Meet our client
Laura Wang, the VP of Marketing has managed and led marketing teams at growth-stage companies for the bulk of her career.
In fact, we’ve worked with her at two different companies over the years!
Facebook is for cat videos
While Laura never specifically said cat videos she did struggle to understand how Facebook was the right place to reach IT decision makers who purchase database products like MariaDB.
It all came down to intent. She wasn’t convinced that the intent was there on Facebook.
- Not sure that folks would be interested in professional development or tools/products on Facebook
- How will the ITDM’s career translate on Facebook?
- Isn’t LinkedIn a better place to reach ITDM’s?
It wasn’t that the ITDM audience wasn't looking for database solutions in general. It’s that she wasn’t convinced they were looking for that information on Facebook.
Facebook Ads pilot program
We let Laura know that we understand her concerns.
Frankly, we had the same mental hurdles to cross ourselves.
I mean, seriously — Facebook Ads for B2B marketing?
What we proposed to Laura was a Facebook Ads pilot program. Very similar to what we had done for ExtraHop Networks.
- Carve out a set amount of media budget to invest in the pilot.
- Agree to a time-frame.
- Agree to the success metrics that will clearly show the outcome of the program - whether it was positive or negative.
Facebook ads approach
This Facebook Ads pilot would focus on creating website custom audiences.
- Audience Building — Use lead scoring provided by MariaDB’s.
- As and Bs only — Plugging the A’s and B’s into Facebook Ads was our first step. Using that custom audience, we then built lookalike campaigns to find more leads to serve ads to on Facebook who looked like an A or B.
- Thirty day creative A/B tests — Now that we were building lookalikes on the right audiences, our optimization efforts began to focus on A/B testing creative. We ran ‘king of the hill’ style A/B tests, with the winner moving onto the next month and a new creative concept or text messaging being slotted in to test against it.
Additionally, we uploaded C, D and (blanks) as a negative lead match.
Lattice Engine scoring system. Lattice Scores went from A and B (engaged, ready to be sold to leads) down to C, D and (blank) grades that went into marketing automation nurture programs.
Lead impact
In less than 1 month we saw the following wins form our pilot program
- Better lead volume and cost per lead (CPL) than any other PPC channel
- High quality leads (As and Bs on the Lattice Engine ranking system)
