Cambrex
Generating and nurturing leads via a new inbound marketing strategy
THE CLIENT
Founded in 1981, Cambrex is a leading small molecule CDMO that provides drug substance, drug product and analytical services across the entire drug lifecycle, as well as active pharmaceutical ingredients. They have cGMP manufacturing facilities in the US, Canada and Europe.
Objectives
Orientation Marketing has managed Cambrex’s print and digital media bookings for a number of years, but following a restructure at Cambrex, as well as a new commercial focus, we were called upon to implement a new marketing strategy that would become more results-focussed and more mature with its marketing systems.
The aim was to demonstrate the performance of our marketing campaigns - which were devised around the goal of lead generation, and subsequently nurturing those leads so that sales were able to peruse those leads during the sales cycle with data and insight achieved from the marketing programme. Our campaigns were split within Cambrex’s three key business units - drug substance, drug product and analytical services split throughout an annual period.
INBOUND MARKETING
Inbound marketing offers a range of advantages, but the main advantage is its ability to generate business contacts and marketing leads in a sustainable manner. We first identified that Cambrex had a range of content pieces - from webinar recordings to whitepapers to technical sheets - that could be used as gated content at the beginning of the buyer’s journey as well as content further down the line during the nurturing process.
All content was organised into categories, and new landing pages were designed and built for conversion so to feed our inbound programme. Numerous emails were built to promote each of our content pieces, all linking up to tracked PDFs of web pages. By providing informational content as such, we were pulling prospects towards Cambrex, prompting them to take action and learn more about content, services and the wider organisation. Essentially entering the sales funnel on their own terms.
SHARPSPRING
Our marketing automation platform of choice, SharpSpring, with its built-in forms, emails and CRM features, was to play a significant role in our program of automated activities. SharpSpring forms were utilised on the Cambrex landing pages (via their WordPress CMS), and once a successful submission was made, a lead was created within the CRM and website tracking was enabled if cookies were accepted.
This would also trigger the workflows that were built, and a series of emails were scheduled to send at intervals with the view of introducing Cambrex’s services via the range of educational content pieces assembled. Lead scores were configured, and once a lead score crossed a certain threshold - dependent on the engagement levels with our content - the lead would be synced over to Cambrex’s global CRM (Salesforce) automatically via Zappier. SharpSpring’s flexible system enabled us to set up these campaigns with minimal setup and development time.
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TARGETTED MEDIA AND PAID SOCIAL
To feed our content and automation program, we needed to access the target audience - already identified via personas - to bring them to our content and inbound marketing programme. The majority of the visitors we were bringing into the program came from our list of recommended vendors within the media We were utilising their programs and creating campaigns that would position Cambrex and direct those audiences to the landing pages that we had built. The campaign was also supplemented by targeted LinkedIn Sponsored Content, which proved to be a great success. Cambrex also utilised owned channels that would have significant interest in the content we were promoting.
RESULTS AND ABM APPROACH
Due to confidentiality, we are unable to publish details related to ROI, no. of leads and opportunities created. However, 10% of all of the leads we had created have been qualified to an MQL, meaning that they are ready for sales to pursue and SharpSpring enabled us to identify the source of all of the leads, and exactly what content that lead had engaged with to help sales with their efforts.
To improve the campaigns further, we introduced an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) approach to identify the leads/target organisations we were looking to bring into the program, further refining the strategy so that the leads we were nurturing would be suitable for Cambrex’s core services.
“The Orientation Marketing team have been great to work with. It’s felt like an extension of the team here and I think we’ve produced some great activities this year.”