Case Study: Applaud: SaaS in the HR Tech space

"If you're looking for someone who cuts through the noise and gets real results, I can't recommend Zoe highly enough. She took the time to understand our business, our customers, and our challenges — and then built a plan that delivered on brand growth and lead generation."

- Duncan Casemore, Co-founder and CTO

Project Overview

Applaud is the HR-focused, employee-led disruptor for the world of work, enabling global enterprises to deliver more intuitive and rewarding employee experiences.

Creating HR service delivery tech from an employee point-of-view, Applaud puts the employee at the center of their everyday world of work, with direct access and personalized control, helping HR do more for their people.

The Challenge

In January 2022, Applaud had ambitions to grow their brand visibility and discoverability in search engines by their desired audience. The company faced a "David and Goliath" issue as their most direct competitors were products from larger Tier 1 SaaS vendors.

The company had already used a marketing agency and briefly hired a digital marketer in-house, but neither yielded the kind of results they strived for. They were now looking for a clear way forward that would support their business objectives of lead generation and brand awareness.

Zoe came in with a fresh perspective, quickly identifying where the gaps were in our digital marketing and, more importantly, what we needed to do to support our business goals.

Duncan Casemore
Co-founder and CTO, Applaud

The Solution

It became clear that Applaud needed an end-to-end digital marketing strategy, including an audit, to understand how future marketing efforts can amplify success.

Part 1: Audit

Note: For the purposes of making this case study a reasonable length, I've chosen to select a couple of items highlighted by an end-to-end audit of Applaud's marketing activity.

Business challenges and ICP: I firstly spoke to multiple people in client-facing roles to understand the key challenges they were facing and get a detailed picture of their ideal customer profile (ICP). This included demographics like job titles and industry, as well as understanding the key pain points they felt Applaud could address.

Website: I audited Applaud's website to see if there were any technical quick fixes that might improve brand visibility in search engine results pages. Among my findings was that the company blog sat within a general resources section along with lots of gated webinars, whitepapers and reports. There were also no topical categories, making the structure of the blog disorganised and hard for Google crawlers to make sense of.

Above: Screenshot of previous www.applaudhr.com/resources page with blog buried deeper in the site and no topic categories.

Paid advertising: An analysis of Applaud's LinkedIn Ads account revealed that the marketing agency they enlisted the year before had used broad targeting and only a small number of audience exclusions. This meant that a % of advertising dollars were lost to an irrelevant audience on their website. Naturally, this traffic did not convert. The ads also sent users to a landing page on the Applaud website, rather than leveraging LinkedIn's native lead gen forms.

Screenshot 2025-01-27 165008

Above: Applaud's broad audience filters meant HR job titles outside of their ICP were being targeted.

Meanwhile on Google Ads, banners were frequently being rejected. A quick examination revealed that button shapes in the ad creative were violating Google's "misleading ad design" policy.

SEO and content: Although Applaud produced high-quality whitepapers and webinars in-house, their blog lacked clear direction. Conducting deep research on competitors, keywords and low-hanging fruit helped us see where opportunities were and laid the groundwork for a content strategy that would really make an impact. Landing pages frequently had forms below the fold, making a prospect far less likely to convert.

Part 2: Marketing Strategy build and action

After the audit I had some great material to build and execute Applaud's digital marketing strategy. Some key highlights below:

Content Strategy: I created a "keyword universe" for Applaud, where topics and commercial keyword areas could be easily visualised to understand the opportunity available. This enabled us to prioritise the 50 or so content ideas from our keyword research - leading to a backlog that we could dip into and commission out over the course of the year.

Armed with a clear idea of the content opportunities available, I quickly commissioned ideas that would give Applaud the most impactful results to high-quality writers.

Paid advertising: My conversations with Applaud's sales and customer success team really helped me zero in on who they wanted to target. I created audiences for LinkedIn with much more robust filters. This included audiences for top-of-funnel new data acquisition campaigns, as well as retargeting and nurturing audiences.

Website: I migrated all blog content from the resources section to a dedicated "blog" section. I created 8 categories based on the keyword research I did, creating a clearer site structure that ensured Google would find and understand our blog content. I also revamped the website's landing pages, removing unnecessary distractions to make converting as simple as possible.

Results

After rolling out the digital marketing strategy, Applaud achieved significant results that met their two key business objectives of brand visibility and lead generation.

Brand visibility

After 6 months we started to see the impact of the new content strategy and SEO changes, which compounded as the year went on.

Key Results within 12 months:

Organic search engine monthly impressions increased by 84% YOY (April 23 vs April 22, Google Search Console)
Clicks per month from search engines doubled in the same time period.
Monthly traffic to Applaud's blog increased by 350%.
The blog became a source of conversions and leads for the first time in the company's history.
In 2025, Applaud appears in AI Overviews for key search terms, as well as featured snippets.

Above: Chart showing Applaud's visibility on page 1 of Google for tracked keywords (data from SEMRush)

Lead Generation

LinkedIn Ads: With the targeting fully optimised, Applaud were able to push out relevant reports through ads to the right audience.

The first campaign launched promoted the company's Digital Employee Experience Trends Report, which won Silver in the B2B Marketing Awards for "Best lead generation or nurturing campaign".

90% of the leads generated over the initial three month period matched Applaud's ICP (ideal customer persona), with external auditing taking place to confirm this.

The campaign also had click-to-conversion rate of 49%, thanks to Applaud leveraging LinkedIn Ads' native lead gen form.

Full Testimonial

"Before working with Zoe, we were stuck in a frustrating cycle — we knew we had a great product, but we were struggling to be seen by the right audience.

Zoe came in with a fresh perspective, quickly identifying where the gaps were in our digital marketing and, more importantly, what we needed to do to support our business goals. She didn’t just throw out generic marketing advice; she took the time to understand our business, our customers, and our challenges — and then built a plan that delivered on brand growth and lead generation

The results spoke for themselves. Suddenly, we were ranking in search, our ads were reaching the right people, and our blog (which had never really done much for us before) became a valuable asset. But beyond the numbers, the biggest change was that digital marketing finally felt like it was working. We had a clear direction, a strategy we believed in, and we could see proper momentum.

If you're looking for someone who cuts through the noise and gets real results, I can't recommend Zoe highly enough."

— Duncan Casemore, Co-Founder & CTO, Applaud

About Digital Hydra

Hi I'm Zoe! For the last 10 years I've been driving results in-house for B2B companies within a variety of industries. I'm a strategic digital marketer with specialist knowledge in SEO, paid advertising, content, data analysis and strategy.

How strategy helped Applaud scale-up their brand awareness and lead generation

Project Overview

The Challenge