Palo Alto Networks
Replacing Pipeline Loss Due to Canceled Meetings & Events
A Forbes Digital 100 company, Palo Alto Networks, is listed on the NYSE and serves over 60,000 organizations across 150 countries, including 85 of the Forbes 100. Palo Alto is a key player in the fast-growing cloud computing industry and a leader in the cloud-native security space. It typically relies on conferences and in-person events to generate customer leads, but in April 2020, with business travel effectively shut down due to COVID-19 restrictions, the company turned to PMG to fill its pipeline via digital marketing.
Services
600%
Increase in leads
50%
Reduced CPLs by more than
274%
More traffic driven
Challenge
Beyond having to quickly develop and execute campaign plans that suddenly had even greater importance behind them, PMG had to overcome other challenges. First, the audience target — cloud security architects, IT security professionals, and generalists working in DevSecOps — were not the type of people who typically embrace ads. And while Palo Alto had a robust library of content (which was great, since there was no time to develop new content), PMG essentially had to start from scratch in terms of building a content strategy. That’s because Palo Alto previously chose to take a product-focused approach to content strategy, instead of leading with solutions-based and thought leadership pieces.
Strategy & Approach
We first addressed the brand’s content strategy. While we knew the core audiences of interest at a high level, PMG created granular groupings so we could more finely leverage Palo Alto’s content, of which many were educational and actionable for readers. To overcome the target audience’s general aversion to ads, we knew we needed to provide value via content and messaging tailored to their focus areas. For example, we specifically targeted people interested in “containers” with specific containers content vs. just general IT/cloud-based targeting.
With the more granular audience structure in place, we turned to the channels. In SEM, our team expanded keyword coverage to include additional long-tail opportunities tailored to the newly-surfaced content. Then, using the most successful keywords, we created audience segments to target with display ads. We also introduced multiple tiers of LinkedIn firmographic targeting, including ABM, interest groups, seniority, and skills. PMG also created retargeting audiences based on past user behavior that were then matched to content offerings. And to manage all of the pieces across platforms, PMG fully leveraged its proprietary marketing intelligence platform Alli to conduct real-time optimization and facilitate quick pivots based on what was or wasn’t working well.
Results
Palo Alto turned to PMG to help recover leads lost due to COVID-19 related shutdowns. This came during a critical two-week period, which wrapped up the company’s fiscal quarter. During that short period of time, PMG delivered well beyond what the client expected.
With the shift of funds going from experiential to digital, PMG had a larger budget to work with — 178% more, to be specific. With that investment, PMG increased leads by 600%, meaning our team drove 2.5X more incremental leads for the client. And the metrics showed that the revised content strategy was a key factor behind the campaign’s success. We saw CTR jump 47%, leading to 274% more traffic to Palo Alto’s site, and the result of that was our retargeting program saw much greater efficiency by the end of the month. Overall, CPLs dropped by more than 50%, while daily lead volume jumped as much as 11X.