Raising awareness and generating leads for Yesplan
Client
Yesplan
Services
Digital Marketing // Social Media Advertising // Google Tag Manager
The client
Yesplan is a company based in Belgium offering cloud-based planning software solutions to the cultural industry, from event planning to resource management.
The brief
Yesplan approached After Digital in early 2022 looking to raise awareness of their software in Europe, increase traffic to their website and increase actions through the site in order to grow their lead list. The overall end goal here was to increase conversions via their demo request page, webinars and downloadable information over three months — resulting in a pool of potential clients to add to their database.
This would be achieved through a B2B marketing approach, harnessing LinkedIn advertising, which allowed Yesplan to reach out to relevant professionals in the cultural industry directly.
As an organisation which had done little to no advertising through LinkedIn, this allowed us to approach Yesplan’s campaign strategy with a completely fresh slate. However, it also meant that considerable brand awareness work was required before we began to push for conversions.
Big results for social media
15
Last-click conversions
133%
Increase in demo request goals being completed
0.36%
CTR compared to the industry average of 0.22%
The challenges
When Yesplan approached us looking to raise their profile in the UK, they were upfront about their lack of resources in-house. Though AD would have a talented marketing professional at Yesplan to work alongside, they didn’t have the ability to build a complete digital advertising strategy and execute it internally. This was our first hurdle. Since little online advertising had previously been carried out by Yesplan we knew we would have to build trust and awareness in the brand first and foremost before growing their profile in the UK.
Also, with outdated tracking, Yesplan weren’t getting the most out of their digital marketing output because they weren’t accurately tracking the results from their content. With that in mind, we had to ensure that we rehauled their current tracking to ensure it was set up for success before a single campaign was run.
“After Digital really helped us out with our first steps into experimenting with ads; something that was totally new to us. We worked well together and AD’s quick response time made it easy to work alongside and collaborate with each other.”
Our approach
As a B2B-focused business, we saw the opportunity to use LinkedIn’s campaign platform to raise awareness of Yesplan’s product to potential clients, using targeted audiences depending on each ad’s objective. For example, though our initial brief had much more of a UK focus, it became clear that much of the upcoming activity was centred around a few specific locations. So, we focused on professionals who worked in the arts, culture, and entertainment industries based in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium and Nordic countries.
However, before going ahead with any LinkedIn advertising, we completed a Google Tag Manager audit. When we initially reviewed their tracking they had outdated, redundant tags and were missing other opportunities to track potential actions on their website. We could also see that there were no social media insight tags; in particular, a lack of tracking for LinkedIn, the platform our activity would be focused on. We removed any redundant tracking tags, refreshed important existing ones, and added new ones to ensure everything was being tracked efficiently — therefore improving goal performance sitewide.
After understanding the key types of content that Yesplan wanted to focus on each month, we started planning a series of ads that would allow users to be filtered through the marketing funnel; from awareness and traffic down to a retargeting campaign that encouraged users to request a demo. Our approach started with raising awareness of Yesplan and their webinars through short but informative videos (known to be the most effective media for brand retention). Once we’d built a sizable audience from the awareness campaigns, we ran a series of promoted LinkedIn events that featured an automated sign-up form (facilitated through Zapier to Zoom) for their attendees to be added as easy-to-retrieve leads. Each event was tied to an upcoming Yesplan webinar which zeroed in on different audiences in different locations.
This activity allowed us to build data through the Yesplan LinkedIn account which further fueled our campaigns. We also focused on increasing traffic to the Yesplan website through the promotion of industry blogs, case studies, and on-demand webinars. By doing this, we were ultimately able to retarget all of our engaged audiences to push for demos. Though it was a tight turnaround, we achieved some great results in our first 3-months, reaching over 395,000 users across our target countries.
Big Results
244%
Increase in sessions on the site directly from LinkedIn
993%
Increase in new users to site directly from LinkedIn
847%
Increase in goal completion rate
Set up for future success
Over the short three-month period we were delighted to see such positive results for Yesplan by not only increasing their users on the site but also increasing their goal completions.