A software company in the communications space wanted to scale their paid search and paid social efforts. In order to hit their aggressive growth goals, they knew they needed to augment their talented in-house growth team with additional resources.

[.c-comment-study-wrapper][.cc-mb-20]“We needed a strategic partner who had the expertise to help us achieve our goals and the skill to fulfill effectively on the strategy. We appreciated that Right Percent had experience targeting SMBs that they could leverage to help us reach our target audience.”[.cc-mb-20]Digital Marketing Lead, Software Company in the Communications Space[.c-comment-study-wrapper]

The Challenge

When we first spoke with the company’s growth team in December 2022, they had lofty growth goals, but didn’t have the resources needed to quickly increase opportunities and scale spend efficiently.

The team was also working with the existence of two separate growth motions: one focused on sales-led growth (SLG) and the other built upon product-led growth (PLG). This required navigating two separate funnels, managing overlapping keywords and audiences, and aligning on how to value conversions and measure progress toward goals.

They wanted to hire an agency team with proven expertise in B2SMB that could serve as a strategic sounding board—especially for help navigating the challenges inherent in having two distinct funnels—as well as support tactical execution.

Enter Right Percent, the Right Side Up venture that focuses exclusively on scaling B2B ads by leveraging their extensive channel-specific expertise and proven results for dozens of other brands targeting SMBs.

The Solution

Right Percent’s first order of business was working cross functionally with the company’s marketing team to restructure and optimize paid search and paid social campaigns to more closely align with channel best practices while still supporting the brand’s unique PLG and SLG motions.

We helped them identify, isolate, and scale quality traffic and leads from both channels while expanding into new audiences and moving away from broad match and into phrase match to hone in on top performing queries in paid search. We achieved this through a combination of bidding strategy adjustments and subsequent optimizations based on down funnel performance—in other words, more closely aligning platform performance and bidding with down funnel results.

On the paid search side, the algorithm had been optimizing for upper funnel metrics, so we restructured the campaigns by breaking out top performing keywords based on back end data. This allowed us to maximize volume where the algorithm otherwise had a blind spot, essentially training it to better understand conversion signals and conversion values. We also helped them with ad copy testing, landing page optimization, bidding strategy tests and tweaks, conversion and conversion value testing, keyword expansion, and keyword pruning.

On the paid social side, the optimizations were focused on isolating and scaling the best audiences and creative, while expanding into new audiences and testing new creative.

But perhaps most importantly, the engagement allowed both teams’ collective experience to solve the most pressing challenges and quickly implement changes.

[.c-comment-study-wrapper][.cc-mb-20]“Through a strong collaborative effort with the client, we were able to substantially improve KPIs across the funnel. Our biggest wins came from focusing on the alignment between platform decisions and down funnel performance. There was no secret sauce; growth came from ensuring every bidding strategy, keyword expansion, or account optimization was executed through the lens of maximizing CW volume within CAC guardrails.”[.cc-mb-20]Derek Hoffman, Director of Growth Marketing, Right Percent[.c-comment-study-wrapper]

The Outcomes

With Right Percent’s help, the team was able to achieve their goal of increasing opportunities and improving spend efficiency.

Paid search

Right Percent helped the software company drive a massive lift in opportunities on the SLG side of the business as well as scale spend with considerable efficiencies on the PLG side.

Sales-Led Growth

Right Percent scaled spend by 93% and helped the brand drive a 103% increase in opportunities from 2022Q4 to 2023Q1.

Through 2023Q2, continued optimization led to another 9% increase in opportunities.

After pausing lower performing campaigns near the end of Q2, cost/close improved and, based on July performance, 2023Q3 is on pace to deliver 2.4x as many closed wons as Q4 2022 at a 49% lower cost/close.

Product-Led Growth

Right Percent scaled spend by 56% from 2022Q4 to 2023Q1, achieving massive efficiency gains in the form of a 10x increase in accepteds, a 4.4x increase in closed trials, and a 65% lower cost/close.

We continued to test scaled budgets in Q2 2023, adding an additional 73% in spend and 49% in closed trials. This amounted to only a 16% increase in cost/close from Q1 to Q2.

Paid social

Right Percent’s paid social efforts focused on Meta and supported the SLG motion. All major steps in the funnel saw a meaningful improvement in their cost per efficiencies from 2022H2 to 2023H1, despite a 28% increase in spend.

• Closed Won volume increased by 91%
• Cost/Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) decreased by 16%
• Cost/Opportunity decreased by 30%
• Cost/Closed Won decreased by 33%
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) increased by 51%

The conversion rates also increased between each step of the funnel, indicating an improvement in lead quality. When you generate a much higher volume of marketing qualified leads, you often see a lower conversion rate down-funnel, but in this case, the MQL to opportunity ratio increased by 20% and the opportunity to closed won ratio increased by 5%.

By helping this software company double down on paid search and paid social, Right Percent helped them achieve their short-term goals and set them up for scalable future growth.

[.c-comment-study-wrapper][.cc-mb-20]“Right Percent was the sounding board we needed to identify the right strategies to help us move towards our goals. They helped us lay a solid foundation that we can build on as we move forward.”[.cc-mb-20]Digital Marketing Lead, Software Company in the Communications Space[.c-comment-study-wrapper]

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