Skillable’s ABM-Inspired Paid Media Tactics Drive 50% YoY Pipeline Growth

From lacking visibility and full-funnel engagement to immediate in-quarter gains

Client Overview

Services Involved

Paid Media, Strategy

Discover how Directive and Skillable, a pioneering platform for experiential learning and skilling, leveraged ABM-inspired paid media strategies through LinkedIn to achieve a 32% QoQ and 50% YoY pipeline increase, whilst increasing MQL efficiency and boosting MQL-to-SQL conversion rates from 23% in August to a record-breaking 42% in October.

42%

MQL increase QoQ

32%

Pipeline Revenue increase QoQ

42%

SQL > Pipeline increase

The Challenge
Our Strategy
The Results

The Challenge

Skillable faced two primary hurdles:

Their combined Search + Performance Max strategy on Google garnered a high volume of low-quality MQLs, that weren’t converting down-funnel and instead attracted individual contributor (IC) traffic vs. traffic from target companies
They understood the industry they were ‘winning’ in but lacked visibility and full-funnel engagement on social media to reach and convert their pipeline-driving target ICP effectively

Our Strategy

Recognizing that while lead form conversion rates were high across Performance Max, conversion rates were poor, resulting in expensive down-funnel activity. With MQL quality and pipeline revenue being our core objective, we needed to finetune our advertising across channels that mattered. Our strategy centered around:

Streamlining Channels to Focus on Pipeline Growth
- We began by narrowing our advertising efforts to focus solely on the most promising channels: Search (specifically branded campaigns) and LinkedIn. Performance Max was paused entirely, as we needed offline conversion tracking (OCT) in place to enable the machine learning algorithm to reliably deliver high-quality MQLs.
Prioritizing “Money” Terms on Search
- We then shifted our focus to driving quality bottom-of-funnel (BOF) traffic by expanding our reach across target countries for branded terms, extending from the US and Canada into the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, France, Sweden, and Switzerland. This expansion quickly brought in high-quality leads from Europe.
- To avoid attracting traffic from individual contributors (ICs) rather than companies, we dug deeper to identify key “money” terms – specific keywords that would attract company decision-makers instead of ICs. By concentrating on five highly targeted, non-branded keyword themes, we ensured our campaigns focused on bringing in traffic with the greatest potential to drive pipeline growth.
Driving Visibility Across Target Account Lists through Segmented ICP Targeting & Optimizing for Efficiency
- Our biggest challenge was re-aligning LinkedIn campaigns to drive awareness, engagement, and lead generation across 6 target account lists (TALs). This involved segmenting messaging and creative by ICP to address their specific needs, whilst also adjusting budget based on audience sizes. We created multiple campaigns with distinct objectives: raising awareness about a better solution for performance-based training, engaging prospects with thought-provoking guides that challenged the status quo and highlighted the efficiency of the lab-based model, and driving MQLs through incentivized conversation ads targeting tightly aligned job titles, with decision-making power, in the right industry. The key link in the chain was ensuring that all of our remarketing loops were in place across each TAL targeted, so that we could retarget users at exactly the right time with the right messaging to get them to take a step closer to converting.
- While we initially saw CPL efficiencies, we sacrificed this for higher converting SQLs and Opps down-funnel, using granular data insights from HubSpot to prioritize MQL, SQL, and opportunity-driving campaigns.