Total Security Solutions Achieves Record-Breaking Leads With Paid Advertising

The Company

As a manufacturer of custom barrier systems designed to stop bullets and break-ins, the mission at Total Security Solutions (TSS) is simple: To be the industry leader in protecting people and property from physical attacks. Since 2004, they have secured over 30,000 buildings with professional in-house design, manufacturing and installation of bullet-resistant systems, delivering trusted protection with the industry’s fastest lead times.

With increased demand for these solutions from schools, workplaces, government agencies and other facilities across the United States, the company is on an aggressive growth path.

They were looking for a full-service digital marketing agency that could help them maintain and grow their pipeline of inbound leads through paid media, content marketing and SEO and other efforts.

The Challenge: Lack of Transparency in Advertising ROI

When TSS first reached out to Kuno Creative, they were already spending a considerable budget on paid advertising each month. However, a lack of transparency in reporting made it difficult to directly attribute ad spend to sales-qualified leads and closed deals and see which efforts were successful so they could do more of what worked.

They also wanted to identify new opportunities for reaching their audiences across industries, see which types of deals were the most profitable, and better understand the average sales cycle for different types of buyers.

“We were transitioning to a mid-market, scaling toward an enterprise corporation, but we had worked for so long with marketing agencies that were in the SMB space,” TSS CMO Paul La Vigne said. “What we needed to find was an agency that had the depth of bench, the expertise and the different disciplines of marketing to take us farther at a faster rate.”

Partnership With Kuno

The Kuno Creative paid media team started by analyzing Total Security Solutions’ ad accounts to identify which search terms drove the most conversions and which weren’t performing based on the cost per lead. Kuno’s RevOps team built highly customized dashboards in HubSpot to clearly show the metrics most important to the company, including:

• Clickthrough rate
• Cost per conversion
• Ad performance by keyword and campaign
• Sales qualified leads from paid search
• Deals and revenue created from paid search
• Average time to close deals by market segment

With these insights, the paid media team could invest more budget toward the best-performing campaigns and the channels where their audience was most engaged.

The Strategy

The Kuno team created ad campaigns to reach potential buyers at every stage, whether they were school administrators considering how to conform to new state regulations, architects looking to specify materials for a project or contractors seeking a quote. They invested in both programmatic advertising to drive awareness, including geotargeted ads at trade shows, and traditional Google search to capture prospects who were ready to take action.

Kuno collaborated with TSS to create new resources to promote with paid ads and also used creative design formats, including animated ads.

By drilling down deep into reporting for each ad channel and campaign, the team could adjust spending and do more of what was working. For instance, they identified one surprising channel with a higher return on advertising spend and began investing more of the budget there.

Results/Key Wins

Since the Kuno team began working with TSS, they have consistently driven growth in sales-qualified leads from paid search. During the Q3 comparison period, TSS continued to exceed weekly KPIs, generating more SQLs than projected and building on the momentum from prior months.

They recently saw the highest number of SQLs they’ve ever had in a single month. This translates to revenue as many deals driven from paid advertising earlier in the year are now closing.

With the success of paid advertising, other digital marketing efforts and the TSS team’s outbound sales efforts, including attending numerous trade shows, the company is increasing revenue and growing its team. They recently hired several regional sales reps to support their growth in key markets.