The client is a B2B SaaS company offering text message marketing solutions, helping companies grow subscriber lists and offer promotions primarily in the retail and ecommerce spaces. The client achieved unicorn status in 2020 with a $2.2-billion valuation and 49,000% growth over a three-year stretch.
THE CHALLENGE
To significantly scale the digital marketing presence of the brand and product in a crowded B2B space, all while building out a more robust system for tracking and attributing success to ads in order to prove out a positive return on the scalability.
THE STRATEGY
The client came to Statwax seeking out a data-focused solution for scaling its digital advertising. Efforts were taking place across common channels like paid search, paid social, and display. But lead quality – measured as prospective customers filling out a demo request form – was still highly volatile. With no direct way to attribute the best-quality leads and customers back to marketing touchpoints, it was difficult to strategically plan which channels and campaigns to scale up and when. This was made more difficult by the strong competitive presence in the digital space, making costs on all channels higher than average.
Statwax knew that the only way to effectively scale ad spend was to more precisely show the client’s leadership exactly what efforts were influencing the ultimate customer decision. A strong infrastructure was in place: Hubspot and Salesforce were deployed and tracking key milestones along the post-lead customer journey. And lead capture forms were already deployed across the website with clear calls-to-action and user-friendly design.
Statwax began by building out a closed-loop analytics system across all lead capture forms as well as both CRM systems. As Statwax’s SEM team rebuilt search and social campaigns from the ground up, our Data & Analytics team deployed new hidden fields to all lead capture forms that would store key identifying parameters of each person who converted. The SEM team worked to include these parameters in all ad URLs – passing along key info such as campaign, source, and unique user identifiers. From there, Statwax deployed custom scripting through Google Tag Manager to ensure that all tracking parameters would pass from an ad click through all pages of the website and into all lead capture forms that may be submitted. Finally, Hubspot and Salesforce were integrated so that leads entering Hubspot through website forms would pass into Salesforce seamlessly, where the client’s SDR team would start tracking milestones, lead quality, and eventual customer information. With this system integration complete, Salesforce milestones were then imported back into ads channels as offline conversions, closing the analytics loop.
At that stage, Statwax’s ads efforts were given full visibility into impact on customer and revenue volume for the client. And the client leadership team could see that information in real time, with dashboards highlighting things like post-lead milestones by campaign or spend as well as time lag from one prospect stage to the next. Statwax used the unique identifiers to build out attribution, showing not just last-click impact but also up-funnel channels that were most impactful on closing customers at different revenue levels. Almost immediately, it became clear which channels, campaigns, keywords, and audiences were driving better-quality leads and higher-revenue customers at a better rate. Statwax was able to strategically allocate budgets to maximize these areas while saving spend on the lower-performing tactics, building a roadmap of exactly where and when to scale. Meanwhile, the newly available attribution data allowed the Data & Analytics team to build predictive models showing which tactics were reaching diminishing returns and which had significantly more investment opportunity.
THE RESULTS
Within the first 8 months of partnering together, Statwax was able to help the client scale its monthly ad spend by 20X from where it began, to more than $2-million per month across all digital. Thanks to the robust tracking, attribution, and reporting put into place, the client achieved:
- A 3.4X return on total investment with Statwax
- Three straight months of all-time highs in lead volume, SQL volume, and closed customers
- A $2.2-billion valuation and recognition as the third fastest-growing company in North America
THE TAKEAWAY
A B2B SaaS sales cycle is not one-click-and-done. There are hefty considerations taking place, and not every website visit or lead is created equal. To successfully scale digital ad efforts, you need visibility into how each dollar spent is ultimately influencing the best and most lucrative customers. A closed-loop analytics system and more robust, real-time reporting are key to evaluating what works, what doesn’t, and what has the most opportunity for more investment without depleting your returns.
