A student loyalty and marketing platform, Student Beans connects leading global brands to an audience of more than 163 million students across 100 countries. To partner with and provide media services to more than 1000 top brands, its revenue team – including marketing, sales, and account management – relies on DocSend to help them create, improve, and deliver the right content, in the right formats, to clients and prospects.

Educating brands with plentiful, diverse content

“As a marketing and sales organization, we engage with brands to teach them how Gen-Z behaves as a demographic, and ways to attract them as customers,” begins Matthew Mortimer, Head of Demand Generation at Student Beans. “Content is very important to this education process.”

Top-of-funnel content, such as a guide to Gen Z, is used by sales and marketing alike to identify warm leads. Student Beans also utilizes later stage content such as case studies, media packs, and rate cards during the decision stage. There is a lot of effort put into content creation so it is critical for them to understand what is resonating and what isn’t. That is where DocSend comes in.

Building a data-focused culture with document analytics

“Understanding what content works for our target audiences gives our sales team a competitive edge,” comments Matthew. “Prior to DocSend, we distributed emails with attachments, assuming our audience wanted to hear what we had to say. Now, we take learnings from DocSend along with other tools which has enabled us to engage with prospects and customers more deeply.”

“As a sales and marketing team, we spend a lot of time looking at DocSend analytics so we can understand which topics are most relevant to certain brands or markets,” says Matthew. “It’s embedded into our business. Whether DocSend is used to help identify a warm lead by knowing someone is reading a guide or to speed up a deal by using page by page analytics of our rate card, it allows us to be more strategic in our sales and marketing efforts.”

These learnings are then shared across the entire company. “We have a weekly dialogue with the sales team to go through what content is working and what’s not,” Matthew says. “Our sales teams operate across U.S., UK and Europe, and APAC, and we want everyone to see and learn from DocSend performance insights.”

Putting insights—big and small—into action

The marketing team regularly reviews DocSend analytics to gather feedback on content consumption and implement that into both the writing and design of future content. Matthew continues, “We use these learnings, along with client feedback, to update our collateral. DocSend tells us when our content is top notch or when it needs improvement.”

Even smaller insights, Matthew shares, can lead to big improvements, noting an enhancement they made to their rate cards, thanks to DocSend. Initially, rate cards included pricing across all territories in an effort to accommodate global prospects. However, they learned this created some confusion. By using DocSend data of rate card consumption, they instead opted to split rate cards per territory for pricing that better reflected what they were selling and to whom.

“We also use DocSend as a key part of our onboarding and implementation process,” he continues. “When we onboard a new brand partner, we share documents through a DocSend Space. This makes it easy for a customer to consume our instructions, and we’re able to track whether they are opening, reviewing, and following the different guides to get up and running on our website.”

Reflecting back while looking forward to the future

Looking ahead, Matthew shares that the Student Beans team is focused on extracting even more value by integrating Salesforce and DocSend.

“When we initially implemented DocSend, we had two instances: one for our sister company and one for Student Beans,” he mentions. “With the help of the DocSend team, we migrated them together for greater performance insights. Bringing Salesforce into this picture will provide even deeper insights into prospect and customer interest.”

Having worked closely with their DocSend account manager for several years, Matthew enjoys knowing he has a knowledgeable, collaborative team to rely on for guidance. The feedback and communication loop between the Student Beans and DocSend teams has remained closely aligned. “A while back, we shared feedback about an enhancement idea for the platform,” Matthew shares. “At the time, we assumed it’d be written down on a piece of paper and didn’t expect to hear about it again.”

“A few months ago, our account manager emailed us to let us know the enhancement we asked for was being rolled out in the next release,” Matthew remarks. “Listening to customer’s suggestions and taking action—you don’t always see this in tech.”