Tag: SaaS

How to Increase Your Trial Signups Through PPC for SaaS

Contributed by Laura Jo Sharpe

Free trials often lead to higher conversion rates. One study showed that two out of three buyers who used a free trial ended up purchasing the product or service afterward. However, encouraging B2B buyers to sign up for the trial in the first place isn’t always straightforward. Thankfully, PPC for SaaS companies can improve your trial signup rate.

Learn how pay-per-click for SaaS works and how you can use it to increase your trial signups.

Does PPC Work for B2B Marketing?

PPC advertising is effective for both B2C and B2B marketing for a SaaS company.

Reaching primary decision-makers can be difficult as you don’t have as many options as B2C marketing. However, when you use PPC strategies, you have a greater chance of your marketing content with your trial signup appearing in front of the right people, which will boost your B2B marketing strategy.

PPC ads can appear in searches, social media, and third-party websites.

What Are the 8 Types of PPC Ads?

Explore the eight primary PPC examples:

Paid Search Advertising

Search ads are content you sponsor to guarantee it appears at the top of relevant Google searches. This is the most popular type of PPC ad. When they appear at the top of search engine results, they have an “Ad” marker before the URL.

To create Google ads for SaaS businesses, you choose the content you want to sponsor and bid on keywords that you want that content to rank for in the tech niche. When your target B2B audience searches those terms, your content with the trial signup will be one of the top results.

Display Advertising

Display ads are like digital billboards. They appear in advertising widgets on sidebars of third-party websites. They are often images with messages that take the reader to a designated landing page.

Instead of targeting keywords, you target specific people. For example, Google can track users and display your trail signup ad to visitors who had previously visited your site.

Social Media Advertising

Over half the world’s population is on social media, making it an ideal place to advertise your trial. Even B2B companies see a positive return for social ads, with 60% of B2B marketers confirming they received an ROI from paid ads on social media.

Some of the most popular platforms for social media advertising include:

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the most effective social media channel for B2B marketing as 80% of the members are business decision-makers.

Because social media users enter an extensive amount of personal information, you can target your audience on social media easier. Use filters like location, demographics, interests, and behaviors to find your audience. Your paid content will appear on their feeds with a “Sponsored” tag under your profile.

Retargeting Ads

Not everyone who visits your website will purchase immediately. The average decision-maker will interact with 13 different pieces of content before choosing a vendor.

Remarketing is the strategy you use to bring your website traffic back to your site after they initially left. While there are several ways you can remarket, retargeting tracks the visitor and then displays PPC ads with your content on third-party sites. These reminders of your products and services offer visitors a chance to reconsider their decision and encourage them to return to your site.

About 33% of B2B marketers say they plan on investing in remarketing as part of their PPC strategy.

Instream Advertising

If you have a video ad, you can display it at the start, middle, or end of a YouTube video as a PPC instream ad.

YouTube is one of the top-visited sites globally, just below Google and Facebook, making it another prime spot to post your ads and reach your target audience. Since 70% of B2B buyers say they watch videos in their buyer’s journey, video ads should play a significant role in your PPC campaigns.

Gmail-Sponsored Ads

You can send your marketing content directly to your audience through Gmail-sponsored ads. These ads appear in the recipient’s inbox alongside their other mail but have an “ad” tag to distinguish them. However, since most businesses don’t use Gmail, these PPC ads are primarily for B2C marketing.

Google Shopping Ads

Google shopping ads are paid ads for your products or services. This ad format works best for physical items from ecommerce stores rather than SaaS companies.

Local Service Ads

This PPC ad is for local businesses offering services to help them appear in local search results. SaaS businesses do not qualify for local service ads.

“LinkedIn is the most effective social media channel for B2B marketing as 80% of the members are business decision-makers.”

How Do I Create a SaaS Marketing Plan to Increase Trial Signups?

Paying for an ad only improves your reach but doesn’t guarantee the right audience will click on the ad. So, what are the proven PPC tactics for more effective SaaS marketing?

Use these eight strategies to build a SaaS marketing plan to increase your trial signup rate.

1. Use Comprehensive Analytics

Tracking the buyer’s journey will tell you where your clients came from before they signed up for your trial. Those previous touchpoints will be key channels for displaying your PPC ads to increase the number of buyers ready to sign up.

