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50% More Leads in a Complex Industry

How SEO and content marketing helped the Dokeos LMS grow in the pharma and dental industries

Healthcare, pharmaceutical, dental and other life science sectors are notoriously difficult to write content for. But when you get your content marketing right for regulated industries like these, you will see rewards. That’s what the learning management system (LMS) Dokeos learned when they turned from freelance writers to SaaSpirin, a SaaS SEO and content marketing agency.

The results

The quality of leads matters in B2B marketing –  a lot. When you attract leads from content created specifically for a niche in a complex industry, they will be more likely to convert AND to represent a larger financial commitment. Working with SaaSpirin, Dokeos noted major achievements like these:

  • Content targeting the pharmaceutical industry brought a 50% increase in B2B leads.
  • #1 rank article for the dental industry quickly brought 2 new clients from 8 leads.
  • Optimized content put bootstrapped Dokeos ahead of larger competitors in its target industries.

Many marketers feel they need to find a specialized writer for their efforts in content marketing for regulated industries. After all, these areas can be heavily regulated and steeped in federal compliance. On top of that, readers are educated and demanding, making industry knowledge a requisite. 

But after trying the freelancer route, Dokeos found that an agency brought the results it was seeking.

Meet Dokeos, an international B2B SaaS company serving clients across many industries

Dokeos is a SaaS LMS platform that powers e-learning, onboarding, and staff certification for companies in the life sciences (pharmaceuticals, dental, clinical), manufacturing, retail, and education industries. The company launched in Belgium in 2004. Since then, operations have expanded to include North America and other international regions. 

Thousands of employees around the world have received onboarding, training, and certifications on the Dokeos platform. The software is customized and white labeled for use by many high-profile clients including Red Cross, Saint-Gobain, Kuehne+Nagel, and IQVIA. 

The challenge of lead acquisition with content

Julien Paquet, partner and head of marketing at Dokeos, knew that content marketing was going to be a driver for the business. He saw it as the perfect medium to convince readers in their target industries that Dokeos could solve the unique issues they faced. 

So Julien implemented a marketing strategy built around website content distributed via AdWords and LinkedIn. Even a small number of high-quality leads from a targeted campaign could translate to sizable revenue. 

Frustration with freelance writers

The entire plan hinged on creating meaningful content. So Julien hired a freelance writer who could get to know the business. When that didn’t work out, he tried another writer. And another. 

After working with a series of freelance writers to create the content, the leads weren’t materializing.

It’s common to experience challenges when outsourcing writers, perhaps especially so in complex B2B sectors. As Julien saw, writers tend to fall into one of two groups. Most freelance writers either:

  1. Know the subject matter but don’t understand SEO and marketing or the software buying process; or
  2. Understand how to write for SEO but can only write superficially about the industry and pain points of the target audience.

Either way, as Julien noted, the content will be unlikely to convert.

The solution: Niche targeting with optimized content

To grow leads with content marketing, especially in regulated industries, it’s really important to focus on content that serves the niche needs of the audience. 

In addition, optimizing the content for organic SEO builds more exposure and increases leads coming to you via your blog.

So, SaaSpirin worked with Julien to determine the topics that were going to be impactful for growing the LMS’s presence in manufacturing, pharma, and other life science industries. Julien suggested topics from his experience, and SaaSpirin also conducted keyword research to pitch additional topics that could help Dokeos build authority and attract inquiries. 

As an SEO and content agency, our team combines expertise in a variety of SaaS industries with tried and true SEO techniques. So we could ideate and create meaningful content that satisfied educated readers and search engines.

The results: high-quality leads from organic search

After working with SaaSpirin, Julien noted two profound changes:

  1. The content targeting specific industries was starting to capture search rankings.
  2. It also began bringing in leads, which converted to new business.

Inbound leads from the pharma industry grew 50% 

Dokeos wanted to engage more clients in the pharmaceutical industry. So our strategist researched and pitched topics for a content cluster of blog posts. 

This cluster captured 62 important industry keyword phrases in the pharma sector within months including “pharma compliance training”,  “gamp 5 training”, “sop for pharmaceutical industry”, and more.  

Thanks to the traction in organic search, Dokeos saw a 50% increase in leads from the articles targeting the pharmaceutical industry. 

The article How to combine GxP and non-GxP training in your LMS has captured 10 keywords, including jumping to the top 10 for “what is gxp and non gxp” in less than three months, beating out pharma-specific websites.

25% of leads from one dental industry article converted to new business

The blog post Why a Dental Office Needs an LMS for OSHA Training started building a presence in Google quickly, ranking for 15 keyword phrases within just two months of publishing. This included lucrative search terms like “OSHA compliance for dental office.”

