1. CASE STUDY: Marketing
CHALLENGE
Establish foundational
marketing processes, controls
and activities to elevate the
brand to new heights while
generating more qualified sales
leads.
SOLUTION
Added a project management
function to a content marketing
strategy.
RESULTS
• 55% Rise in Demo/Contact
Sales Requests
• 42% Rise in Avg Qualified
Leads/Month
• 73% Rise in Content
Downloads
• 105% Rise in Avg Email
Sends
• 20% Rise in Web Traffic
“To be successful, we needed
to establish foundational
processes and controls that
would justify our value,”
David Samia,
Vice President - Product
Engineering Management
Beyond Customer Loyalty: How Strategic Content
Transformed Marketing at Bridgeway
Beyond Customer Loyalty
In 2009, Bridgeway was a successful company that had never made a real
investment in marketing. Founder Pat O’Donnell believed that if you gave
customers outstanding service, they would return the favor via loyalty and
word of mouth promotion. He was right, for a while. But as Bridgeway
evolved, Pat recognized the need for its marketing strategy to mature as
well. For the business to grow, it needed a strong brand, industry awareness,
measurable processes, and most of all, leads at the top of the funnel – in a
word, marketing.
Pat hired David Samia as Vice President of Product Management and
Marketing to meet this need. When David joined, marketing at Bridgeway
consisted of a few staff members primarily focused on administration,
partners, clients, and some trade shows. There was little cooperation or
alignment with sales and no integrated campaigns, only ad hoc activities
executed without any way to measure success.
Company leadership tasked David with making the function more strategic
through initiatives like messaging, positioning, and competitive analysis.
David didn’t stop there. “To be successful, we needed to establish
foundational processes and controls that would justify our value,” David
shared. “A marketing department won’t be around for long if it can’t prove
its worth. So the first thing we did was to get a handle on our budget. We
mapped what we had, where it was being spent, and used tools that we

2. CASE STUDY PAGE 2: Marketing
already had in-house like Salesforce to start tying
marketing activities to sales opportunities.”
David’s team, now spearheaded by Jason Emanis,
began this process by tracking existing tradeshows.
They used Salesforce to map leads from a show back
to their costs, establishing an ROI model that proved
surprisingly positive. With this foundation, the team
set their sights on expanding the marketing program
in new directions: creating valuable content that
would boost awareness, increase engagement, and
generate leads.
Content, Campaigns, and
CustomerConnect LIVE
Jason’s vision of next-gen marketing at Bridgeway
began with a mission: to get in-house legal
professionals who need a business solution to know,
like, and trust Bridgeway. He knew that at its core,
this meant developing content that his audience
would love.
And so Bridgeway University was born. “We knew
that education in corporate legal operations was
scarce,” Jason explains. “So we decided to fill that
gap, develop that education and become ‘the place’
for in-house legal professionals to obtain real-world
know-how about running legal like a business.”
The team began with webcasts, featuring leading
subject matter experts, including non-customers, as
well as partners, clients, and in-house talent. Soon
Jason’s blog was added to the platform, sharing
both new and curated content relevant to the legal
community. Then they began producing white
papers, ebooks, maturity models, and infographics
on a wide variety of topics, building a library that has
attracted over 3300 contacts to date—a significant
number for the small, in-house legal niche market
encompassed by the Fortune 1000 and a few
government agencies.
Fueling the content machine required and
engendered other improvements to the marketing
organization. The team implemented new project
management processes, moving from a reactive to
proactive model centered on an editorial calendar.
A “brand bible” was built, allowing for greater
consistency in visual and written communication.
Weekly one-on-one meetings with sales mean
greater alignment and coordination, leading to a
much better working relationship between the two
departments. And a new market research function
ensures that the team is always knowledgeable and
up-to-date with the latest insights on prospects,
clients, partners, and competitors.
Bridgeway University (BWU) gives the legal
community great content, and gives the Bridgeway
sales team great leads. Jason’s team leverages
technology including Salesforce and Pardot
marketing automation to drive awareness, traffic,
engagement, and conversion. But the process
requires people power as well. The team worked
closely with sales to clean up and organize the
lead database, then define and implement the
requirements that result in a marketing qualified
lead (MQL). With organized data and optimized
technology, the team now runs integrated campaigns
across search, social, email, and web.
The same processes have created as much success in
person as online. Every year, the marketing team runs
CustomerConnect LIVE, a client conference that has
become a benchmark for the industry. Now in its 20th
year, CustomerConnect LIVE provides Bridgeway
clients with 3 days of training, thought leadership,
networking, and fun that merges Pat’s original
vision of loyalty-driven marketing with cutting-edge
strategy and technology.
More Leads, Better Opportunities, and a
Bright Future
Five years ago, David Samia laid the foundation for
a real marketing function at Bridgeway. Since then,
Jason Emanis and his team have added to that
foundation brick by brick, building the necessary
elements to transform Bridgeway’s approach to
marketing.

3. CASE STUDY PAGE 3: Marketing
Today, the results are in. The business enjoys a
stronger brand, greater awareness, increased loyalty,
more efficient processes, and most importantly, a
thriving pipeline. KPIs, now in place and measured
consistently, are up across the board. Average
marketing qualified leads (MQLs) rose 42% from
2014 to 2015 thus far, along with a 55% increase in
Demo and Contact Sales requests from Bridgeway’s
website. Marketing has driven seven wins worth
$2.07M in the last eighteen months, with another
$4.07M in the pipe as of June 2015.
The content marketing strategy has paid off
tremendously. As of April 2015, Bridgeway University
boasts over 1000 downloads, 2400 webcast views,
2800 active companies, and 59 opportunities from
leads with an estimated worth of $22.1 million.
Through his commitment to creating and promoting
useful, meaningful content, Jason and his team have
increased each key metric of their digital marketing
program, including:
• 55% Rise in Demo/Contact Sales Requests
• 42% Rise in Avg Qualified Leads/Month
• 73% increase in content downloads
• 43% more follows on LinkedIn, 25% more likes
on Facebook
• 20% increase in web traffic
• 9% increase in both email open rate and click-to-
open ratio
• 105% increase in average monthly email send
(All stats year over year, 2014-2015)
The qualitative results are equally impressive.
Prospects now approach Bridgeway proactively
instead of being pursued. Sales is armed with not
only more leads, but better leads, qualified through
hard stats like title and company size, but also more
detailed information gleaned from webinar polls,
website activity, and content preferences. This
information communicates valuable insight into a
prospect’s pain points and motivations, and surfaces
opportunities that might otherwise be overlooked.
For Jason Emanis and his team, there’s no slowing
down. They plan to ride their momentum into
even deeper strategic initiatives, including greater
automation, persona-and vertical-based content and
campaigns, and an increased focus on the public
sector business unit. For David Samia, watching the
Bridgeway marketing department succeed has been
a pleasure, but not a surprise. “Without content,
there’s no way to market,” he said. “Jason figured
that out early on, and hasn’t stopped since.”