The Problem
Logicalis had a trust problem. It was spending excessive amounts of time and money on lead and demand generation activity that was resonating with IT and Line of Business (LOB) decision-makers. However, it was struggling to earn the trust of the economic decision-makers that had final sign-off.
As the landscape of technology purchasing evolved, with increasingly diverse buying groups and a shift in ownership of technology decisions from LOB to CIOs, this hurdle led to slow conversion rates. Logicalis found itself selling to the LOB, who then had to convince their CIOs, resulting in delays and inefficiencies. Furthermore, this situation incurred a high cost for lead generation, as they were targeting the wrong decision-makers.
Strategy
As such, Champion developed a strategy to get Logicalis in front of its prospect on their terms and talk about them and their problems. Logicalis needed to engage CIOs who hadn’t yet heard of Logicalis. They needed to demand their attention and develop messaging and communications about them. The CIO needed to look at the content and think – “This is me”, “I wish it were me”, or “This could be me.”
The success of this campaign would be measured in three ways:
- Increased engagement from CIOs
- Feedback from the sales teams that the campaign content had allowed them to open, nurture or close conversations with the target audience.
- Generating 50 pieces of tier 1 media coverage specifically targeting publications CIOs read and engaged with to increase awareness of Logicalis.
Method
After interviewing key stakeholders from within Logicalis, its customers and the wider industry, it became evident the biggest barrier to reaching this target audience was that Logicalis’ existing content and communications was targeted specially at the technical user-buyer rather than the economic buyer. As such, we needed to change this and elevate the conversation to the economic buyer.
To do this, we need to understand their challenges and pain points. Working with the teams, as well as external journalists and analysts, we identified four common themes:
- The expectations of CIOs have never been higher.
- Sustainability was top of the CIO agenda.
- The need to drive innovation was keeping CIOs up at night.
- CIOs had to spend much time selling ideas to the board.
So, we put these hypothesised theories to the test. We went straight to the source and developed a data-driven campaign that questioned 1000 CIOs from around the globe to understand from their perspective what challenges were keeping them up at night.
Creativity
Using the data points from the survey, we created the ‘2023 CIO Survey – The Meteoric Rise of the CIO’ news narrative, highlighting the challenges, barriers and opportunities CIOs face when navigating their organisations towards a digital-first future. We used this narrative as a trojan horse to carry Logicalis messaging that it is on the side of the CIO and can help them to steer their organisations to success.
When creating the content for this campaign, we had to try something new. Targeting a different audience meant we needed to speak a different language. We had to focus on the business outcomes CIOs had told us they wanted to achieve and how to overcome the challenges they were most concerned about.
Using this data, we created a content-centred campaign that fed new insights into the market over a three-month period. The campaign comprised various assets, including a press release, infographics, a gated report, media relations, and social media activity.
We issued a press release for the campaign launch that we pitched to earned media in international and national business, IT, trade, and vertical media. We also published the content across Logicalis’ social media, synchronising with the earned media campaign.
Outcomes
In terms of specific numbers, the campaign resulted in the following:
- 80+ pieces of editorial coverage were achieved, reaching the desired target audience of decision-makers.
- Coverage in over 25 CIO-focused publications.
- 400 Report downloads globally by technology leaders and equivalent.
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