Case Study | How One Door used display ad campaigns to power a marketing influenced pipeline

[Music] hi all and welcome to the session how one door use display ad campaigns to power a marketing influence pipeline i'm narusha mathananda the vp of marketing at influe2 and i'm joined by ken coopsteen the director of marketing from one door welcome ken hey thank you nirosha i appreciate the opportunity to join you today so a little bit of background about one door uh we're the leading provider of cloud-based visual merchandising software and our mission is to help retailers transform how they plan execute and analyze their in-store merchandising and we do this with our cloud-based platform called merchandising cloud and our customers include best buy t-mobile and woolworths out of australia awesome well that's um close to my heart if you can't tell from my accent i'm australian um so thank you thank you for that introduction ken

um and also just to share a little bit about influent 2 at the base level influential takes your digital advertising out of its black box to be able to help you target the buying groups and key decision makers that you that you want to target and gives you back tangible uh tangible results from that to be able to action so but ken's going to take us through that um we have i know that he has a lot to share so let's jump right in um you know ken i was hoping you could tell us a little bit about one door's challenge with its abm program and what the impetus was to use in flue 2. yeah absolutely so a few years back we conducted a deep dive into our personas and found that on average our buying group consisted of about 15 to 20 people at each company and our target accounts are large retail stores like grocery drugs specialty and big box within those buying groups we have key personas that are primarily hq based and they work in either space planning visual merchandising or store operations

and their responsibilities range from other optimizing product assortments so ensuring the right product is on the right shelf and the right store to creating visual merchandising displays to working with the store teams to execute on those product and promotional plans initially we were spending media dollars on account-based ad platforms and we're generally getting a high volume of clicks and traffic to our site and that's great right however the data could not confirm if we were connecting with our personas or really just anyone from a target account and and to us that was kind of a waste of of media dollars we had spent considerable time building out our database so we knew who we had to target and because we're an enterprise software we're talking about a pretty long sales cycle and so we need to sustain our budget so we had to find a way to bring prospects into the funnel and stay engaged with them throughout the journey right so you really needed to be more

focused and you know it'd be great if you could take us through how in flu 2 has helped one door uh with this challenge yeah so one of our challenges is look we don't have a big sales team so we need to be laser focused on the accounts in our abm group and tracking who is engaged with our ads is is really a critical component of our abm strategy and if you want to digitally engage with a specific individual there's only a couple of ways to do this one you can send emails to market automation however what we're finding is there are a lot of false clicks you can't really confirm that the recipient or some corporate software program is opening your email and second you can send in mail using linkedin which is great but whether someone has opened the email there is no reporting to confirm this so our ad agency con creative recommended info 2 because of its first person marketing capabilities and so we started running ads on info 2 in spring of 2020

and we know what i like about it is we know when a person has clicked an ad how many impressions they've been served what pages they have visited as well as providing us with an engagement score to benchmark against others so at the end of the day we can confirm who has seen and engaged with our brand cool and so you know how did this tie back in terms of your icp research and how did you you marry that up yeah so it ties back to our icp research well we just salvaged about three to five personas in each buying group with different goals and pain points and for our first campaign we developed a series of persona specific ads and the goal was to drive our personas to landing pages that are most relevant to them so for us to date the biggest success that we have had with inflow 2 was a campaign targeting walgreens a large drug chain and we were much more specific in the creative and really by simply adding in their

name to the existing headlines the click-through rate increased to 1.1 versus our average of 0.25 and so this was this was amazing we were like whoa this works um we got to do more of this and so we started to focus more on that kind of advertising against accounts who are demonstrating interest in our type of technology so for us when we talk about kind of personalizing ads um efforts like that or don't take a lot of work but yield huge results right cool and in terms of the results you know um and there and the persona engagement with specific content um you know have you learned anything more through this process and this approach yeah absolutely and we were talking about this the other day it's interesting two of our personas are relatively active online in their behavior be it clicks or downloads are fairly similar however one of our personas it seems spends less time online and this has impacted our ability

to connect with them so you know driving results getting engagement so to compensate what we've had to do is really have our bdr focus more efforts against that persona group with one-to-one and that's helping us but it's you know it's that type of insight that you look at and say okay people are really very much different and you can tell by you know the departments that they're in it's just their behaviors and so having that insight allows us to kind of pivot and make adjustments along the way right yeah that's really cool in terms of i know we were talking about this uh in terms of this approach being able to help validate some of your research because you know you sort of go and do this research and it's all all very very well and good but then you get into the real world and you're able to make adjustments from that so i think that that's super interesting um to see that um and then i know also when we were initially chatting um you know you had a bit of an aversion to targeting through social media you you heard that influence ii um really utilizes facebook

