NEOGOV Case Study

M&P was brought in to help the NEOGOV team drive leads for their government HR software. While the campaign goal was straightforward, finding the right audience was the marketing puzzle that needed to be solved. While they serviced the entire United States, NEOGOV’s target audience consisted of Government HR managers, Chiefs of Police and Fire, and public safety officials in charge of training new employees. The M&P team built a campaign that filtered out private companies while also ensuring that we’re hitting the right people, at the right time, in the right place.

the brief

What happens when you have to find a small audience in a big geography? You call the M&P team, obviously.

That’s what NEOGOV did. Their wide array of products, which cover employee onboarding, training management, time tracking, shift scheduling, and all things HR were struggling to generate interest from the right people across the US.

While their software had features useful to the private sector, their business mission was to work exclusively with government and public safety organizations to help improve their employee management.

The difficulty of this campaign for the M&P team was to figure what exactly this audience was searching when looking for HR solutions. Our team determined that there was little to no difference between private and public HR employees looking for software solutions.

This challenge grew into a strategy conversation that centered around the question: how can we capture high-volume, general keywords, while filtering out those in the private sector.

The answer? Prioritize placement for general terms, but make the ad copy extremely clear that NEOGOV only served public organizations. Since PPC, by nature, only costs money when someone clicks, it was determined that we were willing to sacrifice CTR in order to be in front of as many HR representatives as possible. With ad copy strategy, we’d cater to our target audience naturally while bidding on general, high-volume keywords.

Services Mission Summary

SEO

Improve rankings for “government” and “public safety” keywords to dominate the market when these low-volume, but highly qualified searches were initiated.
Audit and improve the quality of content being produced by the content marketing team, which will help answer common questions from HR users prior to buying software.
Expand reach of organic search to capture more keywords and grow overall authority within the software sector.

Paid Search

Target public sector and government HR officials through highly targeted paid search campaigns.
Build a qualified audience throughout current customer data and website visitors to generate a top-of-mind campaign during the long buying cycle.
Develop product landing pages that increase overall conversion rate of users visiting the site from paid search.

The M&P Impact

2.41% Paid Search ROAS

+87% Website Leads

+$389k New Business

+87% Organic Traffic

+185% Conversion Rate

+514% Organic Impressions

Our Paid Search Campaign Strategy

Geo-Targeting

Upon initial launch, our team targeted the entire United States. However, we quickly discovered a large influx of spam traffic from outside our target areas – a common problem for paid search campaigns. To respond, the M&P team isolated zip codes that were generating a majority of spam traffic and excluded these very specific locations, which vastly improved the lead quality coming through the campaigns.

Keyword Research

Our research for NEOGOV and their PowerDMS products revealed that, despite people working in the public sector, their search activity was indistinguishable from private HR employees. Our keyword strategy centered around bidding on general keywords, but being very clear in the ad copy to improve user quality clicking on our ads.

Ad Copy Optimizations

Throughout the campaign, our team consistently tested, optimized, and reviewed ad copy, which was a key component of driving quality traffic to the NEOGOV site. Throughout the optimizations, we found key messaging tactics that were resonating with their target audience, which were implemented throughout the entire NEOGOV marketing efforts.