Webhelp’s insane results prove performance, creative and strategy have more fun together.

Webhelp is an outsourcer that does so much more than deliver efficient processes — they help ambitious brands transform the entire customer journey. Clients love their relentless optimization, sophisticated human management, and pragmatic approach to automation.

Webhelp is a cut above traditional outsourcers — but they play in a crowded market. After growing steadily through word of mouth, they needed a marketing strategy to expand into new markets and services.

They also wanted to win more traditional customer support business — but in a commoditized market, they needed to find and convince those customers who cared about quality and long-term gains more than just ‘Who can do this cheaper?

In essence, Webhelp wanted buyers not only to choose them — but to focus on value over price.

First, Webhelp needed to build a best-in-class demand generation function. Marketing was besieged by requests, and they lacked access to centralized data and a process for acquiring, qualifying and nurturing leads. That made it hard to see how to extract the most value from their marketing spend.

And Webhelp were smart: they knew they needed to balance short-term lead juicing (to keep sales fed) with long-term brand-building (to lay the groundwork to expand into new markets and opportunities).

We decided to tackle both sides together, by pairing a traditional lead-gen campaign with a results-boosting brand campaign.

The result was a double-whammy that hit the market with big-picture reasons to love and trust Webhelp, followed up by tightly-focused messaging about specific trigger moments in the buying journey.

We started in typical Velocity fashion: by auditing everything and talking to everyone. Webhelp is a complex, distributed business with a lot of smart people, so we took the time to figure out where the best opportunities were and get the messaging right.

• Big-ass SEO audit
• Pardot funnel activation audit

• 2 campaign blueprints
• 1 content strategy
• 4 eBooks
• 15 SEO-led articles
• 16 nurture emails
• 10s of PPC and display ads
• 10s more LinkedIn & syndication ads
• 1 SEO dashboard
• And a nurture program in a pear tree

Then we set it up in Pardot, watched it fanatically, reported on it — but most importantly, optimized the shit out of it.

Optimization is the ultimate low-hanging fruit. It’s how you get big returns on your investments for just a little extra work.

In this case, we doubled down on what worked and tweaked what didn’t. For instance: one eBook was seeing twice the engagement of its counterpart. That meant either the ads needed tweaking or … one eBook was just more popular. (Can you guess which one?)

Optimization isn’t just for topics. We learned two key things that changed our approach:

• Photographic-style ads outperformed abstract ones — two-to-one for this audience
• Procurement folks liked our ads just as much as marketing and sales targets—but they were stalling out during the lead-generating download stage.

When you have insights like that, the answers are pretty clear. First, use more photography across our ads. Second, write landing page copy dialed in for procurement audiences.

Search results take time to pay off — often six months — so we like to keep expectations reasonable. We tell people not to even look in the first few months. (Except the people doing the optimizing: it’s hard to fix stuff blindfolded, but we do ask them not to spoil the ending for us).

But … we’re glad we peeked in on this one.

In a month, Google impressions were up 109%. Traffic to the website was up an astonishing 35%. Several of our targeted keywords now ranked on Page 1 in Google. And Webhelp even had a sales inquiry about their (excellent but not well-known) content moderation services. Going from zero to ‘we get leads via search’ in a month isn’t normal.

Aaaaand paid media … well, it paid off with 175 new leads, acquired for 70% below budgeted cost. (Did we mention shithot creative is a huge budget multiplier?)