Avanade PR and marketing campaign in order to raise awareness of its key service line AppDev
Avanade is a global business technology and managed services provider and joint venture of Accenture and Microsoft. Avanade connects insight, innovation and expertise in Microsoft technologies to help customers realise results.
The challenge
Following an internal evaluation at the end of 2012, Avanade UK decided it needed to raise awareness of one of its key service lines: Application Development (AppDev), which focused on building enterprise applications that reflect the changing work environment. It wanted an integrated PR and marketing campaign that would:
- Support sales pipeline for Avanade’s AppDev Solutions.
- Identify key gaps in the media where Avanade can drive its messaging.
- Leverage key events.
- Drive 3 month campaign reaching key customers, partners and employees.
Avanade had just appointed Edelman as its UK PR agency in December 2012 and was already working with April-Six as its creative agency, but even from initial discussions about AppDev it was clear that both agencies had strong ideas about how to carry out this campaign.
Part of the original meeting between Avanade and Edelman was to brainstorm and develop some overall PR themes around AppDev, and they agreed that:
- The overall key message was to deliver its Agile Application Development.
- Three further key messages to drive within this campaign included: speed/time to market, scalability and reduce capex/opex.
- The key offerings identified as areas where awareness is needed and capabilities are strong for Avanade AppDev Solutions included: cloud, mobility and digital marketing.
The solution
It was decided in order to discuss these messages and position Avanade as a thought leader, the best strategy was to commission some third-party research about issues in AppDev to enable Avanade to comment. For this Edelman and Avanade worked collaboratively with independent research agency Vanson Bourne to design a questionnaire and deliver timely results, analysis and insight, within the project objectives.
When the initial PR messages were agreed and the survey was put into the field, these helped to shape the marketing messages. Together with April-Six, Avanade carried out an in-depth message testing process with focus groups and a CIO dinner, and used feedback to create a strong value proposition about Avanade’s AppDev offering.
This value proposition was then used to develop a number of key marketing assets around the theme of disruptive technologies with a visual of a storm, aimed to show how best to navigate through these effectively. The assets were designed to generate demand and traffic to the dedicated Avanade AppDev microsite; all including Avanade’s customer Lotus F1 Team which aligns with AppDev in terms of speed, agility and performance. Assets included:
- AppDev microsite.
- Targeted marketing emails.
- AppDev playbook.
- AppDev flyer.
- AppDev case study booklet.
- Sponsorship of IASA event in London, including a CIO lunch, one speaker slot and a Lotus F1 Team simulator.
It was important that Avanade’s value proposition was in place as early as possible in the campaign, so the team was confident that messages had been tested and they resonated with Avanade’s key CIO audience in the UK. It then meant marketing and PR materials could be developed from this and everything was aligned.
The key platform for the PR campaign was the survey, which was turned around very quickly. This led to various PR tactics, all with the aim of generating media coverage. These tactics included:
- Hosting a media roundtable discussing the ‘application strategy blind-spot’, together with Avanade’s Lotus F1 Team’s CIO and seven journalists.
- Video of key Avanade and Lotus F1 spokespeople giving their views on the issues, for use in marketing emails.
- Four press releases distributed every few months, one highlighting the main results from the survey, and three tailored to specific vertical sectors.
- Bylined article about the key results and analysis, for use with media and marketing.
- Infographic displaying the key results and what they mean for the IT industry, for use media and marketing.
- Media briefings with Avanade and Lotus F1 spokespeople about the survey results.
On the marketing side, the assets were disseminated and Edelman worked with a telemarketing agency to carry out targeted calls to recipients with the aim of generating sales leads. The team also developed other sales and marketing materials, such as LinkedIn and display advertising, to bolster the campaign and sales cheat sheets and specific training sessions based on vertical sectors for the consultants to use.
One key piece of collateral that was produced jointly with Edelman and April-Six was a printed and digital magazine about ‘Application Nirvana’, containing marketing visuals, insights from the roundtable, bylined articles from Avanade and Lotus F1 spokespeople, go to market proposition and infographic.
Results
The AppDev campaign was a huge success, with many results still coming through. The marketing campaign led to 10 new business appointments – this included one contact who met Avanade at the IASA event and followed up after seeing the LinkedIn advert and receiving a marketing call.
Caroline Overholt, marketing manager, Avanade UK: “This campaign has had a huge impact and shows the value of getting all the stakeholders together and agreeing on a value proposition before execution. We were very clear from the start who we were trying to target, which helped us to shape the campaign and the assets created to talk to the right people with consistent messages. It showed the power of telling our story a number of times through a number of touch-points to get the messages to resonate.”
The AppDev campaign is still ongoing and a new phase is being planned in the next few months based around the deadline of the end of support for Windows XP in April 2014.
