The prop-tech company Resonai was founded in 2016 by entrepreneur Emil Alon, shortly after he sold his VR/AR sensing platform to Facebook. Emil envisioned the digital and physical worlds merging in a way that would bring greater intelligence to both, and he set about building a platform that could power machines to understand the physical world through super-human visual perception.
Today, Resonai’s computer vision enterprise platform, Vera, transforms buildings into intelligent environments so that building owners and operators can gain greater operational control and real-time customer insights, while providing innovative and engaging experiences for their tenants and visitors.
When Resonai first started working with Candor in Q3 of 2020, the company was just beginning to ramp up its online presence. It had closed a number of deals through direct and outbound sales efforts, but its goal was to build an inbound marketing engine that would help fuel its growth for years to come.
Candor has helped Resonai build an inbound marketing infrastructure that today is responsible for thousands of sessions on its site and so many inbound leads that the company has had to hire new BD reps to keep up with the demand. Here’s how we did it…
Build Resonai’s search profile — and drive high-value organic traffic
Initially, Resonai’s search profile was extremely limited. Its website had a low domain authority, very few backlinks, and a website that wasn’t optimized for the search engines. As a result, it was getting outranked by its competitors, even for terms specific to its business.
Candor conducted an audit of the Resonai website and its competitive landscape in order to build an SEO strategy that would target the right search terms based on available volume and the site’s potential. Then we recommended small tweaks to the site that would ensure it adhered to all of the technical standards that make it easy for Google to crawl and identify what it’s about.
After that, we started publishing lots of search- and reader-friendly content, including new web copy, pillar pages and a regular cadence of blog posts designed to rank for our targeted keywords. About two years later, Resonai now ranks on page one for more than 200 relevant target industry keywords, half of which are in ranks #1-3.
Predictably, those rankings have led to significant traffic. While the site received almost no organic search traffic in Q4 2020, a little more than a year later it was receiving thousands of sessions per month from search engines, driven by blog posts such as “Retail Store Layout: Designing For Maximum Revenue” and “4 Amazing Intelligent Buildings From Around the World.” All told, Resonai’s website has already surpassed the search traffic and profile of nearly all of its competitors:
Driving inbound leads with gated content
One of Resonai’s main goals was to generate leads to fuel its sales pipeline. To do that, Candor developed a strategy that would capture contact’s names, email addresses, company names, and job titles in exchange for downloading valuable content such as e-books and research reports.
The first downloadable report that Candor published for Resonai was a data-driven research report titled “The State of Augmented Reality in Facilities Management.” Targeting facilities managers and property owners, the report was based on a survey Candor conducted to understand the current and expected use of augmented reality (AR) within corporate, retail, healthcare and other types of professional facilities.
The report was a big hit, generating headlines in media outlets including ZDNet, Facility Executive, Facilities Management Journal, and many others. In its first 12 months, the report brought in nearly 300 leads, and even a year after its publication it continues to bring in new leads every month.
Since then, Candor has published more long-form, gated content on behalf of Resonai, including ebooks targeting retail executives and facilities managers at healthcare centers. All told, the reports have generated hundreds of MQLs for the company, producing a steady stream of new leads every month.
Establish thought leadership
Another goal of Resonai’s was to grow its brand and have decision makers in its field view it as a thought leader. Resonai participates in a quickly emerging field spanning computer vision, smart buildings, AI, AR and more. Working with Candor, it began to publish an array of content that showed how these technologies could all work together to benefit building owners and operators.
Candor ghost wrote a number of bylined articles on behalf of Resonai executives to share their expertise and insights through industry publications. For instance, we published an article on “Digital Concierge Is Paving the Way for Contactless Experiences” in Toolbox, one on “Why Augmented Reality and 3D Visualization Hold the Key to Facilities Management in a Post-COVID World” in Buildings.com, and one on “3 Ways Augmented Reality Can Enhance Post-COVID Healthcare” in AR Insider.
We also turned the Resonai blog into a vehicle for thought leadership, offering valuable insights, analysis and best practices through articles such as “How to Measure the ROI of Digital Signage in Retail,” “5 Mall Design Best Practices That Drive Tenant Satisfaction,” and many more.
As a result of Resonai’s thought leadership content, the company accrued backlinks from nearly 200 new domains, while raising its domain authority (a measure of how authoritative Google views a company’s website) from 25 to 32 — a considerable jump that served to increase its search profile even further!
Onwards and upwards
Resonai and Candor continue to partner to fuel the former’s inbound engine.
"Candor is the best marketing agency I've ever worked with,” says Galia Schwarz, VP of Business Development at Resonai. “They were invaluable in helping Resonai develop an inbound marketing engine that connected us with world-class prospects looking to explore the power of augmented reality. I highly recommend working with them!"
If you're interested in exploring what content marketing could do for your sales pipeline, contact Candor today to schedule a free meeting with our experts.