“The initial aim was to drive brand awareness, but even at this early stage we have already seen a significant associated 3 fold increase in contact acquisition, which is a very positive indicator. The brand has been reinforced more than 200k times between Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, with the vast majority on Google. Combining our brands assets with the digital marketing skills of our agency has generated clear growth and a leading presence within our target audience.”
Scott Eustace
Bentley Synchro - Manager, Product Marketing
As the overall goal of the project was to increase global brand awareness we needed to establish what metrics reflected that.
Awareness, acquisition & growth, global B2B construction software
Bentley SYNCHRO were aware they needed to grow their brand globally and that they could attract growth using paid search and social advertising. They knew they needed insight, support and a clear strategy, so called on the Digital Clarity team to help.
Bentley SYNCHRO is a global collaborative project management platform for the construction industry. The software has been used for projects such as Crossrail, Battersea Power Station and the construction of The Shard, demonstrating the size and complexities of projects which need this software to deliver huge projects on time and on budget.
Objectives & challenges
The overarching goal was to help drive global brand awareness and engage potential clients via search advertising and social media advertising channels.
In turn, this would lead to a qualified sales funnel from where we could deliver a re-engagement strategy to drive conversions from month 6 onward.
There are long lead-to-sale times, often 9 to 12 months. This is where a combination of Google Analytics goal completions and HubSpot new contacts would be used to demonstrate success.
As the nature of this software is a collaborative platform engaging multiple companies and organisations, there are many roles involved in the buy-in process, meaning we needed a very clear approach to the targeting for the advertising. For example, large infrastructure projects, area redevelopments, or tall buildings, all have a size and complexity requiring a sophisticated solution to deliver them on time and on budget.
Goals & KPIs
As the overall goal of the project was to increase global brand awareness we needed to establish what metrics reflected that.
Following the initial brand awareness phase we refined the campaigns and optimised for conversion to sale. This meant focusing on re-engaging previous visitors and prospects.
Month 1 to 6:
- Increase brand searches
- Increase direct traffic
- Dominate for all brand search on PPC
- Increase relevant visits to the website
- Educate and advise on the benefits of Bentley Synchro
Month 6 onward:
- Increase sales funnel
- Increase contacts
- Decrease media spend
- Continued brand exposure
A Winning Strategy
First, we took the time to carefully understand the business and gain a firm understanding of their complex products and services. This led to audience persona’s being developed giving direction to our choices of keywords and ad strategy.
Budgets were strategically upweighted to the first 6 months, with a plan to scale back as the focus shifted to re-engagement of prospects. Therefore the challenge was how to maintain momentum whilst working with reduced budgets from month 6 onwards.
Being a global platform and having no previous Search Advertising data we decided to take a phased approach to rolling out local advertising campaigns starting with their biggest perceived markets UK & USA, then engaging other countries in month 2.
Brand Growth
To measure the brand exposure and signalling we identified some key performance indicators.
These focused on the growth of direct traffic sessions:
- 35% Growth in direct sessions year on year over the first 3 months
Impression share within the market for the brand:
- 70% Impression share grew from 54% to 70% by month 6
Volume of search queries on organic search for brand related searches:
- 85% Year on year growth (Nov to June 2019 vs 2018) in Google Search Console impressions for queries including the brand term
Conversion and Attribution
Since investing in exposure in months 1 to 6, the focus shifted to convert the potential businesses we have already reached from engaged to converted. This required a remarketing strategy to engage users based on initial touchpoints.
- 58% of conversions are driven by multiple touchpoints
Learning from the data we can see that the majority of conversions are influenced by multiple touch points. This reinforced the need for remarketing and continued multi-channel advertising. This shift in strategy saw significant growth in both CTR and conversions.
The Outcome
Our relationship began with the main goal to raise awareness and brand reinforcement for a global B2B software business. Within the first 6 months we achieved a 35% increase in direct sessions to the website influenced by our advertising efforts.
Additional to this we saw an 85% increase in impressions for branded search queries year on year since the campaign started.
Whilst the goal for conversion is only just beginning, we can see initial positive results where qualified Demo Requests (leads) have been increasing.
- 30% Increase in qualified demo requests year on year