However, the attribution model you use for tracking your buyers and their touchpoints will impact how you view your channels. An attribution model is how you distribute value from a sale among each contributing channel.

If you use a last-click attribution model, you only attribute the trial signup to the last channel the buyer visited. This model doesn’t consider other stops they made leading up to the trial signup. For example, that same buyer might have spent significant time on social media earlier in their sales journey, making that channel another valuable location for ads.

Seeing the entire journey in your attribution model is the most effective way to choose the best channels for your PPC ads.

“Seeing the entire journey in your attribution model is the most effective way to choose the best channels for your PPC ads.”

2. Optimize Your Landing Page

Each PPC ad should have its customized landing page. A landing page is a static page that your traffic arrives at from your PPC ads. If your ads send your visitors to your website, they don’t have any specific direction to go and are more likely to get distracted on your site or lose interest.

However, a landing page removes all distractions like the navigation bar. When visitors arrive, there is only one action to complete, like signing up for your trial.

It can also customize the visitor’s message according to the campaign they come from. For example, if your ad was a PPC ad on LinkedIn that targeted financial decision-makers, your landing page might focus on the financial benefits of your software.

To optimize your landing page fully, you will need to perform A/B testing to see which formats and page setups connect best with your audience. For instance, you can run several ads that lead to a copy of the same landing page. However, each landing page might use a different color trial signup button. You can watch to see which color received the most trial signups.

3. Use a Variety of Ads

The average person sees between 6,000 and 10,000 ads each day. In addition, many of those ads are the same across different platforms. If your buyers see a copy and paste of your ad several times a day for several days, they will quickly develop ad fatigue. Instead of reaching them with your invitation to your trial, you will create a negative response.

To avoid ad fatigue, continually switch up your ads, message, images, and format to keep your ads fresh. Each interaction will feel like a new experience and give you another opportunity to highlight the benefits of your trial and products.

“The average person sees between 6,000 and 10,000 ads each day.”

4. Use Lookalike Audiences

When you use Facebook, take advantage of their lookalike audience feature for PPC ads. It will help you reach more of your target audience with your trial signup.

Lookalike is a feature that analyzes your current social media audience. It then searches Facebook for groups with similar characteristics and shares your ads with that audience.

You can create a custom list of a segment of your audience for Facebook to analyze. Then you can make up to 500 lookalike audiences for each group.

5. Create Multiple Personalized PPC Ads

Roughly 80% of marketers say they saw more sales when they used personalization in their strategies. Personalized PPC ads and landing page content change for each target audience to ensure it has the most relevant message for each decision-maker.

“Roughly 80% of marketers say they saw more sales when they used personalization in their strategies.”

For example, what motivates the head of marketing to sign up for your trial will be different than what motivates the CEO of the same company. Therefore, adjusting your ad to those titles allows you to reach your audience more effectively for a higher conversion rate.

6. Use Negative Keywords

You may already know about keywords, which are search phrases you target in your content to improve your ranking in Google searches. However, you can also use negative keywords in your PPC ads.

Negative keywords are the opposite of keywords you want to rank for. They tell the search algorithm what searches you don’t want your ad to appear in because they aren’t relevant to your products or services. By using negative keywords, you reduce the number of clicks on your ad from visitors who aren’t going to sign up for your trial because the service isn’t designed for their needs.

For example, if you are promoting a cookie tracking software trial, you might include “cookie recipe” as a negative keyword, so the search algorithm doesn’t pull your software up in baking-related queries.

Keyword vs Negative Keyword PPC

7. Track Micro Conversions

Before your buyers sign up for your trial, several micro conversions take place. The first micro conversion is clicking on your ad. Next, you can track how long they stay on your page or whether they scroll through the landing page to read your content.

By tracking these micro conversions, you can identify what parts of your PPC ad are effective and where you are most likely to lose your traffic.

For example, you might see many micro conversions leading up to filling out the form. However, most of your visitors might abandon the trial signup form before completing it. Therefore, you can identify the form as a roadblock to trial signups and work on improving that specific area of your landing page.

8. Create a Lead Qualification Process

Once your target audience signs up for a trial, your job isn’t done. When the trial ends, there is a chance they won’t purchase your product.

