CASE STUDY
How Backstage Uses
Parse.ly’s Conversions
to Drive Growth
Before Al Pacino was Al Pacino, he delivered newspapers on Thursdays
along Broadway from 42nd Street to 57th Street in New York City, his
only real source of income. As a struggling 21-year-old actor looking
for his big break, he read the Backstage magazine for tips, advice, and
potential roles.
Founded in December 1960 as a weekly tabloid-size newspaper,
Backstage became the bible for New York City theater actors
navigating the industry. Their editorial content was second-to-none:
full of acting secrets, the latest news about the biggest stars, and—
most importantly—casting calls and open opportunities.
Fast forward to 2011. A group of entrepreneurs saw an opportunity
to make it even easier for modern creative professionals to nd
open jobs, and to help a rapidly scaling content industry with nding
the right talent to sta their projects. What was once solely a print
magazine would become a fully-featured online stang platform for the
entire creative industry, from actors and lighting crews to brands and
marketing agencies.
KEY RESULTS
20%
Increase in conversions
25%
Increase in revenue growth
attributable to content
marketing
10%
Savings on ad spend
2 | PARSE.LY
Challenge: Entering a crowded new market
Backstage kept its magazine after expanding to also be an online
stang marketplace, but their ambitions led them to compete on
additional fronts. They didn’t want to connect creative professionals
for just the media and entertainment industry (where they had industry
notoriety). They were thinking bigger.
From digital trends and consumer behavior, Backstage understood
that corporations across all industries needed to accelerate content
creation. That meant creating hundreds of touchpoints, for dozens of
customer segments, at all stages of the customer lifecycle.
Backstage’s goal? To become the go-to channel for nding the actors,
models, creators, camera operators, production specialists, voiceover
artists, and the hundreds of other professionals involved in helping
companies (not just studios) create content.
At the time, corporate America instinctively turned to platforms like
Indeed, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, Upwork, or Fiverr to connect with
employees or gig workers. Backstage aimed to change those instincts.
Al Pacino trusted Backstage—but would the corporate world
follow suit?
Backstage’s killer advantage: its publishing roots
Backstage had one killer advantage for its push into the new market—
content would be crucial to their success, and the brand had ve
decades of experience making it.
Content serves two main purposes for Backstage. It serves the
common purpose that comes to mind when most people think of
content, such as blogs, emails, web pages, and other content that
is designed to market products, build brand authority, and attract
customers.
“Today, companies
need to create
with both volume
and velocity, and
you need easy,
fast analytics to
test what works
and what doesn’t.
Companies that
can pull that off are
the ones that are
successful. The
ones that can’t will
fall by the wayside.
It’s pure table
stakes now.”
David Grossman, CMO, Backstage
3 | PARSE.LY
But content also serves another purpose for Backstage. Because
Backstage is a marketplace, content also is their product. This is
because of how marketplaces work.
Whether it’s houses on Airbnb, meals on Doordash, or video games on
Steam, each listing is a collection of words, images, and information—
in other words, listings on marketplaces are content. Marketplace
users choose from thousands of options based on what they nd
compelling. And for providing the software and community that forged
the connection, the marketplace takes its fee.
For Backstage’s marketplace, a job posting is a piece of content—just
as much as Oscars coverage, or how Lin-Manuel Miranda decided to
enter lm after succeeding on Broadway.
This meant Backstage could take its 50 years of experience creating
compelling content and apply the same strategies to its new
technology platform.
Is there a gig that’s receiving lots of applications? Maybe that content
should appear on the front page. Is there an article blowing up on social
media? Maybe that piece gets carefully placed in between the job listings.
By taking a “both” approach, Backstage’s team could maximize the
platform’s attention and create a content-driven ywheel where jobs
feed editorial and vice versa. Now, all Backstage needed to do was
scale its reach to more industries and locations beyond New York City
and Los Angeles
Solution: Scripting the Backstage team to win
with content
To succeed, Backstage needed to be able to:
• Quickly create, test, measure, and iterate content.
• Discover what mattered to new customers in dierent locations
and industries.
• Systematically try new tactics, promote the winners, and pull funding
from the underperformers.
“One of the biggest
struggles was
getting content
teams to leverage
data in making their
decisions.
How do you create
a data-centric
organization?
Not everyone is
going to be writing
SQL queries—so
how do you get
that at a surface
level and in people’s
hands so they start
thinking of things in
terms
of performance?”
