Zoho is Leveraging Backlinks to Flank the $66B CRM Market

Flanking is an enduring military tactic, used for millennia by commanders to outmaneuver and overcome much larger opponents. By attacking the enemy from multiple sides, forces have managed to exploit vulnerabilities, divide attention, and ultimately, claim victory. 

Today, this time-tested strategy is moving from the battlefield to the tech landscape — in particular, the competitive arena of the global CRM market. 

Grand View Research estimates the global CRM market is projected to reach a valuation of $65.59 billion this year, with an annual growth rate of 13.9% through 2023. 

Amidst this promising market landscape, Zoho emerges as a prominent player. The innovative tech company uses the flanking strategy to gain a competitive edge. 

Instead of focusing exclusively on a single product or target audience, Zoho astutely launched two distinct CRM solutions: Zoho CRM, a powerful enterprise-level system, and Bigin, a user-friendly platform for small businesses. This dual approach, much like a flanking maneuver, allows Zoho to reach a wider market segment, disrupt its competitors, and fortify its position in the CRM market. 

And, as you can see from the G2 grid below, the market calls for this type of bold strategy. It’s a crowded space, with over 800 available CRMs. 

If you look a little closer into the leaders quadrant, amongst names like Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Freshsales, you’ll notice that the name Zoho actually comes up twice: once as the notorious Zoho CRM and again as Bigin (by Zoho). Zoho’s attacking the CRM market from both sides — with both an enterprise- and startup-level tool. 

Let’s see Zoho’s strategy in action.

Zoho’s Flanking Strategy: Using Two Products to Dominate The CRM Market

Zoho’s strategy to conquer the global CRM market with two distinct product offerings, Zoho CRM for enterprise-level clients and Bigin for small businesses, is astute and forward-thinking. 

A dual-product approach allows Zoho to cater to a broader market segment, addressing distinct needs, and providing appropriate solutions. 

With Zoho CRM, they can target larger corporations that require robust, comprehensive CRM systems with advanced features like AI-driven analytics, integration capabilities, and customizable workflows. On the other hand, Bigin serves small businesses that demand affordability, simple implementation, and quick results. 

By providing tailored CRM solutions to both these segments, Zoho not only increases its market reach and digital presence but also diversifies its revenue streams — thereby enhancing its chances of becoming a global CRM leader. 

It’s an approach that allows Zoho to cross- and up-sell its products, offering a growth path for their clients as they scale.

But there’s a catch: One product has a dominant brand name and market presence, decades in the making. The other was launched in the midst of the pandemic’s first year and targets a niche audience. 

Before we get into how Zoho Inc. makes this dual-product strategy work, let’s look at the marketing engine for each brand.

Zoho’s Marketing Engine 

Created in 2005, just 9 years after the founding of the company, Zoho CRM is one of the company’s flagship products — which is impressive considering they have more than 40 others. 

From a marketing perspective, that means Zoho has had a long time to establish its CRM product in the market, develop marketing materials, and observe the evolution of consumer needs. Just look at the Zoho CRM landing page — a crisp tagline, compelling copy, a simple CTA, and a laundry list of enterprise customers. 

Of course, there are two other things that over 25 years of B2B SaaS excellence give a company: brand recognition and search equity. 

The Zoho brand has been around nearly as long as the Google search engine itself. That’s a major success factor that immediately shows up when you look at the channel-by-channel breakdown of Zoho’s marketing engine, which is led by, you guessed it, direct and organic search.  

I’ll elaborate on how important brand recognition and search equity are to Zoho’s dominance of the CRM market below, but first let’s take at the other piece of this strategy: Bigin. 

Bigin’s Marketing Engine

Zoho launched Bigin (by Zoho CRM) in May 2020, looking to snatch up more small businesses with a “pipe-centric CRM built and priced for small business.” Just over three years out from that launch, the light-weight CRM is being used by over 20,000 startups and small businesses across the globe. 

As a relatively new player on the CRM scene, you’d expect Bigin to deploy a much more holistic marketing strategy. Why? Because it simply hasn’t had the same amount of time to build up the level of brand recognition and search equity as Zoho.  

Looking at the channel distribution below, you can see that’s the case. Bigin relies more on organic, paid, social, and referral traffic to bring in leads. 

