High Performance B2B Marketing Going 100% Digital

18th May 2020

Henry Ropner, Investment Director at FPE Capital, has been running a forum for portfolio company marketing directors to share the latest best practice to ensure sales pipelines remain strong during the lock down period. Lars Pedersen and Claire Strawson, CEO & CMO of FPE portfolio’s HCM SaaS provider Questionmark respectively, recently led the discussion on implementing several marketing automation tools to aid with this transition to be a 100% digitally focused marketing operation.

‘Quality over quantity was the mantra by which Questionmark set out to improve its digital marketing campaign.’

Lars Pedersen – CEO of Questionmark

Lars and Claire had taken the bold decision to move Questionmark into a 100% digital marketing environment several months before the CV-19 lockdown made digital marketing the only channel available. The first step was a critical analysis of the current lead generation and attribution data, which highlighted approximately 40% were obsolete and never going to generate a sale. Giving themselves 6months, the marketing process was redesigned from the bottom up. This started with a wholesale revamp of the website design and associated email, SEO, PPC and social media campaigns. Marketing collateral including key messages, value adds, case studies and white papers were refreshed to help provide more relevant content for potential new users of the software.

Building off these improvements, the team looked to capture and consolidate the marketing leads using best in class marketing attribution software (Hubspot) and productivity solutions (Chili Piper) to drive quality and velocity into the pipeline. Redesignation of marketing spend from physical events has seen a significant increase on the ROI across the marketing budget, including cost of customer acquisition.

'Whilst the global lock down will end, some of the lessons it is teaching marketing teams within B2B sales environments are here to stay. Providing our portfolio with a platform to share ideas, learnings, and best practices is a key part of the value that we bring as a specialist software and services growth investor.'

Dan Walker, Partner and FPE Capital