After seeing unprecedented year over year growth in 2020, 6sense continued to set the bar high. This year, their goal is to double revenue, a task they knew would require expanding beyond the industries they were already engaging with heavily.

As a martech lover and data junky, 6sense’s Digital Marketing Strategist Grace Kleveland Kupczak was up for the challenge. 

Historically, the 6sense marketing team had focused a lot on creating personalized assets and ads based on industry, with an emphasis on the tech industry. Using their own product, they ran ads targeted at in-market accounts and saw amazing results, generating 120% more revenue from their display campaigns. But to double their revenue again, they would need to expand beyond the tech industry.

While the team geared up to start running personalized ads across other industries, Grace realized a problem: while their ads and content were relevant to industry-specific use cases, their website was geared mostly to tech pain points.

“We sell to a lot of different people across a good amount of industries. People have different pain points that they're trying to solve with 6sense because we have a lot of different use cases. While we had a way to personalize other parts of the user journey with our 6sense data, we didn’t have a way to personalize our website content, forcing us to cater it to the majority rather than take a segmented approach.”

By focusing on creating targeted website experiences for industry-specific personas with differentiated needs, Grace thought she could increase the amount of qualified leads in their sales funnel to meet their higher revenue goals. 

“We’re pretty firm believers in personalization at 6sense. So our general hypothesis was if we put time into industries with specific use cases, we will get returns. We will book more meetings, we will drive more pipeline.”

Prioritize what industries to focus on

Grace dove into the 6sense product to determine which industry to start with. The top 3 largest industries were tech, manufacturing and business services. 

“We used 6sense’s profile fit scores and layered in additional information like company size, revenue ranges and geography. Then inside of 6sense there are dashboards that show you which industries those accounts fall into.”

This is what that dashboard looks like:

The team had already focused heavily on tech, and the existing website experience was appropriate enough for business services (for now), but manufacturing audiences presented a huge opportunity. The existing website experience did not speak to manufacturing use cases at all, and this was a big market that could make an impact on 6sense’s bottom line.

Research your buyer needs

Grace consulted with the product marketing team, who spoke to existing manufacturing customers to identify pain points and put together industry-specific use cases. She learned that historically, the majority of manufacturing buying journeys were done offline, but today manufacturing companies need to embrace the digital landscape and become proactive and personalized in their outreach. 

With this in mind, Grace decided to focus on-site messaging towards enabling manufacturers to move from offline to online with ease, and optimize their limited marketing and sales resources in the process to go after the best accounts. They also sought logo approval from their existing manufacturing customers to be used as resonant social proof in web experiences, as well as a thought leadership video with a well-known logistics CMO.

Create a proof of concept… quickly!

Grace had a big vision for a personalized journey, from a custom homepage experience with personalized headlines, CTAs and imagery to a full landing page built bespoke for the industry. But she also wanted to launch as quickly as possible, so she decided to start testing on the homepage while the team worked on building the landing page.

Using the 6sense integration in Mutiny, she quickly personalized the top of the fold on their homepage to highlight manufacturers' biggest pain points, starting by simply swapping out the headline and description on the page, and then later adding a custom hero image. Starting small and launching quickly enabled Grace to start gaining learnings (and additional leads) right away.

This is what her personalized homepage looked like:

Add industry-specific landing pages

After seeing the strong results with the initial homepage test, the team used WordPress to create a dedicated landing page for manufacturing (pictured below). The new page includes industry specific language, social proof, testimonials, and value propositions:

Above the foldPain Points and Testimonials

To start getting traffic to this page right away, Grace personalized the CTA for manufacturing visitors on the homepage, sending those who clicked to the new fully personalized vertical page.

Expand distribution

Grace wanted to get all manufacturing visitors to the new landing page, not just those who entered on the homepage. She expanded coverage by launching a banner through Mutiny that prompts all manufacturing visitors to check out the landing page.

To augment organic inbound traffic, targeted ads and BDR prospecting now also funnel manufacturing leads to the new landing page, putting prospects in front of the industry-specific experience. 

Display ad run through 6sense, targeted to manufacturing companies

“The average time on our industry landing page is almost 18 minutes. And our average time on site is two minutes. So the people that are getting to that landing page and seeing that personalized experience are staying there. It's been something that we've never been able to do before.”