Clutch.co Featured Sponsorship: A Bad Investment or a Smart Choice?

What is Clutch.co?

ClutchCo is a B2B ratings and reviews platform that helps businesses make informed decisions when choosing service providers. What sets Clutch apart is its vast Google traffic, mostly from the US, that can provide valuable exposure for your business. Moreover, if you’re looking to generate new leads, they offer various sponsorship options that can fuel your business growth.

Here at Echo, we also have a profile on Clutch and 10+ reviews.

Featured listings

Recently, Clutch started to offer featured listings, which allow companies to reach additional buyers by positioning themselves on numerous niche pages across the site where they are not currently listed. So, depending on the service, you will get a guaranteed position across dozens to hundreds of pages.

Sounds interesting, right? So, we decided to give it a try at the end of January 2023.

Choosing the right categories

As our core service is IT Staff Augmentation, we started by exploring relevant opportunities in this category. Unfortunately, they only have one well-promoted page with a decent amount of traffic which is already packed with tons of sponsors – https://clutch.co/it-services/staff-augmentation. Other Clutch pages like Top Staff Augmentation Services in Canada, the United Arab Emirates or Australia have just a few monthly visitors. So choosing FL sponsorship there doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Using Ahrefs and internal data from Clutch sales representatives, we analyzed almost all interesting categories and, finally, ended up with four options:

• 1st Featured️ at HR Recruiting | $1,650/m
• 2nd Featured at HR Staffing | $750/m
• 4th Featured at Managed Service Providers | $1,000/m
• 5th Featured at IT Services | $750/m

We successfully paid for this advertisement scheduled to run for the entire month (February 1st – February 28th), and started to observe the numbers on Google Analytics.

A little trick with a logo

Have you ever considered using SVG format for your company’s logo? It turns out that this format can be animated and not many people know about it. Recently, we came across this exciting discovery while browsing our competitors on Clutch. Right after that, we quickly re-uploaded our logo with a new animated version to attract more attention to the profile.

However, if too many companies start using animated SVG logos, Clutch may have to fix it to prevent their platform from becoming too flashy.

Traffic and leads

Our campaign resulted in significant exposure and attracted over 2000 visitors to the Echo website. However, half of the traffic was generated by our competitors from various regions such as India, Pakistan, Poland, Africa, and Latin America.

We were tracking two major goals on our website and got 45 conversions in total:

• Contact form submission (33 times)
• Scheduled meeting via Hubspot (12 times)

At first glance, it seems like quite impressive numbers. But in reality, the vast majority of them were not relevant.

We held only five meetings with more or less relevant prospects and only one of them converted into a real deal. This was a company from Israel looking for cybersecurity experts in Europe. So, here we were acting as tech recruiters. However, considering their specific requirements, it is still unclear whether we can find them the right candidates.

Key takeaways

B2B sales can be a challenging and time-consuming process, with various factors influencing the outcome, such promotional texts and landing page design, as well as global recession. While we had hoped for better results, getting even a single client means it can be considered a successful campaign. Furthermore, we remain optimistic that some of the people we spoke to may become clients in the future with proper follow-ups.

Unfortunately, our campaigns targeting HR Staffing and MSP categories did not yield any results. HR Recruiting and IT Services performed better but still below expectations.

In conclusion, we have decided to continue investing in featured listings but have reduced our budget. We have also started new experiments on Clutch, but that’s a story for another day. 🙂

Update as of September 26th, 2023

Extremely disappointing experience dealing with Clutch manager Jamie Unrau and the Featured Listings service. We had a clear agreement for Staff Augmentation and securing the 2nd Featured spot, for which I made the payment. To my surprise, they placed Echo in the 4th position instead. When I contacted Jamie for an explanation, the response was essentially that it was acceptable. This suggests that, according to their logic, the terms you pay for can be changed at their discretion. Highly unprofessional conduct.

Tags: advertising, analysis, branding, budgeting, clutch.co.