and instagram as one of our advertising channels you know and i think this tends to be a common bias in b2b i mean i have i have this bias myself as well you know i had this bias because you sort of tend to associate uh those those social media platforms with being more b2c but you know can you tell us a little bit more about your version and what you've learned about this and and what your experience has been yeah for sure and and i think you know a lot of people probably have the same kind of reaction is when you're in b2b your expectation that is if you want to reach your audience you have to go to linkedin and linkedin is great um and so when i found out that influence network included facebook we weren't that sure that it was the right channel for us um and it wasn't until a couple months in when we started to do a little bit of research um with com creative we found that facebook was actually a key channel for most of our target audience and if you think about our personas and where they go to spend their time um facebook is still their go to social channel and so what we've been able to see is

more engagement coming from facebook and as you're going to share some of the the other campaigns that we've created the type of content that we've created is ideal for facebook and so in addition to you know info2 on the facebook network we started to do kind of up our game in improving our kind of facebook page because we what we're seeing is there is activity and there's a an opportunity to go there right right and yeah i mean this is one of the things and i think you know you made a really pertinent point um you know when we were preparing is about being where your audience is and being relevant to to what their needs are and um you know i think this is something uh that it often gets confused i think relevance gets confused with personalization and customization um you know which can be really polarizing because it sort of skirts the line of being creepy but i think the other thing to sort of remember here is um you know some of the channels that we typically think of as

b2b marketers they are um you know chock-a-block full of all different content so you're you're actually um opening opening up yourself and your attention and your uh brand to uh channels where people actually have perhaps a bit more attention span and it's not as saturated so i think that was that was a really interesting point that i that i took away from from from what we've been talking about um you know but as you said it's it's been about understanding your user and knowing what's going to appeal to them and applying these insights in a mindful way um and that's something we've discussed at length and so i think we have a special guest who wants to have you say you know before we kick off into this topic so let's hear from him big brother greg from the brady bunch with the message from the gregster for one door well this is far out i hear that one door is retiring the paper planogram is that out of sight or what

well that was pretty cool can you tell us a little bit about about yeah so i'm gonna i'm gonna go into that you know uh barry williams greg brady from the brady bunch um you know 1970s it's part of this campaign that we created and what i wanted to start off with was that you know while influence responsibility for the science part of advertising by helping identify key decision makers and then getting the ads in front of them you know the art of advertising is still up to the brand and our feeling is that b2b advertising should not be cold or sterile it should inspire and and really connect with people on an emotional level even though you know you're you're you're still selling software you're still advertising to people and people have emotions so for us a good example of this is our most recent campaign which you have up on the screen retire the paper planogram and that transports the audience back to the 1970s the origins of the paper planogram to establish that the current merchandising process that retailers are using today

is widely outdated in its time for change so it what we did in our research found out that the paper planogram not get into too much detail but that's really the the map that stores use to identify where products need to go on on a shelf and and this technology was invented in the 70s by the um by k-mart and so where's k-mart today and so this technology is still being used and we thought my god it's it's it's 20 21 like this thing is 50 years old it's time to retire and and so an idea just kind of blossom into this kind of holistic campaign and it's it's been terrific yeah i know i i gosh i can't believe the 70s 50s gave me a little bit of a reality check but look i love this uh you know i loved it when you when you were talking about it when you showed it to me and we i know we could have spent probably the whole session talking about this campaign we couldn't really showcase it but what i really love is how you've taken like this information and data

that you that you've learned about this data point and being able to really transform it into this holistic approach and bringing to life the 70s through these various mediums and really cemented the messaging um you know can you can you tell us a little bit more about how about the campaign results and what you learned from this so it's really amazing creative and our creative team developed visuals around iconic 70s memorabilia so you saw a fondue and an 8-track set really fun is that the day we launched we got a phone call from someone at claire's accessories saying we just saw the campaign it's brilliant we're in the midst of digitizing our process let's talk and responses like this just confirm that your creative is spot-on and it's it was just a great way to kind of set forth this this new campaign and so a little bit as you know where we are today so as the campaign progressed

