About D&M Research
Delivering a mix of customised research with unique and creative proprietary solutions together with proven tracking expertise, D&M has established its brand as a leading agency in Sydney.
The Brief
In 2019, D&M was experiencing a general softening of trade. Like many businesses, D&M had established a number of core customers over the past decade and had developed a reliance on too few customers over recent years.
This softening of trade was partly due to its regular customers becoming less reliable and in some cases, had stopped doing business with D&M due to change of ownership.
This was when D&M decided to engage the services of TW9 Consulting and to pivot the business to a more online lead generation model.
Brand Audit
We began with producing a brand audit which included a review of all digital touchpoints and in particular, the website along with online visibility and ranking.
What we identified from this audit and when benchmarked against direct competitors was that the website user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) was underdelivering and required on-page SEO to include content optimisation, imagery updates, site and page layouts along with optimised navigation.
Although market research is a very competitive business sector, from a Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) perspective, D&M was rarely found when searching online and using focus keywords related to the brand, products and services offered.
We then worked with D&M to define the marketing objectives, conducted a marketing mix analysis and developed their unique selling proposition (USP).
Digital Marketing Strategy
Following the audit of all online touchpoints, we then created a Digital Marketing Strategy for D&M that was centred around lead generation.
We needed to consider how D&M appears online on a more holistic level – what customers are seeing, hearing and intuiting from other users and the interactions they’re part of when it comes to the brand. Much of the lead generation process today is very much in the hands of the customer.
The new strategy included Technical SEO elements to ensure the website meet the requirements of today’s search engines and in particular, Googles new Core Web Vitals ranking factors that came into effect in June 2021.
The strategy also included Search Engine Marketing such as pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimisation (SEO) and social media marketing (SMM) that could work together or independently which D&Ms marketing goals will help to determine when and how we should use these channels.
“Michael is an excellent operator who has transformed our marketing across several platforms, and we are starting to really see some results. Unlike many touting to be experts in this area including all those SEO consultants, Michael’s approach has been strategic and holistic creating an overall digital marketing plan to begin with, then executing to perfection with a test, review, refine methodology. I highly recommend him.”
Derek Jones, Managing Director – D&M Research
The Pandemic
Before Covid-19, D&M would build their pipeline via existing clients and more traditional methods such as networking, face-to-face interactions, cold calling or chatting with prospects at conferences and tradeshows.
However due to the pandemic, over 70% of B2B decision makers now prefer remote human interactions or digital self-service which presents businesses with new challenges. How is a B2B seller supposed to find new customers, whose problems they can solve, when customers don’t want to go back to the old way of doing business?
Buyer Persona Sales System - a New Era of B2B
To get more leads, a B2B like D&M now needs to meet their potential customers where they are now: that is online search and platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter.
It’s crucial that the content we now produce is outcome-based in that it focuses on the problems clients are facing rather than the research services D&M is selling. And we must be able to push this content to market by leveraging relevant platforms for distribution.
We began by developing D&Ms Buyer Personas. Creating buyer personas is the key to understanding what it is that drives a customer to D&M. The buyer persona had to clearly define the customers’ challenges, their goals, why they would turn to D&M, common objections, what sources they use to find information, and what influences their purchasing decision.
The next step was to understand the Buyer Journey. Developing buyer personas will allow us to create content and messaging that appeals to our target audience – but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be able to deliver the right content at the right time. So, the next stage of content mapping is understanding how the buyer journey relates to each of our buyer personas.
And the final step was to link the questions the buyer personas are asking to the different stages of the buyer journey. By linking the buyer personas to the buyer’s journey, we will be able to create a content strategy that not only answers the customers’ questions and pushes them further down the marketing funnel towards making a purchasing decision, but one that is delivered at the right time in each of our persona’s buyer journeys.
The Results
By executing a well-defined digital marketing strategy, D&M has transitioned at what is a timely moment in history with the pandemic, to transition to an almost entirely digital and online lead generation business model.
“We have been working with TW9 consulting now for over 12 months and it’s been nothing but transformative. I have written previously about the professionalism and holistic approach that Michael brings to the table but the real delight has come from his consistent effort to review and refine and set the benchmark higher and higher for all of us month after month.
Michael is always at the forefront of digital marketing and it seems like he really is riding on top, if not ahead of the Google wave! He works seamlessly with our designer and webmaster Emre who’s skill set has thrived under our partnership. The proof though is in the volume of inbound leads this business now enjoys adding not only to our presence and saliency in the market but no doubt to our overall brand equity.
If it keeps going like this I’ll have to tell him to turn the machine off – we are just only keeping up with the opportunity – great problem to have! What’s more, he is a delight to work with! Thank you TW9 and thank you Michael.”
Derek Jones, Managing Director – D&M Research
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