Cross-Border Communications (CBC) works exclusively with international B2B clients to reach their buyers around the world with marketing and branding activities within four core industries: Maritime, High Tech, Engineering Processing, and Medical Technology.

They specialize in understanding how their clients’ solutions impact key market challenges to deliver the most compelling experience possible to their buyers and customers.

In the past year, many of CBC’s clients have been forced to adapt to changing market conditions due to the pandemic, especially in regards to in-person meetings and events being cancelled.

“Many of their buying decision-makers have pivoted to digital research methods rather than picking up the phone to talk to a salesperson,” said Garrett Butler, Digital Engagement Manager at CBC.

Social media has become a big part of how they connect with peers and access content - both for general learning and also company-specific content about potential solutions.”

Garrett Butler

Digital Engagement Manager, Cross-Border Communications

That has left a lot of companies scrambling to adjust, and often finding themselves out of their comfort zone.

“With this shift in the marketplace, we’ve seen a lot of brands playing catch-up and really having to accelerate their digital efforts quickly,” Butler said. “But that presents a knowledge gap of the digital channel landscape and nuances on how to best utilize each social channel to connect and engage with the right audiences.”

And that’s what brought them to Ocean.io: better targeting for more effective outreach.

CBC ran a test to compare their own hand-picked target list against Ocean.io’s AI-generated target list, to see which produced the most relevant companies.

The two campaigns were otherwise identical: The same spend, ad creatives, and run simultaneously across a six-week period.

“The results were outstanding,” said Butler. The Ocean.io account list outperformed the hand-picked account list in nearly every way:

23 percent higher rate of Marketing Qualified Leads versus the CBC target list.

The average cost per MQL was 22 percent lower, and we saw a 14 percent increase in conversion rate in the Linkedin forms compared to the CBC accounts.

The ad creatives even performed slightly better than the control, which Butler credits to the targeting.

The ad creative also saw a slight boost in click-through rate, showing that the audience was more relevant. They were engaged.”

Garrett Butler

Digital Engagement Manager, Cross-Border Communications

“I think that this also provides some insight into what an expanded program will look like, where we go beyond the pilots and double down on what's going to be most efficient moving forward.“