Paessler Case Study | LinkedIn Marketing Solutions

Challenge

Paessler AG’s software PRTG Network Monitor sets the standard in alerting system administrators to potential problems across their networks and associated devices. However, Paessler AG and its agency direct interactive knew that scaling the flow of quality leads amongst such a specialist audience would be a challenge. Through LinkedIn’s unique targeting options, direct interactive was able to engage system administrators throughout the buying journey, delivering quality leads cost-efficiently. In just nine months, Paessler AG built new levels of brand awareness and engagement, generated leads at a quarter of its previous CPL, and drove a healthy flow of generated trials for its new smart home monitoring campaign.

Solution

With a range of new releases in the pipeline for its hero PRTG software, Paessler AG and direct interactive needed a way to scale their lead generation activities and drive new levels of awareness, while reducing cost per lead (CPL).

LinkedIn’s professional audience and unique targeting capabilities were an obvious solution. “We’d had successful campaigns on other platforms in the past, but we wanted to experiment with targeting professionals on LinkedIn,” says direct interactive’s Senior Online Marketing Manager Franziska Stöhr. “Paessler AG produces some great blog posts and really engaging content, and so we started by using this content to build awareness and sponsoring it to see where we could drive the greatest engagement. Then, after six months, we started to build on this with our lead generation activity.”

Franziska and the team experimented with a range of targeting strategies, to identify the most effective approach to engaging their audience of system administrators. “We ran several different campaigns using different targeting facets and then optimised around those that worked best,” explains Franziska. “It helped that we had some very engaging content ideas and formats. We created very useful content about what to do when an employee leaves a company, and a video about the stupid questions that system administrators get asked. We were able to drive down our cost per click (CPC) consistently, and our ‘stupid questions’ video drove a click through rate (CTR) of 2.35%.”

Results

Six months after the launch of Paessler AG’s awareness-building content on LinkedIn, the team launched a new set of campaigns aimed at generating leads further down the funnel – and driving free trials within their smart home monitoring campaign.

“We were able to use the LinkedIn Insight Tag to retarget LinkedIn members who’d visited our website previously, and this helped to drive strong engagement and lower our CPL,” says Franziska. “LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms were hugely effective as well. We used Sponsored Content to promote value-adding assets for system administrators like cheat sheets and an automated employee offboarding script and with Lead Gen Forms the flow-through to leads was particularly strong.”

In order to drive free trials of the new smart home monitoring campaign, Paessler AG and direct interactive developed a combination of ads and video content. These linked through to a landing page on the Paessler AG website where visitors could enter their full details to start the free trial. “This was a different type of activity to the leads we generated through the Lead Gen Forms and involved people entering more details and moving further towards purchase,” says Franziska. “However, we still drove traffic at a really high rate, with a CTR of 1.25%.”

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How Paessler AG cut cost per lead by 75% on LinkedIn

Challenge

Solution

Results