we found that downloads and demo requests were trailing off and we think it was because that the the creative concept wasn't broadly understood by our target audience and there's some reasons for that that i'll get into but this highlighted to us the importance of balancing creative execution with ads that are you know again it's b2b so more offer driven include product shots and sometimes i think we overthink it that the person who's viewing the ad only has two seconds to look at it that's it and so either they get it or they don't and just because you know from the our side of it we're looking at these ads for a long time we think they're amazing you know something's got to pull them in and make them click to the landing page and if your page is set up right then you will effectively guide them to a desired action be it a download or a demo request and now the harsh reality for all of us is that that everyone is not in the market for your product at the same time and when you decide to advertise you

know if someone's not clicking on it doesn't necessarily mean that you know something's not working or the messaging is off it's it's just they're not ready they don't need to click they're not doing any research so in this instance for us um building long-lasting brand awareness is key and we have certainly accomplished this with the retired paper planogram campaign yeah no absolutely and look i think it's really important to highlight here as well that this you know this has been running for one and these are results from one quarter compared to a previous quarter so i think from a campaign life perspective it's a relatively short time in terms of measuring measuring the results um and i think you're absolutely right in terms of um you know when people are in market because all of your accounts i think if one thing that we've learned through the abm journey is that not all of your accounts are in market at all the same time especially you know if you provide the context with with one door that you

are an enterprise grade software and um you know it's the sales cycle is quite long and it's quite an investment in terms of uh making that decision and i i know from our discussions it's not one that's easily uh changed very quickly in terms of churn so you know i think um you know that's a that's a super important point to remember and i think sometimes that gets lost when um when you're looking at the bottom line marketing results or what happens being able to give yourself like that an understanding of what the other factors are um that may be impacting results as well um so you know transitioning us to results and measurement i i'd really like to dive a little bit deeper um you know selfishly for influential i love that you've coined this new term which you which you know came up during our discussions of in flu 2 clickers um so can you tell us a little bit more about these and the overall results of your abm program and the impact that

influence has had so i go into the info2 dashboard probably several times a day just to see who's clicked and i love that i can see which creative is resonating and the level of engagement at an individual level and for me it's great to share what we call the influential clickers the target accounts who have clicked our ads and we do this at our weekly go to market meetings and work with our bdrs and sales team on mapping out next steps of engagement and here's the best part is you know every lead is qualified because we hand-picked them so there's none of that kind of back and forth about is this a good lead it's hey we all wanted to get this person and now we have that person and it's allowed us to demonstrate to sales who and where we are seeing interest and engagement when we share these in for two clickers this is this excitement around like who clicked this week um this visibility has definitely enabled us to better align our abm strategy and is helping our sales connect with our key decision makers just much more

quickly because we know like if they're clicking an ad on monday we make a call on a wednesday they're still kind of aware of what we're talking about there isn't like a two-week delay here um and so one thing that i thought was really interesting that i wanted to share was that our monthly branded searches have increased by 66 and to me that's highlighting the progress and impact we are making on the business and overall the campaign has been successful and we've increased our market and qualified requests by by 62 year-over-year so that is for us that's fantastic yeah no i think that that's that they're very solid results and i i also would like to point out that you know hopefully influence had some had some hand in quite selfishly uh increasing the uh the percentage of branded searches because you brought us on about a year ago and i love to see how that that's increased as well so hopefully we've had some influence on that

you have if if you didn't i probably wouldn't be talking with you today has been a big part of you know kind of our success and our ability to identify folks that we're going after and and we're connecting with them so that's what abm is supposed to do and we feel like we're we're creating a playbook that that's working for us awesome and yeah i know that you know the other thing it's not it's not not everything's a silver bullet you have um you know so many different platforms that you're using and the other thing is it's really about tying back the marketing and sales results together and i know that you've done some and i i sort of advanced the slide accidentally but i know you've been doing some fantastic work on um bringing all these results together can you share a little bit more about this yeah absolutely and i can't take any credit for for the work that you're showing on the stage um what you're looking at is this amazing kind of unified funnel that our friends at b2b fusion and a person on my team jen chewie have been

