How Brandwatch Achieved 20x ROI By Upgrading Their Drift Plan

The Challenge

In 2018, the Brandwatch team sought new opportunities to speak to, engage with, and convert website visitors on a global scale. hey knew that an engagement solution was critical for optimizing their website, they also understood that their customer base didn’t all want to engage in the same way. Some prefer forms, some want to immediately engage with a human, and some favor automated chatbots — so their solution needed to be a flexible one.

The Solution

While Brandwatch already used Intercom as an in-app help solution, Matt Dawson, Director of Growth Marketing, knew that they needed a solution that fit their website. “Drift was the front-runner from the start. After my first call, I was sold, and I knew that this was the solution that I wanted,” he said.

A few months later, Brandwatch went live with Drift.

“The thing that sets Drift apart from the competition is its customer success managers,” Matt said. “They are with you every step of the way. I had weekly calls for my first 12 months and created a real relationship with the team throughout the onboarding process. It helped me launch Drift and it helped with the success we saw — I believe the success of the onboarding process is why we still use Drift to this day.”

A PLATFORM THAT GROWS WITH THE BRAND

Brandwatch took a real crawl-walk-run approach to its Drift deployment, expanding to a global, cross-company, multi-brand deployment over the course of a few short years.

“We started the implementation with our North America team,” Matt said. “This is our biggest region and we thought that if we nailed the implementation in this region, we could easily expand globally. It took us around 9-12 months to completely implement and after that, we rolled it out globally and created playbooks in four different languages.”

While Brandwatch began its journey with Drift on a Premium plan, the team slowly expanded, gradually taking advantage of more features and functionalities. In 2021, Brandwatch upgraded to Drift’s Advanced plan in order to leverage Fastlane, which allows qualified buyers to skip the form and instantly have a conversation. The plan also offered additional support and playbook services.

Not long after their Advanced upgrade, Brandwatch expanded to Drift’s Enterprise plan to take advantage of Conversational AI. This helped improve their chat drop-off rate, their chat engagement, and ultimately, their outcomes.

“Drift’s Conversational AI helps us to navigate complexity,” said Thomas Grünberg, Director of Global Campaigns. “After we completed a merger, our product offerings got more complex and thus we needed smart ways to get web visitors the information that they needed in a timely manner.”

AN ACCELERATED SALES CYCLE with drift fastlane

Brandwatch’s additional investment in Drift proved to be a wise business move after the team saw great results with Fastlane. “Drift Fastlane has definitely shortened our sales cycle,” Thomas said. “It has hugely reduced the time from the first interaction to meeting booked/opp created. The fact that a user can come to our site, book a meeting directly, and have a meeting that suits their schedule is incredibly useful and convenient for our users.”

With Fastlane, Brandwatch has achieved an impressive 8.4 days from lead to opportunity creation.

AN FRICTIONLESS BUYER EXPERIENCE AND FEEDBACK CYCLE

Beyond such success metrics, Drift shaped an unquantifiable aspect of Brandwatch’s operations: the buyer experience.

“I believe that websites with just a form that you fill out and wait for a call back are a totally different experience and perception to a website that offers multiple avenues of interaction,” Thomas said. “If a user can come to our site and use Drift to engage in a direct conversation with a Brandwatch rep, that really improves the brand perception and increases the chance of conversion.”

Furthermore, with the increased opportunity to interact with customers and buyers, Brandwatch found a consistent source of direct feedback. “Free text fields help us understand what users really look for on our website,” Thomas explained. “This information also fuels what content we promote and the overall website development process.”

playbook recommendations and optimization from professional services

In addition to features and functionality, Brandwatch was eager to explore Drift’s professional services.

“We underestimated how much work managing, maintaining, and optimizing Drift would be internally,” Matt explained. “It made total sense to take up the professional services offering — it’s been invaluable to us.”

With Drift professional services, dedicated consultants recommend, build, and optimize playbooks and routing rules for Brandwatch, ensuring they’re maximizing their investment. We’ve created a really close working relationship with our professional services team and it feels like they have become a part of our team,” Matt said. “We really value the work and help they do for us.”

The Future

Though it’s hard to imagine that there’s any more room for growth for Brandwatch, the team insists that there are many more possibilities to explore with Drift.

“We look forward to focus more on live chat, further experimentation with AI, playbook customization, and we’re going to invest significant time into ABM efforts with our recent implementation of 6sense, which has a great integration with Drift,” Thomas said.