When the pandemic hit in 2020, Vya’s biggest sources of leads dried up overnight. They had no success filling in the gaps through traditional digital advertising or web form fills. So they went all in on a new strategy to try and reach top prospects again.
Vya partnered with Influ2 to implement Person-Based Advertising (PBA), drive demand, and fill their pipeline with high-intent leads. Vya’s VP of Marketing and Sales, Martha France, recently presented a webinar with Influ2 about insights, analytics, and lessons learned from their PBA campaigns. If you missed the webinar, catch up on the key takeaways below.
Vya Invested in PBA to Fill Their Pipeline After Leads Dried Up
Vya is a B2B end-to-end marketing resource management platform. Their biggest sources of new leads were in-person events and direct mail.
“Because we’re so targeted, we always relied very heavily on very targeted events to do our marketing, as well as direct mail,” France said during the webinar. “Of course, those were the two channels that completely went away during the pandemic. Nobody was having events anymore…We could send direct mail but we only had office addresses. We didn’t have people’s home addresses.”
Many companies shifted their efforts to a digital marketing strategy during the pandemic. But digital had never been effective for Vya because of their highly targeted strategy. They usually netted a lot of waste and not many conversions.
The concept of Person-Based Advertising, on the other hand, was a natural fit. Through Influ2, Vya could take the people they’d identified as top prospects and serve digital ads directly to them.
“Right now as far as engagement goes, we show ads to the people we want to,” France explained. “People will click and so we label them as “clickers” as far as engagement goes in our CRM. People can then become multi-clickers when we see them clicking multiple times, and they move through that way.
“At the same time, people aren’t downloading things as much as they used to. The whole inbound approach and having your content out there and having people complete forms, we’re just not getting a lot of form fills. So the fact that in Influ2 we can see who’s clicking on our ads…we can see who’s engaging with us without that form.”
They Tested and Expanded PBA Efforts Down the Funnel
Initially, Vya used Person-Based Advertising to bring leads in at the top of the funnel and serve them with this personalized, educational content. But they realized they could also use PBA to identify high-quality prospects who were already considering solutions and even had purchase intent.
The Vya team started to send people not just long-form content but shorter-form, foundational content like blog articles. They learned that they could analyze engagement data from the clicks on this content to understand more about their prospects and where they were in their buyer’s journey.
“We can actually create our own first-party intent signals by identifying and developing content that’s further along in the sales journey, further down the funnel,” France said.
They subsequently developed content intended for multiple stages of the funnel. Some content pieces were educational and meant for prospects at the top of the funnel, looking for answers to questions and seeking out resources. But other content was for prospects at the consideration stage, with criteria for what they should think about when they make a purchase.