PlanetTogether struggled with low lead quality and a long sales cycle

The Challenge

 PlanetTogether faced a challenge commonly seen in the B2B Tech / SaaS industry. They struggled to generate awareness for a complex product, which resulted in minimal quality leads coming into their sales pipeline. Founder and CEO, Jim Cerra, always recognized that “marketing is critical, especially for software companies, always wanting to get visibility for ones product.”

While Cerra had a team of in-house marketers running the company's campaigns to ensure visibility and awareness of their brand, his team struggled to clearly communicate their complex product. They even had problems explaining to their families what their software is and how it works. Cerra spent a decent amount of time guiding his in-house marketing team, and not enough time on creating brand awareness and generating leads.

So, PlanetTogether sought out an outside digital marketing agency and came across Campaign Creators, vying for someone to truly understand their process. After looking into PlanetTogether's existing marketing tactics, it was apparent, user experience on their website needed improvement. When reviewing their overall sales processes, the agency also identified that they had an ineffective sales cycle that was long and very hands-on.

The Goal

After identifying that PlanetTogether struggled with generating quality leads and ultimately converting those leads to customers, Campaign Creators and PlanetTogether worked together and came up with the following goals:

• Increase the flow of traffic to their website
• Capture and convert quality website visitors into leads
• Decrease their sales team's time educating unqualified leads, so they could spend more time closing leads and implementing their product

The Solution

To meet PlanetTogether's goals, Campaign Creators crafted a multi-stage strategy. First, to increase awareness and generate quality traffic to PlanetTogether's website, Campaign Creators performed an SEO audit to determine opportunities for optimization. This led to outlining an SEO content strategy that was used to craft 50 blog outlines optimized for PlanetTogether's ideal buyers and for search engines. To ensure PlanetTogether would continue to be found through search, they implemented ongoing technical SEO maintenance.

Next, a new launchpad website was implemented and optimized for lead conversion. This included newly designed landing pages, forms, CTA's, and lead magnets that visitors were happy to exchange their contact information for. Campaign Creators ensured that once visitors landed on the PlanetTogether website, they clearly understood their unique value proposition and knew exactly what to do next.

Once traffic was flowing to the site and quality leads were being captured, Campaign Creators implemented several Lead Nurturing Campaigns to improve PlanetTogether's lead to customer conversion rates. These campaigns guided customers through a more precise and defined buyer's journey. Using segmentation, this helped define where each lead was in their buying journey and place them into appropriate nurturing workflows. The workflows sent leads the educational content they needed to progress to the next stage of their journey. Lead scoring was also implemented to signify which leads were actually ready to purchase, and their sales team was automatically notified to reach out to these leads. This saved their team from wasting time on unqualified leads.

“We transitioned from not having a sales team to just having sales engineers. The website really educates the buyer on key points that they're interested in,” Cerra explained.

Thanks to Campaign Creators' Sales Consulting and HubSpot Set-Up and Training services, PlanetTogether was able to automate their sales cycle and implement the technology needed to execute this new strategy. This allowed them to spend their time and efforts on their end of sales process, providing consultation to leads on the cusp of converting into customers. Now, their website and lead nurturing campaigns automatically educated their audiences about PlanetTogether's product, so employees wouldn't need to.

The Results

Just like any good marketing campaign, Campaign Creators focused on delighting their customer, PlanetTogether.

“You feel like Campaign Creators becomes a part of your team. . .” - Ryan McMartin, Sales and Marketing Engineer for PlanetTogether

After implementing Campaign Creator's help for a little over a year, they no longer needed to pay for AdWords (previously using it only brought in 20 leads a month). They also generated an average of 70 leads a month. This increased their visitor-to-lead conversion by 325%!

Also, because their marketing strategy was now automated, they saw leads taking a shorter amount of time to convert into customers. Before, it took up to 6 to 9 months for a lead to successfully convert. This increased the number of conversions by a staggering 300% and shortened the length of their sales cycle to between .5 to 3 months.

Lastly, PlanetTogether continued to receive quality assistance even after the onset of their new marketing campaign with Campaign Creator's Retainer Program. After executing Campaign Creator's strategy and continuously optimizing their campaigns, PlanetTogether saw more conversions, were able to shift their focus from educating to selling their product, and experienced consistent continuing growth.