Enterprise-level cybersecurity is highly competitive and enormously complex to market. You have a well-defined buyer audience, and explaining how your solution is better for them is difficult.
So when Orca Security came to Upgrow with aggressive growth targets, we knew it would take a strategy and well-executed B2B lead generation program across Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads. See how we achieve huge results in our Orca Security case study.
About Orca Security
Orca Security is an industry-leading ai-driven cloud security platform that identifies, prioritizes, and remediates security risks and compliance issues across cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Kubernetes. They are the global winners of the 2022 AWS Security Partner of the Year.
The Challenge
Orca Security had a strong product-market fit, a great reputation, valuable resources, and a capable sales team that was ready to work the leads.
They had been testing with paid media, including Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads, but had yet to scale or create a complete marketing funnel. Their first goal was to drive qualified leads from target accounts and increase demos cost-efficiently across North America, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific Japan.
The Approach
We identified Google Ads as a platform more suitable for driving demo signups based on search intent, whereas for LinkedIn Ads, we focused more on generating top-of-funnel leads with account-based marketing and driving demos through retargeting.
Google Ads for Inbound Lead Generation
We first helped Orca Security analyze their existing campaigns to identify performance opportunities to scale out, as well as opportunities to minimize wasted spend. Search campaigns were performing the best and were where we focused most of our attention. Through extensive keyword research, we were able to identify opportunities to expand our list of converting keywords, expand non-branded campaign structures, and leverage automated bidding in order to improve our CPC and Cost/Demo efficiencies.
With the sunset of 3rd party cookies on major browsers, we helped Orca Security navigate the tracking landscape of utilizing 1st party data and incorporating enhanced conversion tracking to improve targeting and measurement effectiveness.
Among many optimizations we introduced, there are 2 which had the biggest impact:
- Aggressive keyword expansion to identify relevant keywords, and negationto reduce ad spend waste and improve relevance/CTR
- Bid strategy testing to identify the best-performing bidstrategy to improve conversionrate performance.
Google Ads Results
Over 4 quarters, Upgrow has managed to increase Orca Security’s demo volume by 163% (Q3 is up 130% YoY) while reducing their Cost/Demo by 41%.
LinkedIn Ads for Targeted Account Marketing
On LinkedIn, we broke out 3 funnel stages of the buyer journey and mapped out how each stage of the buying journey should be targeted: Top funnel campaigns ran against our target audience in order to build awareness/engagement, as well as a remarketing pool to be used for lower funnel stage targeting. Middle funnel campaigns promoted asset downloads to help further educate and inform our CISO and cybersecurity practitioner audiences, leveraging single image and document ad formats, which performed really well, and lead generation forms.
Upgrow’s LinkedIn Ads approaches, like our Echo Chamber Method and Native Ads approach, were highly effective.
Initially, campaigns were targeting job functions, but through in-depth analysis of job titles that made it through to marketing qualified leads (MQLs), we reworked our campaigns to focus on specific job titles (instead of job functions) that previously MQL. Through this approach, we saw a significant increase in lead volume (+306% MoM) and an improvement in cost per lead (CPL) efficiency (-76% MoM). We also aggressively ran remarketing campaigns to nurture our higher funnel audiences further (e.g. video views, engagers, leads), and website visitors in order to drive them to our bottom of funnel demo offer.
LinkedIn Ads Results
Over an 8-month period, lead volume increased by 462% while reducing Cost/Lead by 78%.
