Background

Backblaze is a pioneer in simple, scalable, affordable cloud backup and storage services. With nearly 500,000 customers, including the likes of Patagonia and Fortune Media, Backblaze offers services catering to individuals and businesses alike at a fraction of the cost of other companies in their space.

Challenge

Stackmatix began working with Backblaze as they were looking to scale their marketing program throughout the year. They were looking to run a more comprehensive marketing program and needed extra support quickly to fully test all viable options and identify untapped opportunities.

Solution

Backblaze caters to both consumer customers with their Backblaze Computer Backup offering and business customers with their Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage offering. We first prioritized their B2 Cloud Storage Product, with programs targeting the best business customers to make the largest impact most quickly. 

The best marketing shows the right message, to the right person, at the right time. As such, we started by creating conversion-optimized custom landing pages for each of their B2 Cloud Storage solutions. We then restructured their campaigns to align with each sub-product and their related landing pages.

Additionally, once we reached efficiency and organization within our campaigns, we scaled them by identifying new ways to reach the target customer for each product category. During the first few months, it was critical to adapt our strategy quickly with all of the new testing that was underway. We reviewed reports daily to identify trends and root causes for tactics that, at the surface level, seemed promising but failed to drive the outcomes we were looking to achieve.

In marketing, quantity and quality are equally important. As such, our goal was not just to increase spend, but to increase lead quality at the same time. To drive this result, we tailored both our messaging and targeting tactics to cater to businesses needing more storage. Using our holistic approach, we looked beyond just campaign tactics and incorporated improvements to the landing page, including lead verification methods.

Knowing that Backblaze’s cloud storage platform serves businesses via B2 Cloud Storage as well as the needs of consumers via Computer Backup, we applied our successful B2 marketing approach to the consumer marketing campaigns. Since we didn’t need to start from scratch, we were able to find success much more quickly with less trial-and-error.

Last but not least, if you can’t measure, then you surely cannot optimize. Improving reporting, attribution, and dashboarding was critical to the success of these campaigns. Ultimately, we were able to develop a comprehensive dashboard spanning all of Backblaze’s products and marketing platforms at a level of granularity that allowed us to pinpoint exactly where we were finding success and where things were going awry. Sophisticated reporting enabled greater transparency and communication with Backblaze. As a result, we were able to easily share real time performance data with all key stakeholders.

Results

To enable a rapid testing and learning framework, our first priority was laying down a firm foundation structurally. This allowed us to stay nimble with our optimizations and drive improvements quickly as we launched and scaled the campaigns.

As a result, we both improved the quality of the B2B sales leads that went to Backblaze’s team and scaled these qualified leads by 5x over the course of only 3 months. Furthermore, we increased the average storage size of opportunities in the process with only 1.5x the budget. We also grew free trials by more than 600% in our first month managing Backblaze’s B2C product and lowered cost-per-trial by 45% over the course of the quarter.

We’re proud to have had the opportunity to support Backblaze throughout 2021. The journey has just begun, and we are excited to continue our partnership with Backblaze to achieve even loftier goals in the new year.

Stackmatix’s mission is to support the growth of startups and high-velocity businesses over the long term, so we’re always excited when we can really move the needle for one of our clients. We’d love to see if we can do the same for your business as well. Please email us at sales@stackmatix.com to schedule an introductory call with our team. We look forward to speaking with you!