B2B Online Lead Generation Campaigns

Online B2B Lead Generation Campaigns
Target Niche Audiences & Build Qualified Lead Lists with Internet Advertising

The Client Challenge

This F500 contact center services provider enjoyed the benefit of decades of brand awareness among its core audiences.  Online marketing was used as a predictable tool to generate B2B leads.   However, when corporate goals mandated expansion into new industries; they found themselves faced with lackluster results when trying to duplicate their online lead generation efforts in these new industries.

Massive Impressions conducted media effectiveness tests across the four industries that were being targeted:  Healthcare, Financial Services, Retail and Government.  We then did interviews with prospects and clients, and an in-depth editorial topic review of the media being considered.

What we found was that the poor performance was due to a combination of the following:

Low to no brand awareness for the client services in these new industries

Low to no interest in the call center related content and offers being promoted

Too broad of an audience within the industry specific media

The Online Marketing Solution

Improve Offer Strategy:  The first change in strategy was to upgrade the thought-leadership offers being promoted.  Rather than generic call center content, or content the client thought these new audiences would find interesting, an effort was made to develop new materials that resonated with the pain points and industry lingo specific to each new space.

Media Strategy:  The second change in strategy was to pare down the investment in vertical media.  The ideal scenario would have been to increase the spend and complement with other marketing programs to build brand awareness, however budgets would not allow.  Instead, recommendations were made to:

• Eliminate advertising to the retail industry, which had little to no interest in call center related topics, and instead pursue event marketing and telesales efforts to identify prospects.
• Scale back advertising in the other areas to the 1 or 2 publications and tactics that delivered a minimum of 20% of the desired target audience in the media effectiveness tests.
• Re-allocate remaining funds to broader, call center focused publications which generally delivered a higher percentage of leads within these new target industries than the industry media did; followed-up with industry specific messaging on a one-to-one marketing basis.

The Online Marketing Results

The following results were achieved through online lead generation efforts over a six month period:

• Vertical media response rates increased from zero to .31% – .39% (double the industry average and the client’s benchmarked average)
• Vertical media response volume increased and delivered over 1500 responses to the client website
• Vertical media conversion rates improved from nil to 3% (financial services) and 8.6% (healthcare)
• Over 540 industry vertical leads from across the target industries were collected from general call center media promotions at a cost per conversion of $57 – down from an average of $902 per lead when using vertical industry media alone.