Accelerating Growth of UX/UI Design Agency Through Lead Generation

Driven by organic growth, your business is constantly stressed out and torn between pushing sales and managing day-to-day operations to satisfy your clients. Does this problem ring a bell for your company? Embracing a consistent lead generation campaign and establishing a channel for your sales is one and, frankly, the best way to do it. Read our case study to learn the perks of accelerating sales growth and building a successful outbound campaign.

Having spent nearly a decade “behind the scenes” in lead generation, we bring value to our customers by showing them how a strategic lead generation campaign setup can guarantee consistent long-term results. The key to potential success lies in putting sufficient resources into identifying the product’s ideal customer and creating a functional outbound sales model to turn this customer into a hot lead, by speaking to the narrative in their mind. As a digital marketing agency, we go through the blood, sweat, and tears of market research to do just that for our clients.

While every company embarks on a unique journey of selling its product, the stumbling stones of marketing are not that different. The point of departure for a company is often associated with organic growth. Your friends, family, and client recommendations fuel the word-of-mouth machine to keep the sales going. Satisfied with the number of deals, you pour your heart and soul into operations, abandoning the generation of new leads. Eventually, the organic machine breaks down, knocking your team out with the sobering reality of “now what?”

Luckily for everyone, we know the answer.

With this client, we will show you how a solid lead generation framework, close cooperation with the customer, and a perfectly chosen TA for the campaign make the number of qualified leads skyrocket in a matter of days. Not only did we employ our professional skills to create a tangible and effective lead generation strategy for the company, but we also pursued our values of communication and flexibility to listen to the client’s ideas, breathe life into them, and change the direction along the way to generate maximum leads.

Our client is a product design boutique on a mission to help passionate and open-minded businesses find their unique, functional, and aesthetic voices.

Our client’s sphere of responsibility varies from developing the brand’s identity to the actual front-end development of websites and mobile applications. Services like UX/UI design, market & user research, product strategy, website design, social media marketing, brand design, front-end development, and consulting are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the company’s services and qualifications. To say the least, we were excited to help out a company that could only be described as “Jack of all trades, master of … all!”

Being on the market for nearly three years at the time, our client has created a team of qualified professionals and scored several partnerships a small design agency could only dream of: Viber, Raiffeisen Bank International, Klitschko Foundation, Avanga, and others.

At this point, some of you might think that a company with clients like Viber can easily find prospective leads without spending money on a lead generation campaign. But could they, though?

While having personal ups & downs, our client lacked one vital thing for a growing business: consistency. Since there was no lead generation strategy in place, the agency struggled with a gap between sudden relevance among potential customers and total silence.

Tired of the issue of consistency hanging in the air and affecting the team’s productivity and enthusiasm, the company approached us and raised special interest in our expertise in creating a consistent channel of lead generation and engagement with clients interested in the specific service provided by the client.

Having a specific target audience in mind, our client decided to use LinkedIn as a lead generation platform. In fact, the overwhelming majority of B2B entrepreneurs use LinkedIn for lead generation campaigns because it is the best platform to provide a business with insights into the campaign’s impressions by industry, location, job title, number of employees, and average revenue per enterprise.

Experiencing challenges with client flow can take its toll on a company. Our client did a great job that had every chance of redefining the businesses’ expectations of web design and brand identity. In fact, at some point, the company already proved its worth and partnered up with international corporations. Imagine how depressing it can be for the company to know how much you can do for the world, and still wait around for the right client to come and ask you for help.

Confident in their product quality yet hesitant about their positioning in the market, our client felt lost in all the potential directions of their growth and marketing strategy. After our first call, we immediately knew that we clicked on a professional and personal level. We fell in love with their design solutions, whereas they trusted our expertise and confidence in what we’d been doing.

As a company with more than 8 years of experience in B2B marketing and LinkedIn outreach, our core mission is to accelerate the growth of outstanding companies through communication and mutual support along the journey. So, we did just that with our client by commencing our onboarding process and discussing their vision of the upcoming lead generation campaign.

Respect for clients and synergy with their ideas and expectations are at the core of what we do as a digital marketing agency. So, our first step toward resolving the client’s issues was to listen to what they had to say about our collaboration. As it turned out, the team already had in mind the target audience for the campaign and could describe their ICP as enthusiastic, young, creative, and bold leaders willing to embrace innovation and unconventional design ideas.

Without further ado, we have dived right in and set up a campaign strategy with the following components:

TA Testing

Messaging A/B Testing

LinkedIn Profile Optimization

Together with our client, we defined Marketing & Telecommunication to be the two central industries to approach during the lead generation campaign. We defined the geolocation, the industry size, and the company positions for potential leads. For both target audiences, our goal was to reach CEOs, CMOs, and Chief Strategy Officers, as they were the primary decision-makers within the industry.

