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When Firebolt shifted from pure lead generation to a full-funnel, brand-to-demand strategy on LinkedIn, lead quantity decreased but quality improved tremendously.

The number of qualified sales meetings that marketing generated jumped 6x — from a 2% conversion rate to 12% in just four months.

Audiences exposed to both brand and acquisition messages
on LinkedIn are more likely to convert.

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“As a performance marketer, making the strategy shift from pure demand generation to a full-funnel, brand-to-demand approach on LinkedIn was scary. But we are a challenger brand and we knew that without first building brand awareness and product knowledge in the minds of our audiences, demand generation would be expensive and ineffective. By investing in brand, our MQL to SQL conversion rate jumped 6X in four months.”

Itay Waisman
Head of Demand Generation, Firebolt

Challenge

Firebolt operates in a space dominated by big brands like Google, Amazon and Snowflake.
As a young challenger brand, it has lower brand awareness in key markets like USA and UK. Its unique product build was also not clearly understood by its audiences, making it harder for Firebolt to convince prospects of its value proposition.
It had to drive high-intent leads that fit its specific Ideal Customer Profile on a modest marketing budget but its lead generation campaigns on LinkedIn produced less-than-ideal results, with only 2% of leads converting into qualified sales meetings.

Solution

Firebolt invested in a brand-to-demand strategy on LinkedIn, creating top- and mid-funnel branding content to raise awareness and deepen product knowledge among its audiences.
With limited resources, Firebolt focused on showcasing its brand personality in the form of its agile start-up culture, team of highly-engaged employees, and tons of creativity.
It used an always-on strategy and integrated organic and paid approach on LinkedIn to earn quality engagement among its followers and target audience.
Even though lead quantity decreased due to reduced bottom-funnel activity, the number of qualified sales meetings jumped 6x — from a 2% conversion rate to 12% in just four months.

Success Factors

Organisation-wide agreement to take a long-term view of ROI as a brand-to-demand strategy would result in fewer leads but higher quality ones that would have a greater impact on business results.
The creativity to turn its startup culture into a unique brand personality that consistently shines through in all its creatives.
A highly motivated team with a can-do attitude that makes the best use of limited resources.

Even though the number one barrier to brand marketing is the inability to see short-term results, Firebolt was able to start proving impact after just four months thanks to a proactive approach to attribution tracking.

“Our demo request form has a field asking prospects how they found out about us. About 60% of leads respond with ‘social networks’ even though our marketing CRM system records 70% as direct traffic. This tells us that, instead of prioritising first-touch or last-touch attribution, it’s the most meaningful touch that makes the most impact — and for us, that happens on LinkedIn.”

- Itay Waisman, Head of Demand Generation, Firebolt

Firebolt is a cloud data warehouse for modern data engineering and dev teams. Combining the benefits and ease-of-use of a modern architecture with sub-second performance at terabyte scale, Firebolt helps data engineering and dev teams deliver data applications that end-users love.
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Headquarters: San Francisco, California | No. of Employees: 51 – 200 | Industry: Computer Services

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