Creating and delivering a digital marketing campaign focused on enabling business resilience post COVID-19

Aruba is a global networking technology company with a ‘customer first, customer last’ focus. In the initial aftermath of COVID-19, Aruba had worked closely with customers to help them achieve business continuity. But as the new normal was established, Aruba could see that businesses were facing a new challenge. They needed to keep moving with their strategic IT projects, but at the same time, reduced cash flow meant many lacked the available capital to undertake these initiatives.

Challenge

Aruba and HPE Financial Services came together to offer four Flexible Finance options to help businesses get their IT plans back on track and move forward. The purpose of the campaign was to communicate the financial offer to senior IT decision-makers and IT generalists in mid-enterprise businesses, across rostered and unrostered accounts.

Campaign KPIs:

•  1% response from rostered (target) accounts
•  0.5% response from unrostered accounts
•  Acquire new contacts for the marketing database

bbd was tasked with taking this online campaign to market and had to turn around the whole project in four weeks.The campaign needed to be translated across Europe. We also needed to support the sales team to sell the Flexible Finance options.

The two primary objectives of the campaign were:

Education – to tell potential customers about Aruba’s Flexible Finance offering as a way to initiate or continue strategic projects in short-mid-term.

Awareness – to raise general awareness of Flexible Finance amongst customers and partners as a viable and attractive alternative for project funding, in order to enable future sales conversations.

Our challenge was to help Aruba achieve relevance with their financial services offering by articulating it in a way that addressed the immediate, short-term pain points of IT and C-suite decision-makers, but positioned the benefits of Flexible Finance with longevity.

Approach

We got the project underway with a series of calls with the client and senior stakeholders to understand the business challenge, the context for the campaign, and key considerations for the go-to-market creative and strategy. From this, we produced the campaign brief to capture all pertinent points of a complex brief in a dynamic market, as well as sensitivities around the implications of COVID-19.

With such a tight deadline, we worked rapidly, running a short, focused planning and creative sprint in parallel. Work focused on ideating and iterating quickly, with work being shared back and forth with Aruba in the early stages to make sure we hit the mark.

We developed a clear, concise proposition that articulated Flexible Finance offering:

‘Find your way forward with Aruba and HPE Financial Services’

Solution

The campaign creative needed to be eye-catching enough to add life to what was essentially a financial product.

Our messaging needed to be sensitive to the gravity of the current COVID-19 situation, but also express a feeling of grounded optimism. It had to be industry and segment agnostic, spanning a range of sectors including Healthcare, Education, Retail and Workplaces. And it needed to explain the benefits in easy-to-understand language (which would also need to be translated for deployment across EMEA).

And when we started this project, Aruba had only just released a brand new visual identity, so we also had to nail this new look and feel within a tight timescale.

Hard-working creative

Our execution was entirely driven by the insight of the reality facing our audience – that in order to avoid standing still in a volatile business climate, they needed the flexibility to do several things, not just one.

To encapsulate this insight visually, we used the digital and online vernacular that we’re all familiar with – form fields and dropdown menus. This enabled us to concentrate on delivering our fairly complex messaging in a visually simple but totally appropriate way.

We were able to show that Aruba understood the difficult choices that customers were facing, and then offer a positive answer – with Aruba and HPE Financial Services being the enabler.

The visual ‘UI’ device also put the customer’s experience at the heart of the route, positioning them as the person asking the question and effectively making them the headline writer – perfect for Aruba’s ‘customer first, customer last’ philosophy. The visual simplicity of the dropdown menus helps turn the emotive decision-making process into a compelling rational metaphor for reaching an easy resolution. It’s easy to find a way forwards.

Outcome

We outlined a digital marketing campaign framework. The go-to-market strategy included paid social for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, plus content syndication channels, including TechTarget and EIMS, to drive traffic to a dedicated Eloqua landing page. Here, prospects could access relevant pieces of content and had the option of opting into a sales call and email.Those that signed up were then entered into a dedicated email nurture sequence which provided more information on the 4 pillars of the Flexible Finance offering.

To deliver the campaign we then produced a range of top-of-funnel content assets including: video, infographic and landing page, in the chosen creative style.

The ambition of the campaign is to position the combination of Aruba and HPE Financial Services as an enabler both now and in the future. Today, Flexible Finance is a choice that’s helping customers find solutions to new problems, giving them agility and connectivity immediately as they settle into the new normal. At the same time, it’s providing the flexibility to accelerate innovation when that time comes.