Part of your PPC ad campaign should include how to convert trial signups to retainers.

For example, once a buyer fills out the trial signup form, this action might trigger an automated email drip campaign. Through the emails, you nurture the lead and address any remaining roadblocks they may have.

You might also set up a support system where you can quickly resolve any issues and answer questions during the trial experience to ensure it’s as positive as possible.

Making a seamless transition from trial to retainer is also key to converting trial users because if the process is too complicated, they are less likely to complete it.

Optimize Your Trial Signups Using PPC for SaaS

Behind the Work can help you design ad copy and landing pages with a high conversion rate. Work with our B2B marketing experts to create customized content that will help you reach more of your marketing goals.

Contact us to learn more about our SaaS PPC Management service.

Why Marketers Should Understand B2B SaaS Churn Rates

Contributed by Sonny Sultani

Software as a Service (SaaS) companies provide an invaluable offering. Clients can access beneficial internet applications without the complexity and bandwidth limitations of having to download and manage expensive software. It’s becoming such a popular tool that SaaS applications make up over 70% of total company software use. Of course, the only way for these businesses to thrive is to ensure that acquisition numbers exceed B2B SaaS churn rates.

Every subscription-based company must be aware of B2B SaaS churn rates to secure their overall success and longevity. Keeping an eye on how many people terminate their subscriptions gives marketers important insight into current performance and revenue growth forecasting. SaaS churn rates tell a powerful story about what aspect of the customer experience is failing and what changes you need to make to attract new prospects and retain current customers. As a result, it’s an effective tool for enhancing your digital marketing efforts.

Gain a comprehensive understanding of B2B SaaS churn rates, how to calculate them, and how they impact acquisition and market positioning for continued success.

“SaaS churn rates tell a powerful story about what aspect of the customer experience is failing and what changes you need to make to attract new prospects and retain current customers.”

What Exactly is SaaS Churn Rate?

SaaS churn rate (also known as attrition) is the rate at which customers cancel their subscriptions during a certain amount of time. While an occasional loss may not seem impactful in the big picture of your business plan, if left unchecked, B2B SaaS churn rates can ultimately destroy your business. After all, if you’re not doing anything to retain the customers you acquire, there’s no way for you to stay afloat, let alone grow and expand.

Churn rate doesn’t just reflect lost revenue. It also means you’re spending more on customer acquisition, which can cost up to five times more than customer retention. Keep a close eye on high SaaS churn rates because they can be detrimental to your bottom line.

Types of SaaS Churn Rates

There are essentially two main types of SaaS churn rates:

  • Customer level: A customer completely ends their relationship with your brand.
  • Subscription level: A customer remains with you but changes the level of their subscription.

Factors that Affect B2B SaaS Churn Rates

With either type, several factors can impact SaaS churn rates, including:

  • Seasonality: Churn rates may increase or decrease at certain times of the year.
  • Growth initiatives: If you launch an acquisition campaign, new members could skew data.
  • Demographics: Some people may simply be a better fit for your services than others.
  • Subscription level: Lower-tier services tend to have a higher churn rate than higher tiers.
  • Contract type: Short-term contracts may have higher termination rates than long-term subscriptions.

You can track factors to look for trends and patterns that enable you to plan your marketing efforts accordingly. Meanwhile, other factors that impact churn rates are customer-based and often unpredictable, including:

  • Financial issues: Customers can no longer afford their subscriptions.
  • Changed needs: Your product no longer meets the customer’s needs.
  • Poor customer experience: If someone has a negative experience, they’re likely to terminate their subscription.

Track all of these factors to identify areas of improvement that are in your control and what changes to make to attract new prospects, maintain happy customers, and reduce SaaS churn rates.

“Churn rate doesn’t just reflect lost revenue; it also means you’re spending more on customer acquisition, which can cost up to five times more than customer retention.”

