5 Demand Gen Lessons from the Team that Makes Everything Easier

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Jen Webb

Wiley is a company rich in history – dating back to 1807 – as the original publisher of literary greats such as Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville.

However, it’s not 1807 anymore and to keep Wiley relevant in today’s landscape, we have incorporated new marketing automation technologies to help us launch our biggest Dummies B2B demand generation campaign to date.

With a long sales cycle of 6-9 months that often requires nurturing contacts, getting our solution back in front of them, and constant follow up by the sales team – we needed a better way than relying on calendar notes in order to be there when it is the right time with the right customer.

Today we’re going to cover our 5 fundamental strategies
1. You Have to Clearly Define Objectives and Goals
2. How Creating Buyer-Centric Content Is Key
3. Planning and Implementing Big Initiatives Takes Time
4. And never forgetting our Customers are in Control, we outline our Omni-Channel Approach
5. Finally, and hopefully this goes without saying . . . But monitor and Analyze Your Results

First we Clearly defined our Objectives and Goals

Our target market was marketing professionals in the Tech, finance, and healthcare verticals

Our previous strategy was focused on costly bottom of the funnel tactics with no nurturing.
Our content was disjointed and did a lot of espousing our product, we focused primarily on our brand recognition and product and then we’d go straight for the sell.
With this previous approach, we returned MQLs but few were Sales Ready. And our conversion to SQL was not where we wanted it.

So we set out to Improve the Quality of our MQLs, Their conversion into Opportunities, and improve the speed at which our reps were able to convert and eventually close deals.

“Dummies is one of the most recognizable brands in the world. We can create co-branded content for you and we are easy to work. Ready to buy?

We took a step back and set out to truly understand our customer.

During a lengthy Sales and Marketing alignment exercise we set out to put a face to our buyer and created a detailed buyer’s profile
1) We identified our buyer’s Pain points: what problems was our buyer trying to solve as well as some obstacles to getting things done
We looked at Key drivers and motivations: What makes our buyer tick?
And finally, Validations-- sources of information our buyer valued to assist her decision making process.

Result: Was a fundamental change how we position ourselves to our customers:

We then performed an extensive content audit, and it to our customer’s Journey to Purchase—paying close attention to aligning our content with the various phases-- Interest, Learn/Evaluate, Justify, Purchase, and Expand– and worked with our content marketing team to fill in the gaps.

Examples:
Our Interest content addressed the Pain point that our buyer needed to stay on top of the latest developments in the field--become a modern data-driven marketer. Targeting our ‘suspects’ the email click thru rate promoting this asset was 2.07%.
One piece of content in our Learn phase was a video, addressing the Pain point of how our buyer must constantly find creative ways to raise product awareness and stand out from competitors
Our Evaluate phase focused on inspiration and ROI—our buyer needs to spend her marketing dollars intelligently and show a positive ROI. We presented nearly 20 case studies that served as a wealth of inspirational ideas for our prospects—each showcasing specific objectives, strategy, and measured results.

Dummies Custom Solutions content can set you apart from the crowd and improve your ROI. We make it easy and work with you every step of the way. Wanna learn more?

Interest: Activity from all channels resulted in 6,854 total views and 267 Slideshare actions.
Learn: We received 6,311 video impressions during our initial campaign launch with a video engagement score a strong 72.

Jen Webb

It’s not realistic to think that you will have a demand generation campaign up and running in a short period of time. The key to a successful campaign is taking the time to ensure that you plan it out. Everything from your persona, buyer’s journey, product offering, content, and components of outreach are critical.

Prior to the actual discussion on the campaign, Dummies B2B spent 6 months conducting in-depth one-on-one market research with our client demographic in order to completely re-design our Dummies.biz site into one that showcases our custom solution services as well as help us learn more about pain points that would help build the message outreach and buyer journey.

Once the campaign actually launched, we used Kapost from the start of our campaign in order to allow for multiple teams to collaborate in one spot. As the hub for our campaign brief, persona, buyers journey, content mapping, emails, and landing page designs, we were able to keep on track to our start date using the timeline in Kapost and email prompts to keep the work moving along.

We even included testing into our timeline and gave ourselves some extra time to troubleshoot issues! Because you never know what is going to come up at the last minute.

Jen Webb

You don’t want to rely on just one way of directing prospects into your campaign.

But be sure that you are advertising and reaching out to your customers wherever they are – this is where market the market research also served an important purpose.

We used multiple channels to bring prospects into our content campaign, including LinkedIn, Outbrain and Google search, along with the email nurture campaign.

Driving traffic across channels to the content and the landing pages allows even more people to see your content and drive them into the campaign.

Jen Webb

Even the best laid out campaign can stall, and it is key to analyze results consistently and make improvements to help increase success – especially in a longer campaign. This one was 4 months so there was good opportunities to test emails, content and advertising – and we did just that!

Our core team met every other week or so to analyze email open rates, form submissions, content views, and of course, the MQLs & SQLs

A month into the campaign we decided to stop the Outbrain content advertising – which had been successful for our consumer web site – but not here. We redirect these funds into LinkedIn content sponsorship. Also, we were not seeing great conversion rates from Google Search to the Eloqua landing pages. We redirected the search campaign to the newly designed site and saw our numbers go up 12% from pre-campaign numbers.

Not so much a redirection but a test with the qualification of certain prospects that were further into the buyers journey, but had not yet filled out the contact form. We had the sales reps send a customized email to people that watched over 50% of the case study video. The email noted that they had watched the video and to see if they had any further questions or wanted a free sample package. So while these prospects did not meet our full qualification, we tested to see if there was further interest and evaluation.

And the results show our success from this campaign,

Year over year 2014 to 2015, we increased our MQLs by 64%, SQLs increased by 132% and we now have $1.1 million in potential new business.

We are just now starting to see deals close – so far resulting in $200,000 (which is 4 projects with 2 new clients) and we expect to close further deals between now and June.

Thank you for joining us today!