A client-first approach to advertising

Effective B2B advertising takes a deep understanding of your customers, the marketplace, and your place within it. That is why we started by asking 360science’s best salespeople to pitch their software to us. Once we understood the nuances of the 360science offering, we could map out the common characteristics of qualified leads.

We also examined lead performance data from existing Google ads which, when cross-referenced with CRM data, revealed important keywords and search queries.

Based on this analysis we build detailed customer personas and then a focused advertising strategy on how we could reach those prospects. Finally, we developed creative messaging that engaged and inspired people to act.

Our approach included:

• The first goal was to improve the performance of paid search campaigns. To understand how to redirect advertising budgets – what keywords to bid on and which ones to suppress - we mapped out all search terms relevant to the client’s business and segmented them into “intent hierarchies”. This became the basis for a brand new account structure. It allowed us to maximise impression share on commercial and transactional queries, the ones that are the most likely result in the meaningful click – a demo request or a whitepaper download.
• To validate our assumptions and to further improve targeting precision, together with the client we then built a lead scoring system and connected Google Ads platform with the client’s Salesforce CRM. This helped us to understand what keywords, ads and landing pages are driving actual sales, fuelling the continuous improvement in the leads’ quality.
• To elevate paid search performance even further, after a few months we decided to experiment with Google’s “maximise clicks” smart bidding strategy that we used in conjunction with the robust negative keywords implementation for broad keywords targeting. We assumed that if we set an artificially low maximum bid and high daily budget, we will be able to show our ads for the whole new bunch of long-tail but very qualified queries we were unable to cover with exact, phrase or broad modified keywords. As it turned out in just 60 days, new campaigns generated 23% new leads from completely incremental search terms - with 37% lower CPL!
• But the right keywords and correct audience targeting are not enough if your goal is to maximise returns from your marketing investment. A great ad copy and convincing landing pages are also necessary. So to convert more prospects into buyers, we used the Unbounce platform where we created new landing pages, highlighting specific benefits and calls to action for every customer persona from each targeted market segment.
• The messaging was also customised for recognised visitors based on the time of the previous visit, consumed content, location and demographic.
• Further A/B tests variations were run to increase engagement and conversion rates from non-search traffic, visitors coming from Facebook lookalike targeting and Quora prospecting.