Dropbox wanted to create demand for Dropbox Business in a new audience. They’d traditionally focused on IT decision-makers but recognised marketers as influencers in the decision process and wanted to target them with an innovative, digital campaign in EMEA.
The problem was, they’d never targeted marketers before. There was no value proposition, no competitive benchmarks and Dropbox’s marketing and sales teams lacked experience with this audience.
What Dropbox did know was that marketers are tough to impress. They knew they had high expectations and only engaged with campaigns that wowed them. They knew they needed digital content that provided an immediate value exchange.
And Pulse knew it needed to push the boundaries of digital development, channels and creative to make the campaign come to life.
‘Marketing Dynamix’ was a highly engaging/interactive campaign with the centerpiece being an assessment tool that helped marketers understand and appreciate different personality traits within their teams. It also uncovered personal development areas – improving relationships and team effectiveness.
Marketing Dynamix was hosted on a microsite where users could take the assessment, share results, invite others, and consume personalised content.
The result? 220% performance on lead generation and an awareness campaign that resonated with thousands of marketers.
About Dropbox
Dropbox is a file-hosting technology company that helps 500 million people around the world to work the way they want, on any device, wherever they go through cloud storage and file synchronisation software.
Strategy
In targeting marketers, Dropbox faced the following challenges:
- Low awareness and understanding of the full benefits of Dropbox Business.
- Sales teams lacked insight and knowledge of this audience.
- Marketing to marketers is no easy feat. They have high expectations and will only engage with digital campaigns that truly resonate or ‘wow’ them.
Objectives of the campaign
- Develop a strong Dropbox for marketers value proposition and messaging framework.
- Raise awareness of the full Dropbox Business proposition.
- Generate 1,000 marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
The Big Idea
The centrepiece of the solution was a highly engaging “marketing personality” assessment tool. Aptly named ‘Marketing Dynamix’, the tool helped marketers understand and appreciate different personality traits within their teams. It also uncovered personal development areas – improving relationships and team effectiveness.
Marketing Dynamix was hosted on a secure microsite where users could take the assessment, share results, invite others to take part, and consume valuable content. To ensure credibility, Pulse partnered with psychometric evaluation specialists Lumina Learning.
On completing the test, marketers received a personalised 20-page ‘self-portrait’ e-book. This gave detailed analysis and advice on recipients’ personality strengths, preferred working style and potential areas of weakness.
Recipients were then encouraged to plot their results on the Marketing Dynamix Team Wheel and, crucially, invite marketing colleagues to do that same.
Each person who completed the test received an automated email, encouraging them to share the test with others on their team. Those that didn’t click on the links within the email were passed into an email nurture, with follow up emails continuing to promote the benefits of the assessment, and delivering additional digital content.
Marketing teams that completed the test were provided with a customised Team Wheel, allowing each person to see how their traits compared with others. The Wheel provided a digital overview of the dominant traits of each member of the team, highlighting areas of diversity and condensing quite complex team dynamics into an easily digestible format.
All prospects were retargeted with supporting content and nurtured further down the marketing funnel. Pulse used a wide range of digital channels to ensure it engaged the audience in relevant digital environments.
It also considered the wider business impact of this programme and took steps to ensure Marketing Dynamix provided long-lasting value beyond the timeframe of the campaign. These measures included the creation of a digital sales-enablement playbook, educating Dropbox’s sales and marketing teams on persona pain points and digital techniques to engage the audience.
The target audience
Marketers are often the first to exploit the latest digital techniques, and they’re a tough audience to impress. Many have spent years developing and activating digital marketing campaigns, so Pulse and Dropbox knew it needed something special to make its programme appealing. It needed something very engaging, very targeted and, ultimately, very useful.
To find out what that looked like it conducted two weeks of desk and data research to understand the key pain-points and needs of three personas – marketing leadership, creatives and co-ordinators. It identified various use cases across all job functions, but underpinning them all was a strong emotional-driver: “Overcoming internal and external team communication/collaboration and alignment issues.” This was the key insight that inspired the Marketing Dynamix assessment tool – it wanted to empower marketers to work better together.
All of this heavily influenced the development of the digital strategy – from the creation of Marketing Dynamix ‘hero’ content, associated 20-page ‘Self-Portrait’ e-book, infographics and blogs, to the activation channels and creative assets it used to drive awareness.
Media, channels or techniques used
Pulse developed an extensive digital activation plan that combined social, display media, content syndication, video and email marketing. It built customised creative for each (video ads/gifs/statics) and localised them for each market.
On social the agency used YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat – the first time Snapchat had ever been used in an EMEA B2B marketing campaign.
While LinkedIn clearly appealed for its business audience, Twitter was chosen for its reach, and Facebook was selected for awareness, Snapchat offered something different. Research showed that marketing coordinators were predominantly a young audience – Snapchat seemed a perfect fit.
And Pulse were right; Snapchat delivered 1.4 million impressions and 16,000 clicks.
On the display side, a key media partner in each region was selected and ran programmatic from the in-house desk, leveraging the latest data-layering opportunities to reach marketers at scale in relevant environments.
The agency also pushed the boundaries of marketing technology to extract the most from the data it generated, ensuring tactics worked in unison. Having access to LinkedIn’s demographic insights, Google Analytics, Hotjar, MOAT and a range of other tools gave the insight to make real-time optimisations across adverts, content, website, targeting and re-targeting.
Timescales of the campaign
- April 2017: Research and strategy
- May-June 2017: Content development
- August-December 2017: Activation.
Budgets
- Research/planning: £20,000
- Content (inc development): £99,000
- Activation: £184,000
Results
- Paid social: Impressions: 9,445,499, clicks 68,328
- Programmatic and premium display: Impressions: 8,219,157, Clicks: 7,538 • 2207 MQLs = 220% of target
- £8.8m pipeline/£352k investment = 25:1 ROI.
“Pulse have gone above and beyond, delivering great concepts, executing challenging ideas and pulling together a kit of well-received sales assets to support the campaign. They are very innovative with their approach to data and insights, meaning they’re always optimising and consequently we’ve achieved new levels of awareness and engagement within a new audience space for Dropbox. We’re extremely excited to continue working with Pulse”
This submission won the award for Best use of digital techniques and technologies at the B2B Marketing Awards 2018. Dropbox Marketing Dynamix for Dropbox by Pulse.
