With the rise of digital marketing, brands now have more data points on their customers than ever before. It’s a young industry moving at a lightning pace as companies continue to find unique ways of interacting and engaging with their clientele directly.
We caught up with four marketing leaders from emerging Austin tech companies to learn how they measure success and stand out in an ocean of competition.
Planview’s CMO Bryan Urioste has been in the tech marketing biz for over 15 years. To date, one of the most memorable campaigns he’s been a part of is Planview’s Projectplace offering. Urioste said they debuted their “Get sh*t done” campaign at SXSW through guerrilla marketing tactics, leaning heavily on social media and in-person messaging. Following the positive reactions during the festival, the team then took the campaign online, where it’s still running.
What makes the creative process behind your digital marketing campaigns unique?
It all starts with the people and a truly open and collaborative culture. Our campaign ideation includes a broad range of disciplines and perspectives that involve digital marketers, product domain experts, those with an intuitive understanding of our customers and of course, a few folks that are simply smart and crafty who push our thinking.
Once we understand the story, our ideation runs a bit wild on how to bring it to life. We like to talk in terms of BIG Ideas, execution concepts that are emotive and create a platform for the campaign. If at least one of the ideas doesn’t make someone in the room squirm in their seat, we haven’t pushed our thinking far enough. Great ideas are often born from concepts that are big and impractical.
Bringing any digital marketing campaign to life also requires discipline. We are firm believers in measurement and testing. Just because an idea is creative, doesn’t mean you can’t (and shouldn’t) A/B test the idea. The execution of a campaign is always iterative, so we consider that in our process.
The unsung hero of any digital marketing campaign at Planview is the tool that facilitates the entire process. To combat the challenges of having many steps, virtual participants, ideas, documents, conversations and a high sense of urgency, we rely heavily on our own collaborative work management solution, Projectplace. Quite simply, our campaign roadmap, campaign planning and everyday execution wouldn’t happen without it. It’s our (not-so) secret weapon.
How do you measure its efficacy?
Ultimately, new bookings are the goal line we measure against. There are many interim milestones of progress and indications that a campaign has been effective, but we save our touchdown dance for winning the trust of a customer to commit to our services. Not every campaign serves as a direct line to bookings so we define those performance measurements and clearly state goals as part of the planning process.
What's one of your favorite digital marketing campaigns you've been a part of?
As I see it, a great campaign is one that is truly memorable, solidifies your story in the mind of your audience and is effective at furthering the interest and intent that buyers have in your product or solution. One campaign that I have really enjoyed seeing come to life is actually in the market right now and continuing to expand its footprint.
The simple premise of this campaign is to address people we call “accidental project managers” who have a job to do but the complexity of their work requires them to take on project management responsibilities. These are the folks who don’t have project management anywhere in their title or on LinkedIn, but they absolutely run projects as part of their daily responsibilities.
Our campaign revolves around the notion of these folks that just want to “Get sh!t done”. It’s a unique campaign for Planview because it is a few notches more irreverent than our normal voice, but has created quite a bit of interest. Frankly, people get it because it’s real.
While it’s pretty standard for marketing teams to monitor data on a weekly and monthly basis, the Lifesize team, led by CMO Tiffany O’Brien Nels, gets hourly and daily basis updates in order to ensure they meet their goals and deploy real-time adjustments as needed. In addition to a Sauron-like eye on the data, O’Brien Nels said the team is also in constant communication with sales to stay on top of brand perceptions and customer feedback.
What makes the creative process behind your digital marketing campaigns unique?
I am a big believer in a wholly-connected business and all teams working together to accomplish goals. The way we tackle the creative process behind our digital marketing campaigns is a great example of this, and what I would call unique.
To create fresh and relevant content, we include multiple departments, beyond the marketing team, in the creative planning process – engineering, IT, sales, product development, customer service, etc. Having our team touch base regularly and meaningfully connect with those on the front line as well as those in the back office ensures our campaigns include smart and correct messaging for our IT Pro audience. It also reflects a core aspect of our culture here, ‘Lead with Customer Obsession.’ Each of these groups offers important, and varying, insights into our core audience allowing us to target strong messaging, compelling content and creative, and ultimately set the first impression for engaging with our brand.
How do you measure efficacy?
Two of Lifesize’s core values are ‘Lead with Customer Obsession’ and ‘Make Every Day Matter.’ Every campaign focuses on creating a strong first impression (specifically that we understand our audience, their needs and personalities better than anyone else in our market), “feeding sales” the best opportunities, and supporting the customer lifecycle to impact the bottom line.
What's one of your favorite digital marketing campaigns you've been a part of?
