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How to make marketing more effective? Generate and test hypotheses.
A common mistake made by beginner marketers is to promote services with a “known” tool that has once proven its effectiveness.
Sometimes the first hypothesis gives good results, but over time, its effectiveness decreases, and you need to find a new way to reach the heart and mind of the audience.
Today, we’ll share our experience of working with a language services provider for IT teams and prove the importance of hypothesis testing in B2B.
The project is an educational company Savvy.
The CMO of the project is Serhii Soloviov.
The service is a comprehensive lead generation setup: market research, website audit, creation of lead magnets, in-depth interviews with customers and potential customers; development of advertising creatives and texts, and setup and launch of Facebook ADS.
Navigation through the case:
- Product
- Stage one. Identification of problems
- Stage two. Research
- Solve Marketing team members
- What has been done?
- Conclusions
The approximate time for the case study is 15 minutes.
Product
Savvy is an English language provider for technical teams.
The company has five main products.
- Corporate English — group and individual lessons for the team at the company’s office or online.
- Assessment — assessment of the team that is already working. These are tests that help track language and business communication skills for meetings.
Testing helps to evaluate the effectiveness and management of training. It is conducted at regular intervals and determines who has improved their skills and how over a certain time.
The assessment also includes testing of candidates to receive detailed reports and feedback on their English proficiency.
Based on this information, a decision is made whether to hire the candidate and send him or her to an important interview with foreign colleagues.
Advantages of this test:
- the result is ready in a day;
- recommendations from Savvy specialists to improve the language level;
- a separate dashboard for testing — the BEST service;
- almost no human factor in assessing the knowledge of candidates and employees.
- Business writing training — individualized training to improve email correspondence, reporting, and chatting to be more clear and polite.
- Soft skills workshops — training to improve the interaction between people.
- Executive coaching — training with a Savvy mentor.
The Savvy team includes more than 50 instructors and operates in major Ukrainian cities.
Stage one. Identification of problems
During the consultation, we found out that the company did not use Google ads because of the high cost of placing ads. They didn`t believe in the effectiveness of Facebook promotion, but we managed to prove that it was worth a try!
During the consultation, we identified a need to attract new customers to the Corporate English service.
To achieve this goal, we proposed:
- formulate a marketing strategy;
- conduct in-depth interviews with customers and potential customers to identify their needs;
- create lead magnets;
- write advertising texts and creatives to launch advertising;
- start implementing the strategy immediately.
Stage two. Research
At the beginning of the work, we conduct a study that helps us find answers to the following questions:
Thanks to the research, we learned:
- how the client’s business works. What exactly do we sell and why it is important for the audience;
- who are the strongest competitors and what do we need to do to differentiate ourselves from them;
- what advertising tools should be used soon.
Solve Marketing team members
We assembled a team of six specialists to work on the project:
What has been done?
1. Market research
To research the market and understand what content would have the best impact on the target audience, we conducted a series of interviews with Savvy’s clients. We talked to HR and L&D managers and found out
- what kind of request they had made;
- how well Savvy was able to solve their problem;
- why they chose Savvy;
- what advantages the company has;
- what could be improved in Savvy’s work;
…and many other questions.
Interviews can be an effective tool for lead generation, and we decided to test this hypothesis about SAVVY. So we conducted several interviews with potential customers who would need Corporate English. We searched for them through groups for HR managers and with the help of personal networking by the CEO of Solve Marketing, Serhii Soloviov.
Results:
2. Providing recommendations
Website
A website has a great influence on the number of requests and sales, namely its quality. To determine the effectiveness of a website, it is necessary to analyze the following factors:
- how unique and comprehensive the information is;
- how readable and modern the design is;
- how easy and convenient it is to browse and use the site;
- how fast it loads.
It is possible to assess the effectiveness of a website more accurately by determining its conversion rate.
Glossary of terms:
Conversion is a metric that expresses the correlation between the number of visitors who perform a certain action on a website and their total number. Most often, by this action, we mean buying our product or requesting a consultation.
Therefore, we analyzed the website and prepared recommendations aimed at increasing the conversion rate for the Corporate English service.
