Brand awareness & signalling leads to uplift in conversions.
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.
With no past Google Ads data, they enlisted our help in October 2018, with the initial aim of increasing awareness of the brand worldwide.
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.
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.
First, we took the time to carefully understand their 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.
To measure the brand exposure and signalling we identified some key performance indicators.
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.
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.
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.
