Strategy

All retail and hospitality businesses have a payment solution in place for online payments and bookings, and in-store. Even if the solution is clunky or unintuitive, SMEs rarely see it as a big enough issue for a business to make a change. They perceive it as costly and complicated to switch, for only marginal benefit.

The sales team at Sage were struggling to find a compelling angle to talk about the product. Sage’s service was similarly priced to competitors and had comparable features. The brand had a £500,000 pipeline shortfall for this business line, and needed to get people thinking about the impact a payment gateway has on their business. So Sage worked with The Marketing Practice to develop a proposition, coming up with an eye-catching creative campaign into mid-market prospects to get them to switch.

They focused on amplifying the niggles of a bad payment solution to help SMEs recognise how it has a bigger impact on business drivers than they thought. If slow payments impact customer experience, or the gateway is not secure from fraud, that has a knock-on effect on brand and reputation. 

If your company is trying to expand into other countries, but customers don’t have access to locally recognised payment methods and currency, that has an impact on sales and productivity.

Objectives of the campaign

• Achieve a four month timeline (from brief to launch).
• Deliver 1,000 qualified opportunities with ‘sweet spot’ accounts by May.
• Achieve £500k pipeline.

Media, channels or techniques used

The messaging for all campaign materials followed the overall theme highlighted in the planning – that bad payment processes had a bigger impact on sales, growth, productivity and brand than you think.

This was used across display advertising, social media, paid search adverts, landing pages, and syndicated content on websites such as Spiceworks and Leadscale. Further down the funnel, Sage created materials to arm the sales teams and partners with a new way to talk about switching payment gateways.

As part of the campaign’s second wave, Sage created a video advert, developed to drive more interest in the proposition at a brand level.

All media channels directed towards the campaign content hosted on the Sage Pay site. There were two content hubs featuring end-to-end funnel content – including a bespoke 

‘Insider’s Guide to how businesses are making payments pain-free’

. The Sage Pay team also had unprecedented access to the Sage main website, allowing them to get the benefit of Sage’s SEO for the campaign, instead of sitting on separate landing pages.

The whole campaign was coordinated through the Eloqua marketing automation platform, feeding into Sage’s CRM system. This allowed the team to apply lead scoring to prospects and qualify the high volumes of inbound engagement. This qualification process ensured that leads passed on to sales were with ‘ideal fit’ prospects in relevant accounts – meaning the conversion rate to sales-qualified leads was more than double Sage’s average.

Results

In total the campaign has generated 3,559 leads so far, with an FY18 pipeline value of £1.56 million. This is impressive considering the average deal size is just £500 per year.

The messaging successfully changed attitudes among prospects, shifting their perception from “I have bigger fish to fry” to “I need to sort this now”.