Acquisition Marketing Strategies

Emerging Markets

Project: PaperCut new acquisition marketing strategy

Accountable: Julie Garaway
Role: Director of Digital & Digital Marketing

Team: Digital Marketing Lead, Marketing Automation Specialist, Front End Developer, Copywriter, translation teams, Sales Support, Tech Support

Platforms: WordPress, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Marketo, SalesForce, Disqus

German landing page header

Background

Implementing an acquisition marketing strategy for our free product offering through SEO, SEM and lead nurturing. With a focus on launching in emerging markets. This included a multilingual content strategy across paid ads, retargeting and lead generation pages to provide customers with a product trial process and download of our PaperCut NG product.

What was done?

Organic - SEO was a huge part of the lead acquisition strategy, due to thousands of pages of organic website content from articles written over 15 years. This all dramatically increased search-ability, however was needed to be constantly monitored due to ever changing Google Algorithms.

Content within articles was sourced for general, non product customer problems and allowed the brand to continue to build credibility by being seen as subject matter experts within the industry. This meant there was a blend of SEO and SEM strategies to drive customers to the website, so from there they could find out about our other products and services.

Cross linking these article pages with product information meant we saw direct links from SEO through to product information pages. There was also a close relationship between digital marketing and customer support teams, to ensure there was handover with support enquiries and when leads came in

Paid search - To drive leads through SEM, I created an integrated global strategy, as well as implementing regional based paid search. This project meant working in with our regional teams and determining key market drivers.

There was a few regions that aligned with strategic sales objectives and go to market plans. Our English speaking countries (England, US, Australia) had minor nuances from a regional perspective, including spelling, messaging and offers. Our non english speaking focuses (Germany, Spain, China focuses) meant curating specific messaging that was translated locally and ensured it was cross checked. 

Landing pages - Initial testing campaigns were done in English, through to Marketo landing pages and bespoke lead management processes. Creating the pages through Marketo meant that we able to get the end to end tracking of the lead (pre GDPR.)

Split testing 2 landing pages per campaign including swapping messages (dynamically built to be split tested to 50% of customers). At any given time there was 8 campaigns running, with differing messages that drove you to the corresponding landing pages. 

These landing pages were built for lead generation activities. Downloading the free product as part of the sales funnel process. Installing and using PaperCut NG exposed you to the benefits of PaperCut MF (upgraded product) but still with the feature inclusions for the basic user. This allowed us to build out a sales lead database to nurture for MF product features. 

Approach

After trialling this with English, we were able to track the site flow of customer behaviour, and pin point the pages and content they sought out, before making further decisions. Here we were able to create customised landing pages that included snippets of this information. 

When paid search was tested for non english ads, the first option was for us to send them to our english pages (completely disjointed experience) or to our existing translated pages. These pages were functional, with written content, but very un-engaging. We determined that the customers would need to move to the English site to get most the information they need - which meant losing the conversion.

So we built a contained language microsite. Something that was able to take the core pieces of product information and be used for sales purposes only that have lead generation methods (forms) across every page. There was approx 5 pages which included home, benefits of product, how to, types of customers, examples or brands, and high level stats of value.

Once this was built, we replicated the microsites and translated them into 8 different languages, these were used across our SEM and display ad advertising and gave the sale teams a sales tool to use and send customers to that was in their language. Links to the parent site were available, but the idea was to have just enough information in there to ensure that they enquired.

Conclusion

This project was a great success, we were able to drive leads regionally through to a newly created sales support function (digital marketing initiative) to ensure they were followed up and handed over to the correct spoken language consultant. We implemented tracking on all conversions and were able to increase budget by 300% in each region by obtaining great CPL and lead quality.

*As this is a public website, company sensitive information relating to project has been removed.