Driving Qualified Leads
EasiCleanse Bath Growth Campaign
2019 Business Objective
Drive EasiCleanse Bath account conversions by double-digits through increased product trials and VAT committee meetings
Budget: $275,000
Goal: Driving product trials through sales demos and conferences
Target: WOCNurses, Nurse Managers
Campaign Mix
- APIC Conference: the largest and most impactful way to reach this target audience was a 20x20 booth at the largest infection control conference in the US. Half the budget spend came from this major conference push with print and digital advertising, geo-fence advertising at the conference hall, promotions and customer dinner presentation
- Product landing page to drive lead conversions for sales with gated content featuring an ROI calculator
- Geo-target advertising in key accounts (placing a pin on a hospital for PPC advertising)
- Complete set of marketing materials for clinicians
Results
- Over 2 million total impressions
- Drove 223 total leads for sales with coming from in-booth demos, web requests, and customer dinners
- Salesforce qualified leads resulted in 47 accounts in product trial, 17 VAT committee reviews
- Number of account conversions resulted in 5 different hospital systems and a 176% ROI (two year span post conference)
Patient Recruitment Spotlight
Challenge or Business Issue
Enroll 380 patients (1:1 randomized in the COUNTER HF Clinical Study.
As the Marketing-Communications lead for the company, I was charged with driving patient enrollment for both COUNTER HF and OPTIONS HF Clinical Studies. The primary focus was to support COUNTER HF (US based clinical study).
The first order of business upon arriving at Sunshine Heart was a full analysis of "status quo" for Advertising and Marketing. I conducted a full analysis and generated a presentation breaking down the marketing mix effectiveness as it related to three categories - Inquiries, Referrals, and Enrollments (total spend, results, and cost per result)
I found that the $950,000 campaign spend was not driving the results the company needed. We shifted the focus and re-allocated to a different marketing mix and saved about $210,000 for that yearly budget.
The marketing mix for finding a 55-70 year old with heart failure interested in halting the progression of the disease focused heavily on local advertising, patient database management, and a Google geo-fence PPC campaign. The plan was to arm the Therapy Development Managers (TDMs) working with participating hospitals in the clinical study.
Campaign Mix
- Corporate website redesign with a shift in focus from Investors to Patients
- Creation of clinical study microsite to handle the conversion of patient leads
- Heavy Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-Click advertising geo-targeting high enrollment territories
- Facebook presence and advertising efforts
- Patient testimonials (video)
- Complete set of Physician and Patient targeted Marketing Materials designed to give the doctor the materials to sell the clinical study to the patient prospect
- Event Marketing geared towards publishing clinical evidence or milestones
Results
- Increased overall traffic from start of campaign from 5k visitors to over 15k per month
- Increased total number of leads by 45% month over month compared to previous campaign
- Cost per lead conversion dropped from about $5,000/lead down to about $400/lead
- Targeted geo-fence campaign generated qualified referrals to clinical study sites and led to about 10 enrollments during the pilot-campaign phase before being shut down due to clinical complications with the device.
Pilot Recruitment Spotlight
Challenge or Business Issue
Aerosim Flight Academy had two revenue streams:
- Airline or Contract Flight Students (i.e. China, Kazakhstan, Regional Carrier agreements)
- Self-sponsored, student funded pilots
As the Marketing lead for the company, I was charged with driving revenue for both streams, but the primary target was to drive enrollment of self-sponsored student pilots.
The marketing mix for finding an 18-22 year old interested in becoming a pilot was primarily focused on interactive or digital marketing - Search Engine Marketing (heavy SEO & PPC), social media marketing, heavy video, guerrilla marketing with existing student pilots, interactive virtual tours, and great photography.
Campaign Mix
- Website landing page development and heavy content development with a laser focus on Conversation Rate Optimization
- Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-Click advertising geo-targeting high enrollment territories globally
- Heavy Facebook presence and advertising efforts, Tweeting during events, lots of video and photos on Facebook / Instragram
- Videos generating excitement around becoming a pilot: student life, spotlight on international pilot recruitment, virtual campus tour, and more
- Event Marketing and the BeAPilot Career Expo world tour
- Email Marketing and an organic list that grew to about 15,000 active leads that were managed using SalesForce.
Results
- Increased overall traffic from start of campaign from 10k visitors to over 50k per month
- Since redesigning the website and campaign elements were launched, the bounce rate dropped to just under 30% and an increase of average time on site to about 3:00 minutes per session
- Flight training related keywords (Top 10 targeted keywords) went from non-existent or 50+ on Google's ranking to every keyword term listed in the Top10. And, nearly 90% of the top 25 strategically identified keywords were found on page 1 or page 2 (depending on location of search)
- Over 5,800 average yearly leads (or 483 per month) that equated to about 500 enrollments during the time I ran this lead generation campaign.
- Sales close ratio was ~ 3.5%
- Overall Marketing CPL = $33 per lead (down from well over $125 per lead when I first took over)
Strategic Web Marketing Scenarios
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to the success of every company in business. Businesses who ignore it have a mostly irrelevant website online. Investing in the success of Search Engine Optimization and being patient with slow monthly positive growth is also key. Moving to the top of Google’s search rankings takes time, expert analysis, and a true investment. Google accounts for nearly 75% of all search traffic, but I believe it could be more than that globally. So, making sure your site is designed for Google's algorithm is very important. These four major categories are:
- Content – one of the most important factors in this algorithm. Content that is relevant and written in a natural language versus keywords splashed throughout the content.
- Back links – The more links feeding your site, the higher relevancy and authority your site is to a search engine. Link building is a critical aspect to an organic ranking.
- Mobile Friendly – One of the biggest changes in Google’s algorithm in 2016 was mobile first indexing. Google now primarily scans and crawls a mobile version of a website versus the desktop version. This is an extremely important factor now to indexing and critical to a company’s web user experience.
- Other Technical Factors - Security or encryption based sites (https), H1 and H2 headings or anchor text, etc.
See Search Engine Optimization campaign results below.
Web Analytics & Reporting
I'm a big web and marketing analytics nerd. I love analyzing data, trends, finding opportunities, then executing in order to test those tactics, retooling and doing it all over again.
I have a very straight-forward approach to driving results: REACH - ENGAGE - CONVERT designed to funnel those results down to the business strategy (sales, enrollments, etc). At each milestone, KPIs drive the success at each stage.
An example of my custom dashboard or marketing analysis presentations, can be found in the next section (Driving Qualified Leads) or by clicking on the button below.