Nuance and Microsoft build their customer experience pipeline with global brands
Creating great customer experiences is at the forefront of every B2C and B2B company, with customer care teams feeling the pressure like never before. Customer expectations are high, competition is fierce, and contact center retention continues to experience high turnover. McKinsey’s 2022 State of Customer Care Survey demonstrates just how much pressure customer care leaders are under, where the top three goals going into 2023-2024 are talent retention, simplifying customer experiences, and creating digital care and analytics systems. Nuance, now part of Microsoft, sits at this intersection with their customer engagement solutions, which is where this story begins.
Challenge
Microsoft and Nuance had made strategic investments in building their marketing and sales pipeline by partnering with industry-leading brands HIMSS, Forrester, Reuters, and The Economist to develop webinars focused on improving customer engagement and customer experiences. These highly credible and independent brands were bound to garner the attention of potential buyers, but a programmatic and predictable method for driving registrations and attendance was missing. Each of the webinars was associated with different and very specific market segments—company size, industry, GEO, and titles—which required a rifle, not a shotgun approach to driving demand.
Solution
Merit Mile took the reins, vetting numerous account-based marketing (ABM) and content syndication partners. We focused our evaluation criteria on the partners’ ability to reach the demographics and firmographics of the prospect audience, target specific accounts and titles against lists provided by the client, the robustness of the media platform’s reporting capabilities and dashboards, and of course, cost per lead (CPL). After doing our due diligence, we selected four partners to run the campaign with—HIMSS, Demand Science, Madison Logic, and BrightTALK—that met the campaign criteria. A multi-partner approach was selected to maximize the reach of the campaign, accelerate the pace of lead delivery, provide flexibility to scale up/down a particular campaign, and mitigate risk. Each partner had a committed goal to deliver a set number of marketing qualified leads (MQL) against an aggressive timeline. For each of the campaigns, Merit Mile provided a creative and content strategy to ensure each webinar was optimized for search, display, and creative appeal.
Results
Once the campaign structure was ready and approved by Microsoft and Nuance, Merit Mile and our four partners ran the campaigns over three months. A benefit of working with a globally trusted demand generation partner is the ability to define guaranteed lead criteria and give our clients the confidence that they will receive the type and volume of leads they are expecting - without question. Throughout the life of the campaigns, Merit Mile handled the critical (and often overlooked) role of lead quality assurance, addressing any replacement leads (for example, a bad email address), weekly reporting, and managing client campaign dashboards. Without a partner like Merit Mile managing campaign execution, these time-consuming and detail-oriented responsibilities would fall on the client marketing manager.
On target, on budget, and on pace, Merit Mile delivered against the collective campaign goals, yielding 2,000 qualified leads. An additional 390 organic leads were also delivered, bringing the collective campaign total to 2,390 and counting. The campaigns successfully reached the desired senior level decision making audience, with a composite of C-level (11%), VP (16%), Director (35%), and Manager (34%) titles.
As the campaign was running, Microsoft and Nuance were able to feed the leads into a series of ongoing nurture streams for further engagement. Once the campaigns were complete, Merit Mile developed campaign summary and analysis reports, and conducted post-mortem sessions with the partners, Microsoft, and Nuance.
Deliverables
- Campaign strategy
- Campaign execution and management
- Creative services
Learn more about how Merit Mile can support your vertical content marketing, lead generation, and sales goals by contacting hello@meritmile.com.
Your Merit Mile Team
Scott Lindars
Director
Marketing +
Business Strategy
Saul Darville
Executive
Creative
Director
Mitch Curry
Project
Manager
About Merit Mile
Established in 2007 in Boca Raton, FL, Merit Mile is a marketing services provider focused on helping companies and corporate marketing departments build brands, drive sales revenue, and garner publicity in their respective industries. Our unique differentiator at Merit Mile is our ability to 100% own the message, the publicity, and the demand generation aspects of the corporate marketing function. Clients hire us and rehire us for our ability to refine their messaging/value proposition, develop top and mid-funnel leads, and get the type of editorial publicity that differentiates them from their competitors. From branding to PR to demand generation, Merit Mile is the high-octane fuel that invigorates corporate growth engines. To learn more, please email us at Hello@MeritMile.com, call us at 1-561-362-888, or visit us at www.MeritMile.com.
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