As we observed last year, 2021 was a year of innovation, but also resilience. Digital became the mainstream of growing a business. Most businesses were impacted by the global pandemic and had to learn new ways of doing business as well as collaborating with each other. Adaptability gained more importance than ever.
We would like to share our year 2021 with you, what it brought us in terms of new learnings, and the challenges we had to overcome.
Our year 2021 in numbers
Last year, we ran over 100 digital B2B campaigns for our tech clients across the world. From small campaigns with very limited media budgets to extensive campaigns for huge global clients.
Let’s take a look at the year 2021 in numbers. 😎
- We produced over 13k qualified leads for our clients. All these MQLs were qualified at a minimum of 3 up to 7 touchpoints in certain campaigns before we handed them over to our clients with an opportunity to turn them into SQLs. * *
- We generated over EUR 95 million in a qualified pipeline for a variety of solutions – from software and services to hardware and gadgets.
- Our advertising campaigns reached over 35 million individuals across all segments and companies, from business to tech decision makers, and generated of more than 580k unique clicks from unique individuals from across four different continents.
- We delivered more than 60 sales and marketing training sessions for our clients and partners.
- More than 3k participants attended our training sessions from across four continents. Additionally, we certified more than 350 sellers and marketers in our tailored programmes.
- Finally, the participants rated our services 4.8 out of 5, and emphasised the unique experience and the new knowledge they acquired.
Challenges overcome and new learnings gained
We ran numerous campaigns with various clients, which meant that, naturally, we faced a lot of challenges in 2021. We learnt something from each and every one of these clients, and also gained valuable experience, all of which we would like to share with you.
Channels
In recent years, B2B advertisers have been facing declining performance in LinkedIn advertising. This has also proven to be one of the major challenges for us, as it is still considered the ‘go-to’ channel in B2B campaigns due to its highly selective targeting.
The channel has become too saturated with ads, the usage among our target groups has also been decreasing drastically and HR remains the primary group actively still using it. This led us to redirect the media budget from LinkedIn to other channels, which in turn brought higher results for our clients.
Budgets constraints
Another challenge we occasionally faced last year was the distribution of the budget for promotion. This was particularly the case in campaigns with smaller media budgets, where it is difficult to distribute the budget between all of the desired channels and assets, as well as markets and target groups, thus requiring even great initial planning to ensure results.
Promotion time
At times, not everything works as perfectly as imagined and planned from the outset. Strategies might need to be optimised during a campaign. However, when a promotion runs for a short period of time, for example, 3 weeks, then it is difficult to put new learnings and optimisations into practice, due to the shortness of the duration.
Campaigns with longer durations have the advantage of having enough time to allow proper optimisations, which ultimately result in lower cost per lead, thus ensuring a higher result.
Last, but not least...
If you would like to find out more, we covered all of this and more in detail in our recent webinar Marketing in IT: Performance highlights of 2021, where you can hear about the outcomes and challenges of real campaigns we ran last year and about what we have in store for 2022.
"Marketing in IT: Performance Highlights of 2021"
** We covered the difference between MQL and SQL and how to better qualify your leads in our recent article here.