Red Sentry's SaaS offering of a vulnerability scanner was struggling to find product/market fit. To keep the lights on, we started marketing Pentests as a service offering. We did this by creating highly optimized paid search & retargeting paid media campaigns that took buying intent from the search engines and closed them through nurtured retargeting ads on LinkedIn and Meta.
A huge amount of focus was spent on the pentest side of the business due to the high MRR that is started to drive. We were spending $20K on paid search and paid media - with a rough split of 80-20 respectively amongst the platforms. We were closing 4-5% of the clicks that came from "purchase intent" keywords on our landing page while capturing another roughly 8% with retargeting display ads, LinkedIn, and Meta ads. While growing the pentest side of the business, we also successfully incorporated PLG campaigns for the vulnerability scanner. By iteratively testing new channels, audiences, and messages - we were able to drive new signups daily and track those users usage rates on the scanner. In order to maintain efficient tracking of CRM data with our paid ads efforts - we were able to create a custom logic form inside of their Webflow website that fired an API in their signup process on their platform, that maintained the advertisement's meta data. This was crucial for identifying what sources that signups were coming from. We found PMF once we started to consistently drive new users that stuck and didn't churn.
By the end of our initial engagement, we saw massive revenue growth from the pentest paid search & paid media campaigns and a significant increase in signups from various sourced PMF opportunities. We chose the winning campaign with the highest ROAS for the vulnerability scanner and advised the team on how to advertise to this ICP moving forward. The pentest advertising campaigns still drive $100K's per month and are an incredibly optimized set of paid search and paid media ads. In 2023, we increased Red Sentry's Inbound revenue by almost 300%. We continue to provide strategic oversight & campaign optimization through AB testing their paid search and paid media campaigns - while tracking a 2-3x ROI in their Hubspot CRM dashboards.
