Behind-The-Scenes Of An Award Winning Marketing Campaign
Editor’s note: PathFactory was called LookBookHQ until May 2018.
It’s been a few days but our team is still basking in the glow of the B2B Marketing Exchange. Presented by Demand Gen Report in Scottsdale Arizona from Feb. 19-21, B2BMX is a week filled with fascinating sessions, golden networking opportunities, delicious food, and accolades, specifically, the 7th annual Killer Content Awards.
The KCAs – affectionately known as the Finnys on account of its fin-like shape – exist to acknowledge the efforts of envelope-pushing B2B marketers who are setting new standards when it comes to content creation and campaign execution. This year, 32 winners were chosen in 14 categories.
We are over the moon to announce that, this year, LookBookHQ won a Finny for Sales Enablement! The campaign that earned us this honor is called, Caveman. We’d like to extend a warm congratulations to our fellow Sales Enablement Campaign Finny recipients, Tempur Sealy Hospitality, and Matrixx Software.
What goes into an award-winning campaign? Read on for a full breakdown of why and how we launched Caveman and the results we’ve seen to date.
Once upon a time…
… the LookBookHQ sales team found themselves struggling with a challenge many B2B sales organizations can relate to: they spent too much time calling prospects who didn’t know what LookBookHQ is or the problem we help solve–that is if they even showed up at all! These under-educated prospects created a gap in marketing & sales alignment and, of course, ultimately affected the bottom line.
The marketing team put their heads together: how could they better support the sales team to ensure everyone could have the most productive calls possible?
Caveman was born
This collective marketing brainpower led to Caveman, a campaign designed to help prospects gain a deeper understanding of what LookBookHQ does and highlight how it can help solve a B2B problem every marketer can relate to BEFORE they talk to sales.
Launched in Summer 2017, the multi-channel multimedia campaign explains why marketers need to evolve past primitive marketing metrics like clicks and form fills and focus on engagement data as a more reliable measure of sales-readiness. We call this “engaged intent” and truly believe it is the most powerful metric available to marketers today. Caveman is storytelling at its best. And for added flair, prehistoric animations and sound effects help get this important message across to target accounts.
Allowing prospects to self-educate prior to the sales call allows for a much more productive conversation to take place. Taking it one step further, the Caveman story ends with a list of suggested questions to ask the sales rep to help guide the conversation even further.
On the flip side, it also helps sales avoid time-wasting calls with leads that aren’t a fit or aren’t quite ready to talk yet.
The anatomy of Caveman
To ensure we were maximizing its effect, Caveman was distributed across digital and direct mail channels, including:
- An interactive digital experience: Built on LookBookHQ’s Content Activation Platform but utilizing it in a creative, unconventional way, the story shines a light on how “engaged intent” data can help catapult marketers out of the dark ages of marketing metrics.
- A direct mail component: A throwback ViewMaster was sent via direct mail to hand-picked accounts. It included 3 ‘slide reels’ that told the whole Caveman story–all in a fun, branded package. ViewMasters were sent out to a specific group of lost opportunities that fit the ICP.
- An automated follow-up email outreach: An automated email was sent from the sales rep. If the digital Caveman experience was consumed, they received a ‘looking forward to our call’ message. If they hadn’t engaged with Caveman, the email messaging encouraged them to do so.
You prospect, me sales
To help sales zero in on the best accounts to target, marketing created a set of criteria that an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) should fit. Then, the team pulled from a list of lost opportunities from the past year that fit this proprietary formula to help sales prioritize the best accounts to revitalize.
In addition, a select few accounts were hand-picked by members of the sales team to receive the throwback ViewMaster component.
Out of the dark ages, into the light!
While our beloved Caveman was a creative and unique idea (if we don’t say so ourselves)… did it actually work?
Well, the numbers speak for themselves: Of prospects that consumed the digital Caveman story, over 53% converted from SQL to SQO.
Interestingly, of all the SQLs generated, those who engaged with cavemen had an 89% attendance rate versus 67% attendance rate when they didn’t self-educate with Caveman prior to the meeting. So the marketing team’s hypothesis that more educated prospects would lead to better sales conversations is reflected here.
At the end of the day money talks. Overall, the Caveman campaign contributed to over $10M in pipeline. The digital and direct mail campaign influenced a handful of new customers and closed/won revenue of over $650,000. Cha-ching!
Numbers aside, we collected a lot of qualitative feedback as well. The ViewMaster direct mail portion was very well received. We heard things like:
Caveman lives on as will our love of the fin-shaped trophy and admiration of the line-up of impressive B2B marketers we got to share the podium with. We would love to hear about the outside-the-box campaigns your marketing team has designed! Let us know in the comments below.
