Google & LinkedIn Ads for B2B SaaS Solution

Client Background

Pimly is a B2B SaaS company that offers a product information management (PIM) system for small to midsize manufacturing companies. Their Salesforce-native solution consolidates and organizes essential branding content, making it simple for businesses to add changes to their marketing assets across all channels from a single platform.

The only problem was that Pimly was having trouble distinguishing itself in a highly competitive PIM market and generating qualified leads.
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"Within a span of 90 days, we gained a new customer and achieved positive ROI. InterTeam establishes a smooth workflow through timely deliveries, effective communication, and proactive problem-solving. They also work efficiently and are highly skilled."

Brian Collins

Head of Growth, Pimly

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Our Role

InterTeam pitched them on targeting Salesforce PIM-related keywords. With a track record for pinpoint accuracy with Google, Bing, and LinkedIn ads, they hired us to give them the competitive edge they needed to thrive in a crowded industry.

While discussing the project deliverables, Pimly explained that their goal was to get five or more leads per month, which would be a significant boost in the advertising output and could provide them with a promising return on investment.  

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Challenges

Challenge #1 Competitive Landscape

Pimly offers a powerful and sought-after PIM solution that streamlines marketing for SMBs. However, it competes against a handful of other high-quality advertisers in a hyper-specific niche and targets a particular type of clientele.

Essentially, they’re targeting highly competitive keywords with low search volume. So, when a user searches for keywords like “product information management system” or “PIM,” it’s not uncommon for them to see three to four different ads from different advertisers—costs per click often exceed $30 USD.

Another issue was that even within a niche industry, Pimly’s platform has a unique selling proposition. They essentially offer the only PIM software that is built on Salesforce, which makes them unique but also limits who they can work with. Keywords that included “Salesforce” offered an easy way to amplify ad campaigns. While this provided us with an excellent opportunity to distinguish them from the other companies, the solution was simultaneously the problem. “Salesforce” was trademarked.

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Solution: Requesting Google AdWords Salesforce Trademark Exemption

The key to the search challenge was getting permission to use the trademarked keywords. The goal was to target people who were looking for Pimly’s unique selling proposition using relatively low, not very competitive keyword targeting.
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So, we applied for and were able to negotiate a trademark exemption. It had a massive impact on the campaign. Since May, CTR has consistently been above 10% across all pages, which is a 29% increase from before we were able to use it. Salesforce PIM keywords went up 68%.

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Challenge #2 High Friction Call-to-Action

Another challenge we had to overcome was a low CTR early on in the campaign. Our ads were prompting readers to sign up for a demo or meeting, which turned out to be too aggressive for first-time encounters and was causing friction.

Part of the problem was that Pimly’s software is a high-ticket solution with an annual product life cycle. In other words, it is a big financial and operational commitment.

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Solution: Pivot to Promoting Lead Magnets on Google and LinkedIn Ads With Dedicated Landing Pages

Since leads were unlikely to convert on high-friction CTAs early on, we decided to slow things down. Rather than making a lead commit to a demo or a meeting, we pivoted to a lead magnet strategy instead.
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We created a small fill form to collect email addresses and offered a free guide. With the email in hand and the line of communication open, we offered additional free guides like “Optimize PIM for Speed” or “How to Choose the Best Salesforce PIM” to help them understand the industry and let them come to us when they were ready. This worked really well.

In total, we created eight different guides and optimized each one to match the keywords we were targeting—some with conversion rates of 30%!

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Other Key Strategic Factors

We started with Google ads and eventually moved to LinkedIn Ads. Our thought process was that there is a large presence of B2B leads who would be interested in Pimly’s platform. LinkedIn also offered an opportunity to retarget users who had previously visited the website.

The Results

Despite a slow start, the campaign became and continues to be a massive success. From the outset, Pimly was hoping to acquire five leads per month. And we absolutely blew their expectations out of the water.

Since we started working with them in January 2024, we’ve more than doubled our deliverables, with 60 leads in 5 months. Within the first two months of the campaign, Pimly closed a $100,000 deal!  

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About InterTeam

InterTeam is a full-service PPC agency that offers expert marketing and advertising services to B2B services and SaaS companies. We use paid search and social ads to help businesses generate quality leads, achieve their marketing goals, and accelerate growth.