19 Ideas’ partnership with Invest Buffalo Niagara began in 2017 when they approached us for help with paid search advertising, search engine optimization, and strategic and tactical support with HubSpot. As the relationship grew, we began to also incorporate a focus on platforms that proved to deliver the best results for them: Facebook and LinkedIn.
The Invest Buffalo Niagara team aims to identify and help businesses that are looking to expand or relocate, and ultimately encourages them to come to the Buffalo Niagara region. Our goal was to help Invest Buffalo Niagara generate leads. A lead comes in through HubSpot — or other means — if someone is serious about expansion or relocation, making each contact extremely valuable with high conversion potential. With these leads, Invest Buffalo Niagara can start to truly introduce themselves as a specialized resource for various industries.
HubSpot marketing
The Invest Buffalo Niagara team was already leveraging HubSpot software in their efforts to manage all aspects of their marketing and sales initiatives. They developed high-quality content that they knew their audience would find useful, such as:
- Economic Guide: Contains in-depth information about the local economy
- Incentives Guide: Explains various regional incentives for businesses relocating or expanding to the Buffalo Niagara region
- Canadian Business Guide: Helps business owners in Canada learn more about the benefits of expansion to the United States
- Industry Guides: Provide information about the region tailored to specific industries
In order to obtain the guides, users are required to provide information such as their name, company and email address. This, in turn, gives the Invest Buffalo Niagara team the ability to nurture the newly found lead down a journey which will include the provision of more customized and valuable content, ultimately directing conversations that could lead a business to come to the Buffalo Niagara region.
But a critical component to the success of these pieces is ensuring the content is reaching the right audience — and a wide enough audience — which is where 19 Ideas focused our efforts.
Using data to determine the right channels
Through consistent reporting and analysis, we found that LinkedIn and Facebook were the most effective channels for not only reaching the right audiences, but for getting them to take the action we desired: converting. With this understanding, we reallocated funds from the paid search budget in order to put a larger focus on social media.
Through the first seven months of social media advertising, we successfully generated 77 new leads. However, after the removal of partner categories in Facebook which had allowed for third-party data tracking, B2B targeting became more difficult. So, we reallocated even more funds to LinkedIn to maximize the effectiveness on that channel.
LinkedIn lead-generation advertising
As we continued to generate downloads of these custom content pieces promoted through our social media advertising, we began testing lead-generation ads which were highly effective.
These campaigns made it very easy for users to submit the information we required to access the content download — without ever leaving the platform. From these ads, we generated 100 new leads in the first three months of testing.
Results
Throughout our two-year partnership, we’ve used data to drive our marketing strategies with Invest Buffalo Niagara. Throughout that time, we’ve generated 307 new leads through advertising campaigns on LinkedIn, Facebook and paid search. In addition to these successes, there were also 63 additional leads generated from organic search.
We are proud of our continued work with the Invest Buffalo Niagara team in helping them reach their marketing goals while focusing on consistently refining our strategies to improve performance.