The Customer
From ticketing and helpdesk software, to IT Service Management solutions, ITIL adoption and SaaS, Sunrise has been a key contributor to the development of the Service Desk industry.
Sunrise was established in 1994, and prides itself on being at the forefront of helping organisations to deliver services and manage business processes. In excess of 1,000 customers of every type and size have purchased Sunrise products, ranging from enterprise scale Service Management projects through to straightforward Service Desk implementations. The expertise and knowledge gained from working with such diverse clients, in both public sector ITSM and Commerce, contributes to their product development and future customer implementations.
Sunrise have been true innovators, being one of the first companies globally to bring to market a 100% browser-based application for this sector.
Overview
Sunrise Software approached Surefoot Communications in February 2020 to help them develop creative campaign ideas for lead generation. Traditionally Sunrise Software had relied on direct sales, event attendance and limited direct mail to feed their sales pipeline. Their target market is relatively small, targeting Service Directors & IT Service managers at 500+ employee UK Headquarter companies as well as the public sector.
Ann James, Sunrise Software Marketing Director asked ‘My biggest question is what do B2B Managers react to now? I’m assuming the digital path is the one to take over traditional campaign media but how to make that stick?’
Sunrise Software knew they were competing with some large competitors on the same platforms and wanted to find a way to break the mould.
Approach
Surefoot’s approach to Sunrise’s conundrum was to initially step back from the issue of the marketing deliverables and focus on the solutions that Sunrise deliver not only to the target market decision makers but also the end users. Sunrise had found that their target market were traditionally very hard to engage and the market was saturated with a very ‘technical deliverables’ or ‘cost-based’ approach to sales.
During our initial consultation meetings with Sunrise Marketing Director Ann James it became clear that they were open to a new creative approach to their lead generation. The initial campaign feedback from Surefoot was therefore focussed primarily on user experience rather than product development, attacking the pain points that ultimately become the responsibility of the IT Service Manager. The requirement from Sunrise was to make the approach simple to understand, easy to digest and direct enough to raise questions. This was to be a multi-channel multi-media campaign involving various video scenario’s with a humorous edge to ‘stop the scroll’.
Shortly after initial script ideas were submitted the country went into the first Covid-19 lockdown, extinguishing any hopes of creating bespoke video for the Campaign delivery. Very quickly Surefoot were able to re-assess the planned delivery, switching the solution to involve static imagery and animation to still achieve the deliverables. With video being the fastest growing sales medium over the last 5 years it was felt that this approach was still the most valid. Little could we have anticipated how much time the average worker would spend online and viewing social media channels over the coming months.
We initially built the campaign materials in two parts, allowing us to split the advert and animation elements for various platforms. The first part was to create 30-second video adverts to feature on social media platforms, on the Sunrise website and across online media channels. The second was to create user friendly animations to show the Sunrise Software processes that support the advert scenarios. The deliverables of the campaign focussed on five different, instantly identifiable issues that the target market could relate to. These were:
1. New Starter onboarding
2. Lost work phone reporting, security management and replacement
3. Crisis Management
4. Staff Leaver processing & GDPR regulations
5. Staff New Device requirement processing
All of the deliverables were required as video files in various lengths, animated gif adverts with and without audio, animated software processes and static adverts.
Results
Marketing Director Ann James remarked: ‘That lead image still makes me smile, you got the brief spot on’.
During the initial campaign on LinkedIn the campaign had over 60,000 targeted impressions. This led to several hundred conversions to site, a significant increase over previous Sunrise LinkedIn campaigns and a huge boost to the sales pipeline.
