Virta

This story focuses on how Advance B2B helps Virta grow in its target markets with strategic Paid Search management. If you want to learn more about our overall strategic partnership with Virta, read this story.

You’ll find comments from Sebastian Tamminen, Digital Campaign Manager at Virta, Mónika Bene-Merta, Advertising Strategist at Advance B2B, and Otto Antikainen, Content Marketing Strategist at Advance B2B.

Virta looks to Advance B2B for comprehensive support in achieving its digital marketing objectives; feeding the sales pipeline across their target markets.

To do this, our collaboration includes not only strategic guidance but also valuable input on content direction and targeted advertising efforts. On the advertising front, this means:

• Generating awareness and positioning Virta as a top-of-mind EV charging service provider in all target markets.
• Acquire ICP leads with paid search campaigns targeting high-intent keywords for specific use cases in key markets.
• Making use of first-party data to retarget visitors with relevant hooks based on their previous visits to Virta’s owned pages.

Why advertise on Bing, anyway? Yes, Google’s dominance is real. But it doesn’t mean alternative search engines such as Bing aren’t interesting, especially when they provide additional targeting opportunities. Bing and LinkedIn are owned by Microsoft. BINGO. With Bing, you can reach specific audiences by leveraging LinkedIn data.

Our collaboration with Virta began in 2019, and so did our strategic advertising work, including:

• (re)building Virta's paid search campaigns on Google Ads, aligning them with their business objectives, and focusing on high-value segments.
• Running ads on Bing: a couple of years later, we built a similar account structure on Microsoft Ads and started experimenting with new targeting options.
• Targeting more markets over time: our campaigns have gradually become more complex over the years. From Finnish and English-only ads, we started to run localized ads in key markets for Virta, including Sweden, France, DACH, APAC, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands.
• Integrating ad platforms to HubSpot for smooth reporting: Being able to track and report on advertising performance from one HubSpot
• Running weekly optimizations to 1. keep track of performance, 2. identify new opportunities, and 3. keep up with the latest algorithm updates. 
• Measuring and reporting on what matters: Regardless of a campaign’s objective (generating awareness, acquisition, activation, etc.), you need to be able to measure its performance. We’ve set up conversion points on all relevant channels and can fully attribute performance to our advertising work (whether it be first touch or additional touch points during a complex user journey).  

One of paid search’s most challenging aspects is character restrictions; A 30-character headline isn’t a lot of space to 1. capture your audience's attention and 2. get them to engage (for context, here’s a 30-character headline) on a crowded search results page.

In practice, it means that paid search will only generate engagement (before hitting your website) if: 

• You target the right keywords to begin with.
• Your ads resonate with your target audience (and meet their intent)

This is why localization always beats translation. Translations, though grammatically correct, usually lack substance and context, when localization is all about mastering nuances. And when dealing with character restrictions, nuances grow in importance.

Now, while Advance B2B hosts more than 10 nationalities, we are still far from mastering all the languages in the world. Fortunately, Virta can count on its brilliant local marketing managers to assist with localizing campaigns and ensuring our paid search ads are relevant and optimized.

Ongoing conversations and brainstorming sessions

For this to work, Mónika and Otto work closely with Virta’s marketing managers and host regular coaching sessions to provide strategic guidance, review ad accounts performances, ensure alignment, discuss experiments, and share recent learnings with all target markets.

• Fact: If an ad copy promises the Moon, it will likely generate a lot of engagement. 
• Also, fact: If the page it directs to isn’t up to the challenge, visitors will bounce, and Google will depreciate your ad quality (this means your ad will show less often, and, in turn, your competitors’ ads will take more space).

To avoid entering this vicious circle, Mónika monitors all campaigns and connects with local marketers to ensure ads we run are as aligned as possible with the landing page experience.

We are proud of the results we getting from this collaboration. 

The pipeline attributed to paid search as a first touch point accounts for 36% of the total pipeline generated in 2024.

Now, 36% doesn’t really say much about performance, right? Well, if we look at it from a different perspective, every euro invested in paid search from Virta resulted in €77,3 in the pipeline.

And that calls for celebrations.

Working with a marketing agency yields better results IF both parties are fully invested in the relationship.

Since the very beginning, we have maintained complete transparency with Virta. Despite the evolution of both teams over the past six years, our relationship has only strengthened. In retrospect, it’s fair to say that our partnership has even benefited from fresh insights and new perspectives brought by new team members.

Our strategic collaborations with our customers are a 2-way street; As much as our customers learn from us, we also learn daily from working with them. 

Overcoming language barriers

Capturing the electric vehicle (EV) industry lingo proved initially challenging, particularly in overcoming language barriers. However, we’ve been able to overcome these barriers with transparent communication across international teams. Mónika adds that “even though there’s evident pressure from owning the performance of so many different markets, working together as one team with Virta gives us everything we need to succeed in a positive and supporting environment.”

Changes in teams are beneficial (if properly introduced)

6 years is a long time. In the past 6 years, both teams have seen people come and go. Now, with proper documentation and onboarding, we have managed to not only maintain a great working relationship but also improve our performance year after year.