Improving marketing performance by 500%

ISACA is a global organization that provides training and certification to the technology industry. Its offerings are marketed directly to professionals, to enterprises for group training, and through a network of third-party resellers. I was brought in to elevate these marketing efforts, lead a marketing transformation to become more data-driven, and deliver stronger performance from our marketing investments. One of my initial areas of focus was the business-to-consumer (B2C) vertical campaigns, which commanded the largest portion of the marketing budget.

The Challenge

Upon arrival, several key business issues became apparent, indicating that our marketing approach could be significantly more effective:

• Customer-Centric Journey: Existing marketing didn’t consistently guide prospects through a tailored journey. We weren’t adequately considering their mindset or leveraging their behavior to deliver timely, relevant messages. Additionally, despite having multiple channels like paid media and public relations, there wasn’t a truly orchestrated or unified strategic plan across them. There was significant opportunity to ensure all tactics were intentional & working synergistically.
• One-Dimensional Calendar: There was a heavy reliance on vertical campaigns, often tied to limited-time offers. While essential, these campaigns typically require significant setup time, which limited our ability to react quickly to market changes, new legislation, or competitor actions.
• Sub-optimal Spend: Paid search efforts, though present, suffered from a top-down budget allocation that lacked direct linkage to performance. Budget distribution often mirrored overall product sales rather than being optimized across specific channels or geographies, leading to missed opportunities for higher returns.
• Data-Driven Deficiencies: There was limited use of data-driven techniques and response best practices. Much of the tactical execution could be significantly improved through a more strategic application of data.

The Outcome

Ultimately, these concerted efforts delivered significant results:

• 500% increase in overall performance.
• Optimized core efforts saw a boost in performance.
• New “always-on” efforts, while requiring initial setup, were less resource-intensive on an ongoing basis, providing higher returns and easier scalability.

The Analysis

My first step was to analyze current performance to identify strengths and weaknesses and determine how best to achieve our goals. The analytics revealed several critical insights:

• Funnel Gaps
  • Top-of-the-Funnel: While the middle of the funnel showed strength in demand generation, ISACA’s extensive thought leadership content, though rich, was not optimized for search or well-connected to marketing campaign activities to move users further through the funnel.
  • Targeting Blind Spots: We were using a third-party predictive model for targeting, but without visibility into the algorithm’s driving characteristics, it was difficult to refine our approach effectively.
  • Nurturing Streams: Email primarily used as a one-off. Nurturing email streams were inconsistently used with general messaging rather than tailored based on the user’s interests or behavior.
• Media Optimization
  • Geographic Disparity: There was a significant difference in performance across various geographies, indicating that a “one size fits all” investment strategy was inefficient.
  • Untapped Media Inventory: Available media inventory showed promising projected returns for certain products, reinforcing that our current budget allocation was not maximizing potential.
• SEO Opportunity
  • Consumer behavior indicated a good mix of direct product searches and searches for broader solutions and topics. However, there was no intentional SEO strategy infused into our written content, meaning our content wasn’t working as hard as it could to capture this demand.

The Strategy

The strategy to address these challenges had several key components:

• Channel Optimization: Refocused paid search efforts and optimized spend against the identified findings to deliver a higher Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS). Paid media optimization included aligning investments with specific regions and products, eliminating spend in low-performing geographies to ensure investments yielded the best potential returns.
• Built Top and Bottom Funnel Activities: This involved adapting existing thought leadership content into demand generation tactics such as infographics and gated assets. This content was then woven into nurturing streams for ongoing engagement, effectively filling previous funnel gaps.
• Added an Always-On Stream of Activities: Established a balanced mix of vertical campaigns and horizontal “always-on” programs. Coordinated all marketing channels and built truly integrated campaign plans. This included a new targeting model, reframed messaging for greater customer-centricity, and the incorporation of clear proof points, layering in response best practices, and experimenting with new techniques like YouTube. The always-on efforts had three sub-parts:
  • Horizontal, Continuous Campaign: We created a single, ongoing campaign with overarching creative and a flexible theme. This enabled rapid deployment for featuring different products and provided a mechanism to boost products that were falling behind forecast.
  • Launched Nurturing & Behavioral Email Streams: We moved beyond generic emails by implementing email triggers based on specific audience behavior. These streams, catching users at the right time and mindset, consistently outperformed standard sends. They covered various digital behaviors, such as nurturing emails for “hand-raisers,” those who engaged with related website content, and purchasers of related products.
  • Optimized Core Activities: We refined our geographic focus, reallocated spend towards the strongest-performing products (which required significant cross-functional coordination), and refined our paid search strategy through continuous testing. Additionally, we fully leveraged ISACA’s owned channels to cross-promote content and engage with current certification holders and members, which helped build a valuable top-of-funnel audience.

These transformative efforts were led by Sheera Eby, in her role as VP of Integrated Marketing at ISACA.