Challenge

• There is no single buyer persona. This is a reality faced by B2B organizations everywhere, including ServiceMax, which provides asset-centric field service management for manufacturers and service providers of high-value, complex equipment. With buying committees becoming more complex and diverse, marketing strategies must do the same, even in highly focused verticals.
  
  
• “There’s a bunch of different personas we need to cover individually to make sure we get the full scope of the deal,” says Trey Buchanan, Senior Manager at ServiceMax’s agency Metric Theory. “One person isn’t going to be able to say yes. You have to get all six people to say yes.”

Solution

• In addition to reaching the right people to gain influence within buying committees, ServiceMax and Metric Theory also sought to identify “high-intent” prospects who are more likely to take notice of the brand and show a concrete interest in their solutions.
  
  
• To accomplish this, the teams deployed sharply targeted campaigns with “high-intent content” (analyst reports and other useful materials for their audience), combining Lead Gen Forms with Text Ads, Dynamic Ads, and Sponsored Content. They also leveraged the LinkedIn pixel to retarget previous website visitors who may already have familiarity with the brand.
  
  
• Additionally, ServiceMax targeted members who were active in LinkedIn Groups pertinent to field services, figuring that these individuals might be more eager to seek out educational content and engage with ads.

Results

• Thanks to the quality of their content and precision of their targeting, ServiceMax and Metric Theory have seen strong overall results with their campaign. But the real breakthrough came from the decision to focus their efforts on LinkedIn Groups.
  
  
• “Because those people are so highly engaged, we saw click-through rates that are basically double what the account average was,” says Buchanan. “And then from there, they are actually filling out the form at a higher rate as well.”
  
  
• The Groups campaign outperformed even Retargeting campaigns, producing an incremental surge in quality leads at a 16% lower cost per lead.
  
  
• 189 leads captured at a CPL lower than benchmark
  
  
• 16% better campaign performance when targeting LinkedIn Groups

Quality over quantity

• Their focused approach means that these campaigns from ServiceMax and Metric Theory were smaller in targeting scope, but reaching the right people and personas as evidenced by high click-through and conversion rates.
  
  
• “With online advertising, it’s all about making our budget stretch the furthest and reaching the right buyers. Pairing our testing strategy with strategic audience selections has resulted in our cost per lead to go down and lead quality to going up, making for a happy sales team and an even happier marketing leadership team,” says Shannon Jackson, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at ServiceMax.

Getting sophisticated with ROI measurement

•  The teams at ServiceMax and Metric Theory care about metrics like cost-per-lead (CPL), but not in an isolated sense. They seek to take a more holistic view when measuring ROI, testing variations of audiences and creative to compare results and reach conclusions based on backend pipeline metrics.
  
  
• This analytical strategy helped them develop the successful Groups campaign, measuring it against their retargeting and other prospecting campaigns as benchmarks. “The real analysis for us that told us this was worth it,” Buchanan explains, “was the cost per opportunity and then the overall return on ad spend based on pipeline.”

Selectively reaching the right people

• These days it’s more important than ever to tightly align ad campaigns with the right audiences, and make each impression count. This is a major source of value for advertising LinkedIn for ServiceMax, with an audience of decision makers that includes IT operations managers, financial pros, and actual end users of the software.
  
  
• “With these campaigns, we can know exactly who this job title is that’s in front of this ad, and what company they’re at,” says Buchanan. “And it makes our job of finding these people much easier.”

About ServiceMax

ServiceMax is a global leader in field service management, offering cloud-based software tools that improve the productivity of complex, equipment-centric service execution. Enterprise companies across the globe have turned to ServiceMax to help them keep the world running.