Full-Funnel Marketing for B2B Lead Quality Success
ServiceMax is a leading software company that provides field service software to enterprise businesses. They benefit industries focusing on the industrial internet of things, with major customers in renewables, oil and gas, manufacturing, and power.
The Goal
When Metric Theory first partnered with ServiceMax, they had recently moved away from SMB marketing and were targeting larger enterprise-level deals. However, prior to working with Metric Theory, ServiceMax was not evaluating paid media advertising on their quality lead metric (“Touched Leads”), sales opportunities, or pipeline revenue. To shift focus to enterprise deals, Metric Theory knew that accurate end-to-end lead quality tracking would be essential. Once comprehensive ad tracking parameters, Salesforce dashboard access, and lead quality reporting were in place, Metric Theory and ServiceMax set the following goals:
- Increase lead and touched lead volume
- Decrease cost/touched lead
- Increase touched lead revenue pipeline
ServiceMax had aggressive growth targets, and advertising was the primary driver to achieve those ambitious targets quickly while maintaining lead quality. Metric Theory aimed to scale investment in every stage of the funnel to acquire new customers and pull them through to conversion. The addition of LinkedIn to the advertising mix was a crucial investment geared toward reaching targets. The industry has long lag time to conversion (sometimes more than a week from first click), so it was crucial not only to generate new interest via prospecting campaigns, but also to effectively remarket to those users across channels. That strategy was comprised of the following areas:
Comprehensive search
Working collaboratively with the ServiceMax team, Metric Theory expanded to dozens of new keyword areas and translated key campaigns into additional languages for overseas markets. Because of the importance of company size to lead quality, Metric Theory focused ads on searches that indicated companies at or above a certain number of employed technicians on staff. Metric Theory also used company size targeting on search to maximize reach to that audience.
Account based marketing strategies
Metric Theory worked with ServiceMax to understand their most important target companies, and then targeted those physical locations, along with job functions, industries, and company sizes that matched the target account list to ensure ads were appearing for the most relevant users across LinkedIn and search.
LinkedIn Ads Groups
Beyond ABM targeting within LinkedIn, the teams tested targeting field service related LinkedIn Groups, knowing engaged members of those groups would likely be engaged by ServiceMax’s high quality and high intent educational content. Targeting these groups led to increased click-through rates and conversion rates, resulting in a 16% improvement in cost per lead. These leads also converted to opportunities at a higher than average rate.
"“With online advertising, it’s all about making our budget stretch the furthest and reaching the right buyers. Pairing our testing strategy with strategic audience selections has resulted in our cost per lead to go down and lead quality to going up, making for a happy sales team and an even happier marketing leadership team”"
Solution
Metric Theory’s lead quality focused strategy led to both lower overall cost per lead and an increase of high-quality leads, leading to a 41% increase in pipeline ROI.
These acquisition efforts for quality leads have been a key part of ServiceMax’s 2018 growth. For Q3 year-over-year (first month of LinkedIn management vs the following year), Metric Theory was able to drive a 101% increase in Lead-to-Touched Lead rate while also improving account efficiency.
Performance Results
126%
increase in percent of high quality leads YoY
25%
increase in average deal size YoY
41%
increase in paid media pipeline ROI YoY
