Workbuzz

Founded: 2011

Business type: SaaS

Engagement goals: Identify and address bottom of funnel performance issues, review longer term strategic marketing capabilities

Collaborating with: CEO, CMO, wider marketing team, VP of Sales

Service: Marketing Performance Evaluation, Marketing Growth plans

Find out more: workbuzz.com

WorkBuzz is an Employee Engagement Platform that is helping business and HR leaders better understand the needs of their workforce and enabling faster, more informed decisions. With a focus on deskless workers, the business is redefining the way businesses can connect with their often remote, or on the move, teams, and through the power of AI are offering tools and insights at scale like never before.

Delivering on ambitious revenue growth plans, WorkBuzz had expanded quickly both in terms of clients and its own internal sales and marketing team. The WorkBuzz team now wanted a fresh perspective on their marketing strategy, with our external expert view on opportunities and threats.

At the same time, their industry was undergoing seismic changes with the arms race of AI functionality impacting product roadmaps, market needs and competitive forces.

Auditing WorkBuzz’s marketing capabilities

WorkBuzz approached us with a specific set of deliverables for the project, which included analysis of their sales and marketing capabilities, a benchmarking exercise of their sales pipeline performance, and a specific request for us to review their PPC / Google Ads opportunities. Approaching a funding round, WorkBuzz also wanted investor needs taken into account – something our work with a number of VC and PE organisations enables us to add to a project like this. 

As a result, we customised our marketing capability audit to reflect these requirements and identified an information gathering process, conducting initial interviews with the product, sales and marketing teams. 

These conversations, alongside a detailed analysis of WorkBuzz’s Hubspot processes and Google Ads account, gave us a rounded view of the brand’s sales and marketing activities. 

Our marketing capability audit is designed to be a rigorous and comprehensive deep dive, reviewing more than 80 measures of sales and marketing performance that we break down into categories of capability. In this instance, the initial information gathering process saw us speak to the CMO, CEO, VP Sales, Head of Product and several other members of staff to help us get a 360 degree view of capability, structure and performance. 

The categories of our audit include; Insights, Strategy, Execution, Effectiveness and Optimisation, and enable us to critique the full marketing function from interpreting needs and motivations in the marketplace and product market fit, through to the ability of the brand to execute on a set strategy and their ability to learn and adapt to both their own performance and the changing competitive landscape and marketplace in which they operate.

Several weeks later, we were back round the table discussing the findings of the three reports we delivered; one for each of the project’s main deliverables. The audit report extended to 30 pages and provided a lot of strategic detail for both the processes and the audit’s findings. For each measure assessed, a benchmarked score was provided, alongside recommendations (where required) to address any identified weaknesses. Finally, those priorities were given a RAG status, helping to prioritise the speed and priority of adoption. 

In contrast, the PPC review was focused on short and medium-term performance oriented improvements and was used to help inform the selection of a dedicated PPC agency to support implementing the recommendations we put forward. 

Note: to maintain confidentiality, a generic version of the Spidergram – a tool we used to help visualise WorkBuzz’s benchmarked performance – has been used here to illustrate the type of visual output that was created as part of the audit process.

KPI, reporting and channel growth project

With the audit complete, and priorities identified, WorkBuzz were keen to review their marketing reporting. This project also had a number of requirements including:

• A critical review of their new financial year objectives, KPIs and OKRs as well as the way these were presented to the company’s board and investors.
• A gap analysis of their existing OKRs and future work plans with the audit’s recommendations.
• A strategic growth analysis of the existing marketing mix, broken down by channel and size of opportunity.

The results were broken down into two – a thorough analysis of the existing reporting structure, with recommendations for both board and marketing-based reporting. The recommendations focused on two key areas; namely, reflecting a fuller marketing funnel approach to the brand’s reporting and providing an analysis that looked at the continuity of the existing reporting – ensuring objectives, OKRs and KPIs were all working in sync. 

Secondly, and to deliver on the channel growth analysis, we modelled the size of revenue uplift by channel, looking at the key levers of top of funnel growth in that channel (reaching and engaging more people) as well as assessing improvements to on-site goal and landing page conversion performance, benchmarked against industry standards.  

This enabled us to have in-depth conversations about where the more detailed channel mix priorities should be, the potential growth opportunities for the coming year, and the complementary impact top of funnel activity would have on key measures like branded search.

Jon Paget, Senior Partner at OV says “The WorkBuzz team went into this with complete commitment to the process and an openmindedness as to what we would find. Some of the benchmarked outputs and recommendations supported existing internal discussion, whilst others have stimulated new conversations about growth and longer term priorities”.

“It was brilliant to be part of the resulting conversations regarding reporting and channel growth opportunities. This is where an external strategic view can add so much value – our initial audit had opened the door to opportunities and this detailed analysis allowed us to scope and score the size of the opportunities and enable WorkBuzz to make better decisions as a result.”