Axxis Consulting

Increased sales by transitioning from cold-calling to digital lead generation for a B2B software business

Accredited SAP Gold partner, Axxis Consulting is one of the top resellers of SAP software in Singapore. While telemarketing has been a try-and-tested method of generating new businesses in the B2B software industry, CEO of Axxis Consulting, Harald considered the sustainability of the sales pipeline. He decided to go into digital marketing in order to diversify his lead generation efforts over the long term.

From in-house to outsourced

When Axxis Consulting first approached Icecube marketing, they have already been doing digital marketing for a while, receiving leads online from their efforts. Most work is done in-house, as previous engagement with agencies didn’t yield very satisfactory results.

Axxis Consulting decided to engage Icecube to push their current results past the plateau.

As we make it a point not to set wrong expectations with clients, we started with performing an audit on their Google adwords account.

Harald told us he has been getting leads all along from online channels, so we were quite surprised to find out that the campaign was far from being optimized and budget was not effectively spent.

Message-Audience fit

SAP resellers or B2B software companies typically publish a laundry list of software features in the promotion of their product. This bores & overwhelms the readers. In the case of Axxis Consulting, we learnt that the target audiences of SAP B1 software are accounting managers, business owners, directors and other non-IT personnel.

Hence, there was a need to revamp the marketing message. For example, one of the biggest pain points of SMEs was around talent acquisition & retention. We positioned the product as a solution to their biggest problem, backed up by research .i.e. “Based on studies by US Census Bureau, technology will replace 50% of all jobs in the world by 2020.” As people are more motivated by pain of losing than by the pleasure of gaining, a message tied to the resolution of fear evokes more responses. This is proven to work in the B2B context.

Shooting in the dark

On top of that, conversion tracking was not set up. Even though they were getting leads, they have no idea where(which channel) it came from! This means that money was put into campaigns month after month without knowing if it generated any ROI.

Without this knowledge, it is as good as shooting in the dark. There is no way they could allocate budget on better-performing channels to improve the performance. Everything was just second-guessing.

The turnaround

We then installed a conversion pixel and set up tracking on their Google analytics account to shed some light into their various initiatives.
It turned out most leads were coming from organic and direct means, which can be attributed to their presence in market for a considerable amount of time. Their paid campaign results were behind.

We went on to set up a totally new adwords account and built the adgroups structure from scratch, this time round with keywords matched to specific landing pages. We talked to their team at length to deep-dive into the target audience and the products they sell to develop conversion-optimized landing pages. We worked on a copy that could create emotional resonance with the target audience and lead them to action.

Client moved into a new office with a bigger team than before

” We worked together with Ice Cube Marketing due to their in-depth understanding of Google Ad-words and their ability to help us grow incoming leads. We have worked with other agencies before, but Ice Cube Marketing was the first company to actually make a difference in our digital marketing strategy. We had a very good experience working with ICM, and would recommend them for any company interested to increase their ROI on Google Adwords”

Harald Weinbrecht, CEO, Axxis Consulting

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