Invest Buffalo Niagara
19 Ideas’ partnership with Invest Buffalo Niagara began in 2017 when the organization 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 incorporate a focus on platforms that deliver the best results for the organization: Facebook and LinkedIn.
The Invest Buffalo Niagara team was focused on identifying and helping businesses looking to expand or relocate, ultimately encouraging them to come to the Buffalo Niagara region. Our goal was to help Invest Buffalo Niagara generate leads for businesses serious about expansion or relocation. Each of these leads is extremely valuable with high conversion potential. Invest Buffalo Niagara can uses them to introduce itself as a specialized resource for various industries.
HubSpot marketing FTW.
The Invest Buffalo Niagara team was already leveraging HubSpot software in its efforts to manage all aspects of its marketing and sales initiatives. It developed high-quality content that it knew its audience would find useful, such as:
- An Economic Guide containing in-depth information about the local economy.
- And Incentives Guide explaining various regional incentives for businesses relocating or expanding to the Buffalo Niagara region.
- A Canadian Business Guide to help business owners in Canada learn more about the benefits of expansion to the United States
- Specific Industry Guides that provide information about the region tailored to specific industries.
Users provide information such as their name, company, and email address to obtain the guides. This, in turn, allowed the Invest Buffalo Niagara team to nurture the new lead through a conversion funnel that includes the provision of more customized and valuable content, ultimately developing conversations that might lead a business to relocate to the Buffalo Niagara region.
A critical component to the success of these pieces included ensuring the content reached the right (and broad enough) audience. This is where 19 Ideas focused 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 reaching the right audiences and converting them. We reallocated funds from the paid search budget to focus more on social media.
Through the first seven months of social media advertising, we successfully generated 77 new leads. However, after the removal of the partner categories in Facebook that had allowed for third-party data tracking, B2B targeting became more difficult. So, we reallocated even more funds to LinkedIn to maximize the effectiveness of that channel.
LinkedIn lead-generation advertising.
As we continued to generate downloads of custom content pieces promoted through 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.
The results.
Throughout our partnership, we used data to drive our marketing strategies with Invest Buffalo Niagara. During that time, we generated 307 new leads through advertising campaigns on LinkedIn, Facebook, and paid search. In addition to these successes, 63 additional leads were generated from organic search.
We are proud of our work with the Invest Buffalo Niagara team. Helping them reach their marketing goals while focusing on consistently refining our strategies to improve performance is the way we like to work.