Scaling Cybersecurity Demand with Advertising Skeptics
How do you convert an audience that tends not to trust any marketing?
This is the challenge faced by Field Effect, a SaaS cybersecurity firm with an ideal solution for SMBs. Tougher still, they needed to solve the problem quickly to create demand and scale it up to hit ambitious targets for filling their sales pipeline.
Years of B2B Demand Gen Experience
Field Effect extended its digital marketing team by collaborating with Search Warrant and its team of experienced B2B demand gen marketers. Together, they broke the task down into bite-size chunks.
1. Identify winning content: IT and Cybersecurity pros are famously dubious of marketing and advertising. But they do value peer recommendations and independent, 3rd-party product comparisons and reviews. Field Effect licensed the necessary reviews that demonstrate their solution stands up to more recognized competitive brands.
2. Design best-practice advertising: combining audience data from 6sense with the targeting and reach of LinkedIn and Google let Search Warrant build Field Effect a cost-effective multi-touch ad program to promote its objective product comparisons to just the right people.
3. Polish landing pages to deliver on the promise of the ads: attracting the right person with the right offer still ends in an expensive fail if your landing pages fail to convert – Field Effect and Search Warrant worked together to polish each landing page for its audience.
4. Start small & tune results: a lot of marketing dollars go to waste by scaling up too soon, before you have adjusted and calibrated for results from your ideal customer profile. Only turn up the volume once you see the lead quality you need.
Turn Up the Volume
After a quarter of building, testing, adjusting and testing again with modest ad budgets, Field Effect began to see the kind of quality leads they needed to help their business development reps busy. Now they just needed a lot more of them at a price they could afford. Together Field Effect and Search Warrant turned up the advertising spend and continued to adjust as lead volume grew. Over time, some of the original offers or ads that worked well at a micro level became too expensive at a macro level. Budget was shifted daily to take advantage of the most cost-efficient results. When spam results started sneaking into the mix the team adjusted again to block robots and limit exposure to specific topics and terms.From Skeptics to Believers
Over the course of two quarters Field Effect grew its advertising program by nearly 10x. The marketing team hit and surpassed its annual target for demand generation and filled the sales pipeline with leads to occupy an excited group of BDRs.What about your targets?
The demand generation team at Search Warrant loves to hit targets and after a lot of soul searching we concluded the next one should be yours. If you want help building a demand generation machine – even for a difficult audience –How do you convert a famously skeptical cybersecurity audience?
Field Effect Software
Cybersecurity
Skeptical cybersecurity pros
Action Needed
- Identify a succinct audience list
- Figure out what kind of content persuades a doubting audience
- Publish effective landing pages
- Tune paid ad channels for quality leads
- Scale ad spend to fill the sales pipeline
- Marketing’s annual demand generation target is hit and surpassed
- Scalable advertising program can now be turned up or down as required
- Multiple high-quality offers identified that are valued by a skeptical audience
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