This profitable company knew that driving more growth meant increasing its share of spend with already-committed customers. Adding to the challenge: Their market was a decidedly finite universe.

Our mission: to transform tier-one and tier-two customers into active and passionate advocates. This new team would form the heart of an informal word-of-mouth network that would drive growth – and scale.

This was a world of long-term, relationships, with a high barrier against ‘so-called’ marketing. To understand the sweet spot, we launched a Net Promoter Score (NPS) customer feedback survey, to accurately identify customer perceptions and biases – and move away from anecdotal references.

This began to transform the company’s perception of its base, and how it marketed.

The second step was to lay the foundation for marketing automation, and build a foundation that would ensure success. This included customer segmentation, strong content to ensure clicks and downloads and build trust, and landing pages that drove calls-to-action. One immediate benefit was the creation of a re-usable library of technical papers, based on research done for one-off projects.

Results

The first campaign drove 47 conversions in 72 hours – surprising advocates, and shocking internal skeptics. Within a month, it yielded three projects and one brand new engagement. Net total value: More than $1 million.

Future planning is underway. The company is actively expanding this strategy to additional divisions. It is also creating a market-driven R&D pipeline – for the first time in nearly 80 years.