Communication with potential customers
To increase conversion, we provided recommendations to the Savvy team to improve their communication with potential customers.
Throughout our cooperation, we prepared regular and detailed follow-ups with our suggestions and recommendations to make business promotion more effective.
We recommended:
- enter the European market, namely to include such countries as Poland and Hungary;
- improve the website;
- promote the company’s services through Google ads;
…and many other tips.
What recommendations did we manage to implement in our work?
- Use of lead magnets as a lead generation tool;
- promotion of not only the Corporate English service but also the Assessment direction;
- translation of landing pages into Ukrainian.
3. Lead magnets
Our goal is to increase interest in Corporate English and Assessment services.
How? By using lead magnets that we promote through the “lead forms” tool in Facebook ADS.
Glossary of terms:
A lead magnet is an offer to get something valuable for a potential customer in exchange for contact information.
We created 3 lead magnets for these areas in two languages: Ukrainian and English.
- 2 lead magnets for Corporate English:
Checklist “Top 10 email mistakes that Ukrainian IT professionals should avoid”
Checklist “10 mistakes in business correspondence”
- 1 lead magnet for the Assessment service:
Checklist “Will the candidate pass the interview in English?”
Who is our target audience?
Our target audience is HR managers in IT companies. We chose related interests to target them with Facebook ADS.
However, HR managers in IT companies are only one segment of the project’s target audience. Therefore, we tested several ad groups with different interests:
№ 1: direct interests;
№ 2: direct interests + narrowing to IT;
№ 3: the general audience.
Why the general audience?
By broad audience, we mean running ads without interests, for women and men aged from 18 to 65.
Targeting a broad audience allows you to reach people who may be interested in your (or similar) products, even if they haven’t visited your site yet. To use this audience, you need to have a Facebook Pixel.
We installed Google Tag Manager, linked it to Google Analytics, and added the Pixel. In this way, Facebook started analyzing data from the website, Instagram, and Facebook pages, as well as from the lead form to show ads to those who should be interested.
What did we do next with the applications we received?
At first, we suggested warming up and engaging the received leads with email campaigns, namely:
Task №1: tell about the company.
Task №2: show cases and reviews.
Task №3: sign up for a consultation.
However, the client refused to send an email newsletter, so we improved the offer to “Get a checklist + consultation”. To do this, we set up 4 events in Google Analytics.
We also created a funnel in a Google spreadsheet that automatically received requests for a checklist + consultation.
Results:
4. Advertising texts
At first, we wrote texts that provided as much information as possible about the services. However, as it turned out, their main problem was that they were long. Therefore, the advertising campaigns where we used them were not very successful.
Example №1:
Example №2:
That’s why we reduced the volume of advertising texts in the future, and they turned out to be more effective.
Example №1:
Example №2:
5. Advertising creatives
We created advertising creatives for the Assessment and Corporate English services:
During the second testing of advertising campaigns, we included the offer “For HR managers of IT companies” on advertising creatives. This way, we immediately attracted the attention of the right target audience.
Also, to make them interested in our services, we indicated to the creatives that they would receive a checklist.
Examples:
Conclusions
So, in two months, we have achieved the following results:
- in-depth market research was conducted, which allowed us to provide valuable recommendations for the project;
- successfully tested interviews as a lead generation tool (7 interviews resulted in 2 leads and 1 sale of a service)
- several variants of lead magnets were developed and tested;
- 38 leads were attracted through Facebook ADS advertising (average cost per lead is $2).
We have learned from our own experience that everything is connected in marketing. Therefore, when a client comes to us with a request for a certain marketing tool, we cannot ignore other possible promotion channels. After all, it usually turns out that one tool will not be enough to achieve the desired result.
We also pay special attention to the effectiveness of interviews as a sales channel for B2B. It has shown a high conversion rate, as this type of communication does not oblige a potential client to buy, but helps to work through objections and learn about the needs of the target audience.
Therefore, we recommend testing several marketing tools and channels, and not stopping if you fail to test only one tool. This will make your business marketing effective.
Remote marketing department. Preliminary consultation from a marketer with 15 years of experience.
