Project Background

ClickBid is an event fundraising platform for nonprofits based in West Michigan. When their forming marketing agency struggled to generate leads and were rarely available to meet, their CEO was forced to fill the gap they left behind and handle all of the marketing himself. And without a functioning CRM, it was difficult to track and attribute any ROI from their efforts.

Their fractional CMO, Paula, knew this wasn’t sustainable. ClickBid needed to find a marketing agency that would better help them execute their vision and produce results. That’s when she suggested they hire 1 Bold Step.

Laying the Foundation

We started working with ClickBid in early 2022, and just like with every engagement we have we began with a lean marketing plan that is based on their business goals. With ClickBid, we focused their strategy on building their brand (focused on content), implementing the right marketing technology, and establishing some key operational procedures. While this delayed any demand generation, it set a firm marketing foundation that we would later build on.

Here’s what we word on in the first iteration of our marketing plan:

1. Reposition the brand’s content so they could build stronger, more meaningful relationships with their ideal target audience.
2. Implement a CRM (Hubspot) that allowed ClickBid to better track their marketing and sales efforts, so they could better align the team, have faster technology, and better communication with their customers.
3. Refresh the website based on our new brand strategy to better match their vision — to make it crazy simple to improve the world.

Raining Leads

After 9 months, we created a new lean marketing plan that focused on helping their business grow. But we knew in order to do that, we needed to partner with sales (after all, sales is responsible for closing every single lead).

Here are the 4 main tactics that helped us generate hundreds of leads this year:

1. Inbound campaigns: We launched a number of campaigns that raised brand awareness and highlighted what made ClickBid stand out from their competitors.
2. Ad strategy: We refreshed the digital ad strategy and continue to optimize it by focusing on increase the ROAS (Return On Ad Spend).
3. Educational webinars: With ClickBid’s internal team and partners, we planned, promoted, and hosted educational webinars to help our target audience reach their goals.
4. Sales & Marketing Alignment: We created stronger alignment with their sales and customer success teams so that we could continue to create a better experience for charities and nonprofits.

The Results

Since we first engaged with ClickBid, they created a marketing machine that continues to generate new leads (and new deals), while also strengthening their internal team to further support their growth.

Here are the main results from working with 1 Bold Step compared to the same time period last year:

1. 10 campaigns launched targetted at specific buyers, and prospects
2. 158 new inbound leads a month
3. 40%+ increase in net new sales
4. 28%+ increase in overall revenue

awesome results

What They’ve Said About Our Partnership