify’s content, no matter whether it was produced by their internal team or by Animalz. The Frontify team can take a single piece of content by Animalz and easily repurpose it for their various campaigns and audiences, without extensive editing work.
Kevin said, “We’ve been able to repurpose Animalz’s content in lots of different ways, using them in multiple campaigns and to help nurture leads. This has had an exponential impact on our ability to distribute our message across all our channels.”
“They Feel Like an Extended Frontify Team.”
Animalz started as a stopgap solution for Frontify, to solve an immediate need–increased content production. But Animalz has become a trusted partner for Frontify and we continue to work together, even though they now have a bigger internal team.
About the evolving relationship, Oskar noted “We were looking for an agency that could quickly set up shop and get their hands dirty, creating amazing content, until we could catch up with new hires, and expand our team internally. Since then, we’ve expanded our marketing team, but – as you might’ve noticed – we’re still working with Animalz at the same rate, simply because they’re doing an amazing job.”
Our long-term relationship and thorough understanding of Frontify and their brand allows us to come with new ideas and propose new ways to approach their market. Oskar says, “The way we work with the Animalz team is not very different from how I work with other teams, internally… they feel like an extended Frontify team.”