Case Studies

The Problem

A leading global enterprise B2B content management company was attempting to ameliorate the stigma that their market and products were passé. The global company had recently acquired the leading enterprise software provider, and the original company’s brand leadership got lost in the process. For example, the company became a sub domain of the parent company website and they re-branded the product names that already had 20 years of brand equity and product leadership. As a result, they were struggling to engage their channel partners post acquisition and were at risk of losing their identity as the unique #1 leader in their market.

Moreover, conversations about their products and their company were infrequent and stale, and the sales team didn’t have anything new to motivate them. Finally, rumors were circulating in the market about the global company not investing in this new division’s growth. All in all, they were no longer fresh, so they hired a new Marketing Manager and she chose Fresh Consulting as their partner for their social media strategy and execution because we had a preexisting six-month track history of delivering creative work.

The Strategy

To solve the problems and meet the objectives

Because of the aforementioned problems, our objective was to create a new strategy that would build and distribute fresh digital content that would help them overcome the stigma, internally re-energize sales team, raise awareness of their market leadership among partners and ultimately produce better conversion and increased leads. To that end, we created an executive digital strategy with 200 pages of visual detail to go with it. The 7-layer strategy had these core elements with creative ideas laden in every segment:

  1. BRAND: Included tying brand to creative content, campaigns, and social engagement to show they were investing in their growth and cared about customers.
  2. CONTENT: Including producing and re-purpose creative content that would get the sales team excited and motivate the partners to share with their customers.
  3. CHANNELS: Included suggestions for creating an integrated presence in new general and niche social media channels and engaging the sales team to listen to their customers and build community.
  4. CAMPAIGNS: Included creative new campaigns that would help customers realize that the product was still relevant and growing.
  5. TEAM: Included training materials and responsibilities for leadership and team members involved to lay the groundwork for building a social media team.
  6. TOOLS: Included new tools that would support channel engagement, measurement, and listening.
  7. MEASUREMENT: Addressed what key metrics were important to the client and how to tie metrics to financial measurement.

The Execution

Creative Campaign Execution

A Futuristic Product Campaign

  • We first created a campaign around what the future of the product would be like to help ameliorate the stigma that their solutions were passé.
  • To make that happen, we 1) came up with a authentic name and acquired the domain name 2) built a hip video central to the theme 3) created a microsite to house the video 4) brought in lead generation call to actions 5) integrated the lead forms with their campaign measurement tool and 6) advertised the new campaign across Bing, Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
  • We then suggested and implemented the campaign brand across other marketing efforts they were producing and supported them in showcasing the campaign content at upcoming conferences. This helped their brand be tied to the Future.

Flagship Product Campaign

  • We helped them bring back their original brand name, best known in the industry, by pushing for a keyword laden microsite rather than a simple re-direct.
  • We made the microsite social and interactive with integrated videos, social media presence, and live chat where customers could ask questions and have a dialogue.  For example…
    • We created a top 10 video to help them launch their new software release and featured it on the microsite.
    • We produced an interactive slick ROI calculator to support the sales team in their sales process online and offline.
  • We brought back a mascot well-liked in previous times to help make the product fun again in several marketing pieces, including a video.

Blogging

  • We produced a new slick professional blog and brought back a flash-based game to make the site more fun.
  • We provided training materials for the team and did ongoing updates to support multi-author collaboration and recognition.

Video

We built a series of videos they could use for worldwide conferences, online audiences, and partners to share their message of leadership and their market growth. For example,

  • To help partners realize the global company would continue to invest in its recent acquisition, we created a video showcasing the importance of the market to the overall mission of the broader organization.
  • We created a video for their highly popular global healthcare vertical.

Training

Two of our co-founders (http://www.twitter.com/mikewhitmore) and (http://twitter.com/brentdance) trained and motivated their entire 100+ person sales team at a world wide training in Arizona on why they should participate in Social Media to support their sales efforts, pulling from the 200-page custom social media strategy we created for them, and showed them the content we produced to support their efforts. They subsequently requested a training for their worldwide partners in Washington D.C.

Top 10 Results

Strategy and Execution Results

  1. The Flagship Product microsite we created gets 17,000 visits per month and produces more organic leads than any other source, and is the #1 referrer of web traffic.
  2. The Futuristic Product campaign is a top 5 referrer for lead sources for the sales team.
  3. Their blog now has 17 authors and 114 posts. The blog is the number #5 referrer of web traffic.
  4. The brand is transforming to the desired position where they are recognized for leadership, customer engagement, and ongoing relevance.

Training Results

  1. The executive of the global company division publicly credited us on the Forbes.com website that we helped train their sales team & resellers
  2. We got a standing ovation from the 100+ person sales team at the global company with the Future of Product video we produced. The team has been re-energized to sell their product. Many of the sales team social media naysayers went from negative to positive (according to our client)
  3. 25 of the world wide sales team members are now engaging more actively in social media and starting to do things on weekly or daily basis (extrapolated from a survey we distributed and according to
    our client)
  4. All sales team members have been accepting of subsequent training sessions on social media.
  5. They have an active blogging and twitter team that actually engages and listens.
  6. Two of our videos will have been utilized as the conference openers for their worldwide training conference.