To find the best possible lead generation strategy, we applied A/B testing for the invitation, qualification, offer, and follow-up messages. The key was to conduct A/B testing for each outreach stage separately, taking it one level at a time. Collecting primary data from all the levels eventually helped our campaign both stick to the messages that generated the highest response rate and learn what stage of communication required a shift in approach.

For the first month of the lead generation campaign, we tested two versions of messages to learn which message would resonate more with the prospects. In Marketing & Telecommunications Message A, we invited the prospect to future collaboration, whereas another message contained the invitation to connect and follow each other’s achievements.

While the communication style was the same in both messages, Message A was focused on the direct offer to collaborate.

Developing a lead generation strategy, no matter how significant, relies on the person’s brand and LinkedIn image. One of the first tasks we pursued was to optimize the profile of the company’s Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer, Bohdan.

As a primary profile to set up a lead generation campaign, we developed optimization and content strategies for the profile to increase the overall interest and public trust of our client.

To bring new visitors to Bohdan’s LinkedIn page, we developed a detailed content plan that included company updates, informative articles, and news from the industry. In such a way, we shifted from aggressive marketing to an engaging strategy of sharing prospects-oriented content that resonated with our TA and made it easier for the prospects to find us in the never-ending stream of LinkedIn articles. The unique profile visits demonstrated a 300% growth one month into the campaign.

But deep down, we knew we could go even bigger.

From the very first call with our client, we learned a lot about what the client expected from the leads. Focusing on the Marketing & Telecommunications segments, we made sure to focus on the innovative and aspiring companies.

At first, the results demonstrated a striking difference between the two industries: The marketing segment showed a 2X engagement rate in the potential collaboration with our client, especially when reacting to an explicit call for collaboration. Telecommunications, on the other hand, had a 9.16% acceptance rate during the first month of the campaign.

That was the moment it hit us: we could either continue with the first solution and do our best to bring new leads to our client or research into the leads we generated and markets that could be a better fit for our client.

Our team looked carefully into the profiles of the leads generated during the first half of the campaign, and we noticed something many targeted leaders have in common: they were somehow related to the Crypto and Blockchain industry.

At the time, our client had experience in working with the industry, so we could easily reach out to our prospects by demonstrating cases of successful projects for Blockchain/Crypto companies. That’s when everything fell into place.

During the campaign report discussion, we pitched the idea to switch to the Crypto segment and got the OK from our client. In a matter of days, we turned our campaign upside down. Message scripts, TA definition, LinkedIn content – we changed it all, and boy, was it worth it!

Over the next month, we have seen a 500% increase in the unique profile visits compared to the start of the campaign. Both acceptance and reply rates were twice as high as the results from the first month. The number of leads generated from the Blockchain industry was, drum roll… five times higher, presenting 46 quality leads to our client in a matter of one month.

Needless to say, both our client and the Respect.Studio team were genuinely excited to receive such great results after calling the shots and shifting the campaign’s focus entirely.

Our team pursues the vision of developing innovative, data-driven, and result-oriented solutions for companies to excel in a world overwhelmed with information and variety. That’s why we go above and beyond to make sure that our clients employ lead generation in the most cost-efficient and productive way.

After a successful lead generation campaign for our client, we all took a breather for us to reflect on the job done and for our clients to process all the hot leads they received at the end of the second month.

However, we realized a bit later that such a great partnership could not end abruptly and wanted to help our client get the most out of the potential they now had. Having a promising outbound sales strategy on our hands, we decided to make sure our client could find the most convenient and result-oriented way to implement this strategy in the long run.

As a Ukrainian agency, our client had just enough resources and opportunities in place to adopt the outbound campaign for in-house management. Together, we found that consulting and providing any help the client might need during the transition would be both cost-efficient and productive in generating hot leads. So, the core objective was to make sure that in a few months, our client was ready to launch an internal lead generation campaign.

We created a detailed roadmap of potential cooperation and presented a variety of consulting services, including:

Data Collection and Analysis

Lead Generation Process Optimization

Support Services (Q/A sessions, workshops, weekly reports and feedback, and personalized recommendations)

In May 2022, more than two months after the consulting process initiation, our client successfully started a personalized in-house lead generation campaign.

Nearly half a year into our partnership, we became really close with our client, and our communication has now become more than purely professional chatter. One of the deal-breakers for fruitful cooperation can be the incompatibility of values and team culture. Obviously, it was not the case with our client because the match was real. Technical and working aspects aside, finding a deep connection with our clients is what helps us deliver high-quality results.

At Respect.Studio, we are always happy to form long-term partnerships that benefit everyone along their journeys. When we decided to create an NFT project about Ukrainian heroes, we were excited to find out that the client was just as passionate about the idea. The team offered their services to create a design for upcoming projects.

Our team is about agility, communication, and efficiency. We do not do our job to get things done. We come to work every day with a desire to create quality and innovative tools to make a meaningful contribution to digital communication. And it shows.

Do you feel like your company could use professional help in developing consistent lead flow? Reach out!