About the client
Cisco is the worldwide leader in networking technologies, providing businesses around the world with business tools such as WebEx and TelePresence that enables them to connect, communicate and collaborate with their colleagues and customers, whenever or wherever they are. The copmpany was founded in 1984 in San Francisco
Strategy – boarder business issues the company is facing
Largley bacause of the nature of its business, Cisco has traditionally struggled to be relevant to the UK’s SME community. Despite massive credibility within the IT community, and growing consumer awareness thanks to the acquisition of the Flip line of video cameras, as well as the success of Customer Kings 2009, Cisco provides technology ‘plumbing’ that business people very rarly see. As a result, it is often a challenge for SMEs to connect with the Cisco brand at anything other than a deeply technical level.
Objectives of the campaign
With SMEs making up to almost 90 per cent of British businesses, the segment is, surprisingly, a key target for most technology vendors, resulting in an ever increasingly noisy SME technology market. Cisco tasked Octopus to build on the success of the previous year’s campaign and create the next stage of an ongoing PR campaign to target this important segment.
Despite the inroads made made from the inlingural campaign in 2009, there was still work to be done. This year’s campaign would help strengthen Customer Kings’ reputation as an aspirational award for SMEs, as well as build in solid integration with social media, to reinforce Cisco’s emerging position as a partner.
It is also essential that any PR activity in this sector provided us with fresh material and was integrated into Cisco’s wider marketing objectives to continue building conversations with the SME community. As such the main objectives were:
- Integrate with wider SME lead-generation efforts
- Capitalise on the huge potential of social media and brand advocacy within the SME space
Media, channels or techniques used
Teaming up with Real Business, we launched ‘Customer Kings 2010’: a search for the UKs best customerobsessed businesses, to highlight the role that innovation could play in retaining and finding new customers. Working directly with Cisco’s marketing team and Caspian Publishing, Octopus took the lead on developing a range of content that would provide Cisco with good reason to interact with their SME target audience. This included:
- Customer Kings 2010 brand identity and microsite for entrants, including a ‘kitemark’ for the winners
- Cisco advertising and direct mail programme to drive entries
- A 20-page Cisco-sponsored in-bound supplement in Real Business
- Commissioned piece of research into current SME business trends
- Internal/external Cisco customer newsletters announcing Customer Kings 2010
- Dedicated Twitter feed and creation of Business Heroes blog to drive online traffic back to cisco.com
- A high profile judging panel including Moneysupermarket entrepreneur, Simon Nixon, and Daily Mirror Business Editor, Tricia Phillips
- Dedicated Cisco.com UK Launch page including winners video and text case studies Throughout
Throughout the content development phase, Octopus managed all agency and supplier relationships,
ensuring that material echoed and conformed to wider Cisco campaigns and branding guidelines.
With the first phase of content creation complete, and 16 winners or ‘Customer Kings’ from all corners and sectors of the UK SME landscape chosen by the judging panel, we began to package all of the content into material that could be pitched to the wider UK media.
Timescales of the campaign
Although the content created during the campaign remains in use throughout the year, the bulk of the
campaign is conducted over a six month period.
October – Planning and negotiation of media partnership
November – Customer Kings competition opens for entries
December – Judging panel announced
January – Competition closes; Entries shortlisted to final 40; Judging panel meets to decide winners
February – Editorial copy created; SME research conducted
March – Winners announced; Media outreach launched
Results
To coincide with the launch of the supplement and marketing efforts, Octopus developed the Customer Kings Research Report 2010, the findings of in-depth research into the hopes and fears of 1,000 SMEs in the UK as they focus on customer engagement. This gave a hard-news edge to our story for broadcast, national and regional media outlets and gave us the ability to showcase our Customer Kings as examples of best practice.
All of the media content was packaged up for an embargoed launch on March 11th 2010, a date which also saw the Customer Kings edition of Real Business hit the shelves, the go-live of a major Cisco e-DM campaign announcing the project, a Cisco.com UK homepage takeover and supporting advertising in a range of print and online titles.
The campaign has been a major success for Cisco, with some standout points including:
- 68,000 views of the dedicated microsite alongside 768,300 views of the competition page and over 100 entries to the competition itself
- Supporting PR activity that expanded the campaign to more than 65 pieces of coverage in two weeks – including coverage in The Times, Daily Mirror, Management Today, Retail Week and mycustomer.com as well as broadcast media including BBC stations, Sky News and commercial radio
- Our newly created Customer Kings Twitter feed gained over 500 followers in a three-month period
- Integration with Cisco’s internal and external marketing teams – content has fed the SME marketing programme for months including having winners provide blog posts on the Cisco Business Heroes blog and two winners to be included in above the line advertising programmes
- The competition has fed our customer evidence pipeline from the top – we are now working with our winners to help them create better businesses with technology
- The creation of a SME focused IP that Cisco now owns and can choose to run year-on-year, vital to long-term awareness in this segment. From next year the campaign will be used to develop a fully fledged online SME community
- The supplement ran in 40k+ copies of the March edition with 1000 printed for use within Cisco marketing – moving Cisco into the heartland of British small business
- According to a Precise Media report, for Cisco’s Q3 FY10, David Critchley, Director of SME and spokesperson for Customer Kings was the most quoted spokesperson for Cisco in the UK
Client testimonial
“Because of the sheer number and diversity of SMEs in the UK, they can be a challenging audience for a global technology company like Cisco to gain relevancy with. As such, we wanted a campaign that delivered brand awareness within the space and also created an association with our products as providing genuine business value. Customer Kings has delivered this in spades, our internal team and Octopus have delivered a campaign that both champions and associates Cisco with some of the most innovative and successful companies in the UK. I am very proud of the campaign and am confident that it will continue to build on Cisco’s engagement with SMEs in the UK”, Phil Smith, ceo, Cisco UKI
