Nicole Markisohn is a Marketing Automation Manager at Distil Networks. She is responsible for lead nurturing programs including inbound and outbound campaigns. Her team actively supports North America and EMEA and is expanding its marketing into other global regions.
Company Overview
Distil Networks is the global leader in bot detection and mitigation. It is the only easy and accurate way to protect web applications from bad bots, API abuse, and fraud. Distil protects against web scraping, brute force attacks, competitive data mining, online fraud, account hijacking, unauthorized vulnerability scans, spam, man-in-the-middle attacks, digital ad fraud and downtime.
Challenges
What were some of your marketing challenges before implementing TargetROI?
A big challenge for us was building a full funnel of leads to support our fast growth and expanding sales force. We needed a continuous flow of qualified leads from the right companies who were the right fit for our products. Since the bot market is still relatively new, our sales team was spending a lot of their cycles prospecting, qualifying and educating the marketplace on the bot problem. We wanted to shift that effort so the marketing team concentrated on upfront education, engaging and qualifying leads and sales could spend more time selling Distil Networks solutions.
How have you been measuring marketing success and has that changed since using TargetROI?
We look at lead volume, lead quality, pipeline and closed-won deals attributed to marketing activity. We use a lead scoring system to evaluate lead quality which tracks a number of demographic and firmographic factors such as job title, company size, and revenue. We also look at behavioral activities to determine levels of engagement, including email click-through rate, the number of visits to our website, and content downloads. We track lead volume, lead score, marketing-driven pipeline and closed/won deals to help measure ROI on our investments. Since using integrated solutions, our ability to understand and track the marketing influence in these areas has greatly improved.
Solution
How is TargetROI helping you meet your goals?
We invested in TechTarget’s TargetROI to support our overall marketing strategy. It is an integrated suite of solutions that gives us access to TechTarget’s database to help us surround buying teams in our market. TargetROI leverages Priority Engine™, a real-time demand generation tool that gives us a view of prospects, insights into target accounts and weekly insights into prospect buying and research behavior prioritized by activity. It also includes coordinated content targeting so we know which of our content is resonating with our audience and can apply that intelligence in our nurture campaigns. The brand units that are part of TargetROI help us increase mindshare in the bot landscape and are useful for our nurturing and in re-targeting buyers researching related topics.
One of the ways we leverage TargetROI is in our event marketing. It allows us to target prospects geographically or by vertical to do advanced prospect nurturing. The data insight we get from these integrated solutions helps us understand pain points better and enables us to focus our messaging and content more effectively. It’s also helping us inject ourselves earlier into conversations with prospects active in the web application security space but who may not yet be familiar with Distil Networks solutions.
One of the biggest benefits from TargetROI solutions from my perspective is the level of insight we have into leads. We know, for instance, who is interested in our space, what their pain points are, what topics they’re researching and which vendors they’re considering. That type of actionable insight enables us to be much more targeted in our marketing. Whether that means we pass a lead to sales for immediate follow-up, or enroll it into a targeted nurture track until it becomes more qualified.
How does Target ROI fit in with your marketing technology stack?
Since Priority Engine integrates directly into Salesforce.com, at the push of a button we can pass all this valuable information to our sales team. In cases where we want to nurture prospects further before assigning to sales, we can also export them from Priority Engine directly into our marketing automation system. The whole solution works together and fits within our MarTech stack and workflow. From the start, it has been an extremely seamless implementation.
Results
How has using TargetROI improved your marketing and can you share specific ROI?
Leads that we acquire through the TargetROI program generally convert much faster than leads we acquire through other external sources. It’s made a big difference in our ability to understand pain points for each lead. The level of insight we get from TargetROI goes way beyond what other solution providers offer. We are in a better position than ever before to address the specific issues and pain points that prospects care about since we understand more about them.
TargetROI makes our marketing prospecting programs more effective and has improved our overall lead quality. In a recent webinar we ran that included leads from Priority Engine and other third party sources, Priority Engine leads had a significant rise in open and click-through rates. The leads from the content syndication program convert at higher rates than the rest of our programs. Across the board, we get higher levels of engagement since using TargetROI solutions, and our creative brand units are achieving click-through-rates 2x higher than industry benchmarks.
Since using TargetROI, how do you think marketing has impacted sales?
We’re able to offer much more intelligence and insight to sales than ever before. For example, if a sales rep is actively trying to break into an account, having all this information at their fingertips on what the prospect is looking at, what their top three problems are and which other vendors they’re considering makes a huge difference. That type of intelligence and insight we get from TechTarget’s TargetROI is not available anywhere else. While our sales team is still ramping up, they have been really excited about what we’re sharing and having more meaningful, higher quality conversations.
What was your experience working with your TechTarget team?
From the start, the TechTarget team has been invested in our success. They are continuously in touch to make sure we make the most of TargetROI capabilities, check in on results and provide valuable advice to ensure we are maximizing our investment.
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