More leads, at lower cost,
on a smaller budget.
Who
S-GE is
Switzerland Global Enterprise is the official Swiss organisation for export and investment promotion. Its job is to help Swiss small and medium businesses sell abroad, and to bring foreign companies into Switzerland.
That makes its marketing unusual: the offer is a public service rather than a product, the audience is spread across industries that have nothing in common with each other, and success is a company deciding to start exporting, which is a slow decision made by several people.
A public offer,
sold to a private
decision
The brief was to reach decision-makers inside specific Swiss SMEs, in industries as unlike each other as medical technology, fintech, food and infrastructure, and to make them both aware of the organisation and willing to raise their hand.
The difficulty is that a B2B export decision is not one moment. It is a chain of touchpoints across months and several people in the same company, which means the last click that gets credited is almost never the thing that did the work.
MedTech, FinTech, food and infrastructure do not share vocabulary, publications or buying rhythm. One generic keyword set serves none of them.
Multi-touchpoint journeys across several people in the same company, over months, not a single decision-maker in a single session.
Without an attribution model, the last touch takes the credit and the budget follows it, which starves the work that actually created the demand.
Buy intent,
not audiences
For an offer this specific, the useful signal is what somebody is actively looking for rather than what industry they sit in. So the plan is built on intent first: keywords chosen for the moment a company starts thinking about exporting, with the formats and the bidding arranged around them.
And because the journey has many touchpoints, the measurement had to come before the scaling. An attribution model answers which channel and which keyword genuinely contribute, and only then is there anything worth optimising against.
Carefully selected, intent-driven keywords rather than broad industry terms, so the spend follows companies already asking the question instead of everyone who might one day ask it.
Dynamic Search Ads to catch the queries no list anticipates, Demand Gen to build awareness above the search layer, and continuous A/B testing on ad copy to keep both improving.
Conversion attribution modelling built for a multi-touchpoint B2B journey, so bids, copy and keyword strategy are optimised against contribution rather than against whatever happened to be clicked last.
Buy the moment,
then cover
what it misses
An intent-led keyword architecture, chosen for the questions a company asks when it starts thinking about selling abroad, rather than for the industry it belongs to.
Dynamic Search Ads across the long tail, so the account keeps reaching queries nobody thought to add, in a category where the vocabulary differs by industry.
Demand generation above the search layer, building awareness among companies not yet searching, which is most of the addressable audience for an export promotion agency.
Continuous A/B testing on ad copy, run as a standing process rather than a launch exercise, alongside continuous work on bids and keyword strategy.
An attribution model for the B2B journey, so the contribution of each touchpoint could be read across months and several people in the same company, and budget could move on that reading.
The budget went down.
The leads went up.
Cost per conversion fell 38% and conversions rose 36% over the same period, with a conversion rate up significantly on top. The part that matters is the direction of the budget: it was reduced, not increased, so none of this is volume bought with more money.
That combination is the whole argument. Growth and efficiency usually trade against each other, and they only move together when the account is being told the truth about what converts.
What this
case proves
Cutting a budget and growing the result at the same time is not a media trick. It comes from knowing which touchpoints contribute, which is an attribution question, and the attribution work came before the optimisation rather than after it.
It also shows what intent buying is worth in a category with no common vocabulary. Four industries that share nothing were reached through the one thing they do share: the moment a company starts asking how to export.
“Since 2014, comtogether has demonstrated outstanding skills in international and multi-lingual campaign management. Their flexibility, interest and understanding of our business is highly valued. They are proactive in bringing ideas on campaign optimization and testing and are open to explore possible synergies. Their uncomplicated communication and working style are real assets in our relationship.”
