NewsCred Demand Generation Strategy

The Challenge

With NewsCred’s goals and budget in mind, Walker Sands’ PPC team proposed a content-supported paid strategy combining an intent-focused search campaign and a highly targeted LinkedIn campaign that primarily engaged accounts on NewsCred’s prospect list.

Because NewsCred was employing an account-based marketing approach on a lean budget, the goals for the PPC program were clear:

• LinkedIn: Drive conversions from marketing decision-makers at companies on NewsCred’s prospect list.
• AdWords: Drive conversions from companies on the prospect list while also attracting high-value conversions from companies outside the list that were self-qualifying.

Overall, success would be measured by the quality of leads and not the number of clicks.

Walker Sands’ PPC team worked alongside the agency’s in-house content strategists to leverage NewsCred content assets that would appeal most directly to the target audiences and create compelling landing pages for each. The Marketing Content Strategy Template was identified as highly useful for top-of-funnel prospects, while the Forrester Total Economic Impact Report was the perfect validation resource for prospects who were farther along the buyer journey with NewsCred.

1. Marketing Content Strategy Template: This timely, actionable content tool helps high-level content marketers and strategists plan their content strategy with more than ten different components, including a content mission statement, content pillars, distribution strategy, messaging framework and more.
2. Forrester Total Economic Impact Report: This credible research report, conducted by Forrester Consulting describes how a multinational management consulting firm used NewsCred to realize a 201% ROI, achieve over $1.5M in total benefits, and experience a payback period of only 4.3 months.

Targeted Distribution

For LinkedIn, the Walker Sands PPC team built a highly targeted campaign to engage the most relevant decision-makers at every company on the NewsCred prospect list. For the paid search strategy, the PPC team worked with SEO specialists to identify key phrases that aligned most closely with the pain points that each content asset addressed. The PPC strategy’s hyper-focus on relevant job titles, companies and search intent allowed the campaigns to deliver results without incurring cost overruns.

The Results

Walker Sands’ PPC strategy delivered 482 total conversions across LinkedIn and paid search.

Paid Search

• The paid search strategy resulted in a 11.8% conversion rate, delivering 354 conversions at an average cost per conversion of $43.41.
• Paid search conversion rates jumped from 5.5% to 9.2% to 12.7% over the course of five months.
• 80 of the 354 paid-search conversions were on the NewsCred active prospect list.
• Notable paid search conversions included the Head of Content at Visa, VP of Content at Pepsi, Global Head of Content Strategy at SAP and VP of Content Marketing at PNC.

LinkedIn

• The strategy delivered 128 conversions through LinkedIn – all on the targeted prospect list – with a 14.8% conversion rate and at a $51.63 cost per conversion.
• LinkedIn advertising conversion rates progressively increased from 9.7% in November to 15.6% in March as campaigns were tested and optimized.
• Notable LinkedIn conversions have included the Senior Director of Strategic Marketing at Oracle, AVP Content and the Director of Content Strategy at Mass Mutual, Content Management Architect at Cisco Systems, Director of Digital Content at Adidas, Director of Content Licensing at Time, Head of Content Strategy at Groupon, Research Manager of Marketing Mix Models at Google, and many more. Additionally, multiple leads were generated from major brands, with three conversions from Oracle, six from IBM, five from Cisco and two Mass Mutual.

Looking Ahead

With this large foundation of interested leads for NewsCred, Walker Sands is now managing search and display remarketing campaigns designed to help them through their buyer journey.