U.S Bank

Introducing Content Marketing to Corporate Payments Pays Off Big

THE CHALLENGE OF MARKETING TO INDIVIDUAL BUYERS

U.S. Bank Corporate Payments offers products and services that help companies make and manage corporate and employee payments and transactions. Their solutions are vast, as is their target market, which makes it difficult to market individual products to individual buyers — especially when a sale can take up to 24 months. U.S. Bank needed a cost-effective, long-term content marketing strategy that would create and nurture demand, and test the use of the marketing automation platform Marketo.

After hearing SCHERMER present at a marketing conference, U.S. Bank brought us in to rethink and reboot its demand gen program — with the following limitations: no consolidated marketing database; no use of current customer data or records; and no marketing automation platform, with no plans to implement one in the given timeframe.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP THROUGH LEAD NURTURE

U.S. Bank wanted to position itself as thought leaders in the Corporate Payments market by cost-effectively acquiring and closing net-new customers through a lead nurture program, using content marketing as a core driver. To do that, we needed to:

Prove the effectiveness of using paid, earned and owned channels for creating new demand, and prove the viability of using Marketo to nurture prospects to close.

Test SiriusDecisions benchmark conversion rates and come out of campaign with real, applicable performance metrics for guiding and gauging future campaigns.

Develop a net-new prospect list from which to nurture new contacts into sales-qualified leads within the five-month pilot program.

CAPTURING LEADS THROUGH REAL-TIME OPTIMIZATION

Without a budget for proprietary research, we dug into what they already had: a handful of subject matter experts and a drawer full of commissioned Aberdeen research papers. We combined those inputs with our own secondary research and discovered something new: there were contradictions in the research and public information about Corporate Payment trends. And if we were confused, we were guessing Buyers were too. Our strategy was to help clarify the contradictions.

As the fifth largest commercial bank in the country, U.S. Bank had a wealth of untapped insight and expertise. We helped them harness and leverage that knowledge into a highly targeted thought leadership, content marketing campaign, which offered up trend-focused articles and webinars in exchange for a few pieces of information. We developed personalized experiences that offered tailored messaging, photography and imagery. To capture leads we leveraged multiple media solutions including paid search and retargeting, display ads, paid social across multiple platforms and email.

We utilized real-time optimization and AB testing, making ongoing changes to the text and creative of the search ads and programmatic placements based on performance. We shifted the budget between social channels to ensure we were getting the best cost per lead. We established lead scoring criteria, and nurtured the qualified leads using email retargeting and additional thought leadership content.

SKY-HIGH CONVERSION RATES, GROUND-LEVEL COST PER LEAD

Combining real-time channel analytics and automation from Marketo, we were able to dynamically and continuously optimize the campaign based on what worked and what didn’t.

In less than four months, we boosted conversion rates by nearly 500%, as AB testing and campaign optimization delivered continuously improving results. In the end, cost per lead improved to roughly $200, well below original expectations.

The campaign delivered 1,400+ qualified contacts to U.S. Bank, 115 MQL’s, and a potential deal pipeline valued at 4x ROI.

+500%

CAMPAIGN CONVERSION RATE

+1400

CONTACTS TO U.S. BANK

PIPELINE TO CAMPAIGN SPEND

The expertise and guidance SCHERMER has provided throughout the project has been invaluable. They’ve helped us prove to the business that putting the buyer’s needs first and marketing with relevant content is the right path forward.