Creating a strategy and content to generate leads for Aruba’s AI-driven 360 network security solution.

Problem

Aruba had a well-established and well-deserved reputation as a leading network vendor among Enterprise customers, but its world-leading AI network security offer was not getting the attention or sales it deserved.

We needed to raise Aruba’s profile as a leading security framework provider and position the brand as the first choice for network security.

To establish relevance…

We needed to demonstrate empathy for the modern threat landscape and engage the Enterprise security buyer in how Aruba’s 360° Secure Fabric changes the game. We took a lead from conversations with sales and marketing personnel, combined with combing through various analyst reports and white papers to understand current industry trends.

Planning and strategy

We identified three challenges surrounding this brief. One – the threat landscape was being shaped by the dual forces of increasingly sophisticated attacks which are hard to detect and the proliferation of BYOD, IOT and Cloud which generate overwhelming numbers of false positives. Two – security professionals had a dilemma, needing to open up the network for mobility and digital transformation, yet at the same time protect against attacks. Three – there was fierce competition for the best analysts who can provide a more sophisticated threat response.

Many vendors can detect who and what is on the network. But Aruba goes further. Aruba 360 Secure Fabric has the ability to provide vital insight into what are those people and devices are doing.

This fills an important gap and we identified this as the opportunity for Aruba.

Developing the conversation

While other vendors talked about protecting the network from the outside, our content strategy focused on Aruba being part of the fabric of the network (people and devices) and providing strength from within.

From all this, we needed to distil Aruba’s unique offer into a proposition for the campaign that would resonate with our audience, which is…

Stay one step ahead of the attackers by having the one thing they don’t: Insider knowledge…

Creative, assets and tactics

To execute the proposition of ‘Insider knowledge’ effectively, it was decided that the creative work had to have confident headlines, showing an understanding and empathy with the problems faced by our audience. This meant content creation that used straightforward language in order to carry the idea that Aruba will make working together simple and straightforward. Visually, the campaign had to have striking, clean and uncluttered art direction. The consistent visual element in the creative work has to be representative of the sheer amount of ‘low and slow’ attacks that networks are open to. The ‘repetition’ visual achieved this.

Campaign deployment

The multi-touch integrated campaign structure is a three-tier campaign model, with each stage aligned to the customer journey – Awareness, Consideration and Interest.

Touch 1: Awareness

At the awareness level, Touch 1 ads were served to generate interest in 360° network security. These ads comprised a series of thought-leadership messages around the notion of intelligent security threat detection and might be deployed across a variety of channels depending on the objective of the campaign.

Touch 2: Retargeting ads

Again, acting at the awareness level, Touch 2 retargeting ads were designed to re-engage prospects who had interacted with a previous ad, landing page or content asset, but had failed to complete the desired CTA. Re-targeting ads featured more pain point or benefit-orientated messaging, and spoke more directly, for example using LinkedIn advertising.

Touch 3: Consideration

Touch 3 continued the seamless user journey, bringing users to a landing page. Using a combination of strategic messaging and content that identified the need of the user, this touch discussed a solution in order to steer the user to a CTA.

Touch 4: Interest

The purpose of touch 4 was to fulfil the interest of the user and engage them with a blend of business solution and product benefit messaging that moved the prospect towards a point of decision. It was up to the team who deployed the campaign to decide on the best way to do this – follow-up calls from Business Development Representatives (BDRs) or Sales, entry into an Eloqua/Marketo email nurture programme or the scheduling of a 1:1 meeting or workshop.

Results

Our global creative platform and content marketing strategy united local and regional campaigns and thought leadership activity to build an active and engaged pipeline of leads.