How Cato Networks used Person-Based Advertising to engage enterprise decision makers

While the enterprise segment is revered for high revenue deals, with it also come lengthy and complex sales cycles. Find out how Cato Networks conquered this new segment by focusing its efforts with Person-Based Advertising.

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The need to expand into the enterprise segment, with limited resources and bandwidth

Cato Networks is a pioneer in cloud-first secure networking infrastructure for enterprise firms. When Cato Networks decided to branch into large enterprise sales, it quickly discovered that the decision makers were a small group of specific people who proved challenging to access and engage. Targeting this new segment, also meant more complex sales and longer sales cycles, which brings its own challenges.

While the company was already generating steady enterprise deal flow through its existing marketing efforts, the lackluster response to their content and poor engagement on outreach efforts by sales reps indicated that something needed to change.

While Cato Networks wanted to ramp up its efforts with this new segment, the team couldn’t neglect its existing segments. They needed a solution that would allow them to scale efforts of the marketing team and optimize engagement throughout the marketing-sales funnel.

Person-Based Advertising allowed frictionless experience and granular engagement insights

Cato Networks analyzed its ideal customer profile and developed key buyer personas. From these efforts came Cato Networks’ ‘perfect customer’ list. What they lacked was a way to hone in on the accounts and people on this list and inspire them to engage with their content.

To do this Cato Networks employed a Person-Based Advertising approach, developing top-of-funnel campaigns with assets that deliver genuine user value: guides, comparisons, and analyst reports.

Right off the bat, Cato Networks was able to match roughly 60-70% of their target audience. PBA allowed Cato Networks to target and know precisely who was seeing their ads. Since their ads were delivered to their exact audience list,, they removed content gates, making the entire effort frictionless from a prospect perspective.

PBA helped Cato Networks engage, re-engage and strengthen its strategy for the enterprise segment

From the overall results of the PBA campaigns (below), getting to the right individual with valuable, frictionless content led to more opportunities for Cato Networks and helped it successfully launch into the large enterprise segment. An additional and unseen benefit of this approach was the re-engagement of inactive prospects.

From the Click-Through Rates (CTRs) results, Cato Networks learned that to keep their campaigns performing, they needed to refresh their banner ads about every two weeks. The team also gained greater insight on which visual creative and messaging was resonating for continuous improvement.

The most important takeaway for the team was that generating interest in relevant influencers surrounding the decision-makers Buying Group Marketing can be effective in getting the decision-maker to engage in a conversation.

targets reached

target audience reached

accounts reached

impressions

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website visits

“One prospect downloaded an asset in January, 2018. There were multiple web visits and even a webinar attendance through November. After attempts by our reps to reach the person, it went completely cold.

“Then in April, 2019, the account was added to an Influ2 campaign and 317 impressions later, we saw some very meaningful interactions and the sales rep turned the account into an opportunity.”

Merav Keren, Marketing Director, Cato Networks