Every element of our campaign creative and strategy was built around our broad market research. It’s un-matched success can be directly attributed to the deep and nuanced understanding of our audience, their businesses and market we gained.

The situation: To connect with C-Suite executives, there’s nowhere better than LinkedIn. Our B2B software company had been running ads, targeting decision-makers in US-based quick service restaurant (QSR) chains with at least 50 stores. But without a deep understanding of our target, the campaign had to take an inefficient scattergun approach. The result was an eyewatering $100 cost-per-click (CPC).

The brief: Optimise the ad strategy to return the same or better results while dramatically reducing CPC.

Objectives:

- Reduce CPC by 80% from $100 to under $20 cost per click.

- Contribute to doubling the previous year’s total sales pipeline from 15 million, to 30 million

- Double the web traffic referred from LinkedIn from 500/year to 1000/per year

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To improve efficiency and reduce costs, we used deep audience understanding to create:

Ads that don’t look like ads

Our ad creative didn’t try to sell. Instead, it shared valuable insights, assets and perspectives.

-Ad type 1: Commentary from thought leader

We shared valuable, informative content and audio of our company president, a tech industry leader, sharing his expertise. This was wrapped in engaging animations and design. We also bolstered our president’s standing and trust by sharing media coverage of his speaking engagements.

-Ad type 2: Software education and benefits

Some of our ads directly connected our software functionality and benefits to our audience’s pain points and goals. This leveraged screengrabs and infographic animations to give insight into the tool, inspiring the audience with how it could empower their business.

-Ad type 3: social proof

We used customer testimonials, case studies and special offers to turn prospects into customers.

We know from the data that our prospect’s buying journey is long and complicated, so we designed our campaign to work in three stages, moving prospects from awareness to consideration and decision.

• Awareness (TOFU: Increased brand awareness and attracted new prospects, educating the audience about our brand and its offerings.

• Consideration (MOFU): Addressed specific pain points and to demonstrate how our products or services could provide solutions.

• Decision (BOFU): Used customer testimonials, case studies and special offers to turn prospects into customers.

Data collection and analysis from an unusually wide pool of research sources were fundamental to the success of our campaign.

- Heap.io, Hotjar and LinkedIn pixels on our website to understand user interests and preferences.

- Surveys of existing customers told us their needs and pain points.

- Industry reports analysis gave broad perspectives on market trends and consumer behaviours.

- Quantitative research with NewtonX let us hear from our audiences that they:

o Respond to evidence and information, not sales

o Prioritise improving digital customer engagement, in-store operations, retention and loyalty

o Manage the digital transformation of their full customer journey

o Know the value of a connected platform

- Content refinement based on the pain points and style of ads most likely to resonate.

- Strategy development aligned with our target’s decision-making process.

- Negative targeting with a closely defined target to exclude any users who didn’t fit.

Objective 1: Reduce CPC by 80% from $100 to under $20 cost per click

Overachieved by 1024%

Average CPC reduced by -98.22% from $100 to $1.78

Objective 2: Contribute to doubling the previous year’s total sales pipeline from 15 million, to 30 million Overachieved by 69%

$50.6M added to sales pipeline

Objective 3: Double the web traffic referred from LinkedIn

Overachieved by 150%

400% increase in inbound website from LinkedIn.

OTHER IMPACTS

Content excellence: no-click ads still garnered 3462 clicks – a CPC of $1.88 ($6505.61 spend)

Feedback from LinkedIn: industry-leading results

The LinkedIn Sydney office was blown away by the results and intends to highlight it in their marketing.

Direct feedback from target shows ads are effective

When asked, prospects who seek us out at conferences say they saw our LinkedIn ads.