As GDPR looms over the marketing industry, B2B brands are waking up to the power of paid social media as a less hazardous way to target and engage with their audience. Alex Clarke looks at three paid social media campaigns that absolutely smashed their targets.
1. Hootsuite
Even a company whose bedrock is built upon the power of social media still needs to use it every once in a while. And what greater pressure is there in B2B than having to prove you can practice what you preach? Alex Clarke casts his eye over Hootsuite’s recent social ROI campaign.
Hootsuite. A company whose very service is predicated on using social media to enhance a brand’s marketing activity. ‘How meta’, I hear you say. But even a company that peddles social media for a living encounters the same set of challenges any marketer does when it comes to actually advertising that product over social.
“I’ve been at Hootsuite for over six years, and we have to go through the same process like any other marketer does in terms of justifying our spend,” says Cameron Uganec, senior director of growth marketing and education at Hootsuite.
I jumped on a trans-Atlantic call to discuss the social media management company’s recent paid social campaign and, according to Cameron, the secret to paid social media success is all down to the data.
“The beauty of paid social is that it’s entirely measurable. We’ve measured this campaign right down to influence pipeline, and have seen a 17 times return on investment.
“The first step for marketers is to convince the c-suite to let them test, let’s say, $1000 on a single campaign, and then afterwards show them the data and ask for another $2000 on the next one.”
The choice channel: Facebook
The idea of a video series delivered over a period of time is a shrewd tactic, as it allowed Hootsuite to usher its audience along a journey – starting with education around a potential customer painpoint, moving onto the logistics and implementation of the tactic, and ultimately ending with the proven business value, facilitated, naturally, by Hootsuite’s solution. If a user only watched one of the series videos? No problem – when they visited Hootsuite’s website, they were presented with an entirely different set of messaging versus someone who had watched all the videos, or even someone who had converted after watching only two. This was all achieved via the highly-lauded Facebook pixel, which is where the lion’s share of Hootsuite’s budget was allocated.
“We find Facebook is the most effective platform for social video,” explains Cameron as he justifies the brand’s choice of channel. “For the last year and a half, it’s placed huge focus on video, and we’re seeing that video gets extra algorithm points, which, in turn, drives the highest engagement levels.
“Also, Facebook’s tracking and reporting capabilities are quite sophisticated. It allows us to really target the specific audiences we’re after, especially around job titles and geography – and the platform has done a really good job of being mobile-first.”
Analytics, reporting, and campaign optimisation: Is Facebook truly the king?
One of the major benefits of Facebook as a paid social marketing channel is its campaign optimisation potential. Cameron’s team inspected and analysed the campaign every single day and were able to constantly iterate, not only on the content the campaign was serving, but also its level and depth of targeting.
The campaign’s budget – on Facebook – totalled a very conservative $3000, an extremely small amount when you consider Hootsuite’s value proposition is all about social media management. The results dwarfed its meagre budget: it reached 380,000 Facebook users, delivered 1300 business conversions, 30,000 homepage visits, 142,000 video views, and 17 times ROI.
Hitting the sweet spot
And how did this campaign manage to absolutely smash its targets? Cameron explained that it was all about hitting the proverbial ‘magic spot’ between audience messaging and value proposition. “The videos were optimised for the right medium, in the right format, and with the right content,” he says.
“The challenge for social marketers is successfully marrying the right kind of audience-centric content (the content our audience wants), with the message Hootsuite is trying to drive home (our product message).
“You’ve got to find the right balance between what the audience needs answers to and your value proposition.”
Organic social in B2B: alive and kicking?
One of the most hotly contested statements in B2B right now is whether organic social still has a place in a brand’s marketing approach, beyond customer service. Cameron believes organic social content is just as important as its lucrative paid ally.
“Our paid social person is embedded within the organic social team,” he explains. “We start with organic and, in order to really run paid social efficiently and successfully, you should write the content as if you’re implementing an organic campaign.
