How To Double Inbound Leads In a Year
Overview
Our client took a deep breath, and addressed the executives in the room.
“We will double our inbound leads within the next 12 months,” our client, and the company’s marketing director proclaimed.
“Let’s see you do it,” retorted the company’s CEO, who founded the company 30 years prior.
Game on.
How do you increase brand awareness and double inbound leads for a software company in multiple countries?
Challenge
The ERP software company operated in two countries on separate continents. For the last 30 years, the company had acquired new customers through traditional, offline methods.
Now, they wanted to take things online.
Since SEO takes between 4-12 months to see success, it would be foolish to think that only SEO would double leads in twelve months. We needed something to support SEO. We needed PPC, and Google Ads.
In addition, brand awareness was known in Australia, where the company was founded, but not as much in the United States.
So how does an established ERP software company go from generating leads from conferences to generating leads through search engines?
Solution
Our solution was to lead with a PPC strategy and adjust our SEO strategy based on success.
Since the software company didn’t have the time to wait to rank for competitive terms like “ERP Software,” we purchased sponsored Google Ads for the terms.
Simultaneously, we developed content that targeted the same keywords we were paying for. The hope in targeting the keywords from both SEO and a paid advertising angle is that both would be successful in attracting inbound leads. If we wanted to double leads, why not double the marketing methods to get us there?
To support the content we engaged in an aggressive, yet sustainable Digital PR campaign that placed our ERP software client on reputable sites related to their industry. Our hope was that this approach would help develop brand awareness in the states, and would therefore increase the effectiveness of our paid and organic campaigns.
Result
Our Marketing Director client never had to present back to the executives 12 months later. The company was acquired 9 months after our engagement.
Sure, the acquisition was about acquiring a successful, profitable, 30-year old software company in an established industry. But you’d love to believe that the acquiring company took a look at online business growth, saw that the website was growing and attracting an average of 10 leads per month, and factored that into their decision.
Even if the company wasn’t acquired, we had reached our objective: doubling online leads in just under 12 months through SaaS SEO and PPC.
