How Vodafone turned ‘lost phone’ excuses into a winning campaign

Summary

In 2017, Vodafone launched its flagship mobility product, Device Lifecycle Management. The service outsources the procurement, management and replacement of enterprise mobile devices. The brief was clear – create awareness at the global level and ultimately, arm the sales teams with a high quantity of relevant, warm leads that had a high chance of converting.

This global campaign was created from the ground up to ensure it would meet multiple objectives spanning the entire purchase funnel. Creatively, humour was at the heart of the campaign. Excuses that IT professionals hear for lost or damaged devices are often treated with irreverence. This insight led us to the ‘Excuses, Excuses’ concept, where we highlighted the far-fetched excuses employees use in their defence. The campaign was a huge success, far exceeding all metrics, but particularly pleasing to the sales teams was the amount of relevant leads delivered for follow-up.

About  

Vodafone Global Enterprise (VGE) is the division of Vodafone Group that serves 1,400 of the world’s largest multinationals. Its core offering is connectivity, with fixed, mobile and internet connections forming the other main products and services within the portfolio. Customer experience and collaboration solutions, software defined networking and cloud services complete the VGE enterprise communications offering.

Strategy

The VGE mobility portfolio is suffering from decreasing margins. DLM was created to help overcome this problem, combining an Opex payment model with a tailored service. Given the pressure marketing was under to deliver leads and pipeline, the first challenge was awareness. If no one knew about the product, no one would buy it. The strategy was simple – build a global, multichannel digital campaign supported with high value and relevant content that resonates with the audience right throughout the decision-making process.

Objectives of the campaign

The client brief and objectives for this global campaign were clear:

  • Increase awareness of the DLM offering
  • Deliver marketing generated leads
  • Deliver marketing generated pipeline.

The campaign aimed to address the client’s objectives, first by making them ‘SMART’, with a measurement framework to ensure the KPIs were achieved. Ogilvy UK knew to deliver on the KPIs it would need a campaign designed from the ground up with strategy, tactics and content specific to delivering effectiveness throughout the sales funnel:

KPIs: awareness

  • 4.5 million impressions
  • 72,500 engagements
  • 15,300 clicks.

KPIs: consideration

  • 586 content downloads
  • 586 marketing-generated leads.

KPIs: conversion

  • 119 net new contacts (sale accepted leads)
  • Financial information confidential.

The target audience

The campaign targeted four key personas, including specialist mobility professionals, IT decision-makers, and finance/procurement professionals.

Our challenge was to appeal to three clear segments with differing goals and challenges. It was vital that we identified and addressed varying levels of influence at each stage of the buying process using content and messaging sequentially delivered to our segments with clear and concise CTAs.

Media, channels or techniques used

The campaign was a multichannel digital campaign, which also harnessed Vodafone’s in-house telemarketing team. It centred around content designed to provide value to each target segment at key junctures throughout the purchase journey. Vodafone has a finite list of customer accounts, so to achieve the objective of increasing share of wallet, Ogilvy could only use media and tactics that would guarantee it hit target personas within each account. With no customer-facing content in existence, we had to create the following assets to cover the entire purchase funnel.

Awareness

  • Blog series (aimed at each target persona)
  • Video series drawing from our ‘Excuses, Excuses’ concept – showcasing humorous excuses IT professionals hear every day
  • Infographic (illustrating the challenges and opportunities associated with enterprise mobility).

Consideration

  • ‘Building the case for mobile device management’ strategy guide
  • ‘Why Vodafone’ for managed mobility whitepaper
  • ‘How it works’ visual guide purchase
  • Product factsheet
  • Total cost of ownership tool, channel strategy and tactics were sequentially structured.

The audience could also revisit the campaign through the campaign Eloqua hub. The campaign was first launched with awareness messages, video content and blog posts using LinkedIn sponsored content formats.

Supporting this were HTML5 banners IP-targeted at customer accounts across 2,000 specialist technology websites and an activation email sequence sent to the existing CRM database. Once awareness and engagement had been achieved, additional formats including cost-per-lead solus emails promoted thought leadership content through the Spiceworks platform and lead gen forms on the LinkedIn platform. LinkedIn InMails supported by sponsored content were launched, pushing the bottom-of funnel thought leadership and total cost of ownership tools.

All activity was underpinned by digital techniques designed to maximise engagement and harness existing client-owned platforms.

Conversion pixels on the campaign landing page allowed conversion tracking through to the CRM system, while Facebook and LinkedIn remarketing pixels captured users already engaged with the campaign to retarget and serve consideration/purchase content to the audience. The campaign’s retargeting element used Facebook Canvas – a new disruptive format for Vodafone rarely used in the B2B space.

This provided excellent results, garnering over 50,000 engagements. All leads captured were added to an automated CRM nurture email sequence, featuring product content and the total cost of ownership tool. Leads were then validated and engaged through Vodafone’s telemarketing team.

Timescales of the campaign

  • Research, planning, messaging and creative concept development: 14.07.17-11.08.17
  • Content and asset development: 11.08.17-15.09.17
  • Campaign go-live (media, CRM activation): 15.08.17
  • Remarketing sequence initiated: 10.12.17
  • Media finished: 8.01.18
  • Reporting: 21.01.18​

“[Our target audience] has never been better equipped by marketing to start new conversations and build pipeline” 

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