Relaunching Snow’s brand to key IT decision-makers using relevance, rigour and retargeting.

Problem

Snow tasked us with delivering a focused demand-generation campaign, including the development of a proposition, messaging framework and campaign structure. The campaign was to run on LinkedIn, with a supporting Facebook retargeting strategy.

Snow was already running a variety of organic and paid digital media, content and landing pages.

However, whilst these activities had objectives, they lacked a cohesive strategy and the key performance indicators required to continually test, learn and optimize campaign performance.

Planning, creative & strategy

Audience Insights

To be effective, our channel strategy, content and media assets had to be informed by the motives and behaviours of our identified target personas: Directors of IT, CFOs, CIOs, SAM Managers and Procurement Managers. This required audience research. Geographies for our target personas were Europe, Americas and Asia.

Market dynamics

Looking at the market, we could see that workforce transformation was exerting its influence, with end users and customers demanding new capabilities, fast.

Technology proliferation meant new technologies were easily accessible and this led to end users taking IT procurement into their own hands. Individual IT users were installing software and SaaS applications that were invisible to the wider organization, each with their own individual subscription fees.

This was placing increasing pressure on IT decisions makers to adopt new technologies that enabled new capabilities, whilst balancing that with the need to meet security and compliance standards, guarantee system integration and availability, and maintain control of IT budgets.

For a long time this ballooning of IT infrastructure had gone without acknowledgement, but for many organisations it had now reached a tipping point, with the sheer volume of additional IT services having the potential to become financially crippling if not addressed. However, IT Managers had a problem — a huge lack of visibility into their bloating of IT infrastructure.

Messaging

The age of acceleration had left most organisations with a discovery shortfall. They had limited visibility of usage patterns and were unable to identify new adoption trends. IT desperately needed visibility of all of their software, hardware, SaaS and IaaS.

Many had point solutions; SAMs, HAM, CMPs, and application-specific utilities; SAP, Oracle, etc, but these systems were being purchased and used in a fragmented and siloed manner.

All this placed limitations on the ability of the organisation to leverage data as a strategic asset and make smart, informed decisions that delivered business value. This lack of visibility was impacting their ability to:

In conclusion, organisations needed to discover, normalise and leverage IT spend and usage data across the organisation and deliver insights to the end user in a format that is useful to them.

But this meant getting sight of what they couldn’t see.

This was the opportunity for Snow.

At this level, we were able to position the value of Snow around three key messages: analyse spend and useage patterns, optimise spend to drive maximum returns, and mitigate risk and ensure regulatory compliance. These, in turn, were tied to key business benefits; greater organisational visibiliy, reduced IT budgets, smarter decision making, to achieve a competitive edge.

We distilled our insight into a messaging framework and arrived at a go-to-market proposition:

Software tamed. Performance unleashed.

We also explored how this campaign idea could extend to Snow’s product messaging, aligning key technical pain points with specific product features. This ensured we had a complete set of messaging to span the full customer decision making cycle, from problem awareness to solution understanding.

Campaign activation & execution

The first phase of this particular campaign focused on targeting key IT decision makers via LinkedIn, including the Director of IT, CFO, CIO, SAM manager and procurement manager.

We proposed a best-practice framework for the delivery of the campaign, which enabled us to test the effectiveness of content-based ads, e.g. using a white paper as a lead magnet, pain point ads around our key messaging and product-specific ads. We also proposed a number of through-the-funnel metrics to track the performance of the campaign.

Creative Execution

Creative built on the construction of the lead positioning line – software tamed, performance unleashed – developing it to work for pain point, content and product ads.

Conclusion

The lead generation strategy, creative, and resulting campaign was well received internally at Snow.

To assist Snow with the internal campaign roll-out and implementation, we were asked to create a social best practice guide to steer the execution and optimisation of the campaign. This campaign playbook helped each of the local markets execute the campaign at a local level with their respective agencies. Further work resulting from the success of this campaign also included the creation of an Event in a Box for the Snow Unleashed Stockholm and Miami 2019 events, which included stage set design, pull-up banners, attendee packs and posters.