Four Case Studies of Multiplying Sales with a Targeted Approach
Whether you are launching a new product, want to reach a new type of decision maker or simply want to increase the number of qualified leads or sales opportunities from digital marketing, how can you create results quickly on a budget?
We received questions from newsletter subscribers on how to get started with target marketing in today's saturated search economy so let me share a few examples from personal experience.
Launching a New Product That Was Relatively Early in the Market by Focusing on One Key Purchase-Driver and Owning the Content in the Space
When we launched GotoWebinar, we were still relatively early in the market…so early we had to explain and demonstrate what a webinar was (web seminar).
We broke the market up into two primary uses for SMBs: training and marketing.
For marketing, the primary reason to use webinars was to generate qualified sales leads. We created a lot of content and promotion around the how to generate leads through webinars theme.
It was less about which technologies had the best webinar features but we drove sales by taking a common reason to buy and owning that specific purchase driver with content marketing.
GoTo had other products so we tested the initial topic with the existing customer list, a small number of prospects, and third-party rented lists.
Once we piloted and tested core presentation and follow-up, we scaled it out:
Taking the transcript of the webinar and creating a White Paper for it. For a couple years the WP produced leads at $5 a download from Google Search Ads!
Calling on the core product presentation module, we added an outside speaker/consultant to vary the topics slightly, and went to third-party media to create interest at the top of the funnel.
Extending the life of the content theme by tailoring this same “lead-generation” topic to vertical markets, different product uses, and applications in the marketing funnel.
While the GotoWebinar team eventually built a portfolio of content for other audiences and around other purchase drivers, they used one of my Special Reports as a thought-leadership piece for years on their website.
The result – established an international marketing leader in SMB collaboration technologies.
How to Gain a Foothold with B2B Marketing by Becoming THE Friend of the Product User and Leveraging an All-Digital Plan
For another company, this time focused on the IT audience, we identified a niche of about 100,000 of the actual users of the product and positioned the firm as the “friend of the admin.”
The choice was primarily based on our lack of enterprise products and a small marketing budget. The Go-to-Market strategy was an all-digital plan, which faced minimal competition.
Simply, the strategy was to create and distribute educational digital content
For example, we hosted the online product preview for a company with the install base of our target admins and had 2,450 registrants and 500 admins stay on after the preview for our 30-minute product demo. All without spending a dime on promotion!
Sales for the product increased 70% in the 12 months after this event and the veteran CEO of the firm said it was the best single marketing campaign he’d ever seen.
Success: We eventually built an opt-in list of 75,000 and multiplied sales 4x in 36 month largely led by the choice to drive engagement and a relationship with the IT admin, the user of the SaaS offering.
How a Small, Services Company Went Directly Decision-Making Executives to Cut Through the Clutter and Win Business
A small services company wanted to target CEOs and executives where it previously had been unable to break through the clutter.
We built a workshop model with a twist, not with a pitch for services, in fact the sponsoring company did not speak at all, but with outside speakers who talked about a top problem faced by these busy executives.
The first one was pulled together on short notice but was a massive success with 10 CEOs attending.
Success: The company rolled this model into a quarterly workshop series and quickly built a sales pipeline of 1.5x its annual sales with the workshops alone.
Finding Product-Market Fit and Driving It with a Targeted Program which Pressed on a Specific Pain Point
A small, disruptive security company had an offering engineered differently from competitors so it had many advantages over existing solutions but had a tough time getting mind share and a foothold.
We looked at the different options and narrowed them to one major pain point and were the first ones to articulate the problem and offer an intelligent solution.
We built a multi-pronged campaign to “press on the pain point” around a story with a case study, white paper, and a webinar. The campaign was a home run.
Success: The company received a sizable offer to buy the entire company, partly based on the success of the marketing campaign.
Contact me now to discuss how this proven process of targeted, non-traditional marketing might help grow your business.