We just launched our newest case study with Bitly, an awesome Qualified customer who is using conversational marketing to identify and meet with enterprise buyers and ultimately drive more pipeline from their website. Since go-live, Bitly has seen big results, including a 2X increase in marketing qualified leads and a 6X increase in pipeline on the pages where Qualified is running. 

Their case study breaks down the nuts and bolts of their conversational marketing strategy: the challenges that led them to pursue conversational marketing, their use cases, their integrations, and so forth. 

We thought it would be fun for you all to get to know the brains behind Bitly’s conversational marketing strategy: Matt St. Peter and Michael Miyasaki. Matt (Sr. Manager of Digital Marketing and Web) is responsible for Bitly’s digital and paid ad strategy and Michael (Marketing Operations Manager) owns their marketing technology stack, reporting, and metrics. Together, the duo have built their conversational marketing strategy from the ground up. So tune and get to know them ⬇️

A lot of people know Bitly as a link shortening service, but it’s so much more than that. Can you tell us more about Bitly and the enterprise side of your business? 

Matt: We receive 17 million monthly visitors and our Bitly links are clicked 20 billion times a month. Two out of every three Fortune 500 companies use us as well. We are so much more than a free URL shortener. There’s a lot of things that people don’t realize are Bitly. We have branded links and custom domains. An example of a custom domain would be es.pn for ESPN. They purchased that domain through us and they use that domain through all their short links in all of their digital communications. Having that customization and brand equity in your links is crucial for improvement in click through rate. We’ve started using the mantra “start using your brand instead of ours.” 

What business problem were you trying to solve with conversational marketing? 

Michael: Putting a reduction around speed to lead. Matt mentioned we have a ton of traffic; as marketers know, the quicker we can progress conversations and start discovery with prospects, the more likely they are to convert and move forward with us versus reaching out to other companies. That speed to lead is absolutely crucial.

How do you cut through the noise and make sure your Sales Development Reps (SDRs) are cutting through the noise and connecting with the right buyers? 

Matt: With 17 million visitors a month, we need to be able to sift through our visitors to find the right ones. If we were to open up a chat invitation to every visitor on every page, we don’t have the SDR team to handle that type of traffic (and I don’t know if most people do!) so it’s really important that we find the right places on our site and the right qualifications to make sure we’re connecting with the right leads, when they’re the most interested, rather than filling out a form and  waiting for an email. [Conversational marketing] helps us get to them when they’re ready to talk to sales.

Like any SaaS company, Bitly has a standard “Contact Us” form on your site. Interested buyers fill it out, and your SDRs follow up. You decided to give qualified visitors the option to “skip the line” and talk with sales. How did that go? 

Matt: We all know what the form experience ends up being. But when you put chat right there on the form to tell people “Hey, our sales team is here to help." And the look of Qualified with our SDR’s faces there - it adds a really personal offering. Right when we did that, we saw our pipeline skyrocket. That’s been a clear winner for any experience we’ve done so far.

Let’s talk more about pipeline results! How has conversational marketing helped with pipeline generation? 

Michael: When we rolled this out in Q4, from a marketing qualified leads (MQL) side- leads coming in who pass our qualification criteria and get passed to sales- from Q4 to Q1, we saw a 221% increase in overall MQL volume just by adding [Qualified] to our sales landing page. From a pipeline side, we saw a 615% increase in pipeline quarter over quarter. I think our experiences are being engaged with over 700 times per month and our reps are having at least 130 conversations per month. It’s about finding the sweet spot with regards to who we route to sales: making sure they are the right company size, location, etc. and really meet our qualification criteria.

Last but definitely not least, let’s talk Salesforce. Salesforce is core to everything we do at Qualified. Why is it important that these two platforms connect? 

Michael: What value would it provide had it not integrated with Salesforce? For a lot of companies, Salesforce is the source of truth. What I love the most about the integration is how easy it is to use. You have de-duplication built in so were not concerned about creating duplicates. What I also enjoy with the integrations with Salesforce and Marketo is allowing the reps to see any last interesting moments, any previous engagements they’ve had with Bitly thus far, so they can talk to the history with Bitly. It makes our SDRs feel much more educated and knowledgeable about the prospect.

Thank you, Matt and Michael for taking the time to share your take on Bitly’s conversational marketing platform. We can’t wait to see what you do next! Want to learn more about their strategy with Qualified? Cruise on over to the Bitly case study.