It’s interesting to note, however, that Bigin does also have a high percentage of direct traffic; that suggests a strong brand. As you’ll see below, that brand strength comes directly from Zoho’s backlinking strategy between its enterprise and small biz CRM options. 

Zoho’s Backlinking Strategy — If You Have the Juice, Share It

Link juice, that is — and Zoho, Inc. has a whole lot of it. 

The parent company has been in the software industry for well over 25 years. In that time Zoho has developed over 45 core products and brought in 80 million users across more than 150 different countries. 

If that’s not the definition of a high-authority domain, I don’t know what is. Thankfully, Zoho’s search scorecard is here to back me up:

That’s a pretty incredible organic search resume for a SaaS company.

Now, at the other end of the authority spectrum, we have Bigin (who, despite the name, is not actually very big). Take a look at its search metrics below. Does anything jump out to you?

That’s 87,200 backlinks, earned by a website that only brings in about 6.9K monthly visitors through organic traffic.

This happens because,  from a marketing perspective, Zoho and Bigin aren’t actually distinct entities:  Over the last two years, Zoho has provided over 80,000 do-follow backlinks to Bigin.  That’s a significant transfer of “link juice” from a website with a domain rating of 91 on ahrefs, and ad excellent application of enterprise search optimization tactics. 

Unsurprisingly, this strategy has greatly increased Bigin’s online visibility and credibility, despite its middling search metrics. 

Moving beyond organic and paid performance, Bigin brought in just over 387K visitors for the month of April across all channels. With Similarweb reporting that 22% of that traffic comes from referrals, that’s 85,140 visitors who reach the site through external links. 

Considering that the vast majority of Bigin’s backlinks come from Zoho, it’s safe to say that this link sharing exercise is the driving force behind the growth of this small business CRM. 

Now let’s take a look at exactly where Zoho wants to direct users on the Bigin site. Here are the top Bigin pages by backlinks: 

Surprise, surprise, all 4 of them are conversion-oriented pages – specifically, the Bigin homepage and three landing pages outlining or announcing feature updates. These pages are designed to quickly inform visitors about the benefits of a small business CRM and then get them to sign a lead capture. 

Just take a look at the homepage: 

Referred visitors are immediately hit with a visually-appealing, informative landing page that promises you can start streamlining customer operations in under 30 minutes. Oh, and there’s also a sign-up CTA promising instant access without the need for a credit card. 

I don’t know about you, but if I were a small business owner or startup, that’s music to my ears (or eyes?). 

As good as the landing page is, let’s not forget how the visitor got here. 

They were browsing the massive Zoho, Inc. website — likely unconvinced or uncertain about the prospect of using an enterprise CRM solution — and they found a link for a small business CRM. One click and they’re now looking at an ideal solution. 

Now, Zoho could have prioritized a longform content strategy or large social media campaign to bring in new users. But there’s no telling exactly how long that would take. Alternatively, it could leverage the traffic potential and link equity it has built up over the last 25 years to immediately drive significant traffic to its newest CRM. 

In a SaaS niche that has over 800 competitors, it’s the smart play: funnel the small business consumer segment over to your latest tool and expand the Zoho presence from both ends of the market. 

Genius.

Content is Key, But Don’t Sleep on Backlinks

Focusing on content — strategy, creation, and distribution — is incredibly important to the success of a SaaS brand, no doubt. But many marketers forget that the fruits of that labor, on the organic side, at least, are an equally powerful tool. 

You’ve spent lots of time, and money, building up your link equity with a solid brand and great content. Don’t be afraid to spread some of that juice around. 

While you may not have a Bigin to your Zoho CRM, you can still use that link juice internally. Backlinks are a crucial aspect of SEO strategy, as they indicate a vote of confidence from one site to another, and search engines use them as indicators of content quality. By leveraging Zoho’s established domain authority, Bigin has received a significant boost to its own domain ranking, not to mention its ability to convert new users. 

So, whether you’re bolstering your product offering with a microbrand, just completed an acquisition, or simply want to increase the search performance of a subdomain, this backlink flanking tactic used by Zoho and Bigin is worth strong consideration. 

Your move general.