Background
Solverboard is an all-in-one innovation management platform for enterprise organisations.
The quickest and easiest way to sum it up is…
Sales has Salesforce. Finance has Xero. Marketing has HubSpot. Innovation has Solverboard.
We began talking to them while the platform was still in development.
Our initial conversations around inbound marketing tactics quickly gave way to more important discussions:
“What results do you want from your content in the first three, six and 12 months? Where do you want to be in three years?”
Their ambitions were big.
Blue-chip accounts, tens of thousands of users and massive revenue growth.
It was obvious that the remit in the brief – a bit of inbound support – wasn’t going to do the trick.
The strategy
Solverboard wanted 10 new accounts on-boarded as part of their beta launch by Christmas 2019.
We started working with them at the start of October, giving us just three months to find those 10 beta users.
Organic SEO and social would take too long. Ads would be too expensive.
We decided that an inbound approach combined with targeted LinkedIn and email outreach was the way to go. No other approach would deliver the results they wanted with the time and budget available.
Luckily, Charlie and Aaron at Solverboard already had a list of 100 dream clients for us to target. Our next step was to learn more about the people on that target accounts list.
- Who were they?
- What were they interested in?
- How could we help them?
We conducted our own research using tools like SEMRush and BuzzSumo and cross-referenced what we found with Solverboard’s user-testing feedback.
This gave us multiple quant and qual perspectives on their buyers.
We knew that whatever we did needed to be original and distinctive. This was Solverboard’s first big content marketing campaign, so it needed to be memorable.
We were also aware that as a total newcomer in this field, Solverboard wasn’t yet a ‘thought leader’. So we needed to find a way of establishing some credibility.
After all, why would an experienced enterprise innovator take advice from a platform they’ve never heard of?
As briefs go, this was pretty tricky…
The big idea
As is often the case, the idea was staring us in the face the whole time.
It was right there in Solverboard’s user-testing feedback. It was right there in the conversations Solverboard had with customers while they were researching the product.
Enterprise innovators in different organisations were struggling with the same problems. These problems were already at the heart of Solverboard’s product strategy. So why not put them at the heart of its content strategy?
And rather than just dish out our own advice, why not co-create the report with well-respected innovation thought leaders, at the same time as showing how the platform could help?
We called it…
Innovation Blockers.

Alongside the report and landing page, we produced a bunch of supporting blogs, social posts, social ads, as well as the outreach copy for the InMail and email campaign.
The results
As of May 2020, six months after the Innovation Blockers report was published, that one report had generated:
- 362 leads
- Responses from 37 out of the 100 target account we engaged through our targeted ABM outreach
- 100% increase in traffic to the site
- New website leads per month up 109% in 6 months
The campaign is still running. Since launch, it’s generated a total of 1,052 leads for Solverboard.
We've got industry specialists sharing and discussing our work. Prospects are coming to us saying how impressed they are with the report.
Charlie Widdows, Co-founder
Solverboard

Solverboard