Using audience insights to build a brand and generate leads

Challenge

With next to no previous brand awareness activity and competitors with strong historical brand presence, CDNetworks needed a UK PR partner that it could trust with:

1. Creating a set of succinct, commercially-focused and robust messages for each of its target audiences.
2. Building dedicated content for these audiences, reflecting the messages and suitable for a wide variety of marcomms channels.
3. Converting the heightened brand awareness into leads

With such impact-focused objectives, success would depend on a close understanding of CDNetworks’ specific target audience, beyond the basic “IT decision maker” characterisation.

Solution

CCGroup used its Enterprise Technology Buyers Catalyst, ‘How modern enterprises buy technology’ to determine how best to reach each of CDNetworks’ specific audiences. The priorities were revealed to be:

• Secure top rankings for key Google search terms
• Improve industry analysts’ understanding of CDNetworks
• Drive media coverage in horizontal and vertical UK media
• Create insight-driven content marketing campaigns that supported CDNetworks’ differentiators and portfolio

The CCGroup team started the engagement with a messaging workshop, from which a series of thought leadership stances and differentiators were drawn for each audience to support an ongoing programme of media and analyst relations. The team also completed an audit of target search terms and drafted optimised web copy for the new website’s key pages, and put in place a blog programme.

Finally, CCGroup designed a series of insight-driven content marketing campaigns that addressed the specific concerns of each audience. These were launched in the UK and across the DACH region through CCGroup’s partner agency.

The first campaign targeted multi-national website owners. CCGroup took CDNetworks’ data on European websites’ performance in China and compared this to research data of Chinese online users’ expectations of performance. This revealed a dangerous shortfall in European websites’ performance and highlighted the ramifications on those brands’ reputations.

A subsequent campaign targeted IT departments and security leads. Using market research data, CCGroup discovered widespread DDoS complacency amongst CISOs – while they were confident in their DDoS resilience, this was undermined by the volume of DDoS attacks they admitted they hadn’t been able to defend against.