Strengthening Both ends of the funnel with Google & LinkedIn Ads

Driving sales & leads for stirling brandworks

Roles: strategist, campaign manager, copywriter, creative director.

The Objective:
Stirling Brandworks had enjoyed ten years of organic growth delivering a unique service: building custom websites for libraries across the U.S. In 2020, they wanted to scale that growth with a paid advertising campaign.

Up until this point, all of their business had come from referrals. They were sure there were more libraries out there looking for website design services, but they didn’t know where they were or how to reach them. Our strategy was to leverage multiple digital channels, namely Google and LinkedIn, to find them new leads and drive new business.

Launching a Landing Page Rooted in Social Proof

We know “they’re the best” is better than “we’re the best.” Stirling Brandworks was armed with a rare and valuable asset: 10+ years of amazing testimonials and awards for their library websites. When designing their landing page, we chose to make that social proof the focal point—showcasing Stirling’s vast array of clients and the wonderful things they had to say. We combined this strategy with a clean, colorful design that makes it easy for prospects to get in touch.

You can check out the live page here.

Leveraging Google Ads for bottom-of-the-funnel leads

To find in-market prospects actively looking for a new website for their library, we knew Google was the place to be. Determining the right keywords to target, however, was not so simple. We started by launching five distinct ad sets, each grouped around specific themes like pricing, design, and superlatives. Over the next three months, we tracked the search queries that came in, weeded out the unqualified traffic, and narrowed it down to the ad sets driving the best results. Once we had determined which ad sets worked best, we broke those out into separate campaigns and refined them even further.

Bringing them back with Retargeting ads

As always, retargeting was an integral component of our campaign. We used a mix of traditional banner ads as well as Google’s new responsive display ads that rotate copy and creative, enabling us to test different messages and imagery. For our traditional banner ads, we chose the most popular headline from our search campaign ads and used that across our banner ads. These ads were vital for reengaging landing page visitors and drove a critical sales opportunity.

Proving Expertise with a Lead Magnet E-book

Given the historical sales cycle and relatively low number of in-market prospects, we knew we’d need other ways to engage leads, both to reel them in and nurture them down the sales funnel. To achieve this, we created an e-book, 5 Ways to Revolutionize Your Library Website, that could serve as a “lead magnet.” The e-book was packed with tips and tricks on how to improve your library website. It served as both a resource for prospects doing research as well as a mechanism for proving Stirling’s expertise and building trust with potential clients.

Using LinkedIn Ads to attract top-of-funnel prospects

If an e-book is created but there’s no one there to read it, is it really a “lead magnet?” Easy answer: nope. To get Stirling’s brand and expertise into the hands of the people who would love it the most, we launched a lead generation campaign on LinkedIn, offering a free download of our new e-book in exchange for lead contact information.

We targeted both job titles (Library Directors, Library IT Specialists, etc.) and LinkedIn Groups (Library IT groups, Library Digital communities, etc.). We tested multiple messages and visuals to determine what resonates with our audience the most. We even test video ads against static images (to our surprise, static images performed better).

In less than one and a half months, more than 60 library professionals had downloaded our e-book. We added these contacts to our lists of sales leads that we could retarget and nurture with email campaigns, virtual events, sales calls, and more.

Driving Real Results

Our efforts paid off. In the span of three months, our Google ads campaign generated new library website clients for Stirling and over an 800% return-on-ad-spend. Meanwhile, on LinkedIn, we gained over 60 new leads that were entered into our sales funnel and could be actively nurtured for future sales opportunities.