How InVision Optimized Growth Marketing in 5 Steps

growth marketing

When the InVision marketing team wanted to expand its marketing efforts in 2020, it turned its focus to optimizing its growth marketing processes throughout the whole sales funnel. In doing so, the team has identified five levers that are delivering predictable, repeatable pipeline and growth.

Elle Woulfe, Vice President of Growth Marketing at InVision, shared the lessons her team learned along the way during the B2B Marketing Exchange in February.

Learn more about the five areas her team focused their optimization efforts on so you can help take your own growth marketing program to the next level.

1. Agility

Woulfe said that the team wanted to make agility a key component of InVision’s marketing program to improve the company’s speed to market.

To launch a campaign, the team previously had to complete 14 steps before going to market, many of which had to be done manually. Once the team identified this area for improvement, it reduced the number of steps to six and automated processes so the team doesn’t have to manually create folders or copy documents.

Woulfe said that this streamlined process has helped the team go to market faster with their campaigns and has helped team members focus more on their job rather than tracking project management, leading to higher job satisfaction.

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How the InVision team reduced its campaign process steps over one year.

2. Audience Segmentation

The InVision team also reviewed how it was segmenting its key personas to reduce audience fatigue and improve response rates.

Woulfe said that the team realized that its marketing efforts could be hounding their targets. This prompted the team to find a new way to balance the need to generate pipeline without reaching out to the same audiences too often.

The team created a tool that would help them easily review the key personas they were targeting and in which weeks. Now they can see when one persona is reaching a maximum saturation point saturation, giving the team time to rethink the calendar and move messaging around to other personas. This ensures no one persona is bombarded with marketing messages.

By being able to prevent this fatigue, InVision is now seeing higher open and click rates and lower unsubscribe rates.

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Improvements the InVision achieved by implementing its new tool.

3. Lead Volume & Conversion

Woulfe said that the InVision team also looked at ways to manage lead volumes and conversions that could both manage decreased capacity and increase the quality of leads.

They decided to better define what makes a qualified lead and revamped its lead scoring with priorities based on buying power. Higher priority MQLs now go directly to SDRs, while lower priority leads are tagged as automation-qualified leads (AQLs) for a series of automated follow-ups. These automated follow-ups nurture potential leads, and potentially move those leads up to higher priority MQLs.

The change led to a 53% decrease of overall MQLs, but Woulfe said the process has helped dramatically increase the conversion rate for the best MQLs.

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Increased conversation rates of InVision's best MQLs

4. Marketing Influence

The InVision team wanted greater insight into ABM marketing’s contribution to the pipeline, so they scaled ABM efforts to engage key accounts and create meaningful touchpoints to drive sales and renewals.

Since scaling its ABM program, InVision has increased the percentage of accounts it engages with and diversified to drive more programming into more segments.

This work has helped the marketing team better see its impact on pipeline across the strategic, enterprise and growth segments. By Q4 i2020, marketing activities influenced 95% of sales sourced opportunities, 99% of won renewal opportunities and $2.2 million in closed/won revenue.

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InVision has a clearer view of how marketing is driving pipeline and revenue.

5. Lifecycle Marketing

The last area the InVision team focused on on was its lifecycle marketing efforts and investing in holistic, multi-channel customer tactics.

Woulfe said the team wanted all customers, regardless of where they were in their journey, to take the next best action. This meant focusing on:

  • New User Activation: getting users to engage with their accounts after signing up for a free trial of the product
  • Monetization: moving users from the free trial to a paid version
  • Seat Utilization: ensuring users were familiar with the full breadth and depth of capabilities within the paid version
  • Expansion: encouraging users to extend the length of their contract to use the paid version

By using such tactics as chat, in-app programming and email, Woulfe’s team created an always-on incubator program that targets the right groups of people with the right messages that’s improving customer health and retention.

By ensuring customers are using InVision products in meaningful ways, InVision has been able to test different methods to identify the best ways to expand existing customer relationships.

Bonus: Happier Employees

By taking these five steps, Woulfe says the big win has been what she calls “off the charts” responses that the team has provided about working at InVision—one of her goals when she joined the company.

“To get great things out of people, you have to care about them and their careers,” she says.

By focusing on these five levers to take InVision’s growth marketing to the next level, team members are in a better place to work on their career progression and their skills development while avoiding burnout—all of which are necessary for continuing the marketing program’s success.

“Marketing is a team sport and a people-powered discipline,” she says.

It can be tough to know where to begin when you’re looking for ways to develop and streamline your own growth marketing efforts. These five areas proved successful for InVision and could become a framework for reaching your own plan to deliver a predictable pipeline and growth.

For more great lessons from B2BMX 2021, be sure to check out our Marketing Mixtape: The Greatest Hits of B2BMX 2021.

Toni Boger

As a Content Strategist at Content4Demand, Toni Boger partners with clients to build successful content strategies that empower their digital marketing objectives at all stages, from ideation and creation through execution and promotion. She has a decade of experience in B2B content strategy and development across several industries. Outside of helping clients take their content to the next level, you’ll find Toni learning how to paint, reading a good book, taking aerial arts classes at circus school and watching classic films.

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