Start-up Uses Marketing Automation to Make Smart Business Decisions

The Problem:

CETA formed in 2011 to fill a demand for specific electricity meters within Australia. The demand was being created by a number of organizations including the Australian Government National Measurement Institute (NMI), Green Star, the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB), and the National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS). Standards and regulations brought on by these organizations have had a profound impact on sub-metering of commercial buildings and facilities. To help meet the industry demands for affordable approved electricity meters, CETA became an Australian distributor of pattern approved electricity meters and other related hardware and software. CETA strengths included value priced, reliable electricity meters, engineering expertise and a strong understanding of the market space. What become quickly evident to CETA is while they had all the pieces for meeting demand, CETA was a new company and, like any new company, didn’t have the exposure in the marketplace needed to generate qualified sales leads. In order to become a viable, growing company, CETA needed to solve their demand generation problem.

The Challenge

The challenge CETA faced was not one of supply, rather it was one of demand. With limited budget, any spend on demand generation needed to deliver results at the best possible cost per lead. Part of the challenge was evaluating the results of demand generation initiatives. Traditional marketing initiatives including printed advertisements in trade magazines, exhibiting at trade shows and tele-marketing not only were expensive and time consuming, it was difficult to measure the success of the initiatives. Online marketing offered a lot of options, which was good on one hand but on the other hand, with so many options how does a company of engineers create an online demand generation strategy, execute it and measure it?

The Solution:

Executive management at CETA agreed that demand generation was needed and accepted that they lacked the in-house expertise to be effective. CETA was aware of JumpDEMAND’s reputation to understand demand generation within the industrial automation industry and so they looked to JumpDEMAND for a solution. JumpDEMAND engaged with CETA to provide a demand generation solution to meet the challenges CETA faced. After interviewing key CETA personnel, JumpDEMAND created and delivered a comprehensive demand generation plan. The plan identified product positioning, buyer personas, competitive advantages and other factors to aid in devising an effective demand generation plan.

Execution:

All components of the execution strategy all had one common element – tracking. Whatever the initiative was, it had to be tracked, measured and reported. The first executed initiative included a website architecture built for the sole purpose of conversions. The buying cycle of electricity meters was not instantaneous which means prospects needed to work through a marketing and sales funnel before becoming a customer. The CETA website included call-to-actions and third party credibility indicators that helped lead visitors down a path to provide their contact information for additional information – thus filling the marketing funnel. With a strategic website in place, driving traffic to the website was critical. The JumpDEMAND team executed an aggressive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy so within a matter of weeks traffic began to climb. With the fundamentals in place, an online webinar was promoted to consultants, electrical engineers, sustainability managers and others across Australia. Leveraging JumpDEMAND’s marketing automation platform, ActiveDEMAND, to promote the event through email and social media allowed everything to be tracked. ActiveDEMAND was also able to track the specific answers to polling and survey questions presented to the webinar attendees providing valuable insight into the buying stage of webinar attendees.

Tracking:

As prospects engaged with CETA’s marketing assets, including web page visits, data sheets, white papers, webinars, webcasts and even incoming phone calls, they acquired “points” within the ActiveDEMAND platform. These “points” were used to generate a leads score. Simply assigning values to the actions of prospects wasn’t sufficient enough to determine whether a prospect become a qualified lead. Context needed to be given to the prospect. For example, it was important to know the different between a university student doing research versus an electrical engineer researching for a project. ActiveDEMAND provided a configurable filter to ensure leads generated met the lead definition identified by CETA. All of the data logged by ActiveDEMAND was used to create detailed dashboard and KPI reports. The originating source, campaigns and associated actions of every lead generated was visualized so CETA knew what was working and areas to improve.

The Results:

The demand generation strategy provided an infrastructure to move people through the marketing funnel and deliver qualified leads to sales. Search Engine Optimization enables CETA to dominate the pattern approved electricity meter market in Australia. 18% of the website traffic CETA receives completes a call-to-action and moves deeper through the marketing funnel. Tailored webinars average 300 registrations per event and create 90 qualified leads.

What CETA has to say:

“The fact that we’re able to actually track the performance of marketing initiatives and know what is working and what isn’t is extremely valuable,” says Beverley Meehan, Chief Financial Officer. “Our demand generation budget isn’t just going into a black hole, rather we can see how we have invested in a marketing infrastructure to grow our business.”

About CETA:

CETA Australia is a distributor of a wide range of energy measurement devices servicing Australia in the area of Facility Energy measurement, reporting, optimization, and WAGES data collection. CETA Australia takes pride in having a strong focus on delivering products that are high quality, full featured, and competitively priced.