Month: November 2019

We partnered with a mechanical engineering company, a global market leader in its segment, and created a LinkedIn campaign to increase the company service revenues.  The target group were people who belong to companies of existing companies and involved in the service or maintenance decisions.

With this kind of detailed targeting, we did not only reach the people who are already aware of the company, but also those of a much larger target group: the entire buying center. Here is the brief overview of the campaign and results: 

Campaign information

Campaign: Cross-selling campaign for a machine module which costs around 60,000 euros

Campaign period: 3 weeks 

Media budget: 850 euros 

Reach: 24,000 people in more than 40 countries 

Click-through rate: 2.2% (global LinkedIn benchmark: 0.35%) 

Conversion rate: 15.3% (average B2B website: 0.5 to 1.5%) 

Generated Leads: 83 

Cost per lead: about 11 euros 

Sales potential: 4.98 million euros (83 leads x 60,000 euros) 

The precision of the target group is the key. This campaign specifically reached out to people who not only work for companies that were already the existing customers, but they are also involved in the service or maintenance decisions.

Through LinkedIn, we were able to reach this important and extended audience easily, quickly, and at a relatively low cost. In addition, retargeting via social media channels such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Google Display and Twitter also allow the companies to contact their target customers much more effectively than commonly believed. If you would like to know how large your individual target audience reach is on LinkedIn and Facebook, contact us for a free expert call. 

The advertising messages of most B2B companies are usually framed around answering questions like “What services are available?” and “What do they contain?” Using this kind of communication is exactly where most campaigns fail, because it requires too much mental effort from the customers to find out why the offered product is really valuable. Taking into account the average attention span of social media users of one to five seconds, classic B2B communication often bring a very low or often zero result.   

With the Rethink180™ methodology developed by Leadvolution, you can create effective advertising texts and visuals within a very short time. The framework has helped many of our clients to achieve 50 to 300% increase in click-through rate without using obtrusive, empty advertising messages, or click baiting. Through delivering relevant information, you can generate sustained interests among your customers.

While companies continue to spend a lot of money on elaborate landing pages, they are often not the most suitable destination to send people to. By redirecting the customers away from the platform that they are currently on (and comfortable with), companies are forcing them to re-orient themselves to a new interface and navigation flow – adding unnecessary pain points to the conversion funnel.

Since most customers have short attention span and surrounded by distracting environment, many people end up losing interest and abandon the process. Therefore, companies continue to struggle with low conversion rates below 0.5%.  

LinkedIn and Facebook provide solutions to solve this issue. With features like Lead Ads, Canvas Ads, Chatbots Ads, etc., companies can directly request information from customers in just one click using pre-filled forms. By incorporating these tools in lead generation strategies for our clients, we were able to reach conversion rates of 5 to 20%, without having to create or modify a landing page.

These lead capturing tools present an exciting opportunity for running a pilot project, as internal “coordination loops” are not necessary. Real results can be generated in a short period of time without touching the existing structure which is a huge advantage worth highlighting during internal discussions. Feel free to contact me on LinkedIn for a free expert talk on how such a pilot could look like for your product. 

Campaigns that are delivered simultaneously via several online and offline channels usually achieve better results per channel than if only a single channel is used. A person who has been correctly and positively reached out with a LinkedIn campaign beforehand is much more likely to respond with interest at a personal meeting, especially in cross- & upselling.

E-mail campaigns also get higher opening rates if the customers can connect them with the interesting offers they have previously seen on LinkedIn. Similar positive reinforcement also works the other way around. Social media campaigns typically perform better if your customers have already seen an interesting e-mail on the topic before, even if they might have forgotten about it. Companies can significantly shorten the sales funnel if they make sure that customers are aware of them on all channels.

Leadvolution partnered with a mid-sized engineering company (one of the global market leaders of its industry) to create a sustainable lead generation project via LinkedIn. Within just six weeks after the first workshop, the campaign was launched and has been successfully running for months and months (with occasional pauses in between to avoid lead overdelivering). Below is the brief overview of the project and results:

Campaign Information

Campaign duration: 10 months with occasional pauses  

Geographical distribution: more than 20 countries 

Media budget: 8,900 €

Impressions: 190,000 

Clicks: 2,700 

CTR: 1.41% (Global LinkedIn Benchmark: 0.35%) 

Generated Leads: more than 400 

Conversion rate: 15% (average B2B websites: 0.5-1.0%) 

Cost per lead: about 21 €

Lead quality: The sales acceptance rate was approximately 50%. Among other desired qualities, the leads contained contacts from different countries including eight of the world’s largest companies, matching the target group criteria defined by the client.  

