June 28, 2017

Vodafone

A global, integrated creative marketing campaign to relaunch Vodafone Cloud and Hosting.

The Brief

Vodafone approached Octopus Group having heard about their unique Brand To Sales™ methodology. They were interested in how Octopus Group could help them to relaunch their cloud and hosting offering, grow awareness, improve their position in the competitive cloud market, and deliver high quality sales leads. Octopus Group devised a wide-ranging and ambitious project, involving many of their services. This included research, messaging, creative, digital, lead generation and campaign planning. The result was a global integrated marketing and advertising campaign, based on the central message: ‘There’s a cloud that can…’

The Method

Services Used 
Campaign planning, content, design, digital, and messaging.         

Approach                                                                                      
The first step was to carry out a qualitative research project that looked at enterprise cloud buyers, the factors that accelerated their buying decisions and their opinions on having IT infrastructure delivered and managed by a third party. The research revealed a growing market, but a market that had concerns around security. Also revealed was a desire to be seen as a ‘smart’ business that could take advantage of innovations such as the Internet of Things. This research formed the basis of Vodafone Cloud and Hostings’ new messaging and positioning, and the creative approaches Octopus Group would develop.

Creative Development
Bringing together the design, content, research and brand engagement teams, Octopus Group developed a series of platforms. One of these eventually became the creative for their advertising campaign, and informed all of their content. To ensure they arrived at the right creative platform, their research team at Loudhouse carried out a quantitative research piece amongst senior technology buyers – asking them which of a series of adverts spoke to them, and why.

Thought Leadership Content
Octopus Group developed a series of nine thought leadership content pieces. These were based on the core campaign themes of safe, smart and simple, and drew on use cases to link to their hero video and advertising creative. Their copy team interviewed key Vodafone spokespeople, and used that insight to write three eBooks, three customer stories and three practical guides. They then worked with their design and brand teams to ensure the right pictorial and visual approach. This content was supplemented by EDMs, blogs and social activity.
 

The Results

Octopus Group achieved 15.8m ad impressions, and a 322 per cent increase in web visits year on year. There were also 347 content downloads following the campaign, 1.7 million LinkedIn impressions, 32 webinar registrations, and 100 visitors to the internal campaign microsite.