How to Calculate Churn Rate for SaaS

Because there are so many variables that can affect its outcome, B2B SaaS churn rates can be a complex concept. However, it’s a fairly easy figure to calculate. First, you’ll need to determine the amount of time you want to evaluate (monthly or annually). Then, you’ll need to identify the total number of customers you had at the beginning of that time and the total number of customers you lost in that amount of time. Those numbers will then work into the SaaS churn rate formula as follows:

(Lost Customers / Total Customers at the Start of Time Period) x 100 = Churn Rate

Let’s say you’re wanting to determine your monthly churn rate. If your business had 300 customers at the start of the month and you lost 20 by the end, you would divide 20 by 300. Then, you would multiply that answer (.07) by 100, for a total of a 7% monthly churn rate.

(20 / 300) x 100 = 7%

To keep track of your churn rates, you can maintain a spreadsheet with these figures, or you could simplify the calculating and tracking of your SaaS churn rates with a tool like ProfitWell. This cloud-based app delivers your subscription and financial metrics on one dashboard and can help optimize your pricing and reduce cancellations for lower churn rate.

The goal, of course, is to have the lowest churn rate possible. An acceptable average SaaS churn rate is typically anywhere from 2% to 8%. Anything higher than that could have a significant impact on your monthly recurring revenue.

Churn rate calculations are most beneficial when conducted over a longer timeframe. Short-term results on a daily or weekly basis won’t reveal much insight. But quarterly or annual churn can reveal far-reaching trends and yearly performance. You can see whether your marketing strategy is working and the efficacy of customer retention efforts.

Churn Rate Visibility Improves Acquisition Efforts

SaaS churn rates impact every aspect of your business. They provide the information you need to:

  • Improve customer service: If customers are leaving due to a negative experience, you can re-evaluate your customer service efforts.
  • Rethink customer onboarding: Create a new, smoother, more user-friendly onboarding process that makes customers excited to be new subscribers.
  • Provide better training: When teams don’t silo information and sales and support staff are on the same page, your company can provide a better experience for customers.
  • Seek feedback: At key points along the customer journey, you can check in and see what you could do better to satisfy your current customers.
  • Build deeper relationships: Connect with your customers on a more personal level and build relationships that last.
  • Incentivize current customers: Discount offers and giveaways can entice customers to stay.

Churn rates allow you to learn critical information about ways to improve your approach and current systems to better serve your customers, provide a more personalized experience, and encourage customer loyalty. This is important because 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers.

B2B SaaS churn rates are especially important to marketers. By tracking churn rates and understanding customer behavior, you can adjust your business processes and marketing approach to improve the acquisition of qualified deals with higher customer lifetime value (CLV). A KPI for every SaaS company, CLV is the average amount of money you can expect to earn from one customer throughout the duration of their relationship with your brand. The greater the CLV, the more profitable the customer.

Knowing CLV helps you assess your marketing efforts and provides insight into important KPIs that help you plan current and future marketing strategies for optimal results. It gives you a better idea about your company’s overall profitability and can help you discover ways to increase ROI while decreasing customer acquisition costs. Even just knowing customer lifetime (how long a customer will be with your company) can be an asset. Use churn rate to calculate your customer lifetime as follows:

Customer Lifetime = 1 / Churn Rate

If your churn rate is 7%, then your customer lifetime is 1 / .07 = 14.28 months (or a little over one year). Understanding how long you have with your customer helps you plan an effective marketing strategy to not only make the most of the time you have with them, but to also create a retention strategy that entices them to maintain their subscription even longer.

“Churn rates allow you to learn critical information about ways to improve your approach and current systems to better serve your customers, provide a more personalized experience, and encourage customer loyalty.“

Implement a CRM for Marketing Insights

One of the best ways to combat high B2B SaaS churn rates is to focus on retention through customer relationship management (CRM). A growing industry valued at $69.31 billion, CRM is software that helps you manage all relationships and engagement with prospective and current customers. CRM systems like HubSpot can help you make deeper connections with your audience, streamline operations and processes, and improve revenue generation.

Ultimately, CRM systems help you track your customer’s experience throughout their journey. CRM provides invaluable data that helps you identify areas of high churn and gives clues as to what caused it. Through CRM, you can:

  • Maintain open communication: Customers can give you invaluable feedback to shape your marketing efforts.
  • Understand your customers: Learn the needs, expectations, and preferences of your audience.
  • Channel people through the sales funnel: A better experience helps convert customers.

You also gain access to original advertising sources and can review messaging, channels, and placement to see what about your message didn’t resonate with your audience. You can review bounce rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement to determine which ads yielded high conversions and which ones fell flat.

