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Faced with low conversion rates on their forms, this MSP was having trouble finding leads. That's a tough problem to have — especially when you're looking to expand.
Keeran Networks is an Edmonton-based MSP that was looking to aggressively expand into the Toronto and Vancouver markets.
But when faced with low conversion rates on their forms, they were having trouble finding leads as it was. Not to mention, compounding the problem of that low conversion rate, they were drowning in submissions that weren’t actually good leads — job applications, partner requests, companies that weren’t good matches, and of course, service ticket requests.
While all these submissions might be valuable in their own way, it’s still a lot to sift through when your priority is expansion and you need to connect with promising leads.
Here’s What Flawless Inbound Did
We’re all about smart lead generation and nurturing. We also love opportunities to automate and optimize.
We knew that if Keeran wanted to expand into new markets, they needed a slick lead capture process that cut through the noise to let sales leaders concentrate on making those deals.
Naturally, the client’s expectations were high. They were looking for 1-2 good, new, leads per week. To achieve that, we knew we’d have to drive the marketing strategy across the various digital channels to create a seamless and uniform buying experience for the user — and one that made things easy from Keeran’s side.
So We Want More Leads
The biggest challenge in a saturated market will always be standing out. The other biggest challenge is overcoming skepticism and earning trust.
For online professional relationships, it can be hard to even start. It’s no surprise, but people tend to trust those they’ve met in person more than a form on a website. And people want to work with people they trust.
To address this, we highlighted the best Keeran’s business had to offer: their talented, experienced team, and their technology. This was communicated through the carefully crafted UX on the Keeran website that carries a visitor through the ‘Keeran Way’ or what to expect when they do business with Keeran Networks. Case studies, testimonials, and thoughtful content helped to drive this message home. Preparing a short video with their executive team will be our next step to help build on that trusted advisor relationship through their website.
The Next Step: Identifying and Addressing the Metrics
Metrics are important. It’s how you know how well you’re doing, and how you make decisions about optimizing toward growth.
Flawless Inbound deployed our traditional SEO and ad campaign efforts.
- Selected appropriate keywords to seed and track
- Organized and harnessed content into pillar topics
- Constant technical SEO tweaking
- Developing a process for obtaining backlinks
- Managing advertisements
This allowed us to work on attracting better and more relevant traffic in the first place. As we did this, we considered the metrics by which we would measure success. Working with Keeran, we understood these to be the services request, the number of users/seats, the location, and whether the lead came from paid or organic traffic.
The big one was the number of seats. Using this, we could map the exact number of seats into a meaningful company size estimate: 0 to 24, 25 to 49, 50 to 99, 100 to 200 and 200+. The sweet spot for Keeran was 100-200 seats, so we were able to zero-in on that category as a good match for priority lead nurturing based on the expected return on investment.
The improved conversion tracking and reporting immediately led to better sales follow-up, and an improved ROI from the overall ongoing marketing efforts. The qualified sales leads were cleanly forwarded to the sales leaders for follow-up and Keeran was able have better conversations with more relevant people.
Makes sense. The SEO helped bring in more relevant visitors, the language helped build enough trust to convert, and the improved CRM data organization allowed the company to focus on the right people.
- The dashboard reporting solution was the result of a single conversation meant to obtain clarity over Keeran’s business needs
- The initial draft of the lead follow-up process was presented the following week
- We polished the lead hand-off process up with feedback from the Keeran sales team over the subsequent weeks
The Results: Higher Conversion Rates and More Qualified Leads
In short? We did it. We over-achieved their sales lead targets, reduced lost sales leads, and improved ROI on their sales and marketing efforts.
As we move forward, this success will breed more success. With better historical data building up, over the course of the next year, we’ll be able to take this data and use it to make better revenue forecasts, and more insightful visibility into the most popular and profitable service offerings — crucial for an MSP moving into new markets.
Because we’re tracking all this, we’ll be able to adjust as we go, and compare performance to previous efforts. This is growth-driven design in practice: we’re empowered to do more of what works and learn from what doesn’t.
How About That Conversion Rate?
Here’s a stat that gets to the heart of this idea: using A/B testing, we optimized forms by reducing mandatory fields and mapping desired IT services first. The result was a doubled conversion rate — 1.5% to 3%. Ask better questions; get better results.
Perhaps the most telling metrics of our Inbound success is that in the past quarter, our organic traffic sessions were over double what our paid traffic brought in. The bounce rate for organic was 43.53%, almost half of the 70.11% bounce rate from paid traffic. And, the time on page from organic traffic averaged at 163 seconds, again almost double the 74 seconds on average from the traffic coming from paid ads. Finally, we gained 36 new leads from organic in the same time period that paid ads delivered 7 sales leads. These metrics are all strong indications that it is better, and still possible, to own space online though publishing focused digital content.
The quality of leads that we are receiving is ultimately the most important aspect of this client’s success. It’s one thing to get someone to want to do business with your business, but it’s pretty impressive when that someone is exactly the kind of person you want to do business with. Good marketing, attracting the right people, capturing good data, from good questions, results in good sales performance, month-over-month. That’s Flawless Inbound.