Alloy

Making Up for Lost Marketing Time

Birmingham-based RxBenefits has been a leader in pharmacy benefits for over 25 years. In 2020 the company brought on new investors and a renewed vision to modernize the industry. It’s goal? To launch a new category – pharmacy benefits optimization (PBO). The company tapped Alloy to help it officially launch the PBO, increase awareness and drive qualified traffic to its website.

But despite the company’s long tenure, its marketing department was relatively new, so not only did we face the challenge of category creation, but we also had to quickly overcome KPIs where RxBenefits lagged behind competitors – from Domain Authority to thought leadership. And with a tight timeline to get PBO to market, we had to hit the gas on solving both challenges at the same time.

An Integrated Marketing Program for the Long Haul

A strong online presence is tablestakes for a category creator. So Alloy began the partnership with an SEO and backlink audit, enabling us to establish growth goals for website traffic, Domain Authority and keyword rankings. This research guided the development of a robust integrated marketing program, which included the following pillars:

• Industry media and analyst relations
• A sponsored content program
• An owned content marketing calendar
• A thought leadership strategy, including executive social channels

While the program’s initial activation was focused on category creation, it was flexibly built to evolve into long-term demand generation as soon as the new PBO model gained awareness and traction.

Immediately Outpacing Competitors With No Looking Back

The PBO debut led to significant organizational growth, fueling RxBenefit’s valuation to climb to $1.1 billion in less than 12 months. Nearly three years after joining forces, Alloy is proud to still serve as RxBenefit’s agency of record.

Noisy Airwaves

In 2020, Alloy helped global end-to-end payments provider Paysend debut in the U.S. market. The product quickly gained momentum in the Americas, enabling it to close a $125 million Series B.

However, in the month prior to the VC announcement, Paysend’s well-established competitors became increasingly active in the U.S. marketplace – dominating headlines and influencer chatter with corporate transactions of their own.

Paysend needed a media relations program that would bolster domestic share of voice, demonstrate product differentiation and reverberate globally so it could stand out from the crowd.

Seizing the Moment

To prevent competitors from overshadowing Paysend’s funding announcement, Alloy got to work architecting an aggressive media relations strategy that targeted U.S. tier-1 media and would cascade to other countries.

Specifically, the campaign aimed at building pre-release buzz, gaining visibility with major national technology and venture capital reporters, and owning FinTech and payments trades.

If executed successfully, this corporate communications ‘moment’ promised to elevate Paysend’s FinTech industry leadership status and highlight it’s flat-fee model, which was entirely unique for the market.

Outshining Competitors

The morning of the announcement, an exclusive ran in TechCrunch touting Paysend’s product differentiators. And the momentum didn’t stop. There was immediate interest from U.S. national and trade media that spread across the Atlantic Ocean.

Less than 24 hours after the funding announcement dropped, the news was covered in 41 U.S.-based publications such as Yahoo Finance!, Axios, Fortune, PYMNTS.com Finextra, Finovate, Digital Transactions and Debanked — reaching customer targets and making global waves.

Overall, the funding news was covered in more than 60 pieces of coverage, enabling Paysend to surpass its competitors in total media placements for the first time ever.

Searching for Personas Amid a Pandemic & Competition

Cynerio, a leading provider of healthcare IoT security solutions, was well known in the cybersecurity industry but wanted to accelerate go-to-market in the U.S. enterprise healthcare segment.

However, the cyber industry is saturated with vendors who all walk and talk alike, so Cynerio knew it had to stand out with freshness and provocation. Moreover, buyers at health systems are hard to reach and stretched thin, especially under pandemic pressures. To capture their attention, Cynerio needed to inject creativity and muscle into its inbound marketing machine.

Creating Urgency for Life-threatening Cyber Threats

Cynerio and Alloy partnered on a campaign to launch the brand’s first-ever data report – an inside look at the increasing velocity of medical device vulnerabilities and cyber threats facing hospitals.

The content marketing piece found, among other statistics, that over half of IoT devices used in hospitals have a critical vulnerability that could put facilities and patient lives at risk. We distributed the report through a multi-channel campaign that aimed to educate buyers and direct them to Cynerio’s website.

Triple Threat: Education, Awareness and MQLs

The report immediately captured industry attention – with more than 50 pieces of media coverage pouring in from national, security, tech and health IT publications. Thirty-eight percent of press was Tier I, including The Verge, ZDNet and SC Magazine. Social sharing and SEO rankings followed suit. Combined, organic and referral traffic boosted total website visitors by 29%.

Cynerio had officially succeeded at landing on the screens of its hard-to-reach buyer personas. The campaign architecture continued to be duplicated with subsequent reports, like vulnerability discoveries.

In Search of Additional Online Revenue

geothinQ is a GIS solution that drives return-worthy land investment decisions for project stakeholders. After originally coming to Alloy in 2017 for foundational messaging work, they reapproached us in 2020 with a desire to expand their revenue derived from online, website-driven signups so that they could meet steadily increasing business growth goals. Alloy assessed geothinQ’s current inbound marketing efforts and came up with a plan to increase online signups.

Targeted Ads, Segmented Emails & Relevant Site Content

Alloy conducted an audit of geothinQ’s previous ads, content and email performance, where we found gaps within the company’s keyword and targeting strategies. We then narrowed down a handful of key targets, refined keyword research and designed a marketing plan centered on creating a greater pool of prospects that could be nurtured into customers. To execute on our plan, we created downloadable educational pieces and ongoing blog content that spoke to users at every stage of the buyer’s journey. We then launched targeted email and ad campaigns to reach a qualified audience.

Best Quarter for Online Platform Signups Ever

Prioritizing quick and impactful results, within 6 months Alloy was able to drive hundreds of online signups and conversions for geothinQ, leading to their best performing quarter ever. Strategic inbound marketing tactics centered around content creation, ad optimizations, and email marketing led to these stellar results, which also increased ad click through rate by 280% and improved bounce rate by 40%.