Executive summary
TalkTalk’s business arm was trading as Opal Telecoms, and doing OK.
But OK wasn’t OK. The company hatched an audacious plan to become as big as its residential big sister in three years. An obvious move was to leverage the TalkTalk brand more effectively, and a strategy to migrate to TalkTalk Business was drawn up.
To switch overnight was an option, but presented issues for customers and, crucially, the staff. Opal is a young company and was a result of mergers so more sudden change would have been met with cynicism by people yet to really find a clear brand to belong to.
They felt intimidated by their bigger rivals BT and in the shade of their sister company and were understandably lacking motivation at being just, OK. This was a frustrating situation for everybody as they held an ace yet to be played effectively. Namely their own brand new fibre optic network covering the UK – the TalkTalk network, which delivers the Internet with priority over residential users (something BT with its 100 year old copper cables struggles with) making the future business services everyone’s talking about (cloud, Internet calls) available now.
The marketing team and IAS devised a way to make the people, customers, prospects and competition believe that Opal was ready to take on the world and the mantle of the UK megabrand TalkTalk – a monumental brand, planning, contact and creative strategy that’s serving as one hell of a wake-up call to the industry’s telecoms giant ensues.
Marketing position before marketing Idea was developed
Business Telecoms is a tough market to get noticed in. Telecoms isn’t top of the agenda for the average business person. We just want our communications devices to work well so we can all do business without hanging around waiting to be connected with whatever it may be: a webpage, person, file-heavy email or download. In fact business telecoms is practically invisible to us.
We only notice it when things go wrong. That’s when we notice business telecoms. That’s when the products and crucially the services (ever been on hold for a painful amount of time?) come into focus. After a bad experience we might consider changing providers but then again changing providers represents a hassle businesses could do without. So more often than not we swallow our pride and drift back to the status quo. And because of that spectre of hassle that change brings we’re not even that bothered about price. OK, it might save us a few quid but the service and products won’t change because these telecoms providers are like utilities – they’re all the same right? So, invisible until you’re a problem. Pretty demoralising.
Not for the likes of BT. This situation and market attitude suits the biggest provider just nice. They want customers to forget who they are with and what the frustrations of the service are because more than likely you’re with them. But this status quo has been frustrating the hell out of Opal. You see Opal is not the same as BT. They have something no other provider has got; namely their own brand new fibre optic network covering the whole of the UK – the TalkTalk network. And a strong service ethic for businesses. So what can the next generation network do for the average business?
Without getting technical, it can deliver the Internet with priority over home users (something the legacy network provider with its old copper cables struggles with) and so make the future business services people are talking about, like the cloud, Internet hosted calls and flexible pay as you go bandwidth, available right now. The trouble Opal was having was that to explain all this you do have to get a bit technical. But when you’re the last thing on the market’s mind and they have no desire to change, anything remotely technical tends to remain invisible. So an amazing product and service that genuinely gives businesses an edge was going unnoticed.
By default and as a legacy of selling call rates in the traditional telecoms universe Opal’s marketing and sales strategy was effectively based on the one thing everyone understands, price. But as we mentioned this was not a key issue for businesses and never beats a value proposition in the long term.
No tactics were being planned and all marketing was ad-hoc from month to month with little ability to measure results. Traditional communications of trade press advertising, exhibitions, ‘invoice stuffers,’ PPC and a corporate website were status quo.
This was creating a demoralising situation for everyone and needed monumental reform if people, prospects and customers were going to believe that Opal were ready to take on BT and live up to the brand of TalkTalk Business.
Details of the new strategy
A giant leap in brand positioning
The brand migration strategy was to begin by introducing the TalkTalk Business logo beneath the Opal logo. This was going to set new expectations, so Opal worked hard to establish the point of difference the TalkTalk network delivers with a series of Brand positioning workshops that involved the hands on staff, marketing team and senior management.
The Brand Strategic proposition we arrived at was: Right Time Technology. This was an uncontested space that centred the organization on the three things we were missing. One: a sense of purpose and pride at being the people in the right place at the right time with the right network for business. Two: a value based non-interruptive sales force giving businesses what’s right for them as individual operations when they need it – encouraging value exploration by the sales and team. Three: A value based marketing approach that focused on the technology and the change it could make to people, now.
A giant leap in communications
When every business in the UK is a potential customer where does your marketing strategy start? Ideally you’d like to send them all a salesperson. And that’s exactly what we set out to do – a virtual salesperson. IAS’ web based contact strategy model enabled us to stay in touch with all our contacts to track and build relationships online.
We created websites capable of nurturing people along the purchase timeline and then get ‘actual salespeople’ involved at the right moments. Advertising, social media, direct marketing, digital marketing, PR, call centres, telesales agents and field sales are all integrated. Each channel has the objective of either generating a trackable brand interaction or a lead (online/telephone purchase). It was an ambitious undertaking but now the system is in place the payback is immediate to see. We believe this is the most sophisticated B2B communications programme in the UK and far ahead of our ‘above the line’ competition.
Communications planning is now a rigorous discipline and all proactive contact is planned in advance, leaving flexibility for reactive relationship management. This has taken us from ad-hoc offer based campaigns to a point of real strategic direction and focus on campaign efficiencies.
A giant leap in creativity
To get people to understand the technical superiority of the TalkTalk network when they don’t want to hear technical arguments was a challenge. To make the people and competition believe that Opal was ready to take on the world and the mantle of the UK megabrand TalkTalk added another challenge. In one fell swoop the Old Telecomms Giant did both. By highlighting the inadequacies of their current providers network and service we opened the door to show them the new way. And left BT and the Opal people in no doubt that we mean business.
A giant leap in results
New online sales funnel techniques and cart-abandonment processes improved conversions by a staggering 30 per cent.
A 65 per cent year-on-year increase in site traffic (190,000 unique visitors to 315,000).
Click thru rates at a high of 11.2 per cent.
Online web conversion up by 28 per cent.
Increased awareness by 15 per cent.
Increased inbound leads by 30 per cent.
Increased overall sales by 6 per cent.
Client Testimonial
‘When Craig Duxbury of IAS told me we should get one agency to plan all our activities, I was highly sceptical. We had never done it before. One year on I can’t see it being done any other way.’ Paul Higgins, head of marketing, TalkTalk Business.