Conversely, you can compare high churn ads with low churn ads to determine what aspects of your campaign are performing well and what edits you can make to improve overall performance. All of this gives you the information you need to make necessary adjustments and course corrections to ensure your marketing efforts are effective, impactful, and successful.

How Churn Rates Help You Understand Market Positioning

Churn accounts help you understand a lot about market positioning and messaging. Looking at lost accounts can show you why customers canceled their subscriptions and, even more, whether they left you for a competitor. If customers are choosing competing brands over yours, you know you need to take action to secure better market positioning.

Exit surveys can tell you why people left your company, providing you with an opportunity to make intentional and purposeful changes that help set you apart from your competition. You may need to review your price point, assess your customer service, or come up with innovative ideas to reimagine your products and services to better meet evolving consumer needs.

This data can also let you know whether your messaging is resonating with your audience. Wording, tone of voice, and technical explanations may not be connecting with your customers. You might not be adequately presenting the benefits of your services, so customers aren’t seeing the full value of your offerings. In this way, churn rates can help you educate clients about best use cases, so they have the confidence they need to subscribe to your services.

Churn rate also helps you gain an understanding of your customer base. You can learn purchase behavior, habits, and see common reasons for purchases and terminations. All of this helps you qualify potential clients and target the people most likely to benefit from your offerings. Targeting the right audience ensures higher success rates and lower churn rates, resulting in more revenue and continued growth.

“Churn rates can help you qualify potential clients and target the people most likely to benefit from your offerings.”

Reduce Your B2B SaaS Churn Rates

Churn rates provide invaluable metrics that can shape your business operations and marketing strategies for better customer acquisition, higher retention, and greater revenue generation. Behind the Work provides digital marketing solutions for B2B SaaS clients that attract quality leads and help grow your organization. Enhance your digital marketing strategy with data from B2B SaaS churn rates to boost your overall performance.

Visit Behind the Work today to learn more about how we can help SaaS churn rates.

Modento | Converted 46%

Contributed by BTW Content Team
A Dental Practice Patient Engagement Platform Turned to us to Increase Traffic and Drive New Customer Acquisition Through the Buyer’s Journey

“…It’s so refreshing to have a company put in the work on the front end to really know and understand your product, brand, and voice – I have been continually amazed by how well they have been able to produce content that is aligned with our goals and vision. On top of incredible content, they have the expertise to practically implement content strategies via HubSpot and make sure every piece is getting in front of the right people at the right time. They have saved me so much time and energy and have been an absolute delight to partner with. – Kelly Kaufman, Director of Demand Generation for Modento

Overview

A lot goes into managing a dental practice, and Modento equips providers with the tools they need to run as efficiently as possible. The developers of this all-in-one patient engagement platform knew they had a tool that could benefit many providers, but they needed some help getting their story out to their audience.

After looking at multiple marketing agencies, the team at Modento turned to us to increase website traffic, drive engagement, and generate thoughtful content that proved their industry knowledge. The goals prior to starting the campaign looked like the following:

  • Improving monthly traffic to 300 visits per month starting three months after the campaign began 
  • Initiating discussions that show their status as an industry thought leader
  • Increasing engagement and lead generation due to a better experience across the buyer journey

Challenge

Being a small startup in the software development industry sometimes requires each team member to take on multiple roles, and that can make a deep dive into each marketing channel a difficult task. The developers at Modento felt this pain point, with one team member saying:

“…Being a small startup and a one-woman marketing team at that time and wearing a lot of different hats, I just was spread too thin. I felt like I was kind of scratching the surface on a lot of different marketing channels and marketing efforts and didn’t have the time or manpower or knowledge to go deeper. And some of those channels, specifically inbound content and blog content, (were) those things that I really wanted to prioritize as we were working to become a thought leader in our space and in our industry, but just didn’t have the resources to pursue.”

The Modento team knew they needed help marketing their product, but while other agencies offered the same host of video, blog, and production deliverables, they felt an organic connection was lacking. They wanted to leverage their inbound and blog content to drive higher traffic and more engagement on their site, but they didn’t want a one-size-fits-all approach. Their goal was to reach 300 website visits per month with content that showed their value, but they wanted to be treated like a partner, not just a project.

