Bitrise case study: Buckle up for a really good campaign story
Following a recent round of Series C funding, Bitrise—the world’s first and only Mobile DevOps company—needed to build mindshare and market share…and fast. To do it, they needed to convince tech leaders and their development teams at big financial institutions that when it comes to creating extraordinary app experiences, the best things in life aren’t free.
Making the case for mobile-first
Mobile has made huge leaps forward in the past couple of years. To stay relevant and competitive, organizations that jockey for consumer attention and membership, like banks and insurance firms, have to go all-in on apps. At the same time, developing for mobile has become infinitely more complex, and legacy approaches simply can’t cut it in a mobile-first world. Free, open-source platforms—the kind traditional web experiences are built on—were never made for mobile. And it shows, manifesting on the back end as sluggish builds, bottlenecks and a ton of manual (read: risk-laden) work.
Keywords:
We needed to shift
the mental model
Bitrise had a strong product offering and an exciting brand. But to drive awareness and consideration, we needed to shift the mental model and convince tech leaders that investing in a Mobile DevOps platform and retooling their development protocols is better than having a mobile-first competitor snatch your customer base.
Selecting and segmenting for campaign success
Leveraging the predictive intelligence capabilities of ABM platform 6sense, Bitrise identified ~200 accounts in the financial services space that fit their ICP and showed a strong likelihood to purchase a solution like theirs. Marketbridge validated the account selection and acquired contacts to fill coverage gaps across the buying committee through sales intelligence platform SalesIntel. We segmented the audience into two groups—Practitioners (the DevOps doers) and Tech Leaders (the budget-holders), creating unique messaging and mapping content that would resonate with each audience’s motivations, challenges and goals.
Creative unites agility and security (Yes, really!)
The Bitrise brand is playful, confident and attention-getting. To amplify it for ABM, we needed to inject relevance for a finance audience whose main objective is maximizing app experience while minimizing risk. “Buckle up with Bitrise” became our rally cry, suggesting a sense of security but also an impending takeoff.
Our creative big idea focused on the elements of Bitrise’s platform that resonated strongest with our financial audience: the increased speed of development it offers teams and the comprehensive security features built into the platform.
The GTM play gets personal(ized)
The program kicked off with a “Surround & Nurture” play designed to capture attention and raise awareness. Channels and tactics included account-targeted media (display, native and social) and marketing-led emails that Marketbridge helped implement and deploy across their martech tools and platforms.
The most highly engaged accounts coming out of the “Surround & Nurture” play were funneled to a more highly personalized “Engage & Connect” outbound play focused on generating interest and engagement. Following outbound tactics, contact engagement was evaluated in Marketo using 6sense data and routed to Sales to begin an Outreach email sequence—which was automated on behalf of Sales.
The head-snap moment: account-personalized benchmark experience
Downstream in the “Engage & Connect” play, we directed contacts to a customized digital experience built and hosted in Marketo. Visually, the page was personalized with the account’s logo and name. But that wasn’t the exciting bit. Drawing on data from competitive intelligence platform Apptopia, we benchmarked the account’s mobile app performance against competitors across three key predictors of app store success. For some, the benchmark results were validating; for most, they were a wake-up call.
Buckle up for big results
The program saw wide reach and deep engagement across targeted accounts, and we added hundreds of new contacts into Bitrise’s marketable database for future campaigns. Additionally, we drove impact in buyer journey progression. Using 6sense to benchmark and track pre- and post-campaign buying journey stage movement, we pushed a third of accounts forward 1+ buying stage and grew accounts in Decision and Purchase by 44%. The campaign has gained traction in B2B awards circles as well. “Buckle up with Bitrise” was a finalist in the 2023 B2B Marketing Elevation Awards for Best Account-Based Marketing Program.
The team attributes campaign success to two key factors:
A highly automated campaign
That leveraged a strategic martech stack to deploy and coordinate the cross-channel experience at scale, reducing manual monitoring and management.
Meaningful use of personalization
Across the creative touchpoints, which helped the work stand out and sink in.
Accounts moved forward 1+ buying stage
Growth in decision
and purchase stages
Decision maker
Leads acquired vs. Target
Known account
engagement
New contacts added to database
“The level of personalization and automation [Marketbridge] brought to this campaign made all the difference. It up-leveled our execution to get our message in front of the right eyeballs.”
