B2B Digital Marketing Case Studies
Three examples of successful B2B digital marketing programs with paid media tactics fueling performance.
B2B sales cycles are notoriously long, complicated, and unpredictable. For years, research firm Gartner has been describing the process as a “long, hard slog“.
The not unexpected byproduct of a customer journey that occurs over months or even years, includes as many as a dozen members of a steering committee, and involves interactions across websites, mobile apps, social media, email, and events — is a difficulty in understanding the path from problem identification to vendor selection. How do we really know the relative contributions of each tactic along the way?
There isn’t an easy answer and it only gets more difficult to track as a marketing team gets bigger and invests in more tactics. But we B2B marketing professionals know that digital marketing does work, though we often find it challenging to prove as much.
There are an endless amount of ways to make digital marketing work for B2B companies and successful strategies are largely dependent on an organization’s relative strengths and weaknesses. Some companies, like professional services firms, are able to generate a steady flow of useful and original content because they’ve always marketed themselves that way. Others, like software companies, have become reliant on free trials as the cornerstone of their digital marketing efforts.
The most successful B2B digital marketing operations deploy a multichannel and multi-tactic approach to their efforts. Here are three B2B digital marketing case studies fueled by paid media that illustrate how it can work.
REGIONAL SPECIALTY B2B SMALL BUSINESS
Description: regional, 100 person company in the document management category with a 20 year history of providing reliable services to mostly local customers.
Tactics: phased rollout of PPC and display advertising programs over eight quarters — primarily on Google and Bing platforms — testing a dozen different campaigns focused on unique keyword clusters, ad copy and geographic regions; combined with the development of a robust but modest website with prominent calls to action; plus monthly blog posts and social media promotion support.
Outcome: inbound lead generation volume of 20/month (~one per business day); identification and buildout of new, complementary, high profit-margin line of business uncovered during campaign testing; expansion to acquiring new customers in about half of the states in the continental U.S.; the program generates one new customer per month on average.
Stats: $10,000+/month advertising budget + website marketing manager; delivers leads at $525 apiece and opportunities at $1,500 each; generated $400,000 in year one new customer revenues last year and projected to deliver $1.5 million in lifetime customer value (profits) over five years, which translates to a 5X ROI.
Lessons: paid media can sometimes deliver fast ROI for B2B SMBs but companies need to balance lead sourcing across digital, direct and events or otherwise risk being upended by new competitors, a soft economy, evolving buyer behavior, or deep-pocketed legacy players.
GLOBAL EARLY-STAGE B2B SOFTWARE COMPANY
Description: rapidly growing, well-financed, early-stage software company in an emerging, global category doubling in size each year; product is enterprise software and can cost millions of dollars per year to license.
Tactics: multi-channel and multi-tactic approach deployed by a team of 100+ marketing professionals and agencies covering search engine marketing (organic and paid), social media marketing (organic and paid), content marketing (mostly blog posts, white papers and webinars but also some video), email marketing, and a few TV spots — all supported by a robust corporate community; primary assets included free trial and several big brand analyst reports.
Outcome: search engine marketing tactics were responsible for delivering 2,200 net-new inbound leads (MQLs) per month at the program’s peak (about 75% / 25% split between organic and paid tactics, which is a common ratio for B2B companies); 21% of MQLs converted to opportunities, totaling 450 per month.
Stats: $500,000+/month advertising budget + 5 internal FTEs + agency support for paid media; inbound leads generated by paid media cost $350 per new contact, $720 per MQL, and $1,500 per opportunity; cost per unit for paid social-media sourced leads were 2X as expensive as those sourced by paid ads on the search engines (Google, Bing).
Lessons: paid social media advertising (in B2B, that means LinkedIn Ads) can work as top- to mid-funnel lead generation tool but only if the offer is compelling, unlike with paid search where the offer is often less critical because the user is already in shopping mode;
MID-SIZED, NICHE INSURANCE COMPANY IN THE U.S.
Description: 20 year old company with deep market penetration in the Northeast Corridor of the U.S. gets acquired and overhauls its digital marketing operations in pursuit of aggressive national expansion.
Tactics: soup-to-nuts overhaul of the corporate website including a prioritized, CTA-centric user path, a robust resource center, integration with the corporate CRM, and online dashboards to track performance + paid media and SEO tactics.
Outcome: inbound lead volume via the website increased from 0 to 50 per month and the new forms serve as a sales accelerator, getting salespeople proposal inputs prior to a phone or video call; website leads convert to new business at the rate of about three new contracts per month.
Stats: $10,000+/month advertising budget + ½ internal FTE + agency support for paid media, SEO and website upkeep and expansion; leads via paid media cost about $1,500 each.
Lessons: the analytics infrastructure aspect of digital marketing operations is just as important as the tactics — and requires ongoing maintenance to keep useful and relevant; minus the necessary tracking, analytics and reporting workflows, even the most successful digital marketing programs can struggle to get credit for their contributions.
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Tim Bourgeois is a B2B marketing consultant at East Coast Catalyst and manages the digital marketing strategy audit practice.
Contact him at tbourgeois(at)eastcoastcatalyst(dotcom) to schedule a call to discuss how his team can help with your company’s B2B digital marketing strategy and lead generation performance.