Solution

We pride ourselves on meeting each client on their terms, so we found ourselves compatible with the team at Modento right from the start. We understood their need for higher website traffic, and we partnered with them to help them reach their goal. We assisted by: 

  • Developing a strategy to drive more inbound leads through online sources
  • Positioning Modento as a revolutionary technology that is transparent and high-value, setting it apart from its more established competitors 
  • Showcasing Modento’s advantages in price, packages, and feature offerings
  • Developing content that builds Modento’s authority and thought-leadership in patient engagement 
  • Building trust through high-quality, video-supported case studies and testimonials
  • Increasing the number of live-demo requests 
  • Using content to educate current users on how they can access more features to derive additional value from the platform

EXAMPLES

By launching a campaign that would inform visitors, display the platform’s value, and address common dentistry practice concerns, we sought to furnish Modento with content that would both heighten visibility and drive visitors through the funnel — and the results show that we did.

46%

Of contacts converted from organic search to customers

3k

Website visitors per month after just 3 months

2x

Their website traffic in 9 months

Results

After implementing our campaign, the team at Modento had achieved their goal of increasing website traffic, and were successfully making their platform known. Some of the results were:

  • Over 10 times more blog readers 
  • Greater content engagement
  • Establishment as an industry thought-leader
  • More positive visitor feedback

One Modento team member noted just how helpful our content had proven by citing how many clients told him that they were reevaluating their patient management structures because of the insights they’d found on Modento’s blog.

So whether they purchase the platform or not, our relevant, value-adding content proved instrumental in meeting industry needs and helped Modento put their product on display.

Tideworks | 1000% in 2022

Contributed by BTW Content Team
How a logistics technology provider crushed their lead-gen goals by over 1,000% in 2020 through in-depth buyer personas and targeted campaigns

“The content that you help us produce and the rate of frequency throughout those long sales cycles really helps support the building of trust between us and that prospective customer. They see and hear the same things online as they see and hear them from our people and our customers. That continuity is incredibly valuable.” – Erin Leahy of Tideworks Technology

Preparing its customers for the realities of the logistics landscape

Overview

Tideworks Technology provides cost-effective, reliable terminal operating systems and graphical planning solutions for marine and intermodal terminal operations worldwide. Founded in 1999, Tideworks has 40 years of experience as the technology division for Carrix, Inc., which now operates more cargo terminals than any other company in the world.

Today, over 300,000 logistics professionals utilize their systems daily to load vessels and trains, track containers, make payments, and more at over 100 marine and intermodal terminals globally.

Challenge

Tideworks, like most highly technical B2B companies, operate in dense, competitive industries with extremely long lead times. Before engaging Behind the Work, Tideworks was an established industry stalwart thanks largely to their industry partnerships and word-of-mouth due to outstanding tech and customer service. That said, leadership wanted to expand how Tideworks approached educating prospects on their solutions. 

In sectors where 6-figure deals and long sales cycles are standard, companies who invest in content to drive SEO, educate readers, and deliver high-quality leads to sales reps are going to stay ahead in the increasingly online B2B marketplace. Tideworks’ main challenge was their ambition to create consistent content at scale, paired with the lack of resources internally to execute that plan.

They needed a partner who could act as an extension of their own business, speak the industry language, and consistently develop content to address customer pain points.

More specifically, Tideworks had the following objectives: 

  • Improve global SEO to rank higher in SERPs
  • Establish themselves as a thought-leader in the industry 
  • Increase and maintain consistent website traffic
  • Attract more leads
  • Build out a new company blog

Solution

When dealing with complex (and expensive) products with long sales cycles, content must do the heavy lifting to educate prospective customers. Something interesting happens when your marketing does the job of informing and answering common questions early in the lead funnel – your reps have much more time to focus on the highly engaged, highly informed sales-qualified-leads in front of them. 

Persona research divulged that customers in this space already had a base knowledge of terminal operating software systems and their basic functions.