David Grossman, CMO, Backstage
4 | PARSE.LY
The sheer requirements for Backstage’s content program in terms of
volume, velocity, and results meant that the entire team—not just a few
individuals—had to be numbers-driven. They couldn’t be divided into
the typical “left-brained, right-brained” camps, with imaginative types
handling creativity and analysts handling numbers. It needed to be easy
for their creative marketers to become obsessed with outcomes.
This brought the Backstage team to Parse.ly.
Parse.ly Conversions: Key to outcomes-based
content marketing
The success of Backstage’s new business model depended on driving
key customer actions: job applications, job postings, subscriber
signups, checkouts, and employer registrations. Whether it was a new
article, an email, or a job posted on their platform, Backstage needed
to know which content contributed to those conversion events.
Before signing up for Parse.ly’s Conversions, Backstage’s marketers
and creatives struggled to source this critical information. While they
could access page views and engaged time fairly easily, those were
indirect proxies for the real results they cared about. Unfortunately,
tools that went beyond page views and engaged time were tedious
to use. It’s no surprise that the marketers defaulted to relying on the
data team for answers—a time-consuming, inecient process.
Critically, Backstage content marketers were blind to what content
contributed to conversions before the last touch. They could nd out
the last content a customer read just before clicking the crucial button,
but they didn’t know if the customers also read other jobs or a few
articles along the way.
Parse.ly’s Conversions solved all these issues for Backstage and
democratized the usage of conversions data from only a couple
of analysts to the 30-strong creative team, who could now easily and
immediately access data.
Backstage set up reports and alerts to notify the marketing team when
particular content made a signicant impact. They would then promote
“We’ve reduced
the time to
identify trending
content that is
driving meaningful
conversions—we
can promote and
boost days ahead
of when we could
do it previously. This
has led to a 20%
improvement in
conversions.
Conversion data in
Parse.ly also enables
us to quickly
identify when
content ceases to
be performative—
we save 5-10% of
spend by being able
to rapidly identify
content that is
losing steam.”
David Grossman, CMO, Backstage
5 | PARSE.LY
that content more heavily—putting more ad dollars behind it, including
it in email marketing, creating “round-ups” of the most compelling
content, and via on-platform repurposing. Because they were able
to identify winners more quickly, and also identify when content
became stale, they could nimbly increase and decrease promotional
investments for both maximum impact and savings.
Perhaps best of all, because they had proof of what was actually
working, the marketers were able to discover which topics to write
about for Backstage’s target audiences.
Content marketing driving the business forward
One of the most attractive aspects of Parse.ly’s Conversions is how
easy it makes proving the value of content to your business.
Since Backstage has begun using Parse.ly Conversions, they have
seen a 50% increase in new projects year over year. Not only have they
added more than 100,000 voice actors to the platform, but they’ve also
added production and post-production job opportunities. This makes
Backstage the only place you can hire on-camera talent, voiceover
talent, production, and post-production—all in the same place and at
the same time.
Backstage has also acquired ve companies in the last six months and
entered new markets, becoming the largest creative stang platform in
the U.S., U.K., and Australia, with continental Europe up next.
Backstage CMO David Grossman attributes much of his team’s
success to their ability to make data an essential part of their daily
practice through Parse.ly Conversions.
“Data-phobia is a real problem for a lot of teams,” says Grossman. “You
need the tool that really will eliminate that fear and make data-driven
insights accessible for everyone. The fact is, most analytics platforms
are not made for writers, and they’re intimidating. Parse.ly is the tool
that makes it fun, simple, easy, and not scary to get data—you want to
start using it on a daily basis.”
“Backstage
continues to grow,
and conversion
tracking has helped
us be more efcient.
We’ve saved dozens
of person-hours
a month and seen
real results as a
result—25% for
additive growth
from our content
marketing activities
and objectives.”
David Grossman, CMO, Backstage
6 | PARSE.LY
About Parse.ly
Parse.ly is the analytics platform built for content creators.
Parse.ly gives creators, marketers and developers the
tools to understand content performance, prove content
value, and deliver tailored content experiences that drive
meaningful results.
With Parse.ly, your writers and marketers don’t have to
turn to the analyst team for answers—they can be
data-driven themselves.
Learn more about Parse.ly
“If we didn’t have
Parse.ly, we’d have
to build Parse.ly.”
David Grossman
Chief Marketing Ocer
Backstage
