Align Sales and Marketing to
Conquer a New Territory
Sales at ECI Telecom came to the marketing team and asked for support to penetrate a brand new geographic market in a very limited time frame – under 30 days – and fill the top of the funnel with high-quality leads.
Challenge: Get relevant prospects to the event while being cost-conscious.
Goal: Register 20 participants for an on-sight eight-hour workshop in a new geographic market.
The strategy was an inbound marketing effort combining Sales leveraging its connections through email and social media, and Marketing taking advantage of the existing database along with reaching out to anonymous web visitors from Sweden. Turning unknown website visitors into known visitors was a key goal in the effort.
ECI Telecom came to Insightera (formerly Active Insight), which segmented Web traffic and delivered relevant messages to online visitors, and allowed for real-time intelligence on site visitors and behavior.
Tactics to execute the strategy
To execute the strategy of segmenting and reaching out to website traffic the marketing team used a four-step process:
Step #1. Analyze inbound site traffic
Going back six months, the company looked at trending traffic from the target market (Sweden) and trending engagements in the form of clickthroughs and conversions
Step #2. Define the target audience
Audience was defined by region, website behavior and organization. These definitions helped Marketing create relevant messages for those visitors.
Step #3. Create relevant calls-to-action
First marketing created calls-to-action for driving registration for the workshop for two prospect groups – utility and telecom. Then, because the target market was Sweden, the next task was to create these calls-to-action in the local language.
Step #4. Engage and convert
With all the pieces in place, Marketing used the tool to engage with website visitors by segmenting based on the definitions in Step #2, and responding with the relevant calls-to-action to drive conversion (defined as registering for the workshop).
Results of the effort
From analyzing six months of Web traffic, ECI Telecom knew that it averaged 90 visitors per month from Sweden before the effort. That number rose to 160 over the 25-day campaign.
The “engaging with Swedish Web visitors” campaign created seven clickthroughs and two conversions. This number might say “small,” but keep in mind that for a complex, B2B product, two leads signing up to attend an eight-hour workshop is very valuable.
Here are the overall effort metrics:
• Increased incremental traffic from target market by 60%
• Click-through rate increased 430%
• Conversion increased 2900% with 29% signing up for proprietary event
Marketing surpassed the ultimate goal of 20 workshop participants by registering 27 attendees. Two came from the engage with Swedish Web visitors effort, and the rest could be sourced back to the outreach effort from Sales or prospects who were already in the Marketing database.
The campaign was considered a success, and it actually helped Marketing and Sales get into closer alignment because Sales saw the impact of the effort that Marketing was able to pull together on very short notice.
Originally published in Marketing Sherpa Blog: http://sherpablog.marketingsherpa.com/b2b-marketing/b2b-funnel-campaign-workshop/
