SUMMARY: For many industrial and engineering companies, services and add-on modules are attractive channels for additional revenue. Traditionally, these sales are made through personal visits and mailings. In this article, we show you a case study of how you can use LinkedIn Audience tools to immediately and significantly increase your service revenue.
About Leadvolution
Leadvolution is one of the most experienced social media B2B marketers in Europe with over 140 advertising setups for fast growing startups, exciting SMEs and over 25 global market leaders. Within 4-6 weeks we build a globally scalable social media lead generation for very specific & complex B2B target groups for clients, generating up to 500 leads/month. Read More
About Leadvolution
Leadvolution is one of the most experienced social media B2B marketers in Europe with over 140 advertising setups for fast growing startups, exciting SMEs and over 25 global market leaders. Within 4-6 weeks we build a globally scalable social media lead generation for very specific & complex B2B target groups for clients, generating up to 500 leads/month. Read More
Generating service revenues via classic channels has limited scalability
Industrial and mechanical engineering companies usually inform their customers about additional services and products during personal visits, at trade fairs, or by postal newsletter. However, despite how valuable and established these channels are, they have proven to have limitations in comparison to digital channels.
Customers are only given information about services with long intervals in between.
A personal visit to the customer on site is expensive, time-consuming, and therefore rather rare. Fairs that allow for a personal conversation with customers also have long communication intervals in between for the similar reasons. Most corporates try to bridge the communication gaps by sending out mailings during the intervals.
However, customers often ignore the newsletters and only a few read them. If mailing is overdone and the frequency is too high, they might end up annoying the customers, alienating them away from the companies. As a result, customers generally only learn about new offerings that are relevant for them very late through traditional channels.
The sales dialogue is not conducted with the entire buying center
Even if the companies have a well-maintained CRM (which is often not the case), they usually know only a fraction about the persons involved with the customers personally through contact data. Companies are therefore unable to communicate with customers properly, equally important, with the unknown people who are involved in the process on the customer sides.
Digital channels such as LinkedIn and Facebook can help solve this problem and increase service revenue by regularly engaging with all relevant people involved on the customer side.
Success Case: With less than 1,000 Euro media budget to more than 4 million Euro sales potential
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)
Why was this campaign so successful?
Success factor 1: Correct composition of the target group
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.
Success factor 2: Addressing the target group correctly
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.
Success factor 3: Short and convenient registration processes
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.
Personal contact, email and social media as the perfect complement
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.
Conclusion: Companies can quickly generate additional sales, especially of maintenance and service, from existing customers via LinkedIn.
Do you find the approach exciting and would you like to know more?
Just let us know and we will evaluate the growth potential together with you.
Hannes Fehr: Leading Expertise in B2B.
- 20+ years experience in digital business. Leading positions in media companies (e.g. Tomorrow Focus, Gruner+Jahr etc.) and serial entrepreneur.
- One of the most experienced German marketers for B2B lead generation.
- Over 70 B2B Marketing setups for fast growing B2B startups as well as for large B2B enterprises > 2bn € turnover.
- Official B2B Marketing Guide, B2B Dinner host & speaker @Online Marketing Rockstars, Host & Speaker @Hannover Messe B2B Marketing Executive Dinner series, Official “XING Insider” for B2B Marketing.
- Marketing & BizDev Mentor at several high-class startup-accelerators (e.g. Google, Microsoft, Axel Springer, Telekom etc.).