Doubling down on digital marketing

As a premier resource for best-in-class data, research and insights spanning the global capital markets, the PitchBook team knows firsthand how informed decision-making can fuel better investment strategies. To help clients across the public and private markets conduct due diligence, identify emergent trends and industries, make deals, fundraise and more, PitchBook serves up actionable information that investors can leverage to pull ahead of their competitors.

Just as its clients require clear, precise information to drive decisions, PitchBook must acquire insights to boost its own business success, which means rethinking approaches to marketing and sales to move prospects to PitchBook customers.

However, working with a legacy, last-touch attribution tool, the PitchBook marketing team had little insight into which ads, webpages, or activities sparked customer engagement through months-long sales cycles.

Knowing the power of high-quality analytics to improve decision making, PitchBook began revamping its marketing technologies. The search led the team to revitalize its use of Adobe Marketo Engage and adopt Adobe Marketo Measure (formerly Bizible) as a new marketing attribution application.

“We know that quality data and analytics are the compass for guiding a company forward. The next big step for our marketing team was taking a more integrated approach to managing our campaigns,” says Tyler Hart, Director of Marketing Operations. “The combination of Marketo Engage and Marketo Measure gives our teams the power to quickly execute campaigns, track impacts, and continually refine our approaches with a full path model.”

Investing in every touchpoint

Adopting Marketo Measure provided a solid foundation for the company’s reinvigorated digital marketing efforts, enabling PitchBook to develop an approach that went far beyond adding names to a marketing database or only showing the first or final point of a sale.

PitchBook put Marketo Measure to work gathering data about past touchpoints. When the marketing team looked at the results, they found that high volumes of sales opportunities came from activities on the company’s primary website. Armed with clearer insights, PitchBook optimized its website to increase requests for free trials, which convert to sales at the highest rates. The team has also expanded their profile previews, or public data samples from their database, to boost SEO traffic to the website and drive more free trials.

Using scripts tracking through Marketo Measure, the team now captures individual website visits down to individual webpages. Through the robust reporting capabilities of Marketo Measure, the PitchBook team can model scenarios based on specific channels, like email campaigns, and then use Marketo Engage to send tailored messages through those channels at scale. They’ve seen a spike from 0.25 million to 1.75 million monthly visitors, driving a formidable 600 percent increase in website traffic. Requests for free trials have ballooned 11-fold over a four-year period.

This degree of detail is crucial to sales teams who previously often relied on cold calling customers pulled from a database or trying to track down customers at in-person events. Now, when calling a potential client, PitchBook sales representatives use data about each person’s web visits to start a more personalized conversation. As PitchBook has ramped up its emphasis on generating quality leads and customizing its messaging — efforts that compelled the team to adopt Marketo Measure and expand its Marketo Engage use — close rates have doubled. Through the flexibility of Marketo Measure, the marketing team can map the movement from an initial click on a webpage to attending a PitchBook platform demonstration to closing a final sale. Employing a whole path model that offers insights into many stages of the marketing funnel, the team finds that no touchpoint is too small to be overlooked. Using Marketo Measure, the marketing team enjoys greater visibility in how all efforts, even contributions from other departments, move customers through the sales funnel. When the research team sends PitchBook’s daily newsletter, they encourage many customers to visit the website.

Insights through Marketo Measure empower the marketing team to make the case for directing more time and funds into high-performing actions and channels. As the marketing team flows more and better leads into the sales pipeline, they can closely align their strategies and results with the sales team to convert early opportunities into demonstrations, and then demonstrations into deals.

“Marketo Measure lets us balance a high-level view of customer experiences with much richer detail to make our marketing programs more effective,” says Libby Koebnick, Group Marketing Manager for Analytics. “With the nuanced views Marketo Measure provides, we budget and plan around channels and tactics with proven value.”

The team’s reporting does more than determine which channels should get extra attention, it also creates an expansive picture of how marketing and sales contribute to the company’s success.

Bullish on the benefits of better automation

Making the shift to more sophisticated, data-driven marketing is a big step, and the team looked to close more deals by turning insights into action. For PitchBook, this meant reevaluating its current use of Marketo Engage and regularly tapping into more capabilities.

With final progression tracking in Marketo Engage, PitchBook knows who its customers are and where they are in their journeys. Using audience segmentation and automation, PitchBook instantly triggers email campaigns and engagement efforts that direct people to channels with a history of converting prospects to customers. For instance, the marketing team can rely on features in Marketo Engage to re-engage with website visitors who expressed interest in PitchBook but opted not to purchase. Through the strong integrations between Marketo Engage and other solutions such as Salesforce CRM and Outreach, PitchBook can deliver highly tailored messages at scale for specific demographics of customers, such as venture capital fund managers. The team has used Marketo Engage to help build engagement programs for roughly 12 different customer verticals, moving each group deeper through the sales funnel with campaign strategies personalized to their interests and needs.

By positioning Marketo Engage at the core of its marketing automation, PitchBook also has a powerful lead scoring and routing system on hand. Automated functions qualify lead types, down to specific regions or verticals, letting the team refine marketing content and sales outreach based on whether a customer is the CEO of a startup or the managing director of a large venture capital firm.

“Aligning the rich insights we gain with Marketo Measure with the powerful marketing automation in Marketo Engage enables us to provide our sales teams with faster, smarter ways to connect with leads. It also ensures that those connections are more authentic,” says Hart. “As we’ve explored personalized messaging through Marketo Engage, we’ve doubled sales close rates across the board.”

Putting stock in effective collaboration

Despite the large scope of its marketing and sales efforts, PitchBook has simplified collaboration across all teams thanks to the ease of using Marketo Measure and Marketo Engage.

“A marketing team can have the most creative ideas and unique campaigns, but they won’t be successful without close collaboration with sales,” says Koebnick. “The detailed data we mine from Marketo Measure and the precise targeting through Marketo Engage enables us to plan and execute effective strategies.”

By acquiring more detailed data, marketing can accurately estimate the number of leads they’ll generate per each year, which can inform needs for sales reps, as well as how many product demonstrations and other activities should happen to help achieve sales goals.

“Good analytics tell a story about what businesses can achieve,” says Hart. “In Marketo Measure and Marketo Engage, we can transform marketing and sales to tell that story for ourselves.”