This blog post then started to bring in serious inquiries. Within a couple months, it had generated eight leads. Two of those converted to paid customers, representing extremely high ROI for Dokeos.

“SaaSpirin wrote some articles about the benefits of LMS for dental offices and why we are OSHA compliant at Dokeos. As you can see now on Google, we are first organically. And so we have a lot of leads coming from the dental industry. For example, during the last summer, we received eight leads, and we closed two of them, thanks to this article. And again, two only in the dental area. But there are many more in other industries and in other niches. And this represents a large amount of money.” - Julien Paquet, Dokeos

To many, eight leads may not sound significant. However, this is normal in a niche B2B industry with a tightly targeted audience. The quantity may be small but the quality of leads and probability of conversion is much greater. Each conversion can also net a high and consistent revenue stream, since the Dokeos LMS is a SaaS platform.

How Dokeos and SaaSpirin did it

Creating content that succeeds at SEO and converts leads is not easy. Our blog process relied on collaboration and a willingness to learn from each other, while consistently publishing impactful content. 

Finding the right topics

We leaned heavily on niche-specific content to attract interested leads. For example, we created content created for Dokeos that deals with compliance issues in the pharmaceutical, health, and manufacturing industries. These topics helped demonstrate to readers that Dokeos understood their industry space and instilled confidence that the LMS could be a good fit for their organization.

Typically, we approach topics from an SEO angle. We look for topics that align with the client’s business goals and meet the desired search intent, while promising a worthwhile monthly search volume and attainable level of difficulty.

There can be additional ideas for topics that come from experience in the trenches, so we also tap into the industry knowledge of our clients. We worked with Julien to come to an agreement on topics, keywords, and article specs before assigning content briefs to our writers. 

Writing to engage readers

Some of our topics required highly specific information that’s beyond the scope of a general SEO writer. Our editor worked with our writers to ensure they could satisfy our quality bar, as measured in the following areas:

  • Article fully addresses the topic and satisfies the title
  • Includes only relevant information with no fluff
  • Angle supports the client’s business goals
  • Content is original and fully unique
  • Statistics and assertions are backed by links to authoritative sources

You can learn more about how our writers master a subject in less time with our blog post research process.

Finally, Julien also had experts at Dokeos review blog posts to ensure the accuracy of the content.

Optimizing the content for search

We wanted to build a search engine presence for the content, in order to get in front of more readers and draw leads organically. The foundation for this rested on solid topic research, which our strategist conducted.

Once we had target keywords in mind, we drew up briefs for each article, articulating the angle and points to cover. Then our editor worked with our writers to make sure that the keywords were addressed appropriately.

A big area for us is internal linking. This means paying attention to past topics that had already been published on the Dokeos website and linking to the most relevant articles and case studies each time. 

This internal linking practice holds many benefits in B2B content marketing:

  1. Google can better recognize your clusters of articles surrounding key topics.
  2. Readers are more likely to continue engaging with your site.
  3. Interested parties can more readily find the next piece of information they need to evaluate your product.

We added the content directly in Wordpress for Julien, to save time on publishing blog posts. 

Continued success and new ventures

Dokeos was one of our first clients, and the success we’ve engineered together has made for a very fruitful relationship. 

SaaSpirin helped Dokeos turn things around by focusing on two critical factors: SEO optimization and valuable industry content. Speaking about his experience working with SaaSpirin, Julien had this to say:

“We are always impressed by the quality of the content and how fast you can deliver. We have seen that your team could learn very quickly about our market, the needs of our targets, and we have a lot of different targets at Dokeos. It’s rare to find a company, an agency, that is both well organized in terms of SEO and with people able to learn about the specific issues of our prospects.” - Julien Paquet, Dokeos

Dokeos’s success has also fueled a new venture through the development of its new startup site GXPtraining.com. This companion site provides remote regulatory courses that clients can purchase for their own onboarding and staff training. As with Dokeos, Julien plans to entrust the content creation for GXP Training to SaaSpirin.

Are you in the SaaS industry? Let SaaSpirin do the same for you

What really sets SaaSpirin apart from the competitors is that we get to know our clients and are able to cover complex topics like industry compliance and regulatory oversight. These are subject areas where most content services fail to provide industry-specific information due to the complex nature of the material.

SaaS isn’t a sector where you can get by on generic content. Success requires more than just SEO know-how. It’s also about establishing your organization as an authority insider. This is doubly true if you serve a B2B audience from highly regulated industries. 

Get in touch with SaaSpirin today to kickstart your content marketing campaign!