working on and this kind of unified sales funnel is pulling into salesforce and it's a dashboard that they created that gives us a really robust view of what's working what's not and it's designed to easily provide our senior leadership time with an executive summary so for a lot of folks you know like that whole end of the month or beginning of the month and you got to pull all the results together and you go into different sources and and you're still not sure you know with confidence are you presenting the right data to your executive team this dashboard is very easy for us to follow and it's accurate uh the most insightful part of this is being able to understand and analyze the qualified leads and i think from this we realize though that we we easily get a lot of downloads through paid search and i'm sure many of the people in the audience find that often few of these fall into your your icp and so what we're doing is our strategy has just been readjusting

um our spend and put it into tactics where we know we can hit the people that we want to and of course influence ii is a is a big part of that strategy um we're also using influential as a testing ground for ads where we can gauge the messaging and offers and what's really neat is that we can make changes rather quickly so it's allowing us not just you know connecting one-on-one but it's it's a testing ground for us um we have a lot of control visibility into the dashboard that if something's just not working we're not gonna kind of let it go it's feel fast and correct it so that's what we're doing um but at the end of it all you know we're taking a very focused approach to account based marketing um influence a big part of it and i would say that you know overall all the things that we're doing has helped us as a marketing team um influence about 70 of our year-to-date revenue right wow that's that's uh amazing to be able to have that result and also just i imagine with the with the unified funnel

like it really helps in terms of um helping with that workflow and connecting the dots with the you know the results you're having through your campaigns and being able to make sure sales has visibility of it and actioning that um through through in salesforce where i assume that the majority of them are working is that yeah yeah right yeah that that's brilliant um and look i you know thank you so much for sharing this can i i really appreciate it um i'm gonna throw you a wild card um you know through this process obviously you know it there are always ups and downs you know what what have you learned um through this that you can advise um you know our audience today things that they should look out for and be mindful of if they're going to take this approach as you've done at one door yeah you know i think it's it's being a little bit patient i think there's a lot of ground work that has to be done up front um identifying the individuals and really understanding you know we talk about

pain points and their challenges and understanding what that really translates to in terms of the the creative aspect of it all um is really important because at the end of the day like i said you get two seconds and we've learned you know some good some bad that if that messaging isn't you know really hitting them and pulling them in it it's it's just not going to work for you i also think that it's really important and what we've learned is got to rotate the creative a lot more frequently i think one of the things that that we relied on with the retired campaign was that we you know we love the creative we thought it was amazing um but like i said um the messaging was probably not broadly understood it was like retired the paper planograms and it was an eight-track cassette and so in this kind of b2b space we weren't giving people a balance of like a product shot or an e-guide for them to say okay i'm making a connection and so that's the other thing that we're

learning is you know creative has to be rotated more frequently and one way that we do that is we use the dashboard to look at the impressions so like if someone has hit you know served up 100 impressions and they haven't clicked an ad i don't think impression 101 is going to do it for you um that we need to kind of change up the message and try to understand what's happening in other instances we see you know someone served up three impressions and they clicked an ad and they were hanging out on the landing page and they downloaded something like to me that's better than any sort of like intent signal like someone saw the ad jumped on it and it's our job to quickly connect with that person and and create some dialogue and so that's that's what we're learning um you know we're going up for q4 and a main event in in january so we'll be exploring kind of ways to evolve our retire campaign um more importantly with info2 now is our opportunity to start developing more mid-funnel ads and what does that mean because so much of of

what we've been doing with inflation influence looking at it as a build awareness type of funnel and so what do you do when you know there are people that have clicked on your ads a couple times they know you are they seem interested now we need to try to get into the heads a little bit of of like okay where are they in their journey and what messaging can we send to them so that it brings them in um because ultimately we want them to do is you know connect with a salesperson or bdr or even better you know fill out that demo or request form field um and once we do that then you know we're on to a very different stage with that person right yeah i think that's that's something that um you know we've certainly been trying to communicate in terms of you you think about display advertising as very top of funnel and being able to drive the leads in but actually you know the utility of it is is beyond that in being able to support um sales efforts and align with them and to be able to to communicate about more

content but you have to be able to know where they are in that journey um and where they are with you and be able to reach them as well so you know i guess that's one of our key key differentiators but i'm really super keen to see um you know how that turns out and would i love to hear about that when that when that happens um so look i i think um we're at the with the end of our presentation so ken thank you so much for for joining us you know for for sharing um what you've been doing and being so generous with we're sharing as well um and with your results and and so on and so forth um and to to um to the audience uh thank you for joining us uh we hope you found this session useful um both uh my details and ken's details are on the slide here so if you have any additional questions feel free to reach out to us um but we wish you a lovely rest of your conference [Music]