About Colt
Colt is Europe’s information delivery platform, enabling its customers to share, process and store their vital business information securely. Colt provides major organisations, midsize businesses and wholesale customers with a powerful resource that combines network and IT infrastructure with expertise in IT managed services, networking and communication solutions. Colt operates a 13-country, 25,000km network that includes metropolitan area networks in 34 major European cities with direct fibre connections into 17,000 buildings and 19 Colt data centres.
Strategy – broader business issues the company is facing
The European SME market is one of the key strategic markets for Colt. But, research consistently demonstrated that awareness of Colt among this target audience was low. From a sales and marketing perspective the challenge was to increase the number and quality of leads.
To achieve this Colt’s products had to be easy to purchase and easy to understand. This meant aggressively simplifying the product portfolio in terms of price and configuration.
Colt launched a range of Business Bundles:
- Security Bundle Pack
- Managed Email Security
- Managed Email Archiving
- Managed PC Backup
- Backup Bundle Pack
To promote these bundles Colt elected to focus on the digital channel. The campaign made it easy for businesses across Europe to research and select products online and choose their preferred way to contact Colt – including Live Chat and email.
Objectives of the campaign
Colt’s pan-European campaign was designed to optimise the number of online enquiries and leads generated from visitors to www.colt.net/business.
The first objective was to raise awareness of Colt’s product portfolio and clearly communicate the benefits to SME’s in Europe. The plan was based on research in a number of European markets into what influenced IT buyers vendor selection and decision making process e.g:
- Topics of interest to the audience.
- Online media consumption by market
The second objective was to generate leads to feed into the sales pipeline from the online channel. The combined target for online leads in the five markets was 5225. One of the guiding principles of the campaign was to make it obvious and easy to interact with Colt whether choosing to visit the website, click on a Google ad, open a Colt email or register to download a whitepaper.
The third objective was to publish content across the online channel and make it easy for European audiences to access it. This campaign represents a strategic shift towards increased use of digital media.
Target Audience
The campaign target audience was SMEs in UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. All individuals who had an active role in the decision-making process were targeted and ranged from Business Owners, IT decision makers, IT Services Users and other Influencer groups.
This mix of individuals had their own agenda and interests when it came to selecting an IT/Telecom service supplier. The level of business needs varied based on the size of the company, the importance of IT to the smooth operation of their business, what features and benefits were most appealing to them and what level of expertise they expected from suppliers.
Because of this, the target audience actively seek out reliable sources of information relating to products and business issues on line. This is demonstrated by the audience profile of IDG’s European IT websites and their position as an authority in the online channel. Colt sought to connect with the IDG brand as a prime means of becoming a trusted IT/Telecoms supplier among the target audience.
To optimise the results of this integrated campaign, each element was carefully planned and implemented, based on the results of research into the profile, search patterns and online media consumption in each market, at the same time.
Media, channels or techniques used
The campaign media mix harnessed the search behaviours of the target group in each market on Google. House lists were used as part of a multi-tiered outbound email campaign. Colt also partnered with IDG and placed a series of whitepapers on their top IT websites in each country. All campaigns ran in the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain at the same time.
1. Google Ad campaign
A complex Pay-per-Click campaign was implemented in UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The campaign was built on the results of keyword audits for each of the five markets. The campaign plan was based on the specific local language search terms and volumes for each market and promoted both the Colt brand and strategic products. All ads were produced in local language and drove traffic to the relevant product page on www.colt.net/business.
Additionally, a number of measures were included to minimise wastage and increase conversions. These included geo-targeting to optimise the number of clicks on Colt ads and day-parting to exclude ads being served up at weekends.
2. IDG lead generation campaign
A plan was agreed with IDG to host and promote Colt on their top IT websites. The decision to use both IDG’s content development and their unrivalled media reach into IT decision makers across EMEA was an important part of the campaign.
During 2009, IDG worked with Colt to devise a multi-language series of whitepapers across topics that Colt offers SMEs. The contents ranged from VOIP to Virtualisation, Security to Managed Services. These were hosted across the IDG whitepaper libraries with numerous co-branded traffic drivers promoting these assets to the user base.
The objectives were not only to deliver high quality leads into our sales pipeline by market, but also to achieve maximum brand awareness with a limited budget.
Spain was the lead market and a micro site with exclusive IDG/Colt branding and additional Colt assets was developed to give a broader understanding of the offerings.
3. Outbound email campaign
An outbound email campaign aimed at SME organisations that opted-in to receive marketing communications from Colt was broadcast in all five markets. This was a multi-touch campaign which ran over a period of six weeks.
There was a particular focus on media, finance and professional services vertical sectors. The audience primarily comprised of IT decision-makers and business decision-makers.
The campaign consisted of three emails each addressing a stage in the buying cycle (learn, scope and select). Each of these three emails had an accompanying reminder email (for email recipients that did not click on the first email). Five working days was the time span for triggering emails.
The value exchange was an exclusive whitepaper on one of the hot topics – Business Flexibility. Contact lists were supplied by Colt’s local marketing teams and supplemented by third party lists for Italy and Germany.
To support the three campaign activities all content was fully optimised for search engines. A comprehensive PR programme ensured Colt’s profile was elevated in the Digital Marketing, Industry and Marketing press. A press release was issued to all markets prior to the launch. In addition a series of interviews were arranged with leading industry analysts.
Each element of the campaign was tailored to the specific characteristics of each market in terms of language, messaging, geo-targeting, regulatory requirements, offers and tracking. A multinational team of Live Chat agents supported all of these activities. And enquiries were captured on Eloqua and fed through to local sales teams.
Campaign PerformanceResults
- Average weekley visits with no digital marketing activity = 1000:
- average weekly visits with digital mkg activity = 6000
- Visits 88,073 ( benchmark 54,903)
- Dwell time 3 min 18 (benchmark 2 min 05)
- No. page views 220,553 (benchmark 147,361)
The results show that during the life of the campaign weekly visits to the website rose from on average 1000 per week to over 6,000 per week. In addition the number of visits from launch to date (88,073) is above industry standards.
The campaign results show that the audience perceived Colt as a valuable source of information on IT and Telecoms and spend over 3 minutes on site. In total the number of pages viewed since October is over 220,000.
In total over 25,000 online enquiries have been generated and fed through to the sales pipeline. The best performing conversion tool was Live Chat with over 4000 leads.
Google had the biggest impact on driving traffic to the site and a direct correlation between site visits and leads can be seen during the duration of the ppc campaign. Up to 40,000 site visits can be directly attributed to Google.
The conversion funnel equates to 37 per cent online enquiry to marketing qualified lead; 30 per cent marketing qualified leads to sales opportunity and 30% to sales wins.
As a result of this campaign 3241 leads were passed to local sales teams to convert, resulting in £14.6m revenue.
Client testimonial
“‘Choosing to Turn Left’ was a pan-European integrated campaign that catipluted Colt into the new age of digital marketing. It was delivered in a record six months and exceeded all expectations in terms of leads and wins. It is a shining example of a dedicated team working together and staying focused on results.” Carl Robertson, chief marketing officer, Colt
