Speaking to two audiences at once: Mawla’s messaging sweet spot
“It’s in-house quality copywriting and a full-stack digital marketing experience.”
“I feel like I get a lot of attention, I have a lot of trust that time is being spent well and I don’t need to monitor it, the end copy and content feels like it looks at the business holistically and tries to see if it’s actually something that will sell.”
Dan Malone
Founder, Mawla
When the traditional “speak to one audience” advice doesn’t work…
Mawla is a B2B headless CMS development agency who had two main problems.
First off, their area of expertise is highly technical and they needed to find a way to make their message accessible to Marketing leaders who would be investing in their services.
But the second issue was that they also had to win over the company’s CTO in order to gain contracts. Our job was to find Mawla’s voice in the middle of Ven diagram that needed to win over both CTOs without scaring off non-technical CMOs.
Challenge accepted.
Industry
🤘Headless CMS & JAMstack development
Services
How we helped Mawla find their voice
When it comes to helping brands find their voice, we turn to our resident brand messaging expert, Natalie.
We started off with a detailed brief about Mawla’s vision, clients, goals, and got a feel for what fires them up about their work. From there, we set up a series of interviews with Mawla’s clients past and present.
During those interviews we asked questions like:
- What was going on in your business that made you first reach out to Mawla?
- When did you realise that working with Mawla was worth the investment?
- If Mawla were a celebrity or fictional character, who would they be (our personal favourites were Sonic the Hedgehog and Usain Bolt)
- What hesitations did you have about moving forward with an agency like Mawla?
- What buy-in did you need to get from other stakeholders before you could give them the green light?
These interviews supplied us with the gold and voice-of-customer research we needed to understand what mattered most to Mawla’s clients. We provided full transcripts and recordings of the interviews and Mawla were even able to repurpose some of them for public video testimonials.
We then distilled all we got from our research and brought it together in the Brand Messaging Manifesto. We covered everything from Mawla’s brand mission, vision, customer success story all the way to their tone of voice. And most importantly: the winning messaging formula to win over the two main stakeholders that make up their clients: CTOs and CMOs in scaling B2B SaaS companies.
The main message? “We build sites that marketing teams can update – without developer assistance.” The reason for this was that this particular pain point spanned both Marketing and Product/Engineering.
Marketing was frustrated by constantly relying on devs to update even basic assets on the site, and Product/Engineering was also tired of their devs spending time on the marketing site as it was taking them away from time spent on Product.
PS this was back when the guide was still called the Brand Voice Cookbook. We’ve made some updates since then.
Bringing the Messaging to Mawla’s Site
Now that we understood Mawla’s messaging, positioning, and tone of voice it was time to bring it to their website.
We worked on a series of web pages for Mawla including their homepage, about page and various services pages.
We also wanted to improve Mawla’s SEO for key, bottom-of-funnel keywords that had high commercial intent. This is why we built out a series of specific services pages so they could rank for these specific searches.
Curious to see the end results?
Here are some of the pages we transformed for Mawla.
Some SEO Results for Mawla
97% Increase in Organic Clicks
From Position 19 to 9 for Sanity Agency
From position 19 to 7 for JAMstack Agency