Noted that the data above results from just one campaign, and all the currently active campaigns are generating approximately 10 leads per day. If you are interested in a similar pilot project, please contact us.  

This case study represents an average result we typically generate for our clients. It is important to point out, however, in order to achieve this kind of outcome, that the project must be done correctly from the entire setup to target group selection to appropriate conversion framework. 

If one mistake is made in the chain, it can negatively affect the result of a campaign—and sometimes there will be no result at all. To avoid such mishap, here are some of the factors you should be paying attention to.

There is a common belief across the B2B mechanical industry that the target groups are not digitally active or reachable. However, recent concrete campaign figures show the opposite is true – even older target groups on Facebook and LinkedIn provide high and attractive reach. 

For small and highly niche target groups (e.g., pharmaceutical packaging machinery, paper machinery, or CNC software) the data also confirms the same reality. Today, social media is a great place for companies to reach out to hundreds of thousands of people in the relevant positions across the world.

Unlike the more traditional digital marketing channels such as Google Ads – in which companies could only be contacted by customers who are already aware of the brands’ reputation and actively seek out for its products or services – social media ads allow companies to target a large number of prospects who may have not yet known about the business.

Therefore, it is particularly useful for selling a newly launched product. Through Facebook and LinkedIn, companies can communicate and engage directly with the customers regardless of their prior awareness of the brand in a scalable structure.

Would you like to know how big your individual audience reach is on LinkedIn and Facebook? Feel free to contact us for a free expert call. 

Many traditional companies also believe that using social media channels to reach out to potential customers sends out superficial signals, making the recipients perceive the company as untrustworthy. This is simply untrue.

Here is a quick reality check: Let’s say you find a good and legitimate solution to your business problem via LinkedIn or Facebook. Would you not want to find out more about it just because you came across the information on social media? Probably not. Nevertheless, for a company to successfully use social media to gain new customers, both the ads messages and formats must be well thought-through.

Avoid appearing as ‘funny’ is one recommendation.  Instead, addressing the customers’ problems and opportunities you are bringing as clearly and concretely as possible has proven to be successful.  

The communication approaches of most B2B companies, however, look different from this and are unfit for social media. They typically revolve around answering questions like “who are we?”, what kind of product are we offering?”, “what can they do?”, and so on.

Employing this kind of communication framework is the reason why many lead generation campaigns failed, as it requires too much mental effort from the customers to find out why the product or service being advertised is really for them. Because the average attention span of a social media user is merely between one to five seconds, they rarely step out of their comfort zone and always scroll pass any post that is seen as ‘too complicated’. 

As a result, the click through rate of most B2B companies stay within 0.5% and even lower, and they continue to struggle with lead acquisition.  

Leadvolution has created Rethink180 ™ to solve this particular problem. With this method, you can quickly create ad texts and visuals that are proven to achieve 50 to 300% higher click through rates. By applying Rethink180™ on top of the information that is relevant to the customers, you can generate sustainable interest without using intrusive tricks like click baiting that is damaging your online reputation.

While companies continue to spend a lot of money on elaborate landing pages, they are often not the most suitable destination to send people to. By redirecting the customers away from the platform that they are currently on (and comfortable with), companies are forcing them to re-orient themselves to a new interface and navigation flow – adding unnecessary pain points to the conversion funnel.

LinkedIn and Facebook provide solutions to solve this issue.  With features like Lead Ads, Canvas Ads, Chatbots Ads, etc., companies can directly request information from customers in just one click. By incorporating these tools in lead generation strategies for our clients, we were able to reach conversion rates of 5 to 20%, without having to create or modify a landing page.

These lead capturing tools present an exciting opportunity for running a pilot project. Real results can be generated within a few weeks without having to alter the current setup. 

