Website leads are on pace for a 417% MOM increase.
Website demos are up by over 1,000% MOM (and counting).
Q2 goals unexpectedly reached.
Today, I'm going to share the growth hacks that got us there
Starting at ZERO
Before we started with this client, website leads and demos were ZERO historically.
Expectations for Marketing generating Sales impact were low. This wasn't their first rodeo, and prior to our arrival, several others tried to make an impact but didn't get anywhere.
Fast forward to today, and we're generating quality leads daily using pre-existing tools and concepts that were originally deployed without an underlying strategy.
This week our client asked us, “what randomly changed to get us here?” How do we go from a website that never generated a customer (or a demo or a lead) to one that does all three?
Surely, there’s some luck involved, or as the client asserted, “randomness.”
Anything but "random"
Growth Hacking is a scientific, iterative, Agile approach to Marketing. These spikes came from a strategic framework that helped us generate ideas quickly, put them to test, and improve them using contextual insights.
At any given moment we have over a dozen experiments (learn more about marketing experimentation) running at a time, sometimes more. And we’re adding to that pile every two weeks.
In this instance, several things opened the dam. In this article, I will highlight our most recent top 5 Growth Hacks.
A little about the MVPs we growth hacked:
We started with three MVPs. This isn't the normal prescription though. Usually, we start with one and build up from there. However, during our strategy session, we uncovered a content offer that was never properly executed and an in-person event they had a booth for that didn't have a big-picture strategy tied to it.
Our main MVP idea was to immerse the user in their product through a pre-recorded demo hosted on a landing page designed to schedule a live demo. So, we found a way to take on all three at once by leveraging each concept with at least one of the others.
Our MVPs
- Demo experience (with recorded video)
- Ebook (already existing)
- Live event marketing (geofenced ads)
Right out of the gate, the demo experience only landed appointments with bad leads, the ebook generated leads but at a slow pace, and the live event drove action to the booth, but the post-event actions were muted.
Time to develop some effective SaaS growth hacks.
5 - We eliminated the Google lead form (demo)
The biggest challenge with leads from the Google lead form was that they were from out of the country 95% of the time. This wasn’t helpful to our client, as their customers are primarily in the US with extremely rare instances where out-of-country works. None of the targeting tools in Google eliminated this problem. So, we simply turned this feature off and drove traffic directly to the website.
This caused conversions to plummet immediately, but since the vast majority weren’t good anyway, this cleared the data clutter.
Transparent data is everything, so this was an important step.
4 - Ad platform rebalanced (content offer)
When you have a small ad budget, LinkedIn is not typically a great place for generating leads.
"Small" is a relative term, but in our case, we had $16.67/day to spend on each ad campaign in the platform. That's small by any measure in my book.
But it's enough to explore, set benchmarks, and learn about user behavior. And, since we operate in 2-week sprint cycles, we planned on reacting quickly.
Benchmarks from Sprint 1:
- Much higher CTR and lower CPC with Google vs LinkedIn
- Overall traffic volume was much higher with Google
- Generated leads from Google--none from LinkedIn
- A portion of the Google leads were direct hits or close to the ideal target
Our first growth hacks:
- Shut down LinkedIn
- Doubled down on Google
- Removed non-performing ad sets in Google
Results after 18 days
- Google ad conversions for the content offer grew by 225%
- Cost per lead dropped by 65%
- Everything about the leads improved, from volume to quality
PRE (6/1 - 7/2) POST (7/2 - 7/18) Vol Baseline 225% Direct hits 25% 31% Almost or worth calling 25% 31% So-So 12.5% 15% Unsure 12.5% 19% No good 25% 4%
June 1 - July 2 (pre-hack):
July 3 - 18 (post-hack):
3 - A better video (demo)
On the demo request landing page, our MVP started with a low-production/low-budget placeholder video showing the product and narrating the features that we believed would be the most interesting to the viewer. However, the rate of completion was less than 10%. It wasn't 0, so that meant we had something usable. But it needed adjusting.
We identified where the drops were occurring with the viewership, rewrote the script, and re-recorded and edited the video. We immediately saw a 200% increase in completion views (30%).
Note: it was still low-budget/low-production, but we did use some stock videos and created more of a storyline, so it was definitely a level-up.
2 - Improved landing page (content offer)
Originally, we found a piece of content the client had published 6 months prior that hadn’t generated a single lead, but showed a lot of promise based on what we uncovered during our strategy phase.
The most glaring problem was easily solvable: It wasn't hosted on a landing page, but rather, a blog page with a pop-up form hard-coded to always be popped. It was doomed from the start because the form covered up half of the article.
It also didn't explain much about the content itself.
So, we repackaged it with a traditional landing page Pitch, images, form and slightly updated messaging--and it started generating leads almost right away with a little bit of ad juice. Some of them were really close to the target persona, and could theoretically result in deals with the right sales approach.
SIDE NOTE: This was a new market for our client, so our 'learned' knowledge about how and who to target was extremely limited. We had theories, but no practical data. Nonetheless, we were getting close. Not a bad first shot.
Our first growth hack: More descriptive text to the above-the-fold copy.
Results after 18 days:
- 200% increase in leads in 18 days vs the ENTIRE month prior
- On pace for a 417%
- Cost per lead dropped by 65%
- Conversion went from .96% (9 out of 939) to 9.7% (27 out of 277)--a 10X improvement!
ALL:
PRE
POST
1 - New marketing sequence published
Leads are great. Demos are better. When the nurturing sequences started running, the demos started converting.
In fact, there was a very specific email that triggered the greatest responses.
In many ways this was a benchmark test, so there's no history to compare it to except that bad leads generated on a different landing page for a different campaign. However, the messaging was similar, and we took what we learned from it and applied it to our MVP here.
Key learnings:
- Email nurturing is a MUST
- The audience responds to competitive comparisons & transparent pricing
NOTES: "Form submissions" were on the meeting schedulers embedded via Hubspot. 1 out of the 11 demos came from ads, the other 10 came from the marketing nurturing sequence
What's Next (conclusion)
With momentum comes great responsibility.
As growth hackers, it’s our duty to identify momentum and then capitalize on it. And that is precisely what we’re doing.
Keep in mind, this is Growth. Not everything is going to be about leads and demos. In fact, it was this mindset that allowed us to identify and act on other quick-win opportunities right out of the gate, helping them hit their Q1 sales goals, which wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Upcoming growth hacks:
- Email nurturing for the content offer downloaders
- Repurposed content offer (tweak and re-publish for other targeted industries)
- Lookalike audience ads
- Retargeting ads for content offer downloaders
- CTAs for the demo and the offer throughout the website
- Sales process updates for inbound leads
What would you do next? Does your business growth plan include a perpetual cycle of iteration? Many b2b SaaS companies get tunnel vision--focusing on single dimension goals, like leads generated. But what about deals? Customers? Or retention?
Click HERE to learn more about our Growth Marketing Services
COMMENTS