However, there were two key themes to stick to:

  • Relate the real-world issues personas experience in their jobs to how the Tideworks team and complex products could address them. 
  • Emphasize the capabilities of the team behind the product and the innovative support you should receive from a prospective provider during the buying process

With that in mind, Behind the Work proposed a strategy based on building narrow campaigns around certain high-value products offered by Tideworks and the specific ways they function to solve everyday problems. Illustrated below are the two campaign structures built around the Mainsail Terminal Operating System, Tideworks flagship product, and Tideworks Insight, a popular add-on to Mainsail.

253

253 Leads Generated Beating a 9 Month Goal of 24

38,139

38,139 Website Sessions Beating Goal by 30.7%

Digging Deeper

The campaigns below illustrate a marriage between the traditional inbound methodology and the target customers’ specific research habits. 

The campaigns’ foundations are in-depth, educational pillar pages centered around highly-searched broad topics intended to drive organic traffic to the website. From the pillar page, visitors would become a lead or MQL by submitting their information to receive one of the gated content offers (i.e., TOS Decision Guide or Data-Driven Decision Making Webinar). With the lead information captured, marketing automation would continue to educate and nurture through product and use-case-specific content offers until a lead was educated and engaged enough to be passed along to a sales rep. 

That’s the magic of inbound marketing. It’s not rocket science. Those who succeed are not merely lucky or “in the right place at the right time.” It’s all about human connection. It simply understands your audience’s pain points and research habits, so you can make their buying journey as painless to navigate as possible.

Results

Even in light of the COVID-19 pandemic that shuttered port operations worldwide, Tideworks’ goals were still comfortably exceeded because they continued to position their content in ways that attracted organic attention from their target personas.

Tideworks converted an average of 42% of leads to become marketing-qualified. 17% of those MQLs became sales-qualified.

AlwaysAI | 3,500 Beta Users

Contributed by BTW Content Team
Turning Unknown Developers Into Excited Advocates For Computer Vision

Overview

alwaysAI is an ambitious software startup located in Solana Beach, CA. They’ve been developing a proprietary, deep-learning computer vision system that they market to other software developers looking to add computer vision functionality into their products.

The product developed by the tech startup was rock solid. The difficulty was they didn’t have a system for marketing their new technology.

They knew they had to get the product into developers’ hands to start collecting feedback and building interest, but they didn’t know where to begin.

They were running up against a wall. 

alwaysAI was certain developers would be excited to put the product through its paces once they got a hold of it, but they were too busy developing the product to manage large-scale outreach.

They needed help. They needed results quickly.

Challenge

When you have your nose to the grindstone, churning out code day in and day out you don’t get the chance to do much else. That was the position alwaysAI found themselves in.

Because they didn’t have the time to engage with their target markets, they were operating mostly on guesswork. They thought they understood who their customers were, but they had no way to verify their assumptions.

As part of our initial research, we interviewed developers and executives from around the industry to develop accurate personas. We quickly learned that many of alwaysAI’s assumptions about their target market were not fully correct.

The company also had very little in the way of basic marketing information. Further compounding their problems, they had no real measures for judging the success or failure of a marketing campaign, besides vanity metrics like website sessions. That wasn’t granular enough to tell them if they were really making headway with the developers they needed to reach. In a very real sense, they were flying blind.

Solution

We realized early on that our strategy would have to work around the fact that assets didn’t exist. We could create those as we went, but the immediate push had to be to introduce the brand and build general awareness. And we needed to get people excited about the product.

We decided on a longer-term strategy that focused on the assets we did have — the company’s vision for their future and for the platform itself. We would build a campaign with short term tactics serving as kindling to support the longer-term strategy of building organic interest through deep content development.

Our blueprint process persona research told us that our target developers preferred to vet products for themselves. They didn’t trust marketing messages on their own. They needed to see the product in action. They needed to understand how it worked, how it would integrate with their software, and what its capabilities were.

We decided that the best way to reach a target that required such a deep exploration of the product was to create content. A lot of content. And specifically, video content. Video allowed us to present in-depth product information in a visual format that made it easier for developers to appreciate the product’s benefits.

We made product demos, real-world use cases, tutorials, technical descriptions, and more. We translated the tutorials into illustrated, step-by-step product guides. We wrote about the product extensively. 

We knew that lead generation with these leery developers would only work if we could build a significant amount of trust in alwaysAI and their platform. So we made certain developers had no shortage of informative collateral to whet their appetites. 