Two years ago, we began the hard work of repositioning the Lifesize brand based on a change in our approach to solving the challenge of enterprise collaboration. As part of that transition, we used data to help us understand who really drove the purchasing decision. We had assumed it was the business leader driving, but given the uniqueness of our offering (combining hardware and a SaaS application), it was – in fact – the IT professional.
So, while our communication focused on the business benefits of collaboration, we had to quickly identify the unique needs of that audience to position us as the best partner to make them a hero. We have recently created a great, integrated campaign focused on “total cost of ownership” for IT.
Based on data from surveys, feedback from sales, and our insights into the persona, we believe this will strike a chord – they manage and pay for disparate systems for a number of collaboration functions that we can offer through a single platform. In a number of cases, they do not even know how much they are spending across these services. The top of funnel elements through to the sales execution reinforces that all along the journey our first objective is to make the lives of IT pros easier through an experience and product that puts them in the position to be the hero.
SpareFoot hit the scene in 2009, offering an online marketplace for consumers to locate and reserve storage options. Billick said having too many people involved in a campaign’s creation can actually slow the process down and dilute the intended message. By being an agile startup, he said SpareFoot’s team is able to move quickly and keep its essence.
What makes the creative process behind your digital marketing campaigns unique?
Two main things: a talented team and a nimble, startup mentality. The best marketing campaigns are ones that connect to the core target, provide clear value to those consumers, and tell a story with impact. Too often, I've seen situations where lots of team members, agencies, executives, etc. all weighing in over many months tend to water down the amazing spark that happened at the beginning.
In our case, we have a fast-moving team that starts with connecting our brand with our consumer's needs in real, engaging ways...and then runs with it. As a young, disruptive brand, we have to take swings to resonate to today's consumer, especially when we don't have the budget of massive brands out there.
How do you measure its efficacy?
Depending on the objective of the specific mediums or creatives, we look at a variety of core metrics: awareness lift, return on ad spend (ROAS), incremental response lift, click through rates, view rates and conversions. A successful campaign leads to the primary business outcome it addresses, and then ultimately to the growth of our business.
For example, some of what we're doing with brand campaigns on Facebook, YouTube and with Out of Home is specifically to drive lifts in awareness metrics. In other campaigns that are closer to a consumer's path to rent storage, we want to ensure the costs are optimized for the maximum, most profitable audience acquisition. But all of this must lead to new ways to grow. If a campaign doesn't lead to our business growing, then we stop it quickly and find another opportunity.
What's one of your favorite digital marketing campaigns you've been a part of?
A couple of campaigns come to mind. I'm incredibly excited about the campaign that we're running currently at SpareFoot. Our mission is to help people keep the things that matter. People have an emotional connection to their stuff, and our job is to help them find the best deals on self-storage. So what we've developed is a campaign about "Finding Your Stuff a Home." Stuff itself can come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and we've developed “Stuff” as a character with a ton of unique extensions going forward. We've had a lot of success so far across many digital media and offline channels, all the way through to the site experience.
Another memorable campaign that I was a part of was at Virgin America in the early days of the airline's existence. The brand strategy there was to be provocative and innovative, and one of the best campaigns we did was an integrated marketing campaign with YouTube influencers (Tay Zonday and iJustine to name a few if you're curious) that tied with the fact that we were the first airline to offer fleetwide WiFi. We partnered with YouTube and Google and generated massive distribution, including broadcasting directly from a plane during YouTube Live, that turned into a clear and shareable story connecting our value to consumers. It definitely wasn't something that American Airlines would try to pull off!
Abila’s team earned special recognition this year when they won a Silver Stevie® Award in the Branded Content Campaign of the Year category in the 15th Annual American Business Awards. Andy Prince, senior director of corporate communications for Abila, spilled the deets on what makes their approach successful.
What makes the creative process behind your digital marketing campaigns unique?
As cliché as it may sound, our digital campaigns are truly collaborative across departments and comprehensive across the marketing funnel. Our campaigns are typically not isolated to just social media or public relations or demand generation, for example. We coordinate our campaigns so each different marketing function plays some key role in telling the story.
But, we also create content and assets that support sales enablement. In other words, we take the top-of-the-funnel thought leadership and connect it back to our products and services to help the sales organization speak to campaigns that generate true excitement and interest. It truly is an integrated approach.
How do you measure its efficacy?
What's one of your favorite digital marketing campaigns you've been a part of?
We do comprehensive research studies for the markets we serve. The research studies have a shelf life of about 18 months and generate a tremendous amount of content for us – from blog posts to webinars to press interviews, etc.
Most recently, we won a Stevie Award for our Membership Engagement Study. It was special for a couple of reasons – the response from the market was tremendous and even shifted some of the dialogue around key trends in the association market. More importantly, for me, the Stevie Award was special because it showcased the power of the collective effort of the team.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity. Images provided by participating companies and social media.
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