With a reimagined strategy and sticky content to reach straight into the work-from-home offices of executive and technical decision-makers across the country in a nationwide lockdown, the ‘Backup. Move forward’ campaign targeted 19 enterprise accounts through a seven-touchpoint programme that drew its strength from a highly-personalised set of content and comms, and constant strategic re-evaluation of the market.
Strategy – broader business issues the company is facing
Backup left in the past
- The majority of businesses worldwide are in some stage of digital transformation, whether moving fully to the cloud or modernising IT practices.
- However, data backup is being left behind in legacy systems at enterprise-level organisations, as the vast amount of complex data within these large companies is difficult to move, protect and to replicate.
Battling a pandemic with innovation
- Alongside these pre-existing factors, from March onwards Covid-19 forced Veeam’s traditional approaches to change tack.
- Physical events and direct mails were no longer options, leaving sales with a real loss of customer engagement. Innovative nurturing tactics were required, with unique content formats and a new mix of channels.
Objectives of the campaign
- Position Veeam as the leader in enterprise backup solutions that deliver Cloud Data Management™.
- Pilot the ABM strategy, messaging and tactics before rolling out globally.
- Penetrate a set of key target accounts, decrease deal close time and increase average order value.
The target audience
Account identification and research
Veeam’s sales team had originally collated 40 enterprise accounts they felt were primed to target, and Digital Radish conducted one-on-one interviews with the sales team to dig deep into each account. Digital Radish layered this personal account insight with technographic and intent data, alongside extensive desktop research and market analysis, choosing 20 final accounts and gathering a host of knowledge to form the foundations of the campaign.
However, this all took place in February. So, in the middle of a pandemic, Digital Radish undertook a new analysis of all accounts, reaching a renewed list of 19 accounts ripe to target in the new climate.
The chosen accounts were spread across several verticals, but had one thing in common: their legacy backup was causing problems, and they needed a solution fast.
Contact identification
Once the accounts were finalised, two target personas were identified most likely to engage through analysis of prior comms and industry social listening.
Contacts on sales’ most-wanted lists were then combined with technographic and intent data to finally key contacts, validated by manual LinkedIn searches to identify the most actively-engaged individuals.
Media, channels or techniques used
Phase 1: A personal touch
260 contacts were personality-profiled through Crystal Knows, crafting an individual comms plan for every IT professional based on their ideal conversation style. Initial outreach was sent through the 11 LinkedIn profiles of Veeam’s sales team, consisting of a personal note accompanied by a unique video per contact, shot by the sales member to introduce themselves as a friendly face for everything data backup.
Phase 2: The real deal
Digital Radish and Veeam hit hard with the next touchpoint, providing a detailed report examining each account’s backup situation with hyper-personalised top and tail sections, complimenting their successes while highlighting improvements that could still be made. Sent on LinkedIn and InMail and based on a survey that gathered the opinions of 1500 enterprise professionals, this was a one-of-a-kind read for the audience.
Phase 3: From all angles
With direct mail still out the game, an integrated digital campaign (email and LinkedIn) was devised that directed to a personalised landing page per account. Contacts were pulled in with promises of personal lockdown videos, blogs and guides that explained how Veeam could integrate with their current suppliers, or that laid out specific case studies applicable to their industry – or even offered tools to assess their data management performance in detail.
Phase 4: Sign on the line
The campaign is still underway, with current activity including personal calls from sales, follow-ups to unique webinars or online events, and telemarketing planned for future weeks too.
A constant phase: Partnership
An integral part of the campaign has undoubtedly been the close partnership between sales and marketing. The teams have been in contact daily with updates from both sides flowing. Scheduled activity includes:
- Live dashboard for sales to access, detailing touchpoint engagements per contact with account summaries too.
- Weekly marketing reports for sales, updating on KPIs and highlights.
- Sales updates on any activity within the accounts outside scheduled ABM activity.
- Constant marketing activity within sales’ personal LinkedIn accounts.
- Immediate notifications for sales of any inbound responses within their accounts.
- Monthly presentations on campaign progress with Q&A session included.
Timescales of the campaign
This was a six-month programme.
Results
This programme exceeded targets and is now being rolled out globally. It achieved:
- 100% account engagement.
- 24% response rate.
- 998.9% ROI.
"The campaign’s already surpassed our 2020 targets, with significantly higher engagement levels than expected and watertight sales and marketing alignment."
