Improving marketing performance by 500%

ISACA is a global that provides training and certification to the technology industry. The training and certifications are marketed directly to professionals in the technology industry, to Enterprises for group training, and through 3rd party resellers (accredited training organizations).  I was hired to elevate the marketing efforts, drive the marketing transformation (to become more data-driven) and deliver stronger performance from the marketing investments. One of the first areas of focus was the vertical b2c campaigns that were the largest area of spend within the marketing budget.

There were several business issues to solve:

• Customer Centric Journey – Better path prospects through their journey, and consider their frame of mind, leveraging behavior wherever possible. Incorporating a more customer-driven stream of marketing capitalizes on the audiences’ behavior, so the timing leverages when the audience is most likely to be in the right mindset.
• Create More Bandwidth – Current state the organization had a heavy reliance on vertical campaigns with limited time offers. Vertical campaigns are a key component of most marketing plans, however it’s important,
• Optimization of Spend – Some limited paid search was in place, however the budget was set tops-down and there wasn’t necessarily a linkage between performance of the paid search efforts and budget. The budget distribution mirrored overall product sales versus being linked directly to the channel, leaving room to optimize by difference geographies and look at spend across all channels.
• One Dimensional Calendar – Vertical campaigns generally require runway to stand up. The organization wanted mechanisms that could be put into market more quickly to respond to legislation, competitors, etc.
• Data-driven Strategy – Limited use of data-driven techniques & use of response best practices. Largely improving the tactical execution.
• Integrated Plan – While there might be multiple channels such as paid media and PR, there wasn’t an orchestrated approach or an unified strategic plan across all channels. There was a significant opportunity to ensure all tactics were working harder through integrated planning and execution.

The first step was analyzing current performance to identify what was working and what wasn’t – and also did a review of all activities to determine how to best meet all goals. The analytics revealed:

• That there was significant disparity in performance across geographies.
• There was available media inventory with projected favorable returns for certain products, indicating a “one size fits all” approach wasn’t the most effective investment strategy.
• From a demand gen perspective, the middle of the funnel was the strongest. While the organization had significant thought leadership it wasn’t being used to move users through the funnel, or well connected to marketing campaign activities – retargeting was being exclusively used for conversions, nurturing email streams weren’t consistently being used.
• In exploring consumer behavior, there was a pretty good mix of direct searches for product names as well as searches for solutions and topics. There wasn’t an intentional SEO strategy being infused in written content, so content wasn’t working as hard as it could be.
• The targeting approach needed elevating. A predictive model was in place through a 3^rd party, however there wasn’t visibility into what characteristics were driving the algorithm.

The moving forward strategy had several components to it:

• Created Integrated Plans – Established a mix of vertical campaigns and horizontal always on programs. Coordinated all channels, and worked with the team to build integrated campaign plans. Additionally, worked on incorporating other best practices such as building a new targeting model, reframed messaging for more customer centricity & incorporated proof points, layered in response best practices, tried new techniques such as YouTube.
• Channel Optimization – Refocused the paid search efforts and optimized spend against findings to deliver a higher Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) which considers both revenue and cost to deliver that revenue. Paid media optimization focused on regional alignment, eliminating spend in geographies with low performance. This enabled investments to align to the best potential return.
• Built Top and Bottom Funnel Activities – This included a number of tactics largely driven by adapting thought leadership content to demand gen tactics such as infographics and gated assets. This included weaving content into nurturing streams for ongoing engagement. These activities created
• Added an Always On Stream of Activities – The always on efforts had three sub-parts:
  • Horizontal, Continuous Campaign – Created a single ongoing campaign that carried overarching umbrella creative leveraging a theme that could support any products. This enabled speed to market for featuring different products & also provided a “place’ to feature products that were falling behind forecast.
  • Launched Behavioral Email Streams – Launched emails that were triggered around a specific audience behavior. Behavioral email streams typically perform better than standard email sends because you’re catching the user at the right place and the right time, when they’re in the mindset. The streams covered a number of digital behaviors for example nurturing emails for handraisers & those that engaged with related content/topics on the website, purchasers of related products.
  • Optimized Core Activities – Refined geographies, refocused spend against strongest performing products (required significant cross-functional coordination to facilitate) and refined the paid search strategy through testing to improve performance. Additionally, ISACA owned channels were fully leveraged to cross-promote and engage with current certification holders and members – which ultimately helps build a top of the funnel audience.

Ultimately, these efforts delivered a 500% increase in performance. The core efforts that were optimized saw a boost in performance, and the new always on efforts had a concentrated initial set-up but were less resource intensive on an ongoing basis and therefore providing higher returns with the added bonus of being easier to scale.