Fivetran Drives Millions of Dollars in Pipeline With Authority-Building Content Delivered via Lead Gen Forms

Fivetran, an automated data integration company based in Oakland, California. The software company wanted to jumpstart top-of-funnel leads for its sales team.

Challenge

On its own, simply sharing content on LinkedIn, however, wasn’t driving sufficient engagement or conversions.

“We’re really growing as a company, growing as an organization, and that starts at the top with leads,” said Jonathan Weiss, Paid Media and SEO Specialist for Fivetran. “The higher quality of lead, the better.”

The Fivetran marketing team also wanted to drive conversions among mid-funnel prospects, but they needed to build more trust before the sales pitch. “We have a demo and trial, which is our, ‘Hey, get in and try the product. From there, you’re going to be able to purchase the product,’” said Jonathan. “But if it’s your first time coming to the site, you’re not going to sign up for those.”

Solution

The Fivetran team partnered with Metadata, a LinkedIn marketing partner and B2B demand engine, with an eye on enriching leads, enhancing ad experimentation, and improving integration with Marketo and Salesforce. Metadata helped Fivetran leverage dynamic targeting for Lead Gen Forms.

“We can pull in accounts with certain engagement scores or certain variables,” Jonathan said. This approach enables Fivetran to dynamically target different account stages based on where they are in the sales cycle. “We can get in front of accounts we’ve already identified that might be a little bit more qualified,” he added.

To convert more qualified leads and build brand credibility, Fivetran offered relevant content downloads to targeted accounts, including a whitepaper and a guide to data integration essentials.

Results

In one quarter, the Lead Gen Forms campaign drove 891 leads that influenced $2.4 million in pipeline — for a total cost of about $70K.

In addition, the submitted lead to qualified opportunity rate was over 9%, compared to an average rate of 3% via all other sources. “We’ve increased our conversion goals more than 10 times, and the quality of leads has been incredible,” Jonathan said.

Building trust and brand credibility

Sharing content via the Lead Gen Forms rather than pushing demos also supported positioning Fivetran as a thought leader in the data integration space and cultivated its brand value as a knowledgeable vendor.

“If it’s your first time hearing about Fivetran, they don’t care about a demo or a trial. They want to see, ‘Wow. Fivetran really knows about data integration. They know about which data warehouse performs best. We can trust them with our data,’” Jonathan said. “We’re trying to build that trust by showing that we know our stuff.”

Proven ROI and data clarity

LinkedIn Lead Gen Form campaigns also enabled Fivetran’s marketing team to directly connect conversions with revenues and successfully make the case for continued investment in the platform. “We were able to go to our finance team and say, ‘Hey, here’s what we spent the last half of the year. Look at the quality of leads we’re bringing in.’ And that was like, ‘Okay, go, here’s more money. Continue,’” Jonathan said.

“We’re able to bring in these leads at an incredible price and then prove that these leads are quality." — Jonathan Weiss, Paid Media & SEO Specialist, Fivetran

The integration with Metadata added deeper insight around lead profiles and attribution, while automatically syncing the data with Fivetran’s Salesforce CRM for greater visibility into ROI. “It makes it really easy to be able to say, ‘Oh, this account was from that click and they ended up being an opportunity,’” Jonathan said. “I don’t have to worry about manually importing leads. It’s just right there. But with any other tool, you kind of have to piece that together yourself.”

Lower Cost Per Lead

Even as the quality of leads increased and resulted in millions of dollars in pipeline, the CPL was decreasing — from $200 to $80. The Fivetran team was impressed considering the scale of their campaigns. “That’s the biggest surprise,” Jonathan said. “Sometimes as you open the flood gates, you might bring in a little less qualified traffic.”

“As we’ve been spending more and scaling up, our cost-per-lead is actually going down." — Jonathan Weiss, Paid Media & SEO Specialist, Fivetran

As a result, Fivetran will increase its budget spend for LinkedIn Lead Gen Form campaigns. “We want to continue to hit all different parts of our sales cycle, not just top-of-funnel,” Jonathan said. “I figured at some point we would run out of leads, but there are still more people out there that fit into our target audience.”

Fivetran fully automated connectors sync data from cloud applications, databases, event logs and more into your data warehouse. Their integrations are built for analysts who need data centralized but don’t want to spend time maintaining their own pipelines or ETL systems. They help you focus on what really matters: driving analytics for your business.

Read the full case study.