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Promotion of Outsourcing Services | CROSSBORDER MACHINE.COM
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PROJECT WORK
Long Sales Cycle
Challenge. The duration of the cycle from the first contact to the sale was 5–8 months. Because of this, the return on marketing investments was stretched over time so much that it did not allow the company to increase the promotion budget and scale due to the risk of a cash gap.
Task. Shorten the sales cycle using digital tools so that the freed-up budget can be reinvested in expanding client acquisition channels and reduce the load on sales managers.
Strategy
Before starting the work, we analyzed the Crossborder Machine business model, as well as the project's clients, competitors, and environment. This allowed us to formulate:
Competitive matrix
of the strengths and weaknesses of the provided services, compared to substitutes and direct opponents;
Consumer segments
with a clear gradation of key triggers, needs, and tasks they set (expect) for a company like CBM;
Composition of decision-makers
at each stage for different buyer segments (including indirect ones);
Doubts, questions, and objections
that arise with clients at each stage;
Decision-making stages
stimuli, and key aspects that encourage decision-makers to move from interest to purchase;
Chains of advertising channels
for each segment, through which they can get acquainted with and interact with the business services;
Understand who the CBM client is
the types of business and client profile for whom Crossborder Machine's values and methods are ideally suited in terms of expectations and accepted standards and yield a higher conversion, which will ultimately ensure more accurate targeting during promotion;
Decide how to work with "cold" clients, turning them into buyers
those 90% who seek to solve problems independently without involving outsourcing companies;
Answer the question
"Why clients refuse or decide to cooperate";
See what CBM needs to change in its internal processes
... to increase revenue and conversion from applications to real projects at the sales department level.
Project Implementation
The main fears, risks, and problems of clients that they sought to solve in the process of organizing the export of their products were highlighted.
For each "pain point," we compiled a map of channels/sources through which potential clients can find an answer to a question or solve a problem. Also, by indirect signs, it is possible to determine at what stage the client's company is, and what problems are most concerning during this period.
This allowed us, using the value stream map, to visualize the sales funnel and, using Lean 6 Sigma tools such as the House of Quality and SIPOC, clearly describe the requirements for each element, attribute, performer, and stage in the form of parameters and metrics to assess effectiveness during subsequent promotion.
Funnel
The strategy for client acquisition, given that all "warm" queries were exhausted earlier, was aimed at working with cold audiences at the stage where problems arose that the Crossborder Machine team could solve.
Stage 1. Birth of Needs and Problem Awareness
In the process of building international distribution, every potential client had questions about where and how to sell their products, problems with taxation, customs, delivery, service, returns, etc. At the same time, in 95% of cases, the business sought to find all the answers themselves before turning for help.
Specifically for such an audience, separate advertising campaigns were prepared where we promoted thematic articles, PDF reports, and case studies on solving such issues in practice in the form of social media ads and banners in Google Ads.
We used chains of creatives of various formats with limited frequency to increase the final interaction, as well as targeting by indirect signs and expanding reach by related search queries to collect relevant individuals working or interested in the promoted topic.
Stage 2. Conversion
By tracking and recording every interested user who went to and studied materials about key problems in export projects, we were able, through fine segmentation and end-to-end analytics, to determine the interests of a specific website visitor and the stage at which their export process is. This helped to understand what services they would need (including taking into account the problem that needs to be solved) and what related issues might concern them.
As a result, we formed 7 key segments, for whom, after the first interaction with a specific material, we created unique cascading remarketing chains, developing needs and stimulating contact through advertising:
At the same time, the main goal at this funnel stage was not sales, but obtaining the contact details of decision-makers using feedback forms, chats, calls, and emails in exchange for PDF reports, etc. This is necessary to further communicate with them at the level of remarketing advertising campaigns, email newsletters, and the sales department, using the received contact lists.
Stage 3. Nurturing to Deal
Since our task was not only to increase the number of leads but also to shorten the sales cycle, the next stage after communication with the company's sales managers was "warming up" potential clients using a series of materials designed for 3 main groups (types) of clients:
These actions allowed us to shorten the cycle from 6 to 4.5 months.
Performance
Landing Page
Audiences
In addition to creating "interested audiences" based on indirect signs, we used the Crossborder Machine potential client database, expanding it with the contacts of decision-makers from all enterprises potentially oriented toward export.
This allowed us to create lists of real users for uploading their data to Facebook and Google Ads, create lookalike audiences based on them, thereby determining the most relevant and converting target for promoting display campaigns.
Search Ad Campaign Structure
If the company previously focused its efforts on warmer search queries, rejecting all key phrases that did not bring applications, then with the new system of "selling solutions" to a cold audience, we expanded the promoted semantics by more than 10 times, interacting with everyone involved in export, international sales, and e-commerce.
For the main groups of cold queries, special ads were prepared that did not just advertise services, but led the user to a page where we talked about the best case studies of solving a particular problem and, using native content elements, sold, first and foremost, trust in the brand.
The maximum goal here was to obtain contact data for remarketing.
Cascading Remarketing
All groups of visitors from cold search advertising campaigns and display activities on Facebook, Instagram, and Google were distributed into categories, depending on the purchase decision stage, nurtured, converted, and pushed using remarketing chains according to the cascading system.
Email Marketing
An additional element to cascading remarketing, which seriously influences the conversion of users into real leads and further into customers, were automatic email chains.
They were launched for individual potential clients depending on which material, when, and how they interacted in the sales funnel we built.
End-to-End Analytics
How could we determine at what stage the client is and make such unique communications for them?
The built web analytics system allowed us to assign a unique ID code to every user who left their contact details, which we stored in our database, CRM system, and Google Analytics.
All their actions, clicks, and visited pages were assigned a unique tag. The algorithm we developed allowed us to determine at what stage the client is, thanks to pre-set parameters:
By answering these questions, we not only launched automatic email chains but also used the API to move the contacts and cookies of this user among remarketing audiences, engaging unique ad chains and communications needed by a specific client at a specific moment.
Achievements