iManage, a recognized leader in legal document security used by many Fortune 500 companies, faced a unique growth dilemma. Despite its success within law firms, iManage encountered two critical barriers to market expansion. First, traditional legal firms were slow to upgrade from decades-old systems. Second, iManage’s strong brand recognition in the legal industry did not readily translate into new markets. The launch of iManage Cloud—a SaaS and IaaS offering—was intended to address these challenges by providing firms with always-updated technology at reduced entry costs, but the initial marketing campaigns fell short of expectations.

To overcome these hurdles, I identified three critical issues—complexity, audience, and messaging—and recalibrated the marketing approach accordingly. The existing campaign architecture was overly convoluted, with high-value assets hidden behind multiple retargeting motions and outdated automation tools. By redesigning the lead flow and expediting asset delivery to stakeholders, I synchronized campaign deployment and sales alignment. Additionally, an overreliance on email marketing failed to engage CTOs and CIOs, whose inboxes were often blocked by spam filters, and confined the brand largely to the legal sector. In response, I expanded our outreach through robust search and paid social strategies and enlisted a demand generation expert to guide new channel adoption. Finally, recognizing that our messaging focused too heavily on familiar problems rather than offering immediate solutions, we shifted to solution-driven content that directly addresses the real-world challenges technology leaders face.

This shift in approach yielded impressive results. Engagement metrics rose by 30%, exceeding both company and industry benchmarks. Equally important, targeting a broader audience generated a significant uptick in qualified web traffic, ultimately increasing it by 16 times. With more streamlined processes, expanded channels, and direct solution-focused messaging, iManage Cloud successfully broke through the barriers to growth—strengthening its foothold in the legal market while positioning itself for continued success across a variety of new industries.