Global Search Awards Honour Search Warrant’s work with Kinaxis

The judges’ decision is in: Search Warrant & Kinaxis are awarded Best Use of Search in the B2B PPC advertising category for small agencies for their collaboration with Kinaxis and successfully engaging elusive supply chain planners. We’re thrilled. We’re chuffed. And we want to tell you all about it…

For more than 10 years, the Global Search Awards has celebrated the best of PPC, SEO and content marketing around the world.

Starting in 2020, Search Warrant won Best Use of Search—Travel/Leisure from the Canadian edition of the Search Awards and created a streak come 2021 with two prizes: Best Integrated Agency—Silver Award; and Best Use of Search—Third Sector/Not for Profit.

This year, Search Warrant felt confident taking on the world at the global level and the team’s work was recognized as a finalist in five categories! Aspects of our collaboration with Kinaxis earned four nominations, from Best Global PPC Campaign to Best Canadian PPC Campaign to Most Innovative Campaign and finally, the one we took home – the Best Use of Search—B2B (PPC): Small award.

Not only that, the judges remarked “We were impressed with the creativity and efficient working (sic) demonstrated during the execution of the campaign. SMART objectives were set and amazing results achieved…”

Big wins are rare. Digital marketers toil for hard-won, incremental gains following the iterate, improve and repeat cycle. Opportunities for a massive step up don’t happen every day so when you build one, like the PPC ad campaign for Kinaxis, we suspected it was award worthy.

The Making of a Great PPC Campaign

Kinaxis and Search Warrant have a long history of working together to create online marketing magic. Kinaxis is a Canadian supply chain vendor with a niche audience of some of the largest enterprises in the world. Since they have a niche B2B audience, we need to target like a laser. And for that we chose LinkedIn. LinkedIn costs are not for the ‘faint of budget’, but with strong offers and frequent, compelling messages, we knew high ROI was available.

Although the campaign originated in 2020, we were tasked with increasing volume and efficiency. Targeting alone would not be enough. We also needed compelling offers that are attractive to the audience. Even then, most people won’t share their contact information right away—it requires multiple interactions before they are comfortable sharing.

To remain engaging, LinkedIn limits how many times a member sees the same ad. To get that multi touch result, we needed multiple ad variations to ensure our niche audience interacted with the Kinaxis message often enough to become comfortable..

One ad variation for Kinaxis with a compelling offer to receive an ebook.

With sufficient comfort established, it was time to ask audience members to convert into known prospects through compelling offers and persuasive native lead forms that make converting a cakewalk for members.

Native lead form with a manual work email field added.

All told, the program achieved a year-over-year performance improvement that was quite dramatic. So dramatic, in fact we heard from someone we never expected to…

LinkedIn Chimes In

Our campaign was so successful, the numbers so striking that even LinkedIn reached out to learn more about how it was done. “The numbers tell the tale of this targeting success story,” said Leigh Anderson, Account Executive for LinkedIn. “Kinaxis and Search Warrant are leaders at making meaningful connections with their select audience across the LinkedIn platform.”

Of course, we could never have achieved this result, not to mention an award on the world stage, without the tireless hard work of our clients, who we might add, are pretty sharp cookies. We look forward to celebrating – hopefully in person – with the Kinaxis team just as soon as that trophy arrives from the UK – thanks Kinaxis team!

Maybe you want to build a world-leading PPC ad program too? If yes, we’re keen to try again: contact us today.