Analytics-based Marketing Model for a brilliant change in sales and marketing
Challenge accepted
Visma Software Oy is a supplier of ERP and financial administration software, both on-premise and SaaS products. The company is seeking growth through direct customer acquisition and building a partner network.
Visma Software is part of the Visma Group, including 10 business units. The Group’s strategy is to operate as one Visma. Therefore the products of the various Visma companies are scattered on the visma.fi website and it is not easy to point nor sort out which product belongs to which company.
It is challenging to present both the company and its products in a correct and clear manner since there are dozens of products and there are overlaps in supply.
Visma Software’s product range alone consists of five different ERP or financial and property management systems. Product-oriented marketing is not profitable with such an arrangement. Content marketing, on the other hand, has been seen as a good solution.
Visma Software started content marketing already in 2014 and produced huge amounts of quality content in a couple of years. However, the content was difficult to find on the visma.fi product pages and the data bank.
In 2016, the content was distributed as mass mailings via email, and content downloaders’ contact information was directed to a telemarketing partner.
As the GDPR was approaching, Visma Software wanted to stop mass mailings and move to systematic, targeted and long-term marketing.
Visma Software wanted to strengthen its position as an expert company that stands out with its products. At the same time, the company wanted to recognize the warm leads better.
Reorganization work began with marketing automation and the identifying the buyer personas.
The solution
Visma Software had to take a big step from inefficient mass mailing towards targeted, controlled and automated marketing. This required a creative strategy change and a new way of understanding customer relationships. The latter was solved by defining buyer personas.
Five different buyer personas were defined for Visma Software:
1) Ambitious CEO of a company employing about 200 people. 2) Rational and determined financial director of growth company. 3) The owner of a property management company looking for new ways of working. Two different buyer personas were identified from the accountancy target group: 4) A conservative, stability loving senior leader. 5) A reformist and experimental young leader.
The Eloqua-based Visma Suunta content hub was a creative key to change. Hub provides content in a structured way, tailored to the needs of the defined buyer personas: articles, blogs, videos, guides and research results.
The creative implementation of the Visma Suunta is convincing, but still vividly distinct from the mass.
Eloqua allows you to use dynamic content. Some of the content is gated i.e. they can only be accessed by providing an email address or other information.
The content hub forms utilize progressive profiling to collect data from visitors. Visitors are directed to nurturing campaigns based on their site behavior and the materials they download.
At the beginning of the nurturing phase, the prospect is offered interesting and useful content according to his needs.
Gradually more sales oriented, product-specific information is offered.
Visma Software offers Suunta visitors right content at the right time. And finally, the solutions that the potential buyer has shown to be interested in.
A carefully planned nurturing campaign will effectively guide visitors through the sales funnel while providing an excellent customer experience and useful business support. This allows potential buyers to be directed to the right kind of software products. This results ready-to-buy leads for sales department.
Measurable outcomes
The Visma Suunta content hub both refines the leads and strengthens the position of Visma Software as a thought leader. In a partnership-based business, sharing information and developing customer expertise is of paramount importance. The expertise and know-how provided by the Visma Suunta also increase the sales of software. Suunta has changed the marketing and sales practices of Visma Software. Lead production is now efficient, systematic and long-term. At the moment the content hub accounts for almost 70% of the conversion generated by Visma Software’s marketing and thanks to the new marketing program, the call list has now 7 times the number of contacts it used to have (per week). Suunta allows us to view:
- the number of different buyer personas who have entered the marketing program
- how many companies in a defined industry segment has already been reached
- lead status of contacts, which is also updated as the person moves around in the marketing program
- which content is consumed by buyer personas – this helps us to produce more desired content. Bonus: adding new content to the site has been greatly accelerated – a job that took half an hour before now takes only 5 minutes.
