The partnership
The SaaS buying platform, Vendr, enables the world’s fastest-growing companies to buy and renew SaaS, without friction and at a fair price, as an extension of Finance and Procurement teams.
Gabrielle Dalvet was head of marketing reporting directly to the CEO and board of directors. She was responsible for directing all brand building programs, overseeing all demand generation activities, hiring and managing a marketing department, managing external contractors/vendor relationships.
Gabrielle also started the marketing network, MKGT WMN. Which is where Gabrielle met Jenna Hasenkampf, our managing director. After a Chemistry Call, Gabrielle decided to bring on MKG Marketing to drive digital ads strategy towards lead quality.
Gabrielle was responsible for far too much and needed help. She brought on Christine to head up the Demand Gen department. Given Christine's ability to focus, she had a different goal—lead volume. Internally, they developed an accurate system to evaluate lead quality. So we pivoted our strategy to a full funnel view with a sharper focus on their ideal customer profile. Competitors were also starting to emerge so time was not on our side.
The shift—Facing headwinds as Vendr makes the leap from startup to a scaling tech company
Switching from QUALITY to a QUANTITY strategy wasn’t a problem, but if it didn’t work and we needed to revert back, LinkedIn, Google and Facebook Ads algorithms do not naturally accommodate the back and forth.
Vendr couldn’t afford to lose any cycles if we had to revert back.
We approached the account to be flexible so we could toggle between strategies at a moment's notice. Vendr needed us to provide an efficient reset.
When we were originally brought in, we managed a piece of the Paid Search puzzle with limited accountability. To make this scale, we needed control of the whole account. Christine agreed.
Now that we had full control we reorganized the structure to truly see what's working at that granular level, and with an eye toward how they would want to layer in additional campaigns later—whether competitive, new products, etc.
One of the biggest things we did was make the structure expandable. This included regrouping and then breaking location/industry targeting in order for us to expand and expose. We needed to get a better vantage point into how the leads went through Hubspot, so by making them organized by geo and brand/non-brand we could see that level of information, and then had the ability to layer in budget better based of interest and revenue signals
Example: Latin American leads were not being helpful at first because there were many fake email addresses that confused the data append process following the lead form being submitted. So we were able to say even though it's quality. Let's take them off of our target right now and spend them in other places.
This new Account Structure was built to scale and grow both ongoing optimizations as well as the (likely) future possible launches of new products.
Iterate
Here at MKG we believe in launching with a solid foundation then iterate, iterate, iterate based on data and opportunity.
In going for quantity over quality leads Christine had us add more audiences including procurement. In doing so the data showed that Finance was a bigger market delivering 16% of leads. We recommended combining both procurement and finance for a wider view.
We also recommended:
- Google Display and Search could scale needed a bigger investment
- Piggy back on the success of our Google competitive search campaigns and develop a display competitive focused ad group
- Video for ad creative would help push results further and could be utilized across platforms.
Did it work?
In just four short months paid went from generating less than thirty-three percent of total demand (leads) to over forty percent—159% ahead of our monthly goal.
How did we do this without budget increases?
- 30% more impressions
- Better conversion rate