In publishing this content, we eschewed standard social media sites because our research dictated the target market didn’t put much stock in those platforms. Instead, we focused on specialized platforms that cater to developers like Stack Overflow and GitHub, and viable developer communities like those found on Medium.

As we rolled out our content strategy we were simultaneously building all of the other assets we needed to properly convert developers when the time came, including a knowledge base, a thorough pricing page, and backend automation.

It was an all-out, high-quality content blitz intended to cultivate fertile ground for the upcoming beta. And it worked.

2,021%

2,021% Increase in Traffic in 10 Months

20k

20k Average Website Sessions per Month

3,532

3,532 Beta Users Signed Up

Results

Through our efforts, we helped alwaysAI zero in on the developers most likely to be early adopters for the software. We listened to what they wanted and created a massive content campaign to get them informed and excited about the product.

In the end, it all came down to their beta release. They needed a reservoir of primed developers that knew what the software could do for them and were ready to start experimenting with it.

The day came and alwaysAI reported initial installs far in excess of their targets. As the beta went on, it became abundantly clear that the marketing campaign had been a success. People were downloading the software and using it in their prototypes. They were talking about it on developer sites. And most importantly, they were loving the product.

AlwaysAI was thrilled with the results. Their product is starting to enjoy widespread acceptance among developers interested in deep learning computer vision technologies and they credit our campaign with laying the groundwork for their success. 

We managed to discern the right market, target them with the content they wanted, and transform them into an avid user base. Just as alwaysAI brings vision to objects that were previously blind, our campaign opened the eyes of developers around the world to the company’s potential.

This is a classic example of having the right product at the right time. We simply made certain the right people knew what it could do for them.

SellerChamp | 50% + Trials

Contributed by BTW Content Team
SellerChamp allows you to list, manage and automate your ecommerce listing on some of the worlds largest selling channels.

“Behind the Work’s deep understanding and specialization in PPC ads enable them to ask the right questions and do this for us. Their help goes beyond PPC as they provided really helpful advice—tips on what we should be doing to grow our customer base. I couldn’t be happier with the outcome.” – Nizar Noorani, Founder and CEO, SellerChamp

The Opportunity

SellerChamp is a multi-channel listing and inventory management SaaS platform. Industry outsiders had trouble grasping the subtleties of the company’s key differentiators, and five different ad agencies had failed to fully understand the product and resolve the problem. Read our SaaS case study below to find out more.

SellerChamp needed a solution that would build, optimize, and scale their pay-per-click (PPC) ads so it could increase its spend by 10x over the following six to eight months. They turned to Behind the Work to get the job done.

Our Approach

A complicated product like SellerChamp requires a certain amount of insight and industry knowledge to produce tangible results. Understanding the small things that make a big difference (e.g., the call-to-action, keywords) would make or break the response to this challenge.

Our founder consulted with SellerChamp’s CEO and followed up with a detailed action plan. Behind the Work then:

  • Conducted a basic audit and immediately saw that the company’s analytics were set up in a way that led to inaccurate data—something all the previous agencies missed. We corrected the problem so the client got real, actionable data.
  • Cleaned out the existing campaign and created new ads, ad groups, and campaigns.
  • Segmented their Google ads by service group to give them more control over bidding.

50.53%

50.53% Growth in Trial Sign Ups

-17.67%

-17.67% Cost for Trial Sign-Ups

Results

In just a few weeks, SellerChamp saw unprecedented results, lowering their cost per click (CPC) and customer acquisition cost (CAC). 120/80’s industry knowledge and deep understanding of PPC ads contributed to the remarkable success of this campaign.

Six months later, the numbers spoke for themselves: the client reaped a 50.53% increase in trial sign-ups, with a cost decrease of 17.67% over the previous year. 120/80 continues to host bi-weekly videoconferences with SellerChamp and responds promptly to any emerging issues.

We understand that each business operates within its own unique parameters for success. We succeed whether other agencies fail companies like SellerChamp because we ask the right questions and get the full scope of the client’s needs.

SellerChamp has since expanded its scope of work with 120/80 to include earned media management and customer success interviews, where we call customers that drop out of trials without subscribing to the software to learn about their experiences and try to win them over.