It requires companies very little to no effort to coordinate between teams and departments to get the project up and running – another huge advantage worth highlighting during internal discussions.  Feel free to contact me on LinkedIn for a free expert talk on how such a pilot could look like for your product. 

In the daily business of our customers, a typical sale situation is usually the following: well-paid sales staff work on very few and specific requests – mostly aiming at creating an individual offer. When you inject too many leads into this setup, the sales team often do not have a way to deal with the influx and become overwhelmed by the list. As a consequence, potential successful results from lead generation campaigns then evaporate and vanish.

Due to this reason, we recommend companies to setup a so-called “pre-sales unit”, where the incoming leads are once again filtered based on their intents through series of questions. After the process, the team then only forward the real or “hot leads” to the sales department.

If you have any issue with setting up an efficient pre-sales process, we are happy to support you. Our trail and tested structure will help transform your leads into actual sales.

In social media, the user’s situation must be taken into account when addressing them. Ads should primarily generate interest, not fully inform or explain.

With the Rethink180™ methodology developed by Leadvolution, argumentative approaches can be systematically established that explain to the user in the shortest possible way why the product in question makes sense to them personally and generate the realization that they should request more information.

In this way, it has been proven that 50 to 300% higher click and conversion rates can be achieved than with previous campaigns. And not through intrusive, empty advertising messages or clickbaiting, but through information that is relevant to the customer, offers real added value and thus generates sustained interest.

In order to analyse the perspective, you should proceed systematically in 4 steps:

1. Explore all relevant pain points for your target group that you can solve with your product.
2. Then nail down the consequences that result from the pain points, each for specific job profiles that you would like to reach within your specific target group.
3. Then you quantify the results that your target group can achieve with your product, define buying obstacles and identify arguments to overcome them in your communication.
4. Finally, collect references to your company.

From these points, an argumentation (a “messaging”) can be developed that, in contrast to a general “awareness” text, has a high relevance for your target group, generates direct product interest and, incidentally, delivers real and sustainable branding. Reason: The customer can link the now learned product added value with your company name.

You can use this messaging not only as a storyline for social media ads, but also for any content, for example blog articles, testimonials, “Always on” posts, videos, trade fair content, or lead ads. Do you need a new idea? Then select any pain point, provide it with an example and derive the further storyline for your content directly from it.

Getting the message of an ad clearly to the point has another advantage: the lead quality increases. If the customer already understands the added value he can achieve with a product, this generates genuine product interest. Such a lead is much more valuable for sales than someone who was only interested in a generally informative white paper.

Last but not least, communication oriented towards the customer’s problems or added value makes sense on all channels. You should therefore use social media in combination with ReThink180™ to improve communication on all channels in a data-driven way. The reach of B2B websites usually is too small for A/B testing to deliver truly meaningful results statistically. On LinkedIn, you can test several ads with different communication approaches with a high number of impressions and use the most successful message on the website and other channels as well. Feel free to contact us if you would like to learn more about ReThink180™.

Generally, B2B companies spend a lot of money on elaborate landing pages for their campaigns. However, users who arrive at these pages through social media are usually in restless situations with a lot of external interferences – such as on the bus, in a restaurant, while waiting for an appointment, etc. – or just want to distract themselves and relax. If these social media users are now supposed to load a new website, orient themselves there and fill out a form, companies consequently often achieve very low conversion rates of less than 0.5 percent.

Pre-filled lead ad forms on LinkedIn and Facebook take the user’s current situation into account and make it possible to request further information with just one click. That’s the way how B2B marketer achieve conversion rates of 5 to 20 per cent – without having to create a landing page.

This is particularly exciting for pilot projects, as coordination loops and creation effort are significantly reduced and meaningful success data is generated in just a few weeks, which is worth its weight in gold in internal discussions. Feel free to contact me on LinkedIn to arrange an expert call on what such a pilot project could look like for your company.

Conclusion: For B2B companies, it pays to develop content from the customer’s perspective. The ReThink180™ method developed by Leadvolution helps to create concrete content in a very targeted manner in a short time, to stir high interest and to achieve significant registration rates.

The content produced in this process can help improve contact rates not only on social media, but on all channels. In addition, tools specific to the needs of social media, such as lead ads, should be used to ensure high registration rates once interest has been generated.