10 Case Studies – Real Marketers with Real Results

rsz_money_tree I’m always intrigued when I see what real companies are doing to build their brands, increase their revenue, and grow their firms. Here are five outcomes that stood out to me as I was reading RainToday’s latest ebook How 10 B2B Service Firms Grew Their Business in a Down Economy Using Affordable Marketing & Business Development Tactics:

An advertising agency closed $1.3 million dollars in new business with a $600 direct mail campaign and telephone follow up
An auditing firm’s monthly Pay Per Click ad campaign led to a new engagement that earned them 60 TIMES the cost of the monthly ad spend
After implementing a guerilla marketing campaign with a mix of direct mail, telephone selling, and newsletter ads, a data storage company experienced a 14.4% sales bump of revenue “in the six figures”
A consulting firm used a free ebook of repurposed content to generate 4,000 new leads and boost seminar attendance by 145%
A firm used Google AdWords to boost its web traffic by 1,000% and quadruple its sales pipeline

Here’s an excerpt from one of the cases about marketing with live seminars:

With the topic and speaker nailed down, Bascomb decided to discard the traditional wedding‐style invitation they had previously used and took a stronger, informational approach with the invitation. It featured:

a simple 8 ½” x 11” one‐page invitation, inserted into a #10 business envelope
text highlighting both the speaker’s expertise and the benefits attendees would receive from attending
a cut‐off registration form with space allowing attendees to bring additional guests
three registration methods: email, phone, and mail

Target and Broaden the List

In addition to a small house list of about 100 active prospects and clients, the invitation was mailed to a rented list of 200 construction executives, including a few architects, and engineers—as they’d done in the past. With the goal of not only increasing overall attendance numbers, but drawing more architects and engineers to the session, they also tried something different, “We asked the associations if they would share the invitation with their members, who are architects, engineers, and to a lesser degree, construction executives,” says Bascomb. “And they did, by email, so we were able to expand our reach that way.”

By partnering with key associations, Bascomb was able to broaden the reach and the target. The invitation reached many more architects, engineers, and construction executives than in the past.

Work the Room

It’s not enough just to get people to attend your event; you need to make a connection with them. “We were able to get our construction practice CPAs to attend and really work the room and make some strong connections,” says Bascomb. “The construction principals are very active planning the roundtable and keeping up with who’s coming. So they’re glad we have the ability to pull it together for them, and they’re more than happy to attend. We have four principals and a manager in this construction practice, and they all attended.”

Results: 250% Increase in Attendees and Two New Clients

The jump in attendance was dramatic—from 10 attendees at the previous construction roundtable to 35 attendees for this one, a 250% increase. Bascomb attributes their success to three primary factors:

the intentional focus on increasing the appeal of the topic
including a broader segment in the target audience
leveraging a group (the association) that had existing credibility with the audience

“We were just blown away,” says Bascomb, “and, two of those attendees have already turned into clients—one for us and one for the law firm.” She adds, “The cost of the roundtable was approximately $400‐$600, so the return was clearly very good. We create long‐term relationships with our clients, providing audit and tax, and other services for multiple years. So, the value to us is tens of thousands of dollars.”

That’s not all, the response rate from the changes (including a reformatted invitation and broadened mailing list) resulted in a 12% response rate (up from 5%). Of the 35 registrants generated, there were zero no shows (pretty remarkable for a free event).

Furthermore, several attendees at this roundtable went on to attend additional events sponsored by the firm on other topics. “We’ve accomplished what we set out to do. We’ve increased our reach for further roundtable events. We’ve demonstrated our expertise in the area and our ability to add value to architects, engineers, and constructors,” reports Bascomb. “It’s generated a lot of positive feedback and goodwill.”

It’s all pretty interesting. Go here to download the new RainToday case study ebook.