Hot Banana Client Of The Month - Octopz Case Study
Octopz Quickly Launches New Site and Wraps Arms Around Leads
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Octopz, a Web 2.0 technology startup, was gearing up for its official launch as a company – and it had less than six weeks to turn its bare-bones, “brochureware” Web site into a fully functional, marketing-driven site.
Octopz.com did more than launch on time. In its first three months, the site drove more than 1,000 free trials of the company’s online collaboration tool – far exceeding the company’s goals.
Hot Banana’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Web CMS solution, with integrated Web analytics from ClickTracks, enabled Octopz’s marketing team to quickly launch and optimize its site for better results.
“When you’re a small, agile company, the market expects you to constantly come up with new, interesting things. There’s no time to wait for people to get up and going,” said Ann Christie, Octopz vice president of marketing. “Hot Banana allows us to move at lightning speed – without taking our developers off their mission-critical duties and without relying on five or six different suppliers.”
A “Top 5” Pick That Got Octopz Noticed
Octopz offers a next-generation online collaboration solution built specifically for creative professionals. It allows users to share and work on rich-media files, such as JPEGs, Flash and video. Octopz also features integrated Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and webcams – so presenters and attendees can see and hear each other in real-time.
In 2006, the company released a beta version of the product to a select number of companies and quietly posted a “brochureware” Web site geared toward potential users and investors. By 2007, Octopz was ready for primetime. It decided to officially launch the company at Web 2.0 Expo 2007, a conference for Web professionals, marketers, entrepreneurs and business strategists.
“We had to ramp up our marketing efforts and go from virtually nothing at all to a fully-equipped company in only six weeks. That meant transforming a first-generation Web site into one that would let us really market our Web 2.0 software application,” Christie explained.
Octopz required a solution that:
- put Marketing in control of site updates and maintenance
- included Web analytics, so Marketing could continually analyze and optimize the site
- enabled “social marketing,” in the form of blogs, discussion forums for users and other interactive, Web 2.0 features
- made it easy to launch email campaigns and newsletters, so “active marketing” could begin soon after the site launch.
“Hot Banana has a truly terrific solution, and their team was very easy to work with. Despite the extremely short implementation window, our site launched on time,” said Christie.
The on-time launch was a good thing, because Octopz made a big splash at Web 2.0 Expo. CNET named Octopz as one of the Top Five Web 2.0 Services at the show, and the company attracted extensive positive press and reviews. The company subsequently closed an additional round of venture financing.
Integrated Web Analytics That Converts Visitors Into Leads
Octopz built a site that drives leads and sales by featuring three prominent calls to action on every page: “Try” (sign up for a free trial), “Buy” (purchase a monthly subscription to the product) and “Tour” (see the product in action).
“We originally thought that giving away 100 free trials in the first few months would be fantastic. Instead, we did over 1,000 trials in the first three months – 10 times what we expected,” said Christie.
Part of Octopz’s success in converting site visitors into leads was its use of Hot Banana’s first-of-its-kind Analytics Center, which offers built-in integration with leading Web analytics tools. Hot Banana enables users to select their analytics vendor of choice, then automatically adds the necessary code to each Web page.
Hot Banana seamlessly integrated Octopz.com with ClickTracks Web analytics, empowering the Marketing organization to analyze visitor behavior and optimize the site for better results.
“We can see how many people are coming to the site, what search words got them there and what pages they go to,” said Christie. “The ClickTracks data showed us that our Free Trial form was asking for too much info, so we simplified our process. We also learned that our original home-page animation wasn’t terribly effective, so we replaced it with a more technical version of our product tour that’s performing much better.
“At previous companies, I had to work with several different suppliers to get this level of marketing functionality. Having Web analytics integrated with Hot Banana lets me get more done with a small marketing team and make adjustments much more quickly,” Christie added.
Built-in SEO That Gets Octopz Off to a Good Start
To date, Octopz’s primary focus has been on launching and tuning its site for lead conversions – but that hasn’t stopped the startup from already realizing search engine optimization (SEO) results.
The Hot Banana Web CMS is SEO-friendly, with several built-in features that automatically bake keywords right into the site, in the way that search engines reward.
“Since our launch four months ago, Octopz has targeted a few keywords,” said Christie. “Hot Banana's built-in SEO features have allowed us to beat some of the market leaders in Google’s organic search results. Not bad, considering we haven’t truly begun our search-engine-marketing push yet."
Octopz.com consistently ranked on the first or second page in Google’s organic search results for “online collaboration” – ahead of market leaders like WebEx and Adobe. The company attracted an average of 3,600 visitors per month, with a 3 percent increase in Google traffic.
