Case Study: Primary intelligence
About Primary Intelligence:
Primary Intelligence delivers elevated outcomes for B2B marketing, sales, and product leaders through advanced win/loss and customer experience analysis solutions. As VP marketing (March 2016 to March 2019), I was responsible for building a B2B marketing engine to position the brand as the leading authority in our industry and drive revenue through a thought leadership and content marketing strategy. Deliverables included development/execution of marketing strategy, sales enablement, lead generation program to expand the new business pipeline and programs to retain existing revenue.
The Challenge:
Primary Intelligence (PI) was the industry leader in sales win loss analysis, its particular field of business intelligence. However, as it was expanding to other areas such as customer experience, the company also had several competitors enter the market, putting pressure on new business sales and client retention. Additionally, this market disruption began at precisely the same time the company was attempting to introduce new products and tools in the space. It became apparent to senior leaders that more was needed on the marketing front to combat this new competition, launch new solutions, and to position the company as "The Leader" in order to retain existing clients and drive new business leads. PI had been doing some basic marketing, but needed to build a true marketing engine to achieve their aggressive revenue growth objectives.
Examples of material we created to execute the brand marketing, lead gen and retention strategies for PI. Click the image for a sample of our content or watch the video for our customer conference opening general session.
The Solution:
Once engaged by Primary Intelligence to build and lead their marketing efforts, my first objective was to perform a thorough marketing audit, of existing marketing assets, tools and the marketing team. Some good groundwork had been laid, but there were some glaring opportunities for rapid improvement. One was to focus on digital marketing improvements specifically in the areas of SEO and calls to action, or CTA's on the website. The opportunity for conversion was severely limited due to lack of visibility in search and lack of compelling downloadable content. The solution to this was to research key terms, create value-driven content around those terms and develop CTA's that were designed to drive leads. Another was to help mentor and shape the talented marketing group into a highly-productive, cohesive and effective team.
In conjunction with our website and content strategy, we also embarked on a number of other initiatives to drive new business and retain existing clients. We created a sales enablement program which included competitive intelligence to arm sales with battle cards and talking points, as well as a series of case studies and sales support material in response to the sharp increase in competition. We also established an annual customer conference designed to strengthen client relationships, ensure customer success, expand revenue streams and build customer advocates.
In short, my mission was to develop and execute a comprehensive marketing strategy across all channels that would fill the sales funnel with qualified leads, help retain existing revenue, all while elevating the PI brand to elite status in our market.
The Outcomes:
The content marketing strategy had some very positive results almost immediately that were directly aligned with our key objectives. We began to see improvements in strategic key term search rankings which helped drive a significant increase in NB leads. Additionally, the content was also being consumed by existing clients, which combined with our customer conference, aided in our efforts to thwart competitor poaching by firmly positioning us as the true market authority. And for our larger, overall marketing strategy, all of this new content provided us with tremendous assets to use for social media and nurture/outbound campaigns, which drove leads to even higher levels. Here are some selected results:
1. Lead generation program (SEO + content marketing + Pardot nurture campaign + social) by 2019 had increased average yearly leads 2,264% over 2015.
2. Marketing activities helped drive over $5 million in marketing influenced revenue over a three year span.
3. Averaged almost 550 annual website conversions for three years. This is significant for a B2B company, especially considering it is a 1,000% increase in conversions over 2015.
4. From 2016 to 2019, out of all marketing qualified leads passed to sales, 91% ultimately became sales qualified leads per sales reporting. This means that the quality of leads increased at the same rate as the quantity.
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