West Monroe

Increase quality leads, improve SEO, and enhance analytics

Although West Monroe generated steady traffic and seemingly promising prospects through its digital marketing initiatives, pipeline conversion rates were low, due to the abundance of unqualified leads. In addition, the lack of understanding about West Monroe’s operations, and the specific type of leads needed to drive meaningful business, meant that if a company fell within an industry supported by West Monroe, the previous marketing team targeted the lead — whether or not they were a proper fit for West Monroe’s services.

Insufficient SEO support gave WestMonroe.com little-to-no SEO optimization. Additionally, because of the lack of integration between its customer relationship management (CRM) platform and its digital marketing channels, West Monroe could not automate campaigns, track performance and tie marketing success back to revenue. 

“We needed an agency that could come in and push us with new ideas that would make us feel uncomfortable — things that are fresh, new and help us drive our business,” said Brown. “With Happy Cog, that was their position from the beginning.”

Grow revenue-driven digital marketing efforts through a performance-based partnership

West Monroe’s goals for its digital marketing revamp were clear. First, develop a digital marketing system that integrates its CRM with its outside marketing channels to capture and track data on an account-based level. 

Second, take advantage of AI-enabled scalability to allow its small team to effectively manage hundreds of campaigns simultaneously. 

Third, work with a partner focused on hard metrics that drive business. Impressions and reach are nice, but West Monroe wanted leads, conversions and pipeline revenue. “The big thing we impressed on Happy Cog was that we need a partner in place who can make the channels accountable for driving business,” said Brown. “All the impressions in the world aren’t going to drive business. The Happy Cog team said, ‘Great. Awesome. We are up to the challenge.’”

Areas targeted for improvement included:

SEO strategy

As noted, most leads coming into West Monroe, although plentiful, were grossly unqualified due to the previous marketing firm’s lack of understanding about West Monroe’s business model. Part of the collaborative, partnership-driven and comprehensive effort to change this included building an effective SEO keyword strategy centered around West Monroe’s best-performing thought leadership content. Happy Cog further optimized the SEO strategy by incorporating negative keywords to repress certain search queries that consistently returned unqualified leads. 

With a proper SEO strategy in place, West Monroe can now build organic search traction on keywords that drive interest in paid search so that top-performing keywords increasingly move from paid to natural search engine rankings. “Happy Cog provided us with a team of SEO experts to optimize key parts of our website that drive the most conversions,” said Brown. “They’re building a pipeline driven by thought leadership that prioritizes keywords that drive volume and quality.” 

Data capture

Because West Monroe’s CMS originally was not linked to its digital marketing outlets, the company relied on bare-bones analytics to track basic metrics like downloads, scroll depth and PDF link clicks. The closed-loop channel Happy Cog created between West Monroe’s CRM (including Salesforce data), and its marketing automation platform (Pardot) quickly fixed the issue and cleaned up the analytics. In the process, Happy Cog also moved West Monroe from Google’s Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). 

With a comprehensive dashboard featuring enriched data and updated user-action tracking, West Monroe can now act on expanded analytics like custom content module tracking and following each user through the sales lead funnel. And, they can quickly qualify leads and create top-customer lookalike modeling to further improve lead quality. 

“We are delivering many more qualified leads, thanks to the technology enabled by the Happy Cog team,” said Brown. “We are constantly getting better and smarter at targeting the right people at the right time. We didn’t have that before.”

Bid management

By removing the need to manually manage its keyword bids on search engines like Google and Bing, Happy Cog’s artificial intelligence-fueled bid management system enabled West Monroe’s in-house digital team to start running hundreds of keyword campaigns at once. “Being able to manage all of our ad campaigns on a micro-scale and know how much we’re bidding on all of these keywords, whilemaking adjustments in 30 seconds is huge,” said Brown.

Annual revenue goals met in record time

At the onset of its Happy Cog partnership, West Monroe set aggressive goals for its marketing pipeline. Everywhere from initial leads to marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) to sales-qualified leads (SQLs) to revenue is exceeding those goals, said Brown. 

One year into West Monroe’s digital marketing relationship with Happy Cog, signs of success include:

• Doubling the number of anticipated leads for the year.
• A more than 50% decrease in cost per lead (CPL). 
• The annual revenue goal was met in July and is on track to exceed its stretch goal by 60%.

“It’s been a huge year for us,” Brown said. “We’re really rocking and rolling. Performance has been unprecedented. It’s blowing everything else away.”

West Monroe keeps the connection strong with weekly sync meetings. Thanks to these candid and transparent check-ins, the West Monroe and Happy Cog teams have a trust dynamic that enables the partnership to improve and grow. Said Brown, “Happy Cog’s responsiveness and ability to anticipate from a strategy perspective is why they continue to be a strong partner for us.”