Verkada is a cloud-based enterprise security company that provides intelligent video surveillance, access control, environmental sensors, and alarms in one unified platform. The company’s growth team uses a variety of strategies—including ads, outbound campaigns, and direct mail—to target niche ideal customer profiles such as IT directors, Homeowners Associations (HOAs), industrial businesses, and more.
Verkada's growth team faced a major challenge: they had lots of ideas on how to target niche audiences, but often lacked the resources to do extensive manual research, which limited their ability to execute new campaigns.
“We used to rely on multiple data sources and a team of external contractors to research our prospects. This was a painful (but important) process that required hours of deduplication, training, and revisions,” shared Davide Grieco, Verkada’s Head of Growth. “Clay has helped substantially automate and simplify the data enrichment process across our entire growth team so that tasks that would take a week now take minutes or hours.”
“Clay helps our GTM team execute sophisticated campaigns without waiting on engineering resources. It’s a no-code tool that has helped launch our best marketing products and earn real revenue,” said Davide’s teammate and Growth Associate Talia Schleifer.
Impact TLDR:
Eliminated the need for manual work and external research help with data enrichment, including...
- Automated LinkedIn ad targeting for niche businesses by scraping industry directories
- Automated direct mail data enrichment to find accurate business addresses
- Auto-generated personalized landing pages for prospects
Use case 1: Find prospects' LinkedIn profiles to better target ad campaigns
Verkada targets prospects on their marketing email list with LinkedIn ads. Traditionally, they had done this based on name and email input, which had match rates of just 50%. Talia fed the name and email lists into Clay to search the web for LinkedIn profiles to use as ad targeting inputs instead, which nearly doubled match rates.
“Every time we can match a prospect or company to a LinkedIn profile, we unlock hundreds of options. We can run ads on them, use them as buyer intent groups, and much more,” Talia said.
Clay also is helping Verkada’s team improve the effectiveness of their skills-based ad campaigns. Once Verkada found prospects' LinkedIn profiles, they were able to identify patterns in which skills their target ICP uniquely listed on their profiles.
Use case 2: Scrape local business websites to target niche industries in ad campaigns
Every company has distinct products or services that require tailored audience targeting. However, most are limited to generic, predefined filters when working with industry data.
“At Verkada, we want to target niche ICPs with Linkedin ads, but LinkedIn native filters usually aren’t specific enough to narrow in on the right people,” Talia shared. “Standard industry, job title, or company size filters are too broad. For example, some of our targets are titled “president”—but they need to specifically be presidents of HOAs or property management associations.”
Her teammate Sid, on the APAC team, used Clay to build more niche audiences for ad campaigns by scraping Australians mining and housing council website pages, inspiring Talia to take a similar approach in the US.
To do this, Talia found a comprehensive directory of Homeowners Associations (HOAs) across the United States. Then, she used Clay's Chrome extension to scrape company information from all fifty pages of the directory and enrich it with domains, industries, and LinkedIn profiles. How? She mapped the page elements that she wanted to capture in Clay using a Chrome extension recipe. Then, she used an AI formula to create the hoa-usa.com URL for each of the 50 states and added a "Find Data from Page" enrichment, to run her recipe for every state’s HOA URL. (To start with a list of company names and enrich it with domains and company information, click on this template).
Finally, the team uploaded the enriched data to LinkedIn's ad manager, kicking off a targeted campaign for senior professionals in these HOAs.
“Government directories often exist for different industries so being able to scrape them and run outbound or ad campaigns on them is huge,” Talia said. They were able to get leads for a fraction of the cost and manual work compared to before.
“If I hadn't used Clay, I probably would have manually copy/pasted the data from the directory into a spreadsheet for a few hours, maybe made it halfway through, and quit,” said Talia. “Doing this entire process would’ve taken a week and been completely infeasible.”
Use case 3: Auto-generate personalized landing pages for all prospects
Verkada's growth team noticed that leads on ABM and outbound campaigns converted better when sent customized landing pages.
“Making these personalized landing pages was an impactful part of someone's job for a whole quarter,” Talia said. “He generated 600 pages manually. When he left, it felt impossible to continue. No one had the bandwidth to take it on.”
Enter Clay. Talia used Clay to automate the creation of personalized landing pages on Webflow.
"I can click a button and generate 600 landing pages right now because of the way we’ve connected Clay to Webflow. We can reference someone’s job title, company logo, and more. We can use these pages for hundreds of ABM campaigns, outbound email sequences, inbound follow ups, and even ad campaigns" Talia added.
Below is an example of the template as well as a page generated for Steve Madden—without any human intervention. A single change to a Clay table pushes live updates to all published landing pages, eliminating the need for tracking and manually updating the pages in the future.
Use case 4: Automatically find local business addresses to improve direct mail campaigns
Verkada's growth team often assists sales in closing high-priority accounts by mailing them personalized physical gifts. One big challenge, however, is figuring out where to mail the gift. “Our address data in Salesforce was very inaccurate, so we historically wasted money on packages that didn’t deliver correctly,” Davide said.
To resolve this issue, Verkada used Clay to auto-enrich contacts with their corresponding local business addresses. Claygent creates a distance calculation between the city on the contact’s LinkedIn profile and the city of the company headquarters to determine the best place to send the package. Clay also syncs the correct address to Salesforce.
“This alone is saving half the time of some team members,” Davide said. “They can then use that time to engage with deals or come up with new GTM ideas. We can have thousands of packages delivered on their own and just think about what to do next.”
Clay’s impact on Verkada’s growth workflows
Davide and Talia have used Clay at Verkada to eliminate all manual enrichment work on the growth team and significantly improve their LinkedIn ad targeting, direct mail marketing, and, most importantly, lead conversions.
“Anytime we have an idea that would require mundane tasks, we wonder if we can use Clay,” Talia said. “The growth team never has to wait on engineering timelines to accomplish creative campaign workflows.”
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