Global VAT and tax compliance technology company Taxually briefed Sharper B2B Marketing to raise awareness and drive sales leads among a niche, global B2B audience. The strategy was to adopt an Account Based Marketing (ABM) approach, which used granular audience targeting and personalised messaging to optimise engagement. Email marketing supported by LinkedIn advertising targeted the audience, with daily reports to the sales team ranking prospects according to their engagement levels, allowing tailored follow ups. The global campaign enabled sales to deliver more than €1m of net new revenue.

Taxually was a relatively new player in the niche tax compliance market. The company had grown largely via direct sales outreach. To accelerate and consolidate its growth, Taxually now wanted to adopt an ABM strategy to optimise its sales process.

Sharper B2B Marketing was tasked with developing the marketing strategy and delivering campaign activity, targeting an Amazon Aggregators audience. Aggregators acquire and scale brands already selling products on Amazon, consolidating them to drive economies of scale and rapid growth. Cross-border expansion is a popular growth strategy for Aggregators, but this brings complexities in navigating local tax liabilities.

Specific objectives were:

• Build awareness of the Taxually brand
• Generate leads and opportunities for sales follow up
• Increase the conversion rate through the pipeline
• Deliver net new revenue

The strategy was to adopt a granular targeting approach, using personalised messaging to optimise engagement. The audience was divided into four distinct role types – business leaders, finance leaders, IT leaders and compliance managers. Research was undertaken to understand the drivers and challenges to using Taxually among these audience segments. These insights informed the campaign’s content strategy.

Working alongside the Taxually sales team, Sharper built a database for the campaign, sourcing contact information for the four segments from a target list of 95 Aggregators.

Each contact was targeted via email marketing and LinkedIn advertising.

Email marketing:

• The four segments were divided into 16 workflows based on maturity and likely stage in their growth. Relevant messaging was then delivered across different emails. For example, for the persona responsible for the company’s technology but not tax compliance, messaging made it clear that Taxually would be easy to integrate and was reliable with minimal input from them.
• The copy was designed to intrigue recipients, directing them to a dedicated campaign landing page, housed on the Taxually website.
• The campaign landing page was built with dynamic sections that showed personalised copy and graphics depending on the audience. For example, if the reader was in a segment labelled as “finance focused”, they would see messaging around the cost saving potential and the simple pricing model. Meanwhile, readers in a “compliance focused” segment would see messaging and graphics around the reliability of the tool, the experience of the team and how Taxually kept up-to-date with the latest regulations.

LinkedIn adverts:

• These were used to drive traffic to the campaign landing page and retarget those contacts who interacted with the campaign.
• Monitoring the campaign in close collaboration with sales was key to success. Daily reporting included ranking prospects based on their engagement.
• These prospects were then prioritised by the sales team who used relevant, personalised campaign messaging to optimise follow ups.

• 45% average email open rate
• 31% average clickthrough rate from email
• 147,000 impressions through paid LinkedIn, with a 0.8% clickthrough rate (double the industry average)
• 24 opportunities created with new clients across the UK, Nordics, India, Spain, Italy, and US
• 15% conversion rate from cold prospect to sales-qualified meeting (existing conversion rate of 1-2%)
• €1.1m of net new revenue delivered
• €3.1m of qualified new business pipeline