How This B2B Business Tripled their Online Sales Revenue by Modernizing their Business Model and Partnering with a Proven Marketing Agency

In a nutshell, modernizing a business means ensuring that you’re making the most out of current and future changes in the market and economy. 

And of course a lot of it has to do with “going online” to take advantage of the growth that online marketing can bring you. But it’s not just about doing any kind of online marketing.

Modernizing requires you to be on the cutting edge, constantly. And for most business owners, that starts with a big change to their mindset, as opposed to a few technical tweaks here and there.

Let’s say you want to start expanding to online marketing, like many other businesses that started out offline. Most companies achieve ‘OK’ results here by adding a few online discount campaigns and boosting their products on Facebook.

But if you want to get better results than all of those other companies that are doing this, your mindset needs to shift towards being in the top 10% of businesses in your industry.

This automatically demands that you’ll need the top 10% of everything to get there: the top 10% sales revenue, top people to work with and top marketing strategy to implement.

And that’s why we mentioned in the beginning that hiring just any marketing agency to modernize your business online isn’t enough.

Supporters of this mindset include Shakrit Chanrungsakul, founder of successful Thai growth companies Wecosystem and FireOneOne, and several other growth marketers like Noah Kagan and Andrew Chen. Consider following them if you want to learn more about transformative thinking and staying on the cutting edge.

But from our experience in generating over 1.104 billion baht in online sales revenue for our clients alone, most of our success stories start from the owner’s mindset to want more and better things for their businesses. And Bulliontex’s founders wanted exactly that.

Bulliontex is a fabrics business, both in the wholesale and retail market. The brand had already built a strong reputation in the past 2 decades both locally and internationally.

When the founders started working with us, they were in the middle of a mission to fully modernize their business, to make the most out of digital marketing and gain even more clients.

And in the next section, we’ll explain exactly how we helped grow Bulliontex’s online presence, and how we could measure the success of our work through real sales revenue growth every month.

In addition to improving their brand image and investing more in offline channels, Bulliontex’s goal was to get more online sales, by finding the right digital marketing approach.

Succeeding online always starts with a setup that prioritizes data and KPIs. That’s because the number of sales you get compared to the key KPIs you’re focusing on will determine whether what you’re doing is working; and more importantly, how much more you can improve.

This is why when we started working with Bulliontex, the first thing we did was introduce Performance Marketing to their marketing mix.

Performance marketing is measured by direct sales revenue, and not by secondary metrics like reach or engagement. Typically this involves setting revenue goals with your marketing team, while they ensure you meet those revenue goals every month.

Bulliontex needed performance marketing at this stage of their journey because they needed to see tangible results from their investment.

There is certainly a time and place for awareness or engagement marketing. But the brand was already making branding efforts on their own already, so it didn’t make sense to hire an agency to do double work.

By partnering with a proven marketing agency to get measurable sales on online platforms like Facebook, Bulliontex would successfully prove that their target audience is active and buying on the platform. And this means they could treat Facebook as a new revenue stream.

Constantly asking yourself what you can do to improve your business is always key to success. It promotes growth and keeps you on the cutting edge of business practices.

But of course, it’s easier to have this mindset when things aren’t going well, and you need to make some changes ASAP.

Sometimes it’s much harder to see the benefit of modernizing by expanding to more platforms, or working with professionals: especially when things are actually going well already.

So in the sections below we’ve broken down both the short-term and long-term benefits of performance marketing. That way, when it comes time to make a call of your own, you’ll know what kind of approach your business will need.

1. It’s a low-risk way to increase your sales revenue or prove product/market fit.

From our experience, you can find out whether your existing marketing strategy works within the first few weeks to 3 months of applying performance marketing.

If you still aren’t getting sales after 3 months of trying, then it’s time to revisit the approach. But keep in mind that it doesn’t mean you have to start everything from scratch.

Generally start by tweaking your product or offer to improve product/market fit, and test it again until you find an approach that makes you money.

This already gives you the upper hand over businesses (both B2B and not) that don’t practice performance marketing, because they could be stuck with something that doesn’t work for years, and won’t know until it’s too late. 

It also makes more business sense to know for sure whether something will profit you before putting all your cash into it. And in terms of success, we’ve generated over 1.104 billion baht for our clients so far with this approach, saving countless funds of risky marketing investments in the process.

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2. Performance marketing is 100% measurable, at all times.

The strength of performance marketing lies in its focus on testing things out before investing large amounts of money into it. In addition to proving product/market fit, it also helps you invest better, based on the data you collect.

That means there’s no need for huge viral campaigns or product unveiling events, until you’re absolutely sure that your offer really works first.

All you’ll need to succeed is either a working performance marketing strategy, or a proven marketing partner who has expertise in driving direct sales with performance marketing.

Like we touched on in the beginning, it takes you one look at a KPI sheet to see whether you’re getting the sales you need or not. 

And below, you’ll see how we put all of these factors to work in our partnership with Bulliontex.

To make sure Bulliontex’s online expansion would succeed, we set revenue goals with them from Day 1.

A great practice to have when you’re setting revenue goals is to reflect on where you are now, where you want to be in 3 months, 6 months, and a year from now.

Asking yourself the hard questions is invaluable at this point, as it sets a strong foundation for you to reap the long-term benefits of performance marketing too.

Especially if you’re working with a marketing partner, straightforward discussions about how much you need to earn to break-even and how much for you to profit are essential.

That way the team and you are completely congruent on how much money the marketing efforts have to make for you to grow. And more importantly, you’ll benefit most from the partnership with a marketing agency this way.

Here’s an example of an exercise we did with Bulliontex before launching the performance marketing campaigns:

As you can see everything was tied back to how much money Bulliontex needed to make to profit from the campaigns.

This was crucial to the daily clarity we needed to drive results for the brand. The team’s focus would be on fully driving sales and finding new ways to improve results, without losing their way in the process.

Bulliontex started profiting from performance marketing within 2 months of working with us. And their monthly sales revenue has kept growing since:

On average, Bulliontex’s monthly sales revenue from Facebook is growing 24% per month. This fully supports the founders’ efforts to modernize the brand through generated revenue.

But by far, the biggest long-term benefit of these results is that the brand now has gained a stable and growing online revenue stream for the first time.

At the end of the day, any business, whether B2B or B2C, can succeed with the right sales-driven, performance marketing approach. All that’s required is a clear understanding of what you want out of the campaigns, and a right understanding of what you should expect to get out of a marketing partnership. 

Modern marketing tools give you infinite possibilities to get sales while you get your brand’s name out there. And that’s why capitalizing on these tools (like Facebook marketing) before your competitors do won’t only give you a competitive edge: They’ll also generate real, tangible business growth in the process.