THE OPPORTUNITY:

Creating a breadcrumb trail.

1E is a global leader in enterprise IT efficiency software that hired us to find new customers and guide them down a path to conversion via lead generation campaigns and software trials. While 1E had a good offline reputation for providing enterprise level IT software, their website received little organic traffic to support sales. That’s why we were excited to leverage the power of search engines and inbound marketing to help 1E bring new enterprise prospects into their sales pipeline.

So how do you create exceptional search and display ads that speak to your audience?

THE CHALLENGE:

Getting over traffic jams.

To sell enterprise software, you need to reach a very specific audience. Increasing traffic might look good on your monthly report, but it won’t do much to drive MQLs into the sales pipeline.

We knew that 1E’s prospects were highly educated CTOs and IT managers at worldwide organizations. Their largest customers have more than 300,000 seats and spend millions every year on IT related software solutions. This was a very complex sales cycle so our customer acquisition efforts needed more than simple SEO tweaks or a benefit-laden landing page to achieve success.

The Process:

The right customers with the longest tails.

Our team began developing the campaigns by looking at search trends and deep site analytics. We ensured that we implemented hyper-targeted ads across multiple search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc). This allowed us to reach their enterprise buyers and influence them across the B2B vendor evaluation process.

We also knew that long tail keywords—very specific search queries—were critical to reaching the right prospects through our search and display advertising campaigns. We developed a list of 1,700 long-tail keywords to build our search campaigns around. These longtail keywords had a lower impact on traffic and rankings—but they resulted in a higher impact to sales pipeline product trials, and ultimately revenue.

The Results

More leads, downloads and revenue.

• $3,90M

  in New Business

• 271

  product demos & meeting requests

• 400k

  unique visitors via organic traffic

• 116 Curated PDFs

  82k

  views driven by free content

SEARCH

• 103k

  Unique visitors from
  paid search ads

• $9.22

  return per $1 spent
  on search Ads

• 22%

  of site conversions
  from paid search ads

The Moral of the Story

Ripples across online and offline goals.

A key priority in all of our projects is to ensure that conversion funnels, goal tracking and attribution are used to quantify the ROI of our digital ad campaigns. In the case of 1E, this translated to tracking in-person meeting requests, product trials, whitepaper downloads and even phone calls back to our digital ads and keywords We don’t just review our clients’ projects once after launch, but we constantly monitor and optimize our campaigns based on realtime performance, visitor behaviour and attribution analyses.

As a result of the outstanding performance of these ads, 1E purchased our full-service retainer, which includes direct response and inbound marketing, design, copywriting, and conversion optimization services—with a smile!