Board Intelligence was formed in 2002, evolving speedily over the following years from a small team of consultants in Mayfair to a fast-growth technology and advisory firm that supports over 19,000 of the most senior private and public sector leaders from around the world. Their mission is ‘To turn governance into the most powerful force for good and the most powerful driver of performance’. In order to achieve this ambitious mission, Board Intelligence set themselves some clear but challenging goals designed to achieve the growth and influence they aim for. In order to help them realise those goals they approached Innovation Visual.
LinkedIn is a key lead generation tool for Board Intelligence, not only because it is essentially a captive audience of business leaders but also because of its exceptional advertising targeting ability.
The in-house marketing department at Board Intelligence wanted to bring in help to fully optimise their LinkedIn ads campaigns with the objective of maximising the number of high-quality MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) at the lowest cost possible. These MQLs would be added into the HubSpot CRM for the sales team to pursue and convert in order to achieve their high growth targets.
Before we were asked to become involved, LinkedIn advertising was being managed in-house by Board Intelligence. Innovation Visual had been working on Google Ads for the business for some time already, so in Spring 2020 it was felt that perhaps our skills and experience could be used to achieve the growth they were after across their digital advertising. The idea was that we could make more efficient and effective use of the work we were already doing for them to additionally improve the way the LinkedIn ads performed.
As we already had an excellent understanding of the Board Intelligence key customer personas, positioning, mission and vision, we were able to translate much of that knowledge into more effectively optimising their LinkedIn advertising.
When we came to review the existing account, we developed a tri-strand strategy. The first strand was technical, the second was content based and both strands were brought together by the third which was careful, regular, detail-driven management of the account.
In terms of the technical strategy, we saw that there were gains to be made in the way the ads were structured and set up. Looking at the existing account, we were able to significantly improve performance by refining and streamlining the structure of the adverts, reducing the number of assets being used within each campaign subset to make sure all the ads were being rotated and shown. In addition, we also put in place tools to improve UTM tracking, so we were better able to be clear on which ads were performing and which weren’t, allowing us to shift budget and focus onto those better performing campaigns, maximising return on the spend.
With regard to the content, assets were duplicated across various campaigns divided by persona but weren’t necessarily personalised to each target audience. In line with our understanding of how the Board Intelligence target audience behaved, we divided the campaigns based on a selection of relevant topic theme and subject. This change allowed us to provide more insights on content performance with a simpler structure.
In a bid to remain agile and responsive, a number of different strategies have been deployed in the latter part of 2020 to counter the cumulative effects of COVID over the year. Initial results are encouraging.
The results on the LinkedIn campaign have been very positive. Against benchmarks for relevant industries, the Board Intelligence campaigns achieved a clickthrough rate that is 78% higher than the LinkedIn benchmark.
Of course clickthrough rate is one thing but conversions are key. The Board Intelligence conversion rate was over 8 times higher than the benchmark in the period Jan-Nov 2020.
Looking at the cost of those conversions, we achieved a cost per conversion half the amount of the benchmark.
So in short, we delivered 8 times more leads for half the cost over the period compared to businesses in a similar industry.
Read on to discover how we achieved a 339% increase in website conversions and 785% rise in engagement from social media activity
Read this case studyInnovation Visual Ltd
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