“Often, we’ll be creating and publishing content organically, and if we see that it’s gaining traction in terms of social engagement, we’ll put paid behind it.”
Cameron asserts that a lot of B2B companies make the mistake of dumping their entire social budget on their direct response team, a group that usually comes from a background of digital advertising and, therefore, aren’t trained to optimise spend for social.
So, a blend of paid and organic seems to be the key, according to Cameron. He concludes: “The first era of social marketing was all about engagement: driving conversations and connecting with people.
“This new social marketing era builds on that, moving towards a more acquisition and conversion-based environment. Paid is an essential part of that, but you still have to work together with your organic team and use your organic content at all times.”
2. Sherpa Marketing (Talari Networks)
Sherpa Marketing created a social media campaign for Silicon Valley-based tech vendor Talari Networks, which permeated a previously untapped UK market and created $900,000 in qualified pipeline opportunity. Here’s how…
Heard of SD-WAN? Neither had I. Yet Bedford-based agency Sherpa Marketing was tasked with delivering Talari’s first-ever UK-based paid social campaign to promote that very product.
Predominately used by enterprise-level businesses to connect data centres over vast geographic distances, SD-WAN is a software-defined networking technology distributed on WAN (wide area network) connections.
“Talari is a fast-growing tech vendor that’s successful in the US, but wanted to explore the UK market and use it as a springboard into the rest of Europe,” says Sherpa Marketing’s CEO Tom Perry.
“Our job as the agency was to put some quantifiable numbers around the campaign’s leads and then translate that into pipeline opportunities.”
Leveraging external content
Using a licensed Gartner report on SD-WAN as its social collateral (a report that just so happened to endorse Talari), Sherpa leveraged an established research brand’s content and name to add a wealth of authority to the campaign’s social content.
“Having a well-recognised analysis company badging your content for a campaign is certainly something we advocate,” admits Tom. “We really benefited from having a defined period when we could use the report, so we knew exactly when the campaign was going to start and end.
“Making the investment in a really hot piece of content from such a huge name in the tech world was a key component of the campaign’s success.”
Running for 12 weeks from July to September 2017, and with a social budget of $15,000, Sherpa pushed the Gartner report through LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and a mixture of Google Display and AdWords. But the agency quickly realised that LinkedIn was going to be the campaign’s most lucrative avenue.
“We tend to put the money where the conversions are,” explains Tom. “As it stood at the end of the social campaign, around 80% of the pay was being channeled into LinkedIn, with the rest shared between Facebook and Twitter.”
Trans-Atlantic teething issues
Tom confesses that it wasn’t all plain sailing, especially when discussing channel tactics with Talari in the early stages of campaign planning.
“There are certain perceptions in the US that just aren’t true in the UK,” Tom says. “For example, when we first outlined our ideas around this campaign, Talari was immediately resistant to LinkedIn and pushed us towards paid display on Bing, which we tried with limited success.
“It’s a different market over there, so for us to have the confidence to convince the client that our ideas were going to work over here and then prove it, was a challenge that we really overcame.”
“In fact,” adds Tom, “Talari has now started its own inhouse LinkedIn campaign over in the US as a result of this one.”
The UK campaign’s success is clear, with a 19% conversion rate and $31 cost per conversion on LinkedIn, plus even more impressive results on Facebook (25% conversion rate and $13 cost per conversion).
Leads were collected, evaluated and nurtured in Marketo and Salesforce, an operation that Sherpa’s inside sales team spearheaded. This eradicated the ponderous process of an agency handing MQLs over to the client’s inhouse sales team for a less seamless customer follow-up.
“It wasn’t just a case of a client telling its agency to do some Facebook ads and see what sticks,” asserts Tom. “Talari knew exactly what it wanted, which is why we had such healthy discussions around platforms and tactics.”
