Building brand awareness and thought leadership for 2bcloud through paid advertising, content marketing, and outbound marketing campaigns
2bcloud is a team of cloud experts who help companies utilize the cloud to create great products. They work closely with clients to explore new technologies and methodologies, saving clients valuable time and money. 2bcloud is a global Microsoft partner with deep expertise in building and supporting cloud environments for start-ups and tech companies that want to take their business to the next level.
2bcloud approached Inspired Marketing in mid-2020, looking for support in increasing brand awareness, establishing thought leadership and generating top-of-the-funnel leads that could then be nurtured over time into marketing- and sales-qualified leads by the team at 2bcloud. Later, the company expanded our partnership to include content marketing services, marketing automation support, and outbound marketing services to further enhance and complement its brand awareness, thought leadership and lead generation activities.
2bcloud was looking to raise brand awareness, build thought leadership in the industry, increase engagement with potential prospects, and generate new, top-of-the-funnel leads. In addition, the company wanted to be able to better nurture leads throughout the sales funnel with the long-term goal of optimizing its conversion rates.
Targeting and Messaging
Our initial work with 2bcloud focused on paid advertising and lead generation. We started off by conducting in-depth research on 2bcloud’s offering, ideal audiences, and short- and long-term campaign goals, with an initial focus on top-of-the-funnel and awareness campaigns.
The next step was to define the initial paid campaigns, including the platforms to focus on, the target audiences (geographical regions, industries, types and sizes of companies, positions, and more), budget per platform, and time period for each campaign. Once this was defined, we then created the messaging and content for each campaign, together with any related collateral and supporting materials including optimized landing pages, banner text, ad copy, whitepapers, and guides. Since then, we have been optimizing existing campaigns and creating new ones based on results and additional business goals.
Distribution Channels
Together with 2bcloud, we assess and select the channels for each campaign based on its target audience and specific business goals. These channels include one or more of the following:
– Google Adwords
– Google Display
– LinkedIn and Facebook (with or without lead generation forms)
The cornerstone of any outreach campaign is targeting. Because at the end of the day, an amazing service like 2bcloud and the content we created together has to land in front of the right people to make an impact and increase brand awareness.
Therefore, we began our marketing automation and LinkedIn outbound marketing activities with an overview of 2bcloud’s main offering and business goals. This included working with the 2bcloud team to clearly define the main goals and who they wanted to reach for each campaign in terms of industry, type of organization, vertical, geography and title.
In parallel, we chose a specific focal point from 2bcloud to serve as the face of the first outbound campaign and then re-evaluated this for campaigns that followed. We provide recommendations for optimizing the LI profile of each focal point to include strategic information about 2bcloud, strategic keywords and his or her unique capabilities and achievements in the industry.
Once this is all ready and defined, we create personalized outbound sequence messages for each campaign. Whenever relevant, we included premium content like guides and whitepapers in the messaging campaigns, which boosted the reply rate.
Finally, we set up the audiences and campaigns using relevant tools and launch the campaigns. To make sure we are on the right track and getting maximum results for each campaign, we continuously monitor all campaigns and conduct ongoing A/B testing and optimization.
In addition to the campaigns, we provide ongoing content marketing services for 2bcloud, including organic, educational and insightful content for their website and blog posts from A to Z, conducting briefing/interview calls with relevant stakeholders. We also develop a variety of premium content to support the paid campaigns and ongoing marketing efforts including whitepapers, guides, and checklists. The content is designed to boost awareness of the 2bcloud brand and to strengthen the company’s position as experts and thought leaders in Azure and other cloud technologies.
As a result of learning the market, understanding the needs and challenges of 2bcloud’s target audiences and personas, optimizing top-of-the-funnel, and creating strategic and premium messaging, we were able to successfully increase brand awareness, establish 2bcloud as an industry expert, increase engagement on social media channels, and help the 2bcloud team start a conversation with relevant prospects from the industry.
Website traffic is continuously increasing, both from organic content and paid campaigns, and the content and data from both the paid advertising and LinkedIn outbound campaigns can now be adapted for different goals.
One great example of excellent content and paid advertising performance is a campaign for a whitepaper we wrote on “Setting up Your Azure Cloud Environment for Success”. The campaign brought in 48 potential leads at a cost of $31 per lead, and the lead form completion rate was 26%!
One step closer to success
