THE SETUP
A 20-year leader who is new to demand gen
Heartland had been a leader in payments for more than two decades, built on a traditional sales organization. Demand generation was recent, and still had to earn its budget internally.
That created two jobs at once. Prove the value of the work well enough to justify more investment, and find a partner who could scale across a product line that keeps growing in a market that keeps crowding.
We agreed on a 90-day pilot to test the fit before either side committed further.
The assignment inside that window was specific. Heartland had three standalone point of sale products, Mobile Pay, Terminal+, and Register, and had never marketed them as one suite. We had to merge them into a single offering for independent restaurateurs and retailers, positioned around helping small businesses hold their ground and grow as consumer habits shifted.
Our pilot beat its MQL target by 330%.
THE SOLUTION
A pilot with a number attached to it
Heartland had never tested in-market creative for this solution, so we built two concept variations and ran them against the target audience. Every digital touchpoint was set up to return a learning, because the pilot had to produce direction as well as leads.
The media side had 90 days to make existing paid search and paid social work harder while opening new prospecting channels to reach restaurant and retail owners at scale.
Campaign highlights include:
- Two creative concepts tested in market against the global target audience
- Keyword expansion, bid optimization, and new landing pages across Google and Bing
- Behavioral targeting built on search intent, competitor interest, and contextual viewing
- Custom audiences deployed with third-party data partners
- One-to-one and lookalike modeling across display and paid social
- Cross-network sequential messaging so prospects saw a consistent story through retargeting
- A single primary metric for the pilot, tied to a pro forma target of 266 MQLs in 90 days
THE STRATEGY
Target the operator versus the category
The sweet spot was narrow on purpose. Restaurant and retail SMBs with one or two locations and one or two units for Register and Terminal+. Small enough to move quickly, positioned to grow, which is exactly who a scalable POS suite is built for.
We reached and engaged those targets, tested messaging to find the concept that landed, produced the creative to support it, and launched integrated media around a single goal.
After the pilot, the engagement expanded in December 2021 across media planning and buying, creative strategy and production, and SEO, covering Payments, Online Payments, Payroll, and Point of Sale.
The first structural change on paid search was removing automated bidding and monitoring campaigns daily at the platform level. Working with Heartland’s marketing leadership, we shifted budget toward the products with the best MQL to SQL conversion and the best margin, so spend followed revenue instead of volume.
THE RESULTS
Better performance on less money
The pilot beat every projected benchmark. Thirty days into actively managing the ongoing program, performance improved again while spend came down 23%.
330%
Above MQL projections
280%
Above estimated paid search clicks
32%
Improvement in cost per lead
Why it matters:
- Paid search leads rose 14% in the same 30-day window that spend fell 23%, so the gains came from management rather than budget
- Facebook cost per lead came in 185% under our projection, which told us the audience modeling was working before the volume numbers confirmed it
- The pilot converted into a full engagement in 2021, supporting the organization across media planning/buying, creative strategy & production, as well as SEO.
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Building new audience inroads to market disruption
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