Skills and interest-based targeting
Another interesting aspect was how Sherpa elected to target Talari’s audience, which was relatively broad and untapped this side of the Atlantic. The team decided against the traditional targeting of decision-maker job titles, instead choosing to construct job function personas based on prospects’ skills, whether they were interested in network infrastructure, and how long they’d been in the industry.
As Tom describes: “We identified shared attributes among our audience, because the problem with a broad topic like networking is that decision-maker job titles can take on so many different variations within different companies, which means it’s easy to miss out on a massive core of relevant markets just by not targeting the right job titles.”
Remarket, test, and refine
If prospects weren’t converting by downloading the Gartner report, Sherpa made use of the pixel-based remarketing capabilities available in social by, for example, offering users other content – such as a product demo – that was more relevant to where they were on the sales cycle. On Facebook and Google, this generated a 31% conversion rate.
“We used a very strict test and refine model,” explains Tom, “which is especially important when working with a digital team in the US who really know what they’re talking about.”
Sherpa was able to constantly rotate content, remarketing fresh messaging and assets to increase the chances of conversion. It continues to drive results even after the campaign’s close.
3. Perkbox
With big budget comes big responsibility. Here’s how Perkbox increased its CTR by 20% while decreasing cost per lead by 25%.
Perkbox is a pretty unique company. In a nutshell, Perkbox customers (or rather their employees) have access to hundreds of exclusive offers, which are refreshed on a monthly basis.
Targeting employees and decision-makers as a dual approach presented a unique set of opportunities for the company’s paid social team, as Yoann Pavy, head of performance marketing at Perkbox, explains. “Approaching two separate audiences and speaking to them in a different tone of voice, with different content, and across different channels, can be really tricky.
“We always try to tailor our messages for decision-makers, but that’s where channels like Facebook can be quite restrictive. It’s not a traditional B2B channel, and has favoured B2C approaches for many years now.”
The lion’s share for Facebook
The majority of Perkbox’s paid social activity takes place on Facebook, with around 80% of the company’s social spend being siphoned into the social media giant. And, aside from a six-figure monthly budget, a number of factors made Facebook a successful channel for Perkbox’s campaign.
The most important? You guessed it: the Facebook pixel. Perkbox’s aim was to build custom audiences based on the parameters prospects provided when filling in the campaign’s dedicated landing page form. Its main goal was to segment prospects by company size and seniority.
Speaking to decision-makers and the everyday professional
The challenge was to deliver Facebook content that wasn’t just playful and engaging to employees, but also mature and direct enough to grab the attention
of decision-makers.
“We refreshed our paid social ad content on a weekly basis, because people get bored easily. It’s essential to always refresh your content and continually test.”
Perkbox possessed a library of historic Facebook ads that had generated thousands of shares, comments, and likes – so by jumping on these posts and their already established algorithm value, Yoann’s team was able to refine the messaging to appeal to those highly sought after decision-makers.
“There was so much budget behind these ads that they inevitably drove high levels of engagement – we almost forced them to generate traction,” Yoann says. “It’s not ideal, but it was a necessary evil. Now, we’re really using fresh and interesting content to drive that engagement further.”
Driving volume and efficiency is a learning experience
Another reason the campaign experienced such impressive results was purely down to the relatively unique value proposition that the company has in the market.
As Yoann explains: “Perkbox doesn’t really have any competitors, so this – combined with the big budgets, constant refinement and engaging nature of the ads – meant we experienced really good results.”
He admits that paid social is still a real learning process for the team at Perkbox. “Learning how to drive volume and efficiency on Facebook was (and continues to be) the main issue for the team, because volume doesn’t necessarily equal quality.
“We want people to think about Perkbox when they’re on their coffee break, when they’re at work browsing Facebook or having lunch,” he adds.
“At the end of the day, social ads shouldn’t be seen as ads, so by changing the way we approach content, making it more video-based, dynamic and interactive, we’ll ultimately be adding
to the user experience.”
