Here is an interesting case of a software company that implements an all-in-one technical support system (e.g. support calls, email cases, internal support document creation, etc.) for large businesses and have been in the software space for less than 3 years, but began struggling with generating leads, due to competition from well-established companies and limited marketing funds.
This company has great product reviews, however they weren’t capturing enough leads to sustain their company for the future, and roughly half of their leads were unqualified. In spite of these issues, when the sales team was able to give a demo to a qualified lead they were successful and began to generate revenue. In order to continue to see growth and expand their offerings to new markets, they looked into Marketing Automation to create a content marketing strategy with integrating content.
Background: Software Company Leveraged SharpSpring for Generating New Leads Industry: Technology Goal: Lead Generation B2B/B2C/Channel: B2B/B2C, low volume,high RPU Gross Revenues: $1.07MM Units Sold/Month: 9 Revenue/Unit: $9,900 New Leads/Month: 72
They implemented marketing automation to accomplish the following goals: 1. 2. 3. 4. Generate leads through content marketing Pre-qualify leads in order to help the sales team become more efficient, Maintain contact with new leads to decrease unengaged time in the sales process. Increase the conversion rate for leads that have filled out a form, but have not attended a demo. Goal/ Challenge: Post Sales 0% Lead Generation 70% Sales Engagement 10% They determined that generating high quality content was the most effective way to drive potential customers to the website and obtain their information. Through gated content, they were able to increase the amounts of leads they received per month. With forms, they pre-qualified those leads to remove companies that did not meet their minimum revenue/number of employees, and segmented the leads that did. Personalized drip campaigns provided targeted content to these segments, and automated notifications for sales reps allowed them to provide relevant and useful information and keep leads engaged/moving through the sales funnel. Tactical Philosophy: 1. Gated Content to Capture Leads: With help they were able to create a content marketing strategy with gated content, allowing them to capture lead information. Examples of their content marketing efforts include:
Recommended Tactics: | 1 a. A monthly thought-leadership blog published by their President that was sent via email to leads that opted-in. b. Customized landing pages focused on conversion for each of their marketing efforts. 0% 10% ANALYTICS 10% ANALYTICS 10%
Scenario | 2 2. Determine Effectiveness with Campaigns: Because of a limited marketing budget, each dollar spent needed to be highly efficient. They set up Campaigns in SharpSpring in order to determine which content marketing tactics are performing effectively and delivering positive ROI, in order to focus their efforts and spend. a. Through Campaigns, they were able to see end-to-end metrics for each of their marketing efforts. They were able to know where each lead came from, track the cost of lead generation, and see which drove the most sales. b. they were also able to tag each campaign to better understand the effectiveness of each type (ie: social media v. paid search). 4. Segmentation Using Dynamic Lists: they used Dynamic Lists to segment their leads into unique groups. This allowed them to effectively communicate with each lead based on their qualifications. Leads were pre-qualified based on certain parameters, which increased sales team efficiency and led to higher conversion rates.
They were separated into the following segments Once set up, these Dynamic Lists automatically sort customers and add/remove them from segments as needs change, creating a permanent growth engine.
a. Company size and revenue b. Likelihood of conversion based on lead score 3. Empower Sales with Visitor Information: They used SharpSpring’s capability to track the Life of the Lead through VisitorID in order to empower its sales team with information about their most valuable leads. a. Through VisitorID, anonymous visits these leads made prior to filling out a form were tracked, then assigned to the lead after they identified themselves (by filling out a form/requesting a demo/etc). The sales people were then able to use actionable data about the lead’s anonymous visit history to provide more targeted, valuable information to the lead. b. For example, when an IT company with 8,500 employees and $85MM in revenues filled out a form, the sales person was able to identify that prior to filling out the form they had been to the website 3 times, each time visiting the page related to the software calling support aspect of their software. The sales person then reached out to them asking if they would like a demo highlighting the benefits of software calling, since they knew that was a hot button issue for the lead. c. Downloadable white papers that required a name, company name and email address before being able to access. d. A social media strategy that pushed out high quality content and drove people to site. e. Quarterly webinars on important industry topics. f. Customer surveys on site and via email that gather lead information, as well as valuable information about what features people would like to see, what support features their company uses/finds valuable, etc.
We are working on a summary of the analytics and ROI of this case and will post them soon.
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